Sea Wife - Amity Gaige Page 0,54

thrift seem sexy, this was the price of walking the Cambridge streets where my poetic heroes had walked. This was the price of not having to live somewhere stupid, like Connecticut.

Then she arrived—a dollop of life. We brought her home, droopy headed, draped over the shoulder, diapered and zipped to the neck. We made nervous jokes. We put on funny accents. I sink it iz time for un diaper change.

I wasn’t, to my embarrassment, a natural. From the very first day, I had to learn to be a mother. I had to learn not to be afraid of my love for her. Because love is tidal; it goes out, it comes in, it goes out. I hadn’t known.

Gradually, this movement stopped scaring me, and instead rocked consciousness to sleep. When austerity measures were taken to cut down heating costs, the baby and I kept each other warm under the blankets. I padded around the apartment in my robe and slippers, excited, like I had a houseguest. I don’t have much of a singing voice, but it turns out motherhood opened a trove of lullabies in my memory. Where had they all come from, and how did I know every word?

After one single week off, Michael went back to work at Bingham & Madewell. I didn’t mind. I had my baby. I studied the clarity of her skin, the angelic amnesia in her eyes. She had the perfect heft, a weight for which there was no worthy metric. I counted her digits aloud, in made-up languages.

I believed that motherhood would allow me to finally cease construction on my heart.

I would finally be able to take the scaffolding down.

And then she started to cry.

Like, all the time.

I’ve tried (to be worthy). But when you are handling a big problem you don’t always pick the right solution first. When Sybil got colic in Boston, we had to get out of there quick.

I’d read about Milbury in a magazine, one of those magazines that rates everything. “Best Small Towns in the U.S.” I thought, Connecticut, sure. I could vaguely remember a glittering shoreline out the window of the Vermonter, marina after marina, tiny bridges, clam shacks, libraries, & me thinking, Wow, people live here? Like, permanently? That’s what I remembered about Connecticut.

But, you know, we don’t really “remember.”

We cherry-pick the past.

* * *

—

For three months that winter, crying was what our beautiful baby did—with dedication, like it was her part in a war effort. We went out sometimes, when I was on the verge of insanity, which was all the time; we went out all the time, in January we walked the rock-salted paths of Harvard Yard, in February we sloshed through winter runoff, in March we traced the swollen Charles; we were tailed by our pitiful reflection in the storefronts, and only very occasionally did my ears prick up to hear a unique sound, the sound of not-crying. The intervals of not-crying were so brief that I never had time to reach out for assistance, or to make even the most casual friend.

Plus, Michael was gone all the time.

Plus, he did not understand how wrenching the sound of a baby’s misery is.

It was like my anciently injured self crying out for help and nobody coming.

Again.

Plus, the extension for my dissertation was coming to an end and my mind contained not one single thought about female confessional poets of the mid-twentieth century.

Plus, it’s possible we had stopped loving each other.

(Though this seemed like the least of our problems.)

I was genuinely surprised that motherhood didn’t heal the wound.

In fact, the wound was worse. Because I was faced with the possibility that I was going to offer no better mothering than I had received myself.

A career reading poetry—I think that’s what I’d always wanted. I wanted to sit in a corner somewhere quiet, licking my finger and turning the whispery pages of manuscripts. When I think about this fantasy in which I am reading poetry somewhere quiet, and I poke around its edges, I find no