Reema Rao
She delivers her baby in the kitchen with a thud.
All five pounds of Gold Medal All Purpose Flour. The bag breathes its white residue into the air, onto my clothes, and all over the table I just cleaned. A mess not entirely unlike Lara’s usual arrival from school—a hormonal storm hurling textbooks or papers or whatever else the day might’ve burdened her with. Lara pats her chest where flour dust has claimed her too.
“Newborns aren’t bathed immediately anymore, they keep the vernix for protection,” she informs me.
“Well then, unbathed babies off of where we eat,” I answer.
I run a wet cloth in circles on the table, again, but it only turns the flour dust into goo. I rub and rub until it disappears right into the wood.
Lara stops my compulsion by forcing a sheet of paper in my hand. “CHILDCARE PRACTICAL” in bold, all-caps. Your child is tasked with raising their baby over the course of the weekend. The assignment continues on for one too many paragraphs, with phrases like teaching responsibility, weight of commitment, demands on a parent, followed by a checklist of activities: Learn and administer all safety precautions. Master the swaddle. Feed & burp your baby every two to three hours. Change your baby’s diaper whenever wet or dirty. Lara points to the bottom where there is an X and a blank line. Parent or guardian signature required at the end of the weekend to prove successful raising of the baby. This paper, I think, is taking itself way too seriously.
“Oh sure, the hospital gave me one of these for you too,” I say.
Lara rolls her big, fifteen-year-wise eyes at me. The bigness she inherited from me. The wisdom, she’ll tell anyone, is all her.
“It’s supposed to be an easy A, Mom.”
Lara was my easy A. She was born a textbook offspring, a perfect execution of the Punnet square basics I’d once learned in high school biology—mine and Benj’s bodies and souls split halfway, then merged again. She had my brown skin and his reddish, almost brassy hair. His deep curiosity and my petulance. She was born to do things right. Sleeping through the night by twelve weeks. Socks always matching, right shoe on right and left shoe on left. A kiss goodnight for each of her stuffed animals. Never late for the bus. Never past a due date.
Notebook and pen at the ready now, Lara begins running through a list of diagnostics. She needs a measuring tape to record the baby’s height. She requires a scale that can get down to ounces for the baby’s weight. When I poke the flour bag in its blue belly, where it reads “5 LBS,” Lara pulls her baby into her chest, away from me.
“We don’t know for sure. A baby can lose up to ten percent of its birth weight in the first week,” she justifies.
This bag of flour is only one pound lighter than Lara had been. The O.B. reported, “A small but healthy baby.” Yet for days, even amidst the post-delivery haze, I calculated, Small but still three-hundred times what my first ever weighed. Benj smoothing the grooves in my forehead, knowing what I was thinking and reminding me, “But we have Lara.”
I feel acid rise in my belly, where there’s nothing left but scar tissue and the fetal memory it carries. I look at the Lara we have now—such an eager mother to her flour baby, the dust stubbornly on her chest.
***
Tonight, we need a makeshift plan, so Benj carries a lawn chair in from the garage. We bought a round kitchen table because the rectangle ones felt too large for our family of three. There’d always be an empty side or a leftover chair.
“It’s too low for the table,” I tell Benj.
Lara says it’s fine, she can hold the baby in her lap if it gets uncomfortable–the issue too trivial against the context of the statistics she’s spewing. I set the table for our lopsided arrangement, knowing she didn’t learn any of these in class.
The blind drawing assigned Lara to be a single parent, and she’s worried about the challenges it could pose for her baby. Almost seventy-five percent of single parent households have trouble fulfilling necessary care for their children like doctor’s visits. Fifty-percent can’t take summer trips or send their children to camp. I remind her that we’ve never sent her to camp and that this baby won’t be her concern in two days’ time, many months before camp registration. But she continues buzzing, a fly I keep swatting at and missing—as persistent as a mother’s worry.
She halts stiffly at her baby’s place, pointing at the steel compartment plate I’ve set for it.
“Mom, my baby needs a bottle, not a plate.”
Lara used to love these plates. They neatly sectioned off her foods and kept them from touching. This baby doesn’t even have a mouth to eat or to vocalize these kinds of preferences.
“What am I supposed to do, blend the roti like a smoothie? Which, by the way, is made from the very particles that are your baby,” I point out.
She huffs and hair goes fanning from her forehead—these little nuisances getting in her way.
“You don’t have to be so crass in front of the baby, Mom.”
“Hey hey, fed is best, isn’t it?” Benj offers. His palms plead in both of our directions. “Let’s just call this close enough for tonight.”
