masthead on her ship of discovery. Dan would look across the table at her and smile, although she realized at one point that the lunches he was taking to work were becoming increasingly bland—yogurt and bananas, a bottle of Tums. It was, in a way, a relief to both of them when Tyler was born and the doctor told her to cut back on the spices as they might give Tyler colic. It was easier to slide into the world of white—milk, blankets, clouds.
CAUGHT UP as she was in her own internal travels, it hadn’t bothered Sara that her twin brother had taken off after college with a backpack and a startlingly small amount of money, a one-way ticket to Asia in hand. Henry’s letters had taken forever to get to her, often arriving when he was already in the next country. Word pictures distilled on whispery airmail paper—a faded red temple, standing in the middle of a lake like a ghost; two-thousand-year-old rice terraces, their boundaries irregular and sinuous, cascading their way down a slope; a stone Buddha so large Henry said he could have slept in its outstretched hand; yellow ginkgo leaves against stone steps. Sara saw his life in snapshots, like walking past open doors of hotel rooms and catching an image before the door closed again.
She couldn’t write back, Henry already gone by the time she knew where he was. She didn’t know what she would have written anyway, how to describe her life, the lush, stationary physicality of motherhood. The only way to understand would be to hold it in your arms.
SARA AND DAN’S TWINS had been, quite frankly, a surprise, both their conception and the abundance of it. Tyler had just turned five; Dan was moving steadily up the ladder in the architecture firm. All of a sudden, life was crowded—their house too small, their hands too few.
But after Hillary and Max had been born, she could never have imagined sending them back. Even in the chaos of the move to the new, larger house—the ridiculous timing of it all, the babies too early and barely a week old, the cloth diapers accidentally packed in some box they would find years later when Hillary and Max were entering kindergarten—there had been the excitement of the new and different. She could almost pretend she was traveling.
She wondered sometimes, though, what she would have done without the women who entered her life during that time. Marion, Dan’s boss’s wife, setting up a baby-holding circle and introducing her to Kate and Caroline and Daria. And then there was Hadley, Sara’s next-door neighbor, who had walked across the lawn and into Sara’s living room that morning not long after Sara moved in, gently taking one of the babies into her arms when Sara had in her exhaustion completely forgotten she was holding two. The way, after that day, Hadley would often come over at five in the evening—witching hour, they called it—and create a pasta sauce for dinner or entertain a baby, the afternoons she would take Tyler to the bookstore to find a new book, or for a walk around the neighborhood. Hadley felt like family to Sara, someone who knew what she needed without her saying a word. It was, Sara thought, just a bit like having Henry back.
TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything—at which point, the process would start all over.
An afternoon came when Max and Hillary were almost one year old, Tyler closing in on six. Sara had finally gotten the twins down for their nap and had been reading to Tyler from Gulliver’s Travels, while Tyler made stunningly complicated constructions from his Legos on the floor in front of her. Tyler loved Gulliver’s Travels, the idea of a big, strapping man suddenly overwhelmed by small people, then turning into a small man surrounded by big people. For an
CAUGHT UP as she was in her own internal travels, it hadn’t bothered Sara that her twin brother had taken off after college with a backpack and a startlingly small amount of money, a one-way ticket to Asia in hand. Henry’s letters had taken forever to get to her, often arriving when he was already in the next country. Word pictures distilled on whispery airmail paper—a faded red temple, standing in the middle of a lake like a ghost; two-thousand-year-old rice terraces, their boundaries irregular and sinuous, cascading their way down a slope; a stone Buddha so large Henry said he could have slept in its outstretched hand; yellow ginkgo leaves against stone steps. Sara saw his life in snapshots, like walking past open doors of hotel rooms and catching an image before the door closed again.
She couldn’t write back, Henry already gone by the time she knew where he was. She didn’t know what she would have written anyway, how to describe her life, the lush, stationary physicality of motherhood. The only way to understand would be to hold it in your arms.
SARA AND DAN’S TWINS had been, quite frankly, a surprise, both their conception and the abundance of it. Tyler had just turned five; Dan was moving steadily up the ladder in the architecture firm. All of a sudden, life was crowded—their house too small, their hands too few.
But after Hillary and Max had been born, she could never have imagined sending them back. Even in the chaos of the move to the new, larger house—the ridiculous timing of it all, the babies too early and barely a week old, the cloth diapers accidentally packed in some box they would find years later when Hillary and Max were entering kindergarten—there had been the excitement of the new and different. She could almost pretend she was traveling.
She wondered sometimes, though, what she would have done without the women who entered her life during that time. Marion, Dan’s boss’s wife, setting up a baby-holding circle and introducing her to Kate and Caroline and Daria. And then there was Hadley, Sara’s next-door neighbor, who had walked across the lawn and into Sara’s living room that morning not long after Sara moved in, gently taking one of the babies into her arms when Sara had in her exhaustion completely forgotten she was holding two. The way, after that day, Hadley would often come over at five in the evening—witching hour, they called it—and create a pasta sauce for dinner or entertain a baby, the afternoons she would take Tyler to the bookstore to find a new book, or for a walk around the neighborhood. Hadley felt like family to Sara, someone who knew what she needed without her saying a word. It was, Sara thought, just a bit like having Henry back.
TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything—at which point, the process would start all over.
An afternoon came when Max and Hillary were almost one year old, Tyler closing in on six. Sara had finally gotten the twins down for their nap and had been reading to Tyler from Gulliver’s Travels, while Tyler made stunningly complicated constructions from his Legos on the floor in front of her. Tyler loved Gulliver’s Travels, the idea of a big, strapping man suddenly overwhelmed by small people, then turning into a small man surrounded by big people. For an
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