Skyline
Michelle Kouzmine
I fell in love with Mark when I was too old to believe in fairy tales, but still young enough to believe in love at first sight. We met on a blind date at some cheesy summer fair where Mark dragged me onto the Ferris wheel. We ate hot dogs with ketchup and absorbed the atmosphere. The Phoenix skyline glittered in front of us. As we zoomed closer and farther away from its lights, Mark pointed to the Chase Tower and said, “I’ve been obsessed with skyscrapers since I was a kid. I’ve never been too impressed with nature, but buildings, bridges, tower--I’m in awe of them.”
“It is an awe-inspiring sight,” I said.
Mark took my hand in his and looked at me. I was struck by his face, its openness. It was as if he soaked everything in--me, the fair, the skyline, the breeze and even the night itself--and reflected it back at me, basked in light. His view of the world, of his life, was so bright. He looked out and saw what wasn’t there, but could be. I’d long ago lost that childlike ability to imagine a bright and shiny future for myself. In college, I’d majored in Art, with dreams of becoming a nationally recognized, Southwestern artist--my generation's O'Keefe. Half way through my junior year, when I finally sat down and added up all those student loans I was, one day, going to have to pay back, I gave up on my dream of being an artist and became a realist. So, I minored in Public Relations, mixed up artistic soul with my newfound sensibility, and--poof--a logo designer was created.
Mark pointed again to the city in the distance and said, “One day, I’m going to change the skyline.” As we spun round and round, I leeched off his dreamy buoyancy. I imagined the Ferris wheel breaking free of its hinges and rolling us toward our future.
But we didn’t roll triumphantly to our future. This was reality, after all. The future hurled itself at us. We morphed into real and true adults so much faster than we were prepared for: cars, two of them; a mortgage on a townhouse in a family-friendly yet still hip (if you squinted) neighborhood; furniture from a store that was not IKEA; bills and bills and bills--the kind you’d find in your own mailbox; a baby. We were tired. This being an adult thing happens to everyone; I know that now. But back then it felt like something indescribable and huge was happening uniquely to us.
Mark’s brave optimism, his belief that everything was going to work out perfectly for us, started to lose its new car smell. Our jobs had stalled along with the economy. And, Lexi was the kind of baby everyone thinks they’d never have. She was born screaming and never stopped. She howled at the moon and the sun. One night, when she was just eight-weeks old, she screamed so violently that she gagged on her own wails and choked on her spit-up. We bathed her. We paced around the house, rocking her in our arms. I tried nursing her. But every attempt we made to calm her only agitated her more.
Desperate for silence, we strapped the baby in her car seat and drove around the neighborhood. Peering in the windows of all the bars and restaurants we no longer had time or money to set foot in, I said, “It’s kind of ridiculous, we’re killing ourselves trying to afford a house a neighborhood we don’t have the time to enjoy. Maybe we should move further out.”
Mark kept his eyes on the road. “Give up our home? And commute an hour each way? I haven’t been home before eight in weeks as it is. Didn’t you just say you had to leave in the middle of a meeting to get Lexi before the daycare shut down?”
It was true. I had said that. What I hadn’t told him was that my boss had called me into her office the next morning and told me that she was issuing me a first warning, which meant, “get your shit together or else.” Susanna had already booted me from one of my accounts to punish me for taking time off when Lexi was born. “Just because it’s in your contract doesn’t mean you have to take all the time.”
Lexi’s howls were finally beginning to soften when we hit a pothole. She startled and screamed harder than even before. “Fuck,” I said, as I climbed over the console and squeezed in the seat behind Mark. I rubbed Lexi’s bald head and wiped away the sweat beads before they dripped down into her eyes. “So we’re stuck? A Catch 22?” I had to raise my voice to be heard.
Mark glanced back at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s only temporary. I’ll figure it out. Just trust me, yeah?”
I leaned forward and put my hand on his shoulder. I held on tight. I thought if one of us believed things would be all right, that might be enough. I hoped so, anyway.
It was a quarter past two in the morning when Lexi finally fell asleep. She had cried for six hours, and my ears rang with the echoes of her shrieks. Once we were convinced that Lexi was solidly asleep, Mark gently eased the car up the driveway and coasted up to the garage. I said, “Don’t open the garage door or the noise will wake her.”
Mark said, “I don’t think we should risk taking her in, yet. She’ll wake up.” He reclined the seat back so far his head hovered a foot above my knees.
I tipped my head back and rested it in the crook between the backseat and the window. “Let’s just give it a few more minutes.”
I woke up folded up in ball with my head wedged up against the car seat. I was simmering in my own sweat. My braid was plastered to the side of my face. I sat up, rubbing the crick out of my neck, and tapped Mark on the forehead. “Shit. It’s morning.”
He bolted up and checked his watch. It was five to eight. There was no way either of us was going to be on time and we both had morning meetings. I unstrapped Lexi. She flopped in my arms, hot and sticky, still exhausted from her marathon of screaming. Her eyes fluttered; she hovered in the space between awake and asleep. I dreamed of carrying her to our bed, curling my body around hers, and cocooning ourselves in the cool, crisp sheets of my bed. I held her to me and we ran inside to get ready. Mark overtook me on the stairs and headed straight for the bathroom, the only bathroom, and shut the door. When I heard the water running and realized that he was going to take a shower and not even let me pee first, I hit my palm against the door and yelled, “Asshole!”
I strapped Lexi in her bouncy chair. She immediately wriggled and fussed; I figured I had three to four minutes before fussing ratcheted up to hysteria. My yoga pants were damp with perspiration; I peeled them off and tossed them into the hamper. I popped open a container of baby wipes and tried to scrub the sweat off my body, and threw on the outfit I had worn a few days ago. It smelled relatively clean.
Our bedroom was a mess, boxes everywhere, even though we’d been living there for two and a half months. We were counting on that ninth month of pregnancy to unpack and settle in, but Lexi showed up to life three weeks early. Things were unpacked on a need-to-have basis. The only locatable brush was locked up in the bathroom with Mark, so I dumped a box labeled “dresser” on the floor and rifled through the junk--no brush. I raked my fingers trough my sticky hair and re-braided it as I dashed back to Lexi’s room. She was crying and gasping. I lifted up her bouncy chair, with Lexi still strapped in, and headed for the stairs. Mark came out of the bathroom, dripping wet and with a towel wrapped around his waist. I yelled to him, “You’re going to have to drop her off. I can’t be late, again. Susanna will have my ass!”
“You’ll just have to deal with it,” he said as he passed. I wanted to trip him.
I set Lexi and her chair on the kitchen table and unstrapped her. She hadn’t fed in over five hours, an impossibly long stretch for a two-month old. I undid my blouse, unhooked the flap of my nursing bra, and tried to get her to latch on to my breast as I began, singlehandedly, preparing her bottles for daycare. She squirmed in my arms and gnawed at my nipple, making a clucking sound--nipple confusion, they call it, nature’s punishment for working mothers. I unlatched her and tired to calm her down so she could try again. Lexi’d lost a few ounces already and she was tiny to begin with. C’mon, baby, I thought, please just eat. Dammit, all she had to do in life was eat, sleep and mess diapers. My parenting average was already one for three.
She couldn’t latch on, and was so frustrated that she cried so hard, her tiny arms flung out to the sides, taut and shaking. I gave up and re-buttoned my blouse. I ran upstairs to Lexi's room to get her dressed. She smelled of spoiled milk and sweat, like a French cheese. I wiped her down with baby wipes, changed her diaper and threw a onesie and some booties on her. I held her in my arms and tucked a bottle under my chin, trying to balance it between my chin collarbones. Mark hurried past the room. I said, "Seriously, you really have to take her." I trailed him down the stairs. He ran to the entryway and shoved his feet into his still-tied shoes. "Mark?"
“Babe, there’s just no way.” He walked out, slamming the door behind him.
Dropping my newborn off at preschool made me feel like a shitty mom, every day. But what made me feel worse was that every time I drove away, I was overcome with a sense of relief—to know that for a few hours, I could give up what felt like the pretense of being a parent, and just be myself. I guess I just wasn't cut out for this mommy business. Not everyone is. It's just too bad that once you find that out, it's too late.
Two blocks up from the school I got stuck at a red light in front of a kids' park. Early-bird moms and kids were out and about, enjoying the not-yet-scorching morning air. None of the children were crying. None of the moms looked like they had spent the night in a car. I hated every single one of them.
The elevator at work was notoriously sluggish so I ran up the stairs. I slinked into the conference room at 9:15, fifteen minutes late. Not too bad, really. It sometimes happens that other people could be fifteen minutes late. Fifteen minutes was just a few extra red lights on a long commute, or the slow-ass elevator stopping on every floor, right? Susanna stood at the head of the large conference table, presenting several adaptations of the logos my team and I had been working on. If she noticed I sneaked in late, she didn't show it. My heart, which had been pumping away in my chest from both the dash up the stairs and nervousness, eased back into its natural rhythm.
After the meeting it was handshakes and smiles as usual. I did my little part. "Nice to meet you." Handshake. "I hope you enjoyed the presentation." Handshake. "It was a pleasure." Handshake. "We look forward to hearing from you." Handshake. I was just about to duck out when Susanna said, "Abigail?" She had a very particular smile that she'd use whenever she was about to destroy a person--a look as if she wanted to eat you alive and was resisting by gnashing teeth and clenching her jaw. "Have a seat, won't you? I'll be right back once I've seen Mr. Doobin and his team out." She guided Mr. Doobin out with her hand on his back, while Steve and Julie, the last two lingerers, flashed me looks of pity.
Judy bent down and whispered in my ear, "your shirt." She straightened up and glanced awkwardly at my chest. The entire right side of my blouse was drenched in breast milk; my nipple practically glowed like a stoplight through bra and shirt. I grabbed my folio and pressed it to my chest, pulsing with embarrassment. I wanted to run to my cubicle, pack my things and resign by email. I was half sure Susanna was going to fire me anyway. At least this way I could save myself additional embarrassment. But, before I could muster up the courage to walk out, Susanna came back with that cannibalistic grin creeping across her face. She told me that I should go home, change my top, and spend the rest of the thinking about what it was I really wanted out of my career. I gathered my things and shuffled toward the elevators. On my way out she pointed her silver pen at my face and said, "And, Abigail, that'll be your second official write up. Third time's a firing, not a charm."
"I understand," I said. When the elevator doors finally creaked open, I got in and jabbed at the Close Door button over and over.
