Ricochet Baby (13 page)

‘It’ll be okay,’ Roberta tells herself. ‘It’ll be all right.’

F
OR THE FIRST
week Roberta is home, the hospital picks up the
napkins
and delivers them back, fresh and still warm from the hospital driers. The Plunket nurse visits. ‘What a gorgeous house,’ she says. ‘He’s a lucky little boy to come home to a place like this. You should see some places.’ But her look indicates that people like Roberta could not imagine houses too awful for the human spirit to
flourish
.

Roberta develops mastitis. Her nipples harden and crack and she thinks she looks like a cow with swollen udders. Paul seems almost relieved, as if this visible illness is something he can
comprehend
. He rings Edith, who recommends hot packs, and binding of the breasts. She sounds harassed and distant when Paul hands the phone over to Roberta.

Nathan cries all one night. Paul walks up and down with him. ‘Don’t panic,’ he says. ‘Wind, I expect. Isn’t that what babies get?’ He rubs Nathan’s back and for a while the baby sleeps on his
shoulder
. ‘There,’ he says, as if it is easy. But when he puts him down, Nathan is away again. ‘If you could just feed him again.’

Her milk won’t let down because she is afraid the child will hurt her when he suckles.

‘Try,’ says Paul, ‘or I’ll have to ring the doctor.’ It is three o’ clock in the morning and she cannot imagine Mr Maitland’s response if he were to be phoned up now.

‘I’ll call him first thing in the morning,’ she promises. ‘Go back to sleep and I’ll look after him.’ Paul has to go to work; she knows she has to learn to cope.

‘All right then,’ he says, and buries his head under the
covers
. He sighs and tosses in a dramatic kind of way. It is the first time he has been irritable with her in the month that she has been home.

Roberta takes Nathan downstairs to sit in the bright kitchen with its rimu trim and marble-topped benches. Somehow she must feed him. She pushes him back on to her breast and shuts her eyes, as if not seeing him there will block out the pain. It is so bad that she screams and looks. Her milk is stained with blood.

‘Great,’ says Roberta. Talking to herself is becoming a habit, but it’s good to have someone around. ‘I am feeding my baby my own blood.’ She lets him suckle and it actually helps. Nathan is quiet,
perhaps
because he is less hungry, or perhaps he is too exhausted to scream any more. But in the morning the pain is just as bad.

Paul has an early appointment. ‘You ring the doctor straight away,’ he calls as he leaves. Nobody could tell what a bad night he has had; he looks as smart as ever.

The phone rings when he is barely out of sight. Marise. When Roberta hears her voice, she doesn’t say anything at first.

‘Roberta,’ Marise says anxiously. ‘Roberta.’

Roberta begins to cry, this never-ending weeping which is becoming her constant companion, and tries to explain that it is absolutely nothing at all. Quickly, Marise extracts the truth.

‘Stay right where you are,’ she says, although Roberta has not planned to go anywhere.

In next to no time, Marise walks through the back door,
carrying
a large shiny plastic shopping bag. ‘My sister has a cure,’ she announces. ‘It’s either very new or very old, but it can’t hurt you to try.’

She produces a large firm cabbage from her bag.

‘Yuck.’

‘You don’t have to eat it, you wear it.’

When she thinks about it later, Roberta realises there is
something
shy and excited about Marise that she cannot quite place.

Taking a sharp knife, Marise begins stripping the cabbage until she finds two large, veined leaves, smooth and curling inward like giant shells.

‘Take your gear off,’ she orders. Roberta unbinds herself and her breasts roll forward like big red turnips. ‘Put these on,’ she says, when she has recovered herself. She places the leaves on Roberta’s burning skin, pulling her maternity bra up, to hold the leaves in place. ‘Just sit and relax, okay?’

‘But what are they supposed to do?’

‘Your body temperature cooks the cabbage. Cooking cabbage releases enzymes that draw the swelling. Well, that’s what my sister says.’

Roberta is past caring how ridiculous things might look. Everything looks absurd. Marise lights a cigarette while they wait for something to happen, then crushes it out, looking guilty.

In a few minutes the smell of cooking cabbage fills the room. The leaves wilt, turning a sharper shade of green. Marise peels them off Roberta’s breasts, replacing them with two more. This time they cook more slowly. Roberta feels the pain shifting, drawing towards the surface.

‘It’s working,’ she says, smiling for the first time in a week.

Marise grins. ‘Wearable cuisine.’

That is the moment Paul chooses to return to the house for papers he has forgotten, his sleepless night catching up with him after all.

He stands looking at the scene in the kitchen with distaste. ‘Early dinner?’ he says. He picks up the saucer where Marise has stubbed out her cigarette and looks at her accusingly. Marise
gathers
her belongings and walks out, without saying a word.

‘I thought you were going to call the doctor?’ he says to Roberta.

‘I will.’

