Two days after she gave birth to twin girls, Rose began to imagine that Peter wanted to take them away and sell them. She was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, and doctors put her on an antipsychotic.
Back in the hospital, Rose threw a remote control at Peter and a hard plastic cup full of water. A bottle of pills. A plate. A tray and then a book. The book split his right temple open. She was admitted to a mother-and-child unit at the hospital where she’d delivered, and stayed there for two weeks. It was going to be three but Rose drew the line, Peter told me. It was the most cheerful hospital floor I’d ever been on, and its tireless commitment to transcending the dingy was yet another powerful argument for making sure you had a shit ton of money. It was also a powerful argument for getting pregnant and going crazy, if getting pregnant and going crazy meant you’d be quarantined in a very clean room outfitted with room service, the endless and sincere solicitation of your psychic and bodily temperature, and a picture window that allowed you to be sedated by the sight of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and the regular comings and goings of the Roosevelt Island tram.
Rose sat in the hospital bed wearing a bright pink chenille bathrobe that used to belong to her mother over a black Bikini Kill T-shirt—two pieces of clothing I’d seen so many times I’d started to think my mother had owned the same bathrobe and that I’d bought that T-shirt in 1994, too, when in reality the one I’d bought in 1994 said the Spinanes. I knew Rose was wearing that T-shirt for the same reason she’d worn it in 1994: as a big fuck-you. Three books lay face down, splayed open, like a handful of jacks tossed and spilled, next to her, for that was how she binge-read, in a round, diving back into one book when she got tired of the other. Her hair looked as energetic as usual but her face seemed as stripped of light as the trees outside were stripped of leaves.
Do I look as gray as I feel? she said.
You won’t be this gray forever.
How do you know that?
Because I know you.
She thought about that, and said You would make a very good mother.
Rose, I said. So will you. I know you will.
How do you know that?
Because you are such a good friend.
Don’t cry, she said as I wiped some tears away with the heel of my hand.
Where are the girls? I said.
Down the hall, she said, having tea at the Ritz.
Maria and Josephine. Rose had named them after her grandmothers. Rose held Maria and I held Josephine and I stared into her face on a hunt for the places where Rose left off and Peter began, scouring the curves that shaped her nose, the divot at the center of her top lip, the swirls of blond hair that would surely grow into curls.
Let’s meet Maria, I said, and we switched. Maria’s lashes were that much longer than Josephine’s, and she fidgeted a little bit more. Her hair was much darker. Peter’s hair. Their eyes were the eyes of deer who could tell the future, I thought, and said it out loud.
And now you’ve christened them, she said.
Peter decided that once Rose was discharged from the hospital, Ann Marie would stay in the house and he would move into a nearby Holiday Inn Express. Rather, it was Rose who had decided that, because she thought he needed to stay away for a while in order for her to be absolutely sure she could stop wanting to throw things at him. He asked if I could come over after school a few nights during the week and however much I could give them of my weekend to help, and to have someone in the house who wasn’t Ann Marie. I said I would stay in the house and would go to and from work from there, if everyone thought that was a good idea, and he looked very relieved.
Once home, Rose slept as if she were hiding. She slept and she cried, and her daughters cried, too. It was more painful to listen to Rose’s tears than the crying of her daughters, for her daughters were still strangers to me.
I did the laundry, folded the laundry, made dinner, cleaned up after dinner, fed the girls and changed their diapers—the girls, that’s what Rose’s mother called them. That’s what she called us, too.
Girls, she’d say, dinner’s ready. Girls, have you seen my phone? Girls, someone’s at the door.
When I washed the dishes or changed diapers, Rose would often stand next to me and rest her chin or her head on my shoulder. One night: Rose’s chin on my right shoulder, her right hand on Maria’s head. All I can see is the sadness she will feel, she said.
On another: I came downstairs to find Rose standing in the kitchen smashing the pills she was supposed to be taking with the bottom of a drinking glass. She stopped when she realized there was someone else in the kitchen and it was me.
I don’t believe in them either, I said, but you should probably take those.
I will if you will, she said.
I walked over to the counter, picked one up, and popped it in my mouth. She popped one in hers, and I poured us two glasses of water. As we drank and Rose swallowed I spit mine out in the glass and rinsed it down the sink quickly. She did not notice.
