by Emma Straub
“Damn,” Emily said, finally.
“But they find cool stuff?” Quinn asked.
“Sometimes. Sometimes weird dolls with one eye. My mom loves those, actually.”
Emily smacked him and then buried her head in his stomach. “Oh my god, you’re going to give me nightmares!”
The bedroom that August had wandered into was mostly empty, with washed-out pale pink flowery wallpaper. There was a small bed with musty piles of quilts stacked on top—his mom would want those. There was a large homemade dollhouse on a ledge beside the window, and August knelt down next to it. His mom would want this too—it had a miniature roll of toilet paper in the miniature bathroom. She loved that kind of thing, something that someone’s grandmother had made. The small people had vanished, but that didn’t matter. Small people were easy to come by. He pressed a finger against a tiny swinging door and watched it flap back and forth. August rocked back up to standing.
There was boarding school, but those places were worse. August had read books: drugs, eating disorders, murder. There was home school, but neither of his parents could do math. And high school was bound to be better, right? Teenage rebellion had to help, right? And there were a few more artsy places in the Hudson Valley, private schools that his parents could afford if they sold a thousand dollhouses a day. One girl whose blog he liked had somehow convinced her parents to buy a Winnebago and spend her junior year of high school driving across Mexico. His mother poked her head into the room and squealed with excitement. His parents only drove around looking for more stuff to anchor them down. August pulled the dusty curtain back and looked out the window. At camp, he could be himself, and people loved him for it. At school, costumes were required.
His mother started riffling through the quilts on the bed, separating them out in piles based on the colors and patterns she liked and then unfolding them to look for stains. She was engrossed, petting the stiff cotton squares, clearly thinking about how much she’d pay, and how much she’d charge for them in the store once she brought them home. August turned toward the closet, which was open, as if the girl who’d lived in the room was in the process of getting dressed and had just been raptured away.
The closet wasn’t full; there were only a dozen or so things on hangers, waving slightly with the movement of August’s hand. He brushed his fingers across them, just feeling the fabric. It was easy to tell when something was well made, if it was worth money, and that had little to do with the label inside. He stopped on a white eyelet dress and swiveled the skirt out so that he could see the whole thing.
“Pretty,” his mom said, looking over her shoulder. “Last days of summer? We can sell that. Even after Labor Day.” She straightened her back and hugged a small stack of quilts against her chest.
“I thought you meant me,” August said, and fluttered his eyelashes.
“Always,” his mom said, blowing a kiss into the air. August looked more like his mother than his father, a fact that always made him happy. August blew a kiss back, making his face her mirror, and she smiled at him before turning to the dollhouse and making a fuss, just as he knew she would.
Chapter 8
A Funny Story
Porter had a key to the Big House, though she had to riffle through her pockets several times to remember if she had it on her—she was finding pregnancy to be something of a fugue state, where she often couldn’t remember whether she’d already brushed her teeth or washed her hair and would end up doing something two or three times, just to make sure, or realizing at noon that she’d done neither. Porter kicked off her shoes at the door and walked in.
“Mom? Cecelia? Anybody home?” Porter knew that some of her friends from growing up, the ones who’d left town, felt like they traveled back in time to their adolescence when they were around their parents, and within the walls of their childhood bedrooms, as if the pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Joey McIntyre taped to the wallpaper were ready to jump straight back into their ongoing conversation. That was easy, coming home and being a kid again, because presumably they got to be an adult the other 360 days a year. When you were in your childhood house on a regular basis, it was harder to separate the past and the present—nostalgia only worked with distance.
Porter was excited to see Cecelia, the second-best thing her little brother had ever done, after teaching Porter how to properly roll joints when she was in high school, despite the fact that he was younger than she was. He’d always been like that—preternaturally confident in his own abilities. He must have practiced in the dark for hours, but Porter hadn’t seen it. She’d thought about telling her brother that she was pregnant—he would be the most enthusiastic member of her family, she knew—but even though Porter could vividly remember the day that Cecelia was born, her brother’s experience now seemed like a remote continent, too far away from her growing belly to speak the same language. Nicky had been twenty-three, still a kid himself. There was nothing about his experience that was the same as hers. Same with Elliot, who had a wife and a plan and checklists and a hospital bag sitting by the door at twenty-five weeks. It was easier to keep the secret in. That’s where the baby was, after all.
