As though Emily didn’t spend her entire day at school dealing with errant children and their necessary punishments and calling their parents and delivering stern-but-artificially-loving scoldings. As though she wanted to come home and do this, too!
And if they made love and he didn’t orgasm, how was anyone supposed to know when they were “done”? Some people have real jobs and things to do . . .
A floral apron!
Let’s be clear here: Nick sucks at cleaning the house. Let’s be clear here: Emily would dearly love to be able to afford a cleaning woman, if her husband weren’t sitting around teaching one adjunct class per semester to the tune of five grand each, and writing plays that turn out to be zombie-apocalypse burlesque farces. She is a busy woman and has no fondness of cleaning. Let’s be clear here: Emily is no prude and if some naked dude wants to wear an apron and clean her house from top to bottom so that she could lick the floors, that guy is welcome to call her and as long as the children aren’t home, he can have at it! But when you have been married to someone since 1993, you know the difference between what gets their dick hard and what they are actually capable of doing, and Nick is not capable of picking up his socks, much less scrubbing her toilet daily, or ever, in his entire life, putting away a load of laundry, which, should he attempt it, he would only make her sit there explaining to him where everything “goes,” even though they have lived in this house for the exact same amount of time and she has no mysterious, Pentagon-code-cracking organizational system that should make any of it less than self-evident. She knows that what Nick really meant by this crazy, somewhat disturbing fantasy is that he wanted her to dress him up and have him pretend to clean shit, for twenty minutes or so, before she endlessly played with his dick and denied him orgasms, then, while he happily fell asleep in his apron, she would go and do the real housework, with her sore, cramped hands.
Nick has never once “laid out her clothes,” even though she goes to work every single morning to support their family, presumably like the woman in the fantasy, though of course that woman probably has no kids. By “laying out her clothes,” what he apparently means is hitting the snooze button thirteen times, so that he doesn’t have to wake up to take the boys to school until Emily is on her way out the door, dressed just fine on her own, thanks, like a normal person anyway.
Is this the kind of thing he does then, with his frequent crushes he doesn’t think she notices? Emily . . . isn’t sure. What’s more, she isn’t sure how much she cares. He makes pretty frequent overtures toward sex at home, although not since the pregnancy, which is fine with her. It’s been years since he mentioned this “chastity” thing, and from what Emily can tell, he still likes to shoot his wad at least once a week into her, mainly at night in bed when the boys are asleep, and when Emily would like to be sleeping, too. In this sense, his desire and frequency since around the time of Jay’s birth seems more consistent with long-married middle-agers than with a man having frequent hot-and-heavy affairs, who might either overcompensate with hypersexuality or spurn her altogether, so Emily has deduced that Nick’s tendency to fall into infatuations at the drop of a hat is mainly just an extension of his fantasy life, like the floral apron. Which, on measure, is . . . more pro than con, she supposes. Her many resentments have built such that it’s hard to really . . . want him, exactly . . . but she has also gained weight and spends most of her day around children and women, and it is somewhat gratifying to know that this good-looking Irish guy all the waitresses flirt with still wants to stick it in her and get off.
Or at least it had seemed to Emily prior to the Question of Lina.
By 7:00 p.m., Emily is on her knees, sponging and mopping and slopping up the grotesque horror show that has become her kitchen, when the phone rings. She lunges for it with her filthy cleaning gloves, immediately regretting having done so because now she will have to take a Q-tip dipped in cleaning fluid and cleanse around all the different buttons on the phone, but she presumes it’s probably Nick, and she is not so far gone in this cleaning process that he couldn’t help her if she told him to get his ass home right now. Nick is profoundly averse to confrontation, and if Emily were to raise her voice and say something like, Get your ass home now and help me, he would come home immediately. He doesn’t, however, find anger an attractive quality, and can become petulant and taciturn if she uses it on him too much, making her feel again like she is dealing with one of the kids at school, so she has to be judicious in her blowups, and most likely, The entire house seems to have exploded sewage, it’s horrible, would be enough to get him here. She begins her conversation, “You won’t believe . . .”
