Sisterland (39 page)

“I pooped, but it’s true what everyone says. I was too out of my mind to care.”

“I totally knew you were having a baby last night. I was playing pool with Patrick and all of a sudden, I was like, yep, it’s started. I almost called, but I didn’t want to interrupt a contraction.”

“Well, my water broke at midnight,” I said. “And we came to the hospital around three
A.M.
, and she was born right before eleven.”

“Wow, you had an easy delivery. Jack’s wife was in labor for thirty-three
hours.” Jack was the manager at the Italian restaurant where Vi no longer worked. “Can I hold her?”

“Will you wash your hands?” I said. “Or use that dispenser on the wall?”

Vi squirted out some antibacterial gel, rubbed her hands together—for a not entirely satisfying length of time—and extended her arms. “Come to Auntie Vi,” she said.

“Be careful of her neck,” I said as I eased Rosie toward her.

“You think I’ve never held a baby before?” Vi scrunched up her nose. “Wait.
Have
I ever held a baby?” She stood there with Rosie’s head against the inside of her elbow and swayed. “I have the touch,” Vi said. “She just closed her eyes. So did you get an epidural?”

I shook my head.

Vi held up her free hand. “High five, girlfriend. I was sure you’d cave and ask for drugs.”

“You know those golf shoes with spikes on them? I felt like someone was wearing those and jumping on top of my vagina.”

She laughed. “At least you only had one baby, huh?”

Her “easy delivery” remark had rubbed me the wrong way, and then the high five had mollified me slightly, and then her remark about expecting me to cave had rubbed me the wrong way again, and then the opportunity to say how painful the delivery had been had mollified me again. The allusion to our own birth was neutral—on the one hand, Vi was minimizing what I’d just been through, but on the other hand, I, too, had been thinking about our mother. Her experience giving birth to us had been a major factor in my wish not to have an epidural.

I said, “Is it weird we’re giving the baby a flower name? She was going to be Sophie, but I was holding her right after she was born, and I had a change of heart.” Jeremy had been surprised but amenable; he’d actually suggested the name Rosie months earlier and I’d nixed it
because
it was a flower name.

Vi looked down at Rosie. “It fits her. And
Rosie
isn’t as—whatever it is you thought
Daisy
was. As hippie chick–ish.”

“You don’t think we should name her Rita, do you?”

“Because all it would take to undo everything that was messed up about Mom would be to name your child after her? No. You shouldn’t.” Vi was still looking at Rosie as she said, “How weird is it that you have a kid? I always knew you would, but—”

“I know. It’s surreal.”

“She didn’t even used to exist and someday she’ll have a favorite color. She’ll eat pancakes. Did Jeremy cut the cord?”

“He decided to leave it to the professionals.”

“But he’s a doctor.” Vi said this in the mocking way she sometimes invoked Jeremy’s PhD, though he never identified himself as Dr. Tucker; he had his students call him Professor Tucker. She’d say,
Jeremy, feel my pulse. Take my temperature. Oh, wait
.

“I have to show you something,” I said. “Give me Rosie, and go in the bathroom and look in that plastic bag by the sink.”

After my daughter (my daughter!) was back in my arms, I heard Vi whoop with delight from the bathroom. She reentered my room holding up with both hands a pair of the white mesh underwear a nurse had given me a pack of after the delivery; they were so enormous that they resembled shorts. “These are awesome,” Vi said.

“I knew you’d appreciate them.”

“Are you wearing some right now?”

“And a maxi pad that’s about a foot long.”

“Can I keep this pair?” Vi was dangling the underwear off the tip of her index finger and twirling them. “Patrick will fucking freak when he sees these.”

There was a knock on the door, and the nurse who’d started at three o’clock walked into the room. “Baby last nursed at two-thirty, right?” she said to me. “So let’s give it another go. You need any ibuprofen?”

“Not right now.” They had me breast-feeding every hour, even though my milk hadn’t yet come in and even though no matter what position I maneuvered myself or Rosie into, it didn’t seem like the right one.

