by Emma Straub
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People without children thought that having a newborn was the hardest part of parenthood, that upside-down, day-is-night twilight zone of feedings and toothless wails. But parents knew better. Parents knew that the hardest part of parenthood was figuring out how to do the right thing twenty-four hours a day, forever, and surviving all the times you failed. Astrid felt like she had cursed her own child, like she had set the marble on the track with that one conversation, and that Elliot had just rolled. She could imagine the life that Elliot would have had, if she had said something else. If she had said nothing, even that would have been better. In a parallel universe, she and Elliot had something in common, they would be close, but in this one, she had missed her chance. People always said that life was long, but really they meant their own memories. Barbara’s death meant that Astrid had missed her window at a full recovery, at ever really righting that particular wrong. There were probably other wrongs, too, not just for Elliot but for each of her children. Astrid didn’t know what they were, but they were there, undoubtedly, places she’d greased the track for other marbles without even realizing what she was doing.
The woman with the oxygen tank pointed across the green lawn to a heron tiptoeing toward the oversized birdbath. Astrid tried to paint a polite expression on her face.
When Barbara was hit, this was what Astrid had realized, somewhere in the murky depths of her brain—she would have to have only one of the two conversations. She would have to apologize only to Elliot, and not to Barbara too. It was such a sad, pathetic excuse of a feeling, and Astrid felt ashamed again—ashamed thrice!—admitting it to herself.
The heavy front door creaked open, and Birdie stuck her head out.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m taking a break, and they pointed me this way. God, it is hot out here. Want to get some ice cream?” Birdie’s apron had small hairs clinging to it, whole galaxies on the thick blue cotton. Astrid wanted so badly to deserve her.
Chapter 13
Clap Happy
Porter was excited to introduce Rachel to her goats. Clap Happy’s twenty-five Nubian and Alpine does lived in a large red barn, with a fenced-in pasture full of grass to eat and bins of alfalfa hay set off the ground. They had piles of rocks to climb—what Porter referred to as “the jungle gyms”—and climb they did. The goats were amusing, rambunctious, and affectionate. Astrid had never allowed furry pets—Nicky had had a lizard for a few years, and Elliot had asked for, received, and then returned a snake—and Porter sometimes thought that if she had grown up with dogs or cats, she would be a happier adult.
Kids were born starting in the late summer. Clap Happy wasn’t big enough to keep all the kids, but Porter loved watching them being born, watching their skinny legs and knobby knees straighten and bear weight. She had two human employees—Grace and Hugh—and they were inside turning the enormous vats of milk into cheese. Rachel wanted to see where the magic happened. It was a field trip. Porter leaned against the fence and stuck a straw of hay in her teeth when she saw Rachel’s car pull up.
“You are really going for it, huh,” Rachel said, and laughed.
“This is how we do it in the country,” Porter said.
“Oh, please. They’re so cute!” Rachel stuck her hand through the fence, and two of the Alpines came over to nuzzle her fingers.
“That’s Boo Boo and Cassius Clay,” Porter said.
“You name them?” Rachel looked surprised. Rachel’s parents were city folk, through and through. Porter was surprised that Rachel had decided not to be, that she’d come back to Clapham.
“Of course I name them; I see them all day long, I have to call them something.”
“Aren’t they all women? I mean, female? Because they’re for milk?” Rachel was getting licked.
“I don’t believe in gender norms,” Porter said. “That’s why her name is going to be Elvis.” She rubbed her belly.
“You’re joking.” Rachel stopped and looked at her.
“I am. But maybe she’s a he, who knows? I’m open-minded. Come on, let’s go in.” Porter opened the gate and led Rachel to the jungle gym, where two more goats were playing.
“Do you ever feel like you just swallowed a lava lamp?” Rachel asked. “You know, like, little balls of goo floating up and down?”
“Ha, yes,” Porter said. “Also like hearing a squirrel just inside a wall, like, just tapping and trying to find its way out.”
