by Laura Hankin
Amara sighed. “I know. He is. But all these little financial resentments have built up since I quit my job, and he’s always so drained by the time he gets home every night and we get Charlie to bed that he’s too exhausted to fuck me, let alone have a serious, thorny, fiscal conversation.” She paused. “That’s the other problem here. My vagina is growing cobwebs.”
“So you guys should have a date night,” Claire said.
Amara grimaced. “I’m reluctant to inflict Charlie on unsuspecting babysitters who have no idea what they’re getting into.” The last time Amara and Daniel had hired someone was for Gwen’s Christmas party. When they’d gotten home, the girl had greeted them like she’d been locked in an underground bunker for decades and they’d finally come to set her free.
“I’m not unsuspecting,” Claire said as they turned onto the winding driveway, where the Sycamore House van waited to carry them back to their real lives. “I could babysit.”
Chapter 18
So at six thirty-two P.M. on the following Friday night, Claire knocked on Amara’s apartment door. Amara answered looking frazzled but also stunning, in a sleeveless gold blouse and skintight leather pants, as wails emanated from a distant corner of the apartment.
“Charlie’s being an asshole,” Amara said. “I am so sorry.” Sure enough, when Amara led Claire through the living room and into the small nursery, Charlie was standing up in his crib, holding the slats, his tearstained face so angry, he resembled a miniature Hulk. “I wanted to get him to bed by the time you got here, but, well . . .” She held up her hands in a defeated gesture.
“Hey, bud,” Claire said, taking a tentative step toward him. Man, this kid had liquids coming out of him everywhere—eyes, nose, mouth, probably the parts she couldn’t see too. Had a hapless babysitter ever drowned in baby fluids before, or would she be the first?
“You are a goddess for doing this,” Amara said. “Hopefully he’ll wear himself out in a few minutes, and then you can spend the rest of the night watching TV. And seriously, help yourself to whatever. We’ve got food, drinks, very soft blankets on the couch. Just don’t get too smashed, I suppose. You’ve changed a diaper before, right?”
“Yeah, totally,” Claire lied.
Amara nodded in relief, then looked at the dinosaur-themed clock on Charlie’s wall. “Ah, shit. Daniel’s probably almost at the restaurant.” She peered at Claire. “Erm, will you be all right?”
“What, why?” Claire asked, trying to relax her face.
“You know, I can absolutely tell Daniel to just come home.” Amara bit her lip. “Yeah, I’ll tell him to come home. I don’t even know that I’m up for a big-deal dinner tonight. It’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Stop. Amara,” Claire said, grabbing her hand. “Don’t freak out. Your baby will be fine. I’m already pretty sure I don’t want to have kids anyway, so if he screams for the next three hours, it’ll just reinforce my life choices. You are going to have a nice date with Daniel and rekindle your spark or whatever and be really glad you went. Okay?”
Amara pursed her lips and let out a breath from her nose. “Okay,” she said, squeezing Claire’s hand. “Thank you, Claire.” She kissed the top of Charlie’s head, then turned to go, pausing at the doorway. “Hey. I’m glad we’re friends.”
“Yeah,” Claire said, blushing. “I am too.”
Amara whooshed out. Immediately, Charlie began wailing even louder, staring at Claire as if she’d kidnapped him.
“Um,” she said, then cleared her throat and began to sing. “A B C D E F G.” No dice. Maybe he needed some bouncing? Babies liked that. She picked him up, and he squirmed in her arms as she continued the song, pacing the room. She’d walked from the subway to Amara’s that night with a confident strut. Charlie always seemed to quiet down during music time at playgroup, which meant she’d be able to work some kind of magic trick as his babysitter. She’d be able to sing him to sleep no problem. She’d been delusional. She glanced at the dinosaur clock, where smiling T. rexes frolicked with pterodactyls. Ten minutes had gone by, but they’d felt like an hour.
And then Charlie let out the largest, wettest fart she’d ever heard. Immediately, a stench straight out of a nightmare pervaded the room. As she let out a yelp of disgust, Charlie gave a gurgle and then a devilish smile.
