Chapter 20
Dawn.
Pray.
Morning.
Walk downstairs to find Maria’s daily cappuccino waiting in the empty kitchen.
Pick up mug right as baby starts to wail.
Swallow the cappuccino whole in three scalding gulps and return upstairs.
Change baby’s diaper. Breastfeed. Breastfeed.
Breastfeed. Wonder why the baby drinks milk so slowly.
Chastise self for thinking ill of His creation.
Walk past still-snoring husband with baby; set baby down on the bathroom floor, then reach for toothbrush.
Brush teeth while the baby runs her fingers around an outlet.
Chastise the baby. Pick baby up and walk downstairs, waving to in-laws in the kitchen.
Strap baby into stroller. Walk down the long driveway.
Wave hello to the vineyard workers, already sweating and scattered throughout the fields.
Hello, hello, hello! Oopsies—Hola, hola, hola!
Pause the stroller occasionally so baby can say hola too.
Thank the Lord for a beautiful day. Ask the Lord if He could please wake up snoring husband by the time the walk is over.
Pray.
Afternoon.
Spend nap time scrolling through job posting sites and highlighting potential listings for tomorrow’s five required applications.
Keep face blank when husband ambles past. Make comment of support when he mentions going on a jog, or applying to some jobs, or looking at the jobs you’ve sent over, even though you know he will do none of these things.
Pray.
Evening.
Wake baby from nap. Change diaper. Breastfeed.
Breastfeed. Breastfeed. Close eyes and count to ten over the sound of baby’s sudden, inexplicable wails.
Swallow very strong instinct to slap the baby.
Ask the baby in a cooing murmur what she wants.
What do you want? Rock baby. Breastfeed baby.
Consider shaking baby. Resist urge to shake baby.
Strap baby to chest. Help mother-in-law with dinner.
Steak or chicken or pork chops. Biscuits or sliced sourdough loaf or cornbread.
Asparagus or broccolini. Hold hands. Pray.
Spoon peach mush into baby’s mouth while father-in-law considers aloud, for the millionth time, a presidential run.
Agree with mother-in-law when she says her line about him being the right man for the moment.
Agree with father-in-law when he says his line about the need to return to traditional family values.
Agree with husband when he says his line about the chicken being cooked perfectly.
Give all the credit to your mother-in-law, even though she is riding high on a pharmaceutical steed and almost loaded the chicken into the oven when it was fully frozen.
Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile.
Pray.
The days passed, but just barely. Like a deck of trick cards: so little variation.
One night, I was standing in the kitchen, swaying back and forth to keep Clementine asleep in the carrier, watching Amelia drown some stalks of broccolini in olive oil, when she set down the bottle and said, “You look tired.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was tired, of course I was tired, but Amelia and I did not share vulnerabilities with each other.
I wasn’t even aware she had intimacies to provide.
She was like a porcelain doll, that woman.
If there were two kinds of Christian housewives, then my mother was the first kind—the kind who spends her whole life pursuing a work ethic so breathtakingly valiant in its refusal to account for basic necessities like sleep that mere secular mortals could only shake their heads and mutter some needlepoint idiom about these women finding hidden hours of the day—and Amelia was the second kind, the kind who floated through the dreary tapestry of domesticity via a steady cocktail of Chardonnay, painkillers, and practiced ambivalence.
This, too, was hard work, but of a different sort.
Nothing rattled Amelia. Not her useless son, nor her power-hungry husband.
I’d been living with her for the better part of a year, and I hadn’t seen so much as a shudder of pain or pleasure cross her painted smile—which is why it was so unnerving, to bear witness to her first genuine expression of concern, and to realize that the subject of concern was me.
“Really, honey: you look a bit gray. Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine.” I tried to smile and found that I couldn’t. The bridge of my lips was frozen in place.
“What’s wrong? Isn’t Clementine sleeping through the night?” Amelia clucked disapprovingly. “If she’s not, honey, she should be. She’s not a newborn anymore.”
I paused, looked down at Clementine’s large, fuzzy head.
Funny, I hadn’t even taken a moment to think about it, but it was true: she wasn’t a newborn anymore.
She was seven months old now. Crawling and making noises and, yes, sleeping through the night.
Things should have gotten easier by now, I thought with surprise.
I should be thinking about having another baby soon.
“You know,” Amelia said, “sometimes when I’m feeling really tired, I throw on the brightest shade of lipstick I’ve got.” Her lipstick today was an almost-neon floral red. Now that I was really looking at her face, she did look exhausted. “Do you want me to watch Clementine while you take a shower?”
“I’m okay.” Yesterday morning, I thought vaguely. I showered then. Or maybe the day before that.
“Honey, I insist.” She beckoned again, her smiling growing wider. “In fact, I won’t take no for an answer.”
I reluctantly left Clementine in the kitchen with Amelia and went upstairs to our bathroom, where I found a little collection of gifts waiting for me on the sink countertop: a blow-dryer, a curling iron, and four tubes of lipstick, plus a sticky note with a scrawled cursive message pressed to the mirror at eye level: Take your time, Mama!
What an elegant little ambush. Amelia might as well have scrawled the true meaning in all-caps lipstick across the mirror: Pull yourself together, you selfish little freak :)
Then I noticed the little white pill placed next to the lipstick tubes.
I felt a sudden thrashing desperation to hear my mother’s voice. I pulled out my cell phone and called home. She answered on the second ring. “How’s my Nattie girl?”
“Mama,” I said, then paused. What was I thinking?
I couldn’t tell her what happened. She would be horrified to learn that her daughter let it get this bad in front of such a well-standing family.
The very thought of her daughter standing in the kitchen of a senator’s house in sweatpants with greasy hair would give her a heart attack. “Can I ask you a question?”
