by Emma Straub
“The Big House is really best in the late summer, the whole valley, really.” Cecelia’s father, Nicholas Strick, Nicky Stricky, was the baby of his family, and had run away from his parents’ house before his eighteenth birthday and returned only for holidays and special occasions that had been guilt-tripped for months in advance. He was not a reliable source. The taxi turned onto Flatbush Avenue and headed toward the Manhattan Bridge. Cecelia thought her father could be the most handsome father in the world if he shaved his beard or cut the short, messy ponytail that he usually wore at the nape of his neck, or bought clothes that weren’t made for ranchers and cowboys. Instead her father always looked like someone who could be handsome if he wanted to be, but the beard and the clothes and the hair were effective deterrents.
“She really does have great taste, and she knows everybody,” Juliette said. Cecelia’s mom was French and knew about good taste, everyone said so. Juliette liked Astrid better than her husband did. She may have liked Astrid better than her husband, period. “There are big, clean public swimming pools, and you only ever have to wait because someone is slow, not because there are a hundred people ahead of you. Clapham is great, chérie, you know that. You always liked going there, even when that house was like a toddler disaster, and I was always afraid you were about to kill yourself on the edge of something. And anyway, it’s better to be in the countryside, it gives the blood more oxygen.”
That didn’t sound true, but Cecelia didn’t bother to argue. And if it was, what the hell had her parents been doing, depriving her blood of maximum oxygen for the past thirteen years? “I already agreed to this plan. It’s fine, really.” Cecelia’s suitcases were in the trunk. Together, the three of them—Cecelia and her parents—took up every inch of space in the car, like commuters on a rush-hour F train.
“D’accord,” Juliette said, patting Cecelia’s thigh. Her chin wobbled, and she turned her face toward the window. “Okay.”
“Are you sure you want to go by yourself? We could take the train up with you, get you settled.” Nicky had never volunteered to go to Clapham before—maybe this was already progress. He rubbed his hands on his beard.
“Dad, it’s fine. I’m just going to read the Deathly Hallows again. It’s only two hours.”
“Can you manage the two bags, you think? There are escalators.” Juliette was a dancer, both strong and practical about bodies. It was a good quality in a mother. Whenever Cecelia had fallen down or injured herself as a child, Juliette would whip up a pant leg to show her daughter a scar. Cecelia was trying to remind herself of these things in order to decrease the life-size piñata of her parents that she was building in her mind at all times. It wasn’t their fault, but it also wasn’t her fault, and parents were supposed to be the ones who swooped in and fixed things. But her parents had never been the kind to make a fuss. Her mother was a dancer who pretended not to smoke cigarettes. Her father was a hippie who sold bundles of sticks and crystals to younger hippies on the internet. His claim to fame, outside of their family, where he was famous for his quinoa salads, trumpeting farts, and humorous, improvised songs, was playing a handsome high school student in one movie, The Life and Times of Jake George, filmed when he himself was a handsome high school senior. He’d found the experience of teenage girl fandom so appalling that he’d become a Buddhist and spent the next year in a monastery in Tibet. They weren’t the types to yell and scream on anyone’s behalf, even hers.
“It’ll be fine, Mom.” There was a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, and Cecelia watched it swing back and forth as they drove over the bridge. Taxi TV blared, and Juliette silenced it with her thumb. It was a beautiful day—blue sky, no clouds, no traffic. It almost made Cecelia sad to leave the city, but then she thought about going back to school in September and having her best friend not speak to her and having everyone else assume, because she was leaving, that she was the guilty party—shaming her! Cecelia Raskin-Strick, who had slept with her American Girl dolls until she was twelve, just last year! And they weren’t even soft plastic! And then she wasn’t sad, at least not about leaving. For the rest of the ride, her parents stared out their respective windows and Cecelia looked over the driver’s shoulder, trusting that he was going the right way.
