Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,41
get most of the way home before Marie puked again, warm liquid squishing against her chest and immediately turning cold in the early-spring air. They entered the apartment building with Marie wailing, but in a subdued way that conveyed her extreme dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in the carrier as well as her weakened condition. As repulsed as part of Laura felt by her barf-covered baby and self, the other part of her—the animal that had not existed before Marie was born—wanted nothing more than to comfort Marie and hold her close, no matter what vile substances covered her. She ran up the four flights of stairs to minimize her neighbors’ exposure to the sound, shucked the guitar, carrier, and diaper bag as soon as she entered the apartment, then stripped both herself and Marie naked just inside the front door and walked straight into the shower. She would throw all their wet clothes into a plastic bag later, she told herself. Marie was not a fan of this experience, but by the time they were rinsed clean, her hoarse protest cries had begun to taper into resigned, sustained whining. As quickly as she could, Laura got the limp-limbed baby into a diaper and set her in her crib, where she ratcheted up to sob screams again for the twenty-five seconds it took Laura to put on underpants and the T-shirt she’d slept in. Finally she scooped up Marie and lay down with her in the unmade bed, where Marie lunged for a boob and fell asleep within seconds. Laura shifted around, getting as comfortable as possible in the odd side-lying position that Marie’s presence next to her necessitated, and made a mental note to wake up before Callie arrived and try to get the apartment looking baseline livable, then fell asleep and didn’t wake up again until she heard the buzzer. She looked at the clock. It was twelve thirty; her class was half an hour away at a toy store in Fort Greene.
Complaining about Callie’s lateness was probably not the best way to greet her, but Laura’s panic had to rest somewhere. Callie shrugged and waved her hand in front of her face to indicate that the apartment smelled bad. She was wearing a suede miniskirt, long dangly earrings, and hot-pink lipstick. Had she spent an extra half hour making herself cute?! It was an impulse that Laura could no longer relate to on any level. She handed Callie a seminude Marie, who at least was not crying, and hurriedly shoved the barf clothes pile into a trash bag.
“I’m sorry about the smell. I’ll open a window. I didn’t have time to make a bottle, but there are bags of pumped milk in the freezer—you know how to defrost them, right?—and she probably won’t be hungry anyway. Do you know how to take her temperature? It would be great if you can keep an eye on it. And there’s baby Tylenol around here somewhere that you can give her. Oh, and can you put clothes on her?”
Marie was, mercifully, not seeming all that sick at the moment; her nap had renewed her and she was happily bababaing and playing with Callie’s long earrings.
“Watch out,” Laura warned. “She’ll yank those right through your earlobe.”
Callie put Marie down on the floor so that she could remove her jewelry, and Marie immediately scuttled over to a puke-soaked sock that Laura had missed and began happily waving it around. Puke droplets spattered onto the grimy floorboards. Marie grinned up at Laura and Callie with total trust and joy.
“Oh my God, she’s so gross,” Callie said quietly.
Laura had an almost uncontrollable impulse to scoop Marie up into her arms and tell Callie never mind, that she would skip her classes and stay with her baby. But, she reminded herself, there was an outside chance, if attendance was good, that she would be able to make enough money today to at least give her landlord the impression that she was trying very, very hard and would be able to pay the remainder of her rent within the week. Callie might not be Mary Poppins, but she would keep Marie alive, and being able to keep living in their own apartment was worth one less-than-stellar afternoon of Marie’s life.
Laura ran to the bedroom part of the studio and threw on leggings, a bra and an oversize, not-too-stained cardigan in a bright color that the babies in her classes seemed to like, grabbed her guitar,