It gets better, I say.
Leah winces as the baby tries to relatch and must have pinched her. I hear him choke and sputter and I motion toward her breast.
May I? I ask.
She nods down toward the baby.
I take her breast and place my thumb into the baby’s mouth until it opens fully; I place her nipple far back in his mouth and he latches on and Leah breathes out.
* * *
It’s up to you, says my husband.
We’ve been in the car for two hours and we’ve just now gotten up the courage to talk about asking my parents for a loan.
What are our other options? I say.
We could move in with my parents, he says.
His parents have a one-bedroom house so far north in Maine that they’re often snowed in for weeks or months.
We could do the things that people do when they don’t have rich parents to call.
Our neighbor Luis is moving in with his kids upstate. Another two are going to elder-care facilities that horrify them. The gentrifiers, the people in our building who look most like us, mostly are either buying in or finding apartments south of the park.
We could leave New York, but we’d need to rent a van and get jobs. We’d need first and last month’s rent and a security deposit. We don’t have a car, and our credit’s shot.
We need jobs, I say to him.
I could call some of the old Lehman guys.
It’s been a decade since he left that job. What was once a fancy degree, youth, and hunger is now a single year of relevant experience and creeping middle age.
What do you want, though? I say.
To pay our rent, he says. To take care of our kids.
* * *
Right before the reception disappears, I text my dad to ask if he’s available and he texts back to say he is. I don’t ask for a specific sum but explain the various parts of our dilemma as calmly and as neutrally as I can. We need enough for a deposit, three months’ rent, plus we need guarantors since our credit’s shot.
Don’t call it a loan, though, says my father. Don’t pretend you’ll be able to pay us back.
He’s put me on speaker in his car and my mom’s there. The phone cuts in and out and their voices feel hollow and half-formed; I hear my mother two times mumble something to my father; I hear him say her name and tell her to calm down. They’re building a new house on a new property that they just purchased. The new construction’s proving more expensive than we thought, he says.
They ask a lot of questions, about my job and why I’m not going back to it. I think of telling them because I felt like I was dying walking into that building every morning, because I never saw my children, because I couldn’t stomach watching all those kids not get what their parents had been promised they would get. I think of telling him I was making less at that job than I’ll make stringing together the four jobs I’ve taken since then, except it still doesn’t matter, except neither of these choices pays enough for us to live.
I say: We would pay it back.
I have the adjunct jobs, a part-time freelance gig transcribing subtitles. I’ve sent a résumé to the wine bar where a friend who dropped out of our grad program our third year works.
What’s the plan, though? asks my mother.
I just told you.
But long term, she says. What’s the plan?
I don’t know, I tell her.
I don’t know.
This can’t be good for the children, says my mother. All this stress.
I know, I say. I do not want to start to cry then but I do.
I don’t know the plan, I say. I wish there was one, I say. But there’s only trying to find more work. There’s only hoping that it adds up to enough.
At what point, says my mother, is it time to cut your losses? At what point is it time to give up on this whole dream thing?
I don’t … I start to say but don’t know what she’s asking.
What dream? I ask.
9
THE TWO-YEAR-OLD IS turning three and wants a party. We can’t afford to throw a party, but her sister got a party in December and she’s been talking about her own since then. They’ve been mostly with each other the whole summer; they’ve started fighting more and more often; they’ve begun asking for their friends.
My parents decide, at the last minute, to fly up for the birthday party. They put ten thousand dollars in our bank account the week before we would have had no other options and have served as guarantors on the lease we signed for a one-bedroom apartment farther down in Brooklyn in which my husband built us another loft bed in the room off of the kitchen and our girls sleep in bunk beds that we found on Craigslist even though they’re too young. Even though, every night so far since we got here, I have climbed up into bed with the four-year-old, just to be sure she doesn’t fall.
I don’t know how to feel about this money. I feel grateful and embarrassed. I am lucky and I’m spoiled and my kids are safe and warm and fed.
* * *
The Chilean writer’s back in town for the start of the new semester and I invite her to the birthday party. I invite both of my co–homeroom teachers, and, on a whim, the twenty-four-year-old, who is the only one of the four of us who’s going back to the high school next week when they start. I invite my friend who is quadrilingual and her partner, the handful of kids whose parents’ contact info I have from the two- (now three-) year-old’s school list. My husband bakes a cake and we go to the ninety-nine-cents store by our house and get streamers and balloons and plates and cups and napkins, tiny plastic gems that come in white net bags and that each child clutches to her as we walk around the store, that I agree to buy because it’s a birthday party and they’re only a dollar. We get bagels and I cut up grapes and apples and peaches, hoping none of the parents from the preschool ask if they’re organic. I scrub the bathroom as I let the children watch TV and I bathe them and I dress them and I stand a while in the shower thinking what it is I’m meant to be wearing to my baby’s birthday party. I put on black pants and a black shirt, then take it off and put on a long-sleeved purple dress and when the baby sees me she says, Mommy, that’s my favorite color, and she hugs me, and I slip on flip-flops and rub the moisturizer my mom gets me every Christmas on my face.
* * *
My parents get there first and bring my sister. My mom wears a dress that’s pink and green with animals all over; my father’s shirt is far too crisp.
Hi, I say. I don’t remember how to touch them.
Our girls come running out to greet them. They lift them up and hold them, kiss them. I let them play together as my husband and I continue to set up.
Three years old, I hear my mother say. I remember when your mom was three.
Our girls ask her a thousand questions, and I hear her laugh, and I can see her smiling though I can’t see them.
