by Rumaan Alam
“These are ridiculous,” she says.
“I couldn’t resist,” Lauren says, also laughing.
There’s also a blank book, in a pretty jeweled color.
“For photos,” Lauren says. “Real pictures. Not just data on your cell phone. Old school. You’ll be glad you have it later.”
“Wonderful!” Lulu snatches the book from her hands. “I’ve been saying the same thing. All the pictures, we have all those pictures in the house, and they’re so wonderful to have. The way things are done nowadays . . .”
“You’re sounding old, Mom,” Sarah says. “But you’re right. There’s something nice about real photos. Thanks for this. And that’s enough gifts.”
The afternoon trickles away, and the women trickle away, kissing the baby, kissing her. Fiona is left, legs curled beneath her on the sofa; Lauren is left, picking up used napkins and little bits of ribbon and tossing them into the garbage can under the sink.
“You don’t have to,” she says.
“I do,” Lauren says. “Just sit.”
Sarah does as she’s told, sitting with Henry in her arms, his eyes wide, which will last for a few minutes, but then they’ll grow smaller, and she’ll feed him, and put him down on his back and let him sleep, hopefully for a couple of hours. She’s not tired, exactly, but she could sleep. So, too, could she get up and clean the living room. But she can tell it makes Lauren feel good to help, so she doesn’t.
“What are you thinking for a name?” Sarah asks.
“We’re torn,” Fiona says. “Sam is keeping a list, but I keep vetoing everything on it. Declan? Theo? Quinn? None of those seems exactly right to me.”
“I like Declan,” Sarah says.
“It’s a big responsibility, a name,” Fiona says. “The first act of parenting, and your first chance to fuck up.”
Henry’s name was a foregone conclusion, once they discovered he was a boy. She’s not sure why her parents hadn’t named her brother after their dad but is glad they didn’t—naming the baby for his dead uncle would have been too fraught. Henry should be nothing but cause for joy. Sarah wonders, though, if there isn’t, in Lulu and Huck, some muscle memory associated with cradling a brand-new little boy. She’s always known it intellectually, but now she’s a parent and knows it in a different way: There can’t be a worse horror than losing a child. The baby has given her a new view into Lulu, a new empathy for her. A new bride in a foreign land when she wasn’t much more than a girl; a mother at an age when she still could have used some mothering herself. And then: for him to die? It seems impossible. It’s no wonder they’ve never discussed it.
Sarah feeds the baby, draping one of the big muslin blankets over his head because she doesn’t feel like sharing her chapped and swollen nipple with Fiona and Lauren. Fiona fills a napkin with carrots, then when she’s eaten them all, she leaves. Lauren finishes tidying, brings Sarah a glass of iced water, and stays. The baby goes down, snoring steadily. She transfers him to the bedroom, switches on the monitor, leaves him there, and she and Lauren are alone.
“So how is it?” Lauren is on the floor, her back against the sofa, looking up at her. She’s cradling a cup of coffee. “You’re a mother.”
“I know,” she says. “It’s . . . I don’t know yet, is that a weird answer?”
“Not especially,” Lauren says.
“One day I was myself, then one day I had a baby, and now I’m still myself, but I’m also not. It’s not like something magical happened. I mean, sure it was magical and chemical and blah blah, but mostly, I still feel like the same person with a whole new set of things I have to think about during the day. Every day. For the rest of my life.”
“That seems like a pretty succinct description of parenthood,” Lauren says. “Of course, it’s all another country to me, so to speak.”
“Maybe not forever,” Sarah says.
“Maybe forever,” Lauren says. “What do I know?”
“What do you know? Tell me about Rob.”
“Nothing to tell,” she says.
“Nothing at all?”
“He’s good, I don’t know. Would you like his number?”
“Don’t be an asshole.” Sarah sighs. “We’re making conversation.”
“I’m not being an asshole, I’m just saying. Rob’s Rob. It’s good, it’s fine, it’s the same, it’s not important. We’re here together for the first time since you had a baby, I don’t want to talk about some guy.”
