The Bird House A Novel

May 4, 1967

sitz bath

orange juice



I GOT IN THE BATHTUB quickly, before the children woke up again. The heat soothed my bottom; it was still a bit sore even after four months. Dr. Kellogg said this happened more frequently in older mothers, which irritated me. Even my mother, who considered unmarried women of twenty-two spinsters, wouldn’t have put me out to pasture at thirty. But some days I do feel as old as a gray washcloth. Flat and dry and stiff. The bath swells me up, plumps me like a grape, and I regain a little buoyancy. But how many times a day can a person take a bath?

No one tells you about that part of childbirth, the pain afterward. After my first baby, I asked Theo to go buy me one of those red rubber doughnuts that make it easier to sit, and you would have thought I’d asked him to lance a wound. He was not good with injury. He was not good with change. He liked order, and I suppose he’d imagined a life with children being akin to running a school. Right now it’s a far sight closer to running a hospital. I imagine the idea of a piece of medical equipment in his home offended his sense of interior design.

“Do you have to have it today?” he finally said.

“I would prefer to have had it yesterday,” I replied.

He looked at his watch and telegraphed a whole story with that one small movement. A story he didn’t need to tell me again. He had a meeting, and couldn’t figure out when he could get to the store. He could build a skyscraper, but he couldn’t engineer a simple errand.

When I asked my mother about how she managed the swelling and pain, she, always decorous, claimed she didn’t recall. She had a faraway look in her eyes when I asked, as if she was searching the atmosphere for an answer, and not her memory. I couldn’t help thinking: I bet my father would remember. Not because he was more sensitive, but because he was more aware. When I was a child he seemed to know I was going to cry before I did. Once, when I tripped leaving our gazebo and fell against the rocks circling the hydrangeas, one of his hands reached for me, and the other, I swear, went into his pocket for his handkerchief. The hankie arrived, gently daubing at the corner of my eye, at the precise moment the first tear fell. Years later, he waited for more tears, ready to dry them, to hold me, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

Of course, it’s not my mother’s fault that bad memories elude her. I don’t blame her for blanking out the pain; for wanting to remember only the good things, the early things. She can’t remember what the nursing home staff brought her for breakfast most days, but she remembers Christmas in Vienna with Aunt Caro and Aunt Lillian, and riding in a horsedrawn carriage with a Santa who couldn’t speak English. She kept trying to tell him what she wanted for Christmas, and he nodded over and over again until she started to think he was mechanized. She’s told me this story five or six times, and I find myself nodding the same way. The Viennese nod—useful in so many situations. She can’t remember where she put her reading glasses, but she remembers the first time she went to the Louvre wearing a miniature black beret. She can’t remember why my father left her, but she remembers she was wearing a red dress and red lipstick when she met him.

Even if she could remember, how bad could postpartum be when you had a personal maid and a nanny in your household, people who slept down the hall? I’m sure Bertha and Louise brought her hot compresses, poached eggs, chamomile tea. I’ve taken to writing down what I have for breakfast and when I bathe, to try to keep track of those elusive necessities. My neighbor Betsy says that should be my only goal for the day: to have a bath and eat breakfast. That way, she theorized, you won’t be as annoyed when the rest of the day unravels, when the children and their needs take over. I wish Theo and I could have a nanny like dear old Louise. She fed me and changed me, no doubt, while my mother slept in her Lanz nightgown. Soundly, the way Theo sleeps. Neither of them prepared for this life of constantly waking up. But was I? Who was, when you’re descended from people who had staff to care for the children and clean the house? The money for such things doesn’t exist in our families anymore, but does the taste for them, the craving in the dark recesses of your DNA, ever go away?

Theo left the house early, before seven, complaining he couldn’t sleep. You’re not supposed to sleep, I told him.

“Babies’ cries,” I yawned, “are designed to wake up their parents. To ensure the continuation of the species.”

“Is it my imagination,” he sighed, “or does he cry more than I remember?”

“It’s just a different timbre from Emma’s,” I said, pulling the pillow over my head. I could still hear the baby through the heavy layers of goose down. In some ways, muffled cries sound worse, the music of being smothered.

I couldn’t see Theo’s eyes, those bright eyes that had been my undoing, but I could feel them on me, the way I often did when I used an unusual word. “Timbre.” Staring at me, as if he was turning me into whatever I’d said. My wife is an exotic curiosity. I must stare at her and decide if she is real or not. When I was in my last year at Bryn Mawr, we’d all take the train into Philadelphia to do research at the Free Library. The college library was too claustrophobic, too familiar; the books we needed had always been taken and the people we least wanted to see were always there. The Free Library was just the opposite; it was enormous, drafty, overwhelming. It had, if anything, too much possibility. It was filled with students, too, of course, but rarely the same cast of characters. Except for Theo, who escaped the Penn library every Thursday and Friday. My friends used to tease me: that man with eyes the color of his blueprints is staring at you again. We all thought he was soulful and deep, because his eyes were. It’s a mistake to judge someone by a physical characteristic, I know now, like ascribing human qualities to pets. It’s not the mark of someone soulful and deep to wait a month before you speak to a woman you desire; it’s the mark of someone who has nothing to say. The mark of someone who has allowed his eyes to do the talking his entire life.

“If the crying disturbs you,” I said, the disgust in my voice filtered a bit by the pillow, “you could consider rocking him.”

I had been the one up nursing the baby through his earsplitting demands, gritting my teeth through the pain of what had to be another clogged milk duct, on the right side this time. I was the one soothing him in Aunt Caro’s rocking chair, not Theo. I got up, and he snored away. I’d love to know when he felt his sleep was interrupted.

“I’ll get my own breakfast,” he said, kissing the top of my head. Our bed was so small—one of those turn-of-the-century hand-carved frames too impractical to use, but too beautiful to part with—that he didn’t have to reach far to do it. When one of us tossed and turned in the night, we often rolled into each other. This was once just an excuse for lovemaking; lately it made me feel jolted, bruised. I was aware of all the angles of his body, jutting elbows, knees. When his cold feet sought mine instinctively in the night, his ankle bones seemed to slice my skin.

“And… I’ll buy lunch out today.” He waited after he said it, hoping for me to thank him, I suppose, but I didn’t, and he left. Betsy once said I’d created a monster by making him lunch in the first place. By tending to Theo like a garden that would blossom and eventually give me joy. Betsy always told her version of the truth, and I tried to tell her mine. I tried to tell her how much money we saved on those lunches. How the lunch box itself gave me pleasure, the tidiness of it, the napkin wrapped around the fork, the carton of milk, the silver rocket ships of leftover stew or coq au vin, the foil-wrapped present of pie. Beautiful and pulled together, like Theo was. I believed his beauty could make up for all the shortcomings, like a house with great street presence. But houses need to give you comfort. Houses need to keep you company. You live on the inside of a house, not the outside.

It was impossible to explain a beautiful lunch box, a watered window box, or an organized linen closet to a woman like Betsy, who threw her bras and panties and socks into her drawers without folding them. You know, Ann, she’d say, watching me slice Theo’s meat-loaf sandwich into triangles, Theo’s not your son. And it stung. Stung for years. No matter how close Betsy and I become, there is always a small crevice between us, a crevice that contains that sentence.

Of course, I have my son now, and I see the difference. He is not Theo, and Theo is not him. He doesn’t even recognize his cries. Can’t imagine that desperate high-pitched wail as his own.

I stayed in the bath until the last possible moment. Outside the door, the baby fussed in his crib and Emma whined in the hallway, and still I stayed in, letting the water soothe my bottom and my sore right breast. For just a few seconds more, I stayed.