Chapter One
I probably wasn't the first woman who had ever opened
the door to the Fed Ex man wearing nothing from the waist
up except for a bra. Odds are I was not even the first to
do it in a nursing bra. But I'm willing to bet that no
woman in a nursing bra had ever before greeted our apple-
cheeked FedEx man with her flaps unsnapped and gaping wide
open. You could see that in his face.
I thought about being embarrassed, but decided that
since I'd been too tired to notice that I wasn't dressed,
I
was definitely too tired to care. "You have to air-dry
them," I explained. "Or they can crack."
"That has to hurt," he said.
I signed for the package, which turned out to be yet
another sterling silver rattle from Tiffany (that made
seven), closed the door and dragged myself up the stairs
to
the second floor of the duplex where I lived with my
husband, Peter, my three-year old daughter, Ruby, and the
mutant vampire to whom I'd given birth four months before.
"Yes, yes, yes. I know," I sang in a mock cheerful
voice
as I scooped my screaming baby out of his
bassinet. "Finished your six minute nap, have you? That's
all the sleep you'll be needing this week, isn't it? Hmm?"
Isaac eyed my conveniently exposed nipple and increased
the pitch of his wail. I settled my considerable bulk into
the aggressively ugly glider rocker that had taken pride
of
place in our living room and lifted him to my breast. He
began suckling as though he'd just gotten home from
vacation in Biafra. It had been all of half an hour since
he'd eaten. I leaned back in the chair, ran my tongue over
my unbrushed teeth, and looked up at the clock on the
mantelpiece. Noon. And I'd been awake for eight hours.
Actually, it's hardly fair to say that I woke up at 4:00
AM. That was just when I'd finally abandoned the pretence
that night was a time when we, like the rest of the world,
slept. Isaac Applebaum Wyeth never slept. Never. Like
really never. It was my firm belief that in the four
months
since his birth the kid hadn't closed his eyes for longer
than twenty minutes at a stretch. Okay, that's not fair.
There was that one time when he slept for three hours
straight. But since I was at the doctor's office having a
wound check (bullet and cesarean, but that's another story
altogether) at the time of this miracle, I had only
Isaac's
father's word that it had actually occurred. And I had my
doubts.
Sitting there, nursing Isaac, I entertained myself by
imagining what I would be doing if I were still a federal
public defender and not a bedraggled stay-at-home-mom.
First of all, by this hour of the day I'd already have
finished three or four bail hearings. I might be on the
way
to the Metropolitan Detention Center, hoping my smack-
addict clients were straight enough to have a conversation
about their plea agreements. Or, I might be in trial,
striding around the courtroom, tearing into a quivering
FBI
agent and exposing his testimony for the web of lies that
it was. All right, all right. Maybe not. Maybe I'd be
watching my client self-destruct on the stand while he
explained that the reason he was covered in red paint and
holding the sack of the bank's money complete with the
exploding dye pack was because his friend borrowed his
clothes and car and did the robbery and then mysteriously
gave him the bag. And no, he doesn't remember his friend's
name.
But I wasn't a public defender anymore. I wasn't even a
lawyer. I was just an over-tired, under-dressed mother.
I'd
quit the job I'd loved so much when Ruby was a baby. This
decision shocked the hell out of everyone who knew me. It
certainly hadn't been part of the plan I'd set out for
myself when I walked down the aisle at Harvard Law School
with the big diploma emblazoned with the words Juliet
Applebaum, Juris Doctorat. I'd left Cambridge full to the
brim with ambition and student loans and began my career
as
a corporate lawyer, a job I hated but with a salary I
really needed. Then, one day, I got into an argument with
the clerk in my local video store that changed my life.
Never, when I started dating the slightly geeky, gray-eyed
slacker who gave me such a hard time when I rented Pretty
Woman, did I imagine that he'd pay off my student loans
with the proceeds of a movie called Flesh Eaters and move
me out to Los Angeles.
My husband Peter's success had given me the freedom I
needed to have the career I really wanted, as a criminal
defense lawyer. Our decision to start a family had
derailed
me completely. I know lots of women manage to be full-time
mothers and productive members of the work force at the
same time, but, much to my surprise, I wasn't one of them.
When I tried to do both I succeeded only in being
incompetent at work and short-tempered at home. At some
point I realized that it would be better for my daughter
to
have me around, and if I was bored out of my skull, so be
it.
Isaac must have gotten sick of listening to me yawn,
because he popped off my breast, let loose a massive belch
and graced me with a huge smile. He was, like his sister
before him, bald but for a fringe of hair around the sides
of his lumpy skull. He had a little hooked nose and a
perennially worried expression that made him look, for all
the world, like a beleaguered Jewish accountant and
inspired his father to christen him with the
nickname "Murray Kleinfeld, CPA."
I kissed him a few times under his chins and hoisted
myself up out of the chair.
"Ready to face the day?" I wasn't sure whom I was
asking - my four-month-old son or myself.
Only a mother of an infant knows that it is, in fact,
possible to take a shower, wash your hair and shave your
legs, all within a single verse of "Old MacDonald Had a
Farm." The trick is finishing the "E-I E-I Os" with your
toothbrush in your mouth.
Balancing Isaac on my hip, I gazed at my reflection
critically. Washed and artfully ruffled, my cropped red
hair looked pretty good, as long as you weren't looking
too
intently at the roots. My face had lost some of that
pregnancy bloat, although sometimes it did seem as though
Isaac and I were competing to see who could accumulate the
most chins. My eyes still shone bright green and I decided
to do my best to emphasize the only feature not effected
by
my rather astonishing weight gain. I applied a little
mascara. All in all, if I was careful not to glance below
my neck, I wasn't too hideous.
"Isn't your mama gorgeous?" I asked the baby. He gave
me
a Bronx cheer.
I rubbed some lipstick off my teeth.
"Let's get dressed."
A mere half-hour later, a record for the newly enlarged
Wyeth-Applebaum household, Isaac and I were in the car on
our way to pick up Ruby at preschool. He was, as usual,
screaming, and I was, as usual, singing hysterically along
to the Raffi tape that played on a continuous loop in my
Volvo station wagon.
One really has to wonder how children make it to the
age
of ten without being pitched headfirst out of a car
window.
© Ayelet Waldman