Do you miss Dean when he’s away, or do you like having your own space?” asked Mom.
We were on our way to the pediatrician’s office with her at the wheel of Dean’s beat-up Mitsubishi Galant.
“It’s hard sometimes,” I said. “But then it always feels like we have new stuff to talk about when he gets home. We’re happy to see each other, you know?”
She nodded. “I think the hardest thing for me when you kids were little was never feeling like I could finish anything… everything was always interrupted. And then your father would come home from the stock exchange and I was so hungry for what was going on in the world, and I wanted to be told I was doing things right after singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ all day. Just, ‘Goodness, you’ve painted the dining room table—how wonderful!’ But he wouldn’t say anything at all, he’d just read the paper and have a cocktail and grumble through dinner.”
“You guys were so young,” I said. “I mean, babies. No wonder your entire generation got divorced. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to marry the first guy I slept with, just presuming it would all work out.”
“It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t. Mummie and Daddy always seemed fine. I thought all you had to do was get married and then that was it.”
“And cloth diapers,” I said. “I remember you rinsing them out in the toilet, when Trace was a baby.”
“Well, on Long Island we had a diaper man, at least. He took the dirty dipes away and delivered a pile of clean ones every week.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “No Pampers, no Prozac? No fucking way.”
She nodded. “And no birth control. You and Pagan were both products of the rhythm method.”
“Jesus, Mom. I’d’ve had myself committed, just to catch up on sleep.”
She laughed and turned left, into the doctor’s office parking lot. As she looked for a spot, I thought about the end of her marriage to my father.
In 1967, Mom discovered that she was pregnant a third time, and wept, and told Dad she didn’t know how they could handle having another child. There wasn’t enough money, and they were both so exhausted already.
He asked around on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where he was an ill-paid fledgling broker at the time. Someone knew someone who knew where a woman could get an abortion—from a doctor in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for four hundred dollars cash.
So Mom drove herself to Kennedy airport in the dark one morning, racked with such bad morning sickness it took her the entire drive and four-hour flight to finish one jelly doughnut. She ate it in little tiny pieces, trying to keep something in her stomach, some sugar in her system, so she wouldn’t throw up.
When she arrived at the doctor’s office, the nurse told her the price had gone up to five hundred.
Mom put her four bills on the doctor’s desk. “This is all I have. Please help me.”
She drove herself from the airport back to our tiny rented house in Jericho, New York, arriving home around midnight—bleeding profusely, doubled over with cramps.
She got into bed carefully, not wanting to wake up my father.
He turned toward her in the darkness as she drew the covers up to her chin.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “If you don’t want to have my child, I don’t want to stay married to you. I’ve packed my bags and I’ll be leaving in the morning.”
I was four years old, my sister two and a half.
In my pediatrician’s parking lot, a gigantic Range Rover finally pulled out of a space.
“No, Mom, really,” I said. “I couldn’t have handled the shit you dealt with when we were little. You’re fucking amazing.”
We sat in the waiting room for twenty-five minutes, then the examining room for another ten before the doctor came in. Mom took the chair and settled Parrish in her lap. I sat up on the crinkly-papered exam table with India.
“Do the girls need shots this time?” she asked.
“Probably. It seems like they have to get a few more every time we come in. Hep B, DTaP, meningitis… endless.”
Mom shivered. “Poor little things.”
The doctor bustled in, clipboard in hand. “Mrs. Bauer?”
Dare, I thought to myself, having kept my maiden name. But it seemed needlessly strident to correct her so I just nodded.
“We’re behind on the girls’ vaccination schedule,” she said. “I’d like to get them caught up today.”
Mom raised an eyebrow at me, having always been a proponent of the “I don’t think that really needs stitches” school of parenting.
“Okay, I guess.” I mean, I didn’t want to leave my children vulnerable to typhoid, or whatever, right?
Parrish wailed in my lap as she got an injection in each arm. I closed my eyes and stroked her hair, whispering shhhh in her ear. “It’s okay, sweetie… It’s okay. All done now.”
India screamed next, struggling in Mom’s lap.
