Time of My Life

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Which is exactly how I became an expert magician. Read enough magazines, and you can do just about anything. Because inevitably, on any given month, tucked inside the pages of these bastions of knowledge, there are articles on pulling rabbits out of hats and pulling coins out of noses and pulling off the perfect birthday party, as if that might ensure, or perhaps even prove, that you are the mommy dearest. The mommy best.

  “It was sexy,” Jackson says tonight, slowly lifting my tank top over my head. “Seeing you with the kids today.”

  “Yeah, even your mom managed a grin.” I giggle as he kisses my neck. “Not quite a smile, but a toothless grin.”

  “Don’t bring her up right now,” he grunts.

  “Duly noted.” I feel his mouth work its way down my collarbone.

  “So, Ms. Magician,” Jack says, his voice husky and low, “how about you show me some of those new tricks?”

  “How about you show me some of yours first?”

  “Happy to,” he says, reaching down to unbuckle my belt.

  I press my eyes closed and try to remember why I’d ever jumped off this track to begin with. Because these tiny accommodations, like placating his mother with magic tricks or sidestepping arguments about her in the first place—these small shifts—didn’t seem so seismic now that I understood the consequences of forgoing them. Last time, I asked Jack to make changes; this time, it seemed so much easier if I just made them in myself. It doesn’t feel like so much, I think. No, these compromises definitely don’t feel like too much.

  Jack tugs off my pants.

  What matters, I tell myself just before clearing my mind, is that I’m here, now, making new memories while the old ones are fading into dust.

  Chapter Seven

  This came for you.”

  I look up from my loupe, with which I was poring over storyboards, at the sound of Josie’s voice, and see that her head has been replaced with a Herculean-sized gift basket.

  “Ooh, goodies!” I set the loupe aside and rub my hands together. “What have you got?”

  The monstrosity lands on my desk with a thud, and my pencil cup rattles.

  “Well, you’ve made it,” Josie says, easing herself into a chair and shaking out her arms. “This is the official invitation to the annual Coke friends and family event, which basically means they invite all of their investors to Cipriani and pour top-shelf liquor down their throats to convince them that management is doing right by their money.”

  I start to unpeel the layers of pink plastic that envelop the basket.

  “Have you ever been?” I ask.

  “Five years ago,” she answers. “Before they left us for BBDO. It’s legendary. And they don’t hand these invites out lightly. When I got invited, I’d already been promoted to director.”

  I stand on my tiptoes and try to peer into the depths of the silo-sized gift.

  “So,” Josie continues, “as I said, you’ve made it. Really knocked the hell out of this campaign.”

  “Thanks,” I say with a shrug. “It’s been pretty easy.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” Josie tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You’ve juggled the responsibility well, and just so you know, I’ve put in a word for a promotion.” I meet her eyes and she smiles. “Seriously, Jill, my job could be yours in a few years.”

  I force a grin but feel my pulse beating in my neck, rising in panic. I’m not supposed to get a promotion. I’m supposed to cruise along comfortably at this level until I meet Henry and eventually quit when my belly bulges out to the point at which it can no longer be disguised.

  But all of that’s different now, I remind myself and exhale. Your future is what you make of it, and so what if you don’t exactly envision a life like Josie’s: one in which you feel like you’re leaving half of you behind every morning when you kiss your kids good-bye, and then leaving the other half of you behind each dusk when the hum of your computer whirs to a stop and you click off the light to go home and fall asleep on the couch next to your husband who has flipped the TV to ESPN.

  Her life doesn’t have to be mine, I tell myself. My life, my new life, is yet unwritten.

  “That’s amazing, Josie. Thank you,” I say, my voice weighted in appreciation. I reach into the basket and pull out some bounty. “Seriously? They make Coke-flavored Jelly Bellys? And Coke-flavored licorice?”

  “Oh yeah, you’d be amazed. My daughter lives for this stuff.”

  Tentatively, I take a bite, and it tastes like processed cola with six shots of sugar blended in.

  I can’t remember the last time I had jelly beans. And then it hits me with a rush: Easter 2007, just a few months back, when Katie, at fifteen months, had finally stopped lumbering like a drunken seaman and was rushing around my father’s backyard in Connecticut with the freewheeling bravado that nearly defines toddlerhood, before you’re old enough to remember that falling hurts and that stumbling leaves bruises that won’t fade for days.

  I’d spent the previous night dyeing hard-boiled eggs various shades of lavender, pink, yellow, and baby blue, and then, after greeting my dad and Linda, his girlfriend of nearly a decade but whom he refused to wed, I tucked the pastel-hued creations behind trees and logs and flower beds to create our very own Easter egg hunt. (I’d read about it in Parents.) From my perch on the porch, I watched Henry chase Katie around the grass—she’d lost interest in uncovering the eggs after four minutes, tops. Linda came out with a brimming bag of candy, and even though my trainer at the gym had sworn me off refined sugar, I reached for the Jelly Bellys and popped five (only twenty-two calories, I reminded myself!) in my mouth, savoring the tang of the tartness and the hint of crunchiness that comes with dissolving granulated sugar between your molars.

