Ever After. William Wharton
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Even at six months, she’s sleeping less than eight hours a day. She seems to love life so much she hates to close her eyes. It’s as if she knows.
Bert and I become zombies. We take turns getting up and fetching her. Then we let her stay in bed between us. I think she’ll be safe that way, but she figures how to crawl out from the bottom. Bert wakes up with a start the first night she does it.
‘Kate, where’s Day?’
I’m still groggy.
‘I don’t know, maybe one of us put her in her crib when we were half-asleep.’
‘I didn’t.’
He leaps out of bed in one jump the way he can, like a jack-in-the-box. He leans back into our room.
‘She’s not there!’
I sit up, scared now.
‘Maybe she’s in Wills’s room. Maybe he took her in bed with him because she was crying.’
I crawl out of bed and stand up. I have a terrible headache. Bert’s running up and down the hall. Now I’m worried. Where, in a locked apartment, can a baby go? Could she have hurt herself?
Then I hear Bert laughing. The baby is laughing, too. They’re in the bathroom.
Day is sitting in the bottom of the shower, playing with the toys I put in there when I give her a bath. I know she likes to take a bath, it’s one of her favorite things, but in the middle of the night, without water, in the dark? She’s pointing up to the faucets, wanting us to turn on the water. She’s filthy from crawling around and soaked through. Bert leans over and starts undressing her. Day keeps pointing up at the faucets.
‘OK, Day. This one time. But no more baths at three o’clock in the morning. Understand?’
She smiles and slaps her hands on the bottom of the shower the way she does when there’s water.
‘Bert, do you mind if I go back to bed? I’m pooped and I have a terrible headache.’
‘Go ahead, that’s OK, Babe, I can handle this. You go to bed, try to get some sleep. I’ll see if I can put her down after her bath. Boy, am I ever going to be a mean math teacher tomorrow.’
He turns on the water and I can hear it running as I pad back and crawl into bed. I don’t even hear Bert come in; maybe he doesn’t, because he’s gone off to school when Day screams from her crib and wakes me up.
Mom and Dad come to visit several times. Dad is wonderful with Dayiel. I never expected that. He follows her around the house, wherever she wants to go, letting her do what she wants as long as it isn’t dangerous. He says it’s like having a puppy, and that spending so much time on the living-room floor, crawling with her, he’s acquiring an entirely new view of the world. He also gives her airplane rides, pushing her up over his head or lifting her up on his legs or his feet or letting her sit on his stomach and bounce. I remember him doing all those things with me and Matt and Camille. I’d forgotten.
Having a baby brings back so many things from your own life that you might never have remembered. If I hadn’t seen Dad with Dayiel, I wouldn’t have remembered these acrobatics he did with us. It’s funny how one forgets. Probably forgetting is the closest thing to death most living people ever know. It isn’t sleep.
Mom reads to Dayiel. It seems to calm her. Mom tells me about a study that says a little child, from infancy on, should have three books read to it a day. The same study says that any normal child who has had 3,000 books read to it before going to school will do much better all the way through to university. My God! Three thousand books.
As Day gets older and the weather improves, Mom takes her into our garden or down by the See to feed the ducks and swans. Day’s great, as long as you don’t try to make her do something she doesn’t want to do, or not let her do something she wants. Then she can be so stubborn I could almost kill her. But Bert and I also love her, despite, or maybe because of, all the devilment she gets into and the constant watching she takes.
Everything is going along fine, but then I find out I’m pregnant again. Day’s only thirteen months old, and, naturally, still in diapers. Even Bert, who now knows enough about how hard it is to rear a child, is concerned.
I go to the Frauenklinik and no one is too happy about my having another baby so soon after a Caesarean. But we decide to have it anyway, then Bert will have a vasectomy; or, if it’s possible in the middle of a Caesarean, I’ll have my tubes tied. We’ll never be able to afford rearing more than three kids.
This time I’m sick from the beginning and I have very low blood pressure. I can hardly eat, and what I eat, I usually throw up. Bert’s worried. He says I ought to consider having an abortion; it isn’t too late.
I sleep on the idea, but in the morning I know I want this baby. This way all our kids will be in school by the time I’m forty. We can carry on teaching together, maybe even here, at the International School, with the children at the same school with us. It isn’t the way I’d planned it but now it seems like a good idea, if only I can survive another Caesarean.
Mia is born on December seventeenth. I beg the doctors to let me go home for Christmas Eve, and they agree, but I have to go right back in. On Christmas Day the doctor comes to see me. He says he hated to cut me open again and ruin all that neat embroidery he’d done before but that he’s done just as well this time. He’s thinking about taking up crocheting.
It’s Day’s first proper Christmas and she loves it. Mom and Dad fly from Paris and are there the day I come home with the baby. He has his video camera, calls me ‘mamma Mia,’ and takes some beautiful pictures of Dayiel kissing Mia while she’s nursing and then of Dayiel trying to nurse herself on the other nipple. Mom distracts her with one of the Christmas gifts; it’s another book. Day’s already pointing, not just at the pictures, but at the words. She’ll be reading before she’s five.
It’s the best Christmas I remember and we’ve had some great Christmases in our family. I feel I’ve made it as an adult. I have a wonderful husband and three children. Dad always said you know you’ve grown up when you’d rather have Christmas at your own home with your own kids, than go off to your parents’ house. That’s a bit sad, but I think he’s right. I feel grown up. I never have before.
Just before Mia is born, Bert’s dad dies. He’s had a bad heart for a long time. And although he was in good enough shape to come to the wedding, he looked pale. He just drops dead. He’s sixty-four, only a few years older than my dad.
Bert dashes off for the funeral, helps his mom settle things, and then gets back the week before Mia is born. But he is a wreck.
I was surprised by Bert’s crying before. Now, he can’t mention his dad without breaking down. He continues working at school because he feels he needs to be doing something. But it’s hard for him and it’s hard for me because I can’t help him. Even if I were well, I probably couldn’t do much. It’s hard to understand why we humans don’t seem able to learn about death, the quiet simplicity of it all.
We agree that Bert should quit the International School, and that we should move to Oregon for a year or two so he can be near his mom. Claire’s all alone now in a big house where she’s reared four kids, and doesn’t know what to do. Bert felt terrible leaving her.
Oregon will be a good temporary solution. Besides, Danny wants Wills for one full school year, and if we’re in Oregon, I’ll be able to call him every evening. Danny’s wife Sally has delivered a boy they named Jonathan, and they’ve bought a nice duplex in Redondo Beach. I can’t really say so, but I’m not thrilled.
In the meanwhile, having two babies at the same time is quite a job. I think poor Bert spends half his free time down in that basement filling and emptying washing-machines and hanging clothes, mostly diapers.
Although I recuperate more quickly than I expected, all the muscles in my stomach seem to have turned to mush. It’s a month before I can do one sit-up. I look at my jogging shoes and think I’ll never