by Laura Hankin
“Is it?” Whitney asked, cocking her head, clenching her fists at her sides, the blithe cheeriness on her face resembling a garish mask, her beauty turned grotesque.
“Whitney,” Gwen asked, “are you having an affair with my husband?” The other women in their semicircle grew very still, the suspicion coming upon them like a cloud covering the sun.
“What? No!” Whitney said. “What? I don’t understand what is going on. I’m sorry that you’re upset and worried, Gwen, but we’re here right now for this photo shoot, and everyone is waiting on us—”
“I ran into Christopher at the bar across the street from the Windom, half an hour after I saw Whitney go in,” Claire said.
Gwen flinched, then turned her big blueberry eyes back on Whitney. “Whitney?”
Whitney floundered, her mouth gaping open and closing. The force of all the other women’s stares hit her too as the other conversation in the loft stopped, the ridiculous pop song on the playlist the only sound besides their shallow, anticipatory breaths. “You’re fired,” she said to Claire, her eyes bright and frantic. “You’re fired from playgroup.”
“Oh, Whitney, you selfish, selfish cunt,” Amara said heavily. She moved to Gwen’s side and put an arm around her shoulder, and Gwen sank into her, beginning to wail. “There is no more playgroup.”
Chapter 31
There could be no photo shoot after that. The women flinched away from Whitney’s touch as she tried to get one of them, any of them, to look at her, and then they left her to explain everything to the baffled coffee-table-book woman while they changed as quickly as they could into their normal clothes and gathered their babies, reaching for Gwen’s hand, petting her hair, offering her comforts of various kinds ranging from excessive amounts of alcohol (Meredith and Ellie) to a meditation workshop (Vicki) to a willingness to castrate Christopher (Amara).
Gwen turned them all down. She needed to go home and be with her children, she said, and figure out if her marriage was salvageable. She didn’t know if she could be around them for a while—too many confusing, sad things tied up in the playgroup now—but she’d let them know if that changed.
“We’re here if you need us,” Amara said, then turned to the other women. “I suppose I’ll see you all around.” Her eyes lingered on Claire, who had just come out of the bathroom bearing a handful of toilet paper. Amara took a breath as if to say something before pressing her lips together and buckling Charlie into his stroller.
Claire approached Gwen, offering her the toilet paper to wipe her eyes. Gwen accepted the gesture, giving an embarrassed sniffle. “Oh, Claire,” she said. “You’re out of a job, and it’s all because you were trying to help me.” She straightened her shoulders, the old type A Gwen ready to make some plans despite her heartbreak. “I’m going to find you something new. I bet that somebody I know is looking for an assistant or office manager.”
“Gwen, you don’t have to worry about that right now,” Claire said. “Seriously.” She looked newly mature under the day’s makeup and hair job, with a new, mature sadness too.
“But I will,” Gwen said, touching Claire briefly on the cheek before wheeling Reagan into the elevator alone.
When Gwen came out into the SoHo sunlight, she broke down her stroller, hailed a taxi, and buckled Reagan’s car seat in. Then she slid in beside her daughter, wiped her eyes, and gave her driver an address in the West Village.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” her driver asked.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, then smoothed down her daughter’s tufty hair. “Right, Reagan?”
Of course she knew that Regan was the name of the ambitious sister in King Lear. She’d been an English major at Dartmouth.
The Hudson River sparkled outside her window as they sped up the West Side Highway. Gwen allowed herself to exhale, then flipped open a compact mirror to examine her makeup. She hadn’t been surprised last month—doing her customary check of Christopher’s phone while he was in the shower—to find out that he’d been sleeping with Whitney. Like Christopher, Whitney was a radiant force of charisma, one of the shining ones, and the shining ones always wanted more.