But in her tizzy, she hasn’t checked caller ID, and it’s Chad on the other end of the line.
“Oh my God, what? Are you okay?”
Emily sighs. Chad is dear. She likes that he asked “you” instead of “the baby.” She likes it even if he doesn’t mean it. Who ever told this generation of educated Americans that they were supposed to say everything the way they mean it? What is wrong with people? Don’t they care about how they are being perceived? Chad, Emily has noted, seems to understand about “appearances” and manners. This is probably because he’s so rich, though Emily was raised by a single mother below the poverty line and she, too, understands, so perhaps this is just called Intelligence.
After Chad thanks her again profusely for “saving Miguel’s life last night,” she gives him a quick but theatrical rundown of the disrepair that is her home. Chad is a good audience. He gasps at all the right moments and laughs at her jokes. He isn’t like Nick, who would be running his hands like a maniac through his shambolic hair, swearing under his breath, worrying about money he does nothing to provide, and going to pop an Ativan before doing anything useful.
“Okay,” Chad is saying, laughing like this is all a very good joke, “so as soon as your son is out of the shower, you guys go out and buy some hazmat suits. Meanwhile, I’ll send over one of my crews first thing in the morning and get it all straightened out. Don’t bother cleaning before then because they’ll just make more of a mess. Barb can come and clean it all up once they’re done.”
“Barb?” Emily says. Crews. Straightened out.
“Our cleaning woman,” Chad says. “It’s bizarre, actually, because Miguel and I have had four different cleaning women since we met, and every single one of them has been named Barb.”
Emily has no idea what to say to this.
“They’re all Polish!” Chad hoots, by way of explanation.
Emily thinks: Barbara Streisand. Barbara Kingsolver. Though she went to public schools in Chicago—as of course did Miguel—so she knows a thing or two about Polish, which in Chicago is as strong an ethnic block as African American. The Poles are cliquish and obsessed with their culture, and tend toward political conservatism, speaking Polish at home until the day they die, and owning cleaning services, and none of it makes any sense to her, as they often have blond hair and blue eyes and look exactly like the people who run America, but they apparently patently refuse, preferring to go to their Polish dance parties on the weekend and scrubbing other people’s floors.
“Okay,” she says. She intrinsically understands that Barb is being “comped” to her, like a man in the olden days loaning out his wife to repay a debt. She is fine with this. Chad will compensate or not compensate Barb, but the upshot is the same for Emily. About the “crew,” however, she is skeptical. “Are you going to send me some kind of estimate for the plumbing work?” she says casually. “I’m sure your crew is amazing, but Nick and I may not be able to afford . . . a crew. We might, like, need some guy with a plumber’s crack from Craigslist or something.”
“Are you crazy?” Chad says. “You’re not paying! Good lord! Do you want me to come pick you up right now and get you out of there? Nick can watch the kids, right? We can go somewhere and drink umbrella drinks—they can make yours a virgin if you like. Miguel says tiki lounges are all the rage, even though he never wants to go o
ut and only says that to make me feel old and square.”
Emily laughs genuinely now. She likes sickly sweet umbrella drinks, which Nick thinks are ridiculous. She likes tiki lounges, having frequented them in the 1980s with her fake ID. She likes Chad, and only in this moment does she realize that something is clicking into place just as she thought it would. Something she was afraid to articulate, even to herself, because it seemed . . . misguided. But it is happening—she is only seven weeks pregnant, and already it is working.