Instead of picking up Lexi, like a decent mother would, I drove right past Happy Tots Daycare and headed for home. I was angry with Susanna. Seriously, I had to have one of those bitch bosses who thinks women need to do twice as much as men just to prove themselves. I was angry with myself. It seemed like every other new mom took to Pinterest and posted pictures of herself and her newborn in perfectly matching dresses that she'd designed and sewn one night after work while the baby happily bounced away in a bouncy chair. Really, how were these women real? Or did they suck, too, but got some sort of super-mom rush by making the rest of us feel like shit? If so, it worked. I was barely hanging onto my job, I still needed to pee, and I was pretty sure I smelled of spoiled milk and baby barf. I was even angry with Lexi. Babies were supposed to be little bundles of joy, right? Isn't that what everyone said? Everyone was so happy around little smiling babies, but mine never smiled. Really, never. I've never seen her smile. Like she was defective or something. But mostly I was mad at Mark. Why should his career come before mine? It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair, none of it. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and choked it.
I headed straight to the shower, stripping as I went up the stairs. I let the hot water wash off the grime, baby puke, sour milk and dried sweat, and watched all the guck from the last day and a half swirl the drain. I tried to convince myself that watching it disappear out of my house was some sort of cathartic experience and I'd step out of the shower refreshed, but I never had been Zen enough to believe in such things. At least I felt cleaner, physically. That is until I stepped into my storage room of a bedroom.
I imagined my room probably looked exactly opposite to every other bedroom in the neighborhood, all of which, I assumed, were tidy except for the possibility of a rumpled bed, still unmade from a quick tryst the night before. My neglected bed was relatively neat, but the room looked as if it was being consumed by a cluster of boxes. Maybe, I thought, if I could get the house decluttered, my mind would follow. I began with the pile I’d dumped out that morning.
I remembered packing the box, if you could call it packing. Basically, I had just swiped everything that was on top of our shared dresser into the box and taped it up. A lot of it, I discovered now, was junk we should never have brought with us. We’d actually paid someone to move this garbage from one place to another? I threw half of it away--broken makeup, matchbooks devoid of matches, a used tissue--ew. I found Mark's passport, which he hadn't used in six years, since he went to Milan on his first and only business trip abroad. I didn't even own one--never even wanted to. I like to feel grounded, planted into the Phoenix soil. When I opened the passport to look at Marks’s photo, a piece of paper fell out. I recognized it immediately. It was an invitation I had made for him on our second dating anniversary. It was just an index card. On the front I'd drawn a cityscape of skyscrapers, and I had colored lights in the windows to spell out his name. Written on the back was:
Date: today
Time: dinnertime
Place: ours
Life had been so easy then. The recession was still a few years away. The idea of having a baby was a "some day" fantasy we talked about only when my mother nagged us about having children. Our careers seemed to have been charmed. I used to get to the office an hour early with a Starbucks in hand. I would get more work done in that first hour than in the rest of the entire day. Of course that was before I'd been defeated by a person I'd given birth to and who had weighed less than my MacBook. Mark rocketed from supervisor to project manager, overseeing the company's largest projects. Being the project manager on such large-scale constructions was supposed to be the gateway to bigger and better things. Now his company would be lucky to win a bid on a new walkway or a carport addition.
I flipped through the book on Mark’s bedside table, smoothed out the crease from his dog-eared marker, and slipped the card in as a bookmark and a reminder of simpler times. Maybe it could be an inspiration to us, to stop fighting, stop dwelling on the negative and push through the tough days, months, (let’s hope not) years. One day, Lexi would outgrow her colic, our jobs would get back on track and we could all just get back to the lives we were supposed to have been living all along. Right? Because, this just can’t be it. It just can’t be.
By the time the room was clean, I had to rush out the door to be on time to collect Lexi without being issued a warning. On the other hand, maybe I could just make collecting warnings a new hobby. Or, maybe not. But, picking my baby up was almost as bad as dropping her off because when Miss Laura handed me Lexi's day chart, which kept track of how well she slept and how many times she cried, she would always give me a look like, "Your baby, and therefore you, make my day harder and I hate you for it."
Lexi was usually quiet on the ride home from daycare, partially from being tired from giving her all to Miss Laura, and partly because I took the back roads. One day, after making a wrong turn, I realized that so long as she was moving, she was generally quiet. Motion kept her content. Taking the back way added two miles and a huge dose of priceless silence to our ride home. I glanced in the rearview mirror. We had one of those baby-safety mirrors hanging in the backseat of the car, so that even though Lexi had to sit with her car seat facing backwards, I could see her face. She was slipping into a relaxed drowsiness; her little head swayed with the motion of the car's movements. The sight of her got to me somehow and my stomach radiated a warmth. I was overcome with this immense feeling of love, a feeling I'd never felt for her before, at least not that strongly. I mean I've always loved her, but in a more dutiful way. I wanted to pull over and bury my nose in her wrinkly, soft neck, maybe nibble at her thigh.
At home we curled up on the couch and I fed her from a bottle. It was a bit of a struggle but we managed. As I burped her I said, "You know what we should do, baby? We should go out. And you should be good so that Mommy and Daddy can have a real conversation." I got both of us dressed up pretty. I couldn't remember the last time I hadn't worn either work clothes or yoga pants, despite the fact that I'd never once done yoga. I had this idea that if we could just keep Lexi moving, we could actually leave this house, all together, and get something to eat and talk about something positive for once. When Mark came home, I pushed him right back in the car and strapped the baby in. I hopped in the passenger seat. Mark looked at me with a confused look on his face and said, “About this morning, I’m--”
“Hup,” I said, motioning for him to stop talking. “We are going to drive around until Lexi falls asleep and then we are going to talk about nice, pleasant things. Only nice and pleasant things. If happiness isn’t going to come to us, we’ll have to go find it.”
And like watching back-to-back reruns, we circled the same streets in the same neighborhood, again. It took Lexi a full hour to nod off. Mark whispered, "I wonder what we're going to spend more money on this week, daycare or gas?"
"It'll be worth it," I whispered back. Once we felt secure in our triumph, we pulled into Sonic. There was a time in our lives, only a mere two months and a life time ago, when pulling into Sonic would have filled me with the dread of impending indigestion, but now I was elated.
I popped a fry in my mouth and washed it down with a gulp of chocolate milkshake. This was going to seriously screw my post-pregnancy diet, but as I bit into that burger with extra onion and extra ketchup, I couldn’t have cared a morsel less. "This is amazing," I said as I wiped a dribble of burger juice from my chin.
"Goddamn heaven on a bun," Mark said. "Hey, the proposal went really well this morning. I don't want to jinx anything, but I haven't felt this good after a pitch in a long time." He gave me an aw-shucks-pal knock on the chin and said, "Things are looking up, Abs. I mean, check us out." He spread his arms out slowly, burger in hand, pivoting in a semi-circle like a game-show model. "We're on a date!"
Here's how I know I'm a selfish person: I couldn't let him have this moment. Not because I wanted to ruin it. That was the furthest thing from my mind, honestly. It's just when I have an urge to say something, I can't stifle it. The words worm up from my brainstem, tunnel through my face and then I just blurt them out. "Susanna sent me home today and told me to think about if I want to keep my job or not."
Mark lowered his Coke and wedged the cup between his thighs. "What do you think that means?"
"Well, I guess it means I need to start doing better at work, a lot better."
“But maybe,” Mark said. He stalled for a moment, tapping his wedding ring on the gearshift. “Maybe you could quit.”
"Uh, number one, unless you've just come in to some mysterious family fortune that you forgot to mention, we can't afford to live on one salary. And, number two, I have to work. I'm not cut out to be a housewife. I don't even know how to sew on a button. And I'm pretty sure that's on the list of skills needed to be one of those stay-at-homers." I swung my legs up and over the console and let my feet rest on his right thigh.
"But think of it this way, once you subtract the daycare bill, you hardly make more than minimum wage."
"Gee, thanks. And why don’t we subtract Lexi’s tuition from your salary? Why mine?” I wasn’t doing such a hot job of adhering to my own rule to stick to pleasant conversation.
“Come on, be fair, Abby. Think about it, you might really benefit from being at home. Lexi, too."
I stole a few fries from his pack and said, "Are you insane? I couldn't even imagine being home all day. What would I do? Bake a cherry pie? Take up scrapbooking?”
“Why not?” Mark said.
"No, seriously, we discussed this before Lexi was born and we both decided against it." As I talked I ran the numbers in my head to see just how bad it would be. The answer was really bad, scary bad.
The sun set, sucking in the heat from the air and pulling it down below the horizon. I rolled down the windows. We split a sundae and dueled with our spoons for the last bite. Mark won, scooped it up and held the ice cream in front of me as an offering. "Seriously, you look beautiful. I miss this. I miss us."
I slurped the melted ice cream from his spoon. "Me, too. I can't believe she's still sleeping.” I crawled to the back and oh-so-gently, oh-so-slowly covered her with a blanket. As I squirmed back up, Mark reclined his seat to look at the stars through the skylight. But he forgot about the overhang and instead stared up at a strip of red neon tube lighting.
I turned in my seat to face him and put my hand on his chest. It glowed red in the light. He grasped my wrist, encircling it gently and said, "You should paint again. Quit your job and paint. I never understood why you gave up on your art. You were good."
I still had a lot of my work from school packed away in the garage--mummified in bubble wrap. I said, "Why don't I paint? Because I barely have time to shower.”
"No, before that. Why didn’t you even try to pursue art as profession?"
"Because I grew up and got a real job, like people do."
Mark said, "Maybe that's what we're doing wrong. We're living like people do. Maybe we should do something different."
The next morning, Lexi and I woke up in the rocking chair, my nipple resting on her nose and her mouth still gaping open. She'd cried through most of the night, payback for the quiet date. Mark, who usually grabbed a coffee and ran out the door, was in the kitchen humming. He handed me a fried egg sandwich wrapped in a paper towel. "Here," he said, "I've got to run, but I thought you'd like some breakfast."
"Uh, yes, please." I followed Mark to the front door.
He checked his hair in the hallway mirror and said, "Hey, umm, what did you decide about your job?"
“I didn’t decide anything. I have only once choice, to go with my tail between my legs and grovel.” I took a bite of my sandwich.
I could see the relief in his reflection. "But just for now, yeah? Soon, I'll get some projects going, get a bonus or two and we'll be more solid. I don't know what we were thinking."
"We were high on car exhaust fumes and a toxic blend of sugar and animal fat."
"That could be it." He gave me a peck on the forehead and closed the door.
And grovel I did. Miraculously, it worked. For the next four months, by some sort of divine intervention, I was never late to work. Lexi blossomed. I swear, every time I picked her up from the nursery, she had changed from the morning. She was using her hands, sitting up, eating mashed bananas and avocados. Her little face, which before resembled a wrinkly old man who forgot his dentures, was becoming more cherub-like, like the babies you see on TV and in magazines. For the first time since she was born I felt like we could make it work.
But we hardly saw Mark. The contract he was so sure he'd secure fell through and so did the next and the next. His company hadn't landed a project in over half a year and Mark was going stir crazy, riding the desk and spending all day, every day, sending out proposals that were ignored. When we did see him, he was distant and quiet. Mark and I used to take turns pacing the living room with Lexi while they other one took solace is some stolen me-time. Now, after dinner, he’d go to bed with his iPad and leave me alone with the baby.
