Topics of Conversation

by Miranda Popkey

  “You’ll never guess,” my mother said, “who I ran into today,” no pause, “you remember Esther? From elementary school? You sat next to her in the fourth grade, I think, or maybe it was fifth. Anyway, I ran into her mother at the farmers’ market”—she was putting the flowers into vases now, mixing the birds-of-paradise with the peonies with the anemones—“you remember her, Marcia? Well, Marcia told me that Esther’s a junior account executive at, wait”—she put a hand to her forehead—“let me think, it was either CAA or William Morris, one of those big entertainment companies, agencies they call them.” “Mom, I know they—” “Anyway, Esther’s looking for an assistant and I said you were back in town and that you were looking for a job and she gave me Esther’s business card, the name of the company will be on the business card, I’m sure it’s either William Morris or CAA, if you look in my purse it’s in the little zipper pocket right at the top. Anyway, you should give her a call. That’s what Marcia said, Marcia said that you should give Esther a call, that she would tell Esther that we ran into each other and that you were back in town and that she should expect to hear from you. I’m sure it’s not much money but, you know, it could be a real kind of start, and if you want a new career you’ll have to start at the bottom, and most people apparently start in the mailroom so this would already be a leg up—”

  “Mom,” I said, “I’m not even sure how long I’m going to be in Los Angeles.”

  My mother turned away from the sink. “Well that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give yourself options. You might really like the job, maybe that—”

  “Mom,” I said, standing, tucking my computer under my arm, “I think I’m going to take a nap.”

  My mother frowned. “Are you feeling okay? Do you want me to make you some tea?”

  “I’m fine, Mom. I’m just tired.”

  “Maybe some tea and a slice of toast? I could make you cinnamon toast, you used to—”

  “Mom, I mean, thank you, but I’m not hungry, I’m tired. I’ll be fine if I can just get—”

  “It’s just that you slept in this morning and if you’re feeling sick we should get some food in you, maybe some vitamin C, too, here, I’ll open one of those Emergen-Cs. Those’ll knock out a cold in no time, especially if you catch it early, and I know I have some in the pantry, give me a second and I’ll—”

  “Mom.” I was raising my voice, which I knew my mother would notice and which I suspected she would remember and hold against me but in a way that would make it seem as if she were not holding it against me, as if she were only being observant, as if she were only worried about me, about how I was holding up, this was, after all, such a stressful time. “Mom,” I said, “I just need to rest. Give me an hour. Just give me an hour. We can talk about Esther in an hour.”

  My mother abandoned her flowers, moved toward me, put her hands on my shoulders, her eyebrows furrowed, her lips pursed, she looked, genuinely—I bowed my head to avoid it, this most genuine look of affection pocked with pain. “Honey,” she said, “look, honey, I know that this is—wait, honey, let me get this out.” Her grip tightened. “I know this is—well actually I don’t know much of anything because you won’t tell us what happened”—her voice sharpening—“but I know this must”—softening again—“I know this must be so hard, just so hard for you right now, and I want you to know that if you need anything, if you—now wait, don’t shake your head yet, you don’t know yet, you don’t know. You might need something, and if you, if you do need anything, now, or maybe later, if you need anything, your dad and me, we’re here for you, you know that right?” Pause. “You know that, right?” Small nod. “And if you’re worried—I mean I know you must be worried about a lot of things, I don’t know exactly what because you won’t—but, look, I want you to know that of course we loved John, me and your dad, of course we did, from the moment we met him he was just so nice, nice to you, so nice to me, not like—but I, we, we want you to know that we love John, but you’re our daughter and you come first, whatever happens, whatever happened, whoever—whether it’s your fault or—we just want you to know that you always come first, okay? So, you know, if you’re worried that we—just know we love you and that you can come to us, okay? If you need anything?” The heat of my mother’s body, her standing so close to me, I could feel it, also the smell of her deodorant mingling with the smell of her body wash mingling with the smell of her laundry detergent. Hot outside, must have been. If I looked up, I was sure that if I looked up, I would have been able to see a light sheen of sweat on my mother’s upper lip. “Come here, baby.” My mother wrapped her arms around my back, leaned my torso into hers so that I had to stand on my tiptoes, so that I had to clench my stomach to keep my balance, my body rigid beneath her hands. My mother was shorter than me and I could feel her nose against my neck, the puffs of air it was expelling. She loosened her arms, stepped back. “Honey, maybe after you’ve had that nap, you might consider taking a shower.”

