The Most Fun We Ever Had (21 page)

For a moment she allowed herself to feel angry—what a
child
he was sometimes—but then she considered what he’d said. Maybe he
was
in the mood to joke. He was obliging, sometimes to the point of irritation. He was kind and adaptable. He worked twenty-hour days. They had two kids under six. And he
had
contained the virus, this time at least. She missed being able to find something arousing in these kinds of exchanges, though arousal was the reason that their beloved virus existed in the first place. She rose from the table.

He wasn’t in their bedroom, as she’d expected, nor was he in the living room. She found him instead on the floor outside of the hall closet, sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him and a Barbie doll in his hand. The other held a tiny pink hairbrush, and he was pulling it through the plastic waves of doll hair with baffling gentleness. Violet was leaning heavily against his side, outfitting another Barbie in a lewd waitress uniform.

“Hi, Mama,” Violet said, noticing her first. “Daddy’s doing a braid.”

David looked up at her equably. “Daddy’s attempting to do a braid,” he said, his fingers large and inexpert against the tiny doll head. Violet lunged forward and started rifling through one of her many plastic baskets, stuffed to the gills with tiny shoes, tiny hamburgers, tiny aprons and credit cards and spatulas, microscopic half pairs of earrings that had long ago lost their mates. Marilyn met her husband’s eyes and smiled.

“I was being awful,” she said.

“Only a little.” He shrugged. “You had a long day.”

She studied his face across the sun-streaked wooden hallway, pinkish twilight rays through the windows rendering his hair a kind of stainless steel.

“I’m going to get dinner started,” she said.

“As you were,” he said, and when she turned back to look at him, he winked at her.

Bless him, really, for being in the mood to joke. Someone should be.

—

O
ne night David came home and his wife wasn’t around; he was so used to the welcome sound of her bustle, her radio, her running water, that its absence chilled him a bit. Things had been different between them lately, paler, cooler. It seemed so trite that they could fall prey to such banal domestic gripes. Their five-year-old was incorrigible: so what? Couldn’t they laugh it off like they had everything else?

He paused at the landing to listen. No hum of her voice soothing the children, reading a book, singing a song. No hiss of water in the shower. He climbed the stairs. His daughters’ room was empty. He felt a nervousness settle over him and he held his breath as he jogged down the hall to his own bedroom.

There—he exhaled—was Marilyn, in their bed with a daughter on either side.
The Tiny Seed
was open facedown on her thighs. They were all sleeping soundly, Violet’s head resting on Marilyn’s rib cage, Marilyn’s hand frozen in midworrying of Wendy’s hair. His breath caught at the quiet perfection of his family, honey-blond Wendy and dark, serious Violet, tiny bodies in tiny pajamas, their thumbs in their mouths, their legs—little frog legs—twined together. And Marilyn: the girlish smattering of freckles across her nose, the slight leftward tilt of her head.

He noticed, suddenly—a sharpening of vision like Waldo materializing from a sea of striped Vikings—the curve of his wife’s belly. He stiffened. It strained against the pale blue knit of her sweater, a swell of maybe eight weeks or ten. Perhaps even more: he tried to think of last time, with Violet, how she’d looked. He could only recall her exhaustion.

Now, sound asleep at 7:30. He went in and sat on the edge of the bed beside her, laid a palm flat between her hip bones, gently. She didn’t wake. She didn’t know. And it made him so sad; his wife was so lost to herself that—watching her, sleeping—he was sure she hadn’t noticed. He thought of her that morning, making breakfast for the girls. Had she looked tired? Swollen? Queasy? He could barely remember what they’d talked about—the weather, the impending need for new tires on the car. He’d gone to kiss her and she’d offered him her cheek.

“Have a good day,” he’d said, gathering his things, watching her scramble the eggs. “I love you,” he’d told her shyly, and she’d turned to him and given him a drowsy, tolerant smile.

“I love you back,” she’d said.

