by Julia Fierro
She felt like a fool when she thought of it—the end of days. Like she was some right-wing evangelical. Or one of those people who believed the Mayan prediction that the world would end in 2012. But talk of the end was everywhere. Armageddon. Apocalypse. By flood. By tsunami. By flaming asteroid. Shortage of water and food was inevitable, claimed even the most rational voices on NPR—the only news (at Josh’s firm suggestion) Nicole allowed herself. Despite her news purge, she caught the headlines on the stand in front of the convenience store and watched snippets of the primetime news while on line at the pizzeria. The ads plastered across the subway walls announced new apocalyptic movies—via plague, zombies, earthquake, fire and/or ice. Novels set in dystopian landscapes lined the shelves of bookstores. Autism rates were skyrocketing, the ozone depleting, and you couldn’t eat a tuna sandwich because of the mercury. The world was a mess, and people were terrified; there was no denying it.
Despite her outward nonchalance (she had friends who actually called her laid-back), after Wyatt was born, when all she had at stake multiplied exponentially, she had come to see that terrible things—the witches and boogeymen of her childhood nightmares—could, and did, happen during the day. An airplane, once a benign sight, could slice open the world on a perfect blue morning. A pair of psychopaths could take a high school hostage as the lunch bell rang. You, yes you, could receive mail coated in white dust. You could be pushed into the path of the A train by God knows what kind of mentally deranged person. And what about that woman on the West Side who was walking her dog—electrocuted when she stepped on a seemingly innocent manhole cover?
Measles in Park Slope. Mumps in Midwood. And the bees were disappearing.
Years ago, in college, the dying bees had been the talk at parties while a blunt was passed, discussed with irreverence unique to youth. Now, years later, Nicole couldn’t stop worrying about the bees. Among other things.
It would be safer out on Long Island, wouldn’t it? She knew the idea of fleeing the city was ridiculous. Because of a computer’s prediction? So she revised. It would be good to get away. Yes, that was better. It was the Labor Day holiday, after all. Best to take advantage of the beach house while her parents were in Florida. To get a break from the end-of-summer heat that rose from beneath the sidewalks, sending cockroaches skittering to the surface after sunset. To squeeze in one last beach weekend before summer officially fled. And, she added, the playgroup would be so grateful.
For three years, Nicole, three other new moms, and one stay-at-home dad, had rotated hosting Friday afternoon play dates. Complete with wine and cheese for the parents, and goldfish crackers and juice boxes for the babies, now babies no more, all between three and four years old. The children had grown up together, taking first steps and uttering first words in each other’s company. She owed it to them, Nicole thought, to follow through on her promise of a weekend at the beach.
Nicole found her iPhone and tapped out a text:
Hey! Hope to see y’all on the Gold Coast tomorrow! Forecast: sunny days & breezy nights. We have a baby pool, floaties, & sand toys for kiddies!
Bring sweaters for bonfire on beach! Mojitos await you … xxxooo Nic
She then sent it to the whole playgroup: to Leigh (mommy to Chase and Charlotte), Rip (daddy to Hank), and Susanna (mommy to twins Dash and Levi). Even, after some thought, to Tiffany (mommy to Harper), who was a bit high maintenance and always in some kind of disagreement with one or another of the playgroup parents.
* * *
Nicole set Wyatt’s dinner (carefully cut pork cubes and steamed broccoli) in front of him and paused the episode of Blue’s Clues, breaking his iPad-induced trance.
“Don’t forget to take bites,” she sang. “Or I’ll have to turn off the show.”
“Okay,” Wyatt said as he stared at the iPad screen, waiting for the man who dressed like a boy to reappear.
“Mommy’s going to the bathroom. ’Kay?”
She locked herself in the bathroom, rolled a towel, and tucked it at the bottom of the door.
Fan on.
Window open.
She heard Wyatt on the other side of the wall, singing along with the man-boy on TV, trilling enthusiastically of the joys of brushing your teeth. Make them sparkle! Make them shine!
She steadied the glass pipe (purchased at Lollapalooza almost twenty years ago) on the sink and slipped the small purple plastic box—her weed-delivery guy’s signature—from the rolled-up socks she kept hidden in a box of tampons under the sink.
