Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (3 page)

Chapter 3
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

I
n the
Olivia books, it doesn't matter if the little white pig is not at all sleepy. She still has to take a nap. William, however, is under no such compulsion. His mother has decreed that since William's imagination is so “activated,” since he is so bright, so creative, so highly intelligent, he is in need of constant stimulation and thus cannot be compelled to sleep during the day. I cannot help but believe that Carolyn could have issued such an edict only because it is never she who has to stimulate William's activated little self. Whenever William is not in Jack's or my care, he is with his nanny, Sonia. Sonia's days off are identical to the custody arrangement—every Wednesday and every other weekend. Only then does she retreat to the bowels of Queens and drink slivovitz or play the single-stringed gusle, or is a Croatian gangster's gun moll or does whatever it is that recent immigrants from Dalmatia do on their days off from catering to the needs and whims of overprivileged five-year-olds on the Upper East Side. Actually, I know virtually nothing about Sonia other than the name of the region in Croatia where she is from, and the fact that she once told Jack that one of her grandfathers was Jewish before the war. I don't know what that means, “Jewish before the war.” I don't know how long Sonia has been in America. I don't know where she lives when she is not in the little room off the kitchen that I once glimpsed, when I was looking for the bathroom during a firm dinner in the days before Carolyn threw Jack out, before I fucked Jack in the black Aeron chair behind the desk in his office at Friedman, Taft, Mayberry and Stein, the desk Carolyn chose for him when he made partner and was given a corner office and the money to decorate it.

Sonia takes care of William every day after school, except Wednesday, and I take care of William on Wednesdays, and thus Carolyn has no idea how hard it is to entertain her child for an entire afternoon. I understand from looking her up on UrbanBaby.com that Dr. Carolyn Soule is one of the few obstetricians in the city of New York, perhaps the only one, who does not have other doctors take call for her, who always performs her own deliveries, be they in the middle of the night, on weekends, or on Christmas morning, on any day of the year, in fact, except during the three weeks every August that she spends at her family's house on Nantucket. This makes her a very desirable and comforting doctor, and a somewhat less desirable and comforting wife. Though I didn't get that last judgment off UrbanBaby.com. Presumably on the occasional weekends that she is not working, when she is not called to the hospital to deliver a baby or to monitor a high-risk patient, Carolyn is faced with hour after hour of William's company. Perhaps she has more resources than I. Perhaps she is as excited as her son by the project of reading the dictionary cover to cover and debating the merits of each individual definition. Perhaps she finds it as perplexing as he does that we have come to use the word “morning” for the period of time between sunrise and noon rather than the more aptly named “forenoon.” Perhaps mother and son keep matching magnifying glasses in the kitchen drawer to read the contents of every food packet, searching for the dreaded molecules of wheat, lactose, and, God forbid, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Carolyn
must
love it, or else she endures no more than half an hour of it at a stretch before calling in Sonia, because otherwise she would never have banned the reliable salvation of the television.

I rarely complain about these afternoons, because, after all, isn't the weakness my own? Wouldn't a better stepmother have figured out a series of fascinating ways to pass the time, perhaps constructing a mathematically accurate replica of the Hoover Dam from sugar cubes or starting a breeding program for genetically modified fruit flies with an eye both to finding a cure for color blindness and teaching them how to ride teeny-weeny bicycles? I occasionally whine to my mother, who makes me swear that I will never breathe a word of my dissatisfaction to Jack. I grumble, but I trust her. My mother was herself a stepmother. She is my model of a stepmother, in fact, not because of her success in the endeavor but rather because of her catastrophic, her epic, her operatic failure. My older sisters hated my mother from the moment they met her, years after their own mother had abandoned them to my father's incompetent and grudging care. My mother was a young wife bursting with devotion for the forsaken, motherless waifs, the neglected daughters of the much older man who had swept her off her feet and convinced her to drop out of college and marry him. Despite the fact that my mother proceeded to devote her life to taking care of Lucy and Allison, aged eight and ten, driving them to band practice and skating lessons, making their dentist appointments, packing their lunches, washing their clothes, affixing their perfect spelling tests and SAT results to the door of the fridge, they never changed their minds about her. They never stopped despising her, and they never stopped telling her so.

They were, in fact, so relieved when my parents divorced after almost thirty bitter years that they were even willing to acknowledge their own role in the disaster that was my parents' marriage. Lucy said to me, “It can't have been easy for your mom, taking care of two kids who never wanted her around.” Then she asked if my mother had gained a lot of weight since the divorce and wondered if I'd met our father's new girlfriend yet, who was, Lucy said, “Just fabulous. And beautiful. Really thin.” And then she laughed.

So when my mother says I shouldn't let Jack know that spending time with William makes me so tired that I feel a headache forming deep in the center of my skull, I listen. I allow myself the ludicrous fantasy that each day will be the day that William and I will magically connect, that this is the day we will find ourselves speaking the same language. My other fantasy involves hiring some pleasant young Columbia student to hang out with William in the afternoons while I go to the movies. When I was working full time William went to his mother's apartment with Sonia on Wednesdays and Jack picked him up after work. But then I quit my job, and we changed the schedule, giving Sonia a free day. It doesn't seem fair to take Sonia's day off away from her just because I find amusing her charge to be unbearably difficult. Especially since I am determined that Jack will never know of my grotesque and unacceptable inability to love his child.

