Hot Little Hands

by Abigail Ulman

  Amelia stopped licking the jelly off her fingers. “You never liked my blog?”

  “Well—” Jane looked down at her cup until her eyes were obscured by lashes. She was the only one of the girls who’d inherited their mom’s long eyelashes. “I guess we were all kind of annoyed by your references to eighties movies and obsession with nineties pop culture. You weren’t even alive when most of that stuff was happening, or you were too young to know about it, anyway. The only way you know about Footloose or the Bangles or Punky Brewster and Sassy magazine is from us. It just seemed kind of posey and fake.”

  Amelia lowered her donut hand to the counter. “ ‘We’ were all annoyed? Were the four of you sitting around talking shit about me?”

  “No, but—”

  “There are other places to find out about the nineties, you know,” Amelia said. “The Internet for one. And second”—she looked up at the ceiling—“the Internet.”

  “I know,” Jane said. “I’ve changed my mind now. I like it. I want to read your book. I was probably just jealous. Who doesn’t want to quit their job and write all day and publish a book? I mean, except you.”

  “I used to want that,” Amelia said.

  “You still do.” Jane sat back in her chair. “You’re just scared, paralyzed. That’s why you did the baby thing.”

  “No, I want the baby. It’s weird. I actually feel happy for the first time in ages.”

  “That’s just the bonding hormones talking.”

  “Oh, thank you, New York Times Magazine.”

  “I’m just saying, you don’t really want it.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Mom said you don’t.”

  “Mom doesn’t know.”

  “Mom’s a therapist.”

  “Mom’s not my therapist.”

  “But Mom’s your mom.”

  “That’s true,” Amelia said. “She’s your mom, too.”

  “I know.”

  The girls sat in silence for a second.

  “Have you ever noticed that even when she’s talking on the phone, she’s liking photos on Instagram?”

  “I did notice that!” Amelia said. “She’s not just liking them, she’s leaving comments. Once she left a comment for me while I was on the phone with her. I confronted her about it, and she tried to deny it.”

  “She’s so clueless.”

  “I know. How do her clients take her seriously?”

  The girls shook their heads, and then Jane checked her phone. “I have to go,” she said. “I have two meetings back-to-back, and then a date.”

  “Ooh. With who?”

  “Some guy.” She shrugged. “Off OkCupid.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Cute, sporty, ethical investment adviser. Could be good. What are you gonna do now?”

  “I have to go home and fill out my yoga journal.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s important to fill it out every day.”

  —

  There were baby clothes to buy, and car seat manuals to read, and decisions to be made about the birth, but it really didn’t amount to anything like a full-time job. Amelia understood now why maternity leave didn’t start until the weeks just before a baby arrived. She got into the habit of taking the subway—the G to the E to the 6—uptown to have lunch with her mother, sitting in the waiting room reading books about how to attachment-parent without ruining everyone else’s brunch until her mom had a break between clients. But when Amelia started to show at fifteen weeks, her mom put an end to this, claiming that nobody would want to see a psychotherapist whose smart, talented Manhattan-born-and-bred daughter had decided to put her career on hold at twenty-two and have a baby with a gay man who wasn’t her boyfriend.

  —

  Seth hated being called a man. He was ten years older than Amelia, but he desperately wanted to be called a boy, and he even more desperately wanted to date boys. He came along for her ultrasound at eighteen weeks, and complained the whole way up First Avenue.

  “He was really smart and it seemed so obvious that we would be great together. And I was just about to ask him out, when this little twink, this annoying bear-hunting little twinkie rat wandered in, and they left together immediately. He didn’t even say goodbye.”

  In the past, Amelia would have been paying close attention to the story, taking note of the slang in case she wanted to use it in an essay. But she no longer had to think that way. She reached over and took Seth’s hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Something will come along.”

  She held his hand again on the examination table at the medical center, waiting for the ultrasound tech to arrive.

  “Thank you for coming with me,” she told Seth. “I’ll take you out for lunch after.”

  “Great,” he said. “Don’t tell me where. There are so few real surprises in life.”

  The baby was a boy. He was chilling out on his back in a pose that looked nothing like the fetal position, and he had one hand extended out in front of him; the other one was next to his face.

  “Looks like it’s a Wii kid, not an Xbox one,” she said. The tech was concentrating on the screen and said nothing. Amelia looked at Seth for a response. He was sitting beside her, his jaw gone slightly slack, staring at the grainy baby and breathing fast like he might cry. Amelia squeezed his fingers between hers. “Congratulations,” she said.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m gonna be an uncle.”

  —

  No one in her mother’s family had had a son for as many generations as could be remembered. It had been girls all the way until now, and the other Banks women were taking this hard, considering it a sign that the baby was an aberration and a mistake. Jane’s post-yoga visits had become a regular occurrence.

  “I was reading this article,” she said one afternoon, “about how upper-class Chinese families are actually adopting boys from the States now. Because they have the money to do it and they place such a premium on boys over there. Isn’t that a crazy reversal?”

  “Crazy,” Amelia agreed, biting into a red velvet donut.

