by Emily Gould
“Absolutely not—someone is going to get hurt. Throw those sticks away,” said Laura, but the girls were happy and laughing and occupied, and she had her phone out and was checking a text from Callie that said she’d be at least an hour later than she’d originally said, which would be fine, but probably meant she’d be even later than that. When she looked up, Marie was wailing and clutching her left eye.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!” said Kayla.
“You did! You hurt me!” Marie shrieked. Other parents were turning around to stare. A Hasidic mother with two kids in a stroller and another three on foot had seen the whole thing, including Laura with her phone out, and gave her a look that somehow simultaneously conveyed sympathy and disdain. Laura sat Marie on her lap and examined her. There was no visible sign of injury, but she was clearly in pain. “We’ll get you some ice, okay, baby?” Marie nodded and sniffled.
“Can we still go to the zoo?” Kayla quavered. “I said I was sorry!”
“If Marie still wants to, we can go,” Laura said. “What do you think, Booboo? See the sea lions?”
Marie sniffled her assent.
“It’s almost their feeding time,” said Kayla to her sister, and helped her to her feet. They walked arm in arm in front of Laura toward the guard booth at the zoo entrance. Laura’s heart was still pounding. Another crisis averted. It seemed like there was another one every day, and though this time she had been lucky, more lucky than she deserved, the constant almost-crises took their toll. Laura felt the material of her soul stretch a little bit thinner every time the girls were in harm’s way. Sometimes it seemed like she was punished every time she even dared to think about anything else while in their presence.
* * *
Callie was late, but not much later than she’d said she would be. “Wow, this place looks like a real home!” she said as she walked into the apartment. “Stuff on the walls and everything!”
“Stuff all over the floor, stuff piled in every corner,” said Laura, kicking the girls’ mermaid castle out of the way as she led Callie through to the kitchen.
“You should see my apartment; it’s so sad. I’ve been there for a year and it still looks like I just moved in. I just pack and unpack my suitcases.” She walked around the room, admiring the view of the tall trees out the front windows.
It was, kid crap infestation aside, a nice apartment, Laura admitted to herself with some pride. She and Matt barely made enough to afford the rent, which made it necessary for Matt to do freelance film editing on top of his nine-to-five job and for Laura to spend a lot of time examining the family budget and transferring credit card balances. But it was worth it to be close to the girls’ school, and the park, and to be able to look out the windows on a summer day and see well-kept nineteenth-century town houses on their block keeping the heat at bay with their thick dark walls and cool wide-planked wooden floors. If she could not actually live in one of these houses, it was nice to at least be able to see them from her window.
The girls obediently came and said hi to Callie, who gamely pretended to admire their mermaids and their identically French-braided hair. Then they traipsed off to their bedroom to throw things and shriek at each other while Callie and Laura sat at the kitchen table and drank tea. The area around Marie’s injured eye looked pinkish still, Laura noted as they left, but she hadn’t been complaining about it, so it didn’t seem worth fussing over.
“I’m so glad you’re coming out tonight! Is Matt coming, too?”
“He’s staying here with the girls. But I’m bringing my friend Mara, I hope that’s cool. She’s a big fan of the band.”
“That’s totally cool. I hope she can hang out afterward, too.”
“Maybe. Both of us have to get up early. She has a kid the girls’ age.”
“So she’s old?”
“Not that old. I don’t know, actually. I think she’s, like, thirty-five?”
“That’s old!”
Laura shrugged. Most of her friends were mom friends, and most moms were over thirty-five. It was still sometimes initially an uphill battle to win older people’s trust and respect. They tended not to believe that Laura really understood the gravity of the situation, that life was fraught with pitfalls and consequences. They thought that because she still had elasticity in her undereye-skin and a torso that had emerged relatively unscathed from the rigors of housing and feeding a baby, she wasn’t really in the shit with them. But then they hung out with her a little bit and talked about sleep and viruses and the impossibility of getting men to proactively plan to accommodate other people’s needs. Eventually, they always came around to the idea that Laura really was a mom, even though she could, in the right lighting, still pass for a member of the enemy class: unfettered women.
