Yet the other woman’s expression changed when Mariam took out the carton of cow’s milk from the fridge and poured some into a bottle she’d washed earlier and left on the side of the sink to dry.
‘Oh . . .’ the woman said, looking concerned. ‘Would you like some of my breastmilk? I pumped extra earlier today, but my baby didn’t drink it all. She’s four months, and going through a fussy stage.’ She held out a bottle that contained a small amount of yellowish fatty liquid on top of a layer of very watery milk.
Mariam was so surprised by this offer that she did not respond quickly enough to be able to stop the woman from putting the bottle into her hands.
‘Please don’t feel bad,’ the woman said. ‘Breastmilk is liquid gold, right? I’d rather it didn’t go to waste.’ She finished rinsing out her pumping apparatus at the sink, and tied her dressing gown more tightly around her waist. ‘Hope you get some sleep. Night.’
Mariam stood there for a while, holding the bottle.
She had done her breastfeeding duty. She’d happily and committedly breastfed both her girls until they’d turned one, then switched to cow’s milk on the pediatrician’s recommendation. She still discovered bags of frozen breastmilk at the back of their freezer and was amazed to think she had sustained two babies with her own body for a total of two years. But she had not once said anything to another mother on the matter of breastmilk, or formula, or any other milk product. She had been so very disciplined about it, not wanting to contribute to the endless judgments that mothers were subjected to by the wider culture.
She remembered how, after Alexis was born, the woman she’d shared the maternity room with had been unable to breastfeed because she’d had a double mastectomy a few years earlier, after learning she had the BRCA gene. A doctor doing his rounds told this woman she should buy breastmilk, at whatever cost, because otherwise her baby was at higher risk of getting cancer later in life too. This had totally unraveled the new mother (and it was not even scientifically accurate!), and Mariam had heard her sobbing herself to sleep.
The next morning, over breakfast, chatting with this woman about what to read during night feeds, Mariam had recommended a Mary McCarthy novel called The Group, a book that Candace Bushnell had used as inspiration for her Sex and the City essays.
The Group was one of Mariam’s favorite novels. Set in the 1930s (but published in 1963), it followed a set of women graduates from Vassar into their lives after college, and their candid struggles with all the same things that Mariam felt women of her own generation still struggled with: contraception and work and marriage and motherhood.
And breastfeeding! It had been a revelation to see how those newly modern women in the 1930s had turned to breastfeeding in response to their mothers’ use of formula, which the daughters thought of as backward.
Yet their mothers had, in fact, been first-wave feminists, who’d decided not to do what their mothers had done – sit at home breastfeeding babies – and instead got out there to win the vote for women. This seesawing had continued all through the rest of the twentieth century, with each wave of daughters doing the exact opposite of their moms, in the tug-of-war between the generations.
Mariam’s own mother had proudly formula-fed all three of her babies, Mariam included, as an act of second-wave feminist empowerment (though she hadn’t ever made it back to work). And Mariam sometimes suspected that all the babies born in the new millennium, who had been so obsessively breastfed – like her daughters – would one day purposefully feed their own babies formula, just to vex their poor mothers who’d wrecked their nerves breastfeeding them for so long.
Mariam looked down again at the bottle she was holding.
She poured the breastmilk down the sink, watching the yellow liquid disappear into the dankest depths of the drain. Then she topped up Eva’s cow’s milk with hot water, and turned out the light.
Chapter 5: Jomo
Friday morning of Reunion Weekend
(May 25, 2018)
Jomo jogged along the footpath beside the Charles River, thinking about what Mariam had said the previous night about her conflicted identity as a Syrian Christian.
He’d donated thousands of dollars to the International Committee of the Red Cross when the scale of the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis had first become apparent, but he tried not to think about Syria too much anymore. Once upon a time, he’d been a news junkie, addicted to the ups and downs of the latest headlines, but he’d gradually come to see that knowing about the suffering of others did nothing to help reduce it. All it did was make him feel worried all the time, as each fresh tragedy pinged in his pocket.