“Was that what this was all about, you little jerk?” she asked. “You just had to fart?”
But within seconds, his face collapsed back into tears. Apparently a fart was not what it was all about. The stench lingered. She had to go into the diaper zone.
She pulled out her phone and typed how to change a diaper into YouTube, clicking on the first video that came up. A plump, smiling woman cuddled her baby, talking into the camera. “I quickly realized,” she said, “that diaper time could be bonding time. Talk to your baby while you’re changing his diaper, maybe even tell him a story, and it can be fun and healthy for both of you.” The woman went through a series of easy enough seeming motions to the soundtrack of an Enya song, while her baby stared at her adoringly. Claire closed out of the video and laid Charlie on his changing table.
“Okay,” she said to him as he wriggled and knocked a bottle of hand sanitizer off the table. “Let’s do this.” She unsnapped his onesie and grabbed the sticky tabs on his diaper, then took a deep breath in through her mouth. Moment of truth.
Ugh, she thought when she opened up the diaper. It was everywhere. How could Charlie’s tiny body even contain this much waste? Had he been saving it up for weeks in anticipation of that night? This was worse than she’d ever imagined a baby could produce, like a sizzling shit tornado had blown through his diaper and decimated everything in its path.
She stared at him in horror, then bent down to grab the hand sanitizer off the floor. She’d be needing it. By the time she popped back up again, a still-wailing Charlie had stuck his fists into his own mess and rolled over, smearing it all over the changing table, the wall, and his onesie as if he fancied himself some experimental artist, like Julianne Moore on the pulleys in The Big Lebowski.
“Gah, no!” Claire screamed, bubbles of panic rising up in her stomach, and grabbed onto Charlie before he could paint the rest of the room with his poop. Of course, that meant he simply swiped streaks of it down her arms instead. “Why?” she asked. In response, he grabbed a strand of her hair. “Perfect,” she said. “I was thinking of shaving my head anyway.”
She pressed her hand onto his chest to hold him steady on the changing table and leaned back as far away from him as she could. “Calm down, Charlie Craplin,” she said, gritting her teeth, wishing for a gas mask and a burning-hot shower. “You’ve made your point.” She studied the scene and tried to remember what she was supposed to do. Rewatching the diaper-changing video would only contaminate her phone. She’d have to do the best she could with what she remembered. “Once upon a time,” she said, as she reached for a diaper wipe and began the process of cleaning him off, “there was a little bundle of chaos who decided that he was going to take over the world.” God, there were so many crannies in baby skin that could get disgusting. She reached for another diaper wipe with one hand, holding Charlie’s tiny, velvety feet in the air with the other. Distractedly, she registered that his dimpled toes really were perfect. “He was ruthless and stinky and okay, yes, kind of cute.” His cries began to subside with her story until he was letting out only the smallest of whimpers. Finally, five diaper wipes later, he seemed clean enough, so she bundled the trash away (the onesie appeared beyond repair so she put it in the trash too—Sorry, Amara, she thought, hoping it hadn’t had sentimental value) and pulled a fresh diaper from the pack.
“So sometimes he won his battles for control,” Claire continued as she slid the new diaper on Charlie’s body and checked that it was facing the right way. “But sometimes,” she said, as she pressed the fastening flaps into their proper positions, “his opponents
did okay too.”
Charlie let out a little contented sigh and smiled up at her with the purest, sweetest smile she’d ever seen. Dammit, this was how they got you. She shook her head at him—he wasn’t going to fool her—slid on a onesie that wasn’t spotted with poop, then lifted him gingerly and carried him to his crib. He grabbed onto a stuffed lamb, its fur matted from repeated gnawing, and curled up.
While she sang Beatles songs in her most calming manner, she scrubbed off as much of the mess from the wall as she could manage with the cleaning supplies by the changing table, then squirted half a bottle’s worth of hand sanitizer onto her fingers. Satisfied, she snuck a glance at Charlie. His eyelids were drawing ever closer together. Claire grabbed the baby monitor, backed out of the room with all the stealth of a Navy SEAL, and then listened at the door for a minute. Oh, thank God. Glorious, glorious silence. She started to slump against the door, then remembered just in time that Charlie had turned her into a biohazard.
