by Laura Hankin
“Field trip!” Whitney said, but in her lap, her fingernails kept digging.
So the process of packing and buckling began. Claire had never realized that it was all so complicated, that two blocks could feel like two miles, that there were a million new accessories with which one began to travel in order to keep a tiny human contented and alive. She zipped her guitar back into its case as the women stuffed their babies into coats with varying degrees of ease. (Reagan lay there good-naturedly. Charlie twisted and wriggled while Amara tried to cocoon him.) As Grant disappeared back into his office, Whitney followed him in.
Meredith and Ellie made eyes at each other and scooted their baby prep over nearer to the office door, pretending to be fascinated by zippers. Whitney’s voice was too soft to travel, but some of Grant’s words floated into the living room easily enough, a snatch of Is this really such a big deal? here, a snippet of Just a playgroup there.
Back in Claire’s hometown, the church drummed it into the girls at Sunday school that they were special, meant to be cherished, but that ultimately, husbands were the boss. Apparently you could get a degree from Harvard and a fancy New York apartment, and still, some things would stay the same.
After a couple of minutes, Whitney came marching back out, spots of pink burning high on her cheeks. “Well,” she said, “shall we?”
They all gathered in the foyer. Meredith and Ellie were nearest the door, but they weren’t turning the handle. “Oh,” Meredith said, “I think we’re forgetting the goody bags.”
Whitney stared at her for a moment, then smiled. “Of course! Be right back.” When she reappeared, she handed each of the mothers a little cream-colored bag made from thick, buttery card stock and tied with wide black ribbon handles. Claire inwardly rolled her eyes.
Then the great caravan procession made its way out into the world. Only some of the women could fit in the elevator at a time with their strollers, so they went in shifts: Meredith, Ellie, and Vicki going down first to wait in the lobby, Gwen and Whitney next. As Amara wheeled her stroller forward to join them, her baby threw his sippy cup out onto the floor. “Go ahead,” she said to Claire, bending down to pick it up. “I’ll get the next one.” Amara’s fingers were just closing around the cup when Charlie hurled a Ziploc bag of rice cereal out the other side of the stroller. When it hit the floor, it exploded, bits of cereal pinging everywhere like confetti. “Oh, fantastic,” Amara said.
Some reflex stopped Claire short as the elevator doors closed on Gwen and Whitney. She reached down to gather the pieces of puffed rice from the floor.
“You don’t have to—” Amara said.
“It’s fine,” Claire said.
They swept the pieces off the tile and into their palms in silence. Amara moved quickly, spurts of breath coming out her nose. Then she brushed the cereal into a pocket of her diaper bag, holding it open for Claire and pushing the elevator button with her other elbow.
“Thank you,” Amara said.
“No problem.”
The elevator arrived, its doors sliding open in one smooth, nearly noiseless motion. As they began their descent, their reflections in all the mirrored panels made the elevator seem full for being so quiet. Then, staring straight ahead, Amara spoke.
“So that was weird, right? I’m not insane?”
Claire glanced at her. “Yeah,” she said. “Really weird.”
“Like we’d all time-traveled back to the nineteen fifties. I’ve never felt less like a feminist in my life.”
Claire bit her lip. “How many men does it take to screw up a playgroup?”
Amara gave a rueful laugh. “One, apparently.”
* * *
—
Gwen lived in a brownstone. Not an apartment in a brownstone. Not a brownstone where someone else lived in the basement. Gwen lived in the whole thing.
Some of the women had been there once before for Gwen’s Christmas party, but Meredith and Ellie had already bought double-date tickets to Hamilton before Gwen’s invitations went out. To them, Gwen’s place was entirely new, and they cooed over all four stories of it.
“This is so beautiful,” Meredith said.
“We should have playgroup here more often!” Ellie said.
“Oh, really? Thank you,” Gwen said with the blushing alertness of an understudy thrust into the spotlight. “Now, let me see what I can rustle up for snacks. And we are a shoeless household.”