On the Tube in London, on his way to a meeting with a gem supplier, he’d noticed a poster of a man floating in a choppy sea, looking directly out at the viewer. It was captioned ‘Float to Live’, and Jomo had assumed it was a call to action to help Syrian refugees, so many of whom had drowned trying to get to Europe. As he’d studied the image, however, he realized the man floating in the water was not a Syrian refugee. He was a white guy in a blue shirt, khakis, and Converse sneakers. The poster was a public service notice from the British government for fans of boating: ‘If you fall into water,’ the text beneath the image read, ‘fight your instinct to swim until the cold water shock passes.’
He’d chuckled about it, though really nothing about death from drowning, under any circumstances, was funny. It was just so rare, as an American, to feel superior to the British – or at least equal to them – in being parochial and sort of idiotic. Spending public money on reminding people how to float! When all around them, the world was going up in flames.
The path Jomo was running along followed the curves of the river. He had so many memories of this route, from all the hours he and Rowan had jogged along it during college, in all seasons, each with its own particular pleasures. In the fall, the great piles of dry leaves and the invigorating freshness of the early-morning air. In winter, the quietness of the snowy paths and the river water frozen into ripples at the banks. In spring, the dappled shade and the air sometimes tipping toward muggy, so that they would arrive back at Kirkland with shirts wet through with sweat.
At each visual milestone along the path – the basketball court, the bridge, the rowing sheds – Jomo could access certain old feelings, as if his mind were remapping itself on the terrain.
Weirdly, for example, while passing the Trader Joe’s, he remembered an old shopping list that he’d carried around for a while, maybe during senior year, intending to purchase items to restock the brewery club but never making it to the supermarket. He’d read somewhere that there’s a special place in the brain that stores to-do lists that haven’t been completed, which would also explain why every time he passed the specialty barbecue store near his loft in Tribeca, he thought: Get wood chips to smoke the chicken. Which he had never done, because Jules had told him smoked meat was carcinogenic, and he’d been planning to serve that meal to her.
Another thing he’d stopped doing lately was running to music, to force himself to leave his phone behind. The reluctance with which he did so proved to him how essential it was. Jogging was one of the few times he could decontaminate himself from all the intrusions. Sometimes, as he ran, he imagined all his jumbled thoughts unspooling behind him, out the back of his head, leaving his mind peacefully empty.
Daydreaming was another casualty of the smartphone epidemic. Whenever he had a moment of transitional time – in a cab, say, or walking down the street to get lunch – he wasted it on checking his phone, the slot machine in his pocket, refreshing it constantly to get his dopamine fix.
‘The zombie apocalypse is already here!’ Eloise often said, unaware perhaps that she’d said it the last time he’d seen her, and the time before that, too. ‘Look around and you’ll see them everywhere, their eyes glazed over, unseeing, unfeeling, not present at all. Staring into their phones. The digital undead.’
Jomo tended to take a more pro-technology line when arguing with
Eloise, just to get her riled up, and also because he felt she was sometimes dismissive of Binx’s technological orientation to the world. He couldn’t understand why Eloise didn’t instead celebrate it; there weren’t many people with Binx’s abilities in that arena.
But as the years passed and it became ever more evident that a few skinny, spotty, white coders had somehow managed to bend the entire world to their will, he found himself agreeing with Eloise. And her alarmist talk was always backed up with evidence. Every study done on the impact of non-stop use of smartphones (Eloise had in fact authored one herself) had found the same thing: a sharp decline in every kind of complex happiness available to humans, and a commensurate increase in anxiety. Like lemmings, he and everybody he knew had followed these new gadgets right to the edge of the cliff of reason, and then jumped off.
