Some Possible Solutions Page 4

  Mimosa took shelter in the sight of The Queen—until she observed that the rash had now spread to the scalp. She hoped none of the other mothers would notice.

  “We were just saying how much wet wipe dispensers suck,” someone said. “We can go to the moon, but we can’t create something that makes it easy to get those fucking wipes out?”

  She’d had this same thought two days ago, struggling to yank them out while holding The Queen’s kicking legs high above her gooey diaper.

  “So,” someone said to Mimosa. “How’ve you been holding up?”

  They were all looking at her. The answer was on the tip of her tongue: Oh, just fine. She gazed around the table, at all these other infants in various stages of sleep and wakefulness, of dissatisfaction and contentment. She had to admit that each of them was as beautiful as The Queen, and as repugnant.

  “I cry two to four times a day,” Mimosa said.

  Her confession was met with silence. She shriveled. It was wrong to bare one’s soul.

  “Only four?” someone said.

  “Try six!” someone yelled.

  “Every time I go walking with the baby in the park, it’s like someone turned on a fucking faucet.”

  “The other day this old lady in a wheelchair rolled up to me and was like, ‘Are you okay? Can I help you?’”

  “Oh my god, there’s poop on my dress.”

  “Want half of my croissant?”

  “Hey, please don’t look too close at my baby, ladies! His rash is disgusting!”

  * * *

  “What are you doing?” Sam said one morning, coming up behind her.

  Mimosa was standing at the mirror in the bathroom, gazing at herself, searching for the doppelgängers’ faces in her own.

  “Getting ready,” she said. “Brushing my teeth.”

  But she was not brushing her teeth.

  “Ready for what?” he said.

  “To go and see the—” Mimosa stopped herself, then chose her word: “moms.”

  She regarded him coolly in the mirror, the same way she knew the doppelgängers regarded their husbands when asked what went on at all of those endless meet-ups.

  In the nursery, The Queen coughed, whimpered. Mimosa felt as though her own arm was coughing, whimpering. She smiled to herself.

  “Didn’t you see them yesterday?”

  Mimosa reached around him to pull her sundress off the hanger dangling from the hook on the bathroom door.

  Yes, she had seen them yesterday, had sat with them in a circle, their assorted tears falling onto small heads encrusted with yellowish cradle cap. How precious they were, these women who believed their babies were tiny pieces of cosmic fluff the universe had blown their way for safekeeping, who despised themselves for being unfit for the endeavor of motherhood. There among the doppelgängers, you could come right out and say it: “I think I’m a witch.” And they would echo you word for word. You could confess that in a recent dream you were turning into a geode, and the doppelgängers would list all the things they’d dreamed they were turning into. They knew the feeling—love enwrapped in dread—that made it difficult to push the stroller down the street without being overwhelmed by dark daydreams of garbage trucks rearing up onto the sidewalk.

  She hummed a lullaby as she buckled her sandals. Sam watched her. He had gotten The Queen out of her crib, but The Queen wanted her mother.

  Mimosa stood up and spread her arms wide.

  * * *

  Sam, again. Across the table. Nighttime now. Hair unruly, unshaven: a stranger. They were eating summer squash but it tasted mealy, as though the summer had gone on far too long.

  “I feel bad for us,” Sam said.

  Mimosa stayed quiet, as she so often did nowadays, except when she was among them. At tables all around town, weren’t the other mothers also feeling the weight of their own little lives? She was addicted to eating dinner with The Queen in her lap, but it was difficult to wield the forkfuls of squash so that no chunks fell down onto The Queen’s painfully soft hair.

  The Queen wiggled her legs, unrolled her crooked little sidelong smile.

  Mimosa willed herself to reach across the table and touch Sam’s forearm. She stroked his veins with all the tenderness she could muster. He stared down at her hand as though it was five worms rather than five fingers.

  The Queen’s smile flipped; a wail began deep inside her and shot upward.

  “What’s her problem?” he said. The question sounded harsh, but he was asking it the way a little boy would—scared, and truly wanting to know the answer.

