Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

Of course she doesn’t have any Whitney, the tape long gone to who knows where. Maybe Norah Jones will do.

No to Norah. No to John Mellencamp, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Ian, Alison Krauss, Mickey Mouse, and Barney too. Joanne turns off the music and calls her doctor. With the baby on his activity mat, she listens to the recorded voice instruct her on the health benefits of daily exercise. Her son rolls over mid-scream, then rises on one fat knee. Joanne knows she ought to be delighted — it’s the first time he’s managed to get so far — but feels only impatience as she watches him inch forward, right knee leading. Unable to bring the left up, he collapses, head wedged in the crook where the gym’s arch meets the mat. Reluctantly, she lays the phone down to free him, then rushes back, catching the nurse just before she hangs up.

“Please, I need to see someone today,” Joanne begs when the icy voice says they have no appointments. “I’m desperate.”

They’ll squeeze her in at twelve fifteen. Joanne calls Ryan, but he won’t come home. They’re behind on a job.

“This is so typical of you.”

“What?”

“Is a little help when I’m sick too much to ask?”

“I’ve been telling you to find a babysitter.”

“Yeah, someone’s gonna watch this baby. They’d kill him.”

“Call your mother. She has nothing better to do.”

“Yes, because Lou’s the soul of patience.”

“Well, Jo, you’ll just have to take him with you, then. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal.”

“Thanks a fucking lot,” she says and slams down the phone.

After she changes out of her pajamas, Joanne installs the baby in the stroller, bribing him with a sugarcoated pacifier. Every three houses she swaps the one he’s sucked clean for the one in the bag of sugar. At the end of the block a lawn mower rumbles to life, its motor ebbing, then ramping. Of course she’s tried white noise — fans, the dryer, vacuum cleaners, burbling brooks. One time Ryan brought home fucking whale calls, like a saxophone in a child’s hands.

As she nears the corner, Joanne sees it is a teenage girl pushing the mower. She has long legs like Tina and hair held back with a bandana the way Tina wore it that summer, the summer of the burst eardrums, of Caid and Pamela, of the fight on the hill. That summer mowing the grass was one of the last clues about Tina. The first clue was Megan, Tina’s little sister. Four years younger, she had not been allowed to play with them since they’d started talking about boys and looking up dirty words in the dictionary. But sometime after school let out — who could say so many years later exactly when? Maybe in June, maybe the beginning of July — Megan began to follow Tina everywhere, and Tina refused to stop her. The morning Joanne’s eardrum burst, the girls showed up and attacked Joanne’s fridge as if they’d been on war rations. It wasn’t the first time and Lou had noticed the amount of food disappearing. “Those girls better eat at their own damn house,” she warned Joanne. “Your father’s not paying child support for three.”

That day Tina downed two bowls of Cap’n Crunch before fishing a folded yellow postcard out of her pocket.

“Somebody stuck this on our door.” It was a notice from the health department about their grass. “Do you know how to start a mower?”

He’s finally asleep. Joanne parks the stroller beneath the sycamore and gets the book out of her car. Breaking the Cycle: A Guide for Mothers.

Lou had a hollow plastic tube, maybe three feet long and half an inch in diameter. She called it “the whip,” used it on Joanne’s legs when Joanne lied about going somewhere after school, came home late, or left the kitchen a mess. The whip left red welts shaped like boomerangs. Where did it come from? And where was it now? It seems impossible to throw such a thing in the trash.

Joanne flips through the book from back to front, reading the headings, unwilling to begin at the beginning. When it’s time to go to the doctor, she lifts the baby carefully, but he wakes while she’s buckling him into the car seat and begins to cry. She backs out of the driveway, teeth clenched, checking her mirrors obsessively, as if the baby will appear in one by magic, directly in the path of her wheels.

Forty-five minutes of people staring in the waiting room — one old woman scowls when Joanne uses the sugar pacifier — then five minutes with the doctor.

“Probably a viral infection. Use a double dose of ibuprofen, call if it still hurts in three days.”

“Three days?”

After a lecture about the overuse of antibiotics, the doctor escapes, allowing a sympathetic smile toward the crying baby.

Back home he refuses his bottle, spits out mashed banana, throws a popsicle at her white curtains. Trying to scrub out the stain, Joanne eyes the inflatable pool on the patio. The water will be warm by now, not like yesterday, when she spent an hour with the air pump and the hose only to snatch him out as soon as his toes touched the frigid surface, setting off another rage. He would like it now. He would float, right? And if he didn’t float, he would be quiet.

Joanne calls her mother.

While she waits for Lou to arrive, she puts the baby back in the swing and goes outside to have a cigarette. Several times she’s left him alone in the crib, which the pediatrician calls “the safe zone,” and stuffed cotton in her ears, but today the cotton would be intolerable, so she dons the ridiculous pink fur-covered earmuffs her mother gave her for Christmas. What was she thinking? How can Lou help? Lou always makes everything worse.

Joanne realizes the old man behind her — out trimming his shrubs — is scowling over their shared fence. Assuming it’s the earmuffs that have drawn his attention, she takes them off. The baby is howling as if he’s just been sentenced to death. Joanne checks her watch. Lou lives ten minutes away. What the fuck is taking so long?

The old man goes in and Joanne tries to concentrate on pleasant things — sprinklers hiss-putting in circles, bees buzzing in the lavender, children called in to lunch. That day, at noon, when Joanne had tried to get Tina and Megan to go home for lunch, Megan began to cry and Joanne asked what was going on.

“Nothing.”

“Then what’s the big deal if you eat at your house?”

“No big deal. It’s just.” Tina paused. “My mom has a new boyfriend.”

“Is he an asshole?”

“I don’t know. We don’t see him much.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

Tina shrugged.

So Joanne made them all macaroni and cheese and they ate while playing Monopoly at the kitchen table, then they watched their soap opera. With only one eardrum, the dialogue came at Joanne as if from a cave, the pitch deeper and every vowel laden with echoes. Still, she remained unconcerned, attributing the strange effect to a problem with the TV station. Her other ear had begun to hurt by then, so she took more aspirin, crushing it this time in a cup of leftover frosting.

After the program, they fixed each other’s hair. Joanne worked on Megan’s, which was unusually dirty and knotted. She combed it smooth, then repositioned a homemade barrette of yarn and ribbon.

Megan kept warning, “Be careful. My mom and me made it.”

Lou’s voice, like a German shepherd’s bark, pierces the patio door and Joanne immediately drops her cigarette, stepping on it as she swivels.

“What the hell are you doing? I was out there ringing the goddamn bell.”

Inside the familiar carping begins. Lay down? Aren’t you going to shower? You stink. Well, what’s wrong with him? Maybe he’s got your problem with the ears. Have you had him checked, for Christ’s sake? I’m turning off the air conditioning. The poor thing’s probably cold. You keep it like a freezer in here. Then to the baby. Is that shit I smell? Did you shit your pants?