by Laura Hankin
“You’d better go take that,” Amara said, nodding at the bag in Claire’s hand as she pulled a tarplike piece of clear plastic over the open part of Charlie’s stroller.
“Yeah,” Claire said. “Hey, thanks again. It was really nice—”
“Yes, yes, I know. I’m amazing,” Amara said. “I’ll see you next playgroup.”
Claire laughed. “Okay. Bye.” She bent down toward the clear plastic and waggled her fingers. “Bye, Charlie. Nice hanging out with you.”
In response, Charlie shook his head no, then scrunched up his face and let out a wail, twisting away. Amara shut her eyes for a moment and gave her head a small shake.
“Sorry,” she said. “He really is a good baby. He just doesn’t like to show it very much.”
“You know,” Claire said, “I admire him. He’s got spirit.”
A smile began to curve on Amara’s face, shyer than anything Claire had seen from her before. “You think so?” she asked.
Claire thought about the playgroups she’d been to, the looks some of the other mothers shot Amara when Charlie wouldn’t stop crying, the way he was clearly the least well-behaved of all the babies. People probably didn’t compliment Amara on her child very often. What a terrible feeling that must be. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “He doesn’t give a fuck. All the most interesting people are that way. He’s going to grow up to do great things. Or become a serial killer. One of the two.”
“Thanks ever so much,” Amara said, rolling her eyes. “That last part truly is a comfort.”
The rain started coming down more heavily, anointing them, getting into Claire’s eyes so that she had to blink the drops away. “Oh, boy, this is going to be a fun trip home. Bye for real now,” Claire said, and turned to go.
“Claire,” Amara said. Claire turned back. “Do . . . do you have someone to make you tea and all that after you’ve taken the pill?”
“Um,” Claire said.
“Because you could come back to mine. I’m close, and my husband won’t be home for a while.” Amara paused, pursing her lips. “God. Despite how it sounds, I swear I’m not trying to seduce you.”
* * *
—
Fifteen minutes later, Claire lay on Amara’s brown leather couch as levonorgestrel invaded her ovaries, decimating any unwanted invaders. Pow! Pow! Not fertilizing any eggs today, you devils!
She stretched out, her body already heavy and unsettled, and looked at her surroundings. Amara’s apartment was small. Well, no, it could’ve eaten Claire’s apartment for breakfast and still been hungry, but Claire’s trips to Whitney’s and Gwen’s had skewed her expectations. Their apartments (or brownstones) held a sense of mystery—they could very well contain secret passageways or maid’s quarters or a staircase to the roof. The entirety of Amara’s apartment announced itself immediately. The three doors leading off the living room must have been a bathroom and two bedrooms. The kitchen was only cordoned off by a half wall, so the noises floated straight into the living room—Amara bustling around, the teakettle emitting its high-pitched whistle. And while Whitney’s and Gwen’s homes were both decorated in one unified aesthetic (sleek for Whitney, classic for Gwen), Amara’s home was more the product of a relatively well-off, busy couple who had bought whatever nice furniture caught their fancy at the time and plunked it down wherever it fit.
Well, and then there were a couple of luxury items—a small crystal bowl on a shelf that must have cost a fortune and didn’t even have anything in it, a cashmere blanket on the couch with a tag from Saks Fifth Avenue that was the softest thing Claire had ever touched. Had Amara stolen those too, just gone into Saks and slipped them into her purse with that same frenzied desperation that Claire had seen on her face that day in Whitney’s office? Claire shook her head, not wanting to think about that right now.
On the floor, Charlie crawled around, grabbing at anything that wasn’t nailed down or baby-proofed—a well-worn, dog-eared baby book on the low coffee table (The Foolproof Guide to a Happy, Healthy Baby), a set of keys. He settled on Amara’s large purse and stuck one of its handles into his mouth, gnawing on it like it was an ear of corn.
“All right, as promised, one cup of tea,” Amara said, coming out of the kitchen and setting a steaming mug down on the coffee table. Claire sat up and wrapped her hand around it gratefully.