Chapter 3
Eau de Goat
Porter’s bathroom smelled like goats because Porter smelled like goats. She couldn’t always smell it herself, certainly not when she was with the animals, but once she came home and got into the shower, the steam opened up her pores and the whole room bloomed into a barnyard. It was worse when she smelled like cheese, mostly because other people tended to be more likely to attribute the cheese smell to her own body, whereas when she smelled like the goats, the animals were clearly to blame.
After graduating from Hampshire College, Porter had moved back to Clapham fast, like a rubber band pinged across a room. Her father had been dead for two and a half years, and being at school in Massachusetts had felt so absolutely dumb, but her mother had insisted she stay. What was the point? her mother had asked. What would she do in Clapham but sit around and mope? Porter thought that if she was going to find her father anywhere, in whatever form, it would be at home. And so she came back, reverting quickly to her teenage habits, but with part of her family cleaved off, as if her father had been a dream. It had been like learning to walk with a limp—tough at first, but then she got so used to it that she couldn’t remember what life had felt like on two solid feet.
* * *
—
She’d worked as a substitute teacher at the high school, then at the Clay Depot, a high-end pottery store on Main Street. When she was nearing thirty, Porter’s childhood friend Harriet converted her parents’ land into an organic farm, and then they bought some goats and read some books on fermentation, and now, almost eight years later, Clap Happy Goat Cheese was available in shops in New York City and at every restaurant in Clapham and at specialty cheese shops around the country. Harriet had sold Porter the land and her share of the goats (there were two dozen altogether) and moved to Oregon with her husband, and so now the dairy was Porter’s alone.
It was maybe because of the goats that the idea of getting pregnant on her own didn’t seem all that scary. She was used to assisting reproduction, to having a hand in creating life, even if it was goats. Sperm banks were stud farms, and she’d grown up around enough farmers to know how biology worked. Really, it was mainstream, heteronormative couples who were doing the crazy thing, picking a partner based on what, a sense of humor? Where they went to college? What they did with their tongue when they kissed? And then having a baby. Why didn’t everyone pick one person to marry and then pick the sperm they wanted separately? Also, fathers died, anyone could die, didn’t people understand that? You couldn’t ask one person to be your everything, because that person could be taken away. Would be taken away, eventually. Obviously it would be ideal to have a partner to help with the child once he or she was born—she wasn’t a fool, she knew she had only two hands—but she didn’t want to wait until she was forty. Maybe if she lived in a bigger place, where the dating pool was larger, she wouldn’t have felt in such a rush. But Porter knew everyone in Clapham who she could possibly have sex with, and there were no golden tickets on that list.
There were romantic partners Porter could have had babies with: Jeremy, her high school boyfriend and first love, who had wanted to marry her at eighteen and now lived across town with his perky wife and their two school-age kids; Jonah, her college boyfriend, who smoked weed more often than he ate food, and who had moved to Vermont and seemed to be a professional Bernie Bro Facebook ranter; Hiro—the boy she’d slept with once during the relationship with the pot smoker—a Japanese student who had no social media and an ungoogleable name, so she’d lost track of him. The sex hadn’t been good, but what was good sex? He could have been a good husband, a good father, who knew? And he probably was, with someone else. Then there
were the guys Porter had slept with after college: Chad, the lawyer, whom she’d found both sexy and boring, like a human baseball game; Matthew, the underemployed waiter she’d dated for a few months, who had another girlfriend but sometimes still texted late at night, little empty speech bubbles forever appearing and disappearing after Hey, thinking about you; Billy, the guy she’d met on vacation in Puerto Rico, who was on his own vacation from Wisconsin, and whom Porter was fairly sure had a wedding ring tan line; and then Ryan, her most recent boyfriend, the only one since college whom she’d actually introduced to her family, who probably didn’t love her, and most definitely didn’t want kids. Accidents happened, but Porter had been on the pill since she was a junior in high school, and since then they hadn’t happened to her. All the while, her friends had endless engagement parties, weddings, baby showers, births, like so many rocket ships zooming away from her. Both of her brothers had children, and at least one of them, her niece, Cecelia, was the greatest child to ever be born. Porter was ready to zoom, too, and so she stopped waiting for a pilot to appear.
