“Stop. Amara,” Claire said, grabbing her hand. “Don’t freak out. Your baby will be fine. I’m already pretty sure I don’t want to have kids anyway, so if he screams for the next three hours, it’ll just reinforce my life choices. You are going to have a nice date with Daniel and rekindle your spark or whatever and be really glad you went. Okay?”
Amara pursed her lips and let out a breath from her nose. “Okay,” she said, squeezing Claire’s hand. “Thank you, Claire.” She kissed the top of Charlie’s head, then turned to go, pausing at the doorway. “Hey. I’m glad we’re friends.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, blushing. “I am too.”
Amara whooshed out. Immediately, Charlie began wailing even louder, staring at Claire as if she’d kidnapped him.
“Um,” she said, then cleared her throat and began to sing. “A B C D E F G.” No dice. Maybe he needed some bouncing? Babies liked that. She picked him up, and he squirmed in her arms as she continued the song, pacing the room. She’d walked from the subway to Amara’s that night with a confident strut. Charlie always seemed to quiet down during music time at playgroup, which meant she’d be able to work some kind of magic trick as his babysitter. She’d be able to sing him to sleep no problem. She’d been delusional. She glanced at the dinosaur clock, where smiling T. rexes frolicked with pterodactyls. Ten minutes had gone by, but they’d felt like an hour.
And then Charlie let out the largest, wettest fart she’d ever heard. Immediately, a stench straight out of a nightmare pervaded the room. As she let out a yelp of disgust, Charlie gave a gurgle and then a devilish smile.
“Was that what this was all about, you little jerk?” she asked. “You just had to fart?”
But within seconds, his face collapsed back into tears. Apparently a fart was not what it was all about. The stench lingered. She had to go into the diaper zone.
She pulled out her phone and typed how to change a diaper into YouTube, clicking on the first video that came up. A plump, smiling woman cuddled her baby, talking into the camera. “I quickly realized,” she said, “that diaper time could be bonding time. Talk to your baby while you’re changing his diaper, maybe even tell him a story, and it can be fun and healthy for both of you.” The woman went through a series of easy enough seeming motions to the soundtrack of an Enya song, while her baby stared at her adoringly. Claire closed out of the video and laid Charlie on his changing table.
“Okay,” she said to him as he wriggled and knocked a bottle of hand sanitizer off the table. “Let’s do this.” She unsnapped his onesie and grabbed the sticky tabs on his diaper, then took a deep breath in through her mouth. Moment of truth.
Ugh, she thought when she opened up the diaper. It was everywhere. How could Charlie’s tiny body even contain this much waste? Had he been saving it up for weeks in anticipation of that night? This was worse than she’d ever imagined a baby could produce, like a sizzling shit tornado had blown through his diaper and decimated everything in its path.
She stared at him in horror, then bent down to grab the hand sanitizer off the floor. She’d be needing it. By the time she popped back up again, a still-wailing Charlie had stuck his fists into his own mess and rolled over, smearing it all over the changing table, the wall, and his onesie as if he fancied himself some experimental artist, like Julianne Moore on the pulleys in The Big Lebowski.
“Gah, no!” Claire screamed, bubbles of panic rising up in her stomach, and grabbed onto Charlie before he could paint the rest of the room with his poop. Of course, that meant he simply swiped streaks of it down her arms instead. “Why?” she asked. In response, he grabbed a strand of her hair. “Perfect,” she said. “I was thinking of shaving my head anyway.”
She pressed her hand onto his chest to hold him steady on the changing table and leaned back as far away from him as she could. “Calm down, Charlie Craplin,” she said, gritting her teeth, wishing for a gas mask and a burning-hot shower. “You’ve made your point.” She studied the scene and tried to remember what she was supposed to do. Rewatching the diaper-changing video would only contaminate her phone. She’d have to do the best she could with what she remembered. “Once upon a time,” she said, as she reached for a diaper wipe and began the process of cleaning him off, “there was a little bundle of chaos who decided that he was going to take over the world.” God, there were so many crannies in baby skin that could get disgusting. She reached for another diaper wipe with one hand, holding Charlie’s tiny, velvety feet in the air with the other. Distractedly, she registered that his dimpled toes really were perfect. “He was ruthless and stinky and okay, yes, kind of cute.” His cries began to subside with her story until he was letting out only the smallest of whimpers. Finally, five diaper wipes later, he seemed clean enough, so she bundled the trash away (the onesie appeared beyond repair so she put it in the trash too—Sorry, Amara, she thought, hoping it hadn’t had sentimental value) and pulled a fresh diaper from the pack.
“So sometimes he won his battles for control,” Claire continued as she slid the new diaper on Charlie’s body and checked that it was facing the right way. “But sometimes,” she said, as she pressed the fastening flaps into their proper positions, “his opponents did okay too.”
Charlie let out a little contented sigh and smiled up at her with the purest, sweetest smile she’d ever seen. Dammit, this was how they got you. She shook her head at him—he wasn’t going to fool her—slid on a onesie that wasn’t spotted with poop, then lifted him gingerly and carried him to his crib. He grabbed onto a stuffed lamb, its fur matted from repeated gnawing, and curled up.
While she sang Beatles songs in her most calming manner, she scrubbed off as much of the mess from the wall as she could manage with the cleaning supplies by the changing table, then squirted half a bottle’s worth of hand sanitizer onto her fingers. Satisfied, she snuck a glance at Charlie. His eyelids were drawing ever closer together. Claire grabbed the baby monitor, backed out of the room with all the stealth of a Navy SEAL, and then listened at the door for a minute. Oh, thank God. Glorious, glorious silence. She started to slump against the door, then remembered just in time that Charlie had turned her into a biohazard.
Her hands were clean enough, thanks to the hand sanitizer, so, following Amara’s admonition to help herself to anything, she power-walked to the kitchen and took a quick slug of high-quality Scotch as a reward for surviving that (literal) shit storm. Then she headed for Amara’s bathroom. It was a little weird to use Amara’s shower without asking her, but better to do that than to interrupt a romantic date night with the news that she was currently wandering around their apartment covered in shit. So, very carefully, she stripped off her clothes.
The whole bathroom was beautiful, with slate gray walls and clean white tile. In particular, Amara’s glass-enclosed shower was a dream. Claire’s own showerhead spat out water at irregular intervals and temperatures, but Amara’s copper one released a steady warm rain. Claire scrubbed and scrubbed with a bar of some organic soap that smelled like oatmeal, humming a new melody that had been flitting around her head recently, until the water streaming off her came out clear and her shoulders loosened in relaxation. It was like going to a spa. Luxurious. She could have stayed in the shower forever, using up New York City’s entire water supply, until the Hudson River (or wherever the city’s water came from) became a mere trickle, and the citizens of NYC tarred and feathered her for being an environmental menace.