Some guy—this is a telling turn of phrase. Sarah sees it immediately, that Rob will not last the year. Something has changed, Lauren’s mind has changed. Sarah’s disappointed, maybe not as disappointed as she’d have been a few months ago, before a baby monopolized her every emotion. She likes Lauren and Rob together but is somehow not surprised. “What should we discuss? South Sudan? The election? I can conference in Papa if you’d like.”
“I don’t know, your baby?”
“Yes, he’s very important,” Sarah says. “But he’s very boring. He sleeps, he nurses, the doctor says he’s healthy. You’re not going to turn me into one of those women who only talks about the consistency of their baby’s poop.”
Lauren frowns. “The dignity of motherhood.”
“Do you ever think about it, having a baby?”
“The last time I thought about it was because I was going to and had to take care of it.”
Sarah remembers Lauren’s abortion, of course—the year after college, for all those years of expensive education, it was the first year they actually learned anything. Lauren didn’t have a doctor, as she’d been seeing student health clinicians the previous four years, so Sarah had found the place, out in a part of Queens that was otherwise all tile distributors and malls that catered to Chinese people. They took a car service there, Sarah sat in the waiting room, which was trying so hard to be tasteful, with its plants, its upholstered seats, unobtrusive classical music, its general, genial air. Before, and after, despite not wanting to interfere, despite wanting to simply let Lauren heal, she’d urged her to discuss the thing with Gabe. He had a right to know, didn’t he?
“Shit.” Sarah thinks for a minute. “This isn’t hard for you, now, is it, this baby stuff, because of that?”
Lauren shakes her head. “Ancient history.”
Sarah doesn’t know if Lauren ever actually told Gabe about it. She’s almost sure she didn’t. “Not so ancient.”
“Ten years, basically. A decade. A lot has happened in ten years. Look at you. You’re a wife and a mother.”
“I am a wife, and a mother.” Sarah doesn’t want to think about it—what a ten-year-old boy or girl would look like next to her own baby. Still, she can’t help it.
“Don’t say it like it’s a bad thing. It’s your thing. It’s the thing you were meant to do.”
Sarah is quiet. Everyone’s been tiptoeing around it, concerned words, delivered in hushed voices. This is a surprise. “Thanks a lot,” she says. She’s mad in that way that only Lauren can make her.
“What thanks a lot? It’s not an insult. It’s a good thing. You’ve got a good thing.” Lauren finishes her coffee, sets it on the glass table.
“Do you think that this is all I am, is that it? When people say someone is a wife and mother, what they mean is that she’s merely a wife and a mother. Only a wife and a mother. There’s this implicit poor thing.”
“You’re hearing things,” Lauren says.
“I am? Maybe what I’m hearing is the collective voices of every woman of the last two generations ready to throttle the first person who brings up having it all. Please, Lauren, I know you well enough. Don’t condescend and tell me it’s a compliment.”
“You’re hearing italics where there are no italics,” Lauren says. “You’re wonderful; why are you getting mad at me for pointing out how wonderful you are?”
“It just feels like you’re emphasizing the difference between us for some reason. Like I’ve made some choice that you would never make. Because. I do
n’t know. Because I’m stupid, or old-fashioned, or something.”
“Yeah. You’ve never thought that I’ve made any mistakes,” Lauren says. “You’ve never acted like my being me is totally insane and not the way to do things.” She stands. “I should finish cleaning up.”
“Just leave it, I can clean up later,” Sarah says. They can do this, switch from annoyance with ease. They don’t need to have a big let’s-clear-the-air. All this time, all these years, the same conversation: It shifts, it evolves, but remains essentially the same.
Lauren sits on the sofa. “Okay.” She’s quiet. “Lulu seems to be taking grandmotherhood in stride.”
“Mamina, did she tell you?” Sarah snickers.
“She mentioned.”
“It’s hilarious. My whole life the only times I’ve heard her speak Spanish is to hotel maids. Suddenly, she’s an abuela.”
“You’re forgetting the super, on Eleventh Street. Ramon? She talked to him en español.”
“The super?” Sarah can only barely recall him.
