Читать книгу Ever After - William Wharton, Уильям Уортон - Страница 10

Dayiel is a doll but she’s a devil, too. At four months, she’s already biting my nipples when I nurse her, and she doesn’t even have teeth. Bert thinks it’s funny, and I think Dayiel does it because he laughs.

She’s on her hands and knees almost as soon as she can roll over onto her stomach. She rocks back and forth, laughing out loud as if she’s just robbed a bank. It isn’t long before she develops her own way of crawling – not on her knees but on her hands and her feet – and is scooting around the apartment, like a dog or cat. Nothing is safe. I do everything to baby-proof that apartment, but nothing is Dayiel-proof.

She never sleeps through the night. She’s up three or four times. Then after being nursed, she wants to play. Even at six months, she’s sleeping less than eight hours a day. She seems to love life so much she hates to close her eyes. It’s as if she knows.

Bert and I become zombies. We take turns getting up and fetching her. Then we let her stay in bed between us. I think she’ll be safe that way, but she figures how to crawl out from the bottom. Bert wakes up with a start the first night she does it.

‘Kate, where’s Day?’

I’m still groggy.

‘I don’t know, maybe one of us put her in her crib when we were half-asleep.’

‘I didn’t.’

He leaps out of bed in one jump the way he can, like a jack-in-the-box. He leans back into our room.

‘She’s not there!’

I sit up, scared now.

‘Maybe she’s in Wills’s room. Maybe he took her in bed with him because she was crying.’

I crawl out of bed and stand up. I have a terrible headache. Bert’s running up and down the hall. Now I’m worried. Where, in a locked apartment, can a baby go? Could she have hurt herself?

Then I hear Bert laughing. The baby is laughing, too. They’re in the bathroom.

Day is sitting in the bottom of the shower, playing with the toys I put in there when I give her a bath. I know she likes to take a bath, it’s one of her favorite things, but in the middle of the night, without water, in the dark? She’s pointing up to the faucets, wanting us to turn on the water. She’s filthy from crawling around and soaked through. Bert leans over and starts undressing her. Day keeps pointing up at the faucets.

‘OK, Day. This one time. But no more baths at three o’clock in the morning. Understand?’

She smiles and slaps her hands on the bottom of the shower the way she does when there’s water.

‘Bert, do you mind if I go back to bed? I’m pooped and I have a terrible headache.’

‘Go ahead, that’s OK, Babe, I can handle this. You go to bed, try to get some sleep. I’ll see if I can put her down after her bath. Boy, am I ever going to be a mean math teacher tomorrow.’

He turns on the water and I can hear it running as I pad back and crawl into bed. I don’t even hear Bert come in; maybe he doesn’t, because he’s gone off to school when Day screams from her crib and wakes me up.

Mom and Dad come to visit several times. Dad is wonderful with Dayiel. I never expected that. He follows her around the house, wherever she wants to go, letting her do what she wants as long as it isn’t dangerous. He says it’s like having a puppy, and that spending so much time on the living-room floor, crawling with her, he’s acquiring an entirely new view of the world. He also gives her airplane rides, pushing her up over his head or lifting her up on his legs or his feet or letting her sit on his stomach and bounce. I remember him doing all those things with me and Matt and Camille. I’d forgotten.

Having a baby brings back so many things from your own life that you might never have remembered. If I hadn’t seen Dad with Dayiel, I wouldn’t have remembered these acrobatics he did with us. It’s funny how one forgets. Probably forgetting is the closest thing to death most living people ever know. It isn’t sleep.

Mom reads to Dayiel. It seems to calm her. Mom tells me about a study that says a little child, from infancy on, should have three books read to it a day. The same study says that any normal child who has had 3,000 books read to it before going to school will do much better all the way through to university. My God! Three thousand books.

As Day gets older and the weather improves, Mom takes her into our garden or down by the See to feed the ducks and swans. Day’s great, as long as you don’t try to make her do something she doesn’t want to do, or not let her do something she wants. Then she can be so stubborn I could almost kill her. But Bert and I also love her, despite, or maybe because of, all the devilment she gets into and the constant watching she takes.

