Andrew sat down on a wheeled stool and scooted himself up by Becky’s head. “You are amazing,” he said and kissed her forehead.
“I know!” Becky said. “But I can’t stop shivering!”
“It’s the anesthesia. It’ll stop. Do you want me to get you a blanket?”
“No. No. Stay with me.” Becky closed her eyes, imagining that somewhere not too far away she could hear Mimi elbowing her way past Becky’s mother and screaming.
Give her to me! Let me hold her! She’s my grandbaby! Mine! MINE!
She sighed, thinking that her father would have put a stop to Mimi’s nonsense, if he’d been around. He would have been so happy…
She wiped her eyes. “You okay?” Andrew asked.
Becky nodded. “You should stay with the baby,” she said.
“Are you sure? Our moms are both out there and Sarah’s sleeping in the waiting room.”
“Then you should definitely go,” said Becky, unable to shake the image of Mimi snatching up the little blanket-wrapped bundle and making a break for it.
Andrew kissed her again and left the cubicle, and Becky was alone, without even a machine’s beep to keep her company. “I’m a mother,” she whispered. Somehow it didn’t feel quite real. She waited for the feeling she’d imagined, that rush of pure bliss and unmitigated, unconditional love for everyone in all the world to wash over her. It didn’t seem to have kicked in yet. Why had Ava screamed so much when they’d pulled her out? Why hadn’t she been interested in nursing? Why did she only weigh eight pounds four ounces when the doctors thought she’d be closer to ten pounds? Was there something wrong with Ava? Something they weren’t telling her?
A nurse came in wheeling a clear bag attached to a pole. “Your morphine pump!” she announced.
“Woo hoo!” said Becky. Not that anything hurt yet, but she wasn’t interested in exploring the possibility that at some point after the surgery, something would. The nurse handed Becky a button and explained that she could press it once every ten minutes for an extra dose. “Do you have a stopwatch?” Becky asked. The nurse laughed, gave her some ice chips, and pulled her curtain shut.
“I’m a mother,” she whispered again. She waited to feel changed, transformed, turned inside-out, and rendered completely different. So far she didn’t. She conjured up a picture of her mean Aunt Joan, who’d showed up at her tenth birthday party and pulled her aside before the cake and presents to hiss that she didn’t need such a big slice of cake and wouldn’t she like an apple instead, and waited for the magic of maternity to wash her mental slate clean. Nope. Nothing doing. She found that she still hated Aunt Joan…which meant that motherhood would leave her unchanged. She’d be herself, basically, only with less sleep and a new scar. Oh, dear. Becky hit the morphine button hopefully, figuring that if she couldn’t have emotional tranquillity, she could at least have narcotics.
As if the sigh had summoned her, the nurse reappeared.
“Your room should be ready soon,” she said. “Do you want a little more morphine? Dr. Mendlow left orders saying you could have more.”
“Sure,” she said, figuring, why not? It couldn’t hurt. She hit her button again as the nurse injected something into her IV bag. She wasn’t shivering anymore. She felt pleasantly warm all over, like she was lying on a beach. And she could finally wiggle her toes! “Check me out,” she told the nurse and pointed toward her toes. “I’m a mother!”
“Yes, you are,” the nurse said, patting her shoulder. Becky closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was floating through the halls, giggling, and Andrew was hovering above her, looking concerned.
“How much morphine did they give you?” he asked.
“Press my button, press my button!” Becky said.
Instead of pressing her button, he looked over her head at the nurse. “How much morphine has she had?”
Becky started to laugh even harder, even though she could feel a vague but disturbing pulling sensation at the base of her belly. Where they’d taken the baby. “Hey, I had a baby!”
“That’s right,” said Andrew, with a big, worried-looking smile.
“Ava,” Becky told the nurse, as they wheeled her into her room and eased her, still giggling, onto the bed. “Her name is Ava. Isn’t that a beautiful name?”
