Devil’s Lake

Sometimes Sophie just stared at her baby because, she had realized nine months to the day too late, she did not know what to do with one. You could dangle colorful objects in front of babies; you could feed them; you could sleep them; you could hold them out and show them to other people. But beyond that—what?

It was a good question, she thought. You can only spend so many hours per day dangling.

Other people might have the answer. Mothers might know, mothers who were not Sophie. She always paused before applying the label to herself, anyway. She felt like a person who happened to have a rapidly developing human specimen in her house, yes, but when she looked at the MOMS section of magazines in the grocery store checkout line, she did not feel like she was its audience. Whenever she thought about referring to herself as a mother, her tongue thickened like gravy, like it had when she’d first started introducing Josh as her fiancé. Her voice sounded like she was channeling someone else—someone who was a fiancée—and she felt like an actress in a B-movie (“Come on Billy don’t do this to me please Billy I love you Billy”) in which the audience knows that underneath this breakout role, she is really just a waitress with a studio apartment.

The baby cried like all the bars on a xylophone, and Sophie picked her up. This she could do. It was when the baby stopped crying that she stopped knowing.

When Josh walked in the door, he bolted it and pressed it with his hand, just to make sure it was really, truly shut, even though that didn’t make sense because a bolt is, by definition, a bolt.

Sophie said, “How was work?” and then handed the baby to him. The fact that she did not do the two simultaneously seemed generous.

“I’ve been working all day,” he said.

“I’m fully aware,” she said.

“Can’t I just have a minute?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. She buzzed her lips like the air was a trumpet’s mouthpiece. “Have a minute. Have a minute while you’re holding the baby. Do something with her.”

The baby’s name was Claire. Claire sounded like a grown-up’s name. Sophie felt very small and young when she said “Claire” to the thing that haphazardly eliminated waste and couldn’t bring its eyes into focus.

The next day she would attend the mothers’ group for the first time. The mothers’ group was called “YMCA,” which stood for Young Mothers Comin Atcha. Sophie had decided that the existence of an acronym, the omission of an apostrophe, and the use of a slang compound word meant that the group would be so laid-back that they might not notice if she just dangled until she figured out a more permanent solution.

She wouldn’t tell The Mothers, at least not right away, that she often thought of Claire as an alien, someone who had traveled light-years to learn about human culture. Maybe a college-aged extraterrestrial with rich parents who didn’t mind a little interplanetary meandering—find yourself, but go easy on the Earth-wine—before settling down to a career in alien investment banking. She felt sure that EClaire would take a negative impression back to her home-star, or would at least tell her peers that Earth was not worth the uranium it took to get there. Then, lack of further contact would be Sophie’s fault.

—

“Welcome to the YMCA!” a woman (a mother, presumably) yelled at Sophie when Sophie walked in the door of the woman-mother’s house, which was not at all like a YMCA but very much like an Indonesian bazaar. She appeared to have bought out the “world imports” store and placed the entire inventory on various walls and shelves. But the house managed to look perfectly dense, not overcrowded, probably because the “look” was “marketplace,” and marketplaces are by definition crowded.

This woman was the only mother there so far.

“I’m Kim, and this is Tesla,” she said, looking at her baby. “So great to meet you. We’re a tight group. I bet you’ll knit yourself right in with us.”

“Sophie,” Sophie said.

“And who is this?” Kim asked, touching Claire’s face, so tender and natural, like a peach.

“Contessa Von Trapp Esquire the Third,” Sophie said. She was only twenty-nine; she was allowed to make jokes; jokes were how twenty-nine-year-olds made friends.

“Does she have a nickname?” asked Kim. “Does she co-sleep? Tesla co-sleeps. He loves it.”

Sophie asked, “How can you tell?” and Kim laughed.

The sound of a hybrid station wagon squeezed through the screen of the open front window. “There’s Karen,” said Kim, waving in a way that suggested Karen might not notice the person at whose house she had just arrived. “HI KAREN,” she yelled.

Karen fox-trotted up the driveway, not at all afraid of cracking the skull of her spawn. “Kim and Tesla, Kim and Tesla,” Karen sang, to the tune of “Love and Marriage,” as she walked up the driveway.

The YMCA members were now staring at each other through the window. Each baby’s right hand was limp-fished in its mother’s right hand, waving, as if either baby had any goddamn clue why flapping your arm up and down meant hello and goodbye. It didn’t make any fucking sense anyway.

