Nursery Crimes (24 page)

I
probably wasn’t the first woman who had ever opened the door to the Fed Ex man, wearing nothing from the waist up except for a bra. Odds are I was not even the first to do it in a
nursing
bra. But I’m willing to bet that no woman in a nursing bra had ever before greeted our apple-cheeked Fed Ex man with her flaps unsnapped and gaping wide-open. You could see that in his face.

I thought about being embarrassed, but decided that since I’d been too tired to notice that I wasn’t dressed, I was definitely too tired to care. “You have to air-dry them,” I explained. “Or they can crack.”

“That has to hurt,” he said.

I signed for the package, which turned out to be yet another sterling silver rattle from Tiffany (that made seven), closed the door, and dragged myself up the stairs to the second floor, duplex apartment where I lived with my husband,
Peter, my three-year-old daughter, Ruby, and the mutant vampire to whom I’d given birth four months before.

“Yes, yes, yes. I know,” I sang in a mock cheerful voice as I scooped my screaming baby out of his bassinet. “Finished your six-minute nap, have you? That’s all the sleep you’ll be needing this week, isn’t it? Hmm?”

Isaac eyed my conveniently exposed nipple and increased the pitch of his wail. I settled my considerable bulk into the aggressively ugly glider rocker that had taken pride of place in our living room and lifted him to my breast. He began suckling as though he’d just gotten home from vacation in Biafra. It had been all of half an hour since he’d eaten. I leaned back in the chair, ran my tongue over my unbrushed teeth, and looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece. Noon. And I’d been awake for eight hours. Actually, it’s hardly fair to say that I woke up at 4:00
A.M.
That was just when I’d finally abandoned the pretense that night was a time when we, like the rest of the world, slept. Isaac Applebaum Wyeth never slept. Never. Like really never. It was my firm belief that in the four months since his birth the kid hadn’t closed his eyes for longer than twenty minutes at a stretch. Okay, that’s not fair. There was that one time when he slept for three hours straight. But since I was at the doctor’s office having a wound check (bullet and Caesarean, but that’s another story altogether) at the time of this miracle, I had only Isaac’s father’s word that it had actually occurred. And I had my doubts.

Sitting there, nursing Isaac, I entertained myself by imagining what I would be doing if I were still a federal public defender and not a bedraggled stay-at-home-mom. First of all, by this hour of the day I’d have already finished three or four bail hearings. I might be on the way to the Metropolitan Detention Center, hoping my smack-addict
clients were straight enough to have a conversation about their plea agreements. Or, I might be in trial, striding around the courtroom, tearing into a quivering FBI agent and exposing his testimony for the web of lies that it was. All right, all right. Maybe not. Maybe I’d be watching my client self-destruct on the stand while he explained that the reason he was covered in red paint and holding the sack of the bank’s money complete with the exploding dye pack was because his friend borrowed his clothes and car and did the robbery and then mysteriously gave him the bag. And no, he doesn’t remember his friend’s name.

But I wasn’t a public defender anymore. I wasn’t even a lawyer. I was just an overtired, underdressed mother. I’d quit the job I’d loved so much when Ruby was a baby. This decision shocked the hell out of everyone who knew me. It certainly hadn’t been part of the plan I’d set out for myself when I walked down the aisle at Harvard Law School with the big diploma emblazoned with the words Juliet Applebaum,
Juris Doctorat.
I’d left Cambridge brimming over with ambition and student loans and began my career as a corporate lawyer, a job I hated but with a salary I really needed.

Then, one day, I got into an argument with the clerk in my local video store that changed my life. Never, when I started dating the slightly geeky, gray-eyed slacker who gave me such a hard time when I rented
Pretty Woman
, did I imagine that he’d pay off my student loans with the proceeds of a movie called
Flesh Eaters
and move me out to Los Angeles.

My husband Peter’s success had given me the freedom I needed to have the career I really wanted, as a criminal defense lawyer. Our decision to start a family had derailed me completely. I know lots of women manage to be full-time
mothers and productive members of the work force at the same time, but, much to my surprise, I wasn’t one of them. When I tried to do both I succeeded only in being incompetent at work and short-tempered at home. At some point I realized that it would be better for my daughter to have me around, and if I was bored out of my skull, so be it.

