‹.“Paige!” Mary, the receptionist who had replaced me, stood up the minute I walked in the door. “Let me give you a hand.” She came up to me and lifted Max’s carrier off my arm, poking her finger into his puffy red cheek. “He’s adorable,” she said, and I smiled.
Three of the nurses, hearing my name, swelled into the waiting room. They embraced me and wrapped me in the heady smell of their perfume and the brilliance of their clean white outfits. “You look fabulous,” one said, and I wondered if she didn’t see my tangled, hanging hair; my mismatched socks; the pasty wax of my skin.
Mary was the one to shoo them back behind the swinging wooden door. “Ladies,” she said, “we’ve got an office to run here.” She carried Max to an empty chair, surrounded by several very pregnant women. “Dr. Thayer’s running late,” she said to me. “So what’s new?”
Mary ran back to the black lacquer desk to answer the phone, and I watched her go. I wanted to push her out of the way, to open the top drawer and riffle through the paper clips and the payment invoices, to hear my own steady voice say “Cambridge OB/GYN.” Before Max was even born, Nicholas and I had decided I’d stay home with him. Art school was out of the question, since we couldn’t afford both day care and tuition. And as for me. working, well, the cost of decent day care almost equaled my combined salaries at Mercy and the doctors’ office, so it just didn’t pay. You don’t want a stranger taking care of him, do you? Nicholas had said. And I suppose I had to agree. One year, Nicholas told me, smiling. Let’s give it one year, and then we’ll see. And I had beamed back at him, running my palms over my still-swollen belly. One year. How bad could one single year be?
I leaned over and unzipped Max’s sweater, opened the first few buttons of the jacket underneath. He was sweating. I would have taken them both off, but that would have awakened him for sure, and I wasn’t ready for that. One of the pregnant women caught my eye and smiled. She had healthy, thick brown hair that fell in little cascades to her shoulders. She was wearing a sleeveless linen maternity dress and espadrilles. She looked down at Max and unconsciously rubbed her hands over her belly.
When I turned to look, most of the other women in the office were watching my baby sleep. They all had the same expression on their faces-kind of dreamy, with a softness in their eyes that I never remembered seeing in mine. “How old is he?” the first woman asked.
“Six weeks,” I said, swallowing a lump in my throat. All the others turned at the sound of my voice. They were waiting for me to tell them something-anything-a story that would let them know it was worth the wait; that labor wouldn’t be so horrible; that I had never been happier in my life. “It’s not what you think,” I heard myself saying, my words pouring thick and slow. “I haven’t slept since he was born. I’m always tired. I don’t know what to do with him.”
“But he’s so precious,” another woman said.
I stared at her, her belly, her baby inside. “Consider yourself lucky,” I said.
Mary called my name minutes later. I was set up in a small white examim" ±€lf nation room with a poster of a womb on the wall. I undressed and wrapped the paper robe around myself and opened the drawer to the little oak table. Inside was the tape measure and the Doppler stethoscope. I touched them and peeked at Max, still sleeping. I could remember lying on the examination table during my checkups, listening to the baby’s amplified heartbeat and wondering what he would look like.
Dr. Thayer came into the room in a burst of rustling paper. “Paige!” she said, as if she was surprised to see me there. “How are you feeling?”
She motioned me to a stool, where I could sit and talk to her before getting up on the table and into the humiliating position of an internal exam. “I’m all right,” I said.
Dr. Thayer flipped open my file and scribbled some notes. “No pain? No trouble with nursing?”
“No,” I told her. “No trouble at all.”
She turned to Max, who slept in his carrier on the floor as though he were always an angel. “He’s wonderful,” she said, smiling up at me.
I stared at my son. “Yes,” I said, feeling that choke again at the back of my throat. “He is.” Then I put my head in my hands and started to cry.
I sobbed until I couldn’t catch my breath, and I thought for sure I would wake up Max, but when I lifted my head he was still sleeping peacefully on the floor. “You must think I’m crazy,” I whispered.
Dr. Thayer put her hand on my arm. “I think you’re like every other new mother. What you’re feeling is perfectly normal. Your body has just been through a very traumatic experience, and it needs time to heal, and your mind needs to get adjusted to the fact that your life is going to change.”
I reached across her for a tissue. “I’m awful with him. I don’t know how to be a mother.”
Dr. Thayer glanced at the baby. “Looks like you’re doing fine to me,” she said, “although you might not have needed the sweatshirt and the sweater.”
I winced, knowing that I had done something wrong again and hating myself for it. “How long does it take?” I asked, a thousand questions at once. How long before I know what I’m doing? How long before I feel like myself again? How long before I can look at him with love instead of fear?
Dr. Thayer helped me over to the examination table. “It will take,” she said, “the rest of your life.”
I still had silver lines on my cheeks when Dr. Thayer left, memories I couldn’t wash away of acting like a fool in front of her. I walked out of the office without saying goodbye to the waiting pregnant women or to Mary, who called after me even as the door was closing. I lugged Max to the parking lot, his carrier becoming heavier with each step. The diaper bag cut into my shoulder, and I had a pain in my back from leaning heavily to one side. Max still slept, a miracle, and I found myself praying to the Blessed Mother, figuring she of all holy “Lo±€cutsaints would understand. Just one more half hour, I silently begged, and then we’ll be home. Just one more half hour and he can wake up and I’ll feed him and we’ll go back to our normal routine.
The parking attendant in the lot was a teenager with skin as black as pitch and teeth that gleamed in the sun. He carried a boom box on his shoulder. I gave him my validated ticket, and he handed me my keys. Very carefully, I opened the passenger door and secured the seat belt around Max’s carrier. I shut the door more quietly than I would have imagined possible. Then I moved around to my side of the car.
At the moment I opened the door, the attendant switched on his radio. The hot pulse of rap music split the air as powerfully as a summer storm, rocking the car and the clouds and the pavement. The boy nodded his head and shuffled his feet, hip-hop dancing between the orange parking lines. Max opened his eyes and shrieked louder than I had ever heard him yell.
“Sssh,” I said, patting his head, which was sweaty and red from the band of the sweater’s hood. “You’ve been such a good boy.”
I put the car in drive and started out of the lot, but that only made Max cry louder. He’d slept so long I had no doubt he was starving, but I didn’t want to feed him here. If I could just get him home, everything would be all right. I curved around the line of parked cars and came to the driveway that led out to the street. Max, purpled with effort, began to choke on his own sobs.
“Dear God,” I said, slamming the car into park and unfastening the seat belt around Max’s carrier. I pulled my shirt out of my slacks and hoisted it up around my neck, fumbling with my bra to bare a breast. Max stiffened as I lifted him and held his hot little body against mine. The rough wool of his sweater chafed my skin; his fingers clawed at my ribs. Now I began to cry, and tears splashed onto the face of my son, running over his own tears and falling somewhere between his sweater and sweatshirt. The parking attendant swore at me and started to walk over to the car. I quickly pulled my shirt down over Max’s face, hoping that I wouldn’t smother him. I did not unroll the window. “You’re blocking my driveway,” the boy said, his lips twisted and angry against the hot glass.