by Emma Straub
“As in strong?” Astrid felt her eyelids flicker.
“As in, um, fixed? Like, you know. Immovable?”
“A bit stiff, maybe?” Birdie added.
“Gasp!” Astrid said, pinching Birdie’s thigh. “Traitor!”
“I’m just trying to help her out!” Birdie picked up her chair by the seat and slid closer to Cecelia.
“He would definitely say that you were really organized. Neat. I know he likes that, even if he can’t do it himself,” Cecelia said. “My parents are always fighting over whose turn it is to do the dishes even though neither of them wants to do it.”
“See, that sounds like me,” Astrid said. “Okay, that’s not so bad.” She would show Nicky that she was a flexible person. That she was fun. That she was not only capable of housing and feeding his daughter, but that she was capable of providing substantive care. Astrid hadn’t had time to be warm when her children were small—there were three of them, after all, and she didn’t want to go insane. When they were teenagers, they didn’t pay attention to her, anyway—Astrid remembered picking out flowers for Porter when she was one of the Harvest Queens in the annual school parade, an honor that Porter took about as seriously as a fart, and Porter hadn’t even thanked her. When Russell died, Astrid had had to be tough. A sniveling, destroyed widow wouldn’t do, would it? Astrid didn’t think so. But now, maybe now. She could try.
“Okay, I think that’s enough food for the bear, Cecelia, don’t you?” Birdie asked. “Want some ice cream?”
“Yes, please,” Cecelia said, a child again, holding up her empty plate.
Chapter 19
Twenty Weeks
Pregnant women saw their doctors more than they saw their friends, or at least Porter did. Almost more than she saw her goats. But Porter loved Dr. McConnell. Beth McConnell was an African American woman from Albany, with enormous tortoiseshell glasses and a gap between her front teeth, the smartest, nerdiest girl in any third-grade class made good. What Porter loved most about Dr. McConnell was that she swore (“Oh, shit, I forgot the goo, I’ll be right back”) and was unpretentious, but best of all, she was Porter’s age and unmarried.
The day’s appointment was for the anatomy scan, which zoomed in on each part of the baby’s body, a detailed, slow-moving movie in real time about the completely natural and simultaneously utterly alien reality of growing one human inside another. Porter was nervous.
“So you’ll be able to see everything. Truly everything.” Porter had known for weeks that she was having a girl—mothers over thirty-five had to take extra blood tests, as the risks for all kinds of terrible birth defects skyrocketed, as if in punishment for the delayed procreation, as if the eggs themselves were in revolt, salty at not being invited to the party sooner.
“Yep,” Dr. McConnell said. “The chambers of the heart, the blood, the kidneys, the toes, the spine . . .”
“Hopefully not in that order.” Porter lay back on the chair and lifted her shirt up to the top of her rib cage. For a long time, she had just felt like she was getting fatter and softer, her whole body squishier everywhere except for her breasts, hard little rocks that dreamed of becoming boulders. Now her belly curved out in a proper parenthesis, even when she was lying flat on her back.
“Oh no,” Dr. McConnell said. She rubbed her hands together briskly. “I know it’s not cold outside, but the AC is pumping in here, and my hands are freezing, sorry.” She poked around Porter’s belly, the pads of her fingertips pressing firmly at her pubic bone—“Here’s the bottom of your uterus”—and a few inches below her sternum—“and here’s the top, that’s great. You’re measuring perfectly.” She readied the machine for the sonogram, back so soon in her routine tasks.
