“They’ve been walking up and down the hall for the last half hour. Your mother wanted to go outside and show your daughter the snow, but I convinced her that wasn’t a good idea. Your daughter isn’t wearing a jacket!”
“Huh?” I don’t understand how my mother could possibly be walking around with my baby, but as I’m trying to process this information, Tricia comes into the room tra-la-la-ing a lullaby to Zerena, whom she cradles in her arms. Tricia’s no nightingale—her voice screeches off-key. Zerena is wide awake, unsoothed by Tricia’s jackdaw warble, but Zerena’s mouth is open in amusement, igniting my jealousy. Love is a slippery slope. Already I fear Zerena prefers Tricia’s companionship to mine, but just seeing Zerena safe and happy turns me into a puddle of joy. Tricia picks up a soft pink washcloth from Zerena’s bassinet and wipes clean the drool that gathers on Zerena’s chin. At the touch of that cloth on her skin, Zerena coos.
Tricia dresses so ridiculously young, like a teenager, in her tight designer jeans and snug pinkish-purple—or is it purplish-pink?—camisole. The outfit screams of someone desperate for attention. In high school, she was probably the girl who stole everyone’s boyfriends, but then, thinking about this, I feel a stab in my heart because, damn, I must be the kind of woman who steals husbands. Tricia canters over to the lactation consultant, a ditzball smile pasted on her face, and gushes about the “invigorating constitutional” she and Zerena enjoyed.
“I really think she would have adored the snow! How she would have flipped out over the sensation of snowflakes falling on her face. But look at her!” Tricia says, holding Zerena up. “She looks just like me! Isn’t that amazing?”
Lois, the lactation consultant, giggles. Of course she’d hit it off with Tricia, both of them from the same generational tribe, but as much as she yaps with Lois about eye color and chin similarities, Tricia’s looking squarely at me every time she brings up another way that Zerena is just like her. “She’s a carbon copy of me! I mean, look at her lush eyelashes. They’re a perfect match for mine. She could’ve been my daughter!”
It’s demeaning how Trish carries on as if the baby were hers. She talks with Lois Belcher as if I weren’t here. Finally, when I can take it no more, I clear my throat. “There’s one other way she looks like you.”
Tricia tilts her head. “How’s that?”
“The way she drools. That’s got you written all over it.”
My remark knocks the stuffing out of the rapport Tricia’s been feigning. She stares at me, slack-jawed in shock, but she pulls herself together quickly. Her smile reappears. People like her with moneyed backgrounds and society-page upbringings aren’t like real people; she’s that rare kind of circus performer who’s astutely aware of and eager to control the reactions she provokes. She glances at Lois Belcher, rolls her eyes, and laughs, putting Lois Belcher back at ease. “Gosh, Laurel. You’re always so amusing.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
Tricia peeks at her platinum wristwatch. James has bought me remarkably little bling, but someday he’ll buy me a watch as extravagant as the one Tricia wears. What must it feel like to wear a watch that’s worth a year’s rent? Seeing the time, Tricia gasps.
“What is it?” Lois asks.
“Reality’s calling. It’s four o’clock. I’ve got to rush home and cook dinner for my husband.”
I don’t have to look at Tricia to understand she’s looking straight at me, deliberate and wicked. She’s not averse to playing the “wife” card to get a rise out of me. Had Lois not been in the room with us, my reaction would be different, but for now I accept Zerena when Tricia places her in my arms. A baby should be more than a consolation prize, a booby prize, but the stony face Tricia employs as she adjusts Zerena’s knit hat makes me think that’s all she thinks Zerena is to me: a booby prize.
“I almost forgot to tell you something important,” Tricia says.
“What’s that?”
“It’s not gas. That’s not what doctors believe. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I’m totally at a loss for what Tricia’s talking about.
“Anne Elise’s smile. Doctors used to believe newborn babies couldn’t smile. That what we interpreted, facially, as a smile was in fact just the strain on the baby’s face from passing gas. That’s what they used to believe. But they’re wrong. Lois was telling me this while you napped. Isn’t that right?”
Lois nods. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour. What else have they talked about? They’re so chummy, as if in cahoots with one another.
“So why, then, do babies smile?”
“Well-being, mostly. Not happiness per se, and not because they find something amusing or cute or funny. Isn’t that simply amazing?”
“Why’s that so amazing?”
“You make her smile! Don’t you see it? Already, this early in her life, you’ve endowed her with a sense of well-being!” Tricia says. She, too, is smiling, confident in her own privileged sense of well-being. “Doesn’t that make you feel wonderful?”
It does make me feel wonderful, but I don’t get Tricia. She’s a witch in sheep’s clothing. One moment, she says the meanest, nastiest things, and the next, she says something so totally gorgeous that it makes me want to cry. She’s a disorienting yo-yo, not even conscious of how she makes my emotions boomerang inside me. She’s about to lose her husband to me, but I wish—one way or another, sweet or bitchy—she’d settle upon consistency.
Tricia pats my hand. “And speaking of wonderful, I need to go and cook dinner. I think I’ll make lamb tonight. My husband loves lamb.”
Lois and I watch Tricia head out of the room so she can run home and make supper for Jimmy.
“You’ve got the sweetest mother. You know that, don’t you?” Lois says.
Chapter Eleven
LAUREL
I’m no pincushion, no dartboard, no jailhouse snitch about to be shivved, but an hour after Tricia departs, a half dozen nurses bring out the needles and stick me with medicines, drugs, antibiotics, things one of the sloe-eyed nurses declares “will juice your system up something good,” and when they’re not injecting me with one wonder cure or another, they draw blood samples. I’m feeling better, I tell them, asking if they might discharge me later today, and still they produce the hypodermics. Needles and me never mix well. When I was young, I passed out three times from the sight of blood being drawn from my arm.
Zerena awakens from a nap and immediately fusses for a feeding. One of the nurses hands her to me without speaking, treating Zerena as if she’s but an obstacle to her attempt to draw another vial of my blood. I wish they’d let me be alone with Zerena. It must not do her any good, seeing her mother prodded and probed like this. I long to hold her, comfort her.
“You’re my little sponge,” I say, bringing Zerena to my breast. No matter how much I feed her, she always wants more. Each time she clamps down and nurses, a jolt of electricity charges through me, connecting us. Zerena gazes up at me, her blue eyes shining, and I think she feels it too, that jolt of electricity that passes between us. Before she was born, I looked at her as being my key to hanging on to Jimmy. But she’s a key unto herself. Rather than being just a means to an end, she’s her own little lovable self. Already she owns my heart.
Two doctors—different from yesterday—enter my room without knocking. They’re a pair of smug monkey thirtysomethings, one male and one female, both holding translucent blue acrylic clipboards to their chests. A nurse asks me to make a fist so she can draw more blood, and it’s an unnatural feeling, making a fist with one hand while holding my nursing newborn with the other hand. One of the doctors lowers her clipboard. Her name—Dr. Helen Magee—is stitched onto her white hospital lab coat.