Rose was convinced the drugs would leave traces in her breast milk, so she and I sat in her bed or on the couch, each holding a baby, each holding a bottle filled with formula, watching television, or pretending to.
She’d started to make jokes again. One afternoon she said Let’s just watch The Bachelor, and I said Our mothers breastfed us while watching Watergate hearings, we can’t tell these kids we watched The Bachelor, and she said Please I’m an invalid and then, after ten minutes: I think my college degree was just eradicated.
Maria and Josephine. I would put my nose to their cheeks and whisper Hello, hello, hello, tiny bird. I sang to them, sang them many Beatles songs. Sang “Rocket Man” and “Daniel,” which my aunts had sung to me, and “Kid” and “Alison” and “Fox in the Snow” and “Waterloo Sunset” and “Little Green.” I sang to them because I wanted to say I love you but did not think it was my place yet.
Once I gave Maria my breast. At the kitchen table. Just to see. Lifted up my sweater and laid a cloth like a tent over my shoulder to shade her head crowned with its bird’s nest of black hair. While I was moved by her helplessness and her hunger, it felt no different than being moved by the helplessness of all the tiny dogs tied to fire hydrants and shaking in the cold outside all the bodegas and dry cleaners of Brooklyn. As far as the physical sensation, I preferred having a man take one in his mouth. Much preferred.
Ann Marie, on her way into the kitchen, caught me doing it. I was almost as mortified as if I’d been caught masturbating. She didn’t care, though.
Are you kidding me? she said. Honey, it’s what we’re made for. And look at you, you’re a regular Madonna. Like Rose, her compliments, though effusive, never rang false because of the anger that raged like a sea on the other side of that gesture. You Irish, she said, by way of offering condolences for my genetically induced prudery, and walked off to Clorox the bathroom or give Rose’s bed hospital corners.
Ann Marie never said the words postpartum psychosis or postpartum depression. She said that Rose had been through a lot, and just needed some rest.
On weekends I’d drag Rose out of the house for walks. We’d head up to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights and back, and she’d say things. Make pronouncements.
I’ve got two babies and you’ve got two books.
Do you want one of them? I made too many.
If I ever ask you whether I’ve made a mistake, please don’t answer me.
I gave up, but you didn’t.
No. I gave up, and you didn’t.
My mother is kinder to me when you’re around. Have you ever noticed that? Your mother is kinder when I’m around, too.
What is wrong with us?
Life’s hard enough. Why am I making all these complications for myself? He loves me.
Whenever we approached her stoop she would say what we’d always said to each other: Don’t ever leave me.
I wrote a letter to Rose that consisted of two columns—on the left-hand side of the page, a list of all the things she had achieved, on the right, a list of all the things I admired her for—and slipped it into one of the books she’d stacked on her bedside table.
If you give up, I give up, it began. I tried to do better than that but I couldn’t. It worried me that I couldn’t do better than that.
I’m proud of you girls, Rose’s mother said one night, watching us feed Maria and Josephine.
For what? I said.
You love each other like you’re blood when you don’t have to.
My mother drove up and stayed three nights. She brought three pans of macaroni and cheese and six logs of chocolate chip cookie dough to put in the freezer because she knew Rose loved both. She also brought a deck of cards, and the four of us played hearts while Maria and Josephine slept. My mother taught Rose solitaire during that visit. Somehow Rose had never learned the game—the way my mother had never learned how to make a negroni, which Ann Marie showed her that night, the way Rose had, once upon a time, showed me.
It’s the Sophia Loren of cocktails, Ann Marie said.
I’ll drink to that, said my mother, and had two.
I love you all so much, said Rose, and soon fell asleep with her head on the table, in the middle of a hand, because half a negroni had undone her.
You raised this one right, said Ann Marie to my mother, nodding in my direction, as she shuffled the cards one more time, after Rose had gone to bed.
Thank you, she told Ann Marie. My sisters and mother were a big help. It takes a village, like they say.
I could have never raised Rose without my mother. Sometimes I wanted to kill her, sure, but that’s the price I had to pay. My husband really hated her. Ann Marie took a drink of her negroni, put it back down on the table. My mother, I mean. Used to say he wished he could poison her instant coffee.