Her hands were clean enough, thanks to the hand sanitizer, so, following Amara’s admonition to help herself to anything, she power-walked to the kitchen and took a quick slug of high-quality Scotch as a reward for surviving that (literal) shit storm. Then she headed for Amara’s bathroom. It was a little weird to use Amara’s shower without asking her, but better to do that than to interrupt a romantic date night with the news that she was currently wandering around their apartment covered in shit. So, very carefully, she stripped off her clothes.
The whole bathroom was beautiful, with slate gray walls and clean white tile. In particular, Amara’s glass-enclosed shower was a dream. Claire’s own showerhead spat out water at irregular intervals and temperatures, but Amara’s copper one released a steady warm rain. Claire scrubbed and scrubbed with a bar of some organic soap that smelled like oatmeal, humming a new melody that had been flitting around her head recently, until the water streaming off her came out clear and her shoulders loosened in relaxation. It was like going to a spa. Luxurious. She could have stayed in the shower forever, using up New York City’s entire water supply, until the Hudson River (or wherever the city’s water came from) became a mere trickle, and the citizens of NYC tarred and feathered her for being an environmental menace.
Reluctantly, she turned off the water, then rolled her head from side to side, her muscles sore from going to a Barre class with the moms after playgroup the day before. The studio had been running a special where, for an extra twenty dollars on top of the forty-five-dollar class fee, women could drop off their babies with some childcare experts in one room and then squat and shake for an hour in the room next door. Whitney had invited Claire along, lending her more fancy workout clothes, plunking down her credit card and waving off Claire’s halfhearted offer to pay for herself. So Claire had hoisted her leg up onto a ballet bar and stretched until muscles that she didn’t even know she had burned. When they’d all walked out of class together, Claire’s body had quivered with exhaustion but also with something else, a kind of rush from being part of their joking, sweaty clan.
Now she stepped out of the shower and checked the baby monitor. Charlie was still sleeping. She had plenty of time before Amara and Daniel were supposed to come home. She toweled off, then ran her fingers over a satin lavender robe hanging on a hook next to the towels.
God, it was soft. She stared at it, a longing blossoming in her chest. It couldn’t hurt to try it on, just for a minute.
She shrugged it over her shoulders and belted it around her waist, then stared at herself in the mirror. She looked sexy, but classy sexy, like an old-time movie star in a seduction scene.
“Hello,” she purred at her reflection. “Welcome to my penthouse apartment.” She pursed her lips and pushed out her breasts, then laughed at herself. Her eyes lit on a shelf of Amara’s beauty products, lined up in straight rows like French schoolchildren. Some, like the fancy vitamins, were clearly recommended by the playgroup women. They practically screamed, “EXPENSIVE ALL-NATURAL BULLSHIT.” Others, like the cocoa butter, she could safely assume that none of the other playgroup women had tried.
Staring at all the costly-looking products, Claire wondered if Amara had pilfered any of them, if she’d gone into some organic beauty store and slipped a ninety-nine-dollar bottle of hand lotion into her pocket when no one was looking. Then she thought about the Sisyphean life Amara had been leading for the past year—calming Charlie down, changing his diaper, and then doing it all over again, every day, and all without earning any money to fully call her own. No wonder she needed to steal the occasional luxury item to stay sane. If Claire were in that situation, she would probably have to start robbing banks. It no longer mattered to Claire what Amara had been doing in Whitney’s office, she realized. She trusted her.
And sure, maybe these women went a little overboard with the wellness routines, but now, with the vast array of Amara’s products stretched out in front of her like a mountain range and with the experience of Sycamore House lingering in her mind, Claire started to understand the appeal. She had never really been a fancy-lotion kind of person, but if she were, would her life be any different? Would the world be kinder to her if she spent half an hour every morning applying various creams and makeup? Would she glow like the playgroup women and give off an aura of money that made people want to give her more? (After all, money was like bunnies—once you had a certain amount of hundreds in your wallet, they just kept multiplying. Either people respected you and gave you opportunities that led to more money, or you put it in the stock market, sat back, and watched it give birth over and over again.)