Opening the plastic purple box was part of her ritual. The smell, both sweet and sour, reminded her of the scent of good old clean dirt under a child’s nails on a midsummer afternoon.
She caught her reflection in the mirror. The bud was lifted to her nose, the red hairs glimmering as if coated with fine sugar. She would have laughed if she had been someone else, watching a grown woman prepare to get stoned with such ceremony. A mom. A thirty-five-year-old woman hiding in her bathroom.
She stuffed the pipe’s bowl with fluffy green buds, and before she lit up, she found the device, an invention reclaimed from her college days, which had taken her just a few minutes to re-create. The cardboard tube from a paper-towel roll, a scented dryer sheet taped over one end.
The first pull. The glass stem clicking against her teeth. The heat scratching at the back of her throat. The fullness of her lungs. The sense of safety was immediate, as if her body were saying, “Okay, now. There it is, Nicole. Oh. Kay.”
Nicole blew the smoke through the cardboard tube, and the bathroom smelled of fresh laundry.
They were tiny puffs. Little sips, really, she reassured herself. And what did it matter, when those tiny puffs chased away the worry that bullied her each day. She imagined the smoke’s curled fingers kneading her shoulders, her neck, her jaw, her brain, delivering the calm she needed but without the drab side effects that came with the Zoloft she’d started taking soon after Wyatt was born.
She had been so nervous to call the dealer’s pager number—a gift from her hairstylist. Nicole had held on to the Post-it note until, finally, three months ago, after she had stopped the Zoloft, the anxiety returning, flooding her system like a virus, she had made the call. Her fingers had fumbled when she opened the door for the delivery guy with his knapsack of purple plastic boxes, each packed with a cluster of dewy buds.
Five more pulls, each followed by a spritz from the fig-scented ambiance mist her acupuncturist had recommended. Five was her lucky number. It made her think of one person surrounded by two on each side. Protected.
Nicole was relaxed now. It felt as if the sharp edges of life had blurred, softened, been capped with those plastic triangles she had suctioned to the corners of the coffee table after Wyatt was born. Just to be safe.
With the premium red-haired marijuana ($85 a quarter ounce), Nicole felt okay. Like she could handle anything. In those few hours of weed-cushioned calm, she had started to think that maybe she could finish the novel she’d been working on for six years, maybe she could be a better mother, a better wife, and maybe, just maybe, she could stay off her meds. Josh had been insistent she stay on the Zoloft, despite her attempts at explaining how sluggish, how blah it made her feel. She hadn’t told him when she’d stopped taking it.
In life before Wyatt and Zoloft, her favorite conversational adjectives had been “amazing” and “exquisite.” After Wyatt was born, when she’d fallen into what their pediatrician called the baby blues (she’d wanted to stab him every time he used the phrase), and accepted his prescription for Zoloft, she felt flat, like she’d been transformed into one of the one-dimensional stock characters she lectured against in the undergrad Creative Writing 101 classes she taught twice a week at City College. Where were her highs and lows, the dips and valleys that made life so varied, so interesting? Where was her material?
Writing was impossible. Even reading anything more challenging than a mediocre thriller felt intolerable. Why read when she could sit in front of the te
levision in the few hours between when Wyatt fell asleep and when exhaustion defeated her?
The Z made everything feel so whatever, she had told her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenbaum, who claimed (with a condescending chuckle) that this middle zone was healthy. He suggested she experiment with lowering the Z, five milligrams at a time, to find a happy medium between anxious and sedated. But the lowering of the dose was like a drug in itself. With every five-milligram drop, Nicole could feel the lifting of her spirits (and she wasn’t one to use a cliché lightly).
Four months ago, in the height of the swine-flu panic, she had quit therapy. Without calling, without e-mailing. She deleted the messages Dr. Greenbaum left on her phone without listening to them, an action that gave her a deliciously empowering thrill. She was free of having to listen to her unlikable self in therapy as she recited the dreadful what-ifs circling her mind. What if Wyatt’s sore throat was the first symptom of h1n1? What if terrorists bombed Josh’s subway train? What if the lump in her neck was cancer?