Once Lexi could sit up, she began to see the world from a new angle. She grew curious about everything around her. This apparently distracted her from whatever it was that had irritated before, and now she was astonishingly calm, at least during the day. Nighttime was still a struggle. Usually, I was even able to get some work done in the early evenings. She would sit on my lap and watch, as I'd build graphics on the computer screen. Logos, as a rule, are brightly colored, stimulating. When I'd move objects around the digital workspace, she'd follow along with her wet finger and leave a snail's trail across my screen that would illuminate my work by magnifying the pixels. I began to enjoy work again. Creating logos sounds boring, but really it can be fascinating. There's so much detail and effort that goes into something small--every pixel matters. Basically, my job is to create something tiny that, without words, perfectly represents a multifaceted entity. People don't think much about logos. But the good ones, well, they stick with you.
I was pumping out logos. Really, I was doing some of my best work. On spec, I designed one for a nationally marketed organic juice company. They hired us for a total rebranding based, they’d said, on the strength of the logo. After that meeting I even got a pat on the back and “good job,” from Susanna. Steve, Judy and I went out for celebratory lunch drinks and rehashed the moment Susanna said something nice to someone.
Good news: I never did receive my third write up. Bad news: on Lexi's six-month birthday corporate sent out a mass email to announce that they’d decided to close the Phoenix office. Susanna and a handful of others would be absorbed into the LA, New York and Chicago offices, and the rest of us were let go, effective immediately, with two measly weeks' severance pay.
I cried as I drove to daycare. I mean, of course I cried. I cried so violently that I finally understood how, when Lexi's emotions grew too large to hold in, she'd sob so hard that her cries seemed to gather up from every bit of her body and explode out of her mouth. I pulled into the daycare parking lot and tried to collect myself. I used a baby wipe to clean the mascara off my face and hoped my eyes didn't look too red. When Miss Laura brought Lexi out of the nap room, she saw me and held her arms out toward me, opening and closing her little fists like she was gathering and crimping the air between us, trying to diminish the space between us. When she was close enough, she dove into my chest. I grabbed her with both arms and squeezed her face between my cheek and shoulder. I didn't take her chart. I didn't tell Miss Laura she wouldn't be back tomorrow or the day after that. As I carried her to the car, she grabbed a fist full of my hair and stuffed it in her mouth. "You're so happy to see Mommy? Well, do I have some news for you."
Mark either took the news exceptionally well or he just refused to process it. "I'll figure something out," he said, but his voice was flat. He ate his reheated lasagna in silence and announced he was going to bed.
Being unemployed meant that I could actually spend time with Lexi. We took walks, went to the park and watched the birdies, sang along to the shows on Disney Channel, and took a lot of snuggly naps on the couch. Lexi learned how to crawl and play with toys. She was becoming her own little person instead of just some animated object. She had options and thoughts, likes and dislikes. I would watch her with amazement when she'd chose the red ball over the yellow one, or get absorbed in some minute detail like the pattern of the living room rug.
Lexi and I organized the house. We hung up my paintings. I held my breath as I unwrapped them, afraid that I’d be disappointed, afraid they weren’t as beautiful, as poignant, as I remembered. It was like looking at the artwork of a stranger. I hardly recognized them, and I couldn’t remember painting the individual pieces. What had it felt like creating these? Who had I been back then? I stood in front of one piece, a blurred image of a blue flower. I leaned in and studied the colors. I glided my fingers over the brush strokes. There was a language in the texture, braille-like; the painting told a story of freedom and happiness. It made my stomach clench.
Within a few weeks, I was able to get Lexi on a schedule so that she was, more often than not, asleep during dinnertime. When I’d pace her to sleep, I’d watch all those cooking shows. I got really into it, actually. I'd watch all the famous chefs and I'd try to recreate their recipes. Mark still came home late, but at least I provided him with a better meal than the pizza boy used to bring us. Not that he noticed. He ate his dinner in silence, hardly looking up from his plate.
Finally, I grew angry. I mean, I shopped for the food, planned out the meals, cooked, got Lexi to sleep so that we can enjoy some quiet time together, and not to mention, waited all Goddamned day to hear a voice capable of forming connected syllables, so the least he could do was say, “thanks.” I scraped my untouched dinner into the garbage and said, “You know, you could at least talk to me once in awhile.”
Mark circled his finger around the rim of his glass, and without looking up said, “I honesty just have nothing left to say.”
“Well,” I said, “isn’t that just perfect.”
All those stay-at-home mom things that seemed new and different before sort became mind numbing, fast. And to top it all off, we were so broke that our cable got shut off. The Internet, too. I had to take the iPad to McDonalds and order something off the dollar menu just to check my email.
One day I just sort of burned out, not slowly, but in a flash, like when you flip a light switch and the bulb burns bright for a second and then pops dark. I was standing at the sliding glass doors, looking at the backyard. We had a small deck that led to a community lawn. The grass, in the middle of the desert, was impossibly green, because every forty-five minutes, sprinklers would sprout out of the earth and spray the yard with water. It was mesmerizing. I pulled up a chair and watched, dazed, until Lexi crawled over and rhythmically smacked at my calf. Her touch startled me back to the moment. I picked her up and took her for an afternoon walk.
The sprinklers entranced me again the next day. Only this time, when Lexi rapped at my leg for attention, I kept my eyes on the sprinklers. When she cried, I yanked her up and plonked her in front of the TV to distract her. I went back to the window, to the sprinklers. I had this moment where I couldn't believe this was who I was. I mean, how had I come to this second, to this place, this house? How had this become my life? When Mark came home and asked me what I'd done the whole day, I lied. I told him we had gone for a walk. I told him we played games to work on Lexi's hand-eye coordination. I told him we had a nice day. "That's nice," he said.
And just like he’d said hundreds of times over the past half a year, he told me he had a few proposals in the pipeline that he was sure were going to work out for him, this time. "That's nice," I said.
That night, Lexi did not wake up, leaving Mark and me to fend for ourselves. We hadn’t had sex since before Lexi was born. We hadn’t even had the chance. We sat up in bed on either side of the mattress. The space between us was a canyon.
I willed Lexi to save me, to scream so loud that I'd have no choice but to run to her. Suddenly, I realized, my team had changed. It used to be Abby and Mark--the new parents. And now it was Mom and Baby--and that guy who came home in the evenings.
I pretended to let my magazine fall to my chest and feigned sleep. Mark flipped his book closed, switched off his bedside table and turned over on his side, away from me, without even a sigh of disappointment. As much as I’d just spurned him, I felt sharply rejected. I grabbed a hold of his arm and I jerked him around. "You can't get depressed. Got it? Only I get to be depressed, because you are the one who believes the dream is still out there.” I pitched my magazine to the foot of the bed. It fluttered in the air and then knocked against the top foot board and crashed to the ground. “Because if you're not that person for me, I won't survive."
Mark yanked his arm free of my grip and said, "You know how fucking tiring it is to be the only one who's even still trying?” He put his arms behind his head and stared hard at the ceiling.
“You don’t think I’m trying?” I said. “I’m trying every day just to not lose my every-loving mind.”
Mark laughed and glared at me. “No you don’t. You don’t do anything. You hole yourself up in this house. You don’t take Lexi to the park or to baby groups. You sit around all day.” He rolled on his side. “I thought if you weren’t working, you’d start painting again”
“Fuck you,” I said. The truth was, I was afraid to try to paint again. I was afraid that I was so empty inside that I'd have nothing to paint. I was afraid to stand in front of a blank canvas and know that I had nothing to say. I huffed off with my pillow and slept on rug in front of Lexi’s crib.
Seeing that we were already without cable and Internet, I wondered how far away we were from being without electricity. I asked Mark. He said, “We’re fine. I’ll deal with it.”
“How about I pay the bills.” I said. “Just give me the usernames and passwords and I’ll manage it.”
“I said, I’ll deal with it,” Mark said, and shut the bedroom door, leaving me in the dark hallway, rocking Lexi in my arms.
I stomped off in frustration and Lexi and I ran to Walgreens to buy a pack of diapers. My card was declined. It wasn’t even a credit card; it was my bankcard. I drove to the Starbucks and pulled into the handicapped parking spot to get close enough to the building to steal Wi-Fi and check my statement. We had $7.44 in checking and our savings account had been closed due to insufficient funds.
Mark and I were forced to remortgage the house. I had to get dressed in my big-girl clothes for the first time in months. And, thank you Ben and Jerry, none of my skirts zipped up--and these were my postpartum clothes. Mark called from downstairs, "Abby, come on! We're late."
"I'm coming." I flopped on the bed and sucked in my tummy with every stomach muscle I still had and tried to get the side zipper of my skirt up. It was useless. My stomach was rumpled, flabby and as stretched out as a half-deflated balloon.
"Seriously, Abby, now." Mark barked from downstairs.
I heaved myself up, grabbed a ponytail holder off my bedside table, looped the elastic through the hole and around the button, and prayed to a God I didn’t believe in that it wouldn’t snap and fly off in the middle of our interview. My hip fat bulged out like a lump of yeasty dough. I yanked my shirt down over the gap in the skirt and avoided looking in the mirror.
Even though we were late, we waited in the lobby for over half an hour. I held Lexi on my lap and kept my head down. I couldn't face seeing anyone I knew. I'd been avoiding pretty much all social contact since I'd been let go. It was just too embarrassing. After thirty-some minutes passing by in slow motion, we were called to the back offices, which I envisioned as private, closed rooms, but were actually just a double line of half-opened cubicles. We squeezed into a space the size of a toilet stall. There was no one behind the desk. Our file was open for anyone to see. Apparently, we hadn't made a mortgage payment in four months. I turned to Mark. "Four months? You told me two."
Mark wiggled a giraffe toy in front of Lexi and lifted her from my arms. "I was just trying to buy some time. I really thought that if I could get a good project, I could use the bonus to make back payments. I didn’t want you to worry."
"So the real advantage to paperless statements isn't saving trees. It's actually deceiving spouses. How nice."
The loan officer shook Mark's hand and introduced himself. I offered my hand, but he didn't seem to notice. I stood a few seconds too long with my hand hanging in the air in protest, but he didn’t seem to notice that either. He looked over our file as he eased into his seat. “So you’re here to refinance?” He spoke with the weariness of a man who probably had reoccurring nightmares, night after night, of having to endure listening to the same sob speech, day after day.
Mark folded his hands on the desk and said, "Sir, our financial situation, when we bought the house, was much different than it is today. My wife lost her job a few moths ago. My job is in construction, and you know what's happening in that field these days. And my pay is heavily reliant on bonuses, bonuses I'm no longer getting."
