Dirt went against a mother’s natural instinct. Some hormone must kick in when you give birth, Maddy thought; no longer can you enjoy the sloth and brazen filth of your childless days. You can’t open a bottle of Advil and carelessly leave a few pills scattered on the night table surface, or let a pack of matches fall to the floor unnoticed. Now you have to keep the dirt and dust away from your child, to wipe clean all the windowsills, to vacuum the small, potentially edible thumbtacks and paper clips from their hiding places in the carpeting. When everything finally had the appearance of order, there was always a moment of irrational joy.
Maddy felt this herself whenever she cleaned Duncan’s nursery back in the city. She had gone on maternity leave from the law firm, a job she didn’t like anyway, in order to be able to stay at home with him. Sometimes she cleaned his room, with its duckling nightshade and its calm, yellow walls, just to cheer herself up. It was easy to see why Sara’s mother was cleaning like a dervish, trying to set everything right.
The insanity of the situation, the thing that made no sense, was that although Natalie had lost a child, she was still a mother. Where could she deposit her maternal energy now? Maddy wondered. It was aimless but potent, looking for a place to express itself, like a dog that humps human ankles or the legs of tables. Maddy imagined Sara’s mother becoming a peppy volunteer at an orphanage, standing in the middle of a ward with hand puppets jammed onto her hands, making the puppets speak to each other in high-pitched voices that might possibly amuse these thrown-away children.
But here, in this falling-apart summer house, Natalie needed
to do
something,
and it wasn’t hard for her to figure out what to do: She would clean, clean, clean, restoring the place to a more presentable state. Each day, she could look forward to taking another crack at cleaning Sara’s house, the way people look forward to reading another chapter of an exciting but bad novel they have begun, a book in which secret missile siloes are discovered in rustic outposts, and treachery from the wildcard leader of a tiny Middle Eastern nation shakes the Pentagon.
“I think it’s good that she’s cleaning,” Maddy said to Peter, as they lay in bed and listened to the early-morning sounds of Natalie at work. “She can take her mania, as you call it, and put it to use. People need something to do with themselves when a terrible thing happens to them.”
“I know what
we
need,” he said, and suddenly he put his warm hand on her thigh, as though sex could somehow cure death. But the idea of Sara actually being dead was still foreign and invasive. She couldn’t have sex with him now, and in fact had begun to find it intolerable long before Sara had died.
Sex had become problematic shortly after Maddy had become pregnant; there had been little lightning-bolts of pain in her nipples, so the idea of being touched there had been unpleasant. Then the morning sickness rose up in a big wave (a tsunami, Sara had called it), and the closest Maddy let Peter get was to bring her ice chips in the bathroom as she knelt at the toilet.
Later, during the second trimester, when, according to a pregnancy advice book she’d read, “with morning sickness gone, and a new sense of well-being firmly in place, the sex drive may return, in spades. And remember—you still don’t need to worry about contraception!” Maddy had felt even more troubled by the idea of sex with Peter. While the book assured her that sex was completely safe, she worried that the tip of his long penis would poke against the soft skull of the baby, causing brain damage. She knew this was ridiculous, and she was too embarrassed to tell Peter or to mention it to her chic female obstetrician, Denise. Instead, she
simply put up with sex for a while, letting him blindly thrust inside of her. But she felt no pleasure, simply spirals of worry. She also didn’t want to have an orgasm, because it was known to bring about mini-contractions—harmless though they were, according to the book. But Maddy didn’t want to risk even the remote possibility of going into premature labor, and all for what? So Peter could have fun? She didn’t know what to do, and so, in advance, she discussed the matter with Sara.
They were in a Starbucks at the time, sitting on tall, spindly stools. “I think,” said Sara, stirring her
latte
slowly, dreamily, “you should have sex, but you should fake it.”
“I have never done that in my life,” said Maddy. “That’s from another era—our mothers’ era. Nobody has to fake it anymore.”
Sara shrugged. “All right, then don’t fake it,” she said. “Tell him you just don’t
want
to come, that you don’t feel like it.”
“It will hurt his feelings,” said Maddy.
“You have to take care of yourself, of what you want,” said Sara. “Just do what you have to do.”
