DRAMA QUEEN FOR A DAY Catherine A. Salton
it is 5:15 a.m. on Good Friday when we hear the first thin wail of protest from 14-month-old Nicky's room. He has been expressing his displeasure with his earlier bedtime by waking up at the crack of dawn, despite our best attempts to fool him by lining his window with dark towels. I had been disgusted with myself for this petty trickery when we first did it. What a noble thing to do, Mom, duping your baby on such a small issue! Now, after four days of 5 a.m. wake-up calls, I am seriously thinking about boarding up the window. The wailing resumes. My husband and I lay rigid in bed, feigning sleep, each trying to fool the other into getting up with the baby. The baby, however, is not fooled. The wailing turns into a shriek. When I open the door Nicky points dramatically to the window and says "Boot dee," which I'm pretty sure means "J'accuse!" He is crabby and screechy as I take off his night diaper, which weighs as much as he does, and start fishing around on the shelf for a new one. Fishing around. Fishing around. No diaper. No diaper? No Diaper! "We forgot to get diapers!" I wail as Nicky thrashes around like a hooked trout. Valentine the dog, who has been watching our antics with some mild curiosity, catches the tone in my voice and immediately disappears. I hear some flailing in the bedroom and shortly thereafter my husband appears, struggling into a tatty pair of shorts he's fetched from somewhere, cursing steadily under his breath as he heads for the garage. It's only after the garage door crashes shut again that I remember that those shorts were in the trash because of a big hole in the seat. I am left with the problem of what to do with a bare-bottomed kid until he returns from the diaper-fetching mission. A couple of days before, Nicky had picked up some kind of gut bug that offered no symptoms except for about five truly horrifying diapers a day. These are the kind of diapers that make our childless male friends start investigating immediate vasectomies, the kind of diapers that require a good three-hour airing out of the house when removed. Then Nicky suddenly stops wailing, looks at me intently, and his face turns bright red. "Oh no," I say and witlessly pick him up, thinking, towel! Towel. I race to the linen closet, where there are no towels because I have been putting off doing the laundry. I race into our bedroom and put Nicky down on the floor while I dig frantically through the hampers. I triumphantly fish an aged bath towel out and turn around only to see Nicky beaming beautifully up at me from the floor, where it is obviously a little too late for the towel. I clean up the mess and hose off the baby and we go off to have our breakfast. There is no coffee. I am standing stupidly at the counter, bewailing my fate, when my husband returns from the store bearing an enormous pack of diapers and a poisonous expression. "There's a big hole in these shorts," he says slowly and clearly. "I only noticed it in the frozen food department because I felt this breeze." He places the diapers on the table and walks with rigid dignity into the back bedroom, where he remains for the next two hours, incommunicado. I make myself some tea and sit down to try to read the paper to the cheerful piping of the television, with Barney tikes reminding me in song to "Turn the water off." The water. The yard! I've been forgetting to water the front yard. I fly outside to hook up the sprinkler, and when I turn the water on (thinking, "Take that, Barney"), the sprinkler spins around in circles and then enthusiastically begins watering the street. Fiddling with those little metal tab thingies in order to fix it, I give the sprinkler a yank, which causes the hose to detach and shoot water at hurricane force right up my nose. I retreat into the house, where Nicky points at me, dripping wet, and starts screaming. My husband chooses to reemerge from the bedroom, dressed for work, at this moment. He takes one look at me, the hysterical baby and the growing puddle of water on the floor, and says, "I am so out of here." There is a respite after that, but need I say it won't last. After a too-short nap that leaves Nicky crankier than he'd been in the morning, we go off to the grocery store. Nicky promptly throws a tantrum when I won't let him play with the insecticides and expresses his rage by throwing yogurt containers out of the cart. (Incidentally, yogurt containers explode like little bombs when dropped.) And when we return home to play in the backyard, I notice, as I am sitting minding my own business on the step, that there is this awful smell right around here. Standing up, I discover that in our absence our dog has stepped into something unspeakable of her own making and tracked it up onto the step where I have been sitting. I change my jeans and mop the floors and change the baby and feed the baby and feed my cats and collapse on the sofa thinking that maybe I could watch the news, when I hear a very soft but utterly unmistakable barfing sound from behind the love seat. The cat! Now, I know the routine because as far as I'm concerned I am the 1997 All-California Barfing-Cat-Toss Champion. I grab the heaving cat and whirl around to put it in the garage, where the damage will be minimized, when the garage door opens with its usual roar and my husband starts to pull the car in. Upon seeing this, the cat, who is already in some distress, throws up all over the love seat, the area rug and the floor that I have just mopped at great personal effort. My husband is in the door. Seeing this, he says helpfully, "Maybe next time you should work on accuracy as well as distance." I come to my senses a little later, after throwing only about half his
clothes out the door in Hefty bags.
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