Pretty Baby. Mary Kubica
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in Chicago, is highest among blacks and Hispanics, but that doesn’t negate the fact that a white girl can be poor.
All this scuttles through my mind in the split second I wonder what to do. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl.
But then, to my surprise, the girl boards the train. She slips through the doors seconds before the automated announcement—bing, bong, doors closing—and I follow along, wondering where it is that we’re going, the girl, her baby and me.
The car is crowded. A man rises from his seat, which he graciously offers to the girl; without a word, she accepts, scooting into the metal pew beside a wheeler-dealer in a long black coat, a man who looks at the baby as if it might just be from Mars. Passengers lose themselves in the morning commute—they’re on their cell phones, on their laptops and other technological gadgets, they’re reading novels, the newspaper, the morning’s briefing; they sip their coffee and stare out the window at the city skyline, lost in the gloomy day. The girl carefully removes the baby from her kangaroo pouch. She unfolds the pink fleece blanket, and miraculously, beneath that blanket, the baby appears dry. The train lurches toward the Armitage Station, soaring behind brick buildings and three and four flats, so close to people’s homes I imagine the way they shake as the “L” passes by, glasses rattling in cabinets, TVs silenced by the reverberation of the train, every few minutes of the livelong day and long into the night. We leave Lincoln Park, and head into Old Town, and somewhere along the way the baby settles down, her wailing reduced to a quiet whimper to the obvious relief of those on the train.
I’m forced to stand farther away from the girl than I’d like to be. Bracing myself for the unpredictability of the train’s movements, I peer past bodies and briefcases for the occasional glimpse—flawless ivory skin, patchy red from crying—the mother’s hollow cheeks—a white Onesies jumpsuit—the desperate, hungry suction on a pacifier—vacant eyes. A woman walks by and says, “Cute baby.” The girl forces a smile.
Smiling does not come naturally to the girl. I imagine her beside Zoe and know that she is older: the hopelessness in her eyes, for one, the lack of Zoe’s raw vulnerability, another. And of course, there is the baby (I have myself convinced that Zoe still believes babies are delivered by storks), though beside the businessman the girl is diminutive, like a child. Her hair is disproportional: cut blunt on one side, shoulder length the other. It’s drab, like an old sepia photograph, yellowing with time. There are streaks of red, not her natural hue. She wears dark, heavy eye makeup, smeared from the rain, hidden behind a screen of long, protective bangs.
The train slows its way into the Loop, careening around twists and turns. I watch as the baby is swaddled once again in the pink fleece and stuffed into the nylon coat and prepare myself for their departure. She gets off before I do, at State/Van Buren, and I watch through the window, trying not to lose her in the heavy congestion that fills the city streets at this time of day.
But I do anyway, and just like that, she’s gone.
“How was your day?” Heidi asks when I walk in the front door. I’m greeted by the funky scent of cumin, the sound of cable news from the living room TV, Zoe’s stereo blasting down the hall. On the news: record rainfall clobbering the Midwest. An accumulated collection of wet things resides by the front door: coats and umbrellas and shoes. I add to the collection and shake my head dry, like a wet dog. Moving into the kitchen I plant a kiss on Heidi’s cheek, more a force of habit than something sweet.
Heidi has changed into her pajamas already: red, flannel and plaid, her hair with its natural auburn waves deflated from the rain. Contacts out, glasses on. “Zoe!” she yells. “Dinner’s ready,” though down the hall, between the closed door of our daughter’s bedroom and the deafening sound of boy band music, there’s no chance she heard.
“What’s for dinner?” I ask.
“Chili. Zoe!”
I love chili, but these days Heidi’s chili is a vegetarian chili, loaded with not only black beans and kidney beans and garbanzo beans (and, apparently, cumin), but also what she calls vegetarian meat crumbles, to give the impression of meat without the cow. She snatches bowls from the cabinet, and begins ladling the chili. Heidi is not a vegetarian. But since Zoe began ranting about the fat in meat two weeks ago, Heidi made the family decision to go meat-free for a while. In that time we’ve had vegetarian meat loaf and spaghetti with vegetarian meatballs and vegetarian sloppy joes. But no meat.
“I’ll get her,” I say and head down the narrow hall of our condo. I knock on the pulsating door and, with Zoe’s blessing, poke my head inside to tell her about dinner and she says okay. She’s lying on her canopy bed, a yellow notebook—the one with all the teenybopper celebs she’s torn from magazines taped to the front—on her lap. She slams it shut the minute I enter, gropes for social studies flash cards, which lie beside her, ignored.
I don’t mention the crumbles. I trip over the cat on the way to Heidi’s and my bedroom, loosening my tie as I do.
Moments later, we sit at the kitchen table, and again Heidi asks me about my day.
“Good,” I say. “You?”
“I hate beans,” Zoe declares as she scoops up a spoonful of chili, and then lets it dribble back into the bowl. The living room TV is muted, yet our eyes drift toward it, trying our best to lip-read our way through the evening news. Zoe slumps in her chair, refusing to eat, a cloned version of Heidi, from the roundness of their faces to the wavy hair and brown eyes, everything alike down to their cupid’s-bow lips and a handful of freckles splattered across their snub noses.
“What did you do?” Heidi asks and internally I grimace, not wanting to relive the day, and her stories—Sudanese refugees seeking asylum and illiterate grown men—are depressing. I just want to lip-read my way through the evening news in silence.
But I tell her anyway about a customer due-diligence call and drafting a purchase agreement and a ridiculously early conference call with a client in Hong Kong. At 3:00 a.m. I sneaked from the bedroom that Heidi and I share and crept into the office for the call, and when it was finished, I showered and left for work, long before Heidi or Zoe began to stir.
“I’m leaving in the morning for San Francisco,” I remind her.
She nods her head. “I know. How long?”
“One night.”
And then I ask about her day and Heidi tells me about a young man who emigrated from India to the United States six months ago. He was living in the slums of Mumbai—Dharavi, to be exact; one of the largest slums in the world, as Heidi tells me, where he was earning less than two American dollars a day in his home country. She tells me about their toilets, how they’re few and far between. The residents use the river instead. She’s helping this man, she calls him Aakar, with his grammar. Which isn’t easy. She reminds me: “English is a very difficult language to learn.”
I say that I know.
My wife is a bleeding heart. Which was absolutely adorable when I asked her to marry me, but somehow, after fourteen years of marriage, the words immigrant and refugee hit a nerve for me, generally because I’m sure she’s more concerned with their well-being than my own.
“And your day, Zoe?” Heidi asks.
“It sucked,” Zoe grumbles, slumped in the chair, staring at that chili as though it might just be dog shit, and I laugh to myself. At least one of us is being honest. I want a do-over. My day sucked, too.
“Sucked how?” Heidi asks. I love when Heidi uses the word sucked. Its unnaturalness is comical; the only time Heidi talks about things sucking it’s in reference to a lollipop or straw. And then, “What’s wrong with your chili? Too hot?”
“I told you. I hate beans.”
Five years ago, Heidi