Hot Little Hands

by Abigail Ulman

Everyone fell silent and focused on their bagels. It was clear that by “we” Georgia meant all the Banks girls, and by “this” she meant have children before achieving all your goals and realizing your full potential, fully. It was, Amelia saw now, an unspoken family rule, like “Don’t talk during Gilmore Girls,” or “Don’t ask about Mom’s college boyfriend, Claude.” It probably went doubly for the two younger girls, and should have applied most stringently to Amelia herself, who was the youngest, the baby, the wunderkind blogger-turned-author-turned-mother-to-be.

  —

  Hank usually came back to Brooklyn on Saturdays, and he and Amelia usually fooled around, but today he said he wasn’t in the mood.

  “What’s wrong?” She was standing in their kitchen by the stove and he was at the table. “Don’t you think I’m sexy anymore?”

  “What? Of course I do. You know I can’t resist a girl wearing frilly ankle socks with her glitter jellies.”

  “So then, what?”

  Hank shrugged. “I feel like I’d just be thinking about the baby the whole time. How there’s another guy’s baby in there. It’s kind of a moodkill.”

  “Oh no, I shouldn’t have told you,” Amelia said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You get three months before you have to tell people. I should have waited till then.”

  “Mimi,” he said, “I’m your boyfriend, kind of.” They’d had an open relationship since June, when he’d moved part-time to Rhinebeck for an artist’s assistant job.

  “Then fool around with me.” She actually had to stop herself from stamping her foot on the floor.

  “Maybe later?” he said.

  —

  Later he went out. Amelia stayed in. She had to be careful now, keep away from alcohol and not overdo things. She couldn’t remember the last time she had stayed home on a Saturday night. In college, she had gone out all the time just for fun. More recently, since the book deal, she had to go out on weekends. How could you write about the habits of a generation without seeing those habits up close? Without getting a plus one, a front-row seat, a backstage pass to those habits. Without sipping, slamming, and snorting those habits, and rubbing the remnants into your gums, just for fun.

  Through her window she could see other windows, and in a third of those other windows there was a light on and someone doing something inside. Eating, watching TV, staring at a laptop. Wow, she realized, people do stay home on Saturday nights. Nobody writes essay collections about those people, but they do exist.

  She wondered what she should do with the night. What did expectant mothers do? They nested. She looked around. The place was pretty tidy; Hank was better about keeping it that way than she was. She was usually busy, supposed to be writing. There was a teaspoon on the counter. She put it in the sink. She looked out the window again. A woman across the way was applying makeup without using a mirror. Amelia washed and dried the spoon and dropped it in a drawer. That was enough nesting for the night.

  She went into the living room, curled up under a blanket, turned on Nick at Nite, and fell asleep. She woke up later when Hank got home. They went to bed and had sex immediately. It was better and more energetic than any they’d had in months. Amelia was on top and she came all over him and all over the sheets. This had never happened before, and she wondered if this was what it would feel like when her water broke. She was careful not to wonder this aloud until afterward, when Hank was lying next to her in the dark, in the wet spot, idly rubbing her back.

  “I dunno,” he said. He had obviously not spent much time in his life so far wondering about such things. “But that was pretty cool,” he said, and fell asleep.

  —

  On Sunday morning, Amelia met her friends for brunch at Enid’s. When she told them about the baby, they sat and stared at her belly for what felt like a long time.

  “There’s nothing to see, just my usual pudge.” She pulled her T-shirt tight over her stomach. “The baby’s the size of a blueberry right now.”

  “Ew,” said Dana.

  “Are you hoping for a girl blueberry or a boy blueberry?” asked Gabby.

  Amelia practiced a beatific, all-knowing pregnant-woman smile. “I really don’t care,” she said, “as long as it’s a healthy baby. Boy. I want a healthy baby boy.”

  When their eggs and oatmeal arrived, the other girls talked about their news. Gabby was about to fly to Wyoming to shoot a documentary about Scandinavian cowgirls. Akiko liked her new industrial design job in Dumbo. Dana and her boyfriend were thinking about getting engaged because they wanted to get married on 12/12/12. Akiko was now dating her old boss. Gabby and her boyfriend had been broken up for a month, but they were still living together until their lease was up.

