Sleepless Nights Read Online Free

out of the way. I took the kids to the Natural History Museum once and I swear I saw the animatronic Tyrannosaurus flinch before Geoffrey’s vicious vociferous onslaught (“I’s goin’ to eat it, I’s goin’ to kill it, lemme at it, auntie Q!”).
    “Thanks for the offer, Alison, but really, motherhood isn’t rocket science! ” I laughed uproariously, and felt the barrier at the other end of the line come satisfactorily ringing down.
    “I see,” she muttered, sounding mortified.
    “But if I do have any little problems, Alison, I’ll be sure to ask you, never fear,” I added earnestly, losing yet another tine somewhere in the midst of the knot. “After all, I know Geoffrey and Serena have given you plenty of practice, Alison dear. Now, I must go, Tom and I need to start packing for our Connecticut trip. Did I mention it? Just a few weeks in Paul Dupont’s house… you know, the one from GQ…”
    I put down the phone, picked up a pair of kitchen shears, hacked off the entire offending lump of hair in a burst of impatience, then dissolved into tears.
    It was, in fact, several days after the party before I could bring myself to admit my conversation with Caroline to Tom, my husband, and thus put the plan into action. When my snobbish, superior, all-round-unpleasant in-laws announced their intention to visit, I glimmered the beginnings of an opportunity; time, first, to lay the groundwork. “It will be so delightful to see them!” I said brightly to my husband, and from the moment Peter and Lucille walked in until the second the door banged closed behind them, I was a model of restraint, tolerance, and respect. I affected great interest in Peter’s research papers on cardiac surgical procedures and joined in energetically with Lucille’s perpetual whines about “those careerist women’s libbers.” “Motherhood has improved her,” I heard Peter concede to his wife as they walked off down the corridor. “Although, my God! What’s up with her grooming? ”
    This is not to say it was easy to maintain my sweet-daughter-in-law image during the visit. Peter and Lucille came ostensibly to spend time with the baby and “help out,” actually to reinforce the idea that they did everything right and we were doing everything wrong. “The baby sleeps in a bassinet,” Lucille asked, eyebrows disappearing into her expensive blond hairline, “not a crib? It’s so tiny! I’d be worried about suffocation myself…” And later: “Do you think it’s wise to use these disposable diapers? Have you thought about chemical—er— infloration? ” Last was the production of a smallbox of rice cereal from her bag of “useful things for babies” (none of which were remotely useful for a five-week-old. She clearly viewed Samuel’s lack of interest in the spinning-top contraption she produced as evidence of dangerous developmental delay). “Give him two teaspoons of rice cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he will sleep through the night,” she asserted confidently, opening the box and preparing a bowl of the stuff with cows’ milk straight from the fridge. “ Guaranteed. It’s a little trick my mother taught me,” she added, smiling beatifically. (She only conceded defeat when he’d smeared half the bowl over her face with a single well-placed kick and thrown up the rest of it into her lap. It was almost worth the visit, I decided, watching puked cereal slowly seeping through the crotch of her beige linen trousers, for that. )
    Then, as we restored order to the place (Peter was one of those people who seemed to imagine that tiny elves picked up towels off the floor), I casually introduced the idea of a few weeks’ vacation away. My tone was as insouciant as I could possibly manage. But for all that, my husband looked at me as if the illusion of a transformed Q was, for him at least, beginning abruptly to fade. “All through your pregnancy you accused me of not spending enough time at home,” he said