The Upstairs House Read online

  “But I don’t want to get rid of Solly.”

  “Then good thing we don’t have to.”

  “I feel like you’re not taking me seriously.”

  “I feel like you’re not being serious.” My face fell. Ben softened. “Everyone has babies,” he said, which wasn’t true. “People have babies all the time. We’re in one of the best cities in the world, and we have the best doctors. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  None of this was true. If we had stayed in New York, or moved to Paris, maybe then at least some of it would be true. But after fifteen years away, we’d moved back to Chicago, forty minutes from Ben’s parents, twenty-five from mine.

  “What are you so scared of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  If I let myself linger—and I tried very hard not to—I did know. What scared me was the being known, the knowing. This baby would forever be bound to me. How would I hide myself from a part of myself? I knew my own mother in ways that I hoped my daughter would never know me. I pitied my own mother, and never wanted to be pitied. I’d seen my mother’s C-section scars and her sweat stains, knew the smell that she left in the bathroom. I’d heard her ugly laugh and seen her swear at waitstaff and watched her cry in the dark at our old kitchen table after spilling her fourth glass of wine. Motherhood was not a role I’d envied. It was not a job I wanted.

  But I didn’t not want it either. I didn’t actively push it away. We hadn’t been trying for a baby; I could’ve hidden the news from Ben and handled everything discreetly, but I didn’t. There was a piece of myself I wanted to cultivate, a version of myself I wanted to be. I could pack sack lunches and bring Gatorade to soccer practice, make trifold science fair projects and polish tiny toenails. I could set aside the dissertation that had started to bore me. Best of all, I barely had to do anything. I could choose without actively choosing: here was my body letting us know that we could have this thing, this future, if we wanted it. I could make something of myself, a literal second self, a second living breathing someone who would need me. I supposed it would be nice to be needed.

  If I went to the clinic, I would bleed. If it was just the pill, just a needle, just a quick anesthetic, I thought I might have done it. But I didn’t want to bleed. Bleeding would have been so messy, too obvious a metaphor. I was an academic, and I lived in a world of eternal incubation—always one more semester, one more grant. To bleed would have commemorated finality, an active commitment for which I was not dispositionally prepared.

  So Clara was born.

  WE PUT HER in the car seat and the nurses had to correct the straps, which retrospectively seemed like the beginning, although maybe it was the balloon that was really the beginning, or that the back of the nursery bookshelf cracked when Solly stepped on it while I was putting it together, or my writer’s block, or the stubbed cigarettes the workmen dropped onto our balcony when patching the roof.

  “You have to put her feet through here,” the nurses told us as we readied Clara to leave the recovery room, and Ben’s eyes got wide and worried.

  “They fixed it, see?” I said.

  Ben worried that my milk hadn’t come in yet. He worried about traffic. He had to go to Houston in a week, and his guilt was manifesting as anxiety. He adjusted the blanket that was draped over the car seat.

  “We should have gotten one of those specially made covers.”

  Clara’s eyes were open. They were a dark blue that would probably turn brown. She had wispy hair and a little birthmark just above her left eyebrow. She looked very small in the car seat, and because of this the whole project of parenthood suddenly seemed manageable.

  Still, we stood in the lobby of the hospital, unwilling to embark. Ben frowned, then laughed, then wiped his eyes. He’d never done as well as me on little sleep—on our honeymoon he had to spend the first full day of jet lag at the hotel with the blinds shut.

  “Okay. Yes. Okay.” Ben slapped his fist into his palm. “Okay, we got this.”

  “Of course we do,” I said, “Now get the car.”

  I sat in back with Clara. It was three thirty on a Thursday, which meant traffic, which meant Ben could drive slowly and no one would complain. I felt each stop and start in my pelvis, but compared to the contractions on my previous car ride, it was nothing. I was close enough to trauma that the small things couldn’t hurt me; I could still consciously access each moment of the birth. Clara was thirty-five hours old. I had an ice pack shoved into my massive mesh diaper.