Porter could see her mom’s behind waggling in the air by the counter, her elbows ahead on the kitchen island, the phone snuggled in between her ear and shoulder, a 1950s teenager. Astrid was whispering.
“Mom,” Porter said again, coming close enough to lightly touch Astrid on the back. She didn’t want to scare her—Astrid was almost seventy, and even though her mother had always seemed strong and fit, to an almost immortal degree, Porter had heard about Barbara Baker from Wesley Drewes, and sudden death seemed closer, though of course statistically it had just moved further away. In any case, Porter was nervous.
Astrid swiveled around. “Oh, hi! Hi. Okay,” she spoke into the phone. “Listen, Porter just walked in the door, I’ll talk to you later, okay? Okay. Yes. Me too. Thanks so much, okay. Bye-bye.”
“Where’s Cecelia?” Porter asked, setting down a box of pastries on the kitchen island. Astrid wound around her, following the cord back to the wall, and hung up the phone.
“She’s upstairs, taking a shower, I think. Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but I called Bob—you heard about Barbara, didn’t you?” Porter nodded. “I called Bob to offer my condolences, because I was right there, you know, and you know what he told me?” Astrid’s mouth opened like a jack-o’-lantern, a wide, gaping maw. “She’d just left him and moved in with her mother at Heron Meadows! She was living with her mother! At the old folks’ home! Her mother is so out of it, the poor thing, she probably thought Barbara was her new nurse. It’s the craziest thing I ever heard.” Astrid blew air out of her nose, an involuntary snort.
Porter opened the box and started to eat one, cupping her hand underneath to catch crumbs. “Is this a funny story?”
Astrid waved her hand in front of her face. “Nothing’s funny, everything’s funny! It’s life! Life is finally deciding that your demented—is that what the word is? Dementia’d?—anyway, that your ancient mother is more fun to be around than your husband of thirty-five years, and then getting hit by a school bus! She was probably mailing her divorce papers, do you think? I have to ask Darrell. He delivers mail to Shear Beauty, I bet he’d know. That mailbox has got to be on his route.”
“Mom, you sound like an insane person.”
“Yes, well”—Astrid adjusted her hair—“I’m a curious person.”
“There was actually something I wanted to talk to you about, Mom,” Porter said. She opened the fridge and felt her arms begin to pimple with goose bumps. She closed her eyes and pretended she was just talking to the eggs. If her father had been there, he would have rubbed his hands together, excited for whatever she had to say. If her father had been there, she would have been too young to have a baby.
“Porter! Hi!” Cecelia slid into the kitchen in her socked feet.
Porter turned around and spread her arms wide, letting Cecelia crash into her. Elliot’s kids were actual monsters, creatures who would no doubt go on to commit duplicitous and mean-spirited white-collar crimes, but Cecelia was probably the number one reason that Porter wanted to have a baby—to have someone this smart, this funny, this thoughtful in your life, and have them be obligated to love you forever. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to clone her, adopt her, or be her. Maybe all three.
“How was the train? How’s my stupid brother?” Porter kissed Cecelia’s cheeks, one at a time, the way Juliette did.
“He’s okay. The train was fine. I got up to Harry and Hermione going to his parents’ house, where the woman turns into the snake. I had a turkey sandwich with a slimy piece of lettuce and a gross tomato and now probably have food poisoning.” Cecelia shrugged and then leaned against the counter, collapsing her torso so that it lay flat against the granite. In the months since Porter had seen her last, Cecelia had become a teenager and was slumping toward indifference to most things, right on schedule. The last time she’d been in town—only eight months ago, at Christmas—she hadn’t been like this, and seeing a sulking teenager in the kitchen where she herself had been a sulking teenager set Porter’s heart aflame.
“Mom, let me take this child to lunch.” Porter grabbed Cecelia by the hand. “I am so happy to see you, Chicken.”
“Please don’t call me Chicken,” Cecelia said, but she was smiling.
