by Emily Gould
The utopian group house began to seem less so when its residents began to stir, their noises emanating from behind old, thin walls. Laura washed her face hurriedly in the small downstairs bathroom and left a note for her bandmates before venturing into the world outside.
She’d never spent much time in Philly, but something about its modest architectural ambitions felt immediately homey and comfortable to her; there was something of Columbus here, for sure. But there was also NYC-style beauty here, of both humans and buildings. When it happened, it was even more striking amid the disrepair and kitsch. She walked through the Italian Market, dawdling over a choice of breakfast pastry in a way she hadn’t in years (three). The whole day opened up to her, dazzling with possibility. Then she remembered that she was going to play music onstage tonight, and her happiness evaporated instantly.
She had never had stage fright before—even when the Groupies had opened for the Clips, she’d been too besotted with Dylan to register the situation as anxiety-inducing. Tonight would be the most people she’d played for since then, and she’d rehearsed with the band only a couple of times. She tried to summon the first few words of the new song she’d written with them and drew a blank. Her stomach clenched, and she threw the remainder of her churro in the nearest trash can.
Luckily she was saved from spinning out into panic by a text from Callie, who gave the day shape by telling her where to meet up to “rehearse and chill.” It was far enough away that it justified taking SEPTA, which would be a fun challenge and would remind her of her own city’s relatively sparkling, efficient, and democratic subway system. But she had so much time to kill that she decided to walk there anyway.
She was just beginning to regret this decision—it was getting hotter, and though she knew she was heading in the right direction, she was slightly lost—when she got a call from Matt. She answered on the first ring, breathless. “Is everything okay?”
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to freak you out. Everything is totally, totally fine.” Something about his voice, which was unmistakably the voice of a grown-up, reassured her. Every part of Laura that had clenched up as soon as she saw Matt’s name on her screen released somewhat.
“I am so sorry I’m even bothering you with this. It really is no big deal, but Marie is saying that she isn’t hungry and will wait till Mommy comes home so she can make the food ‘the way Mommy makes it.’ Is there some strategy you use to get her to eat? Like, what does she mean by that?”
“Oh, this trick. She’s pulled this on babysitters before. What a little dissident.”
Matt gently laughed, like they were in this together. Parental solidarity was new and very welcome.
“She’ll break her hunger strike eventually, but if you want to be on the safe side, put out some Goldfish crackers or something and don’t specifically say they’re for her or that she should eat them. She’ll sneak them when she thinks you’re not looking. It’s better than nothing. See if you can get her to drink water, though, it’s hot out.” She paused. “Sorry, I know you’re not an idiot.”
“I’m not not an idiot. Once I sent Kayla to her mom’s for a weekend when I was going out of town with no underwear and they’d just sent their laundry to the drop-off place and K had to wear a bathing suit till I came over with a pair. They told her it was special superhero outfit for big girls.”
Laura indulged him with a mild laugh. “Okay, we’re definitely both idiots. Hey, what are they doing right now?”
She could hear him walking into the other room, the girls’ piping voices becoming just audible. Laura’s heart leaped unexpectedly.
“It looks like they’re at it with the Barbies again. Or whatever these dolls are. The healthy-body-image Barbies. They seem to be going on a trip.”
“They’re trying to find their mommies,” she heard Marie say. Matt was silent on the other end.
“I should go,” she told him, keeping her voice light and level.
“Sure you don’t want to talk to her?”
“I don’t have time right now, but definitely later, before bed. I’ll talk to you soon, okay? Thank you for letting me know about the food. And, Matt, thank you so much again for taking care of her. I owe you guys one.”
“We will most assuredly take you up on that, sooner rather than later. Break a leg!”
“Thank you! I will! I mean, thanks.”
As she hung up, Laura realized that she’d wandered mindlessly while on the phone, and now she definitely didn’t know where she was. The neighborhood she was in now had blocks of undifferentiated vinyl-sided two-story houses, uglier even than the ones on similarly ugly blocks of her North Brooklyn neighborhood. It was midafternoon, but the people she passed seemed as menacing as they might if it had been nighttime.
She was wearing cheap Urban Outfitters jeans that had been through the washing machine too many times and a shapeless gray T-shirt. Sweaty curls stuck to her forehead. She was grateful, in a way, that she looked so shabby; she didn’t look like someone who had anything worth stealing, plus, she didn’t. Her guitar had traveled in the van straight to the practice space, she had $20 in cash, and her credit card was within a hundred dollars of its limit. Cataloging this stuff made her feel less vulnerable, but also depressed.
When she asked for directions she found that the studio was much closer than she’d assumed. Soon she was entering the echoey stairwell of a converted industrial building where she could already hear the dull thump of drums. At the end of the hallway Callie drew back a beaded curtain and enveloped her in a hug that smelled like cigarettes and the same perfume she’d worn since high school, Tommy Girl, the smell of candy and tea. She was holding a beer, which she handed to Laura. It was icy-cold, a shock to Laura’s sweaty hand. She drank it and started on another.
