Chapter Twenty-Three #3
I am delighted that Daisy has turned out to be a baby whisperer and that Holden doesn’t smell like a public changing table, but the moment still lands like a paper cut. Not jealousy exactly, just a small, sudden pain.
—
That night, I rocked Holden asleep in the nursery, pressing my lips to the damp curls at his temples.
I tried, again, to give him my breast. He went rigid.
I reached for the pump, the bottle, but his tiny fists flailed, spitting out the nipple, twisting his head like I was wasabi.
That’s when I noticed Daisy in the doorway.
She set down a sleek bottle of top-of-the-line organic baby formula imported from Switzerland.
On her way out, she said, “Give it up, Em. He needs you whole, not perfect.”
With Holden passed out, belly full of Swiss formula, I go upstairs to Daisy’s place. Willa, the almond mom, strolls the living room offering us all the magic mushroom brownies left over from the sparsely attended Somewhere matinee.
“It’s a subtle high, totally suitable for breastfeeding,” Willa explains. “Harper helps me grow the pods in her Pretty Petals Little Gardening Lab.”
Audrey declines with a single word: “Gluten.” Maya, buried behind an infrared mask, is telling Audrey about a tantric breath-work class happening tomorrow. “It’s my literal dream to climax without anybody touching me,” Audrey says. Olivia surprises all of us by popping half the tray of brownies.
Two hours later, we all sit on the shag carpet sharing a charcuterie tray and a bottle of wine while watching a live stream of our babies on the BabySense Smart Monitor.
Olivia is as high as a teenager hitting an apple bong, nibbling cornichons and intensely studying the bloodied red marks all over Maya’s arms and back from cupping therapy.
“Did Satan do that?”
“Try Jasmine in the detox spa,” Maya says.
“I think my baby is Satan,” Audrey says. She picks up one of Sloane’s gender-neutral American Person dolls, studying it. “God, I’d rather rip off my arm and gnaw on my own flesh than play with dolls.”
The confession springs something in all of us, a scab Daisy forced open.
Brit: “I’m so fucking bored.”
Maya: “I’m angry all the time.”
Audrey, who hasn’t slept in days with Sloane’s incessant crying, jokes, “I googled SIDS…out of hope.”
Brit snort-laughs. “I almost peed myself.”
That makes Audrey, tipsy from the vegan-friendly organic rosé, let loose and laugh, her lips bright and chapped pink, tousles of reddish hair falling onto her face.
We all look at our babies fast asleep downstairs. “Sometimes I look at Arlo and I see all the things that I can’t stand about myself,” Maya says.
“I see my mother,” Olivia says, studying her girls in adjacent cribs.
“My old nose,” Audrey adds.
A moment, then: “God I love her more than anything,” Brit says, looking at Quinn wiggle in her princess onesie.
“I’d die for that little monster,” Audrey says, looking at Sloane, a pink puff of restlessness in an egg-shaped crib.
“He’s my whole heart,” Maya says, gazing at Arlo in his Kith onesie.
“I want to eat his thighs,” I say, looking at Holden, the most miraculous bundle I’ve ever beheld.
Then we all get quiet. “How long will it feel like this?” Olivia asks.
“No clue. I’ve never done edibles,” Audrey says.
“No. Not the drugs. How long will it feel like this?” Olivia asks.
“I think this is it now,” Brit says.
“Oh my God,” Audrey gasps.
“Sorry,” Brit says.
“What if we actually died, like, in childbirth?” Olivia says.
We groan, brushing her off. She hushes us.
“Wait. Wait. A lot of women do. And we’re all dead and this place is actually heaven?
And this weird hollow pod-people version of ourselves is actually death and our babies are down on Earth, but they’re really just ourselves but reborn? ”
We all stare at Olivia.
“No more drugs for you,” I say.
Everyone laughs. Tear-wet laughter. A release. Then, movement in the next room. Daisy watching, then slipping out the front door. To the penthouse?
—
The next day, my last before I have to go back to work, I get a yoga mat and walk onto the mezzanine.
I haven’t felt that ripple of doom since before I found Daisy.
I curl up in a ball, just like Carleigh told me to.
But this time, I am not doing it to strengthen my insides; I am doing it because I want to crawl into a tiny ball, so tiny that Kathy in HR forgets about me. So tiny that I don’t exist.
“ ‘You’re maudlin and full of self-pity. You’re magnificent.’ ” I recognize the line from All about Eve before I even see Daisy standing there. “Somebody’s calling you.”
She looks at my phone with a flash of jealousy.
It’s Penelope. The selfie of the two of us, cheek to cheek, the time we went to her family’s house on the Vineyard.
Penelope sent me out to buy oyster crackers and a container of lobster salad.
I took the bicycle with the brown woven basket and came back two hours later with the lobster salad.
Penelope, in a sun hat, leaned in for a selfie.
“What do I do with the lobster?” She looked at me like she’d forgotten about it entirely, and then she said, looking bored, “I guess put it in the outdoor fridge?” We looked like a couple of friends just back from the beach, not like I’d just been sent on a twenty-dollar-an-hour errand for three hundred dollars’ worth of snacks. I hit dismiss.
I let out a dramatic groan. “Uhhhhh. I can’t believe I have to go back to that office. I can’t do it, Dais.”
Daisy sits beside me. She gives me a little back rub. I expect her to give me her energy, her life, her love. Or at least some sympathy. But instead she says, “Buck the fuck up. We all have to work in this world.”
For the first time, I don’t need what Daisy is offering.
I need more time with my baby, my baby who has learned to hold his head up and sit up by himself and will be crawling soon, and when he does, I will not be there.
Maybe one of the qualified multilingual childcare providers will send me videos.
Or maybe I can live stream his milestones on an app.
Daisy can always pop downstairs and tell me about the whole thing.
I turned pretzel croissants into a boy and almost died giving birth, but he will see some other woman’s face, some other woman’s smile, when he grasps a ball and makes his little body scooch across the floor for the first time.
I slump downstairs to the faux Swedish day care.
I tell the Miss Iowa of a receptionist, in her pink scrubs and French-tip nails, that I need to sign Holden out.
She gives me a couple of Polaroids of Holden throughout the day.
Dozing in his starfish-shaped sleep sack; staring at an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box in abject horror; wide-eyed and jubilant in an outdoor swing.
But I do not want photos. I do not want meditation rooms or pressed juice.
I am able to walk again. I’ve skipped three PT sessions and am somehow able to do the pelvic-floor exercises.
I am getting used to being this other person.
Now I want a luxury not even 527 Park can provide.
I want more time.