You’re not using that phrase right, I want to tell him. Though Benj is technically one of the good guys. The kind who called me beautiful throughout my entire pregnancy, even when I was a mess of leaky bits. What one might’ve called a “Girl Dad” before it had a t-shirt. I don’t think I ask for too much. But the good guys, they do run out of trying.
Benj places a roti on the baby’s plate and spoons a sticky portion of okra on top. I sit at our table for four and watch Lara nourish her baby with newfound patience, scoop by scoop.
***
It becomes absolutely necessary that we go to the discount supercenter the next day. It’s Saturday, and there are traffic jams in the parking lot, middle fingers jutting out of car windows, and carts shoving their way through the small aisles. But Lara has somehow run out of the complimentary diapers from class—perfectly clean diapers cluttering the garbage cans at home. She’s already clipped the necessary coupons in neat shapes.
Thankfully, the “Family Planning” aisle is clear of crowds. It stretches out in front of us, in all of its imposing-colored boxes and tight, shiny plastics. It isn’t until now that I realize the way in which it’s loosely organized from conception to birth to conception again: emergency contraceptives and anti-fungal creams, pregnancy tests and prenatal vitamins, diapers and formula, pads and tampons, condoms and spermicides. How many times had I found myself in this aisle, in the relentless cycle of life and nonlife?
Lara pulls a pack of Size 1 diapers off the shelf. The contraceptives swarm her on either side, shrinking her into the small, unaware child she used to be not so long ago.
“Are you having sex?” I blurt out.
I fidget with the rest of the shopping list written on the back of an old bill–folding it into halves, quarters, eights, sixteenths, thirty-secondths. Lara doesn’t turn towards me, but I see the hair framing her profile redden. She pretends to notice something new on the diaper package, pointing with interest.
“I mean if you have a baby, you must’ve thought about sex,” I add. I don’t mean to be facetious, but it comes out that way.
“No,” she says to the label. “But even if I was, I know the facts.”
I sigh, and anyone would think it was out of relief. But I know what she “knows”—this young, textbooked, untested child of mine—and it’s nothing.
“There’s not a statistic for everything,” I say. “You can’t predict what will happen.”
And yet, I take her shining face into my hands and search for her fortune to be written in her Magic 8 eyeballs. Her baby was just a gift given to her. Motherhood only began the day she carried the flour bag home with certainty and no sooner. She doesn’t really know how lonely it can feel to exist in your own body–even in hope. Or how every mother must be a single-parent to her own wailing wounds after the fact. Intimacy—the possibility of what it may bring or not bring—it could break a girl like her.
The store’s fluorescent lights flicker, but Lara’s eyes swallow the reflection. How many times could I shake her till a good fortune, a safe one, glowed bright and blue in her eyes?
She shakes me now—because I’m being weird and can I please stay on task—removing my hands from her face.
“You can’t predict, but you can be prepared,” she says. “Isn’t that what you should be telling me?”
***
“Have you been practicing your mindfulness techniques?” Katrina asks.
I don’t know, have I? There are seventeen trees on my side of the block, forty-nine sidewalk squares to get to the end. My shower has thirty-seven tiles, thirty-three of which need a good scrub, I note. I’ve become expertly precise at folding papers into fractions of itself—my desk would have anyone thinking I’m passing notes around, starting baseless rumors. Yes, I’ve been practicing, Katrina.
Katrina has nice things, that’s how you know she’s a doctor. I’m always sinking into her real leather sofa and getting lost in the piece of original artwork that commands the wall behind her. I’m guessing she paid somewhere between two and three thousand dollars for it, which is just about nine sessions with me; she’s earned her money back at least tenfold. Her tissues are always on brand.
I come here because I think I’m supposed to. Because Benj told me that better mothers take care of themselves first, even though he also told me that no mother is better than any other. I come here because I think a mother like me should be well-worn by now and I’m not.
I wonder if Katrina has any children of her own. I imagine her family is a nice even number with one boy and one girl, two and a half years apart. Or maybe with her kind of resources, she has two of each. She never says. I’m not sure I’m allowed to ask. I search her face for signs, though I don’t know exactly what I should be looking for. Is it the wisdom of all years passed? Or the weariness of present days? She only tells me how time can feel like a circle. What, then, of the time spent trying to become a mother? Where does that fit in the continuum?
Katrina encourages me to keep counting when I feel lost in the loop. “Most of our minds are not equipped enough to jump straight into traditional mindfulness meditation,” she tells me. “This is a good way to ground yourself in the here and now.”
I’ve tried counting the strands of red going missing from Benj’s head and silvers that have replaced the count in his beard. I’ve kept count of the lines trailing my eyes that I pad with plum oil each night or the veins surfacing in my hands where I smooth the excess. I counted Lara in days until I lost count, switched to months, then years. I count the paint swirls in the artwork. Katrina, you are so right.
