The Love Children (36 page)

Between nursings I sterilized bottles, which I left for the baby when I went to the market and took with me when I took her to the doctor for her monthly weighing and checking. Every day I did her laundry—an amazing amount because of spit-up and spill and leaked effluent. And I had to boil diapers every three days or so. I also bathed her every day, which was, I have to say, a delight. I soaped her gorgeous shiny skin, oiled and powdered her, and dressed her in fresh clothes. I burped her, soothed her, held her, and walked her when she cried, which was often. I surprised myself with my steely endurance, my patient fortitude. When she screamed unendingly and I could find nothing wrong, I just held her in a kind of mute sorrow and thought about how easy it would be to smother her. I didn't feel guilty about these negative impulses. They seemed to me just a function of human
nature, and of course I went on carefully cradling her fragile, defenseless little head and neck. Even when I couldn't stand the screaming, even when I was exhausted, even when my life seemed mere servitude, I could feel myself loving her more than I loved myself, her little finger more precious to me than my own arms and legs or anything else on earth.

That's how these little creatures get us, I thought. They know how we feel and they know we'll put up with anything to save them.

My life seemed utterly given over to things I didn't love doing but had no choice about. The snatches of time I had to myself were so short and interrupted that I couldn't use them for anything. I tried to read, but kept losing the thread; I couldn't concentrate on any of my books until one day, in a drugstore I picked up a murder mystery. It occurred to me that this was something I could read in snatches—a hard way to read Adrienne Rich or Günter Grass or Doris Lessing, whose books were presently on my bedside table. It cost only a couple of dollars, which even on my budget I could spare. And it worked: I could read for half an hour then put it down, and I needed only a little rereading to recapture the plot eight or twelve hours later. After that, I always had a mystery at hand to pick up when I had a half hour to myself. I knew I was wasting my mind, but at least I was entertaining myself.

In May excitement returned to my life as I planted my garden. The plot Dad had given me was big, almost as big as my plot at Pax, so I needed help with it. I pinned up a note on the post office bulletin board and a woman offered her services. Kathleen Martinelli, who lived nearby, was married to a local dentist; she had three kids now in their teens and a big house with a garden of her own, but she was bored. She missed the farm in Georgia where she'd been raised. She was perfect for me. I hired a man to plow, and Kathleen and I planted seeds by hand, row after row.
I had an automatic watering system installed; that left me broke and in debt. After that there was weeding to do, but we had put mulch on everything, so a couple of hours a day by us both was enough to keep it under control.

I would set Isabelle in her stroller, which had a little canopy. I wheeled it under a tree, with a bottle of water tied to the metal support of the carriage. She regularly knocked it too far away to retrieve and would start to wail, and Kathleen and I got lots of exercise running over to her. Her lungs got some exercise too. But mainly she was happy sitting in the outdoors, watching us pull weeds, kicking her arms and legs and babbling to the wind.

 

The deep winter months, January and February, were the slowest time at the restaurant, so Artur had been only mildly upset by my absence. For Artur, mild upset meant moderate hysteria. The restaurant did not do nearly as well with me absent, and as spring approached his hysteria heightened, with accompanying outbursts. But I had been trained by an expert, and I could shrug it off, not even getting angry with him. Since he was overwhelmed with guilt after each tantrum, this worked to my advantage: his debt to me grew with every episode. Still, after three months, I was itching to go back to work, but the baby was still too demanding: she ate five times a day. I could not leave her with Dad even for a few hours.