  “I bet you could get a lot of money for something like that.”

  “Are you suggesting I sell my baby?”

  “No.” Jane looked flustered. “I just think—Mom thinks you should consider adoption.”

  Around the twenty-one-week mark, however, when Amelia had convinced Jane that she planned to have the baby and keep the baby, their conversations devolved into gossip about Jane’s work, or her love life, or complaint sessions about members of the very family whose point of view she was there to represent.

  Not long after that, the visits stopped altogether, and the family seemed to change tack. Now it was her dad who contacted her, emailing her daily from his office in the History Department at Barnard, with links to random articles about random women in the public eye.

  Apparently v. good, he wrote before linking to a book review of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Didn’t know Egan had two sons!

  Remember this? was the subject line of an email containing the famous Demi Moore naked-and-pregnant Vanity Fair cover. This was still so early in her career!

  Interesting idea about leaning in to your ambition, was his analysis of a New Yorker article about the COO of Facebook.

  And then, Amelia’s favorite: a link to the video for Britney Spears’s “Piece of Me” with a note about how he Found these lyrics oddly inspiring.

  “Gee, thanks for the veritable poster board collage of successful working mothers you sent me, Dad,” Amelia said one weekend morning in her parents’ kitchen. She was the first daughter to arrive for brunch, having been a born-again early riser since her twelfth week. She shrugged and bit into an English muffin. “I guess I really can have it all!”

  “That’s right,” said her dad. He was standing by the sink, squeezing fresh orange juice. “You can. No need to give up your writing just because a baby’s on the way.”

  “Well, I�
��good morning, Mom.”

  “Mimi.” Her mom kissed her on the top of the head and took a seat at the table.

  “I have tried to write once or twice recently, but I just got the feeling. This tight, anxious feeling where I find it hard to breathe and nothing that comes out seems good enough. I can hear my heart beating and I feel like I might pass out. That can’t be healthy for the baby.”

  “You just need exposure,” her mom said. “You sit there with the anxiety. And you say, Hello, anxiety, and then you write anyway, despite the feelings. You know I was William Orton’s—”

  “Yes,” said Amelia. “You were William Orton’s therapist when he was writing The Concierge’s Vacation.”

  “Don’t tell anyone that.”

  “It’s been fifteen years. No one cares.”

  “He was a finalist for the Pulitzer.”

  “Well, my book wasn’t going to win anything. It was an essay collection about being a young girl in the big city. There was a piece about my method of using candy heart messages to determine what outfit to wear every day. The working title for the whole book was Don’t Mess Up My Mood Board, or My Unicorn Will Cry.”

  “Well,” her dad said, taking a breath.

  “And Other Instructions,” Amelia added.

  “There’s a good market for that sort of thing.”

  “But I’m not in that market anymore,” she said. “I’ve outgrown it. I can’t write it. It’s over.”

  Amelia was preparing to counter whatever argument they came up with next when she looked across the table and saw that her mother was dripping tears onto her placemat.

  “Nina, what is it?” Her dad came over and knelt beside her mom.

  “It’s fine,” her mom said. She wiped the inner corners of her eyes with the sleeve of her robe, and then she fanned her face with her hands, trying to stop the tears. She looked over at Amelia, her eyes red, and laughed at herself. “I just love you so much,” she said, her voice sounding strained and somehow old all of a sudden. “We both do. All we wanted for all you girls is that you could do anything you want. You wanted to switch schools from Dwight to Hunter, we organized it. You wanted to go to Jewish summer camp? We bought you a Star of David necklace so you’d fit in.”

  “I love that necklace,” Amelia said. “I still wear it on alumni weekend.”

  “You wanted this book deal so badly,” her mom said. “My heart almost broke for you with those first rejections. And when you got it? My heart sang all day. I could barely contain it. I actually told two of my clients the news. I never do that sort of thing.”

  “I did want that deal,” Amelia said, “at the time. But you say we can do anything we want, and now what I want is a baby. And suddenly you don’t want whatever I want.”

  “Because it’s just not done,” her mother said.

  “Some people do it. You had five kids.”

  “That was a different era,” her mom said. “And even then, I was almost thirty when we started. You’re going to regret this. Trust me. You’re twenty-two.”

  “Demi Moore was twenty-two,” Amelia pointed out.

  “Is that right?” her dad asked. He was over by the pantry now, searching the shelves.

  “No,” Amelia said. “That’s not true at all.”

  “Where are the tissues?” he said. “Oh, never mind, I found them.” He brought the box over and set it on the table. Her mom pulled one out and held it to her nose.

  “Whoa, what’s going on?” Celine asked, coming into the kitchen, followed by Isobel. They both lived in the West Village, and had probably shared a cab. “Mom?”

  “It’s nothing. I’m fine,” their mom said.

  “Did you say something about Claude?” Isobel asked.

  “No,” Amelia said. “Mom was just telling me how much she’s looking forward to being a grandmother.”

  “Oh God.” There was a groan from the doorway, and Georgia came in. “I can’t believe I’m gonna be an auntie.”