  “He has this curtain, in the living room. And he pulls it across when he wants privacy. It’s not like he brings girls back there or anything. He just listens to Hot 97 and draws in his sketchbook. It’s so weird. Mimi, you should put it in your book.”

  “I’m not writing the book anymore,” Amelia said.

  “Are you serious?” asked Akiko. “What are you gonna do instead?”

  “Just, like, get ready for the baby.”

  Everyone went quiet. The waitress, sensing the pause, dropped off the check.

  “Let us pay for you.” Akiko reached out and touched her wrist.

  “Yeah,” said Gabby, “as congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” Amelia said, but it felt more like a condolence than congratulations. Or, worse still, like a goodbye. She wondered if her friends might not want her around soon, with her big belly and lack of anecdotes from the night before. Maybe they were worried cute bartenders would stop comping them cocktails and KJs would stop letting them jump the karaoke queue, with a pregnant girl around. Maybe this time next year she would be just another parent trying to push a monstrous stroller past groups of staring Wayfarer-wearers in McCarren Park, on her way to ask suspicious, in-depth questions to vendors at the farmers market. And all anyone nearby would be thinking, her friends included, is that she belonged in the other park. So once her friends had piled their twenties onto the tray, Amelia put her elbows on the table and playfully clapped her hands together. “Hey,” she said, “who wants to hear about how I got a gay guy to knock me up?”

  “Oh, me,” said Akiko. “Me me me.” They all tilted forward to hear her over the breakfast roar, ignoring the hungry people lining up outside the window with their newspapers and toddlers, waiting to be seated.

  —

  Her friends knew some of the story already. Amelia had written thirty pages of prose and a chapter outline, signed with an agent, and, after some near misses and rejections, sold her book to an up-and-coming editor at a good publishing house for enough money to live on for a New York year. She had quit her job with Teach for America and stayed home to write.

  After ten years of blogging, she had finally gotten what she wanted. A book deal, and time to write. Only to—falter. Every piece she conceived seemed stupid: maybe worthy of a blog post but not worthy of a book-length collection of essays. Who cared about the purity rings she and her college boyfriend had ironically exchanged? Who cared that they ironically then never actually slept together for the whole three years they dated? Who cared about the drag queen outside Lucky Cheng’s who had given her the Heimlich one time when she came out of a nearby bodega and choked on a Sour Patch Kid? Who cared about her internship at a bankrupt roller-skating rink, or her extensive Lisa Frank sticker collection, or her shameful adult Baby-Sitters Club addiction? Or her first memory, her Protestant-girl-at-Jewish-camp story, or even what it was like growing up as the youngest of five sisters? This was New York, she had realized, after months of false starts and thwarted attempts. The city of stories. Everyone had their own tales to tell about internships and drag queens and summer camp. Why would they pay money and take the time to read hers?

  This realization had happened about five months into that lost year, and no amount of consoling and
encouragement over brunch at Enid’s was going to help her. She had made a mistake. The editor had made a mistake. Her agent had made a mistake. And they seemed like undoable ones. They’re waiting for it, she reminded herself as she sat down at her computer each morning. They’re waiting for it, she thought as she scrolled through her Twitter feed, posted pictures to her People Using 10-Color Pens in Offices Tumblr, resisted the urge to update her blog (she had taken an official break from it while she wrote the book: her editor’s idea). They’re waiting for it, as she brushed her hair, sent handwritten letters, met up with friends, took an afternoon off, had a nap, visited a friend in Barcelona, watched all nine seasons of Roseanne, read other people’s published essay collections, and took up a few freelance copywriting jobs as supplementary income. We’re waiting for it, her agent Scott seemed to be saying when he checked in with her periodically—both before and after her missed deadline—just to see how it was going.