That sounded a lot like Rose.
Mine used to lock me out of the house if I came home too late, said my mother, scrutinizing her hand. I’d sleep on the porch on a chaise longue she had out there. A few times in winter. In a wool coat she thought I spent too much money on.
Ann Marie laughed. I bet that showed her!
Then my mother laughed. The plan was to wear her down, but it wore me down!
I don’t know if I could have ever forgiven my mother if I hadn’t had Rose, said Ann Marie.
Yes, said my mother, startled, as if Ann Marie had described a feeling she had known but not been able to put into words.
Everything was different back then, said Ann Marie.
Tell me about it, said my mother, scrutinizing her hand.
That woman can talk, said my mother, as we settled down in the bed in the guest room, but I’ve always liked her.
And then, as I turned out the light: Just for the record, I don’t want you ever thinking I needed you to give me a grandchild.
Part of me felt that I had been given a blank check, and part of me wanted to know where the money was coming from.
Why do you say that? I asked her.
Let’s go to sleep, she said.
Did you—
No, she said. Later she would say that she did not think her No was a lie, because what she had gone through after giving birth to me was nowhere near as bad as what Rose had gone through.
My mother fell asleep right away but I could not. I went downstairs to the living room, sat on the couch, turned on a light, took a book from the shelves, but couldn’t read. I watched light from the streetlamp make green stained glass out of the leaves of the plane trees. Rose, my mother, her mother, Josephine, Maria, all asleep upstairs, so many people I loved above me, but I could not rest in that peace. Near midnight in a sleeping house didn’t seem like peace, just then. It felt a little haunted. It might have actually been. When Rose and Peter first moved in, Rose told me she’d seen what she swore was a little girl with long blond curly hair in a blue plaid dress run up the stairs one Saturday morning. She’d never seen her again and I’d always wondered if Rose wanted to see something like that— a specter so benign and full of life, an apparition so like a mirror, it could have served as a blessing on what she was afraid was a huge mistake.
Rose and I had been described as strong but maybe that had just been the blind stubbornness of youth. Our minds had the capacity to instantly synthesize and distill, but this meant they also had the capacity to instantly offer rebuttals to our most deeply held desires. The quickness with which we could imagine what other people thought—what our families might think, what the people we did not respect but feared would think, what the people we liked would think, what people long dead but still alive in our hearts would think—and how willing we were to let other voices have the last word, might partly explain why our minds, to use Rose’s words, had cracked open. Too much noise.
I am so anxious, a student of mine, my favorite, had told me that week. I am so afraid of people making fun of me, I am so afraid of failure, and I know I will live with this fear forever.
At some point Maria or Josephine started to cry, and I got up and crept into Rose’s bedroom, where Ann Marie, sleeping next to Rose, was sitting up and preparing to get out of bed.
I’ll take her, I said.
Bless you, said Ann Marie, and rolled back under the covers.
The tears were Josephine’s. I grabbed a blanket, reached into the crib, wrapped her inside it, and on the way downstairs decided to take her outside. I wanted the air. It was almost spring, the day had been unusually warm, and had she met the moon? Rose’s pink bejeweled flip-flops, which she’d accidentally worn home from a nail salon one afternoon, sat where they usually sat, which was just inside the front doorway. I slipped them on. We stepped outside.
Out on the stoop, Josephine and I bounced up and down. Look, Josephine, I said, though I knew she would not. The moon was full, and as round as her head, which smelled of milk and then sugar, yeast and then snow. Still she cried into my chest, still we bounced. I stared at the moon, which I could never get enough of, because in New York, depending on where the windows in your apartment were situated, how high they were set in the walls, and depending on what time of night you found yourself walking home from the subway, the moon might be hidden from your view for days, even weeks, but here it was, directly above us, purer and more perfect than anything on earth. Even your little head, I whispered to Josephine. Purer and more perfect—and rising like clockwork, besides. The moon did not present as friendly as the sun, and for good reason: those of us who walked beneath it did not know what it took to hang in there, up there, night after night, keeping your circle intact, inviolate, distinct from the darkness.