Bed-Stuy Is Burning Page 2
“Maybe we could . . .” Aaron said. “Just super quick.”
She wouldn’t make it. The oldest Simon would have to fend for himself and all the other Simons. Would he know what to do to survive on his own? Could he hunt? Did he remember where she’d set the traps? Did he know how to bargain with Indians? Had she raised him right? She’d tried to be a good mother but it was hard. The world was cruel and pressed against you from all sides.
Aaron slid his hand down the side of her body to her hip. He wedged the tip of two or three fingers beneath the band of her underwear.
Amelia lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, and the Indians the white people hadn’t killed lived in poverty in glorified ghettos or ran casinos, and her boyfriend was a good man who provided for her and her Simons, and there was only one Simon, and he was in the next room. Did really big Indian reservations have representatives in Congress to fight for them? she wondered. She’d Google it first thing in the morning. The real morning. Exhausted, she lay still.
Aaron rolled away.
He was a good man. She rolled toward him. She should try. For him. To make his life less stressful. To keep him stable. But she couldn’t. She was too tired.
“She said that now that I’ve stopped breast-feeding, it would come back soon,” Amelia said. “Give it a few more weeks. For the drive to return.”
“I know,” Aaron said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Amelia said.
Amelia and Aaron’s passion had never been primarily physical. Not as it had been with Amelia’s first husband—her only husband—when everything else had been terrible. Not terrible. Just . . . tiring. Amelia’s life had always been tiring. That wasn’t true. But tired now, Amelia couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been tired.
Aaron, whom she hadn’t married, was more of a husband than Kevin, Amelia’s actual husband, had ever been. There was a real connection with Aaron; he needed her, and until the baby at least, she’d always enjoyed sex with Aaron—it had felt like a deeper more urgent kind of communication. And now she loved Aaron very much, and she loved their son very much—if “love” was the word for what one felt toward a baby—and she loved their life very much, if “love” was the word for what one felt toward a life, and they’d chosen a capable baby-sitter—
“You asleep?” Amelia said.
“Yes,” he said, unsure.
“Tomorrow we need cash for Antoinette’s MetroCard,” she said.
“I’ve got it laid out already on the table,” he said. He’d gone to the bank in the afternoon. Taken out $120 for the $116.50 card. What was Monday Night’s money line? He could wait a day, make the bet, and give her MetroCards for the next two months. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t even think about it. He would do his best not even to think about it.
“Love you,” she said.
“Good night,” he said. “Love you.”
“I’ll be here when Antoinette leaves tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be working from home.”
“Okay, but I should be home, too.”
“Good,” she said.
“We can make the ravioli,” he said.
Chapter 5
“—NYPD’s critics object, in particular, to the department’s long-standing practice of maintaining order in public spaces. You’re listening to New York Public Radio, WNYC 93.9 FM, AM 820. Police Commissioner Bratton continued: ‘This practice, widely referred to as ‘broken windows’ or quality-of-life or order-maintenance policing, asserts that in communities contending with high levels of disruption, maintaining order not only improves the quality of life for residents, it also reduces opportunities for more serious crime. Indeed, the broken-windows metaphor is one of deterioration: a building where a broken window goes unrepaired will soon be subject to far more extensive vandalism—because it sends a message that the building owners (and, by extension, the police) cannot or will not control minor crimes, and thus will be unable to deter more serious ones.’ Commissioner Bratton concluded: ‘A neighborhood where minor offenses go unchallenged soon becomes a breeding ground for more serious criminal activity and, ultimately, for violen—’ ”
Amelia’s hand found the off button and she swung her feet out of bed. Having just stopped breast-feeding the week before, she wasn’t accustomed to stumbling downstairs to the kitchen for Simon’s bottle of formula.
Simon. He was in the room next door. He was stirring, cooing, jabbering . . . soon he’d be screaming, and, as the radio hadn’t awoken Aaron, Amelia wanted to let Aaron sleep. She’d never thought she’d be the type to look after her men. She liked being awake when Aaron was sleeping and Simon was up but not yet conscious.
