“Baby in a glue trap,” says Sam, the oldest, as he steps out the kitchen door, down the back steps and onto the driveway.
He doesn’t close the door behind him so the autumn evening chill blows in. It’s soccer season, fifth among Sarah’s most despised seasons. (The first, hands down, is Halloween. Ice Hockey is number two. There are others.)
Sarah looks up from the sink filled with sippy cups and suds and, out the kitchen window, watches Sam step into the waiting minivan of Amelia, pretty Amelia. Sarah likes her smile and the way she rocks back on the sidelines, steaming chai tea in her travel mug, as the soccer players soccer around the field. Sarah feels good around Amelia. Around Amelia, she does not feel judged or lesser than.
Sarah turns off the faucet and watches Amelia’s minivan disappear down the street with Sam in it. She does feel it all disappearing some days. She was an English major at Vassar, and she still gets the poetry feeling, that tickling, airy sensation in the pit of her stomach and on the tender spots of her skin.
Stepping toward the open door, she finally registers what Sam has just said.
Baby in a glue trap.
Recently there has been an invasion of chipmunks. Sometimes they are outside. Sometimes they are inside. Derek is generally the one who takes care of such things, but Sarah is not squeamish. She will shoo them out with a broom. She will dispose of the terrified critter frozen in place, paws gnawed but unbreakably locked on the pad of glue.
The babies. There are two. Twins, eight months old. Jack and Ben after their great-grandfathers. (With five children, Sarah and Derek have run out of the obvious namesakes.) Rebecca, the twelve-year-old, is on baby duty as part of her allowance. She treats her work as seriously as a lifeguard, meaning seriously, but also not seriously enough.
“Rebecca!” Walking out of the kitchen, Sarah grabs a dingy dishrag from the counter and dries her hands. She doesn’t panic. There’s nothing to panic about. Five kids, a house like a collection of aged wood and kindling, a financial landscape bleak as a Cleveland February—these things have taught her the limited utility of panic. She will later tell Derek that she knew immediately what she’d find under the family room’s side table, which on its surface is true, but how could she really understand what was coming?
The family room has been converted into a toppled warehouse of choking hazards, the hard angles of toys and game pieces covering the ground like the opposite of twigs and leaves. Sarah steps in and scans. “Jesus, Rebecca! You can’t leave all of these toys out! The boys will chew on these things. You know that! Where are you?”
Rebecca appears at the top of the steps, wearing her pajamas. Of all of life’s pleasures, Rebecca likes sleep the most and so changes into her sleeping clothes as soon as she gets home from school. “Calm down, Mom. I was in the bathroom.”
“The babies. Where are the babies?”
“I left for, like, four seconds. They were playing.”
Stevie, the third of the five, wanders in from the kitchen. He’s been outside, collecting rocks it appears. He is eight, and he cradles a pile of what appears to be dead chipmunks before Sarah realizes it’s actually a collection of muddy stones. She also sees that, like his older brother, he has not closed the door behind him. October cold mixes with the room’s stale air.
“Jesus, Stevie. You know you can’t bring the outside in. Outside things stay—” Her breath catches because she sees a flash of flesh on the floor. Two flashes really. She bends down and peers under the side table where she finds the kicking feet of an otherwise still and content baby.
At Vassar, Sarah once gave thought to sleeping with her Art History professor, a rugged man named Arthur Simmons who was covered in fur rather than hair, fur that his rolled-up sleeves and V-neck undershirts exposed casually and exotically. She felt herself soften whenever he was near and would lose herself during his lectures on the Renaissance as she pictured their affair and then their marriage and then their life on the bluffs of Tuscany, a braless, workless life filled with grapes and sun and oil paint and wild fights and then the fucking on countertops and beneath marble statues, beautiful marble people frozen in time, their hands cupping crowns and oranges.
She never did much more than imagine this life, though. She did well in the course, earning an A- on the final exam.
Sarah pulls on the baby’s foot and slides him from under the side table. He wears a white onesie with the ghost stain of pureed peas. He also wears a moderately full diaper. It is Ben, the more adventurous of the twins. He is generally a happy baby with a rolling laugh. At this moment, though, his face is serious and perplexed because one of his wrists is stuck to a tray of glue. It is a rectangle roughly the size of an ice cube tray. It covers Ben’s arm from the bend of his wrist to the bend of his elbow.
“For fuck’s sake.” Sarah exhales, sliding her hands into Ben’s armpits. “How did you even get to this thing? We hide them so you can’t reach them!” The baby doesn’t respond. “You guys, find Jack now!” She is not panicking. She bites the inside of her cheek to push it all back, and suddenly she feels calm. A baby in a glue trap. Who hasn’t had one of those?
