When Oliver opened his mouth, she pushed him forward, but he missed again.
“He’s almost got it,” said Ayinde.
“Yeah, well, almost won’t get him fed,” Kelly said, wiping her eyes on her shoulder.
“Do you have any formula?” Becky asked.
“I don’t want to give him formula!”
“No, not to feed him, just to give him the taste. I was thinking we could squirt a few drops on your nipple, just so he knows that there’s food there.”
Steve, who’d been waiting just outside the door, handed Ayinde a bottle.
“Okay, Ayinde, squirt.”
Kelly looked down and had to laugh at the way her torso looked like some weird three-handed Rube Goldberg feeding machine.
“Okay, now!”
Becky pinched. Ayinde squirted. Kelly brought the baby to her breast. She closed her eyes and prayed, even though, strictly speaking, she hadn’t believed in God since her mother had found her scrapbook and taken it away, along with Kelly’s allowance for the month, just when she’d almost gotten enough money for a pair of Calvin Klein jeans. And, then, wonder of wonders, she felt the sharp pulling sensation of Oliver starting to suck.
“He’s doing it,” she said, as Steve applauded quietly from the doorway. “Oh, thank God.”
They spent the next hour practicing—getting Oliver latched on, taking him off, getting him latched on again, first with Becky and Ayinde’s help (“it takes a village to feed my child,” Kelly joked), then with just Kelly and Becky, and finally, with Kelly all by herself. Oliver had nursed himself to sleep by the time her sisters, smelling of Mary’s cigarette smoke, filed back into the nursery.
“Terry wants to sterilize her hand again,” Doreen said, giggling.
“Go ahead,” Kelly said. She was afraid to look at them. She was so worried they’d be staring at Ayinde like she was a gazelle that had wandered into the house or, worse, they’d ask for her husband’s autograph.
After her sisters had gone back to New Jersey and Steve had headed to the bedroom for a nap, Kelly and Ayinde and Becky and their babies sat down on the living-room floor.
“If I ask you something,” Becky blurted, “do you promise not to laugh?”
Kelly and Ayinde promised. Becky lifted her daughter, un-snapped her overalls, and pulled them up, along with Ava’s onesie. “Okay,” she said. She took a deep breath and pointed to a spot just underneath the crease of Ava’s armpit. “Is that a third nipple?”
Ayinde raised her eyebrows. Kelly stared down at the baby. “Are you serious?”
“You said you wouldn’t laugh!”
Ayinde reached for Ava and looked at her closely. “I think it’s just a freckle or a birthmark. Did the doctor say anything when she went for her checkup?”
Becky shook her head dolefully. “No. But really, what are they going to tell you? ‘We’re sorry, ma’am, your daughter’s a freak?’ ” She sighed. “Maybe they just hoped I wouldn’t notice the third nipple.”
“It is not a third nipple!” said Kelly.
“Poor Ava,” Becky said, refastening Ava’s clothes. “Maybe we’ll travel all over the country and exhibit her. See the Girl with Three Nipples.”
“I don’t think people will pay to see just one act,” said Ayinde.
“The Girl with Three Nipples and the Incredible Screaming Mother-in-Law,” said Becky. “And me, too. I used to be able to juggle a little bit. You want to see something else weird?”
“Is it a second head?” asked Ayinde.
Becky shook her head, reached into her diaper bag, and pulled out a blue-and-white toile-print bib. “I found this in my diaper bag a few days ago.”
“Pretty,” said Kelly, fingering the bib’s silk trim, then flipping it over to inspect the label. “Ooh, Neiman-Marcus. Very nice.”
“Yeah,” Becky said, “except I don’t know where it came from. And this morning, someone put a silver spoon through my mail slot.”
“Well,” Ayinde said, “you did just have a baby.” Julian, who’d been dozing in his receiving blanket, opened his eyes and yawned with his little hands curled into fists.
