Rich and Pretty

by Rumaan Alam

  “I’m going to finish up those e-mails,” Dan says. “Lauren, say good-bye before you go.” He trots back up the stairs.

  “I can wash those,” Lauren says.

  “I won’t even argue.” Sarah perches precariously on a stool. “Just rinse. We’ll run the dishwasher.”

  “I’ll load,” Lauren says. “After cake.” There’s still more than half the cake left, a sprawling chocolate thing in the shape of a fire truck. She takes it from the fridge, sets it on the kitchen island, opens the freezer door, takes out the chocolate ice cream. “Do you want some?”

  “Why the fuck not,” Sarah says. “I can’t possibly get any bigger.”

  “You’re eating for two, enjoy it,” she says. She serves: modest slices of cake, massive mounds of ice cream. She scrapes the paper carton clean, tosses the container in the garbage. The spoons are silver, incredibly shiny. She tastes it. It tastes exactly how she wants it to taste. It’s so good she leans into the island. Standing across from Sarah, as though they were bartender and patron: This feels confessional, or therapeutic. She’s moved to ask Sarah to tell her all her problems, though here, in this beautifully cold kitchen, with cake, with shining silver spoons, she seems not to have any. “Sorry I missed the party.”

  “You don’t have kids,” Sarah says. “You’re on human time.”

  “I just thought you said two,” she says.

  “It’s better this way, we can talk. I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  “So another boy, huh?” Sarah had mentioned it before; Lauren can’t remember when. “Is Henry excited?”

  “He is,” she says. “Baby brother. He talks about him constantly. We’ll see how he feels about sharing a room, though.”

  “Sharing a room?” Lauren gestures at the ceiling, at the many square feet that unfold overhead. “You must have plenty of space.”

  “The baby will be in our room for a while, but Dan’s moving his office down a floor, and we’re getting an au pair, so she’ll have the top floor to herself. I felt guilty about putting the baby so far away, up there with her like a servant, so we’re going to make that other room a guest room.”

  “I see,” Lauren says.

  “I didn’t want him to get that younger kid complex, you know? You made me sleep upstairs with the help, that sort of thing.”

  “Au pair? Sounds sort of sexy.”

  “She better not be,” Sarah says. “I’m hoping for someone moody and bespectacled, who likes to read poetry and go to the museum every weekend. We’ll see.”

  Lauren tries and fails to imagine Dan seducing a French adolescent. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be, I suppose. Henry’s starting school, so I’ll be able to devote some attention to this one. It won’t be the same as with Henry but it never is, I think. It’s just not possible.”

  “Right. I’m the oldest, remember, so I got the bulk of my parents’ nurturing.” Lauren licks her spoon clean.

  “And look how you turned out!”

  “So the au pair will au pair—and you’ll . . .” Lauren pauses. She doesn’t know how Sarah does it, how Sarah hasn’t lost her mind. Primed for a career doing whatever it is she does and then—to spend years just wiping bottoms. Lauren knows that’s how it’s done, she just can’t believe it.

  “It’s enough work for three, let alone two,” Sarah says. “In my fantasy, she’ll do the drop-off with Henry in the morning, so I can deal here. Sleep. Cook. Maybe go to the gym, can you imagine? Then I’ll do the pickup while she gets the baby to nap. I thought maybe Henry and I could start a mother-son date tradition or something? Afternoons at the bakery or the playground. I want to make sure both the boys get their alone time with me. I’ve read that can be a problem when you have the second.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Lauren says. “You’ll find a way. You always do.” She pauses. “Something’s different in here.”

  “We redid the playroom,” she says. “And new floors there and in here.”

  “New floors. I knew there was something. Are these reclaimed?” Lauren’s been at the design imprint long enough to recognize reclaimed wood. The floors feel very solid underfoot.

  “They are reclaimed,” Sarah says. “A barn in Pennsylvania. I don’t know anything about them. Devin, our architect, he insisted there’s a big difference.”

  “They’re strong,” Lauren says. “But they have that patina, that spirit—it makes the house look less new, more like it’s been around forever. It’s nice.”

  “He promised that two kids wouldn’t be able to destroy them, anyway.” Sarah pushes her empty bowl away. “You want to see the playroom?”

