be the grandmothers their own mothers were not. You wanted someone who loved your baby and shared her intuition without judgment. Who did not drink wine on your sofa while the child cried, or tell you that you ought to cover your boob in mixed company.
She’d heard every variety of complaint from her friends about their parents’ odd post-baby behavior. Elisabeth would have gladly taken any of it over her own situation. Four months in, her parents still hadn’t met Gil.
Her father seemed to think she should bring the baby to him.
“Arizona is gorgeous this time of year,” he said. “It’s the perfect place for kids. They can run all over.”
“But he doesn’t run,” she said. “He can’t even sit yet.”
Her mother was on a Viking cruise up the Rhine when Gil was born. She sent him a cup and bowl handmade by nuns in Bucharest and had since made no overtures to come see him.
So many people—even people Elisabeth didn’t know—made comments about her mother. Nomi brought her own mother over for a visit when she was in Brooklyn. She had knitted Gil a blanket.
“Nothing better than being a grandma,” she said. “Your mom must be over the moon.”
Elisabeth smiled and nodded, knowing that Nomi’s mother was thinking of a different sort of family, one like her own.
Since her early twenties, she had been mostly free of her parents. They did not spend holidays together. Elisabeth never went back to California to visit. But the process of forming her own family had made her reflect more than ever before on the one from which she came.
She didn’t think she would care when her withholding, inattentive mother inevitably turned out to be a withholding, inattentive grandmother. But she did care, sometimes. Her parents loomed larger now than they had at any other moment in her adult life.
“We’re moving because I’m switching careers, but also to be closer to my mom and dad,” Andrew had said again and again in the weeks before they left, simplifying the truth, polishing it. “It will be such a relief to have their help.”
Elisabeth pressed her lips closed whenever he said it. In the abstract, Faye and George were thrilled to be grandparents. But they weren’t helpful. Whenever the baby pooped in her mother-in-law’s presence, Faye would hold him out to her, nose wrinkled, and say, “Somebody needs to be changed.” The one time Elisabeth asked her to take care of him while she ran to the store for ten minutes, she came home to find them watching Dr. Phil. The baby’s eyes were two full moons attached to the faces on Faye’s big-screen TV.
Faye was an elementary school teacher, which Elisabeth had assumed would mean she’d make an incredible grandmother. But it felt like Faye had gotten her fill of childcare at work. She would adore Gil, but she would not be responsible for him.
George doted on the baby, but he was distracted by his own problems lately.
From what Elisabeth could tell, most children in their new neighborhood went to day care part-time or else stayed home with their mothers.
Debbie across the way was a housewife married to an insurance salesman. The other women on Laurel Street had the sorts of job titles that might be all-consuming, but could also be clever terms for doing nothing: Melody was a realtor. Pam taught yoga. They seemed to be home at all times.
Elisabeth supposed they could say the same about her. There were few things more humiliating than meeting a stranger at a party, having him ask what she did for a living. I’m a writer, she would say, and invariably the stranger would get an uncomfortable look on his face. Have you—published? was always the second question, warily asked, and when she said yes, two books, his expression would grow terrified, like she might be about to try to sell him those books from out of the trunk of her car.
It was better when Andrew was beside her. He bragged in a way she could not about herself. Her first was a bestseller, he might say. Or Simon and Schuster gave her a three-book deal.
That third book, due in a year and not yet begun, was the reason she needed to hire someone to watch Gil. Elisabeth didn’t even have an idea yet. It was unlike her. Usually, as she wrapped up one project, she was already well into thinking about the next and eager to start. She had expected that by now