Everything is going along fine, but then I find out I’m pregnant again. Day’s only thirteen months old, and, naturally, still in diapers. Even Bert, who now knows enough about how hard it is to rear a child, is concerned.

I go to the Frauenklinik and no one is too happy about my having another baby so soon after a Caesarean. But we decide to have it anyway, then Bert will have a vasectomy; or, if it’s possible in the middle of a Caesarean, I’ll have my tubes tied. We’ll never be able to afford rearing more than three kids.

This time I’m sick from the beginning and I have very low blood pressure. I can hardly eat, and what I eat, I usually throw up. Bert’s worried. He says I ought to consider having an abortion; it isn’t too late.

I sleep on the idea, but in the morning I know I want this baby. This way all our kids will be in school by the time I’m forty. We can carry on teaching together, maybe even here, at the International School, with the children at the same school with us. It isn’t the way I’d planned it but now it seems like a good idea, if only I can survive another Caesarean.

Mia is born on December seventeenth. I beg the doctors to let me go home for Christmas Eve, and they agree, but I have to go right back in. On Christmas Day the doctor comes to see me. He says he hated to cut me open again and ruin all that neat embroidery he’d done before but that he’s done just as well this time. He’s thinking about taking up crocheting.

It’s Day’s first proper Christmas and she loves it. Mom and Dad fly from Paris and are there the day I come home with the baby. He has his video camera, calls me ‘mamma Mia,’ and takes some beautiful pictures of Dayiel kissing Mia while she’s nursing and then of Dayiel trying to nurse herself on the other nipple. Mom distracts her with one of the Christmas gifts; it’s another book. Day’s already pointing, not just at the pictures, but at the words. She’ll be reading before she’s five.

It’s the best Christmas I remember and we’ve had some great Christmases in our family. I feel I’ve made it as an adult. I have a wonderful husband and three children. Dad always said you know you’ve grown up when you’d rather have Christmas at your own home with your own kids, than go off to your parents’ house. That’s a bit sad, but I think he’s right. I feel grown up. I never have before.

Just before Mia is born, Bert’s dad dies. He’s had a bad heart for a long time. And although he was in good enough shape to come to the wedding, he looked pale. He just drops dead. He’s sixty-four, only a few years older than my dad.

Bert dashes off for the funeral, helps his mom settle things, and then gets back the week before Mia is born. But he is a wreck.

I was surprised by Bert’s crying before. Now, he can’t mention his dad without breaking down. He continues working at school because he feels he needs to be doing something. But it’s hard for him and it’s hard for me because I can’t help him. Even if I were well, I probably couldn’t do much. It’s hard to understand why we humans don’t seem able to learn about death, the quiet simplicity of it all.

We agree that Bert should quit the International School, and that we should move to Oregon for a year or two so he can be near his mom. Claire’s all alone now in a big house where she’s reared four kids, and doesn’t know what to do. Bert felt terrible leaving her.

Oregon will be a good temporary solution. Besides, Danny wants Wills for one full school year, and if we’re in Oregon, I’ll be able to call him every evening. Danny’s wife Sally has delivered a boy they named Jonathan, and they’ve bought a nice duplex in Redondo Beach. I can’t really say so, but I’m not thrilled.

In the meanwhile, having two babies at the same time is quite a job. I think poor Bert spends half his free time down in that basement filling and emptying washing-machines and hanging clothes, mostly diapers.

Although I recuperate more quickly than I expected, all the muscles in my stomach seem to have turned to mush. It’s a month before I can do one sit-up. I look at my jogging shoes and think I’ll never jog again. It’s very depressing.

But Mia is a love. She’s so different from Day. It seems she is smiling and trying to talk from the first moment I see her. I can look in her eyes and she’ll look right back at me and it’s magic somehow. I feel I’ve known her a long time, that she’s very wise and loves me deeply. I know this is considered kooky talk by most people but they just don’t know. I know now I was right.