While they were stopped at a stoplight, Gwen put in some eye drops, blinked, and then carefully reapplied her mascara. She cleared her throat and did a lip trill or two to get rid of all the gunk clogging up her vocal cords. The taxi pulled up at a brownstone, one of those idyllic West Village town houses that retailed for at least ten million dollars. Gwen paid her driver, unbuckled Reagan, carried her stroller up the six stone steps, and rang the doorbell.
“Julie!” said the lithe, buoyant woman who answered the door, stepping forward to kiss Gwen on both cheeks, even though Gwen knew from extensive online research that she had been born in Kentucky, not Paris. “We’re so glad you could make it today!”
“Oh, I know I’m late,” Gwen said, carrying Reagan over the threshold. “This one was being difficult this morning, but we finally got out the door.” She followed the hostess into the living room, where a playgroup of twelve women waved and smiled at her. “Hey, ladies! What did I miss?”
* * *
—
It had all begun when Gwen was pregnant with Reagan, when the two most important men in Gwen’s life decided to screw up at the exact same time.
First, it had been Teddy, Gwen’s brother. Brilliant, difficult Teddy had gotten it into his head that he was going to invent a better cure for ADHD, using the resources afforded to him by his faculty position at Boston University. He was having trouble coming up with the funding for it all, and he’d asked Gwen to invest, so she’d given him a hundred thousand dollars. She was used to coming to his rescue. When their parents died, he’d become her responsibility. She’d bailed him out of jail when he’d gotten caught driving so drunk he could barely stand up. She’d paid for him to go to therapy when he’d called her in the middle of the night to tell her that he’d been stockpiling pills and was staring at hundreds of them all spread out in front of him on his bed at that very moment, beckoning. This time, at least, giving him the money would help him build toward something he felt passionate about.
Then, when she’d called him for an update, midway through her pregnancy, he’d told her the truth: that he’d gotten fired because of a harassment charge levied against him by a research assistant who he swore had been making eyes at him. Nobody wanted to work with him, he said, or give him the institutional support he needed. And worse, he’d already spent her hundred thousand dollars buying supplies and materials through dubiously legal channels, but he now didn’t think he’d be able to use what he’d stockpiled, and so he wouldn’t be able to pay her back.
Only a few weeks later, it had been Christopher. She’d innocently walked into the den to ask him a question about signing up for a Lamaze class, and he’d sprung up from his seat at the computer as if she’d stuck him with a flaming-hot iron, clicking out of something on the screen.
She’d offered up a quick prayer that it was porn—even something really dirty: nubile cheerleaders servicing old grandpas or some obscure fetish like Furries, but when she’d pulled up the browser history he hadn’t had time to wipe clean, she’d found that it was online poker and that he’d lost a significant chunk of their joint money. He only reminded her of her father more and more as they got older.
“No more gambling ever again,” she’d said, and he had promised her, had wept and prostrated himself at her feet. But that man had a self-destructive force inside of him, and it was only a matter of time before it found some other outlet.
For weeks, she felt hopeless. At night, she thought of the Connecticut house, over and over, as she lulled herself to sleep. Instead of counting sheep, she counted its gabled windows, the magnolia blossoms in its backyard. She dreamed about it, the kind of dreams she had trouble shaking herself out of in the morning. If she could only get back there, she could regain something that she’d los
t in the years since her parents had died—something that she couldn’t find in this brownstone that Christopher had contaminated with his golden lies. She could give her daughters the childhood that she’d had.
One day, eight months pregnant with Reagan, she’d dropped Rosie off at her nursery school. And then, on a whim, she’d bought a Metro-North ticket to Westport, called a taxi from the station, and waddled boldly up to the door of the Connecticut house, her heart ricocheting inside her chest as she waited to see if anyone would answer her knock. The property looked the same as it did in her dreams or maybe even lovelier. The flowers in the garden were budding, lilting in the spring breeze. The salt of the ocean perfumed the air.
An older, shorter man answered the door, frowning up at Gwen, his glasses low on his nose, a half-finished sudoku in his hand. “I grew up here,” Gwen said. “And I was wondering if you’d be willing to sell.”
