The truth was Mariam had preemptively motivated Alexis’s good behavior on the way to the festival by promising her an extra hour of screen time that evening if she was kind to her little sister (that would make the babysitter’s job easier too, and let Mariam and Rowan get out the door on time). She often did that on the way to social occasions. A win-win. Contemporary parents really only had carrots at their disposal, not sticks – discipline of any kind now seemed to be equated with child abuse – and a bribe-and-reward system was the only workable solution Mariam had in her daily battles to make her children behave like members of the human race.
On a trip with the girls to the Bronx Zoo earlier that week, while watching the sea lions perform their tricks for fish after fish after fish, she’d had a disconcerting thought: humans, too, are dumb animals doing tricks on repeat in the hope of rewards. From that angle, she glimpsed how absurd her new faith in God would look to a skeptical observer. Not only was she hoping for rewards for her efforts on earth, now she was expecting fish to be thrown to her in the afterlife too.
But the longer she’d watched the sea lions, the stronger had been her sense of how feeble humans must seem to God. So desperate to please. As the sea lions had seemed lovable to her, so must she seem lovable to God.
Sebastian had finally stopped talking, only because he was now entranced by watching his children as they threw themselves maniacally against the yellow plastic walls. ‘Don’t you just wish you could bonsai them?’ he said.
Mariam swallowed another scoop of jello. Fuck the filiarchy! she thought, and decided to multitask.
Sorry I didn’t pray this morning, she said to God, but – well – you saw what it was like trying to get the girls ready.
God was everywhere, he was all things, and he was portable, bless him. Who said she had to go to church to speak to him? She could carry him with her like a handbag, and he was always up for a chat.
Rowan and the girls had laughed at the shape of the Syriac Orthodox church they had visited in Paramus, which did look from the outside like an onion, its roof curving upward into a tufted tower. Mariam wasn’t even sure if her father’s ancestors – who had lived in Ma’loula, northeast of Damascus – had been Syriac Orthodox or some other version of the dozens of varieties of Middle Eastern Christianity that seemed to be loosely grouped under the same umbrella. Her mother had no interest in helping her understand. No wonder Mariam’s religious feelings were so confused.
Her daughters were getting ketchup smeared all over their pretty dresses as they wolfed down hot dogs. She should stop them from jumping in the castle while they were eating, but all the other kids seemed to be doing the same thing, so she let it go. Sebastian’s kids were having a food fight – chucking frankfurters all over the place – and he was doing jack shit about it.
She thought about what might be happening right now at the Rising Dough Collective. The new educator would be there, dusting flour on the kitchen counter, firing up the ovens. Quang, who tied his long black hair up in a dashing man bun. Last Friday, she had not been able to stop staring at the veins in his forearms as he kneaded dough.
Her crush on Quang was nothing major, just one of those attractions-at-a-distance, which she knew passed quickly. They didn’t happen often – perhaps four or five times over the course of her marriage – and probably the same could be said of Rowan, though he’d never confessed to having a crush on anybody but her, which could not possibly be true.
The way to deal with these fleeting crushes, as everybody who’d been happily partnered for a while and didn’t want to cheat knew, was to use them as tinder for imaginative excitements within the safety and trust of their relationship, as Mariam had done. That had been fine before she’d started speaking to God, but now she wasn’t so sure if it was okay. God was such a trickster. What if he was also a pervert? How was she to know when he was and wasn’t observing her?
And what if how she was starting to feel about God was nothing more than the sort of inconsequential crush she had on Quang? There was a reason the Christian worship songs she sometimes heard while channel-surfing on the car radio used the same rousing chord progressions as popular love ballads. ‘Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.’ Someone famous had said this, she just didn’t know who.
In the past, thinking about her crushes had been a way to trick her brain into being turned on faster, a shortcut to the real purpose of the activity, which was connecting with Rowan. They’d been having sex for almost twenty years now, but there was nothing stale about their connection. Through even the toughest years of parental exhaustion, she and Rowan had continued to have good sex. It was a minor miracle, really.
Most people, she’d come to understand, thought of the sexual bond between a couple as similar to the passing of sand through an hourglass: each time you slept with the same person, you lost a few grains of chemistry. Mariam was consistently amazed that for her and Rowan – and, she presumed, for many other couples, though their stories were not part of the master narrative that popular culture told about long-term relationships – each time they had sex they added to that store. And whenever it seemed to be running low, something would happen to flip the hourglass the other way round, so that the top half was full again.
A few concessions had been made, of course, to the reality of their lives as parents. She left her bra on sometimes, though Rowan did not seem to have noticed that these days her breasts hung down like thin curtains of flesh. But she had. Mariam hadn’t realized until after she’d weaned Eva that the sight of her breasts, small but rounded, had been necessary to her own arousal. And her one good set of lingerie was a prop that helped her make the psychological transition from mother to lover, from wife to slut.
Sebastian had finally intervened in his children’s food fight, only because the jumping-castle operator had threatened to shut it down. Mariam’s daughters had abandoned the castle as soon as they’d sensed they might get into trouble.
