Free Playing House by Lauren Slater Page A

on cookies, a house full of scat and sweetness, a woman at once corporate and chaotic, artistic and organized, immersed and transcendent. I wanted it all.
    I spent the first nights of my known pregnancy with all these thoughts, the back and forth, the ambivalence of the bourgeois woman. I focused on the conundrum of the car. How, I wondered, does a woman get one infant and one toddler into two car seats? Do you put the infant on the lawn while you strap the two-year-old in? Do you tether the two-year-old to the fender while you buckle in the baby, who is, in all likelihood, screaming? It was difficult getting out of the house with one. Even going to the grocery store felt like packing for a camping trip, exhausting. Two baby bags? Two different-sized diapers? At $17.44 a box? On the other hand, two together on a snowy day, two sisters telling secrets, a scrumptious baby to bury my face in. Lovely. Awful. The only thing I could see clearly was my status as a pregnant woman, which allowed me to agonize and weigh, in my Crate & Barrel bed.
    Morning came. It came in an unpleasant way, the sun slitting open the sky, the rays streaming in through the window sharp in my gritty eyes. I got up. Cold. Cold. Cold. I’d forgotten how cold one gets in early pregnancy, the uterus taking all the blood.
    Downstairs: “Wake up, Clara, it’s time for school.”
    No go. “Clara? Clara?” Her eyelids were white and shut; her chest, unmoving. Early in her life, I used to check on her several times a night, just to make sure she’d keep going. Now I yelled, “Clara!” No response.
    Slowly, slowly, I lowered my hand to her heart. Even as I did it, I knew exactly what I’d find: her breath. But there is always the fear that this time she won’t be there, your one and only, your best beloved, felled by some accident or disease in her sleep. And if it happened, you would not go on. This is not an idle fear. It’s an everyday occurrence, how your only child heightens your awareness of risk, sharpens your love to a painful point. “Clara!” I shouted. She opened her eyes, smiled a sly little grin.
    As it turned out, she simply didn’t want to go to school. At two, she was already an adolescent. No, not the pink sweater. No, she wanted pants beneath the skirt, not tights,
no tights
. And then when it was time to finally head out the door, she decided to be a dog. She grabbed the dog’s collar and put it around her neck. She attached herself to the leash. She insisted on walking to our car on all fours: Hello, neighbors, hello, no I am not a dominatrix mother. My daughter barked. I started our SUV. This was insane. One was definitely enough.
    Our neighborhood is full of children. The days of being socially responsible appear to be over. My neighbor Jessie said to me, “We’re trying again. I can’t stand the thought of Maya being an only.”
    “You think an only’s bad?” I said.
Only. Only
. What a terrible word. It implies lack, wrongness, something missing. And yet, who doesn’t have something missing? Even mothers with two children, three, four, some say they’d want more if they could. The idea that a second child would fulfill you could be as misguided as the idea that, really, anything would, because life is always lived in gaps.
    I turned to Jessie. We were standing in the schoolyard, waiting to pick up our kids.
    “Only one,” she said, repeating the words. “It’s not ideal. Who will they have to share their memories?”
    I watched my daughter playing in the sharp light of winter. She swooped down the silver curves of the slide. She held hands with a black-haired girl in bright-red tights. “I love you, Lily!” she yelled out. How could I deny her a built-in biological friend?
    Later on, I mentioned that to my husband.
    “Friend?” he said. “I never much liked my sister.”

    Then this happened: my husband lost his job. He has a chronic arm injury that makes computer use excruciatingly painful, and frankly, he was