Page 16 - WTP Vol.X #8

The baby is screaming. He sits inside a plastic pool in the shape of a turtle on the patio of their condo. He slaps the two inches of water with both hands. He looks up to check that she is watching.
“Good job, baby,” she tells him.
At seventeen months, her son is no longer really a baby. He is a toddler, an almost boy, a someday man. But she has called him the baby for so long it is difficult to think of him differently.
When she uncrosses her legs, her moist thighs peel away from each other. The vinyl slats of the deck chair bite into her skin. The California sun is August merciless, especially on the patio of their condo, which is all cement and brick. The two trees planted against the back wall provide no shade, as they are still mostly twig. She and her husband keep talking about a patio cover, or maybe an umbrella.
She closes her eyes. She wants to go home. This desire is enormous inside her, hungry and clawing and sad. Even though it makes no sense.
This is where she lives, with her husband and the baby. The boy. Her son. They own the condo. They brought the baby here on the second day of his life. He knows no other house.
She does not mean their old apartment, even though she lived there with her husband for almost four years, and sometimes when she wakes up
in the condo, she thinks she is back in that tiny bedroom. The apartment was temporary. They were just renting.
The house where her father and step-mother live, forty minutes away, is not it either. Though for years after she moved out, went to college, she thought of their house as home. This feeling slipped away in small degrees. First the bed changed from her twin to a queen for guests. Then her pictures came off the walls, her desk was replaced with a sewing area. When she and her husband bought the condo, she was given the last boxes of her childhood projects, school papers, and old clothes.
The baby shrieks with a rising high-pitch. She opens her eyes to see him splash water into his eyes. He jerks back, startled, and then laughs.
There is a crack in the pool, so the water leaks out in an endless slow drip. As the afternoon wears on, the dark stain creeps across the cement of the patio. The baby’s attention span is shorter than the time it takes the pool to empty through the hairline crack, so it does not matter.
The baby grunts as he pushes his legs underneath him to stand up in the pool. His diaper sags low on his hips, heavy with water and piss. When they first bought the plastic pool, she put him in it naked, and learned the hard way why this was a bad idea. She had to fish his shit out of the water with a spatula.
He holds his hands out toward her and smiles, proud of himself for standing up. His legs have lost their infant chubbiness, stretching and lengthening.
“No, no, no,” she tells him. “Sit down. It’s slippery. Sit down, or no more pool.”
She is not sure how many of her words he understands, certainly not slippery, but he sits down anyway, with a heavy plop. The resulting splash makes him scream.
He is a good baby. Cheerful, comfortable with new faces, loving toward the people he knows. He has slept through the night since he was seven weeks old. He is coordinated for his age, curious. He chatters in long streams of not quite words. His wide smile and
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Nanny State
sArA Joyce robinson