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their mouths and smear it around." He looked back at the cartoon on TV.
    He was right. The second baby, the yellow one, was happily smearing oatmeal into her hair, too.
    Caroline filled the pink spoon with oatmeal, moved in toward the pink highchair, and grabbed both of Holly's arms with her left hand. When she had the baby restrained, she poked the oatmeal into the mouth. Holly grinned, gummed the oatmeal, and swallowed. Then Caroline did the same thing with Ivy.
    "I think I'm getting the hang of it," she said to Poochie.
    "Yeah," Poochie replied, without looking away from the TV.
    "But I'm going to have to wash their hair," Caroline said. "Your mother didn't show me how."
    "Just sit them in the sink," Poochie said, "and spray them with the squirt thing. They really hate it. They scream."
    "Great." Caroline sighed and lunged at Holly with another spoonful of oatmeal.

    "I couldn't sleep with all the noise in here." J.P. stood in the kitchen doorway, half-asleep, wearing his enormous COACH T-shirt and his pajama bottoms. He yawned and looked around.
    One baby, Holly, freshly washed, with her hair still damp, wearing a dry diaper and a clean pink jumpsuit, was lying on her back in the playpen, happily drinking a bottle of milk.
    Caroline was on the floor, trying to fasten fresh yellow clothes onto a wiggling, squirming, damp, fussing Ivy, who was anxiously reaching for her bottle.
    Both highchairs were smeared with oatmeal.
    Caroline had oatmeal in her hair.
    There was water all over the kitchen floor, from the babies' baths.
    Poochie was still staring at the TV. He had turned up the volume to drown the babies' screaming and was sitting on the floor about ten inches from the set, munching on his third bowl of cereal.
    "What's for breakfast?" J.P. asked. "If I'm going to coach a stupid baseball team, I need a really big, nourishing breakfast."
    Poochie, without moving his eyes away from the TV, shoved the nearly empty box of dry cereal across the rug toward J.P.
    Caroline buttoned Ivy's final button, handed her the bottle of milk, and plopped her into the playpen beside her sister. She collapsed onto the couch. "I'm dead," she said. "It's only eight o'clock in the morning, and I'm dead. I am not cut out for motherhood. I don't even
like
those babies."
    J.P. peered into the playpen. "They're kind of cute," he said. Then he leaned over farther and wrinkled his nose. "But they smell sort of gross. Do they need their diapers changed?"

6
    Caroline looked at her watch. Eleven A.M. This isn't
fair,
she thought; they only slept for an hour, and soon it will be time for their lunch, and then I'll have to bathe them again because they'll have squash and peas in their hair, and I don't even
like
babies, and I wanted to go to the primate seminar, and when the court said we'd have to go to Des Moines, the court probably didn't know about "The Holly and the Ivy"—
    Whoops. She'd almost tied a yellow sunbonnet around the head of the pink baby. She switched the little cotton hats, got them on the correct babies, and then lugged them one by one—they were
heavy—
outside to the wide carriage.
    The babies sat side by side, smiling and drooling. Carefully Caroline buckled the straps that held them in. She didn't
like
them, but she wasn't going to run the risk of dumping them on the sidewalk.
    She pushed the carriage along the wide tree-shaded sidewalk, toward the park where J.P. was coaching the Tater Chips. Again she noticed how different it was from New York. Every house was nicely painted, every yard was neatly mowed, every car looked clean. There were no taxi drivers yelling obscenities at each other the way there were at home. No drunks lying in doorways. No trash littering the sidewalks.
    This looked like—well, it looked like Leave It to Beaver's neighborhood. She almost expected Eddie Haskell to come through one of the front doors and say "Good morning" in his wonderfully fake Eddie Haskell voice.
    "Gee whiz! Gosh! Golly,