by Emily Gould
“I’m forty dollars short, but I’ll get it to you tomorrow,” she said as she handed him the cash. “Also, Marie and I have the stomach flu, so …” She made a shooing gesture with her hands. “We’re super contagious, I’m pretty sure.”
Sean seemed unfazed. “I have a great immune system. You really can’t be late with the rent, Laura, I don’t recommend doing that around here.”
Laura shrugged. “Sorry. Tomorrow. Okay, see you then!” She waited for him to move toward the door. Instead, he counted the handful of bills she’d given him, arriving at the same number she just had but much more slowly and not out loud. Marie peered curiously up at him and flapped a hand, waving and smiling.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said to her, and as Marie laughed and smiled, Sean bent down as if to pick her up or touch her. Laura’s entire body clenched with hatred that, for the moment, overpowered her flu-ish weakness. She couldn’t stop herself from bending to snatch Marie and move away from Sean.
“Chill out, sweetheart, I’m just trying to be nice here,” he said.
“I just really wouldn’t want you getting sick,” said Laura through clenched teeth. They stared each other down for a long beat, and Laura felt her face twitch with the effort of maintaining her strained mirthless smile. Then Sean turned and walked out the door, and Laura shut it behind him. She exhaled slowly as she heard him knocking on the next door down the hall.
This surge of adrenaline carried Laura through till the end of Marie’s day, keeping her upright as she dosed an increasingly cranky baby with bright pink liquid Tylenol, fed her some applesauce and yogurt that she managed to keep down, and gave her a more thorough bath than the slapdash emergency shower she’d taken midday. They lay in bed together, and Laura read the stupid penguin book and nursed Marie to sleep and put her down in her crib. Almost as soon as Marie was sound asleep, Laura’s body realized it was allowed to collapse and she found herself hovering over the toilet again, vomiting even though she hadn’t had anything but water in hours. The sheer force of her heaves reminded her of what it had been like to give birth.
After she was done purging every ounce of fluid in her body, Laura lay in bed shivering, feverish, drifting between thoughts and dreams. She wondered repeatedly whether she should get up and take Advil to attempt to break her fever and risk vomiting it up, deciding each time that staying supine and shivering was the best and, for now, only viable course of action. She wished someone would bring her Advil and maybe a handful of freshly fallen snow to wash it down with. She thought about her own mother, when she’d been sick as a child, getting up in the night to bring her medicine and staying with her, rubbing her back until she found sleep again. It was hard to reconcile this memory with the current version of her mother, who never seemed attuned to or curious about the specifics of her continued existence. They talked on the phone once a month or so, and Laura was never exactly honest about anything; her mother still didn’t understand why she was living in New York or how, exactly, she’d ended up with a baby, and this had created a gulf between them that made real communication impossible, so instead they said nonsense things about the minutiae of their days, TV shows that were terrible, her brothers’ kids doing well or badly in school.
Despite all that, Laura still wished for her mother to come and rub her back. When she was little, at least, her mother must have loved her—maybe even loved her as much as Laura now loved Marie. How else could it be possible to take care of someone who needed so much, all the time? The scariest thing was the idea that a similar gulf could someday exist between Laura and Marie. She wanted to cry just thinking about this possibility, but she was too exhausted and dehydrated to even summon tears. It was impossible, anyway. Laura and Marie were always going to be a dyad, united against the oppressive world, as close as they were now, even in an impossible-to-imagine future when Marie did not sleep five feet from Laura and get much of her nourishment from Laura’s body.
As Laura thought this, Marie woke and rustled, as if to determine whether she was unhappy enough to cry. Ultimately she must have decided that yes, she was. With an enormous effort Laura pulled herself out of bed and went to the crib, lifted Marie back into bed with her, and pulled up her shirt to give her a boob. Marie closed her eyes again and kicked both feet against Laura’s leg happily as she soothed herself back into slumber, one hand draped languidly across Laura’s chest and the other gently tugging on a tuft of her own hair.
7
In the spring of 2005, Callie texted Laura and asked her if she could get a drink later in the week, and because it had been probably a month since she’d had any recreational social contact Laura texted back “YES!!” without even checking first to see whether she could get either of Marie’s two favorite sitters.
Luckily, Caroline was free. Marie was obsessed with Caroline. She had actually told Laura that she preferred Caroline’s company to Laura’s, which did sting a bit. “If I got paid sixteen dollars an hour to hang out with you, I’d be much more fun to be around,” Laura felt like telling her, but it wasn’t really the kind of thing you should say to an almost-three-year-old.
In the week leading up to their date, whenever her brain was in an idle mode—doing dishes, picking toys up off the floor, teaching rich ten-year-olds how to play folk songs their grandparents liked—Laura found herself wondering why Callie had gotten back in touch. Their lives and schedules were so different these days that they often went a month or two without seeing each other. The primary way Laura kept tabs on her friends who did things in the world was now via the internet. Callie’s iteration of the Clips had made two albums, played midsize venues all over the country and the world, and had even opened for the Shins on a few dates where they’d played arenas.
