Kelly Day sat at the desk in her high-rise apartment, looking through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the leafy tree tops that lined her street. There was a telephone headset clamped to her ears, the desktop computer’s screen was glowing in front of her, her Palm Pilot and notebook were at the ready, and Lemon was curled contentedly in a corner, languidly licking his privates. She’d never felt more efficient, more together, more happy than she did at that moment, with one hand resting lightly on her belly and Dana Evans, head of Special Programs for the Philadelphia Zoo, rattling off requests into her ear.
“All right,” Kelly said, starting to review. “So that’s no onions, no garlic, no curries, no yellow foods…”
“No yellow vegetables,” Dana Evans said. “I think that saffron rice would be acceptable but not yellow peppers.”
“No yellow vegetables,” Kelly said, making a note and thinking that Prince Andres-Philipe, head of some small, wealthy European nation known for the excellence of its chocolate and the liberality of its divorce laws, sounded like a major head case. “No coffee, no chocolate, no alcohol, no alcoholic flavoring in the dessert…”
“It’s a shame, too,” said Dana. “That Grand Marnier mousse you guys served last time was out of this world.”
“I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” Kelly said, making a notation of the compliment in her Dana Evans file for the next person handling a zoo event. “Now, in terms of the order of events, the students from Creative and Performing Arts will sing our national anthem, then his national anthem…”
“And the brass band?”
“Trumpets when he enters,” Kelly said. “A string quartet will be playing during the meal. Butlered hors d’oeuvres starting at six o’clock, lasting forty-five minutes as the guests arrive, open bars on both sides of the tent. At 6:35, the prince arrives through the back. I’ll have security hold a parking place right by the door and escort him into the tent. We’ll start asking people to take their seats at 6:40. At 7:00, the head of Special Gifts will introduce the prince. He’ll make brief remarks—I’ve got four minutes blocked off—thanking the attendees for their generosity to the zoo. Dinner service will start at 7:10—French service, as we discussed—and the desserts will be buffet style, with petits fours accompanying the coffee service. Dancing will start at 8:15, and I’ve got the prince scheduled to leave at 8:30.”
“One more thing,” said Dana. “The prince prefers male waiters.”
Kelly shook her head and made another note. “Does he have any strong feelings about direct eye contact?”
“None that he’s mentioned,” Dana said. “And the hotel knows he’ll need his tuxedo cleaned and pressed?”
“He can either drop it at the front desk as soon as he checks in or ring the front desk to pick it up once he’s in his room,” said Kelly.
“You’re an angel,” Dana said. “So will I see you at the event?”
“Not me,” Kelly said, grinning. “My maternity leave starts tonight. A whole year!”
“Then I won’t keep you. Good luck!”
“Thanks,” said Kelly. She hung up the phone and rested her bare feet on Lemon’s warm side as she finished typing a memo to her boss containing the final details of the prince’s visit. Then she flipped her laptop closed and her Palm Pilot open. The man from the fabric store was coming to measure their windows tomorrow at ten. They still couldn’t afford the leather couch with nailhead detail she’d had her eye on—not to mention the plasma television set she’d lusted after ever since she’d first seen it advertised—but curtains were at least a start, and…
“Hi,” said a hollow voice. She gasped, jumping up out of her seat, spilling a cup of coffee (decaf and, lucky for her, lukewarm) over her desk (from IKEA and destined for replacement—there was an antique secretary in a lovely shade of gold-green with cabriole legs that she’d seen in a shop on Pine Street) and her dog. Lemon yelped and scurried out of the office with his tail between his legs.
“Steve! You scared me!” She lifted her laptop and started mopping up coffee with her sleeve. “What are you doing home?”
Her husband stood motionless in the middle of their empty living room. The suit that had fit him fine when he’d left for work in the morning seemed bigger now. The jacket hung around his arm in loose folds, the pants drooped at his waist, and the cuffs puddled over his shoes. He looked at the beige carpet and mumbled something Kelly couldn’t hear.
“What?” she asked. She could hear the echo of her mother’s voice in her own, her mother berating her children or giving her husband the third degree—
Where were you? Who broke this? What were you doing last night until two in the morning?
