Apart at the Seams

by Melissa Ford

  “I just wish we were back in college,” I tell her suddenly. I didn’t even know I was going to say that until the words were out of my mouth. “When everything was so easy. Remember how stressed out we got over that silly Shakespeare project? What was the worst that would happen if we didn’t turn it in? We could drop the class and retake the credits. And now everything seems so complicated.”

  Rachel looks at me, bemused while we stand by the receptionist’s desk. “It’s hard to be an adult, but I think you’re glossing over just how hard things were in the moment. I mean, when you’re in college, grades are your life. Ari, I’m going to say this in the nicest possible way: you look awful. Are you sure you’re okay? Your body looks stiff. Are you coming down with something?”

  “I don’t feel very well,” I admit, my heart racing.

  “Maybe you got what Beckett had. Or maybe you’re pregnant!”

  “That’s not possible,” I tell her. “I’m infertile.”

  At that moment, coifed-within-an-inch-of-her-life Marta comes to bring me back to one of the little waxing rooms. Her heels click across the tiles in unison with my own, only softened when our shoes march over a soft tuft of someone’s discarded hair. I lie down on her table, doing math in my head.

  “You have to breathe,” Marta croons at me in an unplaceable accent, gently stroking her thumbs over the crease between my eyes. “You’re holding your breath and it’s making your face tense up. Look at this little groove. My waxing won’t be even.”

  I take a long, shuddering breath and close my eyes. I finished my period one week ago. A totally normal, nothing out of the ordinary period. I’m probably two weeks into my cycle. No chance of being pregnant. And anyway, it took multiple IVF cycles to conceive Beckett. It seems too good to be true to consider getting pregnant without medical intervention. Nope, my stomach issues are just good old-fashioned anxiety.

  Amid all the relief, a tiny part of me deflates, thinking about how great it would be to provide Beckett with a sibling without having to go through IVF again. To have it magically happen when I least expect it, like being sent flowers on a random Monday. But I remind myself that the timing would be awful: morning sickness while I’m trying to finish the outfits, a belly bump during Fashion Week, and knowing my luck, delivery just in time to lock me out of having my hand in the fall line at Davis & Howe. It would push back my dreams of having my own design house by years, and I would need to find momentum again. Momentum like that which comes from designing Emmy dresses doesn’t come along very often. No, this is not the time I want to be pregnant, when everything is coming together for me.

  And being with Ethan is like already having two kids between the messes he leaves behind and the demands he makes on my time. Sometimes it feels as if he went on a responsibility diet to squeeze himself into my apartment, and now that he has a foot in the living room, he can relax and go back to his usual ways, like a bride taking a second croissant at breakfast the morning after her wedding when she no longer needs to fit into the sleek white dress. I try not to feel resentful that one of us has to be the adult. No, I have enough on my plate right now.

  I take another breath, trying not to cringe when Marta quickly rips the muslin off my face, taking my hair with it. This is exactly what I need right now—having everything righted, put in its proper place. I relax into the calm of being someone else cleaning up, falling into that moment right before I need to emerge from the room and before life goes back to its frenetic pace. For these five minutes, I can believe that everything is perfect, that I’ll be able to hit all my deadlines in time and figure out my relationship with Ethan and not one stray hair will be on my brow. I take another deep breath, pinching closed any emotions I felt over the idea of being pregnant. I don’t have time for what-ifs.

  Chapter Nine

  ANY PEACE I WAS able to grab by cleaning up my eyebrows fizzles by the time I get to Monday morning. I stand at the sink, eating a bowl of cereal while I cut up chunks of fruit for Beckett’s breakfast and check email, all at the same time. I’m about to close email on my phone when a message pops up from my mother reminding me that she’s happy to come out to New York and spend the end of August taking care of her grandson. Before I can hit reply, the telephone rings. It’s half past seven on a Monday morning, and she just sent me a message; it can only be one person: my mother. She likes to follow up all emails immediately with a phone call, clearly not trusting technology to carry her important messages to the right hands.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say, balancing the phone between my ear and shoulder while I scrape chunks of pear off the cutting board and onto Beckett’s high chair tray. He immediately flings one of the chunks to the ground, where it sticks to the tile.