Choosing sperm was the ultimate online dating—you had all the information you needed on paper. Porter also wasn’t sure she trusted what were essentially résumés—everyone stretched the truth on résumés— and so she focused on the facts. Porter was tall herself and didn’t need tall genes; she wasn’t Jewish and therefore it was fine if the donor was, in terms of Tay-Sachs and other diseases on the “Jewish panel,” so said her reproductive endocrinologist. Porter wanted to make up for things she lacked—physical coordination, the ability to carry a tune. It was best not to think about these men masturbating into a cup. It was hard to decide which was more off-putting: a man donating sperm just to make some cash or a man donating sperm because he liked the idea of having lots of children borne by strange women. Porter put it out of her mind. The sperm was an ingredient, and this way, she got to choose what kind of cake she wanted to make. The child would be hers alone, and that cupful of swimmers was a means to that end. And now she was pregnant with a girl. Science worked, and miracles happened. The two were not mutually exclusive.
Porter turned off the showerhead and watched the soapy water pool around her feet. Her breasts had always been modest and small, even when the rest of her body had widened with age. Now they were full and hard, more than a palmful of stretching tissue. Her hips and tummy kept the secret with their soft width, a professional hazard. Porter didn’t trust anyone skinny who worked in cheese. You met them from time to time, mostly on the retail side, and Porter always kept her distance. Enjoying the product was important. Thank god her cheese was pasteurized.
Now that she was halfway and starting to show in earnest, Porter knew she was going to have to start telling people. And before she told people, she would have to tell her brothers. And before she told her brothers, she would have to tell her mother. She knew that it would be unimaginable to most women not to tell their mothers that they were embarking on such an experience—she’d seen scores of adult women clutching their mothers’ hands in the waiting room at her reproductive endocrinologist’s office. But Astrid Strick wasn’t like that. She knew how to get stains out of white shirts. She could name all the plants in her garden and identify trees and birds. She could bake everything from scratch. But she did not invite intimacy the way that Porter had observed in other mothers, the kind who would let their children sleep in their bed after a bad dream or get their hair wet in a swimming pool. Astrid had always existed—both before and after her husband died—in an orderly way. She had rules, and the proper clothing for any weather, unlike Porter, who had neither. That was part of it, of course. Porter was going to let her daughter sleep in her bed every night if she wanted to. She’d chew her food and spit it into her mouth, if that was what the baby wanted. Porter was going to be as warm as an oven. That’s what she was going to tell her mother.
Russell Strick had loved The Twilight Zone, and Porter thought that that was how she might have told her father—she would have asked him to imagine an episode where a baby was made in a lab and put into her body. It wasn’t fair, the way most people just got to keep both their parents, and have grandparents for their children, and cutesy nicknames. Porter was used to that unfairness—her college graduation, her brothers’ weddings, her mother’s fiftieth birthday, sixtieth birthday, all the big fucking days—but somehow that part didn’t get easier. He was still gone, and he would miss her big days, too, in addition to her brothers’. He would have been happy that she was having a baby, maybe (in some weird way, a way that they wouldn’t ever talk about out loud) even a little bit happy that he would be the primary male figure, apart from her brothers, that he, Grampa, would loom large. Gramps. Gamps. Pops. Popsy. Porter didn’t know which he would have been, which silly nickname he would have been granted by Cecelia and then called by all his grandchildren in turn. Porter had had a dream that somehow her father was also the father of her baby, through some mix of time travel and magic but with none of the troubling connotations that such a thing would have in real life—in her dream, it was like her father was somehow her grandfather and her father and her child’s father all at once, an ageless ghost, and the women in the family did all the work. It was like a Brad Pitt movie that would make you cry even though it got terrible reviews.
