Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [44]
“Why don’t you call one of the homeless shelters or a cancer organization or something and see if they could use some help with their marketing?”
“I don’t think we have homeless shelters in Rye,” I answered, blowing on my postdinner tea.
“I was speaking metaphorically,” he said.
“Why would I do that? I’m perfectly happy taking care of Katie.” I hoped that my voice sounded less hollow than the truth behind it.
“I just thought that you might want to do something else, too, you know, with your free time.” He rose from the dinner table to clear the plates.
“Free time! I don’t have any free time! Do you think that this mommy thing is a vacation?” I plunked my cup down harder than I’d intended, and the tea swirled near the top, then over the edges and onto the table. I mopped it up with the ribbing from my sweatshirt sleeve and hoped that Henry didn’t notice. “I’m nursing her or changing her or bathing her or entertaining her, and when the nanny comes, I have errands to run! I don’t have a single second of freaking free time! Thank you very much.”
“Jesus, Jill, I was just making a suggestion. Sometimes space away from the baby can be healthy.”
“So now I’m unhealthy?” I could feel tears perching themselves on the ledges of my eyes.
“Oh good God, calm down. It was just a thought.” He plodded into the living room and grabbed the remote.
“If it’s so important to you that I get space, then why did you make me quit work?”
“What are you talking about?” Henry said, returning to the door frame to face me. “You wanted to quit work! I didn’t make you!”
“How can you say that? You packed me up and shipped me off to the suburbs, and now you’re telling me that I’m unhealthy and need space and that I should get out of the house, blah, blah, fucking, blah!”
“All of which you agreed to! Happily!” Henry was now shouting. “Jesus Christ, the thanks I get for making a simple suggestion that you take up volunteering!”
“Be quiet!” I hissed. “You’ll wake Katie.”
But it was too late. Seconds later, I heard her wail, and I could feel Henry’s eyes boring into me from behind as I rushed to my crying daughter, though I don‘t know who was more disturbed, her or me.
Today, on our bench at the zoo, it wasn’t hard to grasp the connotations of what Leigh said: that motherhood could both fill you up and, if you let it, and maybe only if you let it, suck you dry.
“Will you have more?” I ask her, after Allie runs over to us and begs for ice cream money.
“Maybe,” Leigh says. “We’ll see.” She shrugs, then laughs. “I feel like I’ve finally figured this mom thing out. Adding another one might throw the whole balance down the tubes.”
“Well, I’m an untrained expert, but it looks like you’re doing pretty well to me.” Allie hands the ice cream vendor three dollars and struggles, as if it were of grave, consequential world importance, to make a decision on flavors.
“I hope so,” Leigh says. “But you know, you just try to do the best you can. No one ever tells you that the best you can should be enough.”
Allie settles on strawberry and heads back toward us, her cone tipping perilously toward the ground like an unbalanced seesaw until she rights it at the last second. Soon, we hug our good-byes and Leigh smiles a kind smile, saying we should do this again and not too far in the future.
I watch them amble down the brick path of the park, surrounded by a tunnel of lush trees that will soon be shedding their leaves, then renewing them, and I play Leigh’s words over again in my mind. My best should have been enough, I think. So why didn’t enough ever feel like enough for me?
HENRY
We moved to Westchester when I was nearly five months pregnant, six weeks after I quit my job at DMP and right around when my abdomen had blossomed into a perfect curve and my breasts were full and ripe like cantaloupes. Henry promised that I glowed,