The word perfect made Porter’s eyes water. Dr. McConnell probably said it all the time, but Porter was grateful anyway. The idea that anything about what she was doing in life was perfect was a new one. It would have been a nice thing, Porter imagined, to hear that every so often. Rachel’s parents were always cooing about her accomplishments—on Facebook, Rachel’s feed was littered with posts from her mother—baby photos, newspaper clippings, pictures of hippos cuddling in muddy rivers. The subtext was always You are perfect. Maybe she’d always done it, or maybe she was making up for Rachel’s husband, but it didn’t matter. She was still doing it, and there was no way Rachel had asked. Astrid sometimes said things like that to Nicky. Not the word perfect, because that wasn’t how she rolled, but she’d say things like, “Oh, I was at Susan’s Bookshop and these two young ladies at the register were talking about some new book, and then one of them said, ‘It’s just like Jake George!’ And then they both put their hands over their heart and swooned.” She never said things like that about Porter, though Porter knew her mother was proud of her hard work, and what she made. But if Dr. McConnell said that Porter was measuring perfectly, that meant both she and the baby were right on track.
“Well, let’s take a closer look, then. I’m sure you want to see her.” She scooted her wheeled stool over to the wall and flicked off the lights. By the time Dr. McConnell had zoomed in on the first body part—the spine—Porter was already crying.
“I’m sorry,” Porter said. The baby’s heartbeat flickered on the screen like an airplane moving across the night sky, strong and steady.
“I’m not,” Dr. McConnell said. “She’s gorgeous.”
Porter sniffled through the rest of the exam, dabbing her eyes with a tissue every thirty seconds. The baby was curled up like a shrimp, her legs kicking gently, her bent arms pointed toward her face.
“You could always bring someone, you know,” Dr. McConnell said. “Your mother? A sibling?”
Porter pictured Astrid sitting next to her, holding her hand. Would she be crying? Would Porter be crying, if her mother was there? She pictured Elliot, checking his phone in the corner, nodding every so often in a fake show of support. Nicky might have cried. Cecelia too. She could have invited Rachel—why didn’t she? They could be each other’s plus ones! Rachel’s mother was her plus one already. Maybe Jeremy would come? She’d seen him three times now, at the barn, at her house, and once in the back of the vet clinic in the middle of the night. They didn’t talk about the baby, not really, though he did put his hand against her belly, much like the doctor had just done. Of course—he knew what he was feeling for. Dr. McConnell moved the wand, and the baby’s face came into full view. She pushed a button on the machine, and the image changed into a 3-D landscape. The picture was muddy brown, pixelated like the information had to travel a great distance, which, Porter supposed, it had—all the way through her skin, from the inside out. Porter thought about all the men in the world who got to pretend that they had done the work just because they were now losing some hours of sleep. They hadn’t done this. Women were always alone, alone with their babies. There were some burdens—some experiences—that couldn’t be shared. Porter stopped crying and watched the baby hiccup, her little body floating inside her but already having a life of her own.
* * *
—
Porter went back to work and then called her brother from the middle of the pen. It usually took six tries to get Nicky on the phone—Porter always assumed she’d have to leave a few messages before actually reaching him—and so she was surprised when he picked up after three rings.
“Puerto,” he said. “Mom told me about the baby. It’s great.”
Porter shooed a goat away from her shin. “She told you? I was going to tell you! So why didn’t you fucking call me, you freak?”
“It’s great, I said! It’s been busy! I love you!” Nicky coughed. He was always, always smoking weed. Porter assumed it was something he would grow out of, but he was thirty-six now, her baby brother, and marijuana was as much a part of his life as when he was a teenager. If he were a different kind of guy, he’d be planning a CBD oil empire or a field of marijuana plants as high as an elephant’s
eye. But not Nicky—he was just enjoying it. Not many people could walk away from being a Famous Actor, but that was her brother. Weed, yes. Fame, no. There were so many things that other people enjoyed that Nicky had turned away from—Hollywood parties, being famous enough to have his picture in magazines, casual sex—but never marijuana.
“It’s a girl.”
“Girls are the best. How’s mine?” He inhaled.
“She’s great, no thanks to you.” It wasn’t a nice thing to say, but Nicky was her brother, and that’s what siblings were for, target practice. And she knew he wouldn’t take the bait.
“She is, it’s true. Always has been. Took me a while to understand that—they are who they are, from the second they’re born. She and Astrid getting along?”
