overreacting. Children get fevers, he said. Get dressed, Theo, I replied.
At the hospital, they decided to keep Emma overnight for observation. Thought it was just a virus, but they wanted to be safe. I asked the nurse if she could roll a cot into the room, and she turned to us and asked if we wanted one cot or two. One, I said.
No, I’m certain it was work keeping Theo at the office. “All-nighters” are part of any young architect’s life (thirty being young for an architect, yet old for a mother). He had stayed over several times before, so it didn’t even register as an important detail. The trains stop running at 10:30, and there are sofas in nearly everyone’s office. It was common practice and all the wives knew it. I confess I didn’t even notice his absence until morning—the baby slept through the night, finally, and so did I. It was only at 5 a.m. when Emma tumbled in and announced she’d had a bad dream that I told her Daddy would take her back to bed and she informed me, half shouting, half sobbing, that Daddy wasn’t there!
That’s what aggravated me: not that he might be cheating on me, or lying about his whereabouts, but that he couldn’t deal with Emma. I groaned as I stood and scooped her up. She was big for three and a half, and loud. She snuffled in my arms, wiping her nose with her hand. I always thought of girls as quiet, because I was that way—witty, perhaps, but not boisterous. My mother says Emma takes after her sister Caroline, which gives me hope: we all love Aunt Caro, who arrives at staid family events with water balloons and firecrackers smuggled in from her drives to and from Kentucky, where she keeps horses. My mother used to say she looked like she was full of secrets, but always willing to let you in on one. Emma has her coloring, too; darker than my mother and I, almost black Irish looking, with Theo’s turquoise eyes. You never know what you’re going to get in the stew of the womb. But when I wished things for Emma, and tried to imagine her future unfolding, I wished for a spirit, and a life, like Aunt Caro’s. Tomboy spunk in a beautiful package—that’s what I told myself my daughter was heading for. She was just taking her time getting there.
I cradled her head with one hand, and her thick dark hair, always a challenge, felt even more tangled than usual, and she smelled of oil and dust, that vague place between dirty and clean. She often smelled that way. Even as an infant, even after I bathed her, a few hours later something greasy would emanate from her again. I’d say to Theo, she just doesn’t smell like she’s supposed to, and he’d look at me like I had two heads. People would go on and on about the glorious smell of a baby’s scalp; other mothers buried themselves in the furry intersection at the base of their child’s neck, and I kept asking my pediatrician if she had a skin condition, allergies, or clogged sweat glands. Every baby is different, he said. Every sense of smell is different.
My mother said some babies simply have oily scalps, just like adults. My pediatrician suggests a different shampoo, and that does seem to help. But when I ask my mother what I smelled like as a baby, she rubs her hand across my cheek, says I was sweeter than any angel, then changes the subject. She does that often, gives a compliment that doesn’t really answer the question. I think she doesn’t want to admit that she rarely bathed me herself; Louise did. Whenever I ask her a question about parenting, she often struggles to put an answer together. That’s what having servants will do to you, I suppose.
Late at night I’d sneak in to watch Emma sleeping, elegant and quiet, even after a bad day. She looked so sweet in her bed, so calm. I’d breathe deeply in her room, more filled with the cotton candy smell of baby lotion than with her. But now, with the baby and his greedy cries, I was too tired to do anything but Emma’s basic maintenance. Too tired for watching her breathe in her sleep, too tired for guilt or overcompensation. I crouched over Emma’s pink bed, my back protesting as I tried to place her gently down