We came up with it while driving home from dinner. The sky, I remember, had that early morning brightness, though it was nearly ten at night, and there was a full moon without any tricks—no superpowers or strawberry hues or harvest indications. Just light that shone everything into blue. It looked like the world when you’re leaving early for somewhere, and it gave us the feeling that we had a long way to go.
I remember that when we came up with it, I was the one driving—sober, hoping to protect the fetus which was persistently not inside me. Despite how we tried. My sobriety had become a wishful habit, but never a discussion. We were clumsy when it came to concrete conversations. Except sometimes, drunk. But I was sober.
Through the blue darkness of the car, I had asked if he saw the baby that was sitting in the high chair near our table at dinner.
“The waitress was directing questions towards him, like, May I take this plate out of your way? Would you like to see a wine list?”
“Right. And it’s funny, because he’s a baby. A bit as old as time.”
“Yeah, the bit is tired, I get it—but he kept nodding!”
“Babies can nod,” Dan said, not humoring me.
“A serious nod! A thoughtful, adult nod.”
“And the parents were so amused?” Dan asked.
“I was amused!”
“Parents err on the side of terrible,” he said quietly. “All of them think they’re the first to do it.”
I shot him a dirty look, which he tried to remedy: “Until we come around. We’re really gonna reinvent it.”
“We will. Besides, it was the girl, not the parents.”
“Right. Waitresses are terrible too.”
“Well, they’re called servers now.”
We stayed quiet for a couple miles. Dan’s thoughts were far off and indecipherable. He put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed.
Things were tense, I can admit that. But we were working on it.
It had only been that way since March, when I found out Dan was cheating on me with the babysitter. A cliché from which I thought I would be spared, being childless. Our friends, on the other hand, and most of our neighborhood, were far from childless. They were greedily bursting with children.
In the early years of our marriage, we came to the conclusion that the vasectomy he’d had reversed following the end of his first marriage had seriously lowered his fertility—perhaps even forever severed our possibility of becoming parents. We fucked recklessly, like someone would take it away from us. But as we settled into each other we wanted more, and soon sex was unspokenly trying for something.
And we really did try. Dan, in the notes he left around the house for me, began making remarks about what a good mother I would be. We bickered over paint color for nursery walls—my opinion being that chartreuse is timeless and genderless, his that it’s reminiscent of vomit and that lavender would make for a calm child, a sensitive boy. We browsed funny baby shirts online. We had sloppy sex with no precaution. We wanted it to stick.
Now it was a sore subject for us both.
Being surrounded by children made me gush all the more maternal. It turned Dan bitter. And it made both of us always on the outside of something, the parents all parts of a whole: full of rules and standard and clothing swaps as the little bodies grew.
Sourced from that club and handed house to house was a very small handful of babysitters. One of them in particular was in high demand. An honor student, a virtual learner attending a prestigious university on the other coast. Probably bilingual. And if my husband’s opinion means anything, a good lay.
There were only a few nights when I felt something was wrong. Like when I was in Columbus for three days visiting my sister, and Dan didn’t call once, even to say hi. Or when he told me he was out playing cards with a friend, and later that friend’s wife told me about their beautiful date, how we had to go to that restaurant. He had no alibi. The third time I got a bad feeling I still didn’t trust it, I thought myself paranoid, and it was so casual when I asked him. There on the purple loveseat where his legs were draped heavy over mine, the TV playing Jeopardy reruns, I just asked him outright: “Are you lying to me about something?” He immediately confessed, and crumpled into my lap, weeping until I wept, too. Then I was silent for many hours before weeping again, which made him weep too. This went on for some time, back and forth, for a week or two.
I suppose it was still going on like that the night we came up with it.
At first we didn’t talk about the affair. But there was one week in March, following a silent spell, when I grilled him for details. The ones we hadn’t been over yet. I asked them all calmly, with morbid, unflinching curiosity.
Did you go down on her? Could you make her cum? Did you think of me during? Did that turn you off? Is she even drinking age? What did she smell like? Did you fuck in Christina’s house and Frances’, or just the one house? Did you use protection? Did you think you could knock her up or something?
I hated every answer. I hated every second of it. But he clearly hated it more, so I kept on.
All that’s to say, where the conversation went next that night, driving beneath shadows of the moon-lit trees, it wasn’t a ludicrous topic for us. We had decided after my night of incessant questioning and his subsequent breakdown, that it would be best if the babysitter’s name—it was Sabrina —not be unspeakable between us.
Which was why Dan told me about that baby. The newborn who Sabrina babysat. How it never cried. According to Sabrina —he once called her Sab in conversation, a slip that left me mute with rage for nearly three entire days—the five-month-old wept only at the most appropriate times and for purely communicative purposes, such as to signify: Excuse me, but I shit myself; I’m becoming hungry; Has anyone seen my mother? And once the child was soothed and the situation solved, the baby fell calm. He was as simple as that.