She was down to only twenty-five milligrams of Z per day when her thoughts returned. Brilliant thoughts, genius even! A crystal-clear memory (her first kiss), a fantasy (her next novel idea), an observation (oh, how many people there are yearning their way through life).
Hello! Where have you been? Her thoughts hadn’t disappeared; they had been trapped under the mellowing blanket of Z. Under Wyatt’s whining, under the tinny songs his toys played over and over, under her own voice that was always prodding Wyatt. Use your words, honey. Use your words.
She decided she was through with medication, and despite the rocky months that followed, Josh’s complaints she was irritable, erratic, unstable—all those words starting with negative prefixes—she had stayed strong.
With a little help from the monthly delivery of purple plastic boxes.
* * *
The first text was from Susanna, mom to twins, who the parents in the playgroup called (with affection, of course) the lesbian mommy. Cheerful and rosy-cheeked, Susanna, Nicole thought, would’ve made a perfect soccer mom in another life, despite the fact that Allie, Susanna’s partner and some kind of visual artist, was Susanna’s opposite—pale, dangerously thin. Black turtlenecks. Black skinny jeans. Allie reminded Nicole of the goth kids who had moved like zombies through the corridors of her high school.
Susanna:
We’ll be there. Two newly hitched mommies and two little monsters arriving round 5!
Nicole:
congrats!!! glad Allie finally made an honest woman of you. ;) see you tom!
Her phone buzzed with two more texts.
First Leigh, the playgroup’s resident debutante. A blue-blooded blonde, whose slim frame looked chic draped in just about anything. Cheap Old Navy, white jeans, horizontal stripes, even pastels—on Leigh everything looked designer. There was something a bit Grace Kelly-esque about Leigh, Nicole had always thought. Maybe if Grace Kelly were constipated.
Leigh:
Thank you, Nicole. Looking forward.
Rip, the playgroup’s only dad came next:
woo-hoo! we’ll bring the tequila. body shots!!
Nicole knew Rip was sure to show up in his uniform of frayed cargo shorts and faded tee. His straw fedora crushed over unruly brown curls. Rip’s hipster dad-look was cute. Carefully assembled to look as if it were not carefully assembled. But just when Nicole thought she saw a glimpse of something attractive in Rip, he ruined it with an overeager comment, like calling himself a feminist too often and with too much gusto. Or a careless mistake, like arriving sockless at playgroup (there was a strict no-shoe rule at all their homes) so they had to stare at his hairy toe knuckles all afternoon.
Last, came a text from Tiffany. Sultry and unpredictable, Tiffany was the wild card in the playgroup. She knew how to work her perfectly placed curves and rusty Aphrodite-length hair.
Tiffany:
oh sweetie. the serenity of the beach sounds divine. you are SO good to us.
* * *
Night had arrived at last. The ten to fifteen minutes before Josh arrived was Nicole’s favorite time, and although she knew it was wrong, this was when she loved Wyatt most, knowing that the day—and her shift—would soon end.
She missed him already, she thought, as she hovered over her little boy. His eyes were frozen to the iPad while Lightning McQueen raced across the screen.
“I like it when you are still,” she whispered as she knelt next to him, close enough to see his chest lift, his belly fill, with each breath, “That’s a Pablo Neruda poem. I gave it to a boy in college. The first boy I ever loved.”
She felt awkward, as if performing, but continued, “He broke my heart.”
She leaned forward, her nose and lips an inch from Wyatt’s cheek. It was a game she played to see how close she could get before he pushed her away. Her boy looked down his nose at her, his eyes nearly crossed, and said, “You’re a pretty girl, Mommy.”
He knew this always made her smile, and she knew he was hoping she’d say yes to more TV.
“Mmm,” she said. “You always smell good after your bath. Like a milkshake.”
“One more show, Mommy? Please?”
“Sure. Just one more before Daddy gets home.”
She stroked his cheek. As soft as a kitten’s ear.
“Mama’s going to take care of you, pumpkin. She’s never going to let anyone, or anything hurt you. Promise.”
“Okay, Mommy,” he said, nudging her away. “Can I watch Spider-Man?”
