by Rumaan Alam
Lauren is not Sarah, and Rob is not Dan. There’s not going to be a fairy-tale wedding at a mansion; there’s not going to be a happy, healthy heir to the throne, or the family fortune, anyway. She’s a different person, they are different people. She knows what she wants to do, after all. There’s a movie theater on Sixty-Sixth Street, an artsy one, but there’s a stupid-enough movie playing, so she goes inside, takes her seat, turns her phone off, and watches the movie.
The baby eats, dozes, complains, burps, a little of the milk, undigested, spilling out of his soft, gummy mouth and onto Sarah’s shirt. There’s a washcloth somewhere around, but she ignores the wet spit-up, hushes him, calms him, and he’s asleep. She places him in the bassinet, carefully, then sighs with relief. The apartment is mostly tidy. She dumps the cold coffee from Lauren’s mug, runs the dishwasher. The steady thrum of the dishwasher is so reassuring. She takes a shower, stripping out of her milk-scented clothes, running the water lukewarm, gingerly soaping her tits, which were bloody only a week ago, horrifyingly. Women are raised to be comfortable with blood, but you never expect to see the stuff on your breasts.
Sarah considers her naked body in the mirror, after the shower. One of the disadvantages of this particular bathroom, a note she’d pass on to the developers if ever she met them: Few people want a huge mirror to confront them as they step out of the shower. Her breasts are enormous, even though Henry’s only just done the hard work of depleting the supply of milk therein. Her hips are wider than they were before, than they were a year ago, and what she knows but doesn’t quite want to admit is that they’re this way forever; she can stick to whole grains and lean meat for the next ten years but nothing will make her very bones shift. At least her vagina looks less swollen, less purple, and the discharge has stopped altogether. Her physician recommended some exercises, starting to urinate, then stopping; it’s meant to forestall future incontinence. She’s horrified but also mystified; did Lulu go through this? She can never ask her, of course.
Her hair looks good. It’s always been thick, but the pregnancy seems to have tamed it somehow, and of course, it’s always looked its best right out of the shower, or while in the pool, wet, as one mass, tucked demurely behind her ears. She’s always felt her ears were nice, and overlooked. Not everyone has nice ears. This body. This body Dan wanted to possess, and together they made a baby, asleep right now in the very next room. She tells herself that he’s alive, that he’s well, though some instinct in her tells her, every so often, that the baby is dead, that she needs to rush to his side. Either this will pass, or it never will. This is motherhood.
Dan is home. She steps out of the bathroom, her body hidden in the robe, her hair hidden in the towel. This always makes her feel terribly old, when her hair is wrapped up in terrycloth; she hates for Dan to see her this way.
“Hi there.” Dan’s mouth is full of baby carrots.
“Hi yourself.” She kisses him on the lips, gently. “How was work?”
“Work was work,” he says. “How were the festivities?”
“Festive.”
“I see you had a good haul there. Presents galore.”
“I should write the thank-you notes tonight, while I’m thinking about it.” She has some, stashed in the desk drawer. It won’t take too long.
“Society won’t collapse if you wait a night,” Dan says. “How’s the little man?”
“He’s good.” She smiles, an involuntary response at even the thought of Henry. “He was the hit of the party.”
“Naturally. Those good looks. How could he not be?”
“You should have seen it, though.” She tries to paint the picture for him, but knows she’s failing. “Amina held him, Mom held him, and he was just so chill and happy. He’s a people person.”
“Your dad, I think.” Dan pops another baby carrot into his mouth. “It’s in his blood.”
“Still, he’s the best, right? Our baby is the best.”
“Our baby is the best. Can I go look at him?” Dan knows to ask permission.
