Read The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Online
Authors: Nichole Bernier
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (28 page)
After that day her status in the kitchen fell. Shaking with agitation and anger, she’d finally told Chris about the episode, and about the past relationship. He looked at her as if she were saying she’d slept with Giradeaux once again, because withholding information was so unlike her. It had been several tense days before they’d had a resolution.
She decided there would be no more secrets. Nothing was worth that draft of cold air through their marriage.
Kate thought of her reaction to the baby rabbits nearly two weeks before. She thought of the cache of food and water hidden in the spare-tire well of their car back home. She had not intended this. But it had grown as a weed can, spreading into something unmanageable from dark roots choking out that which is healthy. If she felt this way about the things she left unspoken in her marriage—shame,
balanced by need—she could not imagine how Elizabeth must have felt about concealing Michael.
She rose from the grass, wiped dew from her bare legs, and went back inside the house.
April 14, 1998
Two kids under two. Other people do it all the time, but Sourpuss can’t seem to get the hang of it. I’m totally wiped out after a day with my own and God help me after a few hours of also watching Kate’s son, too. (“No big deal” I always say when she asks, because I want it to be no big deal.) It doesn’t seem to affect Dave in the same way, even when he is with them all day. I’d like to believe it’s because he grew up in a large family, though it’s probably just who he is. His skin is thicker, he’s got more patience, he smiles more. The kids are lucky to have him, luckier than they are to have me. In the blackest moments it’s a kind of relief, knowing that if I weren’t here they would be fine.
I’m not cut out for this, like I always suspected. I get too frustrated, blown off my rails by small things. The mailman rings the bell and wakes Jonah after just a twenty-minute nap and I could cry I feel so robbed. I open my eyes every morning feeling like I’ve woken up in someone else’s life, and I’m so tired it’s like there’s sand under my eyelids. Terrible thoughts of what I’d do for another hour in bed, not even asleep necessarily. Just quiet. Alone.
Yesterday I was nursing Anna while Jonah was upstairs fighting a nap, and he cried until he threw up. All over the crib and all over the floor, the only carpeted room in the house. I had to put Anna on the ground midfeeding and she was livid, purple-faced while I cleaned up Jonah, who was no happier. Okay, Dr. Spock. Which one is going to be in therapy in 20 years because of being left on the rug while you cared for the other one? Who needs you more?
Kate rested the book in her lap, and thought of that first summer of motherhood on the island, the afternoon she’d left Flour and gone down the cliff path to sit on the high rocks by the crashing waves.
For a moment she’d imagined stepping off the rock, dropping into the froth and surge and letting her lungs fill with water. She loved her son, she loved her husband. But that love only added to the impulse. She’d known, after she climbed back down to the sand, that it wasn’t something she could explain to anyone.
When she looked up Max was there at the bottom of the path, the bulk of him filling the opening in the brush. He took her hand and led her back up the hill to the kitchen.
What if all the women in the playgroup had felt that way? The loft receded in a moment of vertigo. What if all mothers experienced times of hopeless obliteration, and no one told?
May 11, 1998
Victoria canceled my contract, said the agency isn’t doing any more freelance subcontracting. I want to throw the phone through the window, or go stand on a highway bridge and pitch rocks at trucks. It’s not like I did all that much work, maybe 15 hours a week, but it wasn’t about the amount of time or the money. It wasn’t even about the occasional client meetings with honest-to-God adult interaction, though that was something. It was the identity, the ownership, the 1 a.m. moment behind the idea and then bringing it to fruition that had nothing to do with Dave or the kids. I can’t help feeling like a door has closed on that part of my life
.
May 23, 1998
Schlepped my portfolio and breast pump to TriBeCa, walked some junior VP through four different campaigns I’d done. But I could tell halfway through that he was just being polite. The truth is, not many agencies use freelancers these days, and the ones that do just subcontract to former employees. Everyone wants a known entity; there’s nothing more annoying than a freelancer whose technology is old and unreliable, unless it’s one whose kids are crying in the background. He said they might have a position opening up full-time and I should check back in a month, but of course I can’t do full-time.
