by Laura Hankin
Whitney gave Claire a hug. “Wonderful!” she said.
“Next time, you should bring egg shakers and bubbles,” Gwen said. “The babies love those.”
Claire went to put her guitar back in its case while the rest of the women resumed an intense conversation about pacifiers and when babies needed to stop using them. As Claire zipped up her case, Amara paused next to her. “Whitney was out of soap in the bathroom,” she said in a low voice. “I was looking for more.”
“Okay,” Claire replied. Amara gave her a look of pure venom.
In the foyer, as Claire put her shoes back on, Whitney pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of her wallet, plus a fifty. “For today,” she said.
Claire hadn’t ever held a hundred-dollar bill before. Ben Franklin, that rascal, stared up at her. The idea of carrying it around made her nervous, like she should stuff it into her bra or something to keep it extra-safe.
Whitney pursed her lips and then rifled through her wallet again, pushing aside more hundreds before pulling out another twenty. “And here,” she said. “A little tip, for your first time. Go get yourself some really good ice cream, or something like that, on me.”
It was very kind, Claire thought, and also completely out of touch, like when billionaire presidential candidates are stumped when asked to give the price of milk. Claire bit her lip to keep herself from laughing. “That’s really nice of you. Thanks,” she said.
“Oh, please. My pleasure,” Whitney said, smiling that warm, effervescent smile of hers, the smile of a movie star or of a Pastor Brian. “Can’t wait to see you Thursday!”
Chapter 2
Amara spent the last hour of playgroup feeling pure, full-throated rage. Rage at Charlie, who was crying again like he was getting paid by the wail. Rage at freaking Baby Reagan, who, at a good three months younger than Charlie, was the only other baby who had yet to pull up to standing, but whose wide little eyes seemed to be telling Amara, Any day now, bitch, I’m making moves. (Amara used to fantasize about winning an Emmy. Now she fantasized about Charlie beating Reagan to the punch.) Rage at Claire the Playgroup Musician, who had seemed so interesting at first and whom Amara now wanted nowhere near them, ever again.
And rage at herself, for what she’d been doing in Whitney’s desk. When had she become such a shitty, unrecognizable person?
Amara pulled Charlie onto her lap and tried to bounce him into silence, as all the women assembled on the couch and chairs for their next activity. Oh, she was rage-filled about that too—playgroup was supposed to be a time for a bunch of shell-shocked mothers to come together and complain about how they were too tired to screw their husbands. But ever since Whitney’s Mom Instagram had started gaining traction, Whitney had begun acting like an Activities Director on a Disney cruise. Some theater had offered Whitney free tickets to a puppet show? Of course they’d bundled their babies up and trekked down to midtown. Some fitness instructor wanted them to try a stroller exercise class in Central Park? They were ready to sweat their little butts off! A discounted trial month of all-natural wellness vitamins specially curated for new mothers? Bring them on!
And now they had to sit and listen to a representative from the supplement company do the hard sell. “So,” Dr. Clark said, folding one leg over the other and leaning forward in Whitney’s armchair. “How did you all like your trial month of TrueMommy?” Dr. Clark was MIT educated and polished—the kind of woman who looked like she ate scientific journals for breakfast and then worked out for two hours afterward to burn off all the calories. She was a mother too, she told them, so she knew firsthand the way that pregnancy could ravage your body, depleting your essential vitamins and minerals so that it felt like you’d never fully get back on your feet. That was why she’d been so enthusiastic about joining the TrueMommy team. The supplements had been a godsend when she was recovering from her own second pregnancy, allowing her to reclaim her power as a woman, as a mother.
Placebo effect, Amara thought. Also, what kind of a stupid, guilt-inducing name was “TrueMommy”? She was already a true fucking mommy all right, according to the men at her former office, who had stared at her like she was from a whole new species when she returned from maternity leave; to her single female friends, who wrote gushing comments on pictures of Charlie online but never asked her to hang out in person anymore; and to the homeless guy on her corner, who hooted, “Hot mama!” whenever she walked by.