Stepan came back at the end of May and by this time he could play with Isabelle a little. At four months, she knew us all. She could play peekaboo and enjoyed being lifted and swung around. She was just starting on pureed food and I let Stepan feed her. He held her in his left arm and fed her with his right, as I did, but in the process revealed his moral deficiencies. For Stepan was shocked by Isabelle's certainty about what she wanted to eat and what she didn't. He profoundly disapproved of this. Maybe
he grew up hungry enough to be willing to eat whatever he was given and felt that she should do the same. But Isabelle had never been hungry for very long; her screams might sound as if she were dying of starvation, but she was always fed within twenty minutes of their starting. She might be vague about most things, but not her tastes: she loved lima beans, green beans, any kind of beans mashed into a puree. She adored tiny bits of bacon on her tongue. But she hated peas and merely tolerated baked potato and cereal. Fussy little bit, she was. He tried to fight her on this, forcing mashed peas into her mouth. She just kept spitting them out. In this fight, like most struggles of will between parents and small children, he was not just wasting his energy but was also teaching her things like rage, hate, and rebellion. I told him parents invariably lose power struggles with infants, if not immediately, then in the long run. This got me nowhere. So then I told him if he didn't stop he couldn't feed her anymore.

By the end of May Isabelle was down to four meals a day—milk at six a.m., cereal at ten a.m., a baked potato and vegetable at two p.m., and another meal at six p.m. She was sleeping through the night! Hurrah!

I started planning to go back to work. I would stop nursing; I prepared to take her with me. I would go in about three, after her lunch. I'd only have to feed her once during my working hours, at six. I could use the restaurant blender to puree. Also I would have a larger choice of fresh foods and the kitchen staff could help me.

There was an unheated back room in the restaurant holding mainly junk. One Monday when the restaurant was closed, I got rid of the trash. The next day, I went in early and scrubbed down the walls, ceiling, and floor before work. Monday and Tuesday of the next week, Artur painted the room white and bought an electric heater for it. I bought a lined window shade and a white curtain for the window and took in an old bookcase from our house.
Artur painted that too, and I used it to store Isabelle's baby oil, baby powder, diapers, diaper rash cream, safety pins, and suchlike. I bought a covered diaper pail for the stinky things.

I bought a second baby seat, one of those little bouncy canvas chairs they had then, and sat her in it in the kitchen. She was enchanted by all the activity. The staff adored her, of course; every one of them made a fuss when they passed her, and soon she loved them all, crying out and hurling into the air whatever she had in her hand whenever she spotted them. They helped me puree varied things for her to eat, and eventually she ate like a restaurant critic, sampling pineapple and butternut squash and mango and brook trout and capon and whatever else we had. She turned into a gourmet, with extremely sophisticated tastes, and she stayed that way.

When I started back to work, I would go in early in the day, leaving Isabelle with Dad for an hour, and plan the menu and order the food. Then I would go back home and take care of her. I would change her, dress her, and drive with her to the restaurant, set her in her bouncy seat, and start cooking. She was deliriously happy, entertained by six staff members plus Artur; sometimes a customer would come back to visit.

The staff helped me fix her dinner, and they took turns feeding her, fighting for the privilege. After that she would play for a while, then I'd steal a half hour, take her into her little room and clean her up, powder her, and put her in the English carriage Artur had given me, with a bottle of warm milk to keep her company. The carriage was solid and had a brake; it was high enough not to break my back when I bent over to put her in it or pick her up the way the car seat or bouncy chair did. She nestled under her blanket, ecstatic with her bottle, and closed her eyes. The room was chilly even in June, so I would turn on the electric heater. She seemed to be in bliss. She slept better there than she did at home.

Before I left home every day, I made up a batch of formula. I kept the sterilizer at the restaurant and sterilized the bottles every day. I kept bottles in both refrigerators. When she went to sleep, at naptime or in the evening or late at night, I propped the bottle on a soft little holder next to her. I worried that she would be unhappy at missing my breast, but she didn't seem to mind and fussed only when she lost the bottle. These days she was feeding well, filling herself up and sleeping well afterward. And with so many people in and out of the kitchen, someone always heard her if she fussed.

Her only bad time was when I was leaving work late at night and had to bundle her up even more to carry her to the car; she always woke in a rage and would start to cry. But the cool outside air hitting her lungs made her pass out almost instantly—which always made me laugh, which then always made me feel like a monster.