These sessions are like the cheap weed I sometimes smoked at Lara’s age. It hits you big and fast and you’re having epiphanies. Then before you know it, you’re sober and don’t remember what it was that was supposed to make it all glimmer.
***
That evening, I reach deep inside, behind all of the life that’s accumulated since. It’s in the back of the nightstand. I’m not rummaging. I know exactly where it is every time.
From his side of the bed, Benj doesn’t ask what I’m doing. From my side, I can’t tell if he’s even looking at me. He is only a dark shadow backlit by the lamp beside him. If he knew what I held in my hand—I often think he does—he’d call it just some old clutter.
I push myself off the bed and stow myself in the bathroom. Lock the door. Let my body soften and melt against the hard tile as it knows to do. No matter what time of year it is, the black tiles stay calm and numbing. From fourths to halves to a single sonogram image, I let my baby reveal itself to me. Her? Him? We were going to let it be a surprise.
For so long I feared that my body would spontaneously create life somehow. Birth control, diligent alarms, tracking apps, a few morning-after pills, “a few more months” I’d say to Benj whenever he would ask about children. The thought of motherhood overwhelmed me.
Until my first appointment, when the doctor applied the cool gel to my stomach and waved her wand, willing a baby to appear on the ultrasound screen like magic. Nothing more than a gray ball of pixels to my eye. Then she held the Doppler against my skin to reveal its rapid beating. When the gray shape fluttered on screen, the beating quickened. I was told this was the baby’s heart. Though my body already knew, my own heart syncing to its rhythm naturally. Was this maternal instinct? In this room, I learned all the ways motherhood should overwhelm me.
I conceived easily, and then I loved, so easily, this baby that barely existed. The perfect start, though loss would be the first weight I would really carry in the end. The last of the baby leaving me and the blood test confirming it. The standard question I’ll repeatedly answer on the annual physical intake: Pregnancies? Two. Lara’s lips pinching at my breast, claiming me as hers only. The years passing in gentle succession since. The flour particles I find are still hidden in the folds of my pants. Benj’s feet shuffling at the base of the bathroom door, hesitating before disappearing. Grief and its lifelong gestation.
I press my fingers into the seventeen-year-old fissures on the sonogram, from folding and unfolding.
***
First thing the next morning, longing for a mother’s comfort, I decide to bake cookies. I want my kneading to turn back time. It’s early enough on the weekend that Lara won’t be up. I think I could surprise her the same way I used to when I packed her school lunch. But I’m forgetting how even then, the cookies often returned home with Lara’s defense: “I might get too sugared out.” At an age when I wasn’t putting notes in her lunches yet because she was too young to read. Maybe I’d only ever done this for myself.
Lara, however, is already awake, attempting to swaddle at the kitchen table. It comes undone. The baby is proportionally sized, it doesn’t wiggle or protest, it should be easier. Though I know better than to offer advice, instead, focusing on tending to my task alongside hers.
I coax the butter, sugar, and eggs to come together with a firm hand on a thick whisk.
She reevaluates the folds in her swaddle, pulls it apart along its lines and tries again.
I fold in flour with my open palm, under-over, until the distinct streaks of wet and dry become smooth. I think about how easily I could pull apart her baby and take some of its own flour for my purpose.
She pulls either side of the swaddle tight across the baby, tucking one end into the other. It falls apart with too much slack.
I dig the heel of my hand into the dough until it softens and manipulates the way I need it to. I dig and I dig and I dig.
Lara lets out a frustrated sigh. The swaddle unfurls and flour gathers in its creases.
My breath turns rhythmic as I roll even cookies within my lightly dusted hands. I do it all the hard way, by hand, as always.
Lara starts again. The swaddle comes undone again.
“Stop watching me,” she sears. “You’re making it worse.”
I look away then and through the gold-hued oven door. I wait to watch the cookies rise with potential. That’s my favorite part. Still, they’ll deflate when touched by the outside air.
***
Later, Lara doubles down—I’d only ever made it worse, because nothing I did was right.
She is horrified. The flour baby sits in her crisscrossed legs. An uneaten plate of cookies next to her. Discoloring baby photos scatter the floor around her, the albums bleeding of my crimes. There are photos of her sleeping on her stomach, probably gasping for air; a crib mobile of stars and planets threatening to come crashing down to earth; baby powder dustings, poisonous proof caught on the camera lens. Had I ever heard of SIDS?! Legs dangling out of a jumping chair. What about hip dysplasia! She keeps listing off the offenses.
“It’s a wonder I’m here!” she yells.
