Mitchell is watching his wife pack Lara and Paloma into the back seat of the station wagon. How sweet they look in their Sunday best. So what if they turned out to be Catholics, did he really think he had something better to give them? He feels strangely proud of their yellow ribbons, their shiny, neatly cut chestnut hair, their black patent-leather shoes and their matching white dresses with the daisy belts he doesn’t know how their mother managed to make for them. In her own way, she’s a genius.
She closes the stationwagon door with her foot. Then she looks up at Mitchell, quizzically, as if she’s still in shock from his offer to stay at home with Baby Roo. He likes the shape of her face when it’s upturned like that – the sharpness of the chin, the fullness of the pouting lips. And her eyes, how large they look. You’d never know she had a six-month-old baby to look at those legs.
He tells himself, as her eyes slip upwards, that he really doesn’t deserve this look of adoration that has come over her face, until he realizes she’s not looking at him but at Baby Roo, who is on his back in the African shawl. She calls up something. He can’t hear so he opens the window – not an easy feat when you have a six month old in what seems to him to be an awfully loose-fitting carrier. (How does she do it?) He feels Baby Roo shifting dangerously, has to compensate abruptly so that she doesn’t go flying out the window.
‘Do you remember how to take it off?’ she asks.
‘EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OK!’
She gives him the thumbs up, then jumps into the car. She does her usual kamikaze backing-up job, misses a motorcycle by that much – although her vision may have been blocked. There were a lot of things he can see that she can’t see at street level.
When she’s gone, he turns around (slowly, to avoid swinging Baby Roo), and surveys his office, which (as usual) doesn’t look like one: there is material draped on every single table, stack of papers and machine. Becky has been on a sewing binge this summer, and not just for herself and the girls. The material that’s actually under the sewing machine needle – that blue plaid flannel – that’s for a shirt for him.
It’s not the pattern he would have chosen. As he looks at it hanging so trustingly from the edge of his desk, he imagines Becky agonizing over fabrics, trying to choose the one that will make him happiest, tragically selecting the wrong one, bringing it home and hiding it, staying up late to get it done, straining her eyes over buttonholes, while he …
His mind goes into panic mode as he reviews the new commitments he has crashlanded into – that new building, those new partners, the shaky loan, that shady banker (like hell he was Kiki’s cousin’s ex-brother-in-law). There is only one word that describes his behaviour since I left the business, and that word is spree. He has committed himself up to his eyeballs, and now, unless he did some very fancy footwork …
What the hell is he going to do with you, Laura, when you turn up in the office tomorrow? What misguided Samaritan impulse prompted him to hire you? How is he going to be able to use you productively if he has to hide the truth from you? What if you find out anyway? What if you feel obligated to tell not just your husband but your good friend Becky?
What will Becky do if she discovers that the paper he had her sign last week makes her the guarantor of every last shaky loan he’s put his name to?
The thing that kills him is, she’s been so nice to him lately. Take last night. He woke up at 3 a.m. to a strange chirping noise. His first thought was that it was a burglar, his second that it was a bird, his third that it was a bird underneath their bed. And so he had looked, but the only thing he could see down there was a blue, low-heeled sandal. He had waited to hear for the chirp to repeat itself. Typically, it didn’t until he was back in bed and drifting off.
It was at this point that he began to wonder if the chirping noise was coming from inside his head. He had spent the next hour or so trying but not quite succeeding to face this possibility. Every time he heard it, he marvelled despairingly at its authenticity. He found himself thinking of his freshman room-mate, who had also heard voices during those months before they had to commit him. Was this how real they had sounded to the poor guy?
It was past four when Mitchell went downstairs to roll a joint and just happened to pass underneath the smoke detector at the same time it chirped. Oh, his relief when he realized its batteries were running low!
But the anxiety had taken its toll. He had almost broken his neck while putting the new ones in. The hastily set up stepladder wobbled dangerously when he was standing on the top step – if he had not compensated for it abruptly, it would have sent him flying over the banister. Sleep was out of the question after this. So he had gone downstairs and rolled that joint and turned on the TV and tried to mellow out but as luck would have it the only thing he could find in English was a talk show about credit card abusers. Their grim faces would have depressed him at the best of times: combined with his already stressed state of mind and sensemilla it sent him tumbling into an extreme attack of earthquake phobia.