  “How did you know it was me?” she asks, even though she knows all about caller ID.

  “Because you just sent me an email,” I tell her. I don’t add that I’m also racing around, desperately trying to get out the door, and she seems to have a sixth sense of when I don’t have time to talk and calls anyway.

  “Oh!” my mother says, “you got it? You didn’t respond.”

  “That’s because I just got it. You just sent it.” I smile in order to keep the edge out of my voice. “I’m really grateful for the offer of help, but really, Ethan and I have it under control. Why don’t I come to you after Fashion Week is done?”

  “I really don’t mind, Arianna. I can give you two a break.”

  “I know, and we appreciate it. But the apartment is so small. Smaller than last year with all of Ethan’s stuff. There wouldn’t be a place for you to sleep.”

  My mother is quiet on her end of the line, as if realizing for the first time what Ethan moving in means.

  “How is Ethan?”

  How is Ethan? Well-rested because he’s still in that bed that you can no longer sleep in. It would have been great if he had picked up on my hinting the night before and offered to get Beckett ready in the morning so I could leave even earlier and tackle a few things before Francesca got to the loft, but he only commiserated with how insane my week sounded before rolling over and yawning about how these are his last days of freedom before school begins.

  “He’s great. Finishing up teaching his summer classes, getting ready for the school year.”

  “Actually, how is Rachel? You barely talk about her anymore. Don’t you see her?”

  “I just saw her,” I sigh, bending down to pick up the fruit that has landed on the floor. It’s never worth it to grab the first chunk of pear when I know it’s going to be followed by four more. Beckett grins and rubs an apple slice over his face. “We went to lunch last week.”

  “What is she up to these days? Planning the wedding?”

  “Planning the wedding, writing her blog, the book is coming out soon.”

  “Lots of exciting stuff,” my mother comments, and I’m instantly annoyed. What about my life? My kid, the Emmy outfits, my exciting boyfriend. She has her own mother to oooh and aaah over her good things.

  “I guess,” I agree.

  “She must be super-busy. Are you helping her out with the wedding plans?”

  “She actually seems to have a lot of time on her hands, you know, writing on her own schedule,” I comment. “And her mother-in-law is helping her with wedding stuff. I’m the one who is sort of maxed out right now.”

  I can practically hear my mother biting her tongue, the sharp edges of her teeth coming down against the soft flesh. My mother has a set of three, lifelong best friends, and they call themselves “The Girls.” My father knew in marrying her that he also got Betty, Maureen, and Carol as part of the package. My whole life, my mother has been pushing the importance of female friendships as if they’re chewable vitamins.

  “You don’t sound happy for her,” my mother scolds. “She’s your best friend.”

  “I know,” I tell her, my voice s
oftening. “I am thrilled for her. I’m planning on scooping up a dozen copies of her book the moment it comes out, and I’m not even divorced. At the same time, I am stretched too thin and can’t fit planning her second wedding to the same person in my life right now. Anyway, she has Adam. He’s a best friend for when her real best friend is busy.”

  “You know it’s different, men and women. A woman needs her girlfriends.”

  I don’t correct my mother, gritting my teeth as I look at the digital clock on the stove. “I really have to run. I have to drop off Beckett with the nanny.”

  I untangle myself from the phone call as quickly as possible and dump the rest of our breakfast things in the sink. I dampen a paper towel and rub it over Beckett’s face and hands, scooping him up along with my bag, keys, and phone. I’m not sure what my mother wants me to do—stop working and cater to Rachel’s whims? How could that possibly be healthy? And who the hell will cater to my whims?