“Whose newborn?” I asked.
“Oh, Joel’s. Remember?”
Joel and Alyssa, our neighbors in the stone and stucco house on the other end of the cul-de-sac. We were close with them during the first couple months of living here. This newborn was their third son. The other two were high school age and already away at a boarding school in Western Massachusetts. The gossip being that their most recent child was an accident. A fact evidenced by the frequency with which the parents left town, as they had when they were childless. To Cape Cod, Nantucket, Montauk, seemingly on an endless honeymoon.
The first time we’d had dinner with them, Alyssa asked how Dan and I met. I hardly thought it was an interesting story. It was just after undergrad, and my friend Susan took me to a bar down the street that was holding an event, a ploy to bring in an older crowd of former regulars-turned-professionals. Reformed barflies. It was speed dating.
“Like romantic music chairs?” Alyssa had interrupted.
“More like marathon interviewing, but kind of sexy.”
I don’t remember the questions Dan asked me – mostly, I remember the ones he didn’t. The other men seemed to share a script: Do you want to travel? Do you have children? Do you want children? How many? Do you run, hike, are you active?
When really, what they wanted to know: Will you give me a baby?
Dan, I think, wanted to know about my favorite type of dessert.
I looked over at Dan, who was fidgeting with the radio for a program he liked. He found a world music segment, and the signal faded in and out and went silent entirely when we crossed uneven pavement. His thick hair, graying early around the ears, stuck up bird-like and attentive in messy chunks on the back of his head. I asked him if he’d heard the gossip about the newborn. He had.
“Don’t get me wrong, I think some of our neighbors are just insane.”
“Of course,” I said.
“But I see where they’re coming from with this one.”
“Exactly!” I said. “Those two have always been travel types! Career people! They just vacation and email and email on vacation—there’s no way the kid gets any attention! I swear even Alyssa said so. That’s why they love boarding school. It’s like empty-nesting early.”
Dan laughed. He was getting riled up, too. He’d had two martinis at dinner.
“I mean, who the fuck lets a 20-year-old watch their brand-new baby four nights a week?”
I stopped laughing. “Four?”
“Oh, it’s been a total drama,” Dan said. “Everyone’s pissed. Joel and Alyssa totally monopolized her schedule.”
When I spoke again, it was as though my voice came on its own accord, and it sounded serious when I asked, “What nights is she there?”
Dan thought for a moment. “Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays. And Saturdays.”
“Saturdays?”
“Saturdays. Yeah.”
After that, we had six back-road miles until home. Dan and I were nearly silent for all of them, thinking loudly. It was the closest I had felt to his thoughts since the earlier days of our marriage, when he could make me laugh with only a well-timed glance. Or even before that, in the very beginning, when we were graduate students assisting the same professor, helping each other with edits while reviewing the professor’s work. We would make indecipherable scribbles in the margins and interpret each other’s chicken scratch. Our silence felt thick with that old telepathy. Like he was sitting in my head and whispering things at the same moment that I thought them.
We were brimming with parenthood, with righteousness. With a schedule.
I turned onto our street and there, on the other end of the cul-de-sac, sat Sabrina’s white Prius in Joel and Alyssa’s driveway.
The kitchen light was on, the bedrooms dark.
As we pulled into our driveway Dan finally spoke again. His voice aloud was so real and familiar, it startled bumps onto my arms.
“You’re going to love him. He’s a lot cuter than most kids this young.”
“You’ve seen him?
He paused. “Sabrina showed me a picture once.”
The honesty was fine. But I did imagine the phone in her hands, balanced on her pinky, her fingernails superficially manicured to be too long for everyday tasks, painted a juvenile color. Imagined the hand resting on his naked chest as she flipped through her photo album post-coitally, sharing images of her life. Her palm resting on his nipple. It made me want to hit him.
But then I imagined an infant witness sitting in the backseat, learning about love from us, and I didn’t. A child would be great for us. Would help us remember what true patience was.
We sat in the running car long enough for Dan to send a text. He kept his eyes on the screen even as I went inside. Grabbed our emergency bags from the closet. Dan’s favorite sweater and an armful of blankets. His eyes were still on the screen when I came back and slipped back into the passenger seat to wait.
A notification came up. His door opened. And I was left in the dark, turning up the heat. In the rearview mirror I watched through the lazy clouds of exhaust gathering behind our car as a sliver of light opened into a foyer. I could see the silhouettes of Dan, and the babysitter, and I could see her clueless and wanting and young as she beckoned him in one last time.
Recommended reading: Like Life by Lorrie Moore; Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson; Squandering the Blue by Kate Braverman; Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy; Teenager by Bud Smith; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver; White Angel by Michael Cunningham; The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin; The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditvlenson
