In her arms, Ismael felt impossibly light and springy—had Jack ever been this small?—his hot tears soaking the shoulder of her dress. “It’s okay, little sweetie,” she said, kissing his head, soft black curls flattening under her lips. His smell was different than Jack’s—muskier, more herbal. A different soap, that was all it was, and yet it was enough to make him seem almost a different species. “It’s okay,” she said. But he was already calming, breathing in great, huge, shuddering gulps.
“Baby,” said Jack, staring solemnly up at her, his blue eyes darkening with confusion. “Baby.” This was what he called himself. “Baby!” he shouted when he found photos of himself floating around the apartment. “Jack baby do it,” he said when he wanted to climb onto a chair or eat applesauce unassisted. But he was really a boy now, hitting his Spaldeen against the wall and racing his Little People airplane across the floor and demanding to be read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel ten times in a row.
“Okay,” said Caitlin, who had emerged from behind the stroller holding a short, fat bottle filled with the thick, supernaturally white weight of formula. Sadie was almost afraid to look in the direction of Vicky. Breast-feeding was, of course, one of the key points of her ideology. Breast-feeding, that is, for a prescribed amount of time: no less than one year, no more than a year and a half. “After that it’s bad for their development,” she’d told Sadie numerous times, clucking her tongue in the direction of one of their neighbors, who still boldly nursed her three-year-old in the park. Sadie had said nothing, telling herself, Forget it, Jack. It’s Chinatown. Jack, at least, generally confined his habit to the home.
Sadie handed Ismael to his mother, with some reluctance, and sat down on the bench beside her. His eyes now fully lined with red, Jack scrambled up beside her and watched as Ismael sucked rhythmically at his bottle. “Nurse,” he whispered to Sadie, with his most impish smile. “Nurse.”
“No, sweetie,” she said gently. “It’s not the nursing time. We only nurse before we go to sleep.”
“Nurse,” he said more urgently, reaching an exploratory hand toward her left breast. It was time, she thought, to get him home, to bed.
“He’s still nursing?” asked Caitlin, her composure regained.
Sadie nodded. “I’m trying to wean him, but I can’t quite figure out how. He’s always been a big nurser. He wouldn’t even take a bottle. It’s part of the reason I didn’t go back to work.”
“He’ll stop when he goes to school, right? And I guess it keeps him tethered to you,” said Caitlin, sending an acid jolt into Sadie’s mouth. Fuck you, she thought, wishing she could summon a more intelligent response. “I couldn’t do it,” Caitlin said, with a shrug. “I felt like a cow. There’s so much pressure to breast-feed now. It’s like your baby is going to die if you don’t. They scare you with all this stuff about breast-fed babies being smarter.”
“But it is supposed to be better for the baby,” said Sadie, ever aware that she didn’t want to play the role of Vicky, arbiter of all things maternal. And yet who was Caitlin to judge her? Caitlin Green-Gold, of all people?
“Actually, there’s a lot of contention over that.” In Caitlin’s arms, Ismael’s eyes were drooping shut. “Because of toxins in breast milk, from plastics and pesticides and all that. We have all these toxins stored up in our fat cells—just sitting there, like, forever—and they’re released into our breast milk. So some people are saying that formula is actually better, in certain ways.”
“Really.” Jack had clambered into her lap and dropped his head sweetly on her shoulder. “Nurse,” he whispered. “Nurse.”
“Yeah, there was a big thing about it in Nature last year. But none of the mainstream media picked it up.”
“Really?” said Sadie, pulling Jack’s hand out from the neck of her dress. Why had Caitlin been reading Nature? “That’s surprising. It sounds like just the sort of story the mainstream media would pick up. Or, at least, NPR.”
Caitlin rolled her eyes. “NPR?” she snorted. “Are you serious? The mouthpiece of the pseudoliberal hegemony? Like they’re going to run a story that would question the status quo.”
“That breast-feeding is better—”
“The upper-middle-class postfeminist baby-worship bullshit,” spat Caitlin. “Where, it’s like, if we don’t spend every minute with our kids, if they’re not attached to our tits twenty-four hours a day, we’re guilty of child abuse. I mean, I totally get the cultural imperative behind it, but I just think it’s bullshit.”
“What’s the cultural imperative behind it?” asked Sadie, as she knew Caitlin wanted her to, though she suspected she knew the answer.
“We’re the kids of fucking baby boomers,” cried Caitlin. “Our moms either waited too long to get pregnant, then went back to work right away, or had kids early, then got pissed about it and went to encounter groups to get in touch with their rage.” She sighed. “Either way, we were all parked in front of the TV after school, eating Doritos. So now we have this, like, collective desire to return to a simpler age, when gender roles were more clearly defined: Mom stayed home and baked cookies. Dad went to work.”
“Which means,” Sadie carried on, quelling uneasiness at her own hypocrisy, though it was apparently Caitlin’s hypocrisy, too, “that all these women with Ph.D.’s are standing around the playground talking about diapers.”
“Right,” said Caitlin, rubbing Ismael’s back in wide circles. “Like your friend Beth.”
Sadie laughed. “Beth is a staff writer for Slate. And teaches at NYU.”
“Whatever.” Caitlin shrugged. “The mommy group culture. It’s a waste. And a formula for unhappiness. Not that what our mothers did made them—or us—happy.”
“So, what do you think we should do?” Sadie asked. What she meant, she knew, was, What do you think I should do? It was a question she had been afraid to ask herself in recent months—a question she had been afraid to raise with any of her friends. “If we shouldn’t stay home and we shouldn’t go back to work—”
“See, I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it,” Caitlin responded, shaking her head. In her arms, Ismael had fallen back asleep, his head turned toward Sadie, snoring lightly through his tiny, elegant nostrils. “Nurse, nurse, nurse,” Jack moaned softly as she stroked his curls, so much softer than her own. He was exhausted, poor boy. “It’s not about going back to work or staying home. It’s about cultural concepts of what constitutes a woman’s identity. It’s about whether a woman, when she becomes a mother, has to give up every other part of her identity. That’s really what all the second-wave feminists wanted.”
“I thought they wanted help washing dirty diapers and control of the family finances.” She grinned. “What does Marilyn French say? ‘Shit and string beans.’”
Caitlin waved her hands dismissively. “That was just window dressing. What they wanted was to not just be”—she affected a child’s high whine—“‘mommy, mommy, mommy.’” In her arms, Ismael shuddered, deep and contented, and turned his face into Caitlin’s chest. “Hey,” Caitlin said in a soft voice. “Hey, little man.”
“And now?” Sadie contemplated transferring Jack to his stroller. He would be reluctant. There would be tears. But he was too heavy to carry all the way home. Ed could do it, but not she.