Now that he was warmed up, his body felt good, despite the fact that he hadn’t slept much the night before. He’d got back to his room in the early hours of the morning. It had been pretty low-key at the Spee, once he’d finally made it there after the Fly, unable to persuade Jules – by then yawning her head off – to join him. Maybe earlier in the night there’d been crazy dancing, but by the time he got to the club, men and women were conversing quietly beneath the giant stuffed bear.
Some of the college-age women, he’d assumed, were fully-fledged members themselves now, staying on after graduation for summer jobs or internships in Boston. As a result, the difference in the atmosphere between the Fly and the Spee was unmistakable. He’d felt a pride he knew was laughable at the sight of two women behind the old wooden bar, helping themselves – with familiarity – to the offerings in the famously well-stocked cabinets. And as he’d been about to leave, a young woman had let herself in the red front door with her very own key.
Maybe that’s why Jules hadn’t wanted to come with him to the Spee, he thought. Would she experience it as an affront to everything she had endured in trying – but failing – to establish a women-only final club? His heart, already beating fast from the pace he was setting, sped up at thoughts of her humiliation all those years ago. How bravely she had suffered. He had never seen those naked photos of her, even though Mariam and Eloise had wanted him to look at them when they first appeared on some random website, in order to understand what Jules was dealing with.
He had seen Jules naked since, but in a very different context: skinny-dipping in the Hamptons, all of them leaping into the pool by the light of the moon.
He knew her body fairly intimately, as best friends do. She had a mole on her lower back that she worried about for occasionally being itchy. He’d held her hair out of her face while she vomited, wearing nothing but a silk slip, when she’d got Bali belly during his visit to her film set in Indonesia.
And on their trip to Tanzania, the previous summer, they’d both gone totally feral while camping on the hot plains of the Serengeti. Sleeping in their underwear because of the heat, taking turns to keep watch as they each peed right outside their tent in the night, too afraid of lions to venture to the pit toilet at the edge of the unfenced campsite. She hadn’t shaved her armpits for the duration of the trip; he remembered how soft her hair was as it grew out, how uninhibited she had been, wearing a tank top and taking photos of an approaching thunderstorm out the open roof of the Land Rover.
He’d still been trying then to make sense of ‘the lost months’, as he thought of them. Even when she’d been in the most immersive film environments, she’d always stayed in touch with him. In the past, Jomo had prided himself on being her lifeline in those sometimes suffocating subcultures.
He knew how much social energy it took for her to establish herself with the other actors and crew on each new project, to do all the backstage bonding that was required. He had seen firsthand, on his visits to her sets, the trials she endured living in a new city or country, far from home comforts. He knew she struggled at the end of each shoot, when she was forced to emerge from the cocoon that she’d created and move on, almost immediately, to some new set, some new project, some new group of people with whom she had to bond from scratch. In some ways, Jomo thought, it was like experiencing college over and over, in smaller stints but with the same cycle of newness–intimacy–farewell, and he’d sometimes envied that, even while knowing the toll it took on her emotionally.
Then there were the difficulties of rejoining those past colleagues, often a long time after the end of a shoot, for the ever-extended global publicity circus, and trying to recapture a closeness that had long since evaporated. Without the stabilizing, grounding influence of the crew around them, the gods and goddesses of Hollywood were often on their worst behavior during those tours, their egos fueled by the media and the fans. This was when Jules was most vulnerable to her bouts of depression – which she berated herself for all the more keenly because they came right when the rest of the world was telling her how good she had it, how much they wanted to be her.
Jomo had lived through it all with Jules, counseled her many times through each phase. So there was no good reason why she had stopped communicating with him for the first few months of 2017 unless she’d been trying to keep something secret. And what secret worth keeping did not involve romantic love?
This was what had truly terrified him, though he’d always known it would – and should – happen one day. On that trip to Tanzania, he had searched constantly for telltale signs that Jules had fallen in love for the first time in her life. But he’d asked her nothing directly, not wanting to ruin their trip; he was so thrilled, after all, that she’d kept their old pact, coming with him on his pilgrimage to the place where his dad had spent most of his childhood and young adulthood.
