Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [93]
More by memory than by sight she filled the darkness with the shapes that three and a half months had made familiar without making them dear. Mrs. Elliott’s back room: there the commode, there the dresser, there the Boston rocker, there the barely outlined windows. The air was soft and stale. Would Oliver agree with Mrs. Elliott that it was unhealthy to sleep with the windows open to the night fog, or would he call that an old wives’ tale, and open them up? She hoped he would. She wanted his authority asserted against Mrs. Elliott’s infallibility. Three and a half months of boarding had made her want, above anything she could remember or imagine, her own house, with her husband in it instead of working himself to death in someone else’s office or on someone else’s survey, and running every night experiments that failed and failed.
Again the weak bleating that her ears had been tuned for. Her ghost moved in the invisible dresser mirror as she slipped out of bed. Groping, she found the doorknob. The adjoining darkness was acid with diaper odors. Bedsprings squeaked. “Yes?” said Marian’s voice.
“I’ve got him,” Susan said. “I’ll have to light the lamp, I’m sorry. He’s messed.”
Her hands found lamp and matches by the habit of many dark mornings. In the light’s bloom, there he was: wide-open blue eyes, toothless smile, kicking legs. She talked to him in fierce soft disapproval, tweaking his toes and kissing his fingers, while she cleaned and changed him. Ohhhhh, such a baby! Such a baaaad baby! All uncovered and all messed! Icky! Such a messy baby. Thee hasn’t been a good boy at all!
With the dried, talcumed, wrapped, and fretful weight on her shoulder, protecting the little warm round head with her hand, she stooped and blew out the lamp. In pitch blackness hung with after-images of the lamp’s flame, a cloud of green moons the shape of ragged smiles, she found her way back to the other room. By the time she had located the rocker and sat down and opened her nightgown to let him nurse, she saw that the darkness had become dusk. The windows were gray, the furniture had acquired substance, the wallpaper all but revealed its pattern. Oliver’s face, down in the pillow, had one ear, one closed eye, half a mustache.
The baby’s sounds were so hungry he reminded her of some dry root in the first rains; her breast was wet and slippery with his mouthing. Creation, she thought. Emergence. Growth. Already he was a person, with his fat legs and his firm mottled flesh and his toothless smiles. He had never had a day of sickness, not so much as a cold. She was determined he never should. And he didn’t weigh eleven pounds at birth, that was an insulting error of Dr. McPherson’s scales. Oliver, figuring backward along his normal rate of growth, had estimated that he couldn’t have weighed more than eight. Yes, she told him, bending to nuzzle his silky hair. Yes, but! You eat like that and you’ll weigh as much as Mrs. Elliott’s horse.
Then she raised her eyes and saw that Oliver was lying on his side, wide awake in the gray light, watching them. It made her shy to be seen so, and she turned away a little, but he lay there with his eyes full of love and said, “Stay the way you were.”
So she turned back, but diffidently. She felt devoured, with his eyes on her and the baby making such animal noises at her breast. She said, “You got here so late, shouldn’t you sleep some more?”
“I’ve already slept more than I’m used to.”
“You’ve been working too hard. Is there anything new?”
“There isn’t a job in the world, apparently.”
“Well, I’ve got one thing to report,” she said. “Thomas has definitely commissioned the Santa Cruz article. I’ve been drawing every day. I even drew one of Mrs. Elliott’s dreadful daughters and made her look quite presentable.”
“Good. They could use a little outside help.” He looked at her with such shining eyes that it was all she could do not to turn her shoulder to hide her munched and kneaded breast. She made a protesting, abashed little face at him. “There’s one