“I know, but it wasn’t wrapped, and there wasn’t a card.” Becky shrugged. “It could’ve been from one of the fellows at the hospital. There are six of them who Andrew works with, and I swear, there’s one working set of social skills between them. And the one I get stuck talking to at parties is never the one who’s got it.” She got to her feet and slipped Ava back into her sling. “Are you guys up for a walk in the morning?”
They agreed that, barring naps or breast-feeding emergencies, they’d meet at ten o’clock by the goat statue in Rittenhouse Square Park. When they were gone, Kelly set a dozing Oliver back into his crib, then stretched out on the nursery floor, with her hands by her side so she wouldn’t run the risk of encountering her belly flab. She closed her eyes and started imagining how it would be; the things she’d buy and where she’d put them; the couch and the lacquered rattan armoire, the inlaid coffee table, the plasma TV. Everything clean, everything new, everything perfect, the way her baby boy deserved. She didn’t open her eyes when she heard Steve walk into the room.
“Hi,” said her husband. “Listen, if you want to rest for a while, I’ll take care of the baby.” Kelly kept her eyes closed, focusing on the vision of her living room that seemed so close she could almost touch it—the Vladimir Kagan high-backed barrel chairs, the Turkish rug she’d seen at Material Culture, the antique maple sideboard, framed and matted professionally shot photographs of their son on the wall…
“Kelly?”
She made a sleepy noise and turned onto her side. After a minute, Steve tiptoed out of the nursery, and she and her son were left alone to dream.
“Baby?”
Ayinde opened her left eye. She was lying on her side, with her body curled around Julian’s, and Richard’s body curled around hers. Julian was fourteen weeks old and, so far, he hadn’t spent a single minute in his beautifully appointed crib. During the daytime, when he napped, he was in his stroller or, more likely than not, in his mother’s arms. And at night, he slept beside her, nestled next to her breast while she lay beside him, breathing in his scent, tracing his face, the curve of his cheek, or his ear with her fingernail.
“Ayinde?” Richard whispered, a little more loudly.
“Shh,” she whispered back. It was two fifteen in the morning. Julian had been sleeping for less than an hour. She shook Richard’s hand off her hip. “What?” she whispered.
“Could you just…” His voice was apologetic. “…Maybe move over a little bit?”
Ayinde shook her head, then realized her husband wouldn’t be able to see the gesture in the dark. “There’s no room,” she whispered. “I don’t want the baby to roll off the bed.”
She heard Richard stifle a sigh. “Tell me again why he can’t sleep in his crib.”
Ayinde felt guilt surging through her. There was no earthly reason for the baby not to be in his crib, except for the fact that she didn’t think she could stand to have him so far away. “He’s happy here,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Richard said reasonably, “but I’m unhappy here. I’m about to fall out of my own bed.”
“Well, can’t you just stick it out?” Ayinde asked. “He’s just a baby!” She leaned down to look at her darling boy, so sweet in his blue footie pajamas, to touch his lips with her finger and plant a feather-light kiss on his cheek. “He’s brand new.”
“How long are you planning on keeping him in here with us?” Richard asked.
“I don’t know,” Ayinde said.
Forever,
she thought dreamily, as she gathered Julian into her arms, nuzzling her baby behind his ear, drinking in the whistle of his exhalations. Lucky for her, Priscilla Prewitt was on the same page as she was concerning sleep.
For thousands of years, the family bed was the order of the day,
she wrote.
And when you think about it, it’s still what makes the most sense. Where is Baby going to feel the safest and most secure? What’s most convenient for the breast-feeding mom?
(In Priscilla Prewitt’s world, Ayinde quickly learned, every mom was a breast-feeding mom. Formula was acceptable “only in the event of a true emergency, and by true emergency I don’t mean you’re bored or you’re busy or you just want a break; I mean you’re in the hospital or somebody’s dyin’.”)
Richard sighed.
“Maybe we could get a bigger bed,” Ayinde offered.
“I had this one custom made,” Richard said. And she wasn’t imagining it. He sounded impatient. “Look, Ayinde, babies sleep in cribs. It’s what they do! You and I both slept in cribs, and we turned out fine.”
