Little Earthquakes (18 page)

Lia smiled. She shrugged off her coat, bent down, and lifted Ava into her arms. She settled the baby against her a little awkwardly and rocked her back and forth as she rocked across the kitchen, singing in a voice that was high and sweet and silvery.

Becky held her breath. Ava reached up with one wandering hand and tangled her fingers in Lia’s hair.

“How was your doctor’s appointment?” Steve asked, with his right hand on her knee.

Kelly took a deep breath and tried to wake up. She had known this question would be coming, and she knew that in spite of how it sounded it had nothing to do with Steve’s concern for her health.
How was your doctor’s appointment,
loosely translated, meant
Can we have sex?

“It was fine,” she said slowly, knowing what would come next. Knowing and not wanting it one bit.

The truth was, she was cleared for takeoff. “You’re fine,” Dr. Mendlow had said, still buried practically wrist-deep in what she amusingly used to think of as her private parts. That was before she gave birth in a teaching hospital and wound up pushing in full view of a parade of residents, interns, medical students, and, she could have sworn, a junior high school field trip, although Steve insisted that she’d hallucinated that part. “Whenever you’re ready, you can start having intercourse.” Kelly would have laughed longer than thirty seconds, but she knew the doctor was busy, and she had to get back home as fast as she could because Oliver would need to nurse again. That, and she couldn’t think of a polite way to say that she’d never wanted to have sex less in her entire life and that the spectacle of her shorts-clad, couch-bound husband, who kept telling her that he was taking a much-needed mental health break before starting his job search in earnest, wasn’t doing much for her libido.

There was also the matter of the couch. She’d come back from walking Lemon and Oliver one afternoon to find a giant orange-and-brown-plaid three-seater squatting in the middle of her formerly vacant living room. She’d closed her eyes, certain that when she opened them again the ugliest couch in the history of furniture would have vanished. But no. The couch was still there.

“Steve?”

Her husband, still wearing the boxer shorts he’d slept in, wandered into the room.

“What is this?”

“Oh,” he said, looking at the couch as if he, too, was seeing it for the first time. “The Conovans were throwing it out, and I told them we’d take it.”

“But…” She struggled to find the right words. “But it’s hideous!”

“It’s a couch,” he said. “It’s something to sit on.” He flopped down defiantly. Kelly winced at the sour smell of mildew and eau de old people that wafted out of the cushions. The thing smelled as if someone had died on top of it. And then stayed awhile. And it looked…God, she thought and swallowed hard. It looked close enough to the couch she’d had in her house growing up to be its evil twin.

“Steve. Please. It’s awful.”

“I like it,” he said. And that was that. The couch had stayed.

Dr. Mendlow looked at Kelly as she wiped her eyes with the hem of the pink paper-towel gown. “Why don’t you step into my office?” he said. He looked as boyish as ever in his customary blue scrubs and white coat, but she saw a tie peeking out from underneath his collar. She wondered where he was going and whether he’d be bringing his wife.

“No,” she said, still snorting a little, “no, really, I’m fine. Just a little exhausted.” Which was such an understatement that it set her off on another gale of laughter. She’d fed Oliver at 11:00 at night, at 1:30 in the morning, at 3
A.M.
, at 5
A.M.
, and literally had been forced to drag her nipple out of his mouth so that she could make her 8:30 appointment.

“My office,” he said, washing his hands. Kelly wiped herself off, pulled on her panties, her sweatpants, and her T-shirt (stained with spit-up on both shoulders, she noticed, but what could she do?), and arranged herself in one of Dr. Mendlow’s leather chairs.

“Listen,” he said, sitting behind his desk five minutes later, jolting Kelly out of the light doze she’d fallen into, “whatever you want to tell your husband, I’ll back you up.”

Her jaw must have dropped. “You want to tell him I said nothing but holding hands until six months, you go right ahead.”

“I…really?”

“You’re breast-feeding?”

Kelly nodded.

“Then you’re not sleeping much. And you’re adjusting to what’s probably the biggest change in your life. Sex probably isn’t very high on your list right now.”

“My husband,” Kelly said and then stopped. The truth was that the six weeks after Oliver was born felt like a vacation. “Nothing in the vagina,” Dr. Mendlow had said. “No intercourse, no tampons, no douching,” he told them. “You can have oral sex,” he said. Kelly thought Steve was going to vault over her hospital bed and hug him, until he continued, “That means you can sit around and talk about all the sex you aren’t having.” Steve’s face fell. “Come see me in six weeks, and we’ll see where you are.” Then the doctor had whacked Steve lightly on the forearm with Oliver’s medical chart and headed out the door.

