“Ew,” I said.
He kissed me on the mouth and I gave in, tasting carrot.
“What else happened today?” I asked, going back to the stove. The sauce was reducing. Time to put the lid on. I checked the oven temperature.
Dave thought. “We finished our risk analysis project…I gave a little speech…Oh, Sarah got in trouble.”
“What for?”
“What do you mean what for? For dress code. Joanna’s had it out for basically all the women in the department for months. Today Sarah wore jeans with holes in them because it was Friday, but the holes were too far up on her thighs, so now she’s been formally reprimanded for the third time and her case is going to HR. Do you think I’d get formally reprimanded if I wore jeans with holes that high?”
“I mean, all they’d be seeing is your boxers. Maybe if you wore tighty-whities.”
Dave laughed. “Would you still love me if I wore tighty-whities?”
“I’d still love you if anything,” I said.
“Okay, kiddo, you’re through,” Dave said, wiping Eli’s mouth and hands. “Come say good night to your mommy and we’ll go get a bath. Is there enough time for a bath before dinner?”
“I’ll do his bath.”
“You will?”
“Yeah.” I stepped back from the counter and collected Eli from Dave’s arms. “All you have to do is watch to make sure dinner doesn’t explode. It’s done in forty minutes, I set a timer.”
“Wow. Helpful Fridays. Is it likely to explode?” Dave called after me as I carried Eli upstairs.
* * *
—
The guest room was at the top of the stairs, its door still open. I looked inside and saw that the duffel was gone. She’d come to the house again, maybe while I was at the store, or maybe she’d let herself in while I made dinner, slipping upstairs in bare feet so she’d be quieter.
Eli wriggled in my arms. He’d wet his diaper. I hurried to the bathroom, turned on the water, and set him naked in the tub. He flapped his hands and sent two wings of water arcing up to sprinkle me.
It wasn’t hard to wash him, although I hated it, his helplessness; his body was so small. How long until he would be able to wash himself? I didn’t remember ever having been washed by my mother, although I was sure she had done it at some point, maybe hating me just the same.
I still remembered what it felt like when Dave and I had started trying to have a baby. The decision was nonexistent; he’d always wanted to have a big family, and I wanted to give him everything. And it was another way to tether him to me and me alone; his family was nearby and we spent a lot of time at their houses before we bought our own, so that he devoted almost as much time to being a Flores man as he did to being my husband, mine.
When I told him I was ready to get pregnant, it was like everything else fell away. Sex became beautifully serious. He made me ride him while he watched with his mouth open, like I was all new to him again.
It took me almost four months to get pregnant. I took a test every month, and on the last month I was too excited to wait until morning. I got up at midnight and went to the bathroom, and then I crawled back into bed and whispered to Dave that it had worked. He started to cry, and I reached for the light so I could see his face.
I blinked. Eli was making spit bubbles, sinking down so that they would float on the surface of the water. He poked one with a stubby finger.
“That’s a bubble,” I tried.
He didn’t respond.
I held his head so he wouldn’t hit the metal faucet as he wriggled around. His skull was soft and warm in my palm.
Eli looked up at me. His eyes were dark and glossy like Dave’s. I didn’t know what his expression meant.
Would he remember me at all?
I had hated being pregnant. The baby sent a ripple across my body, disrupting even the extremities. Pimples broke out across my nose and cheeks, and I carried new weight on my hips and thighs. I’d always been long-legged, easily slender; now I was sluggish and heavy. Everything I ate sat on me like a snow. I had to take an antiemetic, which made dry skin peel off my lips and kept me from sleeping. I lay awake picking at the corners of my mouth and trying not to move too much, knowing it would upset Dave if he woke up and saw me half-dead and angry.
Three months in, I looked in the mirror and saw that a blood vessel had burst overnight, turning the white of my eye an alarming, febrile pink. At the same time my thighs grew hot. My underwear soaked through, purple-black with blood. It was over.
Dave had been desperate to try again. After the experience of pregnancy, I understood my body in a way I never had before, as a kind of receptacle. I read pregnancy books, which called me a vessel, meaning it positively; but it implied a passivity I found demeaning. I could have been anyone under him. I knew he would have denied it if I said it. Later, he would not even remember the way he had looked at me during those nights—as if fatherhood was just behind me on the mattress and I was in his way.
I lifted Eli out of the bath and wrapped him in a towel. He protested wordlessly as I scrubbed his hair dry, twisting his body this way and that, and screeched when I tried to help him use his new teething toothbrush, a yellow banana-shaped thing that Dave had brought home yesterday. “Spit,” I instructed. He swallowed.
I sighed, and Eli began to cry.
I opened my mouth to soothe him, and my jaw sent a spear of pain through the right side of my face. I’d been grinding my teeth and hadn’t noticed.
Eli wailed.
I picked him up and held him to my chest as I didn’t often do when we were alone, and carried him to his room. In the corner was the rocking chair I’d used when he was younger and still on formula. I sat in it now and leaned back.
It had taken me half a year to get pregnant again. When I was congratulated by the doctor I made myself smile at him. I thought, It’s only nine months. You can do anything for nine months.
I didn’t think of Eli as a person until he began to move inside me. Then I waited to love him. When that didn’t happen, I waited for birth; I had read that the body released chemicals in the first five minutes of mother and infant meeting.
I asked Maria if she’d enjoyed being pregnant. She’d said it made her feel strong, and that she used to cry when Joachim sang to the baby through her skin.
People say you don’t remember the worst parts of birth, but I remember everything. To make room for Eli’s shoulders, they cut me open. Dave held me down while I screamed. The doctor said, It’s only a small incision to avoid any more tearing, and then Eli was born and they took him away to be cleaned. I lay panting on the bed, Dave’s hands still pinning me to the mattress as a nurse kneaded my belly until the placenta came free. It felt like something had been ripped out of me by the roots.