There was the sound of water sloshing. I could see her perfectly: standing in our kitchen, ear pressed to her shoulder to keep the phone in place while she scrubbed the dishes. “Ask me anything, sweetheart.”
I sat down on the closed toilet, buried my head in my free hand. “How were you always so good at everything?”
She laughed. “Honey, I don’t think anyone ever accused me of being good at everything before.”
“I just mean the little things. The house was always clean. You always got dressed and put makeup on. We always had outfits planned for us. How did you do all that, on top of your job and the knitting?”
“Well.” The water sloshed in the silence. “You know, I don’t know if I ever really thought about this, Nattie, but do you know what trick I used to do, once your father had passed on, God rest his soul?”
It still amazed me, how easily she referenced his passing. She really had convinced herself he was dead.
“Whenever I was reaching my wits’ end, I would pause for a moment and—do you know what I would do?” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial register. “I would imagine I was being watched.”
I opened my eyes and frowned at the tiles on the bathroom floor. “Watched?”
“It’s lonely, you know. Housework. But it felt a bit less lonely when I pretended I had a little audience sitting on the couch with me. Watching me vacuum or take out the trash. Cheering me on!”
I didn’t say anything. I felt suddenly nauseous.
So that was the secret: all those years I’d spent watching my mother and the other women in our community, marveling at how effortlessly they performed their roles as mother, homemaker, wife; all the moments I’d thought of them at college, summoning their easy joy and holding it in my hand like a lucky rabbit’s foot while the girls in the dorm complained about everything—it was a lie, wasn’t it?
If not an outright lie, then certainly not the full truth, either.
They weren’t actually happy. They were just pretending that they were.
“And the Lord is fine with this? With you needing to … pretend?”
My mother didn’t skip a beat. She’d locked into her argument and was on a roll now.
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it pretending. It’s more like a form of remembering, don’t you think?
After all, who do you think encouraged me to come up with that little idea to begin with?
Who is our Lord and Savior, if not the original audience member for our lives? ”
“Huh,” I said. I couldn’t argue with that.
I said goodbye to my mother, hung up the phone, and stared at myself in the mirror.
Tried to imagine a small group of women standing in the corner of the bathroom, watching me, holding little score sheets, stern-faced and mascaraed, like an Olympic judging panel.
I hesitated, then picked up the pill and dropped it into the toilet.
There it was, undeniably: the sudden swell of applause.
Middle of the night.
Wake up. Shower. Wash and condition hair.
Exfoliate. Shave. Blow-dry hair. Curl hair.
Layer creams and pigments onto skin. Foundation, blush, eyelash curler, mascara, brow liner.
As your mother-in-law would say: the bare minimum.
While the sun rises outside, stare at reflection in the bathroom mirror, inspecting for flaws.
Practice saying, It’s nothing. Practice saying, I just like starting my day with a little bit of me time.
Swallow the rising misery in throat. Swallow the fury.
Swallow the anxiety. Swallow the desire to light the house on fire and walk out the front door while husband, baby, and in-laws burn to death.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Kill yourself.
No—conjure the audience. Conjure Jesus. Conjure mother.
Conjure Reena. Yes, that’s the ticket. Reena back east, pulling an all-nighter in a corner cubicle in the basement library of school, slouched before a beam of artificial light.
Eating some tasteless protein bar, so filled with chemicals it could survive a nuclear holocaust. Watch her as she pauses.
Gets the sense, prickling on the back of her neck, that she’s being watched.
She looks up and scans the room. Her gaze lands on you.
Oh—the baby’s crying.
Go get your baby.
Reena disappeared from the bathroom, leaving me alone with my reflection, which grinned sharply back at me.
The days passed more quickly after that.
And then one afternoon, Amelia pulled me aside in the hallway to compliment my “fresh new look.” I was like a brand-new woman, she said, her eyes wide with approval.
She stepped closer to me, close enough for me to smell the Chardonnay on her breath as she said, “Work like a charm, don’t they? ”
“What do?”
“Oh, you know.” She winked, or tried to wink; her facial expressions seemed to suffer from an extended stutter step of removal from her nerve signals.
The result was that one eyelid closed very slowly and reopened, giving the effect of a malfunctioning animatronic doll.
She leaned in and whispered, “Do you know what they called them in my day?”
I shrugged helplessly.
“Mother’s little helper.”
The awareness dawned uncomfortably on me. It had been weeks since she gave me that one pill. Did she honestly think, through some deranged thread of Pinot Grigio–soaked dream logic, that a single dose had kept me going for weeks?
“I’ll get you a prescription,” she slurred. “I have a doctor friend. A friend who’s a doctor.”
“Oh,” I said quickly, “I don’t want to put you out—”
“Oh, honey. I get them in bulk. And anyways—what do you think family is for?”
Then she stepped forward and gave me a strange, drapey hug. Standing there with her arms wrapped around me, I felt like I was in the embrace of a great stiff-winged bird, feathers fluttering with wind—no, not feathers, not wind, but then what was that shuddering movement?
I stiffened, and the arms wrapped tighter. She was sobbing, I realized. Sobbing hard into my neck. Mumbling something that sounded like—
Help.
“Amelia,” I said with shock. “Oh, there, there …”
Just as quickly she stepped back, and I swallowed a gasp. Her eyes were bloodshot and raccoon-rimmed with mascara, and she was smiling fiercely, even though she had started to hiccup a bit from the force of her sobs. “Oh, don’t pay attention to me.” Hiccup. “I’m just happy for you, that’s all!”
“Amelia—”
“Call me Mama,” she hissed, smiling wider. She gave my shoulder one last rub, emitting a gleeful little sob, and then said, “I’m going to freshen up before dinner.” Then she loped meanderingly down the hallway and turned in to the master bedroom, the door shutting behind her with a click.