The Stud Book by Monica Drake

Author:Monica Drake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Satire, Contemporary Women, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307955531
Publisher: Hogarth
Published: 2013-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Georgie flossed her teeth in the upstairs bathroom and when Bella started crying in the next room over, she paused, a white line of dental tape still laced around her fingers. It was almost midnight. She could see Humble in bed, reflected in the slice of bathroom mirror, framed by the open door. He was watching a cop show on TV.

He said, “Did you fill out the life insurance papers?”

Ah, crumb! Again. She didn’t want to think about ever dying, about leaving her daughter, leaving this world. Georgie stopped flossing long enough to say, “I’ll get to it in the morning.”

“Get to it? What do you do all day?”

The baby monitor was on her side of the bed, where it cranked up the volume of Bella’s crying and brought it out in stereo like they had unhappy twins, one in each room, one a little more electronic than the other. Humble didn’t let on that he even heard it. He had a beer on his side of the bed. Bella kept up the howl. The heartbeat of the white noise machine, with its steady thump-thump, seeped through the monitor, too. Georgie dropped her floss in the wastebasket.

This was the first night they’d moved Bella to her own room. She was a tiny baby on a raft of cushions on a big, flat mattress in a lovely maple crib.

Georgie walked into the bedroom, ready to sink into bed, but couldn’t relax as long as Bella was crying.

With his eyes still on the TV, Humble leaned over and clicked the monitor off. The heartbeat and the baby’s cry were muffled but fought their way through the walls.

“Should we check on her?”

Humble said, “She’ll get herself to sleep.”

Georgie felt the baby’s cry crawl through her body in a steady low-voltage electricity that powered a nearly constant tension in her neck. The heartbeat matched her own. “If we let her cry, we’re teaching her that we don’t listen.”

Humble said, “That worked for my parents.”

“You think your mom listens to you, even now?” Humble’s mom was present only as an absence, a grandmother who made no promises.

Bella coughed, a choking little baby cough. It was a whole drama going on in the next room.

Georgie said, “We’re teaching her she can’t affect her environment. We’re teaching powerlessness.”

Humble reached for his beer and took a sip.

“If I bring her in here, we can turn the heartbeat off,” she negotiated. The baby would hear Georgie’s heartbeat through her chest. They’d sleep that close together.

Humble put his beer bottle down. He said, “I can’t sleep with her in the bed.”

With that bottle, and his bed, Georgie saw him then as a grown baby. This is how his mother raised him: a crib and a bottle.

He was a tired baby, his eyes ringed with exhaustion.

But to let Bella cry, alone like that, even though she was only one room over, was to Georgie like leaving her on the side of the road, lost in a vast world.

Georgie went to check on her.

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