“Okay,” said Caitlin, who had emerged from behind the stroller holding a short, fat bottle filled with the thick, supernaturally white weight of formula. Sadie was almost afraid to look in the direction of Vicky. Breast-feeding was, of course, one of the key points of her ideology. Breast-feeding, that is, for a prescribed amount of time: no less than one year, no more than a year and a half. “After that it’s bad for their development,” she’d told Sadie numerous times, clucking her tongue in the direction of one of their neighbors, who still boldly nursed her three-year-old in the park. Sadie had said nothing, telling herself, Forget it, Jack. It’s Chinatown. Jack, at least, generally confined his habit to the home.
Sadie handed Ismael to his mother, with some reluctance, and sat down on the bench beside her. His eyes now fully lined with red, Jack scrambled up beside her and watched as Ismael sucked rhythmically at his bottle. “Nurse,” he whispered to Sadie, with his most impish smile. “Nurse.”
“No, sweetie,” she said gently. “It’s not the nursing time. We only nurse before we go to sleep.”
“Nurse,” he said more urgently, reaching an exploratory hand toward her left breast. It was time, she thought, to get him home, to bed.
“He’s still nursing?” asked Caitlin, her composure regained.
Sadie nodded. “I’m trying to wean him, but I can’t quite figure out how. He’s always been a big nurser. He wouldn’t even take a bottle. It’s part of the reason I didn’t go back to work.”
“He’ll stop when he goes to school, right? And I guess it keeps him tethered to you,” said Caitlin, sending an acid jolt into Sadie’s mouth. Fuck you, she thought, wishing she could summon a more intelligent response. “I couldn’t do it,” Caitlin said, with a shrug. “I felt like a cow. There’s so much pressure to breast-feed now. It’s like your baby is going to die if you don’t. They scare you with all this stuff about breast-fed babies being smarter.”
“But it is supposed to be better for the baby,” said Sadie, ever aware that she didn’t want to play the role of Vicky, arbiter of all things maternal. And yet who was Caitlin to judge her? Caitlin Green-Gold, of all people?
“Actually, there’s a lot of contention over that.” In Caitlin’s arms, Ismael’s eyes were drooping shut. “Because of toxins in breast milk, from plastics and pesticides and all that. We have all these toxins stored up in our fat cells—just sitting there, like, forever—and they’re released into our breast milk. So some people are saying that formula is actually better, in certain ways.”
“Really.” Jack had clambered into her lap and dropped his head sweetly on her shoulder. “Nurse,” he whispered. “Nurse.”
“Yeah, there was a big thing about it in Nature last year. But none of the mainstream media picked it up.”
“Really?” said Sadie, pulling Jack’s hand out from the neck of her dress. Why had Caitlin been reading Nature? “That’s surprising. It sounds like just the sort of story the mainstream media would pick up. Or, at least, NPR.”
Caitlin rolled her eyes. “NPR?” she snorted. “Are you serious? The mouthpiece of the pseudoliberal hegemony? Like they’re going to run a story that would question the status quo.”
“That breast-feeding is better—”
“The upper-middle-class postfeminist baby-worship bullshit,” spat Caitlin. “Where, it’s like, if we don’t spend every minute with our kids, if they’re not attached to our tits twenty-four hours a day, we’re guilty of child abuse. I mean, I totally get the cultural imperative behind it, but I just think it’s bullshit.”
“What’s the cultural imperative behind it?” asked Sadie, as she knew Caitlin wanted her to, though she suspected she knew the answer.
“We’re the kids of fucking baby boomers,” cried Caitlin. “Our moms either waited too long to get pregnant, then went back to work right away, or had kids early, then got pissed about it and went to encounter groups to get in touch with their rage.” She sighed. “Either way, we were all parked in front of the TV after school, eating Doritos. So now we have this, like, collective desire to return to a simpler age, when gender roles were more clearly defined: Mom stayed home and baked cookies. Dad went to work.”
“Which means,” Sadie carried on, quelling uneasiness at her own hypocrisy, though it was apparently Caitlin’s hypocrisy, too, “that all these women with Ph.D.’s are standing around the playground talking about diapers.”