And so, with Sara as her invisible guide, Maddy went to bed with her husband that night, and as soon as she touched him she felt the corresponding pulse and blossom under her hand, like a sponge thrust into water. When he was inside her, there was a hot, sharp streak, and she imagined the baby’s head receiving the repeated blows, its tiny eyes closing to withstand the pain. Peter shuddered out his own orgasm. After he had recovered, he moved his hand predictably down under the blanket, the fingers splayed, and tried his usual maneuvers to bring her to orgasm.
Just do what you have to do,
she heard Sara saying, and Maddy closed her own eyes and began to utter some small sounds in her throat, letting them build in an operatic fashion, actually beginning to enjoy the craft of the deceit. She closed her legs and scissored them, nearly crushing Peter’s caught hand, and then after a couple of small pulsations, her feet flexed, her jaw set in the particular way that it usually did when all this was authentic, she
relaxed her entire body. They lay together for a while, Peter stroking her head, the baby safe from uterine contractions, and Maddy thought to herself:
I must call Sara.
Now, Maddy took Peter’s hand off her thigh and uncurled it. “I can’t do this,” she said. She motioned in the vague direction of the Portacrib, where Duncan lay asleep. “The baby,” she added.
“The baby’s in dreamland,” said Peter.
“Right now he is,” Maddy said. “But he could wake up.” She paused. “And actually,” she went on, “I just don’t feel like it. I mean, Sara’s
dead,
Peter. It’s so recent.”
His sex drive was intact, but certainly it had undergone some sort of transformation after witnessing Maddy in labor, when he had seen her howling like a she-wolf on a hilltop. It had been her great mistake to refuse the epidural offered to her by the anesthesiologist, who’d actually seemed disappointed when she turned it down. Then, during pushing, that two-hour period of time during which Maddy began to hallucinate a roll of theater tickets unspooling from her vagina, Peter had seen her cervix open wide, so wide it might destroy him, might swallow him whole, like in some grade-B movie called
Attach of the 10-Centimeter Vagina.
She had shrieked and contorted her face, and although Peter held her hand and whispered to her that she was his beloved, and popped a tape of those singing monks into the cassette player so she could visualize the cool of a church and people in cowls lighting candles, she knew that Peter would always possess an image of her when she appeared before him in their bed: that of a screaming, Munch-like figure with a vagina as vast as a state wildlife preserve. But still, somehow, it did not deter him.
She was vaguely disgusted by his sexual fealty; it seemed excessive to her, even a bit unnatural. In part, this was because she knew she wasn’t beautiful. As a teenager with Sara, Maddy had taken on the role of the less attractive but wryly good-natured sister (a role that, in the movies of her parents’ era, would have been played by Eve Arden), and it occasionally occurred to her, over the
years, that she hated this role. Why didn’t some boy write a love letter to
her
about the way her eyes looked in the moonlight or the way her skin was “as smooth as ‘abalaster’ “? But the roles were firmly established, and there was nothing to do about it except not be Sara’s friend. And because Maddy loved Sara, that wasn’t a possibility.
An ambient competition encircled the two friends even though they never acknowledged it openly. But it wasn’t just competition; it was a slowly revolving, rotisseried rage, at least as far as Maddy was concerned. She was humiliated by her own secret reserve of unkind feeling toward Sara. Whenever they went shopping for clothes they would casually strip together in a dressing room, and Sara would be sure to murmur something like, “God, Maddy, you have such perfect legs. Mine are stumps.” Because neither part of that observation was remotely true, Maddy would be forced to accept the remark in unhappy silence, or else beg to differ, which then forced Sara to murmur her dissent and continue the lie.
Rejected now, Peter turned away from Maddy, stepping into pants, and then he slipped silently from the room. When he was gone, Maddy reached into her bottom dresser drawer and pulled out a small, flat bottle of Mrs. Moyles’s peach schnapps that she had begun drinking after the accident. This was such a
girl’s
drink, as sweet as any children’s medicine, but it still provided a familiar ribbon of heat as it went down the gullet, vaguely reminding her of a lunchbox dessert of canned peaches in heavy syrup. Maddy drank only when Peter wasn’t looking. Now she tossed her head back and swallowed a warm, clear ounce or so, then she capped the bottle and thrust it back under her shirts in the drawer and stood over the Portacrib, staring down at Duncan.