  “Auntie Annie is an auntie. We’re not aunties.”

  “That baby, that boy, better not call me Auntie.”

  Amelia thrust her belly in her oldest sister’s direction. “You hear that, baby? Auntie Georgie is talking to you!”

  “I think I want to be a Papa,” their dad said. The girls turned around and stared at him. “That’s what I called my grandfather. Papa. I was his favorite grandson.”

  “Whoa,” said Isobel. “This is actually, actually happening.”

  —

  After brunch, Amelia’s mom found a few boxes of the girls’ old toys and clothes, stored in the closet in Georgia and Celine’s old bedroom. Amelia sat on the floor with her legs splayed out in front of her, picking through smocked pinafores, My Little Ponys with knotted manes, a View-Master with photo reels of baby farm animals and Yellowstone Park, and Guess Who? and Strawberry Shortcake games with pieces either missing or put away in the wrong box.

  “I thought this stuff might be worth something on eBay one day,” her mom said. “I hadn’t actually pictured any of you girls reusing it.”

  Amelia had made a small pile of booties and diaper covers when her sisters appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh my God,” Isobel said, “that’s my Snoopy money box.”

  “And those are my swap cards,” Jane said.

  “No, they’re not.” Isobel pulled the album out of Jane’s hands. “They’re mine. I spent all my pocket money in fifth grade on those.”

  “Yeah, but you gave them to me,” Jane said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.” Jane grabbed hold of one side of the album. “I gave you my whole eraser collection and my Care Bear. We traded.”

  “No, we didn’t. Mom!”

  “Mom!”

  Georgia was next to Amelia on the floor now, making a pile of her own. The other girls descended and the five of them rifled through boxes, making piles and inspecting one another’s collections for stolen goods.

  “Amelia, that’s my quilt. Grandma made it when Mom was pregnant with me,” Celine said. “I was planning to use it if I ever have kids.”

  “You still can,” Amelia said. “I’m just borrowing it. I’ll bring all this stuff back after I’m done with it.”

  “No, you won’t,” Isobel said.

  “I promise.”

  Eventually her sisters conceded, but only after drawing up an inventory of everything Amelia was taking, alphabetically, from Bassinet to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

  —

  Hank loved all the baby paraphernalia. He made cute noises about the tiny shoes and the fuzzy hats with the animal ears poking out. He loved how much Amelia ate now, and he enjoyed the challenge of fulfilling her cravings exactly, trying to locate lumpy rice pudding or really hard nectarines or chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting, before she either fell asleep or lost the craving. He loved how horny she was all the time. But he wasn’t necessarily into the expanding stomach, the vertical line running down the skin below her belly button, her darkening nipples, or the idea of a baby.

  “You know you can leave,” Amelia told him one afternoon. She was watching him drink a beer and making him breathe in her face after every swig. She missed the smell. “You’re not in town that much. And it won’t be very fun to stay here once there’s a baby on the scene.”

  “How would you do the whole rent?” he asked.

  “If they let me keep the advance, I can manage till the baby’s about three months.”

  “Then you’ll finish the book?”

  “I’ll probably try to freelance from home at first. Then look for something full-time later.”

  “What about Teach for America? Those kids loved you.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I’d be considered much of a role model anymore.”

  Hank took a swig, swallowed, put the beer bottle on the coffee table, and reached for Amelia. He held her face in his hands. “You’re gonna be amazing,” he said.

  “I am already.” She w
iped the beer off his upper lip with the back of her hand. “Would it be totally weird,” she said, “if I named it after you?”

  “Whoa, yes,” he said. “It really would. But I’d probably be pretty stoked as well.”

  And that was it. It was Amelia’s easiest breakup to date. She thought about writing an essay about it. “The Best Breakup in Brooklyn,” she could call it. She considered heaving herself off the couch and scribbling down some notes right away, but then Hank suggested that they paint a mural on the living room wall next to where the crib was set up. A ladybug maybe. Or a robot. Or maybe a huge reproduction of the MTA subway map, because, “Dude, you’re never too young to start learning that shit.”

  That night, as soon as Amelia lay down in bed, the baby started to kick. She slid her legs over to what had been Hank’s side of the bed and tried to picture her body the way it looked before she got pregnant. It had had its problem areas, sure, but it was contained and easy to dress and was surely shapeable to perfection, Amelia had always imagined, if she had ever had the motivation or desire. Maybe she should have posed nude for life drawing classes in college like Akiko and Dana had. At least that way there would be a record out there somewhere of how she used to be.

  If she was being honest with herself, she also didn’t like the vertical line on her stomach, or the changing nipples, or her paunchy face, or the acid reflux she got at least once a day now. She wondered if any of it would go away after the baby was born. She shoved the comforter off her legs. Fuck, you better be worth it, she thought and, probably in direct response, the baby double-thumped a limb against her insides.

  She reached across for her phone on the bedside table and texted Seth. Whatchu doing?

  Mixologizing

  Guess what I just realized? I have a penis inside my body.

  For 9 straight months? he wrote. Muy jealous.