Momfriends (17 page)

“No, I meant, when do you go back to work?”

“Oh, right, well, I haven’t really given it much thought. I guess I am supposed to go back in six weeks. Luckily we are in hiatus through the end of the summer so I can take extra time. I can’t even imagine going back now.”

“But don’t you want to feel like an adult again? You know, talk to real people?’

I don’t know how to answer. I can’t really imagine leaving Abe for such long periods of time. I have no idea who is going to take care of him. But I don’t feel I can tell Claudia that. I have a feeling I am going to be judged. I shrug.

“Well, anyway, I should pack up your food, if you need to get back. I should probably do some work too.”

“Ok,” I stand up and try to ignore the amount of crumbs that roll off me. Claudia goes back into her kitchen and emerges with a large paper bag.

“What is all this?”

“Oh, it’s a few extras. I put some paper plates in there because I know that the last thing you want to do at the end of the night is dishes.”

“Thank you, that was so thoughtful.”

“You’re welcome.” She walks me to the door. “Please call me if you need anything.”

“Thanks again.”

I walk back over to my apartment. I really am missing Abe, and this whole idea of having to go back to work makes me want to snuggle him. I take a deep breath and open the door.

Pam is rocking Abe ferociously. He is only wearing a diaper.

“He’s exhausted,” she says right away.

“Do you need to catch your train? Sorry it took so long.”

“Well, we had a grand time, Abe and Maw-Maw.” Maw-Maw is what she insists on being called as if she is Minnie Pearl or something. She switches her voice to a high chirp. “Didn’t we? Yes, didn’t we, Abe?”

Abe smiles. The traitor.

“Where are his clothes?”

“He felt hot. Don’t you think it’s a little hot in here?”

“Not really.”

“He was burning up.” Are we really going to have to do this every week?

“Did you give him all the milk?” I left specific instructions to try to only use one bottle.

“I had too. He was starving.”

“Really? Ok.” He wasn’t starving. He couldn’t have been, but feeding him is the easy solution. I want to point that out to her, but I can’t figure out a way to do it without seeming completely ungrateful. I glance at the clock. It is a quarter to five. “Do you need to catch your train?”

“Yes, I should. Unless you need me to stay so you can take a shower or something.”

“No, I’m fine,” I say. I actually took a shower this morning, but glancing at my reflection in the mirror, I see that it barely makes a difference. Maybe it is hot. Maybe Abe is burning up. I
had
abandoned my boy. It’s cooler in Boston, but I’m not going there.

“Well then, I’ll get my things,” she says. She hesitates before handing Abe back to me. I know she doubts my competence, and as if she has spent the afternoon brainwashing Abe, he immediately starts to wail when he gets into my arms. Thanks, kid.

“I can stay,” Pam says again.

“No, we’ll be fine,” I say. The offer is enticing, but not if it means agreeing to it.

“I think he’s hungry,” Pam says. “You don’t have any more milk?”

“Not pumped. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine,” I say. But I am not sure I believe it. I don’t want to feed him in front of her. I want her gone. I want to reconnect with him.

She takes an extraordinary amount of time to collect her things and leave. She asks me several more time if I need her to stay and then coos at Abe and says things like “you poor hungry baby” to make sure I get the idea that she thinks he should be fed.

At long last I lock the door behind her and carry him back with me over onto the couch. I don’t think he is hungry. He had two big bottles of milk. Why does he always have to be something, tired or hungry or have a dirty diaper? Why can’t he just want to cry for the fuck of it? That’s how I felt all the time these days. Sure there are reasons, but in the end sometimes it is a relief to cry.

I put him next to me on couch so that I can set myself up to feed him and he lets out the loudest longest wail. Immediately I pick him up and he spits up. Was it possible that he has been overfed?

The smell of his spit up reassures me so much that I don’t mind that it got all over the front of my shirt. I’m not going out again anyway. I dab it off with the burp cloth. After he spits up, he looks at me and smiles in relief. I giggle and then he nestles into me and falls asleep.

“Oh, my god,” I say out loud and squeeze his little body. It is amazing. Maybe he missed me and needs his mama to relax.

