BEING IN STORES TOGETHER WAS a new pleasure, as was being in the car, or a restaurant, or walking from the car to the restaurant. Each time the scenery changed we were brand-new all over again. We strolled around the Glendale Galleria mall, arm in arm, chins held high. I liked to watch men ogle her and see the way their faces changed when I put my hand in hers. Me! A woman who was too old to qualify and in fact had never qualified, not even at her age. Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time. Phillip knew—he knew and he’d tried to tell me, but I hadn’t listened. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d heard the news about me and Clee.
She was more than young, she was chivalrous: holding doors open, carrying bags—not paying for things, because she didn’t have any money, but pointing out what she thought would look good on me. She steered me into a lingerie store so I could get some “curtains,” as she called them. The stuff she picked out was frilly and girlish looking, totally inappropriate for someone my age, with my body. Wiry salt-and-pepper pubic hairs poked through the sheer pink panties, but she never saw—she just asked me to wear them out of the store.
“You’ve got the curtains on?”
“Yes.”
She threw her arm over my shoulder.
WHEN TAMMY THE PIG-FACED nurse asked us if we’d started skin-to-skin yet we both went red. We had never even been naked together.
“Skin-to-skin helps to regulate the baby’s heart rate and breathing, and of course it’s great for the mother-baby bond.”
“No,” I whispered, catching up. “We’ve haven’t held him yet.”
“Who wants to go first?”
“Cheryl,” said Clee quickly. “Because I really have to go to the bathroom.”
Tammy glanced at me. She had thought I was Clee’s mom right up until the moment she saw us kissing by the elevator. I took off my blouse and bra and hung them on the back of a chair. Tammy wrangled Jack’s lines and tubes, carefully lifting him out of his case. He grimaced and twisted in the air like a caterpillar. She placed him between my breasts and adjusted his limbs so that his skin and my skin were touching as much as possible, tucking a thin pink cotton blanket over the two of us. And then she left.
I looked behind me. Clee was in the bathroom. Jack’s little chest pushed in and out; his machines were quiet. He made a snuffling noise and his enormous black eyes lurched upward.
Hi, he said.
Hi, I said.
We’d been waiting for this since I was nine. I leaned back and tried to relax with my hand cupping the whole of his legs and bottom. I felt like a statue of something virtuous. Here we are. Here we really are. It was hard to stay present, the moment kept jumping around like a sunspot. Across the room Jay Jay was settled on his mom’s chest in the same position covered by the same pink blanket. We smiled at each other.
“What’s his name?” she whispered.
“Jack,” I whispered.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s his name,” she said, pointing to Jay Jay.
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“What are the chances?”
“Don’t move.” It was Clee; she took a picture on her phone and then kissed my ear.
“Guess what that baby’s name is?” I said.
“Jack, I know,” she said. “That’s where I got the idea.”
“You named our baby after their baby?”
Clee looked annoyed. “We don’t know them—we’re never going to see them again. I thought it was a nice name.”
The other Jack’s mom looked both flattered and offended. Clee patted our Jack right on his soft spot, undeterred. Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She behaved a little more like a guest now, folding her clothes and putting them in a careful stack on my dresser while inadvertently knocking over all my lotions and jewelry. For the first few days back we tried to eat at the kitchen table and have conversations, but I could tell it just wasn’t her thing, so I sat with her on the couch and we watched TV during dinner. I even ate microwave meals sometimes; they all had the same brown sweetness, even the very salty ones. I washed her breast pump parts and helped her label the bottles with the date; she took pictures of us and decorated them with an app called Heartify. We were kids playing married—it was exciting just to brush our teeth side by side, pretending we were used to it. She may have thought I’d done all this before because I had a late-blooming flair for cohabitation—ideas just came to me. The first weekend I bought a chalkboard and hung it next to my calendar, above the phone.
“For phone messages. The chalk is in this dish. There’s all the colors plus white.”
“Everyone calls me on my cell,” she said, “but I can write your messages there. If you want me to answer. Usually I just let it go to voice mail.”
“You can really write anything on the chalkboard. It could be for encouraging sayings, like each Sunday we put a saying for the week.” I wrote DON’T GIVE UP in blue chalk and then erased it. “That was just an example. We can alternate weeks.”
“I don’t know that many sayings.”
“Or tally marks—like if you need to keep track of anything, you can do it here.”
She looked at me for a moment and then picked up the purple chalk and made a little mark in the upper left-hand corner of the chalkboard.
“Exactly,” I said, putting the chalk back in the dish.
“Do you want to know what it’s for?”
“What’s it for?”
“Each time I think: I love you.”
I straightened all the chalks so they were in a row before I looked up. Not smiling, no, she was serious and excited. I could tell this was the kind of thing she’d been planning to say to a woman for a long time.
“See how it’s up in the corner like that?” Her lips against my ear. “I left lots of room for the future.”
TAMMY SAID IT WAS TIME to try nursing. “Come back for his four o’clock feeding. First child, right? The nurse on duty will help you get the hang of it.”
I looked at Clee. She was squinting at the ceiling.
At four there was a new young nurse with short hair, Sue. She looked at her clipboard.
“So it looks like the mother”—her eyes moved back and forth between us—“will be nursing for the first time?”
“Actually, no,” said Clee firmly. “I’ve decided to stick with the pump.”
“Oh,” Sue said. She was looking around the room hoping another nurse would be interested.
“Is Lin your married name?” Clee asked, touching the nurse’s name tag with a roguish frown.
Sue Lin smiled at the clipboard, adjusting the pen on it until it dropped to the floor.
“No, I mean it is, I’m not—I guess it’s okay if you give a bottle.”
I watched Clee swagger over to the Isolette.
“Isn’t it important that she nurses?” I said. “For bonding?”
Sue blushed. “Yes, of course. Next time she should breastfeed.”
But she didn’t, she dodged it every time. I learned to hold the tiny bottle like a pencil, tease his lips until they opened, point the nipple at the roof of his mouth.
This is Clee’s milk, not mine.
It was important to give credit where it was due. He sucked and swallowed with his eyes locked on me.