Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“He’s asleep!” Nina snapped.

“You don’t want us to park and come up?” Barry asked.

Nina froze in position, her legs out of the car, her torso inside, thinking: I swear, I’ll never forgive you, Eric, if you let them.

“We can be a big help,” Barry sold himself. “We raised a kid, you know.”

“Uh … ” came out of Eric.

“Let them be,” Miriam said. “They need to rest. We’ll visit tomorrow.”

While negotiating the lobby — Nina moved slowly, giving an impression of protective motherhood, although it was her sore wound that needed the care — Nina reflected that Eric was incapable of saying no to his father. That task always fell to Miriam. Father and son were overpowering men, not only physically and vocally, but in their vibrant, expressive faces. Refusing them was to hurt a bear: a huge, warm, gentle creature shocked by cruelty, his pain and fear made more pathetic by the size of the suffering. Eric feared disappointing his father’s expectations and love as much as Nina feared failing Eric.

She thought of this as a problem not in relation to herself. She didn’t mind. After all, she had no desire to let Eric down. He demanded only affection and attention; there was nothing brutal in his wants. She thought of it for Luke. Sons have to say no to their fathers, she argued to herself in the elevator, the tower of Eric beside her, Luke unconscious in her arms. The shadow of this man could forever block the sun from her child, obliterate from Luke’s sight much that was not in Eric’s vision but existed in hers. The world, for Eric, was composed of things: gadgets, money, luxuries, ways of doing. For her the planet had life: in its changing sky, in the aging of faces, in the dirt of buildings, in the brisk efficiency of winter and the languorous sex of summer.

Eric believed people and the things they did were important; sometimes Nina could contemplate the end of humanity not only with calm but with a kind of relief. She didn’t bleed at every horror on the news; she didn’t weep while passing the homeless, covered, like forgotten cars, with grime; she didn’t rage at all the bloodthirsty bigotry of the international world, black against white, Jew against Arab; she didn’t despair at the great listless heads of the starving. Instead, she felt hopelessness keenly in all the world’s activities.

Nina stood in the hallway while Eric fumbled with the keys. He was nervous; his body moved ahead of his intentions and left him uncoordinated. He had stumbled in the lobby when he simultaneously moved ahead to the elevator and then reversed direction to help her. He had raced to press the buttons inside, mistakenly holding the door open button until she pointed it out. Now, in his haste to get the right key in the lock, he had dropped the ring. There was silence throughout the building. Everything he did echoed in the stairwell near their door.

She felt dread at this waiting. In the hospital her intimacy with Luke seemed apart from the world and its ghastliness. When they crossed the doorsill to their apartment, the struggle to raise Luke in the mad world would begin. She wanted Luke to know, really know, there was a place of beauty for him, not the decorated prettiness of an apartment, but the warm, messy love of home, as she had felt with her brothers and sisters in that rambling house in Brookline, Massachusetts. The noise of dinner, the soft fabric of nightclothes, the games of Christmas, the excitement of Saturday morning, the regret of Sunday night — all the joys of her childhood she wanted to be Luke’s. She suddenly felt this life for Luke, here, shelved horizontally in the storehouse of New York, reared by a huge father obsessed by possessions, was pregnant with disaster.

They entered.

The apartment was still. An open window in their bedroom lifted a white curtain, billowing like a sail on Blue Hill Bay. “We’re home, baby,” she said to Luke, and moved the hand she had supporting his bottom. The diaper felt softer than usual. She pressed it again. There was something slippery underneath. “I think he’s taken a crap,” she said to Eric.

“You’re kidding!” he said as though an astounding and disastrous turn of events had occurred.

“They do that, you know.”

“The changing table’s all set up,” Eric said, again in a rush to do things his body wasn’t ready for. He tried to put her bag down and motion her toward the baby’s room in one gesture and nearly toppled himself as a result. He had to put out one hand on the floor to prevent a complete spill.

She found herself laughing uncontrollably, her body quaking from it, shaking Luke. Luke moaned. “Shhh,” Nina said to Eric, but she meant it for herself. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“I’m not trying to!”

“Relax.”

“Okay. I’m fine. It’s in here. I’ve set everything up.” Eric pointed to Luke’s room. She moved to have a view of it. The crib was badly placed, against the far wall between the windows. The changing table, which was really an antique dresser inherited from her grandmother, was in the middle against a wall. All quite wrong: the arrangement lacked any sense of flow; the objects were merely plunked down. She regretted again that she hadn’t redone the whole apartment while pregnant. “We’ll have to move the changing table by the window and put the crib here.” She gestured to indicate the wall farthest from the windows, where he had put the inexpensive white shelves, intended for the toys Luke would inevitably acquire.

“Why?” Eric objected. “We can hear him better over there,” he said, meaning that the crib was next to the bathroom, which was also connected to their bedroom.

She shook her head no. Explaining was too complicated and she didn’t want the bother of reasoning Eric out of it. She knew anyway he argued merely as a point of pride, irritated he had displeased her. Now Luke added to the disharmony. He woke up, with immediate angry cries.

“What’s the matter?” Eric pleaded, his face bewildered.

“He needs to be changed.”

“He knows that?”

Nina walked to the dresser and put Luke on his back. Luke’s face turned red. His hollow mouth yawned with screeching objections. The sound quickened her heartbeat, made her feel she had to be fast: that Luke was a ticking bomb she had to defuse. “Where are the diapers?” she demanded.

“Diapers?” Eric said slowly. “Oh, my God.”

“The hospital package,” she said, nodding at the paper bag the nurse had given her with free baby supplies.

Luke’s cries raged on as she unsnapped his tiny outfit. A dark mass showed through the diaper material, and had spread across the bottom to ooze from the side onto his thighs. The gook looked like oatmeal. She heard tearing sounds from behind her, and a glance revealed Eric, frantic, unable to open the stapled bag, ripping it apart. The sample package of four diapers also frustrated him. He pulled its top off in one motion. She knew his actions were funny, but she felt only impatience.

When she took another look at Luke (his chest now heaving with frightened, angry bewilderment), she noticed the oatmeal had gotten onto his clothes, and was squashed up his back, messing the plastic of the mattress and staining the bottom of his undershirt. Luke would have to be totally stripped and lifted off the mattress, which would then need wiping before clean clothes could be laid down. She had done all this several times in the hospital, but then Luke had been quiet, his arms maneuvering in the air awkwardly, his unfocused eyes peering with studied wonder at lights and shadows. To take the time now, with his wailing, seemed impossible.

Eric brought a diaper over. “What’s the matter?” he said, not to her, but to Luke, as if he were sensible, capable of response.