MRS. COVET
It started with the ladybugs.
The first one was a promise of luck on a spring day as I folded towels in the kids’ bathroom. The shiny little bubble moved clumsily up the mirror, seemed actually to waddle in her red armor with its cheerful yellow spots.
Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home,
Your children are crying,
Your house is on fire.
What’s lucky about that?
I leaned over and put my finger up to her; she crawled up on it. I wondered, Are you supposed to make a wish?
Tyler walked in then, eyes puffy from his nap, and pulled down his pants for a pee, utterly unaware of my presence. I watched him, the ladybug balanced on my fingertip, as the manly stream of yellow piss thundered down into the bowl. He pulled up his pants and turned toward the door.
“What about your hands?” I said.
He looked up, only mildly surprised to see me there, then held out his chubby hands for me to wash. I am as ubiquitous as air in this house for my children; often they take as much notice of me as if I were a breeze filtering through the screen door. This doesn’t sound too good, I know, but I take pride in it. My kids trust me. They know I’ll be there.
Tyler went back into his room. I heard him starting to build an airport. His older brother, Kyle, was still in school. It was two-thirty, and I figured I had time for a quick orgasm before school let out. So I went into our bedroom, slipped under the covers of the unmade bed, and took off my pants.
La petite mort. That’s what the French call it. A little death. It is like dying, isn’t it? The open mouth, the closed eyes, and how you go out of time for a few seconds—you’re nowhere. It’s impossible to feel fear while you’re coming. I wouldn’t care if there were a shark charging at me through the surf.
When I first flirted with Craig in college, we were flipping through an anthology of French poems when we read it there and giggled. Une petite mort. Later, when we were in bed together, we whispered it into each other’s ears—une petite mort. (We were French majors.)
Actual physical sex seems so clumsy and awkward to me these days. My own nudity seems rubbery, numb, this pregnant belly and these thin weak limbs, this rough shock of pubic hair. Sex works much more smoothly in my mind. I never think of anyone but my husband, of course—that would be a real betrayal. I haven’t ever been unfaithful to Craig, and I wouldn’t. I always turn him into a stranger, though, when I do it: some guy I meet in a bar, or a library. He looks over at me and he just can’t help being excited by my huge butt (which I actually do not have).
So I do kind of secretly understand those gay men who say they just love to make it with strangers. I mean, I would never have the courage personally to go pick up someone I hadn’t even been introduced to, and I probably wouldn’t even like it, if it were real. Or maybe I would. But you know how some people are so disgusted with the idea of certain gay men and how they used to have sex with strangers before AIDS; who knows, maybe they still do, but not all of them do. In fact, the most solid couple I know, aside from me and Craig, are both men—Larry and Dennis, we had them over to dinner last week. They wouldn’t dream of picking up a stranger. I am totally non-homophobic—except of course when it comes to my sons, where it does make me mildly nervous, the idea of them being gay, but they’re not, I don’t think. It’s probably too early to tell, though you’d think I have an intuition.
Anyway, the point is, I think there is something sort of heartbreaking about sex with strangers. But at the same time I believe absolutely in fidelity. Because I just can’t stand hurting people and I can’t stand being hurt. I never wanted a dog—even as a kid—because dogs die after ten or thirteen years, at the most, and then you have to live through that loss again and again with every dog. They make you love them, they practically become a person to you, and then they die. Or they get so sick you actually have to have them killed. We had a dog when I was a little girl, a collie, her name was Folly, Folly the Collie, and one day when she was old she got frozen to the ice outside. She couldn’t get up anymore. It didn’t help warming her up; her legs had gone. She looked up at us helplessly and my dad and I took her to the vet and I held her while they gave her the injection and she peeked up at me with a worried, obedient expression. She knew that I was going to kill her, and she didn’t understand why. And then I was supposed to leave the room—or maybe I was scared to stay. I left Folly alone to die. So that was pretty terrible. And I have resisted getting my own boys pets for this reason. The price for love, we all know, is eventually loss, and it’s a stiff price, let me tell you. Romantic movies and books are waging a perpetual ad campaign trying to get us all to love with unbridled passion. “Love!” they say. “Love! Love more! Abandon all precaution! Stop being so defensive! Feeling a chill in your marriage? Get a divorce! Marry the repairman!”
