The next week, when Grant wanted to stay home to watch a game, she ran into Christopher again. “Fancy seeing you here!” she said, and they moved through the market together, trying samples of olive oil and jam, laughing over a particularly bulbous onion that Christopher pulled out of the pile. At the stand selling homemade bread, the elderly man ringing up Whitney’s purchases threw in a free packet of sugar cookies. “For the beautiful family,” he said, winking at her and Christopher.
“Oh, we’re . . . ,” Whitney began, but Christopher just smiled and thanked the man.
As they turned away from the stall, Christopher whispered, “We can’t turn down free cookies!” So they brought those over to the same bench they’d sat on the week before and ate them slowly, talking until the last crumb was gone.
Whitney pointed to a sign. “Next Saturday’s the last market of the season.”
“That’s too bad,” Christopher said. “It’s been nice, having fresh produce.”
The next week, Whitney woke to sleet and slush. She stared out the window at the unforgiving weather, an out-of-proportion disappointment blooming in her chest. She had just really wanted some cage-free eggs, she told herself.
She’d almost believed it too, until Gwen’s Christmas party.
Chapter 6
Baby Reagan was a pretentious little show-off as far as Amara was concerned.
“Look!” Gwen said to them all, taking Reagan’s sippy cup out of her pudgy hands and putting it on top of the low table in Whitney’s living room. All the women sitting together on the floor, filling out their vitamin forms, turned their heads to watch as Reagan squinted and grunted, then swung her arms up to the tabletop. Amara willed Reagan to give up and be a tiny, immobile slug a while longer—Lord, she was a monster, rooting for a baby to fail—but Reagan pushed and wobbled to her feet as most of the other mothers squealed, clapping their hands, while Vicki gave her slow, faraway nod of approval.
And just like that, Charlie became the last child in playgroup who still hadn’t stood up on his own. The slowest of the babies.
Enough already, she thought as Gwen beamed at her daughter. Reagan wasn’t the second coming of Christ. She wasn’t even that cute. Whitney’s hand crept over to Amara’s on the rug and gave it a quick, tight squeeze.
Amara let her hand linger in the warmth of Whitney’s for a moment, then untangled herself. “We’ve got to head to Charlie’s pediatrician appointment,” she said, grateful for the excuse to leave. God, this was breastfeeding all over again.
Sometimes, Amara wished she could lop off her tits and toss them in a dumpster. All her adult life, they’d been causing her trouble. She’d gotten a reduction a few years ago, because when she’d hurried through the hallways at work, the unwieldy buggers threatened to put someone’s eye out, and if she’d had one more conversation with a coworker in which she caught him staring, she would have punched him straight in the nose. At the time, her doctor had failed to mention that it could come back to bite her.
Breastfeeding was supposed to be natural. A cow could get a calf to suckle at her teat, and yet Amara, who had a degree from a well-regarded university and had handled some of the most famous celebrities in the world, couldn’t get Charlie to latch onto her nipple. Fucking babies. The most narcissistic rock star on the planet was no match for the average six-month-old.
It wasn’t like one of those articles on the mom-centric websites: “How My Battle to Breastfeed Taught Me Who I Really Am” or some similar nonsense. The women who wrote those stories would recall how they’d tried and tried until, after some magical words of wisdom from a kindly lactation consultant or a few deep, centering breaths, they’d navigated their babies to the perfect spot and their little angels latched on and stayed on, moonlight from the window draping across mother and child. Only then, in a blinding flash of insight, would the author realize the depth of strength and selflessness that had always existed inside of her. There was always a happy ending, a moment at which a woman knew she was a good mother.
All of that was the exact opposite of Amara’s experience.
She eventually attained a basic competence in breastfeeding her son, but it was never easy or mindless or satisfying. Meanwhile, her breasts were perpetually heavy and raw; she’d dealt with multiple rounds of mastitis; her nipples chafed at her shirts, and sometimes they leaked; and she pumped all the time, but never a consistent enough amount to provide real nourishment for Charlie. So her boy was a de facto formula baby, which apparently meant she didn’t love him enough because, as people were so fond of reminding her, breast was best! (But she did love him, despite it all, with a steady ache. She’d journeyed through the terrifying, alien wonders of pregnancy and discovered a new sun, even if sometimes she wished she could leave Charlie on a church doorstep and take off for South America.)
All the other mothers in playgroup were juicy and bountiful. Especially Vicki. Vicki’s boob was a goddamn fire hose. If Vicki whipped her boob out to breastfeed on a park bench, all the babies in the vicinity probably whooshed out of their strollers, desperate for a taste of that liquid gold. Vicki would never stop breastfeeding, and her son would grow up with a hearty Oedipus complex. Amara pictured little Jonah in the schoolyard telling the assorted boys, “If you love Mountain Dew, you’ve gotta try my mother’s milk!” At his wedding, he’d clink Vicki’s boob against his bride’s champagne glass before taking a suckle.
The playgroup women had listened to Amara’s woes and suggested all sorts of tricks, like eating a lot of oatmeal or trying a different brand of breast pump. (“You ever notice,” Joanna had said as she and Amara took the elevator after one such playgroup, “how people can say they’re trying to help you while making you feel worse than before?”) Eventually Amara had just stopped talking about it and given up.
But she couldn’t just give up on Charlie’s motor development.
Sitting in Dr. Katz’s waiting room an hour later, in between rocking Charlie’s stroller back and forth with her foot and texting the office address to Daniel again (he was running late, some meeting at work had gone over), she pulled The Foolproof Guide to a Happy, Healthy Baby out of her bag. She read this book the way twelve-year-olds pored over Harry Potter novels, hunting for clues, rereading, and annotating late into the night. She hadn’t yet written erotic fan fiction about the two doctors who had coauthored the thing, but hey, given the direction in which her mental health was heading, maybe that was on the horizon. She flipped to the developmental checklist page, which was covered with her own notes. She’d checked woefully few of the boxes. She went over the list of things she wanted to ask Dr. Katz, and her heart raced at the thought of what his answers might be.
* * *
—
“Well, Charlie’s still underweight!” Dr. Katz said to Amara and Daniel. This doctor was far too cheerful about everything. Amara’s parents had not emigrated from Nigeria to London and worked their asses off to give her every opportunity—even sending her to college in the US, for fuck’s sake!—just for Amara’s kid to go on a hunger strike.