On the bed he considered the substance of her beneath his hand. Maybe she’d just put on some weight. But the bulge under his palm felt muscular, distended: the expanding of her uterus. In her sleep, Marilyn whimpered, the reaction to a dream, and he felt the striking impact of shame, suddenly, for doing this to her, for putting her in this position. It made him feel brutish and oppressive. He had
impregnated
her; he was tying her down, tethering her to a life of laundry and homework and glassy-eyed kid wrangling; he had set her up in a cramped house and filled her womb, again and again and, now, again, with babies, even though she was tired, even though she wasn’t herself anymore. But he couldn’t take all the blame. She enjoyed sex as much as he did. It was the only way they connected lately, really; sometimes when he came home she was already in bed and they wouldn’t talk at all; she would just wrap her legs around him, slip a hand inside his briefs, wordlessly open herself to him, gazing up, even and silent. They made love instead of talking; how could this come as a surprise to either of them?

It would come as a surprise to her. He was positive about that.

He kept his hand on her belly, though, feeling for what he was now sure was another baby, someone to brighten things up, humble Wendy a bit, delight them all. He felt unexpected tears spring to his eyes. Maybe even a boy this time. Another baby.

Marilyn stirred. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” She looked at his hand on her abdomen and he rubbed it back and forth over her pelvic bones, like he’d simply been trying to rouse her.

“It’s me,” he said. “Hey, kid.”

—

L
iza was an easy baby, and David honestly didn’t know what they would have done if she hadn’t been because they didn’t have
room
for a difficult one. They barely had room for any baby at all; they were physically at capacity in their little house and they had wedged Liza’s crib beside their bed; he tripped over its splayed antique legs in the dark when he was getting ready for work. Of course he and Marilyn both were enamored with her in the dazed, delirious, lovesick way of exhausted new parents, but they had more pressing things—more demanding, high-maintenance children—to which they had to devote most of their attention. It was constant stress, constant chaos, a series of indistinguishable days. He did his rounds at the hospital, he kissed his daughters goodnight, he slept, he fought with his wife. It became harder and harder to justify—he was working, of course, smack in the middle of his residency, to get them to a point of solvency, but that would mean nothing if his family fell apart before the logistical stuff started to come together. Their house was too small, Marilyn was spread too thin, and Wendy had more energy than anyone knew what to do with.

But none of this was Liza’s fault, however unexpected she’d been—“It’s not
fair,
” Marilyn had said, heartbreakingly, when her third pregnancy had been confirmed. He’d heard once that children’s personalities adapted to their surroundings, and Liza—apparently sensing, at three months old, that her household could not sustain more turmoil—radiated calm. So he began a new routine with her, one that gave her individualized attention and gave him—selfishly—a dose of tranquillity.

When he got home at night he would bypass his obligations—the mail, the garbage that needed taking out, the dinner that he needed to eat because Marilyn was constantly lamenting that he was disappearing while she was rapidly expanding—and instead tiptoe into his bedroom, circumvent his sleeping wife, and silently lift Liza from her crib. She usually didn’t wake—always a good sleeper, dutiful and disciplined; “a stickler for naps,” Marilyn said fondly—and he took her to the living room or sometimes to the porch, if it was warm, and just sat with her, cradled her against his chest and hummed to her, intoxicated by the immaculate sweetness of this tiny new daughter. He sang to her, held her against him and hummed.

His lips pressed against her head, the vibrations of his throat reverberating back to him through her still-forming skull, and she fit against his shoulder perfectly, relied on him to keep her upright. The grass wet with dew and the moon receding and his daughter in his arms, a person in his life whom he’d managed not to let down yet. Wendy remained moody and difficult in school and guilty and belligerent at home, and Violet was the tolerant peacemaker. Liza was, in effect, the
middle child
even when she was technically the youngest. And he would never quite forgive himself or Marilyn for that, for letting her exist as anything other than a welcome member of their family, and so he’d hum to her, rock around the yard with his sleeping baby daughter, “Born on the Bayou” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Back in the USSR,” and he had to mollify himself with the possibility that though she’d never remember the humming itself, she might absorb the notion of being loved, that it would somehow take hold in the plates of her tiny skull, that it would accompany her as she grew, as she progressed beyond the confines of her disordered family.