“Also like I’m going to give birth and it’s just going to be the most massive poop in the world, with no actual baby.” Rachel stopped and put her hands flat against her belly. “I’m sorry. You’re not poop.”
“I love you,” Porter said. “Why are we the only normal people in the world? I’m so sick of all the books and apps that are like, golly gee, it’s an avocado!” She scratched Cassius Clay on the ear. “Do you actually have a name yet?” This was one of the reasons Porter was sorry not to have a partner—there was no one to bounce names off, no one to quickly rule out Jezebel or Strawberry or Loretta. Friends and family all had opinions, but their opinions didn’t matter, not really. This is what partners were for. She did have names on her list, real ones, but they existed only on a small piece of paper in her bedroom: Athena Cassiopeia Ursa Agnes Eleanor Louisa. She added to it and crossed things out but had yet to actually assign a single name to the person in her body.
“My husband’s friend just had a baby and named him Felix, which I really like,” said Rachel. Rachel didn’t know what she was having, a choice that Porter respected in other people but could never have handled herself, like being a marathon runner or going camping in the winter.
“I like Felix,” Porter said, crossing it off her future boy list in her head. Almost every woman she knew had been keeping lists like that since they were twenty. She and Rachel had talked about baby names when they were fourteen! It had been baked into both of them, this desire. It wasn’t for everyone, but Porter and Rachel had both been the type to plan ahead. Sometimes Porter looked at the most popular girl names for New York State just to rule things out. She didn’t want her daughter to have a name that six other girls in her first-grade class would have, one of many. She wanted to choose a name that would work for a Supreme Court justice, or an engineer, or a stern but fair high school English teacher, the kind of person who would have a library named after her someday.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Rachel asked, extending her hand to get snuffled by Boo Boo again, a true glutton for attention, as most of the goats were. “All the people I could have married. Not that anyone else asked me! But all the strangers I could have chosen to have a baby with. Like, Sliding Doors, but with my life, instead of Gwyneth Paltrow. Is that the most depressing thing you’ve ever heard?”
Porter shook her head. “Yes. I mean, no, it’s not the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. It’s my entire life. It’s also a fun game to play for other people. The good news is that I think you have to stop when you have children, because you know that whoever you give birth to wouldn’t be there if you’d made different choices. And when Elvis is born, or Felix, or Tallulah, or whoever, you and I are going to look at them and say, fuck, I’m glad you’re here, and not someone else, and whatever choices you made led you to that person, your little person, and so the past becomes perfect. The future can always change, but not the past. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “At least I hope so.”
Rachel shuffled over and wrapped her arms around Porter’s middle, the gentlest tackle. “Thank you for saying that. Why did we ever stop being friends? It’s so nice to be your friend. Right? Am I crazy?”
“You’re not crazy,” Porter said, and hugged her friend back. The goats gathered around their legs, a happy herd, always looking for more treats, more fun. One stepped on her foot and then wagged its tail. “I don’t know why. I mean, it’s not hard to keep in touch. I guess it’s ea
sier than it used to be. Texting.”
“Oh, let’s be text friends, yes,” Rachel said. “Let’s text each other all day long. I’ll text you when my students are driving me crazy because they won’t stop texting.” She laughed, still hovering around Porter’s bump.