  “Sure,” Lauren says. She puts her bowl on top of Sarah’s and places them in the sink. She follows the mass of Sarah’s body, moving slowly across the floor, which is clean and toy-free. There’s a big dining table, rustic, simple, set with benches, between the island and the pocket doors, which are set into the sort of elaborately carved walls common in houses of this era. The doors move open effortlessly, and quietly, on their casters.

  The playroom is bright; though they’re in the basement, they’re not so far below street level, and the windows are big. One wall is floor-to-ceiling shelves: toys, books, framed photos, even a miniature library ladder that reaches to the uppermost shelf. There’s a sofa, large and low-slung, off white, inviting a stain but surprisingly clean. There’s a small child-size desk and chair, and a child-size easel, and a child-size guitar and a child-size drum set. There are paintings on construction paper, framed in simple white frames, dozens of them, hung on the facing wall. On each, Sarah’s written Henry’s name, and the date the artist completed the work. The room is quiet, cool, beautiful. There are many trucks, but Lauren does not see the truck she has brought. The room is perfect, of course. She feels sheepish about the book she’s brought with her. This room could have been in there.

  “Let’s sit.” Sarah eases herself onto the sofa. “I can’t handle the stairs right now. Maybe I should start sleeping down here.”

  The sofa is firm, but comfortable. Lauren thinks it must be stuffed with actual horsehair, a rarity in this day and age.

  “So, how’s work?”

  “It’s good, actually.” This is true but still feels like a surprise. “I’m producing a book with this queeny old designer who’s about a hundred, you should see his rooms. Gold andirons, hand-painted wallpaper, murals on the ceilings, that kind of thing.”

  “Do you miss cookbooks?”

  “I don’t,” Lauren says. “I think I was ready for this change. Enough of the best turkey burgers ever. The one-hour dinner party. I was done. Now, I’m developing titles, reaching out to new writers and soliciting designers. And we’re doing well. Actually making money, in books, which is nice.”

  Sarah yawns. “I’m sorry. I’m not yawning because you’re boring, I’m yawning because my brain is very tired.”

  “Not offended,” Lauren says. “You’re pregnant.”

  “So any other news?” Sarah gives her a knowing look. “Come on.”

  Lauren considers telling her about David, has considered telling her for weeks now—fine, it’s months—but hasn’t. David is still secret. David is still hers. If she does talk about him now, she’s worried the real truth will come spilling out of her. There’s been Gabe, there’s been Rob, there’s been Matt, there’s been Thom; all good, all fine, all happy enough memories, if she overlooks the worse parts, which is easier as time goes by. The worse parts slip away, with her knowledge of algebra and the world capitals.

  It’s not that David is different, though he is that, it’s that her feeling about the thing is different. She can see what she could never see before: the future. Marriage can’t be musical chairs; grab a mate when the music stops. The music stops, for most of the women she’s known, somewhere around thirty-three, and the marriages begin. And six years from then, right about now, in fact, as the cycle dictates: the divorces. She tried to see this—with Gabe, with Rob, with
Matt: the future. It never came into focus. It never seemed possible, as much as they, and Sarah, and her mother, and her father, might have wanted it to. She still hasn’t introduced her parents to David, but curiously enough, she wants to.

  “I’m ready for a vacation,” she says. “I’m over this summer.”

  “We’re going away on Monday. We’re renting a house in East Hampton with Fiona and her kids. Family vacation. I even convinced Dan to take three days off, but only three, because he’s worried about the paternity leave coming up. But we’ll all be together those three days, and actually Henry and I are going for ten. You should come out.”

  “Fiona. She’s got kids plural, then?”

  Sarah nods. “Owen’s just a little younger than Henry, Eliza is almost two now.”

  “So cute,” Lauren says. “You guys should have synced up your second borns, too, you could have had family vacations together forever.”

  Sarah is quiet. “We did, actually. Not by design, but it happened.” She pauses. “I lost the baby.”

  Lauren looks at her. Sarah looks calm, her posture, her demeanor bearing no real relationship to the words she’s just said. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I had no idea. When was this?”

  “I never told you.” Sarah exhales deeply. “I don’t know why, to be honest. I just. It was so bad, Lolo.”

  Lauren pulls her feet up under herself, pivots in the sofa so she’s almost sitting on Sarah’s lap. She touches her arm, tentatively. Sarah, so fat, so solid, seems fragile. “Were you far along?”