  I wrestle with Beckett’s stroller when I reach the ground floor, snapping his bucking body into the harness. “Please, Becks,” I croon. “Make this easy for Mommy.”

  Beckett cooperates enough to get us out the door and toward the nanny share apartment a few blocks away. Maybe even as a toddler he can sense my stress levels because for once he doesn’t screech and grunt when we see a parked school bus and I don’t stop to allow him to gawk at it. We get to Martina without incident, and I pass her my son and his diaper bag with a change of clothes and a promise that he hasn’t had a fever for days.

  I leave the stroller in their hallway since I’m too late to park it nicely in the front entrance way, and race over to the loft, getting into the sample room in record time, but still a few minutes behind Francesca, who immediately dumps a list of things she needs pronto, presto, prestissimo. I take a deep breath, mentally setting aside any hope of working on the toiles in the morning, and gather the beads I’ll need from the notions closet, along with a needle and thread.

  When my samplehands stroll into the room a half hour later, I pounce on them before Francesca can lure them away with Fashion Week work. “Dave,” I breathe, passing him the cut fabric for a pair of black pants, “I need you to finish this before you jump into anything else. And Ophelia, I need you to work on Bee’s gold dress that you cut for me.”

  Ophelia turns her heavily outlined eyes on me. “The buttery yellow column? I cut that to Tara’s proportions.”

  “No! It’s for Bee. Bee!” I’m aware that everyone in the room is staring at us, but I can’t help it. I know this is why we work with toiles before we ever start on the finished product, but Ophelia’s mistake just cost us time, which feels more precious than material at the moment.

  “Well, it said Tara on the notes.”

  “I’m certain that it didn’t,” I tell her, even though there’s a small possibility that I messed something up in my haste to pass off work to the samplehands while Beckett was sick.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Ophelia shrugs. “I’ll redo it this afternoon.”

  “I’ll do it,” I snap. “I need it done now.”

  Except, of course, I can’t do it now either. I have three layers of fringe I’m attaching to the back of a slinky top. Ophelia doesn’t fight me on it, and we retreat to separate worktables. I spend the next half hour silently fuming, holding imaginary conversations with Ophelia in my head where she admits that everything is her fault.

  I work through the morning, work through lunch time, and don’t pause to even use the bathroom until it feels as if my fingers are going numb from tightly gripping the needle. I stare at myself in the mirror, cringing at how tired I look and it’s only Monday. How am I going to get through the end of this week? I’m supposed to be doing a first fitting on Thursday over at the Nightly. What if I don’t have all the toiles finished in time?

  My phone buzzes on my way back to the sample room, and I glance at the screen.

  Hey sweets, could you pick up my lens for me at the photography store next to the loft? They said it was ready.

  Ethan’s lens. I had dropped it off for him a few weeks ago. It makes sense considering I work two doors down from his favorite store, but picking it up means going out in the middle of the day since they close by five. I stare at the screen and then write back, of course. He’s picking up Beckett for me tonight. I can spare fifteen minutes for an errand if I have to work late. I take a deep breath, repeating a mantra in my head. Lens and dress. Lens and dress. Just get through picking up the lens and starting the dress, and everything will fall into place the rest of the day.

  Francesca intercepts me before I can sit down at the table and start recutting Bee’s dress pattern. “Arianna, the fringe is puckering. Look at this. It needs to be redone. All of it.”

  She holds out the back of the top, and I can clearly see that the fabric is warping even as my brain scrambles to come up with some way not to redo the work. Tabitha reaches over me and smooths over the fringe with her thumb. “Definitely fixable. We were just about to go on a coffee run. Can we get you something, Francesca? We’ll be back in five minutes to start this.”

  I let Tabitha thrust my purse into my hands and lead me downstairs, my whole body numb.

  “We’re going on a coffee run,” she hisses, “because you look like shit. First of all, you need to eat. We’re going to stuff a muffin in you.”