But now her reprieve was over, and Steve’s hand was inching up her thigh. “Can we?” he asked. Kelly ran through her options. There weren’t many. She could tell him no and just postpone the inevitable, or she could tell him yes, bite the bullet, and hope for a fast conclusion.

“Is the baby sleeping?” she whispered. Steve peered down to the foot of the bed, where Oliver reposed, snug in his Pack-n-Play (after his first night at home, Kelly had quickly figured out that the gorgeous, perfect little nursery was going to remain unused as long as the baby was waking up three or four times a night). Steve nodded, smacked his lips, and dove.

He started by kissing her neck, gentle nibbles up and down. Umm. She closed her eyes and tried not to yawn as he pressed against her. He was kissing her collarbones…pushing up her nightgown…shaking her shoulders.

“Wha? Huh?” She blinked.

“Did you fall asleep?”

“No!” she said. Had she? Probably. Kelly pinched herself hard on the thigh and vowed that the least she could do would be to stay awake for the entirety of this encounter. She owed her husband that much.

“Where were we?” she asked. She kissed his earlobe and nibbled at his chest. He moaned, and circled her breasts with his hand, rubbing at the nipples with his thumbs.

“Whoa!”

“What?” She couldn’t have fallen asleep again, she thought. It wasn’t possible.

He raised his hands in front of her face, shaking them, with a look of such disgust that she expected to see blood dripping from his fingertips. Instead she saw a few innocuous white drops. Milk.

“Honey, it’s no big deal.”

He shook his head, still looking pale and disconcerted, and resumed his efforts. Off went the nightgown. Off went the granny panties, stained the color of faded ketchup at the crotch (she hoped he wouldn’t notice in the flickering blue light of the baby monitor). In went the KY jelly he’d subtly placed on the nightstand after they’d finished dinner. On went the condom. Ribbed for her pleasure, said the box. Hah.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” he panted.
Ouch.
What on earth was going on down there? Had the twelve-year-old resident who’d sewn up her episiotomy accidentally revirginized her? Kelly shut her eyes and tried to relax.

“Oh, God,” he breathed in her ear. “Oh, God, Kelly, you feel so good.”

“Mmm,” she moaned back, thinking that she didn’t feel good at all. Her belly was still loose and flabby; she felt as if there was a half-deflated inner tube around her midsection, and its skin looked as if someone had dipped a rake in red paint and stroked it up and down. She knew the stretch marks would fade, but for the time being, she couldn’t stand to look at them. Steve, however, didn’t seem to mind.

“What do you want?” he gasped and grabbed her ankle, pulling her right leg up toward his shoulder. Kelly bit back a yelp and tossed her head in pain that she hoped he would mistake for passion. “What do you want me to do?”

And instead of some ribald response, some variant of
Do it to me harder,
which would be her typical prepregnancy answer, his question set off an echo in her head, courtesy of one of the books she’d been reading to Oliver before he’d fallen asleep.
Mister Brown can moo, can you?

“Kelly?”

Oh, the wonderful sounds Mr. Brown can do. Mr. Brown can moo like a cow…

“Moo!” she said.

Steve stopped moving long enough to stare at her. “What?”

“I mean, mmmm,” she moaned. Louder this time.
Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.

“Kelly?”

Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown is a wonder…

“Kell?”

Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown makes thunder!
“Oh, God!” she said. Generic, but acceptable. At least it didn’t rhyme.

She clutched Steve’s shoulders as his breathing sped up.
Thank you, God,
she thought, as he gasped, and Oliver started to cry.

“Argh!” sighed her husband.

“Wah!” cried her baby.

Cow goes moo, sheep goes baa,
went her head, which had evidently abandoned Dr. Seuss and moved on to the board books of Sandra Boynton.
I am never going to sleep again, ever,
Kelly thought, rolling out from beneath her husband and lifting her baby into her arms.