They ran through the new songs Laura had written, and it felt effortless, even though a few minutes earlier she hadn’t been able to remember any of the words. She and Callie grinned at each other and danced around the way they had in her bedroom as teenagers. After another beer Laura realized that she wasn’t going to have energy left for the show if she didn’t take a nap, so she curled up in a corner of the loft on a pile of foam sound insulation and fell into a deep sleep. When she woke up it was eight. She frantically dialed Matt as soon as she’d opened her eyes.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Was she okay going to sleep? Did she ask about me?”
“I thought of calling you, but I know you’re in the middle of stuff. Like, being a rock star.” His tone was kind, gentle, appeasing. He was clearly willing her not to freak out. “She’s still really high on the big-girl factor of being with Kayla. I mean, she asked where you were, and I told her, and I said you were coming home tomorrow, and she wasn’t thrilled about it but she didn’t cry or anything. I’ll keep you posted, of course.”
Laura was silent, willing herself not to cry twice in one day in front of this guy she barely knew except from a year’s worth of generic wry playground/pickup interactions. He seemed to notice the tension in her silence, though, and stayed on the phone with her a little longer. After a minute of just letting her breathe through her stifled tears, he seemed to figure out what to say.
“I remember when Demetria and I first split and we were just figuring out divvying up time with Kayla—she was too little to understand what was going on, but she still knew, you know? And it’s so hard, not just missing them, but thinking of them feeling bad even for a second. I always tell myself that it helps them figure out how to be independent, and maybe that’s bullshit—or maybe it’s not. Who knows? Who knows whether anything we do with them, good or bad, even matters. All we can do is try our best. But you also have to do what’s best for you. I’m sorry to lecture you, I mean it as a pep talk. It’s the one I give myself, like I said.”
“It’s the one I give myself, too, but it’s nice to hear it from someone else for a change,” Laura said. She felt outsize gratitude toward Matt. If they’d been in the same room, she would have hugged h
im.
She hung up feeling shitty, but not totally gutted. It was almost time to head back to the house, where she would let Callie doll her up, and then to the venue, where she would walk onstage and sing a love song that no one in the room would understand was actually about a child. And back in Brooklyn, in a toddler bed in Matt’s small apartment, Marie would sleep peacefully till morning, or so she hoped.
* * *
Onstage, the bright lights blinded Laura at first, but then she began to make out the shape of the crowd. There were men in the front row and women behind them, as there were at every show. She heard a tremble in her voice when she began to sing. Callie heard it, too, and shot her a warning look. To kill her nerves, she started making eye contact with the dudes in the front row, giving one of them fuck-me vibes and then icing him completely, ignoring him and moving on to the next one. She started to have fun, and then she started to feel downright euphoric. By the end of the set, she felt like she was at the dawn of a new era in her life, one where she could do this every night that someone would let her get up on a stage.
She was so adrenalized after the show that there was no way she was about to sleep. Fortunately the after-party took over the entire group house afterward, so she couldn’t have slept if she’d wanted to. She had been determined to get up early, get on the Chinatown bus, and get back to see Marie as soon as possible, but before she realized exactly what was happening she’d had several beers and no dinner and even a bump off a key held by a sweetly solicitous group-house resident named Jeremy who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen. He seemed to think there was a chance that he could hook up with Laura, which meant that he somehow didn’t realize that she, though temporally twenty-six, was in fact dozens of light-years older than he was. The attention was flattering, though, and Laura let herself be led into his bedroom. On a lumpy mattress she allowed herself to be pawed at while experiencing no real feelings except bemusement, and even a little bit of purely physical happiness. She let him kiss and suck her boobs, suppressing a laugh when she thought about how the last person to have done so was Marie. But she kindly but firmly cut things off when he tried to venture toward her belt buckle. Then she went to go see if the party had died down enough that she could get her couch back.
Callie intercepted her with a red SOLO cup full of mostly vodka, and said she had to come up to the roof with them now. The hot day had dissipated into a sparkling night, now nearing dawn, and the dimmer lights of the smaller city allowed several stars to peek through. She and Callie lay down next to each other and looked up at them.
“I’m so excited we’re back together,” Callie said. “This feels so right. It’s what we always dreamed of, and it’s finally coming true.” It was clear that she was drunk. Sincerity was not her usual mode.
Laura thought about her actual dreams, which she had almost forgotten existed, and which did not include Callie. In them, Laura was the only one onstage, playing and singing her own songs, traveling around free of all encumbrances.