  She’d been sixteen weeks. It was old hat, pregnancy. She threw herself into it, and it felt as if it had been longer because she’d gotten so big, so quickly. In utero, Henry had cooperated, blossoming after she walked down the aisle, but the second one had made her presence known early. Sarah had dug out some of the less offensive pregnancy clothes, stored in a plastic box in the basement. She’d bought books for Henry, books about being a big brother, about how love isn’t diminished, but rather amplified, when you add another person into the mix.

  She’d told her parents, she’d told Fiona, she’d told the nanny. She’d been on the verge of calling Lauren, actually—it was on her to-do list—when, one otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, she woke up feeling different, somehow. The baby hadn’t really started moving, but Sarah felt a stillness there, inside her taut belly. The doctor asked her to come in, but it was the radiologist, whom she didn’t even know, who gently placed a hand on Sarah’s knee and confirmed that there was no heartbeat.

  One of those things. They had to dilate her. They used seaweed, of all insane things. The twenty-first century and that’s how it’s done. She went home, came back, and it was all a terrible mockery of what had happened four years earlier, with Henry: the room hushed, the pain nonexistent, the final moment not an anticlimax even. Dan held her hand, and she cried. She declined to look at the baby, declined the offer of an autopsy. She went home and, two days later, took the big brother books out of the pile by Henry’s bedside.

  “Four months. Showing and everything. Then, one morning, spontaneous.”

  Lauren’s mind races, trying to latch on to the right thing to say, trying to give voice to all the questions that come up. “But why didn’t you tell me? This is terrible. I could have—. I don’t know what I could have done. But I could have done something. I could have tried.”

  “I know.” Sarah squeezes Lauren’s forearm. “It’s not you. I wanted it to be over. I wanted to come home, and just be here, with Henry, and Dan, and be quiet. I thought I was pushing it, with the universe. I thought I was asking too much. I just wanted to . . . to never think about it again.”

  Lauren thinks, immediately, of Christopher. Ghost brother, the lost boy Lulu never talks about.

  “Hey, we got through it,” Sarah says. Another squeeze of the arm. “I should have called, I’m sorry.”

  “I should have been there,” Lauren says. “I’m a terrible friend.”

  “You’re not. You’re my best friend. It’s fine. Here I am. Look at me.” She spreads her arms open wide to indicate the bulk of her body. “He’s fine in there. It’s all okay.”

  “I’m so sorry, though.” Lauren reaches up to take Sarah’s hand, which is cool, and soft. “I don’t know what to say. You’re so. Fine. But I know you. I know that you must not have been fine. I wish you’d told me.”

  “Just one of those things, that’s what the doctor kept saying. Sarah, it’s just one of those things.”

  “One of those fucking horrible things.”

  Sarah is quiet. “I didn’t know, Lolo. I didn’t know if I could call you. With that. I didn’t know if you’d . . . if you’d understand. No. I knew you’d understand. I just didn’t . . .”

  Lauren gets it. She does. She’s offended, but it washes away quickly. She understands why Sarah would keep this from her, would keep this to herself. And she understands now that she can’t be mad, that she can’t shift the focus, from Sarah to herself. This is one of those moments: real life happening. She has to take it for what it is. She looks around the room. The books on the shelves are arranged by height and by color. “You could have told me,” she says, as gently as she can. “But you’re telling me now.”

  Sarah looks away. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “You say you’re done being sad about this,” Lauren says. “So let’s be happy. You’re going to have a baby. It’s a happy ending.”

  “It is a happy ending,” Sarah says.

  Lauren smiles. “I brought a present,” she says. “Trucks.”

  “Henry will love it, I’m sure. But I apologize in advance if he’s not thankful enough. He got so many presents. It was like a religious experience for him, ripping open all that paper.”

  “As long as he remembers me,” Lauren says. “He’ll remember me, right?”

  “Auntie Lauren? Yes. He’ll remember you.” Sarah pauses. “But, if being remembered is a big concern, well, the surest way to deal with that is to come around more. You should. Actually. Come around more. I don’t know why you don’t.”

  “I’m here,” Lauren says. Then, admitting: “You’re right.”

  “I moved to fucking Brooklyn, Lauren,” she says. “I’m right here, twenty minutes away.”