The loan officer glanced over the top of our file at Mark and sighed. "It's in the bank's interest that you do not default on your loan. Therefore, I will approve. If you still can't pay, you'll have to sell." He stamped and signed the forms and slid the packet across the desk. Mark was holding Lexi so I signed first. I picked up the pen and scrawled my name on the line, hoping Mark understood the contract better than I did. I went to fill in the date. “I’m sorry, this will sound dumb, but what’s the date?” I said.
The officer, who still hadn’t even glanced at me, said, “It’s the twelfth.”
And then I said, in a very small, ashamed voice, “Okay, but what month is it?”
On the way home, Mark was jittery and Lexi threw a fit--my own reoccurring nightmare. I thought we were past the non-stop crying phase. When we pulled into the driveway she was still sobbing. Her cries escalated to wailing. She felt hot, but I couldn't tell if she was overheated from working herself up or if she had a fever. I tried to soothe her as Mark searched the house for a thermometer while muttering words like, “housekeeping” and “organization.”
Her temperature was fine, a touch high, but nothing to worry about. We tried distracting her with her favorite toys, snacks, TV shows, but nothing worked. I rubbed her cheek with my finger and she grabbed it and put it in her mouth, twisting her head to the side to get my finger further back in. She bit down with her back gums and I could feel, hot, swollen mounds on the top and bottom of her gums. "Oh shit," I said, "molars. I totally forgot about the molars.” Since Lexi had cried right through the first nine months of her life anyway, we sort of missed round one of teeth cutting. We were unprepared for round two. I gave her a dose of Tylenol to take the edge off and froze some of her teether toys.
All week long, Lexi was miserable and she was making us even more miserable than we already were. Mark felt guilty about the mortgage debacle so he took over crying-baby duty when he came home in the evenings. He was actually pretty good at it. Two nights in a row, he managed to time her acetaminophen dose just right and have her asleep by 7:30. The second night, he came down the stairs and said, "Either we go out and have some fun for once, or risk becoming the only cabin fever cases ever recorded in Arizona." He arranged for our neighbor's teenage daughter, Sarah, to sit with Lexi. I was dying to get out of the house, but at the same time, I didn't want to leave my baby who was so clearly in more pain than she could handle without the comfort of her mom. What if she woke up and I wasn’t here? What if Sarah didn't know how much Tylenol to give her? Mark assured me she'd be fine. I gave the sitter my number and told her to call me for any reason at all and promised her that I could be back within ten minutes of her call. Mark dragged me out the door.
We got in the car and Mark pulled a torn-out magazine page from his back pocket and dialed a number. I snatched the page from his hand. It was from one of my cooking magazines, a feature story on Bread, a very hot, very expensive restaurant downtown. As he made the reservation, I pulled on his elbow, trying to break the contact between the phone and his ear. "Mark, hang up. Mark, we can't afford that place."
He said, "At this point, we can't afford McDonalds, so really, what difference does it make?"
I didn't agree, but I figured if was going to feel guilty about leaving my teething baby, I might was well make it worth it.
We ordered based on the one-up-from-the-bottom plan: second cheapest wine, second cheapest salad, second cheapest entrée and second cheapest dessert. I kept my phone on the table with the screen facing upwards so that if Sarah called and I didn't hear, I'd see the screen flick on. I didn't ask Mark how work was going because I knew it wasn't going well. We absolutely didn't talk about money. And neither of us even dared to mention Lexi for fear I'd jump up and run--literally run, because Mark had the car keys--home to check on her. Mark ordered a second bottle. The prices looked less scary after the first bottle was empty, but still I protested, sort of.
Mark leaned over the table with his face looked excited and open. I hadn't seen that expression in a long time. It filled me with the warm-fuzziness of nostalgia. He said, "Actually, I have some news. We're not here just for an evening out. We're here to celebrate."
I took a sip. "Celebrate what?" I thought, given that I hadn't even known what month it was, that I'd forgotten something like a birthday or an anniversary.
Mark slid to the edge of his seat and said, "I got a job offer, a good one."
"Are you serious?" I damn near broke into hymn. I put my fingers up to my lips and looked around, embarrassed. "Oh my God, Mark, that's amazing!"
He leaned in closer and said, "And I haven't even told you the best part yet. The job's in Moscow. They're building an entire new city there, right next to the old one. And they'll pay our rent. There are schools there, American ones." Mark talked on and on, selling Moscow to me like it was a timeshare in Palm Springs.
"Mark,” I said, “what are you talking about? I'm not going to Moscow. Lexi's not going to Moscow. I mean we don't even know anything about that place. And Lexi’s an Arizona baby. She couldn't acclimate to Moscow. Isn't it like frozen there?"
"I know it sounds crazy. But there's a huge expat community there. People do it all the time. Don't say anything right now. Just think about it. There's a woman in my office who was stationed there for four years. She came back to Phoenix and paid for a house with cash. Cash, Abs.”
On the ride home I could practically see the thoughts zooming around Mark's head. His fingers tapped, tapped, tapped on the door handle. It was like he was so unused to being excited about something that his body couldn't contain it. I couldn’t even begin to process what he’d just said. How could he even think I’d move to Moscow? At this point, I didn’t think I’d move anywhere with him. He had lied to me about the mortgage. He never tells me anything about his day. And now he thought I should pack up my entire life and move half way around the world to a country I’d never even thought about. For fuck’s sake, I’d never even been to Canada.
As soon as we turned down our street and I saw the lights were on in Lexi's room, I knew something was wrong. I jerked the car into park. "Lexi must have woken up." I could hear her screaming as I ran up the front porch stairs. I opened the door and saw Sarah pacing back and forth with Lexi in her arms. Lexi was screaming so hard that her face was purple and she was gasping for breath between wails. Her hair was matted down and soaked in sweat, and her face was coated in drool and snot. I grabbed her from Sarah's arms. "Why didn't you call me?"
Sarah stood, dumbfounded for a second, and then said, "Mark told me not to call. He gave me an extra thirty dollars and asked me if I could handle it if she cried." She fidgeted from foot to foot. Her shirt was splotched with Lexi's drool. "I was just about to call, though. She's been crying forever." Sarah looked as though trying not to cry was becoming too difficult. She was about to crack.
I turned to Mark. "You are a fucking jackass, you know that? What the hell is wrong with you?" I pressed Lexi to my chest, her tears and snot soaked into my blouse. She grabbed at me, pulling my sleeves and burying her face into my breasts. I launched the car keys at Mark. He ducked and they clanked against the front door. "Drive her home.”
I cleaned Lexi up in the bathroom sink. Her crying simmered down from a desperate howl to a whimper and hiccough combo that said to me, "Thank goodness you're here. I've been calling for you." I undressed her and held her tiny, naked body against my chest. I leaned against the bathroom wall and slid down to the ground and nuzzled her entire body between my knees and my breasts.
"I know, honey. I'm here. I'm so sorry." I cooed in her ear.
While Mark was gone, I was thinking about what I would say to him. I was going to ask him what kind of selfish, horrible parents would let their baby scream in the arms of stranger, just so they could have a few glasses of wine? What kind of a husband would bribe a teenage child? An asshole, that kind.
When Mark came home, he didn't come upstairs. Lexi was falling asleep, but every few seconds, she'd flinch and gasp to let me know that she wasn't asleep hard enough for me to lay her down. I knew this could go on for hours, so I wrapped her in a towel and crept downstairs with her in my arms. I had to talk to Mark, to yell at him, to get the screams out of my throat before they choked me to death.
I pounded down the stairs. "You are a terrible father, you know that? How dare you do like this? How dare you make me make such a scene in front of our neighbor's kid? How dare you let you own baby cry? Just, just how dare you?" My voice, shrill and edgy, woke Lexi up and she matched my screams and raised me one.
Mark followed me as I paced. "She's not a baby. She's going to be a year old in a few weeks. And you know why our daughter's so unhappy? Because we're unhappy, Abby. Both of us. We're both nervous and sad and so wrapped up in the fucking failure of our lives that we are making our own daughter unhappy." I felt as if he grabbed me by the throat and strangled me.
I took a step back from Mark and turned away, protecting Lexi from him. "How dare you say that to us?"
He reached out to me, but I stepped back again. He said, "I'm not judging you or blaming you. I'm blaming our situation. It's not fair for any of us. We've got to make some real changes or this life is going to ruin us. We'll end up hating each other and getting a divorce like just about everyone else. We need to make a change. A big one."
"You mean like moving to Moscow?" I rolled my eyes.
"Yes!" He yelled so loudly that Lexi started and yelled louder--competing.
I tilted her up and propped her against my shoulder. "We can't just up and move out of the country. What about me? This house we just resigned for? What about Lexi?"
Mark grabbed my arm to halt my retreat from him. "What choice do we have, Abby? We have no savings. We have no other prospects. It's not like your phone is blowing up with offers. This is it, babe. This is our only choice." His word slapped me across the face.
Lexi and I took refuge in the bedroom. I was far past the possibly of sleeping, but there was no way I was leaving the room. I was locking him out, claiming the room for myself, a hostile take over. Lexi dozed off on Mark’s pillow. I got up and arranged the reading chair and his bedside table into a barrier to keep her from rolling off. I picked Mark’s book off the table and flipped through the pages to find the MARK index card. It wasn’t there. I sat on the bed and looked around the room. The card was lying, face down, on the floor, circled by the indent in the carpeting that had been left behind by the table. If Mark had ever seen it, he’d never mentioned it. I left it there.
After I cooled down a bit, I went downstairs to find Mark. He was sitting in the kitchen, drinking with ambition. I searched his face for the openness and realized it was gone. When had it gone away? His face no longer radiated with all the possibilities the universe could throw at him. It was lined and hard. It was tired. And I realized, part of it was my fault. There was a time when Mark’s happiness was more important to me than my own, a time when I would have moved anywhere with him, without hesitation, so that he’d have a chance at realizing his dreams.
I stood in front of him with my arms crossed before me like a looping of barbed wire. "So, tell me about this Moscow job."
"What's the point?” Mark picked up the bottle from the table and poured the last few sips into his glass.
"The point? The point is I want to know about it."
"It's for a huge development firm. They needed a native English speaker with experience working on large scale projects." He took a sip.
"So you were perfect for the job?"
"So they seem to think. They're building a cluster of skyscrapers, just on the edge of town. Sort of like a La Defense on steroids."
"Skyscrapers?"
"Lots of them."
I nodded and went back upstairs to Lexi. I scooped her up; she was fast sleep and hardly stirred in my arms. We stood in front of my blue painting. I swirled my nose around her downy scalp and stared at my own signature, a white flag hoisted up in a sea of blue. Mark had found a way to make his dream come true. He was going to change a skyline and nothing was going to stop him from going. The question was, with us or without us? I hadn’t decided. I still didn’t know what my dream was. What was my skyline?
