Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

But the drive was short. In the parking lot, Diane was overwhelmed with guilt that she had had such a good time in the car. She sang back to the music, laughed at the snapshots of her past — lovers, arguments, ancient happiness.

Your mother is very ill, she scolded. Today the drive seemed to end even more quickly, the joy of it over so fast. Diane darkened her face as she stepped into the hospital, ready to heap mounds of phony confidence over her terror and hopelessness about Lily’s condition. She had hours of vigil ahead, sitting beside her split-open mother. Lily, exhausted and on painkillers, would sleep on and off, always clutching Diane’s hand, as if it had life to spare. The linen, the hospital noises, Lily’s fear never changed. It was boring. Very scary and very boring.

Diane tried to remember New York. Her real life, she would have said a few weeks ago. But Peter and Byron, their apartment, her old job, her friends — they had no tidal force to draw her to them. It seemed life had always been this way: Lily and Diane, fighting nature.

Peter and Byron didn’t need Diane, anyway. According to Peter, this time Byron had taken the IQ test without any problem. He had gone to the prenursery school with typical enthusiasm and come home babbling about the activities.

Last night Diane had had a twenty-minute conversation with Byron over the phone; he rattled off the things they did in school and concluded, “You know, Mommy, I think I’m going to like growing up.”

“Oh,” Diane said, and held herself back from laughing. “How come?”

“Well, Daddy said I go to school for eighteen years while I grow up. I think I’m really going to like that.”

Peter got on afterward and sounded like a competent parent of many year’ experience It was bizarre.

Maybe I was the problem. Me. With my ceaseless demands, my endless criticism.

Whom did I do all that work for? Nobody needed it. Nobody wanted it.

“We miss you,” Peter said last night at the end of her conversation with Byron. But he didn’t sound sincere. The facts didn’t bear him out.

My mother needs me, she answered herself walking into the cardiac care unit. Do I take her back to New York? Insist to Peter we move into a larger apartment with a room for Mom?

That frail, scared, greedy, foolish woman. Diane loved her.

Diane set her face into a strong look of confidence and walked into the room.

The bed was empty.

“Ma?” she called out.

And she was hovering outside the window, looking at the Diane in the doorway: dressed in nice clothes, her hair brushed, her face made up, carrying the newspapers, and a take-out container of coffee.

“Ma?” this nice person called out.

Diane rushed to herself, smashed through the window, across the linoleum floor, rushed up into her own body, became herself, and began to scream: “Where is my mother? Where is my mother?”

Two nurses, both of them familiar faces, ran in and began to talk, to her and at each other. A mistake had been made, they were trying to say, Diane was supposed to have been called.

They didn’t have to finish their explanations. Diane had forgotten to worry about this, about a sudden event during her absence. Diane had forgotten to be vigilant; she could have talked them into letting her sleep at the hospital, she could have — but she didn’t and so, of course, Lily was dead.

WHEN NINA told Tad’s secretary she’d call Eric back, Nina remembered the smell of Luke’s hair. She had bent down to kiss Luke as she left him at the play group, but he was being called by David, by Katy, by Josh, by Rachel—“Hello Luke!” “Luke! Look at my new shoes!” “Luke! come play with me!”—and Nina’s lips managed to catch only the top of Luke’s head as he moved toward his friends. Hours later, at work, she could still feel the fur in her nose, the smell of baked life from his scalp, fresh and warm: soft hair, hard skull.

To Nina and Eric’s astonishment, according to the two young women who ran the prenursery school, Luke was the favorite of his class, always in demand, chosen by the other children to arbitrate disputes or as a spokesman for their desires. Today’s easy separation from Luke was thoroughly different from the first month of taking Luke to the prenursery school. Then he had clung to Nina’s side, peering out from a lowered brow and half-concealed head. He was a growth on her body; baby kangaroo in the pouch. Now Luke woke up early, asking, “Is it time for school?” He squirmed out of her pouch, rushed from her at the entrance, ran to his world. He loved his new friends, their habits, their mistakes, their games. Nowadays Nina had to plan ahead for the weekends, ask Luke which friend he wanted to see, make a date, and then tactfully say no to the others when their mothers phoned, eager to reserve time with her Luke. Solitary Nina had raised a friend to all toddlers. She worried his popularity was merely a by-product of his poor self-defense mechanisms, but it didn’t seem to be in practice: Luke had the ultimate threat, that there were others who wanted to play with him, and so he was wooed, given what he wanted, without the need to demand it.

Luke’s development gave Nina confidence. When Tad turned over to Nina more and more of the supervision of the line, she felt competent, assured of the future, because her Luke, the mewling, unhappy, constipated, nervous infant, had grown into a strong, smart, loving, and happy child. Why didn’t it mean that to Eric? He was responsible for much of Luke’s maturation; why had Eric’s self-esteem declined?

Eric phoned in the midst of a hassle with two models. One had arrived late for a fitting and said she had to leave early for a shoot; Nina needed more time with her. Nina wanted to concentrate on persuading the model and Eric’s call was a distraction. “Ask him if I can call him back?” Nina said, and tried to reason with the model, but she overheard Tad’s secretary say to Eric, “Then where can she call you back?” and Nina smelled Luke’s hair from the morning: baked and soft and hard.

“Wait!” she called out. “I’ll take it.”

“Nina?” Eric’s voice answered her hello. He called out from the bottom of a canyon of New York noise — trucks, horns, shouting pedestrians.

“Eric? Where are you?”

“On the street.” He was desperate. “Can you — are you busy?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve had it with Joe!” The words were strong, but Eric’s tone was scared.

“You’ve quit?”

“No, I — uh — I just told him. I’m going short the market, I can’t— I sold out all the stocks, your father’s stocks, and I’m gonna go short.”

Short meant betting against them, Eric had once explained to her. Over the years, Eric always made going short sound dangerous, immoral. It was something he was tempted to do and feared; he often spoke of it the way teenagers talk of breaking some rule; trying something adult they weren’t supposed to: sex, drugs, running away from home. She knew that much; it was a step Eric feared and desperately wanted to take.

He was babbling his financial talk now: “The P/E’s are too high, interest rates aren’t coming down anymore, everybody’s bullish— so who’s gonna buy? Everybody’s in the market, so there’s no one left. All the greater fools have bought. There’s the Iran-contra scandal, there’s — we’ve had a great run, but it’s over, it’s 1929 again. Joe says it’s 1928, but that’s exactly the way people get trapped, convincing themselves—”

“Eric,” Nina interrupted. He could go on endlessly and never state his problem. Like Luke, wanting you, the one he loves, to discover it for him. “Why aren’t you in the office? Have you had a fight with Joe or did you—”