Ayinde smoothed her jacket over the mushy area where her waist had once been and tried not to fidget as the news director looked at her tape. “Good stuff, good stuff,” he murmured, as a televised Ayinde talked onscreen about house fires and car crashes, bond issues and benefits rodeos, and the real-time Ayinde realized with a sinking feeling that she’d forgotten to stick breast pads in her bra before she’d left the house. Then again, Paul Davis, the WCAU news director, hadn’t given her much notice. Her agent had sent her tapes to the station—to this one and to every other shop in town, up to and including the second public station, which was located in the middle of a neighborhood in Roxborough she knew Richard would never let her drive to alone—months earlier, when Richard had been traded. But that had been months ago, and she hadn’t gotten so much as a nibble until the night before when Davis himself had called to ask whether she had a minute to stop by the station that morning. It was going to be a crazy day, Ayinde realized—once she was done she’d have to turn around, go home, pick up the baby, and drive all the way to New York to meet her mother—but if she got a job offer, it would have been worth it.

Paul Davis—fiftyish, white, handsome in a tweedy, goateed way—clicked the set into silence and looked down at the résumé on his desk.

“Yale, huh? And a master’s from Columbia.”

“Don’t hold it against me,” said Ayinde, and they both laughed.

“West Virginia for ten months…”

“Which was about eight months too long,” said Ayinde. More laughter. She let herself relax a bit as she pulled her jacket tightly across her chest.

“Six years in Fort Worth.”

“I started out doing general assignment work and features, and, as you’ll see, I was promoted to weekend editor, then to anchor of the five o’clock news, which had a twelve percent rise in ratings the first year I was there.”

“Very nice, very nice,” he said, scribbling something on the résumé. “Look, Ayinde. I’m going to be honest with you.”

She smiled at him. He’d said her name right on the first try, which had to count for something.

“You’ve clearly got the skills to succeed in this market. You’ve got the look—well, I don’t need to tell you that.”

She nodded again, her heart rising. “In Texas they had to test-market my hair a few times to get it right…”

“Your hair’s not the issue,” Paul Davis said. “Your husband is.”

“My husband,” Ayinde repeated.

“You’re intelligent. You’re warm. You’re smart but not condescending.” Paul Davis looked at the screen again, where Ayinde’s face was frozen, lips parted, eyes half-shut. “You’re sexy but not in an obvious way. I’m just afraid that you’re not going to work as an anchor in this market. Nobody’s going to tune in to see you read the news.”

“They’re not?”

Davis shook his head. “They’re going to tune in to see what kind of woman Richard Towne married. They’ll tune in to see what you’re wearing, and what your ring looks like, and how you’re doing your hair. I’m just not sure they’d buy you as the person telling them about the school strikes and the car crashes.”

Ayinde straightened her back. “I think my skills as a reporter speak for themselves. You can ask any of my colleagues in Fort Worth. Getting married to Richard Towne didn’t knock fifty points off of my IQ. I’m professional, I’m committed, I work hard, I’m a team player, and I don’t ask for special treatment.”

Paul Davis nodded. The look on his face was not unsympathetic. “I’m sure all of that’s true,” he said. “And I’m sorry for the position your marriage has placed you in. But I don’t think there’s a news director or GM in town who’d tell you any different. Your status—your celebrity—would be a distraction to the viewer.”

“But I’m not a celebrity! Richard’s the celebrity!”

Paul Davis hit Eject and handed Ayinde’s tape back to her. “Let me tell you what we’re thinking,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later, Ayinde wandered back into the parking lot, feeling as if she’d walked through a tornado.
Special correspondent,
she thought, unlocking her car and tossing her tape into the passenger’s seat, where it bounced off the caramel-colored leather and landed on the floor. Yale and Columbia and ten months in West Virginia lugging her own camera around; four years as a reporter and two years anchoring in a top-twenty-five market and they wanted her to be a quote-unquote special correspondent? To go to Sixers games and—how had that loathsome Paul Davis put it—“use your access to give viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the team”? Profiles of the players. Profiles of the coaches. Profiles of the dancers, for heaven’s sake!

She yanked the seat belt in place. “Bullshit,” she whispered, putting the car in gear, heading home to pick up Julian, who was napping in his bassinet with the maid standing guard at his nursery door. “Richard called,” Clara told her. Ayinde sighed, loaded the baby and all of his gear into the car, and called his cell phone. Richard had watched her get dressed that morning, advising her on the plum-colored suit versus the gray one. He’d kissed her and told her she was going to knock them dead.

“How’d it go?” he asked eagerly.

