Rockaway (17 page)

“I can't wait to see them.”

“It's amazing, how everything's really coming along
now. Being away from home, being here, it's all been so . . . generative. Really defining. So don't worry about me, all right? I'm fine. I'm doing it. I'm in the groove.”

Emily nods, thinking. “The truth is . . .” she pauses, “you were always the talented one. You were blessed that way. I used to be so jealous.”

“Oh,” Sarah says. She looks away from Emily's gaze, pushes her hands back onto her belly. “Well, thanks.”

“So, when's the exhibit happening? Is there a date set? Michael and I can escape the kids for a few days maybe, come out for it? I'd love to be there.”

“It's not really that definite, yet. I'll want to show her all the work I've done here, the whole series, first. The woman with the gallery. Consult with her about the details, the framing, the installation. It's still way down the road. Don't worry, I'll let you guys know.”

A faint eggy smell breezes in. Probably the compost, she thinks. She removes her hand from Emily's belly to stretch her arms for a moment, flex her own bones. Emily drinks some juice, then offers up the glass.

“You want some more?” Sarah asks.

“No, for you. Go ahead and finish it.”

Sarah swallows the last of the juice. “Hey,” she tells Emily, “you know, maybe you could write the text for the catalog? Would you like that?”

“Sure, I'd love to.”

She smiles, puts her hand back on Emily's stomach, slides slow hard circles, hard, harder.

“You can stop if you want,” Emily says. “Really.”

“No, I like doing this.”

“I did also think, though . . .” Emily drifts her hand across Elijah's forehead. “After Rachel was born, and then now, I do think there's one part about having kids that you'd really like—”

“Look, I know I'm missing out. It's the most primally important life experience there is, right? I get that. But I've got so much other stuff going on in my life, I just—”

“Believe me, Sarah, I'm not proselytizing. But
this
part, I mean. This is my favorite. This is the best.” Emily kisses the top of Elijah's head.

“Breastfeeding?”

“It isn't like a guy doing it. It's totally different.”

“It must be an amazing feeling.”

“You want to?”

Sarah's hand stops in mid-circuit. “Breastfeed Elijah?”

“Sure. See what it feels like.”

“I don't exactly have any milk.”

“Neither do I. He's sucking down colostrum, now. Anyway, I told you, it's more of a comfort thing for him. The closeness.”

“I don't know . . .” The idea of baring her own small breast, of tucking her tiny pink point of a nipple into his
baby mouth, feels all wrong. Fraudulent. Like a little girl playacting, outside-the-lines lipstick stolen from a big sister's drawer, high-heeled shoes sneaked from a mommy's closet, spooning pretend food into a baby doll's hard plastic mouth. She feels faintly queasy, must be that smell, compost and baby vomit, this rancid oil.

There's a sudden, lumpy throb beneath her hand, knobbing Emily's belly. “Hey,” Sarah says, laughing, “take it easy, kid. We know you're in there.”

“Any time, Ariel,” Emily says tiredly. “We're ready and waiting. We're excited to meet you. Any time you're ready.” She pulls her nipple from Elijah's baby-drunk face, and dabs at his chin with the diaper. “It does make me a little sad, I guess,” she says to Sarah. “That you'll miss out on this.”

Actually, it's a cliché, isn't it? Sarah thinks, studying her. “Nursing Mother,” too banal, like a subway ad for La Leche League. A cheesy Hallmark Mother's Day card. All those relentless Mary-and-baby-Jesus icons. No, she can't paint Emily now. She is supposed to find her beautiful this way, she knows, still beautiful, even more beautiful, a woman's body ripe with fruit, performing this miraculous function, pregnancy, birth, but what has happened to this body is just awful. So sad. She can't draw her in tribute now, it would be something else. It wouldn't be kind. Like an anatomical study, faintly Darwinian. She's aesthetically distasteful, now. Scarred. That ugly brown line bisecting her abdomen,
down to the pubic bone, a leftover from her two previous pregnancies; it looks like a trail of ants, Sarah thinks, crushed by a careless foot.