“Porter,” Astrid said, now back to her stern self. “The house is full of food! But fine. I have something I wanted to talk to you about too.” Birdie wouldn’t mind—Birdie would be thrilled.
“It’s nothing,” Porter said. Cecelia cocked her head to the side, like a dog. It was exactly like when her parents tried not to fight in front of her, just opening and closing their mouths like fish on land.
Cecelia plucked one of the apple turnovers out of the box and took a bite. “Do you need some privacy? I can wait in my room.” She looked to Astrid and then to Porter.
“You are a magnificent person,” Porter said. “Seriously. How did you get this wonderful and mature? Yes, great. Want to go have a snack in town? In a few minutes?” Both pregnant women and teenagers could eat an unlimited number of meals in any given day, their bodies working so hard to transform into something new.
“Sure,” Cecelia said. Astrid stuck a plate under the turnover and Cecelia hustled back up the stairs. Porter and Astrid both waited for her to vanish, and then for the clunk of her door—Porter’s childhood bedroom door—before speaking again.
“I think we should invite Elliot and the family over this weekend for brunch,” Astrid said. “Would you come? I’m going to invite Birdie. You know Birdie, don’t you? And Cecelia, of course.”
“I’m pregnant, Mom, and of course I know Birdie, she’s been cutting your hair for years and you have lunch with her every Monday,” Porter said.
“What?” Astrid said.
“I’m pregnant,” Porter said. “Or did you mean about you and Birdie having lunch?”
“Sorry, Porter,” Astrid said. “Last I checked, there wasn’t really a danger of that happening. We had the talk, I remember it well, and Nurse Johnson always had the bowl of condoms in her office. That was a whole debacle with the town council, god, those fools! I know that was a long time ago, but surely you remember the basics. What happened? Tell me.” Astrid smoothed the front of her zip-up sweatshirt. She pushed her hair up, patting it like a show dog. Her hair had always been dark, and now it was a shiny silver instead, a polished bell. This wasn’t what she imagined—she thought of Barbara Baker again, who had floated for so long at the edge of her vision. It could all be over in an instant. She could be different; there was still time. Astrid thought about Birdie, about how she felt when they were alone together. She wanted to be a different kind of mother than she had been; was that so hard to say? “Lots of women go through this.”
“I’m pregnant by choice, actually. I’m having a baby. By myself.” Porter felt her body begin to heat up, starting in her chest and moving outward, a swift-moving forest fire. She kept her feet planted in the kitchen, with her hands flat against the cool granite counter, and said what she had practiced in the bathroom mirror. “I thought about this for a long time, and it’s the right decision for me. I know it’s not something you would have done, but this is my choice, and I hope you can support it. You’re going to have another grandchild.”
She sounded like an after-school special, but there wasn’t really any other way to say it. There was a baby in her body, and she’d put it there. This was another by-product of staying in one’s hometown: Parents weren’t frozen in amber, fixed at the moment you left, providing a tidy dividing line between parent and child. Porter couldn’t distinguish the person Astrid was now from the person she’d been in Porter’s childhood. Maybe Nicky could see differences, like she could see differences in Cecelia—absence made contrast plain. Not that it mattered now—Porter and her mother were both adults. Starting the conversation had been scary, but now the train was on the tracks and it was moving and she couldn’t jump off. Porter exhaled through her mouth.
“Who is the father? Are you and Ryan back together? It’s not Jeremy Fogelman, is it?” Astrid had never liked any of Porter’s boyfriends, no one had. She shook her head, as if she could whisk the news away if she disagreed with it strongly enough. “You’re only thirty-eight years old. I’m trying to be sympathetic here, I want to understand. Can you help me understand? Girls in New York City don’t even get married until now, you’re not far behind. You’re going to meet someone, and then what? He becomes stepdad? Oh, god.” Astrid was doing the math in her head. “How far along are you? You’re definitely keeping it? It’s not that I’m not evolved, Porter, it’s just that I actually raised three children, and I happen to know that it’s not a one-person job. Why didn’t you ever talk to me about this? How long have you been planning to do this?”