I haven’t noticed any of the authors of these propaganda pieces putting their home phone numbers inside their book jackets or on the end credits of their films, so that we can call them when we have to go to the hospital and watch the people we have loved with such abandon die. They offer no help as we witness our husbands, wives, parents, children, turn blue and green and crumple up like an old balloon; I haven’t noticed them offering to put away the garments of the dead, or those who have abandoned us for others. Where are these artists when we need them? Do they offer us any condolence whatsoever? No, because they don’t care about us. They don’t even think about us. They feed off our yearning to be loved as totally as when we were at our mother’s tit, they grow rich off our pathetic need to be happy as embryos, bathed in the warm bath of our mother’s blood.
About a week after I saw the first ladybug, I noticed there were five of them in the boys’ bathroom. Two in the sink, one in the bathtub, two crawling around on the mirror. Days after that, I was reading Tyler a story in his bed when one of them dropped onto my cheek. It panicked me, I shrieked. I never knew they could fly. They land clumsily, stupidly, and when it’s time to take off, they push a little secret pair of wings out from under their shells. Within a month I had counted thirty-five ladybugs in the boys’ bathroom alone. Then I started finding them in the bedrooms, our bathroom, the closets. They were flying more and more, and one day one of them was zooming around in crazy circles, and it bit me in the back of the leg. It was an invasion. I started to think they were evil.
But you can’t kill a ladybug. It’s terrible luck to kill a ladybug.
I started spending more and more time out of the house. Once I dropped the boys at school, I stayed out, got a cup of decaf, went food shopping, even went to a matinee a couple of times. Then I would pick up Tyler from nursery school and we’d go out to an early lunch. The house was becoming a mess. Orange peels under the beds, grime in the toilet bowl. Craig tried to be nice about it. He knows how I get when I’m pregnant. It’s hard to describe what happens—it’s as though all the walls in my mind slide down like car windows, and the thoughts just float freely around my brain. I find socks in the freezer, notebooks in the linen closet. I once showed up two days late to the dentist. At least I got the time right. But the ladybugs were threatening to be a real problem. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t want to be in the house, and I wouldn’t let Craig get an exterminator. One night, we were sitting at the kitchen table after dinner. Craig watched as one of the creatures crawled along the edge of a bowl filled with coagulating breakfast cereal. Then he said, “If you need help with the house, I’ll get you someone. I’ll ask my mother.” I burst into tears. I’m not sure if it was relief or a premonition.
The very next day, at 9:00 a.m., my mother-in-law, Carroll Rice, drove up in her new Chevy Impala. She was dressed in baby blue: ironed slacks, matching blue sweater with shoulder pads in it. Her white-blond hair had even taken on a bluish cast. Still in Craig’s pajamas, I watched her through the window, my belly pressing against the glass, as she got out of the car, primly brushing imaginary crumbs from her bust, and walked around to the other side. The passenger door opened with ominous slowness; I saw one hand grip the side of the doorframe. A dark head appeared, then swung out of view. A moment passed. Suddenly, an enormous woman heaved herself out of the low car and unfolded herself with difficulty. She must have been six feet tall. Short, dark hair, athletic build. Breasts the size of watermelons. Carroll came up to her shoulder. The two of them strode up to the house. Carroll opened the door with a perfunctory knock, calling out “Daphne!” in her high, singsong voice.
“Hi, Carroll,” I said. My underarms were sweating, my teeth were unbrushed, my hair was snarled. Carroll looked me up and down and sighed. She’d had six kids and I doubt she’d let herself look like this for one single morning.
“Honey, this is Nat. She is going to get your life in order.”
The Enormous Woman towered over me. Her eyes were a light piercing green; her massive chin seemed clamped onto the rest of her face by a fierce underbite. She was wearing a vast sweatsuit the color of concrete. “I hear you need a little help with the house,” she said.
“Well,” I said. “I—I … think I do. We just thought we’d try…”
“You sit tight, honey,” Nat said. “You don’t look too good. I’m a trained nurse, so calm down.” I sat.
Carroll looked at me smugly. “I am so glad you finally let me help you,” she whispered.
Nat made us both tea, then set about cleaning the kitchen, whistling loudly, with vibrato. After a while, she thundered upstairs and turned the radio on. I never even showed her around the house. She figured it all out for herself.