She reveled in the potential energy of the day. The neighborhood was brimming with life. Her neighbors, who had been mistreated for years, seemed ready for some kind of reckoning. There’d been protests on the street the day before. Chanting and praying. She wondered what would come of it.
In the kitchen downstairs, in order to mix the formula, she did a little dance, jumping up and down with the eight-ounce bottle. Her own protest against the morning ritual. She tried to jump and kick her feet off to the side and land gracefully again, and she succeeded!
She was a superwoman, she thought. She knocked back a swig of seltzer and felt the burn of bubbles down her throat. The coffee machine had been timed correctly! She drank a quarter cup scalding and black.
A working, mothering, girlfriending, housekeeping superhero! You see—it could be done!
Amelia hadn’t experienced any of the postpartum depression she’d read about. She was generally hungry to have the world see her as she saw herself, but this wasn’t depression, it was ambition. She wanted to be a success. A writer. A mother. Not a wife, necessarily, but the family woman her own mother had never cared about being. But Amelia also wanted to lean in. Now that Kevin was far behind her, she had so much to give, and she wanted to give it to Simon, to Aaron, and to the world. She wanted to be present for those she loved. She felt she should be important, and being a mother was at least important to one person. It was the most important person in the world to one person.
She remembered her own mother standing over her bed. Amelia must have been ten or eleven.
“Rub my back?” Amelia had mustered the courage to ask.
Her mother was distracted.
“Just for a minute?”
Her mother sighed, and Amelia felt a hand on the covers, but her mother was already out of the room, watching TV or preparing to go out.
Amelia vowed not to ask for affection again.
Now there were moments Amelia empathized with her mother—moments when she resented her son—but those felt normal, and fleeting. Not a product of depression as much as common sense. No one wanted to be out of bed before sunrise mixing formula and water. No one wanted to be exhausted, to clean poop off thighs and her fingers, to smell like sour milk and be cried at and have no time to herself or interest in sex. But more often, she wanted to feel—and did feel deeply—what she suspected her own mother hadn’t felt for anyone.
She wanted to write about the emotions of motherhood, about how she still wasn’t sure “love” was the right word for what she felt for her son. Simon was so vulnerable, so needy. He needed her so much, but when the object of love couldn’t reciprocate love, was the emotion a mother felt “love” or something more than love or less than love or just different? Like why would what one felt for a baby who couldn’t talk or do anything at all be the same word for what one felt for a lover or a parent? They were all strong emotions, but calling them the same word wasn’t right. The emotion Amelia felt for her mother had something to do with the emotion she felt for Aaron, but those two emotions had almost nothing to do with what she felt for this needy little wormy thing that had come out of her body. She felt toward all three of them powerfully, but to call it all love seemed lazy. Or paltry. Or something. When everyone asked her if she loved Simon more than she’d ever loved anything, the
answer wasn’t yes. It wasn’t exactly no, but it wasn’t yes. It was a feeling she was sure a lot of mothers must share, and she wanted to find the right language for it. The French probably said l’amour de l’enfant. Or did that mean the love a child felt? No one in the world knew how to talk about what Amelia was feeling.
Now she was back upstairs. Caffeinated. Looking out a window onto the cross street for any signs of protest or disruption, although she knew both were unlikely at this early hour. A twelve-year-old boy had been killed by cops who’d thought he’d had a gun. They had shot him ten times. Yesterday—Sunday—Amelia had considered joining the marches in front of her house, but when she opened her door all the women were wearing dresses and yellow or purple hats, coming right from church, so she wouldn’t have belonged. Still, she was on their side and wanted them to know. She joined the Twitter anger with a #12yearsold10shots tweet of her own. A child killed because of scared, overaggressive police. Proud of my neighbors for speaking back to power #12yearsold10shots, she’d written before going to sleep.
