Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“The wipes!” she said, pronouncing the words hard. She could barely keep from screaming.

“Right here!” he said, shouting to be heard over Luke’s cries. He lifted a blue plastic container of moistened cloths beside Luke’s kicking feet. It had been right in front of her eyes.

She lifted Luke’s legs, gripping his toy feet so hard they went red. “You’re hurting him,” Eric said.

She pulled the diaper, a pot overflowing with the hot cereal, from under him, folded it — the stuff squeezed out the sides — and handed the mass to Eric. He took it manfully, but then stood there watching, while the slop in his hands threatened to drop on the floor. “Throw it out!” she yelled over Luke’s now-rending cries, broken by gasps for breath. She had Luke’s lower half in the air, his feet together in one hand, like a trussed chicken. She looked at the smeared mattress and realized she would need more than simply the wipes to clean it off.

“Where?” Eric asked.

“In the kitchen. And get some paper towels!”

Eric ran to the kitchen. She heard him banging the cabinet doors, opening and closing them violently.

A look at Luke: eyes gone, mouth a pulsing cavern of agony, fingers scratching for help. She put a hand on his bony, throbbing chest. “Shhhh! Shhhhh!” she hissed, intended as a comfort, but her voice sounded scared and angry.

Eric rushed in, sweating, carrying a huge roll of paper towels still in its plastic package. He couldn’t get it open; the wrapping clung to his fingers. In desperation, he knelt beside her, furious, and dug through it to the paper towels, but at the cost of many sheets, torn apart by his method. He handed her a wad of fragments.

The stuff, at first, only spread out more, sliding from under the towels. Some of it splattered on her dress. Some oozed through the holes Eric’s fingers had made and squeezed through onto her hand.

A wave of nausea hit her stomach. Luke’s gasps for breath seemed to go on longer. Could he be choking?

She began to tremble.

Eric appeared. He banged against her hip. There was a flurry of paper, flags of it waving over the changing table, covering everything. A section fluttered on top of Luke’s face. She heard herself scream. She pulled it off him.

“It’s fine, it’s fine!” Eric yelled. He was tossing gobs of soiled paper towels onto the floor. The mattress was clean. “How do I do the diaper?” he shouted, aiming it under Luke. Now Eric was holding Luke’s legs up.

She pushed the diaper into position. Eric dropped Luke’s legs. Together they pulled the fasteners out, sealing them across the front. Eric instantly picked the wailing frog to his massive chest and swung his body from side to side.

“Please baby please baby please baby, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.” Eric’s brow, covered by sweat, furrowed comically, his eyes wide, like a boy holding back tears.

She took a breath. There was a stabbing soreness at the bottom of her body, at some mysterious place around, beside, above, below her vagina and anus. She felt the floor undulate.

I won’t faint!

“Give him to me,” she said.

“He’s all right!” Eric shouted. Luke was quiet. Eric rocked his body from side to side so fast that she thought Luke’s brains must be rattled.

“I have to feed him,” she said softly.

Eric stopped his movements. He looked at her dubiously. What was wrong with him?

“Give him to me,” she repeated. “He has to be fed.”

She looked at the room, so beautifully in order only a minute before. There were papers everywhere, colored with the strange soupy muck of her son; there were slain boxes, their entrails scattered across the floor. Eric rose like a ruined tower amidst the chaos, his shirt out, darkened by nervous continents of perspiration, his mouth open stupidly, his huge arms crossed, impaling the little creature to his chest, fiercely gripping Luke to protect him from the barbarians.

“Are you okay now?” he asked.

“I’m fine!” she said. The question made her ache with irritation. What the hell was the matter with him?

“Are you sure?”

She looked at the mess. She began to laugh, from her belly. From her punched-out middle, laughter trembled.

“Look at the room,” she said.

“I’ll clean it,” he said humorlessly. “Are you all right?”

“Goddamm it! Yes! Stop it! Stop saying that!”

He made no answer. He looked down at Luke and kissed the strange confused head of hair. Eric’s lips puffed out to make the contact gentle. He kissed Luke over and over. The sight was mesmerizing. Eric looked like an ape grooming his baby. From Luke there came sounds: peeps, sighs, moans, and then a squawk.

“He’s hungry,” she said, exhausted, almost unable to speak. She eased herself into the rocking chair under the window.

“Here we go,” Eric said, approaching with Luke.

She glanced at her watch to note the time of the feeding.

They had been home ten minutes.

PETER ANSWERED the phone eagerly. He grabbed the receiver — reaching for salvation. Rescue, anyway, from the tedium of home. At nine o’clock Diane was already asleep, exhausted by her solo care of Byron. This was the final week of her housebound status. She still had no assurance of a nanny. However, she claimed she was close to hiring away a terrific woman for the amazing fee of three hundred a week. Three hundred a week! The amount wasn’t a problem. Between them, Diane and Peter earned one hundred and sixty thousand a year, and his trust fund yielded him an additional after-tax income of fifty thousand. But Peter thought of their resources as exceptional. How in God’s name were all those other people paying for it? And there were so many! Since the birth of Byron, he had noticed the streets of New York were abundant with children: well-dressed, alert toddlers overseen by black, brown, and coffee-skinned women. Everywhere he saw little white boys and girls pulled reluctantly by large dark hands, their pale, smudged tear-stained faces wiped and kissed by thick lips, or their limp, exhausted bodies carried by plump, sweaty peasant arms. Children of the rich raised by the poor.

It gave him pause. Why?

Peter’s childhood — after the divorce — had been the same, although his caretakers had been white: a fat, affectionate Polish woman, a dour young Swedish graduate student, a cheerful middle-aged English nanny dressed in starched white. Weren’t they merely versions of the current phenomenon? He had grown up intelligent, well educated, socialized. He was no finger-licking, drug-taking street tough. He had no urges to have a few beers and go bowling.

He began to laugh. All these thoughts were so deliciously unliberal, unprogressive, bigoted. And as he laughed, the sleeping silence of his tedious home was broken by the ringing phone.

“Hello?”

A pause. Not a broken connection. There was someone there. Rachel? He hoped.

“Hello,” he repeated, gently, to encourage her.

“Uh … hello, this is Pearl. Is this the Hummel residence?”

The black southern accent told him this was Diane’s hope. “Yes, it is.”

“I met your wife in the park. I take care—”

“Yes, yes,” he said eagerly. “She told me.”

“Is she there?”

“She’s asleep. I can have her call you tomorrow, or—”

“She said you needed a baby-sitter for your boy. He’s so beautiful! A strong head. I think he’s gonna be a big boy.”

That pipsqueak? My son? Peter was five-seven, Diane five-five. The chances Byron would be big were small. “Thank you,” he said.

“I can’t leave my girl right now. Wouldn’t be fair to her parents. But my friend — I don’t know whether you need to hear about other people — but my friend Francine is looking for work. She’s taken care of many children. I never recommend people, you understand? I would be ashamed to recommend somebody who wasn’t any good, who might not be good. Oh, I would die if something bad happened because people had trusted me and I had to recommend someone who wasn’t good. My friend, I’ve known her since I was young, she’s taken care of many, many children—”