“Not very well,” she said. She pulled out onto the Schuylkill Expressway. It was probably for the best, she thought, as Richard made indignant noises and asked whether Ayinde wanted to switch agents and if there was anything he could do to help. Maybe this was nothing short of God’s way of telling her that she was supposed to be a stay-at-home mom, that her time was best spent with her baby.

“Where is my darling boy?” Lolo trilled two hours later—more for the benefit of the assembled photographers, makeup artists, hair stylists, and assistants than for Julian, Ayinde was sure.

“Right here,” Ayinde sang back, setting down the car seat and overstuffed diaper bag on a table lined with platters of bagels and pastries, and turning sideways so that her mother could see Julian in his
Baby Success!
–mandated front carrier. The photo shoot was being held in a Chelsea studio, a long, rectangular room with a concrete floor and rolls of black paper hanging from the ceiling to serve as backdrops. There was a screened-off area for makeup and wardrobe, and techno music blasted from the speakers suspended from the ceiling. “This is my daughter,” Lolo said grandly. “She’s an anchorwoman.”

“Not anymore,” said Ayinde, thinking of how she’d spent her morning. “I’m just a mom now.” She looked down at Julian, thinking that the words didn’t sound any better out loud than they had in her head on her way out of the WCAU parking lot. She’d have to work on that.
Darlin’, you are now the proud owner of the best job title there is!
was what
Baby Success!
said.

Her mother looked at Ayinde. “Back down to fighting weight?” she asked.

“More or less,” Ayinde said, determined not to let Lolo bait her. She’d agreed to this photo shoot for
More
magazine—“Generations of Beauty,” they were calling it, or something equally ridiculous—as a favor to Lolo and over her husband’s objections. “I don’t want our baby in a magazine,” Richard said, and Ayinde had agreed. Normally, she hated the way the media turned wives and children of athletes into disposable accessories, whose only job was to look good cheering in the stands. But Lolo had insisted. More than that, really. Lolo had begged. “You know how hard it is to find work at my age,” she said. “And if this goes well, Estée Lauder might consider me for their Face Over Fifty.” By Ayinde’s calculations, Lolo was actually eligible to be a Face Over Sixty, but the less said about that, the better. There was a part of her, a part she usually managed to keep hidden and quiet, that was still desperate for Lolo’s approval, or even Lolo’s acknowledgment, and it was that part that had agreed to bring Julian into Manhattan for a family portrait, while the more rational part of her mind was insisting,
No way.

“What a sweetie!” Three girls dressed all in black, with low-waisted pants and cruelly pointed shoes, were clustered around Julian. Ayinde hugged her son, taking a deep, restorative sniff of his hair and warm skin.

Lolo’s voice rose above the girls’ coos. She’d already been to makeup. Her coppery skin and green-gold eyes looked as lovely as ever, her lips ripe and her cheekbones high and fine and her eyelashes thick and black as a bird’s wings. “They’re ready for you, darling.” She looked at the baby, as if he’d turned into a large tumor attached to her daughter’s chest. “Where’s the nanny?”

Ayinde took another deep breath of Julian’s scent and nuzzled his curls before answering. “Mother, I don’t have a nanny.”

“Well, the sitter, then.”

“No sitter.”

Lolo lifted an immaculately groomed eyebrow. “Au pair?” she asked, without much hope in her voice.

Ayinde forced herself to smile. “Just me.” She let one of the pointy-toed girls lead her to a chair. Julian sat in her lap while a man named Corey applied blush and bronzer and coppery eyeshadow to her face and arranged her braids in a twist at the nape of her neck. “Breast-feeding,” she said ruefully, after the third couture gown failed to fit over her chest. She could hear her mother sucking her teeth from ten yards away. A champion tooth-sucker was Lolo Mbezi. It made up for the fact that she never frowned. “Wrinkles, darling,” she’d say, whenever she caught her daughter doing it.

“Hmm,” said the wardrobe man, helping her slip into a Vera Wang dress, a shimmering column of pale-gray silk. It didn’t zip, but he told her not to worry. “A few pins, a little tape, and we’ll be just fine.” He looked over Ayinde’s head. “Oh, my,” he breathed. Ayinde turned and saw her mother, resplendent in ruched and pleated chiffon in a dozen shades of pink ranging from blush to magenta. A strapless bodice showed off her shoulders and collarbone, her flawless mocha skin, and the length of her slim neck. The skirt was a bell-shaped explosion of layers, puffing out gracefully as Lolo glided across the room, hands holding up the skirt, elbows bent just so. Ayinde suddenly felt as drab as a pigeon. “And here’s the star of the show!”