It shamed her to admit it, but her son made her happiest when he slept. That way, she could be certain nothing bad would befall him; he had moved beyond the frightening window of crib death, and now sleep seemed such a lovely harbor for a baby. When he
slept, she could move about the house freely, carrying the monitor receiver with her like a cell phone, glancing at the row of red lights for constant reassurance. It was only when Duncan was awake that she doubted her own skills as a mother, worrying that she would drop him or that he would spike a fever so high it would be unmanageable.
There was a book that Maddy had taken with her to the house this summer and which now convinced her that she was a bad mother. The book was a best-seller written by one Dr. Melanie Blandish, Ed.D., an Australian child development expert. It was called
The Upbeat Baby,
and it had made Maddy feel that her depression over Sara had caused her to be a terrible mother, and that her baby would grow up to be pessimistic and probably even insane. He would develop a classic young-adult onset schizophrenia, in which he would go from being an adorable undergraduate majoring in Semiotics at Brown to a terrified, unshaven beast cowering in his childhood bedroom jabbering in other tongues.
Maddy kept the Melanie Blandish book in her drawer, right beside the peach schnapps, reading surreptitiously when Peter wasn’t around. She was like someone poking at a tender, recent injury, causing herself a kind of low-level pain that in its intensity offered a singular pleasure. “Your baby needs your love all the time,” wrote Dr. Blandish. “You ought to make yourself available to him, like an all-night chemist’s dispensing love. If you seem particularly distracted, believe me,
he will /(now it.”
This passage haunted Maddy; how often had she seemed this way, how often had the baby seen her cry over Sara, and simply stared at her in utter, helpless perplexity? Dr. Blandish didn’t tell you what to do if your best friend had just been killed in a car accident and you were trying to raise a baby; she gave no advice on managing your life, but simply offered premonitions of doom.
Why, Maddy asked herself lately, had she ever decided to have a baby? She wasn’t ready for this, and neither was Peter. Very recently, it seemed, they had been staying up late and having lots
of sex and eating in a variety of cheap restaurants and going to many movies, and once even going to a tiny jewelry store on Avenue A on a Saturday night to have Maddy’s nose pierced. Then, on a whim almost as casual as the nose-piercing decision, they had decided to stop using birth control. She had taken her circular packet of pills one night, put them in an ash tray, and ceremonially burned them, although the plastic had only curled and smoked and stank up the apartment, leaving the pills themselves intact behind their transparent bubble windows.
Sara had been envious at first when Maddy became pregnant so quickly. “You’re so lucky,” she’d said. “You’re like a fertility goddess. Now you get to drink malteds for nine months, and then people give you all those presents, and then you end up with this tiny baby all your own. You get to
continue
yourself, to make a bid for immortality.” Sara’s envy was an important element to Maddy; she’d welcomed it in a secretive, somewhat triumphant way.
But Sara had really only envied the theoretical baby, not the actual, demanding one. When Duncan was born, Sara brought yellow roses to the apartment and a “family size” bar of chocolate, and then she’d hovered for a few hours, folding doll-sized laundry and screening Maddy’s phone calls. Then, when things became too tedious, Sara slipped off to a late showing of an arty, violent Hong Kong action picture at Columbia with some man she’d recently met in a seminar. “Oh, are you sure you don’t mind?” she’d asked before she left, and Maddy had answered no, no, of course I don’t mind, there’s nothing for you to do here anyway, I’m perfectly fine. As Sara watched the movie at midnight while snuggling against the leather-jacketed shoulder of her date, Maddy disappeared into the quicksand of motherhood. Her nose hole became infected, and the doctor scolded her for not having had it pierced under his supervision and for not taking care of it now, and said she had to let it close over. She nursed the baby for hours and sometimes was so weary afterward—her nipples a hotheaded red, her eyes barely open—that she went to bed at eight,
while in the meantime Sara kept sleeping with a number of interesting, difficult men. Sara dated and dated, and eventually she met the powerfully handsome Sloan, who kept her occupied for a while. Meanwhile, Maddy nursed her baby around the clock, feeling isolated and alone in a surreal way, even with Peter beside her. Sometimes she felt like a lost astronaut spinning into infinity. Once, at 3
A.M.,
Maddy ate Sara’s chocolate bar by herself, polishing off the entire, formidable block in one sitting.