  * * *

  In the black of the night, Mimosa reached out toward Sam’s silhouette, but there was nothing there. She could see his outline in the darkness, very dimly, his head on the pillow, but there was no body to touch.

  Waking up sometime later to nurse The Queen, she saw that Sam was back, his outline and his body both—relieved, tender, she ran her fingers from the top of his head down his spine.

  * * *

  They were lounging on blankets in the park, the doppelgängers and their babies; the mothers were eating grapes, they were tossing grapes, they were laughing, their minds were loose and hazy, their babies had awoken them at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. and 6 a.m., and what could be more hilarious than that? Now the babies were crying, now pooping, now wanting milk, milk, milk, and out came the luminous breasts, and who wouldn’t want to place lips on breasts so full, and the mothers grinned at each other like a bunch of teenagers on the same high, and the heat wave painted an extra shimmer over it all, and the grapes were radiant in the grass and The Queen smiled her wide milky smile and motherhood (the doppelgängers agreed) was underrated, everything so dazzling, Mimosa had diamonds for eyes. A universe away from the grim dinner table in her quiet home, from the version of herself that had sat on a beat-up brown couch with Sam a decade back, both of them stock-still and united in secrecy when his ex-girlfriend entered the room; now it was she and The Queen who froze when he entered the room.

  “Isn’t it funny,” one of the doppelgängers murmured lazily, “that we never talk about our so-called better halves?”

  It was explosive, the chorus of agreement; it always was, with the doppelgängers. And Mimosa joined in; hadn’t she just been marveling at her distance from him?

  Yet amid the sharing that followed, the echoes upon echoes upon echoes, the dark amusement at their collective indifference to their partners, Mimosa found herself wanting Sam, she found herself standing up, drunkenly gathering The Queen’s scattered belongings.

  She dumped The Queen into the stroller, moving more hastily by the second, and set off across the grass toward the path, putting distance between herself and the smell of their laundered and spat-up-upon sundresses, fleeing the perfect alignment of their thoughts and her own.

  She glanced back; the doppelgängers were all packing up and dispersing.

  * * *

  Back from the park, navigating through the screen door into the kitchen, Mimosa felt weak, awkward. The car seat banged hard against the door frame and The Queen awoke with a shriek, her body rigid in its devotion to the screams.

  She clutched the writhing baby and ran down the hallway to the bathroom and hit the switch and stared at the mirror. The Queen’s rash was worse than ever, spreading across her face; Mimosa felt it pressing upward as though through her own pores.

  But meanwhile The Queen’s screeching self was warm and strong, tried and true, and Mimosa couldn’t contain all these sensations, the overlapping positive and negative and positive and negative. There was no room in her for such love; it was explosive, almost identical to panic.

  She slammed the light switch downward. In the darkness, The Queen quieted. The desolate evening twined itself around them. Mimosa wondered what they looked like in the black mirror.

  Sam.

  “I’m beat,” she confessed.

  “I’ll take the baby,” he said. “You take a nap.”

  “What ab
out dinner?” she said.

  The Queen was limp, gentle, in his arms. Mimosa walked to the bedroom and plummeted into sleep.

  * * *

  When Mimosa awoke, she felt strangely refreshed, as though she had slept for years. The bedroom was cool, the heat wave broken. She couldn’t wait to see them.

  The house was dark. The car was gone. Outside, the last of the day was draining away swiftly, as it does in late August—or, wait, had September arrived?

  She called out for them, even used The Queen’s given name, but the words felt foreign on her lips.

  The kitchen was invisible, silent.

  It was no wonder that he had left her. She had been awful to him, hadn’t she? Yet she couldn’t remember how she’d been. All she remembered from the entire summer was The Queen’s face, its thousand different expressions.

  She didn’t want to have to survive without him, but she could.

  The other, though—that she could not survive.

  * * *

  There was only one place she could think of to go. In the ever-weakening light, she hurried down sidewalks no one ever walked. She couldn’t tell where the night ended and she began.