“Right,” said Caitlin, rubbing Ismael’s back in wide circles. “Like your friend Beth.”
Sadie laughed. “Beth is a staff writer for Slate. And teaches at NYU.”
“Whatever.” Caitlin shrugged. “The mommy group culture. It’s a waste. And a formula for unhappiness. Not that what our mothers did made them—or us—happy.”
“So, what do you think we should do?” Sadie asked. What she meant, she knew, was, What do you think I should do? It was a question she had been afraid to ask herself in recent months—a question she had been afraid to raise with any of her friends. “If we shouldn’t stay home and we shouldn’t go back to work—”
“See, I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it,” Caitlin responded, shaking her head. In her arms, Ismael had fallen back asleep, his head turned toward Sadie, snoring lightly through his tiny, elegant nostrils. “Nurse, nurse, nurse,” Jack moaned softly as she stroked his curls, so much softer than her own. He was exhausted, poor boy. “It’s not about going back to work or staying home. It’s about cultural concepts of what constitutes a woman’s identity. It’s about whether a woman, when she becomes a mother, has to give up every other part of her identity. That’s really what all the second-wave feminists wanted.”
“I thought they wanted help washing dirty diapers and control of the family finances.” She grinned. “What does Marilyn French say? ‘Shit and string beans.’”
Caitlin waved her hands dismissively. “That was just window dressing. What they wanted was to not just be”—she affected a child’s high whine—“‘mommy, mommy, mommy.’” In her arms, Ismael shuddered, deep and contented, and turned his face into Caitlin’s chest. “Hey,” Caitlin said in a soft voice. “Hey, little man.”
“And now?” Sadie contemplated transferring Jack to his stroller. He would be reluctant. There would be tears. But he was too heavy to carry all the way home. Ed could do it, but not she.
“Now it’s like the Eisenhower era all over again. They all want to be ‘mommies.’” Her mouth slack with disgust, she gestured toward Vicky and her clan. “And, of course, big business likes it that way, ’cause they can sell them more stuff. There’s, like, the whole mommy industry. You’re not a real mom unless you have a four-hundred-dollar diaper bag and you go to Mommy and Me yoga at Jivamukti and you read ‘mommy lit’ and nurse your kid in a two-thousand-dollar ersatz midcentury modern rocking chair. You’ve seen all this, right?” Caitlin gave her a challenging look.
“Hmmm,” said Sadie, rising and depositing Jack in the stroller. He immediately began to wail. “You know,” she called to Caitlin, before she could think better of it, as she handed Jack his favorite toy, a wooden figurine of a Victorian policeman, found in the basement of their building and washed in hot water. “You should write a book.”
“I should,” said Caitlin, with such an air of entitlement—Of course I should write a book, seeing as my thoughts are so profoundly original and penetrating—that Sadie immediately regretted giving her mouth over to the still-active editorial section of her brain.
“Read book,” Jack called now, calmer. “Take nap.”
“I’ve really got to get him home,” said Sadie, turning to Caitlin, who sat, still, on the bench. “He’s exhausted.”
“We’ll walk with you. Where do you guys live?”
“In Hillman,” Sadie told her. “On Columbia Street.”
“You’re kidding.” Caitlin stood and fell in step beside Sadie. “I’m right across the street. In the Amalgamated.”
“Really? How funny that we’ve never seen each other
before!”
“I usually walk up to Tompkins Square Park,” Caitlin explained.
Ahead of Sadie and Caitlin, on the winding concrete path, the Orthodox mothers streamed out through the gate, their kids skipping alongside them, and turned east on Grand.
“How long have you lived here?” Caitlin asked as the gate clanged shut behind them. From the corner of her eye, Sadie could see Vicky waving. She was nice, really. Sadie waved back.
“Two years. A little less.”
“We just got here in January. It’s cheaper than Brooklyn now.” Sadie was not sure that this was true, but she said nothing. “Do you have a two-bedroom? Or a three?” The layouts of the apartments in the area’s buildings were all roughly the same—having been built by the same cooperative organization immediately before and after the war.
“Two,” Sadie told her, again having the feeling that Caitlin already possessed this information, through Lil, and that these banal questions were leading somewhere, somewhere Sadie might not want to go. “What about you?”