She shook her head to dispel this fantasy. She had only committed to this one show; she still wasn’t sure whether she had it in her to do more. It was both gratifying and irritating to know that for the past three years, every time she had tried to dismiss the feeling that there was something she was missing out on, she had been right. She had missed a lot of nights on roofs, meaningless kisses, red SOLO cups, and flickers of hardworking transcendence in a sweaty spotlight. What she had done instead seemed distant at this moment. She wanted to pine for the weight of Marie’s little body automatically cuddling into hers as they watched TV or read stories, but she couldn’t quite summon it. It had taken only twenty-four hours to forget. The moon shone down on the rooftop like a spotlight.
* * *
The Chinatown bus ride was excruciating; every bump (there were many) reverberated all the way up her spine to the crown of her head. She tentatively sipped a Vitaminwater, but her mouth remained dry. It was exotic to be so hungover. She had almost forgotten what it felt like. The novelty wore off quickly.
Still, she felt a surge of excitement as the bus emerged from the tunnel and the bustle of Canal Street was suddenly visible through the windows; she was home, where she belonged, and in less than an hour she would be reunited with Marie.
She wolfed an eggy pastry and a supersweet tea at a Chinese bakery, then took the Q to Union Square, transferred to the L, and waited an annoyingly long midday wait for the G. She felt too tired and sick and nervous to read the magazine she’d brought, so she played a game where she looked at her fellow passengers and tried to guess whether they had children. Something about their faces, she imagined, would always give it away, regardless of age or race. Some harrowed, ennobled thing. But she found that she often couldn’t guess, and she wondered what anyone would guess about her: a woman in her midtwenties, a girl, really, with smeared remnants of last night’s eyeliner and hair that smelled like cigarettes and the tar of a roof where she’d slept.
Last night’s drunken feeling of having severed the invisible cord that tethered her to Marie was now completely gone. She would have run alongside the subway if doing so could have gotten her home any faster. And even so, simultaneously, a contrary part of her still wanted to linger in this moment of being separate and plausibly childless, young again and free.
Matt answered the door in a shirt stained with some kind of pink juice, looking as tired as Laura felt but also genuinely happy to see her. “You look like you had fun last night. How was the show?”
Laura grimaced. “Way too much fun, but it was worth it. Where are the girls?”
“Hiding in Kayla’s room. They’ve been up since five thirty playing some game they invented that involves yelling really loud.”
Again Laura felt the impulse to give Matt a hug. They were like soldiers meeting in a wartime hospital and comparing notes about the battles they’d been injured in. She wondered whether raising a child with someone else felt like that all the time.
She opened the door to Kayla’s room tentatively. The girls were both sitting on Kayla’s bed in a nest of blankets and pillows and stuffed animals and various bits of plastic-toy flotsam and jetsam, and both of them looked perfectly calm and happy. But as soon as Marie saw her mother she ran to her legs and began to cry hysterically.
Laura bent down and embraced Marie, who clung to her with almost bruising force as she continued to cry.
“Mommy, Mommy, why did you leave me?”
“Baby, it was just one night, we talked about this. I had to go play music in another city, but I came right back for you. And you got to have a slumber party with Kayla! Didn’t you have fun?” Hot tears soaked through Laura’s T-shirt. A towering wave of exhaustion washed over her, almost immobilizing her. Marie’s warm little body was so heavy in her arms.
Marie was crying so hard that it was hard to understand what she was saying. “I didn’t know if you would come back,” it sounded like. “I missed you. I was scared.” She said the word so that it sounded like “scowed.”
“Did you tell Matt you were scared?”
“Mommy, don’t do that again. I promise, I won’t be bad.”
“Honey, you weren’t bad. I had to leave you, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be with you. I always want to be with you.”
“Then why?” screamed Marie. Kayla dropped a nude doll over the edge of the bed as she watched them with impassive curiosity.
“Baby, sometimes I need to leave, because …”
Marie cried harder and Laura decided to abandon this line of conversation. Anyway, what could she say? That she needed to go to work and make money to support Marie? It was true, but that wasn’t why she’d gone. Was she supposed to explain how it had felt to sing onstage, that it was like one of her limbs had been severed and then reattached and now blood was flowing through it again? Marie would never understand why her mother would choose anything over being with her. “Something else is more important to me than you are” would be wha
t she would hear, no matter what Laura said.
Between her racking sobs, Marie was saying the same thing over and over again, and again it took Laura a second to decipher it; her enunciation was still toddlery and garbled. But when she realized what it was, she felt like her heart and lungs were being scooped out with a dull trowel.
“Mommy, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
* * *
Three days later, Laura dropped Marie off at day care and then went to meet Callie at Oslo to talk about the rest of the tour. She got there early so that she could order a coffee and sit by herself at a table and try to clear her mind and make a decision, but her mind remained stubbornly clouded over. She got up to get a refill and took it back to her table and nursed it.