Refund (12 page)

The Third Child

A
s the streetlights blinked on, Jane Goldman stepped onto her front porch to listen to the faint sound of screaming float from the other houses on her street. The screaming was the sound of children protesting everything: eating, bathing, sharing toys, going to sleep. As the weather warmed, she stood outside on her porch, smoking a rare cigarette and listening. This was her life now, at forty: she had married a man whom she admired and loved, and after the initial confusion of early marriage—the fact that they betrayed the other simply by being themselves—they fell into the exhausting momentum that was their lives. They had produced a son, now five years old, and a daughter, now eight months, two beings who hurtled into the world, ruby-lipped, peach-skinned, and who now held them hostage as surely as masked gunmen controlled a bank.

Jane was a freelance editor for technical manuals, and her husband, after seeing his business as a high-priced website designer dry up, settled into a job as a consultant. They had moved to a midsized
city in South Carolina. It was not their first choice, and they did not know if they would ever feel at home there, but they could afford, finally, a small house as well as a car. They had found their own happiness, weighted by resignation: that they were who they were, that they could never truly know the thoughts of another person, that their love was bruised by the carelessness of their own parents (his mother, her father); that they would wander the world in their dreams with ghostly, intangible lovers, that their children would move from adoration of them to fury, that they and their parents would die in different cities, that they would never accomplish anything that would leave any lasting mark on the world. They had longed for this, from the first lonely moment of their childhoods when they realized they could not marry their fathers or mothers, through the burning romanticism of their teens, to the bustling search of their twenties, and there was the faint regret that this tumult and exhaustion was what they had longed for too, and soon it would be gone.

Jane stood on the porch each night, watching the dusk settle on to their street. And when the screaming had ended, she sat watching the other families move behind the windows, gliding silently in their aquariums of golden light.

O
NE MORNING SOON AFTER
, J
ANE SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON THE FLOOR
of the bathroom, the baby grappling at her breasts, and watched the line form on the test. She and her husband had not been trying for another child. She pressed her lips to her baby girl's soft head, this one she wanted to love, and she understood, clearly, that she did not feel capable of loving a third child. She had given everything to the others. She kissed the baby's head, grateful for the aura of kindness the baby bestowed upon her, for now there was no illusion, as there had been when she was a young woman, that this being inside of her would not become a child; she held the thick, muscular result in
her hands. The baby's tiny fingers made her feel faint. They lived in a part of the country where a third (or fourth or fifth) unexpected child arrived and, with jovial weariness, families “made room” for them. She looked at the red line, and it measured all the moments remaining in her life.

The husband staggered awake after a depressing dream in which a childhood friend had retired early and moved to Tuscany. The kitchen smelled fetid, as though an animal had crawled into a corner and died. The boy, still grief-stricken over his sister's birth, utilizing their guilt over this to demand endless presents, described his longing for a Slinky that another child had brought to school. “I did want it,” he wailed in a monotone. “I did. I did. I did. I did.” He wanted to wear his Superman shirt with the red cape attached to the shoulders and spent his breakfast leaping out of his seat and trying to shoot his sister with a plastic gun. She, too, already had preferences and screamed until Jane put her into a purple outfit with floppy bunny ears. They wanted to be anything but human. Her husband could not find anything to put on his lunch sandwich and, with a sort of martyred defiance, slapped margarine on bread. “What a man does to save money,” he murmured.

“Why don't you just buy your lunch?” she asked.

“Do you know how much that costs?” he said. “Do you know how much I'm saving this family by eating crap on bread every day?”

“Get me a Slinky!” the boy yelled, to everyone. The baby screamed.

“Will everyone please shut up?” she said, and then she flinched, embarrassed.

“Don't say that around the children,” he said.

“I can say what I want.”

“Don't say
shut up
,” the boy said, in a ponderous tone.

“Eat your breakfast,” she hissed at him.

“I hate it,” he wailed, writhing out of his seat and onto the floor,
where he curled up under the table as though preparing for a nuclear bomb. She glanced at her husband; their love had been, like all love at the beginning, a mutual and essential misunderstanding, a belief that each could absorb qualities held by the other, that each could save the other from loneliness, that their future held endless promise, that they would not be separated by death. This version of joy was what they had chosen of their own free will.

The baby, not wanting to be outdone, suddenly struck a pose like a fashion model. “How cute,” said the husband; they all hungered for a moment of beauty. The baby laughed, a glittery sound. The boy wept. The future lay before them, limp and endless. The husband got on his hands and knees by the son. “Come now,” he said, his voice exquisite with tenderness. “You're a big boy now.” He pleaded for maturity for five minutes, and when his voice was about to snap, the boy crawled out and donned a backpack, which made him resemble a miniature college student. He turned around, delighted, so they all applauded.

Their son ran out to their lawn. There was a sweet green freshness in the morning air. It was a Tuesday; she believed she was six weeks along; there was a bad taste in her mouth, of ash. Behind them was their house, a flimsy tribute to the middle class, but one bad car crash, one growing lump, a few missed paychecks would send them packing. They could not afford to have a heart attack, to lose their minds. It was just spring; daffodils burst out of the cold earth. She and her husband stood, bewildered, watching the children in the golden Southern sunlight. She loved them so deeply her skin felt as if it were burning, and she also knew that her love, which she had thought contained boundless wealth, could be handed out to dozens, hundreds, had its finite limits as well.

She called the babysitter, kissed her children goodbye, and went to the clinic. She was afraid that he would have tried to
convince her to have the third child. She wept on the way there, for her certainty that she could not have another, for her desire to be good enough for the boy and girl. When she arrived at the clinic, she had stopped weeping. She drove home, sore and cramping, three hours later, down the broad gray lanes bordered by fast-food emporiums, wanting to swerve in and run inside to the high school girls in bright hats behind the counters so that she could hear them say brightly,
May I help you?