But she doesn’t. She uses the cabbage leaves several times during the day, and by evening she is able to feed Nathan again.

When he comes home, Paul doesn’t ask whether she has rung the doctor again.

‘I hope you’ve taken a shower,’ he says, as she gets into bed.

Roberta lies beside him; he lays his hand on her. ‘They’re softer,’ he says, grudgingly.

‘It’s a relief,’ she says.

Paul leans over her and lowers his mouth to her breast. He sucks her nipple hard, dragging on the sour soup of her milk.

Roberta hears a quiet voice in her brain. This is not what I want, it says to her. She lies quietly beside him and lets it talk.

H
ER DAYS ARE
quiet, punctuated by the wind. Young mothers in her street walk by wheeling prams, skirts whipping around their knees. She looks at them for signs, trying to gauge their
happiness
, their capabilities, whether they are coping with the world. Some of them look tired, but none of them is distraught, although on once a week visits to the supermarket she
sometimes
hears women shouting at their children when they have done nothing wrong. It is not anger that she feels. Roberta does not want to shout at Nathan. She is not sure that she feels
anything
.

Even if she is lucky, as the Plunket nurse says, the dark mood she experienced in the hospital grows deeper. In the mornings when she wakes, her eyelids won’t open straight away, glued together by dread. She rubs them to get rid of the sticky substance beneath, but there’s nothing there, just remorseless light when finally she begins to face each day. The person she remembers being, before this, before pregnancy, before Nathan, has gone. The waviness in her hair disappears, the small curling fronds around her face. The weeping returns.

Bernard comes to visit one day, unexpectedly.

‘It’s time I saw this baby of yours,’ he says, standing framed in the doorway, almost having to bend his head.

‘He’s asleep,’ says Roberta, as if she doesn’t want to show him to her brother. ‘I mean, it’s great to see you. He does cry quite a bit, so if you could just not wake him up.’

Bernard walks up the stairs behind her, awkwardly trying to tiptoe.

Nathan is asleep, his face peaceful and smooth. ‘You’d better hold him,’ she says.

‘Well, if you’re sure.’

She lifts him out of his bassinet and places him in Bernard’s arms. He stands quietly for a long time, looking at Nathan. She wishes he would say something.

‘Stop looking so scared,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to run off with him.’

But she sees the covetous, stealthy look in his eyes, the brother she has never altogether trusted.

‘I’ll make you a cuppa,’ she says, just so he will give Nathan back.

‘Sounds good,’ he says, but when Nathan is down again, and they have returned to the kitchen, he says, ‘Well, I’ll be off now.’

‘But you’ve only just come.’ Roberta is afraid that she has offended him; he is family, after all.

Other days, she sits idly, when there are things she could be doing. She catches herself examining her love for Paul in minute detail. Anyone might be forgiven for wondering whether she ever saw anything good in him at all, she tells herself sternly. But that is not the way it has been. She believes that what they have
experienced
is love. Isn’t it?

Paul and Roberta lived in a university flat together. The arrangement was not by design; there was simply a vacancy in the flat Roberta shared with two other people and he answered their advertisement. These women held a house meeting. ‘Do we want any more men?’ they asked each other.

They had all but given up on admitting men into the flat after a succession of boors who smoked more dope than they thought safe, mixed up whites and coloured in the washing machine and missed the lavatory bowl — all that kind of stuff.

Then Paul turned up on the doorstep. He was well-spoken, seemed quiet. ‘I only need a place until the end of the year, then my girlfriend and I will probably get married.’ They were impressed.

They held another house meeting. ‘If he doesn’t work out it’s only a few months to the end of the year,’ said one of the flatmates.

We can probably cope for that long, if he’s awful.

But he did work out, beautifully. He was clean, tidy and a great cook. He knew the difference between good wine and bad, not as something learned and ostentatious, but as knowledge taken for granted. Roberta remembers the way the pattern of life in the flat became more mature, their behaviour like that of grown-up people. They sat down for meals, and took proper turns at
shopping
so that there was always food in the house, and, without being asked, took to playing the stereo at levels which they had all secretly yearned for.

Paul didn’t bring Prudence, his girlfriend, to sleep over, which was a relief. The couple went to her place, or his family’s, at
the weekends, and during the week they both studied. Prudence wore a neat sapphire engagement ring, which was unusual for a student. Her father was a doctor up north. At the end of the year there was a shock announcement: Prudence had been awarded a scholarship to study abroad.

‘I told her she had to take it,’ Paul explained to them. They were impressed by that, too, though one of them, whom the others secretly thought was going off the rails anyway, groaned and said, ‘Do we really trust a
SNAG
?’

‘Our commitment could never be in d oubt,’ Paul said. ‘Of course I’ll wait for her.’ He was quiet for a week or so, and the women asked him to stay on in the flat.