Tired of his gnawing, Charlie reached into Amara’s purse and began scooping its contents onto the ground. The first to hit the floor was a pretty little bag, like the ones Whitney had given out the other week. “Oh, yeah, what’s this whole goody bag thing about?” Claire asked as Charlie held the bag upside down and shook everything inside it out.
Amara picked up Charlie, stopping his destruction, and he kicked and wriggled in her arms as Claire plucked the goody bag from the floor, running her fingers over its pretty pattern of embossed golden leaves. “Oh, you know,” Amara said as she carried Charlie to one of those bouncy freestanding baby seats, like an inner tube with no water. “Silly wellness things that people send Whitney because of her Instagram. She goes all out and makes us these little party favor bags of them. I think she has too much time on her hands.” She slid Charlie in, and he began to jump, pounding at the garish neon piano key buttons in front of him until they released their tinny music. Amara returned to the floor in front of the couch, where Charlie had dumped everything, sat down, and began to gather it all back up with a sigh. “Let’s see,” she said, holding up a bar of soap in the air like a presenter on the Home Shopping Network. “Today, we’ve got special, toxin-free soap to make sure your baby’s skin is soft as margarine.” She picked up a small suede box, delicate and expensive-looking enough to house an engagement ring inside, with a tag reading TrueMommy in a clean Avenir font. “Organic mommy vitamins to make your hair shiny and give you the energy to go on. And finally,” she said, waving a postcard in the air, “a coupon for fifteen percent off a Mommy-and-me yoga class that I will never go to.”
“Man,” Claire said, holding out her hand to take the goodies and put them back into the bag. “Whitney gets a lot of free shit. I should start a fancy Instagram.”
“Right? The whole thing is kind of insane, but people love her, apparently. The Internet goes wild for beautiful young moms who make all the regular moms feel hopeful. Whitney is an achievable unicorn to them, like if they just drink enough kale smoothies and meditate for ten minutes a day, they’ll wake up in her perfect life,” Amara said, handing over the objects and then tensing up as though she was worried Claire was going to break the special soap she was stuffing back into the bag.
“I’ll have to get her autograph at the next playgroup,” Claire said, squinting at the fancy TrueMommy description: A comprehensive supplement & metabolic optimizer for new moms. “Well, that’s a complicated way to say ‘these pills will make you skinny.’”
“All right, they do a little bit more than that. Or at least they’d better. I’m paying enough for them.”
“What?” Claire laughed. “Do they increase your sex drive and boost your IQ by fifty points too?” What a load of BS. Sure, she’d like to believe that eating activated charcoal could turn her into Heidi Klum, but at the end of the day, she was always going to be herself, unfortunately. She’d bet her left boob that TrueMommy was up-charging these moms like crazy, that these vitamins contained two dollars’ worth of herbs but retailed for two hundred dollars.
Amara opened her mouth as if to argue, an unsettled look on her face. Then she bit her lip and got to her feet. “Well, to each their own. Shall I put on some music?”
Claire nodded, so Amara walked over to her phone and began scrolling through it. The bergamot scent of Claire’s tea wafted up toward her, and she blew on the liquid, then took a small sip, lying back as the warmth coursed through her body and settled in her stomach. She closed her eyes. Then those familiar, hateful chords began pulsing out of a speaker. Claire startled and
sat up. Amara leaned against the wall, watching her with catlike stillness.
“Um,” Claire said. “Hmm, maybe we could listen to some jazz instead. Better for a rainy day.”
“Don’t you want to further your pop-culture awareness?” Amara asked, raising an eyebrow. “Meredith and Ellie would probably cream their pants if you played this in playgroup.”
“I’d rather not make Meredith and Ellie cream their pants,” Claire said as Marlena and Marcus began to harmonize:
You’ll take those Idaho eyes back to where they belong
And I’ll come too
I don’t belong anywhere except next to you.
“Anyway,” Claire said, “I think I get the gist.” Over in his baby jumper, Charlie pounded his fake piano keys again, and the metallic notes from that mixed with the lush sounds of the song. Claire’s head began to throb.
“Why are you so weird about this song?” Amara asked, laughing.
“Because it’s my band!” Claire snapped. Amara reached out and paused the music, and they sat in silence except for a fading sound from Charlie’s contraption.
