Most of my
posts are designed to make you smile. I
like to smile, and I figure you do, too.
Today’s post is a bit different. It
is a true story except for, you know, the parts I made up. No, what I mean is that the story is real,
but not much is known about its main character. I made up her motivations and emotions out
of my own head, but the basic story is true. One of the babies in
this tale grew up to become my friend, and when she told me her story, my jaw
dropped. I’ve never dropped my jaw
before, not that I can remember. It’s an
astonishing story, and I bet your jaw will drop, too.
No Day at the Beach
She was
tired, so, so tired. Her eyelids
dragged, but she’d made it. She’d
buckled the babies into their car seats, one and then the other; it took so
damned long with two of them. She’d gone
to the store and bought three bags of groceries -- oh, god! She’d forgotten dish soap. Oh, no.
Oh, no, oh, no. She’d have to do
this all over again! Okay, but not now. Get a grip, for heaven’s sakes. Now she could drive home and take a little
nap, or at least, well, the babies were asleep now. That meant they’d wake up when she stopped
the car. They’d be hungry, too. They’d fuss while she fixed formula. She could never remember how much to measure,
so that was getting down the powder and reading the directions in that tiny
print, and measuring and mixing it up, and they’d cry, hungry, the entire
time. She thought they were big enough to hold their own bottles,
but they refused .
They’d rather kick and fuss. She'd have to sit there holding them which always
made her angry.
She’d feed
Timmy first. He was the loudest, his
pitch strumming her nerves. She’d give
Timmy his and then Tammy. With luck that
would hold them for a few minutes, and she could rest before strapping them
into the high chairs and shoveling baby food into them. What should she give them today? Oh, whatever.
It was all government approved, right? God, it
would be at least an hour before she could put them on the floor.
Their toys
were still scattered from this morning, so maybe they would play and she could lay down on the couch. She wished their
faces lit up for her like they did for Claudia when she came to baby sit. They had each other, though, so maybe they’d
play. But they’d want the solid food before
she could sleep. Oh, for an
uninterrupted hour.
Nathanial
was always mad at her. “You can’t sleep
all the time!” he yelled. “You sleep all
the time! Can’t you damned even fix
dinner before I get home? I’m tired,
too, you know! I don’t want to hear
about this baby depression stuff.
There’s two babies, and I’m tired, too!
You don’t want to get up with them at night, and you don’t want to get
up with them in the morning. Do you want
them at all?”
Did she want
them? Had she ever wanted them? Well, she’d wanted one once. Years before she’d had Nicky, and that had
been fine. She slept when he slept, just
like they said to do. He was cute and
chubby and happy, so she’d wanted another.
Carl, well, that wasn’t so good.
When he slept, she’d had to take care of Nick. She’d been tired and depressed. No more,
she’d said, but just one careless night, and there was Alex. A "surprise".
Surprise sounded better than "accident".
At the time, she’d thought he was an accident, but later she found out
how bad accident could mean. She’d been
tired, and that had made her sad, although maybe being sad had made her
tired. Anyway, after Carl, she’d never gotten over
being tired and sad, and it got worse with Alex. It was too hard, just too damn hard. One day it just became easier to move out.
She slowed
as the car in front of her turned. Gotta
pay attention. Gotta keep my mind on the
road. At least the babies slept in the
back. Maybe they would sleep after she pulled into the driveway. She could just sit on
the step while they slept on in the car.
Slept on and on. That would be so
good, if they just slept on and on.
She should
have felt sad leaving Nick and Carl and Alex, but it had been too much responsibility,
and the divorce came easy, no fighting over custody. Paul wanted the boys, and she didn’t,
easy as that. No fighting over property
either; there wasn’t much. Sign the
papers, thank the judge, leave the sad behind.
One night
she was out having a drink, and she met Nathanial. They had fun
together! Then he wanted a baby, and she
thought, well it would make him happy.
She could handle one. Only it
wasn’t one; it was Timmy and Tammy, one always crying, one always hungry, one
always smelly.
A horn blasted;
she slammed on the brakes; the babies woke up, all at once, in one blink of an
eye. A car raced across the intersection
in front of her, the driver giving her the finger. She’d missed the stop sign. The babies, jarred awake, screamed. She began to shake, clammy with fear. She hadn’t seen the sign at all, wrapped up
in her thoughts. Her stomach
clenched. “It’s over,” she told
herself. “It’s over. You stopped in time. That last time, you tried to stop, and this
time you did stop. It won’t happen
again, but you have pay attention! It
was hard, though, with all that noise from the back seat. “Hush!” she yelled at them, but they kept
on.