If someone had injected her with truth serum the night she badgered Nick that they should have Chad and Miguel’s child for what was clearly no logical reason, her not having seen Miguel for some twenty years and their already having their hands full between her demanding career and Jay, what Emily would have said (and what it was absolutely imperative that she hide from everyone on the planet, especially Nick but perhaps also herself) was that she had made the offer because she was afraid Lina was different to Nick, and Miguel was Lina’s sister, and Emily wanted to insinuate herself into this potentially problematic situation and thereby control it. She was so acclimated to Nick’s crushes that they barely fazed her anymore—maybe, even, they alleviated a certain pressure on her to pretend to be more interested in him than she really was, and allowed their marriage to function more smoothly. But throughout the months of the ridiculous zombie play, something was . . . happening. Nick talked about Lina almost constantly at home. Lina said this, Lina said that. And about two weeks before the closing-night party, he had told her, in his guileless Nick way, that Lina was making him “love and understand himself more” and that their friendship had been a powerfully positive force “of self-acceptance” in his life and that he was really going to miss it.
Love and understand himself more?
How exactly was some thirty-year-old stripper assisting her husband with “self-acceptance”?
And did he think she didn’t understand that the sentence I am really going to miss it translated directly, in man-speak, to I am going to continue my involvement with this woman?
There was simply no way on the planet that Nick was going to be permitted—after all she had done for him—to abandon and humiliate her that way, in front of everyone.
Lina was, apparently, a lesbian. As such, Emily had avoided fighting with Nick about the friendship, for fear of appearing controlling and possessive in ways that were the opposite of “self-acceptance” and whatever the hell else he thought Lina was selling. But Nick used to fuck a lot of lesbians. That sounded weird—none of the lesbians Emily knew went off for the occasional roll in the hay with a dude—but it was one of the stories she had heard him tell over and over and over again until it had gone from the height of charisma to making her want to put a fork in her eye: when he lived in London, after fleeing his oppressively small Irish town, he went through a period wherein he fell in company with a group of hot lipstick lesbians, and more than half their number at one time or another took him to bed, almost all but the one he was actually there to stalk and believed himself in love with.
So Lina was a lesbian. That was supposed to make her safe. But with Nick, nothing was “normal.” Everything was zombie plays and no income and coming and going at will and confessions about floral aprons and sudden comments that were truly so uproariously funny that their sons thought he was a rock star.
So: a baby. For nine months—for longer—she would be able to “keep tabs” on Nick and Lina via Miguel, her old friend. She would be the do-gooder carrying their baby, and even Nick, with his man-brain, would be too ashamed to fuck one of the baby daddies’ trampy little sisters, with the tacky tit tattoo. She would nip this nonsense in the bud, and Lina could crawl back under the little ghetto rock from whence she came, a rock not unlike those Emily’s mother had once lived under, though Emily’s mother had not been smart enough to strip and turn her tackiness into an economic commodity: she and Emily had just lived in squalor while Mom gave it away for free.
“Miles!” she calls loudly, not bothering to knock on his door. “You’re watching your brother until Dad gets home, okay? I’m going out to talk some business with Chad.” “’Kay,” Miles calls from behind his door.
Emily almost calls back that when Nick gets home, he should not clean the kitchen because Polish Barb is on it . . . but then she changes her mind. Why shouldn’t Nick clean the kitchen? If “the crew” makes another mess tomorrow, Barb will take care of that, Chad said. There’s no reason they have to begin with a mess. Why shouldn’t Nick do something useful?
She scrambles out of her too-tight robe, puts on tights and a skirt and a boxy turtleneck, wets her hair to make sure nothing of Chernobyl is still living in it and combs it out and braids it. She puts on some bright pink lipstick (Nick doesn’t like her lipstick; he prefers red).
She waits at the door, like on a date, the feeling still bubbling inside her that somehow it has worked.
What? What worked? She and Nick have only agreed to take ten thousand dollars for the surrogacy. The boys offered thirty—thirty!—but Nick said he wouldn’t go along if they took that much, and at first Emily argued, but then something began to settle in her: a kind of dangerously hopeful epiphany.
By looking like she was “not doing it for the money,” she was making it less of a business transaction. She was getting in Chad’s and Miguel’s permanent good graces. She was the hero of the story . . .