  At home we gingerly walked her up the stairs from the garage, leaving our overnight bags in the trunk. She was asleep, and had another half an hour before she needed to wake up and eat—until she was back up to her birth weight, we had to feed her without fail every two hours.

  Ben held the car seat while I unlocked the door.

  My sister had used our spare key to come by and pick up Solly—she’d brought flowers and hung a banner that read “Welcome, Clara” in pink and purple marker on top of the TV. There were muffins on the counter and casseroles in the fridge. Our couch pillows were fluffed and Solly’s corner freshly vacuumed, almost free of hair.

  “We should set up the swing,” said Ben.

  “Tomorrow.”

  I went to an armchair, lowered myself slowly. It hurt to sit down. The air-conditioning was blasting loud and cold, and the sun coming in from the open blinds hit me right in the eyes. For a moment I felt outside my body, past it, looking down from above. Where am I? I wanted to ask Ben. But I knew where I was; I just didn’t like it. What had we done? Why had we done this? I had a chapter about Gertrude Stein to incorporate into my dissertation. I had a recipe for sous vide rack of lamb I’d been dying to try. With another forty hours, I might beat Ben’s ninja video game.

  “I think I need to change my . . . you know,” I said. “Those cold packs we took from the hospital bathroom . . . can you get them? They’re still in the car.”

  Ben stood wide-eyed, breathing heavily, holding Clara away from his body, not at all the way the nurses had shown. He kept bending his knees as if he might put her down, then standing straight again, then bending. His panic flickered toward me. What was wrong with us?

  “I’ll go down to the car,” said Ben. “And I’ll just leave her . . . ?” Neither of us had yet been alone with Clara. There was always my mother or sister, the button that summoned the nurses on call. But this wasn’t sustainable, this togetherness. I looked at Ben. We laughed. He just had to run to the car for our bags.

  I heard Ben taking the back stairs, his weight making the same dull echo that annoyed me when he came home late, or when our downstairs neighbor went up to the roof: a hollow, metallic sound that usually lasted a few seconds, until whoever was walking had made it from the unfinished stairwell to the carpeted hall. But now the echoing continued—light and peppery, like someone walking in stilettos. Tap TAP tap TAP tap. Maybe Arthur from downstairs had a friend. Maybe it was some kind of maintenance and we had missed the e-mail. Clara started to cry.

  I popped a breast out of my T-shirt and squeezed. Leaning forward made my pelvis ache. Colostrum eked out of my nipple, orange and sticky, and from somewhere deep inside me a watery red sopped through my industrial-grade maxi pad, wetting my maternity leggings, staining the chair. Clara’s mouth found food. I bit my lip and tried to hold my pelvic floor. The tap TAP tap continued.

  “What the fuck is Arthur doing up there?” I said when Ben returned.

  “What do you mean? Arthur’s car’s not in its spot. I think we’re the only ones home.”

  “Well, then what’s making that noise?”

  “If you want me to take her and try . . .” Ben trailed off, because there was nothing for him to try, there was just me and Clara’s slippery gums, and the milk that my body would be making. I’d never been this consistently close to another person. I’d never had this much power. If I stood up, Clara would fall off my lap, off my breast. And if I held her neck just so . . . I had so much control; I had no control at al
l.

  The upstairs banging came again, and when I winced, Ben asked if there was something he could bring me.

  “It’s so loud,” I said. “Has Arthur always been this loud?”

  Ben studiously examined the casseroles Annie had left in the fridge, pulling up the tinfoil, then re-covering. There was an unfamiliar feeling to the condo, like someone had been here—not Annie, who’d let herself in to make beds and wipe counters, but someone else who had come after. I shivered. I was a disciple of Mrs. What-to-Expect, whose bible I’d dog-eared and underlined and put in a place of honor on my nightstand. She warned of preeclampsia and babies being sunny-side up and hyperemesis gravidarum and complications stemming from an epidural and checking for wet diapers and umbilical infections and SIDS. She said nothing about noises being louder, about the air in your home feeling colder.

  “Can we bring Solly back now?” I asked.