Most people got it the wrong way around when they heard Jomo’s dad had grown up in Africa, assuming his father was black. But in fact his mom was African-American and his dad was white, born to German parents who had moved to newly independent Tanzania – then Tanganyika – during the presidency of Julius K. Nyerere, who had been one of the greatest and most humane leaders in history. According to family legend, Jomo was supposed to have been named after him – his father’s idea – but his mother hadn’t liked the name, so they’d compromised instead on Jomo, the given name of the first president of independent Kenya. (Jules had teased him about his name ever since she’d discovered, on their trip, that Jomo meant ‘flaming spear’.)
Jomo’s German grandfather had been a filmmaker, and he had uprooted his family from Frankfurt to make the first film of the majestic wildebeest migration across the plains of the Serengeti, which had turned out to be very influential in the wildlife conservation cause. He’d had a small plane painted to look like a zebra, with black and white stripes – Jomo was never sure, looking at pictures of it, if this was for decoration or camouflage – and he’d worked closely with Nyerere to support his visionary conservation policies.
Jomo had been raised on stories of his dad’s idyllic childhood and teenagerhood, though it was later marred by tragedy. His dad’s older brother had, at the age of 21, been killed in a plane crash while doing an aerial wildlife survey. Soon afterward, his mother had died of malaria, though the family always said she had died of grief.
Mother and son had been buried together at the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. Many decades later, when Jomo’s grandfather had died in Frankfurt, his body had been transported to Tanzania so that he could be buried beside them. Jomo had not gone to that burial – nor to the service in Germany – because he’d been about to sit his SAT exams, and his parents had insisted he focus on his studies and college applications. It was the way of the modern American teenager, encouraged to put achievement before all else, yet Jomo had always regretted not properly farewelling his grandfather.
Maybe that was why the bushpigs episode had felt so charged. The tent in which he and Jules had held each other in terror was only a few hundred feet away from the cairn that marked the spot where his family members were buried.
He had been dreaming, that
night in the tent, that he and Jules were about to jump off a building still under construction and, in the unlogic of dreamland, he’d known that if he had four weights tied to his ankles, he would die. As they fell, Jules called out, ‘How many weights?’ And he’d looked down and said, ‘Four. Goodbye, my friend.’
He’d woken just before he hit the ground, to the loud grunts of bushpigs surrounding their tent. He could see their shadows too – it was a full-moon night; earlier they had watched the orange moon rise above the crater.
For the first time, the word ‘petrified’ made sense to him. He had turned into stone. Jules, he soon realized, was also awake, and also lying very still, listening to the grunts outside. That afternoon, as they’d been pitching their tent a bit farther away from the other members of their tour, the guide, Mburi, had cautioned against it. Of all the dangerous wild animals in the bush, he’d said, the ones to be most afraid of were the carnivorous bushpigs found there at the crater. They came out at night to look for meat of any kind, and had huge tusks they used to rip through tents to get at the humans inside.
They’d ignored Mburi and carried on with pitching their tent at a distance, needing some respite from the constant surveillance of the other tourists, starstruck by Jules.
Does my dream signify something? Jomo had thought as he and Jules edged toward each other, away from the sides of the tent. Is this how it ends for us? He had planned out how he would roll over Jules to protect her from being gored if the bushpigs on her side of the tent made the first attack. They had clung to each other for what felt like hours, until the tent’s walls went bright at dawn.
‘I was only joking!’ Mburi had said at breakfast, after they’d described their brush with death to the others at the table. ‘Bushpigs eat worms!’
Mburi did not stop laughing as he drove the Land Rover all the way down the precipitous slope that led to the bottom of the crater, though the road had been partially washed away and he later told them that cars often toppled off it. (This time they weren’t sure whether to believe him.)
Life After Truth Page 10