She searches for my forgiveness in every page of the parenting books Benj unearthed from the basement. There is nothing said about what Benj did or didn’t do.
“Yes, you are here Lara. A whole fifteen years too.”
I run circles around her, snatching up the photos, counting as I go, before she ruins every last memory. I have to wipe each photo with the edge of my sweater to get rid of the relentless flour dust.
“Well, I guess you’ve been a very lucky mother.”
Lara looks up at me, a hold on one last photo between her gummy fingers. Her voice is as baiting as the hanging mobile.
“You don’t know anything,” I scold, parent to child.
“That doesn’t mean you know everything,” she answers back.
What did I know? A second pregnancy and a second chance, but I couldn’t forget the words “pregnancy terminated,” bare body in a cold, airless room. If the cells remember every pregnancy, mine only remembered fear first. I carried Lara with such heavy hesitation, that I could only pray for the day that she would separate from my body, alive. I couldn’t admit that maybe everything that came after, all that I was too afraid to hope for, was in fact only luck.
“You don’t know anything about anything,” I repeat, bully to victim. To my perfect child, who fills me with so much awe, she scares me.
***
The baby seeped out of me. So steadily at first that I didn’t know I was miscarrying. Things happen. How much loss really constitutes the end?
Benj found me stripped down and shaking on the toilet seat. Everything that was once sacred about our relationship—these unkempt human rituals—was revealed. My hunched, naked body quivered in ways it never did when I was straddling him in bed. Benj pulled me to the floor and we cried into each other’s chests, into the hollows of our necks, into fistfuls of hair. Lust and sorrow becoming outlines of each other. It would always be.
I thought the baby would go out fighting. I thought it would claw into my insides, one of its fast-growing nails tethering to my fibers. I thought it would kick hard against the downward current—mother’s bruised ribs and all that. At least one last scream that would force its way out of my own wide-open mouth. I found myself reaching between my legs to catch it raw. I need to hold the baby. I wished to see a body—the formation of a head, nubs where limbs would one day grow, a heart in its last beat—but I cried even more when I came to terms with the fact that I could not recognize my own baby.
At the end, it was just a death in pink, red, and purple dribbles.
***
Tomorrow, with my permission, the flour baby will be discharged from Lara’s care. The right thing, I think while staring at the assignment sheet, is to fold it, fold it, fold it down until it’s been fragmented into countless, unidentifiable cells that the carpet will swallow up. But the suitable thing is what I choose to do. I scribble my signature next to the X at the bottom of the paper. I should leave it on her nightstand.
I wait until I know Lara has fallen asleep. A habit to catch a glimpse of her at her most delicate. I open the door, remembering where to stop before it creaks and the glow of hallway light wakes her. I’m the nurse doing midnight rounds for all the new mothers. Her eyes, feathered shut, could float open at any moment and catch me in the middle of my uncharacteristically sentimental act.
There were so many evenings when we’d return home after a long car ride—Lara pretending to sleep, so we’d have to carry her to bed. I knew she was pretending because her eyes would shut too hard, the folds of her lids wrinkling in concentration. Tonight, Lara’s breaths come heavy and deep, motherly and depleted.
The flour baby sits lonely on her nightstand, because SIDS and all that. But as dutiful as Lara has been, the baby has worn in its short life. Only two days ago, she brought the flour home fresh, untouched, and full of promise. Now its edges are crinkled and brown from being cared for. Life is so fragile that even love can hurt it.
I feel myself rolling the pen that I signed with over and over in my cardigan. I count how many times—one, two, three, four, five, six…or was it sixteen? I’ve lost count. Too many or not enough to know if I’ve already done what I’m about to do. Quick and painless, I puncture the bottom corner of the bag.
The damage is barely noticeable. No one would know if it had been marred by someone else or by its own existence. Some might overlook the hole all together. I wrap my fingers around the puncture and squeeze it just enough for some of the baby-soft flour to spill onto the nightstand, leaving breathy stains on the wood.
It’ll continue to spill out that way when Lara takes it to school. Only when provoked. Only in slow, little increments, no clumps, that’ll leave a steady trail wherever it goes. In the backpack, on the bus, in the hallways. If left unrepaired for long enough, it’ll hollow out, leaving nothing but the skin of the bag and the memory of what once its contents could have become.
#
Reema Rao is a fiction writer. A Best of the Net finalist, Wigleaf Top 50 longlister, and a Pushcart Prize nominee, her work can be found in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Witness, The Los Angeles Review, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. She has been awarded The Jennifer Weiner Fellowship by Blue Stoop, residency with Storyknife Writers Retreat, and has received support from Tin House, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and other residential writers’ workshops. She lives in Chicago with her husband, son, and pup and is at work on a short story collection and a novel.