“Was my band,” Claire said, looking down into the mug of tea before her, unused to saying it aloud. “They kicked me out because they found someone better, and then they got famous, and here I am.”
* * *
—
Vagabond had been in the home stretch of a three-week tour when Claire’s boyfriend, Quinton, called to tell her that he might have cancer.
She answered the phone flushed with excitement, fresh off having played through “Idaho Eyes” for the very first time in rehearsal, a spidey sense telling her that this new song was the best thing they’d ever done. Her first thought, when she heard the way Quinton said, “Hello,” was that he had called to break up with her, and she felt a pang of sadness, because Quinton was so normal compared to all the charming, aimless artists she’d dated in the past. Quinton, who had gone to law school, got eight hours of sleep a night so that he’d be well rested for his job at city hall. He talked about art and politics with aplomb. He was training for a half marathon. Claire had a nice time with Quinton, and meanwhile, every time she turned around, another person she knew was getting engaged. She and Quinton had gone on a double date with Thea and her wife, Amy, and Quinton and Thea had traded law school stories. When he left to go to the bathroom, Thea had said to Claire, “You should marry this guy.” Since Claire barely spoke to her parents anymore and didn’t much trust their opinions anyway, Thea was the most valuable family approval she could get.
But on the phone, what Quinton had to say was far worse than a breakup. Quinton had a strange rash that wouldn’t go away. Quinton had a low platelet count. Quinton had gone to a doctor who told him that they couldn’t know anything definitively until the tests came back, but that it might be leukemia.
“I know we’ve only been together for five months. So if it’s cancer,” he said, a wobble creeping into his voice, “you don’t have to stay with me.”
“What?” she asked, overcome with worry for him. “No, I wouldn’t . . . I wouldn’t do that. Of course I’ll stay with you.”
He let out a breath of relief. “I love you, Claire,” he said for the first time.
“I love you too,” she said, unsure how much she actually meant it and how much she knew it was what he needed to hear.
Over the rest of the night, as she and the Vagabond boys played for a couple hundred people in Pittsburgh and then went out to a bar to celebrate, a new kind of panic sunk in. What had she just committed to? Would being there for Quinton mean having to quit the band? She took a shot and then another. Marcus stuck by her side that night. Sometimes, after shows, he’d disappear with a pretty fan. Other times, if no fan caught his eye, he’d “accidentally” brush his hand against Claire’s breast, then look at her to see how she reacted. (If she was being honest, she’d always carried a torch for him, but it was better to keep things professional, not to get into Fleetwood Mac territory.) She took some more shots, and this time, when Marcus put his hands on her hips, she didn’t pull away or feign ignorance. And when he followed her into the bathroom and kissed her, she kissed him back until she felt the bile rising up in her throat and had to pull away to vomit. If she hadn’t gotten sick, she didn’t know how far she would have gone with him.
The next morning, she woke up resolute (and extremely hungover). They still had one more show left on the tour, in Philadelphia the next night, but she couldn’t do it. She was going to surprise Quinton and take him to a bed-and-breakfast in the Hudson Valley, a distraction while he waited for his test results to come back.
“You guys can survive without me for one night,” she said, attempting to be casual and jokey, avoiding Marcus’s angry eyes. “I believe in you.”
“But it’s Union Transfer,” Marcus said. “This show is fucking important.”
“Hey,” Diego said, “I bet my cousin, Marlena, could step in and sing whatever harmonies we need. She lives right outside of Philly, and she’s a big fan, so she knows all the songs and totally gets our vibe.” Claire had felt such relief, even kissed Diego on the cheek in gratitude, as Marcus reluctantly agreed.
So Claire and Quinton had hopped on a Metro-North train and hiked among the changing late-autumn leaves, holding hands, Quinton smiling stoically at all of Claire’s frantic jokes.
On Saturday night, as Vagabond was preparing to take the stage in Philly, Claire and Quinton wandered, tipsy, down the streets of the little Hudson Valley town, which people said was the place where hip Brooklynites moved when they got tired of city living and wanted to have a family. Claire looked at Quinton. Maybe that wouldn’t be too bad a life.