“Mom. Of course I’m keeping it, I paid to have this person created and placed inside my body. And the father is a person. A man. In the world, somewhere. When the child is eighteen, she can contact him via the sperm bank, and then, I don’t know, we’ll see. I know you’re not going to like it, but that’s what’s happening.” Porter took a deep breath. This was why she’d waited to tell her mother. Astrid’s standards for everyone else were the same as her standards for herself, which left no room for error. “And why would you even suggest Jeremy Fogelman? That’s absurd. This is why I didn’t tell you; I knew this was how you’d react, and I didn’t want you to talk me out of it. This is good news, okay?”
Astrid stared. “You know, you’ve always been this way. Everything always had to be on your own terms. Remember when you were Harvest Queen and you made everyone else on the float stand on the lower level of the float so that you were the tallest?” Astrid sat down in her chair at the kitchen table and plucked a hard-boiled egg out of a basket. She cracked it firmly on the lip of the table and began to peel. “You think you can do it with only two arms and two hands, maybe you can.”
Porter watched her mother make a tidy pile of eggshell. “I have told you a thousand times, the float was built that way, there was only space for one person on the top part of the float that year.” The theme had been Studio 54.
“Mm-hmm,” Astrid said. She shook some salt onto the smooth skin of the egg white and took a small bite. “I liked that you were on top, you looked like the Statue of Liberty in that green dress.”
“Thank you?” If Astrid had talked this way to either of Porter’s brothers, they would have walked out of the room. Porter thought that it had to do with her being the only girl, always eager to please, conditioned by the outside world to react softly and with a smile to everything short of bodily harm. It was important to get along, and Astrid had her ways. Nicky had run off to avoid her, and Elliot only wanted to be like what he remembered of their father, w
hich was a twentysomething’s view of an adult man, a Ken doll with bills to pay. And so that left Porter and her mother.
“Do you need a doctor? Who are you seeing?” Astrid asked.
“Dr. Beth McConnell, at Northern Dutchess,” Porter said.
“I know Beth,” Astrid said. “She spoke to the hospital board at our annual luncheon last year.”
“And you can’t believe she didn’t call you.” Porter rolled her eyes.
Cecelia bounded back into the room, swinging her backpack in a large circle. Astrid looked up from her egg and waved a finger.
“We’ll talk more about this later,” Porter said. “Bye, Mom.”
“Goodbye, dear. Wear your seatbelt.” And with that, Astrid stood up, swept all the pieces of eggshell into her palm, and then blew half a kiss with her free hand, the most spontaneous affection she’d given Porter since her last birthday. It was a start.
Chapter 9
Little Red Riding Hoods
Northern Dutchess Hospital was one town north, in Rhinebeck. It had been built in the 1980s and had the glass bricks to prove it. Porter parked in the covered lot and made her way through the lobby, which was painted in various pastel shades and felt less antiseptic than most hospitals, and more like being at a gender-neutral baby shower. The ob-gyns were on the second floor. She’d gone on a tour of the delivery rooms, all of which overlooked the parking lot, probably because people didn’t stay very long and weren’t likely to complain about the lack of a view when they had a new baby to stare at. Porter was ten minutes early and picked a chair in the corner.
Waiting rooms full of pregnant women and women who wanted to be pregnant were more full of codes than a spy’s briefcase. Porter had been taking notes on her phone, theoretically to remember the experience, mostly because she was always there alone and most of the women were with their partners and she wanted to look busy. The only women who truly seemed not to give a shit were the ones with one or two kids already at home, who took calls from babysitters and answered questions about cookies and iPad time and then spread out their belongings like it was a day at the spa, so happy to have no one touching them, no bottom to wipe, no mysteriously sticky fingers to clean. Some young women came with their partners and stroked their baby bumps like enormous diamond rings, their nerves assuaged by the doting of their loved ones. It was all races and ages, within the scope of human reproduction. Sometimes there were jittery teenagers, holding hands like they might push a button and find themselves in line to see a movie, just on a regular date, instead of sitting on padded chairs and waiting for a doctor to call a name. Sometimes couples fought silently, the woman’s face a knotted fist of anger, and Porter would amuse herself by trying to imagine what her husband or boyfriend had said. She liked those couples best.