I let him sleep on me for a good twenty minutes, savoring the moments. But then, in spite of how awesome it is, I decide to maximize the time and I pump my full breasts. I get an unprecedented five ounces on each side. So exciting. I set up a pillow barrier around him on the couch and on the floor. I pull the coffee table across the room in case he falls off. In truth there is no way that even if he rolls over and over he could ever hit it, but I need to be certain. I go into the kitchen and do all the dishes and set up the coffeemaker to make coffee tomorrow.

He is still sleeping when Steve gets home. I have Claudia’s stew heating up on the stove, following the explicit instructions she wrote out for me on her personalized stationary.

“Wow, it smells great in here. Wait, where’s Abe?” Steve asks.

“I’ve abandoned my child! I’ve abandoned my boy!” I shout. And Steve gets it. We saw
There Will Be Blood
together, and now we both stand in the kitchen hysterically laughing.

“Really,” I say, between gulps of laughter. “Really, he’s on the couch.”

“Wow,” Steve says wiping his eyes. “You had a good day, huh? I guess my mother’s visit really helped.”

Part of me doesn’t want to admit that. It isn’t solely that. It definitely helped to have some time to myself. But most importantly what made me happy was to go home and feel that I was at last beginning to understand Abe. Or that he was beginning to trust me. And also it was awesome to have him nestle into me that way.

Steve and I eat dinner in the kitchen. Steve even opens up a bottle of wine. Claudia’s three meat-stew is delicious. I will have to stop by and tell her. Or maybe I should send her a formal thank-you.

Every couple of minutes one of us goes into the living room to check on Abe. While I can’t fully relax, it is certainly one of the best meals I had in a long time. The wine helps.

We hear a little squawk from the living room and we both calmly go in to get him. Steve dutifully gets me a glass of water and I nurse Abe painlessly.

He falls asleep on the boob, and Steve carefully transports him into his crib. I hold my breath, cringing when I hear the floor squeak. It’s a spot I know to avoid. But it miraculously doesn’t wake Abe and Steve joins me on the couch.

“Do you think he is down?” I dare to ask.

“I don’t know. He was pretty out of it. He didn’t stir at all.”

“Should we watch TV or something? It’s only nine. He never goes down this early.”

“I know, it’s crazy,” Steve says. “Wow!”

“Yeah, wow,” I say. I lean my head against the shoulder. It is so amazing to be sitting here with him on the couch and not have a baby strapped to me. “Have you seen Tiny Mouse lately?”

“No, I see his food gets eaten. I put it out every morning, but there’s no sign of him.”

“He’s totally pissed at us,” I say. Then it’s back to the impression. “I’ve abandoned my cat. I’ve abandoned my feline.”

Steve laughs. “It’s so nice to see you in a good mood.”

“Thanks,” I say. I have a feeling I know where this is going.

“You look really pretty today,” he says.

I am tired, but sometimes, you have to get over your tiredness. I stand up and take Steve’s hand.

“What?”

“C’mon,” I say. I bring him into the bedroom. I can do this. After this evening, I think I can do anything. Even have sex with my husband.

It all starts familiarly enough. But then Steve goes for my breasts, which are exposed in my unfastened nursing bra.

“Um, you know, maybe they could be off-limits, for tonight,” I say. I don’t really wait for his response. I secure the hooks on my nursing bra and put my breasts away.

“Oh, ok, sure,” he says. We begin to kiss again, but then I start thinking that I am not really getting as turned on as I usually do. Nothing is happening. Steve sticks his fingers into my underwear and somehow I wrestle his fingers away. I kiss him more vigorously. I am trying to prove to myself that I am into this.

“Is everything ok,” he asks.

“Fabulous,” I say. But the more we kiss, the more I actually start to panic about what is going to happen. I don’t think I can do it. My vagina is only starting to heal, right? I never want to feel the kind of pain I felt there again. What if sex undid something? Worse, what if I get pregnant again?

“You have a condom right?”

“Yes,” he says. I am disappointed. No contraception would be grounds for calling it off. Now I have to go forward. We keep kissing. I am waiting for Abe to cry, so I can dash out of the room, but nothing. This is going to happen. I am a mom, now. Cavorting like some trollop doesn’t seem right.