Karen’s baby waved at Claire.

No longer willing to have a screened interaction, Sophie opened the front door.

“Hi, I’m Sophie, and this is Claire,” she said. It came out like she was introducing her wife. She’d started to say “daughter, Claire,” but “daughter” was such a mature word. For adults only. XXX. Daughter.

Karen peeled the baby and its accompanying Bjorn from her body. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “It’s just so nice to be able to recharge around people who are going through the same things, you know? People who get it.”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Sophie said.

In a few minutes, five more mothers came atcha, their offspring expertly strapped in as if they’d never been born at all but were still being anatomically tube-fed.

“These Bjorns are just so great,” Kim said. “It’s just so great to be able to be in contact with your baby so much of the time. It helps so much with neurological development.”

Karen pulled her breast out of her shirt and squeezed it before latching the baby to her nipple, which was large and hard and brick-red. “My husband wears it, too,” she said. “He says since he doesn’t have hips, this is the next best thing.”

Everyone tittered. Really, they tittered.

“The other day, Patrick started teaching Tesla Baby Sign Language,” said Kim. “Watch.” She spread her hand open and tapped her chin with her thumb.

Tesla stared at her.

“He’s learning,” she said.

“Patrick is so great,” said Karen. “Is Ron still in charge of tummy time, Brooke?” Who was Brooke? Why were these husbands involved?

Josh loved video games. He played a game in which you had a life and you lived it.

“That’s not a game,” Sophie told him.

He had made his virtual life such that a virtual baby was born on the same day as the real one.

“But this baby’s diapers could fumigate the house,” Sophie said. “This baby’s attachments need to be secure.”

“I told you when you got pregnant that I only knew what to do with them when they could talk,” he said. “One minute in real life is one second in The Sims. This one is already communicating!”

So while Sophie held the baby all the time (because she did know about the neurological importance of physical contact, and about babies’ abilities to use hand signals long before they can verbalize—she just didn’t need to flaunt it), Josh was building up an alternative life, one that was happening in the future, until the baby could say something with a subject. “I am.” “Me want.” “Daddy home.” “Mommy who.”

Sometimes Sophie realized how little she actually knew about her husband. She tried to imagine what went on in his head during downtimes, but she couldn’t. She imagined nothing. Maybe static, just to drown out any signals that tried, like water tossed into oil, to rise to the surface.

“What are you thinking?” she asked him maybe once a month when the bedroom lights had been out for a few minutes.

“Nothing,” he replied, and fell right asleep, while she was left contemplating a lie she told when she was six, a girl whose boyfriend she stole sophomore year, the way she used to be attached at the hip to other girls but wasn’t anymore, hadn’t been for years, the way you can wake up one morning and realize that you don’t know the person in bed next to you, despite the fact that he is not a swarthy one-night stand but your boyfriend, fiancé, husband.

“How is your husband with the baby?” asked Kim, who was staring at Sophie.

“He’s just my boyfriend, actually,” Sophie said, just to see if it felt better.

Barely a second (though it seemed like at least a full minute) passed before Karen said, “Dating is so nice. I miss dating.”

“And thank God,” said Kim, “that we live in a time when you have that option to create life with someone while still exploring other options.”

Sophie could not believe that these women were her age. They smiled at each other like their moms smiled at each other. They had potpourri. Sophie didn’t even have a matching set of pots. “You guys,” she thought, “a few years ago we were in college burning popcorn in the hall microwave and setting off the fire alarm.”

She sensed that if she told an anecdote about hypothetical college kids who burned hypothetical popcorn, the mothers would laugh a single tone, shake their heads, and say, “They’ll never learn.”

“We are those kids!” she wanted to scream. “When did you become not those kids?”

Was there a moment? She saw their husbands placing rings on their fingers and their babies sliming out of their bodies, and their DNA changed right before her eyes—the base pairs switching sides, trading places so that all of a sudden these women-not-girls wanted to buy ramekins and felt comfortable calling sleeping with someone “co-sleeping.”

Sophie, despite the social protocol demanding that you not up and leave a conversation without a damn good reason that everyone agreed was a damn good reason, needed to up and leave. She pulled a hat from her diaper bag and placed it on Claire’s bumpy head to signal that they were going outside, so that maybe she could just say goodbye instead of having to explain: I’m leaving.

“You shouldn’t let it flop over her face like that,” Brooke, whoever Brooke was, or thought she was, said. “You’ll make one eye stronger than the other.”