They had arranged to meet on the early side, in deference to Laura’s schedule, at a bar in her new neighborhood. As usual, Callie was running almost half an hour late, but Laura didn’t really mind; half an hour to herself, just to be alone with her thoughts, was almost better than having a drink with a friend. Okay, it was better. But any longer than thirty minutes and she would relax too fully, get too luxuriously wrapped up in her solitude, and Callie’s eventual arrival would be as jarring as an early-morning alarm clock intruding on a pleasant dream.
She ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a pint of IPA, then claimed a seat close to the front windows of the dimly lit Pencil Factory bar so that she could read. She had forgotten to bring a book, so she had to read the daily free newspaper that she found on a barstool. Any text that wasn’t about Busytown was a balm to Laura’s brain.
When Callie finally arrived, the grilled cheese was long gone and Laura was well into her second IPA, a decision she would likely regret at five forty-five the next morning. The sun was setting, and the bar was fully transitioning from late-afternoon sleepiness to its more bustling nighttime mode. Callie had done her eyeliner in the same way that she’d worn it in the music video where Callie and Davey, who were no longer romantically involved, made out in a field of poppies that turned into dripping hearts as they slid hypnotically down the screen toward a puddle of what looked like blood on the floor. That particular song wasn’t like the rest of the Clips’ second album; it sounded more like one of Laura’s songs, with a simple structure and a basic, hooky chord progression. That was because Laura had written it. The songwriting credit, especially since it had gotten licensed to a commercial, had provided enough cash to pay off one of her credit cards, and it continued to provide a small but much-needed cushion of what now felt like checks for nothing. Whenever Laura heard it, which was rarely because she never really sought out new music these days, she felt like she could hear something missing in it. Possibly her voice.
Callie seemed, on the surface, not to notice that people were looking at her, but Laura had known her long enough that she could see the emboldening effect a little bit of attention had on her. She straightened up and became more poised and pretty. Looking at Callie was like looking at an image of Callie: her edge
s were so crisp. Laura had taken some pains with her own appearance, but she was very conscious of her own blurriness—the halo of frizz across the surface of her air-dried, split-ended hair, the pills of fuzz on her years-old black acrylic cardigan. Laura wasn’t unattractive, she knew, by anyone’s standards—she was young, and thin because she barely had time to eat, and her face was still open and inviting. But Callie was an idea that people were already familiar with. They looked at her and saw their memory of her superimposed on her actual self. That was being famous.
“You have a little something … here, let me,” she said as she reached over to dislodge the tiny piece of burnt grilled cheese crumb from the corner of Laura’s mouth. It was a disorienting moment of humiliation mixed with pleasure; she was a slob, but also, how nice to be gently touched. It had been a while since anyone had touched her.
“I’m just going to grab a drink. You need a refill?” Callie pointed to Laura’s glass as she walked to the bar. Her glass still had a few sips left in it. Laura hesitated, knowing that if she did, Callie would decide for her. The drinks she ordered came quickly, even though there had been several people waiting before her, and she set another beer down in front of Laura, and a vodka soda in front of herself. She clinked the rim of her glass against Laura’s and started politely asking her about her life and politely listening to her answers, or at least pretending to.
Laura had long since stopped trying to fill Callie in on specifics. Spinning the latest events of Marie’s life into a funny anecdote for someone who didn’t have any points of reference for what little kids were like just made her feel gross, like a bad stand-up comedian, and like she was selling out Marie’s intimate little details in a way that was disrespectful to her. With a fellow parent—someone from Marie’s day care or one of her coworkers—she would not have hesitated to share the week’s big events, which had included Marie shouting to a full coffee shop that she had just pooped. But with Callie, it was different. She wanted her life to seem cozy, not shit-smeared.
“I’ve been really busy!”
“Busy how?”
“Well, I’m doing all these different jobs—teaching private music lessons, working in a school part-time. I work all the time that I’m not with Marie so I can afford her childcare, basically.”
“But when she’s in day care you get some time to think about your own music again, right?”
Laura took a larger sip. “I haven’t really been doing that at all. It’s just not coming. Like, there’s no idle time for ideas for songs to just float in my direction.”
“Not even in the shower?”
“In the shower I’m thinking about my schedule for the week, making grocery lists, keeping track of money—my brain won’t let that boring shit drop for long enough to let anything more interesting in.”
“That’s disappointing.”
It was a strange thing for Callie to say.
“Like, you personally are disappointed in me?”
Callie paused, and Laura could tell that she was trying to act casual about something that was actually a big deal. She had always been so transparent when she wanted something. Now she shot Laura her winningest smile, all teeth visible. Had she had them whitened?
“I had been hoping … We, I mean, the band was hoping you would write more songs for our next album. Maybe even play some dates on the tour, even just the East Coast shows, if that’s all you have time for, but if you can, we’d love it. I’ve been feeling like we need more of your kind of songs.”
Callie’s charm wasn’t working; it was having the opposite of its intended effect. Did she really think she could use Laura as needed, forgetting about her in between times when she came in handy? Laura felt her breathing speeding up, and struggled to keep her tone light. “I’m so surprised to hear you say that!”
