The Most Fun We Ever Had (29 page)

The food arrived, interrupting them again, but by then her stomach had turned, thinking of contractions and kickballs and her own irrelevance, how easily her mother had forgotten her. She wasn’t large, but she was the proportionately biggest person in her family, bested by her mother now only because of her pregnancy. There was the most damning story about how Wendy weighed nearly 10 pounds when she was born, that her birth had nearly done her mother in, her mother who weighed, on a bad day, maybe 115. Wendy’s origin story: the tale of a giant mutant baby hell-bent on wrecking her tiny elfin mother from the inside out. She watched Liza, stick-thin and birdlike, surreptitiously smash three pats of butter onto a piece of bread before shoving it into her mouth. She watched Violet, prissy like Summer Frank, eating the salad she’d ordered in imitation of their mother, undoubtedly in an attempt to seem reasonable and adult. Wendy had ordered penne alla vodka in an effort to appear mature, and she pushed the creamy orange mess around her plate again and again. She thought of her parents naked, her father pumping over her mother; she thought of her mother straining to give birth; she thought of the salad her mother was eating traveling through secret, bloodied channels to feed the new baby. She felt sick. Her father, so tall and thin, had finished his cavatelli quickly and she moved to push some of her food on his plate.

“Eyes bigger than your stomach, Wend?” he asked, joking, accepting the ration.

She forced herself to laugh, felt her mother’s eyes on her, ignored them. It was the first meal she successfully avoided eating.

—

T
he Mother’s Day that fell just a week before Grace was born: she awakened to the feel of David’s mouth on her shoulder, kissing a line from the nape of her neck, and she was so disoriented by the notion of being roused by anything romantic that it took her a minute to register him. She shifted and he moved his kisses down into her clavicles and she moaned a little before remembering the unforgettable fact of her girth, remembering that the last time she and David had had sex there had been snow on the ground outside.

“Honey, what are you doing?” She couldn’t roll over without considerable assistance so she flopped artlessly on her back. He was propped up on his elbow, his hair in one of its more comical states of disarray, and she couldn’t help but smile at him.

“What do you think I’m doing?” he asked, laughing, and it occurred to her that she’d forgotten what it felt like to have her husband desire her, and she felt her eyes filling hotly, felt the jab of the baby against her ribs, felt the sheets beneath her, damp with a mammalian but decidedly unconnubial sweat.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, pressing her face into her pillow.

He moved closer to her, a tentative hand on her side. “What is it?”

“
Look
at me,” she said into the pillow, her words coming out like marshmallows.

“I am,” David said, running his hand up and down. “I am looking at you.”

“Well, stop.” She looked up and they both laughed. “What’s with us? When did this become so foreign to me? Am I— Something’s
off,
David, don’t you feel like something’s—” Beneath his hand on her side, the baby kicked hard, and he met her eyes, smiling.

“Things are a little different these days,” he said. “I know we can’t—” He paused, blushing. The idea that they
couldn’t
was new, specific to this pregnancy; she was convinced that late-term carnal indulgence was what had put her into labor with all three of the girls. “I was reading about— I thought that maybe I could—
service
you.”

“Service me?” She was horrified. The wave of emotion had passed, its only evidence a salty wetness on her cheeks, cooling in the breeze from their window. “Like a
car
?”

“No, not like a
car,
” David said. “Open your legs.” This, whatever it was, sounded suspiciously like a pelvic exam, and she watched him, thighs clamped together. He leaned in and kissed her and then scooted his way down the mattress by her feet and put a hand on her knee, pulling gently. “Come on. Let me do something for you.”

“David, what are you—”

“Shh.”

She shifted somewhat doubtfully and he reached to slide off her underpants. She considered their beige unsexiness, the urine that had probably leaked into their crotch every time she’d sneezed or moved too suddenly since putting them on.

“Do you want an extra pillow?” he asked, and she shook her head, too curious to interrupt him. “Okay,” he said. “Just try to relax.” He reached for her knees again, parting them tenderly. He kissed the inside of each of her thighs and her breath caught in her throat.