“Sarah?” Emily strains to raise up Elijah's slack, sleepy body, to hand him over, offering him. “You want to? Yes?”

“No. Thanks, but . . .”
The most important thing in the world
, she can hear herself recite generously to Emily, but it isn't. It's the most
common
thing in the world, farcically pedestrian. It's no great achievement, anybody can have a baby, be a mother, idiots, drunks, teenagers, dogs, there's no singular or sacred experience here.

“You sure?” Emily's kind smile is maddening, a complacent smirk.

She's trying so hard to offer me something, Sarah thinks, but I'm the one who has it all. I'm just here visiting this life, but she's stuck in it, she's trapped. I get to leave when I want. I'm the one with all the freedom, all the choices, the blessings, like she says, the incredible paintings to do, the real achievement, future, an exciting, unencumbered life all my own ahead of me.

“I don't think so,” Sarah says. “But thanks.”

“You really can, if you want to.”

That drifting, putrid odor again, cloying. “You smell that?” she asks Emily. “That's awful. I think the compost is too close to the house. It's encroaching. It's taking over the garden.” Sarah laughs shortly, gets up, and pulls the curtains
fully closed against the smell. “I'm going to go bring in the chard. Should we have it for dinner? Do that thing with the garlic?”

There's always such a difference, she thinks, leaving without waiting for Emily to answer, between not having a choice—and having a choice but choosing no.

WHEN THE CONTRACTIONS first start, just after eight that night, Sarah goes to the darkening garden and selects a grotesquely oversized and rubbery zucchini, which takes her forty minutes to grate. In between spooning batches of green-flecked batter into loaf pans, she refills glasses of juice for Emily, presses down hard with an orange on her sacrum, and, with Michael, helps her pace the living room near the birthing tub. She pours herself a large glass of McCallan 18 over ice and sips it while she makes nine loaves of zucchini bread, factoring in one for the midwife to snack on during labor, and two to take home with her afterward in thanks, like a party favor. Aggie brings Rachel and Elijah into the kitchen, and slices them thick sweet hunks from the family loaves, spread with butter. Sometime after midnight Nana, balancing on her walker like a pro, and Emily's parents Leah and Sid, her aunt Rose and cousin Susan, all arrive together
in a car from New York, with bags of deli food from Zabar's. There are loud happy greetings when they see Sarah, a flurry of embracing and kissing and chatter—
Did you have a good summer, sweetheart
? Nana asks her,
Have you enjoyed the house? I'll be back next week, when are you going home?
and Sarah nods, smiles, excuses herself to clean up the kitchen—punctuated by Emily's groans and Michael's frustrated efforts to hook up the water hose to the birthing tub properly, and the oven timer
dinging
on another done batch of bread. The midwife shows up at dawn, yawning but perky, just as Emily is easing into the tub. Michael crawls in behind her, so she can lean against him. Sarah gives them both a mouthful of crushed ice. Rachel and Elijah lean over the tub, patting ripples into the water with their small, sticky hands. Nana, propped by her walker, and Leah, Sid, Rose, and Susan press near, their mouths all dropped into open, giddy smiles. Sarah remembers Emily's mother Leah making her all those snacks after school, the bananas with chunky peanut butter and homemade squash soups, with those same big, caretaking smiles on her face, and Emily's father Sid driving her home after it got dark, waiting to make sure there was someone there before driving off so Sarah wouldn't be all alone.
Okay, so you'll be okay, Sarah?
She remembers wanting to go back to Emily's house, just stay and live there all the time. Emily's family, robust, huge with cousins, grandparents, uncles and aunts, Emily's color-coordinated
outfits, Leah playing board games with them, trying on makeup with them, buying Sarah her first box of Tampax, taping one of Sarah's drawings to their refrigerator, and Sid showing up at school events, even the daytime ones, the Open Houses, the art shows, cheering loudly for Sarah, too, because she was there alone, buying one of Sarah's girlhood paintings for twenty-five dollars to hang proudly on his office wall, dancing with Sarah at Emily's Bat Mitzvah and Sweet Sixteen parties, teaching Sarah how to ride a bicycle—
not
her father, she suddenly remembers, sees, it was
Emily's
father Sid who taught her, even that was Emily's, the father who ran alongside the wobbly, released-from-his-grip bike, applauding and cheering her on, the father who knelt and comforted her, cleaned her skinned knees, Emily sharing all that with her, but none of it ever really hers.