“Yes, we slept in cribs,” she whispered back. “And my mother drank and took diet pills and snorted God knows what when she was pregnant with me, and your mother…” Ayinde shut her mouth, knowing that she’d wandered into the briar patch. Richard hardly ever talked about his mother, who’d been sixteen when she’d had him, with no husband or even a steady boyfriend in sight, and God only knew what she’d indulged in when she was expecting. Family legend was that Doris Towne hadn’t even known she was pregnant, that she’d mistaken labor pains for indigestion brought on by bad fried clams, and wound up giving birth to Richard in the hospital parking lot in the backseat of one of her girlfriend’s cars. Ayinde cleared her throat and reached for her husband’s hand. “We know better now. That’s all. And there are lots of studies about the benefits of shared sleep.”
“Shared sleep?” Richard scoffed. “Nobody’s sharing any sleep with me. I’m afraid to roll over because I’ll roll on the baby; I’m afraid to clear my throat because I’ll wake him up…”
“I’m sorry,” Ayinde said. Richard reached for her, pulling her bottom against his crotch.
“Come here,” he said. His fingertips grazed her breasts.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry,” he said, jerking his hands and his body away.
“Oh, Richard, that hurts!” Tears sprang to her eyes. Ayinde was committed to breast-feeding, even though some of the other players’ wives had taken her aside to whisper that it would ruin her figure. She didn’t care about her figure, but she wished someone had told her how painful it would be; how her breasts alternated between feeling as floopy as half-filled water balloons and as swollen and painful as if they were made of hot glass. Her nipples felt as if some ill-tempered animal had been chewing at them while she slept. And Julian didn’t have teeth. How would she survive once he got them? She’d have to figure it out. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended breast-feeding for the first year, and Priscilla Prewitt, big surprise, said there was no reason to stop then and that it was “better for Dumpling and better for Mom” to keep nursing “right up ’til nursery school if you can!”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, sounding both apologetic and indignant. After a moment’s silence, he rolled over and sighed. “Is it supposed to be this hard?”
“What? Breast-feeding?”
“No,” he said sadly. “Everything.” There was a rustle of the sheets, cool air against her legs, and then Richard was unfolding himself from the bed. “I’m gonna go sleep down the hall,” he said. He bent down and kissed his wife’s forehead; the dry, chaste kiss that a grown-up uncle gives a sixteen-year-old niece. “Good night.” He bent down toward Julian.
“Don’t wake him up!” Ayinde whispered, more sharply than she’d meant to.
Please,
she thought, curving her body even more closely against her son’s.
Please just leave and let us sleep.
“Don’t worry.” He brushed one thick fingertip against the baby’s cheek, then shut the door with barely a click. Ayinde pulled the covers up to her chin, resting her own cheek against Julian’s curls.
“Okay,” Becky said, yelling into the telephone to make herself heard over Ava’s wails. “What kind of cry would you say this is?”
“What kind of cry?” Andrew repeated. Becky tilted the phone so that he’d be able to hear every nuance of Ava’s screams. It was five in the morning; her baby was four weeks old, and her husband was in the hospital, called away at midnight to tend to the various internal injuries of six teenagers who’d decided it would be fun to get lit up on apricot brandy and drive into a tollbooth. “I don’t know. What’s it sound like to you?”
She tucked the baby under her arm, anchored the telephone under her chin, and thumbed through the T. Berry Brazelton guide to newborns that had become their less-than-reliable road map to figuring out Ava. “Is it a shrill, rising cry or a low, rhythmic cry?”
“Let me listen for a minute.”
Becky rolled her eyes and rocked the baby in her arms. For the past two days, in an attempt to improve Ava’s mood and sleeping habits, she’d been giving her an all-natural colic remedy called gripe water. It was made with caraway and dill, and while it hadn’t helped much with the crying, it had given Ava a scent pleasantly reminiscent of a fresh loaf of rye bread.
