“Really, honey: you look a bitgray.Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine.” I tried to smile and found that I couldn’t. The bridge of my lips was frozen in place.
“What’s wrong? Isn’t Clementine sleeping through the night?”Amelia clucked disapprovingly. “If she’s not, honey, she should be. She’s not a newborn anymore.”
I paused, looked down at Clementine’s large, fuzzy head. Funny, I hadn’t even taken a moment to think about it, but it was true: she wasn’t a newborn anymore. She was seven months old now. Crawling and making noises and, yes, sleeping through the night.Things should have gotten easier by now,I thought with surprise.I should be thinking about having another baby soon.
“You know,” Amelia said, “sometimes when I’m feeling really tired, I throw on the brightest shade of lipstick I’ve got.” Her lipstick today was an almost-neon floral red. Now that I was really looking at her face, she did look exhausted. “Do you want me to watch Clementine while you take a shower?”
“I’m okay.”Yesterday morning,I thought vaguely.I showered then. Or maybe the day before that.
“Honey, I insist.” She beckoned again, her smiling growing wider. “In fact, I won’t take no for an answer.”
I reluctantly left Clementine in the kitchen with Amelia and went upstairs to our bathroom, where I found a little collection of gifts waiting for me on the sink countertop: a blow-dryer, a curling iron, and four tubes of lipstick, plus a sticky note with a scrawled cursive message pressed to the mirror at eye level:Take your time, Mama!
What an elegant little ambush. Amelia might as well have scrawled the true meaning in all-caps lipstick across the mirror:Pull yourself together, you selfish little freak :)
Then I noticed the little white pill placed next to the lipstick tubes.
I felt a sudden thrashing desperation to hear my mother’s voice. I pulled out my cell phone and called home. She answered on the second ring. “How’s my Nattie girl?”
“Mama,” I said, then paused. What was I thinking? I couldn’t tell her what happened. She would be horrified to learn that her daughter let itget this badin front of such a well-standing family. The verythoughtof her daughter standing in the kitchen of a senator’s house in sweatpants with greasy hair would give her a heart attack. “Can I ask you a question?”
There was the sound of water sloshing. I could see her perfectly: standing in our kitchen, ear pressed to her shoulder to keep the phone in place while she scrubbed the dishes. “Ask me anything, sweetheart.”
I sat down on the closed toilet, buried my head in my free hand. “How were you always sogoodat everything?”
She laughed. “Honey, I don’t think anyone ever accused me of being good at everything before.”
“I just mean the little things. The house was always clean. You always got dressed and put makeup on. We always had outfits planned for us. How did you do all that, on top of your job and the knitting?”
“Well.” The water sloshed in the silence. “You know, I don’t know if I ever reallythoughtabout this, Nattie, but do you know what trick I used to do, once your father had passed on, God rest his soul?”
It still amazed me, how easily she referenced his passing. She really had convinced herself he was dead.
“Whenever I was reaching my wits’ end, I would pause for a moment and—do you know what I would do?” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial register. “I would imagine I was beingwatched.”
I opened my eyes and frowned at the tiles on the bathroom floor. “Watched?”
“It’s lonely, you know. Housework. But it felt a bitlesslonely when I pretended I had a little audience sitting on the couch with me. Watching me vacuum or take out the trash. Cheering me on!”
I didn’t say anything. I felt suddenly nauseous. So that was the secret: all those years I’d spent watching my mother and the other women in our community, marveling at how effortlessly they performed their roles as mother, homemaker, wife; all the moments I’d thought of them at college, summoning their easy joy and holding it in my hand like a lucky rabbit’s foot while the girls in thedorm complained about everything—it was a lie, wasn’t it? If not an outright lie, then certainly not the full truth, either. They weren’t actually happy. They were just pretending that they were. “And the Lord is fine with this? With you needing to … pretend?”
My mother didn’t skip a beat. She’d locked into her argument and was on a roll now. “Oh, I wouldn’t call it pretending. It’s more like a form ofremembering,don’t you think? After all, who do you think encouraged me to come up with that little idea to begin with? Who is our Lord and Savior, if not theoriginalaudience member for our lives?”
“Huh,” I said. I couldn’t argue with that.
I said goodbye to my mother, hung up the phone, and stared at myself in the mirror. Tried to imagine a small group of women standing in the corner of the bathroom, watching me, holding little score sheets, stern-faced and mascaraed, like an Olympic judging panel. I hesitated, then picked up the pill and dropped it into the toilet.
There it was, undeniably: the sudden swell of applause.
Middle of the night.
Wake up. Shower. Wash and condition hair. Exfoliate. Shave. Blow-dry hair. Curl hair. Layer creams and pigments onto skin. Foundation, blush, eyelash curler, mascara, brow liner. As your mother-in-law would say: the bare minimum. While the sun rises outside, stare at reflection in the bathroom mirror, inspecting for flaws. Practice saying,It’s nothing.Practice saying,I just like starting my day with a little bit of me time.Swallow the rising misery in throat. Swallow the fury. Swallow the anxiety. Swallow the desire to light the house on fire and walk out the front door while husband, baby, and in-laws burn to death. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Kill yourself. No—conjure the audience. Conjure Jesus. Conjure mother. Conjure Reena.Yes, that’s the ticket. Reena back east, pulling an all-nighter in a corner cubicle in the basement library of school, slouched before a beam of artificial light. Eating some tasteless protein bar, so filledwith chemicals it could survive a nuclear holocaust. Watch her as she pauses. Gets the sense, prickling on the back of her neck, that she’s being watched.
She looks up and scans the room. Her gaze lands on you.
Oh—the baby’s crying.