She charmed him with her childhood memories of the place and with her enormous belly. He’d been toying with the idea of retiring to Florida anyway. The price he listed wasn’t unreasonable. About a million more than she’d have after divorcing Christopher and selling the brownstone, if her rough estimates were correct. (Idiotic of her not to get a prenup, to put Christopher’s name on the deed of the house right alongside hers in that rose-colored certitude she’d had when they’d gotten married. Christopher had taken so much from her already, and when she tried to get free of him, he would only end up taking more.) She’d told the man that she would be in touch and started thinking.
The answer came to her, of all places, in the hospital delivery room, when Reagan started pushing her way out into the world. As Gwen grunted and gritted her teeth against the pain, she thought of the sleepless nights she’d had with Rosie, the sleepless nights she’d soon have again, the other exhausted new mothers she’d met in Rosie’s infant music class and playgroup who, like Gwen, were barely making it through the day. There seemed to be endless, beleaguered women who were simultaneously overcome with love and dazed by the impossible work of caring for a ravenous little despot. Every one of them was living through a moment of radical personal change when they were no longer the stars of their own lives, when they were shaken by a depth of worry they’d never before experienced. They knew they were supposed to shoulder their transformation uncomplainingly and selflessly, like “good” mothers, while also maintaining the body weight and grooming habits of a Disney Channel ingenue. It made a lot of them a little crazy, and it made some of them a lot crazy. Sometimes, a mother couldn’t hack it. She gave up and scared the shit out of everyone else. (Because her failure didn’t just affect her! When she left, her children were cast out too, denied access to their glittering birthright.) But what if there was a way to give all these overwhelmed women a tiny boost, a bit of the calm and competence they craved?
“Regan,” Gwen had whispered when her own ravenous creature was laid in her arms, thinking of King Lear and the ways in which the men of the world consistently underestimated the women around them. Christopher heard her and thought of Ronald (a picture of her grandfather and the Gipper hung in their upstairs hallway), and that was what had gone on the birth certificate, extra “a” and all. No surprise. She and Christopher had always just missed understanding each other, like cars trying and failing to merge into each other’s lanes.
Once she’d had a month or so to recover, she went to see Teddy. He had all this supply, and she knew where he could get demand. But they’d have to be smart about it. The “perfect” mothers of the world would want to say that they’d been duped if the truth ever came out. They’d add a bunch of the in-vogue wellness jargon, some fancy packaging to make it seem legitimate, and jack up the price to ridiculous amounts. Teddy had been resistant, but he owed her. She’d taken care of him her entire life, even though he was older, and now that she had two tiny, precious girls relying on her, it was finally the time for him to step up and be the big brother that she’d always wanted him to be.
Besides, Gwen told Teddy when he still hesitated, they were giving these women a gift. Their own mother had spent her life yoked to every fad diet that came along, denying herself and denying herself, always hungry for food she couldn’t have. She’d given her limited rations of energy to her drunken husband and her wide-eyed little girl and, most of all, to her troubled son until she had nothing left for herself. TrueMommy would make things easier for women like their mother, keeping their appetites at bay, allowing them to actually have some time for themselves. Those women could afford it.
The most flabbergasting thing about it all was that it had worked.
Gwen played her cards right. She learned how to create appealing design templates, how to cover her tracks, and how to open up a secret bank account. Using a lawyer bound to keep her identity private through attorney-client privilege, she started a shell corporation in Delaware so that the women who paid her could make their checks out to “TrueMommy LLC” in peace. But she also offered incentives for paying in cash, a small “playgroup discount” that allowed all these wealthy women to pat themselves on the back for getting a deal. The vast majority of mothers wanted to believe that they could be thrifty even as they paid out insane amounts, and so most of the money made its way to Gwen in the form of hundred-dollar bills, collected by the cute, discreet college boy she hired to do personal TrueMommy deliveries each month. (The women tended to go gaga over the fact that TrueMommy cared so much about its customers that it sent a boy in uniform to hand-deliver the vitamins! Such service!)
