What We Have (28 page)

Eileen frowned. “That’s a little harder,” she told us. “Most of our girls are looking for a place to live.”

She tried to pitch the live-in idea, but Jacques put up a hand to stop her. “We’re pretty private,” he told her. “We like to have evenings and weekends to ourselves, just us.”

That was an understatement. No sane, likeable child-care person would want to stay with us for a minute if they saw us on a typical evening, nine-ish. We didn’t even like seeing ourselves then, let alone each other. Evenings and weekends were subject to crankiness, half-dress, and eating takeout straight from the fridge.

I could barely imagine having a stranger around during the day, when we supposedly needed help. How could I talk to my mother and Julie and sob every afternoon into Sacha’s back in front of someone I didn’t know—even someone discreet, yet confiding?

“Live out,” I confirmed weakly.

It didn’t seem possible that we had already reached this point. July was coming to an end, and Sacha would be eight months old in a few weeks. She was crawling now. How long before she took her first steps?

The future was blank. All I could manage was to try not to plan, to focus on the here and now: mashing up steamed veggies and fruit for Sacha, taking her for walks, going running. My book had ground to a standstill in the middle of horoscopes, as if prognostication everywhere had come to a halt.

My mother
—

I felt like I should say something about my mother to Eileen Diamond. I had a strange compulsion to tell everyone I met about her, like the speaker in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
My mother has metastatic breast cancer. Stage 4, in her bones. Incurable, actually. We’re hoping chemo will buy her time, but she hasn’t been able to start the second round of treatment yet. We don’t know for sure when she can. She’s in a lot of pain from the cancer, and sometimes it’s hard for her to stay awake or concentrate—

Eileen was passing us each a questionnaire to fill out.

And this whole thing is so hard to understand, because even though we come from a cancer family, it’s not breast cancer, it’s
ovarian
cancer. We were always so worried about our ovaries, and so careful, and then this happened, and it just doesn’t make sense—

But there was no time here for family history. We had these forms to fill out. Parenting style, schedules, hobbies. These details would help us find a “match,” Eileen said.

Our hobbies.

Sacha wriggled around on my lap, trying to grab the pen from me. I had a brief flashback to senior year in high school, looking at the big space on college applications for listing major activities. Honors, national awards.

I didn’t really have hobbies.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to pick some up. Maybe my mother would rally. Maybe we’d find a great nanny, get the house issue settled, I’d get back to working on my book, we’d have a schedule—

I could study Farsi.

“What should I say?” I whispered to Jacques, who was busy writing. I read his entries for Hobbies over his shoulder.
Squash. Biking. Sudoku
.

Sudoku?
“That’s not a hobby,” I objected, tapping on the word with my pencil.

He looked offended. Then he frowned at my blank page. “What about running?” he asked, looking me over like we’d just met. Only this time, he wasn’t planning to ask for my number.

Running! I’d forgotten about that.

Running
, I wrote in one of the blanks in rounder-than-usual print. I thought for a while. One hobby didn’t seem enough.
Hobby
seemed to demand a plural.
Travel
, I wrote next.

Did flying back and forth to Detroit count as travel? I pictured the magazine racks in the Northwest Airlines, Terminal D. The last row of coach.

Apparently, we were out of time.

“Terrific,” Eileen was saying, taking back our forms. “Now, maybe we can just chat about these for a little while—”

Jacques was getting annoyed. He didn’t mind filling out a short form, but he was missing a meeting and didn’t want to talk about hobbies (real ones included sleeping late, scouring the classifieds for used trucks, and watching reruns of
Law & Order
). He wanted to find out what we got for our nonrefundable deposit. We were post-hobby, and we needed help.

All it took was a few terse questions, and Eileen—she had an MBA, after all—jumped into action. Of course, we could move on—of course, if he had a
meeting
—

She scattered a few brightly colored folders on the desk between us and disappeared into her inner office, where the contracts were kept. Jacques, frowning, took out a checkbook.

I looked over file number one. Annika Nilson, a sweet-faced girl relocated to Boston from a Midwestern farming community, straight A student, active in her church, her own hobbies (volunteering at a soup kitchen, stargazing) suggesting compassion and a love of nature. Her essay—“The Importance of Family”—centered on a tribute to her grandmother, who’d taught her to bake before dying of congestive heart failure when Annika was twelve.

I pictured myself opening the front door after a day of teaching to see Annika’s shining head bent over Sacha’s, nudging tiny fingers around a rolling pin.

When Eileen returned, I cleared my throat. “
Annika
looks like a nice girl,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal.

Eileen frowned, looked at the folder, reddened. “Oh—I’ve made a mistake,” she said.

Annika, it seemed, had already been placed. A couple in the Back Bay had just hired her. A pair of headhunters, Eileen said approvingly, taking the file back. With two-year-old twins.

In my envious imagination, the headhunters were doubles, with two of everything. Two toddlers. Two high-powered jobs. Twice as prepared to swoop in and grab Annika.

We were behind again.

“Don’t worry,” Eileen assured us, “there are other candidates”—maybe not quite Annika, her tone implied—“but it’s true, this is a
very active
time in the nanny-hiring season.”

End of July. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to get their child-care situation squared away before Labor Day. We should get back to Eileen with our top choices as soon as possible.

Jacques seemed to guess how I felt.

“They probably keep Annika’s file as a decoy,” he said under his breath as Eileen ushered us out. I could tell he was trying to cheer me up. “Just to scare people into choosing someone else quickly. Annika probably doesn’t even exist.”

We drove home a different route than usual, letting Sacha drift off in the back. Musing over our options.