It is Stevie who finds the other baby underneath the curtains and on his back, gnawing on a wooden block.
“Got him!” Stevie shouts. He deposits his armload of wet rocks on the couch before picking up his brother. She does not react. What is there to react to?
“To the bathroom!” she commands. “Now! Everyone! Don’t stop.”
Rebecca steps toward her. “Is he okay? It wasn’t my fault.” For an instant, Sarah sees a woman in her daughter’s face, the lines on her forehead, the defensive flare of her nostrils. Some days, Sarah wants that, wants them all to be older so that she can breathe again, but she stops herself. She’s heard too many women at grocery stores and in line at the pharmacy gush over her five kids. She hears in these women’s voices the bare landscape of childlessness, and, though the political implication slays her in some ways, in other ways she understands their mourning. She understands it intimately.
Still, now, with a baby in a glue trap, and three others trailing her up the stairs, she wonders what it will feel like when they are all gone, gone, gone. What kind of couch will she own? What kind of silence will greet her in the evenings as she waits for Derek to return home?
The adhesive in the most popular and affordable glue traps is derived from mineral oils, resins, and synthetic rubber. The major pest control conglomerates then lace this substance with rodent-attracting flavors to lure rats, mice, and chipmunks. In college Sarah would have found these traps cruel and indiscriminate and, likely, would have seen them as an elaborate metaphor about men or capitalism or her relationship with her own mother or even God —but now, there is no metaphor here, only the industry’s most effective viscous adherent, the color of semen, the consistency of deeply chewed gum.
“Goddamn it,” she mutters. She holds Ben by his armpits with both her arms fully extended like she would hold a cat she’d found on her front porch. She hates cats. She hates how her culture has told her that she must find them adorable companions. “Fuck that,” she told her college roommate Missy. “I fucking hate cats.”
Sarah does not hate Ben, of course, but she does hate Missy, or at least her voice. Sometimes she mistakes it for her own—or maybe vice versa. She cannot tell.
She also hates being the one who must clean everything up. Derek is gone but not absent, which, she’s come to think, makes it even harder because she has no foil, no enemy. He loves her and the kids. He sacrifices for them all. Without a hint of complaint or exhaustion, he cleans the house every Saturday. He is a generous lover, sometimes going down on her in the morning before she’s showered and not even expecting anything in return. “I got the feeling you needed that,” he says to her as he slides back up, her fingers still clutching his scalp. Sarah does not hate Derek or the children. But she hates this. She has begun to worry that she hates herself too.
She’s made it up the stairs and stands in front of the open bathroom door. She gazes upon the foul and filthy closet-sized room where her children purportedly clean themselves. “Everybody in,” she commands. “Rebecca, go get my cell phone first. It’s in the bedroom.”
Rebecca does as she’s told. Sarah can see that Rebecca has absorbed the significance of this moment perhaps more than she herself has. She feels it rising now and so sucks in a quick breath and steps into the bathroom with Stevie following, the other baby, Jack, sideways in his arms like a load of firewood.
According to the poison control hotline, there are no specific treatments for a baby in a glue trap. The man who picks up is remarkably nonplussed. “No problem, Ma’am,” he says. “Let me look up what we know. You just stay calm. We’ll get through this together.”
Sarah nods. Ben is in her lap. The plastic tray pokes her stomach, which is not a firm stomach, but it’s not a bag of uncooked dough either. Around her are the other kids. Rebecca has Jack now. Stevie sits Indian style—Criss-Cross-Apple-Sauce, she corrects herself—in the corner, tracing his finger in the grout surrounding the floor’s square tiles. He is lost in his imagination, and the others are calm, which makes Sarah release a sound she hasn’t heard herself make before. Maybe it’s okay, she thinks. Why am I okay?
The fluty music on the other end of the phone stops. “Well, Ma’am, it looks like these guys keep their trade secrets to themselves. That’s okay, though. We looked up what we know, and we’re going to treat this like we’d treat any other adhesive situation.” He pauses. “How’s the kid doing?”
Sarah realizes that she needs to call Derek. First, though, this man needs to finish. “He’s fine,” Sarah says. “Now what do I do?”
“Run a warm bath with gentle soap, perhaps a dish soap without perfumes and whatnot. Let it soak. And then it looks like you can use some vegetable oil, like a canola oil or perhaps a corn oil, and slather the kid up. Go slowly, Ma’am. Don’t start pulling too hard. Eventually, it should release.”
“Release?”
“You’ll have to pull a bit of course. But slowly, Ma’am. You can always take the child to the emergency room as well.”