“Our place is, like, a combined space. It’s four one-bedrooms.”
“That sounds great,” said Sadie, fighting a discomfiting wave of jealousy.
“Yeah, it’s a lot of space. And, you know, the apartments in the Amalgamated are so much nicer than in the other buildings—”
“Really,” said Sadie. No, Caitlin had not changed.
“Yeah, I mean, because it’s prewar. So the ceilings are higher and the windows are larger and we have great moldings. The other buildings, the apartments are so boxy. We looked at some when we were trying to buy.”
“We like to think of it as Modernist,” said Sadie, with a smile. She, of course, lived in one of those boxy apartments.
“But the guy who combined the places had the worst taste. It was like Boca, circa 1983. White leather couches. Pink tile floor. Mirrored doors on the closets.”
“Bleh.” Such decor was common in their buildings.
“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “Really bad. We’re ripping everything out. Knocking down all the walls. It’s been going on forever.”
Their apartment, Sadie realized, must be the one she’d heard everyone talking about: it was the first in the neighborhood to sell for more than a million dollars. The real estate section had done a story on it.
“Do you miss Williamsburg?” she asked suddenly. She herself still missed Brooklyn even after two years, though her old neighborhood was rapidly being invaded by hedge fund managers and suchlike, exactly the sort of people she’d moved there to avoid. Still, Dave and Emily and Beth were all there, and it would be nice to be around the corner from them again, especially now that Beth had Emma. But they couldn’t afford it, not now, not yet. Everything that came in seemed to flow right back out again. They were still making huge payments each month on the credit cards Ed had used, in part, to finance his film. The money from the distribution deal—which had not been insubstantial—had gone right into his company, into the new film. The thing was: it didn’t have to be this way. After Sundance, he’d been offered development deals with Fox and Paramount, but he’d—to Sadie’s shock—turned them down. He didn’t want, he explained, another Boom Time scenario. “That was a bad, bad time,” he told her. “I woke up feeling like shit and it just got worse as the day went on.” I know, she told him. I understand. And she did. He wanted control over his work. “I don’t care about the money,” he said. “If you do things right, the money will come.” Thinking of this—his earnestness, the sound of his voice—she felt, suddenly, the weight of his absence. Maybe, she thought suddenly, I should just pack us up and meet him in Sarajevo.
Caitlin was talking about Williamsburg. Sadie had missed the answer to her own question. “But I was also glad to get out. By the time I left it had changed so much. It used to be a real neighborhood. Everyone was an artist. Now it’s, like, filled with trust-fund kids and lawyers. Starbucks is trying to open a branch on Bedford.”
“No!” Sadie shouted.
“Seriously,” Caitlin nodded. “A Starbucks on Bedford.” She sighed. “And the new people in the neighborhood are excited about it. That’s the thing.”
“But I’m sure the old-timers are protesting. Rob must be planning something, right?” Sadie was pleased she remembered the name of Caitlin’s husband, though he hadn’t ever bothered to remember hers.
“Rob,” Caitlin scoffed, rolling her eyes, “is in North Carolina solving the problems of displaced migrant farmworkers.”
“North Carolina!” said Sadie, stunned—and strangely pleased—that she and Caitlin had somehow wound up in this same corner of Manhattan, their husbands off in distant regions, their babies cleaving to them alone. “But what about his prison project? What was it called?”
“PrisonBreak,” Caitlin told her. “His old assistant took over for him. It’s huge now. They have a staff of, like, twenty. And they’re running Crown into the ground.” She paused. “Lil didn’t tell you? We’re divorced.”
“Oh,” said Sadie, glancing down at Ismael, who, she saw, looked nothing, of course, like the pale, wormy Rob. She had heard this news, hadn’t she, maybe? From Emily? Perhaps. “I’m so sorry.”
“Ismael’s not his,” she said, following Sadie’s glance. “He’s Osman’s. My partner.”
“Oh,” said Sadie, who had stopped short when she realized that—miracle of miracles—Jack had fallen asleep in his stroller.
“It’s so funny,” Caitlin went on. “When I married Rob I thought I was rebelling against my parents’ bourgeois values, marrying an activist, you know? But I was really just buying into them. Marrying a rich Jew, just like they wanted. Not that they’d ever said so.”
