In a voice that makes the windows rattle, the baby orders the dog to return the baby he swallowed. At that moment, a lion comes in and eats the dog.
“Take me away, sweetlove,” says the lady, “before something really bad happens. I like you better than that smelly baby.”
She says her name is Marie, though she is a different Marie.
The baby reaches into the lion’s mouth and pulls out the dog, then reaches into the dog’s mouth to pull out the other baby, who seems a little smaller for having been eaten.
The lady is so overjoyed she announces that both babies can sleep in the same bed with her if they promise not to kick or wet. When they all go into the lady’s room, they discover that someone has eaten her bed.
Marie requests a private interview. The request comes in the form of a note delivered to me by the baby.
I tell her as soon as we are alone that I don’t like her using the baby as a go-between.
“I make such a mess of things.” she says. “I’m terrible. I really am. I really am terrible.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Oh, yes. It was a terrible thing to do. I’m always doing terrible things.” She laughs with self-mockery, offering one or two jewel-like tears. “The baby, you know, your baby, like, doesn’t dig me anymore. I told him yesterday that in my opinion it would be to his benefit to have more peer-group experiences, and now he won’t talk to me and he won’t even look at me.”
“He doesn’t like to be pushed into anything. Which doesn’t excuse his being rude. If you like, I’ll talk to him about it.”
She throws back her head in a melodramatic pose. “You people make me so angry. No offense. But a baby needs some kind of structure from his adult models. You can’t just let him do whatever he wants to do…. Now I’ve said too much and you’re going to ask me to leave.” Her face turns a deep red.
I indicate that we’re receptive in this house to differences of opinion.
“He’s really a love,” she says. “He really is.” She gets down on her knees and pleads with me to change my approach.
Her zealousness is hard to resist. “Have you talked to my wife?” I ask.
“I’ve always had more success with men,” she says.
ANOTHER VERSION OF THE SAME STORY
The baby tiptoes into Marie’s room while she is sleeping, or, in any event, giving the impression of being asleep, and asks her if she’d like to hear the story of the Sleeping Beauty. She’s heard it too many times, she murmurs, for it still to be fresh and exciting for her. Besides, she’s still, ummm, asleep.
“This is a different Sleeping Beauty,” says the baby. “This Sleeping Beauty is awake.”
Awake? The idea seems to interest the baby-sitter for a moment or two before it slips away into the dead spaces of unrequited loss.
“She’s not really awake,” says the baby, improvising. “I just said that to make the story sound different. Well, I’ll tell it to you in a very low voice. Okay?”
The baby-sitter seems to agree to this compromise, though falls asleep in the middle of the story. When she wakes up — it is at the most surprising part of the story — she is in a bad mood and says that the baby has no business being in her bed. “Only people I ask to come into my bed are allowed to be there,” she says. “Now go away.”
The baby is tenacity itself, refuses dismissal, buries himself under the covers, attempts to charm.
Marie rolls him over the edge of the bed, like a sausage, tumbling him to the floor with a bang.
“I won’t tell you any more stories,” the baby says, refusing against disposition of habit to let her see the pain she has brought to his life.
When the baby takes himself away, Marie comes after him, saying she’s sorry, inviting him back. “I’m always like this in the morning, baby. When I’m fast asleep, I can’t bear to be touched. I’ll tell you a story if you come back.”
“Well, I’m not coming back,” says the baby.
All day he refuses to look at the baby-sitter and he refuses to talk to her.
The next morning the baby forgets that he is angry with his baby-sitter and he asks her if he can sleep in her bed.
“Why don’t you go out and play?” she says, turning her back on him.
The baby will not. The baby will not do anything she asks of him.
Contemplating the nature of things in the bathroom that adjoins my study, I overhear this exchange between the baby and Marie.
“Do you love me?”
“I love you.”
“Do you really love me?”
Kissing sounds, or what I imagine to be the sounds of kissing, follow. Moments after that, I hear the door to the baby’s room click shut.
Hours pass. Sibilant whispers snake through the house like a gas leak from some undeterminable quarter.
I am, for no reason I can explain to myself, disturbed by the behavior of the baby and the baby-sitter. It is just not polite, I tell myself, for the two of them to stay by themselves all day in a closed room. It is also, I should imagine, not particularly healthy to be locked in that way. After a point, as an act of responsibility, I knock gently on the baby’s door. “Is everything all right in there?”
I am answered by giggles, which I find not a little shocking under the circumstances.
I mumble something about it perhaps not being a good idea, not being exactly healthy, spending a lot of time in a closed room, do you think? More giggles. Some boos.
“It happens to be a beautiful day out,” I say, and when I get no further answer, go out for a walk to prove my point.
My wife returns from shopping late in the afternoon, laden with packages. She laments the difficulty of finding anything in the stores she really likes. Everything is not right, has been created with someone else in mind.
I make no mention of the baby and Marie.
After my wife shows me the things she’s bought, a pair of socks and a tie for me, she asks if anything interesting happened while she was gone.
“Nothing interesting,” I say.
She calls the baby, and gets no answer. “Did they go out?” she asks.
“They’re in his room.”
“Are they?”
She is about to raise an eyebrow when Marie and the baby glide into the dining room, holding hands, the baby’s face aglow. At the dinner table, they exchange secretive smiles, which do not, of course, escape notice. The baby sings to himself as he eats, his mother observing him with pained concentration.
After dinner, baby and baby-sitter mumble their excuses and disappear upstairs.
“They seem to be hitting it off,” I say to make conversation. “Do they?” my wife says. She presses her face into my shoulder and holds on.
The next day, when the baby comes into the study to borrow my typewriter, I ask him what he does in his room with Marie when they have the door closed.
He shrugs. “Things,” he says.
A certain awkwardness appears to have come between us. I inform him, looking out the window as I deliver my speech, that his mother and I would prefer him to keep the door slightly open when he is alone in the room with his sitter.
When he is gone, I regret having yielded to what seems to me unexamined impulse. I call him back. “Just because it disturbs us,” I say, “it doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s wrong.”
“If the door is open,” he says, “someone might come in and someone might go out. We do Batman, Batwoman, and Batbaby in the room, and if the door is open, the baby could run away.”
We punch each other gently and hug, having come to a better understanding of our respective situations.