Day Care
by Nora Lange
She eventually wrote this about herself: I do not deserve nature. I want to have sex in the daylight. She would not include in her dating profile where she was raised, on the West Coast with drought-appropriate faucets and toilets, and chickens. (Her mother had kept them around for company, and for food.) She understood the potential consequences of presenting her needs completely yet concisely online. The advice, overwhelming, that she had scrolled through recommended doing the exact opposite. Females advised other females to save themselves from immediate or eventual scrutiny by hiding their true self.
Before going to all the trouble of building an online profile, which was enormously time-consuming (she had a job and an infant to care for, alone, in Los Angeles), she first ran the idea of seeking daytime sex by other mothers online who called her a slut, which she didn’t fight, though she recognized that perhaps she would be better off looking for guidance elsewhere. She then took the sex-nature conundrum – as she came to see the proposition – to her boss, a wealthy art collector, who was also kind. She explained to her boss, an actual widow herself (not a mother raising a child alone like she was), over fistfuls of fresh bread, that she had found this specific platform for weirdos on recommendation from the other mothers who had publicly slammed her for being a new mom with sick slut desires, but who had privately called her their hero for putting herself out there. Her boss wanted in, too.
As they waited for the housepainters to arrive, she and her boss took out a legal pad and began compiling their notable attributes. From there, they imputed the data onto the dating app open on their computers. Her boss said that she just wanted someone to prepare her a perfect omelet after fucking, and she would provide all the ingredients to make this happen. For her profile, she had inched open a bit more – there was her fear of nature, as she wrote, her mother (an abyss), her preference for waffles over pancakes, and of course her want of sex with either gender (both have feminine and masculine auras) between when work ended in the late afternoon, and before picking her daughter up from daycare. MartyArty immediately responded, ‘How old?’
The doorbell rang. Her dinging phone was ricocheting on her lap. She looked to find a flurry of texts that had come in from her mother, who wrote saying that she was at the airport in Los Angeles to see her daughter. Heavy storms were on their way. Her mother loved a good storm. Everything was happening at once. The house-painters had arrived, as her boss’s small dogs barked in defense of their property. She removed the breadcrumbs from the table with her hands, and thought about how she used to be a pretty good artist. Now, she made bad mom art to care for herself. The red chip bullshit stuff. (She had a dozen videos starring her daughter using plastic dinosaurs positioned inside of their refrigerator make-believing ‘existence.’) On her own time, she labored to convince herself that the mundane, the inappropriately, excessively lackluster – soiled diapers, pumping while Googling trash pick-up schedules – was enough to feel awake. Then her aching breasts were right there to remind her of her need for nature. She had read articles on motherhood that suggested being horny, stimulating yourself, helps with the milk flow. Though the experts didn’t express themselves in those exact words. What they recommended was to scroll through images of your infant as you pumped to get the liquids flowing.
She drove to the Los Angeles International Airport to pick up her mother, as she had no other choice. ‘Don’t move to Orem. Utah’s really a desert. Remember the dead squirrel?’ her mother said, fresh off her flight from Portland, Oregon, hopping into her daughter’s Honda Fit. She touched her mother’s knee: bare, solid, beautifully familiar. Her mother refused to wear anything other than summer clothes when visiting her daughter in California. The two of them – mother and daughter – tucked inside the Fit like sticks of gum in the humid California weather, then sped away.
A few weeks before, after several days of heavy rainfall, before her mother’s visit to experience more heavy rainfall, before posting her dating profile, and before the sun had come out momentarily though not long enough to dry the land – she had found a dead, very plump, and very well-endowed squirrel. Its body was on the driveway belonging to the Modernist mansion for sale next door to her duplex . She was charmed by the totem. The squirrel, despite no longer living, had an unmistakable, masterful erection, striking like the Gothic spires adorning Paris. With a nearby palm frond that had fallen, she scooped up the squirrel and shuttled him to the top of the hill in Silver Lake, where she deposited him inside of a smooth grave that she had carved from the mud beneath an impromptu shrine assembled from a half-eaten bag of Doritos, and an empty can of Pure La Croix. His resting place. Not far from where she and her daughter slept. Right at the hem of the sky.
