chapter 11 | house no. 4

July, 1987

Boxes, boxes everywhere and not a cup to drink with, I think as I walk through what used to look like a kitchen. I can’t help but let out a long, exhausted sigh. It’s so steamy-hot in here, and I could really use a glass of water. A sluggish part of my brain notes that I forgot to put the sippy cups in the “do not pack” pile and they are now buried somewhere deep in this maze of brown cardboard. As if on cue, Christopher, now two, starts to wail at my side.

“Shit.” I say, so worn out from the day of supervising packers, placating children, and cleaning cupboards that I can’t even flip my mental profanity into something child-friendly. At least David, lost in his Legos in the living room, doesn’t hear.

“Sit,” Chris says. “Sippy?”

The hand not holding Chris goes to my forehead in frustration.

“I’m lookin’, sweetie,” I say, and I commence my mental search for a spare sippy as I stare aimlessly at the boxes. Each box has something written in bold, black marker. KITCHEN, POTS. KITCHEN, GLASSWARE. KITCHEN, UTENSILS. Nothing resembling KITCHEN, SIPPY CUPS.

The box beside me has “KITCHEN, MISSELANUS” written on its side. I try very hard not to belittle the packers, but this little detail makes me laugh . . . with a very distinct tinge of hysteria. Missel-anus, my butt.

“Sippy, sippy, sippy,” Chris repeats over and over as he whines and rubs his sweaty boogies on my shoulder.

I consider asking John if he’s seen a sippy cup, but he is outside sharing a questionably legal beer with the packers. The smoke from their cigarettes drifts through the open window, making my kitchen stink. It lingers in the heavy, humid air outside. The smell dances on my frayed nerves like a spark. I’m so tired . . . from the day, from the week, from my life . . . that all I want to do is fall down and scream. Rather like my son.

“Sippy, sippy, sippeeeeeeeeeeee,” Chris whines into my ear.

My mom-radar goes off and I remember seeing a cup on the van floor beneath one of the seats. It’s been there for eons, probably growing a new life form, but it will do.

I push my way through the boxes to the door and yell through clenched teeth out the open window. “John, there’s a sippy cup under the passenger-side chair in the van. Can you get it please?”

“Sippeeeeeeeeeeee . . .”

John looks up like I’m interrupting an important board meeting, not a casual beer between strangers.

“What?” he asks through Chris’s whines. He has the audacity to look angry. I can see the “how dare you disturb my social hour” roll across his face. Of all the self-centered, monumental pricks. He’s been sitting on his ass the entire day, working on some paperwork thing or another, while I’ve fed, changed, cleaned, entertained, supervised and basically managed the lives of our entire family of four.

My blood pressure spikes upwards. “The van. A sippy cup in the van. Can you get it? Now?”

“I waaaaaaaaaaant sippeeeeeeeeee!”

“Where?” John says, waking up to the fact that his second son is wailing at the top of his lungs into my ear.

“In. The. Van. Under the seat. Passenger side.”

Chris’s screeches have reached nuclear-meltdown pitch. John clues in to the urgency of the situation and slowly gets up to walk toward the van, murmuring something I can’t hear. One of the packers chuckles. I want to kill both John and the packer with a blunt spoon. If I weren’t so bone tired, and if our utensils weren’t locked away for God-knows-how-long in a box marked KITCHEN, UTENSILS, they’d be dead—right now—their innards spread out under the blazing sun, waiting for the vultures to come and gorge themselves.

The packer shuts up when he sees the look on my face. In fact, all three of the large, sweaty strangers put down their empty beers and look at their watches.

I don’t hear what they say, but they hop in their cube van and are backing out before John returns, blue cup dangling nonchalantly from his finger.

As expected, the sippy cup has a layer of fur on what was probably orange juice. The screaming in my ear stops like someone has thrown a switch.

“Sippy?” And then Chris is wriggling like a rabid squirrel trying to get at the disgusting, smelly cup John has handed to me. Instead of offering to help, John turns and heads back outside to clean up the beer bottles. I slam the door and half set, half drop Chris on the floor. There is no way I’m letting my child put this thing in his mouth.

