But in the spring, her pain began to fade. She went back to the gym, snapped back into shape, and bought yoga pants that hid nothing. Our lovemaking began again, sporadic and incidental, modest in its meaning, ambition, and duration.
The weather had been warm and beautiful, and then it really was summer. Sun dappled the leaves of our walnut tree. Lawnmowers hummed in the evening. Somehow, the bill for Kaya’s summer camp had finally been paid, three thousand bucks, and the bill for fall pre-K was already late. One night after dinner we walked through the woods at the end of our neighborhood and into the park, Kaya ran ahead, I carried Beanie, Robin and I held hands, and I remember it well because later that night I almost killed her.
There were abandoned tricycles and a basketball left lying on the playground, and I threw an errant skyhook that went over the backboard and into a hedge. At some point, after the kids had been bathed and put to bed, we sat on the rug folding laundry, discussing them, how Beanie liked to sip his bathwater while I read him a story, how Kaya had fallen in love with the ugliest white patent leather shoes in the world, two sizes too big, and pleaded for them, and tripped on the sidewalk and skinned her nose, but still refused to take them off. How, at four, she was less unified, more complicated and skeptical, already bored with having her picture taken, offering a fake smile, and how Beanie would get angry if he couldn’t spit cottage cheese into the holes in my harmonica. We wanted them with the madness of a teenage crush, we belonged to them now, we were nothing on our own anymore, and we placed their clothes in neat piles, amazed at what we’d done. To have a conversation lasting longer than thirty seconds about something other than that day’s logistics or strategies she’d learned from parenting books on how to destroy our kids’ will left me thrilled and grateful and brimming with hope.
Then I cleaned the kitchen while Robin sat at the table, watching rough edits, making notes for the Nature Channel on a show not about nature, but about a hoarder who lived with fifty-two chickens clucking inside his house. Then she dragged the Internet for the perfect pair of boots and recipes for people who eat flax, while getting whacked on pinot grigio, explaining to me that manganese is good for my prostate. Then she lay on the carpet, raising and lowering her pelvis in a kind of yoga-pants mating ritual, making soft breathy sounds, her nursing boobs rising, moving up her body’s absolute geography as her hips lifted, then falling as her butt met the floor. Afterward she did our house bills, pausing for a moment to insult my income and future prospects, to recall my back taxes and lingering debts, until Beanie started screaming. He woke up Kaya, who made one too many demands, and then Robin started yelling too, telling her to stop crying, threatening her with consequences, referring to the chart. The Chart of Good Behavior rewarded Kaya with gifts and gum or punished her with the loss of dessert and weekend television. It went on like that. It hurt to hear. I tried not to. She took it out on Kaya as a way to yell at me, because I didn’t like the chart, or because parenting is hard, and she actually didn’t know what the fuck she was doing, and neither did I, and that made her mad. My agony at hearing my daughter suffer had to be contained. Because she was a child in this marriage, Kaya’s suffering could not be avoided.
After putting them back to bed, we tidied up the first floor, gathering, sweeping, shoving, folding. Robin followed me around, blaming me for sabotaging Beanie’s nap schedule, blowing wine breath in my face, punctuating descriptions of a four-year-old with words like “obstinate,” “transitional,” and “oppositional,” educating me along the way, insulting me with her sarcasm.
Perhaps I made it sound worse than it actually was. What I know is, we were mostly kind to each other. It was good at least half the time. All she had to do was walk into a room in her bathrobe, smelling like a baby herself, asking me to check a mole on her back, suddenly small and vulnerable, and I’d give in, my heart blown open like a parachute, a kiss on her neck when I was done.
After the insults, she sat at the table, blouse raised and tucked into her armpits, breast-pump suction cups strapped across her chest, squinting at the milk collecting in the bottle, talking about Beanie’s burps.
“Why do you think he has colic?” I asked.
“He’s too old for colic.”
“That’s probably true.”
“You’re not listening. I said it was something I’m eating. I said my breast milk is pink. I said it seems like colic.” She’d pushed aside our place mats from dinner and laid out her knitting project.
“I’m not listening.”
“From your tomato sauce last night.”
“I know what the problem is.”
She didn’t look up but cocked her head to the side, suction cups against her chest.
“You think our family’s going to fall apart because your family fell apart,” I said. “And if you keep it up, it will.”
“Keep what up?”
“Your militaristic expectations.”
She squinted at the bottle of tomato-colored milk, slowly filling. “You had your perfect mom. She never yelled, never said no. She protected you from your father because you needed that. But now you’re the parent. You don’t get to be the baby anymore.”
“And you don’t get to be my father.”
“Why don’t you go fuck your mother.”
“I don’t need to be educated by you.”
“If you do to your kids what your mother did to you, they’ll end up like you, an emotional cripple, unable to work with others, waiting around for some paradise that never existed, that will never exist because life isn’t perfect.”
“I know it isn’t perfect because you get into a screaming fight with a four-year-old every night so she cries until you bribe her with a cookie and packs of gum.”
“You’re the one who treats people badly, you cut me off at dinner,” she said, “and if you do it again I’m going to take my fork and stab you. Do you want me to stab you?”
“Every night you talk about how broke we are, while I’m trying to eat.”
“This from a guy who sleeps till noon while the babysitter my father pays for takes care of his kid.”
“That’s bullshit, but how would I even know? I never see a dime of that money.”
“And you never will, because you’d blow it.”
Kaya stood at the other end of the kitchen, holding the cat, listening.
“She plopped on my head.” She said to the cat, “I want you to apologize for biting my chin. I give you an apologize, and you give me an apologize and send it to my brain.”
Robin unhooked herself and pulled down her shirt and knelt and hugged Kaya. Kaya spoke to the cat: “You’re a cutie wootie. You’re a furball. Dat’s not responsible, sweetie.” Robin put the cat on the floor and carried Kaya upstairs and lay down next to her and fell asleep.