Fast-forward, and now her mother was in her car, visiting without having been invited. Her mother was the reason she hadn’t left Los Angeles to join her husband in rural Utah, where he had taken a new position autonomously, without a family discussion. Her mother was the reason she had not left her well-paying job managing a wealthy woman’s day-to-day affairs, as well as her art collection. Her mother was the reason she had not given up their cute one-bedroom ‘treehouse’ to join her husband, where he had taken a coveted position with an updated job title in an educational institution (Student Operations Specialist Coordinator), apparently a dinosaur role (that even the name change would not be able to reverse), that was increasingly near-impossible to come by. He had signed a one-year lease on a rental without consulting her. He was there, and now, eagerly, impatiently, waiting for her and their six-month-old daughter to join him in Utah to begin their future. Her mother had said to her daughter that to leave her role with the wealthy art collector, who provided quality kickbacks, who was notorious for her unexpected kindness – like passing her chilled bottles of real champagne from the country of France – to leave her community to move to a place where she had none, amounted to self-harm. Her boss was rich and nice, which confused people who expected her boss to be entitled and evil. Her mother made it a habit to remind her of their maternal line. The women in their family did not leave well-paying positions, reliable domiciles, kickbacks of any kind, to follow men. Men were not solutions. Men were like piping, her mother said, verbally slapping her: things passed through them up until a point. The fix could be jeopardizing and costly. You could lose everything. Those women refused to relinquish their independence. Subsequently, all female children were taught the ways of women. They were provided with a cassette player of their own, and tapes of female rock bands such as Heart. They were provided tutorials on how to masturbate, and taught how to read. This was the way to ensure a female’s longevity. ‘While we don’t burn our witches anymore, we do everything but,’ her mother said, clutching onto her seatbelt for dear life, noting the black SUV merging onto the highway didn’t fit in its lane nearly pummeled them.
‘Those giant vehicles are weapons,’ her mother said.
Her mother asked about the dating app, which was open on her cellphone on the car’s dashboard, so that she could reply to MartyArty at some point, maybe. They were stuck in traffic.
‘Here’s the thing,’ she said to her mother – she was out of time. ‘Days pass carelessly.’
As it was, she had a large, alarming bump next to her bellybutton. It could be a hernia. Maybe it was cancer. Her hair was falling out by the handful. Her belly sagged like a Baggu bag. And her child – all of six months – was no longer being stored there. Day care meant sick baby. And sick baby meant she had to skip work to care for sick baby, and entertain sick baby with bad mom art, like playing kangaroo or making shadow videos or asking the internet, ‘what do we really know about the microwave?’ Her wealthy employer was growing impatient with empathy. The thing was, she fiddled with her online profile not only to get off during the hours she was available (limited), but also to better understand why she’d ended up in her current position – raising a child alone as her mother had done. Her online profile seeking daytime sex, as far as she saw it, had the potential to be truer to herself than she could be to herself in real life under real life pressures, because the web was infinite and her car and her one-bedroom duplex – which was to say, her reality – were not.
‘Is she thriving?’ her mother insisted on knowing about her granddaughter.
‘Yeah, she likes school,’ she said to her mother about her daughter’s day care. Meanwhile, she paid attention to the car in front of her while simultaneously rejecting a deep well of feeling caused by missing her daughter so enormously, which was all encompassing and mostly debilitating. Every morning, she dropped her daughter off at day care and then drove to her boss’ house near the reservoir. (Her boss collected art but did not consider herself to be an art collector.) Her work responsibilities were wide-ranging. She did things such as checking in on international shipments, liaising with galler-ists, and tracking smaller orders, like homemade, patchy linen napkins procured from Etsy. Sometimes, she had one, even two hours between getting home from work and assembling her daughter’s dinner, before picking her up from day care, where the kid made no effort to conceal her preference to stay. An evaporating bracket of time for her to have sex. Meanwhile, her husband – father of their baby – waited for them to arrive in rural Utah.
There was an unpure silence between mother and daughter. Her mother changed the radio station from news to K-EARTH’s classic hits. Her mother could be hurtfully aloof. She would open her heart just enough so that you might spot softness, but the effort to go inside would require a crowbar. Her mother offered to drop her off back at work. Her mother would take the Fit, try not to lose control on the Los Angeles streets, to then pick up her granddaughter and take her to play at the recreation center playground in Silver Lake. Her mother volunteered to wash the car that was nasty with grit. Her mother embraced a good car wash. As a longtime coupon-clipper, she loved a deal. Plus, the car wash architecture and culture in Los Angeles could not be matched.