But the lemons in your hair, that was yours, she reminds herself, you had that. Your own mother combing your hair, and your own father at the beach, watching to make sure the waves didn't carry you off and disappear you forever. And the birthday parties, the real, once-upon-a-time parties, before her brother died, when it was still okay to celebrate that she was there and alive. She had that, it was real and they were there, they gave her all of that. Before they were broken or disappeared. They did their best.

So, that's it, then, why isn't that enough for you, it has to
be. Lemons and ocean waves and candles on cakes. A mouthful of honey. Your parents, waving to you from shore.

The labor gets worse, and the groans more ragged, and a thrill flares through Sarah, a delight in every looming, ugly, torturing second of it. When Emily starts to scream from somewhere deep inside, Sarah gulps from her glass of McCallan and thinks about hospitals and doctors, and what if something's really wrong this time, maybe she needs an episiotomy or a Cesarean. Maybe they should just hack her open like a chicken. Or they could go at Emily's belly like it's a piñata, the whole family taking turns with a broomstick. She wonders if having this baby's going to kill Emily, tear her up for real, spill all her insides so the tub is a giant vat of drained-out, frothy Emily-blood, and a dead Emily, Michael crying, everyone hysterical at losing her, the baby still lodged inside, gotten rid of with Emily, and then they'd all turn to her, Sarah, she'd be all they had left, their child, wife, mommy, and they'd all put their arms around her and let her hold back on. It would all be hers, the house in the country with the sheep and the ducklings, the garden and buzzing, endlessly honey-rich bees, the nanny to raise the kids, the maid to clean, the rich husband, the healthy, able mother and father there to take care of her and keep her safe, the art on an easel just waiting for when she felt like getting around to it, because it doesn't matter, there's plenty of time, no
tick tick tick
, there's nothing at stake, nothing
to prove or define. Even the tub full of hot blood would be hers, if she wanted to bathe in it like the Countess in the painting and be frozen in young time forever, all of this would be her home, hers.

Emily screams, and Sarah stumbles over it, blinking, then steps back behind everyone to get out of the way, retreats to the kitchen, gets a handful of ice from the freezer, and there, taped to the refrigerator, is her little-girl crayon drawing: colorful flowers, a happy sun beaming spokes of sunshine, a doggy, three sheep, ducklings,
My Family
, two grown-up and two child-sized smiley stick figures all holding hands before a thatched-roof cottage. My perfect happy family.

No, it isn't hers. It's Rachel's drawing, she realizes. It's not her family, her house, it never will be. It's all a mere fantasy, a birthday candle wish. A childish game of pretend.

She pours more whiskey.

Emily screams again, and, leaning sideways from the edge of the room, Sarah can still see into the tub; she can see the flush of cloudy liquid from between Emily's legs, displacing the tub water with its thrust, first white, then a brilliant crimson, then the dark crowning of Ariel's head. Emily takes a slow, deep moan of breath as Michael presses his mouth to the side of her damp forehead. The midwife slides her fingertips just enough inside Emily to coax out a thin lump of shoulder, then, in another brief bright swirl
of blood, a white glow of skin, the baby comes rushing through, kicks its legs free of its folded, packed-tight shape, and opens its tiny tadpole underwater mouth. The midwife lifts the dripping body from the water and settles it onto Emily's heaving chest. Leah and Sid hug each other, Nana is clapping her hands with joy at the birth of her seventh great-grandchild, Rachel is squealing, wanting to touch the baby, and everyone else slowly begins to breathe just as the baby takes its first whimpering choke of air. The dun-colored cord still links from the baby's belly down into the water, into Emily, and from where Sarah is standing the refraction at the water's surface gives the illusion that the cord has already been sliced in two.