“Hmmm,” said Sadie. She had grown tired of Caitlin and was unsure of what to do now that Jack was suddenly—and without any effort on Sadie’s part—asleep. He hadn’t fallen asleep in his stroller in months. Could she move him into his crib without waking him? Could she even stop walking? If so, she could buy a second cup of coffee and sit in the park and read.
“It all came out when I married Osman. They were furious. I’m so out of touch with them that I thought they’d be thrilled. He’s a programmer. He works for, like, Google. Totally solid. But he’s Pakistani.” She pulled her sunglasses out of her stroller bag and clumsily slid them onto her face. “He worships Ed, you know. All those guys do.”
“Wow,” said Sadie, uncomfortably. “So what did his parents think?” She was interested against her will. “Were they okay with you?”
Caitlin nodded. “They’re professors, just like my parents. Class is the great equalizer, right?”
“I suppose.”
In silence, the women walked past Moishe’s Bakery, gazing at the black-and-white cookies and prune hamantaschen in the window.
“So you’re still in touch with Lil?” asked Caitlin as they reached the corner of Columbia Street, where they’d soon part ways.
Sadie shook her head. “No, not really. Not since she left Tuck.”
“Me, too,” she said, nodding her head solemnly. “We weren’t as close after she got out of the hospital. She was really in a bad way.”
“I was under the impression that there wasn’t really anything wrong with her,” said Sadie, keeping her gaze fixed ahead of her. “Emily saw her right after she was admitted and said she seemed fine. She was just upset about the miscarriage. And angry with Tuck.” She could not prevent herself from narrowing her eyes at Caitlin. “Emily said she got worse in the hospital.”
They had reached the entrance to Caitlin’s building and stopped. “That’s not how it seemed to me,” she told Sadie, with a shrug. “And remember, I saw her a lot more than all of you did right before she got sick.”
She wasn’t sick, Sadie started to say, but before she could, Caitlin had cocked her head toward the archway leading into her building. “Do you want to come in?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” said Sadie. “I really should get him home and try to put him in his crib.” Caitli
n pushed a lock of yellow hair behind her ear. “He can sleep in Ismael’s crib.” She gestured toward her son. “And you and I can have some coffee.” A broad, almost loony smile suddenly sliced across her face. “Oh, and we have kittens! We just brought them home from the shelter. Do you remember our old cats? Those fat things.” Sadie smiled faintly. She did indeed. “They died a year ago. All three within a month. It was like they had a pact.” For a moment, her jaw softened. “I miss them. But the kittens are cute. If Jack wakes up, he can play with them!”
Sadie sighed and succumbed, as she’d known she would. She was too tired to argue. “That sounds great,” she said, and followed Caitlin down the ramp, through the brick archway, across the pretty courtyard, with its oblong fountain, and into the small foyer of the building.
“The contractor’s not here today,” Caitlin explained as they trundled themselves into the small, clunky elevator. “So it shouldn’t be too loud. The kitchen guy might be taking measurements or something, but he shouldn’t bother us too much.” The door closed loudly and Caitlin pressed the cracked black Bakelite button, the “4” long rubbed off its face. With a jolt, the ropes and pullies and gears started up their low thrum. The truth was, Sadie loved these buildings. Caitlin was right. They were the most beautiful in the neighborhood, modeled on a Parisian complex of the 1920s. Her own building, constructed some seven or eight years later, was a brute.
“Have you guys renovated?” Caitlin was asking her. “It’s total hell. We have, like, twenty guys. The architect. The contractor.” She began ticking them off her fingers. “The soundproofing guy. The cabinet guy. The stone guy. The concrete guy. The tile guy. The floor guy. The electrician. The plumber.” Sadie nodded sympathetically, though her apartment still had the original 1948 kitchen, complete with a monstrous white BiltRite stove and painted oak cabinets that leaked sawdust onto her pots and pans. She had to wash everything before she used it. “It’s not functional,” Rose had cried two years earlier, when they’d cleaned out the apartment after Minnie’s death, Sadie so pregnant she could barely bend over, and still with a month to go.
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