Back at work, her boss had left two hefty bags of dry cleaning in the middle of the kitchen floor next to the dog bowls, which needed to be rinsed and put away. In the parking lot outside of the dry cleaners, she looked at the weather in Orem, Utah – scorching. She looked at the real estate and wished she hadn’t.
She restarted her phone, hoping to start again. She put a baby wipe on her lap and watched the water leave a wet mark on her crotch. Her phone, refreshed, was back on. She looked to it for instructions. The dry cleaner texted to say that the order was ready for pickup. In addition to art-managing, she completed these day-to-day tasks, too, running errands for her wealthy boss. But often she sat in overheating parking lots, sweating and daydreaming about cannonballs. She excused herself of this mental meandering, reasoning millions of people in corporate positions wasted time.
A mosquito had left a mark on her fleshy arm. They relished her flesh. Nobody thinks that Los Angeles has mosquitos. People go on and on about it being a desert, but mosquitos worship the city. She searched ‘help me,’ and it seemed she had broken Google. She adjusted her inquiry: ‘How to disrupt patterns and lifecycles?’ ‘How to offset one’s own predictability?’
‘Is anyone else out there totally tired of themselves?’
Google was dead. Until it wasn’t: ‘Work on your inner peace,’ was one mom’s advice online, when she decided to refine her search: ‘How to raise a child alone when your mother raised you alone and you don’t wish to turn out exactly the same and yet it looks like you are identical.’
She came home from work to find her daughter and her mother playing with blocks on the floor. Her daughter didn’t understand her grandmother. Sure, she was a baby, but even babies could identify what was a complicated matter. Her mother had made herself a pomegranate-lime gin fizz cocktail in a mason jar, and when she caught her daughter’s glare, she said people in Los Angeles start early. ‘Have you seen the nannies at the coffee shop? Now that’s a study,’ recommended her mother. Her mother’s jar of gin was frosty. Her infant’s little fingers had left marks on it. Her mother asked about her day and took her smartphone away. Her mother produced an old flip phone, presenting it to her like a puppy.
‘Portland is analog,’ her mother said.
The next day, she left early for work with her working flip phone. Her daughter was still sleeping in her crib in the bedroom. Her mother was asleep on the couch, covered in layers of sweatshirts, sprinkled with plastic dinosaurs.
‘Do I not pay you enough?’ Her boss was in her workout gear, eyeing the flip phone, which dangled limply in her hand. She explained to her boss that her mother had given it to her to slow down. Her mother had thoughts about the internet, speed, and female power. Her mother basically believed that smartphones were the devil, and not the desirable one that knows good booze, fine ass, and reads literature at parties.
She shared several more of her mother’s theories about pleasure with her boss until her boss’ eyes ran out of juice. She then returned to focusing on the swatches of wallpaper. She told her boss she had to pump because she did. Her boss then went off to her aerobics trainer, which luckily was in another part of town, which meant she could have a second breakfast with gobs of nut butters without being monitored. She found herself starving after first breakfast. Plus, she could read all the glossy magazines – like, touch them, press the pages in her hands like another hand. She could be in the presence of the beautiful and eat a lot again. When her boss came back from her workout, she carried with her a refurbished iPhone 13, already activated. Her boss had added her to the family plan.
‘Traitor,’ her mother said later that night of her daughter’s new, refurbished phone when everyone was cozily assembled in the one-bedroom duplex. Why her mother couldn’t just focus on being a grandmother should have been the theme. There they were, the three of them an outline of a triangle – baby-daughter, daughter-mother, daughter-mother-grandmother – around the table, eating turkey meatballs with spaghetti dripping with red sauce. A painting, she thought. Not even a bad one.
The next day was the same: the baby was asleep in her crib, her mother was passed out on the couch. She went to work. Her boss left to work out. She ate another round of breakfast – water-based oatmeal with raisins, almond, peanut, cashew, and sunflower butters – and imagined lunchtime. During lunch breaks, she would go to her all-time favorite room in her boss’ expansive domicile: the sea green bathroom with a view of the reservoir. There, on the third floor next to the library, she studied her packed lunch – a yellow cheese on yellow cheese sandwich, on sourdough bread – and sought inner peace. She has never once wondered why the wealthy suggest that others, like the poor, look on the bright side.