“I give up,” Andrew said.
“So what should I do now?”
“Is she wet?”
Becky sniffed Ava’s diaper, a move she would have never believed herself capable of a few short weeks ago. The baby was looking less than lovely. Her elastic-bottomed sleep sack, pink and printed with bees and flowers, was rucked up underneath her armpits, and her face flared with the whiteheads and juicy pustules of a case of baby acne so bad that Becky had to sit on her hands to keep herself from slapping a pore strip on Ava’s nose. After four weeks, the baby was still completely bald, and although Becky would never have admitted it to anyone, she thought that much of the time Ava looked like the world’s smallest angry old man. Especially when she was crying. “No. Not wet.”
“Is she hungry?”
“I nursed her half an hour ago.”
“Oh, yeah,” Andrew said.
Oh, yeah, indeed,
thought Becky. Nursing Ava had turned out to be a million times more complicated than she’d thought it would be. She had overactive letdown, which meant that the instant the baby got near her breasts, it was like a spigot going off. Which meant that she had to wear nipple shields—little bits of silicone that looked like tiny see-through sombreros and had a nasty habit of falling to the floor just as she was getting Ava into nursing position—so that her daughter wouldn’t choke to death on her dinner.
“Try the bouncy seat,” said Andrew.
“Tried it,” Becky said. “Nothing doing.”
“Maybe you could sing to her?”
Becky took a deep breath and looked down at her daughter. “Love,” she sang. “Exciting and new. Come aboard. We’re expecting you…”
Ava wailed even louder.
“Facts of Life?” Becky offered. The baby drew in a breath and paused, silent, with her mouth wide open. Becky knew what was coming next—Ava Rae’s Nuclear Scream of Death. Patent Pending.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Andrew said in her ear, as Ava unfurled her shriek. “I’m sorry I can’t be there to help.”
Becky struggled with the screaming baby and the telephone. “Why does God hate me?” she said to no one in particular. She hugged Ava against her and rocked her back and forth. Ava had been crying for the past thirty minutes, with no sign of stopping.
Can’t you help me?
she seemed to be asking with each wail.
Can’t anyone help me, please?
Becky was starting to feel desperate. She wished her mother was still there. Edith Rothstein had somehow managed to survive not one baby but two. Maybe she had some kind of secret formula, a magic lullabye she’d invented when she wasn’t occupied picking specks of invisible lint off the couches. But Edith had to get back to Florida and to her job. She had packed up and departed after a week during which she’d rocked the baby, changed the baby, washed and folded every piece of clothing the baby owned, and wiped down every single item in Becky’s kitchen, up to and including the four ramekins buried in the back of her cabinet. It was too early to call her; too early to call her friends on the chance that their babies, unlike Ava, were asleep.
“Maybe I’ll take her outside,” she said.
“At five in the morning?”
“Just on the front step,” Becky said. “I don’t know, maybe a change of scenery will work.”
“Take the phone,” said Andrew.
“Got it,” said Becky. They said good-bye. She wrapped Ava, who was still screaming, in a receiving blanket, pulled Andrew’s bathrobe around her shoulders, shoved her feet into the nearest shoes she could find (from the way the left one pinched and the right one gaped, she deduced she’d gotten one of her prepregnancy shoes and one of her husband’s sneakers), twisted her hair into a bun, and clomped down the stairs.
“Taking the night air, taking the night air,” she sang as she opened the front door. A woman—the same one she’d seen in the park and in the coffee shop, with the streaky blond hair and the long blue coat—was sitting on the front step across the street, underneath a streetlamp, staring at Becky’s front door.
“Oh, hi!” said Becky, somewhat startled.
The woman jumped to her feet and started walking rapidly east, toward the park, her hair swinging against the back of the coat, a giant pink bag bouncing against her shoulders.
“Hey!” Becky called. She crossed the sidewalk, turning sideways to squeeze between two SUVs, and then she was out on the street, with her curiosity overriding her fear. The woman didn’t feel dangerous. Although, Becky thought, maybe extreme sleep deprivation meant that her instincts weren’t what they should be.