—and it set her teeth on edge. She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry, Steve. I didn’t hear you.”
Steve’s hair was curling limply over his collar.
Haircut,
Kelly thought, reaching automatically for her Palm Pilot before she forced herself to look at Steve again.
“What is it?” she asked again, feeling fear creep up her spine, wrapping around her belly. Steve never looked this way. He’d always been…not cocky, exactly, not like Scott Schiff, who’d probably looked like a successful investment banker from birth, but quietly confident, sure that his intelligence and drive would lead, inevitably, to his success. Only now, with his head hanging down and his hands dangling at his sides, Steven Day didn’t look like the head of e-business for one of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies. He looked like a scared little boy.
“Laid off,” Steve repeated, his Adam’s apple jerking with each word. “I fucked something up, and they…” He paused. “They decided to cut back on their e-business initiatives.”
She stared at him, taking a minute to figure out what he meant. “You got fired?” she blurted.
“Laid off.”
The words felt like a shot to her heart. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not,” said Steve, hunching his shoulders. “Me, Philip, half of the programmers, three of the receptionists…”
Kelly pressed her hands down hard on the lid of her laptop and found that she wasn’t interested in the plight of the programmers or the receptionists or Steve’s friend Philip. Instead, she felt a rage so black and absolute that it scared her.
Those assholes,
she thought, drawing in a shaky breath.
I’m going to have a baby! How could they have done this to us?
“Do they know that I’m pregnant?” she asked, hating the shrill sound of her voice.
“Yeah,” said Steve. “That’s why they’re giving me three months’ severance instead of two.”
Three months. Kelly’s mind started clicking. Three months’ pay, minus their rent, minus credit-card payments, car payments, utilities, health insurance…
“Do we still have our health insurance?” she asked, hearing her voice waver.
“I can pay for it,” Steve said. “We’ll have COBRA. We’ll be okay, Kelly. Don’t worry about that.”
She drew a deep breath. “What happened?” Almost without thinking, she touched her cell phone, her Palm, the neat stack of bills that she was going to use Quicken to pay that night.
What now?
she thought, feeling her head spinning. “Why would they do this to you?”
“I just screwed up, okay?” he yelled. “It wasn’t like I meant to do it. It just happened.” He raked his hands through his hair. “I feel like an idiot,” he muttered. Kelly went to the living room and started rearranging things—the tape measure she’d left on the floor, copies of
Forbes
and
Money
and
Power
magazines and
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
that were stacked in the space where a coffee table would go. There was a picture she’d torn out of
Traditional Homes
magazine of the window treatments she wanted. She folded it into a tiny square and shoved it into the pocket of her maternity jeans.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, thinking of the deal they’d made—she’d take a year off to stay home with the baby; he’d work and support them.
Steve pushed himself away from the table and walked past her without meeting her eyes. “I’m going for a run,” he said.
“You’re going for a run,” she repeated, thinking that this was his bizarre idea of a joke, waiting for him to tell her that he was kidding about all of it. Running. And losing his job.
She went to the kitchen with one hand on her belly, which felt heavier than it ever had, and started pulling things out of the refrigerator—chicken breasts, broccoli, chicken broth for rice. Five minutes later, Steve stalked out of the bedroom, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and his running shoes. “I’ll be back soon.” And then he was gone.
Kelly stood in the quiet of the kitchen for a minute, waiting for Steve to come back and tell her he was kidding, that everything would be all right, that he’d keep the promise he’d made that first night, that he would take care of her. When he didn’t reappear, she put the chicken in the oven and put water on to boil for broccoli. Then she shuffled into the bedroom, where her husband’s suit and shoes and tie lay in a pile on the bed and curled up on top of them, resting her forehead on a sleeve that was still damp and smelling of coffee. He’d screwed up, and what could she do about it? She’d already arranged their whole glorious future in her mind—the big wedding, the beautiful apartment, the babies, all of it predicated on the career her husband would have, the salary that would make it all possible.
Wrong again, dumbo,
a voice whispered in her mind. And what would happen now? There wasn’t a lemon law for husbands. She couldn’t bring him in for a tune-up or call his boss and try to fix the mistake that had cost him his job.