In front of her yellow-layered cheese sandwich, moist in a plastic baggy, she ate fudgy chocolate and revised her view on Mary Cassatt’s mothers. With chocolate from France that she had borrowed from her boss’ pantry, which she vowed that she would replace, cocooned safely in her mouth, she wondered if the painter’s women, alone, save for their children, dressed in their bonnets and pastel hues, did what they did in her paintings – knit, sew, stared blanky to another time and place – so as to avoid murdering their children. Mary’s women had restraint. In the bathroom, she worked to release her breasts from their amassed liquid. She wondered where the abundance of milk came from, and whether climate change was to blame for making everything go moldy faster. Her tits were ginormous. Dinosaurs were extinct and she could only partially remember why.
Her refurbished iPhone sat propped against a mandarin-lilac-scented candle that needed replacing – part of her job – on top of the toilet. She devoured insanely decadent chocolates that she would never be able to replace and scrolled through images of her daughter sleeping. She consumed photographs of her child over the past six months, a ritual to compel her breasts to give in and ‘let down.’ At any moment, the nice new phone might fall in the toilet bowl and she would be stuck searching for a bag of rice to drop it into. She would have to go to Trader Joe’s. She would be forced to seek out answers: ‘How to tell your boss the truth about the contents of their pantry evaporating when they are beginning to mistrust you?’ Inner peace would be much harder to locate once unemployed. Unemployed, and worse off, she would really have no choice but to move to Orem to join her husband.
Her tits and head swelled and ached like they had finally found each other across a crowded room. Her breasts needed to get on antidepressants. Her boss knew a guy that knew a guy that could take care of that.
Then – at long last, a notification from a potential sex match. At once, feeling utterly disgusting, like a very bad mom looking for daytime sex while her child was in day care, the milk came pouring out like art. She capped the little plastic tubs now filled with ‘liquid gold,’ a phrase someone had shared with her when she had mistakenly called it ‘boob juice.’
It was revealed that her mother had edited her profile. Her mother had limited the men who could contact her daughter to a one-mile radius, which her mother fully understood significantly lowered her chances for daytime sex in Los Angeles. People were scheduled. The whole idea was to cast a wide net, to have options, to make things happen with little-to-no effort. The whole sleep-deprived mind process was about tripling her chances at finding a match.
While her boss was working out with her personal trainer, she took her mother back to the airport and told her to fly back to Oregon. She told her that she would mail her belongings.
‘You fucking love the post,’ she said to her mother, dropping her at the LAX curb.
‘I hope you find the sex you’re looking for,’ her mother said, and meant it.
Parking enforcement circled her Fit. Her mother got out. They waved at each other like in a romantic comedy. A cop rapped on her window, but she was already moving – the wheels were in motion. She nodded and hit the gas. Her phone buzzed. It was her mother. ‘Be careful of mom slogans online,’ her voice projected through the car’s speakers. Having been left to care for two children, her mother had a thing about abandonment and anonymity, which was to say, about being disappeared. If her mother had had the chance to go to college, she would have championed the alchemist Mary Anne Atwood, who in the 1800s wrote on hermeticism at her father’s bequest. Her father went on to publish her philosophical treaty anonymously. Then, after the fact, upon reading it, he went on to buy up the remaining copies and burned them. Mary Anne had given away too many secrets about nature.
Before returning to work, she stopped at Echo Park Lake. She needed goji berries from Lassen’s Market to refill the container in her boss’ pantry, which were not yet empty. Looking ahead was good thinking – the kind of thinking her mother had hoped might save her daughter. Joggers panted around the lake. The Canadian Geese – which had multiplied and claimed the park as their own – quickly ran after them. She bought a cone full of chopped mango and lime from a vendor. She sat on the hood of her car in the sun, squeezing the lime juice over her fruit, and snapped a selfie. Not a succession of selfies – because fuck that shit, what happened to art? – but one imperfect photo of herself. She uploaded it to her profile. Everything in the photo looked in order. Lately, she was experiencing incontinence. That, or she would be moving along, getting through her day, only to look down and notice a boob hanging out like a best girlfriend, or her fly unzipped and wide like a whale’s mouth.
Finally, her mother was on a plane back to Portland, and she was able to retrieve past messages on her dating account, before her mother had changed it. She decided on a man in his late twenties from Duluth, whose daytime schedule aligned with hers. An engineer, who worked at Disney in the animation department. He, too, had a small child and was desperate for sex. His wife had been afraid of him ever since their baby was born. He was hoping a promising connection might relieve him from his other attachments, like changing bike tires. He was doing his finest to adjust to the shifts within the domestic sphere – children were prisms, feelings of parental loneliness could be sharp – and to resist his need to hoard his favorite sneakers that would no doubt be discontinued.