Mariam waved farewell to Sebastian as she followed the girls toward the face-painting line. He was on his hands and knees, trying to mop up mustard from the corners of the plastic castle, but still looked positively cheerful. Maybe he really did love his kids more than she loved hers.
For a while, waiting in line while the girls ate a second serving of jello – that would be Rowan’s problem later, not hers – she gave in to the urge to scroll through her social-media feeds, while semi-eavesdropping on the women behind her.
When she was with the girls, she tried not to look at her phone too often, because she’d read somewhere that the tradition of mother and child sharing their inner and outer worlds with each other – the child pointing, the mother directing her gaze toward what her child was looking at – was in danger of being destroyed by smartphones. It was true that most of the nannies, parents or even grandparents Mariam observed in playgrounds hardly ever looked up from their phones, not even when the children called out to them, wanting them to look at a bird or a bus or a bit of trash floating past in the wind. And yet parents were mortally offended when those same kids, as teenagers, refused to look up from their own screens to return their gaze. They had learned from the best.
Mariam read the latest tweets from Frederick Reese.
Rowan believed that following the people they despised politically just encouraged them, but she got a sort of sick kick out of checking in on his daily awfulness. Almost every single tweet ended with a deluge of miniature American flags and hysterical laughing emojis, even his most recent one, posted earlier that morning:
America haters have their panties in a bunch b/c illegal Mexicans not given free soap, toothbrushes and fancy shower caps. What do they expect, a stay at the Reese Hotel honeymoon suite?
What Reese had failed to mention was that the New York Times article that broke this news had focused only on the lack of any sanitary provisions given to children being held in detention. Mariam thought of the dozens of children’s toothbrushes she’d blith
ely chucked in the trash over the years (she had a thing about replacing them every few months). She looked at all the little children waiting to get their faces painted to look like tigers and frogs and goblins, and she hated herself, and all of them – even her own daughters, for a millisecond – for being so lucky.
To disperse this mist of self-hatred, she watched – with the sound off, so the girls wouldn’t cotton on – a YouTube video of a baby panda waking from a nap, stretching, sticking out its tiny pink tongue, and doing the world’s most adorable yawn.
‘Oh, I don’t do weekdays,’ one of the women behind her in the line said. ‘Once, my kid was sick, and the nanny was sick too, and I had to care for him on a Wednesday. It was awful.’
This from the same mother who had just been telling the others her son was only allowed half an hour of screen time a week, Mariam thought. It was the poor nanny who had to soldier on without any of the things that made spending thousands of hours with young children bearable for an adult: screens, sugary snacks, pacifiers. This woman had also said she’d given her kids Fitbits for Christmas – they were both under the age of three! – so she could track exactly how much sleep and physical activity they were getting while in the nanny’s care. Why not just go all the way and embed a spy cam in their favorite toy?
The baby panda was scratching its soft tummy with a shoot of bamboo.
At least that woman’s nanny was getting paid for her daily heroism, Mariam thought. There was a family who lived next door to them in Brooklyn who had a full-time nanny, and Mariam shifted between empathy for her and resentment. Their kitchen windows faced each other, and while Mariam was preparing dinner and scrubbing pots, she would look across at the nanny doing the exact same labor and mentally calculate how much she would have earned that day, compared to Mariam’s salary of a big fat zero.
Lately, Mariam had found herself doing a really annoying ‘performance’ of her domestic exhaustion for Rowan. She’d be counting down the seconds until he got home from work, dying to see him, but then the moment he walked through the door she would not be able to look up from whatever inane household task she was doing – folding dish towels, say. Even if she’d had a great day with the girls, she would list for him over dinner (a sympathetic audience of one) every single thing she had done around the home. How many times she’d unpacked and repacked the dishwasher, how many loads of laundry had been washed, dried, folded and packed away in his absence.
This is the happiest time of your life, she would sternly say to herself in bed. Stop wishing it away. Stop presenting yourself as the harried, depressed housewife. But the next evening, when she heard his key in the lock, she would find herself once again furrowing her brow and compulsively cleaning out the gunk from the kitchen sink, making sure he witnessed her in this role of domestic slave.
Ugh. It was a wonder he put up with her. His father, who had Scottish ancestry, had once told her that Rowan had been named for a tree in Gaelic mythology, a rowan, valued for its abilities to heal and protect those who ate its red berries. It was the right name for her husband. He was endlessly patient and forgiving. His life’s purpose was to heal those in need and fiercely protect those he loved. Yet sometimes she wondered how he would cope if their roles had been reversed; if she was out working her ass off as principal of a public school and he was the one at home, toiling over the kids and the housework. Neither of them had it easy in terms of their daily work, but sometimes the patience it took to parent well seemed beyond Mariam, and was probably beyond most people, perhaps even Rowan.
That was why Mariam didn’t like it when little old ladies stopped to peer at her girls, saying wistfully, ‘Treasure them. They grow up so quickly.’