  “You got married and had a kid and now you’re having another one and it’s life, Sarah.” They’ll have this conversation forever. “Twenty-six years, I’ve known you. Here I am.”

  Sarah shrugs. “So, a year from now, at Henry’s sixth birthday, you’ll come over with Legos, or whatever six-year-old boys like, and we’ll talk. But we could do it sooner.”

  “I know. I get wrapped up in being me,” Lauren says. “You’re not missing anything.” Now she can’t tell Sarah about David. It’ll just confirm Sarah’s suspicion that something is being kept from her, even if that’s not what’s happening, or not what Lauren means to happen. She smiles, at the thought of David, his bright eyes, his fidgety hands. Sarah will like him, Sarah will love him, when they meet.

  “You’re sure it’s not because you’re so busy with hot guys and amazing nights out that the last thing you want to do is come to Park Slope and drink white wine in my backyard?”

  “Come to your mansion and sit in your beautiful garden and drink white wine? Are you joking? I will do that, anytime. I’ll remember. That we should do that.”

  “I am lucky,” Sarah says, looking around the beautiful, quiet room. “I know it. Let me ask you a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you want a glass of wine?”

  “I’d have a glass of wine,” Lauren says.

  “Good,” Sarah says. “Because I want two sips of your glass of wine. Two. Maybe three.”

  July was rainy, August sunny, so the vines draped across the arbor are full, green, alive. There’s lots of shade, but still, sliding the door open, there’s a blast of heat, as might accompany the opening of an oven. Sarah wiggles back into a chair, tries to ignore the weather. There’s no point tal
king about it, anyway.

  Ten little children, eight boys and two girls, red-faced, damp-haired, have ridden their little metal scooters home, gift bags (temporary tattoos, bottles of bubbles) in tow, and presumably ten other sets of parents are right now enjoying the respite of their child’s unexpected afternoon nap. After all that exertion, that running and screaming, Henry, compliant, had stripped out of his shirt, wiggled into his sheets, his room cool and quiet, and started to snore. They have, maybe, another twenty minutes.

  Lauren has the glass and the bottle, only a third empty, as few of the parents drank at the party. She tips some of the yellowish wine into the glass, sips it.

  “Mmm,” she says, approvingly. “Here.” Lauren hands the glass to her.

  Sarah takes a tiny sip. It’s fruity, sweet, like biting into an apple that’s been soaking in alcohol. She shouldn’t, after what she’s been through—losing the pregnancy, which is how she thinks of it, a pregnancy, not a child. It was the darkest time in her life and made her realize how light the rest of it has been. She knew that, of course, would never have described it as anything else, her life, but still.

  Without Henry, she’d have given into it: the grief, the darkness, the sadness. The memory is both distant and fresh, in the past and right there with her. Sarah feels better that she’s told Lauren. She hadn’t told her, because she thought that would make it easier to get through. But not telling Lauren made it worse. Now, though, she does feel—if not better, lighter, a sense that things are right between them.

  Something about being around Lauren makes her want to indulge in vice. She’s dying for a cigarette, which she can’t quite believe. She can’t think of the last time she’s had a cigarette.

  “Well, that’s fucking great,” she says. She hands the wineglass back. “Take it away.” It’s very big in Lauren’s hands, very big near her face, which is small, delicate, lovely. Her eyes look darker than Sarah remembers. She seems good, Lauren. She seems happy.

  “This yard is incredible,” Lauren says.

  “It was the real reason we bought the house,” Sarah says. “It’s so thoughtful, the way they did it. I guess it makes a difference, when you’re an expert. You just see things in a different way. It would never in a million years have occurred to me to do this.” It’s true. The asymmetry of the yard, the way it’s all chopped up into zones, runs counter to what she’d have thought would make the small garden feel bigger, but it’s brilliant, and the place feels like it just goes on forever. And here, in the middle of it, the big birthday present: a swing set. Custom made, to save them the trek to the playground a few blocks over, good for just running out and getting a quick bit of play in. It’s very simple and slender, as not to take up too much space: a pair of swings, one for a baby, one for a big kid, though the bucket seat for baby can be replaced. The woodworker who built it showed her how easy it will be, when the time comes. The frame of the swing doubles as a ladder, which Henry had been more delighted about than the swing, actually, climbing, reaching up toward the sky, grabbing at nothing, lost in his own, fluid reality.