Music wafted out the door of a local bar, and they went into the noise, pushing through a crowd and ordering sour beers. On a small stage, a band of older men, nearing retirement age, or maybe just retired, played rockabilly tunes. Outfitted in bright suit jackets and funny, music-themed ties, they were talented guys, putting their all into it, wailing away, and Quinton held out his hand and pulled her close to dance. Around them, middle-aged couples twisted and waved their arms. She leaned against Quinton’s strong chest. It couldn’t be cancer. Or, if it was, they were catching it early enough that everything would be fine.
The beer coated her tongue as one song ended and another began, a Chuck Berry cover. The thirty or so people in the bar’s low light danced as if they hadn’t gotten a chance to move much lately, eager but with a certain stiffness. Quinton fit right in—he was always a little stiff when he danced. He didn’t have a natural sense of rhythm, but he tried. It was endearing, usually.
Somewhere in the third song, Claire’s feeling about the whole scene shifted. She couldn’t say why. Nothing in particular happened. A sadness just overcame her. How many of these men onstage had thought they would lead exceptional lives, had been convinced they’d be the next Paul Simon? And how many of them now looked forward all week (or all month? How often did they get together?) to this one blip of playing other people’s music for a tipsy crowd, this one chance to time-travel back to the false promise of their youth?
She wanted to do something astonishing with her life. The potential to be astonishing with Vagabond hovered, just out of reach. But she could blink and end up a regular here. Around her, people laughed and smiled, but it was like she’d gotten a particular form of X-ray vision she couldn’t turn off, and now all she saw was an undercurrent of regret beneath it all. Her limbs tightened up. She drained her beer. Then she tugged on Quinton’s hand and asked if they could go.
Quinton didn’t understand when she tried to describe it to him on their walk back to the B and B. “I thought it was fun,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t bad. I’m not saying that. They were good musicians, and that’s what made it even sadder,” she said, stumbling over her imperfect words.
“Maybe this is what they want for thems
elves,” he said, so she let it be.
Surely there was a way for her to be there for Quinton, if he needed her, and to get back to Vagabond as soon as possible. And when she did get back to Vagabond, she needed to stand up for herself more. She needed to show up to practice with song lyrics or even full songs rather than just hoping that Marcus would ask for her help. She wanted to be more than just the token female eye candy.
And then on Sunday morning, when Quinton was in the shower, Claire stretched out in their two-hundred-dollar-a-night room with its rose-patterned wallpaper, pulled up a video from the Vagabond show on Facebook, and realized how much she’d fucked herself over. Marlena strutted around the stage, gorgeous, her voice a weird, thrilling yowl. Marlena was curvy where Claire was flat, with dark, striking features while Claire looked like a spare member of the Weasley family. Marlena and Marcus sang into the same microphone for “Idaho Eyes”—how could they have debuted “Idaho Eyes” without her?—their lips almost touching, their bodies moving in perfect rhythm, and the sexual chemistry was so strong, it even turned Claire on a little before she closed out of the video in disgust.
Marcus and the others moved fast, sitting her down for the talk just a few days later. She’d been heartbroken and wildly angry, and spent a lot of time reading articles about Pete Best, the first drummer for the Beatles, who the others kicked out when they were right on the cusp of success. Pete Best, at least, had had the comfort of rumors that the other guys had been jealous, that he’d been the most good-looking one, attracting the most ardent fan attention, and so Paul and John and George had traded him in for goofy-looking Ringo, who was safer. Claire knew that the Vagabond guys had traded up in every way.
All those times she’d spitefully mailed her parents clippings of Vagabond reviews or interviews, wanting to show them that they had been wrong for trying to hold her back, came swimming into her mind, filling her with a hot, sinking shame. Her entire grandiose view of herself as a special talent had come tumbling down, a pyramid crumbling into dust. She’d paraded from Ohio to New York like an emperor but—surprise!—she hadn’t been wearing any clothes. The story didn’t talk about the emperor afterward, did it? How he felt when everyone realized that he’d been duped, that his expensive new suit was no suit at all? She wanted to know what had gone through the emperor’s head, how he’d dealt with it. Did he sleep with any lady who would still have him? Did he drink himself to sleep each night? The story didn’t respect him enough to say.
