The wet nurse milks the meadow vipers with more care than she suckles the infant.
Every day at dawn, under the watch of Venus, she takes the heater’s iron grate from the nursery’s wall, removes the vipers in their glass terrarium from the shaft, and sets the terrarium on the high-gloss hardwood floor. The vial, sanitized and sealed with plastic film, sits within reach on the nightstand, next to the baby monitor and cypress-wood bowl. Behind the glass of the terrarium, the meadow vipers flex and weave around each other, their copper eyes and black tongues glint, signaling readiness. From the black-and-tan scaled huddle, she picks a snake—one hand gripping just below the spoon-shaped head, the other hand holding the tail. She then coaxes open the snake’s agitated jaw and presses its tender pink mouth to the plastic film. Its unsheathed fangs puncture the plastic and its venom—neon gold—pools in the vial. After the milking, she feeds the snakes quail eggs then returns the sealed terrarium to the shaft in the nursery wall.
She learned to milk snakes as a child, before everything else. Before the women with badges and cobalt coats took her to be raised right, before being passed from home to home, before her shoulders and hips grew broad, and long before she was impregnated and ultimately left with a heavy stone in her spleen. But she could not recall who taught her to milk snakes. All her memory kept was the smell of larkspur, a pair of tough hands, the squat table cluttered with mortars and pestles, and the purr of an infant mixing with the lilting voice that recited this recipe:
One part venom of the meadow viper, one part mother’s spit, three parts caraway powder, ten parts goat’s milk. Combine in a cypress bowl, stir with a rib bone, drink in one swallow, rest for the length of five lullabies, then nurse.
Had her own child emerged alive, breathing, she would have nursed thusly.
• •
The trip had been planned. The pregnancy had not.
Lil should never have become a mother in the first place—she wasn’t supposed to be able to. There was so much yet for her to achieve, more corporate rungs to climb. Lil was an adamant woman. She was unwavering in her stance that there was no reason to cancel the couple’s vacation she had been awarded for exceeding sales goals and securing a new suite of enterprise clients. It had been a good year, professionally speaking.
“We had a deal, hun,” Greg said, and readjusted the tiny bow clipped in the baby’s mist of translucent hair. He stood next to the newly assembled crib, shirtless, behind him a backdrop of Sandro Botticelli wallpaper—a mural-sized reproduction of The Birth of Venus. Lil looked beyond him into the placid face of Venus, took one of her hands from the nursery’s doorframe and rested it on her sharp hip. A month into motherhood and she had yet to enter the room.
“A deal? No, sweetheart, we came to an agreement. I agreed to have the baby for you so you could ‘achieve your purpose’ as long as I could continue to achieve my purpose without interruption. This vacation is part of my purpose.”
Greg disagreed. As he rocked the baby in his arms and tried to cajole it into drinking from the bottle, he gazed at Lil, who appeared austere in her pinstripe jumpsuit, severely straightened hair like a sheet of ice. She never changed out of her work clothes when she came home from the office.
“I deserve reasons,” he said, while the baby tugged at his graying beard. “Good reasons,” he specified.
“Oh, I’ll give you reasons,” she said. “I’ve earned this. I’ve fucking earned this.” And, “Do I need to remind you who pays the bills, who funds your writing projects, who will be paying the kid’s college tuition?” And, “To be blunt, I don’t trust myself around the baby, just like I didn’t trust myself with the canary. Remember what happened with the canary? My point is, some time away with you could help my state of mind, we could reconnect. Plus, it might ‘awaken your muse’ or whatever.”
Greg breathed deeply, taking in the scent of the baby, his soft bare belly expanded. He relented—he was drawn to the words “reconnect” and “muse,” and he saw the opportunity to establish another agreement.
“How about this. We’ll take the couple’s vacation you earned, hun, and we’ll hire a wet nurse to stay with the baby.”
He had been advocating for a wet nurse the moment the obstetrician declared Lil’s breasts impotent.
“One of the guys in my writing group teaches prenatal yoga—I bet he knows someone. Do we have a deal?”