CHAPTER TEN

Liza wondered how much of seemingly normal adult life was simply approximation, effort, good acting. It was the pink stage of morning, the birds going crazy outside, and she was on her side in bed, staring at Ryan, imagining the baby and trying to conjure some tenderness for the two in concert. Perhaps it was less approximation than recognition. Maybe she
was
feeling tenderness and she simply couldn’t
tell.
“Hey,” she whispered.

Ryan barely stirred.

She took his hand, hot from being pressed beneath his pillow, and brought it to her belly. Perhaps all of these moments had to be orchestrated. Perhaps all that adulthood
was
was repeatedly going through the motions, trying out different arrangements and occasionally landing in cinematic tableaus such as this one, a woman in the not-yet-ungainly stage of pregnancy,
aglow,
maybe, rousing her partner for no other reason than to remind him of the kinetic existence of their child-in-progress.

“Ryan,” she said. Then, louder:
“Ryan.”

He startled, regarded her from beneath heavy eyelids. “You okay?”

She tried to smile at him. A precise orchestration of purposefully casual emotion. Maybe that was all relationships were. “I’m fine.”

“What time is it?” He moved his hand from her stomach to rub his eyes, not even seeming to notice her.

“It’s early,” she said. She had it in her head that maybe she could cajole him out with her. She’d read somewhere that one way to help a depressed partner was by urging them to accompany you on manageable trips, brief outings that could yield a sense of accomplishment. They could tackle an item or two on her ever-growing baby list. Maybe wander through the Garfield Park Conservatory. “How about if we venture into the world today?” she said softly.

“Lize, I really didn’t sleep well. Could we talk about this in a little while?” His eyes were slipping closed again.

“I made you coffee,” she said, and she tried not to be hurt as he sighed laboriously, pushed himself upright, took her proffered mug.

“Is there some reason we have to do this at six in the morning?”

“Is there some reason you’re being such a dick?” She closed her eyes. “Sorry, I—”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m just— I was just awake, for a while, in the middle of the night. I’m just—irritable.”

“What if we went furniture shopping today?” she asked. She’d tried to think of the least fraught items on her list, snuggly animal-printed talismans that would not remind them of the baby’s constant need or its alarming fragility.

Ryan looked away from her. “Isn’t it a little early to be thinking about that?”

“The next few months are going to fly. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few of the big things in place? Just for peace of mind?”

“All that stuff’s ex
pen
sive, Liza. Jesus.”

She kicked herself for failing to consider how Ryan would feel to watch her pay for the necessary accoutrements of their baby’s well-being. Even worse than he felt watching her buy groceries or pay the mortgage, she realized. And she felt at once shamefaced and resentful, sad that she’d activated his inferiority complex and annoyed that she couldn’t enjoy even the most basic parental preparations, that she wasn’t allowed to feel excited about cedar cribs or ergonomic rocking chairs because doing so would be yet another inadvertent reminder to Ryan that he wasn’t pulling his weight.

“Just a few things, I thought,” she said quietly, already backing down.

“That seems like something your mom would be into.”

She wouldn’t allow herself to cry, mostly because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “Sure,” she said. “Yeah, I’ll ask her.” She moved onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. “What’re your plans for the day, then?”

“Thought I might mess around with the new Halo demo. See what’s what.”

It saddened her profoundly, his efforts to make playing video games sound like legitimate work, like some kind of professional research instead of just another anodyne outlet for him to sink into for hours at a time.

“What if you asked Jonah to come over?” she said. She wasn’t sure where the idea had come from, but it struck her now that it was possibly a good one. “He might like Halo.”

“Huh.” To her surprise, he did not sound entirely averse.

“Just a thought,” she said carefully. “Could be useful to have an—opponent. And I bet it’d be nice for him to feel more included by the family.”

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I might have a little insight into where he’s coming from.”