She was wild, she says. Always naked. She learned to swim at two and would have spent all day in the ocean if she could.
* * *
The buzzer starts to buzz and people trudge up the three flights of stairs to our new place. There are too many people, says my husband. We have the single window unit in the window, but we are all in the same small room next to the kitchen, and the stove’s still on from the cake that’s baking and all of us begin to sweat and the kids run back and forth between the kitchen and their room.
I watch my mom the whole time. She kneels down to talk to all the children. Her arms are very thin, her shoulders thick with freckles, and she gestures a lot when she talks, like me. The Chilean writer comes in, and I hug her. I stand in the hall with her a minute and she holds my elbow and I think that I might tell her all of what the last six weeks have been like, but instead I hug her again and she leads me back inside. My co–homeroom teacher has driven from New Jersey, where she is now in med school. The twenty-four-year-old sits on one of the small IKEA chairs and eats from a bowl of popcorn, though he’s six feet three at least and it looks like, any moment, the chai
r might break beneath him; he hunches over, and I try to offer him a beer.
Gifts pile up on the table next to the food and the cake and the water pitcher that we’ve set out. I’ve set up a roll of butcher paper on the floor of the girls’ room with paints that, I hope, I tell the other parents, are mostly washable. The kids paint the paper, then each other. The parents all go back out into the kitchen to get more wine and beer. My mom takes pictures and my dad sits on the couch with my other younger co–homeroom teacher and asks her about grad school. He holds his ankle on his knee and I watch him as she smiles as he asks her another question and she answers and he smiles back.
We have forgotten candles. The Chilean writer takes my keys and walks the two blocks to the bodega and comes back with candles that turn out to be trick candles and the two-year-old blows six times before the fire’s finally out. Everybody laughs and, though I worry that she’ll cry, the now three-year-old thinks the fire’s magic and she claps and when the candles are all out she looks sad. I give her all of them piled on a plate so she can lick the frosting off and she seems better. We serve the cake and everybody tells me it’s delicious and I have to keep saying, It wasn’t me, it was my husband, and they all look at him, then me again, and I shake my head and he smiles from the kitchen with the four-year-old up in his arms.
Someone gets paint on the girls’ sheets and someone else pees in the kitchen. My mother posts a whole album of pictures on the internet in real time, and the twenty-four-year-old leaves early and as he leaves he shakes my hand. I hug my co–homeroom teachers as I walk them to their cars and tell them not to forget to call me. The Chilean writer sits on our couch and makes my husband laugh. My dad starts cleaning up the girls’ room by himself and I tell him to stop but he doesn’t listen. My sister’s holding someone’s baby but I don’t know whose.
ELIZABETH, SAYS MY, says my mother. She’s the only person in the world who can say my name and make it mean; I hear her close to me and I turn.
The apartment’s mostly empty. I can hear my husband and the Chilean writer still talking in the other room.
I think of all the ways this isn’t what it should be, that I’m not. That there is a corner of the bathroom where grout and mold have become one and even though I scrubbed at it for half an hour, she would have known how to make it better and I don’t. The floor of the girls’ room is covered in paint and toys and Duplos. There’s half a piece of cake smeared into the four-year-old’s pillow.
It was nice, says my mother.
I shrug, looking down at my feet and all the Duplos.
I go to pick one up and throw it in a bin. She leans over behind me and hands me a small pink My Little Pony, another Duplo. I pick up a doll’s dress, a stuffed dog, a stuffed horse, three tiny plastic dinosaurs. I listen as she throws magnet tiles into a bin. I try to scrape the frosting off the four-year-old’s pillow with my fingers. Once, when I was up in my room crying—when I was fourteen and often up in my room crying, and she often stayed downstairs and made the dinner and talked to my dad and sister and pretended that I wasn’t there—but once, she climbed up the stairs and held me on her lap though I was bigger than her and she rocked me back and forth and held my hand.
We both stand up straight, the floor mostly cleared, though I can see toys still underneath the kids’ beds. My girls run by and I think that she might touch me but she doesn’t. The baby comes up to grab hold of my leg and her sister barrels in behind. My mom watches them and me, I think, though I don’t turn toward her.
She says: They’re so beautiful, Elizabeth.
The baby starts to cry because her sister is on top of her and holding on to her too tightly and I pick her up and then her sister starts to cry because her sister’s being held and she wants to be held too and also her sister is the only one who got any presents and birthdays aren’t fair and someone stole the frosting off her cake and now there isn’t any more. I lean over to lift her too, but my mom gets to her first and holds her in her arms.
I turn toward her and I smile. The four-year-old grabs hold of my mom’s face and presses her cheeks inward. The now three-year-old leans her hot cheek against mine and I say, Thanks.
ALSO BY LYNN STEGER STRONG
Hold Still
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LYNN STEGER STRONG’S first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/W. W. Norton in 2016. Her nonfiction has been published in The Paris Review, The Cut, Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Elle.com, Catapult, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She teaches both fiction and nonfiction writing. Or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Also by Lynn Steger Strong
About the Author
Copyright
WANT. Copyright © 2020 by Lynn Steger Strong. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Jaya Miceli
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Strong, Lynn Steger, 1983– author.
Title: Want: a novel / Lynn Steger Strong.
Description: First edition. | New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019040523 (print) | LCCN 2019040524 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250247544 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250247537 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3619.T7785 W36 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.T7785 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040523
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040524
e-ISBN 9781250247537
First Edition: June 2020
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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