We need to put the apartment back in perfect condition or we’ll lose our deposit; three kids can really wreck a place. We scrub everything, then paint. To us it looks perfect but we know to a German eye it’s a pigsty. But Frau Zeidelman gives us back our money anyway.

The goodbye parties seem to go on forever. It’s worse than three Christmases and New Years thrown together. But it’s wonderful. The washing-machine we give to Camille and her husband Sam. The VW ‘hulk’ we pass on to Matt. We give away most of the furniture the same way it had been given to us. On the last night we have just the crib for Mia, our mattress on the floor with Day between us, and Wills on a pillow. Friends are going to pick those up the next day.

In the dark, Bert turns toward me.

‘You know, Kate, I thought I’d never learn to like old Krautland, but if it weren’t for my mother being alone, and Wills going to live with Danny, and the fact we don’t have any furniture, I’d go right back to Stan and tell him I’m going to stay after all. These people here at the school are even nicer than Oregonians and that’s saying something.’

Traveling with kids is never fun, and this trip starts out wrong. First, we need to wait six hours in Munich before the plane is allowed to take off. On the trip to Paris, strong winds make the plane dip and roll. The flight from Paris to New York is even worse. And then I get sick. I haven’t been sick on a plane since I was twelve years old, but I go into the tiny plastic restroom and vomit till I think I’m going to die. One of the attendants hears me, or maybe Bert sends her back, but she knocks and I manage to pull back the lever to let her in.

She’s nice and considerate, and puts me in one of the seats reserved for the crew, tips it back and gives me a pill. She asks if I’m pregnant. I point up the aisle toward Bert, Mia, Day, and Wills.

‘They’re mine.’

I’m sure the stewardess thinks I’m either some kind of Arkansas hick or a fanatic Catholic. But she, like everyone else, is so kind. Different attendants help Bert and Wills with the babies during the whole trip.

When we finally land at JFK, we’re six hours late.

Mom is waiting at the airport, and has been for almost six hours. She’s come up from the beachhouse they have in New Jersey, where they’ve spent the last seven summers. It’s a really old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned town called Ocean Grove. I loved it when I visited them there about five years ago. But it would’ve cost 700 additional dollars to make the stopover this time, and we couldn’t afford it.

I get off the plane dead white, Mia in my arms, Bert’s balancing Dayiel and our hand luggage. Wills is toting another bag. It’s a deep, low point. And there’s Mom, smiling as ever, as if she’d just met us on the street by accident. I cry. I don’t feel much like a grown-up. I feel like a little girl who’s gotten lost and just found her Mommy.

When it all settles down, Bert is looking at our tickets.

‘Well, Babe, we’ve missed our connecting flight. Could I leave Dayiel with you while I go see what’s happening?’

I can only nod. Mia is nursing. I’ll bet the milk she’s getting is sour. But it keeps her quiet. When Mia drops off to sleep, Mom takes her. She watches Wills watching Day, and I drop off, dead to the world.

When I wake, Bert’s back and he’s all smiles.

‘They were going to put us up in a Hilton Hotel or something until tomorrow, but I told them we have a place to stay if they could just hold us over until the flight next week.

‘There was a whole bunch of palaver, but in the end we agreed, so if it’s OK with Rosemary, we’re on our way to Ocean Grove, in a car, yet. Think of that.’

We arrive in Ocean Grove after midnight. Dad’s asleep. He jumps out of bed the way he does, stark naked. He says he’d held the place at the banquet they were supposed to be attending, until the lady took the food away. Then he came home, worried, checked at the airport, found the flight from Munich was delayed, then decided to grab some sleep and worry more in the morning. The idea of catastrophes happening in our family just never seems to come up. Somehow we’ve all lived in a kind of never-never land where nothing ever happens to us, only to other people.

