by Laura Hankin
But the really bad feelings had kicked in when the “Idaho Eyes” music video went viral, and suddenly, Vagabond was everywhere, from the radio to the home page of Pitchfork to Saturday Night Live. Claire tried to hate-watch their SNL performance, but it just made her feel horrible because Marlena was better than she would have been, and if it were any other band, she would’ve been a fan.
Quinton didn’t even have cancer. It had been fucking bedbugs all along causing the rash—the same bedbugs Claire woke up to find in her own apartment a couple of weeks after Vagabond kicked her out. Quinton had helped her stuff all her shoes and books into bags and sat with her while she did all her laundry on the hottest setting, and she knew that she would never be able to stop blaming him, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. So in short order, she had gone from having a career she loved, a boyfriend she liked, and a certain sense of self-respect to having jack shit.
* * *
—
Excellent, Claire thought, as her eyes welled up. She was breaking down in front of Amara for the second time that day. She hadn’t meant to tell her everything like that. Not even Thea knew about the Marcus kiss. “Please, don’t spread this around to the other moms,” Claire said. “It’s been nice being around people who don’t just see me as the girl who wasn’t good enough to stay in the band, you know?”
“Of course I won’t,” Amara said, an unfamiliar look of sympathy on her face. She shook her head. “That’s rubbish. The way they treated you was rubbish. But if it makes you feel any better, they’re nothing special anyway. The only really interesting part of that song is the bridge.”
Claire let out something halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I wrote the bridge,” she said. She’d never asked for an official songwriting credit—she’d done only that one part, and only because Marcus had come into rehearsal completely stumped, soliciting ideas, and there’d been a free-form brainstorming session in which everyone had tried things, and hers ended up being the lines that worked best. And then they were all celebrating the completion of the song, and she hadn’t wanted to be a bitch and ruin the moment by demanding credit.
“So what are you going to do?” Amara asked.
“Well, obviously, the dream is to show them that I’m doing just fine. I’ve been on the lookout for bands that need singers, but I keep freaking out at the prospect of actually auditioning for them.” She rolled her eyes. “Maybe I should just find a rich guy who’s into artistic types and have his babies.”
“I’m sorry,” Amara said, sitting down next to her on the couch. “You wrote the only good part of the number one song in the country, and you’re going to give up? Don’t be an idiot. Why are you trying to just be the girl in someone else’s band?” She paused and gave Claire that appraising look she was so good at, the one that left no room for secrets. “Play me something. Not a kids’ song. Not a cover. Something of yours.”
“Oh,” Claire said, shifting uncomfortably. “I think I’ve embarrassed myself in front of you enough for one day.”
“What, you need me to share my hidden shames?” Amara asked. “How about this: I’m freaking out that my baby still isn’t standing, my husband and I haven’t had sex in two months, and—” She stopped short.
“And?” Claire asked, an image coming unbidden into her mind—Amara with her hand in Whitney’s desk drawer, desperation all over her face.
But Amara just shrugged. “And I tried to go back to work and fucked it all up.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Claire asked.
“No. What I want is for you to play me a song. So are you going to or not?”
Amara was sitting up ramrod straight, a wry twist to her mouth, drumming her fingers on her knee, and Claire knew how the movie version of this moment went—she picked up her guitar and sang something beautiful and revealing and true (while the camera slowly zoomed in on her face), and Amara loved it and called up all her entertainment-industry contacts right then and there. But Claire didn’t have a song to play. She’d written snatches of lyrics back in the good Vagabond days and helped Marcus refine his ideas, but she had nothing full to call her own. She’d sat around pitying herself, only to be wildly unprepared when opportunity arose. “I can’t yet,” she said. “But can I let you know when I’m ready?”
The wry twist disappeared from Amara’s mouth. “Yes,” she said. “But, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, don’t wait forever to get your shit together, all right? Life only gives you so many chances.”
Chapter 11
It was important to engage in a little self-care when you were a mother, Whitney told herself, as she handed Hope to the moonfaced Hunter College student she’d hired to babysit. “I’ll only be a couple of hours. I’m just going to do a few errands and get a massage,” she said, and bent down to put her heels on. But in unfamiliar arms, Hope reached out a dimpled hand to her mother and her face began to crumple.
“Ma! Ma!” Hope cried.
Was there any worse sound than your child wailing your name? A wave of guilt crashed over Whitney. “Oh, no,” she said, her arms automatically reaching to take Hope back.
“We’ll be fine!” the babysitter said, cheerful as a flight attendant during turbulence, so Whitney let her arms drop back down to her sides, where they hung, restless.
“You’ve got the emergency numbers—”
“Yes.”
“And you know she might be allergic to nuts, so we just steer clear of them—”
“Right.”
“And you’re certified in baby CPR.”
“I am,” the girl said. “Don’t worry. Just go! Enjoy your ‘me’ time!”