Isaac must have gotten sick of listening to me yawn, because he popped off my breast, let loose a massive belch, and graced me with a huge smile. He was, like his sister before him, bald but for a fringe of hair around the sides of his lumpy skull. He had a little hooked nose and a perennially worried expression that made him look, for all the world, like a beleaguered Jewish accountant and inspired his father to christen him with the nickname Murray Kleinfeld, CPA.

I kissed him a few times under his chins and hoisted myself up out of the chair.

“Ready to face the day?” I wasn’t sure who I was asking—my four-month-old son or myself.

Only a mother of an infant knows that it is in fact possible to take a shower, wash your hair, and shave your legs, all within a single verse of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” The trick is finishing the E-I E-I O’s with your toothbrush in your mouth.

Balancing Isaac on my hip, I gazed at my reflection critically. Washed and artfully ruffled, my cropped red hair looked pretty good, as long as you weren’t looking too intently at the roots. My face had lost some of that pregnancy bloat, although sometimes it did seem as though Isaac and I were competing to see who could accumulate the most chins. My eyes still shone bright green and I decided to do my best to emphasize the only feature not affected by my rather astonishing weight gain. I applied a little mascara.
All in all, if I was careful not to glance below my neck, I wasn’t too hideous.

“Isn’t your mama gorgeous?” I asked the baby. He gave me a Bronx cheer.

I rubbed some lipstick off my teeth.

“Let’s get dressed.”

A mere half-hour later, a record for the newly enlarged Wyeth-Applebaum household, Isaac and I were in the car on our way to pick up Ruby at preschool. He was, as usual, screaming, and I was, as usual, singing hysterically along with the Raffi tape that played on a continuous loop in my Volvo station wagon.

One really has to wonder how children make it to the age of ten without being pitched headfirst out a car window.

O
N
the way home, my children thoughtfully contrived to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel—not an easy task given that I’d been averaging more or less eleven minutes of sleep a night—by regaling me, at top volume with (in one ear) a long, involved story about Sneakers the rat and how he had escaped from his cage, and (in the other) the usual hysterical weeping.

As we pulled into our driveway, Ruby said, “Mama, can we go to the park? Please oh please oh please oh please.”

It was only because I was momentarily distracted by thoughts of the proper diagnosis of sleep-deprivation psychosis that I forgot that I’d been looking forward to turning on
Sesame Street
and enjoying an hour or so of TV-induced stupor (mine rather than theirs).

“Okay, honey,” I said. Oh well, there was always the possibility that Isaac would fall asleep on the way there. I bundled the two of them into their double stroller and set off for a walk to the playground.

Our neighborhood, Hancock Park, is one of the oldest in Los Angeles, dating all the way back to the 1920s. It’s full of big old houses, most of them stuccoed Spanish-style numbers with the occasional elaborate English Tudor thrown in for variety. The broad tree-lined avenues arc in gentle, carefully planned curves. While the addresses might have hinted at a certain long-ago grandeur, the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown L.A. and a number of less savory neighborhoods has, in the last couple of decades, made it a haunt of car thieves and even the odd mugger or two. That’s kept the housing prices lower than in some tonier areas. It’s also kept out the movie-industry riffraff for the most part. We lived in one of the many duplexes sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.

On our walk to the park, I was taking up quite a bit of sidewalk space—all of it to be exact. Without realizing it, I’d caused something of a traffic jam behind me, which I noticed only when a polite little voice said, “Excuse me, may we pass?”

I turned around to see a gaggle of boys, ranging in age from about six to ten, gliding on Rollerblades behind me. They looked like your basic boys, kneepads covered in mud, shirttails flying, except that their shirts were white button-downs and they wore black trousers. They also wore yarmulkes and sported long, curling sidelocks. Hasidic Jewish Rollerbladers.

