The women first met in June of last year when Frida was dropping Harriet off for the weekend. Gust had moved into Susanna’s loft in Fishtown, while Frida still lived in their first house in Bella Vista. They’d been separated for only a few weeks. Nights she could keep Harriet for nursing, but Gust got the baby on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and Frida had to deliver both the baby and bottles of pumped milk. That day, Susanna answered the door wearing only Gust’s shirt. She had a proud and drowsy gaze that made Frida want to scratch her. Frida didn’t want to hand her child to this just-fucked woman, but Gust came and took Harriet from her arms, and he looked happy, not happy like a man who’d found new love, but happy like a dog.
When Susanna reached for the cooler of milk, Frida snapped at her. Only the parents should handle the milk.
“Please, Frida, be reasonable,” Gust said.
As they headed upstairs with Harriet, Frida hoped they wouldn’t kiss in front of the baby, but as she walked away, she realized that they would kiss and rub and grab in front of Harriet, maybe even make love while the baby slept in the same room. In her father’s home, Harriet would see love thrive and grow.
* * *
It’s Saturday night. Early. Harriet’s dinnertime. Frida sits at her kitchen table watching the minutes pass on the digital clock above the stove. She kicks at the leg of Harriet’s high chair. Gust and Susanna might not be giving Harriet enough to eat. Susanna probably took her to the park today and chattered incessantly, narrating her every move. Susanna never stops talking. She read some book about how babies and toddlers need to hear ten thousand words a day, from birth until age five, in order to be prepared for kindergarten.
Though she eventually caved, Frida used to find American-mother babble pitiful. Other mothers shot her disapproving looks when she pushed Harriet on the swings silently, when she sat at the edge of the sandbox and tried to skim the New Yorker while Harriet played alone. She was sometimes assumed to be a distracted nanny. Once, when Harriet was seven months old, there was a mother who outright scolded her as Harriet crawled around the playground. Why wasn’t she watching her baby? What if the baby picked up a rock and tried to swallow it and choked?
Frida didn’t try to defend herself. She grabbed Harriet and hurried home, never returning to that playground, even though it was the closest and cleanest one.
The playground mothers frightened her. She couldn’t match their fervor or skill, hadn’t done enough research, stopped breastfeeding after five months when these women were still cheerfully nursing three-year-olds.
She thought that becoming a mother would mean joining a community, but the mothers she’s met are as petty as newly minted sorority sisters, a self-appointed task force hewing to a maternal hard line. Women who only talk about their children bore her. She has little enthusiasm for the banal, repetitive world of toddlers but believes things will improve once Harriet goes to preschool, once they can converse. It wasn’t that Frida didn’t have ideas about child-rearing. She liked that book about French parenting, but Gust was horrified at the idea of sleep training Harriet at three months, the idea of prioritizing their adult needs. The ethos of that book was selfish.
“I’m ready to be unselfish,” Gust said. “Aren’t you?”
She hasn’t been outside today. Renee told her to stop calling Gust and asking to FaceTime with Harriet, to wait to talk to the social worker. This morning, she wallowed in the nursery for hours, touching Harriet’s toys and blankets. Everything needs to be washed. Maybe replaced, when she can afford it. The men didn’t leave any marks, but they left bad luck. Harriet can never know that her nursery was treated like a crime scene.
Sitting in the rocking chair, Frida wept, angry that she had to fake it when she had no tears left. But no tears would suggest no remorse, and no remorse would suggest that she’s an even worse mother than the state imagines. So she grabbed Harriet’s pink bunny and squeezed it and pictured Harriet frightened and alone. She nursed her shame. Her parents always said she needed an audience.
She stands and walks over to the sliding glass door. Opens it and peers into the neighbor’s yard. The next-door neighbor on the north side is building a trellis. He’s been hammering all day. She’d like to flick a lit match over the fence just to see what would happen, would like to burn down that tree that drips fuzzy brown tendrils into her yard, but she doesn’t know if he was the Good Samaritan who called the police.
Her fridge is emptier than it was at the inspection. There’s a container of sweet potato wedges starting to mold, a half-consumed jar of peanut butter, a carton of milk that expired three days ago, packets of ketchup stashed in the door. She snacks on some of Harriet’s string cheese. She should prepare a nutritious dinner, show the state that she can cook, but when she considers walking to the grocery store, considers how the camera will note the time of her departure and return, her methods of food preparation and how gracefully she eats, she wants to roam further afield.