  “These actually aren’t bad,” I say now to Josie. I stuff down a whole handful. “God, I never eat this crap.”

  “Yeah right, me neither!” She laughs and throws me a wink. “And with that, I’m sure that I’ll see you at the vending machines at 4:00. I’ll fight you for the Red Vines.”

  Oops. Indeed, back before Katie granted me a muffin top and eight stubborn pounds that wouldn’t budge despite my virtuous cross-training and weight-lifting routine (as read about in Self ), I abused sugar much like someone might abuse crack.

  “Oh,” Josie said, popping her head back into the door opening. “You should buy a new dress for this. And bring that boyfriend of yours. He’s a keeper.”

  “He is, isn’t he?” I grin.

  Maybe this time, he’ll actually stick.

  “HOW ABOUT THIS ONE?” Megan holds up a red, white, and blue empire-waist gown that looks like it would be more appropriate for a Fourth of July float than a classy candelabra-lit affair with a swing band playing in the background while various canapés are offered by tuxedo-clad waiters.

  I scrunch my face up like I’d just eaten a sour pickle and shake my head no. I still hadn’t adjusted to the fashion of half a decade past. In 2007, I was the embodiment of the Lilly Pulitzer catalog: crisp dark jeans, linen blouses, floral-printed sundresses.

  “It’s the look that makes the woman,” I’d tell myself each morning after dragging myself from bed, dreading the oncoming day, the tedium and the poop-filled diapers and the plastic smile that would eventually cause my cheeks to cramp if I didn’t let it fall at least three times during one of Katie’s playdates. So I’d reach into the depths of my closet and pull out a splashy pink and green tank top with ironed khaki capris to match, and I’d slide on deep chocolate leather sandals, and pull my highlighted hair into a clean low ponytail, and wash just a touch of cream blush across my cheeks and onto my lips, and then I’d stare into the mirror and convince myself that indeed, “it’s the look that makes the woman,” and now, this woman was me. Then I’d nod at the embodiment of mommyhood perfection and turn to climb the stairs to whisk Katie from her crib.

  “Come on,” Megan whines. “I never thought I’d say this, but Jill, I’m sick of shopping. We’ve been at this for ne
arly two hours, and you haven’t liked anything you’ve seen!”

  Is it my fault that designers in 2000 seemed to think it was a brilliant idea to bring back the hideous fashions from the ’80s? Is it my fault that I have good enough taste to just say no to prints that look like they belong on the curtains of my Westchester home and shoulder pads that couldn’t flatter a linebacker?

  “Here,” I say, pulling a strapless silver cocktail dress from the back rack. “This might work.”

  “Finally,” Megan sighs, and plops down on a beige leather chair that they put out for drained husbands who are forced to trudge after their wives for a rash of weekend shopping. Nearly a month after her miscarriage, Meg’s looking vibrant, healthy even, and I can’t help but stare just before I duck into the dressing room.

  Last time around, I hadn’t stopped to notice. Jack and I were starting to wind our way free of each other, like a ball of yarn in which just one thread had come loose, and the Coke project was drowning my free time, and I’d started dreaming about my mother again, so somehow, Meg got lost in the shuffle. Lost in the innocuous way that happens when life simply piles up. You grab a friend on her cell for two minutes, then promise to call each other back later, but later becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow ebbs into a week, and before you’ve even realized it, a month has flown by, and you’ve disengaged yourself from each other’s worlds. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t adore each other, and certainly doesn’t mean that when you do catch up that you don’t pour out all of the missing details. You do. But for that month or those weeks, you’re blind to the nuances that change a person over the course of time, that stack up like dominoes until she’s a different person entirely. This time out, I’d vowed to keep a closer eye on Megan, to perhaps protect her from the spiral that would suck her downward into emotional depths that, at least in my previous life, I’d failed to understand. Or perhaps more honestly, I failed to understand because I didn’t see the spiral in the first place.

  “How’s work?” I ask Megan over coffee, after I admired my naked body in the dressing room mirror (No stretch marks from Katie! No stomach that perpetually looks three months pregnant! No shaking jello under the curve of my butt!) and purchased the silver dress (two sizes smaller!).

  “Eh,” she says. “I don’t really give a shit.” Meg’s an associate at Bartlett and Jones, one of the top law firms in the city, where they process their lawyers in the way that cuts of beef might be at a slaughterhouse. They string you up, put you through your paces, and just like those poor cows, you rarely get out alive.

  “That bad?” I say. She never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place, and just went to law school because she couldn’t think of anything better to do, a holding pattern for those first few postcollege years and her early twenties.

  “Just a lot of filing papers and reading over fine print in documents and blah, blah, blah.” She rolls her eyes, then blurts out, “So Tyler and I are ready to try again.”

  “Has your doctor given you the okay?” I attempt to offer enough support in my voice to conceal my alarm at her announcement.

  She nods, her mouth full of raisin scone.

  “And you feel ready to do this?” I pause. “Not physically. Emotionally.”

  “You sound like my doctor,” she laughs, though there’s no joy behind it. “She told me that since I’ve stopped bleeding, we can try again as soon as I get my period. But that maybe I should take some time to cope with the loss of the first baby.”

