Valley of Ashes (2 page)

W
hen the girls had first figured out how to crawl in our Manhattan apartment, Dean built them a giant, beautifully constructed playpen “fence” out of dowels and two-by-fours. Out here we put it up around the dining room table and filled it with toys to keep them occupied so I could occasionally try to get grown-up stuff done, like cleaning the rest of the house before Mom arrived.

It was about eight feet square, a nice space for them to toddle around in, not least since the landlord must have gotten a deal on orange-shag wall-to-wall carpeting so there was a cushy landing whenever they wobbled and fell over.

I changed both their diapers, scrubbed off my hands and forearms, made two quesadillas and chopped up some raw broccoli, strapped the girls into their primary-colored plastic booster seats, filled two sippy cups with milk, and started on the piles of dishes in the sink.

When they were done eating, smearing each other with melted cheese, and shot-putting various bits of lunch around the kitchen, I gently sponged their faces, hosed off their drool-and-cheddar-and-banana-slice-decked bibs, picked chunks of greasy tortilla out of their hair, and set them loose in the playpen so I could start sweeping leftover chunks off the kitchen floor (also a disgusting “antique” shade of orange, to match the shag rug and rancid-rust Formica countertops).

I yearned to win some giant Powerball jackpot just so I could buy
the place and rip out every speck of orange in it, then pile it up in the dirt-road alley behind our backyard and set it all on fire.

Because the house itself was beautiful—probably built sometime in the teens. It had high ceilings and tall graceful windows and doorways.

There was a solidity to it, as well. This was a house built by people who wanted to stick around. People who’d headed west, maybe, thinking about California, but got to the foot of the Rockies and said to themselves, “You know, this is really pretty damn great right here. Let’s plant a whole lot of graceful shade trees and lay out some generously Euclidean streets and make a life. We’ll have wide porches and deep backyards, and we’ll plant gardens and talk to our neighbors over the side fence. Take our time with things. Maybe start a university.”

I looked through the door to the dining room to check on the girls. They’d both climbed into an empty Pampers carton and were grinning at each other, convulsed with laughter.

The sun was streaming in through the front windows, and as exhausted as I was, I had a sudden gut-shot of pure joy, watching them play together. I grabbed our video camera and recorded a minute of them giggling in the box.

After putting the camera back on its high shelf, I started hosing down the girls’ booster-chair trays in the kitchen sink, the drain of which then backed up and spilled over onto the floor when the washing machine’s rinse cycle emptied.

By the time I’d mopped that up and joined my children in the dining room, lugging the country-blue vacuum cleaner my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas some years earlier, Parrish had taken another massive dump in her diapers, removed them, crawled smack-dab through the middle of the steaming pile of crap, and left a serpentine fecal Hansel-and-Gretel trail crisscrossing the carpet under and around the table.

I dropped the vacuum and ran to grab the kitchen garbage can, a clean diaper, a box of butt-wipes, a roll of paper towels, and the dish soap, then climbed into the playpen.

By this point, Parrish had liberated a fistful of bowel product from the back of her diaper and mashed it against the table’s edge.

“Dude,” I said, snaking an arm around her chubby little waist to pull her away from the burgeoning shit-mural, “contrary to popular opinion, your butt does
not
make Play-Doh.”

Parrish laughed up at me and tried to grab my hair with her
merde
-encrusted fists. I captured her wrists in one hand and started the haz-mat remediation with a thick wad of wipes.

Ten minutes later, I had her swabbed down, re-diapered, re-dressed, and sweetly reeking of
Eau de
Johnson’s-Baby-Whatever, plus all the crap scraped up, the carpet and table sudsed and lathered and rinsed.

I plopped her back down in the playpen, kissed the top of her downy blond head, said, “Good thing you’re cute, sweetness,” and grabbed the vacuum cleaner.

I plugged the damn thing in and got down on my hands and knees to begin assaulting the rest of the ugly rug fronds.

This posture was necessary because our vacuum had about as much sucking power as a pair of asthmatic elves armed with defective crazy straws, so the only way to make it actually pick up dirt and detritus was to remove all accoutrements from the hose-end before scraping it rapidly back and forth across the orange fronds of shag.

The mind-numbing number of hours I’d devoted to this activity had worn down the hose’s plastic tip to a slanty point, like a giant black lipstick.

My mother-in-law vacuumed her entire house every day. And did all the accounting for the family farm. And was generally cheerful, but witty. Which is kind of tough to measure up to.

Especially since I was now lying stomach-down on the floor with both arms shoved on a blind mission into the murky depths beneath our sofa—having already raked out six desiccated baby carrots, two Popsicle sticks, half a sesame bagel, and our missing copy of
Velveteen Rabbit
(the pages of which appeared to be cemented shut with a thick mortar of hummus). I was just wondering how long it had actually been since I’d
last
vacuumed, considering the thick ruff of velveteenish
furry stuff growing along the edges of the petrified hummus, when the doorbell rang.

I caught sight of myself in the front-hall mirror as I stood up to answer it. My skin was gray, my dark blond hair was stringy, and there was a spit-lacquered floret of broccoli affixed to the center of my right eyebrow. Also, I was fatter than I’d ever been in my life by about twenty pounds—and I hadn’t exactly started out as a rail.

Awesome.

I had a second of wistfulness for my misspent youth, the years when all I worried about was scraping up a few bucks to go bar-hopping with my pal Ellis, and there were always drunk old guys mumbling about how I looked like Ingrid Bergman.

“Get a load of you now,” I said to the mirror. “You’d be lucky if they said Ing
mar
.”

She used to be cool, but now…

The living room behind me still resembled Bourbon Street at dawn on Ash Wednesday—minus the confetti and vomit, at least.

