Losing It Read Free Page A

reaching for her sides – a teasing, pinching kind of tickle.
    “Matthew, honey, I have to wipe you,” she said, and moved to return him to the changing table. But he wouldn’t let go. He clamped his teeth around her nipple and she was forced to lean all the way over so he could still suckle while he lay flat. “Ow! Come on, let go!” she said and wiggled her finger between his lips and her skin. The vacuum was broken but his jaw stayed firm. “Matthew. Matthew!”
    He wouldn’t let go. She had to strain and twist to keep her breast positioned on top of him while she grabbed a fresh diaper, wrapped him up, fought the safety pins into place. It wasn’t snug but would have to do. She stood him up rudely. For a few seconds he was shocked into letting go of the nipple, too stunned even to cry. She took advantage and hustled him into a dry plastic lining, then just as he opened his mouth she plugged him onto the left breast so that his scream was muffled, went deep inside her.
    Back on the rocker, she pulled an old blanket around them, tried to tuck her cold feet underneath her, but it was a tight fit, uncomfortable, so she left them down. She closed her eyes and rocked and sang little snatches of nursery rhymes. “
To market to market to buy a fat pig.”
She had a funny memory of her mother deliberately mixing up the words of old songs.
    Hush little baby don’t you cry
,
Mommy’s gonna bake you a wishbird pie
,
And if that wishbird pie won’t chew
,
Mommy’s gonna make you a daydream stew
.
    That Scrabble-champion gleam in her eye, always ready to score and total and find herself ahead. “Well, I don’t understand what the problem is,” her mother used to say, gazing over Julia’s shoulder at some wearisome bit of homework, the square of the lesser angle or the Diet of Wurms. “When I was in school it was just a question of remembering!” She gave parties for forty, she wrote the book-club newsletter for thirty-five years, she remembered exactly when you’d last worn a particular sweater and what boy was a nuisance and what bill had been paid when and from what account. She knew the origins of weird words –
ergotism
, a disease in grasses that also means quibbling, arguing, wrangling. When was that? A year and a half ago at Christmas she’d brought that out to put Bob in his place. He was pontificating – about what? About the role of the artist in a world gone mad with materialism, something like that, and she’d cut right in with, “What an ergotist,” which had stopped him flat.
    “Egotist?” he said finally. “Don’t you mean?”
    But she insisted on
ergotist
, and she knew what it meant, and he didn’t. “A lifetime of crossword puzzles must be worth something,” she’d said.
    She was shutting down even then but they didn’t know it. They’d all thought it was just the peculiarities of age. After Julia’s father had died, her mother had settled into her routines, her toast and tea for breakfast, walking to Pullman’s, to the bank, to Lilian’s for her hair on Tuesdays. Things were coming apart, in hindsight it was obvious, but four months ago she wasstill driving – to the library, to bridge club, to the dry cleaner’s. The living-room table was a disaster: papers piled in odd clumps sorted according to no decipherable order, bills mixed with garage-sale flyers and strange articles carefully clipped, obituaries and wedding announcements of people her mother had never known, ads for weight loss and used cars, unopened letters, and of course her messages scrawled on scraps of paper that she’d forget about then rediscover. “
Left in cheesecloth,”
she’d read, squinting, and turn to Julia. “What does that mean? Why did I write that?”
    Looking to Julia for the answer, increasingly for every answer, for who it was who called and what he was asking for, and where the insurance papers went, and what had happened to the damn radio that was
always
in her kitchen, thirty-one years