* * *
We go on a field trip to the New York Botanical Garden train show on the Metro-North and we corral the kids onto one train and then another.
Why are we doing this shit? one of my kids asks me as we walk on a wooded, tree-lined path. It’s warmer than it’s been the past few weeks and sunny.
It’s a gorgeous day, I say.
I know, she says.
This lady makes us do this shit because it’s for rich white people, says another student.
“This lady” is the CEO of this school where I teach. I shrug and do not talk because I do not think that they are wrong.
We watch a video about the making of the train show.
All I fucking do is ride the train, says one of my students.
When we get inside it’s warm and there are plants all around us. The trains are small and made of sticks and twigs and pieces of plants. They’re beautiful though strangely alienating. We’re a pack of people. My other coteachers are both black women. None of our kids are white. No one else besides our group is black or under fifty and they gawk at us.
What are they doing here? one woman says as she walks past us.
I’m so angry I can’t see and almost grab hold of her arm to scold her; one girl turns to another girl, laughing, pointing at me; Miz is going to hit a bitch, she says.
On the train ride home, we let the kids get off as we pass close to their apartments, and my coteachers get off farther downtown.
I sit alone another forty minutes to the train I’ll have to transfer to to get to Brooklyn. I read Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist. I scroll through Instagram and realize I haven’t searched for Sasha there. I pretend she won’t notice that I follow her as I follow her, and then I follow him because neither of them is locked and he’s right there. I watch a video of a cliff on the coast somewhere in California, then Hawaii. There is a dog, a beach, more cliffs. Pictures of Paris, Vienna, Barcelona. No baby, no bump. Only one picture, the two of them, just their faces, twenty-seven weeks before this; he kisses her cheek, both of them looking toward the camera, smiling, sunglasses on their heads.
* * *
At my night class, I teach Magda Szabó’s The Door, a book about a woman, a writer, and her relationship with her domestic worker. I’m not sure “domestic worker” is the word, nor is “maid.” It’s her relationship with a woman who cleans her house and cooks for her and her husband, but also, is perhaps her closest, dearest friend. They are not friends, though, because of class; they are not friends because in the domestic worker’s moment of desperate need, the main character betrays her violently. This is, at least, how I read the book. There is a moment when the main character could help her friend, her domestic worker, who has no one else, who has loved her intensely over many years, but instead, she calls in strangers, instead, she gives those strangers access to her friend—her friend’s greatest nightmare is being vulnerable to strangers—and she drives off in a car to work. I find this book so horrifying, the impact and the power of passivity, the way in which this woman can both love her friend and not ever recognize her humanity, not realize the violence she’s enacting, even as she spends days planning how she’ll do it, even as she lies about it later on. I cannot breathe when I finish reading. I go into class ecstatic, wore out, scared.
What did you guys think, though? I say after we briefly discuss the book’s context.
We discuss the strange space that Hungary inhabited during the Second World War—aligned with Hitler early as well as later occupied, complicit in the crimes committed and later victims of them, yoking themselves tightly with the Allied forces in so many of the later narratives. In 1949, I tell my students, Szabó was awarded one of Hungary’s most prestigious literary awards, except the prize was rescinded on the same day. She’d been named an “enemy of the people” by the Communist Party, which had recently come to power, and would not be allowed to publish for years after that. The book, in fact, opens with the writer character having finally been set free to work again, to be published, the impetus for the hiring of the domestic worker being that she’s been allowed to be a writer again after all those years. In a review I read of the novel in preparation, the reviewer says that the book creates the feeling of both being run over by a car and being the driver of the car at the same time. This time, even more than the time before, as I reread, instead of sleeping, every night this week, I felt this in the novel, the specific horror of deep and certain concrete culpability combined with helplessness.
So, I say, what did you guys think?
They look at me, wary.
You think it was violent? asks a boy in the back who always talks.
You didn’t? I say.
Maybe? he says.
She leaves her, I say. She could help, and she just goes.
She sends doctors, they say. She brings help.
But she’s not there, I say, worked up all of a sudden and cognizant that I should stop this, that this is not the behavior of a grown-up university professor but, maybe, of a frantic, wore-out child.
She doesn’t stay, I say. She says she loves her and she lays her bare for strangers in her most vulnerable state.
A girl who sits next to me and hardly ever speaks but always takes notes diligently while other students speak, whispers, so I and maybe the three or four people closest to her hear her, she says, She kills her, basically.
* * *
My husband works on weekends so we don’t have to pay for childcare. During the week, while I work, he takes care of our girls. We have an extra thousand dollars in our bank account because he just got paid for a job, so I call the sitter and she comes over and I run fifteen miles and take a thirty-minute shower.
Once the sitter’s left, I set up paints on the floor atop a pile of old issues of the New York Review of Books and set out paper and old wood from various of my husband’s jobs and let the girls make things. The baby nurses and I get light-headed from the running and her eating. They paint the paper and the wood and then their hands and feet and I wonder briefly if I should tell them not to paint their bodies, but it’s only watercolors, so then they start painting my face.
I get a news alert on my phone, an hour into painting: a ballistic missile alarm went off in Hawaii, the alert says, but officials say it was a false alarm.
I’m quiet a minute, looking at my phone, then back and forth between paint-covered children.
Can I paint your eyes? the four-year-old says, coming at me with a fine brush covered in purple. I throw the phone up onto the couch, smiling at our daughters. I lie back on the floor with my eyes closed, my hand resting on the baby’s calves as she moves around me.
I say: Only the lids.
* * *
At 2:00 am on Tuesday, the baby starts to cry and I go into her room and her forehead and her cheeks are hot and sweating. When I come back from the bathroom where we keep the baby Motrin, she’s thrown up on her sheets. I pick her up and take her clothes off and run a warm bath but she vomits three more times, so I rub her down with a warm cloth, standing her up naked in the bathtub, as she keeps vomiting. She vomits on my clothes too and I take them off and rinse myself and both of us sit in the hallway of the apartment, her hot skin splayed across my legs, in T-shirts but no pants. She’s crying off and on and there’s nothing left for her to vomit but her fever hasn’t broken and I don’t want to leave her and she curls up on my lap and falls asleep. At 5:00 am, my husband throws up in the bathroom sink. At 6:00, I email work and tell them that I’m going to be late. I take the four-year-old to school and my husband’s emptied out enough, so he stays with the baby so I don’t have to miss the day. At 1:00, the school calls to say the four-year-old has gotten sick, and when I pick her up she’s crying and I carry her the mile home because she’s too sick to walk and she’s vomiting too often to get in a car or ride the train. At home, the baby and my husband are asleep and I wash the four-year-old with another warm cloth and sit with her with an empty plastic mixing bowl until she’s also emptied out. I give her tiny sips of water and when my husband and the baby wake up both of their fevers have broken and they go outside for a short walk. I stay with the four-year-old and we watch five hours of Paw Patrol and Dora and Friends and she falls in and out of sleep. That night, I put everyone to bed and order myself a five-dollar pad thai and sit alone and read.