“Can I help?” Steve asked.
“No, no, I’ll get them.” This was the way it had always been; the way she’d once liked it. Steve worked long hours, and Kelly took care of the house. She hadn’t felt burdened when she dropped off the dry-cleaning or picked up the groceries. It was only fair because he was making so much more money than she was.
And he would be again,
she told herself.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she told him. She shut the dishwasher, dried her hands, and carried the baby to his room to nurse him again and give him his bath. At eight-thirty, she began walking up and down the hall with Oliver in her arms, singing to him until he fell asleep. Then she cleared the table, tossing out paper napkins and chopsticks, casting baleful looks at the Ghetto Couch, which was still crouching, front and center, in their living room. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said. Steve nodded. Kelly padded down the hall into Oliver’s room. The baby was sprawled on his back, arms and legs akimbo, mouth open, eyes shut. She closed her own eyes and laid her hand on his chest, holding her breath until she felt its gentle rise and fall. How old would he be, she wondered, before she stopped sneaking into his room to make sure he was still breathing. One? Two? Eighteen? She tiptoed out of the room, then went to the office to enter Oliver’s wet diapers and naps into his spreadsheet and write a cheery e-mail to the caterers and florists and musicians she’d gotten to know.
Dear colleagues!
she composed in her head.
I’m sure you weren’t expecting to hear from me so soon, but I’m back to work, a little more quickly than expected…
The desktop computer flickered into brilliant life with just a quick tap at the mouse.
TEACH FOR AMERICA
read the words on the screen, Huh? She scrolled down, thinking this had to be a mistake or a pop-up ad.
We call upon outstanding recent college graduates to commit two years to teach in low-income rural and urban communities to expand opportunities for children growing up there.
Oh, God. Was Steve seriously thinking about relocating to some slum, with wife and baby in tow? Kelly swallowed hard, feeling suddenly light-headed and queasy, and flicked through the five other windows her husband had left open.
BE A TEACHING ASSISTANT IN PHILADELPHIA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS
, one invited. And there was a page giving all the pertinent information about Temple University’s one-year teacher certification program.
Teaching. Dear God. She remembered their wedding day, how he’d fought with the priest over the “for richer or poorer” part of the vows. He hadn’t even wanted to say “poorer.” “It’s not in the realm of possibility,” he told Father Frank calmly, as the priest stared at him, then at Kelly, bushy eyebrows raised as if to ask,
Is he kidding?
Kelly sat in front of the computer, feeling her heart kicking against her rib cage. He couldn’t be serious…could he? She thought about Mr. Dubeo, who’d had all eight of the O’Hara siblings in his American History class and who’d driven the same Chevy Nova for the fourteen years they’d been in school. Mr. Dubeo had worn thick plastic glasses and five different polyester ties, one for each day of the week. The same five ties for fourteen years, and he’d carried plastic-wrapped sandwiches in his briefcase and eaten them at his desk during fourth period. Steve couldn’t be thinking of being a teacher. He couldn’t.
Oliver started fussing in his crib. She shuffled down the hall, picked the baby up, and held him in her arms. Her little boy, her gorgeous, sweet, pinchable little guy. She blew kisses on his belly, changed his diaper, carried him back to the living room, and sat on the Ghetto Couch to nurse. She tried to ignore the dust in the air and the new set of newspapers on the floor as she cradled Oliver’s head in her right hand. Instead of firing their once-a-week cleaning lady to save money, she should have cancelled the digital cable. She just bet that Steve would be looking harder for work if there weren’t three hundred channels at his fingertips. She just bet that his suits wouldn’t be hanging in the closet and that there wouldn’t be an ass-shaped groove in the couch.
Once the baby was sleeping again, she pulled off her clothes and let them drop to the floor by the side of the bed, and then, wearing just panties and a bra, she crawled underneath the covers, with Lemon breathing dog breath into her face. Five minutes later, Steve was in bed, reaching for her.
He can’t be serious,
she thought, squeezing her eyes shut before she realized that her husband wasn’t trying to touch her breast or her leg. He was trying to hold her hand.
“Kelly?”
She kept breathing slowly and deeply.
“Kelly, are we going to talk about this?”
She ignored him.
No, we are not going to talk about this. There’s nothing to discuss. You’re going to get the kind of job you had when we got married and I’m going to stay home with our baby, the way we agreed I would.
Steve sighed and flopped onto his back. “You don’t have to go back to work if you don’t want to,” he said.
Kelly rolled over to face him. “Did you get a job?” she asked eagerly.
Steve pulled back. “Jesus, you scared me!”
“Did you get a job?” she asked again.
