Daddy

Her own parents were no help because they were in Chicago, and for all their good intentions, his weren't much better. His mother had had one child, and the memory of how to cope with it seemed to have escaped her. Being around Benjamin only seemed to make her nervous. But not nearly as nervous as it was making Sarah.

Eventually the baby settled down, and Benjamin seemed a lot less terrifying to her by the time he was walking. They were finally out of the woods They rented a house on Long Island for the summer, and in another year she could send him to nursery school … one more year … she was almost home free … and then she could go back to writing. She had given up the idea of a job. She wanted to write a novel. Everything was starting to look up, and then she got the flu. It was the flu to end all flus, and after a month of it, she was convinced she was dying. She had never been so sick in her life. She had a cold that simply would not go away, a cough that sounded like TB, and she was nauseated from morning till night from coughing. In the end, after four weeks of battling it, she decided to go to the expense and see the doctor. She had the flu, but she had more than that. She was expecting another baby. This time there was no anger, no rages, no outrage or fury, there was simply despair, and what seemed to Oliver like hours and hours and hours of crying. She couldn't face it, she couldn't do it again. She couldn't handle another child, and Benjamin wasn't even out of diapers, and now there would be two of them. It was the only time she had actually seen Oliver down too. He didn't know what to do to turn her around. And just like the first time, he was thrilled about the baby, but telling her that only made her cry harder.

“I can't … I just can't, Ollie … please … don't make me. …” They argued about an abortion again, and once she almost swayed him, for fear that if he didn't agree, she might go crazy. But he talked her out of it, and he got a raise when she was halfway through the pregnancy, and spent every penny of it hiring a woman to come in and help her with Benjamin three afternoons a week. She was an Irish girl from a family of thirteen children, and she was just what Sarah needed. Suddenly she could go out, to libraries, to meet friends, to art galleries and museums, and her disposition improved immeasurably. She even started to enjoy Benjamin, and once or twice she took him to the museum with her. And Oliver knew that although she wouldn't admit it to him, she was beginning to look forward to their second baby.

Melissa was born when Benjamin was two, and Oliver started thinking seriously about moving his family to the country. They looked at houses in Connecticut almost every weekend, and finally decided they just couldn't afford them. They tried Long Island, West-chester, and it seemed as though every weekend they were riding to look at houses. Pound Ridge, Rye, Bronxville, Katonah, and then finally, after a year, they found just what they wanted in Purchase. It was an old farmhouse that hadn't been lived in in twenty years, and it needed an enormous amount of work. It was part of an estate, and they got it for a song in probate. A song that still cost them dearly to sing, but scraping and saving and doing most of the work themselves, they turned it into a remarkably pretty place within a year, and they were both proud of it. “But this does not mean I'm going to have more children, Oliver Watson!” As far as she was concerned, it was enough of a sacrifice that she was living in the suburbs. She had sworn that she would never do that when they were dating. But even she had to admit that it made more sense. The apartment on Second Avenue had been impossible to manage, and everything else they'd looked at in town seemed tiny and was ridiculously expensive. Here the children had their own rooms.

There was a huge but cozy living room with a fireplace, a library they lovingly filled with books, a cozy kitchen with two brick walls, heavy wooden beams overhead, and an old-fashioned stove that Sarah insisted on restoring and keeping. It had huge bay windows that looked over what she magically turned into a garden, and she could watch the children playing outside when she was cooking. With their move to the country, she had lost the Irish girl, and it was just as well, because for the moment they couldn't afford her.

Benjamin was three by then anyway, and he was in school every morning, and two years later Melissa was in school too, and Sarah told herself she would go back to writing. But somehow there was no time anymore.

She always had things to do. She was doing volunteer work at the local hospital, working one day a week at the children's school, running errands, doing car pools, keeping the house clean, ironing Ollie's shirts, and working in the garden. It was a hell of a switch for the once assistant editor of the Crimson. But the funny thing was, she didn't mind it.