Where Whitney’s apartment was sleek and modern, all clean white lines, Gwen’s was classic and old-fashioned, with dark patterned wallpaper, Oriental rugs, and a chandelier hanging from the living room ceiling. A gleaming piano sat against one wall, and there was even a real fireplace with a basket of wood next to it. Signs of an older child marked the house—a scooter tilting against a wall in the entryway, a pair of gossamer pink fairy wings discarded on the cushioned window seat. Claire longed for everyone else to disappear so that she could pour herself a glass of whiskey (this would be the kind of house with an excellent liquor collection—she just knew it), climb onto that window seat, and stay there, listening to the sounds of traffic and passersby and staring out at the street as the sun dipped low in the sky. Did Gwen ever do that? Probably not. Gwen didn’t seem like the kind of woman who wanted to just sit and think for hours. Window seats were wasted on the wrong people.
“John keeps trying to convince me that we should move to a brownstone,” Ellie was saying. “I need a doorman. But if any place was going to change my mind . . .”
Whitney stood in the center of the room, and though she smiled and looked around with everyone else, her arms were folded across her chest like a teenager on the sidelines of a dance. The hostess becomes the hosted, an old-time narrator voice intoned in Claire’s head, and for a brief moment, she looked for Amara, wanting to say it to her, before shaking herself out of the impulse.
“Look at these family photos!” Ellie squealed, peering at the mantle as Vicki, bouncing her baby against her chest, went wandering out of sight.
“Oh, my God, Gwen, you were a little angel,” Meredith said as Gwen reentered the room with a heaping plate of glistening cherries and a bottle of wine.
Claire bent forward to look at the photo Meredith was pointing at—Gwen, probably around age five, with a head full of golden curls and a smile splitting her chubby face wide open. She stood on a lawn with two glamorous adults—her parents, no doubt—and a boy a couple of years older than her, with similarly fair features, his eyes wide as if he’d been startled by the camera flash.
“Is that your brother?” Claire asked, and Gwen nodded. “What does he do?”
Gwen bit her lip, hesitating. “He’s . . . he’s between things at the moment. He hasn’t been well lately.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Claire said, and Gwen gave her a small, sad smile.
“Stop!” Ellie shrieked, looking at a different picture. “Wait. This is Christopher? Gwen, your husband is a fox!”
“Um, yes, please!” Meredith said, fanning her face.
Claire leaned toward the picture in question, propped up next to a couple of framed photos of the children—Gwen in a wedding dress, a man in a tuxedo with his arm slung around her. Yup, “fox” was accurate. He wasn’t conventionally handsome—no Ken doll for Gwen. Somehow that made him more attractive. He had curling, glinting hair that fell over his forehead, a prominent nose, big, wild eyebrows. Nothing about him was pretty. He was probably amazing in bed.
Hey, good for Gwen.
“If I’d known you all were coming over, I’d have gotten some more appropriate snacks. Just keep the cherries away from the babies,” Gwen was saying as she passed around the gorgeous plate of fruit. “Because of the pits.”
“You should definitely take a picture for your Insta here, Whitney,” Meredith said.
“No, no,” Whitney said. “I don’t want to put a picture of Gwen�
�s house online if she doesn’t feel comfortable with photos.”
“Oh, gosh,” Gwen said. “Well, as long as you don’t put my address in the caption, I suppose it’s fine. Maybe by the piano? Unless it’s too dark over there.”
Amara appeared at Claire’s side. “Gwen’s cousin put a picture of her kid online, and it got used on a child porn site,” she explained in a low voice as they watched the other women gather around the piano bench. Whitney sat down with Hope in her lap.
“Yikes,” Claire said back. In the sudden, blinding flash of the camera, Whitney pressed Hope’s tiny fists against the piano keys and smiled.
Chapter 8
Hot with embarrassment and shame, Whitney blinked a few times. Where was Amara? Over in a corner whispering with Claire, of all people. Whitney took some deep breaths, trying to will herself into a kind of meditation, to be at peace, even as Ellie and Meredith crowded around the photo that Gwen had just taken and declared it to be beautiful.