Lil considered the Return On Investment of hiring a wet nurse for a moment, then nodded.
• •
How many babies had the wet nurse suckled? Tens of babies. Enough to fill a spacious loft in the warehouse district, at least. Lower East Side babies, Queens babies, Upstate babies. The mothers found her appealing in her “folksiness,” as they’d put it. “You’re so authentic. Rustic,” they’d say approvingly, as though assessing a piece of Shaker-style furniture or a loaf of Italian bread. And for how long had she suckled others’ babies? Ever since she emigrated, so five years now.
Her approach was always the same: cool, tough, keen on imparting the unspoken wisdom of grit. She never loved, never warmed. She attributed her constant coolness to the many hands she passed through in her youth, to the many learned methods of escape, and to the stone in her spleen. But here in the luxe nursery with the birth of Venus ever recurring before her, in the perpetual breath of spring, the wet nurse begins to sense an unwelcome warm breeze swirl around her feet, her ankles.
The infant reaches for her from the depths of the crib and the wet nurse scowls, observes its fine, translucent hair like a pile of glass noodles on its scalp, its dull ashen skin. It is weak. Weary. It looks as if it has been pulled from a well, not a womb. Though she is not often concerned, this concerns the wet nurse and she is moved to act—she attributes the concern to the presence of the warm breeze and curses it.
Dipping her lithe arms into the crib, she lifts the infant and sets it on the expansive tundra of the sheepskin rug at the center of the nursery. The infant mumbles and lolls while the wet nurse uses a mortar and pestle to grind a small heap of caraway seeds into a fine dust. She knows of a remedy, an elixir that might help them both regain some strength, some solidity.
“There is much I do not know,” the wet nurse says, wiping the film of the elixir from her lips, “but I know this much: survival is impossible for those who do not make a pact with danger.”
The infant mews with hunger.
• •
During the interview, Lil and Greg did not ask the wet nurse if she had a child of her own, but they did ask about her diet. She brushed her dark braid of hair aside, slipped her hand under the collar of her blouse, removed a grocery list from her bra strap and offered it to them:
-Goat’s milk –Hazelnuts –Caraway –Bulgur -Quail eggs -Dried mulberries -Ghee
The wet nurse watched over them. She stood next to a stone rendering of the Buddha on a pedestal, while Lil and Greg sat on their leather chaise and prattled. They discussed the grocery list and the other various papers splayed before them on the teak coffee table. Among the papers a résumé Lil marked up in several places, offering professional pointers, an overwrought letter of recommendation from the prenatal yoga instructor, and a hand-written list of references that included a few socialites, a practitioner of herbal medicine, and several doulas. After some gentle questioning from Greg, they led her from the living room, up the stairs, to the nursery.
Lil stood in the doorway and watched Greg scoop the baby from the crib, the wet nurse at his side.
“We have to see if the baby connects with you, you know, likes your, uh, scent, and everything,” he said as he handed the baby over.
The wet nurse scowled, nodded, took the baby, and the baby took to her—nuzzling, drooling. The wet nurse had no other choice but to unbutton her blouse. Propped against the doorframe, Lil looked on coolly, arms crossed over her chest. She couldn’t help but compare the wet nurse’s bared breast to that of Venus’s. Venus’s single breast appeared stonelike and purely decorative, while the wet nurse’s breast was spongy and utilitarian.
“Wow,” said Greg, beaming, “Wow, great, you’re connecting already, I can really feel it.” He paused, looked to the doorway. “But you might want to add some greens to your diet.”
Lil nodded, her eyes fixed on the baby’s pulsing mouth.
“Yes, sir,” the wet nurse replied.
When they returned to the living room, she plucked the grocery list from the coffee table and added: –Stinging nettle -Dandelion.
That she was so receptive to feedback reassured them. They moved her into the nursery the following evening.
• •
“The child is strong, getting stronger,” the wet nurse tells Lil and Greg when they call from their opulent, pink-tinted resort suite in Acapulco.
