The days melted into each other. I felt it overwhelming sometimes that I was expected, all the time, to be a person. I woke in pieces. I was a random collection of parts. One shoulder but not the other, one ear. The skin on my face was raw, peeled open. I was so tired that it was really like that. It won’t last I thought. This is a phase, this is only now and now isn’t always. This minute is only this minute and this minute is only one minute long. Sometimes I would hang myself in the doorway, like a bat, with my arms and shoulders held at odd, rigid angles, and I would say Boo! to E when she came around the corner. Look! I would say, I’m a bat! Come be my bat baby, come be my baby bat and she would laugh and I would hug her little reed-body and wish suddenly, sharply, for this minute we were in to last for ever.

My hands were raw from washing dishes, from grappling with the unmanageable weight of wet laundry, from soaping hair, and brushing teeth. One night, I came back to myself with a start. It must have been two or three in the morning, one of those hours between children, when the apartment seemed to have no one but myself inside it. I found myself standing by the door, my hand on the door handle, my bag on my shoulder. I threw the bag down and tram tickets, whole streams of them, waterfalled out in a rush of paper, the ink black and fresh and gleaming, the paper curling around my ankles like inviting foam. I ran to check on B.

He was asleep in his crib and I woke him, shaking his shoulder a bit, my wet fingers leaving prints on his soft little sleeping shirt. Once he was awake he wanted me. I picked him up and shushed him. I settled with him on the sofa and slipped my nipple into his mouth for him to suck. There, I said, there, there, there. I’m here, I said. Here I am.

Afterwards, satisfied, I put him back down and I crawled into my own bed and we were all good and quiet then. Tucked in and up and away, each of us under our own clean sheets we were right in our right places and ready for M to sweetly find us, to kiss our cheeks when he came home, whenever it was that he did.

4

The next day came and found us though, in the early morning hours. B was hungry and we passed driftingly around the dining table, sitting down for just a minute in each place, the only guests at the party, sitting alone together in all the various chairs.

I wanted to make the empty room into a guest room. A really really perfect guest room. Everything would be white, I could see it, really see it in my head the way it would be. Towels, bedspread, pillow cases, sheets and curtains. Light and white. Glowing and scrubbed clean. Inside, everything would drift lazily, like on the best summer days.