When she heard the door open an hour later, Kelly pulled off her clothes, wrapped herself in a bathrobe, and walked into the living room. Steve was lying on the floor, where a couch should have been. He’d kicked his sneakers off. His T-shirt clung to his chest as it rose and fell.
Kelly looked down at him, struggling to find the proper—the wifely—tone of voice. Sympathetic. Empathetic. Something-thetic. “Look,” she finally managed. “These things happen. Mistakes get made…”
“Nice use of the passive voice there,” Steve said.
“Well, what do you want me to say?” Kelly asked. Steve flinched as if she’d slapped him. It didn’t slow her down. “Do you want me to say that this is all fine? That I’m going to have a baby and my husband doesn’t have a job, but it’s okay?”
Steve finally raised his head. “Something’s burning.” The smoke alarms went off with a whoop. Lemon started barking furiously.
“Shit,” Kelly said. She went into the kitchen and saw that the water had boiled away and the bottom of the pot was burned. She turned off the burner, dumped the pot into the sink, and ran cold water into it. A hissing cloud of steam rose around her head. The fire alarm seemed to shriek even louder.
Kelly ran into the bathroom, pulled half a dozen scented candles from underneath the sink—cinnamon, vanilla, Spring Rain, Sugar Cookie. She carried them back to the kitchen and lit each one. She could hear Steve on the phone with the building’s super, telling him everything was fine. “Just a little cooking accident.”
And a little unemployment,
Kelly thought. She set the candles on top of the stove, ran to the front bathroom for a can of air freshener, and started spraying. Lemon whined and cringed away from the can.
Steve grabbed her wrist. “What are you doing?”
She opened her mouth to try to explain the way her mother’s kitchen back in Ocean City had been—dishes eternally piled in the sink, the dishwasher perpetually half-emptied, and its smell, most of all, the smell, as if the walls had absorbed the residue of every meal that had ever been cooked there, every pan of bacon and pot of Brussels sprouts, every cigarette that had ever been smoked, every beer that had ever been opened (and every can of bourbon and Tab). “I just don’t want it to smell like smoke in here,” was all she said. She reached for the air freshener and saw that her hand was shaking. Steve took the can out of her hand and put it down.
“I’m going to sleep,” she said. It was seven o’clock at night, and she hadn’t eaten dinner, but Steve simply nodded and said, “Okay.” Kelly balled her hands into fists and resisted the urge to reach for the air freshener again. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened. Things will be all right.” The words hung in the kitchen alongside the smoke. Steve didn’t look at her.
“Well, good night,” she said and marched past him, through the empty living room, down the hall, past the office and the baby’s room, into their bedroom. She remembered the first time she’d seen this apartment, how it had been everything she’d ever wanted. High ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, en suite bathroom with Jacuzzi tub and separate shower, marble countertops and hand-painted porcelain fixtures. A bathtub that nobody else had ever used, two full bathrooms for the two of them.
We deserve it. You deserve it,
Steve would say, making dinner reservations at the priciest place in town, surprising her with a gold bracelet, an iPod, a trip to Jamaica.
Why not?
she’d think. She was making good money, and Steve’s salary, after bonuses, was so big it surprised them both. Things were only getting better, so why not?
“Why not?” she whispered, burying her face in her hands.
The book that would change her baby’s life arrived the first week of July, when Julian was eleven weeks old. Its title page was half covered in Lolo’s oversized scrawl.
THOUGHT YOU MIGHT FIND THIS HELPFUL
, her mother had written. “Helpful” had two
l
’s at the end. Ah, well. Spelling had never been her mother’s strong suit. Ayinde would have showed it to Richard, and they would have both laughed at it, but Richard was gone again. Golfing, then lunch downtown with executives from the video-game company, who were currently in the midst of developing a game based on Richard’s moves. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, standing at the foot of their bed, a butterscotch suede jacket draped over his broad shoulders and his golf spikes in his hand. “I’ll be back in time for dinner.”
