by Laura Hankin
As a ringing in her ears grew louder and louder, Claire skimmed from the writer’s description of Marlena’s vocals (she whirls between seductress, she-demon, and naif) to the story of Marlena and Marcus’s fast-blooming romance (Jones-White told Rodriguez that he realized he was in love with her at the “Idaho Eyes” music video shoot, right before the director called “Action” on the last take, and when you watch it, you can sense a tremulous intensity in their interactions). Her eyes flicked past the desultory mentions of Chuck and Diego.
Then, a few paragraphs in, she found it.
And if some of the original fans accuse the band of selling out, of trading in a certain rawness (not to mention a completely different female singer) for something more polished and poppy, the band doesn’t seem to mind. Jones-White declines to comment when I ask him about why the band moved away from their old singer and sound, except to say, “She was fine, but Marlena is fire.”
Claire stared at the page until her vision blurred, the words tattooing themselves on her brain. Then the door to the studio opened, and a young woman came strutting out, a self-satisfied smirk on her face, the guys in the audition room watching her go. One of them followed her to the door, looking at a list in his hand. “Claire Martin?” he asked.
A great lump rose in Claire’s throat, and she ducked her head down, pretending to be engrossed in the magazine, as the man repeated her name, looking around the waiting room for some response, the other auditionees shrugging their shoulders.
“Oookay,” he said, “no Claire Martin, then.” He looked back down at the list. “Anna Lee?” The Jack Sparrow eyeliner girl popped up from her seat with a nervous wave—a link in an infinite chain of younger, shinier girls always popping up like in Whac-A-Mole—and followed him inside.
* * *
—
Claire practically ran to playgroup after that, biting back tears and anger at herself and at Vagabond. She craved the uncomplicated chatter of the mothers, their confidence that singing songs to their children was just about the most important thing anyone could do. She was running a little early, but she didn’t mind, and she dashed into the elevator. Amara, evidently running a little late, was already in there, with Charlie and his stroller in tow.
“Hey!” Claire said, pasting on a smile. Amara gave her a silent nod in return and stared at the floor numbers spinning by. God, she was intimidating, all the planes of her face taut, her bones sharper than ever in these close quarters. But also, it couldn’t hurt to try to get back into her good graces. Maybe they could just laugh off the whole Claire-walking-in-on-Amara-stealing-from-Whitney thing.
“So Whitney mentioned you used to work for a late-night show,” Claire said, attempting a light and friendly tone. “That’s really cool!”
“Yeah. Thanks,” Amara said.
“She said you did something with musicians? Booking music?” Claire asked.
Slowly, Amara swiveled her head to look at Claire straight on. “What, you have an EP or something?” she asked, her voice turning drier than Claire had ever heard it. “You’re looking for the perfect connection to get discovered, and you think I could be useful to you?”
“Um, I—” Claire stammered.
A vein began to pulse in Amara’s throat. “Look. You might think you have some kind of leverage over me, but you don’t,” she said. “I told you, I was looking for soap. If, for some crazy reason, you decide to tell Whitney otherwise, I don’t think there’s any chance in hell she’ll believe you.”
“Wow,” Claire said, a laugh of disbelief escaping from her like a bark. She suddenly felt like she was sliding all the way down to the end of her rope. “‘Leverage’? Okay. That’s not what I was implying at all. I’m here to sing to your babies and make some money so that I don’t have to go live in my parents’ basement, not to get involved in whatever shit is going on between you all. I’m not going to mess things up for you. So please don’t mess things up for me.”
Amara stared at Claire for a moment as the elevator slowed, reaching its destination. “Fine,” Amara said, as the ding sounded and the doors opened on the penthouse floor.
Claire followed as Amara wheeled her stroller down the hallway to the line of all the other strollers. Those strollers all looked like cars at a luxury dealership, probably with the latest NASA technology installed. In comparison, Amara’s stroller looked like . . . well, a regular stroller. Yup, definitely money issues, Claire thought as she walked past Amara and knocked on Whitney’s door.
Whitney greeted Claire with her usual hug, then stepped back and gave her a searching look. “Is everything okay? Can I get you something? Water? Wine?”
“Oh, no, thank you. I’m all set,” Claire said, but Whitney raised an eyebrow.
“I hope you aren’t just saying that to be professional. I’m going to keep asking, every playgroup, until you let me shower you in refreshments.”
“Then I’ll take that wine today,” Claire said.
“Yes, Claire!” Whitney said, leading her into the living room and opening up a bottle of chardonnay. “Welcome to the party.”
“I wouldn’t put the oils on the baby’s skin,” Gwen was saying to Meredith, “if you haven’t talked to your doctor about it.”
“Claire,” Ellie called. “Come over here! We’re testing out essential oils that someone sent Whitney for free, because her Instagram is blowing up. She got like two thousand new followers this week!” Ellie squinted at the labels on the bottles in front of her. “Now, are you feeling anxious, tired, or nauseous?”
“Is there an option for all of the above?” Claire asked as she unzipped her guitar.
“Oh, no, what’s wrong?” Whitney asked, handing Claire a wineglass and furrowing her brow in concern.