“I know you love me,” she said. “I know we’ll have sex again—maybe when the baby’s in college. You don’t need to do this to prove something. You don’t want to put your
face
—”

She stopped speaking because apparently he did; she suddenly felt his tongue, its rough, catlike warmth between her legs, exploring, venturing shallowly inside her.

“Oh,” she said, more of a gasp than a word. She thought, shamefully, of Dean McGillis, in the sand on Oak Street Beach, their bodies shielded by the boulders. Her life before David. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks. She sank back onto her elbows. “Honey.”

The sensation abated and his face appeared, rising like a moon over her belly. “Everything okay?”

She felt herself flush and she nodded. “Yes.” Resting weakly against her pillow, she added, “Thank you.”

He grinned. “You don’t have to thank me, kid.”

“I might,” she said dizzily. How was it possible they’d never done this before? She did the equivalent for him on occasion—much less frequently since they’d had the children—but she always felt a low-level gag reflex as she did, persevered only because she could see how much he enjoyed it. But this: what
was
this? She pushed the thought from her head with surprising ease as she felt a quickening low inside of her, David’s tongue—that chaste, gentle tongue—working its way around the sacred space that she hadn’t shared with him in months. Or that he hadn’t wanted her to share. She stroked his neck.

When she came, it was different than other times, at once ethereal and violent, accompanied by the movement of the baby in a way that maybe should have shamed her but she was too taken. She pressed her face again into the pillow, this time to muffle her own sounds.

“How was that?” David asked, continuing to stroke her with his hand. She inhaled raggedly and nodded. His face was slick with her and it embarrassed her for just a fraction of a second because the look in his eyes was unmistakable, his love for his hulking, unsexy, animal wife and the fluid from her body that he now wore unabashedly on his own skin.

“Come here,” she said, and he crawled up next to her and she kissed him, wiped the wetness from his mouth. “You’re really something, you know that?”

He tucked her hair behind her ear. “Better than the alternative.”

“There’s a decent chance I’ll be less encumbered by Father’s Day.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

“I love you madly; you know that too?”

He kissed her in another line, this time down her throat, over her breasts, her belly, and then back down between her legs. “There she is,” he hummed, like he was soothing a baby. “There’s my girl.” He was back to work and she was letting him, her hands in his hair. This man, with his surprising tenderness, his care for her. There he was.

He was on his stomach between her tented knees, trying again, when they heard the girls in the hallway, a chorus of giggly whispering. She stiffened, snapping her legs shut as David leapt away. When the door opened she was beet-red and covering herself with a much-too-warm blanket and he was standing ten feet from the bed in an unconvincing display of nonchalance.

“Is it a good time?” Violet asked, as Liza was shouting, “Happy
Mother
’s Day.” Her children had not quite mastered the clichéd tray of charmingly shambolic pancakes, but Violet held a plate of toast while Wendy and Liza clutched, respectively, a box of Crispix and a bouquet of tulips pulled from the front yard.

“Look at all this,” she said, glancing at David, trying not to laugh. “Come here, loves.”

“I’ll get some coffee,” he said, and he patted her knee under the blankets.

“Come on up,” she said, wondering where he’d thrown her underwear, hoping to God it wasn’t anywhere visible. Liza mounted their bed first, crawling up and snuggling against her. Violet followed more shyly, coming to kiss her on the cheek. “How sweet are my girls,” she said, scooting over to make room for Violet. Now only Wendy remained in the doorway, pulling out a handful of dry cereal and letting it rain, one piece at a time, back into the box. “Wednesday, humor me today. Let me have all three of you in the same bed.” Wendy fought a smile. “Come on. Come placate your big crazy mother.” Wendy advanced into the room and curled herself demurely at the foot of the bed. “Did your dad help you with this?”

Violet shook her head. “No, it was our idea.”

Liza draped herself over Marilyn’s belly, dropping the tulips and their accompanying dirt into David’s spot on the bed. “Oh my
gosh,
” she squealed. “He kicked me.”