Porter stepped over the lip of the bathtub and wrapped herself in a towel. She wiped at the mirror with her hand, clearing a space large enough to see her reflection.
“You’re a grown-up,” she said to herself. “You’re a grown-ass woman, with a growing-ass baby inside her. You are an adult. It’s your life.” Porter turned to the side and cupped her hand beneath her belly. “Hey, you. I’m your mom, and I swear to god, everything is going to be okay. I am ninety-five percent sure that everything is going to be okay. At least seventy percent. I swear. Fuck.”
She would tell her mother today. Or tomorrow. At the very latest, she would tell her mother tomorrow.
Chapter 4
Unaccompanied Minor
It was only four stops on the train—Yonkers, Croton, Poughkeepsie, Clapham. Cecelia had a window seat but kept her nose in her book. The conductor had given her a special bracelet that read UNACCOMPANIED but might as well have read ABANDONED FOUNDLING, PLEASE TAKE ME HOME AND MAKE ME A SANDWICH. All the mothers on the train—Cecelia could tell which ones they were, even though only a few of them actually had children with them—gave her pitying looks and asked her pointless questions, like “Sure is pretty out there, isn’t it?” to which she would smile and offer an affirmative nod. Fathers either knew better than to speak to an adolescent girl they didn’t know or were better able to shut off the part of their brain that noticed children not their own.
* * *
—
Other girls—the girls she had been friends with until very recently, the ones who drank the cold coffee from their parents’ abandoned mugs on the kitchen table and sometimes even an inch of vodka pilfered from the freezer—might have hidden in the bathroom at the opportune moment and then leapt off in a place that sounded more exciting, like Rome (even if it was Rome, New York) or Niagara Falls (even though she didn’t have a raincoat and was too young to gamble), but Cecelia didn’t want her parents to worry. Especially now. What would happen if she didn’t get off the train? Cecelia couldn’t quite picture it—Astrid would no doubt know just what to do, how to stop the train, how to scour the platforms for the next dozen stops. She probably had a walkie-talkie in her junk drawer that could reach the conductor personally. And then Cecelia would be in trouble, and her parents would have to jump on the next train together and they would fight and then they’d be at the Big House and fight some more about whose fault the whole thing was, without ever figuring out that it was actually their fault, if you got down to it. Regardless, she had only forty dollars and a credit card that went straight to her parents’ bank account, and so even if she didn’t mind the idea of stressing everybody out, it wouldn’t last long. Sh
e wasn’t built for life on the lam.
The Clapham station was just a long platform with tracks on either side, a mouth with braces. The Hudson River moved swiftly alongside. Cecelia humped her enormous suitcases onto the platform with the conductor’s help and tried not to die of embarrassment as he called her grandmother’s name, his booming voice carrying over the hum of the train and the sounds of passing cars and birds twittering overhead. The station was up a long, precarious flight of stairs, that’s where the waiting room was, with benches made of wood slats. That was probably where Astrid was right now. There was no one else in sight. Some people found cities scary, Cecelia knew, but those people had been swayed by misleading statistics and Batman movies. There was nothing frightening about being in a place where you were always surrounded by hundreds of people—there was always someone nearby who could hear you scream. Cecelia knew, because she was a modern girl, that her race and economic status meant that not only could someone hear her scream, but that someone would also be likely to help. It was also true that, because she was a girl, her parents had taught her to carry her house keys in between her fingers like Wolverine, just in case.
The conductor called her gammy’s name again—“Ast-rid Stri-ick!” as though her gammy were the only contestant on the game show Who Wants to Take Care of This Minor? Cecelia laughed nervously, knowing full well that her grandmother had never been late for anything in her entire life.
“I’m sure she’s upstairs; she must just be in the bathroom.” Cecelia crossed her arms over her chest. Everyone else had already disembarked and trotted happily up the stairs into their loved ones’ waiting arms, or their cars, or Spiro’s, which was one block farther from the water.