Later, drying myself off from my shower, I could hear the sermon she was listening to on the radio. A man’s voice was saying, “But the question is not what you need. The question is: What does Jesus need? And the answer is easy—because the answer is always the same: Jesus needs your love.” By the time I emerged from my room, Nat had found a place for everything in the house. Anything that could fit inside another thing got crammed in there. It didn’t matter if it made no sense. She put hair elastics inside egg cups. Magic Markers in the salad bowl. The place looked immaculate, but a lot of things went missing.
After a day or two, I began to suspect that Nat was killing the ladybugs. There were fewer and fewer of them around. Once I found twenty dead bodies on a windowsill. I sniffed, but I couldn’t smell chemicals. Why were they dying? “It’s the end of their season,” said Nat. But still I suspected her. So many ladybugs ought to have brought something hugely lucky to our lives. Killing them could bring calamity. I started to fret, and whenever I hadn’t felt the baby move for more than an hour, I poked it till it squirmed.
Nat cooked, too. The fare was plain and fairly tasteless, but the kids loved it: lasagna, spaghetti with meatballs, fried fish, baked beans. After she was done with the cleaning on that first day, at around one, I expected her to leave, but all she did was put on an apron and start chopping. When the kids were home, she had them doing chores. Tyler walked around with a cleaning rag hanging from his belt, a sponge in one hand. Both boys loved working for Nat. She combed their tousled hair, tamed the curls I loved and slicked them back with water. She started talking about buzz cuts. With the house cleaned, the kids occupied, and dinner in the oven, all I had to do was read and wait for Craig to come home. I spent more and more time in my room. Nat fussed over me. In bed for ten minutes, I’d hear a knock on the door, see her giant silhouette framed by the doorway. “You hungry?” I ate three meals a day, plus egg sandwiches at eleven, a bowl of beans at four. I gained fifteen pounds in a month. My doctor was astounded and relieved that I was up to a normal weight. I didn’t tell him that I barely ever walked, ate all day, rarely saw my children. Nat was turning me into an invalid. And I was beginning to realize that Carroll thought I’d been one all along. Hiding in the hall one night, I heard her talking to Craig in her rough whisper. “I tell you, Nat has saved you. Saved you all.”
“It wasn’t that bad, Ma,” said Craig in a cracked voice—always conciliatory, always making less of things, always talking women down.
“Wasn’t that bad? You’re like one of those frogs. If you put a frog in cold water and heat it slowly it won’t notice, and before you know it—”
“You have a boiled frog. I get it.”
“Admit the house is running better.”
“Absolutely. And I thank you.”
“She needed this, Craig.”
“I know.”
“She’s fragile.”
“She’s been under stress, she’s fine.”
They moved away at that point and I couldn’t hear, but two days later, Craig started talking about therapy. God, forgive the mother of my husband.
One afternoon, with nothing else to do, I took off my dress and looked into the mirror. My hips and thighs had puffed up, thanks to Nat’s forced feedings, my belly stuck out, but my arms and legs were still skinny. I looked like someone had started to blow me up but stopped before the limbs were fully inflated. There was a dark line drawn down the center of my torso, as if by a Chinese brush. It traveled from between my breasts all the way to my pubis, bifurcating my belly, as if marking me for some operation. How strange pregnancy is. I still can’t get over it. To house a baby inside. It makes me feel anonymous, animal. That day, as I stood in front of the mirror, I felt the most intense need to meet this baby. I suddenly had to see its face. This image of me I saw covering up my child—I wanted to claw it away like clay. I needed to break the spell of containment, confinement; I needed to escape from Nat. I wanted to scream. And then—I swear to God it happened this way, I am not making this up—my water broke. As I was standing there naked in front of the mirror, warm liquid traveled down my legs and gathered in a pool at my feet. Two months early. I put on some sweats and called the doctor. Left the kids with Nat. Thank God she was there, I thought, as I rushed out the door with Craig. My dear husband’s face looked pinched; he avoided my gaze. He was frightened. Seven months can be enough, but not always. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking, If we lose this baby, she won’t survive.
They cut me open and lifted him out of me. After, I looked down at the ruby-red gash in my abdomen, glistening like a fleshy flower, my legs warm, numbed, itchy from anesthesia. The doctor held the baby up. He was silent. Moving faintly. Blue. He was handed away. Two masked nurses massaged him wordlessly under orange light. I asked to hold him. No one answered. They kneaded his flesh, trying to coax his reluctant spirit back through the threshold of the world, where it hovered, undecided. Then I heard the wail, fine as a silken thread, floating through the air and I knew he would live. I knew this one was fine, just as I had known my baby sister would die from the moment I held her in my arms, though I did not know it in thoughts. She lasted two months. A child without a destiny. Sixty-one days stamped on her hand. Virginia.
