Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“I don’t know,” said Sadie, though the truth was, she did know. She was done. Done with the whole corporate thing. Done with ushering through other people’s books. The debacle with Tuck’s book—Val had canceled his contract after Sadie left, without so much as a glance at his rewrites—had been the final nail in the coffin. She needed to stop wasting time, to write her own. And she had started, however hesitantly, in the dark hours before Jack woke, while she drank dark coffee with sugar, the only time of the day when she felt keenly focused, able to think. But she would not discuss this with Caitlin. Or with anyone, really, but Ed, who thought she should think about screenplays. “A publishing satire,” he suggested. “Or a Whit Stillman kind of thing.” Maybe, she told him.

“Have you been to the mommies’ group?” Caitlin asked, jerking her head toward Vicky and her cohorts, who stood huddled by the sprinkler, which was shaped like a rainbow.

“Yes,” said Sadie. “Horrible.”

“Oh. My. God,” agreed Caitlin. “ So horrible. They, like, think that they’re liberal because they feed their kids organic baby food, but they’re like Betty Friedan’s worst nightmare.”

For the first time that day, Sadie smiled. “It’s true,” she said.

“Mama,” Jack cried suddenly, grabbing her finger and pulling her toward the bench. “Baby. Baby .” As they approached the bench—Caitlin trailing desultorily behind Sadie and Jack—a faint cooing noise began emanating from the big pram.

“He’s awake,” said Caitlin flatly. And he was. Kicking his thin arms and legs against his soft white blanket and gazing, alarmed, at Sadie and Jack, who arrived at his side first. A moment later, when Caitlin stepped into his line of vision, he let out a frantic wail. “Okay, okay,” said Caitlin, her face turning a bright scarlet. “Hold on a second.” She began rooting in the bottom of the pram. Pick him up , thought Sadie, her blood pressure rising perceptibly. Across the park, Vicky whispered urgently in the ear of her skinny friend, while the fat one shook her head from side to side, setting her jowls aquiver.

“Baby,” said Jack nervously. “Baby.”

“Would you like me to pick him up?” asked Sadie.

“That would be great,” said Caitlin, through gritted teeth.

In her arms, Ismael felt impossibly light and springy—had Jack ever been this small?—his hot tears soaking the shoulder of her dress. “It’s okay, little sweetie,” she said, kissing his head, soft black curls flattening under her lips. His smell was different than Jack’s—muskier, more herbal. A different soap, that was all it was, and yet it was enough to make him seem almost a different species. “It’s okay,” she said. But he was already calming, breathing in great, huge, shuddering gulps.

“Baby,” said Jack, staring solemnly up at her, his blue eyes darkening with confusion. “Baby.” This was what he called himself. “Baby!” he shouted when he found photos of himself floating around the apartment. “Jack baby do it,” he said when he wanted to climb onto a chair or eat applesauce unassisted. But he was really a boy now, hitting his Spaldeen against the wall and racing his Little People airplane across the floor and demanding to be read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel ten times in a row.

“Okay,” said Caitlin, who had emerged from behind the stroller holding a short, fat bottle filled with the thick, supernaturally white weight of formula. Sadie was almost afraid to look in the direction of Vicky. Breast-feeding was, of course, one of the key points of her ideology. Breast-feeding, that is, for a prescribed amount of time: no less than one year, no more than a year and a half. “After that it’s bad for their development,” she’d told Sadie numerous times, clucking her tongue in the direction of one of their neighbors, who still boldly nursed her three-year-old in the park. Sadie had said nothing, telling herself, Forget it, Jack. It’s Chinatown . Jack, at least, generally confined his habit to the home.

Sadie handed Ismael to his mother, with some reluctance, and sat down on the bench beside her. His eyes now fully lined with red, Jack scrambled up beside her and watched as Ismael sucked rhythmically at his bottle. “Nurse,” he whispered to Sadie, with his most impish smile. “Nurse.”

“No, sweetie,” she said gently. “It’s not the nursing time. We only nurse before we go to sleep.”

“Nurse,” he said more urgently, reaching an exploratory hand toward her left breast. It was time, she thought, to get him home, to bed.

“He’s still nursing?” asked Caitlin, her composure regained.

Sadie nodded. “I’m trying to wean him, but I can’t quite figure out how. He’s always been a big nurser. He wouldn’t even take a bottle. It’s part of the reason I didn’t go back to work.”

“He’ll stop when he goes to school, right? And I guess it keeps him tethered to you,” said Caitlin, sending an acid jolt into Sadie’s mouth. Fuck you , she thought, wishing she could summon a more intelligent response. “I couldn’t do it,” Caitlin said, with a shrug. “I felt like a cow. There’s so much pressure to breast-feed now. It’s like your baby is going to die if you don’t. They scare you with all this stuff about breast-fed babies being smarter.”

“But it is supposed to be better for the baby,” said Sadie, ever aware that she didn’t want to play the role of Vicky, arbiter of all things maternal. And yet who was Caitlin to judge her? Caitlin Green-Gold, of all people?

“Actually, there’s a lot of contention over that.” In Caitlin’s arms, Ismael’s eyes were drooping shut. “Because of toxins in breast milk, from plastics and pesticides and all that. We have all these toxins stored up in our fat cells—just sitting there, like, forever —and they’re released into our breast milk. So some people are saying that formula is actually better, in certain ways.”

“ Really .” Jack had clambered into her lap and dropped his head sweetly on her shoulder. “ Nurse ,” he whispered. “ Nurse. ”

“Yeah, there was a big thing about it in Nature last year. But none of the mainstream media picked it up.”

“ Really ?” said Sadie, pulling Jack’s hand out from the neck of her dress. Why had Caitlin been reading Nature ? “That’s surprising. It sounds like just the sort of story the mainstream media would pick up. Or, at least, NPR.”

Caitlin rolled her eyes. “ NPR? ” she snorted. “Are you serious? The mouthpiece of the pseudoliberal hegemony? Like they’re going to run a story that would question the status quo.”

“That breast-feeding is better—”

“The upper-middle-class postfeminist baby-worship bullshit ,” spat Caitlin. “Where, it’s like, if we don’t spend every minute with our kids, if they’re not attached to our tits twenty-four hours a day, we’re guilty of child abuse. I mean, I totally get the cultural imperative behind it, but I just think it’s bullshit.”

“What’s the cultural imperative behind it?” asked Sadie, as she knew Caitlin wanted her to, though she suspected she knew the answer.

“We’re the kids of fucking baby boomers,” cried Caitlin. “Our moms either waited too long to get pregnant, then went back to work right away, or had kids early, then got pissed about it and went to encounter groups to get in touch with their rage.” She sighed. “Either way, we were all parked in front of the TV after school, eating Doritos. So now we have this, like, collective desire to return to a simpler age, when gender roles were more clearly defined: Mom stayed home and baked cookies. Dad went to work.”