“As long as you tiptoe. Seriously, wake him and I’m sending you to the pharmacist for estrogen shots. You can feed him yourself.” She unwinds the towel from her hair, which flops down unhappily. The hummus is drying and cracking like mud in the blue enameled bowl. There’s a stack of napkins, unused, and a bowl of chocolates, wrapped in gold foil, from a box sent by the staff at the store, a box of chocolates to celebrate a new baby, how incongruous, though it’s the thought that counts. She should clean up. She should dry her hair, put on some comfortable clothes, make them something for dinner, nothing elaborate; there’s a box of baby spinach that could easily become a salad, there’s half of a rotisserie chicken inside the fridge that could easily become two sandwiches. Dinner, on plates, with napkins, at the table, or on the coffee table, a glass of water for her, a glass of wine for Dan, this should be easy. She has the wherewithal. He worked all day, he works every day; this is her work.
Dan creeps back into the living room, leaving the bedroom door open the barest crack. “That is one good-looking kid,” he says.
“It can’t be denied.” She’s in the kitchen. She’ll dress later. She pulls the spinach from the box, using her hands; it’s been rinsed, right? She drops it into a big wooden bowl, douses it with olive oil, looks for the half lemon she knows is around there somewhere. She’s forever cutting new lemons when there’s already a cut half rolling around in the fridge. She unearths one, from behind the jar of mustard; gets both, and the mayonnaise, and the chicken. She rips the skin from the carcass, tosses it into the sink, pulls off fistfuls of the flesh.
“How was Lulu?”
“She’s herself. A very pleased grandmother. I’m not sure I would have predicted that.”
“You wouldn’t have?” Dan’s typing on his phone.
She slides a bottle of wine across the counter toward Dan, then the wine key, then a glass, one of the set they received as a wedding gift, from her cousin Tatiana, she thinks. They’re massive, these glasses, you could keep goldfish in them, and though they’re quite expensive, Sarah believes in using their best things in their everyday life. It makes things seem more special.
“Thanks.” Dan pries the foil off the top of the bottle. “I think doting grandmother—excuse me, Mamina—is the role Lulu was born to play, frankly.” He sits on the stool on the other side of the counter, sighing as he does.
“Tired?”
“We’re prepping Topoforimax for the final round of tests. We’ve been back and forth about a million times with the ethicists about the test, and of course, we’re getting a lot of pressure to rush this one.”
“This one is diabetes?” She can barely remember.
“Topical insulin.” Dan pours the wine into the glass, peers down into the bowl of it suspiciously.
“The patch.” She nods. She runs the knife roughly over the chicken, dumps it into a bowl, scoops in mayonnaise, studies it, tosses in more. A few flakes of sea salt, some pepper, some mustard, a stir. There’s dill, she remembers, pulls some of the fragrant fluff from the stalk, doesn’t bother chopping, just drops it into the mix. There’s two-thirds of a baguette, and she finds the serrated knife, slices a segment of the bread, halves that, then splits it. She spoons the chicken salad into the bread, replaces the top on the bottom half, pushes down on it, forcing out the air. It’s still resilient, the bread, so she takes a clean kitchen towel from the drawer by the stove, drapes it over the two sandwiches, balances the heaviest cast-iron casserole on top of it.
“I have some news, though,” Dan says.
“Oh?”
“I have to go to Minneapolis for the final phase of the test,” he says. “It won’t be until November, but Doctor Inglis had to drop out, and there’s no one else.”
“Well, if you have to go, you have to go.” She squeezes the half lemon into the palm of her hand, catching the seeds in the crevices between fingers, tossing the sticky pips in the general direction of the sink. Since Henry, Bo
tswana has been forgotten. Even Minneapolis now sounds to her as far away as the moon. She dips her lemony hands into the spinach, tosses it, working her fingers over the oily leaves. She shakes them clean, washes them quickly, pauses, listening: Is that the baby? No, nothing.
“I’ll fly back, weekends, of course.”
“So much flying,” she says. “Back and forth. If you need to stay, you should. You should get some downtime. Find a nice hotel, order room service, the whole thing. You don’t want to spend every weekend at the airport.”
“We’ll see. November in Minneapolis.” Dan yawns. “I’m not exactly thrilled about it.”
Pecans. She remembers there are pecans. She breaks the seal on the airtight canister, snaps pecans in half and tosses them on top of the spinach. “What about Thanksgiving? Mom mentioned maybe doing it in the country this year.”
“In the country?”
“A new tradition,” she says. “Grandchild playing in the leaves while Huck bastes.”