But this morning, no one unusual was outside. All she saw were some preteens laughing and eating chips on the way to school. She sat down with Simon in the glider rocking chair, and he was so focused on the bottle that maybe what Amelia’s swelling heart felt was exactly and only love.
Her skin thrilled to her baby’s. In her lap in the glider, unswaddled and changed, he was just in a tiny puffy diaper. His arms and legs and chest and back were fresh and sticky, not as dirty surfaces are sticky but as elastic ones like taut cellophane can be. His skin was fragrant and delicate like a summer peach or the pages of a new book. Or the pages of an antique book. Or his whole body was like an olive? Or a tongue! He was squirming and then relaxing very quickly and then squirming again. And smiling. And ducking. Like a boxer. Or a duck. Sucking, then refusing the bottle. Maybe because it was formula and not milk from her body. Looking up at her and resisting, resting, squirming again. Until he found and sucked at the bottle in earnest.
Three or four minutes earlier, she’d been groggy and still thinking half thoughts about essays she didn’t want to write, but Simon’s skin had made her come alive. She was thrilled to be liberated from the filling and emptying of the milk from her breasts. The early light through the stained-glass windows was cream colored as in a church, and Amelia could almost cry with a sharp morning joy.
Simon wasn’t the love of her life yet. But the way all he cared about in the world was the bottle—at this moment, he was so trusting. So attentive. And she controlled the bottle. It was like she never knew any living thing could be so attentive until her son’s whole body found the formula sucking its way down into his stomach, and nothing else mattered to either of them.
She couldn’t wait until he could really hug her back. Until he could love her back! She wasn’t sure if there was such thing as nonreciprocal love. That was what she wanted to write about. But somehow his fragility made up for his inability to love. It was hard to believe he had lived inside her longer than he had lived outside her
She couldn’t wait until he could talk!
Simon stopped sucking at the formula and quickly lost interest even though Amelia knew he must still be hungry. His suck wasn’t as strong as it was supposed to be, but the doctor said it wasn’t weak enough to raise any real concern yet. He was putting on weight on the low side of normal, but still close enough to normal not to be worried.
Aaron called it the “A-word” and made Amelia promise not to say it anymore, though she had only actually said it two or three times. If Simon were autistic—Amelia thought, looking at the baby’s tiny arms, his hands, each little perfect finger, each fingernail (wasn’t it amazing that his nails had grown inside her body?)—she’d want to run from Simon and remember him for the rest of his life as he was right now when he was a six-month-old little baby just like the other little babies.
Chapter 6
Aaron shoveled cereal into his mouth, reviewing Friday’s stream on his computer. Amelia felt it was an invasion of Antoinette’s privacy, but Aaron didn’t care. Simon was currently in the crib down one floor sleeping off his bottle, while Amelia was in the shower. Aaron wanted to spend his twenty minutes before work watching what his son’s day had been like the Friday before.
The software allowed Aaron to watch at ten, twenty, or fifty-times the normal speed, so a whole day took from a few minutes to a few hours, and whenever there was a loud noise or something unusual it would automatically slow down. When Antoinette took Simon out to the park or when Simon was sleeping, the system would skip over those parts, but when Antoinette and Simon were working on tummy time—Aaron had placed the mat in front of the hidden-camera clock—Aaron could see how she handled Simon, if she paid close enough attention to him, if she was too aggressive with him, that kind of thing.
And it wasn’t just a way to monitor an employee to whom he paid good money. (He paid her in cash. It was a weekly test of his resolve. He’d passed the test, mostly. Paid Antoinette her stack of seven fifties each week, wincing but taking nothing for himself. He hadn’t bet this football season. Or preseason. Nothing since the NBA finals. Handing her that money each week was a sign that he was starting to be in control.) The video also helped him feel closer to his son. Other than over the weekends, he hardly saw Simon, who tended to be napping when Aaron left for the day and was usually down for the night by the time Aaron got home.
