Hot Little Hands

by Abigail Ulman

  “Congratulations,” Camille said, her legs wound around each other like pipe cleaners and her neck decorated with a nautical-themed scarf. “A lot of my friends from high school had babies at your age. You know what the best part is, right? You could be an empty nester by the time you’re forty.”

  “Are any of your friends empty nesters already?” Amelia asked.

  Her mind was too buzzy to sit still and listen while the editor answered. Camille had suggested this meeting, and Amelia was certain she was going to be asked about a time line for publication and, if she didn’t have one, a time line for paying back her advance. She had spent the morning formulating a financial plan, emailing all the copywriting clients she’d ever had, and scouring baby forums to work out how much it cost to have one, wondering if she could breast-feed till the kid was of paper-route age.

  “I’m sorry I let you down,” she said. “I know you went out on a limb to buy the book in the first place. I want you to know I’ll get the money back to you. I’m happy to commit to a payment schedule, or whatever you think is best.”

  “Psshhh.” Camille shook her head. “You know I’d rather see you finish your book than see that money again. You’re so funny, Amelia. You have a great voice. Are you sure you don’t want to try to finish it? You could write about the pregnancy and the baby, or pretend neither of those things happened and just continue as you were. Whatever you want.”

  “I can’t,” Amelia said. “I just don’t think it’s gonna happen.”

  “In that case…” Camille leaned over her satchel and pulled out her iPad. “I wanted to ask you something.” She went into Firefox and opened up the blog of a pretty young girl, who was pictured in her bedroom, kneeling on the floor in faux worship, in front of a shrine dedicated solely to—

  “Stephanie Zinone,” Amelia whispered, “from Grease 2.”

  The girl had low bangs and a purple headband in her hair, and she was wearing a Pink Ladies jacket inside out, just like Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie. She was staring wide-eyed at the shrine with a solemn, reverent expression on her face. It was an awesome picture.

  “Do you know Sabina?” Camille asked her. “She’s been writing a blog called Rainbow Cake since she was eight years old. She’s a sophomore in high school now.”

  “No, I don’t know it,” Amelia said. “Her name’s Sabina?”

  “Yeah, she’s Russian but she was born in Dubai. Her parents are engineers and they were working there. They moved to the States when she was about five. She actually taught herself English by reading Sweet Valley High books.”

  “Wow, I’ll have to look her up.”

  “I think you’d like her blog. She does fashion shoots, little reviews. That kind of thing. She’s got a good following. Anyway.” Camille slid the iPad back into her bag. “I’m in talks with her about a book. I just wanted to run something by you. She has a piece about how when she was in grade school, she used to decide what to wear the next day by whatever color Katie Couric was wearing on the evening news. She had a system. I remembered your candy heart piece, which I love, and I wanted to see if you still plan to use it, in your book or your blog, or anywhere else. If you do, it’s totally fine. Like I said, I love that piece—”

  “It’s fine,” Amelia said. “She can have it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.” Amelia rested her hands on her belly and forced a smile.

  “So are you excited about the baby?” Camille asked. “Or scared? How does it feel?”

  “It feels great,” Amelia said, and for the first time, it came out as a lie. “I feel the happiest I’ve ever felt.”

  —

  All the way down Broadway, Amelia didn’t take in a thing she passed: didn’t see a person she brushed by or even glance at the shoes in the window of David Z. Tears prickled on her cheeks and she pulled her hat down over her ears and tried to hide herself. Katie Couric, she kept thinking. Katie Couric on the evening news. She was in grade school. When Katie Couric was on the evening news.

  A sob escaped her mouth at the corner of 9th Street. The other people waiting for the light looked over. A guy with a bike. A woman with a Strand tote. A few others. With her puffy coat and her makeup-less face and the big bulge at her midsection, she knew what she looked like to them: a young pregnant girl not even interesting enough to have her own reality show. A bookless writer. A blogless unicorn lover. A big stupid nobody.

  The doors of (Le) Poisson Rouge were locked when she got there, and she banged until someone answered: an older man in a turtleneck who took one look at her and didn’t try to stop her when she said she was there to see Seth.

  She found him downstairs in the quiet nightclub. He was sitting at the bar, on the patron side, talking to a muscly bald guy, and he looked half pleased, half horrified to see Amelia approaching, her belly leading the way across the empty dance floor.

  “Mimi,” he said, standing up. “This is—what’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Amelia looked at the other guy and laughed. “Sorry. I just came to ask you a question.”

  “What is it?” Seth asked.

  “When did—when did Katie Couric take over the evening news?”

  Seth looked at his friend and back at her. “Who?”

  Amelia started to cry again. Seth put an arm around her. “What’s going on?”

  Amelia said the first thing that came to her mind: “I just feel. So. Fat.”

  —

  Later, after Seth had put her in a cab and given the driver the address, Amelia found herself lying on her parents’ couch, her face buried in her mom’s lap, sobbing for a good few hours, stopping every now and then to explain to her mom, again, about Sabina and her blog and her book and Stephanie Zinone and the Pink Ladies jacket.

  “What does she know about Grease 2?” she asked. “What do I?”