And in general, the whole wellness craze was a load of crap. According to the wellness ideology (as far as Amara could tell), people—but mostly women—had the potential to be so much healthier and happier (and thinner) if only they shunned processed sugars and most of Western medicine and got back to all-natural basics, which, not coincidentally, cost a lot of money. If you mastered wellness, you could be efficient and centered and smoking hot, for you! All you had to do was drink fancy juice, take a lot of yoga classes, and put a five-hundred-dollar jade egg up your vagina, and then you could start having the orgasms your body was meant to have! You’d never disappoint your partner by turning down sex ever again, because you’d be so empowered and energetic that you’d want it all the time!
Perhaps there was a crumb of truth to the trend, but Lord, did people go overboard, and these TrueMommy pills were the perfect example. The trial month came in a beautiful suede box that looked like it belonged on a shelf at Barneys. Inside, the vitamins were separated into four packets, one for each week, all labeled with their own particular focus and cutesy name, like “Week Two: Good Day Sunshine” (extra Saint-John’s-wort to boost a new mother’s mood!) and “Week Four: Energizer Honey” (loaded with B12, for mamas who were ready to tackle their tough schedules with renewed vigor). She’d started taking the vitamins at first only because of the heavy discount and because it seemed like a way to bond with the other women. Back at the beginning of the trial month, her husband, Daniel, had noticed Amara popping the amber vitamins as they got ready in the morning, and they’d had a good laugh over the whole industry.
“Just please promise me,” Daniel said, rolling his eyes and grinning at her, “that you’ll never end up throwing away tons of money on vitamins you’re going to pee out anyway.”
“Darling. Do I look like Gwyneth Paltrow?” Amara had asked, and he had squinted at her in mock-seriousness and said, “Hmm, not quite.”
But now, the other mothers were smiling at Dr. Clark. “My hair is finally looking full again,” Ellie said, “so I’m a big fan.”
“I’ve had less of an urge to cram Oreos into my mouth every night,” Whitney said, laughing. “Although maybe that’s not the vitamins’ doing.”
Gwen pulled out a Moleskine journal. “I had a few questions,” she said, flipping to a long list written in her tidy handwriting. “I showed my doctor the ingredients list, of course, but I wanted to double-check some things with you, because obviously you can never be too careful about what you’re putting into your body when you’ve got children to think about.”
Oh, Lord. Gwen might not have known much about Shakespeare, but she was the only one of them to have an older child, so when it came to the practicalities of motherhood, she fancied herself a regular Einstein, quick to “helpfully” let the other mothers know when they were doing it wrong. She began peppering Dr. Clark with a list of questions about whether they’d conducted any clinical trials (“Yes,” Dr. Clark said. “Nine out of ten moms have reported feeling at least moderately more well rested and energetic, but I’m happy to e-mail you the full data if you’d like.”), why the supplements were priced so much higher than the others on the market (“We’re not about the big mass-market crank out,” Dr. Clark said with the patience of a saint. “We send small-batch, individualized packets every month because we want to address each woman’s own personal needs. So, if you’ve been, say, feeling particularly tired, or are having a postpartum acne breakout, you just fill out the form to tell us so, and we curate the amount of Saint-John
’s-wort or peppermint or what have you in your particular capsules. Obviously, though, if we’ve got our fantastic doctors working on customized vitamins all the time, we’ve got to pay them!”), and more. Would Gwen shut up already so they could get this over with and Amara could go home?
Amara could sense Whitney, next to her, trying to catch her attention, hoping to exchange loving eye rolls like they always did when Gwen started going on the type A train, but after what had happened in Whitney’s office, Amara couldn’t look Whitney in the eye right now. Charlie was still crying, so Amara stood up and began to walk him back and forth across the room.
How were all these other babies so well-behaved? It was almost enough to make Amara miss Joanna the Lost Playgroup Mom, the one they didn’t talk about anymore. Joanna’s son had been the most difficult of all. Whenever he’d gone off on a screaming tear, Joanna had looked at him with hopelessness in her eyes, and Amara had thought with a guilty relief that at least Charlie wasn’t that bad. Joanna lived in Jersey now, but sometimes her grim presence still lingered in their playgroup circle, as if she were haunting them all, reminding them of what they could become.