“Here she is!” said the nurse, as she came through the door pushing a wheeled table with a plastic rectangle on top. And inside of the rectangle, wrapped in fresh blankets, in a little striped blue-and-pink cap and an electronic bracelet around one tiny ankle, was Ava. She wasn’t screaming anymore but blinking and peering around.
Becky held out her arm, still dangling with the IV tube. “Baby,” she instructed. Andrew scooped the baby up from her little nest and handed her to Becky. “Baby,” Becky whispered to Ava.
“Baby,” Andrew whispered to his wife.
“Press my button,” Becky whispered back.
“I think you’ve had enough morphine.”
“I’m trying to stay on top of the pain,” Becky explained. “Press it, press it, press it!”
“Okay, already,” he said, as Edith walked into the room, eyes brimming.
“Oh…oh, Becky!” Edith said, bursting into tears as she took in the sight of Becky with the baby in her arms. “Oh, Becky…she’s so beautiful…I just wish your father…”
“I know,” Becky said, feeling her own eyes well up. “I miss him, too.”
Edith blew her nose as Ava opened her mouth and started to cry. Andrew and Becky looked at each other.
“Oh, shit,” Becky said. “Take the baby, take the baby!”
“You’ve got her,” he said, in a manner that she supposed was meant to be encouraging.
“I’m
high!
” Becky protested. “I can’t have the baby! You take her! Oh, God, she’s crying. Call a nurse!”
“It’s okay,” he said, laughing a little. “It’s okay.” He tucked the baby back against her chest. “Shhh, shhh,” he said. Ava stopped crying and looked up at them, her eyes no color and every color at once.
“Hello, gorgeous,” Becky whispered. Ava batted her wispy eyelashes and yawned. Becky stared at her until, finally, they both fell asleep.
“Hahyahhhh.”
Becky cracked one eyelid open. The hospital room was a blur—the morphine, she supposed—and was silent except for Andrew’s snoring and that horrible noise of her mother-in-law.
“Hahyahhhh.”
There was her mother-in-law, Mimi Breslow Levy Rabinowitz Anderson Klein, flanked by two of her friends, teeny-tiny women in cashmere sweater sets and low-rise jeans exposing their sixtysomething hip bones.
Mutton dressed as lamb,
Becky thought, eyeing the wrinkled cup of her mother-in-law’s navel. The three of them were lined up over Ava’s bassinet. Mimi’s head was dangling inches from the baby’s, so close that their noses were practically touching.
“Hah, Anna Banana,” Mimi said, inching her face forward.
Oh,
Becky thought.
Oh, no.
Anna had been Mimi’s mother’s name. Becky knew that Andrew had told his mother that they were planning on naming their baby after her. But Andrew certainly must have told his mother that they’d named the baby Ava, not Anna. And even if he hadn’t, Ava’s name was written plain as day on the pink three-by-five notecard taped to her bassinet.
“Sweet little Anna,” Mimi crooned to her friends. “And just look what I bought her!” She reached into her purse with her free hand and pulled out a miniature pink tank top with the word
HOTTIE
spelled out in sequins on the front. “Isn’t it adorable?” she asked, as her friends cooed their approval. Becky wondered if the outfit came with a matching G-string. And the purchase-separately pimp. “Let’s see how it looks!” one of Mimi’s friends said.
Mimi lifted the baby out of her bassinet, appearing not to notice as her head flopped forward, and began pulling on the tank top. “Hey,” Becky tried to say, but her throat was so dry that the words came out as a whisper. She stared at Andrew, willing him to wake up and put a stop to this, as Mimi inched her hand underneath the bassinet and stealthily removed one of the bottles of formula the night nurse had left there. Becky waited until Mimi had almost maneuvered the nipple into her baby’s mouth. Then she pushed herself up until she was upright, gritting her teeth at the pain, not even noticing as the sheet one of the nurses had laid on top of her slipped off her chest.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Mimi jumped at the sound of her daughter-in-law’s raspy voice. The bottle flew out of her hand.
One of Mimi’s lady friends stared at Becky. “Oh, dear, she hasn’t got a stitch on underneath that gown,” she said.