  Staying in was unbearable, so for a while going out was the only option that worked. It was all—the bars, the openings, the shows, the house parties, warehouse parties, rooftop parties, stoop parties—research for her next essay. What can I write about my generation? she wondered. The Y generation, the entrepreneurial generation, the trophy generation, the Obama generation, the 9/11 generation, the queer, the fun, the public, the digital, the boomerang generation. From what she saw on her many nightly adventures, it seemed more fun to be someone living in this generation than someone standing apart from it, trying to analyze and write about it.

  When she needed the analyzing to stop, there was sometimes alcohol but always Hank. There at the end of the night or beginning of the day to slip into her bed and fuck her until sleep. It was pornier and more banal than she would have liked. The power dynamic was always the same—he was in charge and she was in his thrall—and though sometimes she liked to challenge this way of doing things (“Yeah, suck that dick,” he’d say. “Which dick?” Amelia would ask, looking up with faux confusion. She’d point at it. “You mean this one? Right here?”), she was usually just glad for the complete distraction and oblivion that came with that kind of sex.

  All of that worked for a while, until a year after she’d signed her book contract, when Amelia had turned around and noticed that a lot of her friends were actually progressing with their lives. Things were changing, in a way that seemed shocking. Gabby had graduated film school, and she was getting funding to make short films. Dana had met a guy she could viably be with long-term, and had actually fallen in love with him. Everyone they’d gone to school with was busy becoming what they had dreamed of becoming, what they’d trained to become. They were struggling and worried about the economy, and they had too many roommates and loads of debt, but at least they were moving forward.

  Her sisters, too, were moving ahead in their careers, chatting excitedly at Saturday brunch about interviews and promotions and press conferences, while Amelia curled up on the beanbag and nibbled at her bagel, hoping nobody would ask her that dreadful question to which she never had a proper answer: How’s the book coming?

  “It’s not a book,” she always wanted to snap at people when they asked. “It’s just thirty pages and a chapter outline. Your drafts folder is more of a book than my book is a book.”

  She thought about returning to teaching, to save some money and pay back her advance. She thought about telling her agent and editor the truth, that she couldn’t do it, that, for reasons that were opaque to her and everyone else, this thing that was difficult but doable for so many was actually impossible for her. She thought about moving to Argentina and changing her name, like a German war criminal. It seemed like there could be a wig involved in that somehow. And then, one afternoon this past August, just hours before the start of Hurricane Irene, when she had finished stockpiling canned goods and was waiting for her best friend, Seth, to come over and spend the weekend, she had flicked through her Netflix queue and watched Blue Valentine. And by the time Seth arrived, she knew what she had to do.

  “Uh, that’s not the message that movie’s trying to convey,” Seth said, coming in with a paper bag of groceries in his arms.

  “I’m ready,” Amelia said. “I know it. It’s what I’m s’posed to do next.”

  Seth, having been a bartender for most of his adult life, had a shrug-and-let-live attitude about even the biggest decisions. So his only moment of true consternation seemed to come when Amelia sat him down in front of a paused TV screen, with a bloated and balding Ryan Gosling on it, and told him that he should be the father.

  “Think about it,” she’d said. “You’re always saying you want a family someday. You’re also always saying that you never meet anyone you like and you don’t want to just screw around. We could have a baby!” She was kneeling on the couch beside him, gesticulating wildly. She felt like a politician. A preacher! A twenty-two-year-old woman whose iPeriod app said she was ovulating that very weekend and she better get to it!

  “We love each other,” she said. “We’re always going to be in each other’s lives. You could have weekends. I could take vacations. I trust your diet choices. I know how hygienic you are. You’re super hot and I have pretty nice cheekbones under here somewhere. Just please.” She fell onto him, her head on his chest, his heart beating against her temple. “Please go halfsies in a baby with me.”

  Ryan Gosling was still frozen on the TV. A small child by his side. His hand pointing at something offscreen. His character had never regretted having that baby, Amelia thought. There may have been a lot of things he wished were different, but that wasn’t one of them.