“We’re keeping TrueMommy exclusive for now,” Dr. Clark was saying, “because we’re going back and forth with the FDA to see if they’ll give us full approval, which they normally don’t do for supplements. But in the meantime, we wanted to reach out personally to mothers who we thought could be really aspirational brand ambassadors for when we go big, which is how we found you all.”
That was about all Amara’s patience could take. “‘Brand ambassadors’?” she said in a withering tone as Charlie’s tears soaked through her blouse. “All right, I have a question. Is this a pyramid scheme?”
Dr. Clark looked at her, a brief hint of annoyance flitting across her face before she replaced it with a smile. “No, no! I just meant that we’re waiting on doing a full ad campaign until we hear back from the FDA. Once we do, we’re hoping to use real moms in our curated rollout of the website and social media—maybe even on TV too.”
“So you’re saying we’ll be Instagram famous?” Ellie asked.
Dr. Clark laughed. “Well, no promises.”
“Okay, but for the record,” said Meredith, “I want it noted that I’m very okay with my pending celebrity.” She and Ellie launched into another of their extended mind-meld cackles.
“So what do you all think?” Dr. Clark asked. “If you want to sign up as a playgroup, we can just deliver all the supplements to Whitney each month and cut out the individual shipping costs!”
Meredith and Ellie were in immediately while Vicki gave a slow, faraway nod.
“I don’t know,” Amara said, shaking her head. She shouldn’t. The fact that she and Daniel were having to get by on one salary instead of the expected two was already causing serious issues. Just please promise me that you’ll never end up throwing away tons of money on vitamins you’re going to pee out anyway. The price tag on the TrueMommy supplements was absolutely mental. If Daniel saw the cost, he’d be livid.
“I suppose I have been more well rested,” Gwen said. “Even though Reagan is still finicky at night, I feel like I’m getting close to eight hours of sleep.”
It was so tempting, though, to believe in a miracle vitamin—something that could make her feel normal again so that she could be a good mother to her beautiful, impossible baby, who had come out of her howling like a wolf and had barely stopped howling in the year since then. Something that would give her the energy she needed to be patient with him. And that reliable old placebo effect had been helping to make things seem a little more manageable over the last month, today notwithstanding. If what had happened in Whitney’s office was any indication, Amara needed all the help she could get.
“I’m in too,” Whitney said with a smile, giving a little shimmy of her shoulders and throwing her hands up in the air. “Why not?”
“We’re going to become crunchy, all-natural moms, aren’t we?” Amara said. “Pretty soon we’ll be staunch anti-vaxxers.”
“Well, the thing about vaccines is I just don’t know if I should trust them,” Whitney said. Amara stared at her, and Whitney laughed. “Kidding!”
“Don’t even joke about that,” Gwen said.
“I’m pretty sure you can take Saint-John’s-wort and still believe in science,” Whitney said, waving her hand through the air. “So what do you think, Amara?”
She shouldn’t.
The other women all turned to look at her and her twisting, splotchy baby. The pity in their eyes was what did her in. It was the same charitable look previously reserved for Joanna.
“Oh, fine. Whatever,” Amara said. “I’m in too.”
Chapter 3
After they’d all said goodbye to Dr. Clark, it was time to take some pictures for Whitney’s Instagram.
Whitney hadn’t meant to join the legions of InstaMoms. But during those first few months, she’d been alone with Hope so often, and the minutes had stretched like one of those scarves a magician pulled from his mouth—on and on and on, endless. (And yet somehow, whenever she actually needed more time for, say, sleeping or leaving the apartment for an appointment, the minutes flew.) At first, she’d taken the pictures to show Grant when he got home from work to keep him updated on what he’d missed out on. She’d nestle against him as he loosened his tie and hold her phone up toward him, scrolling through: Hope’s scrunchy face when she’d just woken up from a nap, looking like a scowling WWE wrestler; Hope learning how to smile, so cute it made Whitney’s insides melty. Grant would say, “She’s a beauty like her mom,” and then ask if she wanted a Barolo or a grenache with dinner.