“Why?”
“I just thought I was this totally ancillary part of your success. I just happened to be there at the beginning of your story.”
“Well, that’s not what happened.” Callie clinked her ice cubes and looked directly into Laura’s eyes. Her beautiful, seamless makeup crinkled softly in the center of her forehead, where she was making a wrinkle appear to express her concern.
“It’s just hard to think about without getting mad. But I’m not mad at you, exactly.”
She was, though. The combination of the low-grade irritation of having to wait for Callie plus the beers and the attendant worry about how unpleasant tomorrow morning would be had unlocked some capacity to feel truly angry that had lain dormant in her until this exact moment. But there was another feeling running in a channel parallel to it in Laura’s body. It was, maybe, excitement. She’d had slightly too much to drink.
Callie moved closer to her, like when she’d brushed the crumb away, but this time she held Laura’s face cupped in her hand. It was like when she used to do Laura’s makeup, when she’d wielded control of Laura’s face, how people saw her. From the corner of her eye, Laura saw several men at the bar trying to be subtle about the fact that they were openly staring at them. From an outsider’s perspective, it did seem like they might be about to kiss. But what was between them was more complicated than sex.
“Don’t take your anger out on me. Channel it into your music, make something out of it. You still can,” Callie said, intoning the corny words with total seriousness, like a fortune-teller or a self-help guru. Laura nodded, mesmerized by Callie’s closeness, her perfume, her beauty, the beers.
“So you’re in?”
“I’m in,” Laura heard herself saying, without quite believing it.
8
The initial moment of leaving Marie to go to Philly to play a show went much worse than Laura had imagined. She should have left Marie overnight much earlier in their life together, before Marie had the ability to describe her feelings with words. That would have been so much easier for both of them, or at least for Laura. But there had never been a reason to leave her until now, and so they were both unrehearsed for the moment of their separation.
She had wangled an invitation for Marie to spend the weekend with Kayla, her best friend from day care, whose dad, Matt, was one of the more relaxed-seeming fellow parents. He had sleepy eyes and a potbelly, and had done a credible job of not seeming scandalized by Laura’s age when he’d first met her. No one in her bougie neighborhood believed that an English-speaking white woman under thirty could be a toddler’s mother, not her babysitter.
All week long, whenever she’d been able to work the upcoming trip into conversation, Laura had told Marie about how much fun she was going to have at Kayla’s house and what a big-girl treat it would be to sleep in an unfamiliar bed and to eat breakfast from unfamiliar dishes, to the point where she worried that no possible slumber party could ever live up to how wildly exotic she’d made it seem. Marie had, after much deliberation, picked out a select, top-flight crew of toys to bring with her, and Laura had watched with heart-mangling pride as she explained to these toys, using some of the same enticing vocabulary Laura had used with Marie, how much they were going to enjoy their adventure. The whole time, Laura thought about how, if this went well or even okay, they were going to do it again, and again. She both did and didn’t want it to go well. She had no idea what she wanted.
On the morning of the show, Laura managed not to cry in front of Marie as she dropped her off with Matt and Kayla. She hugged her tightly once but didn’t linger. She could hear Marie crying the entire time she was racing for the door, taking the stairs so quickly she worried about tripping over her own feet and falling. It seemed to take forever to get out of their building. When she got out to the sidewalk she allowed herself one gasping full-body sob and then a fast-paced block of silent tears. She texted Matt, asking him to tell her when Marie chilled out, and hoped that he wasn’t lying when he texted back to say that the girls were already busy investigating the little suitcase full of toys Marie had brought. By the time she met up with Callie a half an hour later in Manhattan, Laura was
feeling almost normal.
* * *
They were staying in a group house that often hosted touring musicians, which Laura had expected to be gross but turned out to be less gross than her own apartment. It benefited a lot from having high ceilings and the vaguely healthy ambiance created wherever you see a lot of bikes.
Laura didn’t get a good look when they were arriving, because it was much later than her usual ten-thirty bedtime and she crashed immediately on the couch provided for her, but in the morning, when she woke up hours earlier than anyone else, she had the entire place to herself and realized it was gorgeous—light blazing through the windows’ thick old glass, well-established houseplants sending a green smell into the air to mingle with the vinegary whiff of the clean countertops. It was so nice just to be somewhere besides home. Even though she and Marie had been in the new place for only a couple of months, there was already a patina of toddler grime on everything: Goldfish crackers fossilizing in the little divots where the radiator met the floor, greasy handprints visible on the walls when the light hit them at the right angle. It was exotic for Laura to wake up somewhere where cleaning up was someone else’s responsibility. The people who lived here probably had a chore wheel. A vestigial part of her brain made a note to ask if they were looking for new housemates, but then she remembered that she didn’t live in Philly and also that she already had a roommate: her tiny child. It had happened: for a fraction of a second, Laura had inhabited the version of herself who would have existed if her daughter had never been born, and it felt good.