For twenty years, while Dad was supporting the family as a painter, we lived without life assurance, car insurance: we had no liability insurance of any kind, no social security, nothing but Dad’s little disability pension from when he was wounded in World War II. My parents were crazy, lucky, or dumb. Maybe it was crazy-dumb-luck, because we hardly ever even got sick. I don’t think that any of us four kids saw a doctor more than six or seven times in twenty years, and then it was mostly to get shots.

Mom is a bit of a witch, a good witch. She has fixed up the whole upper floor of that big house in New Jersey just for us, with a crib for Dayiel, a bassinet for Mia, and separate beds (and rooms) for Wills and us. We aren’t even supposed to be coming. Could she have bewitched that plane? When I was a teenager, I used to think she had some special power, the way she’d always know things. Now I see it has nothing to do with witches. She just has strong intuitions that she believes in and then acts on them. She’ll never believe what’s happened to us – that’s not the kind of witch she is. She’s a practical one.

We sleep like dead people. It’s ten o’clock before I hear Bert rolling out of bed to get Mia. She’s slept through the night for the first time. Or maybe she did wake but we didn’t know it. He tucks her in beside me and she begins to nurse furiously. Bert climbs out of bed, and goes downstairs. Wills is still asleep.

I know that Dad and Mom, even after being up late the night before, will have already played tennis, swum, gone for a bike ride, or maybe a little jog.

Dad’s something of a fading jock, but Mom was always the most unathletic person I’ve known. Now, she’s out there, hitting a tennis ball two-handed, and hitting it hard. She runs her two miles every morning, slowly, but she does it. I wonder if, after the kids have grown some, I’ll ever get back in shape. I’m the same as Mom, no athlete, but I like feeling good.

We have a wonderful week. Dayiel’s in and out of the water, playing in the sand with her granddad, making castles, ball ramps, and running around on a beach that seems to have no limits.

Bert is a regular water-bug and Wills even more so. They’re in and out of the ocean with Dad about twenty times a day. Wills has more friends than he can play with and disappears for long stretches. Both Bert and Dad are a lot more confident about the kids than I am and don’t seem to be watching them. Bert comes up to a shower that’s attached to the boardwalk, washing off Mia. After he’s changed her, I go over.

‘Aren’t you watching Wills? He’s out there in those high waves, riding on one of those boogie boards, and he could sink, or even float out of sight. You’re as bad as Dad. You never expect anything dangerous to happen.’

Bert squints up at me into the sunlight.

‘Look, Kate. You see those guys sitting up on those white stands, wearing the red jackets? Those are lifeguards. They’re watching everybody, especially little kids, and they know this water like the back of their hands. I was talking to one, in fact the captain of the lifeguards, and do you know that, in the almost hundred years since they started having lifeguards here, nobody has ever drowned on this beach? This is probably the safest place in the world. So relax and enjoy.’

I turn away. This is so like him. But he’s right. From then on I try to relax and enjoy. It’s like coming home.

Mom and I share the cooking, and the boys take care of the little ones. Even Uncle Robert, my tall little brother, does his share. He likes Day, although generally he hates little kids. After watching her, he then has to explain to us, in his slow, methodical way, why she’s exceptional.

Mom drives us to the plane. Everything is on schedule. If Mom is involved I have the feeling that everything will be fine.

We arrive in Oregon, and Bert’s brother Steve picks us up. I have no idea what to expect. The road from the airport is so full of weird vehicles, RVs, cars pulling trailers, vans, caravans, all driving fast, really fast, and cutting in and out all the time, that I finally say something to Bert’s brother.

‘Steve, don’t they have any speed limits here? You’re doing seventy and almost everybody is passing you. I thought France or Germany was bad, but this makes their driving look almost sane.’

‘Everybody in Oregon is going somewhere in a hurry it seems, Kate. I don’t understand it myself. But if you go under seventy you’ll be run right over. You know, Oregon is one of the few states that went back to the sixty-five mile speed limit. This means they drive seventy-five without the cops doing anything. Maybe it’s the frontier spirit.’