“I’m all for new traditions,” he says. “Though I don’t know that he’ll be up for frolicking in the leaves this year. We’ll be lucky if he can hold his head up by then.”
Sarah loosens and then reties the sash around the robe. She doesn’t want to go into the bedroom, wake Henry, so she’ll dress later, or just slip into bed naked, the sheets cool against her skin, and she’ll pull Henry close to her when he cries; it’ll be easier for his little mouth to find her breast. She won’t even need to wake up. It’s weirdly second nature already, and she knows she’s lucky that it hasn’t been too hard, or too painful. She lifts the dish off the sandwich. It needs a good forty minutes to really compress, but never mind. There’s a traditional sandwich made this way, tuna, lots of olives, oil, and bread—something she had in France, once, as a child, on vacation with her parents. She’s forgotten it until now. You wrap the sandwich in plastic, compress it for hours, eat it at the seaside. She’ll do that, before the summer’s out—they can pack a picnic, drive to Long Island; Amina’s mother has a place in Quogue. Sarah puts the sandwiches on plates, divides the salad in half. Forks; no need for knives. She should have put capers in the chicken, but never mind. She carries the plates out of the kitchen and into the living room, places them on the coffee table, a twinge as she bends, still some soreness there, right at the hip.
“Dinner and a movie,” Dan says. He stands, picks up the glass, walks to the sofa. “Thanks, babe.”
She shrugs. “It’s nothing special.” Salt, pepper. She goes back to the kitchen for the saltbox, the pepper mill—a matching set, a wedding gift from Dan’s aunt and uncle. She brings these to the coffee table.
Dan’s switched on the television, volume turned low. “Stupid sitcom, reality show about cake, reality show about hairdressing, reality show about singing?”
“I think that’s dancing, actually, that one. I vote for cake.”
“Cake it is, then.” Dan flicks the volume up, just a bit, brings the sandwich to his mouth. “Delicious, babe. Thank you.”
She plucks one of the pecans off the salad. Are they a superfood? She can never remember what the superfoods are, or what they promise. Her hips do not want her to sit on the floor, as she normally would. She perches on the edge of the chair across from the sofa. It’s leather, midcentury, and she’s recently decided it’s not her taste. She should send it to the store, it’s the kind of thing that always finds a buyer quickly. She takes a bite of the sandwich. It would have been better with capers. Through the open bedroom door, she hears the snuffle, the tiny wail with which Henry announces he’s awake. He’ll be wet, and he’ll be hungry, too.
“Be right back,” she says.
Chapter 18
Trucks—Sarah said he likes trucks. But a truck T-shirt? A book about trucks? A puzzle depicting trucks? A realistic, German-made plastic scale model of a truck, or a handcrafted hunk of wood that somehow communicates the essence of a truck? A little plastic package with five metal trucks inside or a set of pajamas emblazoned with trucks or a toothbrush that comes with truck toothpaste or a box of markers that’s shaped like a truck or a bouncy red rubber ball with a picture of a fire truck on it or a green plastic truck that’s meant to go in the sandbox or to the beach and comes with a little shovel and a tiny rake? Lauren doesn’t know what a five-year-old boy likes, or thinks about, or cares about. And she doesn’t know it for certain, but it’s reasonable to guess that this particular five-year-old boy has a fairly significant arsenal of toy trucks, truck books, truck clothes, truck ephemera, at home.
She settles on a truck made of wood, a jaunty green semi, pulling a simple wood car trailer, bearing four little wooden cars, but as this is fairly inexpensive, she also buys a pair of books, texts, taxonomies, really: photographs and jargon (what child needs to know about a goose-neck trailer truck?) but the girl at the bookstore swears they’re very popular. She wraps them in paper that’s bright blue with white polka dots, and taken in sum the three packages look alluring and bountiful, particularly when stuffed into a little paper bag, tied, for good measure, with a single, bobbing balloon. Henry will probably be diverted by the balloon and bag, mostly, in accordance with the law that deems the packaging more interesting than the contents.