Towards the end of the following academic year, Prudence wrote him a dear John letter, to say she had fallen in love with a ski instructor in the French Alps. Everyone felt furious with her. Paul was just about to complete honours in psychology, and he looked so awful that they all took turns sitting with him in the evenings just to be sure he kept studying. When it was Roberta’s turn, she sat very still, reading and hardly daring to breathe lest she break his concentration.

Her own study was lumbering along; she was studying
accountancy
because she was considered good at mathematics, which only meant she had stayed the course at high school when everyone else had dropped out. Secretly she wished she had done arts. She wanted something that took her nowhere, as her mother said, although what she knew about it Roberta wasn’t certain. Edith sometimes suggested she might go back for the winter balls at Walnut. There was Grant, who had always fancied her. Grant wore cable-knit sweaters and kept his hands in his pockets, and her cousin Sally had wanted to marry him for years. Roberta wondered if her mother’s desire to match them up might be in order to put one over her in-laws, but that seemed too uncharitable a thought, even for Edith. At other times, she wondered if her mother wanted her home to be her friend. A friend for the rest of Edith’s life, when all else failed. Some hope.

One evening, Paul said, ‘I can’t go on like this, I just can’t. Come out and have a drink with me, Roberta.’

At the pub he looked at her across gin and tonics. ‘You keep me going, Roberta.’

‘It’s not just me, the other girls care about you too,’ she said, because that is the way she has always been, wanting to share praise
as well as blame. Her brother Bernard used to jeer and call her the peacemaker, as if it was an insult, because she wanted to bring about harmony where none was possible.

‘No, it’s you. I wait for it be your turn to sit with me. So I thought today, how silly this is, that I’m waiting for it to be your turn, and what a sap you must think me, needing a nanny every night. The truth is, I don’t want to think about Prudence any more. I’d like to spend some time with you.’

Thinking back, she does not remember him telling her that he loved her, though she is sure that she said this to him. After he passed his exams, the two of them went on a working holiday to Australia. Roberta worked as a waitress on the Gold Coast, and Paul got a job relief teaching for a while. The beginning of the university year started and they should have gone back so Roberta could return to varsity, but they didn’t. They became a couple, and now they have been one for six years, married for the past four. They are generally kind to one another; they have had some fun together.

So she finds herself going back over that time, trying to decide when she began to love Paul, and she finds that she can’t, what ever she may have said; it’s like a stitch in a piece of
embroidery
, already so smooth and worn that it does not bear close
examination
because then the whole picture is open to question. At first it is shocking to consider that she might not love him in the way she believes, a kind of an unfaithfulness in itself. But once she has begun, she cannot stop; it’s like scooping sweet crumbs from behind her teeth with the tip of her tongue. She catches herself in the act again, and asks herself again and again, what sort of a
person
am I? What sort of a monster?

She glimpses her reflection in odd corners of the house, not in the mirrors, because she cannot bear to look at herself, but, depending on the light against the windows, sometimes she sees herself there, or in the glass of a picture, another time in the polish of the sunlit table.

This time last year, she was a pretty young woman who wore well-cut suits with padded shoulders, and softly draped blouses so that she wouldn’t appear mannish, the clothes sprinkled with fine gold jewellery. She visited restaurants with her husband, and had begun to hold dinner parties. Now, she is a gaunt-eyed creature with dry hair springing out of her scalp. She feels as if she has flu all the time.

One day, when the wind is quiet, she stands outside and
studies
the wind turbine, turning over very quietly in the gentler air. What do women really want, she asks herself. Did I ever ask for this? Thinking about this sends a shudder through her. She goes back inside and puts another pile of washing into the machine, but continues to shiver. She wonders if she is feeling one of the
earthquake
tremors which often strike Wellington. People wait for the big one.

But the earth below hasn’t moved, like a bad joke about sex. What she feels is inexplicable sorrow. She has not been given to phobias, except for her sudden fear of heights, nor does she
consider
herself foolish or ignorant. As well as the half-finished degree in accountancy, she reads books. After she stopped gymnastics, she took up reading in a big way, not as a brainy or ostentatious
occupation
. Some girls read when they are small and give it all up when they reach adolescence. They don’t want to be geeks or swots, they say, and so it is one thing or the other. But Roberta was different. She read her way steadily through many books, in a private,
interested
way, just for the pleasure of it.

In spring she went to the women’s book festival, standing shyly but firmly in the queue so that visiting authors could sign the books she bought. One year she got Fay Weldon, companionable and motherly, another time Barbara Trapido, with raining grey hair and a raw friendly face, and once A1 zipless fuck Erica Jong, in this day of Aids. Would you please sign my mother’s name, it’s to Edith, thank you, thank you, she loves your books so much, she lives in the country, couldn’t make it herself, oh I’m sorry to hold up the queue, thank you, thank you.

She never gives the books to her mother. Edith doesn’t read. She gardens with a ruthless quixotic artistry, and she drinks.