In the taxi, Whitney’s feet began to sweat. She pushed her shoes half off so that they dangled on her toes, trying to air out while avoiding the dusty floor of the cab. She took off one heel entirely, pretending to examine it, and gave it a discreet sniff, as the driver answered her questions about how long he’d been in the United States (nineteen years), what his children were studying (medicine for the girl; the boy couldn’t decide yet). The lining of the shoe smelled sour and old, an unshakable record of every time she’d perspired.
She told the driver to drop her off in front of a shoe store. Despite having only a few minutes before her appointment (and when your baby was in the service of a babysitter, every moment counted), she tried on a pair of nude heels in a size seven. The fabric was cool against her skin, exuding that contagious new shoe smell, so she bought the heels, throwing her old shoes in her purse. Then she walked the remaining block to the Windom Hotel and Spa on East Forty-Seventh Street and Second Avenue, breaking the shoes in, feeling where a blister would form on her heel but not yet, not today.
The hotel had recently undergone a renovation, opening what online buzz said was one of the best spas in that area, even if not too many people knew about it yet. She pushed her way around the revolving door and into the calm, hushed lobby. Reception desk to the left, spa entrance to the right. She looked at the suite number on her phone and took the elevator straight up.
On the eighth floor, she walked to room 811, her heels leaving little impressions on the hallway carpet. She hesitated before knocking. It wasn’t too late to turn around, to keep all of this relegated to a fantasy, to greet Grant when he came home from work that night with a clear conscience. To let him turn to her in the darkness after Hope had fallen asleep and try for a few long minutes to get her off efficiently, like she was a piece of furniture he was trying to assemble and the damn instructions weren’t clear. To tell him again that it wasn’t going to happen for her that night and that he shouldn’t worry. To let him jerk back and forth above her while both of them kept their eyes closed, him thinking about who knows what, her thinking about the man inside room 811.
She knocked on the door. When Christopher answered, he looked at her as if she were already naked. “I didn’t know if you’d come,
” he said, a smile curling on his face. The room behind him was beautiful without being extravagant. The duvet had a crease in it where he’d sat to wait.
“I didn’t either.” Her voice came out girlish, small somehow. She wondered if Hope had stopped calling after her.
After that playgroup when Grant had been so rigid and embarrassing, when she’d posted that picture of herself and Hope at Gwen’s piano, Whitney got a direct message: I see you made a visit to the museum today. It was signed –An Exhibit. Her heart skipped around in her chest. Some resolve inside of her crumbled. She answered back.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she said now to Christopher, and he reached out, looping his finger around the belt on her waist.
“Whit. Let’s not do this part,” he said. “Where we have to convince each other. We already know.”
So she nodded, stepped forward, and followed Christopher inside.
Chapter 12
Over the weekend, Claire sat down to write something beautiful and revealing and true. She turned off her phone and put it in the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror. “Stop being a waste of space,” she told her reflection. She lit a fucking candle.
And then she sprawled on the floor with her guitar on her lap. She was going to contemplate life, digging Grand Canyon deep into her soul. Something came to her as she stared at the sputtering candle, an idea about embers in December (a spark in them yet, despite their regret), and she spent a half hour setting it to music before realizing that it was sentimental bullshit. Also, embers couldn’t feel regret. She couldn’t anthropomorphize embers. She didn’t work for Pixar.
Then she tried something about Quinton. Maybe there was a moment in that relationship, an instant when she had felt very deeply that she loved him. That one late night at his apartment, after they’d had sex, when they’d gone to the kitchen to look for a midnight snack, and barelegged and giddy, they’d danced around eating peanut butter in the light from the refrigerator. She sang a makeshift chorus. She pictured Amara listening to it, scorn curling around her lips. Claire had an urge to smash her guitar into a thousand tiny wood shards and to exile herself to Antarctica. Forget digging canyon deep. It was more like jabbing a shovel into concrete over and over again. What a terrible feeling it was, to sift through your heart and guts and soul and to come up short.
This was exactly how she’d felt in the beginning of Vagabond. She and Marcus had met teaching music classes together, at that bouncy, corporate children’s entertainment company she’d worked at when she first moved to New York. Their voices blended well, and they made each other laugh by improvising banter that wasn’t in the class script. So when he’d asked her to join the new band he was starting, she’d come into their first practice bursting with song ideas, snatches of lyrics and melodies. But he had dismissed them all, saying, “Okay, Jesus Girl. Did you ever listen to anything besides Christian rock?”
She laid her head back onto her mattress and reached for her computer, balancing it on her stomach, ready to numb out on the always available drug of the Internet and temporarily forget how disappointed she was in herself. (Even though, like alcohol, using the Internet to forget your troubles often left you feeling terribly hungover and worse than before.) After a quick scan of Twitter and New York magazine, she remembered Whitney’s social media and pulled it up.
