• • • • •
On Tuesday, Roman ishome before seven with spicy cumin lamb hand-ripped noodles that make my mouth all tingly like I French-kissed a bowl of potpourri. Holden is teething and inconsolable. He’d lost hischupeteand dropped his Munchkin Stay Put Suction Bowl, spilling the Gerber organic single-grain baby oatmeal all over the kitchen floor. So much for staying put. I take Holden out of the high chair and bounce him on my hip, trying to calm him down (“At the Copa…Copacabana…”). No reaction. Had he moved on from Manilow? Oatmeal under my toes, I open every drawer trying to find a spare pacifier. Roman comes up behind me as if all is calm. He puts his hands on my waist, kisses my neck. “Yesterday…yeah, that was something.”
I have no idea what he is talking about. I have a Gerber cereal crisis, a missingchupete, and a screaming baby who may or may not have refined his musical tastes without me. Who could remember what happened yesterday? Roman pops a spicy sour lamb dumpling. “Naughty stuff.”
“Have you seen hischupete?”
“His what?”
I give him a prickly look. “I’ve spent thirty minutes trying to calm him down and you don’t even know what achupeteis? Classic…Classic.Oh, and did you want to help me clean up this shit? Or nah? Just figured it will clean itself?”
Roman reaches for Holden. “Here. Hey there, buddy. Hey, big guy…” Holden stops crying. He stares at Roman, happier than he’s been in hours. Dada. I want to eat that baby like a dumpling.
“You’re good at that. You should do it more often,” I say, taking an oyster box of noodles and a pair of chopsticks into the bedroom and slamming the door behind me. But as soon as I sit on the bed, I see the turtle. The vague smell of a penguin house. Turtly’s cold-blooded neck craning at me, reminding me that it is one thing to eat spicy noodles in bed in protest. Quite another when a turtle also lives there.
I burst out of the bedroom. By day, I wore Roman’s tattered menswear. By night, I started wearing a geisha-like muumuu that I’d recently found on the sale rack at Century 21. Roman didn’t initially notice that I’d ditched the flannel pajamas that I’d bought in the hospital and that I really should’ve burned. But the way he put his hands on my hips, kissed my neck, as ill-timed as the effort had been, told me he noticed.
I come out of the bedroom and Holden is asleep on Roman’s lap. “I can’t move or I’d do the cleaning up,” he whispers.
“Uh-huh.” I scoop Holden up and put him in his crib and then walk to clean up the oatmeal. Roman sits on the sofa, a buffet of spicy noodles on the coffee table.
“I’ll take the feedings tonight,” he says.
Even though a big part of the reason we agreed that I would pump was so that Roman could help with night feedings, he’s never offered. Not since the layoffs. We used to fight about it, but then I started using the nights to browseJuju Beanand research Daisy. I started to like having that time to myself.
“Now you offer?”
“What?”
“He’s finally sleeping through the night.”
“Is he?”
All right, so we hadn’tquitemastered sleep training, but we were close. I walk into the bathroom. I look in the mirror. I don’t have the energy to fight, but hiding in the bathroom and letting him finish the shrimp shumai feels like accepting defeat. I stick my feet in the tub to wash off the oatmeal and walk back to the couch.
“Want the last soup dumpling?” he says, and I forgive him because I know that sharing dim sum is how Roman shows love.
I finish off the dumpling. Roman plays with a strand of my hair, tucking it behind my ear. He’s never done this before. Or at least I don’t remember if he did it before we had a baby. I didn’t register every touch, every sidelong glance, back then.
When we are finished, Roman sweeps the empty plastic containers into the plasticThank Youbag. He rubs down the coffee table with a flimsy napkin. He walks to the front door and drops the greasy remnants into the recycling bin in the hallway. I’d never told Roman how much it annoyed me when he shoved an entire bag of takeout into the kitchen trash can and then I had to empty the whole thing in the hallway. Somehow, tonight, he just knew.
Roman comes back inside. I am waiting for him to pressure me to come to bed. After the spicy noodles and my geisha robe and wiping down the table and taking night duty. He must really want a blow job. Maybe a colleague told him at work drinks? “Dude, you gotta be real nice to her.” But he doesn’t try to lure me to bed. He picks up my pillow and professionally fluffs it, something he picked up the summer he spent working in a motel in New South Wales. He gives my forehead an affable little smooch. “Get some sleep? We’ll try to keep the party down if he wakes up.”
—
In the morning, Veronica calls me for the third time. “I don’t know exactly what kind of deal you worked out with Phil, but you can only get a remote-work arrangement, and maintain your salary, if you write a minimum of twenty letters a week.”
“Not a problem. I can do that.”
“Good, because there’s already a stack building up on your desk and Ted is buried in Feed the Children.”
“Can you messenger them over?”
“Emily. This isn’tVoguein the nineties. I’ll leave them with Phyllis at reception.” She hangs up.
I look at Holden. I’m spooning him an airplane of oatmeal. He’s playing with his Baby Einstein Sticky Spinner BPA-free high chair activity toy. “Well, she is cranky-cranky, isn’t she? I guess we’re going to take a trip to Mommy’s office, koala. How fun is that?” Holden sticks out his tongue, his jibber-jabber so close to forming actual words now. “Yep, you said it, exactly that much fun, little koala man.”
—