I took a halfhearted swipe at my verdantly cruciferous eyebrow and reached for the doorknob.

My beautiful dark-haired mother danced in off the porch and threw her arms around me. “Oh, Madeline, it’s so good to
see
you!”

I hugged back with gusto, burbling my gratitude that she was visiting against the side of her neck.

Mom pulled back half a step from our embrace. “Hold still a sec.”

She plucked something from my hair with her fingertips, then threw whatever it was back over her left shoulder toward the lawn.

“That was a lump of shit, I think,” she said. “Did you just change the girls’ diapers?”

Whereupon I nodded and burst into tears.

D
o you miss Dean when he’s away, or do you like having your own space?” asked Mom.

We were on our way to the pediatrician’s office with her at the wheel of Dean’s beat-up Mitsubishi Galant.

“It’s hard sometimes,” I said. “But then it always feels like we have new stuff to talk about when he gets home. We’re happy to see each other, you know?”

She nodded. “I think the hardest thing for me when you kids were little was never feeling like I could
finish
anything… everything was always interrupted. And then your father would come home from the stock exchange and I was so hungry for what was going on in the
world
, and I wanted to be told I was doing things right after singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ all day. Just, ‘Goodness, you’ve painted the dining room table—how wonderful!’ But he wouldn’t say anything at all, he’d just read the paper and have a cocktail and grumble through dinner.”

“You guys were so young,” I said. “I mean,
babies
. No wonder your entire generation got divorced. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to marry the first guy I slept with, just presuming it would all work out.”

“It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t. Mummie and Daddy always seemed fine. I thought all you had to do was get married and then that was it.”

“And cloth diapers,” I said. “I remember you rinsing them out in the toilet, when Trace was a baby.”

“Well, on Long Island we had a diaper man, at least. He took the dirty dipes away and delivered a pile of clean ones every week.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “No Pampers, no Prozac? No fucking way.”

She nodded. “
And
no birth control. You and Pagan were both products of the rhythm method.”

“Jesus, Mom. I’d’ve had myself committed, just to catch up on sleep.”

She laughed and turned left, into the doctor’s office parking lot. As she looked for a spot, I thought about the end of her marriage to my father.

In 1967, Mom discovered that she was pregnant a third time, and wept, and told Dad she didn’t know how they could handle having another child. There wasn’t enough money, and they were both so exhausted already.

He asked around on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where he was an ill-paid fledgling broker at the time. Someone knew someone who knew where a woman could get an abortion—from a doctor in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for four hundred dollars cash.

So Mom drove herself to Kennedy airport in the dark one morning, racked with such bad morning sickness it took her the entire drive
and
four-hour flight to finish one jelly doughnut. She ate it in little tiny pieces, trying to keep something in her stomach, some sugar in her system, so she wouldn’t throw up.

When she arrived at the doctor’s office, the nurse told her the price had gone up to five hundred.

Mom put her four bills on the doctor’s desk. “This is all I have. Please help me.”

She drove herself from the airport back to our tiny rented house in Jericho, New York, arriving home around midnight—bleeding profusely, doubled over with cramps.

She got into bed carefully, not wanting to wake up my father.

He turned toward her in the darkness as she drew the covers up to her chin.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “If you don’t want to have my child, I don’t want to stay married to you. I’ve packed my bags and I’ll be leaving in the morning.”

I was four years old, my sister two and a half.

In my pediatrician’s parking lot, a gigantic Range Rover finally pulled out of a space.

“No, Mom, really,” I said. “I couldn’t have handled the shit you dealt with when we were little. You’re fucking amazing.”

We sat in the waiting room for twenty-five minutes, then the examining room for another ten before the doctor came in. Mom took the chair and settled Parrish in her lap. I sat up on the crinkly-papered exam table with India.

“Do the girls need shots this time?” she asked.

“Probably. It seems like they have to get a few more every time we come in. Hep B, DTaP, meningitis… endless.”

Mom shivered. “Poor little things.”

The doctor bustled in, clipboard in hand. “Mrs. Bauer?”

Dare
, I thought to myself, having kept my maiden name. But it seemed needlessly strident to correct her so I just nodded.

“We’re behind on the girls’ vaccination schedule,” she said. “I’d like to get them caught up today.”

Mom raised an eyebrow at me, having always been a proponent of the “I don’t think that really
needs
stitches” school of parenting.

“Okay, I guess.” I mean, I didn’t want to leave my children vulnerable to typhoid, or whatever, right?

Parrish wailed in my lap as she got an injection in each arm. I closed my eyes and stroked her hair, whispering
shhhh
in her ear. “It’s okay, sweetie… It’s okay. All done now.”

India screamed next, struggling in Mom’s lap.

I was just so damn tired. The pitiful sound of both children’s sobs made tears well up in my eyes.

“Now, we find these shots are usually tolerated really well,” said the
doctor, “but if the girls have any discomfort tonight, it’s all right to give them a little liquid Tylenol.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

The woman grabbed her clipboard and race-walked out of the room.

“What a
bitch
,” said Mom in a stage whisper the moment the exam room door had clicked shut.

I snickered despite myself and turned to look at her.

“Oh, Mom… you cried, too?” I said, handing her a wad of Kleenex from the doctor’s stash. “Your mascara’s running.”

“I couldn’t stand it,” she said, sniffling and dabbing at her eyes. “Getting a shot in each arm? Horrible.”

We carried the girls back out to the parking lot. India was asleep before Mom had finished fastening the straps on her car seat.

“Why don’t you go up and take a nap when we get home, Madeline?” said Mom. “You look exhausted.”