“No, Kelly, I didn’t get a job in the last ten minutes, but there’s no reason to panic. We’ve got savings.”
True enough, she thought. Steve had sold his share of the online investing firm he’d helped get off the ground after graduate school for a decent sum—not the millions he and his partners had been worth on paper at one point, but they certainly had more in the bank than other couples their age. But she didn’t want to touch their savings because what would happen when they were gone? “I don’t want to use our savings,” she said.
“Yeah, well…” She could see him shrug in the darkness. “Our circumstances have changed. We can use that while I look around.”
“But I don’t want to,” Kelly said. “I’m not comfortable with that. I don’t mind working.”
Liar,
she thought. “But I want you to be working, too. I don’t want us to just sit around spending money we were supposed to invest.”
“I want to find a job I like, and that takes time,” Steve said, now sounding whiny. Wimpy. Weak. Your W word here. “I wasn’t happy in a big company, Kelly.”
“Well, who ever said work’s supposed to make you happy?” she asked. “That’s why they call it a job, you know? Do you think my job makes me happy? I didn’t grow up dreaming about organizing Christmas parties and summer picnics for a bunch of forty-year-old guys in suits. But I do it because it gets the bills paid.”
Her husband blew out his breath in frustration.
“I’m going to sleep,” Kelly said again. But she couldn’t. When Steve started snoring, she crept back into the office and opened her Favorites folder. There was the oval commode and the Cubist bar stools, and the Donghia bed. She sat there, staring, her face bathed in the blue glow of the screen, for three hours, until her son’s cries summoned her to the nursery again.
“Oopsies! Oopsies! Spit-up in aisle five!” Mimi trilled.
Becky prayed, for what felt like the millionth time in the last three weeks, for the strength not to murder her mother-in-law. She looked at Ava, who seemed perfectly fine. “I think if you just wiped her off…”
“Oh, I’ll just get her a fresh outfit.” Which would be Ava’s fourth fresh outfit that day—not bad, Becky thought. When she’d first arrived, Mimi had run through an astonishing seven outfits before lunchtime. Becky wouldn’t have minded so much, except she was the one doing the laundry, and Mimi insisted on dressing Ava in what Becky had come to think of as slut-wear. At present, the baby was clad in a miniature pair of ripped jeans with a chain dangling from one of the pockets and a pink onesie that read
GRANDMA’S LITTLE ANGEL.
As a final touch, there was a pink-and-white-sequined lace headband wrapped around Ava’s still-bald skull.
“Do you think her hair will come in soon?” Mimi asked, as she’d asked every day, while she carried the baby up the stairs, her own belly chain dangling, her own hot-pink high heels trip-trapping on the hardwood floors.
“I don’t know,” Becky said.
I don’t care,
she thought.
“Soon you’ll have hair,” Mimi confided to Ava. “And then you’ll be so beautiful! All the boys will want your number!”
“She’s beautiful already,” Becky called. “And smart! And nice! And we don’t care about boys yet! And…oh, fuck it,” she muttered and sank onto the couch. This was awful. It was unbelievable. Unendurable. Unacceptable. But after twenty-six days in residence, Mimi was showing no signs of leaving, and, worse, Andrew was showing no willingness to make her.
“She’s lonely, Becky. She likes being here. And isn’t she helping you out?”
Becky said nothing. She didn’t know how to tell Andrew that leaving Ava with Mimi while she went to work made her profoundly uncomfortable because, even though she couldn’t prove it, she was positive that Mimi was ignoring every single one of her requests, suggestions, and out-and-out orders regarding Ava’s care and feeding.
No people food,
Becky would tell Mimi, and she’d come home at eleven o’clock at night to find her daughter’s tongue dyed purple and the cellophane torn off a pint of blueberries.
No bottles,
she’d say, but she was completely convinced that Mimi was slipping her daughter formula on the sly.
No television,
she’d requested, but just the day before, Mimi had started a breakfast conversation with the words, “When Ava and I were watching Oprah…” And she’d given up on the clothes. Pre-Mimi, Becky had stocked Ava’s dresser with dozens of pretty, affordable, appropriate outfits from Old Navy and Baby Gap. It didn’t matter. Every time she turned around, Mimi had put the baby into something more outlandish. Last night, Ava had been wearing a tiny pink tutu.
To sleep in!
Becky had whispered to Andrew as they lay uncomfortably on the pullout couch.
This has to stop!
“All dressed!” Mimi announced, carrying Ava, now arrayed in a frilly yellow sundress and—
No,
Becky thought, blinking,
no way.
But there it was. A tiny yellow bow, somehow affixed to Ava’s head.