Matt came out of the bedroom, where he’d been either working or just dicking around on his laptop, and nodded a quick hi to Callie on his way to root around in the fridge.
“Honey, Callie’s playing a show tonight. You saw it on the calendar, right?”
“Yeah, of course. Wait, are you going to it?”
“Why else would it be on the calendar?”
Matt stopped munching halfway through a string cheese, stumped. “I don’t know, just so we’d know it was happening, I guess, in case we wanted to send good vibes?”
“Callie got me tickets. I’m bringing Mara. So you have the girls for dinner and bedtime.”
“Shit, really? I mean, I can do it, I just also have to finish this project. Maybe we can get a sitter?”
“At five thirty on a Saturday? You’re welcome to try.”
“Okay, well, it’s not ideal, but we’ll manage. I’ll get it done after they go to bed.”
Laura knew that meant he would sleep in the next morning, which meant she shouldn’t stay out late partying with the band—she hadn’t really wanted to, but it was sad to have the choice taken out of her hands.
Matt left with his cheese. Callie rolled her eyes after him, but Laura hesitated to sell him out by complaining. She wanted Callie to admire her marriage like she’d admired the apartment. “He’s actually so great at remembering stuff like that usually. I mean, if it weren’t for him, I’d have to get a sitter every single time I wanted to leave the house.”
“Yeah, and if it weren’t for him, you’d only have one kid to take care of and it would be twice as easy for you to get away,” Callie said lightly.
“Away to where, though? I want to be with them, most of the time.”
“Well, you’re very lucky then! You have exactly what you want.” Callie smiled and sipped her tea. She didn’t mean anything by it. She meant exactly what she said. She had no idea what she was talking about, thought Laura, and realized that she felt about Callie the same way the thirty-five-year-olds (unfairly) felt about her.
* * *
Laura and Mara met up at a bar on Second Avenue, skipping the opening band so they could brace themselves for fun. The pregaming had been Mara’s idea.
“I haven’t been to a show where you couldn’t sit down in years,” she’d said when Laura had extended the invitation initially. “I’ll need to ease into it.”
Winning Mara over had felt to Laura like a triumph, almost like a romantic conquest. She’d seen her on the street for months, doing school drop-off, at the playground, wrangling her small child in the grocery store, and had admired her outfits and her forbidding, perpetually distracted facial expression. She’d tried the basic moves—small smiles of solidarity, “How old is she?”—and gotten nowhere, until eventually they’d found themselves at the same birthday party for one of Kayla and Marie’s classmates. It was held in the backyard of a mind-meltingly enviable brownstone, with organic juice boxes for the children and chenin blanc for their chaperones, but no amount of social lubricant could make it unawkward for Laura, who kept trying and failing to join conversations between people who clearly all knew one another already. And anyway she had nothing to offer on the subject of Fire Island versus Martha’s
Vineyard. Mara stood by herself, near the wine, looking unapologetically bored. Laura had come up to her and poured herself another glass, then raised it to Mara in a toast.
“To the birthday boy, Caiden, or whatever,” she’d said, and watched with excitement as a smile spread over Mara’s face. Her teeth were slightly crooked; maybe she held her face so stoically to avoid showing them. They were cute, though.
“It’s Theo,” she told Laura. “Just kidding, I actually have no idea.”
They had been friends ever since, but tonight was the first time they’d hung out without their children. It wasn’t immediately a welcome change. Laura missed being able to gloss over any lull by taking an interest in the miniature social interactions running parallel to her own; without any distractions, they were forced to complete their sentences and follow their thoughts to conclusions. But after a couple of rounds the initial awkwardness faded, and by the time they decided it was time to walk over to the venue, Laura and Mara were both feeling almost carefree. The sun had almost set and the sky was still streaky, the air was a perfect temperature, just a little bit too warm. They were ready to stand in a dark room and be pounded all over by waves of music.