  “I thought we said we’d leave her with your sister for the first few days.” Ben brought me a pillow, tucking it behind my head. I was still leaking, but at least Clara had latched. I had another forty-five minutes until I was supposed to take my Colax. I hated it when people said “I thought” and meant “I know.”

  “I just think it would be comforting to have her here,” I said.

  “We’d have to walk her.”

  “You would have to walk her.”

  “That’s what I meant. Do you want me to look for the nursing pillow? Do we know how long she’s going to eat?”

  The noise upstairs augmented, more persistent. “Is there something you can do about that?” I asked him.

  “About the mess? About the pillow?”

  “About the banging. Can’t you just go talk to Arthur?”

  “Megan, I told you he’s not home. There’s nothing to do.”

  “Just because his car is gone doesn’t mean he is.”

  “Megan, stop it.”

  He’d snapped at me. Ben never snapped at me. Ben was even-keeled, the opposite of Annie’s awful ex-boyfriend Calvin, the opposite of my awful ex-boyfriends. I felt a momentary thrill of unease.

  And then: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for yelling.” He hadn’t yelled, but I didn’t see any use in correcting him. He rubbed my shoulders and the pressure wasn’t firm enough to feel good, just a flaccid, perfunctory tickle. I had to summon deep reserves of patience not to shake him off.

  The crashing came again, this time immediately above me. I jumped at the sound. Clara shifted her position but didn’t complain.

  “Are you okay?” Ben asked. He was looking toward the kitchen—the opposite direction of the noise—as if trying to meet the eye of someone waiting there. As if there was a button he could press like the one that rang the nurses at the hospital, and when they came, he could throw up his hands. He’d say, “I don’t know how to make her stop,” and the nurses would say, “Have you tried rocking her?” He wouldn’t know how to tell them that the her he’d meant was me.

  “Megan,” Ben said, “are we okay?”

  He didn’t mean it in jest, but I couldn’t help laughing.

  And maybe that was the beginning—the noises from upstairs, the first crack in Ben, my laughter. A dawning recognition that the anxiety I’d felt during my pregnancy was only going to increase now that Clara had come out of me. The dry, itchy skin. The sensitivity to light. The word sensitivity comes from the Old French sensitif, which means “capable of feeling.” In a way I supposed it was good, to know that I was and I could.

  3

  I was the one who’d insisted on the condo. We’d bought it three months earlier from a family of four, marveling at how they fit both of their preschool-age children into such a small, closetless second bedroom. Our thinking was that by the time Clara was two or so, we’d upgrade to a house—by then we would be ready to move out to the suburbs, where we could afford a nice big place on just Ben’s salary. Well, that was Ben’s thinking. That was Ben’s justification for humoring me and buying a home in the city that we knew we’d soon outgrow. He wanted to buy close to his parents, wanted a yard and some trees that would be ours, wanted a garden that we’d have to go and water. Having never had any of these things, I didn’t miss them. I told Ben that I’d rather not be alone, to which he replied that in the suburbs I’d have Clara and a lot of other family to help me. He couldn’t understand why I found this so funny.

  Ben never talked about how our money was actually his money. He traveled a lot for work, and we had tacitly decided that my major household contribution was not begrudging him that travel. In the end, I used his schedule as leverage. I said, “I’m pregnant, and I’ll be at home more often, and Deerfield is too close to your mother.”

  That was that. We bought the small two-bedroom duplex with the mauve kitchen backsplash we both hated. We lived above Arthur Ocampo, who was twenty-six and painfully attractive. Arthur welcomed us with a mango icebox cake his mom had made but that he didn’t want in the house because of his diet, which we guessed was just protein shakes and whatever he was always outside grilling. We were in the back of the building, facing the alley, and we shared the roof deck with Arthur. We didn’t interact much. We weren’t going to be friends. For three months our occasional contact was limited to pulling our cars into the shared garage at the same time, or when I went up to the roof and he was already there with a beer and his laptop. The comfortable stasis we’d established was partly why Ben was so adamant we shouldn’t ask him to be quiet.