  “I have yogurt in the refrigerator at the loft,” I tell her, motioning backward.

  “But you haven’t taken a break to eat it. No, you’re going to get yourself a big, fattening muffin. Or some pound cake. It’s not as if you need to worry about calories. You do realize that you’ve been losing weight?”

  I look down at my caramel-colored leggings and realize how skinny my legs look in the pants, like two unsalted pretzel sticks. “You’re underfed,” Tabitha tells me, “and that is contributing to the problem.”

  “What problem? I just don’t have time to eat,” I insist. “I’m busy. I have too much to do, and then I get home and it’s about taking care of Beckett and . . .”

  “That’s bullshit,” Tabitha sniffs. We get up to the register and she orders me a blueberry muffin, throwing Francesca’s coffee and her own drink into my order. I pay for it all along with an iced tea and slide down the counter to wait by the barista. “You have time to wolf down a container of yogurt. You’re choosing to make yourself even more stressed out.”

  I raise my eyebrows at her, but Tabitha continues her campaign of tough love. “When Francesca showed you the fringe, you looked as if you were either going to explode at her or burst into tears, neither of which is going to get you through Fashion Hell. That is the crux of The Problem.”

  “That’s because I have so much . . .”

  Tabitha holds up her perfectly manicured hand—the only person in the loft who can somehow not only keep her nails long but the polished unchipped at all times—and cuts me off from launching into a litany of excuses. “You’ve been through Fashion Week lead-up dozens of times. You normally work well under pressure. You’re unflappable. A freakin’ Midwesterner down to your bones. What is throwing you off your game this time? Because I’ve never seen you so unfocused. That fringe looked like shit, and you knew it looked like shit. Why would you turn in something puckered like that?”

  “I didn’t know it was puckered,” I tell her. She gives me a doubtful look. “I swear, it looked fine when I turned it in. Something happened to it after I was done working on it.”

  “So you’re saying the least likely explanation is the correct one? What is that math-y thing called again?”

  “Occam’s razor?” I offer. “Other people touched it after me. Maybe someone was working on a seam and it pulled the material strangely.”

  “No one touched it after you,” Tabitha informs me. “You were the last person to touch it. See, this is part of The Problem. ‘Problem’ with
a capital ‘P.’ You’re not paying attention to things anymore. You’re constantly rushing, and in constantly rushing, you make mistakes that end up costing you more time.”

  “So despite having twenty-five hours’ worth of work for each twenty-four-hour day, I should slow down,” I repeat, accepting my muffin and drink from the barista. We pause by the sugar station to dump two sweeteners into my drink.

  “I saw this great TED Talk the other day about how trying to speed up and do more actually makes us ultimately do less. It was on YouTube and it already had over a million views, so you know that it’s brilliant.”

  “A video of a kitten batting at a ball of yarn gets a million views.”

  Tabitha ignores me and secures her lid to her cup. “She said that by doing something as simple as a daily meditation staring at your inspiration board, you can get more accomplished than by rushing about, trying to force things to happen. The universe knows when you’re trying to do too much. It makes you slow down.”

  “The universe sounds like a bully.” Talking to Tabitha at least has the desired effect of calming me down even though I still want to weep when I think about the rest of my day. “I don’t even know what an inspiration board is, nor do I have the time to make one. If it’s all the same, I’m going to run to the photography store now and get Ethan’s lens, and then I’m going to bury myself in work until I can’t see straight. That’s how you get stuff done.”

  “Unless the universe intercedes,” Tabitha intones. “The main thing you have to remember is to watch out for yourself. You need to eat, get some sleep, take a deep breath, and slow everything down.”

  I don’t bother informing Tabitha how supremely unhelpful this idea sounds in the face of all I need to get done. Instead, I just smile my famous, Midwestern pleasant smile—the bane of all New Yorkers—and sweetly take Ethan’s errand off my to-do list so I can feel as if I can breathe again.