Suburbs

Katya is round and glowing when she comes to buy the baby swing. I plug it in to show her how it works—though we both know I’m showing her that it works, sensing her instinctive distrust, the natural marketplace-buyer state of being—and how to break it down to fit in the trunk.

“I can help you load it up,” I say as I hand her a cumbersome armful of bars, more natural in her grip since her baby is still in her womb, while mine wriggles on my hip.

“No, that’s alright.” There’s a robustness to her, a nesting sort of strength, so I don’t push again. Next to her, I’m deflated both emotionally and physically, my stomach hanging loose even six months postpartum.

She loads it easily and slams the trunk with finality.

“That’ll do it,” she says, slapping her hands together as though clapping away dust from a hard day's work even though it wasn’t dirty. Was it? She turns to me with a round-cheeked smile and holds out the neatly folded bill. With the money held aloft between us, she looks around as though for the first time. “It’s so quiet out here. I live downtown.”

“I lived downtown once,” and even though it’s true, it tastes like a lie.

She doesn’t seem to hear me. “Is it nice?”

I take the bill and go to put it in my pocket, but my maternity pants don’t have any. I crush it in my fist and hop to reposition my son as he begins to gnaw on my shoulder. “The swing?”

She laughs and meets my eye, realizing I’m not joking as I realize my mistake.

“Oh. The neighborhood?”

She chuckles again, awkwardly now. “Yeah. It must be nice to have so much quiet.”

I want to explain my presence here in the suburbs, that my husband used to commute when we had our first child, all the way downtown, but he’d spend ninety minutes in traffic in the evenings, and now that our first child is in preschool only a ten-minute walk away, it just makes sense. With the new baby, it couldn’t be helped. I need my husband home after work.

I want to say that I miss downtown and would be there right now if I could, that the quiet chokes me and the fresh air isn’t that much fresher and the sidewalks are so crooked that I just stay inside anyway, and that makes me depressed, and that makes me fat and then that make me more depressed.

I want to recount that when I lived in the city, I knew the place that would make a macchiato like I had in Naples once and the place whose house wine rivaled the top-shelf stuff elsewhere and who played music low enough that you could read poetry to the pleasant din of humanity.

I want to explain that I did plan to strap a baby to my chest and keep doing those things, but then I’d stay up all night, and someone told me to sleep when the baby sleeps, but what was I meant to do when the baby never slept and now I never sleep, and now I can’t read poetry because my mind is a fog, and I can’t watch opera because I’m overstimulated, and I can’t drink wine because my body isn’t mine, and the baby cluster feeds and won’t let anyone else hold him, and if you can’t take me with you then at least stay a while and remind me what it is to be a whole person, and I’ll pour you a glass of wine and listen to whatever you have to say just to not have to hear my own voice singing a fucking lullaby that I can’t remember the words to anyway.

But people don’t say that. They say, “The quiet is nice.” So that’s what I say too.

Finally, she drives away with a memory in the form of a baby swing I forgot to mourn, and I tell myself I’m ungrateful and won’t I miss this when it's gone.