  “I won’t be able to get any work done,” I said to Ben on our first full day at home, “with all that knocking.” My T-shirt stained with spit-up, my ass numb from sitting. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed my face.

  “You can’t feed the baby? You can’t do her diapers?” Ben was trying to be sweetly facetious.

  “I can’t lie in bed and cry,” I said, and his smile faded. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be . . . I mean my dissertation.”

  “Hey.” Ben crouched down to meet my eyes where I sat holding Clara. “I didn’t mean to imply that what you’re doing isn’t work. Or that you won’t ever get back to your project.” Another clang came from above us. He was waiting for me to respond. I wanted more—for him to tell me that he’d go and quiet Arthur, or that he was angry, or worried, or that I was imagining things. I needed something to grab on to—something sharp that could shock me back into a self that was more than a headache and cracked nipples.

  “You don’t have to worry about your research now,” Ben said. “Focus on Clara.”

  I didn’t have to be told to focus on Clara. All I did now was focus on Clara. I fed her. I burped her. I swapped out her diapers. I barely slept because of her. I sweated under her heat. I smelled like yellow milk and urine.

  My half brother once did a school project on rabbits that ate their own progeny. Newborn rabbits looked like little sausages. The mother rabbit had desperate pink eyes. She had to work hard to chew.

  ON CLARA’S THIRD day of life, we took her to the pediatrician to be measured and weighed, and the radiant heat steamed like a sauna and she cried the whole time. A nurse took blood from her heel, and it looked like spilled wine. When we got home, the stairwell sounds were louder.

  “Don’t you hear that?” I said. Ben shrugged. He went to microwave a frozen burrito. “They’re better in the oven,” I said. He ignored me, and I said, “God, stop ignoring me. Stop ignoring fucking everything.”

  “Megan,” he said, but that was all. He turned away and the microwave beeped. Clara peed through her onesie. Ben scraped the wet tortilla off his plate. “Arthur really isn’t making much noise,” he said, finally facing me. “And if you think you hear him, then I’m sure he’s also hearing Clara crying.”

  I FELL ASLEEP. I woke up. I considered taking a shower. I forced myself to eat.

  IF YOU THINK you hear. If you think. Perhaps I heard the sounds so clearly because I spent all day sitting perfectly still, holding Clara while she slept. Nursing her. I did not enjoy nursing. Nobody—no
t my mother, not Mrs. What-to-Expect—had warned me how much nursing would hurt.

  “It feels nice,” my mother insisted, even as I cried through the pain of it in front of her. “It’s a nice bonding experience.” She’d come over to help cook or clean—it wasn’t clear which, and since she’d spent the morning either staring at Clara or googling where to buy the best gluten-free cupcakes, it didn’t seem likely either task would be accomplished. Scrolling through my phone, I saw that several members of my graduate school cohort were headed to Berlin—I had never been to Berlin and felt now that I would never go to Berlin, because I’d be sitting here with a baby latched to my tit and my mother droning on about the best type of cream to prevent wrinkles on the backs of my hands. I was still fat. I would now be fat forever. Clara was four days old, and when she was sleeping I was wide awake, and when she was awake I wanted to be sleeping. I made a little squawk of pain as she gnawed around to get a better latch. My mother looked at me quizzically. It would be easier to buy formula. Then Ben could help.

  The women on the What-to-Expect message boards insisted that I shouldn’t buy formula: that the proteins in my breast milk were entirely irreplaceable, that formula-fed babies would be thinner at first, and then develop into ugly, obese toddlers. Though only a lurker on these message boards, I took their collective wisdom as gospel. After all, most were second-time mothers; they knew. So I suffered. I chewed my lip. I pumped to up my milk supply, saving each ounce, watching the fat rise to the top of all the little lined-up bottles. I rubbed lanolin on my nipples, which did nothing, but gave the illusion of action. I listened to my mother list off natural ingredients in a daze that was only broken by the sound of our downstairs neighbor, traveling constantly, angrily, up the stairs to the roof.