I was just so damn tired. The pitiful sound of both children’s sobs made tears well up in my eyes.
“Now, we find these shots are usually tolerated really well,” said the doctor, “but if the girls have any discomfort tonight, it’s all right to give them a little liquid Tylenol.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
The woman grabbed her clipboard and race-walked out of the room.
“What a bitch,” said Mom in a stage whisper the moment the exam room door had clicked shut.
I snickered despite myself and turned to look at her.
“Oh, Mom… you cried, too?” I said, handing her a wad of Kleenex from the doctor’s stash. “Your mascara’s running.”
“I couldn’t stand it,” she said, sniffling and dabbing at her eyes. “Getting a shot in each arm? Horrible.”
We carried the girls back out to the parking lot. India was asleep before Mom had finished fastening the straps on her car seat.
“Why don’t you go up and take a nap when we get home, Madeline?” said Mom. “You look exhausted.”
“That would be my idea of Nirvana,” I said, right before Parrish projectile-vomited all over me.
I was looking for clean clothes for Parrish once we’d gotten back to the house.
“I’ll do all that,” said Mom. “Don’t be silly.”
“But you shouldn’t have to—”
She took me gently by the shoulders and turned me toward the staircase.
“Go upstairs,” said my mother. “Wash your face. Put on a clean shirt.”
I just stood there for a minute, then glanced back over my shoulder.
Mom had already somehow stripped Parrish down to just a diaper and laid her gently on the sofa. “I think she’s finished throwing up, poor little thing.”
Even so, the cushions beneath her were now miraculously, tautly sheeted with several clean towels.
I shook my head. “How did you get—”
“Go upstairs,” said Mom, shaking a crook’d finger at me. “I’m the mother, and I say so.”
When I reached the landing, I heard her call my name from below.
“Yeah?” I said, peering back down over the banister.
“Turn your dirty clothes inside out and throw them down here once you’ve got them off. I’ll start a load of laundry.”
“Thank you.”
“And then I think you should run yourself a bath.”
“Okay.”
She stepped into sight beneath me. “After that you can go to sleep.”
I bowed to her in gratitude, knocking my forehead three times against the banister.
I’d just gotten out of the bathtub and wrapped myself in a big towel when Mom came upstairs.
“Is Parrish okay?” I asked, reaching back into the tepid water to yank out the plug by its chain.
“I gave her some apple juice and she kept it down. She might go to sleep for a while.”
“Do you think I should take her temperature?”
“I think you should take a nap.”
I padded down the hallway toward Dean’s and my bedroom, my skin not even damp anymore.
“It’s so weird,” I said. “You barely even need towels at this altitude. It’s like going through the dryers at a car wash.”
I put on a bra and pulled a clean T-shirt over my head.
“The clasp broke on these pearls you got from Mummie?” asked Mom, lifting the string of cultured orbs from the jewelry box atop my bureau, my third of what had been her mother’s triple-strand necklace.
“The clasp is fine,” I said, rubbing my wet hair roughly with a towel. “The thread snapped, right near the end where it attaches.”
She nodded. “I’ll take the girls out for a walk later and let you nap. We’ll have a little adventure and find a jewelry store to fix these.”
“Just go to sleep for a while.”
I felt so refreshed after the bath I didn’t think I’d drift off, but I blinked my eyes a couple of times and the next time I opened them the bedroom walls were tinted blood orange, reflecting the sunset.
Downstairs, Mom had made dinner for all four of us.
Parrish woke up around three that night, weeping and screaming. She was hot and sweaty and crying as though she were in great pain—or being chased by rabid wolves.
I gave her liquid Tylenol and carried her downstairs and held her as I walked slowly back and forth across the moonlit living room floor. I buried my nose in her sweet, alfalfa-smelling hair as she shrieked in my ear, humming softly until she exhausted herself back to sleep once more.
Sitting with her cradled across my lap for another ten minutes, I gazed at her dear little face in the blue moonlight.
She made a fist and raised her thumb to her mouth, dark lashes grazing her cheeks—so beautiful it made me ache.
Lucky, lucky, lucky. Yes I am.