She hadn’t taken particularly good care of herself on the road with Vagabond. She’d shoveled down pizza and beer most nights along with the rest of the guys, and bathed a bit less than she should have, and hurriedly slicked on red lipstick for only the important shows. If she’d had the energy to go for a run each morning while the guys slept in, to put an array of products into her hair and onto her skin, maybe Marlena wouldn’t have been able to march in and usurp her so easily. Maybe Claire would have fascinated the guys enough, and they would’ve stayed loyal.
Or maybe nothing would have changed. But in this particular moment, it was tempting to try on a Whitney-and-Amara kind of life, to pretend that she wasn’t messy, flawed, exhausted by the world. To imagine that a new and content Claire could rise up from the discarded parts of the old one, that people could be awed by her. Help yourself to anything, she thought, and squeezed a pump of “skin-repairing” eucalyptus lotion onto her palm.
She made her way down the line with the growing excitement of a child snooping in her mother’s jewelry box. Humming to herself, she put on a drop of hair oil to stop her frizz and rubbed her cheeks with exfoliating cream that smelled like the sea and billed itself as “a facial in a jar.”
“Luminous skin? Me?” she said to her reflection. “Oh, you’re too sweet. I just woke up like this.” She came to the TrueMommy supplements and popped one into her mouth. “Why, yes, I did just give birth a day ago,” she said. “But of course I’ll be on the cover of your fashion magazine. What? No photoshopping necessary? If you say so!”
As the vitamin made its way into her system, she half-expected an instant transformation, like when she went to the gym for half an hour and then checked her stomach for a six-pack. But the same old Claire stared back at her in the mirror. She screwed the cap back onto the supplement jar and kept making her way down the line.
Instant transformations weren’t possible, but she could take better care of herself. Maybe this silly playing around in Amara’s beauty supplies could be the start of a new phase, of becoming a woman instead of some liminal creature still acting like a girl. She just needed some discipline, like the playgroup women had.
Then a thought hit her, and her heart started to race. These TrueMommy things were expensive. Did Amara count them? What if she noticed that she’d come up short at the end of the cycle and realized that Clair
e had taken one?
No, Amara would probably blame the manufacturer. Or even if she figured out Claire had taken one somehow, she might think it was weird, but she wouldn’t hate her for it. It was just a fucking vitamin. Claire could buy her a whole bottle of Flintstone Gummies to make up for it. But none of her rationalizations made her heart slow down. It raced even faster, weirdly so, in a way that she’d felt before, although not recently. She put her palm on her chest and felt the kicking pulse. And then Claire’s stomach dropped.
She’d done a fair amount of drugs in her day. She had been in a band, after all. Thanks to a series of long, hazy nights with the Vagabond crew, she knew the unpredictable beauty of acid, the drowsy pull of pot, the glorious kick of cocaine. Marcus had managed to get a prescription for Adderall, and sometimes they dug into it on long days when they wanted to be extra-productive with rehearsals.
And this “vitamin” working its way through her system was no all-natural supplement. It was straight-up speed.
Chapter 19
Amara sat at a corner table at Les Trois Cochons and swirled her pinot noir around in her glass. What the fuck was taking Daniel so long? She had sprinted half the way to the upscale French bistro after foisting off Charlie when he was not in a state to be left so that she wouldn’t be more than a few minutes late for their date night, and now, ten minutes later, she was still sitting here alone while a disdainful, helium-voiced waitress hovered, asking if there was anything she could get her while she waited. Elderly Upper East Side couples cut into their steaks, Édith Piaf played in the background, and the smell of onions wafted out from the kitchen. Amara took a big sip of wine, trying to push away her annoyance. She didn’t want the night to be ruined before it even began.