She usually gave them a sweet smile in return and then said, ‘Ah, but you have forgotten: the years may be short but the days are long.’
Those women had repressed the daily slog of parenting! Even Rowan’s grandmother, who by all accounts had been an uncaring mother to his dad, had spent her final years in her nursing home’s reminiscence room, which was designed to look like a living room from the post-war years, complete with bakelite telephone, wireless, gramophone, and hat stand. She’d found it soothing to rock baby dolls in that room, transporting herself back to the years in which she was raising young children – the years that people seemed to long for the rest of their lives, even if they had not enjoyed them at the time.
The baby panda was now riding capably on a yellow plastic rocking horse. It must be a fake video, Mariam realized.
‘How old are yours?’ one of the moms behind her said, trying to fold Mariam into their conversation.
Mariam wondered if it would work to joke that Alexis was 65 months old, like in some movie she and Rowan had watched. They had both laughed at that line, because it captured something about the rocky transition from parenting a baby to parenting a child. With a baby, the definition of good parenting was to give them everything they wanted immediately. But with a child, being a good parent meant actively denying most of their wishes, teaching them to delay gratification, to respect boundaries, to keep themselves under control. Some parents never made that transition (Sebastian came to mind).
‘She’s five, and my younger daughter is one and a half,’ Mariam replied, putting her phone away.
‘They’re gorgeous,’ the woman said, with genuine feeling. With generosity.
Mariam looked down at her children, at their heads of identical black curls.
It had been a while, she realized, since she had contemplated them from afar with reverence. The way Sebastian had been looking at his children: drinking them in. It often was only possible when her mother visited. Her delight in the girls, and the way she took them off Mariam’s hands, gave Mariam space to see them. The rest of the time they were on top of her, and there was always the next thing to do, and the next, and the next.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the woman, who was wearing a summer dress the color of mangoes. ‘Which ones are yours?’
‘Oh, I don’t have children of my own,’ she said. She put her arms around the other two women. ‘We were roommates, and their children are now like nieces and nephews to me.’
All three of them beamed at Mariam.
She smiled back, knowing exactly how they felt.
There was something so precious about having lived in close quarters with friends while you were young. You could never be false with them later in life. They remembered the core of who you were before you’d begun to build your adult identity, like layering clothes in winter. No doubt between these three friends there had been, and perhaps still were, simmering jealousies, brief falling-outs or spikes of hurtful gossip. But fundamentally, Mariam believed, your college friends, if you managed to stay in touch with them, kept you honest for the rest of your life.
Jules, Eloise, Jomo and – most of all – Rowan helped her draw a straight line between who she once was and who she had become, so that she couldn’t ever lose her way back, not entirely.
Sometimes leaves might cover the track for a period, or it might become overgrown with moss, or weeds, or something else fast-growing; at other times it was too blindingly clear, like a sidewalk after the rain, every blemish in its concrete grain showing. Yet it was something she had never anticipated when she was younger, how much she would appreciate that the path back to her own past was still there, if she cared to look for it.
Chapter 7: Eloise
Friday afternoon of Reunion Weekend
(May 25, 2018)
After making stilted conversation with the woman who was clipping bits of dead cuticle skin away from her toenails, Eloise had finally lapsed into silence. It was clear that the woman, who was from Cambodia and did not speak much English, was relieved Eloise had stopped talking. She struck up a conversation in her own language with the woman working next to her, who was painting the toenails of the next chair’s occupant a severe eggplant color.
Several armchairs down, Jules and Mariam were chatting while tw
o women scrubbed their feet and massaged their calves.
Though Eloise had booked for the three of them, the salon was extremely busy – it seemed that almost every alumna in town was there, wanting to look her best at the first official reunion events that evening – so Eloise had not been able to sit next to her friends. She’d told them to take the two adjacent chairs, which they’d probably thought was her being kind. The truth was she needed to think through, one last time, how she was going to tell them about the surrogate.
The massage function of the chair was on, to Eloise’s discomfort, but she somehow felt it would be rude to ask the woman working on her feet to switch it off. The automatic rollers were chugging up and down her spine, pushing her forward and back in jerky motions, while beneath her thighs another roller was moving around erratically, as if she were sitting on a mechanical mouse.
One of her pet hates – and it seemed there were more and more of these lately – was automated equipment that was imperfectly designed. The inevitable war between humans and AI had surely started the day somebody invented a motion-sensing flush for public toilets. Each time she leapt up, pants around her ankles, after her butt was sprayed with filthy water mid pee, she would gladly have poked to death the little red sensor behind the seat. The same went for this inept massage machine that should really be marketed as a torture device.
She breathed deeply and tried to ignore the fact that she was paying a woman to wash her feet. It was wrong at so many levels.
She glanced down the long row of women of all ages, colors, shapes. Some of them had their eyes closed, some were paging through celebrity magazines or thumb-tapping at their phones, some were staring at the large TV on the opposite wall. They all probably thought that it was fine because they were paying for the service, but was it so very different from the rich women of ancient Rome having their bodies pampered by slaves?
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