“Sippeeeeee!” It starts again as he falls on his diapered backside.

“Christopher, honey, mommy has to wash it out! It’s icky! Tastes bad!” I say as I fight my way to the sink. He’s up again and hanging off my leg, screaming as I do so.

I am not a patient woman. I want to be, but I’m not. And the screaming dervish flailing on my leg is just about doing me in. Where in the hell is John? Why in the hell am I doing this? I can think of a million different things—useful, good-citizen things—that I’d rather be doing than sweating with a screaming, snotty kid on my leg.

I glance out at the window, and a black car drives by—one that I recognize but doesn’t belong to anyone our street. It goes by often, slowing as it nears our house, and today I shiver when I see it. One thing I won’t miss from this place is the feeling that someone is watching me.

“Sippeeeeeeee . . .” Christopher screams.

The cup hisses as I open it and then fur dumps into the sink in one stinking, green blob. Yuck. Oh my God that stinks!

And then it happens with no warning at all. The donuts, the McDonalds hamburger and the French fries come flying up from my stomach and through my mouth and nose like an F-18, splattering unceremoniously in the sink beside the blob.

Oh.

The world around me sharpens down like an HB pencil as I catch my breath, thinning and compressing into this moment. Even Chris stops crying, curious as to what that noise was and why Mommy is leaning over the sink.

“Sippy, Momma?” he says.

I swallow, and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, still staring at the bile, food, and fuzzy blob in front of me.

“Just a minute, sweetie.”

I rinse the cup out, pour some dish detergent in, swirl it around with my finger and dump it—knowing that there’s no way I’ll find a dishrag in here. The blob and half-digested food clog the sink, but I don’t look at it. Even the thought makes me queasy.

When the cup is as clean as it’s going to get, I fill it with cold water and squat down to Christopher’s level. He reaches out and grabs it with his chubby little fist, smiling broadly with tear-stained cheeks.

“Sippy.”

Overcome with a mixture of fatigue and raw emotion, I sit right there on the floor among the boxes and gather him into my arms. His body is warm and soft, and the cup makes rushing, screechy noises as he pulls away at it. His other fist reaches up and grabs a lock of hair from my ponytail. In seconds his eyes are closed, and I wish like anything that I could do the same—just fall asleep and forget about moves and black cars and everything but my little blue sippy cup.

I hear the door squeak and slam shut, but thankfully Chris doesn’t wake. Someone pushes through the boxes and I look up to see John, looking sheepish and carrying two cold Cokes.

“Sorry,” he says.

He puts one can down, opens the other and then hands it to me, being careful not to drip condensation on our sleeping toddler. I have to shift Chris a little to take the can, but he’s too far gone to notice. John picks up the other can, slides down beside me and gently brushes back Chris’s hair.

“I forgot you were in here with the boys by yourself,” John says quietly. “I just . . . offered the guys a beer, and didn’t think that you might need some help.”

Damn right, I think as I take a sip of Coke. It soothes my bile-raw throat. I wait for a second—to make sure it will stay down there—and then take another sip.

“I hate this part.” I say. “The boxes, the mess, . . . not knowing where anything is.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But you’re good at it.”

Incredulous, I turn to look at him.

“Good at it?” I say.

“You are! The kids have busy bags full of toys, we have a cooler full of drinks, we’ve got hotels booked half-way across the country, and when we get there, David’s school will be waiting for him. I couldn’t have done all that.”

He’s right. John couldn’t organize eggs into a carton.

“I love you, you know,” he says.

I nod. “I do know.”

“Good.”

We sit there, Christopher sleeping, David playing with his Legos in the other room, and the light slowly dimming as the sun sinks behind the trees.

“John?”

“Yeah, Ellie?”

“I think . . . I think I’m pregnant.”

He turns and looks at me, first in the face, then down at my stomach—which is hidden by our sleeping toddler. John smiles a big, wide-cheeked, face-splitting grin.

“Babe, that’s the best news I’ve heard all year.”

He holds up his Coke and we clink cans, and I think that today—in spite of the craziness, the heat, the disruption, and the vomit—today has turned out to be a pretty good day.