Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

She turned up the volume on the classical radio station, which she only listened to when her mind was too occupied for lyrics or talk. Occupied was a polite term for the current state of her amped-up brain. If she hadn’t been parked in plain sight on the main commercial strip of their tiny gossipy town, she would have lain down on the front seat and gone to sleep. She was so tired lately. She couldn’t manage more than a few hours at night when she’d involuntarily shift into some kind of exalted state of anxiety. She would be awake for hours, telling herself to get out of bed and brew some tea or run a warm bath or read, but she couldn’t manage to do any of those things either; she would just lie next to Walt, listening to his gentle snore (even when sleeping, he was unfailingly polite), rigid and paralyzed with worry about Nora and Louisa and money and the mortgage and college tuition and global warming and pesticides in food and lack of privacy on the Internet and cancer —God, how often had she microwaved food in plastic containers when the girls were little? — and whether she’d permanently compromised their intelligence by not breast-feeding and what were the repercussions of that one month she’d let them joyfully tear around the living room in hand-me-down walkers from a kind older neighbor until an unkind younger neighbor told her that everyone knew walkers delayed motor and mental development. She’d fixate on what would happen to the girls when they left home and strayed from her watchful eye (What was the range of Stalkerville? How many miles? She’d have to check) and wonder who could ever love and care for them the way she and Walt did, except that lately she felt like a big fat failure in the love and care department. Oh! And she was fat! She’d gained at least ten pounds since the lunch with Leo, maybe more, she was afraid to weigh herself. Everything felt tight and uncomfortable. She’d taken to covering her unbuttoned jeans with long shirts borrowed from Walt; she could hardly afford to buy new clothes. Nora’s coat was looking particularly ratty, but if she bought Nora a new coat, she would have to buy Louisa one, too (it was her rule: parity in all things!), and she definitely couldn’t afford two.

Melody remembered a day long ago when both girls had raging ear infections. Two fevers, two toddlers crying all night who both hated medicine of any kind. As she watched the doctor writing prescriptions, she wondered how on earth she was going to manage to get eardrops and amoxicillin into two cranky, sick babies ( four ears, two mouths) three to four times a day for ten days.

“It gets easier, right?” she’d asked her pediatrician then, holding one squirming, sweaty child in each arm, neither one would be put down, not even for a minute.

“That depends on what you mean by easier,” the doctor said, laughing sympathetically. “I have two teenagers and you know what they say.”

“No,” Melody said, dizzy from lack of sleep and too much coffee. “I don’t know what they say.”

“Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.”

Melody had wanted to slap the doctor. Having twins seemed so hard when they were little, especially when they were living in the city. Now she found herself wishing for the days when the hardest thing she had to do was dress and load two babies into the unwieldy double stroller and make her way to the playground where she’d sit with the other mothers. They’d all show up with steaming lattes in the winter, iced cappuccinos in the summer, and grease-stained paper bags with various pastries purchased to share. They’d talk and pass bits of lemon cake or blueberry muffins or some gooey cinnamon confection called monkey bread (Melody’s favorite), and the conversation would often turn to life before kids, what it had been like to sleep late, fit into skinnier jeans, finish reading a book before so much time passed between chapters that you had to start from the beginning again, go to an office every day and order out lunch. “Sure I had to kiss a few asses,” one of the women said, “but I didn’t have to wipe any.”

“I was an important person!” Melody remembered another mother saying. “I managed people and budgets and got paid . Now look at me.” She’d gestured to the baby fastened to her breast. “I’m sitting here in the park, half naked, and I don’t even care who sees. And what’s worse is that nobody is even trying to look.” The woman detached her sleeping baby from her nipple and ran a soft finger over his pudgy cheek. “These breasts used to make things happen, you know? These breasts didn’t put anybody to sleep.”

Melody couldn’t help but stare a little at the prominent veins running beneath the woman’s fair skin, the darkened, engorged nipple. She’d tried to breast-feed the twins, had wanted to so badly, but had given up after six weeks, unable to get them on any kind of schedule and nearly out of her mind with lack of sleep. She watched the other mom hook her nursing bra closed and hoist the infant up on her shoulder, rhythmically thumping his back to elicit a burp. “I used to read three newspapers every morning. Three. ” Her voice was softer now so as not to disturb the baby. “You know where I get all my news now? Fucking Oprah.” Her expression was rueful, but also resigned, her fingers making small circles on the baby’s back. “What can you do? This is temporary, right?”

Melody never knew how to join those conversations, so she didn’t. She’d sit and smile and try to nod knowingly, but what she would have said if she could have mustered the nerve was that before her daughters were born she was nothing . She was a secretary. A typist. Someone who blew off college because her father died the fall of her senior year of high school and her mother was checked out and Melody herself was paralyzed with confusion and grief. Not to mention her kind of shitty grades.

But then one day Walter sat next to her in their company cafeteria. He introduced himself and handed her a piece of chocolate cake, saying it was the last one and he’d grabbed it for her because he’d noticed she usually allowed herself a slice on Fridays. When Walt asked her out for pizza and a movie and only months later asked her to be his wife and only a year after that she became a mother to not one but two brilliantly beautiful baby girls? Well, that was something; then she became someone .

She leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe she could just doze for a minute or two. She thought about Nora’s coat and wondered if a new set of buttons would help. Something decorative — wooden or pewter or maybe a colorful glass button, emerald green maybe. She could do that, she could afford two sets of new buttons. Sometimes a small change could make all the difference.

After they saw Leo in the park, it took another three weeks for Nora to coerce Louisa out again and that was the day Simone spotted them leaving and asked if she could join. “I thought I saw you two skipping out of this particular ring of hell a few weeks ago,” she said, stopping on the front steps of the building to light a cigarette. “I live around here. Want to go to my apartment?”

In the weeks since then whenever they skipped class, Simone joined them and she’d completely taken over their weekly excursions. It was winter, and the only thing Louisa and Nora ever did now was go to the American Museum of Natural History because Simone had a family membership card and it was free or hang out at Simone’s apartment, which was always empty because both of her parents were attorneys who almost always went into the office on Saturdays. Louisa was sick of it. She wasn’t only sick of the deceit — she was certain it was just a matter of time before they were caught and then what? — she was sick of Simone’s apartment and even sick of the museum, a place she used to love because it was one of their family’s special destinations, one of the few Melody-approved field trips into New York, and what had seemed gleaming and exotic all through their childhoods — rooms with sharks and dinosaurs and cases of gemstones; live butterflies! — had been dulled over the past few months, tainted with familiarity and guilt and boredom.