  “You know a lot about Grease 2,” her mom said, rubbing her back, and Amelia started to cry again.

  “Why did I do this?” she said finally. “It’s like I tried to commit suicide or something. It’s like I just couldn’t hack it. Who’s gonna date me now? Who’s gonna marry me?”

  “I didn’t know you wanted to get married,” her mom said.

  “I don’t,” Amelia said. “But why did I do this? It’s like I’m nothing now.”

  “I think—” Her mom went quiet. Amelia stopped crying and tried to slow her breathing. She waited to hear what her mom thought. “I think you just wanted to keep busy and feel involved. And not writing the book made you feel futile. That part was the suicide. So you just did this big new thing. That’s what I think. And I think you’re going to be great at it.”

  “You do?” Amelia said, looking up at her mom.

  “Sure,” her mom said. “Better than me, anyway. I had no idea what I was doing. Still don’t.”

  —

  Amelia wasn’t a great mother, or a bad one. She was just a mother. She had a hard first few months, worn down by sleeplessness and feeding difficulties and the urgent and constant recognition that it was her sole responsibility to keep another tiny human alive. When her sisters came over, swanning by on their way home from work or brunch or drinks or a date, Amelia was so excited to have them hold Henry for five minutes so she could shower that she didn’t even try to register their feelings about her life or the way she looked or the state of her kitchen or the silent and blank computer sitting in the corner, the keyboard covered in a pile of mismatched socks, each about three inches in length.

  “Hey, little perfect,” she heard Celine say one day.

  “Hi, precious moo,” Jane echoed.

  “You’re not holding him right,” Georgia said. “He’s uncomfortable, give him to me.”

  Amelia wondered if her sisters might actually be capable of love and, more specifically, love for the little piece of illegitimate family kicking in their arms.

  Her parents came often, her friends now and then, Seth brought his parents over, and Hank would text her o
n occasion to ask if there was anything she needed.

  I’m fine, she’d text back days later, when Henry was in his sling and she finally had the use of her fingers. You enjoy your feckless youth.

  —

  The publishing industry was, as ever, teetering on the edge of demise. No one had been ready for e-readers, Amazon was soliciting books for publication all by itself, people were still writing op-eds that said things like “Call me a Luddite, but I just love curling up with a good old bound book, and a screen will never feel the same.”

  “But it doesn’t matter how you feel,” Amelia would mutter out loud to whatever well-meaning pundit it was that week.

  Her old editor Camille had left her publishing house not long after Henry was born and gone to get an MFA, and either Sabina hadn’t yet finished her manuscript or it had been buried at the bottom of some new editor’s pile, giving it a long lead time, and a 2013 publication date. Amelia and Henry were on their way home from the park one afternoon, the boy just having learned to walk, when they saw it in the window of WORD bookstore. Amelia bought it and took it home and it sat on her bedside table, topped by book after book, while she was kept busy by her new schedule: freelance copywriting, nap times, mealtimes, playdates with kids from the park and their parents, kids from the YMCA and their parents, kids from Henry’s preschool and their parents.

  Occasionally, when her own parents offered to babysit, she would go out with her old friends, never failing to be the one who got the drunkest, stealing drags off people’s cigarettes in the street. One time she made out with a Pratt student in the back of a crowded bar, declining his invitation to go home together with that glorious and improbable excuse: I have a kid.

  “You what?” he shouted over the music.

  “She has a kid,” Akiko repeated. And the two girls laughed.

  “Whoa,” the guy said, “that’s wild.” He grinned approvingly, like she was doing it for a social practice class or a performance project. Then he went and talked to someone else.

  And so Sabina’s book had been out for a couple of years by the time Amelia found it under her pile, and tried to read it aloud to Henry one night at bedtime.

  “Rainbow Cake & Yoo-hoo, and Other Balanced Meals,” Amelia read off the cover. Then she opened the book.

  “I love sugar cereals,” the first chapter began. “I love sugar cereals so much that the year I experienced my first bout of real freedom—I was eleven and my parents went away, and left us in the care of a crazy babysitter who was a junior at Vassar and had a penchant for giving herself acupuncture—I decided I would eat sugar cereal for every meal every day of that week. This was not an easy feat. Not because of Jasmine. She was in the bathroom carefully sticking needles into her temples. But because of my older brother Sergei. Who had a sweet tooth. And a proclivity for getting cavities. And who could never keep a secret. And who found me one day, outside in our tree house, devouring a bowl of Trix—”

  “What’s sugar cereal?” Henry asked. “What’s devouring? Where are the pictures? What’s—”

  Amelia gave up and reached for one of his regular books, the one about the lighthouse and the children of New York. She left Sabina’s book on the blanket beside her. She planned to finish the chapter when she got into her own bed that night but, as usual by that stage, she was too tired to do anything, and she fell asleep before she’d finished calculating how many hours she had of quiet before Henry was up again, singing in the living room. One second she was staring at the alarm clock, counting, and then her eyes were closed and the book fell out of her grasp and slipped down between the headboard and the wall. She found it there months later, wiped the dust off, and put it on the bookshelf. She would get to it later on, she decided, when she had more time.