“When we moved in, or right after, she came over, with a bunch of crap for the apartment, then she saw Ramon and gave him a long lecture in Spanish about how he had to look after us or something, I couldn’t follow it, but actually, I could tell what she meant.”
“I never knew that,” Sarah says. She remembers that day, though—Lulu, with lamps, a rug, some framed photos, a coffee table, a plant, a plant stand, a huge number of things for their ridiculously small apartment. The rug had covered almost every inch of the living room. “That seems like a long time ago, somehow, Eleventh Street. It seems like longer ago than college. It seems like longer ago than actually being eleven.”
“It does. I wonder why?”
“I remember all that other stuff so well, you know. Being eleven. With you. Being with you is mostly what I remember. Weekends in Connecticut, the horse, stealing Papa’s cigarettes.”
“I remember that stuff, too,” Lauren says. “Drinking wine with dinner on Sunday, that was the first time I ever had wine. Your mom, pouring me a glass, like it was totally normal. I never saw anything like that.”
“Mom’s always been a social drinker.”
“Lulu is a social everything. I can just picture it now, can’t you, ten-year-old Henry getting a little shot glass of cabernet so he can join in the toast?”
Sarah can see it, with such clarity, such certainty. Lauren truly knows her family. “I never knew that,” she says, “your first glass of wine.”
“My first so many things, Sarah. You’ve been around for so many of my first things. My first trip to the state of Connecticut, I’m pretty sure. The first horse I ever rode on. My first kiss, the first time I touched a penis, you’ve been there for all that. We are old.”
“We’re not,” Sarah says. “We’re good. We’re happy. We’re just getting started.”
“That’s what I meant,” Lauren says. She laughs.
“It’s still possible,” Sarah says. This is what she most wants to tell Lauren, what she most can’t tell Lauren, because it will make Lauren mad, and maybe she’s right to be mad, maybe it’s condescending to hear this from someone who’s only three months and nine days your elder. Lauren, beautiful Lauren, smart in a way Sarah will never be, of the world in a way Sarah will never be, powerful in a way Sarah will never be. She can do anything, and seems not to know it.
“What is?” Lauren’s stood, is tidying up, despite being admonished not to.
“Anything,” Sarah says. She means it. “Anything.”
“Maybe,” Lauren says.
After a while, the baby starts crying. It begins as a snuffle, what sounds like a sneeze, something involuntary, then it turns out to be voluntary, then it turns out to be loud. Lauren slips on her shoes, slips out the door, Sarah, on the sofa, her nipple elongated and purple, vanishing into the baby’s mouth. Lauren remembers, when the elevator reaches the lobby, that she meant to get Sarah another glass of water before she left. She’s heard that breastfeeding mothers need lots of water.
It’s near October, but still, the heat is a palpable thing. The air is a soup. The city smells. It’s getting darker but only marginally cooler—one of those nights when there’s lots of crime, and it’s too hot to touch anyone. She’s not hungry, it’s impossible to be hungry in this kind of weather, and she’s not interested in anything. Even watching television at home sounds unpleasant. She could take the train from right near here, but she decides to walk. She can walk in a straight line, but walking down those stairs and going underground is another thing she doesn’t want to do. She’s read somewhere the temperature on the subway platform rises from the heat of the arriving trains.
She rarely thinks much about the apartment on Eleventh Street, and Sarah’s right—it seems more remote than things that happened a decade before they lived there. Memory is odd, in that respect. It was small, that apartment, but it had its charms. The bathroom had a pretty view, over an adjacent backyard, to a community garden, one very well tended. The window was in the shower, the windowsill where they kept their bottles of shampoo and shaving cream. She could shower and look down at all that green and feel something.
Her mother had said nothing, or very little, when she explained that Sarah was having a baby.
“That was fast, they just got married . . . when?”
Lauren had been able to picture her mother, doing the mental calculations. Her mother had not brought them anything to that apartment on Eleventh Street, not even a plate of cupcakes, though she had taken them out to the Japanese restaurant around the corner one night, her, Sarah, Gabe. She remembers the look on her mother’s face when she realized that Gabe was probably going back to the apartment with them, that there was absolutely nothing—no sense of propriety—to stop him from doing so. They’d fucked once, Lauren remembers, in that shower, Gabe behind her, their hands braced on that windowsill, the two of them looking down at that community garden.