Michelle Kouzmine
I fell in love with Mark when I was too old to believe in fairy tales, but still young enough to believe in love at first sight. We met on a blind date at some cheesy summer fair where Mark dragged me onto the Ferris wheel. We ate hot dogs with ketchup and absorbed the atmosphere. The Phoenix skyline glittered in front of us. As we zoomed closer and farther away from its lights, Mark pointed to the Chase Tower and said, “I’ve been obsessed with skyscrapers since I was a kid. I’ve never been too impressed with nature, but buildings, bridges, tower--I’m in awe of them.”
“It is an awe-inspiring sight,” I said.
Mark took my hand in his and looked at me. I was struck by his face, its openness. It was as if he soaked everything in--me, the fair, the skyline, the breeze and even the night itself--and reflected it back at me, basked in light. His view of the world, of his life, was so bright. He looked out and saw what wasn’t there, but could be. I’d long ago lost that childlike ability to imagine a bright and shiny future for myself. In college, I’d majored in Art, with dreams of becoming a nationally recognized, Southwestern artist--my generation's O'Keefe. Half way through my junior year, when I finally sat down and added up all those student loans I was, one day, going to have to pay back, I gave up on my dream of being an artist and became a realist. So, I minored in Public Relations, mixed up artistic soul with my newfound sensibility, and--poof--a logo designer was created.
Mark pointed again to the city in the distance and said, “One day, I’m going to change the skyline.” As we spun round and round, I leeched off his dreamy buoyancy. I imagined the Ferris wheel breaking free of its hinges and rolling us toward our future.
But we didn’t roll triumphantly to our future. This was reality, after all. The future hurled itself at us. We morphed into real and true adults so much faster than we were prepared for: cars, two of them; a mortgage on a townhouse in a family-friendly yet still hip (if you squinted) neighborhood; furniture from a store that was not IKEA; bills and bills and bills--the kind you’d find in your own mailbox; a baby. We were tired. This being an adult thing happens to everyone; I know that now. But back then it felt like something indescribable and huge was happening uniquely to us.
Mark’s brave optimism, his belief that everything was going to work out perfectly for us, started to lose its new car smell. Our jobs had stalled along with the economy. And, Lexi was the kind of baby everyone thinks they’d never have. She was born screaming and never stopped. She howled at the moon and the sun. One night, when she was just eight-weeks old, she screamed so violently that she gagged on her own wails and choked on her spit-up. We bathed her. We paced around the house, rocking her in our arms. I tried nursing her. But every attempt we made to calm her only agitated her more.
Desperate for silence, we strapped the baby in her car seat and drove around the neighborhood. Peering in the windows of all the bars and restaurants we no longer had time or money to set foot in, I said, “It’s kind of ridiculous, we’re killing ourselves trying to afford a house a neighborhood we don’t have the time to enjoy. Maybe we should move further out.”
Mark kept his eyes on the road. “Give up our home? And commute an hour each way? I haven’t been home before eight in weeks as it is. Didn’t you just say you had to leave in the middle of a meeting to get Lexi before the daycare shut down?”
It was true. I had said that. What I hadn’t told him was that my boss had called me into her office the next morning and told me that she was issuing me a first warning, which meant, “get your shit together or else.” Susanna had already booted me from one of my accounts to punish me for taking time off when Lexi was born. “Just because it’s in your contract doesn’t mean you have to take all the time.”
Lexi’s howls were finally beginning to soften when we hit a pothole. She startled and screamed harder than even before. “Fuck,” I said, as I climbed over the console and squeezed in the seat behind Mark. I rubbed Lexi’s bald head and wiped away the sweat beads before they dripped down into her eyes. “So we’re stuck? A Catch 22?” I had to raise my voice to be heard.
Mark glanced back at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s only temporary. I’ll figure it out. Just trust me, yeah?”
I leaned forward and put my hand on his shoulder. I held on tight. I thought if one of us believed things would be all right, that might be enough. I hoped so, anyway.
It was a quarter past two in the morning when Lexi finally fell asleep. She had cried for six hours, and my ears rang with the echoes of her shrieks. Once we were convinced that Lexi was solidly asleep, Mark gently eased the car up the driveway and coasted up to the garage. I said, “Don’t open the garage door or the noise will wake her.”
Mark said, “I don’t think we should risk taking her in, yet. She’ll wake up.” He reclined the seat back so far his head hovered a foot above my knees.
I tipped my head back and rested it in the crook between the backseat and the window. “Let’s just give it a few more minutes.”
I woke up folded up in ball with my head wedged up against the car seat. I was simmering in my own sweat. My braid was plastered to the side of my face. I sat up, rubbing the crick out of my neck, and tapped Mark on the forehead. “Shit. It’s morning.”
He bolted up and checked his watch. It was five to eight. There was no way either of us was going to be on time and we both had morning meetings. I unstrapped Lexi. She flopped in my arms, hot and sticky, still exhausted from her marathon of screaming. Her eyes fluttered; she hovered in the space between awake and asleep. I dreamed of carrying her to our bed, curling my body around hers, and cocooning ourselves in the cool, crisp sheets of my bed. I held her to me and we ran inside to get ready. Mark overtook me on the stairs and headed straight for the bathroom, the only bathroom, and shut the door. When I heard the water running and realized that he was going to take a shower and not even let me pee first, I hit my palm against the door and yelled, “Asshole!”
I strapped Lexi in her bouncy chair. She immediately wriggled and fussed; I figured I had three to four minutes before fussing ratcheted up to hysteria. My yoga pants were damp with perspiration; I peeled them off and tossed them into the hamper. I popped open a container of baby wipes and tried to scrub the sweat off my body, and threw on the outfit I had worn a few days ago. It smelled relatively clean.
Our bedroom was a mess, boxes everywhere, even though we’d been living there for two and a half months. We were counting on that ninth month of pregnancy to unpack and settle in, but Lexi showed up to life three weeks early. Things were unpacked on a need-to-have basis. The only locatable brush was locked up in the bathroom with Mark, so I dumped a box labeled “dresser” on the floor and rifled through the junk--no brush. I raked my fingers trough my sticky hair and re-braided it as I dashed back to Lexi’s room. She was crying and gasping. I lifted up her bouncy chair, with Lexi still strapped in, and headed for the stairs. Mark came out of the bathroom, dripping wet and with a towel wrapped around his waist. I yelled to him, “You’re going to have to drop her off. I can’t be late, again. Susanna will have my ass!”
“You’ll just have to deal with it,” he said as he passed. I wanted to trip him.
I set Lexi and her chair on the kitchen table and unstrapped her. She hadn’t fed in over five hours, an impossibly long stretch for a two-month old. I undid my blouse, unhooked the flap of my nursing bra, and tried to get her to latch on to my breast as I began, singlehandedly, preparing her bottles for daycare. She squirmed in my arms and gnawed at my nipple, making a clucking sound--nipple confusion, they call it, nature’s punishment for working mothers. I unlatched her and tired to calm her down so she could try again. Lexi’d lost a few ounces already and she was tiny to begin with. C’mon, baby, I thought, please just eat. Dammit, all she had to do in life was eat, sleep and mess diapers. My parenting average was already one for three.
She couldn’t latch on, and was so frustrated that she cried so hard, her tiny arms flung out to the sides, taut and shaking. I gave up and re-buttoned my blouse. I ran upstairs to Lexi's room to get her dressed. She smelled of spoiled milk and sweat, like a French cheese. I wiped her down with baby wipes, changed her diaper and threw a onesie and some booties on her. I held her in my arms and tucked a bottle under my chin, trying to balance it between my chin collarbones. Mark hurried past the room. I said, "Seriously, you really have to take her." I trailed him down the stairs. He ran to the entryway and shoved his feet into his still-tied shoes. "Mark?"
“Babe, there’s just no way.” He walked out, slamming the door behind him.
Dropping my newborn off at preschool made me feel like a shitty mom, every day. But what made me feel worse was that every time I drove away, I was overcome with a sense of relief—to know that for a few hours, I could give up what felt like the pretense of being a parent, and just be myself. I guess I just wasn't cut out for this mommy business. Not everyone is. It's just too bad that once you find that out, it's too late.
Two blocks up from the school I got stuck at a red light in front of a kids' park. Early-bird moms and kids were out and about, enjoying the not-yet-scorching morning air. None of the children were crying. None of the moms looked like they had spent the night in a car. I hated every single one of them.
The elevator at work was notoriously sluggish so I ran up the stairs. I slinked into the conference room at 9:15, fifteen minutes late. Not too bad, really. It sometimes happens that other people could be fifteen minutes late. Fifteen minutes was just a few extra red lights on a long commute, or the slow-ass elevator stopping on every floor, right? Susanna stood at the head of the large conference table, presenting several adaptations of the logos my team and I had been working on. If she noticed I sneaked in late, she didn't show it. My heart, which had been pumping away in my chest from both the dash up the stairs and nervousness, eased back into its natural rhythm.
After the meeting it was handshakes and smiles as usual. I did my little part. "Nice to meet you." Handshake. "I hope you enjoyed the presentation." Handshake. "It was a pleasure." Handshake. "We look forward to hearing from you." Handshake. I was just about to duck out when Susanna said, "Abigail?" She had a very particular smile that she'd use whenever she was about to destroy a person--a look as if she wanted to eat you alive and was resisting by gnashing teeth and clenching her jaw. "Have a seat, won't you? I'll be right back once I've seen Mr. Doobin and his team out." She guided Mr. Doobin out with her hand on his back, while Steve and Julie, the last two lingerers, flashed me looks of pity.
Judy bent down and whispered in my ear, "your shirt." She straightened up and glanced awkwardly at my chest. The entire right side of my blouse was drenched in breast milk; my nipple practically glowed like a stoplight through bra and shirt. I grabbed my folio and pressed it to my chest, pulsing with embarrassment. I wanted to run to my cubicle, pack my things and resign by email. I was half sure Susanna was going to fire me anyway. At least this way I could save myself additional embarrassment. But, before I could muster up the courage to walk out, Susanna came back with that cannibalistic grin creeping across her face. She told me that I should go home, change my top, and spend the rest of the thinking about what it was I really wanted out of my career. I gathered my things and shuffled toward the elevators. On my way out she pointed her silver pen at my face and said, "And, Abigail, that'll be your second official write up. Third time's a firing, not a charm."
"I understand," I said. When the elevator doors finally creaked open, I got in and jabbed at the Close Door button over and over.
