I was thinking about sneaking off when the twins went down for their nap. No one would know. They had each other. Who did I have? The husband was at work and still working when he came home at night.
“What are you thinking about?” I’d ask at dinner.
“I wish you’d stop asking,” he’d say. “I’m going through code, trying to find a bug. You wouldn’t understand.”
I guess he was right. He was right about the garden, and me needing to plant tomatoes and beans. Right about the kids needing to be around other kids. But I had no friends with kids for play dates. For a while, I toyed with the idea of chickens, Rhode Island Reds or Bantams, but it would be too much work—the coop, the buying, the feeding. Babies and chickens?
So I took up quilting. All those pins and scissors, needles piercing fabric, and the wheel cutters. It was satisfying, cutting scraps, piecing bits together. I tossed the finished quilt across our bed, but the colors clashed. Looked worse on the couch. So I threw it over the crib while the babies slept, snuggled together because they hollered like Hades when I tried to keep them apart. The quilt flounced over the frame and bars, fuchsias and magentas and violets swirling. I folded it under the bottom, made a box of the crib, like a present with the babies breathing inside.
I tore the quilt off as quickly as I’d thrown it over. Their arms and legs and damp hair tendrils all nestled in a groggy tumble.
So. Quilting was out.
Suffocation rarely starts in a panic. Sometimes it begins in a drowsy state of not-knowing, the air warm and dense. Do something productive. Get out of the house. I grabbed the macaroni pan, went behind the barn, plucked wild blackberries till the pan brimmed. Sugar and pectin, old canning jars rescued from basement storage. Me, with a giant wooden spoon stirring the cauldron of dark berry froth and skimming scum from the top. The preservation method is critical. Botulism is bad news. You can’t even taste it. I chose the water bath method, drowning the jars in a roiling boil. Watched them for a minute. Ten. Couple more for good measure. The minutes like horizons. A meditation on pressure and release that stretched on, entire years of steam and escape.
The thing about fruit is the seeds. Dozens on each berry. Each a pod of possibility and promise, made sweet with sugar and heat, then trapped in glass. The babies were seeds, and by God, so was I. Only twenty-two at that point. According to some scientists, my brain wasn’t even done forming yet. Still working out the regions concerned with action and consequence. The twins changed every day. Another tooth, another pound, more hair. My changes simmered inside. But I was cooking. Free radical bacteria killed in a stewing pot, then poured into impenetrable walls, placed in the pantry to set.
The husband had ideas for the barn. A workshop for himself. Set about fixing it up on weekends. Peg board with wire hooks so he could change it up, rearrange if needed. Everything adaptable and conformable to whatever he needed to build. He swept his arm across the wall, imagining the possibilities. Hammers here, pry-bars there. Between jacking hooks into peg holes, he told me about work, how his manager asked him to stand in for him in a meeting.
“Bunch of you-know-what hitting the fan over that scrap aluminum debacle.” The debacle in question had something to do with the manager selling metal to the scrap yard in Burlington, keeping the profits for himself. Wasn’t the first time. “The VP was pissed. Pee-issed. But I told him that the metal had to be removed. Safety regulations. Because of the way the routers make sharp ribbons, and Jack Bilson did the company a favor. Bilson was so impressed with how I lied on the spot that he said he’s going to make me his personal spokesman. He was joking, yeah, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I got a better merit raise this year for saving his sorry ass.”
He stood back from the wall, pleased with the neatness of it all, the sledge-hammers and claw hammers and ball-peens all in rows. “The only difference between guilt and glory is how you spin it,” he said, then dug a Sharpie from a rusty S&W coffee can and drew cartoon silhouettes around every tool, each a little bigger and more ghoulish than the thing itself. “So I’ll remember where they go,” he said, and I knew, for all his talk of adaptability, the beautiful planks of the barn would forever be covered by pegboard, and the tools would always be relegated to their caricatured spaces. The barn would be a model of order and routine.
My routines were dictated by feedings, diapers, and naps. I was a good soldier, marching into each room of duty: kitchen, bedroom, bath. The babies splashed in the tub. Toys floated, ducks and rabbits. The tap fit like a pistol grip in my palm. Another nudge, bubbles rising, a flush of fascination as the water rose to their belly buttons, chests, nipples, and chins. Babies blowing bubbles. Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles.
I yanked the rubber plug, chucked it in the corner. Jesus. The water went glug, glug, glug. I folded the girls into my arms. Two bundles of dampness. Bouncy, bouncy. Cradled. Swaddled. Cocooned. Can you breathe through the towels, little ones? Can you say, Mommy? Can you cry?
I gave them a second nap that day. Gave myself a break. And two naps again the day after. I stood in the barn tracing my fingers along the black outlines of pliers and wrenches. Climbed into the hayloft and lay down on the floor, even though it was covered with dried chicken poop from some other family’s life. A cottonwood shook its leaves within the frame of the hayloft door. Shook the blue sky around it into different shapes, giant sky-squid writhing its terrible, tentacled arms. Maybe I could hear the babies crying.
People talk about owning their pets, but they don’t ever say they own their kids. I didn’t own mine. Hell, I didn’t even know them. They had their own language. Shaped in the womb. Talking in gurgles and hands. I was the feeder, bather, changer. The slave labor. You know, a lot of women say they bond with their babies when they nurse, but I don’t think that really happens. We just say that so we don’t sound like monsters.
I told my husband the bond was bogus, but he just stared at me. Failed Mommy. Freak Mommy. Two weeks later, we were in bed. We went at it, over and over, and he said, “I read that women who don’t nurse can’t come.” He was all sweaty. He told me how their brains don’t produce enough oxytocin. I had my palms flat against the headboard just to keep my head from banging into the wood, and he said, “That’s what your problem is. If you’d nurse, you could let go, have an orgasm.” If I let go, I’d have a cracked skull, is what I’d have.
I’d tried to nurse, but do you have any idea what it’s like when your nipples are raw, giving more blood than milk? Besides, babies are just parcels of penury, hungry for food and attention, sucking life, not giving it back. Or maybe that was just twins. My girls were so wrapped up in each other that I was a ghost. My husband talked without looking at me, mostly not talking. The moon, you know, is just a ghost in the sky, reflecting someone else’s radiance. Pale thing. Anemic. Alone.
On the grand scale of things, leaving isn’t so bad. In botany they call it abscission – a cutting away, like deciduous leaves dropping in autumn or forsythia blossoms in spring. Think of those whirligig maple seeds, except those were my girls and I was the mama tree letting go. When I closed the door, Heather and Tiffany were still awake. This was no cigarette break. Once I walked away, that would be that. So, I carried their voices with me, their naptime prattle and knell. Little songbirds. Summer light. Cherry petals and cotton seeds fluttering on the breeze.
Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the poetry books Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea (2013). Jill holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her recent work has been published in Slate, Waxwing, Diode Poetry Journal, Southeast Literary Review, and Crab Creek Review. Jill teaches Creative Writing for Skagit Valley College where she lives on traditional Lhaq’temish lands.
Marianne Dalton is a curator, writer, and visual fine artist in both painting and photography. She describes herself as an ex-city dweller gone feral and lives in rural upstate New York.