I left with a smile, handing him one of the new business cards I ordered to show that I’m a serious part-timer, not just someone winging it while the kids are napping. When I lifted my arm at the curb to hail a cab, the breeze was damp on my blouse. I looked down and saw that I was leaking. Wet spots the size of quarters, as obvious as tasseled pasties at a strip club. I could make myself insane wondering how long they might have been there. When I got to Grand Central I ran to the bathroom to pump and had to sit in a toilet stall, the machine on battery mode and wheezing so loudly I could only imagine what everyone thought I was doing in there. An electric razor? A vibrator? Before last week’s interview, I had to pump squatting in a custodial closet.
After I bagged five ounces I ran out into the main terminal in danger of missing my train, and while I was looking up at the schedule boards I ran smack into someone else. Five ounces, everywhere. Then the sitter called to tell me Anna was hungry but refusing the bottle, when would I be home?
I cried on the train, face turned to the window. Who am I kidding? You can do all your gymnastics to try and fool Mother Nature, use all your fancy gadgets and pills and pumps and sitters, but biology always wins in the end
.
July 20, 1998, midnight
I asked Kate to watch the kids, claimed a late-afternoon doctor’s appointment, and I went to the copy shop to add some things to my portfolio and mail a few more résumés. Before I headed out the door I threw some shirts and pants in a garbage bag. What’s that? she asked, and it came out easily, Dropping stuff off at Goodwill.
After the post office I got on the highway. I put the windows down, opened the sunroof, and blasted music I don’t even know, horrible numbing stuff. I passed one exit, then another, and another. I hit the Bruckner Expressway and turned the music up until I could feel the bass in my breastbone. Then I heard the fumf of a blown tire.
Standing there with the AAA guy I saw my life as an endless loop
of the same scene. No matter how many times I imagined driving away or how many times I packed a bag and really did it, I would never reach the FDR
.
August 27, 1998
Dave is in Texas for three days at an equipment conference, and I’ve decided I will paint the baby’s room. Put Anna in the cradle in our bedroom, and have been spending the past few nights in a land of small animals and nursery rhymes, a cheerful task that “bridges both worlds,” as Nadia suggested.…
Nadia? Kate struggled to think of any mutual friends in town, or anyone that had been mentioned earlier in the journals, but came up with no one.
… Bunnies everywhere, a cottontail orgy. I find that merlot helps me channel Beatrix Potter and gives a pleasantly forgiving view of my day. I am getting better at this. I tell myself this and I 70 percent mean it.
We are having Anna baptized next week and I find myself offering up snippets of prayer. Not just that I can discover some inner well of the qualities I need to be a good mother, but that I can fake it until I can become one. LIVE AS IF. A phrase from my mother’s playbook
.
By midfall Elizabeth had fallen into a parenting rhythm, balancing activities that gave the children pleasure with things she wanted to do herself. One warm Friday afternoon in late September, the Martins hosted a margarita-and-juicebox party to christen their new swingset. As children trampled the tomato plants and fought over sandbox toys, and the husbands asked Kate’s opinion about restaurants in Manhattan, Elizabeth slipped away. She walked inside her house, went upstairs, and watched from her bedroom window as the party functioned perfectly well without her. Next to the window a stack of her paintings leaned against the wall, and she flipped through them dispassionately, eyeing them as a stranger might.
The
dimensions are off here. This one’s saccharine schlock. This one not bad, possibly salable
. As she came back down she overheard Brittain in the living room, resting her third-trimester legs on an ottoman and talking to someone in a stage whisper about home security systems.
So useless without glass-break coverage
, she said.
I hope she learned from the experience and got a better system put in here. I still can’t believe … Personally, I never would have …
Elizabeth stood just out of view in the doorway and watched Brittain sitting with Kate, who sat quietly nursing Piper as Brittain went on. Elizabeth leaned against the wall unseen, listening to hear whether Kate would agree. A few moments later after Brittain left the room, Elizabeth joined Kate.
Calm moments like this, when she isn’t on fire being entertaining, she really is a different person. Everything about her is softer with the extra weight; women always want to lose the baby weight without realizing how it makes a face kinder. I wish I could sketch her profile, thick hair curving in a dark sweep under her chin. But I don’t want to ask if I can and then see that moment of discomfort, struggling to find a polite no, or more likely turning it into a joke
.