“Great, great. Well, Acapulco is just wonderful,” Lil says. “It’s only been a couple days, but I think I could stay forever.”
“So, it’s good?”
“So good,” Lil says. “This morning we took a ‘Meditation for Dummies’ class at some pyramid ruins. I’ve got a full-body massage scheduled for this afternoon. And tomorrow we swim with dolphins.”
“Rescued dolphins,” Greg chimes in.
“Right,” Lil says, “rescued dolphins. Anyway, we’re hitting everything on the agenda.”
“Very good,” the wet nurse says.
“I think the baby would really like the rescued dolphins,” Greg adds. “It’s so uplifting to connect with nature—and babies are natural-born swimmers, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” the wet nurse says.
• •
The warmer the breeze grows and the higher it rises, the smaller the stone in the wet nurse’s spleen becomes. Now the breeze swirls around her thighs, and the stone feels lighter. Her inclinations are shifting—she no longer perpetually scowls at the infant; she no longer hides the coterie of meadow vipers in the nursery wall. Instead, the terrarium sits on the nightstand next to the cypress bowl and the baby monitor.
Sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall beneath the toes of Zephyr, she rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands, something she does when trying to understand what is moving in her—trying to discern the shape of it and convert it into meaning.
For a week straight she rubbed her eyes this way, huddled in a hotel bathtub in Athens, after she gave birth. Eventually, the act yielded results, purposes were figured—the stone was born, her visa was approved. She wonders, worries—if she loses the stone, does she lose what remains of her stillborn?
In her lap, the infant squirms, spits up on itself. Its colors were changing—its hair growing darker like a shadow cast across its scalp, its skin less ashen, its eyes more metallic. The wet nurse kisses the infant on the forehead, on each cheek—as she does so she realizes she has never before kissed an infant. She then mops the spit-up from its chest and belly with the cuff of her blouse. The infant yawns, pulls at her long black braid, and paws at her heavy breast.
“If you want, you must take,” she says to the infant. “All of my children learn at least this much.”
It takes the infant three minutes to work the breast out of the wet nurse’s blouse—two minutes less than the day before.
• •
“The child is getting fat,” the wet nurse says when the parents call after a week of vacation has passed, “and its color is very improved.”
“Not too fat, I hope!” Lil says. “I’m joking. God. But we do want to lay the groundwork for success.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the wet nurse replies, sitting herself and the baby in the tufted rocking chair beside the nightstand, phone pinched between shoulder and chin, eyes fixed on the terrarium.
“Is the vacation still good?”
“Sure, it’s good,” says Greg. “You’re on speaker, by the way. And by the way, we’re thinking about extending our stay for a few days—Lil negotiated an awesome deal with the resort. I don’t know if it’s the best idea, but—”
“Very good,” the wet nurse says. “Enjoy. Don’t rush home.”
“Right, right. I just really miss my baby. Lil says—”
“OK, hun,” Lil interjects. “We’ll set up a video call, OK? Greg, you’ll like that. You know how to make a video call?”
“No,” says the wet nurse.
“No worries. I’ll email you instructions and everything. It’s a good skill to have.”
• •
In Acapulco, Lil and Greg were failing to reconnect. Even while they basked in the sun or walked along the resort’s exclusive white-sand beach, it seemed all they could do was strike deals—the vacation was a series of this-for-that transactions. Dinner at a Michelin star restaurant for Lil, head for Greg. A couple’s spa day for Lil, a couple’s consultation with a bodhisattva for Greg. An extended stay for Lil, the promise of professional baby photos for Greg—she learned he was “drawn to” those pictures of newborns dressed as fruits and vegetables.
Lil wasn’t sure what to make of this dynamic. Greg used to be so easy, used to be fine with everything, it was always fine by him. He never had demands, and he followed instructions well enough.
“I’ve got to work late again. Another deadline to meet.”
“Fine by me,” he’d say.
“What do you think about Morocco?”
“No arguments here,” he’d say.
