Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,39

were pure bliss. Marie was still a little butterfly who could be distracted for ages by dust motes or a rattle attached to her wrist, and sometimes she would even fall asleep—just like that, with no preamble or coaxing, leaving Laura free to march around the room interacting energetically with other people’s children, hamming it up as much as possible in order to cement herself in their tiny minds so that her class might become an important part of their routine, important enough that they’d sign up for a five-class or ten-class package and enable Laura to buy another week’s worth of groceries.

But as Marie’s personality had asserted itself and her mobility increased, it was becoming much harder to both wrangle her and amuse ten other babies and their respective handlers. Instead of sitting mesmerized and clap-flapping her hands like the other babies did as Laura strummed hard and bounced around, Marie would crawl around the perimeter of the room, inevitably finding the one non-hidden cord or uncovered socket. She would open other people’s diaper bags and upend their contents onto the floor, or steal her compatriots’ bottles and drink some stranger’s breast milk from them.

She did not intend these actions to be aggressive or evil, of course. She was a little baby! Still, it was hard not to interpret her antics as a form of sabotage, especially because it was working. Attendance was down, and reenrollment was getting rarer. Laura was beginning to suspect that she would have to find another new line of work, something lucrative enough to justify the amount of babysitting it would require, but she was already treading water every day trying to fulfill her existing obligations, and it was impossible to imagine how she would find time to seek out new ones. She worried about money every waking moment, her brain ticking through a litany of options one by one and finding each mental door closed. Her mother, though delighted to have another grandchild, was so cash-strapped that Laura could not imagine asking her for anything; the $50 gift card she had sent when Marie was born had, Laura knew, required her to cut a corner somewhere else in the budget. When she would inevitably reach the end of the mental hallway, Daisy was always there. Dylan’s family clearly had money in a way that Laura’s did not. In Laura’s imagination Daisy was always wearing the same shapeless black dress she’d worn to Dylan’s memorial, but she was sitting at a table piled high with stacks of cash, like a waitress at Bar Lafitte at the end of the world’s most successful shift. It was tempting. But Daisy was awful, and she hated Laura. Laura didn’t want someone like that in her and Marie’s new life.

Marie popped off Laura’s nipple and began thrashing around, begging to be put on the floor. Laura obliged and dressed as quickly as possible, finding her last pair of acceptably clean jeans and her second-to-last pair of underpants, all with one eye on Marie, who was grunting as she fished around between the uneven floorboards in the hopes of finding another delicious nail like the one Laura had prized out of her mouth a few days earlier. After Laura managed to clothe herself she set about the miniature wrestling match that was dressing and diapering Marie, finishing with just enough time to feed Marie a banana and make herself a cup of instant coffee before it was nonnegotiably time to strap the baby onto her front and her guitar to her back and hustle the five long and ten short blocks to her first class of the day.

Laura sailed through the class undisturbed by Marie, who seemed uncharacteristically subdued. As the other babies clapped and flailed along to Laura’s original composition about an octopus who needs to buy—but cannot afford—eight new shoes (semiautobiographical in origin), Marie sat at the periphery of the circle, chewing listlessly on someone else’s expensive rubber giraffe. Laura imagined that Marie was attaining some new milestone of maturity and could now intuit when her mother needed her to be calm. They were going to work together as a team now, Laura thought, and her heart swelled. The true cause of Marie’s newfound mature attitude revealed itself, though, as class was ending, when she simultaneously puked and shat herself so profoundly that Laura had to rush off to the bathroom to change her clothes. The moms and nannies of the other students looked on in horror