It could
have been a kid in the intersection, not a car.
It had been a kid in the accident. She
hadn’t even run a stop sign then or anything.
The police investigation said the investigation showed shit wasn't her fault. Witnesses saw
the boy swerve his bike into the street.
They said he’d been goofing off, riding no hands, and that even though
she’d been going slow, there was no way she could have stopped.
But she knew
that she had hit that kid. It didn’t
matter how slowly she’d been going or that Tammy and Timmy hadn’t been crying
then. She wished they shut up now. She would always remember the thunk of the
body against the car. She’d hit him, and
he’d died.
Thinking
about it exhausted her. The wailing from
the backseat was all that kept her awake.
“What did I tell you?” she screamed, and she flailed a hand behind her
seat, and hit Tammy hard on her fat little leg, smearing her hand through gummed cookie on the car seat's edge.
Usually the more docile of the two, Tammy belted an outraged
scream.
She shrank
into herself in shame. She’d hit her
baby girl. Tears trickled down her
face. She couldn’t take care of two
babies. She’d left three little
boys. She’d killed another. Shame turned to anger, and now she wanted to
rip those car seats out so it would be quiet back there. How could she drive when they distracted
her? How could she drive when she was
always wiped out? She wanted to
sleep.
“SHUT UP!”
she screamed. She jerked the car to the
curb, the sudden movement causing them to shriek louder. She flung around to hit them again but was pulled in by
the seat belt. She wanted to hit them
both until they were quiet. Oh! That was terrible! SHE was terrible. She’d left her boys. She’d killed a kid. She wanted to smack these babies so they’d
just be quiet! She sat strapped in, shaking.
She looked at her hand in revulsion and wiped it off on
her jeans. The car seats needed a good
hosing off. Nathanial said so. He said they were disgusting. She thought of herself, rested after a nap,
babies asleep in the house, her with the car seats out in the sunshine, the
water sluicing over the plastic, everything shiny and clean. How spacious the back seat would be without
anything strapped in there. How nice it
would smell without dirty babies and moldy snacks. How nice that would . . . .
Timmy’s
screech roused her. She forced eyelids
up. “There, there,” she said, but it
didn’t sound convincing even to her.
Tammy’s voice rose, then Timmy’s overrode it as if they’d suddenly
learned to take turns just to annoy her.
She’d never wash off the car seats.
She’d never make dinner. She’d
never get a nap, not with the two of them.
“Please," she pleaded, "please shut up.”
They didn’t
shut up. By now they were stuck in it,
stuck in the sobs and keeping each other going.
They needed somebody who could rock them and sing to them. They needed somebody like Marilyn, Claudia’s
mom. How did she do it? Marilyn had ten kids, count them, ten, all as
happy as the day is long. Even Claudia
said she loved having all those brothers and sisters. Timmy and Tammy needed a mom like Marilyn.
She thought
about that, and she thought about wanting to hit her babies. She knew in her head it was awful to want to
hit them, but she really wanted to. She’d
do it, too, if they didn't shut up! She was only four blocks from the beach where Claudia took them when she baby sat. Claudia went there all the time, she
said. She and her millions of brothers
and sisters went to play on the beach.
She
carefully made a turn, then found a parking spot right at the access walkway,
first little happiness she’d had all day.
She unbuckled Timmy’s car seat and hauled him down to the sand. She trudged back for Tammy, slow going and
hot in the sun. She sat them side by
side, settled so their faces were in the shade.
She did that for them even though she thought they looked ugly with
their faces lined with tears and smeared with snot. The rocking of being carried had lulled them,
but now they began screaming again, enraging her. What did they want from her? She’d put them in the shade! Spoiled little brats.
“Hey!” she snapped her fingers gaining momentary
attention before they began kicking again. “Hey, cut it out; it's Claudia's beach!" Tammy’s siren wail split her ears. Tommy was angry and red in the face
with it. “Shut up!” she shouted, “Shut
up!”
She turned
and raced from their screaming and their sniveling and their smells. She slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the
car door, and, in a convoluted combination of guilt and relief, put her head
down on the steering wheel and sobbed.
Finally she blew her nose and, without one look back, headed home for a
nap.