  I woke up hours later, hungover. It was eight o’clock, dark, the sun already down. There was a tall glass full of a cloudy liquid, pale orange, on my bedside table. A braver woman, a more passionate, a more foolish woman, a woman more honest with herself, more in touch with her feelings—anyway a different woman would have opened a window and poured the damn drink out. But I am the woman I am. I am practical and I do not like waste, and I was thirsty. I drank it.

  Fresno, 2014

  The game,” I said, sip of wine, grimace, “is, one: we go around in a circle; two: we tell each other when it happened.”

  This was the situation: the babies were down and the moms were drinking. It was me and Sandra and Dominique and Fran, single girls, hair unwashed, breasts leaking. Not Fran’s. Fran’s kid never figured out the latch and her milk dried up, breasts shriveled. Well, shriveled. Fran weighed ninety pounds at nine months, not an ounce more, hips so narrow you wondered how she got a tampon in never mind a child out. (C-section.) Even hard and full and heavy her breasts had never been bigger than satsumas. Smoother skin, probably. Not that I’d seen them, Fran’s breasts, but you’d think, you’d have to hope. She was a washed-out blonde, hair and skin the same lemon-yogurt color.

  Dominique and Sandra and I were legal secretaries at the same firm. A big firm but still, some kind of coincidence. Eight months between Dominique’s daughter and my son, Sandra’s daughter in the middle, and not a father in sight. Sandra and Fran lived in the same apartment building, a water-damaged dump northeast of downtown, a few streets up from Shaw. They’d met in the laundry room. Fran had been folding a onesie. I recognized her, Fran said. Not from around the building, I mean I saw her and I knew she was a mom. Just knew. I rolled my eyes. We didn’t call ourselves a book club.

  I wasn’t drunk but I was drunker than they were. When I suggested the game, I mean. The conversation. Eight months of pregnant sobriety and another twelve breast-feeding and not trusting myself to pump and dump and now one glass of wine was enough to get me tipsy. Two and I’d be spilling secrets, trying and failing to wink. Not that I didn’t trust myself to pump and dump properly. More that I didn’t trust my body, suspected it might keep some alcohol in reserve, hide the ethanol in my ducts, release it when next my son fed. It seemed like something a new mom shouldn’t be allowed to get away with, drinking with her friends while her baby slept. Louche was the word that came to mind. Also lazy also bad. I wasn’t raised Catholic but I had somewhere acquired the sensibility. Anyway I imagined it was wrong and that my body would therefore find a way to ensure I didn’t get away with it.

  But I’d recently weaned my son and one of the moms, Dominique probably, offered me a glass of wine and why not. Dominique was French and so carried with her a particular air of authority. In her presence excess was authorized, encouraged. She’d eaten raw fish and soft cheeses all nine months, drunk red wine, and look at Élise, she was fine, perfectly fine. That air of authority: it also prevented me from asking how a French girl had ended up in the ugliest part of Califo
rnia farm country.

  Yes, it must have been Dominique who poured me that first drink, Dominique not taking no for an answer, telling me it would loosen my shoulders, help me sleep, and then I was halfway through my second glass of sour white and I was clearing my throat and saying, “What if we played a game.” Dominique looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and it occurred to me that her encouraging me to drink, in part it was a perverse curiosity. And why not, sip of wine, grimace, let her have her fun. Fun here was hard to come by if your hopes soared higher than the second story of an air-conditioned shopping complex. We single mothers more or less had to make our own.