Whitney wanted to be generous and kind. She wanted to be the woman on her Instagram—her best self, whose most confessional transgressions were Today I got a little grumpy with Hope or Sometimes I wish I could sleep for a million years! She wanted to focus on her daughter and not worry about whether or not the rest of the playgroup women were making soft, snide remarks to one another about her marriage. She wanted to slap the self-satisfied smirk off of Gwen’s face and then get the hell out of her brownstone, back to where she was less likely to make decisions that could completely upend the careful curation of her life.
She’d told herself, after Gwen’s Christmas party, that she was never going to come back here. Arrogant, self-involved Grant had no idea what he’d done.
* * *
—
Gwen’s Christmas party had been the first nonparenting-related social event that Whitney had attended since Hope’s birth. She and Grant hired a teenage girl who lived on the fifth floor of their building and paid her an exorbitant amount to sit in front of their TV while Hope slept, even though the girl’s allowance was probably more than Whitney’s mother had earned as a dental hygienist. (But there was a bonus. The girl came with reinforcements: her parents a mere elevator ride away if Hope wouldn’t stop crying and the girl panicked.)
Whitney loved Christmas in New York. Perhaps real New Yorkers grew to resent the decorated department store windows drawing Midwesterners like moths, but her trashy-tourist heart loved them and always would. She pictured taking Hope downtown to see them when she was a little older and could appreciate them, both of them gaping in delight at the animatronics display, then wending their way over to the Bryant Park holiday market, taking bites of warm Nutella-filled crepes, watching the ice-skaters in the shadow of the Christmas tree.
She’d been so excited for the party, even asking Grant if he would watch Hope one weekend afternoon so that she could go out and buy a new dress. The first experience of shopping for a pretty outfit post-baby was a dispiriting one. Her body translated into new, nonstretchy clothes in all sorts of unflattering ways, the dressing room mirrors specially designed to highlight her stretch marks and lumps, as well as the fine lines just starting to make their way across her forehead. She’d always disdained those women with too-taut faces—she’d prefer to age gracefully!—but then she’d actually started aging. Now, as she looked at herself, she wondered if it was possible to find an understated plastic surgeon, someone who could help her maintain herself with an infinitely subtle hand.
Finally, though, she found a red dress, with an Empire waist that camouflaged the fact that her stomach still pooched out in a way she hated (she wanted to lose that final bit of weight, but leaving the house to exercise took energy she couldn’t seem to muster) and a low lace bodice that emphasized the one part of her body that she actually liked better now.
She took her time getting ready for the Christmas party, even though putting Hope down took longer than anticipated. She wanted to make Grant’s eyes light up when he saw her all dressed up again, the way they had prepregnancy, when they’d spun from the latest new downtown restaurants to weekend getaways and back again. Perhaps tonight could be a kind of reset for them—a chance to feel romantic after so many months of changing poopy diapers, after the disappointing birthday dinner, after the recent sleep-schedule debacle when he’d snapped at her that Hope was fine and she should stop staring at the video baby monitor.
But when Whitney made her grand entrance from the bathroom, Grant just glanced at her. “We finally ready to go?” he asked, clearly annoyed that he’d had to entertain the babysitter all by himself. He didn’t say anything at all about the new dress.
She’d realized, soon after meeting him, that Grant could be a jerk. But there were benefits to being with someone who didn’t make nice all the time. He was a jerk to people on her behalf so that she never had to be, so that she could be the one to smile at the waiter who had messed up her order while Grant instilled the fear of God in him. She could relax in their beautiful apartment, for which he’d done all the tough negotiating.
And, most important, he wasn’t a jerk to her. He treated her like she was a precious thing, like she had proven herself worthy of more from him. Back before he’d proposed, she’d worried that things might change when she introduced him to her parents, and so she’d held off as long as possible, still making excuses months after she’d met his family over dinner at Jean-Georges. (“Our treat, of course,” Grant’s father had said, putting down his card like the thousand-dollar meal was nothing.) When Whitney had finally taken Grant to her childhood home, they’d suffered through an awkward dinner during which her mom served oversalted meat loaf and her dad reeked of stale beer. She’d turned to Grant in the car afterward, expecting a new hint of disgust in his eyes. But instead, he stroked her face. “Whitney, you are a marvel,” he said, and she saw that her humble beginnings had only made her more precious to him, like she was a pearl that someone had accidentally dropped in a ditch, and Grant could help her reach the place where she truly belonged. She’d thought things would stay like that forever.
