Not that I would do that. I would never drive off a cliff, plunging Chloe and me to our fiery deaths.
Leave it! I tell myself.
We climb steeply up through deep pine woods, the trees so close they brush the roof of the car with a whispering sound. At the top of the drive is a stone house with a tower. It looks like the castle in a fairy tale—or in one of Schuyler Bennett’s stories.
I pull into the gravel drive. A light has come on in the doorway and I can see the silhouette of a woman behind the glass. For a moment the outline, with its stooped back, looks like the cardboard cutout of a Halloween witch, but then as the woman comes out the door I see it’s just that she has a limp and is leaning heavily to one side with a cane. She’s much older than her last author picture but still I recognize her as Schuyler Bennett, come out herself to welcome us.
I turn quickly to check on Chloe. In the light from the door I can see her clearly, her face sticky with tears and formula, sound asleep in the car seat. After my morbid fantasy of her being gone I’m almost surprised to see her and for a moment she looks like a stranger. Then I feel a swell of relief followed by the familiar pang of guilt, as if imagining her gone were the same thing as wanting her gone.
I turn back around and roll down the window. Schuyler Bennett sticks a crooked hand in and says, “You must be Laurel.”
I can feel a hysterical response bubbling up to my lips: Yes! That’s who I must be! But all I say is “Yes, that’s me.”
Daphne’s Journal, June 11, 20—
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
That’s what I said in group today and Esta said there are no supposed-tos here.
“Supposed-to is society telling us what motherhood should look like. Most of you are here because you didn’t measure up to that supposed-to. We’re here to say to hell with supposed-to!”
She actually pumped her fist and there was a smattering of applause and a chorus of yeahs—practically a cheering session for the sleep-deprived postpartum crowd. It all made me feel just exactly how I felt in third grade when I asked during a dental hygiene lesson if there was some other way besides brushing to remove the gooey white stuff that collected between my teeth and Miss Dubovsky led the class in a round of “Brush! Brush! Brush!” (She could have told me about flossing instead!)
Chastised. That’s how it made me feel. Since this is my journal—Esta suggested we keep a journal in which to write down all the things we’re afraid to say out loud—I may as well tell the truth. So there, Esta, your little motivational speech made me feel chastised.
But then one of the other mothers—the blond Valkyrie in $300 True Religion jeans who looks like she was doing Pilates during delivery—said, “I’m with Daphne here. I didn’t think I’d be spending my baby’s first few months feeling homicidal.”
“Can you tell us whom you’re feeling homicidal toward?” Esta asked, blinking at the Valkyrie. I noticed she hadn’t fobbed her off with a slogan, but then the Valkyrie didn’t look like she was used to being fobbed off.
The Valkyrie didn’t answer right away. She crossed one long leg over the other and I noticed that her toenails were painted bright red. Who had time to get a pedicure with a baby at home?
There was a palpable tension in the room. So far all anyone had admitted to was feeling a little blue and maybe “even a little angry” at our progeny when they kept us up all night and spit up in our hair and cracked our nipples with their insistent hungry mouths. But then she smiled, cool as a cucumber, and said, “Right now I’m feeling homicidal towards whoever designed these fucking chairs.”
We all moaned in sympathy. All our backs hurt. We could all agree on that.
AFTERWARD WHEN WE were all heading to our cars Valkyrie sidled up to me and said in such a casual aside I wasn’t sure she was talking to me, “I was going to say I feel homicidal toward my husband for signing me up for this loony-tunes circus.”
I hid my gasp with a laugh. “My husband signed me up too,” I admitted in a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s been so worried about me he even offered to babysit.”
She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Please. Make him pay for a babysitter next time.” She gestured to a young girl wheeling a white-bonneted Orbit stroller (the same one I’d seen advertised in Parenting for over $700) along the shaded edge of the parking lot. “That way we can have a playdate afterward.”
“How old is your baby?” I asked, cucumber cool myself. A playdate! I wanted to jump up and down. Valkyrie wanted to have a playdate with me! I hadn’t felt so excited since Todd Brill asked me out in the tenth grade.
“Four months and still screaming through the night, the little bitch.”
This time I wasn’t able to hide my gasp. I’d never heard anyone call her baby a bitch! I really didn’t know what to say to that, but then she was already taking long-legged strides across the asphalt toward the keening cry of the baby, calling, “Here I am, here’s Mommy—” And then, in an altogether different voice, to the babysitter, “Has she been crying this whole time? Why didn’t you come get me?”
“She only started when she heard your voice,” said the girl, a wide-eyed naïf who looked all of sixteen, looking nervously between me and her employer.
“Figures,” my new friend said. Then she swooped the baby up in the air, surprising her mid-cry into silence, and making my stomach drop as she held the wiggling baby at arm’s length over the hard