  “And you disagree?” I raise my mug to my lips, careful not to spill the steaming coffee on my fingers. My eyes watch her steadily over the rim.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “But why put it off? What’s the point in delaying it? The longer we wait, the longer it is until I get pregnant again.” Her face falls, and I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.

  “You know what’s funny,” she continues, not really asking a question.

  “No,” I say. “What?”

  “You spend your whole life frantically trying not to get pregnant. I mean, I’ve been on the pill since I was sixteen! Eleven fucking years of being on the pill until I went off it last year. So you spend your whole life trying to prevent this thing—condoms, pills, gels, creams, whatever—and then, it turns out that guess what? It’s not so easy to do, to get pregnant in the first place!”

  “I was certain that I was pregnant back in high school once,” I say. “With Daniel. God, remember him? Did I ever tell you this story, how our condom broke, and I was two days late, and I was freaking out?” I stop, unsure why I’m telling the story. I think of Daniel, his black curls and his cherry cheeks, and how we split soon after I got my period, in that awkward, stilted way when you still see each other in the hallways and still wonder whether or not you broke up because the other person thought you didn’t know how to kiss or because your boobs were too small.

  “Oh, God, yeah, I know.” Megan’s words are accelerating. “I can’t tell you how many times I thought I was pregnant. Crying on the toilet because my period hadn’t come or because I’d forgotten to take a pill exactly on the dot—because you know, that’s what the stupid package warns you about—or because of whatever.” She stops to gather her breath. “And Jesus, I remember being so filled with goddamn fear because, well, what the hell do you do if you’re eighteen and pregnant or twenty and pregnant, and now, I’m twenty-eight, and I can’t get fucking pregnant, and then when I do, I lose the baby!”

  I think she’s going to start crying, so I reach over to touch her hand, but instead, she peers up with a wistful smile.

  “Jesus,” she says. “If I knew that it would be so hard to get pregnant, I’d have had a lot more sex.”

  I snort out some coffee and nod.

  I raise my mug. “To more sex,” I say, and startlingly, Mrs. Kwon, my dry cleaner, echoes in my ear.

  “To more sex,” Meg replies, matching her mug to mine and clinking them together.

  “And to a baby,” I say, fervently, feverishly hoping that this time, Meg is more blessed.

  “To a baby,” she answers. “To babies for both of us. And to whatever those babies might bring.” She catches the panic in my eye. “Not now.” She smiles and waves a free hand. “But, you know, in the future. To the babies of our future.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I say. “To the babies of our future.”

  I feel my chest tighten like a clamp’s been placed around my heart. Katie, I think. Katie. The baby of my future. What happens to Katie now that the future is nothing more than a foggy memory, one that might fade when the sun rises and the morning mist lifts?

  Chapter Eight

  There is a perpetual and bewildering sense of déjà vu when you desert the future and reinsert yourself into the past. Like a rat, spinning on its wheel, who keeps running by the same scenery over and over again, only each time, the scientist changes just enough of the backdrop so the rodent wonders if he’s merely imagining the sameness or if, indeed, everything is exactly as it’s always been.

  Part of this is amusing: I can catch up on old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and can render Jackson speechless when I insist that we place bets, which I subsequently win, on who will get the boot each week on Survivor.

  “What the hell?” he says with his hands in the air, just after that button-cute Colleen gets her torch extinguished. “What freaky voodoo signs did you pick up on to figure it out this time?”

  I grin and bite into the gooey cheese pizza that we order every Thursday night for our Survivor viewings.

  “Just good perception,” I say. “Either you can read people or you can’t.”

  “Uh-uh,” he answers, unconvinced. “Have you been reading spoilers again?”

  “Hand to God, I haven’t.” I laugh.

  “Fine. I owe you a twenty-minute back massage before bed.” He gets up to grab me some more Diet Coke (we have an endless supply thanks to work) and pecks my lips as he goes. “But I swear, I better win one of these days o
r else I’m searching your computer for incriminating evidence of rule-breaking!”

  “Search all you want,” I practically sing. “Some things are just a gift, and you either have it or you don’t.”

  But these moments of bemusement aside, there are other things about revisiting the life you’ve already trodden that are so disconcerting that you feel as if you’re being tailed, watched by someone hidden in the shadows who might leap out at any moment, until, of course, you realize that this person is you. There is a constant sense that I am playing a dangerous game of tug-of-war with fate, and I find myself continually wondering if everything I do throughout my day is predestined. If, as I stop into Starbucks for my morning coffee, I did this exact same thing at the exact same time half a decade earlier or, as I stop by Gene’s desk to gossip, if I’m rehashing information that’s already been filtered through my sensorial landscape. I’ve discovered that I can’t remember all the mundane details of my day-to-day life, so while there’s a vague sense of familiarity, little of it seems nailed down or tangible. Which leaves me feeling like I’m swimming in quicksand, at once wanting it to suck me in and do with me what it might, and alternatively, grasping and clawing my way out because the thought of going under, of essentially leaving fate to have its way with me, is too spine-chillingly terrifying to allow.