The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [45]
It’s not as if they ever ask. The unknown age they wish to know all about is their own—what were their peculiarities as babies, and toddlers, in the misty pasts of five years ago, three years ago, last year, even. When Dana pulls out a jacket for Leah that was originally Lizzie’s, Lizzie greets it with amazed delight—how can it possibly still exist, when the three-year-old who wore it has vanished without a trace?
For Leah, the misty past is still the present, and no amount of future dredging will bring to the surface her daily events of right now—her friend Tessa, at preschool, whose claim on Leah is that she wears a tiny ponytail smack on the top of her head, for example. Were we to move this year, that might furnish her with a memory of this house—a ghostly sense of lines and the fall of light that would present itself to her in some future half-waking state. I wish that Leah’s state of mind weren’t so unavailable to us all, including herself, because she is driving us crazy.
Dana was glad to get Leah for her third, because Leah was big and cuddly and slept through on the tenth day. There is no subsequent achievement that parent wants of child with more ardor than the accomplishment of eight hours at a stretch, during the night. Leah slept ten, and then, at three months, fourteen rock-solid nightly hours, and woke up smiling. She didn’t even crawl until ten months, and could be counted on to stay happily in one place when infants who had been neonates with her were already biting electrical cords and falling down the stairs. At one, when she said her first word, it was “song,” a request that Dana sing to her. Since the others were already by this time covering their ears and saying, “Oh, God!” whenever Dana launched into a tune, Dana thought that her last chance for that musical mother’s fantasy was a dream come true. Everyone, especially me, liked the way Leah gave spontaneous hugs and said, “I love you,” at the drop of a hat. She seemed to have an instinctive understanding of your deepest parental wishes, and a need to fulfill them. Patients who had seen her at the office would stop us and say, “That Leah is such a wonderful baby. You don’t know how lucky you are.” My brother would get on the phone from Cincinnati and shout in her baby ear, “Leah! Cheer up!”
Dana was overjoyed but suspicious. She would say, “No one grows up to be this nice. How are “we going to wreck it?” But she would say it in a smug tone, as if experience alone assured that we wouldn’t. Dana felt especially close to Leah, physically close and blindly trusting. They nursed, they sang, they read books, they got lost in the aisles of the grocery store companionably choosing this and that. “The others are like you,” she often said, “but she is like me, lazy.” That’s what she said, but she meant “everything anyone could want.” Leah was everything she could want and she, as far as she knew, was everything that Leah could want.
Not long ago, Dana got up first and went into Leah’s room to get her out of her crib, and Leah said distinctly, “I want Daddy.” Dana came back to the bedroom, chuckling, and I got Leah up. The next morning it happened again, but the days went on as before, with Dana sitting in the mornings and me taking the early appointments, then Dana dropping Leah at preschool, where she said, “Bye-bye, Mom, I love you.”
At three I leave the office and go home to meet the schoolgirls. At five we pick up Leah, at six Dana comes home to dinner. Twelve hours of dentistry at about $100 an hour. We work alternate Saturday mornings, another $500 a week. Simple multiplication will reveal our gross income for parttime work. This is what we went to dental school for, isn’t it? Since they got the dental plan over at the university, people ask me if business is better. I say, “You can’t beat them off with a stick,” meaning new patients. The idea of Dana and myself on the front stoop of our office building