“Kaya,” I said, knowing she could hear, “get off Mommy so Beanie can eat.”
“She used to make jokes: ‘When I’m drooling in the corner, smother me with a pillow.’?”
“She’s not drooling.”
“Yet. But maybe this is when I’m supposed to kill her.”
“Don’t kill her tonight.”
“All right.”
“Or at least make it look like an accident.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. Kaya, stop it.”
“Sorry.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
I didn’t know who she was talking to.
If Robin needed help she’d call Elizabeth, who lived eighteen feet away. They liked to stand in the alley between our two houses and talk intensely as the girls rode up and down on their tricycles. Robin talked about Beanie’s sleep patterns and Kaya’s emotional IQ. Elizabeth talked about her fourteen-month-old’s language problems and her seven-year-old caving to the mind games of her five-year-old. They talked about clients Elizabeth saw for psychotherapy and a story editor who tortured Robin. They discussed clothing, did fashion shows for each other: can I get away with this, is this consistent with my persona? They talked about cutting off their hair, glass beads, making jewelry, maternity undergarments, the anti-inflammatory properties of turmeric, hot yoga, colon cleansing, the perils of a Montessori education, the naughty spanking trilogy, the sexy vampire movies, postpartum body issues, hip pain, back spasms, stretched stomachs, cosmetic surgery where they freeze your fat. If you got her talking long enough, Robin mentioned her weight, that she was bigger now, so she thought her head looked too small. They talked about sex and marriage, aging parents, the transformation of a loved one in decline, the terrible suffering of their mothers, helplessness and guilt.
I hung up and drove the last fifty miles to campus. After unpacking the car I went to dinner and ate barbecued chicken under the big white tent, at a table with Howard, a bald guy with a tanned, polished head, and Tina or Dina, who’d come here last year and made sculptures out of wire. After dinner we crowded onto the porch, where a poet read a poem. Carl gave his welcoming remarks, urging us not to climb through windows if we lost our dorm keys. Then we went off to see the theater company do a mash-up of Chekhov plays, set in the 1930s, with Uncle Vanya shooting himself in the second act, wandering in and out with a bandage on his head. In the big hall of the main building I heard Tabitha give the same talk she gave last year, about her spiritual journey beyond incest, into alcoholism, then past that, into group sex and casino gambling, ending in healing and forgiveness. In the gallery there were photos taken by an American soldier during some of the hundreds of trips he’d made while bringing fuel to stranded convoys all over Afghanistan, of the landscape, people, and culture, before he himself was finally blown up and killed. The photos survived. I ate some chocolate-dipped strawberries and talked to a woman with blue streaks in her hair.
Then I went back to the Barn, hung my pants on a nail in the wall by the refrigerator, and thought about Robin, what she was doing, what I’d be doing at that hour if I were home. It was just the usual struggle to stay in love, keep it hot, keep it real, the boredom and revulsion, the afterthought of copulation, the fight for her attention, treating me like a roommate, or maybe like a vision of some shuddering gelatinous organ she’d forgotten still worked inside her.
First a guy sticks something in you. Then a thing grows inside your body. Eventually it tears its way out, leaving a trail of destruction. Then it’s outside your body, but still sucking on you. It makes you weird, these different people in you and on you. Robin had had two C-sections and felt that they’d put her back together wrong the second time. A cold electric twinge shot down her back, down her leg, while walking, sitting, standing, or lying down. It defied any cure, painkillers, epidurals. For a while she wore a small black box on her belt that electro-stimmed her buttocks.
In a previous life, she bit my neck and licked my ear when we did it. After Kaya, I worried about courting her in my pajamas, with our little angel breathing down the hall, and lost focus and cringed as Robin’s patience ran out if I finished too fast or not fast enough and overstayed my welcome. Bad sex was better than nothing, but Beanie effectively ended the badness. Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, turned weirdly okay. Like our anniversary, we weren’t sure anymore when it was supposed to happen. And, with the exception of my tongue on her clitoris every who knows when, she didn’t need to be touched. She had vibrators for that. I think she mostly thought of what I did as a way to save batteries.
Our sex life hadn’t been mauled by depression, routine, or conflict as much as it had been mauled by distraction, diffusion, a surfeit of beauty. Was that it? Our children’s vitality and strangeness, their softness, shocked me every day. Their lightness and willingness and spirit and stupidity surprised me, their readiness to bravely step into a world they couldn’t understand, packed with swimming pools, speeding cars, blazing sun, fanged dogs, stinging bees, heat, silent anger, slammed doors, inexplicable demands, funny hats slammed on their heads, and constantly from every direction these giants with twelve-pound heads, ten times their weight, five times their height, grabbing, pushing, shoving past, talking loud, telling them how to think, what to want, how to treat their own impulses, which ones to kill, which to love. No to crawling inside a dishwasher or smacking your food when you chewed. Yes to climbing trees and sucking your toes. I was sad for the bleakness of a little kid’s bumbling existence, envious of the simplicity of their cause. They faced the world because they had no choice. Someone was crying. Someone had pooped his pants. They were explorers in a new land. Robin and I stood by them, in parallel formation, to witness and guide them.