Sure, Aaron was watching to make sure Antoinette didn’t abuse his baby, but he loved watching Simon’s face as he struggled on his stomach for another ten seconds—as his facial expression turned from concentration to tears. Aaron wanted to quit his job sometimes as he watched this lady build his son’s muscles, but before too long he was very happy to have a job that gave him something to do other than roll his baby over. The changing diapers and feeding bottles he actually liked—but how did Antoinette manage the boredom of all the time in between?
And of course the surveillance also had something to do with the gambling. If Aaron could live a public life as a rabbi and an internal one so far away from the bimah; if he could ruin his professional life, a life that had taken so many years of preparation, study, and perseverance—he didn’t trust a nanny not to lose herself for a moment and shake the shit out of his baby just because she’d had a bad weekend at home and wanted to get some aggression out (and Simon wouldn’t stop crying, and the police didn’t respect her, and she thought no one was watching). So Aaron made sure to watch.
What Aaron’s newest psychologist said was that because Aaron had a secret that fucked up his life, he needed to make sure other people didn’t let their secrets fuck up Aaron’s life, too. Aaron said that sounded pretty much right.
“Does that sound healthy to you?” the psychologist had asked.
“It sounds sensible to me,” Aaron had said.
“So you are okay with constantly monitoring every aspect of your life to ensure that no one allows their inner lives to spill out into yours?”
“I am okay with monitoring the woman who spends all day alone with my son, yes,” Aaron had said. He waited for the psychologist to do something with that. From experience, he knew that a rabbi would give people advice, which was grounded in his own interpretation of the Torah and his interpretation of other people’s interpretations of the Torah. Aaron had expected the psychologist to do something similar. But, uselessly, he had ended the conversation there.
“Okay,” the psychologist had said. “If you’ve thought it out and you’re okay with monitoring her, then that’s good,” he’d said.
“And you’re sure you’ve got your own life under control now?” the psychologist had said next session. “Or is this monitoring of your son’s nanny easier than monitoring yourself?”
“I’ve been better lately,” Aaron had said.
And that was that.
• • •
So far, video of the previous Friday morning had been the same as every day for the last few weeks: the tummy tim
e, the feeding, the disappearance to take naps or walk to the park or around the block. Antoinette was about Aaron’s and Amelia’s age. Midthirties, probably. A thick build and pretty, with bangs and full, attractive, smiling lips. Antoinette had been hiding herself, though, for the past week or so, under a scarf wrapped around her head. Either way, Aaron trusted her as much as he could have trusted any nanny in just the few months she’d been working for him. These morning computer sessions built his trust. Antoinette had figured out the same tricks Aaron and Amelia had discovered to wiggle the bottle into Simon’s mouth, to tease Simon’s lips by pulling the nipple out and making Simon lean forward for it.
But then, halfway through Friday’s afternoon bottle—and Simon was really drinking well, drinking better and faster than Aaron had ever seen Simon drink from his or Amelia’s own arms—Antoinette looked down at Simon so her bangs covered her eyes, and though Simon was still drinking really well, she pulled the bottle from his mouth, and without breaking eye contact, put the bottle down on the side table and lifted Simon up off her lap.
Simon had lately been getting better at eye contact. Amelia worried about things like this—eye contact, neck musculature—so Aaron wanted to grab her out of the shower one floor down and bring her up into the office to watch, but instead he chose to savor the moment alone.
Antoinette—bottle now to her side—lifted Simon up so his dangling feet grazed the top of her thighs. She sang in a sweet, optimistic voice:
Show me your motion
Tra la la la la
Come on show me your motion
Tra la la la la la
Show me your motion
Tra la la la la
You look like a sugar in a plum
Plum plum.
She supported Simon’s neck with one hand and took the rest of his weight with the other hand under one of his arms, and she held him there, the two of them looking at each other. First Simon screwed up his face and smooshed his eyes closed and his lips together, but then he relaxed. She smiled, and Simon made a noise, a nice noise, then Antoinette smiled again. And she kind of shook Simon, but up and down, in a playful way.