  * * *

  Approaching the house, Mimosa anticipated a scene identical to the one she’d fled: Mary Rogers standing alone in her own unlit kitchen, orphaned. But when she looked through the screen door, she saw that Mary Rogers’s kitchen was all Technicolor—the brilliant red of the tablecloth, the intense white gleam of the refrigerator. There sat Mary Rogers, glorious, at the small breakfast table in the corner, beneath the glow of an orange plastic shade, with her husband and her baby. They were just finishing dessert. Mary Rogers held the baby—almost but not quite as beautiful as The Queen. Mary Rogers’s husband’s back faced Mimosa. It could have been Sam’s back—the post-work slump, the hair just beginning to dull.

  Mimosa wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything, to slip into Mary Rogers’s body, hold her baby, eat her last spoonful of ice cream.

  Mary Rogers stood and passed the baby to the husband. As she turned to walk out of the kitchen into the hallway, Mimosa noticed the mouth-shaped marks on the back of her neck.

  When Mimosa pressed, the screen door into Mary Rogers’s kitchen opened with a squeak she recognized from her own screen door.

  “Well hello,” said Mary Rogers’s husband with an odd matter-of-factness. He twisted around to smile at her.

  He looked just like Sam.

  The baby on his lap began to whimper. She felt her milk come down. Her fingertips went electric with desire. She rushed across the kitchen and seized the baby. The man’s only protest was a wry half-laugh.

  “Oh baby,” she said. “Where’d your mama go?”

  She sat down across from him and unbuttoned her sundress. The baby latched. That ecstatic buzz of oxytocin; she could feel it spreading through her blood, making her toes and fingers tingle, opening the valves of her heart and the ducts in her breasts, a downpour of milk and sympathy.

  He watched her in that flat, cool way of his. She enjoyed his gaze. She felt grand, maternal, untouchable, like a woman from before human history.

  When the baby had taken its fill, she buttoned her sundress and stood up, holding the baby close, its head in the nook beneath her chin. He too stood and they stepped away from the breakfast table, out of the circle cast by the hanging lamp.

  He placed his forehead against her forehead.

  “What if she comes back?” she said.

  “Who?” he said. His breath on her eyelid. “Who are you talking about?”

  THE MESSY JOY OF THE FINAL THROES OF THE DINNER PARTY

  Eva was in the kitchen, placing a pile of dirty dishes beside the sink, when a silence fell across the dinner table in the other room, the deep silence of people waiting for someone to pull a photograph of his child out of his wallet—or, more likely, waiting for a YouTube video to load. Moments before, there had been escalating banter about the sexual indiscretions of a once-beloved politician and the dubious merits of an art-house film. Frankly, it had been a relief to escape to the kitchen, to scrape the nauseating scraps into the trash can. She hid behind the idea that she alone had carried the dirty plates into the kitchen because she alone was a gracious dinner guest—a pleasing alternative to her knowledge that she alone had carried the plates into the kitchen because she alone did not belong here, among these dazzling, merciless people.

  Eva embellished her good-guesthood, rinsing the plates, lining them up in the dishwasher, all the while waiting for the silence to break, for a roar of laughter to pummel outward. Yet the silence held, and it became clear to Eva that she’d have to reenter the other room.

  Stepping through the doorway, she couldn’t contain her gasp of shock. What an odd, odd joke for them to play on her—all seven of them frozen in place, the host half-standing to pour cream into coffee, forks held in various positions between apple pie and mouth, a hand thrown upward in emphasis, a head thrown backward in laughter, fingers wrapped fervently around wineglasses: a flawless tableau of the messy joy of the final throes of the dinner party.

  She tiptoed toward the table, waiting for them to break scene, turn toward her with faces that demanded the correct response. Yet the tableau remained utterly perfect, still, disconcerting. Eager to catch a blink, Eva stared at the eyelids—and realized that most were halfway or three-quarters open or closed, stuck at different stages of a blink.

