“Wow. What a lovely dinner you were making,” said Katie, as if we might just be able to reheat it. It was freezing and damp in the house because I’d left all the windows open, but everything was nonetheless still reeking of the stalled feast. We stood in the front hallway and looked around. There was a full, leaking pot on every burner, onion peels and pepper seeds and green bean ends and stems of all varieties all over the countertops, empty cans and food packages, a full blender with spatter stains all around (I am not a neat cook). Besides dinner, there were clothes strewn on every horizontal surface, notebooks scattered on the floor, piles of books absolutely everywhere. Our beds were not made. We had no clean clothes. Nearly nothing in the house was put away. We remembered vaguely about studying for exams, which at that point felt like several months ago, but had forgotten how much everything—even the baby as it turned out—had been on hold until after they were over.
“It’s a good thing we aren’t going home for Christmas,” said Katie, “because it’s going to take us until next year to clean this house.” It is a sad irony that while I am a good cook, I am a crappy housekeeper, and while Katie is a brilliant shopper and organizer of humans, she’s also a crappy housekeeper—she says between us we make two-thirds of the woman we’re each supposed to be—and so the house pretty frequently looked, if not quite this bad, not a whole lot better.
“We better get at it,” I said, but neither of us moved.
“Maybe a quick nap first?” she suggested.
“We could just torch the place for the insurance money,” I offered.
“We don’t have any insurance,” Katie pointed out.
“Oh. My. God,” said a voice behind us.
It was my grandmother. I actually wept with gratitude.
“What the hell happened here?” demanded my mom, coming up behind her.
“Man.” My dad whistled. “I’m glad I brought the tools.”
“I didn’t know your family was coming,” Katie squealed, delighted.
“Me neither,” I muffled from my mother’s arms.
“Well we had to see this baby, didn’t we,” my grandmother stated. “We left as soon as you called.” My father nodded bleary-eyed confirmation.
“Besides,” said my grandmother, “somebody needs to clean all this shit up.”
We cleaned and cleaned, threw away dinner, made new food for brunch, scrubbed the counters and floors and corners all around the house, dusted, mopped, and disinfected, washed, dried, and folded, found homes (or at least out-of-the-way piles) for all the books. In far less time than I would have predicted, the whole house looked and smelled like a place babies might like to be.
“This place has never been this clean,” said Katie.
“Enjoy it,” said my mother. “It’s not going to last the night.”
Then as if we were back in that movie I’d been imagining, the front door opened, and there stood Diane, Jill, and an enormous bundle of blankets I could only assume contained Atlas.
There was a lot of jostling and cooing over and at the baby and passing him around. Our parents offered sage advice on the right ways to hold him and lay him down and stop him from crying. We all watched Jill feed him and tried not to stare at her breasts. My grandmother force-fed everyone (she gets this from me). There was actually a fight over who got to change his diaper. Jason and Lucas came bearing gifts. There were so many concerned and capable hands that later in the afternoon, Jill took a nap, Katie took a walk, and my dad and I went out to rent a movie. Atlas mostly slept. When he woke, he fussed only briefly and noncommittally, and Jill fed him, and he went right back to sleep. Everyone said what a good baby he was.
I started to suspect this might be easier than I thought. I started to think that clearly we’d lucked out with one of those easy babies, and we’d be able to do this no problem. I was so relieved. We were, all three of us, positively giddy. Our parents, meanwhile, were exchanging knowing glances that I only understood later on. Towards night, when my parents and my grandmother finally got in the car to go to the hotel, when Lucas and Jason left too, I did not feel panicked or lost. I knew we could do this. I knew they weren’t far. When Diane hugged us all and walked out the door wishing us luck and promising to be back in the next day or so, I thought: don’t hurry, we’ll be fine. When it was just the four of us again—and the wonder of “just the” being followed by “four of us” stopped me but felt good and right—I turned off the light, put a blanket over Jill and Atlas napping on the sofa, sat with a small lamp in the kitchen, and started reading a book. For pleasure. It wasn’t even like the movie anymore—not that dramatic or involved—more like a commercial for quiet dishwashers or soft light bulbs. It didn’t look like what I thought my life would look like, but it felt like it, and that seemed realer and better to me. We had surmounted the hard parts, made a perfect baby, found another way to be a family. Happy ending! I wanted to turn off the lights, walk quietly into my bedroom, and roll the credits.
Of course, anyone with a brain realizes that birth is not an ending, it’s a beginning. And also that even if your baby is pretty quiet his first day home from the hospital when lots of people are around and everyone wants to hold him and he’s still a little stunned, that doesn’t actually have anything to do with tomorrow.
PART II
Atlas(t) (My love has come along)
Fifteen
It worked, just barely, like this: Jill taught Mondays and Fridays from nine o’clock to noon, and she held office hours from noon to two after class on Mondays. She was taking Holocaust Narratives on Wednesday afternoons from noon to three and Advanced Gender Theory and Praxis on Tuesdays from three to six. Katie taught Tuesday/Thursday from twelve to three and was in Romantic Poets from nine to twelve Thursday and Lesser Known Victorian Novelists on Friday from nine to noon with office hours after Friday’s class (Katie’s point was that having office hours on Friday afternoons ensured that most students wouldn’t come). I taught Monday/Wednesday/Friday from three to five and was taking the Medieval Book Monday mornings and Shakespeare’s Literary London Wednesday mornings with office hours Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Plus we were all taking Early Modern Gender Studies together Tuesday mornings from nine to twelve. This meant someone could always be home, though handoffs were frequently tight, except for Tuesday mornings when Jason stayed with Atlas before he went and taught at one o’clock after Jill rushed home from her noon SGA meeting (alternate weeks only). For about the first week of classes, this seemed reasonable. We were tired—not getting a lot of sleep because Atlas was wanting to eat every two hours or so, and in those early days, when he was up, we were all up—but it mostly seemed like the usual beginning-of-the-semester chaos when everything is madness, but you know that it will settle down soon.
This didn’t settle down though. It settled up; it upsettled. We had had to adopt Nico’s approach of scheduling all our hours, but it soon became clear that all those unscheduled green blocks coded on the chart for free time were not nearly as free as they had seemed in planning. We had figured that we could read while we held the baby. I had had visions of me on sofa, book in one hand, baby in other, foot rubbing Uncle Claude, fabulously multitasking. In fact, it is harder than you’d think to read, take notes, cross-reference, write thoughtful marginalia, and tend to a rarely-asleep-for-more-than-fifteen-minutes baby. Or maybe it’s exactly as hard as you’d think, but what you were imagining was closer to reality than what we were imagining. Like everything that must go exactly according to plan in order to work, this didn’t.