And yet there were days. Sometimes, Jack’s very easiness—his warmth, his attachment to her—made him difficult. He still, at nearly two, often wanted to sleep on her lap for naps, rather than in his crib, so that the process of putting him down took hours and left her senseless with exhaustion. And though he was happy to sit for half an hour, loading and unloading blocks into the back of his plastic dump truck, he didn’t want her to read while he did so. “Mama, guck,” he cried, and snatched the paper from her hands. And then there were nights: when he woke, sobbing, frightened by some shadow in his room or corner of his developing psyche (or, as Ed said, simply thirsty), and refused to return to sleep, making her feel heartless for, in her exhaustion, desiring that he do so. Even when Ed was home, it was Sadie he wanted in those terrible hours, and Sadie he wanted before he went to sleep in the evening, and before his naps, and when he woke up in the morning. For he was, somehow, still nursing. This great big boy, who barely fit on her lap, with his head of wild curls. A year ago, she’d offered him milk, just as the doctor told her to, and he’d puckered his lips and said “No. Bad.” She’d tried everything: soy, goat, sheep, rice, which was supposed to most resemble breast milk. But he refused them all—just as he’d refused the bottle (filled, then, with breast milk, pumped, painfully, in dribs and drabs, at the kitchen table, after he went to sleep) at two months, then three, then four.
“He’s not still nursing?” Rose asked each time they visited. On this one point Rose and Ed happily agreed. “You’ve got to wean him,” Ed had said the night before. “You’re wearing yourself out.”
“How?” Sadie snapped. “I’m trying.” But the truth was: she wasn’t. Not because she didn’t want to—she did. In a way. Sometimes, while he nursed, he rested a fat, proprietary hand on her breast, occasionally giving it a hard squeeze. “No,” she said, prying his fingers off her, fighting a wave of irritation. But why? She had shared her body with him this long, hadn’t she? Was it fair to suddenly demand it back? No. And yet, she was tired. So tired. Too tired to be groped by a three-foot-tall toddler. And yet, too tired to figure out a way to get him into his crib that didn’t involve pawing her.
Exhaustion had become a defining principle for her, guiding every choice she made, leading her, increasingly, on a lazy and lonely track: emails and phone calls went unreturned for months; the dry cleaning lingered in the shop; her hair grew flat and fuzzed with dirt; the paper collected on the coffee table, crisp and unfingered, for she could not bear to read about the endless war, the latest foibles of the absurd regime that had launched it, the murders and fires in the Bronx and Queens and far-out Brooklyn. This exhaustion, she knew, was far from a new story, so far that she could barely bring herself to mention it when Beth or Emily, on the rare occasions she spoke with them, asked how she was. And yet she thought she did have it harder than, say, Vicky, whose husband was a social worker at a school in the East Village and arrived home promptly at four in the afternoon every day, as Vicky never failed to remind her. “You should do what Noah and I do,” she’d advised months back, when Sadie, in a weak moment, admitted that she was having trouble coping. “He has half an hour to settle in after work. Then at four thirty it’s my time.” She smiled meaningfully. “Ava goes to bed at six, you know, and then we have our time.” But Ed did not get home at four o’clock—ever. He was gone for days, sometimes weeks, in L.A. for meetings, or, lately, directing videos or commercials, because, though she told neither her parents nor her friends this, they needed money, badly.
“Why don’t you go with him?” Vicky had asked a few days ago as they loaded laundry into their building’s industrial washers, Jack and Ava pushing around the heavy wire carts. It was a question she’d heard before: from Beth, from Dave, from Emily, from her mother, who thought it was Sadie’s duty to accompany Ed wherever business took him, or hey, who could blame him for finding “a little something on the side” (Rose had really used this phrase). They didn’t seem to understand that Ed wasn’t on vacation, lounging by the pool at Chateau Marmont. “He’s going to Bosnia,” she reminded them. “But it’s safe there now, isn’t it?” they asked. She supposed it was. But still, it just seemed a bit much. What would she do with Jack all day—Ed was often on set for twenty hours in a row—in a place where she didn’t speak the language, where she knew no one. “It’s actually kind of nice being alone,” she told everyone.
There was truth to this. In the evenings, after she put Jack to bed, she felt almost giddy with freedom: She could take a bath! Eat cookies for dinner! Get into bed at eight o’clock and read, just as she’d done when she was single, in her little apartment on Baltic Street, but better, for then she’d always been consumed with work, with the endless piles of manuscripts to edit.
But on this June morning, as she deposited Jack in a swing and gave him a push, the evening and its small luxuries seemed very far away. Ed would be gone for four months, an inconceivable amount of time. She’d slept badly, anxious about Ed’s travel, anxious about the months without him, months of picking up the milk and purchasing birthday gifts, and doing the laundry, the endless laundry, and generally managing everything alone, and as she lifted Jack into the swing and gave him a push, she found herself prey to self-pity, an increasingly common phenomenon. The older Jack got, the more she realized that the difficulties of being alone with him for such long stretches were larger than just the everyday hassles: each day, she faced a million tiny choices—choices that would affect who Jack would become and how he regarded the world—and each day the repercussions of those choices grew larger and larger, swelling inside her head like a sponge, absorbing the material around it. Would she let him watch television? Eat candy? Drink juice? Wear the obnoxiously boyish clothing—with plasticky renderings of basketballs and trucks—purchased for him by her mother? Take a bath with her, now that he was more a boy and less a baby? And the smaller, more subtle things, too: if she grew impatient with him, if she snapped at Ed on the phone, if she seemed sad or angry or depressed. All of these things could somehow damage her son’s psyche. Or had she absorbed too much of the rhetoric of the mommies’ group? She should, perhaps, have gone with Ed.
“Down,” Jack said now, thrusting one sturdy arm out in front of him, like a little commandant. “Ga!” He’d barely been in the swing five minutes.
“You want to come out?” she asked doubtfully.
“Yes,” he said, tossing his arm out again. “Mama! Ga!” His eyes, she saw, were rimmed with red. Like her, he’d slept badly the night before. Today, she’d put him down for his nap early, before noon. “Mama, ga!” he said a third time, as an enormous blue pram materialized in front of the gate that led into the baby swings. At the helm of this outsized device stood a short young woman, her eyes covered in trendily large sunglasses, her diminutive form dwarfed by the girth of her haul, which she was having trouble maneuvering through the narrow entryway.