Kate was aware of everything speeding up: her breathing, her heart; her whole body suddenly at attention—mouth dry, eyes staring stupidly, every follicle prickling on her arms and legs. Thirty minutes earlier she had been exhausted, ready to close the book after the long day that had begun with miniature golf and hadn’t slowed. But not any longer. It was as if she were privy to a confidential review she was never meant to see. And yet it had been handed to her.
November 2, 1998
Kate started working for a restaurant start-up here in town, a bistro being launched by someone from her culinary school. It struck me that they must need some graphic design done—logo, menus, ads, whatever. Leslie’s sister-in-law doesn’t need her nanny in the mornings now that the kids are in preschool, and she’s available a few mornings
a week. It could work. I might just hint at it and see if she’s receptive. Kate will probably ask to see my portfolio, so I’ll need to update it. I stayed up too late last night looking at fonts online, thinking of the way she described the bistro. Bleeding Cowboys is a good font, old-school, fading at the edges, western but not too. Or Vielkalahizo, crisp and simple.
Dave’s been away for three days in California. Life with two little kids is like a three-legged race—I can’t get anywhere easily or respond quickly. Sometimes I’m seized with an irrational fear that something’s going to happen and I’m destined to lose one of them. It’s crazy but for those seconds it’s real, my punishment for taking to motherhood too slowly
.
November 18, 1998
I had a brief conversation this morning with Kate after playgroup about consulting for the restaurant. She was vague and breezy, Hmmm, I don’t know what they’re doing for their graphics. She talked a little bit about the bistro concept and some of the people on the team, all with great NYC credentials. But in the end she sidestepped it. Was perfectly nice of course, and professional. But I could tell she was squirming, and she was noncommittal in a way that I know means it won’t come up again.
If they have someone else on board already doing their graphics I think she would have said so. Is it that she doesn’t want to work with a friend? Or that she assumes I’m not very talented? She could have at least asked to see my portfolio.
It was so obvious what was going on that we both had to pretend it wasn’t. She just isn’t willing to put her own reputation on the line to put me in front of her people. I’m Elizabeth of the bunny murals on the bedroom wall
.
When Elizabeth came to her pitching freelance design work, Kate had only the vaguest idea of what Elizabeth’s past work consisted of.
She knew it was with an ad agency, but thought her responsibilities had been mostly administrative, and for periods of time forgot that it existed at all. Kate dug for any recollection of Elizabeth talking about designing ads, victorious over finishing a project or clinching a new client, but she came up with nothing. There might have been an occasional reference to being overtired from working late into the night, but Kate had assumed it was the family’s own bills or taxes, which Elizabeth had said she found tedious. The truth was, Kate hadn’t asked. So the idea of putting Elizabeth in a room with the New York designers and chefs, a team of investors already squeamish about whether the town was sophisticated enough for their restaurant, was not one Kate had considered seriously. At the time, Kate had been consumed with managing the transition between her lives as chef and mom, two halves that would not integrate. She could barely recall the conversation. Elizabeth’s request had come and gone and Kate hadn’t thought of it again, it had been that inconsequential. To her.
She was hungry and nauseated, was tired yet felt as if she could run for miles. She didn’t know what she felt, beyond an agitated awareness that her perceptions were off, and in some ways always had been. Kate stood abruptly and climbed down the ladder.
She paced around the main room picking up kids’ books, then putting them down two feet away, adjusting pillows on the couch. She saw now that she had made a quick and inaccurate assessment of Elizabeth. She’d seen propriety and generosity and someone who always said yes, and had thought
simple
, thought
dreamless
. She’d mistaken reticence for a lack of passion, and what Kate had seen as slovenly contentment—Elizabeth slouching about in maternity clothes long after Anna’s birth, hair lank and unwashed—was something far more complicated, a dark, sad place. Kate’s mantra that you never knew what was going on with others had somehow not extended to Elizabeth, and she had conveyed her low expectations of her in countless small ways.