Her body emits a groan. She knows this is true, but she can’t envision it. Not yet. A baby in a glue trap. It just confirms too much.
“Thank you,” she says and hangs up. She realizes that the bathroom is silent, which she appreciates. She really does have wonderful children. She holds her breath for a moment, just a moment, then leans back and reaches for the faucet on the bathtub. The lunge makes her lose her balance slightly. Beneath her, Ben instinctively clutches her as the room fills with the sound of flowing water.
When they were babies and before the twins arrived, Sarah used to place the three oldest kids in the tub at the same time: Sam, Rebecca, and Stevie. Downstairs in the basement are photo albums with picture after picture of kids in the bath, three kids with gleaming, goofy smiles and bodies covered with suds. Once they were scrubbed and shampooed, Sarah would sit with her back against the wall and let them play, a mug of Chardonnay at her side. Almost always, she would imagine them older, but sometimes she would also imagine all of it catching up to her, and so they were sick or hurt, arms in a sling, heads shaved, IV drips worming into the veins on the top of their hands. More than once Derek walked into the bathroom, arms filled with towels to help with the drying, only to find Sarah seated on the floor, red-nosed and quietly crying with her three giggling children in front of her.
Now, there is only one kid in the tub, Ben, and he bangs the water with his arm’s new appendage. He is not panicking. He seems curious about his arm, though. He stares at it intensely while he splashes.
“Can I go to my room?”
Sarah swivels toward Stevie. “No,” she says. “No one leaves the bathroom until this is over.”
“How long will that be?” His voice pinches, and his eyes narrow.
“I don’t know. This is all new to me.”
“But I’m bored.”
“Listen,” Sarah snaps. “Your brother is having a much worse day than you, and he’s making it work.”
“He’s a baby. He doesn’t know anything.”
The first thought that comes to her is Well, who does? But she bites down on it. She doesn’t like to use sarcasm with her kids. “Well, he knows he shouldn’t have a third arm.”
“When do we do the oil?” Rebecca asks. She’s the one who had zipped downstairs and found the dish soap from the kitchen counter and pulled the family-sized jug of vegetable oil from the bottom of the pantry. Sarah sometimes jokes to her friends that her daughter has the middle-child compliance that will make her a valued sorority sister and a thirty-five-year-old divorcée. Now, though, Rebecca’s constitution is perfect. It’s ideal. It’s exactly what is needed.
“Oh no!” That’s Stevie who no longer sounds bored. He’s pointing at the bathtub. “He pooped!”
“For fuck’s sake!”
In one practiced swoop, Sarah plucks Ben out of the tub and holds him in front of her like a child sacrifice. “Towel!” she shouts, and Rebecca stands up immediately and pulls a damp towel from the hook on the back of the door. Before she swaddles her son, she checks to make sure he is done relieving himself, which he isn’t. Sarah feels a surge of adrenaline and exhaustion, and the smell begins to bloom just as Ben, shivering and naked, begins to wail.
Sarah took Biology in high school, so she knows that the skin is the human body’s largest organ. She remembers Mr. Hoffman making the class stand in a circle to demonstrate how much space the epidermis would fill: twenty square feet. Sarah thought it was nonsensical and misleading on Mr. Hoffman’s part to stand in a circle rather than a square, which is why more than two decades later, she can remember this detail and relay it to Stevie, who is now riveted by the action in the bathroom.
Ben’s cries fill the air, but Stevie doesn’t seem to notice. He is instead fascinated with how the tray of the glue trap pulls on Ben’s skin as Sarah tests whether it seems looser after the bath. It does, in fact, seem like it’s getting looser, but not much.
Sarah shouts the facts about the human skin just so Stevie can hear over the baby’s cries. The shouting also distracts him from looking back at the floater in the tub. She knows he wants to get on his knees and stare at it, and that repulses her, not because she’s squeamish—she has five children—but because it suddenly seems to mean something, to say something about her as a mother, which is absurd, she tells herself in the moment, but still.
“So your skin is like a heart?” Stevie asks, his eyes wide. The whole world is like this for Stevie.
Rebecca cups Sarah’s elbow. “Mom, what are we going to do?”
“Let’s try the oil.” Sarah’s mouth is dry. She’s beginning to panic.
“Should we call Daddy?”
Sarah shakes her head more vigorously than what’s called for, but the reaction is instinctive and total. She’s realized that she does not want to call her husband after all. Not yet. Rebecca does not protest. Instead she sets Jack on the ground and grabs the jug of oil. She twists the lid off and looks up at Sarah with doubtful eyes.