The party is at their house. All that space—why wouldn’t it be? And that backyard, a simple rectangular lot, but excavated and carved and contoured and polished by the previous owners (landscape architects both). An arbor wrapped in vines bridges the kitchen and the yard. She’s sat there with Sarah and Dan, dinner, candlelit, a charmed summer evening, and looked down into the spill of all that yard, the stone terrace, planted with herbs, that runs the length of the garden, the single pine at the very back, making it possible to pretend their neighbor’s house doesn’t exist. She’s been there for dinner with Matt; she’s been there for dinner with Thom. Sarah liked Matt; Sarah did not like Thom. In the end, Lauren liked neither of them, and now they’re both mostly forgotten, footnotes, background in different, more important memories: dropping by with Christmas presents for Henry, bringing over a bagful of cookbooks for no particular reason, eating spatchcocked chicken Dan grilled under two aluminum foil-wrapped bricks, even the very first time she saw the house. Matt had driven her over. It was March, and the trees were naked, and the house was empty, so the windows were bare; thus, the rooms were drenched in pale light, and the place seemed holy, blessed, massive beyond reason. Matt, anyway, had been impressed.
The toy store is not far from their place, so she walks. It is sticky—New York in August, the air dense and swampy, what little breeze there is hot and ineffectual. The asphalt looks shiny, like it’s melting, and the garbage cans on the corners, overflowing with discarded Popsicle wrappers and other effluvia, smell terrible. The tote bag weighs heavily on her shoulder—she’s brought her most recent book, for Sarah, a monograph on creative spaces for children: playrooms with chalkboard walls, an old ballroom fitted out with a trampoline and basketball court, bunk beds carved to look like a pirate ship. Silly, but it had been fun to work on.
Lauren rings the bell, waits, then, hearing nothing, knocks, loudly but hopefully not insistently. She’s thirsty.
She can see Dan’s sweaty face through the door, distorted by the warp of the glass. He gives an impatient wave before pulling the door open. “Lauren,” he says. “Hey!”
He sounds mildly out of breath. He’s gained weight, Dan, a gradual process, over the years, but heavier, now, he looks more like himself, like the person he’s always been in the process of becoming. Sweating has made his hair a little unkempt. He’s wearing a blue polo shirt, so faded at the collar, it must be a well-loved one, and khaki shorts, swollen with pockets. “Hi!”
“We were wondering where you were,” he says. “Hot, right? Come in.”
“August,” she says. The house is cool; the previous owners installed central air-conditioning, a rarity in these century-old brownstones. It’s very quiet inside.
“August,” he says, closing the door behi
nd her forcefully, shutting the month of August outside where it belongs. “Sarah’s just tidying up.”
“Tidying up?” She follows him down the stairs to the basement. The steps lead directly to the kitchen, mostly white, very bright.
Sarah is standing at the island. “You made it!” she says. “Sorry, this is disgusting.” She’s scraping some sort of brown goop into the sink. She grimaces, rinses her hands, dries them. She walks toward her, waddles really, hugs her, as much as is possible, given her incredible girth.
“Wow,” Lauren says without thinking. “You look—great.” She does though; Sarah, hair pulled back, pregnant and fat, like a lady of the canyon, like a painting from Northern Europe’s Renaissance, all creamy skin and sly smiles.
“I look massive, you mean,” Sarah says. “I know. Six weeks left, too. I think he’s going to be a basketball player.”
“Where’s Henry?” She looks around—the kitchen, too, is quiet. There are no sounds from the playroom, behind them.
“Henry’s asleep,” Sarah says. “The party ended at twelve.”
“Shit,” she says. “I thought it was at two.”
Sarah shrugs. “He’ll probably sleep another hour. It’s fine. This way we can talk.”
“I missed the whole party?” She feels foolish.
“A kid’s party,” Sarah says. “You didn’t miss anything. Henry’s worn-out, from all that running around, all that sugar. Plus all the stupid presents.”
“Sugar?” Lauren drops the parcels onto the kitchen counter.
“Cake’s in the fridge. It’s so hot outside it was melting. And there’s ice cream. A ridiculous amount, actually. Help yourself.”