“What are you doing?” Becky asked again, pointing at the bassinet with the hand that didn’t have the IV needle.
“I…she…”
Andrew rolled over on his cot.
“Excuse me! She was hungry!” Mimi said shrilly. “I was just going to…”
“I’m breast-feeding,” Becky said, pointing at the notecard that announced to all the world that
AVA ROTHSTEIN-RABINOWITZ IS A BREAST-FED GIRL
! “If she’s hungry, just give her to me.”
Mimi grabbed the baby under the armpits with less care than she would have shown to a ten-pound sack of flour and handed her over.
“And her name is Ava,” Becky said.
Mimi’s eyebrows drew down, and her freshly lipsticked mouth folded in on itself. She turned toward her son, who was still lying on his cot. “What? WHY? She was supposed to be named after my mother! This was supposed to be my honor!”
“She is named after your mother,” Andrew said mildly. “She’s named Ava.”
“My mother’s name was not AVA! My mother’s name…”
“Started with the letter A. And so does Ava’s,” Becky said and looked at Mimi, practically daring her to start a fight, knowing what she’d say if her mother-in-law took the bait—
you got to name your son whatever you wanted; we have the same right.
Mimi’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Becky pulled her gown open. Mimi flinched.
“We can talk about this later,” she said, backing out of the room so fast that she almost tripped on her high heels. Her friends scurried out after her. Becky settled Ava against her and looked over at Andrew, who was staring at the baby in her
HOTTIE
tank top.
He rubbed his eyes again. “Is that what the hospital’s giving the baby girls now?”
“No, that would be what your mother’s giving little girls now. And why was she trying to feed the baby without asking us first?”
“I’m not sure,” he muttered, gathering the bottles of formula and hiding them in his suitcase, “but it won’t happen again. I’ll talk to her.”
For all the good it’ll do us,
Becky thought. “And
HOTTIE
?” she asked, pointing to the offending shirt. “I know we haven’t discussed this, but I think we should wait a while before we let the baby wear things that say
HOTTIE.
Six months, at least.” Then she giggled. “Did you see how fast Mimi got out of here? My nipples are her Kryptonite!”
Andrew bit his lip. Becky could tell he was struggling not to smile. “Becky, she is my mother,” he said, but he delivered the sentence quickly and without conviction. Ava stopped sucking and opened her eyes. “Don’t worry,” Becky whispered to her daughter. “We won’t let her bother you a bit.”
“Okay,” Kelly called, as she walked into her apartment with baby Oliver in her arms and her husband, her dog, and three sisters in her wake. “Terry, there’s a lasagna in the freezer. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and bake it for an hour. Mary, would you mind bringing my laptop into the bedroom? I want to send out an announcement…oh, and can you bring me the digital camera so I can download the pictures? Steve, if you go to the My Documents folder on the desktop, there’s a spreadsheet labeled ‘Oliver Week One.’ Can you please enter one wet diaper at 10:45? And Doreen, can you take Lemon for a walk?”
Her sisters and her husband dispersed, leaving Kelly alone with her baby, who was sleeping, eyes tightly shut and mouth open, in her arms. He had her husband’s ears and his chin, but his eyes and mouth were shaped exactly like hers. “Hello, Oliver,” she whispered. “Welcome home.” She set him gently into his crib and knelt by the bookshelf. Her stitches hurt, but she managed to pull her copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
off the shelf and replace it with
What to Expect the First Year.
When she looked up, Steve was standing in the doorway, shuffling his feet.
“The wet diaper has been entered, and the pacifier is clean.”
“Could you take your shoes off?” Kelly asked. She wanted to ask him to take a shower and change his clothes because she was sure he was still crawling with hospital germs, but she wasn’t sure how he would take it.
He set his sneakers by the door. “Hey, I’m sorry about the pictures,” he said.
Kelly stood up and walked slowly back to the rocker, listening to what sounded like her sisters going through her closet. “Is this a good color for me?” she heard Terry ask.