Recently, though, she hadn’t been feeling much like a precious thing anymore.
The party was in full swing by the time they arrived. Gwen hadn’t told them that she lived in a brownstone when she’d invited the playgroup (which was still reeling from the departure of Joanna, the members all reminding themselves that they were six now, not seven), and Whitney tried hard not to gape. Her guilty pleasure was looking at houses. In another life, she would have ended up a Realtor in the suburbs.
Gwen’s living room was like all the best Christmas movies come to life, a far cry from the gaudiness of Whitney’s own childhood front yard. A Douglas fir scraped the ceiling, decorated with glowing colored orbs, along with an assortment of old-fashioned ornaments in painted wood, silver, and gold. The table was laid with hors d’oeuvres (baked Brie with jam conquering the air, but she wouldn’t eat it, no), and at a bar cart in the corner, a hired bartender poured Scotch for the men and champagne for the women.
Gwen came over to greet them with a smile on her face, a little red from the alcohol, tugging Christopher by the hand. “You made it!” she exclaimed, giving Whitney a brief hug. The physical intimacy surprised Whitney—Gwen was not particularly tactile, which was how Whitney could tell that she was drunk. “And you’ve met Christopher, right?” she asked, even as her gaze swept away from Whitney, scanning the party to make sure that everything was in place. Gwen was too uptight to be a natural hostess.
“Yes, my farmers market buddy!” Christopher said in a casual, friendly tone, reaching out to shake Whitney’s hand. But as he took her in, the look that came over his face was not so casual. He had noticed her dress.
A little girl with wet hair came running out, weaving among the guests, hurling herself against Christopher’s legs, trailed by a nanny with a look of horror on her face. “Rosie!” Gwen said. “What are you doing still up? You�
��re going to be so tired tomorrow!”
“It’s too dark!” Rosie wailed. The nanny began making apologies to Christopher, but he waved them off and knelt down to look his daughter in the eyes.
“Sounds like you need a story that lights your mind up nice and bright even when you close your eyes, huh?” Christopher asked her. Beside Whitney, Grant stifled a snort and took a big swig of his Scotch, but Whitney watched, riveted, as the little girl gave her father a solemn nod.
“I’ve got this,” Christopher said to Gwen, then turned to Whitney and Grant. “Excuse me. I have a very important story to tell.” He swung his daughter up to his shoulders and carried her off toward the stairs, the nanny following behind.
Whitney had been looking forward to talking with Amara and her husband, Daniel, a slightly nerdy man with a kind face and glasses, but they were already on their way out. “One drink and I’m exhausted, apparently,” Amara said to Gwen, who hugged Amara goodbye before rushing off to greet some new arrivals.
Amara leaned in close to Whitney, Scotch on her breath. “Don’t tell Gwen,” Amara said as Daniel grinned and ran his fingers down her arm, “but we’re leaving to go do something really wild.” She and Daniel shared a conspiratorial look. “We’re going to walk around in the dark, just the two of us.”
“You crazy kids,” Whitney said.
“You know it,” Daniel said. “Maybe we’ll even stop off at a late-night diner, if we get too cold. Who can say where the night will take us?”
“Endless possibilities,” Amara said, laughing. “As long as we get home by eleven P.M., because that’s when our babysitter has to leave.”
Whitney watched them go. When she turned back, Grant had started talking with some men he recognized from the hedge fund world. Whitney turned to one of them.
“What do you do?” she asked. He went on a monologue about mutual funds while she made pleasant, smiling exclamations. When he finished, he stared at her, waiting for her to ask him another question about himself. She was good at parties, good at talking to strangers and turning on the smile that made them feel endlessly fascinating. But the rigors of taking care of a baby had temporarily depleted her desire to make small talk. So she excused herself and plucked a champagne flute off a tray. Then she headed to the stairs, telling herself that she wanted to go exploring.