  Gallagher is working on his anger issues. Ellis has an infant son who is finally sleeping through the night. Skolski went to Penn State (so did his brother, his father, and his uncles) and he is very upset about the Sandusky scandal. Miller doesn’t think men benefit from being married; he himself never resolved a single argument with his, thank God, ex-wife. The Albanian is excited to watch the fight tonight. Morris is on the phone with the relative of an elderly Romanian woman in a wheelchair. Coots is thirty-three and unmarried and, when in conversation, he involuntarily moves his lips as the other person is talking. He’s the one fingerprinting me.

  “Am I in trouble for something?” I ask as he uses his thumb to press mine down onto the screen.

  “I’ll explain later,” he says.

  —

  Out in the main area, with the line of officers sitting up behind the counter, and the rows of travelers sitting and waiting, Coots lifts my suitcase onto a long table and pulls surgical gloves onto his hands. He unzips the case and flips it open. Inside, my clothes are a tangle of T-shirts and cutoffs, and most of my shoes have escaped the plastic bags I shoved them into. Everything looks like it’s peppered with sand. “Wow,” I say. “It was much neater when I left Istanbul. It must have got shaken up on the plane.”

  He ignores me. He pulls my hand grinder out of the case, opens it, and sniffs it. “What’s this for?”

  “Coffee.”

  He puts it on the table and holds up a scrap of paper. “Whose phone number is this?”

  “A girl in Istanbul.”

  “If I called this number right now, who would answer?”

  “I guess that girl.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know. She was chatting to me and my friend at a museum. She gave us her number in case we needed anything while we were in Turkey.”

  “What did you need?”

  “I think she meant if we needed advice about places to go.”

  “This isn’t a whole lot of clothing. Where’s the rest of your clothes and belongings?”

  “Some of it’s in London, and some of it’s in San Francisco. Oh, and I have a few things in LA, too.”

  “You can pack this up now,” he says. “Bring it into that office when you’re done.”

  “Okay, but what for? What’s happening now?”

  “For an interview.”

  “I’m a bit worried I’m going to miss my connecting flight. It boards in an hour.”

  “Then you better hurry up.”

  —

  Are you there? I text my sister.

  Hey! she responds a minute later. You back in SF?

  No I’ve been stuck at immigration for an hour. Maybe they think I have drugs or something from Turkey.

  Maybe they heard your music and consider it an act of terror?

  Haha maybe I’ll show them a pic of your face and request political asylum.

  “No phones,” Gallagher calls to me. “Put it away.”

  —

  Coots is sitting behind a desk when I come in. The office is bare except for the desk, two chairs, a desktop computer, and a window on the wall that I assume is a two-way mirror.

  “Do you speak English well enough to understand me?” he says as I sit down.

  “Sorry?”

  “This is the interview,” he says. “The interview is beginning now.”

  “Oh, can we start again?”

  “Do you speak English well enough to understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand what I’ve said to you?”

  “You mean, the question about whether or not I speak English?”

  “Yes.” He lowers his chin toward his chest and glares at me from beneath his eyebrows. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “England.”

  “Are you a citizen of England?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he asks me if my mum is, if my dad is. He asks where my family resides, and if any of my relatives live abroad. “What is the purpose of your visit to the United States today?” he asks.

  “Just a visit, I guess.”

  “Which country or countries did you visit bef
ore your arrival today?”

  “I was in Turkey for two weeks. Before that I was in Cyprus, at a conference. And before that I was in London for a month. And before that I was in San Francisco.” He’s typing all my answers into the PC.

  “Am I in trouble for something?”

  “I’ll explain it later. You used to live here.”

  “Yes, I lived in California for six years.”

  “What type of visa did you have at that time?”

  “An E. E-40, I think?”

  “That’s not a visa category.”

  “Oh. It was a student visa. Whatever the code is for that.”

  “What line of work are you in?”

  “I’m an editor-at-large for a film journal, and I teach now and then, at a few different universities.”

  He asks me if I’m married, if I have any kids. He asks if I have a boyfriend. “Well—” I shift a little in my chair. “Kind of. I don’t really know.”

  “You don’t know if you have a boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, because—” I stop talking and his lips stop moving. “I don’t know how much information you need. I was playing music with this guy, Lars. We thought we needed a fuller sound, so we could try to play bigger venues. So we got this guy Jacob to play trumpet with us. He’s amazing, super talented. Lars made a rule that nothing could happen between me and Jacob because of the band, but then we did kind of start hanging out. Then we accidentally missed a few rehearsals and showed up late for a pretty important show. So then Lars said he’d wasted years of his musical life on me, and he left the band and started a new one. They’re really bad, I saw them play. It’s all kind of disastrous.”

  Coots stopped typing thirty seconds ago. “So, you do not have a boyfriend.”

  “Well—” I look at my reflection in the two-way mirror. If I’d known I was going to be interrogated today I might have boarded the airplane wearing something other than an oversized NEIGHBOURS T-shirt I usually wear to bed and a pair of tights. I look back at him. “Yeah, I guess not. I guess now I don’t have a boyfriend or a band.”