Los Angeles, like New York, has a large and vibrant Hasidic community. These are the most observant Jews; they
follow the rules of Judaism to the absolute letter. They wear traditional clothing, the men in dark suits with their heads covered at all times. The women dress modestly, in long dresses with sleeves past their elbows, and their hair concealed by wigs and hats. The Hasidim follow a
rebbe
, a spiritual leader. There are different sects that, if you are more familiar with them than I, can sometimes be told apart by their distinctiveness of dress; some groups of men wear knickers or fur hats, some women wear only dark tights and eschew light-colored stockings of any kind.

The Hasidic community is about as different from your basic, garden-variety assimilated Jew as the Amish are from the members of your local Episcopalian church.

Because my neighborhood is relatively inexpensive, and because the duplex apartments are large and comfortable, it has become home to much of Los Angeles’s Hasidic community. The neighborhood boasts a number of yeshivas and synagogues, and it’s always possible to find “a piece herring,” as my grandfather would say—except on a Saturday. That’s when the myriad little kosher grocery stores and markets close up tight until Sunday morning. Because this is Los Angeles, the land of weird contradictions, there’s also a huge Honeybaked Ham store right in the middle of the Hasidic enclave. Go figure.

I didn’t have a lot of contact with the Hasidim. They keep pretty much to themselves. The mothers rarely take their kids to the park, although the older children do seem to have free run of the streets—unlike the other neighborhood kids, most of whom are chauffeured by their ex-lawyer or stockbroker moms from carefully organized play dates to music lessons to ballet to soccer practice.

“Sorry, guys,” I said, and pushed the stroller up a driveway so they could whiz past.

“Why do those boys dress so funny?” Ruby asked.

“They don’t dress funny, sweetie. They’re just wearing yarmulkes and
tzitzit.
”

“They do so dress funny. What’s a yummyka and tis tis?”

“Okay, maybe it is a little funny. A yarmulke is a little hat and
tzitzit
are those long strings hanging out of their pants. Those are special things Jews wear.”

“We’re Jews and we don’t wear those.”

“True.” What to say?
That’s because we’re bad Jews
? I settled for something that one of the teachers at Ruby’s Reform Jewish preschool would have said. “Everybody celebrates religion in a different way.”

“Our way has Christmas.”

“Well, that’s not exactly how we celebrate being Jewish. That’s more like how we celebrate being Christian. Sort of. Hey, look at that doggy!” It’s nice that three-year-olds can’t usually sense when their mothers are desperately trying to change the subject. Ruby and Isaac’s status as children of a mixed marriage, while certainly run-of-the-mill, does bring up the occasional unanswerable question. My husband, Peter, is vaguely Protestant and decidedly non-practicing. The closest he comes to religion is Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. My approach to Judaism is similarly low-key, expressing itself primarily in a deep-seated identification with Woody Allen and a guilt-ridden love of bacon.

Up ahead of us the boys were gathered around a frisky golden retriever puppy on a leash. Its owner, a much-pierced, artfully bored, post-adolescent of indeterminate gender, was leaning against a tree.

One of the boys reached out his fingers and said, “Nice girl” as the dog sniffed his hand.

Another immediately piped up, “What for you tink she’s a goil?” Here was this eight-year-old on Rollerblades with
a thick Yiddish accent that made him sound like a pint-sized version of my great-uncle Moe.

I maneuvered the stroller around the Hasidic boys and continued up the street. On the corner of La Brea we passed a little kosher market.

“Hey, Ruby, want some gelt?” Ruby and I share a soft spot for the chocolate coins in gold foil that used to be available only around Hanukkah. You can get them year round in my neighborhood.

“Yes! Mmm!”

We walked up to the entrance of the store and I leaned forward over the stroller, trying to reach the door handle. No luck. I walked around to pull it open and then had to leap for the stroller, which was starting to roll down the sidewalk. The door slammed shut. This is the twenty-first century. By now weren’t all doors supposed to glide soundlessly open, activated by heat-sensing devices? For that matter, weren’t we all supposed to have personal anti-gravity packs that would make awkward double-strollers a fond memory?

For some reason, and totally out of the blue, this disappointment of the futuristic fantasies created in my generation by
The Jetsons
made me cry. I leaned against the handles of my stroller and sobbed, inelegantly and furiously. I just felt so overwhelmed and hopeless, and most of all, tired. Deeply and completely tired down to my very bones. I stood there weeping while my two children stared.