fevers, two toddlers crying all night who both hated medicine of any kind. As she watched the doctor writing prescriptions, she wondered how on earth she was going to manage to get eardrops and amoxicillin into two cranky, sick babies (four ears, two mouths) three to four times a day for ten days.
“It gets easier, right?” she’d asked her pediatrician then, holding one squirming, sweaty child in each arm, neither one would be put down, not even for a minute.
“That depends on what you mean by easier,” the doctor said, laughing sympathetically. “I have two teenagers and you know what they say.”
“No,” Melody said, dizzy from lack of sleep and too much coffee. “I don’t know what they say.”
“Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.”
Melody had wanted to slap the doctor. Having twins seemed so hard when they were little, especially when they were living in the city. Now she found herself wishing for the days when the hardest thing she had to do was dress and load two babies into the unwieldy double stroller and make her way to the playground where she’d sit with the other mothers. They’d all show up with steaming lattes in the winter, iced cappuccinos in the summer, and grease-stained paper bags with various pastries purchased to share. They’d talk and pass bits of lemon cake or blueberry muffins or some gooey cinnamon confection called monkey bread (Melody’s favorite), and the conversation would often turn to life before kids, what it had been like to sleep late, fit into skinnier jeans, finish reading a book before so much time passed between chapters that you had to start from the beginning again, go to an office every day and order out lunch. “Sure I had to kiss a few asses,” one of the women said, “but I didn’t have to wipe any.”
“I was an important person!” Melody remembered another mother saying. “I managed people and budgets and got paid. Now look at me.” She’d gestured to the baby fastened to her breast. “I’m sitting here in the park, half naked, and I don’t even care who sees. And what’s worse is that nobody is even trying to look.” The woman detached her sleeping baby from her nipple and ran a soft finger over his pudgy cheek. “These breasts used to make things happen, you know? These breasts didn’t put anybody to sleep.”
Melody couldn’t help but stare a little at the prominent veins running beneath the woman’s fair skin, the darkened, engorged nipple. She’d tried to breast-feed the twins, had wanted to so badly, but had given up after six weeks, unable to get them on any kind of schedule and nearly out of her mind with lack of sleep. She watched the other mom hook her nursing bra closed and hoist the infant up on her shoulder, rhythmically thumping his back to elicit a burp. “I used to read three newspapers every morning. Three.” Her voice was softer now so as not to disturb the baby. “You know where I get all my news now? Fucking Oprah.” Her expression was rueful, but also resigned, her fingers making small circles on the baby’s back. “What can you do? This is temporary, right?”
Melody never knew how to join those conversations, so she didn’t. She’d sit and smile and try to nod knowingly, but what she would have said if she could have mustered the nerve was that before her daughters were born she was nothing. She was a secretary. A typist. Someone who blew off college because her father died the fall of her senior year of high school and her mother was checked out and Melody herself was paralyzed with confusion and grief. Not to mention her kind of shitty grades.
But then one day Walter sat next to her in their company cafeteria. He introduced himself and handed her a piece of chocolate cake, saying it was the last one and he’d grabbed it for her because he’d noticed she usually allowed herself a slice on Fridays. When Walt asked her out for pizza and a movie and only months later asked her to be his wife and only a year after that she became a mother to not one but two brilliantly beautiful baby girls? Well, that was something; then she became someone.
She leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe she could just doze for a minute or two. She thought about Nora’s coat and wondered if a new set of buttons would help.