I could hear her car start up and drive away. But then suddenly she was back — the car, the clamber up the stairs, the bursting return through the back door. “I forgot something,” she said, and stepped over to the counter, opened a drawer, and grabbed a kitchen knife, which she stuck gleefully in her leather bag. “A concealed weapon, or a chef’s tool? Who can say? Already, driving around in winter with a shovel in my car makes me feel like a serial killer.” Then she flew off again.
The instructions, typed and printed out from a computer, were slid into a book entitled Your Baby and Child. I took them both into the living room, where I sat on one of the pillow-ticking sofas, flipping through the pages of the book first. I looked at the chapter “Older Babies” and noted boldfaced headings such as “Beware of lightweight carriages” and “Don’t try to keep your baby clean.” I would have gotten both these things wrong. Treat him like a manual laborer. Skin is the most washable material of any in your house. The advice seemed counterintuitive and random, as if it had said, Whack him along the the neck with scarlet mittens from Belgium. Sarah’s pages seemed sane by comparison. Tassie, When Emmie gets up you will know: she whimpers then goes into a full cry. Reintroduce yourself to her. The changing table is right there in her room (where the crying will be coming from). All the changing supplies are on the shelf. There are sippy cups for milk and juice in the kitchen and she can have whatever she wants to eat — that is, whatever you can find. Sane except for this part: I have arranged for some risotto to be FedExed to her but I will also bring her something home from the kitchen tonight.
FedExed risotto? I looked in the cupboard, and in addition to a jar of matzo balls that looked like something from high school biology, I saw little jars of organic peas, carrots, and bananas for toddlers. I knew babysitters had a bad reputation for eating baby food, and although I was hungry — a starving college student! — I would try to avoid opening one up right away. Perhaps later. The bananas, I knew, were puddingy and delicious. I had heard of a woman who once, in a pinch, served banana baby food as a dessert, in parfait dishes, at a dinner party in Dellacrosse.
I stared at those bananas. Since Mary-Emma was going to get FedExed risotto, maybe … I could not resist. Besides, she was old for this food and could eat regular bananas, a bunch of which sat on the counter. I twisted open the top and wolfed it down with a spoon, then rinsed the jar and tossed it into the recycling, which was a clear plastic bag torn to hang on the knob of the back door. Though most things about the house announced themselves with clarity, others I had to figure out.
From upstairs came a whimper, then a full cry. Sarah hadn’t shown me around the house, so I had to find the staircase myself. There were actually two staircases, side by side, meeting at a windowed landing midway, and then they merged and became one, going the rest of the short way up, where a plastic gate, suction-cupped to the wall, blocked one’s path. I stepped over it with a kind of scissors kick and then made my way toward the cry. I passed a bathroom with walls painted the pale brown of a paper bag; on the sink was an assortment of prescription pills in their vials, as if someone were collecting beads, getting ready to make a necklace. I passed a bedroom with a mission bed that had perhaps failed at its mission, and a cherry dresser that perhaps had not. Atop it was a jewelry box with the phyllo thin drawers of a beekeeper’s hive.
The baby’s room as promised appeared to be on a higher floor yet, the door to which at first I could not find. The crying was at the west end of the house, but when I opened doors to find a staircase I found only closets. There was a short pause and then full-scale wailing began.
It was maddening trying to figure out how to get to it. I wandered in and out of the rooms in a low-level panic that prevented me from taking full notice of them, though they seemed both elegantly pastel and cluttered to my darting, searching eye. At the east end of the hall, on the left, I saw an open doorway. I lunged toward it, found yet another stairwell gate locked in place. But the actual wooden door was swung wide open, so I stepped over that gate, too, onto steps thickly carpeted in dull earwax gold. Through a tiny window at another landing, framed in the cross pieces, I could see spiny winter treetops and telephone wire. The staircase wound around, and then there it was, the nursery spread out beneath the eaves. The angled ceilings and walls were painted a pale wheat yellow, like a chablis, and at the windows at either end of the space hung curtains of sheer white over heavy, room-darkening shades. A double nightlight in lurid orange plugged up the electrical socket just to the left of a changing table and dresser. Emmie’s white crib, with its Winnie-the-Pooh bumpers and bedding, was in the far corner, and she was standing, clinging to its rail. In the short time that I’d not seen her, her silky black hair had fallen out and in its stead tight, blondish-brown curls were growing in, the start of an afro, really. It looked almost like a wig. When she saw it was me, her crying momentarily stopped in wonder.
“Hey, Mary-Emma,” I said, returning her, at least halfway, to her former name. She looked at me, then resumed wailing. But when I went to lift her out of the crib, she was eager, and clung to me and quieted down. She was warm and soft and smelled of powder and pee. I took her to the changing table, where she lay passively. I pulled off her balloon-print trousers and disposable diaper, which was made of a soft, strangely layered paper I’d never seen before and which peeled away from her pink-brown bottom like the paper from poultry giblets. The room was dark from the still-drawn shades, and the air was moist from a humidifier. I fumbled around on the shelf over the changing table for a plastic box of wipes and accidentally knocked it to the floor.
“Uh-oh!” said Emmie. She already knew both the sound and the language of things going wrong.
“It’s OK,” I said. The wipes were in a heater, and so the falling was loud. Luckily none of the wipes came out and the heater light stayed on, so I assumed nothing was broken. Heated wipes! I know my own mother would be appalled by such things. As a baby, I would have gotten the chilly wipes of winter, or frozen dabs with unheated cotton balls, or a quick tepid washcloth, if I was lucky. My mother probably soothed my diaper rash with ice cubes from her soda glass. Still, I did not feel sorry for myself. I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn’t quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around her, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing — the opposite of my childhood — and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn’t matter what happened to you as a girclass="underline" you ended up the same.
Once Mary-Emma was changed and sprinkled piney and dry with some silky herbal rice starch, I carried her downstairs, stepping awkwardly over the plastic baby gates. I found myself saying “Wheeeee!” and “Upsy-oopsy.” Mary-Emma just looked at me with neutral interest. It was a look I’d forgotten and never saw anymore in grown people. But it was the best. It was fantastically engaged: scholarly, unjudging, and angelic. We stood on the landing, deciding which staircase to descend. “Which one?” I asked her. “This one?” Ah, once more: the uncertainty of the adult world. And she thrust out her arm and pointed toward the one that led to the kitchen. She knew her way around already, or was at least acting like it for purposes of displaying authority. I seemed to have little authority whatsoever but to be instead her happy maidservant. The tinier the child, the more you were the servant, I knew. Older children were more subservient, less queenly and demanding.