“They seem to be. I don’t think Mom is driving her crazy yet.” It was a glorious day—inching toward fall, but warm and light. If there was a place like Clapham in mid-September year-round, Porter would have moved there. And Northern California didn’t count, it was too far away.
“That’s good. I keep calling, but it’s hard to get her on the phone. Don’t laugh,” he said, but Porter was already laughing.
“Pot, kettle,” she said. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too. I really wish I could see you pregnant. It’s crazy, Puerto. You’re gonna be great. And don’t listen to Astrid, you don’t need anybody. I mean, you don’t need a husband. You need a community, you need friends who can come over with food and wash dishes and do the laundry. But you don’t need a husband. Trust me. We’re not that great.”
“You’re not so bad.” Porter reached into her pocket and found a chocolate bar she didn’t remember buying.
“And you’re feeling okay? No morning sickness? Juliette threw up, like, four times a day for months. God, I haven’t thought about that in years. She used to carry mints in her pocket, in every bag. For years, whenever we used a bag, there was a little package of barf mints in the bottom. That’s what she called them, barf mints.”
Porter was quiet. She could tell her brother wasn’t done, not quite.
“It’s so weird, having Cecelia not be with one of us. It’s like being in a constellation. You can’t see the whole picture when you’re one of the stars, you know? That’s what I feel like right now. The point of an arrow. The bottom corner of a spoon. Nothing. Juliette and I are doing our thing, you know, here and there, together, alone, whatever. But without Cecelia here, it feels like pretend, like we could both just spin off into our orbit and no one would notice or care. There’s no weight holding us together.”
It was also how Porter felt about herself and her brothers, that they were three parts of a whole that had somehow gotten untangled. She remembered being little and loving her brothers more than she loved anything else in the world, thinking (before their father died) that the three of them could run away and have adventures and that nothing bad could ever happen, because they had each other. Nicky and Elliot were so different from each other now, and they had always been, but the proximity of childhood had made the differences seem unimportant, just a part of their comedic timing, like rivals on a sitcom. Nicky was their wild little mascot, and Elliot their de facto leader, and Porter was the peanut butter, the glue. They both loved her more than they loved each other. When Nicky had been in the movie and people paid attention to him, out of nowhere, a bolt of blue, Porter and Elliot had swooped in like two bodyguards. He was the first to break away, and then when their dad died, it unhooked the rest, and Porter had spent her whole adult life trying to figure out how to put it back together. Jeremy had told her a thousand times that brothers didn’t matter—he didn’t speak to his brother more than once a year, and who cared—but Porter had never wanted to give up. She never called Elliot, and he never called her, and when they were together, Porter felt more irritated than anything else, but still. But still.
“Love you, Nicky.” He would have cried at the ultrasound, he would have held her hand. He would have said something about their dad that she’d forgotten. It wasn’t fair when people moved away—they took so much of you with them, without even meaning to.
“Love you, too, sis,” Nicky said. “Hug that girl for me, will you?”
“Of course,” Porter said, and she wrapped her arms around her own body too. Sometimes she wondered if she’d been too successful at convincing everyone in town that she was as tough as her mother, as tough as her brothers. She was so tough that no one ever checked on her, just to make sure she was doing okay, because she was always doing okay. That wasn’t true, of course, but no one ever bothered to find out. That was another thing Porter was going to do as a mom—she was going to ask her daughter how she was, and what she was feeling, at least once a week, if not once a day. She would wait for the answer.
Chapter 20
August Tells the Truth, Part One
The first way August made sense of it was thinking about the moment when cells began to come together and multiply, every human their own private science experiment. August’s parents explained it one day after school in the third grade. Making a baby was like baking a cake, August’s mother, Ruth, had said, with ingredients, and a specific order in which to do things, and then you had to wait and see if the recipe worked. So, August thought, maybe they got part of the recipe wrong, and put in too much of my mom and not enough of my dad. Maybe that’s where the feeling came from. Later, August would be embarrassed by this thought, which was wrong in a thousand ways, but kids were kids. August had been only eight.