A pointy-toed girl handed Julian to his mother. The baby was completely naked. “You know, I’m not sure this is a good idea…” Ayinde said.

“Oh, don’t be such a worrier!” said Lolo, beaming at her daughter and grandson. “Darling, you look lovely. Very chic. Spin round.” Ayinde did. “Marvelous. Bobby, you’re a miracle worker…with the pinning, you can hardly tell about the zip.”

Ayinde closed her eyes and prayed for patience as the photographer arranged them—Lolo standing on an eighteen-inch platform, Ayinde sitting below her, trying to suck in her stomach, the naked baby in her lap.

“Wonderful, Lolo, that’s amazing with the eyes,” called the photographer. Ayinde tried not to yawn as Julian squirmed. “Chin up, Ayinde…no, not quite so high…tilt your head a little, nope, nope, other way…”

Ayinde was starting to sweat underneath the lights, and the muscles in her legs and back were trembling with the effort of sitting perfectly erect. Julian wriggled harder, batting at the dangling silver earrings they’d given her.

“I think we need to take a break,” she managed to say before her son successfully snagged one of the earrings and yanked at it hard. “I need to feed him…”

“One of the girls can give him his bottle,” said Lolo, shaking out the pleats of her gown.

“He doesn’t get bottles, Mother. I’m breast-feeding…”
Just like that book you sent told me to,
Ayinde thought.

“It’s okay, we’re almost done. Eyes this way, please. Perfect. Ayinde, let’s try the baby held on your other side.”

Ayinde shifted Julian from her right arm to her left. The baby responded by peeing down the front of her gown. Lolo sucked in a horrified breath. Ayinde closed her eyes to a faint patter of giggles from the pointy-toed girls.

“And thank you, ladies, that’ll be all,” said the photographer.

“I don’t understand why you don’t have a nanny,” Lolo said. It was an hour later, and they were eating a late lunch of chicken paillard in a back booth at La Goulue. Ayinde had changed into leggings and one of Richard’s jerseys. Lolo was impeccable as ever in a Donna Karan pantsuit. And she was eating, while Ayinde’s plate sat untouched in front of her because Julian was nursing and both of her hands were occupied, much to her mother’s unstated but evident irritation.

“I want to raise him myself,” Ayinde said.

“Well, of course, that’s wonderful, but don’t you want to have a life of your own?”

“This is my life right now.”

“All that expensive education…,” her mother murmured.

“What do you want from me?” Ayinde snapped. Lolo blinked at her coolly.

“I want what every mother wants for her children, darling. I want you to be happy.”

“No, really,” said Ayinde. “I know you want something, and I can’t figure out what. You send me this book…” Julian started whimpering. She switched him from her right breast to her left as discreetly as she could manage it, smoothed his hair, and continued. “You send me this book that says that the purest bond in the world is the bond between a mother and a child, that says that I should breast-feed until he’s three and let him sleep in my bed, and that leaving him with a nanny is tantamount to child abuse…”

Lolo looked puzzled. “The book says that?”

Ayinde bit back hysterical laughter. Trust Lolo to not even have skimmed the back cover of
Baby Success!,
which had become Ayinde’s scripture. “Look. Raising Julian is my job right now. This is my work. And it’s important work.”

“Well, of course it is,” said Lolo, sounding nonplussed. “But it doesn’t mean you should never have any time for yourself.”

“Like when it’s convenient for you,” Ayinde said.

Lolo tilted her head. “Oh, darling, let’s not fight.” She speared a piece of chicken on her fork and held it out. “Here. Open up.”

“Mother…”

“You must be hungry. Here.” She waved the forkful of chicken near Ayinde’s lips, and Ayinde reluctantly opened her mouth. “There you are!” her mother said. She gave a pleased smile and sat back, her face glowing underneath her makeup. (Ayinde had washed hers off the instant she could, knowing that makeup in combination with Julian’s wandering hands would spell ruin for her clothes.) “All I’m saying,” Lolo continued, “is that there’s nothing wrong with having some help. You have to give yourself a rest every once in a while, even if you’re the best mother in the world.”