I was staring at my mother at that moment, not the baby. Her body and looks were things I observed the way some people relied on the clouds and the moon, to try to decide what weather was coming. She was beautiful all the time. Everybody in town said so. She was a blue-eyed, broad-shouldered blonde who went through a room like a magnet, pulling men’s heads behind her. But that day when she stood before me, her hair like straw, and only pinned up with a few clips, no fancy French twist, and no eye makeup to speak of, she seemed worn down, soft, even harmed. I had no concept of what she’d been through, a black closet called “labor.” I imagined that she fell down on the floor, and got soft, and then somehow, the doctors pried the baby out. I didn’t have any details, and sincerely, I did not want them.
My mother had no smile for any of us.
My father took her elbow to help her up the stairs. She was unsteady on her feet. When she got to the porch, he picked up the basket next to me and offered it to her.
She looked at the handle, “You carry her for a while, how about it?”
He cleared his throat.
“Hello, Sidney,” she said, “You know how tired I am?”
“Hope you feel better now, Miss Diana,” she said, with something in her tone, I thought, like a secret.
My mother turned back to me, “Well, what do you say about her? You had a look now?”
I said, “She’s lovely.”
“Connor, you hear that?” She rolled her big eyes.
When we went inside to the library, my father put the basket on the coffee table. We all sat down as if we were at the end of a long journey. An air of low discomfort moved through us. I didn’t know how that could be, but it was. Sidney went to get some iced tea. When my sister squirmed, I begged to hold her.
My mother said, “Well, let her, what’s the harm?”—which put off the mood for a moment.
My father obeyed, lifting the baby from the basket, and told me to get into position.
They said for me to sit in the wingback chair. I climbed up into it—wide as a throne—and put my feet on the stool. Finally Sidney lifted the baby into my lap, showed me how to cradle her soft head.
Under her dark wisps of hair, her soft spot was moving up and down, a tiny, lacy trampoline, blue blood coursing through. She arched her back, drew up her limbs. The great perfect roundness of her. She grabbed my finger, made a little kiss with her lips. I had found her a name by that time. I whispered in her ear. Sweetie.
My father said, “Well listen to that, darling,” to my mother, and she said, “She can call her what she likes.” Then she asked my father to take her to bed, and he agreed. She took his hand and clomped up the stairs, almost in a hurry. His wing tips made little thuds on the carpet, out of sync with her steps.
When Sidney said she had a four o’clock bottle, I had to hand my sister back. But I sat right next to them in a kitchen chair while Sidney let her drink and drink. She said she was “thirsty as a sailor.” Once, she fell asleep, the nipple in her mouth. Sidney thumped the bottom of her feet to wake her. She startled, and her arms spread out, her fingers too. “She does that because the bough breaks,” Sidney said. “Isn’t she something?”
“The bough breaks?” I asked.
“She thinks it does. She’s born with that song, she comes with it.”
We were at the breakfast table while the sun went down, and the sky turned from raging pink to purple. The cicadas shuddered and rattled. The day had been put down into a frying pan and was sizzling there.
When she had finished the bottle, my sister slept again.
That first night, my parents had her in a bassinette in their bedroom. She woke us all up around three, wailing. I could hear my mother, her voice all breathy, “I can’t stand this Connor. You!”—and then something else, whispered.
He said, “What do you mean? What?”
I could hardly fall back to sleep. I couldn’t wait to see my baby sister again. They had told me they would let me dress her in the morning.
After about four nights like that first one—Sweetie’s wailing, their talking, no one sleeping through—my father came home from his law office in the middle of the morning on a Tuesday. Sidney and I were shelling peas, surprised to see him. My mother was upstairs in bed—she had come down earlier and said she couldn’t sleep a wink at night for the baby’s crying, then gone back up.
“I came to talk to you, Sidney,” he said, clearing his throat.
“Yes, Mr. McKenzie.”
He sniffed, the way he did. “Why don’t you move in with us for a few months? I’ll pay you fifty a week. You can take the sleeping porch next to the nursery. Move in; keep all your things here. Help get this baby right. On a schedule.” When he was done speaking, he took off his hat and held it in front of his stomach.
Sidney drew in her mouth so her lips disappeared, and she pushed up her eyeglasses. After a long pause, she said, “Let me have some time to think. I’d appreciate that.”
“Please,” my father smiled, his eyes glistening with hope. “Do. Think about it.”
I already knew the answer.
The next day, after another night full of crying, it was rainy. Sidney came in the back door at seven-fifteen, her usual time. She paused by the washing machine on the laundry porch to take off her coat and lean her umbrella upside down in the corner to dry.
My father and I were in the kitchen, holding our breath, and Sweetie was snoozing in the bassinette on the floor. My mother was upstairs. Sidney took her apron from a hook and tied it on, and then she threw back her head and walked toward us.
At the dish drain she turned, held quite still, and wove her fingers. Her neck was so long it sometimes made me think of a swan. She bit down on her bottom lip for a moment, which made her face flatter, half as pretty.
“You know Mother likes me home at night because she had that stroke. And my brother’s wife is sick and I may have to go up there,” she said. “Any day. To nurse her. She just had a child and then, two months ago, the tumor came back. My brother Reginald. Went up there to work at the Port Authority.”
My father threw up his chin, listening. “Are you leaving to go to Philadelphia any time soon?”
“No, but he could ask for me.”
“How about a few weeks, just a few?”
She shook her head.
My mother came in and sat down. She was in a seersucker housecoat with a spot of coffee on it. First, she was silent, and then she turned to my father and said, “Did you ask her? What did she say?”
But Sidney turned to my mother, and said, “I cannot spend the night. I am sorry.”
“Really—honestly. Why can’t you help us out?”
“My mother, and my brother’s wife—”
“What does your brother’s wife have to do with it?”
She got up from the table, pushing it away from her as she stood, so she was shoving it at the rest of us, and knocking the baby’s bassinette with the table’s leg. “For Christ’s sake,” she said.
My father bit the inside of his cheek. Then he reached down, for the basket—because she woke Sweetie. “What did you do that for?” he asked.