My mother cannot cook from scratch this evening, so she pries open the Tupperware in my freezer. The craggy iced plateaus of meatballs resemble a Martian landscape and I wish, for a minute, that we could all get Arby’s. When my father arrives he holds Sam for a while, then dons my pink gardening gloves and slips out the door to weed the lawn. Sam stands at the train table my in-laws bought him, idly dragging engines. When Jordan throws open the door, Sam hurls a train at his leg.
“Sam, you’re in time-out. We don’t throw things.”
“I think he’s just experimenting,” says my mother.
Jordan folds his thin lips together as he rummages around his briefcase for Sam’s medicine. Later he will remind me how Sam scampered around our hotel in Cooperstown, banging his souvenir bat against the walls, as my father giggled like a schoolboy and Jordan hung his head.
“The pharmacist suggested he take this with yogurt,” he says.
“Yup,” I say.
“I bragged how Sam loves yogurt.” He beams.
There is hope.
Jordan heads to the couch with a can of wasabi peas that could pass for vegetables: our compromise on how to model proper eating behavior. At one point I tried to cook for my husband, gallantly avoiding the aversions bequeathed by his mother. But he picked at the food, doused it with hot sauce, and then disappeared upstairs into the bathroom, whether for relief or refuge. So now I cook for my father, who is always pleased with my efforts.
“I’ll take care of him tonight,” Jordan promises me, and I know that means blasting white noise from his iPhone into Sam’s ear canal. My parents and I will joke about his slothful and sedentary ways. But when Jordan mustered the energy to wrestle with Sam one evening, my parents sobbed to me that Sam could develop reflux and ruin his stomach. The words sat on my tongue, like the diced zucchini on which Sam sometimes chokes as I sit helplessly, afraid to swipe his tongue with my finger; and after waiting an agonizing hour, I spat my parents’ warning to Jordan.
“Damn it,” he snapped. “Your parents are forbidden in my house.”
He yelled and pounded furniture, threw keys and books, and I pleaded with him in whispers not to wake the baby. I spent hours appeasing him every way I knew: sweet-talk, offers of sex, swearing that it was only my own Freudian hang-ups, my neurotic obsession with bowels, that had prompted such an outlandish fear about a healthy display of love. I agreed my parents were at fault, but only for raising and nurturing such a basket case as myself. The next evening, a subdued Jordan retreated upstairs early, eating his chips on the toilet. My parents hooted at the image.
“I told him not to wrestle,” I promised them.
“I love wrestling,” says my father. “I’m a big fan of Hulk Hogan. Our only request is that Jordan wait to rough-house till after Sam’s digested his meal.”
“Shake it, honey,” says my mother, watching me uncap the medicine to swirl into a bowl of yogurt. She buckles Sam into his high chair and watches nervously.
Sam squinches his face in disgust, and my heart thrums with panic that I’ve sabotaged months of my mother’s labor.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have mixed it,” says Mom, plating my father’s meal.
But Sam chokes it down once I begin to sing to him — sweetly, ardently, desperately. After dinner my father turns on a baseball game, even though Sam should be heading up to bed.
“A special treat for our boy,” he says. Jordan chafes at my parents’ possessive “our,” but I find it as comforting as warm milk in a mug.
My mother has circles under her eyes, the bruises of fatigue and agony, and I know I should tell her to go home, take a nap. When I float the suggestion, however feebly, a hysteric lilt aerates her voice. “I love taking care of them. I don’t want to miss a thing. You think I only hang around for the fun and photo ops?”
And yet she does have fun, and I don’t begrudge her. She worries better and more swiftly than I. She demands maître d’s open restaurants early so Sam can have his oatmeal at the appointed hour; she would never let him run around like a monkey in a tuxedo, drunk on bee pollen — so naturally I concede the “fun.” When she rocks him to sleep, I hear them giggle in the glider as I waddle the halls.
The dogwood outside Sam’s window has faded into darkness by the time my mother finishes rinsing pots. Excited at his utility, Jordan has found Motrin in the medicine cabinet to help Sam sleep.
“Shake it!” I remind him.
My parents come upstairs to kiss Sam’s cheeks, whisper their goodbyes. Sam coughs in his sleep a few times, arises before dawn.
“Cook!” he cries.
I run into the nursery and hoist him, awkwardly, out of the crib. He sits down and I fall to my knees.
“Mommy,” he says, resting his head on my belly.
And the music in my head is so exquisite, I don’t care that I’m second fiddle.
My mother calls at 7:45. “I’m so depressed he’s sick that I barely slept. Can I come over now?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Listen, Grandma reminded me Cousin Donna ruined her stomach with too much Motrin. She says to give Tylenol, instead.”
“Okay. I’ll buy some.”
“You have some. Under your sink.”
A tiny fold of my brain realizes that instead of appeasing my parents, I could tell them to go to hell. But I snuff the thought even as it sparks.
My power is and must remain invisible, like an arsenal of nuclear weapons. To know I hold my mother’s heart in my palm, my sharpened talons hovering over its quivering muscle, is enough to stay my hand. The knowledge, the pity, is enough. I will never tell my parents how Sam had nightmares for weeks after they took him to the zoo, screaming about the “big, mean faces” he’d seen. I will never tell them what “la crayola” means. I will never confess my secret affection for my mother-in-law. Try as I might, I cannot sputter my mother’s charge that Sam is allergic to Sherri: her perfume and pets, Starbucks and stilettos. The words are lodged in me like gristle, but I can’t bring myself to clear my throat or conscience by spitting upon another weak woman. As we waited for our check at Mykonos on Sunday, my mother sent me a text that read: “Having fun? Maybe I’ll show up and make Sherri cry.” Seeing my phone light up, Sherri bent over the screen like a child drawn to a shiny coin; and as I swiftly knocked my phone away I felt like embracing her as I might a little sister, chafing as we did at the same cruel woman. But every time Jordan’s condition flares and he screams on the toilet, I’m newly convinced that worry — not laughter — is the best medicine.
My parents’ motives are pure and clean, so I will not impugn them even when they turn to poison in my soul. I still feel the blister of joy that popped on my heart when Sam sniffed the noxious bouquet as we all fidgeted in line to the strains of Beethoven. As he wrinkled up his button nose, a peculiar sharpness scraped at my throat. Yet I was too giddy at the recent memory of my father holding up Sam’s nose to the lilacs blooming at Highland Park, weeping openly, vowing that our beautiful child should only know beautiful things.
About Melissa Pheterson
