Read Online Broadway Baby by Alan Shapiro - Free Book Online

baby on the couch in the living room. But nothing worked. It was one a.m. and the baby was crying; the baby was crying at two a.m., at three, at four, when Curly got up and dressed. As he left, he kissed Miriam on the cheek and said that if the crying continued she should maybe call the doctor. Big help he is. Now it was just her and the wailing baby in the new apartment they moved to when they found out she was pregnant. One moment she was scared that something was really wrong; the next moment she was frustrated, then angry, then thinking she should slam the baby’s head against the wall and at least then she’d know why she was crying.
    It wasn’t till nine a.m. that the baby went back to sleep. Julie, Miriam told herself, as she lay down at last, we’ll call her Julie.
    R IGHT FROM THE start, Julie was a quiet child and (Miriam had to admit it) a little standoffish. And three years later, when Ethan, the moody redhead, came along, with his tantrums and his attention-grabbing ways (weren’t his first words “me” and “mine”?), Julie grew even more withdrawn and cooler. Oh, she had friends, lots of friends, and the little girl she turned into when her friends were over—affectionate, talka­tive, eager to please—bore no resemblance to the girl she was at home with just the family. Aloof, not contrary, Julie would shrug and mumble, “I guess,” whenever Miriam would ask her if she wanted to play a board game or cook together. But it was never fun because the girl just sleepwalked through the play. It was as if she agreed to almost anything Miriam proposed so as not to disappoint her mother. And yet the more Miriam tried to keep her interested, the more distant the girl became. Sometimes she found herself begging Julie to get more involved, to pay attention. “Come on Julie,” she’d say, “play with me, like this, come on, it’s fun.” But Julie would just look at her as if Miriam were the child, the needy one, begging for attention, and Julie the too-busy mother.
    So Miriam backed off. She learned to admire Julie’s self-possession, her focus. She came to appreciate, if not entirely enjoy, seeing Julie, often for hours at a time, on the floor of her room with all her books spread out before her, so engrossed in reading, happily in a world of her own. Th at self-sufficiency, though, drove her little brother crazy. Ethan always wanted Julie to play with him, or at least watch him play with his truck or his toy soldiers, and when she wouldn’t so much as look up from the book, he’d pinch or poke her, and when that didn’t work he’d hurl himself into her lap, getting between her and the book, and say, like Th umper in Bambi, “Whatcha doin’?” She’d finally cry out, “Leave me alone,” and run to her room and slam the door. After a while, he stopped asking her to play and went straight for the poking and pinching, just to annoy her.
    “Honey, you’re gonna ruin your eyes, the way you read so much,” Miriam would say, or “Play with your brother for a change,” but Julie just ignored her and kept reading. It scared Miriam how much Julie read, though she bragged to her friends and family all the time about what a reader her daughter was, a brilliant girl, a real professor.
    But then with Sam, “the baby,” Julie, six years old now, was completely different. Julie couldn’t leave Sam alone. Miriam would find her sometimes in the middle of the night at Sam’s crib, fussing with his little blanket, or just looking at him. She wanted to hold him, be the one to give him the bottle, or change his diaper, or just play with him for hours on the floor. Sometimes, in the morning, or at bedtime, while Miriam sat with Sam in the big rocking chair beside his crib, Julie would get into her lap, and then Ethan, who couldn’t bear to miss out on anything, would climb up, too, and with Julie holding the bottle for Sam, and Ethan sucking his thumb, the four of them would rock together while Miriam sang