  “When what happened?” This was Sandra. Sandra was slightly older than the rest of us. Not that the rest of us were young, mid-thirties, late thirties, but Sandra was in her early forties, married twice and divorced twice, thought she was too old to get pregnant, got sloppy with birth control. Or so I imagined. It was in her apartment that we gathered, and sometimes, though not on this occasion, she furnished snacks, thin, greasy blondies, crackers and sweaty chunks of mild cheddar cheese. Effort marked her difference as much as age. Not that the rest of us had given up, just that you could see her trying. Or so I assumed because we did not, though some of us had known each other for years, though we had been gathering in Sandra’s apartment for months now, putting our babies down in her spare bedroom, the babies arranged in a circle around Sandra’s single baby monitor, despite all this, we did not, did not ever, discuss our lives before. Not who the father was, not our relationship with him. Not our mothers and their eagerness to spoil the baby versus their desire to judge us. Not siblings or first loves or difficulties dating or which members of our families did and did not help with babysitting. Dominique and Sandra had been at the firm when I was hired and I didn’t know where they’d worked before. I didn’t know where Fran worked, period. Sandra’s two marriages, her two divorces, I was just inventing. Anyway, I was tipsy and it seemed suddenly not just odd to me but wrong, this not-knowing.

  “I mean,” I said, “how we got here. Not the baby part, not how we got pregnant, who the guy was. I mean, you can tell that, too. But what I mean is the moment when getting here, to this room”—I gestured with both hands, pointing down at Sandra’s thin carpet as if it might be possible to misunderstand which room I meant—“with the wine and the kid and the no partner, the moment when that became inevitable.” Sandra’s carpet was a collection of stiff loops, the loops the color of brown rice.

  Fran coughed. I suspected her of having some kind of benefactor. Not because she lived well but because on her own I could not imagine her living at all. Not just her breasts seemed shriveled, her face, too, her nose a hard beak and the skin behind it sloping away. Sometimes I saw Fran holding her son, improbably large, his legs a procession of plump rolls, the tendons in her upper arms visible as she lifted him above her head, her son giggling and Fran making a noise with her mouth, the noise trying to sound like the word whee but coming out labored, coming out scratchy and choked, and I wondered that she didn’t drop him. My son, a shriveled raisin in comparison, like a snack for Fran’s or maybe like the wrinkled shit he’d taken after eating his pureed peas. And breast milk was supposed to be so good for a kid. When she cradled her son, stroked his forehead with her long fingers, it was easier to understand, Fran’s strength. A witch in a fairy tale, hunched over her prize.

  “Look,” I said, swallowing the rest of my wine, putting the glass down on the coffee table, “I’ll start. I’ll start so you can see what I mean.

  “How I got here is I started dating a guy at work,” I said. “Jeff. His name was Jeff.” This was not true. “I was twenty, still in college, this was the summer between junior and senior year, so technically this wasn’t a job, it wasn’t work, it was an internship.” This was mostly true. I didn’t intend to make my story all the way up, but I did want, for no important reason, for my story to be unverifiable, for Jeff to be untraceable. “He was older, married. Not so much older, early forties, and I was twenty, an adult.” Dominique had settled into her chair, stuffed, its fabric patterned, busy. Her father was French and she’d been raised in Avignon but her mother was South African, had emigrated in her twenties, and so Dominique’s accent in English was not purely French, had in it also something adjacent to British. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were curved in a smile. We’d had lunch a few times, Dominique and I; dinner once and, over dinner, conversation. She’d cooked for me in her apartment, small but well-appointed, leather and blond wood and thick, spotless velvet, and in a neighborhood in the city’s northeastern-most corner, a neighborhood in which I could not afford to live. I’d noticed her bookshelves, built-in, custom-made she told me, noticed they were filled with books. The first functional bookshelves I’d seen since I’d moved from Los Angeles. It was important to me that Dominique find my story interesting. “Two kids,” I continued, “a boy and a girl. I looked the girl up recently. She’s in her freshman year at Penn. Blond hair, straight teeth, plays field hockey. No visible damage.” Not Penn, a less prestigious school. Otherwise accurate. Well, to the best of my knowledge. “Anyway.” I shrugged. “It didn’t work out. Obviously. The summer ended, I went back to school. I say back but the internship was in New York and school was in New York and of course because the internship was in New York Jeff was also in New York and for a while we kept seeing each other. And Jeff told me, kept telling me, that he was going to leave his wife.” Another shrug. “And I believed him. Though maybe also I knew he wouldn’t because around this time I started riding subways out to the end of the line, subways and also escalators, riding them up and down and then up again. I liked being in motion.” I was sitting on the floor and now I began picking at Sandra’s brown-rice carpet with my thumb and index finger. The escalators were not really meant to be part of the story. “There was one escalator in a shopping complex in Pelham Bay Park I rode a lot. Sort of a two-for-one deal since Pelham Bay Park is the last stop on the uptown 6.” My cheeks were hot. I stared at the pale wooden legs of the coffee table. This wood hasn’t been stained, I thought. What’s the word for that. On the couch I heard Sandra shifting. “You know,” I said, “the illusion of movement.” Was the word nude? Nude wood?

