Strangers in the House
Lisa Glatt
My husband Jack had been in jail for over a year when my next door neighbor Diane gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy.
They're calling Diane's depression postpartum, but she and I both know she was depressed before the babies came, so who knows what it's called. I go to her house every day to check on the three of them, to make sure they're all clean and fed.
The babies are six weeks old and still without names. They sleep side by side in cribs in the den, their little hands and feet poking out from yellow pajamas. The walls in the room are white—no mobiles, no toys on the shelves, nothing that squeaks or stimulates or entertains. There's a beat up couch against one wall and an old broken television on the floor in the corner. The carpet is an ugly green.
Except for what's absolutely necessary—pajamas, two blankets, and the cribs themselves—the baby gifts Diane received are in boxes in the garage, some still wrapped in pink or blue paper. "I'll get to it, Kate," Diane snaps, irritated, holding her stomach, where the babies, after twenty hours of labor, were finally taken.
When Jack was arrested I started spending more and more time with Diane, who was, before that, just a neighbor I sometimes had coffee with. We're different, the two of us. There's our age, for one thing. I'm twenty-five and Diane's forty-three, and lucky, if you ask me, that she even got pregnant. "Why'd you wait so long?" I asked her once.
"I didn't wait," she said. "Not everyone wants…" she began and then stopped herself, looking at me. "Oh forget it," she said.
Since Jack went away, though, we've shared cups of decaffeinated tea and butter cookies. We've watched videos and talk shows and the Lifetime channel with a personal interest in television about women without men because that is what we are.
Diane's husband Barry left three months ago, drove off one midnight in their new minivan, and headed to Anita's apartment. Anita is a landscaper, the young woman who took care of Diane's backyard and garden.
Midway through Diane's pregnancy certain things were impossible, she said. Sex, for one, standing on her feet for more than twenty minutes at a time, and bending down, tending to her begonias and roses. It was me who found Anita in the Pennysaver. It was me who came over one Monday afternoon, stood on Diane's porch with the paper rolled up in my hand, saying, "You need help. Here's some help." It was me who sat at Diane's dining room table and encouraged her to call the number. "Look," I said, "this woman's business is in Culver City—she's right around the block."
"I don't know," Diane said. She was standing at the stove with one hand behind her back.
"What do you have to lose?"
"I don't like strangers in the house."
"In the backyard," I corrected her. "She's a landscaper. She's not moving in." I was pointing at the Pennysaver. "She can come in through the back gate if you're that weird about it."
Diane shrugged and the kettle whistled. "Peach or mint?" she asked me.
"Peach."
"The flowers are important," Diane said, wavering. She dropped the tea bags in the pot and poured the hot water. "Maybe I do need some help out there," she said.
I could see the steam rising and smell the fruit. "That's right," I said, standing up. "Hand me the phone."
Jack is in jail for a hit and run. He was intoxicated, drunk out of his head, as he was every Friday night and all day Saturday and Sunday—but when Monday came, he sobered up, put on his white jacket, kissed my cheek and sometimes my lips, and headed to the office, where, together with two other guys, friends of his from dental school, he's a dentist.
In the courtroom I sat biting at the skin around my fingernails, trying to feel supportive while the ugly evidence piled up. Big color photographs of his car hung on an easel. The prosecutor, a serious woman in a navy blue suit and flats, pointed at the dented fender and the headlight hanging from two thick wires. There were drops of the victim's blood under the bumper. You don't know what someone's capable of, you don't know who they are, I was thinking. I looked at Jack, who was sitting next to his lawyer, leaning in and whispering something in the man's ear. What else have you done? I was thinking.
They gave him two years in prison and 500 hours of community service. He's to spend the hours helping the victims of traumatic accidents. This is what he gets for leaving a woman on Sunset Boulevard with a ruptured spleen and facial lacerations. Mary Anne Macy recovered—that's not the point. Jack is an adult. A professional. He's a dentist—doesn't he take care of people? He should know better—he should be better, even when drunk.
I was with Diane when the twins came—had taken two Ativan that I had left over from the trial. Usually, I'm not good with physical pain—my own or anyone else's, but their births, I wanted to see. Diane was moaning low like an animal. "Don't go, Kate," she said between contractions. "You're all I have."
"I'm right here," I said.
"Don't leave me."
"I'm not going anywhere."