“Nothing,” Claire said. “Just a bad audition.”
“Well, if they don’t take you, they’re missing out,” Whitney said.
“Hear, hear,” Meredith said, then scooted her baby close to Claire. “Lexington, go give Claire a cuddle.”
The little girl laid her head against Claire’s shoulder and then began thwacking at her guitar. Ellie scooted her baby, Mason, over too, and then Hope toddled over, joining in on the hugging/thwacking. Claire couldn’t help but laugh at the baby invasion. “Help!” she said. “I’m drowning in cuteness.”
“Claire, what’s your Instagram handle?” Whitney asked, typing something on her phone. She held up the screen in front of Claire, showing a photo she had just taken of the moment and posted on her feed. In the picture, Claire’s eyes were crinkled in happiness for the first time in a long time. “You look adorable.”
“Um, I actually got rid of my social media,” Claire said. One night a couple of months ago, she’d gone down a Vagabond rabbit hole and found herself researching how to make a troll account so that she could write mean, anonymous messages to Marlena. Catching herself, she’d decided then and there to delete all the apps. That way she could also avoid the occasional well-meaning messages from loyal fans who wanted to know what had happened to her and the less-well-meaning messages from people in her hometown telling her that in times of crisis, they turned to Jesus for comfort. “I just found myself wasting too much time on it.”
“That’s smart,” Gwen said, nodding.
“You’ve got better willpower than I have!” Whitney said.
“I’m making you a concoction of peppermint, lemongrass, and lavender,” Ellie announced. “It might taste weird, but it’ll be good for you.”
The mothers looked at Claire as if they had discovered the special secret of her worth, and sure, she thought the lives they led were ridiculous and she knew she was just their employee, but still. Claire was at the eye of a hurricane, a new peace and calm coming over her as the women whirled around, that terrible Rolling Stone cover blowing away in the wind. Not even Amara in the corner could ruin it. The mothers were mothering her, and she
fucking loved it.
Chapter 5
When Whitney came back into the living room after waving goodbye to a slightly tipsy Claire, the other mothers were filling out their TrueMommy surveys for the next month’s batch of vitamins, deep in conversation about their husbands.
“That’s just what Christopher was saying the other night,” Gwen said.
“Ugh, can you please get him to convince John?” Ellie said, then let out a dramatic sigh. “It is a tragedy that we’ve never managed to get all the playgroup husbands in the same room.”
Meredith clapped her hands together. “We should plan a big group dinner for all of us! Right, Whitney?”
“That’s a nice idea,” Whitney said, refilling Ellie’s wineglass. “I could do some restaurant research.” She startled, as if remembering something. “Oh, Gwen, didn’t you say you had something to show us after music?”
It wasn’t the first time someone had brought up getting together with all the husbands. Each time it happened, Whitney would nod at the idea enthusiastically and volunteer to plan. But she would never look into restaurants. All of them together in the same room—it was the worst idea in the world.
* * *
—
Whitney shouldn’t have gotten so excited about her thirtieth birthday dinner, back in November. That was the problem: She’d set it up to fail from the start. In her expectation of the night, she and Grant had a meal full of sparkling conversation and long, loving looks, and at the end of it, he made a heartfelt speech about how lucky he was to have found her, and they went home and had amazing sex, and it was like the beginning of their relationship all over again.
In reality, they spent most of the meal discussing their upcoming Christmas vacation with Grant’s extended family, a conversation full of logistics and fraught, familiar arguments. They both drank more than usual, and then their taxi hit horrible traffic on the way home, so by the time Whitney came out of the bathroom in the scarlet slip Grant always liked so much, he had already fallen asleep.
Well, they’d have the rest of the weekend to make up for it. On Saturday morning, she woke to glorious sun, one of those crisp November days made all the more beautiful by the knowledge that winter could be descending at any moment. After attending to Hope, she crawled back into bed. “Sweetie,” she said, nuzzling against Grant’s shoulder. “Let’s go to the farmers market.”
He groaned, letting out a gust of morning breath, and pulled the pillow over his head. “It’s early.”
Whitney persisted. “It’ll be fun! We can get some fresh veggies and cook a nice dinner.”
“Why don’t you and Hope go?” he said without opening his eyes. “You guys will have a better time without me slowing you down.”
“We’d never have a better time without you,” she said, slipping her arm around him. His muscles tensed under her touch.
“I need a little break.”
She poked him playfully. Sometimes she felt like a parody of herself. “Come on, lazy bones.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” he snapped, “but people who work all week like to relax on the weekends.”
So she bundled Hope into her winter coat, and they set off without Grant.
Whitney hadn’t been one of those women who dreaded turning thirty, who viewed it as some sort of terrifying deadline. Anyway, she’d gotten her life together in plenty of time, meeting Grant at twenty-four, giving birth to Hope at twenty-nine. But as she pushed her daughter down the avenue, toward the farmers market, an unsettling ache came over her. In her quest to build the perfect family, had she rushed things, using up all of her allotted excitement and adventure too quickly, leaving the rest of her life to rehashing the same arguments over and over again? No. She was being silly. Motherhood was a new kind of adventure, and she and Grant had plenty of excitement left to enjoy. They were just in a bit of a rut right now because they were so tired all the time. But that would pass.
