“Well, he might just need more time. Men aren’t naturals with babies like we are. He’ll come around, though. How could he not? Alice is scrumptious,” she said, and peppered the baby’s foot with kisses.
Sunday was the only day that William had no classes or work, and his presence in the apartment threw off Julia and the baby’s normal routine. Julia sent her husband out for any errand she could think of and took a long afternoon nap, but it still felt like every time she looked up, William was in front of her, asking a silly question. Which shirt should he wear? Should he contact the movers about what time they planned to show up on the designated day? Did she want him to ask the super about the elevator button? Did these grapes look okay to eat?
Julia finally said, “I can’t give you every single answer in the universe! I’m busy with the baby, and I don’t have time to take care of two children.”
William looked hurt, and he apologized. This irritated her too. Julia shifted in her chair, beneath the baby, and wished it were Monday morning. She could feel the real questions in their marriage lurking beneath the surface of William’s tiny ones. These questions were hers: Do you really want this life? Me, and Alice? Do you want to be here with us?
William asked fewer questions after that, but this meant that he spoke less. This irritated Julia too, and the way he avoided the baby made her increasingly sad. Now that one of the main equations of their marriage—William’s questions plus Julia’s answers equaled a plan—had broken down, they were awkward around each other. “Am I doing something wrong?” he asked her one night, after they’d turned out the lights. “Oh, William, you’re fine,” she said into the darkness, and then fell asleep.
When Cecelia visited next, Julia tried to explain her revelation while giving birth and how different she was now. She said, “Did you feel like an animal?”
Cecelia considered this. “Well, I don’t think I made the kind of noises you made or went quite as feral.” She grinned at her sister. “But I know what you mean, I think. If someone tried to hurt Izzy, I’d rip their face off.”
“You’re more powerful since you had Izzy.”
“Am I?” Cecelia said, with doubt in her voice. Izzy was on her lap. The baby could stand on her own now for a few wobbly moments, but she liked to pat Alice with great enthusiasm, so Cecelia stayed close.
“I convinced William to go to graduate school,” Julia said. “But I’m the one who should have gone. I could have gotten a PhD in organizational psychology or gone to business school. I could run a business, don’t you think?”
Cecelia kissed Izzy’s soft cheek. “I think you’ve got some powerful hormones in your body and you should enjoy them while they last.”
That night, in the shadows, Julia said, “I miss you, Daddy. I wish you could have seen me as a mother. It would have made you smile.”
* * *
—
JULIA AND WILLIAM MOVED into the bigger apartment in July, when Alice was eleven weeks old. The apartment had two bedrooms and a new kitchen, but the living room windows looked out over other buildings instead of the sky and a peaceful quad. Alice woke up less frequently in the night, so Julia slept in bed with the bassinet beside her. Although Julia had wanted to move before Alice’s birth, she’d come to appreciate the timing. This was where she would start her new life. She’d decided, without talking to William, that she’d start working when Alice was six months old. Julia eyed her closet and designated half of it for the business suits she would soon buy. She walked from room to room in the apartment, thinking: When I’m making money, we’ll buy a new sofa to go there and a soft rug for Alice to crawl on.
William was gone for long hours, studying in the library, attending graduate classes, and teaching a summer course. By teaching and taking classes during the summer, he would earn his degree sooner, but he looked exhausted and glassy-eyed when he was home. Now that the baby was a little older, Julia’s sisters visited less often. Cecelia and Emeline had their own apartment—a basement space with a tiny backyard for Izzy—and Sylvie had rented a studio on the top floor of a small building near the Lozano Library. Her sisters were busy, and Julia was no longer their focus.
Once a week, Julia phoned Rose. The call sounded like the long distance it covered: Sometimes there was static, and Rose sat on her condo’s balcony, where she could see a sliver of ocean, so there was noise on her end too. Wind, occasional car honks, perhaps the sea.
“The air is different here,” Rose said. “Softer. Saltier too.”
“Alice can almost roll over,” Julia said. “Did you get the last set of photos? The ones I took in the park?”
“Yes,” Rose said. “She looks healthy. Did I tell you the ladies and I take turns cooking dinner?”
Julia looked down at Alice, who was lying in her lap. The baby was holding and inspecting one of her feet. What a marvel, Alice seemed to be thinking. Look at this craftsmanship. Julia smiled.
She heard her mother say, You have to let me go.
“What did you say?” Julia said.
“I made enchiladas for the first time. They weren’t bad either.”
Julia shook her head to clear it. She said, “Mama, did you feel different after having me? After becoming a mother?”
“What a question! I barely remember that time, Julia. By the time you were Alice’s age, I was pregnant with Sylvie, wasn’t I? I was far too busy to think about how I felt.”
Julia nodded. What had happened seemed to have happened only to her. “I have to go now, Mama. This call is expensive.”
When she hung up, Julia put Alice down for her nap. The baby was always amenable to the idea of sleeping. Each time she was laid in the bassinet, she seemed to set her mind to the task at hand. Alice closed her eyes, a small smile on her lips, and tried her best to sleep.
Julia pulled the shades and lay down on her own bed. She’d figured out why it was her father she’d yearned for since Alice was born. She wanted to explain to Charlie how she now saw the world, because he was the one who would understand. Her father had seen her power—understood its scope—before she had. When Julia told him that she and William were getting married, Charlie had looked disappointed for a split second. That reaction hadn’t made sense to Julia at the time, because she knew her father liked William. But Charlie had stopped calling her his rocket around the same time, and Julia realized now that her father had hoped for more for her. He’d seen her potential and wanted to watch her soar, not marry and make a home. “I can do both, Daddy,” she said now into the room softened with the sound of light baby snores. “I’ll figure out how to do both.”
Sylvie
FEBRUARY 1983–AUGUST 1983
THERE WAS A THREE-MONTH GAP between when Sylvie stopped sleeping at Julia and William’s apartment and when she got her own place. She’d told Julia that she had an apartment to stay in when she moved out. This wasn’t true, though. She didn’t have anywhere lined up. She’d simply known, the evening she’d forgotten her keys and spoken to William on the bench, that it was time for her to live somewhere else. That was the second time Sylvie had cried since her father’s death; the first was after she’d read William’s manuscript.