Instead of picking up Lexi, like a decent mother would, I drove right past Happy Tots Daycare and headed for home. I was angry with Susanna. Seriously, I had to have one of those bitch bosses who thinks women need to do twice as much as men just to prove themselves. I was angry with myself. It seemed like every other new mom took to Pinterest and posted pictures of herself and her newborn in perfectly matching dresses that she'd designed and sewn one night after work while the baby happily bounced away in a bouncy chair. Really, how were these women real? Or did they suck, too, but got some sort of super-mom rush by making the rest of us feel like shit? If so, it worked. I was barely hanging onto my job, I still needed to pee, and I was pretty sure I smelled of spoiled milk and baby barf. I was even angry with Lexi. Babies were supposed to be little bundles of joy, right? Isn't that what everyone said? Everyone was so happy around little smiling babies, but mine never smiled. Really, never. I've never seen her smile. Like she was defective or something. But mostly I was mad at Mark. Why should his career come before mine? It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair, none of it. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and choked it.
I headed straight to the shower, stripping as I went up the stairs. I let the hot water wash off the grime, baby puke, sour milk and dried sweat, and watched all the guck from the last day and a half swirl the drain. I tried to convince myself that watching it disappear out of my house was some sort of cathartic experience and I'd step out of the shower refreshed, but I never had been Zen enough to believe in such things. At least I felt cleaner, physically. That is until I stepped into my storage room of a bedroom.
I imagined my room probably looked exactly opposite to every other bedroom in the neighborhood, all of which, I assumed, were tidy except for the possibility of a rumpled bed, still unmade from a quick tryst the night before. My neglected bed was relatively neat, but the room looked as if it was being consumed by a cluster of boxes. Maybe, I thought, if I could get the house decluttered, my mind would follow. I began with the pile I’d dumped out that morning.
I remembered packing the box, if you could call it packing. Basically, I had just swiped everything that was on top of our shared dresser into the box and taped it up. A lot of it, I discovered now, was junk we should never have brought with us. We’d actually paid someone to move this garbage from one place to another? I threw half of it away--broken makeup, matchbooks devoid of matches, a used tissue--ew. I found Mark's passport, which he hadn't used in six years, since he went to Milan on his first and only business trip abroad. I didn't even own one--never even wanted to. I like to feel grounded, planted into the Phoenix soil. When I opened the passport to look at Marks’s photo, a piece of paper fell out. I recognized it immediately. It was an invitation I had made for him on our second dating anniversary. It was just an index card. On the front I'd drawn a cityscape of skyscrapers, and I had colored lights in the windows to spell out his name. Written on the back was:
Date: today
Time: dinnertime
Place: ours
Life had been so easy then. The recession was still a few years away. The idea of having a baby was a "some day" fantasy we talked about only when my mother nagged us about having children. Our careers seemed to have been charmed. I used to get to the office an hour early with a Starbucks in hand. I would get more work done in that first hour than in the rest of the entire day. Of course that was before I'd been defeated by a person I'd given birth to and who had weighed less than my MacBook. Mark rocketed from supervisor to project manager, overseeing the company's largest projects. Being the project manager on such large-scale constructions was supposed to be the gateway to bigger and better things. Now his company would be lucky to win a bid on a new walkway or a carport addition.
I flipped through the book on Mark’s bedside table, smoothed out the crease from his dog-eared marker, and slipped the card in as a bookmark and a reminder of simpler times. Maybe it could be an inspiration to us, to stop fighting, stop dwelling on the negative and push through the tough days, months, (let’s hope not) years. One day, Lexi would outgrow her colic, our jobs would get back on track and we could all just get back to the lives we were supposed to have been living all along. Right? Because, this just can’t be it. It just can’t be.
By the time the room was clean, I had to rush out the door to be on time to collect Lexi without being issued a warning. On the other hand, maybe I could just make collecting warnings a new hobby. Or, maybe not. But, picking my baby up was almost as bad as dropping her off because when Miss Laura handed me Lexi's day chart, which kept track of how well she slept and how many times she cried, she would always give me a look like, "Your baby, and therefore you, make my day harder and I hate you for it."
Lexi was usually quiet on the ride home from daycare, partially from being tired from giving her all to Miss Laura, and partly because I took the back roads. One day, after making a wrong turn, I realized that so long as she was moving, she was generally quiet. Motion kept her content. Taking the back way added two miles and a huge dose of priceless silence to our ride home. I glanced in the rearview mirror. We had one of those baby-safety mirrors hanging in the backseat of the car, so that even though Lexi had to sit with her car seat facing backwards, I could see her face. She was slipping into a relaxed drowsiness; her little head swayed with the motion of the car's movements. The sight of her got to me somehow and my stomach radiated a warmth. I was overcome with this immense feeling of love, a feeling I'd never felt for her before, at least not that strongly. I mean I've always loved her, but in a more dutiful way. I wanted to pull over and bury my nose in her wrinkly, soft neck, maybe nibble at her thigh.
At home we curled up on the couch and I fed her from a bottle. It was a bit of a struggle but we managed. As I burped her I said, "You know what we should do, baby? We should go out. And you should be good so that Mommy and Daddy can have a real conversation." I got both of us dressed up pretty. I couldn't remember the last time I hadn't worn either work clothes or yoga pants, despite the fact that I'd never once done yoga. I had this idea that if we could just keep Lexi moving, we could actually leave this house, all together, and get something to eat and talk about something positive for once. When Mark came home, I pushed him right back in the car and strapped the baby in. I hopped in the passenger seat. Mark looked at me with a confused look on his face and said, “About this morning, I’m--”
“Hup,” I said, motioning for him to stop talking. “We are going to drive around until Lexi falls asleep and then we are going to talk about nice, pleasant things. Only nice and pleasant things. If happiness isn’t going to come to us, we’ll have to go find it.”
And like watching back-to-back reruns, we circled the same streets in the same neighborhood, again. It took Lexi a full hour to nod off. Mark whispered, "I wonder what we're going to spend more money on this week, daycare or gas?"
"It'll be worth it," I whispered back. Once we felt secure in our triumph, we pulled into Sonic. There was a time in our lives, only a mere two months and a life time ago, when pulling into Sonic would have filled me with the dread of impending indigestion, but now I was elated.
I popped a fry in my mouth and washed it down with a gulp of chocolate milkshake. This was going to seriously screw my post-pregnancy diet, but as I bit into that burger with extra onion and extra ketchup, I couldn’t have cared a morsel less. "This is amazing," I said as I wiped a dribble of burger juice from my chin.
"Goddamn heaven on a bun," Mark said. "Hey, the proposal went really well this morning. I don't want to jinx anything, but I haven't felt this good after a pitch in a long time." He gave me an aw-shucks-pal knock on the chin and said, "Things are looking up, Abs. I mean, check us out." He spread his arms out slowly, burger in hand, pivoting in a semi-circle like a game-show model. "We're on a date!"
Here's how I know I'm a selfish person: I couldn't let him have this moment. Not because I wanted to ruin it. That was the furthest thing from my mind, honestly. It's just when I have an urge to say something, I can't stifle it. The words worm up from my brainstem, tunnel through my face and then I just blurt them out. "Susanna sent me home today and told me to think about if I want to keep my job or not."
Mark lowered his Coke and wedged the cup between his thighs. "What do you think that means?"
"Well, I guess it means I need to start doing better at work, a lot better."
“But maybe,” Mark said. He stalled for a moment, tapping his wedding ring on the gearshift. “Maybe you could quit.”
"Uh, number one, unless you've just come in to some mysterious family fortune that you forgot to mention, we can't afford to live on one salary. And, number two, I have to work. I'm not cut out to be a housewife. I don't even know how to sew on a button. And I'm pretty sure that's on the list of skills needed to be one of those stay-at-homers." I swung my legs up and over the console and let my feet rest on his right thigh.
"But think of it this way, once you subtract the daycare bill, you hardly make more than minimum wage."
"Gee, thanks. And why don’t we subtract Lexi’s tuition from your salary? Why mine?” I wasn’t doing such a hot job of adhering to my own rule to stick to pleasant conversation.
“Come on, be fair, Abby. Think about it, you might really benefit from being at home. Lexi, too."
I stole a few fries from his pack and said, "Are you insane? I couldn't even imagine being home all day. What would I do? Bake a cherry pie? Take up scrapbooking?”
“Why not?” Mark said.
"No, seriously, we discussed this before Lexi was born and we both decided against it." As I talked I ran the numbers in my head to see just how bad it would be. The answer was really bad, scary bad.
The sun set, sucking in the heat from the air and pulling it down below the horizon. I rolled down the windows. We split a sundae and dueled with our spoons for the last bite. Mark won, scooped it up and held the ice cream in front of me as an offering. "Seriously, you look beautiful. I miss this. I miss us."
I slurped the melted ice cream from his spoon. "Me, too. I can't believe she's still sleeping.” I crawled to the back and oh-so-gently, oh-so-slowly covered her with a blanket. As I squirmed back up, Mark reclined his seat to look at the stars through the skylight. But he forgot about the overhang and instead stared up at a strip of red neon tube lighting.
I turned in my seat to face him and put my hand on his chest. It glowed red in the light. He grasped my wrist, encircling it gently and said, "You should paint again. Quit your job and paint. I never understood why you gave up on your art. You were good."
I still had a lot of my work from school packed away in the garage--mummified in bubble wrap. I said, "Why don't I paint? Because I barely have time to shower.”
"No, before that. Why didn’t you even try to pursue art as profession?"
"Because I grew up and got a real job, like people do."
Mark said, "Maybe that's what we're doing wrong. We're living like people do. Maybe we should do something different."
The next morning, Lexi and I woke up in the rocking chair, my nipple resting on her nose and her mouth still gaping open. She'd cried through most of the night, payback for the quiet date. Mark, who usually grabbed a coffee and ran out the door, was in the kitchen humming. He handed me a fried egg sandwich wrapped in a paper towel. "Here," he said, "I've got to run, but I thought you'd like some breakfast."
"Uh, yes, please." I followed Mark to the front door.
He checked his hair in the hallway mirror and said, "Hey, umm, what did you decide about your job?"
“I didn’t decide anything. I have only once choice, to go with my tail between my legs and grovel.” I took a bite of my sandwich.
I could see the relief in his reflection. "But just for now, yeah? Soon, I'll get some projects going, get a bonus or two and we'll be more solid. I don't know what we were thinking."
"We were high on car exhaust fumes and a toxic blend of sugar and animal fat."
"That could be it." He gave me a peck on the forehead and closed the door.
And grovel I did. Miraculously, it worked. For the next four months, by some sort of divine intervention, I was never late to work. Lexi blossomed. I swear, every time I picked her up from the nursery, she had changed from the morning. She was using her hands, sitting up, eating mashed bananas and avocados. Her little face, which before resembled a wrinkly old man who forgot his dentures, was becoming more cherub-like, like the babies you see on TV and in magazines. For the first time since she was born I felt like we could make it work.
But we hardly saw Mark. The contract he was so sure he'd secure fell through and so did the next and the next. His company hadn't landed a project in over half a year and Mark was going stir crazy, riding the desk and spending all day, every day, sending out proposals that were ignored. When we did see him, he was distant and quiet. Mark and I used to take turns pacing the living room with Lexi while they other one took solace is some stolen me-time. Now, after dinner, he’d go to bed with his iPad and leave me alone with the baby.