“Pick up my drycleaning. Dust, and water the houseplants, please?”
“Sure thing,” he’d say.
She thought it would always be this way between them. Greg was better at doing the laundry than he was at writing. He’d been working on his book, a massive self-help project ranging from mindfulness to DIY acupuncture, off and on for the better part of a decade. Lil had seen this as a net positive—the house was always tidy.
But then a bug, a glitch manifested: he started negotiating. He started making deals. When did he start? She couldn’t recall, but she didn’t like it. What she needed was an assistant, not an associate. She was, after all, the CEO of her own life, and she intended to rise to 2iC at her company within a matter of years. If she didn’t have time for the laundry now, she never would, and Greg’s cost was already built into her budget. But now he was raising his fee without adding any value, and she wasn’t sure if she was willing to pay.
• •
The wide mouth that belonged to the lilting voice—her mother’s. The olive-shaped face that belonged to the purring infant—her sister’s. These memories from the before-time return to the wet nurse carried by the breeze. For her they are small gifts washing up on the shore of her mind: a thatched roof with holes in spots through which the sky could be seen; the smell of bay leaves and stewed goat; weaving snake traps by hand from water softened reeds; the sensation of her hair being brushed, braided, unbraided. The stone in her spleen had been reduced to a grain. The warm breeze was rising still; it wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.
They had been together for almost two weeks now, and the infant prescribed a noise to the wet nurse that was specific to her. The noise was a deep cooing, like a pigeon’s song, but more guttural. Like any mother would, the wet nurse knew what the noise meant, and she felt she was being reborn into motherhood, that the infant was being reborn as her own.
The two lie side by side on the sheepskin rug, naked, weaving in and out of sleep, twitching with dreams. Venus watches over them, the wavelets surrounding her shell ripple. Within arm’s reach sits the glass terrarium, teeming with meadow vipers. The scene is close to idyllic.
The wet nurse wakes to a soft “plink, plink.” The meadow vipers, agitated, are striking at the glass of the terrarium. She nudges the infant awake, nuzzling it like a horse might nuzzle its foal. The infant latches to her breast, biting and sucking with force. As she nurses, she combs her fingers through the infant’s hair—now as black as her own—and recites the old recipe.
One part venom of the meadow viper, one part mother’s spit, three parts caraway powder, ten parts goat’s milk. Combine in a cypress bowl, stir with a rib bone, drink in one swallow, rest for the length of five lullabies, then nurse.
“We’re strong enough, now. It is time,” she says, then pulls the infant from her.
A tidy set of teeth marks circle her glossy nipple. The infant burps and coos as she sets it on the sheepskin rug and reaches for the lid of the terrarium, removes it.
• •
Lil and Greg can’t get the positioning of the phone quite right. Their heads appear cropped—Greg without eyebrows or forehead, Lil without a mouth. All they see of the wet nurse is her neck, her chest. The baby is tucked against her, bulging, and swaddled in a blanket, wearing a snug knit cap.
“Wow, she’s changed so much—she really does look different, bigger,” says Greg. “It’s only been, what, a week and half? Feels like a lifetime.”
“Hun, don’t be so theatrical,” says Lil, catching the strap of her bathing suit before it slips from her shoulder.
“Hi, hey,” she says and waves into the screen.
The baby slaps the screen with a pulpy hand, but makes no noise, then turns toward the wet nurse’s chest and scoops out a breast from her blouse. Full and pale, auspicious as an egg emerging warm from the chicken. The wet nurse folds the breast back into her shirt. The baby slaps her, and again scoops out the breast, a few threads of its darkened hair escape the knit cap.
“I’m sorry,” the wet nurse says.
“I’m sorry,” she repeats, and tucks the hair back up into the cap.
“It’s fine, it’s great,” Lil says. “It shows intensity of confidence—a valuable quality, really.”
Greg’s eyes are misty, distant-looking.
“I miss my baby,” he says, sniffles, looks to Lil. “She’s my person, my purpose, y’know?”