Steve has my underwear off. His boxers are off too. We are heading into the home stretch.

No way.

“Um, Steve,” I say, sitting up at the same time. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“What? Really? Why?”

“I just . . . I don’t know . . . I can’t. I’m not feeling it. Mentally or physically.”

“Ok,” he says. He is pulling up his boxers. He is going to sulk.

“I’m so sorry. It’s not happening for me, and I don’t want to force it.”

“No, you don’t,” Steve agrees, halfheartedly. “When do you think you will want to? Not force it. Do it.”

“I really don’t know. I thought I would have by now.” I feel awful about all this. I hope he knows that. But I can’t. My good mood is slowly deflating. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s ok,” he says. He rubs my arm and then pats my shoulder. I still don’t want to be touched. What if I never did? “Have a good night, love.”

“You too, honey,” I say. He rolls over and within a minute, I hear him snoring. He is disappointed, but not enough to stay awake and think about it. His exhaustion won out.

Me? I have a lot on my mind. Liz, a nanny, Claudia, Pam. And the fact that the closest I would come to sex any time soon was already smudged on my toes

Chapter 10

Claudia Sets Sail on a Sea of Rulelessness

I needed written guidelines. I thrived on instructions. When cooking, I always followed a recipe, never improvising. When I played the violin, I kept my sheet music in front of me. Whenever I went on a trip I liked to have the directions written out neatly in a series of Post-its that I stuck on the dashboard.

There had to be instructions for this. I’m sure if I had done my research I would have found some online guidebook or a discussion group to have me navigate through whatever it was I was doing.

Though I wasn’t actually doing anything. No one could argue otherwise. I was just having lunch.

I had my excuse ready if I was ever questioned. I had a folder in my bag that I planned to whip out if anyone came along and questioned why Keith and I were having lunch together. I could point to the folder and make up a meeting about something. Anything. He worked in talent. I would think of something talent related. I should have had my excuse prepared but I didn’t. It wasn’t like me to be so unprepared.

But if I did have an excuse at the ready that it would be a virtual admission to Keith that I knew we were doing something wrong. I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit that. He was acting so blasé about the whole thing.

Except occasionally when he held my gaze until I had to look away. And once again I had that feeling that I had to either cross my legs or climb across the table onto his lap.

But nobody could possibly question this, could they? They couldn’t. We were two colleagues having lunch in the office café. If we were really doing anything illicit, I am more that sure we wouldn’t be right there in front of everyone. He asked me to lunch and I went. This is what people did. All around us were other coworkers dining together. Not everyone picked up their lunch and returned to their cubes and offices to work through without looking up.

No, people were having innocent, platonic conversations and experiences. There was nothing untoward about it.

Except that I found myself having trouble looking at Keith. And when I did look at him, all I did was look at his mouth, at his lips, at his hands.

And I couldn’t eat. My stomach was churning in knots. I had already had one mishap in which the food I scooped up refused to stay on my fork. The whole idea of eating was made more difficult by the way Keith was looking at me. He looked at me like I was transparent.

I could barely concentrate on the words he was saying. I was nodding and “mmm-hmming.”

I wished I knew what was and was not acceptable. There had to be a way to do it, but what was
it
? What was I doing?

Did he know that I was married? He must have. I was wearing a wedding ring. I needed to do the ethical thing—I needed to remind him that I was married, just in case he was going into this under false pretenses. I made sure to turn my ring toward him as I held my fork and cut my chicken, but he wasn’t looking at my hand.

This whole thing was banal. He couldn’t possibly really be interested in me. There wasn’t anything about me that men would be interested in. Interviewing. Maybe this was an informational interview. Maybe he wanted to join my department. Except, he wasn’t interviewing me. He wasn’t asking me anything. He kept talking.

He was telling me some story about some large animal—an elk? a buffalo? a moose? I wasn’t sure—that ran across the road in front of him somewhere on the West Coast. Washington maybe. It was so hard to concentrate.

I definitely hadn’t said much so far, but I had to figure out a way to work Peter into this conversation. I thought of Peter. I actually pictured his face instead of only contemplated the idea that having a husband made it wrong to be doing whatever this was. I pictured my children sitting on Peter’s lap as he read
Guess How Much I Love You.