“In my head, I’m already texting you,” Porter said. “There, I just sent another one.” There had been reasons, though not good ones. Were there ever good reasons, for not being a good friend? She remembered a slumber party with six or seven girls, all of them in sleeping bags on the floor of her bedroom like hot dogs on a grill, lying next to each other, eyes wide open in the dark, talking about love. Each girl, in turn, proclaimed the boy she like liked, and then all the other girls would shriek and laugh. Rachel went before Porter, and she’d said Jeremy’s name first. When Porter said his name a minute later, all the other girls ooooooohed, because, of course, only one could win. It was like voting in a primary election: You could support only one friend’s crush on a boy. You couldn’t back two candidates in the same race. Was that when their friendship had begun to wane, that night? They had both sworn it was nothing and had banded together, but a few months later, when Jeremy had saved a seat for Porter in the last row of the school bus, Make Out Row, as it was called, she had zipped onto the pleather cushion as fast as her legs could carry her. It was nothing, of course, just a high school romance, kid stuff. Friends understood. Porter could say that to Rachel now, that she’d been a jerk, and it would be okay. Everyone made mistakes, especially when they were full of hormones and lust, the molten core of every teenage girl. And after that, Jeremy had been her primary relationship, the most important thing, and everything else had suffered, though she hadn’t mourned it at the time. She could tell Rachel that too. She would, when the right moment presented itself.
What Porter couldn’t (and wouldn’t) say was how often she imagined going back in time and marrying Jeremy Fogelman, how many times over the year she had punched things in her bedroom and thought, What the fuck, twenty-year-old Porter? Who were you waiting for? Because then she could have a person who she loved instead of just borrowing him illicitly, on and off, over the last eighteen years. She hadn’t told anyone. Everyone—her mother, Rachel, John Sullivan—knew that Jeremy had been her boyfriend when she was a kid, but no one knew that it had gone on well after Jeremy got married. They often met at the barn, but sometimes, when they were feeling a little luxurious, they went to Manhattan, and got the smallest room at the best hotel they could afford. Vets had annual conferences, too, in sexy locations such as Minneapolis in February! Memphis in August! Porter could always find a handy excuse. It came back to planting the flag: He was hers first. Whatever came after got layered on top, like whipped cream and sprinkles. Whatever she and Jeremy were to each other, it was the base. They were the bananas in the banana split.
The last time they’d slept together, almost two years ago, they’d gone into the city—all the way to Brooklyn, where people their age were still finding themselves. They did what they usually did, which was that Porter checked into a hotel (this time a new and glossy place that was shaped like an upside-down pyramid), and then she and Jeremy would “run into” each other at either a bar or a restaurant or a movie theater and sit next to each other, shocked and amazed at the coincidence. Then they’d go back to the hotel, have sex a few times, take a shower, and then Jeremy would leave and Porter would watch bad television and sleep alone in the clean hotel sheets. It was a pretty sublime arrangement, if you didn’t think about it too much.
But this time was different. Porter had had something on her mind. They’d had dinner at a Mexican restaurant nearby, and she’d had three strong margaritas, each one making her tongue more wiggly in her mouth.
“So,” she said. They were stumbling down the hallway in the hotel, bumping into the walls and each other. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Me too,” Jeremy said. “I’ve been thinking about taking off your pants and licking your clit until you scream.”
“Stop it,” Porter said. “I mean, that sounds good, let’s come back to that in a minute. But I’m serious.” She slowed to a stop, bracing herself against a doorframe. “You aren’t happy.”
Jeremy laughed. “How can you say that? I have everything I could possibly want.” He came closer, squeezing her sides with his big hands. Porter put her palm flat against his chest.
“You don’t have me, not really.”
“Of course I do, look at us!” He leaned forward and started kissing her neck.
“But you also have Kristen.”
Jeremy straightened back up. “Come on, Port.”
“I told you, I’ve been thinking. You aren’t happy in your marriage, and I’m right fucking here! You always said that you would be okay with me finding someone, and I have. I found you. I want to cut the bullshit, Jeremy. I want to have babies before I’m too old, and who would I have babies with, if not with you?”