“But is she your porpoise?” Lil laughs. And as she reaches for the mini bottle of tequila clutched between her thighs, snug against her crotch, a small snake emerges from the cuff of the wet nurse’s blouse.
The screen goes dark.
• •
Though the screen is dark, Lil and Greg continue to stare into it, unsure of what it is they saw. Beyond the open bow window, the ocean sashays, its swells increase in size. The wind picks up and a gust fills the pale chiffon curtains—they lift and ripple, whipping into the room like a pair of hands.
Lil finishes what’s left of the tequila, slips off the edge of the bed, stands over the minibar, opens its mini door with her foot but takes nothing from it.
Greg, fiddles with the phone, taps on the meditation app he downloaded after the “Meditation for Dummies” class.
“Hun, I think we should go home. Seriously,” Greg says, “I’m just going to squeeze in a quick meditation—I need to find my center—and then let’s call the airline. ASAP.”
Lil’s bathing suit strap slips again, her small, stern breast is exposed. She doesn’t bother to hide it.
“You go,” she says.
She takes a step backwards, and another.
“You go, and I’ll stay. Deal?” she says, and recedes into the bathroom, locks the door, runs a bath.
Greg struggles to sit through a ten-minute guided meditation—despite the soothing cadence of the handsome British voice, he cannot breathe away his fear, he cannot find his center. He makes a call to the airline, then to the front desk, and packs his suitcase. Before he leaves, he places the credit card Lil gave him so many years ago in the scallop shell on the nightstand, presses his palms together and offers a small bow.
• •
Within the nursery, all is springtime and love. The warm breeze engulfs everything, carrying the scent of larkspur and the sea. Even the painting has come alive—Venus’s hair undulates, the fabric draped over the gods and goddesses billows out from the wall into the room. The infant giggles, jubilant, and crawls across the high-gloss hardwood floor, chasing meadow vipers that slither and glide out of reach, hide in the shag of the sheepskin rug.
The wet nurse reclines in the tufted rocking chair, naked, radiant. Her braid has come undone. Black hair cascades over her broad shoulders, parts around her bare breasts, nipples raw and red as pomegranate flesh. A meadow viper encircles her ankle, swirls around her shin. She laughs—a soft, easy laugh—and reaches for the viper. With fingers wrapped snug just below its head, she presses her thumb against the hinge of its jaw, and peers into its mouth—such an innocent plush pink.
The snake’s venom glands are pulsing, and she is about to milk, when the front door opens and footsteps sound on the stairs. She stands and approaches the threshold of the nursery, takes a wide stance, readies herself. The snake writhes but her grip is firm. She holds it out in front of her. A pearl of venom forms on the tip of each translucent fang.
“Don’t worry,” she says over her shoulder to the infant, “this is why we made our pact. No one is stronger than we are.”
The infant coos in reply. A snake hisses.
Greg appears in the doorway, his swirl of gray beard striking against his sunburned skin. The wet nurse lowers the snake, releases it, and backs away from the nursery’s threshold. She kneels on the sheepskin rug next to the infant, who clutches her hair, pulls itself up to her breast, and feasts.
“I thought it was something else,” she says, “a beast, an intruder.”
Greg’s eyes bulge and flick from baby to snake and back again.
“What, what,” he stammers, but can’t conjure the script he had written up and rehearsed during his long flight.
“Go. Now. Go,” he spits, “ASAP.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the wet nurse replies. “I’m sorry but I cannot go. The child and I are connected now. You see? Just as you wanted.” She gestures toward the infant’s shock of dark hair, to the fading snake bites they each wear on their ankles.
With a lilting voice she recites the recipe, her inheritance:
One part venom of the meadow viper, one part mother’s spit, three parts caraway powder, ten parts goat’s milk. Combine in a cypress bowl, stir with a rib bone, drink in one swallow, rest for the length of five lullabies, then nurse.
What remains of the stone in her spleen dissolves.
Greg staggers across the room and sinks to lotus position at the feet of Venus who wriggles her alabaster toes and steps off the edge of her shell.