Tara Ison - Rockaway

The housework is done by a nervous young woman in her twenties, who comes twice a week and talks compulsively to Sarah about her coming and going boyfriends; Rachel and Elijah are cared for by their nanny, a mammoth, fleshy grandmother of seven with a blond crew cut, who eight hours a day joshes them out of their whines, listens to Rachel chant her loop of “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” walks them around out of doors searching for dragonfly wings, and lets them ride her like a horse. Being a doula means keeping to the fringe of that, not disrupting the settled flow of the house with her presence — her job is the garnish, to provide distraction and simple comforts. She rubs Emily’s feet with peppermint lotion, brushes out and braids her hair, stirs curry powder and gobs of soy mayonnaise into her favorite scrambled eggs. She takes the bags full of the wool shorn from the three sheep — Messy Marv, Sophia, and Brian — to the carding lady, who teaches her about vegetable-based dyes and shows her how to spin fibers to yarn on a wooden, foot-pedaled wheel. She takes the bored family dog for long, deep-lung’d walks in the woods surrounding Emily’s house, and checks him for ticks. She joins Michael when he is tense and exhausted for cocktail-hour glasses of McCallan 18 whiskey, pops in a reggae CD, and asks him about his day while Emily naps. She fills a wheelbarrow of basil from the garden and makes pesto, scooping cups of it into recycled yogurt containers for freezing. She picks too-ripe blackberries until the juice stains her cuticles like blood, as if she’d tried to claw her way out of a pit.

She picks up the creamy, fluffy curls of wool from the carding lady, and Emily, whose fingers are swollen, hands over knitting needles so Sarah can get to work on this year’s sweaters for the family. She stretches out on the living room sofa with Emily, knitting, humming, massaging the dog’s stiff-haired belly with her toes.

“Was he ever married, this guy? Does he have any kids?” Emily asks, drinking juice.

“One son. I think he’s twenty-eight or nine.” Marty has shown her a recent photo: his son, a stunning version of a much-younger Marty, dancing unabashedly at some wild tribal event.

“He must’ve gotten married pretty young.”

“Yep.” Sarah smiles over her needles at Emily. “He got married the year before you and I were born.”

“Well, you know, it’s what they did back then. Marry young,” says Emily, poking Sarah in the thigh with her foot. “You know, in that generation.”

“He’s still friends with his ex-wife.”

“That’s good. That’s a sign of maturity.”

“Oh, just what I need. Another sign of his maturity.”

“Is that the wool from Messy Marv?”

“Uh huh.” Sarah holds up her work; rows of knitted wool are lining up like a furrowed field. “The pullover for Rachel.”

“Pretty.”

She puts her knitting down, and takes the juice glass from Emily. “Should we do your stomach again?”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks. Is that stuff still okay, you think? It’s leftover from Elijah.”

Sarah sniffs at a bottle of apricot oil. “It’s fine. Maybe a little funky. It’s fine.” She slides a pillow under Emily’s knees, helps pull off her splotched blouse. She pours oil into her palm, warms it a moment, smoothes it in expanding, then decreasing concentric circles on Emily’s swollen basket of an abdomen.

Emily takes a deep breath, and gazes up at the ceiling. “Two more days, and the midwife won’t let me deliver at home,” she says. “Maybe I should swim more laps. Get on the Stairmaster.”

“Or a trampoline. A pogo stick.”

“You can do that harder.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“That’s okay. This isn’t supposed to feel wonderful.” Emily sighs. “It’s meant to be persuasive.”

Sarah pushes her palm with more force, feeling what must be baby foot, baby arm, baby skull. “Are you still going with ‘Ariel’?”

“Yep. ‘Lion of God.’ That is, of course, assuming he or she is ever actually born.” Emily balls her fists, and shoves them under the small of her back. Her naked breasts slip sideways.

“Here. .” Sarah adjusts the pillow under Emily’s knees. “I’d be so freaked out. But maybe it’s easier, each time? Does it get easier?”

“I think it gets worse . I know what’s coming. I know this really horrendous thing is going to happen, rip up my body and be really traumatic, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s absolutely inevitable.”

“Sounds like being on death row. Waiting for the firing squad.”

“Sort of, yeah. Woop. .” A droplet of milk spills from her right breast to the couch. “That hasn’t happened in a while. Can you hand me a diaper?”

“Yeah, here. Wait, this one’s a little vomity.”

“That’s okay.”

“The other one, too.” Sarah motions to Emily’s left nipple, where milk is beading up. She watches Emily tuck the diaper under her breasts; they look full and stretched out, and Sarah thinks of wind socks, of how they start to sag just at the moment the breeze first dies, somehow sagging while still taut and weighted with air. In high school, in college, Emily’s body was a picture, the loveliest, unblemished thing. She remembers coveting that body. The body, and Emily’s attitude toward it, blithe, unaware. She used to draw Emily naked, in tribute. A 2B Conte soft crayon for shading the longish lines and curves, a 1 or 2H to get the fine points, an eyelash, a fingernail, a nipple’s crinkled nub. The light from their dorm room window glowing over Emily’s plummy, lissome nakedness; Sarah, skinny and shapeless, drawing her, both of them drinking jug Chablis and analyzing Fauvist art, agonizing over boys, being silly and so-serious and young. A book they’d do together some day, a feminist reinterpretation of fairy tales, Emily writing the text, a series of prose poems, Sarah drawing mock and ironic Pre-Raphaelite heroines in pen and ink. But it would be so different to draw her now. Capture that drummed-flat navel and slumped breasts, the distorted spine, the pearly streaks of stretch marks. The recline on a couch out of weariness and strain. Sarah straightens her own spine and looks down at her own legs, glowing with vibrancy and health, in good shape from all the bicycling and long strolls around Rockaway. She helps Emily mop up milk.

“Thanks. So, tell me stories. I picture this guy quoting Kabbalah at you all the time.”

“No,” Sarah says, smiling. “He doesn’t do that.” She pours more apricot oil, returns to orbiting Emily’s belly with a greased hand. “But he gets up every morning at six-thirty to daven.”

“Sarah.”

“I know.”

“I cannot picture this,” says Emily. “You and this guy.”

“There’s nothing to picture. He just likes having me hover around. I’m just entourage.”

“So why don’t you start something? If you want it to happen.”

“But I don’t . I don’t think I do. .” She is confused, made uneasy by his lack of initiative, by the blurriness between them. She has thought of starting it, yes, but she senses if she is too assertive, too sexual, he’ll just be appalled, see baseness, cast her away with some righteous biblical injunction. “This guy’s too weird. It’s too complicated. It isn’t about sex,” she says. And it isn’t , she thinks. It’s something else, there is something else they must be getting at, but she doesn’t know what. It is unrecognizable, it feels like maybe a place to rest, it is a joke she can make, it is fraught.

“It’s not like it was with David,” she says, finally.

“But that’s all it was with David.”

“Yeah. It was so simple. So well-defined. Clean margins. I miss that.”