Not wrong. Just different. The way two different people can follow the same recipe and make two different cakes, depending on how much vanilla you put in, what kind of butter you use, how long you mix things together. How patient you are. How many times you open the oven, just to check.
The clothing helped—the shop was always full of different possibilities. August’s parents thought of them as costumes but August knew better.
When August was ten, the family drove to summer camp for the first time. August had begged to go—already a good researcher, August had found the camp online. It was progressive, even for Clapham, even for the Northeast, even for people like Ruth and John who sold old clothes and composted with worms. The camp T-shirt read SUNSHINE VILLAGE CAMP IS NONCOMPETITIVE, NONRACIST, NONHOMOPHOBIC, NONTRANSPHOBIC, NONSEXIST, NOT FOR PROFIT. The word zinged in the middle and electrified August’s eyeballs every time it appeared. The camp was hidden in the woods of Massachusetts, only a few hours away, but when John turned the car down the private road that led to the camp, a collection of old barns and converted farm buildings, August felt nauseous—this summer was a test to see if anyone else noticed, to find out what happened if anyone knew the truth.
At camp, everyone was experimenting with something: macramé, bisexuality, slime, ultimate frisbee, French kissing, makeup, shaving their legs. August decided to start with a new name. August was one of twelve kids in a bunk called Evergreen, everyone equipped with two sets of sheets and a sleeping bag and a canteen and four pairs of shorts and eight T-shirts and two sweatshirts and as many pairs of underwear as they had. August’s bed was a bottom bunk, which was coveted, though August thought sleeping on top seemed like more fun, and so when August offered to swap with a kid named Danny, a curly-headed blond from Brooklyn, August was thrilled and hugged Danny, saying, “Dude! You rule!” When the bunk gathered for their first circle time, where everyone introduced themselves and said where they were from, August announced, as confidently as possible, as if it wasn’t the first time, that at home, no one actually used the name August, but Robin instead, and that they should too. And so they did. Easy as that. It felt like a tiny shaft of light piercing a pitch-black room.
Sometimes a lie wasn’t a lie when it got you closer to the truth. Sometimes a lie was more like a wish, or a prayer.
Robin Sullivan. The kind of name where you couldn’t tell. It was an in-between name, a practice name,
maybe. The girls in the bunk next door were August’s closest friends, and when August ran over to their table in the dining room every morning, they sang out “Rockin’ Robin, tweet, tweedly twee” in unison, and August’s eyes rolled back from pleasure, like a dog getting its tummy rubbed. They weren’t like the girls in Clapham, who all wore capri leggings and let their long hair grow to the middle of their backs and rode pink bicycles with pink and purple streamers and bought the same color lipstick at CVS as soon as their parents said they were allowed. The girls at camp were different. One girl had a buzz cut, one girl had three holes in one of her ears. The women counselors were different too: Some wore baggy jean cutoffs and had nose rings, and some wore tiny flowery dresses and had Rapunzel hair. One, who everyone called Goose, bragged that she’d never cut her toenails. The black girls slept with their hair wrapped in silk scarves. All the girls farted noisily and then laughed. August hadn’t been sure before, because being a girl had always been so specific, so narrow, but the girls at camp weren’t all like the ones August knew at home, and they weren’t all the same. They all thought August was gay, and it seemed silly to correct them. There were lots of gay kids at camp, and some of the older ones paired up and held hands and kissed at the end of the weekly dances, or behind bunks, when they thought no one was looking, just like the straight couples. It was like once you passed through the gate, all the rules about how things were supposed to work got erased, and instead they could just work however they wanted, in whatever way felt best, and no one ever got teased. It felt like another planet.
August had picked the camp, in part, because no one from Clapham went there, and once John and Ruth drove away, there would be no one paying attention to the things August said, no one judging those things against what they knew to be true. Or things that they thought they knew, because August had never said otherwise.