It went along classic lines. First he thought the house was shaking. Then he went down to the cellar to check to see if the foundations were still anchored. They were. Then he went back into the kitchen and sat down and looked at the pots and pans hanging on the rack over the sink and wondered what would become of them in a 4.9, a 6.7, a 30 second 8.2. If it happened now, where would he go? Under the table, upstairs to the girls’ room? Would there be a fire, did they have emergency supplies on hand as detailed in the front of the phone book? If it happened when he was at work, how would he make contact with his family? What if his kids were in their nursery school in the Marina and the landfill liquified? What if he was under a high-rise when the plate glass started popping out? What if Becky was driving across a bridge?
More to the point, what would have become of him if Becky hadn’t come downstairs when she did? His hands were so shaky by then that he couldn’t even turn the TV off – which was lucky, because it was the TV that had woken her up. Not that she was at all annoyed – and that was what killed him, the fact that she didn’t have a single thought for herself as she sat there next to him holding his hand. Why was she so easy to fool? He had almost broken down and confessed, but praise the gods! he had held himself back.
Now, as he abandons the office cum sewing room for the kitchen with Baby Roo on his back, he tells himself he still has a chance.
Successful people are people who take setbacks and complications and turn them into advantages. Maybe he’ll be able to find some way to turn this new building around fast enough to pay back that loan fast enough to make the balloon payment on the house fast enough to make sure Becky never finds out he conned her into signing a very serious and binding document without explaining to her what it meant.
He conjures up her trusting, concerned face. As he aims the remote control at the TV, he vows to become worthy of it.
He finds the baseball game. He sits down on the couch and remembers at the last moment that he can’t sit back because if he did it would mean squashing Baby Roo, who is – how could he have forgotten? – hanging off his back in that flimsy African shawl. And so he sits forward to give her room to breathe, but she doesn’t really like it even if he sits forward, in fact, she whimpers and squirms and digs her little feet into his kidneys. So he gets up, and tries to watch the game while pacing the floor, but then she starts crying so loud he can’t even hear the commentary. He decides she must be thirsty. He goes over to the counter where Becky has left a bottle of breast milk. It is only half defrosted. Ugh.
He is ashamed of his disgust for its appearance. Especially when Baby Roo begins to wail again. That is why his thoughts become muddled, that is why he puts the bottle into the microwave without checking first to see if the bottle is microwave-safe.
Oh no! He braces himself for an explosion that doesn’t happen. He takes the bottle out with shaking hands and tries to pass it to Baby Roo first over his shoulder, then under his arm. He drops it, then picks it up with great difficulty, and then tries passing it over his shoulder right into Baby’s hand, except that this time it falls into the shawl.
A wetness starts spreading. By now Baby Roo is hysterical, her little fists pummelling at his back. He has to get her out of there, but how? If he unties her here in the kitchen, she’ll just fall to the floor. He can’t risk that, so he runs – too fast, sending her into even more frantic wailing – up to the bedroom, where he tries to untie the shawl while lying sideways, except that he can’t undo the knot with one hand. The next thing he tries is to encourage Baby Roo to climb out of the shawl of her own accord while he is lying on the bed on his stomach.
But she doesn’t climb out. Instead she starts choking and spluttering. The wetness spreads across his back. She sounds like she’s suffocating. He sits up to give her air. She screams. He stands up. She is gnawing at his shoulder blade between frantic wails. He has to find a way of getting this bottle to her!
At last he hits on a solution: by standing between the two mirrors in the master bedroom, he is able to (a) locate and (b) fish out the milk bottle and (c) get it into Baby Roo’s little hands. The crying comes to an end. He is able to go downstairs. And even watch the baseball game, which is somewhat amazing to him. Except that he can’t stop worrying about the little bundle on his back. She’s not drinking the milk properly, she’s gulping down the air which promises all sorts of trouble, in addition to which she is, as he knows from the upstairs mirrors, all tangled up in this ridiculous shawl thing by now. How can he pay attention to this baseball game knowing that his daughter could be suffocating?
He hits on a new idea. If he puts the TV on the far end of the counter, he can sit at this near end, or rather half sit on the stool with the rest of his weight distributed on the counter. And if, at the same time, he can have his shaving mirror propped up on the stove, he can also see over his shoulder, and make sure Baby Roo is alive even when she isn’t kicking. It’s precarious, and uncomfortable, but it’s the best he can do.