S
OMETIMES DURING THE DAY THERE WOULD BE A KNOCK ON THE
door, and it would be their eight-year-old neighbor Mary Grace. She was the only person who was ever at the door. She was beloved by their son, and for this reason, Jane let her wander into their house at all times. Mary Grace was fiercely competitive in all areas including height, hour of bedtime, and the quality of bribe her mother had given her in order for her to get a flu shot. She had thin brown hair, and her eyes were hooded with the suspicion that her parents would do anything possible to keep from listening to her.

Mary Grace's parents were silent, mysterious types who were very involved in their Baptist church. Jane and her husband tried to guess why the parents never spoke to them and why they never invited the son to their house. Perhaps Mary Grace's father was having an affair. Or the mother was having an affair. Perhaps they never had sex or had bad sex. Perhaps they did not make each other laugh. Perhaps the mother was sad because she wished she had become a ballet dancer, a doctor, a rock star. Perhaps one drank too much. Perhaps he wanted to live in Australia. Perhaps she hated his taste in clothes. Perhaps one of them had cancer. Perhaps they did not want their floors to get dirty. Would they break up or marinate in their sourness for years? Mary Grace's parents did not set up any sort of social life for her. Jane noticed the wife spending most of her free
time snipping their front hedges with gardening implements that were large and vicious. Jane saw the husband on his dutiful evening walks around the block, his eyes cast down, his feet lifting in a peculiar way so he seemed to be tiptoeing across ice. Mary Grace scuttled over to Jane's at least once a day, neatly dressed and clean, but always with the demeanor of someone who was starving.

That day, she was grateful for the girl's knock. Jane had returned from the clinic, opened the door to her home slowly, as though she were an intruder. The children noticed nothing; their absorption in their own crises was complete. They saw only that she was their mother and fell toward her. She was aching and exhausted, but the babysitter couldn't stay. Jane needed a stranger in the kitchen, someone to speak because she could not.

“Let's make a magic potion,” Mary Grace announced. She believed touchingly that she could realize her great dreams in their home. The girl rushed into the kitchen. Her hands rummaged through drawers, plucked juice boxes from cupboards. “We need to make a magic potion,” she said. “We need olive oil. Lemonade. Baking soda. Seltzer.”

“Yes,” her son said, gazing at Mary Grace.

Jane brought the items over, and Mary Grace poured them carefully into a glass. Her son was now whispering to her, his face intent, and the girl said, rolling her eyes, “No. It will not make you into a cheetah.” Jane looked at Mary Grace.

“He can become a cheetah if he wants,” Jane broke in.

“Then I want to become a princess,” said Mary Grace.

She brought them some vinegar and mayonnaise and seltzer and watched them stir their concoction. Mary Grace looked up and said, “My mother's doing her fitness video. She wants to get to her high school weight.”

“Oh,” said Jane.

“She was going to become a fitness instructor, but then she was dating my dad and they knew each other three weeks, and then she dropped everything to have me.” She giggled frantically, as though she was not sure what sound to make. Then Mary Grace grasped Jane's forearm. The girl's nails were long and sharp. “Can we add perfume to make princesses?” she asked.

Jane allowed the girl to hold her arm for a moment. “No,” she said. She patted Mary Grace's hand carefully. “I'm sure she's very glad she has you,” she said, and she reached up to a cabinet for some baking soda. Mary Grace released her hand.

“Then she had my brother like that,
boom
, and then my sister, and she says if she gets back to her high school weight, she'll look seventeen again.” Mary Grace took the baking soda, poured it in, and the mixture began to fizz and rise. The children shrieked at the possibilities implied in this, and when the potion puttered out they looked toward Jane. “More!” called her son.

“I want a snack now,” Mary Grace said.

Jane opened the refrigerator. She felt more blood slip out of her, sharply took a breath. “Do you want some carrots?” she asked.

“I want ice cream with hot fudge syrup,” said the girl. “Please.”

I
N
B
OSTON, WHERE
J
ANE USED TO LIVE, HER HUSBAND HAD A SUCCESSFUL
business constructing corporate websites, but he most enjoyed helping people create elaborate personal shrines that floated in no place on earth. People wanted all sorts of things on them: personal philosophy, photos both personal and professional, diary fragments, links to other people whom they admired but to whom they had no other connection. Her husband understood their desire to communicate their best selves with an unknown, invisible public; a shy person, he had forced himself to become sociable and liked convincing people of all the intimate facts they needed to tell strangers
about themselves. When they met, he was exuberant, and she was disdainful of websites; she was the only person he had ever met who did not want one for herself. “Don't you want people to click and find out all about you?” he asked. “Your achievements and innermost thoughts?” He was leaning, one arm against a wall, clutching cheap wine in a plastic glass.

“No,” she said.

He sensed she was holding back, and that made her appear to conceal something deeply valuable. She admired his shamelessness, the way he could go up to people at a party and convince them to create monuments to themselves. They had both stumbled out from families in which they felt they did not belong: she, second of four, he, oldest of three. He had a beautiful, careless mother who had left the family for two years when he was seven; this created in him a sharp and fierce practicality, a need to ingratiate himself and to hoard money. She had been belittled by her father and for years had cultivated the aloofness of the shy.

The economy quickly broke apart their life. People and companies were running out of money to create themselves in an invisible space. She had been working as an editor for a small publisher, and that was the first job she lost simply because the company was folding. Their rent was shooting up, they were in their late thirties with a three-year-old, another on the way, and they had nothing saved for retirement. It was time to move on.