Chad and Miguel—poverty-stricken Miguel from their high school days—are almost unfeasibly wealthy men. Chad owns hundreds of properties. Hundreds. They just bought one of those historic mansions lining Wicker Park. Chad’s family has houses and condos in Wisconsin, Miami, Puerto Vallarta, Scottsdale. In taking only one-third the money they were offering her, Emily was actually . . . opening the door to more, if she played her cards right. If she became a friend. The kind of friend everyone knows isn’t a gold digger, and therefore asks to hold the gold.
“Where are you going, Mommy?” Jay says, standing in his hooded towel. “I’m hungry.”
“Well, clearly I can’t cook in that train wreck of a kitchen,” Emily snaps. “When your father gets home, have him run out and pick something up for you.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out with Chad.”
“About the baby?” Jay asks.
“Yes, about the baby.” Emily checks behind the curtain for the lights of Chad’s car.
“Are you going to like the new baby more than me?” Jay says, behind her.
Emily snorts. “It’s not my baby. I don’t like the new baby in any particular way.”
“I’m still your baby, then?” Jay asks, and Emily immediately thinks of how Nick coddles him. A child with special needs shouldn’t talk this way—shouldn’t behave immaturely for his age—it only encourages his being teased.
“You will always be my youngest child, yes,” Emily corrects. “You aren’t a baby, but you are not in competition with this baby, if that’s what you’re asking, because this baby is not mine, and is nothing to me.” Then, seeing headlights approaching, she adds, “We don’t say that to other people because it’s rude. It’s my job to keep this baby safe. But it is a business transaction and I want to do a good job, just like I would do a good job at the school where I work. It’s not about you.”
“Oh,” Jay says.
Emily races out the door, not kissing him good-bye, because she has confirmed that he is not in competition with the baby, but she doesn’t wish to reward his clingy behavior, so she has done quite enough. She goes more slowly down her front stairs so that Chad will see she is “being careful” and doing a good job, just like she said. She gets into his car (he drives a dump, unbefitting of his economic status) and experiences herself as lighter than she has felt in ages, almost girlish in her excitement, like on a first date, the entire world of possibilities spread at her feet.
Because sometimes, just sometimes, after a lifetime of stupid mistakes, you finally do something right and get a do-over. And
here is Chad, smiling, and that—it is suddenly abundantly clear to Emily—is exactly what this is.
LINA
On Beaver Island, it’s like the world ends every winter. The drive from Chicago is seven hours just to get to Charlevoix, where then you have to wait to catch a two-plus-hour ferry to the island. By early December, this usually means waiting overnight, because the ferries don’t take off every few hours like in the summer. By January, the ferry won’t run at all, and the island will be in quarantine all winter long aside from its tiny, exorbitantly priced airport. This poses logistical problems Mami and I cannot wrap our minds around. We are from the city. When it snows in Chicago, the plows are out on the streets at 4:00 a.m. The city never shuts down. On Beaver Island, the island residents could be cannibalizing one another for all the contact they have with the outside world. How is Isabel supposed to get advanced medical treatment in a place where even the Internet can only be accessed at the library, which is hardly ever open, so people congregate in the parking lot trying to get online? It’s like Isabel has gotten cancer on Little House on the Goddamn Prairie.
Mami sobs for the seven-hour ride, which is something people say but I fucking mean it. Her stamina is impressive. She wails like a banshee, like an Indian bride set on fire and going down with her husband, like she is immolating inside my car. I have no idea what to do with her. The history between Mami and Isabel feels like a minefield. I am one of the mines buried under the ground, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I would like to make it easier on them and bury the evidence of my existence, but instead I am driving the car. There is no articulating how much I would like to shut up my mother who is not my mother; how much I would like a Jameson and a handful of Oxys; how much I would like to slice a razor or a knife along the tender inside of my arms; how much I wish Miguel were in the car with me. I am ready to explode, but when I look in the rearview mirror I look normal, and the schism unsettles me further. I’m wearing lipstick because I’m apparently an asshole. I swerve around and nearly get us killed half a dozen times, but Mami’s hysteria is not feigned; she doesn’t suddenly sit upright and chide me for my careless driving—she is the real deal of grief and doesn’t even notice trucks blowing their foghorns at my incompetency.
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