Once Lexi could sit up, she began to see the world from a new angle. She grew curious about everything around her. This apparently distracted her from whatever it was that had irritated before, and now she was astonishingly calm, at least during the day. Nighttime was still a struggle. Usually, I was even able to get some work done in the early evenings. She would sit on my lap and watch, as I'd build graphics on the computer screen. Logos, as a rule, are brightly colored, stimulating. When I'd move objects around the digital workspace, she'd follow along with her wet finger and leave a snail's trail across my screen that would illuminate my work by magnifying the pixels. I began to enjoy work again. Creating logos sounds boring, but really it can be fascinating. There's so much detail and effort that goes into something small--every pixel matters. Basically, my job is to create something tiny that, without words, perfectly represents a multifaceted entity. People don't think much about logos. But the good ones, well, they stick with you.
I was pumping out logos. Really, I was doing some of my best work. On spec, I designed one for a nationally marketed organic juice company. They hired us for a total rebranding based, they’d said, on the strength of the logo. After that meeting I even got a pat on the back and “good job,” from Susanna. Steve, Judy and I went out for celebratory lunch drinks and rehashed the moment Susanna said something nice to someone.
Good news: I never did receive my third write up. Bad news: on Lexi's six-month birthday corporate sent out a mass email to announce that they’d decided to close the Phoenix office. Susanna and a handful of others would be absorbed into the LA, New York and Chicago offices, and the rest of us were let go, effective immediately, with two measly weeks' severance pay.
I cried as I drove to daycare. I mean, of course I cried. I cried so violently that I finally understood how, when Lexi's emotions grew too large to hold in, she'd sob so hard that her cries seemed to gather up from every bit of her body and explode out of her mouth. I pulled into the daycare parking lot and tried to collect myself. I used a baby wipe to clean the mascara off my face and hoped my eyes didn't look too red. When Miss Laura brought Lexi out of the nap room, she saw me and held her arms out toward me, opening and closing her little fists like she was gathering and crimping the air between us, trying to diminish the space between us. When she was close enough, she dove into my chest. I grabbed her with both arms and squeezed her face between my cheek and shoulder. I didn't take her chart. I didn't tell Miss Laura she wouldn't be back tomorrow or the day after that. As I carried her to the car, she grabbed a fist full of my hair and stuffed it in her mouth. "You're so happy to see Mommy? Well, do I have some news for you."
Mark either took the news exceptionally well or he just refused to process it. "I'll figure something out," he said, but his voice was flat. He ate his reheated lasagna in silence and announced he was going to bed.
Being unemployed meant that I could actually spend time with Lexi. We took walks, went to the park and watched the birdies, sang along to the shows on Disney Channel, and took a lot of snuggly naps on the couch. Lexi learned how to crawl and play with toys. She was becoming her own little person instead of just some animated object. She had options and thoughts, likes and dislikes. I would watch her with amazement when she'd chose the red ball over the yellow one, or get absorbed in some minute detail like the pattern of the living room rug.
Lexi and I organized the house. We hung up my paintings. I held my breath as I unwrapped them, afraid that I’d be disappointed, afraid they weren’t as beautiful, as poignant, as I remembered. It was like looking at the artwork of a stranger. I hardly recognized them, and I couldn’t remember painting the individual pieces. What had it felt like creating these? Who had I been back then? I stood in front of one piece, a blurred image of a blue flower. I leaned in and studied the colors. I glided my fingers over the brush strokes. There was a language in the texture, braille-like; the painting told a story of freedom and happiness. It made my stomach clench.
Within a few weeks, I was able to get Lexi on a schedule so that she was, more often than not, asleep during dinnertime. When I’d pace her to sleep, I’d watch all those cooking shows. I got really into it, actually. I'd watch all the famous chefs and I'd try to recreate their recipes. Mark still came home late, but at least I provided him with a better meal than the pizza boy used to bring us. Not that he noticed. He ate his dinner in silence, hardly looking up from his plate.
Finally, I grew angry. I mean, I shopped for the food, planned out the meals, cooked, got Lexi to sleep so that we can enjoy some quiet time together, and not to mention, waited all Goddamned day to hear a voice capable of forming connected syllables, so the least he could do was say, “thanks.” I scraped my untouched dinner into the garbage and said, “You know, you could at least talk to me once in awhile.”
Mark circled his finger around the rim of his glass, and without looking up said, “I honesty just have nothing left to say.”
“Well,” I said, “isn’t that just perfect.”
All those stay-at-home mom things that seemed new and different before sort became mind numbing, fast. And to top it all off, we were so broke that our cable got shut off. The Internet, too. I had to take the iPad to McDonalds and order something off the dollar menu just to check my email.
One day I just sort of burned out, not slowly, but in a flash, like when you flip a light switch and the bulb burns bright for a second and then pops dark. I was standing at the sliding glass doors, looking at the backyard. We had a small deck that led to a community lawn. The grass, in the middle of the desert, was impossibly green, because every forty-five minutes, sprinklers would sprout out of the earth and spray the yard with water. It was mesmerizing. I pulled up a chair and watched, dazed, until Lexi crawled over and rhythmically smacked at my calf. Her touch startled me back to the moment. I picked her up and took her for an afternoon walk.
The sprinklers entranced me again the next day. Only this time, when Lexi rapped at my leg for attention, I kept my eyes on the sprinklers. When she cried, I yanked her up and plonked her in front of the TV to distract her. I went back to the window, to the sprinklers. I had this moment where I couldn't believe this was who I was. I mean, how had I come to this second, to this place, this house? How had this become my life? When Mark came home and asked me what I'd done the whole day, I lied. I told him we had gone for a walk. I told him we played games to work on Lexi's hand-eye coordination. I told him we had a nice day. "That's nice," he said.
And just like he’d said hundreds of times over the past half a year, he told me he had a few proposals in the pipeline that he was sure were going to work out for him, this time. "That's nice," I said.
That night, Lexi did not wake up, leaving Mark and me to fend for ourselves. We hadn’t had sex since before Lexi was born. We hadn’t even had the chance. We sat up in bed on either side of the mattress. The space between us was a canyon.
I willed Lexi to save me, to scream so loud that I'd have no choice but to run to her. Suddenly, I realized, my team had changed. It used to be Abby and Mark--the new parents. And now it was Mom and Baby--and that guy who came home in the evenings.
I pretended to let my magazine fall to my chest and feigned sleep. Mark flipped his book closed, switched off his bedside table and turned over on his side, away from me, without even a sigh of disappointment. As much as I’d just spurned him, I felt sharply rejected. I grabbed a hold of his arm and I jerked him around. "You can't get depressed. Got it? Only I get to be depressed, because you are the one who believes the dream is still out there.” I pitched my magazine to the foot of the bed. It fluttered in the air and then knocked against the top foot board and crashed to the ground. “Because if you're not that person for me, I won't survive."
Mark yanked his arm free of my grip and said, "You know how fucking tiring it is to be the only one who's even still trying?” He put his arms behind his head and stared hard at the ceiling.
“You don’t think I’m trying?” I said. “I’m trying every day just to not lose my every-loving mind.”
Mark laughed and glared at me. “No you don’t. You don’t do anything. You hole yourself up in this house. You don’t take Lexi to the park or to baby groups. You sit around all day.” He rolled on his side. “I thought if you weren’t working, you’d start painting again”
“Fuck you,” I said. The truth was, I was afraid to try to paint again. I was afraid that I was so empty inside that I'd have nothing to paint. I was afraid to stand in front of a blank canvas and know that I had nothing to say. I huffed off with my pillow and slept on rug in front of Lexi’s crib.
Seeing that we were already without cable and Internet, I wondered how far away we were from being without electricity. I asked Mark. He said, “We’re fine. I’ll deal with it.”
“How about I pay the bills.” I said. “Just give me the usernames and passwords and I’ll manage it.”
“I said, I’ll deal with it,” Mark said, and shut the bedroom door, leaving me in the dark hallway, rocking Lexi in my arms.
I stomped off in frustration and Lexi and I ran to Walgreens to buy a pack of diapers. My card was declined. It wasn’t even a credit card; it was my bankcard. I drove to the Starbucks and pulled into the handicapped parking spot to get close enough to the building to steal Wi-Fi and check my statement. We had $7.44 in checking and our savings account had been closed due to insufficient funds.
Mark and I were forced to remortgage the house. I had to get dressed in my big-girl clothes for the first time in months. And, thank you Ben and Jerry, none of my skirts zipped up--and these were my postpartum clothes. Mark called from downstairs, "Abby, come on! We're late."
"I'm coming." I flopped on the bed and sucked in my tummy with every stomach muscle I still had and tried to get the side zipper of my skirt up. It was useless. My stomach was rumpled, flabby and as stretched out as a half-deflated balloon.
"Seriously, Abby, now." Mark barked from downstairs.
I heaved myself up, grabbed a ponytail holder off my bedside table, looped the elastic through the hole and around the button, and prayed to a God I didn’t believe in that it wouldn’t snap and fly off in the middle of our interview. My hip fat bulged out like a lump of yeasty dough. I yanked my shirt down over the gap in the skirt and avoided looking in the mirror.
Even though we were late, we waited in the lobby for over half an hour. I held Lexi on my lap and kept my head down. I couldn't face seeing anyone I knew. I'd been avoiding pretty much all social contact since I'd been let go. It was just too embarrassing. After thirty-some minutes passing by in slow motion, we were called to the back offices, which I envisioned as private, closed rooms, but were actually just a double line of half-opened cubicles. We squeezed into a space the size of a toilet stall. There was no one behind the desk. Our file was open for anyone to see. Apparently, we hadn't made a mortgage payment in four months. I turned to Mark. "Four months? You told me two."
Mark wiggled a giraffe toy in front of Lexi and lifted her from my arms. "I was just trying to buy some time. I really thought that if I could get a good project, I could use the bonus to make back payments. I didn’t want you to worry."
"So the real advantage to paperless statements isn't saving trees. It's actually deceiving spouses. How nice."
The loan officer shook Mark's hand and introduced himself. I offered my hand, but he didn't seem to notice. I stood a few seconds too long with my hand hanging in the air in protest, but he didn’t seem to notice that either. He looked over our file as he eased into his seat. “So you’re here to refinance?” He spoke with the weariness of a man who probably had reoccurring nightmares, night after night, of having to endure listening to the same sob speech, day after day.
Mark folded his hands on the desk and said, "Sir, our financial situation, when we bought the house, was much different than it is today. My wife lost her job a few moths ago. My job is in construction, and you know what's happening in that field these days. And my pay is heavily reliant on bonuses, bonuses I'm no longer getting."