Gwen found midsized Momstagrams of beautiful women who needed validation but who hadn’t yet gotten quite enough of it. They always revealed far too much information about their whereabouts in the updates they posted. Going to sail some boats in Central Park with my little sea captain, they’d write under a picture of their child in a sailor outfit, and she’d run out to the pond and then very casually sit next to them, striking up a conversation, mentioning with a sad sigh that motherhood could be so lonely. Their eyes would light up, and they’d either invite her to the playgroup they already had or resolve to start one with her name first on the list.
She never introduced TrueMommy right away. She would attend a few playgroup meetings first, make sure that nobody involved was a crusading-justice type who would care more about blowing the whistle than about self-preservation if they ever had to face the reality of what was in the pills they were gobbling down. And then she’d send the message to the Mom accounts and rehearse the actor from Philly whom she’d hired to play Dr. Lauren Clark, prepping her with all the questions that Gwen would bombard her with during the playgroup meeting, as well as anything else she could think of. In general, she’d only show up at a handful of playgroup meetings every month, just frequently enough to make sure that everything was working out as it was supposed to. She’d avoid having her picture taken or getting too close to anyone. And if things started to go south, she could always pretend to be as dumbfounded as the rest of them and drop the specter of Child Protective Services to keep them all quiet.
The Whitney playgroup had been different, because it was actually in her neighborhood. She did want Reagan to have one stable thing so that she’d develop healthily and be able to form lasting relationships. Gwen used her real name in that one, invited them to her house when Christopher mentioned how much he wanted to have a Christmas party and meet some of her mom friends, and acquiesced to get together not only once a week, but twice. She hadn’t intended to introduce TrueMommy with these women at all. It was too close to home. And Amara was so outspoken and unfiltered that she might be the kind to tell the truth in a worst-case scenario. But then Gwen had watched how Amara worried about Charlie. Amara’s fear that she was failing her son could be a powerful resource. Mothers who felt that they were mothering wrong were a uniquely vulnerable group. What had really cemented the whole thing, though, was the Joanna factor. Joanna had spooked them all, priming them to look for a miracle, a way to ward of
f contagion. How could Gwen pass up such an irresistible opportunity?
Throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, Gwen had two hundred fifty mothers hooked. She planned to do it for a little less than a year, which would get through most of Teddy’s supply, and put her a hair north of the amount she needed for the house. Then she’d gradually taper off the dose of the drug in each week’s shipment before she disappeared. But she’d started keeping a list of mothers who’d taken to TrueMommy like fish in water, who thrived on it so much that she had a feeling they’d seek it out even if they knew the truth about what was in it. She had twenty-nine mothers on that list (she’d had a tentative thirty-one, before she’d taken Ellie and Meredith off), and perhaps she could work something out with them. It could be a good source of continued revenue. Help her buy some furnishings for the house, send Rosie to ballet lessons.
She fell into bed every night completely exhausted, but also fulfilled in a strange way, the kind of self-satisfaction that she hadn’t experienced for years. Whenever she went to work parties as Christopher’s date, everyone’s eyes would glaze over when she said she was a stay-at-home mom. It had been exhausting to prove that she was smart, so she’d started playing dumb instead. Now, as she widened her eyes and asked about their jobs, which sounded so exciting and so tough, some badass bitch inside of her threw her arms open and howled into the wind.
* * *
—
In the beautiful West Village brownstone, as all the women sipped their wine and chatted among themselves, Gwen noticed that one of the other mothers, an exceedingly tan woman named Angie, was scribbling various ailments onto her TrueMommy personal-curation form.
“Oh, right!” Gwen said, scooting over. “I need to do that too. I told them the other week that I’d been feeling a little nauseous, and they upped the peppermint oil in my vitamins. I’ve been feeling so much better.”
