The Fourth Child, Jessica Winter [fantasy novels to read txt] 📗

nurse could tug her by the arm, press her into a parallel world, white and ceaseless, without Lauren in it. Alone in a pod on the moon. All because Jane had consented to the thought. It was Jane who had invited this apparition into the nursery, something out of a bad movie, her cold, elegant fingers drumming on the wooden rails of Lauren’s crib.

Lauren. Her crooked, crinkly-eyed smile. The honey-and-almond folds of her knees and elbows. The café au lait mark on herhip, the size of Jane’s thumbnail; Jane had flipped through an atlas one feverish night, Lauren wheezing in the crook of herarm, and determined that the mark was in the shape of Finland, with particular fidelity to the topography of its eastern borderwith Russia. The feathery fur on Lauren’s shoulders and in the V between her shoulder blades, still lingering there long afterher infancy. Toddler Lauren’s heartbreaking byeee-bye when a door closed that she wished to stay open. Lauren telling an anecdote in her own slushy, temperate language, gesticulatingin fluent De Niro, furrowing her brow as she searched for the perfect turn of phrase. In these moments Lauren looked a lotlike Sonja, who still called when she was home on break, who still came around.

So did Geeta, but only with Sonja. They were a package deal. Elise would join them or come on her own. Christy faded out,although she was going to UB and still living at home.

The worst was the first year. Geeta and Sonja brought Mylar balloons when they visited Jane after the baby. Nursing Laurenon the couch, her friends cross-legged on the matching overstuffed chairs that Mrs. Brennan had chosen from Kittinger, Janewatched the balloons nudging against the ceiling of the living room, clumsy and aimless blobs, and saw herself as an invalidin a hospital full of false cheer, as if she were recovering from a severe head injury as her friends guided her through someremedial small talk. Part of her rehabilitation. She told them too eagerly about what she was reading, Wordsworth and Winnicottand Ordinary People, but she didn’t admit that she couldn’t pay attention for more than a few pages at a time.

What cannot be taken for granted is the mother’s pleasure that goes with the clothing and the bathing of her own baby. If you are there enjoying it all, it is like the sun coming out for the baby. That was Winnicott.

“I’ll definitely have to check all those books out,” Geeta said finally, and Jane’s uterus performed one of its last contractions,letting go a sorrow that she could not name but was nonetheless sitting in front of her.

Enjoy being turned-in and almost in love with yourself, the baby is so nearly a part of you. That also was Winnicott. And it was true that Jane could enjoy this, so long as it was only her and Lauren.

Pat’s sister, Marie, ten years older, businesslike in her courteousness and with three small children of her own, always included Jane in her card games and PTAfund-raiser meetings with her friends, all in their late twenties or older, with children who were mostly in school already.But Jane could never entirely learn their repartée of weary disparagement: of their husbands, their children, and the mothersin the group who didn’t happen to be present that day. Jane’s mother frequently commented on how Marie “carried herself withsuch grace,” like she was a widow or bearing the burden of some unjust opprobrium—or maybe the burden was the fact that Marielooked exactly like Pat and yet, by some abstruse geometry, he was the pretty one. That was the kind of thought that Jane’smother would have.

Her mother often told Jane, “You are so lucky to have Marie.” Or, “She gave you a leg up.” Or, “She showed you the ropes.”Or, “She’s been very good to you, really gone out of her way.” These were accusations. Her mother’s praise of Marie was aeuphemism for a darker thought: that Jane had cut corners, received a gift in error, gotten away with something, she had cheated,she had lied, and look, it had all worked out for her anyway, like it always does, this smooth, easy life laid down for herby the work and thoughtfulness and compassion of others.

In the ordinary things you do you are quite naturally doing very important things, and the beauty of it is that you do not have to be clever, and you do not even have to think if you do not want to. Winnicott again.

 

Three years with Lauren, the idyll of the only child, was so much of what Jane imagined the first months of a romance to be:the hours alone together doing nothing in particular, staring into each other’s eyes, laughing at jokes they couldn’t haveexplained to others or even themselves, lolling in grass or snow, kneading each other’s flesh, eating off each other’s plates.Even Lauren’s tantrums, infrequent and easily resolved, could be observed with some degree of detachment. A summer storm througha frosted pane.

Duck, Lauren whispered for dark, when she woke in the first inklings of dawn. Bight, Lauren whispered for bright, when her mother switched on the lamp by her crib. Her little face opening like a flower when she found the names for things.

“That’s right, Lauren. It was duck and now it’s bight,” her mother told her. This was the best time of day, at dawn, beforePat woke, when Jane and Lauren could share secrets about their world and decide, just the two of them, how to name everythingin it.

Marie’s friends complained about the early starts, the relentless menial labor that multiplied with two and then three children.Pretty much everyone was stopping at three these days. “You’ve only got the one,” they would say. “Just wait—you’ll see.”

They complained about having to read the same books aloud over and over. For Jane, who could recite The Snowy Day and The Story of Ferdinand and Goodnight Moon by heart, extreme repetition had granted these stories the calming, incantatory quality of the prayers that she no longerfelt