“Terry, no touching!” she called toward the bedroom. “It’s okay,” she said to Steve, easing herself down into the rocker. “The nurses took some nice shots. You know, once they revived you.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Steve said. “It was just…” He swallowed hard. “There was an awful lot of blood.”
It wasn’t as if it was your blood,
Kelly thought. Her delivery had been awful. She’d torn before her episiotomy and lost so much blood that she’d needed a transfusion, and Oliver had been running a fever, so he’d spent the first two nights of his life in the NICU, and Steve, instead of being helpful and loving and supportive, had passed out during the delivery and split his forehead open on the edge of the table. They’d both come back from the hospital with stitches.
Terry and Doreen stood in the nursery doorway. Terry was holding a pale-blue silk blouse; Doreen had a gold chain in her hands. “Can I borrow this just for tonight?” Terry asked, turning the question into one long word. “And this?” Doreen asked, holding the necklace. “Anthony and I are going out to dinner.”
“Fine, fine,” Kelly said wearily, knowing it was unlikely she’d ever see the shirt and the necklace again, or that if she saw them, they’d be stained or ripped or broken. In the crib, Oliver gave a tiny, catlike yawn. “It’s all right,” Kelly said. “Now, Steve, why don’t you download the pictures, choose the best one, go to the website that I’ve bookmarked, and we can order the birth announcements.”
“Hey, you’re online here?” asked Mary, wandering in just as Terry and Doreen left with the blouse and the necklace. “Can I check my e-mail real quick?”
“Sure,” said Kelly. Mary left. Steve sighed and leaned against the wall. The bandage on his forehead was starting to look dingy around the edges. Kelly wondered if she could change it. “I’m whipped,” he said.
Kelly tried to be sympathetic. She was whipped, too. She’d suffered through the hospital noise and the nurses, too, who’d woken her and the baby up every four hours to check their vital signs. “How about some coffee?” she asked, and stuck her head out the door. “Hey, Terry, can you make some coffee?”
“You shouldn’t drink coffee,” Terry said, loping back into the nursery. Kelly’s youngest sister wore tight, faded jeans, a blue-and-purple shirt whose cuffs drooped past her wrists, hand-sewn moccasins, and feathered earrings. “It does terrible things to your insides. I had a series of high colonics in Vermont, and you would not believe the stuff that came out of me.”
“Terry, nobody wants to hear about the stuff that came out of you,” said Doreen. Doreen also wore jeans, but hers were stiff and new looking, and she’d paired them with a pink sweatshirt and sensible sneakers…and, Kelly saw, her gold necklace.
“Seriously,” said Mary. Mary wore a Wing Bowl T-shirt and khaki shorts with bulging pockets. Kelly wondered what was in them. Makeup, maybe. Mary’s last visit had coincided a little too neatly with the disappearance of Kelly’s favorite eyeliner.
“You guys!” Kelly said. Her sisters turned to face her. “Mary, go get Steve his coffee. Doreen, can you bring my suitcase to the bedroom? The dirty clothes are in the plastic bag, and anything that’s folded you can just leave on the bed. Terry…” Her voice trailed off. Her baby sister, the prettiest and, alas, most vacuous member of the family, stared at her, strawberry lips parted. “What are you doing with the sterilizer?”
“Oh, is that what it is?” Terry asked, pulling her thumb out of the device. “Guess I won’t have to wash my hands for a while.” The three of them drifted out the door.
A minute later, Oliver started to cry. Kelly looked at her watch. It was four o’clock, an hour after she’d been discharged from the hospital, and Oliver had last eaten…She pulled out her Palm Pilot. Wet diaper at 9:00, nursed for fifteen minutes at 10:00, then again at 11:20, poop diaper at noon, forty-five-minute nap…“I think he’s hungry,” she said. She went to lift Oliver out of the crib. Steve beat her there.
“Hey, baby boy,” he said, hefting the baby into the air. Oliver’s neck wobbled. Kelly bit back a scream.
“Steve, be careful!”