Holy shit, she had almost fifty thousand followers on Twitter and nearly twice that on Instagram. Whitney had always been so modest about it, Claire hadn’t realized she’d reached that level of social media fame. Scrolling through, though, she could see why it was taking off. First of all, no surprise, Whitney photographed extremely well. She was stunning in real life, of course, but maybe even more luminous in the camera’s eye. And second, the photos she chose were pure visual candy, showing a world in which families only ever delighted in one another, the playgroup was a team of beautiful women who took care of themselves and their friends in equal measure, and Whitney and Hope made a perfect mother-daughter pair whether they were riding a carousel, drinking smoothies, or doing Mommy-and-me yoga poses, the photo captions inevitably sprinkled with “wellness” or “self-care.” Whitney modeled a new kind of motherhood in which a woman could be gorgeous and empowered and selfless at the same time, all without breaking a sweat.
Claire Gchatted the link to Thea, who had made it clear that she expected regular updates on all the playgroup gossip, and went back to the Instagram, stopping at a picture of Whitney tickling Hope on her lap. God, had her own mother ever looked at her like that, with such pure love? Given the way they’d fallen out with each other over Thea when Claire was in high school, and the awkwardness of their dutiful, twice-monthly phone calls now, Claire doubted it.
Her Gchat beeped with a message from Thea. Oh, shit, she wrote. Whitney Morgan is Whitney McNab? We took an art history class together my sophomore year.
Those maiden names will get ya, Claire wrote back as she continued to click through, reading the comments on the picture Whitney had taken of her with her guitar, surrounded by the babies. People loved it! What was this weird, positive, rainbow-sparkle corner of the Internet where the comments section was just people saying how beautiful you were instead of trolls calling you a cunt?
I’m sure she doesn’t know who I am, Thea wrote. Obviously I had a crush on her. Also obviously I never spoke to her.
Claire smiled at that, and then at Whitney’s most recent picture, of Whitney sprawled on the floor on her stomach, laughing, while Hope propped herself up on Whitney’s back. DIY alert! Whitney had written in the caption. Pro tip: If a little, lovable tyrant demands all of your time and you haven’t been able to get a massage in ages, trick the tiny dictator into becoming your masseuse. Sure, her technique may not be perfect, but I’d still highly recommend. The comments for that one were filled with LOLs and laughing emojis.
This is propaganda, Thea wrote. Now I want a baby.
Bahaha, Claire wrote back, and kept on clicking.
A picture of all the playgroup women, accompanied by a sentimental caption—These women are my rocks. Parenting can be exhausting, and there’s no calling in sick. But my playgroup ladies always show up, and thank goodness for that—had prompted a slew of comments calling them “inspirational.”
It was all a little silly, Claire thought, not to mention privileged up the wazoo. The “self-care” Whitney touted wasn’t available to people like Claire, who couldn’t shell out thousands of dollars to relax, who had to make themselves feel better in more makeshift ways that often backfired. (A fancy spa day never left you with a condom floating inside your body, for example.)
But also, maybe these women were inspirational. They didn’t decide they felt like bad mothers and give up on parenting to numb out online. They didn’t mope around in self-pity. They showed up. Oh, God, Claire thought with a mix of surprise and dismay, she really liked them all. They had invited her in and somehow become the highlight of her week, something entirely different from the other gigs (occasional catering, a part-time job at a clothing store) that she’d been picking up recently. They brought . . . color back into her life.
She put the computer aside, as their faces swam in her mind, looking at her with that maternal warmth and encouragement they gave so well.
Then she got up and tried to write something else.
* * *
—
Claire came to Tuesday’s playgroup on a mission to get to Amara. But when she arrived, the moms were all preoccupied by a juice cleanse they were doing together, a weird, cranky energy pervading the room. Instead of sipping on wine and nibbling fruit and dark chocolate like normal, they clutched little bottles full of dark green liquid, taking delicate swallows.
When they explained that they’d ingested nothing but this specialty juice for two days straight (Each day’s mixture had a ton of nutrients! They started in the mornings with purified water, cayenne, agave, and lemon, moved
on to cold-pressed kale and cucumber, and ended the day with raw cashew milk!), Claire made the mistake of calling it a diet, and they all laughed too brightly and shook their heads, almost in unison. “It’s a cleanse,” Meredith said.
“Yeah, we’re just getting rid of the toxins you build up by living in the world,” said Ellie. “Resetting and starting out the week with a clean, healthy slate.”
“Honestly, it feels amazing,” Whitney said.
Amara rolled her eyes. “Really incredible.”
Could a person get addicted to wellness like cocaine and have to keep doing more and more to get the same high? Pretty soon the moms would be injecting collagen straight into one another’s asses and insisting that they’d never felt better.
Claire went to pull her guitar out of its case and caught Amara’s eye, but then Ellie decided to show off her new scarf, a shimmery scarlet thing that fluttered like a leaf in the wind, and the moms all gathered to ooh and ahh.
“It’s Hermès,” Ellie said. “Thank you, wife bonus!”
Amara blanched. “‘Wife bonus’? Oh, please, God, no. Ellie, you’re not John’s employee.”