“Hey, wait!” Becky yelled. The woman in the blue coat kept moving toward Eighteenth Street, head down, feet moving faster. Becky picked up the pace, closing the distance between them. “Please slow down!” she called. “Please” was, as her mother had always told her, the magic word. The woman stopped in her tracks, hunching her shoulders with her back to Becky, as if she were afraid she was going to get hit.
“What are you doing here?” Becky called from behind her, squinting through the darkness and holding her daughter tight against her chest. With her free hand, she reached for the bathrobe pocket, feeling the comforting weight of the telephone.
The woman turned to face her. Becky saw that she was beautiful…and that she was crying. She had on the long blue down coat Becky had seen before, dirty pink shoes, blue jeans peeking out from underneath the jacket, long hair that was blond at the ends and dark at the crown. She looked to be about Becky’s age—early thirties, give or take.
Hollywood tragedy,
Becky thought, and then she stepped forward without trying to figure out why those words had popped into her head.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, looking desperately unhappy. “I’m sorry.”
Becky settled Ava—who, miraculously, had stopped crying and now appeared to be watching the proceedings with a degree of interest—against her shoulder.
“What were you doing in front of my house?” Becky asked. She wondered if maybe the woman was homeless. That would make a certain kind of sense. Homeless people were a fact of life in Philadelphia. There was a woman who’d pretty much adopted the Dumpster behind Mas. Becky and Sarah would leave lunch on the back step for her every afternoon. She tried to think of what she had in her kitchen. Apples, leftover bread, and tomato salad…“Are you hungry?” Becky asked.
“Am I hungry?” the woman repeated. She appeared to be considering the question as she looked down at her shoes. “No, thank you,” she said politely. “I’m all right.”
“Well, how about some tea, then?” Becky asked.
This is so bizarre,
she thought.
Maybe I am dreaming. Maybe the baby finally stopped crying and I fell asleep…
The woman, meanwhile, was edging toward her, stepping sideways, balanced lightly on the balls of her feet, ready to run if Becky pulled her phone out of the bathrobe pocket and called the cops. Becky looked at the big pink bag over her shoulders and finally figured out what it was. A diaper bag.
The woman looked up at Becky. “I heard your baby crying,” she said.
Becky looked at the woman. She had wide-set eyes, a full, pink mouth, high cheekbones, a heart-shaped face with a pointy chin that should have been too sharp for her face, but on screen…
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, I know you! You were in that movie about the cheerleaders.”
The woman shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. That was Kirsten Dunst.”
“But you were in something.”
The woman reached out with one fingertip and almost touched Ava’s bare foot. “She’s so beautiful,” she said. “You must be so happy.”
“Happy. Yeah, well, when she sleeps…” Becky’s voice trailed off. Lia Frederick. That was her name. Lia Frederick. And her married name was Lia Lane. Which Becky had no reason to know except that she was a devotee of
Entertainment Weekly
and
People
and the nightly tabloid TV shows on which Lia Frederick was a regular. Lia Frederick had played half a dozen small roles in big-budget shoot-’em-ups, and she’d played a nuclear scientist with a rare blood disease and a stalker ex-husband in a movie on Lifetime that Becky had seen twice in the past four weeks when she’d been stuck inside with her brand-new squalling baby.
Lia reached into the diaper bag and pulled out a burp cloth, a fancy one in a blue-and-white print that matched the bib Becky had found. “Here,” she said and tried to put it in Becky’s hand. “This is for you.”
So this was where the little baby gifts had been coming from,
Becky thought. This was who’d slipped the spoon through her mail slot and who’d put the rattle in her bag and left a pacifier at Mas.
“Here,” said Lia, trying to put it in the pocket of Becky’s bathrobe. “Please, take it. I don’t need it anymore.”
Becky searched her memory.
Hollywood tragedy,
she thought again, and then she had it. Some normally bubbly anchorbabe, face arranged into an unfamiliar somber expression.