  She turned her attention to the host, the exact sort of no-nonsense All-American handsome that was never attracted to her. It was then, gazing at the cream he was pouring, that she understood: the cream, suspended in its arc, absolutely unmoving, its white tip just barely touching the dark surface of the coffee.

  This was no joke, no performance. Everything was frozen. Except for her.

  She lifted her hand, waggled her fingers in her host’s face. No response.

  At that point her terror should have overwhelmed her. But what she felt was glee.

  First she walked over to her husband, her beloved unshaven husband, he whose eyes were nearly shut as he drank deep from a glass of red wine. She kissed him on the forehead, stroked his cheek; a strange place to start, perhaps, in this roomful of seven, with the one person she actually had the right to touch. But he wasn’t always amenable to having his face stroked or his forehead kissed.

  Next, back to the host, he who enjoyed his opinions. Eva seized this opportunity to put her lips against his, giving him and all his fraternity brothers a one-sided kiss.

  Eva removed her hostess’s necklace—she’d had her eye on it all evening—and slung it around her own neck. It was a large metal pendant on a black string, the kind of object that could protect you. Then, Eva removed the eyeglasses of the librarian—she who took pleasure in wearing thick eyeglasses, knowing how her sharp beauty transformed them—and placed them on the gooey plate beside her delicately bitten pie. As for the hostess’s overweight but witty sister (it was easy to imagine a childhood of despair): Eva removed the woman’s rubber band and reworked her ponytail, putting it at a cocky angle, helping her capitalize on her thick hair, the one thing she had over her sister. The graduate student, so young and tired-looking, merited the same treatment as Eva’s own husband: the kiss on the forehead, the stroke of the cheek.

  Eva paused in her labors to stick her finger into the freshly whipped cream, something she’d been desperate to do ever since her hostess placed it on the table. She wanted to eat it forever and ever—but duty called.

  The two remaining men were indistinguishable from each other. They’d been egging the conversation along all night, mocking or interrogating anyone who made any kind of definitive statement about anything. What were their names? Fred and Ted, Tom and Ron, Tim and Jim? Yet they seemed ever so much less irritating now that they were stuck here with their mouths open to receive forkfuls of pie. Gently, she sprinkled salt.

  Her work complete, Eva stepped back to admire them, this small group of immobile human
beings, all of whom had traveled through life to arrive at this dinner table. All of whom felt unloved and lonely and stupid and awkward and guilty and anxious and insufficient, all of whom woke up each day and did things, tried to do the right things, brushed their teeth and attempted not to shame themselves, took pride in their little accomplishments and strove to speak with authority about a thing or two. How vulnerable they looked now, trapped in their humblest gestures, how pitiful, how dear! She found herself achingly aware of their skeletons, of the fact that just beneath their skin lay tendons and intestines and other repulsive things. She loved them, these people—the lettuce lodged in someone’s tooth, the parade of acne across a forehead, the stain on the shirt, the fray of the hem.

  She returned to the host, stuck in the most unnatural position of all. She knew he’d felt as out of place the whole evening as she had; she knew everyone had felt as out of place the whole evening as she had.

  It was just then, as she was moving her lips once more toward his, that it broke.

  Suddenly they were sipping, biting, pouring, breathing. And then they were staring at her, blinking at her, because what was she doing all up in the host’s face when he was trying to pour the cream? And, excuse us, but why’s she got the hostess’s Peruvian charm around her own neck?

  And then the interchangeable men spitting salty pie into their napkins, the perplexed librarian salvaging her glasses from her pie goo, the fat sister’s hand searching for her relocated ponytail, the hasty return of the necklace to the hostess, someone wondering aloud who dared stick his finger into the whipped cream, the kind yet slightly ashamed gaze of her beloved husband. Serene, Eva strolled around the table and settled into her seat, from whence she had a perfect view.

  LIFE CARE CENTER

  Across the hall from the room where my sister may or may not be dying, there is a woman who moans Help all day long.