“Mimi, how did you…”
“Cornstarch paste!” her mother-in-law said. “Works wonders! Now nobody will think you’re a little boy,” she cooed to Ava. “Isn’t that right! We’re ready for a nibble,” she said to Becky, without looking at her.
Cornstarch,
Becky thought, shaking her head as she walked down to the kitchen and called possibilities up the stairs.
Cashews?
Too fatty.
Cheese and crackers?
Didn’t Andrew tell you I’ve got a wheat allergy? No?
An apple?
Is it organic? Can you cut it up? And take off the skin? And maybe if you’ve got a little cheese to put with it and maybe a few of those cashews after all and another glass of this wine.
Once Mimi’s plate had been prepared and Ava had gone down for her second nap, Becky started on dinner. She snipped sprigs of rosemary from a pot on the windowsill, tuned the radio to the classical music station, and read a few recipes for clafouti to calm herself down.
At five-thirty, Ava started to cry. “I’ll get her!” Mimi yelled. “Ewww, stinky!” Becky sighed, washed her hands, and went to change her daughter’s dirty diaper, counting the minutes until Andrew would come home. It was so unfair. She’d actually had plans for the night. Somehow, in between working three nights a week, keeping the house, and toting Ava to music class and playgroup and yoga and walks in the park, she’d managed to take ten minutes online, during which she’d ordered three X-rated DVDs with which to celebrate her and Andrew’s triumphant—and so far unscheduled—return to the marital bed.
The telephone rang, and, of course, Mimi picked it up. “Hayahhh. Oh.” She held the phone pinched between her fingers as if it were a dead fish. “For you.”
Becky looked at the caller ID and headed to the baby’s room. “Hi, Mom,” she said.
“She couldn’t even say hello to me?” her mother asked indignantly. “And why is she still staying with you? How long has it been?”
“Don’t even ask,” Becky said.
“How are you doing?” Edith asked. “Are you holding up all right?”
Becky bit back the words she was dying to say.
Come get me! Or let me come home! I’m living with a crazy lady and I can’t take it anymore!
“We’re all right,” she said instead. “We’re hanging in there.”
“Oh, honey. I wish I could be there to help.”
“It’s okay,” Becky said. “I’ll give you a call later. I’ve got to go.”
She set the table with Ava cooing in her bouncy seat as Mimi flipped aimlessly through the channels and asked Becky if she had an emery board (no), a Diet Coke (ditto), or whether she could hold the baby (Mimi, let’s just let her settle down a bit).
At seven o’clock, Becky heard Andrew’s key in the door and had to restrain herself from hurling herself and the baby at him and begging to be taken to a hotel. Preferably one in another country.
“Hah, angel!” said Mimi, elbowing Becky out of the way and swooping in for a kiss.
“Hi, Mom,” Andrew said, giving Mimi a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “Hi, honey,” he said, wrapping his arms around Becky and giving her a kiss of a very different kind. She thought of the three DVDs, stripped of their plastic and tucked between two of her cookbooks, with a pang of regret.
“We’re having lamb,” Mimi announced, as if Andrew couldn’t see that for himself. “We never had lamb when Andrew was growing up,” she told Becky. “I don’t know why. It always seemed like, I don’t know, the thing you got when you couldn’t afford steak.”
Well, that’s just me and my low-class family,
Becky thought. She stretched out the meal for as long as she could, half listening as Mimi ran down what sounded like the entire roster of Andrew’s high school class (“And that nice Mark Askowitz rented a villa in Jamaica for his mother to use. Do you keep in touch with him?”). She spent half an hour bathing Ava, putting her into her pajamas, singing to her until she fell asleep. When Becky tiptoed out of Ava’s room, Mimi was clomping down the hallway in her high heels, not making even the tiniest attempt to be quiet. “Sleep well!” she had the nerve to call over her shoulder as she disappeared into Andrew and Becky’s bedroom.
When the bedroom door was closed, Becky slipped one of the DVDs out of the cookbook and into her pocket. She met Andrew back in the living room, where he was wrestling with the pullout couch. “Thanks for being such a good sport,” he said.
“I brought us a present,” Becky whispered, flicking off the lights and turning on the television set.
When she showed him the disc, his eyes lit up. “Nice!”
“Actually, naughty,” she giggled. They waited, holding hands and kissing, until what seemed like a decent interval. Once Mimi’s raspy exhalations began drifting down the stairs, it was playtime.
“I love you,” Andrew whispered twenty minutes later, when they were both breathing normally.
“As well you should,” said Becky. She closed her eyes and drifted into sleep to the music of her mother-in-law’s snores.