“What?” Steve asked. He was wearing one of his old Penn T-shirts, jeans, and three days’ worth of stubble. Since his job had ended, he’d given up regular shaving, and Kelly had been trying, with some success, not to nag him about that or about the clothes and shoes and magazines he left on the floor.
“His neck! Be careful!”
Steve looked at her as if she was crazy, then shrugged and handed the baby over. Kelly settled Oliver into the crook of her arm and sat in the rocker, where she pulled her shirt up and struggled to unhook her bra cup.
“Need some help?” Steve asked.
She shook her head and guided Oliver’s face to her breast. Where nothing happened.
“Come on,” Kelly whispered, jiggling Oliver on her knee, “come on, come on, come on!” She was trying to remember everything she’d learned in breast-feeding class and practiced in the hospital. Support the head. Pinch the nipple and get it lined up with the baby’s mouth. Wait until the baby’s mouth is wide open, then push his face toward your breast. She lined up. She waited. She pushed. Nothing. Oliver turned his face sideways and started to scream.
“Are you okay in there?” Steve asked.
“Fine!” Kelly called back, hoping he’d go for a run soon. She wanted him out of the house, out of her hair, and away from her sisters, who were starting to ask a few too many questions about how work was going. Even Terry, who was a world-class ditz, would be able to figure out that Steve wasn’t saying much about his job because Steve didn’t have one anymore. And what about her friends? Becky’s husband was a doctor, Ayinde’s husband was Richard Towne. How long could she keep up the fiction of “paternity leave” and “job search” before it become obvious that what her husband was really doing was nothing?
“Come on, honey!” she whispered to Oliver, who turned his face away, wailing. He’d been nursing like a champ in the hospital, but in the hospital there were nurses and lactation consultants just a phone call away. At home she only had Steve, who’d been napping while Kelly did the feedings, and Doreen and Terry, who didn’t have kids. Kelly couldn’t remember what Mary had fed her babies. Kelly had been in high school when they were born, just a baby herself. Either way, she couldn’t ask them for help. She was the one who helped them, who lent them clothes and money when she could, who advised them on haircuts and boyfriends, car purchases and job interviews. If she told them she needed something, they’d probably look at her as if she’d started talking backwards. She’d have to figure this out on her own.
“Come on,” she whispered again. Breast-feeding had been easy enough in theory—insert Tab A into Slot B, wait for nature and hunger to take over—but what were you supposed to do when Slot B was wriggling and screaming, and you needed at least one hand free to get Tab A into place?
“The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, the wheels on the bus go round and round…” The baby kept screaming. “The wipers on the bus go round and round…” No. Wait. The wipers didn’t go round and round, they did something else. But what?
Steve stuck his head into the room again. “Swish, swish, swish.”
Thank you, Mr. Rogers,
Kelly thought. “Do you want me to take him for a while? They gave us some bottles at the hospital.”
“No, we cannot give him a bottle,” Kelly said. She flicked her bangs out of her eyes and took a deep breath. “We just have to figure this out.”
“Do you want me to get one of your sisters?”
Kelly closed her eyes, wishing for Maureen, her favorite sister, all the way in California. Wishing, God help her, for her mother. Even though she’d spent many of her final years muttering to herself or half-passed out in front of her soap operas, Paula O’Hara had at least known how to nurse a baby. She could hear her sisters in the living room. From the sound of it, they were trying to get Lemon to walk on Kelly’s treadmill. “She’s got a sterilizer in there!” Terry reported breathlessly.
“That’s our girl,” Mary said, laughing her death-rattle laugh as she walked to the kitchen. The oven door opened and closed.
“Lasagna,” Doreen grumbled. “Just perfect when it’s ninety degrees outside.”
Kelly wriggled in the rocker, hating the way her jiggly stomach pushed against the elastic waistband of the maternity jeans she’d worn home and the way her breasts felt like two footballs some doctor with a mean sense of humor had Krazy-Glued onto her chest. “Tell them to go get some coffee or something. And bring me my purse, okay?” She pulled out her wallet and the business card with the lactation center’s number. “Could you call and leave a message?”