Her mother would do the math, of course, that is the sort of woman she is.
“She was pregnant before the wedding,” Lauren explained. “Nothing planned. It just happened. So we kept it quiet.”
Her mother offers only an I see. What Bella Brooks sees, what she has to say, it’s all a mystery to Lauren. She feels implicated in this, that she scares her own mother, that her mother is so careful when they speak, so fearful of saying the wrong thing, being the wrong kind of person. Worse still, that she’s not wrong. She loves her mother, but her mother’s responses to things drive her crazy. She knew every thought going through her mother’s mind as she told her about Sarah and her baby: disapproval—sex before marriage, a baby barely inside wedlock, the tacit lie to all those wedding guests. It’s classless.
Then, maybe more to the point, what about her, Bella? Will she be a grandmother, will Lauren ever marry, have a baby? The one without the other might, might be forgivable. It’s a shame to deny someone who’d be so gifted a grandmother the opportunity to be one.
Bella’s disapproval would vanish, though, if she ever came to the city, saw Henry, saw Sarah’s cool and charmless apartment, the nice sofa, the prettily wrapped presents. Certainly Sarah’s the daughter she always dreamed of, the daughter she thought she’d be getting. Lauren’s annoyed by her mother, yes, but always feels appropriately guilty about the fact that her mother annoys her.
Lauren is supposed to call Rob. She’d told him she would, that morning, but now she doesn’t want to. Has no interest in it, in hearing his voice, in talking to him, in trying to communicate to him what she wants or doesn’t want to do, in hearing what he wants or doesn’t want to do. What she wants is to walk, through the city, and think about nothing in particular. When she first lived here, in that apartment on Eleventh Street, sometimes she’d just walk for hours. She felt so proprietary about the city then, the city in which she’d previously always been just a visitor. In for the day, for school; in for the weekend, with Sarah. Then, at twenty-one, in for real, in this city, her
city. It feels like a long time since she just walked around, not going anywhere in particular, making her way in the general direction of home, but free to stop if something—a slice of pizza, a folding table covered with used paperbacks—catches her eye.
Sarah thinks that long-ago abortion is causing her pain, after these many years. It’s touching, and telling, very Sarah. For all her money, all her sophistication, all her worldliness, there’s something so naive about her. For Lauren’s second abortion, which she’s never told Sarah about, she went with Gabe; the same clinic, where she’d had a nice experience, or a nonhorrible experience. It was at the end of things, Gabe asking her to marry him, trying to convince her to do this with him, have a baby, make a life, that it would work, that it would be wonderful. She couldn’t make him understand: that she knew it never would.
“I’m not supposed to pressure you, or question your choices.” Gabe had a huge, very prominent Adam’s apple. He was so much taller than her it was right at her eye level. “But Lauren.”
That second time was harder, she admits that. Gabe, tears in the corners of his eyes. A good man, a great man for someone else. He’d gone out to get maxi pads, sorbet. He still asked her about getting married, even after, but with less optimism, with something like heartbreak. If it wouldn’t have worked before that day, it certainly wouldn’t have worked after. From that moment on, nothing between them was the same. Sarah doesn’t know any of this, no one does—a secret you keep from your closest friend is one you share with no one. And she is that, after all this time, isn’t she, Sarah, her closest friend?
It’s the sort of evening that makes you feel very small in the world. Maybe she will give up the apartment and sell the cute little vintage sofa and go to Portland, maybe she’ll buy a dog, and learn to drive stick, and become a vegan. Maybe she’ll stay here and marry Rob and have a baby and time it to the birth of Sarah’s next baby and their children will be best friends just as they are best friends and every Sunday they’ll get together for a big, communal dinner, a roast chicken, on colorful porcelain plates. Sarah thinks anything is possible, but of course, for Sarah, anything is possible. Lauren has never quite believed that.