But a few minutes later, she became fierce. "You're a little bitch," she shouted.
I stepped back, away from her.
"It's okay, honey," the nurse said to me. "This happens sometimes—the anger."
Diane was grimacing, looking like she wanted to thrash around but was too big to do so. "I hope these kids don't have his goddamn face," she said.
And finally, sobbing, "I don't love them," she said.
"You haven't met them yet."
"I don't love them," she said again.
"You're their mother," I said.
She growled at me. "You called that girl," she said. "You called that fucking gardener."
"I'm sorry," I said, meaning it.
"You're just as guilty as your rotten husband—you're a…" and then she lost the word. She was panting, not breathing the way they wanted her to.
"Breathe," the nurse said. "Come on now. Breathe."
And Diane breathed.
And in between breaths, she said again, "You're a…" What the hell is the word?" she screamed.
"An enabler," I said.
Jack calls on Wednesday afternoon. I imagine him standing in line waiting for the phone. I imagine him in that outfit that looks like blue paper. He doesn't make eye contact with the other men—they are, he says, different than he is. They're guilty of something.
"You're guilty," I remind him.
"They're guilty of murder, burglary, and rape, Katie."
You left a woman in the street to die, I want to say, but don't.
You left a woman with a bleeding spleen and cuts so deep on her chin that onlookers could see white bone. You left a woman just my age on the asphalt when you should have pulled over to the side of the road, should have stopped the car and went to her, should have held her hand, whispered soothing apologies until help came.
Instead, I say, "I won't be here when you get out, Jack. I'm going away."
"What?" he says, surprised.
But then his time is up and the phone plays this little song before it goes dead.
It's dusk when I go to Diane's house. I only plan to say goodbye. I only plan to tell her that she'll need to take care of the babies on her own now. I'm carrying a book called Name Your Baby. I bought it weeks before the twins came because I'd known early on that Diane was avoiding things, like unpacking the baby gifts her family had been sending her from New York, like washing her hair and brushing her teeth and changing her clothes.
Last week I brought up naming the babies and Diane changed the subject. We were sitting on her couch playing Backgammon. I'd just fed them their formula and put them down. "Have you thought about names?" I said. "It's important," I said. "It's about identity and loving them," I told her.
"He actually ran off with the gardener," she said. "It's such a stereotype."
"Not really," I said. "A stereotype is running off with your secretary or maybe the babysitter."
"Whatever," she said, putting down her dice cup. Then, "Have you talked to Jack?"
"This morning," I said. "He's playing shuffle board and bingo—it's like he's an old man."
"At least he loves you."
"Yes, well…"
"Well what?"
"Nothing," I said.
"And at least you know where he is—and that he's not going to meet some landscaper." Diane picked up the cup and dropped the dice inside.
"Go," I said. "Take your turn."
She looked at me like she didn't understand what I was saying.
"Take your turn," I said again.
"Who does the gardening in goddamn lipstick, that's what I'd like to know." She had one hand over the cup and was shaking the dice and shaking the dice, looking at me, and shaking them still. "Dark lipstick too," she said, horrified.
I shook my head.
"The bitch wore dark red lipstick. My husband ran off with a landscaper with dark red lips." She was still shaking.
"Take your turn, Diane," I said for the third time. "Are you okay?" I asked her.
"You know, that bastard was the one who wanted kids," she said, finally letting the dice go.
Now, I only plan on sitting down at the kitchen table with Diane and helping her name them. I only plan on opening the book and saying the names out loud, but when I get to the house all the shades are pulled down and she won't answer the door. I only plan on saying the names into the air so that she can hear, so that she can see the babies then, who they are. I plan on saying, Dylan and Jessica and Margaret and Terrance. I imagine her saying the names out loud too, trying them out.
"Diane," I shout at the door. "Are you in there?" I knock again and still nothing. I open my purse and pull out the key she gave me. I walk into the house and call her name again. Still, nothing. I go into her room and see her curled up and sleeping on the floor. The bed is made, something she hasn't done in months, and that's when it hits me, what I'm supposed to do. I'm looking at Diane, her messy hair, her floral nightgown. I'm listening to her snore. I see her alarm clock on its side, an empty bottle of wine on the nightstand, and her fuzzy slippers in front of the closet.
And then I go to the den.
There they are, sleeping and pink—waiting for me, waiting for their names.