Steve pinched the card between his first two fingers. “What should I say?”
“That I can’t get him latched on!”
Steve fled for the telephone. Kelly kept trying as she heard her sisters file out the door. Oliver kept trying and shaking his head back and forth as if he was deliberately trying to avoid her nipple.
“What can I do?” Steve asked, staring over her shoulder at the red-faced, writhing baby as if he were a grenade.
“Call Becky,” she said. “Her number’s on the notepad on the right-hand side of the refrigerator.”
Two minutes later, Steve was back. “She wasn’t home, but I left a message.”
Kelly rested Oliver over her shoulder, against the burp cloth she’d placed there in the hope that there’d be some need of it in the near future, and rocked him, nuzzling his fuzzy, blue-veined head, praying he’d stop crying. “Can you call Ayinde?”
His eyes lit up. “You’ve got Richard Towne’s home phone number?”
“Please just call, okay? And don’t bother Richard if he answers!”
Steve nodded and came back a minute later carrying the phone. “Ayinde,” he whispered.
“Ayinde? It’s Kelly. Um, can you…” Her voice broke. Twenty minutes into at-home motherhood, and she already needed to be bailed out. She clenched her fists. “I can’t get Oliver to latch on, and he hasn’t had anything to eat in hours.” Kelly nodded. “Oh, no, you don’t have to…are you sure? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Thank you. Thank you so much.” She recited her address, hung up the phone, and handed it to Steve. “She’s on her way.”
The phone trilled again. Steve handed it over. “It’s Becky.”
“Becky? Listen. Oliver won’t nurse. I can’t get him latched on, and I’ve been trying forever, and…” She shot a frenzied look at her watch. “He hasn’t had anything to eat in hours.”
“Okay, okay, shh, shh, he’s not going to starve in one afternoon,” Becky said.
“Are you making baby noises at me?” Kelly demanded.
“Yeah. Sorry,” said Becky. “It just happens. You’ll see. Andrew tried to hug me the other night, and I wrapped my arms around him and started burping him. Ava just woke up. We’ll leave as soon as I change her.”
“Thank you,” said Kelly. She wiped her nose on the burp cloth and looked down at Oliver, who’d fallen asleep with his fists clenched.
Half an hour later, Becky and Ayinde had arrived with their babies. Julian was tucked into his car seat, swaddled so tightly that just the top of his fuzzy curls and his big brown eyes peeked out, and Ava, ten days old, was nestled in a sling against Becky’s chest. “She’s beautiful,” Kelly said.
“She’s bald,” Becky corrected. “Wow. Monogrammed burp cloths!” Becky marveled, taking in Oliver’s Peter Rabbit rug, the bunny-shaped night-light and rabbit-print crib bumpers, his educational black-and-white mobile, the stacks of
Baby Einstein
DVDs on the bookshelf. “Your nursery has a theme. Do you know what the theme of Ava’s nursery is? Laundry.” She set Ava, who was gray-eyed, pink-cheeked, and bald, into Oliver’s crib. “Okay. Show us what’s going on.”
Kelly picked up the baby, holding her breath, hoping against hope that in front of an audience he’d start nursing like he’d been doing it all his life. No dice. Align face, open mouth, insert nipple, miss, try again, and then brace herself for Oliver’s screams.
Becky looked at Ayinde, then back at Kelly. “Hmm. It looks like he’s missing your nipple.” She pulled her curls on top of her head and rolled up her sleeves. “I’m just going to go wash my hands. Is it okay if I touch you?”
“Sure! Touch! Take pictures! Post them on the Internet! Just please get him to eat something!”
“No worries. We’re going to figure this out. Kelly, you hold his head.” Kelly tucked Oliver’s sweaty scalp into her palm, looking into his scrunched-up face. Becky put one hand underneath Kelly’s breast and pinched the nipple at a different angle than what Kelly had been trying. “Wait…wait…”