Our condolences go out to Sam and Lia Lane, whose ten-week-old son Caleb died last week.
“Oh my God.”
“Please,” said Lia, looking desperate and sad as she pushed the little bib at Becky. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I scared you. I’m sorry I was in front of your house; I couldn’t sleep so I went for a walk, and I was just resting for a minute when I heard the baby start to cry. Please. Please just take it. Please.”
Becky put the cloth in her bathrobe pocket, and she took Lia by the hand. “Come with me,” she said.
Ten minutes later, Lia was sitting at her table, still looking as if she might bolt, and Becky was sitting in the rocking chair she’d installed in the corner of the kitchen. Ava, it turned out, had been hungry after all, and she was nursing contentedly while whapping at the side of Becky’s breast with one tiny fist and looking like an angry old man who was now trying to get his change back from a broken vending machine.
Twix bar! Twix bar! Goddamnit, I wanted a Twix bar!
Becky smiled, burped the baby, and set her into her Moses basket on the kitchen table. “Scrambled eggs. I’m going to make scrambled eggs,” she said, before Lia could answer.
Becky cracked four eggs one-handed into a bowl and reached for her sea salt, her pepper mill, and her whisk. “Whenever my brother and I got sick, my mother used to make us scrambled eggs. I have no idea why, but, well…”
“I’m not sick, though,” Lia said with a tiny smile. She took a long breath and let it out slowly. “I used to live here, you know. I mean, not here, here—not downtown—but in Philadelphia. In the Great Northeast.”
Becky put a chunk of butter in the pan and flicked on the heat. “Tea?” she asked. When Lia nodded, she put the kettle on to boil. “So you came back home, after…” Her voice trailed off.
“After,” Lia said. She looked ruefully at her diaper bag. “I got on the plane with this bag. I wasn’t even thinking. I had all this stuff, this baby stuff, and then I saw you in April.”
“Did I look pregnant?” Becky blurted, then shook her head at herself. Here she was, with incontrovertible evidence of her condition, and she was still playing Pregnant or Just Fat?
“Yeah,” Lia said. “And I just thought…oh, I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I kind of lost my mind.”
“I can understand that,” Becky said. She poured the eggs into the pan and turned down the heat. “I mean, I can imagine…well, I can’t imagine, really. It’s the worst thing I can think of.” She tilted the pan, stirred the eggs, and popped two crumpets into the toaster.
“I watched you for a while,” Lia said. “You and your two friends. But I don’t know their names.” She smiled. “I didn’t even know Ava’s name. You never call her Ava, you know? She’s the baby of a thousand names. Tiny Toes, Grumbelina, Princess Plumberbutt…”
“I think we were having diaper issues that day,” Becky said. “Anyhow, the blond woman is Kelly and her baby’s Oliver. She keeps flow charts, and her big recreational activity is returning things. She’s basically the Meg Ryan of Babies R Us, but she’s really nice. The black woman’s Ayinde and her baby’s Julian. Her husband’s on the Sixers, and she lives in this mansion in Gladwyne. I’m not sure I would have gotten to know either one of them, before.” She shrugged. “Babies make strange bedfellows.”
Ava stirred in her basket, raising one clenched fist above her head. “The baby power salute,” Becky said.
“Caleb used to do that,” Lia said. “That was my baby’s name. Caleb.” She seemed about to say more, then she closed her mouth and stared down at Ava.
“Where’s your husband?” Becky asked, struggling to come up with his name. “Sam, right?”
Lia shook her head. “Back in Los Angeles. I kind of just left. I wanted to tell him…it wasn’t his fault, but…” She shook her head again. “I just couldn’t stay,” she said softly.
Becky turned off the flame and reached for plates and napkins. Ava started flailing her arms. “Can you hold her?” Becky asked.
“Oh,” Lia said. “I, I don’t think…”
“She doesn’t bite,” Becky said from the stove. “And even if she did, it would probably be okay, as she is still in the situation of having no teeth.”