Then it had been fun to rearrange the setting a little bit, to make sure that Hope was doing tummy time right by a vase of fresh flowers, or to take the photo with a stack of her favorite books in the foreground. Whitney could use up half an hour finding the right light. The photos came out so well that it seemed a shame not to put them on her Instagram. Grant’s sisters would want to see. By that point, she’d stopped showing Grant the pictures. Sometimes, she had a vague sense that he thought of her and Hope as trapped in amber while he was at work and that he didn’t particularly care to see her evidence to the contrary.
And then that time she’d bought those gorgeous matching Mommy-Infant sundresses from Petit Bateau, she had to document that too, setting up a timer out on the balcony, the trees in Central Park drenched in brilliant hues behind them, captioning the photo, “My baby bestie and I aren’t ready to say goodbye to summer!” Initially, she was surprised when people started following and tagging. She was also a tiny bit creeped out. But it felt nice to be seen again. It took off from there.
Mostly, it was a pleasant little hobby. She didn’t have a huge following—she wasn’t about to start going to those seminars on how to “grow your audience,” but she used to work in PR, so she had a few tricks up her sleeve. And it was exciting when some matrix somewhere branded her an “influencer,” and people started sending her things in exchange for a mention. She’d never fully gotten rid of that grasping part of herself that tingled for free stuff.
The Instagram made her happy for another reason too: Hope was so small and unspoiled, and Whitney had been given the awe-inspiring power to shape her. What if she accidentally molded this darling creature into someone less than she had the potential to be? What if Hope grew up less happy, less confident than she could’ve been with a different mother? Every time Whitney posted a picture of her child’s face wrinkled with delight and read the comments about how cute Hope was, she felt that Hope would grow up to be smart and well-adjusted and kind, made up of only the best parts of her parents. According to her social media, Whitney was doing motherhood right.
Because there were endless ways to do motherhood wrong. One could be too indulgent or too withholding. One could work too much or stay home too long. One could be far too lackadaisical or
far too anxious. Whitney knew the latter very well. At a doctor’s appointment a few months ago, she’d expressed what she thought was a perfectly normal amount of anxiety to her ob-gyn, and then he’d tried to press a Xanax prescription on her, as if she were a cliché, some bored suburban mom who couldn’t get through the day without a chemical aid. Whitney didn’t need Xanax! Not that she would judge someone who did need it, someone who was actually suffering from postpartum depression. Someone like Joanna.
Oh, Joanna. Whitney had meant to go visit her at some point, maybe bring her a cake from the neighborhood bakery that Joanna had liked so much. Maybe if a doctor had prescribed Joanna Xanax, she would still be sitting in their circle with her wounded, troublesome boy, and no one would have had to get the police involved.
Whitney batted away thoughts of Joanna and handed the camera to Gwen, who had become the playgroup’s go-to photo taker, since she didn’t want pictures of her and Reagan posted on a public forum. She’d told them all a horrible story about a cousin of hers who had posted a few snaps of her kids in the bath together on Facebook—all very innocent. A few weeks later, the cousin was contacted by the FBI because those same darling pictures had shown up on a child porn site. They’d all shuddered, and Whitney hadn’t taken a photo for her account that day. In retrospect, though, it was a little annoying, this tendency of Gwen’s to ruin harmless fun with that holier-than-thou attitude. In truth, Whitney had spent a lot of time lately trying to quit thinking uncharitable thoughts about Gwen. It was absurdly difficult. Since Gwen’s Christmas party, Whitney had entertained multiple daydreams in which Gwen had a psychotic break, severed all ties with loved ones, and moved to a hovel in Lithuania.
Whitney shook her head, lifted up Hope, and popped onto the couch next to Amara. The other mothers played with their babies on the floor in front of them, as Gwen took a few uninspired photos.