Sarah buys staples like vegetable oil at Costco, but she doesn’t talk about it like some of the other middle-aged people she knows. She doesn’t share information about the size and quality of their salmon fillets or reveal the secret that March is the best time to buy their home electronics or go on and on about the speed of their oil changes and tire rotations. All of that talk turns her stomach. It makes her feel lost. It makes her feel dead.
That said, she does appreciate the liberation of buying in bulk because, within an hour or two, she’s able to complete the transactions that seem to occupy other people’s whole lives.
Sarah can’t remember when she bought the two-and-a-half gallon jug of vegetable oil or how much she spent on it, but in this moment it settles her because the plastic bottle is so large that it doesn’t seem possible for it to ever run empty. Ben squirms in her lap and continues to wail. His face is swollen now with tears and snot. She tries to soothe him while Rebecca does the same for baby Jack, who has begun to whimper too. “It’s okay, bunny gooses,” Rebecca says. “It’s okay.”
Sarah also can’t remember when she invented the phrase “bunny goose” to express affection for her children, but it’s stuck.
The vegetable oil comes out faster than Sarah expects and spills down Ben’s arm and onto her jeans and then the tile floor. Ben begins to shake his arm wildly, spraying oil across Sarah’s face. “Jesus,” she blurts and then grabs the baby’s arm to stop him. She squeezes. From the look on his face, she may be squeezing too hard.
It takes a few seconds of soothing, but eventually Ben calms down enough to let Sarah test the trap again. She pulls lightly, lifting the skin of his forearm with it, like lifting a shoe that’s just stepped in a wad of gum. But then she senses just the slightest release. Ben yelps then cries.
“You’re hurting him!” shouts Rebecca.
“It’s okay,” she says and stops with the pulling. She lifts the oil jug again. “Scissors. I need scissors.”
“For what?” Rebecca sounds alarmed and full of judgment.
“Just get me the goddamned scissors, okay?”
Sarah is crushed when she sees what her voice has done to her daughter. She feels the urge to apologize, but before she can, Rebecca has done what she’s been told. She is up and out the door, and all Sarah can think about is what Daisy Buchanan said about her daughter in The Great Gatsby. She can’t remember the precise words but it was something about hoping her baby girl grows up to be a fool just like her.
At Vassar, Missy Gallagher was Sarah’s freshman year roommate. She was from Dallas and had the flaxen hair of a miniature horse that, as a child, Sarah once rode and fell in love with at a pumpkin-picking farm. Missy Gallagher said things like: “Oh, Sar! I love that blouse! Can I help you iron it?” and “Your mother is just adorable. I just can’t see why you’re so angry with her.” She was a round, often unpretty cloud of doubt and judgment that followed Sarah around her freshman year and then disappeared as if she were a cloud made not of water and air but of birds, a flock of starlings darting through the sky in one dark mass and then, suddenly, breaking apart in a million black dots.
Missy Gallagher disappeared from Sarah’s life just like that in May of 1990, but her voice had somehow remained. For the last twenty-five years, Missy Gallagher has whispered into Sarah’s ear more than even Sarah allows herself to consider.
Here in the bathroom, Missy Gallagher says, “Sarah, you’re being stubborn! There’s no shame in admitting you’re a fraud and a bitch.” Sarah shakes her head and then lifts the trap so that Ben’s screams fill the room and the strands of glue pull off his skin enough that Sarah can begin to snip the thin strings with the scissors.
“It’s okay,” Sarah soothes fruitlessly. “It’s okay.” Jack is on fire now too, his face narrowed into a soggy fist, and Sarah knows without looking up that Rebecca is watery and anxious as well. They’re in a moment now that they will all remember, she knows. It makes her nauseated, but she has no choice. She lifts harder, exposing a jungle of glue vines. She snips and then snips again.
Missy Gallagher has an opinion about Sarah’s choices, but thankfully Sarah can’t really hear it because the room is a jet engine of noise and echoes. Even Stevie has joined in. “Momma, you’re hurting him!”
It’s almost done when the lights flick off and on, off and on, and Sarah turns to see Derek and Sam, standing sweaty in the doorway, their faces shocked and curious.
“Someone shit in the bathtub!” Sam says. He’s recently started swearing. He’s fourteen. Other things will soon change too, Sarah knows.
“Jesus, Sarah, what happened?” Derek’s face slides into disbelief. “Why are you covered with oil?”
She is crying herself now, and she closes her eyes for a long time. The room quiets. When she opens them again, Derek is ushering the parade of her family out of the bathroom until all the noise in the room belongs to the boy in her arms and her own pounding heart.
She looks back down, and Ben’s arm is almost entirely exposed now, a red, pulsing landscape of hurt. She lifts the tray and cuts the final strings.