This was not the group Sophie was looking for. This was not the group that she could ask, “So do you sometimes forget that you have a baby? Like you’re walking around the grocery store thinking that you’re just yourself, and you’ve got ‘Teenage Wasteland’ stuck in your head, and you’re wondering if you’ll actually go hiking this weekend or if you’ll just talk about it, and isn’t that book you’re reading great, and then you look down and there’s, like, this baby in front of you, and you think, ‘Oh my god, I am responsible for that,’ and you wish you could go back to that part where you were humming ‘Don’t cry, don’t raise your eyes’?”

“I have to go,” she said. “Claire and I have to go. We have to go buy cloth diapers.”

Billy listen to me Billy I’m not that person anymore I’ve changed okay look at me look at me Billy.

—

Sophie would have to fix this on her own. She would have to invent the screwdriver and invent the screw and invent the plane saw and invent Krazy Glue then take everything apart and then put it back together in some way that made it work.

The next day, she took her family to the park, a family-friendly place where families did wholesome things like throw Frisbees and talk about what they’d learned in school this week.

Josh went swimming. Without even waiting for Sophie to unbuckle their daughter, he took off and launched himself from some rocks, without even checking to see if there were rocks underneath those rocks.

Sitting in the grass with the baby, Sophie plucked stalks and put them on the baby’s head, because the baby would never remember and Claire thought that was funny.

When she looked up from Claire’s bright green head, she could not see Josh anywhere. She wondered if he had died drowning or if he had been kidnapped or if he was just behind some rocks.

She picked Claire up and started to walk back to the car, so that if Josh was still alive, he could experience her disappearance too, so she could ask him, one night in the dark, what he thought.

“Are you getting the sandwiches?” she heard as soon as her back was turned.

Josh was running up to them with a towel resting across his shoulders, looking just as pretty and imperturbable as he had the day they’d met, when his car was broken down on the road, and she’d stopped because he looked so peaceful standing on the side of the road next to that smoking Geo and waving his white sock in the air that she couldn’t imagine he would do anything blood-spilling that would ruin the calm.

Later, she thought about how sociopaths are the opposite of perturbed by their deeds, how it brings them the satisfaction that crossword puzzles bring other people. But she’d always been attracted to sociopaths, anyway, and since he didn’t kill her, she was still alive to watch 20/20s and Frontlines about men who lead double lives—one pool-fence-multigrain-bread-for-the-Little-League-playing-kids life, and one life of slash-and-dash on “business trips.” She loved it when Josh took business trips.

“Yes, what kind do you want?” she asked.

“Turkey,” he said, “yum,” and tossed his towel on the rocks and dove in and came back up with drops spiraling down his curls like electrons in a magnetic field, which was always how she felt too, whether she wanted to or not.

She knew from some college class that she’d burnt popcorn studying for that when electrons do that, they release radio waves that travel through space and hit radio telescopes here on Earth.

Experts believed that extraterrestrials would communicate using radio waves.

She tried to make a connection between Josh’s hair, her emotions, and Claire’s potentially exoplanetary status. A connection seemed to exist, based on the system of images and metaphors that she’d set up. And if she could not draw meaning from something she’d made, how could she draw meaning from anything?

She tried to beam radio waves at her daughter, but she didn’t know how to encode information in them. The effort felt akin to getting a Chinese character tattoo or barking at a dog—you could be saying anything, or nothing at all.

If there had been no concept of “mother,” Sophie might have thought she was a good mom. If it had been dark outside, maybe she would have been able to see where Claire came from. Maybe she would be able to pick up the radio waves from Claire’s real mom. Or maybe there was no real mom. Maybe there were no aliens. Maybe we were alone.

She wondered if it was worse to be alone or if it was worse to be together but never able to say anything to each other.

Josh ran up to the car and held out his hand. Sophie put hers inside it.

“Sandwich?” he said, holding out his other hand.

By the time her message could even get across, she’d be dead.

In some sense, it didn’t matter if we were alone. It only mattered if we felt alone. If we were practically—in the for-all-intents-and-purposes way, not in the almost-but-maybe-not-quite way—alone. The aliens could be sipping alien Earl Grey and listening to bizarro Debussy, but if we could never ask them if they preferred honey to sugar or “Claire de Lune” to “Afternoon of the Fawn” or sign language to speech, it didn’t really matter what they were drinking or hearing or saying.

“Sandwich,” she said, handing the sandwich over.