The baby had to stay in the hospital for a while, and so did I. Every night, Craig came to see us and told us how the boys were doing. Nat had shaved their heads. She said there was a head lice scare in school, but I doubted that. She had always wanted them shorn. Then there was church. She had taken them twice in one week. Craig said she even went out and bought them new, Christian-looking clothes. We laughed about it. She was living in the house. Of course she was—how else could Craig get to work by eight?
I felt so peaceful once the baby was born. I felt like I would never plan a thing again. I was cocooned in the present, all alone with baby Adam. He had to be in an incubator the first couple of days, when I wasn’t breastfeeding him, but after that they let me keep him in my room. I just stared into his face for hours. The truth is, I was a little wary about going back to real life.
But finally the day came. We drove up to the house, and I saw Kyle, my big-boned boy, walking outside with the garden hose. He had a crew cut and was wearing a red-and-white-checked shirt tucked into his jeans. He looked like something out of Leave It to Beaver. “Hey!” I said. He ran to the car and looked at me shyly. He’d only been to the hospital to visit twice. He was getting used to life without me. As he peered through the back window to take a look at the baby, I wondered: If I die, how long will he remember my face, my voice? How long till he never dreams about me anymore? The main thing I loved about being a mother was being indispensable. The front door opened and Nat stood wearing a maroon sweatsuit, her hand on Tyler’s shoulder. I got out of the car and hugged both boys.
“I hate the baby,” Tyler announced.
“Oh, now,” said Nat, “he’s your brother. He’s gonna be your buddy. For now he’s just a baby.” She reached in, cooing, and took Adam from the car seat, set him on her mammoth breast, where he looked as small as a ferret. I felt a mixture of envy and relief. I was so tired.
“You go up and nap,” said Nat as we walked into the sterilized kitchen. “I’ll bring him up when he starts rooting.” I climbed the stairs gratefully, the incision in my belly burning. Craig followed me. It was so amazing to be able to walk upstairs with no kids following us. Craig lay close beside me, his light blue irises magnified behind his round glasses. The thing about Craig is, his parents were divorced when he was eight; secretly he lives in fear that one day he’ll fall out of love with me and leave, and I’ll turn into a bitter and unlovable woman like his mother. So I never know if his love is real or if it’s just distilled guilt. But I knew at that moment he just plain loved me.
“Well, you did it again,” he said.
“I’m a little scared.”
“He’s going to be fine. I’m glad Nat is here.”
“Me, too. How much are we paying her, anyway?”
He shrugged. “She’s a present from my mother.”
That night at dinner, as we were tucking into Nat’s famous lasagna and chopped salad, the baby sleeping peacefully in his bassinet, a fight erupted between Kyle and Tyler. Kyle was trying to steal a cherry tomato from Tyler’s plate. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s tomato,” said Craig. I stood up to wash some more. Nat shot up fast instead, chuckling. “My husband calls me Mrs. Covet,” she said, washing the tomatoes in a sieve. Craig and I looked up at her, surprised.
“I didn’t know you were married, Nat,” Craig said. Nat put her hand on her hip in mock outrage.
“What’d ya think, I was an old maid? He calls me Mrs. Covet ’cause whenever he orders something in a restaurant, I change my order so’s I can have what he’s having, ’cause it always sounds so much better than what I ordered. Mrs. Covet. That’s me.” From that night, Craig and I started calling Nat “Mrs. Covet” when we were alone.
Now that the baby was born I felt a little clearer in my head. And my life was so easy with Nat in charge. She had turned out to be the Mercedes of baby nurses. She kept the baby changed, bathed, in clean clothes. She gave him to me when he was about to be hungry. He was the most contented baby I had ever seen. I looked back on the other two and marveled that I had been able to cope at all by myself. Since my sister Virginia died I had been so scared that something would happen to my babies. Now, with Nat here, I felt safe. She was a nurse. She would be able to handle any emergency. I started taking better care of myself—got a manicure and pedicure, had my hair blown out. I looked fat around the middle, but healthy. No one could believe I had just given birth. Craig and I went out to dinner. We fooled around. I started feeling better about myself, and even daydreamed about going to grad school one day.
Copyright © 2022 by Rebecca Miller