After having sex, they looked at the ceiling in her bedroom. The overwhelming sun bounced off the white walls. Her baby’s crib was next to them, and it was full of unfolded, clean laundry. The engineer had on one of those handy but clunky watches that calculated his movements. She let him check his progress because he was itching to do so. She let him trace her stretchmarks. He’d been curious about having sex with a mother of a six-month-old since his wife never let him touch her after their child was born. She and the engineer had sex again. They talked about having ear wax – so much more of it than when they were kids. They worried about their children. After, she asked him to cry like an animated baby. Like, really wail in the style of one of the cartoons that he made for Disney. Obediently, he made some unconvincing noises. Try harder, she instructed. His wails sounded totally and absolutely wrong and unconvincing.
The Disney engineer from Duluth had not given his all.
‘You need to throw your torso into it, like rushing toward a need that cannot be met,’ she explained of infants. ‘You should know this.’
Didn’t he have a baby?
It was time for the engineer to leave. She said she was grateful for the hour or so that they were able to share in their schedules. He said she was talking in that condescending way that everyone around him did when they recounted what they were grateful for. She thanked him for the daytime sex, but she needed to get going – her child didn’t spend all day in daycare. Time was a luxury, which she thoroughly understood when she found herself sitting upright, uncomfortably breastfeeding into the wee hours of the morning, when the blackout curtains didn’t stand a chance against the bright California light, and even in the rain, as her toddler repeated ‘DADA’ mid-suck-bite as he waited for them to join him in Utah.
That night, after cleaning up and putting her baby to bed in their single bedroom, she hid out in the bathroom. Her mother called. It was raining in Portland. She missed wearing shorts, she said over the phone. It was her mother’s habit to check in when it was rainy in Portland, which was to say that she called often. The two of them made up. They became especially warm when returning to the subject of the dismantling body as it aged. About birth: giving it, receiving it. About pleasure. About feeling like yourself again, and how online new mothers talk about getting ‘it back,’ but what did that even mean when calculating time passing? How could that mean anything other than to stick your head in an oven?
She asked her mother about her boyfriend. Her mother had a durable man in Portland who lived on her same block. She appreciated hearing about this man that was kind to her mother. Sex, it seemed to her mother, held more significance later in life, when all should be said and done. But everything was just beginning, for her and for her daughter, too. They reasoned that perhaps this was the case, because over time, women became closer to their truer selves. To knowing what did please them. On the toilet, in peace, she earnestly prayed that her daughter would sleep through the night.
When her daughter was first born, she was like a goldfish. That was how her mouth, and the hospital room felt. ‘Everything submerged in atmosphere,’ she had told the nurses who were with her in the hospital that day. Babies’ eyes liked to stay tightly closed, like a clam refusing to open. Her daughter was born nearly two months early. To reach her, to get her to open her delicate mouth, she’d had to kiss her lips. Kiss after kiss. Sure enough, like a music box, her baby sprung to life.
On the toilet, talking to her mother, her baby safe and asleep in her crib, the neighbor’s sensor lights flooded through the slim rectangular window. These kept her awake at night as she tried to dream on her mattress in the living room. Lit-up like an identified convict-mom, she eyed the mold developing in the shower. There was an incoming call from her husband in Utah. She placed her mother on hold to take it.
‘You ready to move?’ her husband asked. No. She was not ready. Not even a hint of momentum. Even the sated, erect, dead squirrel – though all those promising things – was not ready to be limp on a driveway, of all places, outside of a Modernist mansion. Surely, the animal would have preferred the cushy mattress in the primary bedroom.
‘Duck duck goose,’ she said.
‘You’re my best friend,’ he told her of his loving her for twenty years.
‘Bags are packed,’ she told her husband.
She and their daughter’s plane tickets had been purchased. The movers had been scheduled for later that week and more rain was predicted to arrive.
Crouched on the toilet seat, she wondered if her husband’s place – the one he had rented in Utah, where he sat waiting for them to join him to initiate their future together – had a bathtub. One without mold. She would be sure to purchase a gray plastic whale. The sort that fits nicely inside a porcelain tub to keep the child safe. She could bathe her baby until her skin squeaked.
Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
This previously unpublished piece will appear in her upcoming collection Day Care which will be published in April by Two Dollar Radio.