Ayinde lowered her eyes. Every time he left, she thought about the perfume she’d smelled when he’d come so late to the hospital, and every time she’d started to ask him about it, something kept her from getting the words out. Her mother, maybe. She didn’t want to be pathetic, chasing after the man who’d already married her, checking his collars for lipstick and going through his wallet for receipts. So she merely lifted Julian’s pudgy forearm in her hand. “Wave bye-bye to Daddy,” she said. Richard had kissed them both and Ayinde had snuggled back into bed with Julian curled against her. When she opened her eyes, her husband was gone and so, inexplicably, were two hours of her morning.
Priscilla Prewitt’s Baby Success!
read the cover of the book Lolo had sent. Underneath the title was a picture of a woman with warm brown eyes and silver hair in a no-nonsense bob and a beaming baby in her arms.
GIVE YOUR BABY THE BEST BEGINNING
read the back cover.
PRISCILLA PREWITT SHOWS NEW MOTHERS THE WAY!
Julian pumped his arms in the air. Ayinde gave him her index finger to grasp and turned the pages with her free hand.
Priscilla Prewitt,
she read,
has been a childcare professional for more than thirty years, both in her native Alabama and in Los Angeles, where she developed her easy-to-follow, five-point plan for
Baby Success!
In her patented “down-home” prose backed up by the latest scientific studies, Priscilla Prewitt teaches every mother how to get her baby off to a successful start, ensuring success in preschool and beyond, and peace and harmony for the whole family!
Five-point plan,
Ayinde mused, flipping to the table of contents and chapters entitled “Sleep, Baby, Sleep!” and “Starting a Schedule” and “Keep On Keepin’ On.” It was eleven o’clock in the morning and she hadn’t even managed to get herself out of bed yet. The day before, she hadn’t gotten dressed until three and hadn’t eaten until dinner. The cook had prepared her a beautiful niçoise salad for lunch that had sat on the kitchen counter, the tuna turning brown and curling up at the edges, because Ayinde had stayed in bed for the duration of Julian’s nap, marveling at his long-fingered hands and his lips, moving through the bedroom in a kind of milky underwater haze that was caused, she figured, from having been awakened the previous night at one, four, and five-thirty in the morning because Julian was hungry or Julian was wet or Julian was just being a newborn and needed her around. Had she even brushed her teeth? She ran her tongue over her incisors and decided that the answer was no. Scheduling didn’t sound bad at all.
Julian batted at the braids she had put in the week before, figuring they were as low maintenance as she could handle and she wouldn’t have to worry about offending conservative Philadelphia television viewers anytime soon. She hummed to him, some wordless lullabye that her nanny had sung to her, opened up a page at random, and started reading.
A baby on a schedule—a baby in a familiar daily routine—is a happy baby. Think about your own life, darlin’. How would you feel if you got up in the morning not knowing whether it’s six o’clock or ten o’clock? Not knowing whether your next meal would come in fifteen minutes or two hours? Not knowing what your day would hold? You’d be a big ol’ grouch, and rightly so! Babies crave routine and regularity. They want to know what’s coming next, whether it’s a nap or a nursing or a bath or bedtime…and the sooner you get them started on a pleasant, predictable, easy-to-manage routine, the happier you and Dumpling will be.
“Dumpling,” Ayinde said experimentally. Julian tugged at her braid and gave a squeak. She flipped through the book, thinking that the
Baby Success!
plan, with its required logs and charts and timers, sounded fairly time-consuming…but what did she have besides time? She had no job. She couldn’t travel with Richard to away games or business trips even if she’d wanted to. She was rattling around the gigantic house she’d insisted upon with nothing to do but mind the baby.
Ayinde stared into Priscilla Prewitt’s warm brown eyes, wondering what her own mother would make of
Baby Success!
So far, Lolo was shaping up to be as effective and engaged a grandmother as she’d been a mother. She and Stuart had hired a driver to bring them in from New York once. Her parents had spent a total of three hours with Julian since his birth, and the baby had been asleep for two of them. They’d sat stiffly, side by side on the couch, beautifully over-dressed, as if they’d come to audition for the roles of doting, and extremely wealthy, grandparents. Her father had bounced the baby on his knee (a little too vigorously for Ayinde’s taste, but she’d kept quiet). Then he’d sung “Danny Boy” in his ringing baritone. That, evidently, constituted the entirety of his baby-entertaining skills. He’d vanished into the guest house where she’d found him an hour later, playing pool with the publicist.
