Chapter Eighteen
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Daisy agreed to watch Holden, a life-changing development.
Because if there is one thing worse than a finger-fucking session with Carleigh, it is having to pay for childcare during a finger-fucking session with Carleigh.
If I am going to be away from my baby for a full sixty minutes, why can’t it be for a facial?
I walk past the other patients, past the torn meniscus and the sciaticas and the hip replacements, to a back room.
The Red Room. I take off my clothes from the waist down and put on a medical gown.
I climb on the exam table and I wait. If I use these few minutes correctly, if I stare at the popcorn ceiling, fixate on the outline of brown around an air vent that looks like a brontosaurus that I want to show to Holden, in just the right way, then I can go to another place, another planet.
If I do it just right, I do not even notice when Carleigh comes in.
(“Hiiiii. How’s the baby?!”) I do not notice that she has put on rubber gloves.
(“Sleeping any better??”) Or that she is dipping them into an industrial-size tub of K-Y Jelly. (“Let’s see what’s going on in there!”)
The hurt cuts through me like gardening shears. I grip the side of the table.
Carleigh asks me each week how many times I urinate at night.
Five. It is always at least five, in addition to two or three night feedings.
If I am lucky, the pees coincide with the feedings, but they usually don’t.
Roman tells me not to drink before bed, as if I am downing a sweet tea at nine p.m. Yes, beverages, that’s my problem, not postpartum urinary incontinence.
I am supposed to keep a diary of piss, but I don’t.
I feel like a fish being filleted on a slab, but still I find a way to ask Carleigh the same question I always ask, my voice small and throaty.
“How’s the wedding planning?” From there, I am being operated by some kind of vagina ventriloquist. The question will kick off thirty minutes of small talk about flower arrangements (“Baby’s breath looks so cheap…
”) and band versus deejay (“Both, obviously”).
And “I told Troy, if there’s no seafood tower, what’s the point of even getting married?
” My mouth pulled open; words somehow come out.
“I couldn’t agree more.” And “That’s what event planners are for. ”
If we are talking about venues and vows and food trucks, then we don’t have to talk about how I’ve failed, again.
Truth is, as sweet and good-intentioned as she is, Carleigh is constantly disappointed in me.
She tries to couch her irritation in an anecdote about trying on dresses at Mark Ingram, but I know what she’s thinking.
“Hmm. It’s not feeling any tighter,” Carleigh says, really in there now.
My insides are a messy bin of Magna-Tiles that Carleigh is trying to clean up. “Squeeze?”
“I am squeezing.” That’s not the ventriloquist. That is me, about to cry because I am fucking squeezing. At least, I think I am squeezing? She takes her fingers out. I am no longer hiding in the ceiling. I am there on the table, in real time.
“Are you doing your Kegels?” Carleigh asks.
“Every night,” I say. What is a Kegel? I am afraid to admit to Carleigh that, after weeks of physical therapy, I still don’t really know.
“Remember, you pretend you’re holding a blueberry in there and then breathe out…and…let it go,” Carleigh says. Every week she gives me the blueberry analogy. She’s given me the blueberry analogy so many times that I am tempted to put a blueberry up there just to see what she is talking about.
She massages my pelvis and then moves to an electric wand.
I try to go back to my safe space in the popcorn ceiling.
The ceiling could be the white sands at Waikiki Beach.
The ceiling could be that endless salt lake in Bolivia that I saw in National Geographic.
The ceiling could be the first page of my poetry book.
I am floating outside of myself. I am lifted off the exam table and the crumply white paper roll.
I am lifted out of New York. Out of womanhood.
I don’t even remember jumping off the table, wiping between my legs, putting my clothes back on.
I just appear in a flash, like some quantum space-time continuum, at the front desk, where Diane asks how everything was today.
“Fantastic,” I say.
Diane asks me for my insurance card. I give it to her, accidentally knocking over a stack of pamphlets titled “Happy Mom, Thriving Kid!” I kneel down to pick them up. Diane xeroxes the card and as she hands it back to me, she says, “We no longer accept your insurance.”
“What?”
“You need to get another referral to put this through your PPO,” Diane says. HMO, PPO, EPO, POS, ACA, CObrA. I am drowning in an alphabet soup of insurance.
“I gave birth in-network.”
“Looks like you have to recover out-of-network,” Diane says, flagging the next patient.
—
After my appointment, I walk to Pier 25, a waterfront playground on the West Side Highway with miniature golf, a dog park, and panoramic views of the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty.
It’s a favorite haunt of the Tribeca moms. I find Daisy in the sandbox with Holden.
She’s with a couple nannies and a babysitter I vaguely recognize from the Stuy Town playroom.
Holden’s sitting up with no support now.
Daisy backs a dump truck into a puddle of water, beeping sounds and everything.
I take off my shoes and get into the sand with them.
“Have you ever had fruit in your vagina?” I ask.
Before she can answer, I grab Holden and snuggle him tight in my arms. Another one of his signature whiffs, a look like he’s Hegel contemplating the universe. “He’s dirty.”
“I can change him,” Daisy says, eager to prove her nanny bona fides.
But I am already digging for a diaper in my Itzy Ritzy Boss Backpack.
I notice that Daisy is carrying the Row’s slouchy bag.
I saw this purse on a Hadid sister on TikTok.
It cost four thousand dollars, the it bag of the fall (and it’s not even Labor Day).
I have no idea why I can’t put diapers in the leather tote that I bought at a market in Florence.
Or the Chloe bag that Penelope gave me to donate but that I secretly kept.
Why a separate bag for the diapers? But that is what they tell you, you need an ugly-ass backpack with a stupid name that you would never use in your normal life… for the Pampers.
“I got it,” I say. We walk to the public bathroom. Daisy holds the door. She leans on the edge of the sink, filling me in on everything I missed, as I wipe Holden. I see her gag a little. “C’mon, this is nothing. You should’ve seen it when I gave him pears.”
“No. It’s the baby wipes. Something about that smell…” She changes the topic. “He drank about a gallon of your boob juice, and some two-year-old tried to dump sand on his head, but I gave her nanny a look like I would cut a bitch. What is wrong with toddlers?”
“They’re little terrorists,” I say.
Without hesitating, Daisy takes the dirty diaper and helps me change Holden into a bathing suit.
She is my extra set of hands. We lather him in SPF 50 and spend the rest of the afternoon waving him under the cool mist of the splash pad.
He has a sun hat with whales on it and the biggest smile.
Daisy is getting wet, too, rocking him in her arms. He shrieks with glee, and we all collapse, wet and happy and sun-kissed, on a poplin blanket on grass at the edge of the Hudson.
We hear a pushcart selling paletas. Daisy gets up to go buy us each one.
A few minutes later, Daisy is dabbing Holden’s first taste of an ice pop onto his tongue.
“There you go. Yummy. Très bien. Cherry.” He licks and licks, lapping it up, the first thing he loves more than my stubborn breast milk.
I put him down on his belly and he wiggles, arms stretched overhead, soaking up the sun.
We lie on our backs on either side of him, arms crossed behind our heads, lips stained red.
“I’d honestly take this over St. Tropez,” Daisy says. A sanitation truck passes us, the snarl and stink of New York in late August. After that, a siren.
“Why do I doubt that?”
Holden is doing the full-body giggle again, which makes us giggle. We are all smiles and giggles and cherry syrup. I look at Holden. We needed the company.