Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,38

and then Laura picked up Marie and Marie smacked her happily in the face and yanked her hair while sucking a tiny circular bitemark into the flesh of her upper arm while making delighted, gleeful gurgles.

“Gentle,” Laura said, as though Marie could understand or care, and “Look! Outside!” as they approached the window. She pulled the cord and sunshine streamed into their small room. “Look, there’s the Laundromat. And the pizza place, and the Chinese place, and the bodega.”

Marie interrupted her pinching exploration of Laura’s tattered T-shirt and upper chest to wave to these businesses. All their graffitied shutters were still down; it was six thirty and even the Laundromat didn’t open till eight. But there were streaks of light making the dingy storefronts look somewhat appealing, at least, and soon there would be leaves on the spindly trees instead of just plastic bags flapping in the wind. The winter would be over soon. As long as she didn’t have to wake up while it was still dark out, Laura thought, she could withstand almost anything. She would never have to live Marie’s terrifyingly helpless first few months on earth again; that alone was cause enough for celebration.

Laura nursed Marie in the chair by the window instead of lying down in bed so that she wouldn’t be tempted to fall back asleep. The last time she’d done that, she’d been jarred out of her lazy drowse by a moment of cold-blooded horror as she saw Marie scuttling with lightning speed toward the edge of the bed. At first Marie focused so hard on nursing that she was almost cross-eyed, but once her initial desperate hunger was sated, she looked up at Laura as she sucked and gently whapped her chest with an open palm. Laura grabbed her hand and absently toyed with her fingers, which Marie found so funny that she stopped nursing to laugh. She laughed all the time now, usually at things that Laura didn’t see the humor in, like the face she involuntarily made when Marie pulled her hair, or at a particular page of the frankly idiotic book about penguins. But it was so good to hear her laugh that Laura offered up her hair and read the stupid penguin book every day. She was more smitten with Marie than she had ever been with anyone in her life. Her feelings for Marie made her feelings for Dylan seem even more like a distant memory. She had never glimpsed his likeness in her baby’s face, which had seemed from her first moments like a wholly original face, nothing to do with how either of her parents looked at all.

She had worked at Bar Lafitte far into her pregnancy, wearing low-cut empire-waist dresses in an attempt to focus patrons’ attention on her growing breasts and not on the bulge below. After Marie’s birth she’d tried to work nights again but had to quit after a week; she’d spent every minute at the bar in a state of barely concealed panic, imagining the ineptitude of the teenage neighbor whom she was paying to sit on her couch while she tried to smile at the tables of men who just had no idea, no possible idea, of what it was costing her mentally to make small talk with them while her daughter was probably crying for her a full half-hour subway ride away. And then she’d had to pay the teenager almost all of what she’d managed to make. It made no sense.

So she had set out to combine all her interests—making money, playing music, and being in the same room as her baby—by teaching baby music classes. This brain wave, when it had first occurred to her, had seemed like the solution to all her problems. She quickly learned a repertoire of classics about ducks and buses and monkeys jumping on the bed, wrote a couple of originals whose loopiness belied their late-night origins, put up some brightly colored flyers in the nicer neighborhoods immediately adjacent to her less nice new neighborhood—a liminal zone that included warehouses and a toxic ribbon of sludge called the Gowanus Canal—and soon she had booked a few regular gigs at toy stores and yoga studios. One of the women who ran children’s programming at a local yoga mini-chain had even heard of the Groupies, which made Laura feel fleetingly cool, linked to her old self in a way she hadn’t felt for a while. The first few months of this new career