“Will you wait in the hall?” I said to Vi.

“Wow,” Vi said. “Still a prude, even after childbirth.” She gathered up
her purse and the cape she now wore instead of a coat, a fashion choice that had coincided with the ascent of her new career. “I’m going to go find Jeremy so we can smoke cigars. Oh, I almost forgot Rosie’s present.” From the purse, Vi withdrew a small cardboard box. Rosie was nestled against my chest, and I said, “You open it.”

After Vi had pulled off the tape, she lifted out a layer of white tissue paper and then a small pale blue pear-shaped bottle with a clear crystal stopper. Holding it up, she said proudly, “It’s an antique perfume holder.”

Of course it was an antique perfume holder; I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling. Two months before, my friend Janet had thrown me a baby shower, for which Jeremy’s mother and sister-in-law had flown to St. Louis and at which I’d had bestowed on me onesies and bibs and stuffed animals, a baby carrier and a mobile and a special trash can just for diapers. Vi had forgotten to show up. It had crossed my mind that she either consciously or subconsciously wasn’t pleased that I was pregnant, but I was fairly sure the shower had just slipped her mind; it was on a Saturday at eleven in the morning, when she wasn’t necessarily awake. Afterward, she’d been determined to make it up to me. A few nights later, Jeremy worked late and she brought over pickles and ice cream, neither of which I was craving, as well as a DVD about natural childbirth that a friend had loaned her. After the first birth, Vi said, “I’m sorry, but that’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. Can we watch
Project Runway
?”

In the hospital room, the perfume holder caught the dim January light coming in the window.

“It’s really pretty,” I said. “Thank you.”

“But wait for the best part.” She turned the bottle around, and I saw that across its widest surface was painted a white-and-pink rose. To the nurse, Vi said, “And I didn’t even know what my sister was naming her baby.”

“How about that?” said the nurse. “You’re psychic.”

There was, of
course, that blur of early days and nights after we’d brought Rosie home, a tiredness deeper than any I’d ever known, the endless
cycle of nursing her and burping her and changing her, of all three of us slipping into a desperate kind of sleep before resuming the cycle. But slowly, a kind of schedule asserted itself; the exhausted confusion cleared. Rosie ate every three hours. Each morning, an hour after nursing her, I sat at the dining room table and pumped milk that I’d then transfer into freezer bags in preparation for when I’d return to my job at the elder-care agency and Rosie would enter day care. I hated the pump, the whirring nipple-yanking tugs that made me not simply feel like a cow but gave me new sympathy for cows themselves, and I forbade Jeremy to enter the room while I used it.

Rosie began to look back at us when we looked at her, began to smile, began to sleep for longer stretches; she developed a particular affinity for a little stuffed cat and would suck joyfully on its left ear. At twelve weeks, we moved her from a bassinet in our room to her own room, which made me uneasy, but Jeremy reminded me that all the books said moving her would only get harder as she grew older. “For me or for her?” I said, and he said, “Aren’t you guys still kind of the same?” Which he meant as a joke, but it was how I felt—that once Vi and I had been a single person split apart, and now my daughter and I were. With her in the stroller, Rosie and I took long walks north on DeMun and west on Wydown, up and down the fancy streets with the old, big houses and tall trees, and though I purposely didn’t go onto the street where Mrs. Abbott had lived, passing the entrance to it always filled me with gratitude that I was no longer in my twenties and miserable. (In the summer of 2001, I had awakened one morning and known Mrs. Abbott was dead; I waited a week, then found her obituary online. She had been born in Bristol, Connecticut, I learned, and her maiden name had been Spaeth.)

