Those arduous, early months when I failed at everything—trips into the city, nursing, marriage—were one of the reasons I became a lactation consultant. Therapists would say it was my compulsion to reenact this drama in order to “get it right,” master it, make it turn out the way it should have. Maybe. But no matter how many classes I teach I still end up divorced and living in Sprawlandia.
It takes me a few minutes of searching through my hopeful stockpile of off-to-college items to remember that I had squirreled the trust documents away in a special spot on my bookshelf between The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding and a journal with an article I intend to read about inducing lactation in the female transsexual. I grab the papers, check the reassuring words at the top—“Irrevocable Trust Agreement”—carefully fold the packet into my purse, and run back to the car.
I take a shortcut to the hospital that leads me through a neighborhood I haven’t entered for years. Before I can even consciously recall why, I remember that, in fact, I have done all I could for Aubrey’s immune system: As Recent Studies advise, I did let her play with livestock.
It was Aubrey’s first-grade field trip to Pioneer Farm. Aubrey had asked me so many times when I was going to be a room mother, or bring cupcakes, or read to the class like all the other moms, that I’d signed up to drive. I couldn’t exactly explain to Aubrey about how some moms had to work while others just got to stay at home and worry about which spinning class to take.
It turned out that Madison Chaffee was one of the three little girls—Paige and Kelsey were already strapped in the back—assigned to ride with us. This, the neighborhood I’m driving through now, is Madison’s neighborhood. That field trip started to go wrong when Joyce came out of her Tara-columned house in her dry-cleaned jeans and a celery-colored sweater, with expensive highlights gleaming in her hair. It was the first time Joyce and I had been face-to-face since Aubrey and I were dropped from her pool-mom gatherings.
“Cam! How have you been?” Joyce had greeted me with a high-pitched effusiveness that made me remember that she’d been a sorority girl.
When Joyce went to set up Madison’s booster seat, it was bad enough that one of the back doors on the old Corolla I drove at that time was broken and that I had to redirect Joyce to the functioning one. But did that side of the car have to have a stalagmite of bird shit crusted on top? After loading her daughter up with enough Fruit Gushers and Goldfish to cross the Kalahari, Joyce had pointed to the other two girls already strapped in the backseat and told me, “You can just drop Paige and Kelsey off back here after the field trip.”
But not Aubrey? I wanted to ask. You’re having a playdate and not inviting my little girl?
The pain of that rejection was exponentially stunning: It was the pain I knew Aubrey would feel when the other three girls skipped off to a playdate that did not include her, multiplied by not only my own rejection as a fit Parkhaven mother, but by every slight I had ever endured in my own life. The experience showed me that the instant she gives birth, all the defenses a person has built up in her entire adult life are stripped away.
Consequently, Joyce’s unkindness, and the $115 I was losing by not teaching my usual Tuesday-morning class, were what I was dwelling on while Aubrey fed a pink piglet from a bottle. I wasn’t really paying attention to any of it. Not the smell of wet hay. Not that the piglet had a spot of gray over his right eye. Or how the sunlight shining through his ears gave them a salmon-colored glow. Not how the hood of her pink parka trimmed in fake white fur had fallen down, and staticky strawberry blonde hair floated around her face in the dry winter air. Or how her lips were chapped to a perfect, tender red, and tiny, saw-toothed ridges of white enamel glinted in the space left where her two front baby teeth once were. Or even how Aubrey shrieked with delight as the piglet power-sucked down the milk, almost tugging the bottle from her hand.
And then, without a single connecting thought, I switch from regret–time traveling to creating alternate universes. In this new and