Part 1
Friday
babe in the wood
Allie
Allie called the playgroup Mommy Camp. This had made Susanna laugh at first, when they were new mothers juggling the fussy twin boys Susanna had birthed, when their clothes, the urban artist’s uniform of all black, showed every spot of spit-up and streak of snot. But lately, Allie’s jokes sounded, even to Allie, like the jabs of an outsider. Instead of life feeling like us vs. them, it felt like Allie vs. Susanna.
They had been driving for over an hour, Levi and Dash asleep in the backseat, when the map on Allie’s phone directed them off the main road. Susanna drove onto a causeway flanked by the wind-whipped waves of the Long Island Sound. The narrow road was dotted with trees; their branches stripped white, gnarled by the salt wind.
“You didn’t say the beach house was this far,” Allie said, as the sun bounced off the water, assaulting her eyes. She sank into the passenger seat and pulled the hood of her black sweatshirt over her head.
She had been up most of the night color-correcting a cover photo she’d shot for a Danish magazine. She was behind on the deadline after their three-day trip (with the boys, Susanna had insisted), to Massachusetts, where they’d been married at the Northampton town hall. Then Levi, the more demanding of their boys, had woken at four this morning, shuffling into their room, his thick honey-dusted hair spilling into his eyes. He had begged to join Susanna and Allie in their bed, and Susanna had relented. Not for the first time, Allie had thought about how Susanna coddled the twin who looked most like her. Susanna and Levi looked as if they belonged on a Swiss mountaintop, herding goats. Yodeling. Dash, the more diminutive twin, took after Allie, or at least after Eric, their beloved sperm donor and good friend whose appearance had matched Allie’s brother. Straight brown hair. Skin so pale you could see the green veins that crisscrossed his temples.
“Oh,” Susanna gushed, “it’s amazing. Should we stop? Look, we can pull over right there and look at the water.”
“Wait. The boys.” Allie sprang forward. “They’ll wake if we stop.”
When the boys had simultaneously fallen asleep in Queens after thirty minutes of gridlock, it had felt like a gift from who-knows-who-or-what. Allie was an atheist, like most of the artists, filmmakers, and designers who made up her and Susanna’s elite New York City circle. Still, she thought, they should wring every drop from the blessing.
“Please,” Allie pleaded softly, “sweetheart. Let’s keep going. I ha
ve to pee, and my head is killing me.”
Silently, Susanna accelerated, the eight-month-sized globe of her belly bumping the steering wheel. Allie could see, in the tightness under Susanna’s jaw, that she had, once again, said the wrong thing.
“Maybe the pregnant woman carrying your baby is the one who has to pee,” Susanna said. With the quick-fire anger of a woman in her last term, Allie thought.
“I’m sorry,” Allie said. “That was selfish.”
She couldn’t help adding, “It’s not a competition, you know.” She knew that this, in Susanna’s mind, negated the apology, but Susanna’s tone irked her, the “you-owe-me-big-time” tone Susanna used more and more as she neared the end of her pregnancy.
Our pregnancy, Allie thought, correcting herself, though she preferred to call the pregnancy “the egg swap.” She found levity worked best when describing their situation to her childless friends, all immersed in a world of unscheduled and unbridled creation, and who she bumped into at the few SoHo gallery shows she could get to these days.
Susanna, my partner, is carrying my egg, fertilized with the sperm of our twins’ father, aka, our homo best friend. Ba dum bump! Like a punch line.
Some of these friends, like Allie, had been Susanna’s teachers years ago when she was a student at the Parsons School of Design, and they relished in teasing Allie. You knocked up your student, did ya? This made Allie smile and remember that other Susanna—Susie, she’d corrected Allie (Professor Strong) on that first day of class over a decade ago, her high ponytail swinging.
The sleek European station wagon (Susanna had wanted a minivan of all things, but Allie had prevailed) wound around the curved road. The sun flickered through the canopy of trees, some already splashed with autumn gold, and Allie imagined herself in her studio, painting, mixing colors until she found a match for the green-gold that unfurled like silk streamers above. Hot coffee. Lou Reed. Guilt-free smokes. But the fantasy dissipated as Susanna began to talk about her new business, a rental stroller franchise, Babes-on-the-Go!™.