She wandered from booth to booth, pushing Hope’s stroller past the stand selling homemade bread and stopping to look at the farm-fresh eggs. She glanced over at a baby babbling nearby, smiling at her distractedly before recognizing her as Reagan.
“Oh, hey, you!” Whitney said, leaning down and holding out her hand for Reagan to grab onto. She looked up, expecting to see Gwen at the helm of Reagan’s stroller, but an unfamiliar man stood there instead.
“Hello,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“Hi,” she said, drawing back from Reagan. “Sorry. I promise I’m not one of those creepy women who touches random babies without asking!”
“It happens all the time,” he said. “Having such a beautiful baby—it’s a blessing and a curse.”
Whitney laughed. “I’m Whitney, from Gwen’s playgroup.”
“Oh, of course, the famous Whitney!” he said, then knelt down by her stroller, smiling. “And this must be Hope.” When he straightened back up, he stuck out his hand for a shake. “I’m Christopher.” As they shook, Whitney took him in. Gwen’s husband had a bump in his nose, like he’d broken it and decided not to fix it, hair that curled down toward his chin, and stubble on his face. He looked around the market in an engaged and open way, different from the other bored, clean-cut men accompanying their wives. When he’d smiled down at his daughter, it had been with a pure, beautiful adoration.
Whitney blinked. “Is Gwen around?”
“No. On Saturdays, she takes Rosie to her dance class, and I bring Reagan here.” Good for them, Whitney thought, dividing up parenting duties like that. She’d like to discuss something similar with Grant, when they had another child. “What about your husband?” Christopher asked, as if he’d read her mind. “Is he here? The playgroup spouses need to do some bonding too!”
“Oh, he’s at home, recuperating from last night,” she said, and then added, offhand, “We went out to celebrate my birthday.”
“Hey,” Christopher said, his face breaking into a crinkly smile. “Happy birthday!”
“Thanks,” she said. “A big one. Thirty!”
“Whoa,” he said. “A big one, indeed!” He glanced around, his eyes landing on a nearby sign advertising hot apple cider. “Here, let me buy you a cup of birthday cider.”
“Oh, please, you don’t have to.”
“Reagan,” he said, bending down toward his baby in her stroller, “what do you think about us buying our nice friend some cider?” Reagan gurgled, and Christopher nodded very seriously at her before turning back to Whitney, saying in a confidential sort of tone, “Well, the boss has spoken, and she says I do have to. I’m afraid if you don’t accept, she’ll think you’re very rude.”
Whitney laughed, and Christopher ordered them each a steaming cup. They sat on a nearby bench to drink, parking their strollers beside them. “How are you feeling about the big three-oh?” Christopher asked.
“Oh, it’s really just another birthday,” she said.
“Yes and no,” he said, looking at her like he cared what she thought.
“Well,” she said, and hesitated. “It does make you do a certain accounting of the choices you’ve made throughout your twenties.”
“It definitely does,” he said. “And how do yours add up?”
“Oh, they add up wonderfully. But . . . well, where I grew up, twenty-nine was late to have a baby, and that’s not so much the case in New York.”
“Mm,” Christopher said, blowing on his cider, steam rising into the air around him. “In terms of New York parenting, you’re practically a baby yourself.”
“Exactly. I’m the youngest one in the playgroup, and sometimes when I listen to the other women talk about the adventures they had—Ellie went off for a year and taught English in South Korea; Amara partied with all kinds of celebrities—I think maybe I should’ve taken some more time to wander.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s silly.”
“I don’t th
ink it’s silly,” Christopher said, pulling out a bag of cut-up strawberries and handing one to Reagan. “Although it was the opposite for me. I turned thirty, looked around at all the adventuring I’d done, and realized I hadn’t built anything solid. But hey, then two weeks later, I met Gwen.”
“So two weeks from now, I’ll probably pick up and move to Japan,” Whitney said.
“Exactly.” He laughed a nice, easy laugh that lifted the cloud she’d been walking around under all morning. “Just wait till you see forty looming on the horizon. It gets even weirder.”
They kept chatting as they drank their ciders, the other market-goers whirling around them, until Whitney’s phone dinged with a message from Grant asking where she was.
“Oh, we have to go!” Whitney said, standing. Somehow, nearly an hour had gone by.
“We do too. Great talking with you,” Christopher said. “Hey, maybe we’ll see you again next Saturday. We come here every week around this time.”
“Yeah, maybe. That would be nice,” Whitney said. “Tell Gwen I say hi.” She waved as he and Reagan disappeared into the crowd. Then she put her hands into her coat pocket, her fingers suddenly freezing.
The next week, when Grant wanted to stay home to watch a game, she ran into Christopher again. “Fancy seeing you here!” she said, and they moved through the market together, trying samples of olive oil and jam, laughing over a particularly bulbous onion that Christopher pulled out of the pile. At the stand selling homemade bread, the elderly man ringing up Whitney’s purchases threw in a free packet of sugar cookies. “For the beautiful family,” he said, winking at her and Christopher.
