“I’m calling your mother,” Ed kept saying, his voice low and tight. “She needs to get down there and help you. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”
Her mother, of course, thought that a new baby was no cause for any special treatment. “I wore my regular clothes home from the hospital,” she told Sadie three hours after Jack’s prolonged entry into the world, while Sadie lay, stunned and starving, in a high bed at Roosevelt Hospital. “And a week later I was back at my League of Women Voters meeting. I was the chair then, you see.” Still, at Ed’s behest—her mother loved Ed, despite constant complaints about his proclivity for “raggedy sneakers”—Rose came down on weekday afternoons to “help,” crowing loudly about the neighborhood, which she still viewed as the teeming ghetto of her youth. Her concept of help, however, was generally limited to expounding on the myriad ways in which the care and upkeep of babies had degenerated in the modern era. “Whole landfills are devoted to disposable diapers,” she said, as she sat on the couch eating the babka she’d picked up at the East Broadway Bakery, and observing Sadie as she emptied and cleaned out the diaper bin. “I can’t believe you’re not using cloth.” Sadie reminded her mother that she’d had a full-time nanny—the blonde, glamorous Michelle, who’d cared for Sadie until she started first grade—to change and launder those cloth diapers.
“She walks in the door,” Sadie complained to the mothers, from the depths of Vicky’s faux-Stickley couch, Jack splayed out in her arms, a stream of milk drying on his jowl, “and says, ‘A cup of coffee would be nice.’” The mothers clucked with disapproval but offered no sympathy. All of their mothers, it seemed, supplied them with weekly casseroles and babysat on demand and paid for sessions with postpartum doulas, the very notion of which would have made Rose Peregrine choke with scorn. “I think you need to explain your needs to her,” Vicky counseled. “She doesn’t understand that you need help. You can’t expect her to be a mind reader.” The others nodded in agreement. “Maybe,” Sadie replied skeptically. The problem with these women, she was beginning to see, was that the insularity of their concerns made them strangely self-centered, which in turn left them strangely immune to compassion. In devoting their every thought to their children and their households, they had become like children themselves, utterly convinced that ultimate justice lay in the firm rules that governed their days—the cry-it-out and no-dairy-until-age-five and siblings-should-be-spaced-two-years-apart—and that anyone who veered from these laws was doomed, if not to misery, then at least difficulty. She could feel herself being pulled under, pulled into the narrow confines of their world: the playground politics (“We invited Ella to Ava’s birthday party and then we weren’t invited to Ella’s party!”), the inane competitiveness (“Sophia was holding her head up by the time she was a week old, but that’s very unusual”), the crippling anxiety (“The doctor said to give her soft cheese, but what does that mean? How soft? What kind of cheese exactly?”).
Sometimes she saw them solo, at the candy shop on Hester, buying organic, unsulfured dried fruit or single-estate, sustainably grown baking chocolate, or at the coffee shop, sipping cappuccinos and plying their babies with scones, and they were always perfectly nice, causing Sadie to ease up on her previous judgment and to wonder what exactly was wrong with her, what defect Rose had somehow inflicted on her that led her now, as a supposedly mature adult—a wife, a mother—to forcibly isolate herself and her child from the social fabric of her new neighborhood. They were fine people, they just weren’t her people.
But her people—her real friends, of whom she now seemed to have dispiritingly few—were all still in Brooklyn. Just a few stops away on the F or the J, but somehow they were all so busy. Beth had Emma—almost a year now, a sweet, chubby girl with wispy blonde hair like her half brother, Sam—and her writing, with its endless deadlines, and had found friends in her neighborhood (Sadie’s old neighborhood, it pained her to think). Emily had work and school and Josh, with whom she was still in the early, obsessive stage of romance, and Clara, too, whom Josh had gotten into a special, intensive outpatient treatment program at the clinic’s Westchester campus, which was great but required a lot of time. And Lil, well, Lil had stopped speaking to Sadie after everything went wrong with Tuck’s book, though the truth was, she’d pulled away the minute Sadie announced she was pregnant. Tal, of course, was no longer her friend and she tried not to think of him (though sometimes—even after all these years—she found herself noting a song or a book or an idea to mention to him, before remembering, Oh, I can’t). Dave was often away—touring, recording—and when he wasn’t, he was fully occupied with his music friends, many of whom had babies of their own, babies they toted with them to dinner, to midnight shows at M Shanghai and Galapagos, babies they dressed in miniature Star Wars and Clash T-shirts and took to “Rock-a-Baby” classes at the Brooklyn Brewery, where they tossed Shakey Eggs in time to “Ziggy Stardust” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” and the first track from the new Radiohead album. But these were not Sadie’s people either, not exactly, much as Dave—and, perhaps, Sadie herself—would have liked them to be.
Usually, though, Sadie was content on her own. The rhythms of motherhood—the regularity, the structure of it, the dinner at six and bath at seven and bed at eight—suited her. And then there was Jack himself, with his hooded Peregrine eyes and his fair Peregrine hair and Ed’s pale eyes and long legs and arms, who had emerged from her, fully formed, the sort of child whom Rose described as “easy”: a decent sleeper, an infrequent crier, an eater of brussels sprouts, in possession of a broad, ready smile that charmed the proprietors of the local bakery and dry cleaner and pizza shop. In the night, when he woke and clung to her, his hot face in her shoulder, she felt the individual muscles of her heart slowly ripping into their isolate strands. She loved him so. No one had warned her of this, this furious, frightening animal love that turned her into a strange, senseless being, who had given up a job she loved—though she supposed she was already loving it less well before Jack came along; she supposed she had been perhaps looking for a reason to give it up—because she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her infant with an underpaid West Indian woman who had abandoned her own children to take care of Sadie’s. It had turned her—a fearless traveler—into an anxious, twittering freak who had yet, in the two years since Jack’s birth, to board a plane, for what if it were to explode on takeoff, or, more likely, fall prey to box cutter–wielding madmen, causing her life to end, and preventing her from ever again watching Jake’s prodigious cheeks burst into a smile or slacken into sleep. It had happened two weeks after Jack’s birth. It would happen again.