When Rosie and I drove to Schnucks, in the parking lot I carefully lifted her from her car seat and inserted her into the baby carrier, her chest facing mine because she was still so little. Inside, she’d turn her head to see the apples or cereal boxes. When the other customers or the checkout woman would remark on her cuteness, I’d smile modestly, as if I didn’t secretly consider their compliments insufficient. If she fell asleep on the ride home, I would sit in our driveway with the car in Park and the engine
on and the air conditioner running, the ozone layer be damned—this was in April or May—and as I waited for her to awaken, I’d do absolutely nothing because I didn’t yet have a cellphone with Internet access, didn’t want to disturb her by talking on the phone, and usually wouldn’t have remembered to bring along a book in her diaper bag. I’d look in the rearview mirror at the street behind me, the green leaves on a ginkgo tree and the cars passing, and I’d feel not bored or impatient but rather, as I observed her (her car seat faced backward, with her own mirror reflecting her closed eyes and tilted head into my mirror), as if, in watching her sleep, I was making a deposit in the bank account of her well-being. This was how I felt when she nursed, too, when I also wasn’t bored despite the fact that, unlike other mothers I knew, I never read or watched television while doing it. But perhaps it was not the magic of motherhood that I was experiencing in these moments; perhaps I just had a greater capacity for inertia than I’d ever realized.

I had prepared myself for the tedium of life with a baby, warned about it by co-workers and friends and countless movies and sitcoms, but I’d experienced much in my adult life that was more tedious: office meetings and office paperwork and wedding toasts and the wait at the mechanic’s while my oil was changed. Rosie was not tedious to me; rather, she was my own tiny and charming companion. It wasn’t that I endlessly tried to amuse or edify her. I just brought her along when I did things, in and out of the house, and her skin was very soft and her expressions were sweet and she was a real person, a miniature person who clearly adored me, and I adored her in return.

And then she was sixteen weeks old, and it was time for me to return to work at the elder-care agency and for Rosie to go to the day care Jeremy and I had picked out when I was still pregnant. Rosie would be entering the Zucchini Room of a medium-sized place on Hanley Road, and I accompanied her for a half day on the Friday before she started. This time, I noticed things I hadn’t when Jeremy and I had visited months before: how runny the other babies’ noses were and how chewed-on the toys looked, plus could two teachers really look after eight babies when it took all my energy and attention to look after one? But the kids seemed mostly happy,
and the adults were warm. Jeremy would take Rosie on Monday, we decided, so that I wouldn’t bawl.

After going to sleep on Sunday night, I awoke around three from a dream in which Rosie was in a prison cell; she was crying, reaching for me, from behind bars. I got out of bed and hurried to her room, where I found her asleep on her back, breathing evenly. My heartbeat slowed as I watched her in the dark. Eventually, I went back to bed.

In the morning, when I tried to describe the dream to Jeremy, he smiled. I was changing Rosie’s diaper while Jeremy stood nearby. “Are you a baby bandit, Rosie?” he said. He touched my shoulder. “It’s natural that you’re feeling nervous.”

But in some ways, it was easier being back at work than I’d expected: The schedule and the rooms were familiar; talking to other adults, having conversations, consumed my attention. There was a routine I could slip into, that could carry me along, and there was the shocking weightlessness of being responsible only for myself. Except when I closed the door of my office and taped paper over the rectangular window to pump, my body belonged to me. But when Rosie came into my mind, I’d feel a lurching worry. What if one of the teachers dropped her?

Meeting with a diabetic eighty-six-year-old and his sixty-five-year-old daughter, I kept looking at the clock above my bulletin board, waiting for the minutes to pass until I could walk out to the parking lot, get into my car, and drive to pick up Rosie.

As the weeks passed, my uneasiness waxed and waned. “She had a good day,” Miss Helen would often say when I picked Rosie up. Rosie’s clothes smelled like the teachers, which wasn’t to say the teachers smelled bad—just that there was no denying Rosie had been elsewhere.

I started putting her in leather booties with a smiling teddy bear over the toes. She didn’t need shoes, in that she was many months away from walking. But her socks always fell off, and then she was barefoot, and how could I endure my tiny daughter being out in the world without me, barefoot? Every morning, I’d pull the shoes over her feet before securing her in the car seat so Jeremy could carry her away.