Inside the venue, Laura flashed the badge that Callie had given her and they were escorted up to a balcony that seemed to be suspended almost directly over the stage, so they felt like they were floating in the dark. The other people in this section had also all been deemed important for some reason; they were journalists here to review the show, or, like Laura, friends with the band. She spotted a guy who looked familiar and almost said hi before realizing that he was a semi-famous comedian, not an old acquaintance.
The feeling that Laura got as she watched Callie play her songs was so strange, a mix of pain and pleasure. Or maybe it was more like the kind of minor pain you can easily stand to inflict on yourself but that’s intolerable when someone else does it. She stood there wallowing in it. She looked at the band and imagined herself in it, of course. She kept her jaw tightly clenched so that she wouldn’t be tempted to mouth the words. All around her, other people were singing along.
The band had just come out for an encore when the phone in her pocket buzzed. She shouted, “I have to take this; it’s Matt” to Mara quickly before pushing back through to the stairwell.
It was Marie, Matt explained. She’d woken up crying, complaining that her eye had an owie, and when he’d turned on the lights he’d seen that her cornea was red and her face was streaked with pink-tinged tears. He’d given her saline eyedrops and parked her in front of a Disney movie with a Popsicle, but the eye did look bad. Had something happened? Laura told him about the poke she’d sustained at the park. She had been so quick to dismiss it; the girls were so dramatic about every little bump, especially the ones they gave each other. And she’d been fine all afternoon. But maybe it was infected? At the very least, a visit to pediatric urgent care seemed like a good idea.
“In the morning, though, right?” she asked.
But she knew she would leave, was already regretting the drinks. There was no way she could go out with the band now and impress Mara by having such cool friends. Now that the possibility was being snatched from her, she badly wanted the consolation of getting drunk. It was supposed to be her reward for witnessing Callie onstage doing what Laura should have been doing. Her body was full of energy that had no place to go. She felt it course through her as a wave of rage.
“Why did you call me? Why couldn’t you have just dealt with this on your own?” she asked Matt.
He exhaled slowly, and in the background she heard Marie crying. She sounded like she had as a much younger child, when she would regularly half wake from a nightmare and scream “Mama! Mama!” even though Laura was right there.
“Look, I’m sorry, baby. I know this sucks. You should stay out if you want to, okay?” said Matt, in his patient, reasonable voice that somehow only ever made her more upset.
“No, of course I won’t. I’ll come home. I’m coming home.”
She went back out to the balcony to tell Mara that she was leaving and saw the look of disappointment flicker across her face.
“I totally understand,” Mara yelled, mouth close to Laura’s head so that she could hear her over the music. “Men can be so pathetic!”
Laura wanted to explain, or confess, or something, but it was too loud to have a detailed conversation about whose choices had created the family dynamic that pretty much required Laura’s constant vigilance—Matt, who had passively allowed the dynamic to develop, or Laura, whose fear that things would fall apart without her had allowed Matt to avoid learning how to care for the children in their neediest moments. Long story short, Matt wasn’t the only one who was pathetic.
As she made her way down the stairs to the exit, Laura passed the semi-famous comedian again, coming back from the bar with a drink in each hand. He gave her a nod of what seemed like recognition, and Laura realized that he’d made the same mistake she’d made earlier—he was pretending now that he knew who she was, because he assumed that they must have met and didn’t want her to feel awkward. She was smiling to herself about it when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
When she turned, she saw that he had followed her and was now proffering one of the drinks, something cloudy and brown with a cherry. “I can’t find the person I was bringing this to, and I thought you looked like you could use a drink,” he said, with the confidence of a person whose pickup abilities have been bolstered for years by positive reinforcement. Laura did want another drink, though.