Lolo wasn’t much better. She held the baby once, tentatively, and pretended not to mind when he’d drooled on her Jil Sander suit, but Ayinde had caught her dabbing furtively at the stain on the cream-colored sleeve. They’d dropped off a teddy bear that was easily five times as big as the baby and a complete layette of Petit Bateau outfits they’d purchased duty-free during their last trip to St. Barth’s. That, so far, had been the extent of the Mbezi/Walker’s involvement with little Julian.
“All Through the Night” read chapter six. Julian opened his eyes and started to cry. Ayinde sighed, thinking she’d settle for her baby’s sleeping All Through Three Hours. She carried Julian to the glider and began nursing him, supporting his body with her right hand while she turned pages with her left.
By the next morning, Ayinde had all of her tools in place—an electronic timer, so she could see exactly how long Julian was nursing, and the brands of slings and strollers and baby bathtubs and baby soap and baby shampoo that Priscilla Prewitt recommended. (
Now I want y’all to know that I’m not getting one red cent from these manufacturers. These are simply the products that I’ve liked the best over the years.
)
Ten minutes into her
Baby Success!
program, she had her first problem.
Brand-new babies should be nursing a maximum of thirty minutes per feeding,
Priscilla Prewitt wrote.
Longer than that, and they’re just usin’ you as a pacifier.
But after thirty minutes, Julian was still going strong. Ayinde squinted at the book, looking for further instructions.
If Dumpling is reluctant to let go of the booby, tell him nicely but firmly that mealtime’s over, and there will be more to come later. Then ease him off the breast, and offer him a pacifier—or, if you’re going all-natural, your finger to suck on.
“Julian!” Ayinde said, in her best estimation of a tone that was nice but firm. “Mealtime is over!” He ignored her, eyes squeezed shut, jaw working. Ayinde let him nurse another minute, which slid into another two, which was almost five when she was accosted with a vision of her son running home from kindergarten and opening her blouse himself.
“Okay!” she said in her firm-but-cheerful tone. She tried to pull him off gently. The baby’s head slid backward. Unfortunately, her nipple came with it.
“Ow!” she hissed. Julian opened his eyes, startled, and began wailing. Just then, the telephone rang.
Kelly,
she thought, groping for the Talk button without so much as glancing at the caller ID. Maybe it was Kelly, or Becky, and she could tell her what to do…
Alas, it was Lolo. “I hear that sweet boy!” she announced. Ayinde could imagine her mother standing in the white-on-white kitchen in which nothing other than tea was ever prepared, misting her orchids, dressed, as always, in couture—a pencil skirt or a wrap dress, high heels, and one of the dramatic hats that had become her signature look.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Hello, my love. How are you doing?”
“Just fine,” Ayinde said, as Julian blatted.
Lolo’s tone was dubious. “That doesn’t sound like a happy baby.”
“He’s just a little cranky,” Ayinde said, as Julian wailed even more loudly. She set him down in his Priscilla Prewitt–approved bouncy seat, tucked the receiver under her chin, and tried to refasten her bra. “It’s his cranky time.”
“Are you using that book I sent? It came very highly recommended. My masseuse swears by it!”
“High praise,” Ayinde murmured.
Lolo raised her voice until she was shouting over the baby’s cries. “Well, Ayinde, the point of the book is that once you get your baby into a routine, he won’t have a cranky time!”
“I understand that,” Ayinde said, fumbling her breast pad back into place. “We’re working on it.”
“You know,” Lolo said, “you never cried like that by the time you were Julian’s age.”
“Are you sure?”
She gave a brittle laugh. “I think I can remember what my own daughter was like.”
With all the drugs it was rumored Lolo had taken in the 1970s, Ayinde wasn’t so sure. “I should go.”
“Of course, love. Take good care of that darling baby!”
Ayinde hung up the phone, rehooked her bra, and picked up Julian, whose wails had given way to little whimpers. “Hey, sweetheart,” she whispered. His eyes were beginning to close. Oh, dear. She picked up the book.
