“Yes.”
She didn’t ask whether I’d seen the low balance in our checking account, didn’t say a word about it, didn’t wonder whether I’d lost my mind, and when it was clear that she wouldn’t, I asked her. She said quietly that she’d ordered four pairs of boots and was planning to return three. The account had been wildly overdrawn, but I was so heartened by this news of her spending that I decided to announce my raise, and assured her that I would deposit the check ASAP, but she wasn’t listening or didn’t care.
“Don’t poke your brother with a fork.”
“I just wanna toch.”
“Cut it out, sweetie.”
“He likes it, Momma!”
Beanie screamed. Robin threatened Kaya with the loss of weekend television. He sat in a chair clipped to the side of the table, and clocked his sister warily. When it seemed that Kaya had lost interest in poking him, he went back to his applesauce.
“I’m finished.”
“Eat your avocado.”
“What’s dessert?” Robin told Kaya to bring the cookies.
Then she told me about her night. Beanie up at ten, then up at one for an hour. When he went back down, she worried that he’d wake up again, and that if she couldn’t fall back to sleep she’d be too tired and would blow her meeting. “Then I’m lying there worrying, trapped in this room, stuck in this bed, trapped like a convict, waiting for a peep from him, and every creak and bird noise and car out there sounds like it’s pretty much happening in my ear, my heart starts pounding and I wonder if I should get up and work, but I know I’ll hate my work and be infected by this insecurity about everything—then Kaya’s standing by my head, shoving a plastic doll in my face, and I’m so happy to see her I want to cry.”
I waited for her to direct the blame.
“Does that happen to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Every night.”
“How do you stand it?”
What if it wasn’t my fault?
“How do you get anything done?”
“I don’t.”
“And my face is covered in rosacea, on my chin, under my nose, behind my ears. I have stuff on it that makes it hard to move my skin, and when I do it cracks and burns.”
What if I was forgivable? What if this was just a phase? What if, in a few months, things improved? What if, underneath it all, she wanted what I wanted? What if, in the meantime, our needs for intimacy were mostly being met by our children? What if we’d been temporarily blown off course and still had a bright future ahead of us, with some acceptable level of insistent sadness woven into the fabric of time?
After the meeting she went to Iris’s house and talked to the caregivers about hygiene, then sat beside her mother for two hours. “I told her about my meeting. She was really proud. ‘You’re so smart, so beautiful.’ I think that was the best part of my day. I told her about the new show. ‘My beautiful, beautiful—’?” Robin was quiet for a second. “?‘Hey, what’s your name again?’?” She sighed. I tried to picture it. “I guess that was the worst part of my day.” I told her I was sorry.
I’d done a lot of horrible things that couldn’t be undone, and planned to write about those things, and was already sorry for that too, for how I was made, sorry for the way I am, that I wanted more, sorry for how badly at that very moment I missed being in bed, in the Barn, listening to the rain, buried deep inside Amy, breathing when she breathed. What did it mean? It meant new life. The first time I felt it, I thought I’d live forever. But I wouldn’t. I was just a body whizzing through time.
“Dementia,” Robin said, “is connected to estrogen. My dementia will start when menopause starts. But I’m not sure if it’s from not having enough estrogen or from having too much. I can’t remember, which is actually a sign of dementia.”
“You don’t have dementia.”
“Promise to kill me when I get like that.”
I promised, although I knew that what she really wanted was for me to be nice to her, to be kind and patient with everyone, and maybe in a few months our goddamned baby would sleep through the night.
But I wanted more. I wanted Robin to ask how I’d slept, whether I’d gone to the beach, was I having fun. I wanted some time to show her again who I was, for an hour or two on Sunday mornings, to lie in bed with nowhere to go, feeling cool sheets on my legs, talking about what we’d make for breakfast, listening to the sounds out the window of cars and birds. I wanted hugs and petting and inside jokes, us against the world. I wanted daily eroticism, dishy sex talk, innuendo, full-frontal hugs with her boobs mashed against me as she pinned me against the dishwasher, short bursts of stolen kisses while our shrimps played a room away, a warm body welded to mine, merging for a few seconds before we went our separate ways. I wanted her to put on a show, every night, wanted to feel as though she, or someone, would die from desire; I wanted her to want my body and call me beautiful. I wanted her to say “pussy” every once in a while, “my pussy,” whisper it in my ear, that sort of thing, use the different words for penis now and then, “cock,” “prick.”
What if I could ask for it in exchange for loving her, and for dragging her hair out of the shower drain, and carrying the fucking AC units up and down the basement steps, hauling the five-gallon water jugs, garbage and groceries, making sure to pay her parking tickets, dandling our babies every night, cooking light and tasty meals, scraping old rice off the floor under Beanie’s chair, folding and neatly placing her lacy undergarments back in her drawer of frilly things?
“Are you flying out to New Mexico alone?”
She didn’t answer. I was jealous. Although I was no more jealous than I would’ve been imagining Amy bending over to take it from Mike. Because I’d been away and had touched someone new, Robin had become strange to me all over again; her situation felt new and precarious, and tinged with excitement.
I recalled a night seven or eight years earlier, before we moved to D.C., seated in the corner of our kitchen in Lauraville, with our view of the cemetery. Danny and his wife, Elaine, had come to dinner. They had a new baby in the Snap-N-Go and Elaine was already pregnant again, which tormented us because we were in the middle of disgusting fertility stuff and our being able to have a kid was not looking good.