“I was actually on my way out,” she said, reaching for it. “You’re friends with Callie?”
“I know her, but Davey is my guy. He’s been working with me on some projects,” he said. “You and Callie go way back, right?”
“Wait, you actually know who I am?”
The comedian smirked, which wasn’t exactly attractive, but his whole thing was about being a little bit more abrasive than your average person. He did an exaggerated pompous voice. “Do you know who I am?”
Laura was too tired and distracted to put energy into flirting, and was also trying to drink as quickly as possible so that she could more effectively mute her inner critic. “Honestly? I know your face. But I haven’t watched a lot of TV lately that isn’t for five-year-olds.”
“That’s right, you’re the teen mom!”
She tried hard not to find this flattering. “Not exactly a teen.”
“I’ve seen those shows, too. Not because I have kids—I mean, none that I know of. But I’ve done a lot of voice-over work. Do your kids watch Dragon Dancers?”
Laura nodded. Marie and Kayla were obsessed with those stupid dragons in tutus.
“I’m the pink one. Drogola.”
“Whoa!”
“I know!” He was being satirically false modest, but Laura was genuinely impressed.
“That’s a great performance,” she told him.
There was a tiny moment of a crack in his bluster and Laura could tell he was genuinely gratified, but then he immediately reassumed his persona. “Speaking of performances, you used to be in this band, too, right? Why aren’t you onstage?”
“It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just sometimes be in a band and sometimes not,” she explained patiently, as though to a child, a dumber child than either of her actual children. The manhattan or whatever it was had been better and stronger than any of the other drinks she’d had that night; apparently, the comedian’s fame gave him access to a better class of everything, even overpriced plastic-cup drinks. In her back pocket, her phone twitched. She pulled it out and read a text from Matt asking her to please pick up Popsicles if she saw any on her way home.
“Thanks for the drink,” she said, putting the empty glass back into the comedian’s hand.
“See you around, teen mom,” he said, seemingly still under the impression that this was a funny thing to say.
Half an hour later she clattered through the door of her apartm
ent, drunk and slightly nauseated by the smell of the cab she’d taken. Matt and Marie were sitting together on the couch, watching a DVD. Marie turned toward the sound of Laura coming in and she could see the red streak in her little eyeball from halfway across the room. “Oh my God!” she said, forgetting to try to seem calm for Marie’s sake.
Matt shot her a look, less admonishing than confused, then registered that she was drunk. “Should we take her to urgent care?” he said in the hushed tone that they used to talk about the girls when they were right there. “I mean, should one of us? I’ll stay with Kayla?”
“Mommy, where are the Popsicles?” Marie whined.
“Baby, I forgot, I’m so sorry. We can get Popsicles tomorrow.” Exhaustion was threatening to envelop Laura. Today had lasted so long already. There had been so many different parts of it. Could there really be an entire new part of it still to go, at the pediatric urgent care clinic or the emergency room?
“But I want one now!”
“I don’t think it’s going to make a difference whether we go now or in the morning,” she said quietly to Matt. “It looks bad, but I think it’s just irritated. We should put a cold washcloth on it and try to get her to bed.” She was pretending to be in control, making her voice calm and stern, but she was faking it; she wasn’t some kind of eyeball doctor.
“Really? It’s so red.”
“Matt, it’s not about to fall out of her head,” Laura said, finally out of patience for everyone.
“My eye is going to fall out of my head?” Marie was now paying close attention. Matt looked at Laura with the cold, tight expression that meant he would, starting now, seethe silently for up to twenty-four hours, until she could weasel her way back into his good graces or until it simply became too inconvenient to hate her.
“No, it’s not going to fall out, baby,” said Laura to Marie. “It’s just a scratch. I’m going to put a magic soothing cloth on it, okay? It’s going to take the scratchiness away, and you can sit here with us till the end of the episode and then we’ll all go to sleep.”