But Jeremy had already had his kids. He’d also had a vasectomy, years ago, when his youngest was four. And that was it, she’d drawn the line, a line carved with her own wants and frustrations, and he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) cross it. They’d gone into the hotel room and had sex twice in a row, which Porter had understood as a mutual admittance that they would never have sex this good again, with anyone. After that, there were no more hotel rooms, no more well-lit lobby bars in remote cities, no more midmorning fucks in the barn, her back against the grainy wood. The one positive aspect to breaking up with a person you weren’t married to was that it could all vanish in a puff of smoke: there were no lawyers, no shared assets, no bookshelves or record collections to peel apart. And so Porter had moved on. She dated people she didn’t care about. She swiped right. What had he said? It was timing. When they met, they were too young, and she wasn’t ready. When he was ready to get married, there was Kristen, Kristen who had been born with a wish-list registry, who had a favorite diamond shape. Porter didn’t care about jewelry. That was the very worst part of being an adult, understanding that there was no fairness in the world, no unseen hand on the Ouija board. There was only the internet and the paths you chose for whatever stupid reason that seemed right at the time, when you had one extra drink at a party, or were feeling lonely at exactly the moment that someone else was too. And wasn’t everyone, always?
Rachel put out her hand and Boo Boo licked it again, and finding nothing there, turned tail and ran away, bleating, as if warning the rest of her friends that these two round humans had nothing to offer. Rachel coughed, and then laughed. “Do you have a human bathroom here? I think I just wet my pants.”
“Right this way,” Porter said, leading her inside.
Chapter 14
Cecelia’s First Day
Clapham Junior High, from the outside, was a brick fortress. It had green grass and a flagpole and a parking lot. Cecelia’s school in Brooklyn had been unremarkable in different ways—crowded, diverse, with kids from a thousand different countries; inedible, bland food in vast quantities—but she had yet to discover the center of the Venn diagram in which the schools overlapped. Lockers? Hallways? It wasn’t a long list. She’d gone into the school building exactly once, with Astrid, for a new-student orientation, an hour-long chatty tour by a seventh grader named Kimberly. Why did schools not understand that the best person to introduce kids to a new school would be someone who acted like it was no big whoop? No one wanted to be singled out for anything. All anyone in the middle of puberty wanted was a larger rock to hide under, and the spotlight pointed somewhere else.
August had told her that his stop was before hers on the bus, and that he’d probably be on it, depending on his parents. Cecelia was trying hard to play down her attachment to the idea of their being friends. He might not even be on the bus, she kept telling herself, and if he wasn’t, she’d be okay, she’d just choose an empty seat, or sit next to a girl who smiled, literally any girl who smiled. The girl didn’t
even need to offer teeth, just lips in the shape of a shallow crescent. It didn’t mean anything. It was just a bus ride.
Her old school didn’t start for another week, and Cecelia was keeping abreast of her former friends’ lives on Snapchat and Instagram. There were the Finstas and the Rinstas—the fake and the real, the accounts that your parents could see, where every kid posted things about school and new haircuts and cute dogs on the street, and the accounts where you could see more bare skin and authentic teen misery. Katherine had blocked her on both, but some of the peripheral friends in their group hadn’t, and so Cecelia could catch glimpses of what was going on in her old life. Sonya had cut her hair and dyed it pink. Maddy had been posting more pouty selfies than usual, which probably meant that she’d broken up with her boyfriend, a friendly toucher who offered to give everyone back rubs in the hallway but then always put his hands just a half-inch too close to your boobs. Cecelia wanted to comment but was afraid that Katherine would respond and then a hole in the earth would open up and Cecelia would have to jump in. She already felt bad enough about the whole thing, sort of, even though she knew what she’d done (tell her parents, tell Katherine’s parents, tell their teacher) was the objective Right Thing to Do. Sometimes doing the right thing sucked.
Gammy had agreed to wait inside the house, and not watch her get on the bus, but Cecelia saw her face in the window, though Astrid had quickly disappeared behind the curtain. The bus had clearly been serviced since the accident—it had a gleaming new paint job, bright yellow with black letters so glossy they looked wet. The door folded open, revealing a skinny woman with pale skin and hair dyed as dark and wet as the black painted letters. She looked nervous, which Cecelia could understand. It probably wasn’t easy to step into a job recently vacated by a vehicular manslaughter, even if it meant the bar for surpassing the previous standard was rock bottom.