And suddenly she had three pairs of hands on her stomach, even reluctant Wendy’s, prodding, reacting to the movement from within, laughing, murmuring to one another. She allowed herself to rest back against her pillows again, contented in an entirely different way. Your family could do that to you sometimes, catch you off-guard with their charm and their normalcy. Those rare moments—like this one—were the reason that she was pregnant again. That she and David would soon be celebrating their seventeenth wedding anniversary. That these three girls, wearying as they often were, were currently making her happier than she’d possibly ever been. This was the point of having a family, these fleeting moments of absolute pleasure. Stockholm syndrome. They kept her coming back for more.

She shifted beneath the weight of the baby and the six small hands. She reached to stroke Wendy’s hair and her heart swelled when Wendy let her. This was the point.

“God,” David said when he returned. “I leave for ninety seconds and look what happens.”

—

H
e couldn’t recall ever seeing so much blood. Things with Marilyn went very wrong very quickly and he was taken to the far corner of the room with the baby; still nameless, she received a rough bath and a perfect 10 on her Apgar all while he considered the knowledge he had accrued in med school of placenta accreta, which he had heard Gillian say, not to him but to someone else in the room. Gillian was suddenly shouting out orders that he could not bring himself to process. The baby was swaddled and placed in his arms and he stood dumbly, staring at a ravaged, bloodied version of his wife, until Gillian noticed him and stopped, red hands poised above the glossy gushing of Marilyn’s uterus, and said, “She’ll be fine, Dad. Go introduce yourself to your daughter.”

Another girl,
he thought dimly, but he had no one to tell. One of the nurses—Kathleen, who was both no-nonsense and mystically intuitive—laid a hand on his back and led him out.

“Come on, Dr. Sorenson.”

Marilyn had been admitted at 3:00 a.m. and he was wearing jeans and a Cubs T-shirt, unshaven and wide-eyed. He knew some of the nurses who had tended to Marilyn over the twelve-odd hours and they looked at him knowingly, fondly, not as Dr. Sorenson but as a soon-to-be new dad; as a man who, when prompted, made up a story to entertain his suffering wife, something Arthurian that he remembered from an undergrad lit class; as a man who took it stoically when his wife shot down the story, hissing,
No knights. Nothing medieval. Don’t talk to me about the fucking patriarchy right now, and don’t ever touch me again.
He’d suddenly felt ridiculous, schooled, completely foolish about the fact that these nurses—far more capable than he, conversant in the baffling language of women—had ever deigned to call him “doctor.”

“David,” he corrected her hoarsely, and Kathleen patted at his shoulder.

“Chin up, David. She’s in good hands. Look who you’ve got there.”

It was then that he finally looked down at the baby.

“Do you have a name picked out?” Kathleen asked, leading him back to Marilyn’s hospital room, from which she had been whisked at such speed that he had barely been able to hang on to her hand—a room where he didn’t want to go; a room whose walls held the memories of his wife vocally and animally in agony. Kathleen led him gently to the chair next to the bed, where he had spent the better part of the last twelve hours. The bed was gone, wheeled away with his wife still attached.

“Christopher,” he said wryly, feeling the ironic weight of the name.

Kathleen smiled, handed him a cup of water. “Sounds like you’ve had a few shockers today, hmm?” He looked up at her again and felt the muscles of his face lighten a bit; he wasn’t sure if he was about to smile or cry. “You didn’t have a girl’s name picked out?”

“Grace,” he said, studying his new daughter’s face, rumpled and reddened and damp. He touched a wisp of hair on her forehead—dark like Violet’s, dark like his own—and she flinched, but she still wasn’t crying, had quieted almost immediately after they cut the cord.

Let’s give it a go
. This was what he got for being impulsive: his wife slit open and bleeding without getting to see their beautiful new baby; facing single fatherhood of four daughters. The last word he’d heard Marilyn utter—on all fours, writhing—was
motherfucker
. He felt himself starting to cry and he felt Kathleen’s warm hand again on his shoulder.

“It’s a beautiful name,” she said, and she turned to leave him alone. “I’m praying for Marilyn,” she added quickly before she slipped from the room. And he looked down at the baby and she looked back up at him, met his eyes, it seemed, though he knew she wasn’t yet capable. He started praying then too—first halfheartedly to the ominous Catholic God of his childhood and then to something larger.
Just please don’t let her die,
he thought.
Please, anyone, whoever, I don’t mean anything without her; I can’t do this without her.