“Do you know what eBay is?” William says, interrupting my thoughts. As usual, we are having a snack instead of a nap. William is swirling his spoon around in his bowl of nonfat, dairy-free sorbet. William is lactose intolerant, according to his mother. He drinks soy milk, and eats Tofutti and dairy-free sorbet.

“Yes,” I say, vaguely.

“My friend Bailey's dad sells things on eBay.”

“Hmm.”

“Bailey says his dad takes all their old stuff and sells it on eBay. Everything they don't want anymore. Like Bailey's old bike, and his dad's skis from when he was in college.”

I nod, but I am not paying much attention.

“Emilia?”

“Yes, William.”

“Bailey's dad makes a lot of money on eBay. A lot.”

“Good for Bailey's dad.”

“Do you ever go to eBay?”

I sigh and look at him. “No, not really.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Or I could just ask Bailey's dad. I'm sure he'd sell me a pair of old skis if I needed them.”

William wrinkles his brow. “No, no. I mean, you should
sell
stuff. To make money, like Bailey's dad. Don't you have any old stuff?”

“We could sell your dad's skis. Or just one of them. How about that? One Völkl ski. Two years old. And one pole.”

William shakes his head. “That's silly. Nobody would buy one ski. We should sell the baby's stuff.”

I do not answer. I sit on the other side of the kitchen table and clutch my coffee cup so tightly that I cannot believe it doesn't shatter beneath my fingers.

“We can sell the crib,” he says. “The crib cost one thousand three hundred and eleven dollars.” William likes to know what things cost. “So if we sold it on eBay we would get two thousand dollars. Or maybe even ten thousand dollars.”

“No, we wouldn't,” I say.

“That's how eBay works,” he says, patiently. “You take all the stuff you don't need anymore and people give you lots of money for it.”

I stare at the top of William's head. He has Carolyn's pale brown hair, but while hers hangs in a preternaturally shiny sheath to her shoulders, swinging smoothly, with never a split end or ragged edge, his is full of cowlicks, standing up on one part of his head, flattened on the other. The hair is fine, and you can see the yellow crust of his scalp through the greasy strands. William has something called cradle cap, Jack says, or rather Carolyn says, and we must rub baby oil into his head every night and brush it with a soft-bristled brush before using a fine-toothed comb to gently lift off the flakes. When Jack refers to this condition, I must clamp my lips together to keep from pointing out that the child is far too old for a cradle, and that as far as I can tell he has nothing more nor less than a bad case of dandruff.

I say, “We could not get ten thousand dollars for the crib on eBay.”

“We can sell the stroller, too. I bet we would get five thousand dollars for the stroller.”

“William, that's not the way eBay works. It's not magic. People have to want something in order to bid on it. Nobody is going to bid thousands of dollars for . . . for a stroller they can buy brand new for eight hundred and seventy-five.” My jaw is clenched so tight the pain is traveling up behind my ears, along my temples and tying itself into a knot at the top of my head.

“Bailey's dad says . . .”

“You're just misunderstanding Bailey's dad. Or Bailey's misunderstanding him.”

William scowls. “You don't even know Bailey. Or his dad.”

“I don't want to talk about selling the baby's things, William.”

“But that's what eBay's
for
. You're supposed to sell stuff you don't need. You don't need the stuffies or the baby clothes or the diapers. That dumb American Girl doll you bought is still in the box. You should sell that stupid Samantha on eBay.”

And now it is too much for me. “Shut up, William. Just shut up.” I get up from the table. My chair clatters to the floor. I stare at it, already feeling guilty, already resentful of the guilt. It sometimes seems like William is Carolyn's little mouthpiece, her surrogate goad. He prods and pokes until I satisfy their low expectations, until I prove once again that I am a terrible person. I tell myself that he is not trying to trap me, not trying to force me to reveal my failings and my flaws. He is only a little boy. And yet Carolyn and I have both vested in him so much more power than any small boy should have.

I leave the chair lying on the floor and William sitting at the table and walk out of the room. I stop in the doorway of the little bedroom down the hall, the one intended, when the building was built, as a maid's room. It is moss green with a border of pale pink roses. I painted it myself, so the edges are ragged, almost frayed. If you look very closely you can see that the row of roses is crooked, that it staggers down across the wall and around the room so that when the roses reach the left of the double window they are a full inch-and-a-half lower than when they began on the right. This bothers me very much and I wish I could redo it, or that I had paid someone to do it correctly.

I lean against the doorjamb, and press my fingers into the soft flesh of my belly. I feel for my uterus, wondering if it is still swollen and engorged. I palpate the loose jelly roll that was once my waist and dig my index and middle finger into the place right below my belly button. It hurts, and for that I am grateful. I would hate to think that everything had gone back to normal, that it had all been erased or blotted out, that the only evidence of what had happened was a crooked stencil on a poorly painted wall.

I keep my eyes on the stenciled border, and I do not look at the rest of the room. I do not look at the ridiculously overpriced crib, with the pink bedding—fat, overblown roses on one side, gingham checks on the reverse. I do not look at the changing table, the neat stacks of infant diapers, the baby-wipes warmer with the cord wound around it like a dead snake, the pots of diaper rash ointment and baby lotion. I do not look at the antique carpet with the Arts and Crafts pattern, in a shade of pink that the rug dealer told me was so rare that he had never seen it before. I do not look at the glider rocker, with its cream-colored leather seat and matching footrest, special ordered by my mother as a baby present. My father gave us a $5,000 savings bond. I wonder what one does with a savings bond in the name of someone who no longer exists?