  Outside, rain hit the fire escape and the wind whipped off the water and troubled the tree next to her window. She was glad she had brought her plants in before the storm hit. She was so busy thinking about this that when Seth first said okay, she didn’t really hear him.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “What?” She sat up.

  “Okay.”

  “Really?” She grabbed his shoulders. She was wild-eyed with joy. “Really really really?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s go halfsies. All the way.”

  —

  “Holy shit,” Akiko said now. All three of the other girls sat staring at her, with no intention of moving, even though the line outside had grown, and the waitress had already delivered their change. “So you did it the natural way.”

  “Well, as natural as it can be, with a gay guy. I took off my clothes and stood in the bedroom, in my underwear, trying to dance sexy to the Grease 2 soundtrack. Then Seth did this freaked-out little yell. It was pouring outside but he ran down the street and bought a bottle of Beefeater, some tonic, and two forties. He drank a quarter of the gin on the stairs on his way back up.”

  “And that was enough?” Dana asked.

  “No. Then he made me shove all my hair up in a beanie. He changed the music to FutureSex/LoveSounds. And remember that old Marky Mark Calvin Klein poster I had up in my dorm room, freshman year? We got that out and stuck it on the wall above my bed for us both to concentrate on. Then we dimmed the light and I tried not to make a single sound to distract him from the task at hand. And the guy was a trouper. He was grossed out. But he trouped. Like, three times.”

  “Did he stay over?”

  “Yeah, on the couch. Then the next morning, I made us Froot Loops with chocolate milk and all he said was, ‘That was so wrong. But I’m glad we did it.’ ”

  “And what about you?” Gabby asked as they all stood up to go. “Are you glad?”

  “Totally,” Amelia said. “I’m the happiest I’ve been in ages.”

  —

  If Amelia was worried she might not fit in with her friends anymore, she didn’t find a new group or instant community at the prenatal yoga class she started attending at Yogaga on Manhattan Avenue. While the woman behind the desk smiled at her nicely enough, Amelia sensed the other students looking at her with judgment. She was two mont
hs’ pregnant now, and not showing at all, and she was probably the youngest person in the room by ten years.

  The yoga itself didn’t feel right, either. They moved from cat-cow into a slow sun salutation into warriors one and two. There was no down dog because it made a lot of pregnant women nauseous, and there was no plank pose or chaturanga because people’s bellies would get in the way. The instructor told them the classes would help them breathe through the pain of childbirth, but Amelia couldn’t see how that could be true when there was no pain in the class to breathe through. She didn’t see how the practice was teaching anyone kindness or compassion, either, when everyone basically ignored her.

  In the changing room after class, she listened to the other women chatting about their ob-gyns and midwives, and the pros and cons of getting a doula. It was clear from their conversations that after they got changed, they were heading either back to work or back to other, already-born children. Amelia had neither of those things to return to, and the most she could do was learn the other women’s names and say hi and bye to them upon arrival or on her way out. None of them bothered to learn hers.

  It was after a midday yoga class one Wednesday that Amelia came outside and saw her sister Jane waiting on the curb, drinking coconut water from a can through a straw.

  “What are you doing here?” Amelia asked. Jane was a deputy press secretary at the mayor’s office and usually worked through lunch, and often dinner, too.

  “Mom told me you came here. I thought we could talk. Have you had lunch yet?”

  “No.”

  “It’s on me.”

  “Really? Sweet.”

  “Well, actually, it’s on Mom.”

  “Oh.”

  “Wherever you want.”

  Amelia took her to Peter Pan bakery, where she got a jelly donut with vanilla cream. Jane got a cup of coffee.

  “So,” Jane said when they’d sat down. “Let’s be honest. I never really liked your blog. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. I can’t even say that I planned to read your book.” She reached back with both hands and tightened her ponytail. She was all business. It was clear why the family had chosen her as its emissary. Not only was she closest in age to Amelia, she was also a professional communicator. She maintained eye contact and an earnest facial expression as she said, “But now—now I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s a mistake to have this baby. I think you should get a termination and finish your manuscript. Seriously.”