Artur was humbly, satisfyingly grateful for my return. Business always picked up in the summer, his best time. People thronged to visit their Vermont vacation houses or spend long weekends at local bed and breakfasts. The busy season lasted till the end of October, when people stopped coming to see the leaves, so there was no way I could take Isabelle to Pax in September, as I'd promised Stepan. I called him to apologize. He was nice about it, being busy himself with the harvest and pruning, and came to visit us in November instead, braving Dad's contempt to see her. I respected that. And in time I came to trust him with her—he had stopped provoking power struggles with her. He fed her sweetly, didn't try to force her or get annoyed with her slowness at eating. She would hum and look around the room when he fed her, take her time mashing her mouthfuls with her tiny gums and tongue, while she studied the kitchen ceiling and walls and the pots hanging over the stove, the pictures on the walls. He changed her promptly and well, and he picked her up immediately
when she started to cry. So for the week he was with us, I left her with him when I went to work.

Her absence when I was working made me realize what a strain her presence created: it broke my concentration and I didn't cook as well. But I thought, Hell, so what. It's more important to take care of the baby than it is to cook perfectly. My next thought was, That's why men seem more dedicated than women. To art or whatever. They won't break their concentration for a baby or a child, they'd rather let it scream. Or sit in shit. Like Dad. Their art or their work, or even just television, comes first. But I didn't want to be like that. No matter what, for me the baby would always come first. When Stepan left, I went back to taking Isabelle to work with me.

She grew so fast
. I could cry with sorrow that Isabelle grew so fast, remembering how adorable she had been crawling around discovering the world of carpets and chair legs, shoe buckles and cigarette packets, especially the cellophane. Then suddenly she was on her feet, running in triumph to our outstretched arms, so proud of herself she couldn't stop grinning and exploring tabletops and objects she could bang on. She lurched around the rooms, more surely than Marguerite, the Fields' child, but reminding me of her, and I suddenly understood how Annette and Ted could have loved their little bundle, despite the problems. Isabelle launched herself from table or chair and ran in tiny staggering steps as far as she could before falling or managing to reach some handhold, a chair arm or table, which she would then pound in triumph like a tiny Tarzan. She loved the kitchen and explored it at every opportunity. She would open a cabinet and remove its contents, pot by pot. She'd carry each object across the room and present it to me, then go back for another, with the utmost seriousness of purpose. When the cabinet was empty, she would start on the next; when they were all empty, she would replace the objects, but in such disorder that they didn't fit. I had to redo the job, but I waited to do that until she'd gone for her nap. She would babble all the while she did this, and in time, the babbling turned into
words, though not words I could fathom the meaning of. The satisfaction of utterance made her face beam with complacency.
She
knew what she was saying.

By the time she was a year old, I could understand her. Recognizable words—
no
,
poppop
(for my father),
gone
(also usually for my father),
car.
No
mama
, not for a long time. But once she mastered those syllables, she was off and running, sentences pouring out of her. She was a fierce little thing, intense whether in a state of joy or enduring the profound tragedies that beset childhood. I tried to understand. I stretched myself as far toward her as I could reach. And she grew into a beautiful child, a good child—all children are good—wanting to be loved, wanting approval.

By 1979 the restaurant had become a fashionable place in our part of the state; we were completely booked most summer nights and now were in the black even in the winter. Artur was ecstatic. Success was good for him. It made him generous with praise and less subject to panic. Success did for him what it is supposed to do but doesn't always, put him in a mellow state of mind. At this point I could tell him I wanted to be a partner in the business without fearing a hysterical explosion. He knew I could leave if I was unsatisfied, that Dad would back me in a place of my own if I asked him to. By now Artur loved Isabelle and me; we'd become his family and he couldn't do without us. I didn't just cook, I co-managed the restaurant; I ran the kitchen and, with Kathleen's help, supplied it with fresh organic vegetables and herbs, at least in late summer and early fall. So he agreed, asking that I put some cash into the business. The restaurant badly needed redecorating. I had saved most of my wages, so I could do that.