“Look,” Jacques said, stopping short on a street about a mile from the House with the Green Shag. “There’s a FOR SALE sign. Why hasn’t Sandi shown us this place?”

I squinted up at the house: big, dark stucco, a little close to the road, which was pretty busy. It was hard to tell what the house was like. Ivy crawling up the walls. Not in spectacular repair. “I’ll ask her,” I said uncertainly, wondering what grabbed him about it.

You couldn’t even see the yard from this vantage. Was it “useable”? Who could tell? Maybe the need to get settled was starting to hit Jacques, too.

Seize the house
, as the Romans might have put it.

ONCE THERE WAS NO JULY
or August.

The Romans had a ten-month calendar, with months named for gods and numbers. March, from Mars. November, from nine; December, from ten. The fifth month used to be called Quintilis; the sixth, Sextilis.

Then Julius Caesar got the fifth month named for him—so Quintilis was changed to July. Eventually his great-nephew Augustus wanted a month of his own, too, and Sextilis became August.

What if months were named for feelings, instead of numbers or emperors or gods? Remorse. Terror. Ire. Today is the seventeenth day of Remorse. Ire has ended. Can you believe it’s Terror again already?

Or maybe you could use Kübler-Ross’s stages. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

In that case, we were in Bargaining now. Or maybe somewhere between Bargaining and Depression. It was the last week of July. Full summer. Heat burned behind the retina like an eclipse, I couldn’t remember a season other than this. The warmth moved up inside of us, dulling us, slowing us to a crawl. Some nights I woke up, soaked, to the split and crash of thunder, and in the next room Sacha slept, working her thumb in her mouth, undisturbed.

We were all on hold, waiting. Julie was due any day now, and I called her constantly, the two of us evaluating signs of imminent labor over the phone.
What exactly did the pain feel like? Low? Sharp or dull?

“Your cousin is coming, Sachabelle,” I crooned, holding Sacha on my lap. Julie had stopped working after she got back to Maine from the Fourth of July, and spent most days now out on their screened porch, talking to me or to my mother on the phone, dabbing herself with ice water, trying to find a comfortable position.

Between calling Julie and calling my mother, I read files from Centre Nanny. It was time to get ready for the fall. I tried to get things done—I got a referral from Dr. Muto for an internist who said she’d be happy to take me on as a regular patient. Her name was Dr. Pierce, and she wore funky glasses and had a cockeyed smile that put me instantly at ease. My version of our family history didn’t seem to faze her.

“Let’s see what’s going on here,” she said, putting my chart down and coming over to examine me.

Nothing was going on. Normal breast exam. Normal blood pressure, normal weight, normal blood work. Everything was normal, except that because of my mother, nothing was.

“Still nursing?” Dr. Pierce asked me, looking down at Sacha, who had come with me, the way she always did.

I shook my head.
Last things
, I thought, trying to remember now what nursing had felt like.

THE LAST WEEK OF JULY,
Dr. Brenner gave my mother the all clear to start round two of F-U. Her blood work looked good. But now my mother was the one to stall: She was determined to go to Maine when Julie had the baby, and she wanted to put the chemo off until she got back.

“She’s nuts,” Julie complained, when we talked about it later.

“She needs to do the treatment! She can’t put it off just for me. Can you imagine how I’ll feel if the baby is two weeks late?”

My mother refused to listen to anyone. F-U could wait, she said crisply. Her new grandchild could not. Period. End of discussion.

Julie begged me to talk sense into her.

I tried. Sometimes the logistics angle worked best. “Listen. I can’t get my tickets to come out and help if I don’t know when you’re going to do the treatment,” I reminded my mother.

She refused to listen.

Dr. Brenner was OK with the idea of waiting a bit longer. They agreed she’d start round two when she got back from Maine. And my father was going to take time off from work, so she didn’t need me to come out, though she appreciated the offer, she told me. Case closed.

So we waited, all of us.

 

I KEPT SOME ROUTINES, STARTED
new ones. I went to the university to get my office set up, letting Sacha chew on the edge of Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish
while I wiped down bookshelves. I put books on reserve at the library for my courses. I called Sandi to check in about the house we’d seen. Yes, she knew it, it was a great house inside, but it needed work, and the owner was asking more than we said we could spend—but she’d check with the broker, just to see, because it had been on the market for a while, and you never knew—

Some mornings I sat at the kitchen counter holding my day planner like it was some kind of sacred text, moving my finger along the edge of one entry or another.

This, and this, and this. This is how we fill up a life.

 

IN THE AFTERNOONS, I TALKED
over child-care options with my mother.

Jacques and I had picked our top three candidates. Cara Reilly from Des Moines, twenty-three, working toward her master’s in early childhood education at Simmons. Jamie Brice from the North Shore, who loved children and was hoping to go into pediatric nursing one day. And Annabel O’Rourke from Plymouth—the youngest of the batch, only nineteen, who loved “sewing and ‘surprises,’ ” and had included a photo of herself in her file (a little out of focus) taken on a roller coaster, both arms up.

On the phone, my mother and I mulled over the pros and cons of each. So far, Cara was the front-runner. “What does Cara’s mother do?” my mother asked, as if this were the clincher. (If, for example, her mother happened to teach AP History at an elite private school, that would be a plus.) I admitted I didn’t know, and there was silence. Maybe she was thinking about that, about the lack of information surrounding mothers, their eventual irrelevance, how they could mean so much for so long, but when push came to shove, they were only bedrock after all—invisible, below the surface, not even warranting a minute of an interviewer’s time. But no, apparently she wasn’t thinking about that, she was already moving on to other issues. What about siblings? “Sisters or brothers,” she mused. “That’s important.”