The loan officer glanced over the top of our file at Mark and sighed. "It's in the bank's interest that you do not default on your loan. Therefore, I will approve. If you still can't pay, you'll have to sell." He stamped and signed the forms and slid the packet across the desk. Mark was holding Lexi so I signed first. I picked up the pen and scrawled my name on the line, hoping Mark understood the contract better than I did. I went to fill in the date. “I’m sorry, this will sound dumb, but what’s the date?” I said.
The officer, who still hadn’t even glanced at me, said, “It’s the twelfth.”
And then I said, in a very small, ashamed voice, “Okay, but what month is it?”
On the way home, Mark was jittery and Lexi threw a fit--my own reoccurring nightmare. I thought we were past the non-stop crying phase. When we pulled into the driveway she was still sobbing. Her cries escalated to wailing. She felt hot, but I couldn't tell if she was overheated from working herself up or if she had a fever. I tried to soothe her as Mark searched the house for a thermometer while muttering words like, “housekeeping” and “organization.”
Her temperature was fine, a touch high, but nothing to worry about. We tried distracting her with her favorite toys, snacks, TV shows, but nothing worked. I rubbed her cheek with my finger and she grabbed it and put it in her mouth, twisting her head to the side to get my finger further back in. She bit down with her back gums and I could feel, hot, swollen mounds on the top and bottom of her gums. "Oh shit," I said, "molars. I totally forgot about the molars.” Since Lexi had cried right through the first nine months of her life anyway, we sort of missed round one of teeth cutting. We were unprepared for round two. I gave her a dose of Tylenol to take the edge off and froze some of her teether toys.
All week long, Lexi was miserable and she was making us even more miserable than we already were. Mark felt guilty about the mortgage debacle so he took over crying-baby duty when he came home in the evenings. He was actually pretty good at it. Two nights in a row, he managed to time her acetaminophen dose just right and have her asleep by 7:30. The second night, he came down the stairs and said, "Either we go out and have some fun for once, or risk becoming the only cabin fever cases ever recorded in Arizona." He arranged for our neighbor's teenage daughter, Sarah, to sit with Lexi. I was dying to get out of the house, but at the same time, I didn't want to leave my baby who was so clearly in more pain than she could handle without the comfort of her mom. What if she woke up and I wasn’t here? What if Sarah didn't know how much Tylenol to give her? Mark assured me she'd be fine. I gave the sitter my number and told her to call me for any reason at all and promised her that I could be back within ten minutes of her call. Mark dragged me out the door.
We got in the car and Mark pulled a torn-out magazine page from his back pocket and dialed a number. I snatched the page from his hand. It was from one of my cooking magazines, a feature story on Bread, a very hot, very expensive restaurant downtown. As he made the reservation, I pulled on his elbow, trying to break the contact between the phone and his ear. "Mark, hang up. Mark, we can't afford that place."
He said, "At this point, we can't afford McDonalds, so really, what difference does it make?"
I didn't agree, but I figured if was going to feel guilty about leaving my teething baby, I might was well make it worth it.
We ordered based on the one-up-from-the-bottom plan: second cheapest wine, second cheapest salad, second cheapest entrée and second cheapest dessert. I kept my phone on the table with the screen facing upwards so that if Sarah called and I didn't hear, I'd see the screen flick on. I didn't ask Mark how work was going because I knew it wasn't going well. We absolutely didn't talk about money. And neither of us even dared to mention Lexi for fear I'd jump up and run--literally run, because Mark had the car keys--home to check on her. Mark ordered a second bottle. The prices looked less scary after the first bottle was empty, but still I protested, sort of.
Mark leaned over the table with his face looked excited and open. I hadn't seen that expression in a long time. It filled me with the warm-fuzziness of nostalgia. He said, "Actually, I have some news. We're not here just for an evening out. We're here to celebrate."
I took a sip. "Celebrate what?" I thought, given that I hadn't even known what month it was, that I'd forgotten something like a birthday or an anniversary.
Mark slid to the edge of his seat and said, "I got a job offer, a good one."
"Are you serious?" I damn near broke into hymn. I put my fingers up to my lips and looked around, embarrassed. "Oh my God, Mark, that's amazing!"
He leaned in closer and said, "And I haven't even told you the best part yet. The job's in Moscow. They're building an entire new city there, right next to the old one. And they'll pay our rent. There are schools there, American ones." Mark talked on and on, selling Moscow to me like it was a timeshare in Palm Springs.
"Mark,” I said, “what are you talking about? I'm not going to Moscow. Lexi's not going to Moscow. I mean we don't even know anything about that place. And Lexi’s an Arizona baby. She couldn't acclimate to Moscow. Isn't it like frozen there?"
"I know it sounds crazy. But there's a huge expat community there. People do it all the time. Don't say anything right now. Just think about it. There's a woman in my office who was stationed there for four years. She came back to Phoenix and paid for a house with cash. Cash, Abs.”
On the ride home I could practically see the thoughts zooming around Mark's head. His fingers tapped, tapped, tapped on the door handle. It was like he was so unused to being excited about something that his body couldn't contain it. I couldn’t even begin to process what he’d just said. How could he even think I’d move to Moscow? At this point, I didn’t think I’d move anywhere with him. He had lied to me about the mortgage. He never tells me anything about his day. And now he thought I should pack up my entire life and move half way around the world to a country I’d never even thought about. For fuck’s sake, I’d never even been to Canada.
As soon as we turned down our street and I saw the lights were on in Lexi's room, I knew something was wrong. I jerked the car into park. "Lexi must have woken up." I could hear her screaming as I ran up the front porch stairs. I opened the door and saw Sarah pacing back and forth with Lexi in her arms. Lexi was screaming so hard that her face was purple and she was gasping for breath between wails. Her hair was matted down and soaked in sweat, and her face was coated in drool and snot. I grabbed her from Sarah's arms. "Why didn't you call me?"
Sarah stood, dumbfounded for a second, and then said, "Mark told me not to call. He gave me an extra thirty dollars and asked me if I could handle it if she cried." She fidgeted from foot to foot. Her shirt was splotched with Lexi's drool. "I was just about to call, though. She's been crying forever." Sarah looked as though trying not to cry was becoming too difficult. She was about to crack.
I turned to Mark. "You are a fucking jackass, you know that? What the hell is wrong with you?" I pressed Lexi to my chest, her tears and snot soaked into my blouse. She grabbed at me, pulling my sleeves and burying her face into my breasts. I launched the car keys at Mark. He ducked and they clanked against the front door. "Drive her home.”
I cleaned Lexi up in the bathroom sink. Her crying simmered down from a desperate howl to a whimper and hiccough combo that said to me, "Thank goodness you're here. I've been calling for you." I undressed her and held her tiny, naked body against my chest. I leaned against the bathroom wall and slid down to the ground and nuzzled her entire body between my knees and my breasts.
"I know, honey. I'm here. I'm so sorry." I cooed in her ear.
While Mark was gone, I was thinking about what I would say to him. I was going to ask him what kind of selfish, horrible parents would let their baby scream in the arms of stranger, just so they could have a few glasses of wine? What kind of a husband would bribe a teenage child? An asshole, that kind.
When Mark came home, he didn't come upstairs. Lexi was falling asleep, but every few seconds, she'd flinch and gasp to let me know that she wasn't asleep hard enough for me to lay her down. I knew this could go on for hours, so I wrapped her in a towel and crept downstairs with her in my arms. I had to talk to Mark, to yell at him, to get the screams out of my throat before they choked me to death.
I pounded down the stairs. "You are a terrible father, you know that? How dare you do like this? How dare you make me make such a scene in front of our neighbor's kid? How dare you let you own baby cry? Just, just how dare you?" My voice, shrill and edgy, woke Lexi up and she matched my screams and raised me one.
Mark followed me as I paced. "She's not a baby. She's going to be a year old in a few weeks. And you know why our daughter's so unhappy? Because we're unhappy, Abby. Both of us. We're both nervous and sad and so wrapped up in the fucking failure of our lives that we are making our own daughter unhappy." I felt as if he grabbed me by the throat and strangled me.
I took a step back from Mark and turned away, protecting Lexi from him. "How dare you say that to us?"
He reached out to me, but I stepped back again. He said, "I'm not judging you or blaming you. I'm blaming our situation. It's not fair for any of us. We've got to make some real changes or this life is going to ruin us. We'll end up hating each other and getting a divorce like just about everyone else. We need to make a change. A big one."
"You mean like moving to Moscow?" I rolled my eyes.
"Yes!" He yelled so loudly that Lexi started and yelled louder--competing.
I tilted her up and propped her against my shoulder. "We can't just up and move out of the country. What about me? This house we just resigned for? What about Lexi?"
Mark grabbed my arm to halt my retreat from him. "What choice do we have, Abby? We have no savings. We have no other prospects. It's not like your phone is blowing up with offers. This is it, babe. This is our only choice." His word slapped me across the face.
Lexi and I took refuge in the bedroom. I was far past the possibly of sleeping, but there was no way I was leaving the room. I was locking him out, claiming the room for myself, a hostile take over. Lexi dozed off on Mark’s pillow. I got up and arranged the reading chair and his bedside table into a barrier to keep her from rolling off. I picked Mark’s book off the table and flipped through the pages to find the MARK index card. It wasn’t there. I sat on the bed and looked around the room. The card was lying, face down, on the floor, circled by the indent in the carpeting that had been left behind by the table. If Mark had ever seen it, he’d never mentioned it. I left it there.
After I cooled down a bit, I went downstairs to find Mark. He was sitting in the kitchen, drinking with ambition. I searched his face for the openness and realized it was gone. When had it gone away? His face no longer radiated with all the possibilities the universe could throw at him. It was lined and hard. It was tired. And I realized, part of it was my fault. There was a time when Mark’s happiness was more important to me than my own, a time when I would have moved anywhere with him, without hesitation, so that he’d have a chance at realizing his dreams.
I stood in front of him with my arms crossed before me like a looping of barbed wire. "So, tell me about this Moscow job."
"What's the point?” Mark picked up the bottle from the table and poured the last few sips into his glass.
"The point? The point is I want to know about it."
"It's for a huge development firm. They needed a native English speaker with experience working on large scale projects." He took a sip.
"So you were perfect for the job?"
"So they seem to think. They're building a cluster of skyscrapers, just on the edge of town. Sort of like a La Defense on steroids."
"Skyscrapers?"
"Lots of them."
I nodded and went back upstairs to Lexi. I scooped her up; she was fast sleep and hardly stirred in my arms. We stood in front of my blue painting. I swirled my nose around her downy scalp and stared at my own signature, a white flag hoisted up in a sea of blue. Mark had found a way to make his dream come true. He was going to change a skyline and nothing was going to stop him from going. The question was, with us or without us? I hadn’t decided. I still didn’t know what my dream was. What was my skyline?