  Sandra got up and went to the kitchen for more wine. “How long?” asked Dominique. “How long did it last?” In the kitchen, a cabinet being closed. Fran was perched on one arm of the couch. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her thumbing at her phone.

  “Nine months. Nine months and I never saw the inside of his apartment. His wife lived there, too, of course, so did the kids, so it was hotels, mostly. He paid. I was in college, he paid for everything, the hotels, dinner out, dresses, a necklace once. He had money, real estate. Real estate law, that’s what he specialized in.” In fact he’d been a professor. In fact I’d been his research assistant. It made the hotel rooms more impressive, actually, the fact that he was paying for them on an academic’s salary. “It wasn’t,” I said, “about the money. And the sex was good but it wasn’t about the sex.” Taking dictation, my knees on the couch, a legal pad propped against the pillows, him behind me, my careful cursive, lifting the pen when he moved against me so the ink wouldn’t smudge. My cheeks were still hot, were burning.

  “What was it about?” Fran’s voice, tiny and high. I looked up. The screen of her phone was dark but it was still in her hand. Not expressing interest. She wanted me to get to the point.

  “The first time,” I said, “we didn’t have sex. He took me out to dinner, and then after dinner, we went to a hotel. I can’t actually remember now”—I made a sound like a laugh—“how he convinced me, how we got there, subway or cab or on foot. I remember the room. Not a room, a suite: living room, sitting room, bedroom, bathroom.” Saying this out loud it occurred to me: family money. He must have had family money. “He took me to the bedroom.” Sandra was back and pouring us all wine. Dominique was sitting up straight now, her feet flat on Sandra’s brown-rice carpet. She’d had a pedicure
recently, her toenails glinted mauve. “And once we were in the bedroom he pushed me onto the bed, arranged my body so that it was facedown. Not rough but firm.” Firm enough that I knew he wouldn’t mind getting rough. Me making my body limp, pliable. “He put one hand on my neck, one hand on the small of my back. He pressed down, once.” Like my body was clay and the bed was a mold. “Then he lifted his hands, stepped back.” Waiting for me to set. “I was still fully clothed. I could hear his breath, my breath. Otherwise it was silent.” I touched my wine glass. I wanted to pick it up, take a sip, but I couldn’t be sure my hands wouldn’t shake, the wine wouldn’t spill. “And then he said, maybe I twitched or something, he said, Don’t move. He said, Don’t fucking move. He said, I’m watching you. He said, I’m watching you and if you move I’ll know so you better not move. And then, for a long time, nothing. Twenty minutes or so. Then he told me to get back up. We went into the living room or the sitting room, whichever room had the TV, and he turned it on and we watched something. I don’t remember what.” I was breathing again. I picked my glass up, took a sip of wine, set the glass back down on the coffee table, hands steady. “The thing is,” I said, “the whole time he was watching me—I didn’t have to do anything. There were no choices to make. I closed my eyes, and my arms and legs—like I had melted into the bed but also I was floating. It’s not that I fell asleep, just”—I gestured with one hand, flung it out—“inside, just, blank. Like I was hovering above consciousness. Or maybe below, I don’t know. His hands were enormous, enormous and hairy, and it hurt when he pressed me down. Just for a moment and not a lot but enough. Enough so that I knew—plus he had this voice, low and full and—but so that I knew not to move. And that I felt beneath his hands—remade in the way that pain, anyway—” I shrugged. “The point is I’m always—my mind’s always—there’s a churning inside, you know? And I know it doesn’t seem like”—I shrugged again—“but there’s a line, and it runs straight from that hotel room to the hotel room where”—I paused—“the comfort I take, in being told what to do. The fact that I instinctively hate kindness. These things were always—but it wasn’t until—”