The morning began with Mimi descending into the kitchen in suede pants and a fur-trimmed sweater, a face full of makeup and her usual barrage of requests. Did Becky have fresh orange juice?
No.
Flavored decaf coffee?
No.
Spelt bread?
Mimi, I don’t even know what that is. Sorry.
The instant Becky sat down at the table, Ava started to scream.
“Don’t worry!” Mimi singsonged, grabbing Ava out of Becky’s arms. “Let’s just watch the video I brought over!”
“We don’t watch videos with her!” Andrew called toward his mother’s back. Mimi ignored him.
“Let Grandma just find the remote control.” Becky heard the television set clicking on. Then she heard the noise of the DVD player powering up. Andrew and Becky looked at each other, frozen in disbelief.
Oh, shit,
Andrew mouthed. They turned at the same instant, slamming into each other. Becky slipped and fell. Andrew stepped over her without ceremony and galloped up the stairs. Too late. Even from her current location—curled on the floor, with her face a few inches from the bottom of the refrigerator—she could hear the grunts and moans, and, worse, oh, God, oh, no, the sound of slapping. “Yeah, you like that, baby?” a voice inquired. And there was the sleazy background music,
bomp-chicka-bomp-bomp.
And, inevitably, Mimi’s scream.
“What is this?”
It would have been funny if it had happened to somebody else, Becky decided, picking herself slowly off the floor, as Andrew clicked the DVD player into silence. In fact, it was kind of funny anyhow.
“What in God’s name…”
Oof. She got to her feet, hoping that Ava hadn’t seen anything that would scar her for life, and headed up the stairs as Andrew stammered out an explanation that amounted to
I have no idea how that got in there.
“I raised you better than this!” Mimi was shrieking, standing in front of the television set with her hands planted on her bony hips. Becky pressed her lips together, feeling her entire body shaking with laughter.
“I have never been so disgusted in my entire LIFE!”
Good thing it wasn’t the anal scene,
Becky thought. And that was it. She bent double, tears streaming from her eyes, as Andrew continued to blurt out apologies.
“You should be ashamed!” Mimi yelled, eyes flashing beneath their layers of eyeliner.
Becky wiped her eyes, thinking that no matter what else, this woman was never ever ever going to make her husband feel guilty about sex ever again. She squared her shoulders, flipped her hair over her shoulders, picked Ava up from the couch where she’d been unceremoniously abandoned, and said the one thing that she knew could save her husband’s ass. “Actually, Mimi, it’s mine.”
“You…you…” Mimi’s thinning black hair stood in a frizzy corona around her head. Even the fur on her sweater seemed to quiver.
“Mine,” Becky repeated. She popped the disc out of the machine and stuck it in her back pocket. “Jessa Blake’s a particular favorite of mine. I really enjoyed her work in
Up and Cummers Four.
”
“I…you…oh!” Mimi exclaimed. She shot Becky a poisonous look, stormed up the stairs, and slammed the door of their bedroom. Becky looked at Andrew, who looked back at her, a smile curling the corners of his mouth.
“Up and Cummers Four?”
“I’ll rent it someday. Don’t worry. You don’t need to have seen
Up and Cummers One, Two,
or
Three
to appreciate it.”
He tucked his hand under the back of her head, tilting her face toward his. “You’re really something, you know that?”
“In a good way or a not-good way?”
“In an amazing way,” he said and kissed her, before picking up his briefcase and heading out the door. Becky took Ava for a very long walk, and they spent another two hours loitering in a coffee shop, ignoring the evil looks of the counter staff. At four o’clock, the house was quiet, and the bedroom door was still closed.
Mimi must be sulking,
Becky thought.
Or recovering from the shock.
She’d just put Ava on the changing table when the telephone rang.
“Hello?”
It was Ayinde. And she was crying. “Becky?”
“What?” Becky asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Something happened,” she said. “Can you come over?”
Becky felt her heart stop. “Is it Julian? Is Julian okay?’
“Julian’s fine,” said Ayinde, “but please, can you just come?” And then she started to cry again.
“I’ll be right there,” Becky said, thinking fast—the diaper bag was packed with wipes, a fresh outfit, and the half dozen diapers that Ava could go through in a single afternoon.
“Don’t listen to the radio,” Ayinde said. “When you’re driving. Please. Please, promise me you won’t.” Becky promised. She changed Ava’s diaper and picked up her car seat. She checked her purse for her wallet and her keys and headed out the door. It wasn’t until she was halfway to Gladwyne that she realized she hadn’t even told her mother-in-law good-bye.