Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“I don’t use a purse.”

“My plastic camera?”

“Your camera’s broken.”

Daphne had reached the wailing stage. Agatha started feeling desperate. She said, “We could stand next to the crib, maybe. Just talk and smile and stuff.”

“Okay.”

They got up and went down the hall, past the closed door of their mother’s room and into the children’s room. It smelled of dirty diapers. Daphne was sitting in that superstraight way she had with her fingers wrapped around the crib bars, and when they came in she grew quiet and pressed her face to the bars so her little nose stuck out. She had been crying so hard that her upper lip was glassed over. She blinked and stared at them and then gave a big sloppy grin.

“Now, what is this nonsense I’m hearing?” Agatha said sternly.

She was trying to sound like Grandma Bedloe. Grownups had these voices they saved just for babies. If she’d wanted, she could have put on her mother’s voice. “Sweetheart!” Or Danny’s. “How’s my princess?” he would ask. Used to ask. In the olden days asked.

Best to stick with Grandma Bedloe. “Who’s this making such a hullabaloo?”

Daphne grinned wider, with her four new crinkle-edged teeth shining forth and her lashes all wet and sticking to her cheeks. She wore just a little undershirt, and her diaper was a brownish color — what their uncle Ian would call Not a Pretty Sight.

“Give her her pacifier,” Thomas suggested.

“She gets mad if you give her a pacifier when she wants a bottle.”

“Maybe she’s not hungry yet.”

“After her nap, she’s always hungry.”

Daphne looked back and forth between the two of them. It seemed to be dawning on her that they weren’t going to be much help.

“Just try her pacifier,” Thomas said.

“Well, where’d it go?”

They reached in between the bars and patted the sheet, hunting. Some places the sheet was damp, but that might have been the heat, or tears. The smell was terrible.

“Found it!” Thomas crowed. He poked the pacifier between Daphne’s lips, but she spat it out again. Her chin began quivering and her eyebrows turned bright pink.

“Phooey,” Thomas said. He picked up the pacifier and jammed it in his own mouth, and then he backed off till he was sitting on the edge of his bed with his arms folded tight across his chest.

“Maybe we could feed her in her crib,” Agatha said.

Thomas made noisy sucking sounds.

Agatha went to the kitchen and dragged a gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator. She set the jug on the table and took a cloudy nursing bottle from the jumble of unwashed dishes next to the sink.

Daphne was back to “Oho! Oho!”

First Agatha tried pouring very, very slowly, but milk got all over the table and soaked Thomas’s page of the coloring book. When she speeded up she did better. She replaced the nipple and carried the bottle down the hall, de-chilling it in her hands as she walked. Outside her mother’s door she paused and listened but she didn’t hear a sound. It must be a two-pill nap, or even three-pill. She went on into the children’s room.

Daphne’s mouth was an ugly shouting square now and she was red-faced and snotty and sweaty. Thomas had his eyes squeezed shut. “Wake up,” Agatha told him roughly as she passed. She fitted the bottle between the crib bars and held it toward Daphne. “Here.”

Daphne flailed out and the bottle went flying. Off popped the nipple. Milk splashed the decal of the rabbit in pink overalls on the headboard. “Stupid!” Agatha shouted. “Stupid fat old baby! ”

Daphne cried harder. “Help me reach this bottle,” Agatha told Thomas, but Thomas had pulled his bedspread up over his head. She turned back to the bottle. It lay on its side toward the rear of the crib, and every time Daphne bounced another glug of milk would spill out onto the sheet. Finally Agatha pressed the two clamps on the railing to lower it. There was Daphne, no longer fenced in, quieting slightly and hiccuping and looking interested. There was the bottle, within easy reach. Agatha found the nipple in a fold of wet sheet and put it back on, and then she tipped the bottle toward Daphne. This time, Daphne accepted it. She drank sitting up, blinking at the first cold swallow but after that making do. One hand clutched over and over on Agatha’s wrist. “Mm,” she said at each gulp. “Mm. Mm.” Agatha suddenly felt the most enormous thirst.

Behind her, she heard the slithering sound of Thomas coming out of his bedspread. She heard the smack as he pulled the pacifier from his mouth. “She sure does stink,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“You going to change her, Agatha?”

She stood firm, cupping her elbow with her free hand. She did know how to change a diaper. She had often helped her mother — fetched the powder or the washcloth. Yes, she thought she could do it on her own. But still she didn’t answer. She tossed her head to flick her hair off her face. She felt Thomas come up cautiously to stand next to her. He was twiddling the pacifier between his fingers. Just as Daphne let go of the nipple after her last gulp ( Squirrel-oh! the nipple said), he reached over and plugged her mouth with the pacifier. Daphne went on sucking. Thomas and Agatha took a step back, but Daphne stayed quiet.

“Soose,” Thomas said happily.

That was what their mother called a pacifier: soose.

Agatha took a clean diaper from the stack on the bureau. She tipped Daphne onto her back and slid the diaper beneath her. The pins were no trouble. This was going to be easy. But the poo was disgusting. She wrinkled her nose and folded the dirty diaper inward. Thomas said, “Yuck!” and went back to his bed.

She carried the diaper down the hall to the bathroom, holding it in a clump far out in front of her. She lowered it into the toilet and swished it around. All the ick started crumbling away. She flushed the toilet and swished again in clearer water, back and forth, dreamily.

Sometimes their mother said “soose” and sometimes she said “soother.” Maybe they were both the same word. People here in Baltimore said “pacifier,” and so did Thomas and Agatha, trying to fit in; but their mother was not from Baltimore. She was from out in the country where they used to live with their father in a metal-colored trailer. Then they all got divorced. This was when Thomas was just a baby. He couldn’t even remember. And then later they moved to Baltimore in Mr. Belling’s long black car. Everything was going to be wonderful, wonderful, their mother said. She got so many new clothes! Their apartment sat over a drugstore that stocked every kind of candy, and when Mr. Belling visited he sent Thomas and Agatha downstairs with a dollar bill each and they could take as long as they liked deciding. Thomas did remember Mr. Belling. He didn’t like him much, though. When Mr. Belling stopped coming, Thomas asked if he could have the Baltimore Colts mug Mr. Belling used to drink his beer from, and their mother started crying. She snatched the mug from the dish drainer and slammed it against the sink until it broke in a million pieces. Thomas said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t really want it!” After that their mother had to get a job and leave them with Mrs. Myrdal, but then she met Danny. She acted more like her old self once she met Danny. On her wedding day she said it was all of them’s wedding day. She gave Agatha a little pink rose from her bridal bouquet.

Thomas said Danny was probably their real father. Agatha knew he wasn’t, though. She told Thomas their real father was nicer. In fact Danny was the nicest man she had ever known — nicer than their father, who had never had much to do with them, and certainly a whole lot nicer than Mr. Belling, with his two fat diamond rings and his puckered eyes the color of new dungarees. But she wanted Thomas to feel jealous over what she could still remember. Thomas had a terrible memory. Agatha’s memory was letter-perfect; she never forgot a thing.