DO NOT ALLOW DUMPLING TO SLEEP AFTER A FEEDING!
Priscilla Prewitt admonished.
Do you want to take a big ol’ nap after eating a heavy meal?
“Yes,” Ayinde said.
No!
Priscilla Prewitt wrote.
The ideal order for Baby’s development is meal, then activity, and then a little visit to Dreamland.
“Julian. Dumpling.” She kissed his cheek and wiggled his toes. He opened his mouth and started to cry again. “Playtime!” She dangled the fuzzy butterfly in front of the baby’s face. Richard hated the fuzzy butterfly, along with the blue teddy bear and the crinkly-winged insects. “It’s sissy stuff,” he’d said.
“How very evolved of you,” she’d replied and explained that there were very few options available for newborns in the dump-truck-and-bulldozer category, even if she’d wanted to seek them out, which she didn’t. “What did you play with when you were a baby?” she asked.
His face closed. Ayinde regretted the question immediately. Richard had grown up in Atlanta in half a dozen houses—his grandmother’s, an aunt here, a play-cousin there, places Ayinde had only seen on TV and in the profile
Sports Illustrated
had run a few years ago. No toys there. Worse, no mother. It was part of what drew them together. Even though Ayinde had been abandoned in a posh apartment and enrolled in boarding school as soon as she hit fourteen, and Richard had been dumped in apartments in the projects, it all came down to the same thing—parents who had better things to do. But Ayinde, at least, had had a consistent adult in her nanny, Serena, who’d cared for her from the time she was six weeks old until her eighth birthday. She’d had toys and clothes and grand birthday parties, a roof over her head, and the guarantee of three meals. Richard’s life hadn’t been like that.
“You want to know what I played with?” he asked shortly. Then he’d smiled to soften the blow of his words. “Basketballs, baby.” Julian had basketballs, of course—a regulation-sized sphere that bore the autographs of all of the Sixers and a miniature one that Richard kept tucked in Julian’s crib.
“Let’s shake a leg,” she told her son, who peered at her through slitted eyes as she wiped his face with a burp cloth, replaced his dirty T-shirt with a clean one, fastened a blue-and-white bib around his neck, and carried him into the sticky air outside.
“Just be patient,” Becky was saying from her perch on a bench in Rittenhouse Square Park, where she and Kelly and their respective bellies were sitting side by side in short-sleeved shirts and sneakers, squabbling about the right way to give birth.
Like it was going to be up to them,
Ayinde thought with a smile.
“I am being patient,” Kelly replied. She lurched to her feet and stretched her arms over her head, then grabbed her left elbow with her right hand and pulled. “I’ve been patient. But it’s thirty-eight weeks, which is full term, so why can’t they just induce me already?” She blew out a frustrated breath and switched elbows, then moved on to hamstring stretches.
Ayinde wheeled Julian over to the bench, thinking that Kelly, with her wisp of a blond ponytail and translucent skin, was looking considerably less chipper than she had in that first yoga class. Her lips were chapped, her blue eyes were sunken, and her body, in her black-and-white maternity workout ensemble, seemed to be all belly. Her arms and legs had moved past skinny toward scrawny, and she had dark circles under her eyes.
“Babies know when they want to be born,” Becky said. “What’s the rush?” Becky’s appearance had also changed in the past weeks. She had the same full cheeks and tumble of curls, the same uniform of sneakers, leggings, and oversize T-shirts. The difference was, she’d finally started to show. Which was good news, Becky said, insofar as she finally looked pregnant, but bad news because people kept asking her whether she was having twins. Or triplets. And whether she’d taken fertility drugs to get them.
“You need to relax,” Becky said, unscrewing the top of her water bottle and taking a gulp. Kelly made a noncommittal noise and started doing torso twists. The two of them were polar opposites when it came to their birth plans. Becky wanted an all-natural birth: no drugs, no medical interventions, laboring at home for as long as she could manage with her husband and her friend Sarah there to help. She’d taken classes in something called the Bradley Method and was fond of parroting expressions from her instructor such as “Babies know when they’re ready to be born” and “Women were having babies just fine long before doctors got involved” and “You have to let your labor unfold in its own time.”