by Emma Straub
Chapter 25
Working Together
The contract wasn’t as solid as it seemed. Wendy went through all the points quickly. They were alone in Elliot’s office. This was why they needed extra help with the kids—because in addition to her part-time job, Wendy had taken on a pro bono client: her husband. Beauty Bar was offering more money than the other businesses on Main Street, it was true, but they were offering only a five-year lease, with an option to renew, with rent increases of only half a percent for the entire length of their lease. They wanted the landlord to pay for everything else—snow removal, air-conditioning, the rent during the time it would take to build the store, which could be up to nine months, much longer than the standard three.
“So, no way! Right?” Elliot had shut the office door so that they were talking in private. He’d built his career by building houses, which was just managing crews and couples, basically, and usually the architects and interior designers got the brunt of those problems. The most trouble he had was when people wanted to move outlets and bathrooms, without understanding that both power and water came from somewhere else and didn’t just appear in a wall by magic.
“This is a first offer,” Wendy said. “They’re testing you.”
Elliot nodded. “Okay. Okay. So now what?”
“You make a counteroffer, and take all this garbage out, and tell them what you actually want, and if they don’t come back to it, I will give you a million dollars. Do you know how much money they have, El? This company makes billions of dollars. They can pay for everything. They just don’t want to if they don’t have to.”
“And what if they take it?” Elliot looked out the window, where a pair of squirrels were chasing each other up a tree. “Then we have to do it?”
“You don’t have to do it until you’ve signed a contract,” Wendy said.
Elliot put his hands on his jaw and rubbed. “I think I’ve been grinding my teeth.” He paced. “On the one hand, I want it,” he said. “It would change the whole town, and I would be the one who did it. But on the other hand, it would change the whole town, and I would be the one who did it.”
“There will be other offers,” Wendy said. “We could do more research, take some polls, you know, find out what people want. Do they want beauty products? Sure. But maybe there’s something they want more. I’m telling you, El, this not-great offer is the sign that they will eventually make you a really, really good offer. I can feel it.” Wendy opened her laptop and started typing. “I’m just taking everything out and starting over. I love this. I feel like an assassin.”
Elliot raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”
Wendy didn’t look up.
“That’s kind of hot, Wen.”
Now she looked up. Elliot walked slowly back over to his desk. His office manager sat outside, down the hall. Out of eyeshot and earshot, especially when the door was closed.
“I’ll tell you when something’s hot,” Wendy said. A twitch in her lower lip gave her away. “Sit down.”
Elliot wheeled his chair so that it was next to hers, both of them facing away from the door. Wendy unbuttoned her own pants, and then his.
“Ask me if you can touch me,” she said.
“Can I touch you?” Elliot asked.
“Yes.”
Wendy took Elliot’s hand and snaked it past her waistband.
“I’m not going to ask you,” she said. “I’m just going to do whatever I want to you, and you’re going to like it.”
“Yes,” Elliot said, his eyes fluttering closed in concentration. It was just like when they were in the library in college, so hungry for each other’s bodies that they’d have sex in the unisex bathrooms. It wasn’t that the children had taken away Elliot’s desire for his wife, or his appreciation of her body and all the things it could do—it was just that they were always so fucking tired all the time. In the land before children, Elliot had loved Wendy like crazy—how smart she was, how beautiful she was, how confident she was. She had always been out of his league, but somehow, she’d loved him back. They had both wanted children, but it felt so good to remember, before that, how much they had both wanted each other. How did anyone with kids under six do anything at all? This was how, maybe. They did things during the day—legal things, pleasurable things, any thing. He wanted to do what she said forever.
Chapter 26
Join the Parade
The Parade Crew met in seventh period, when the school day was officially over but when all the sports teams had their practices, and the halls filled with the sounds of student musicians wheeling their cello cases across the floor. Cecelia waited in the hall until just before the bell rang, then walked into her homeroom. She was in no hurry.
Ms. Skolnick was sitting on her desk with her knees wide apart, a folding table in front of her. There were half a dozen kids scattered around the room, no one that Cecelia recognized. One boy in the back of the class seemed to have a five o’clock shadow, which would have made him look like an adult if he hadn’t also been wearing a tie-dyed Pokémon T-shirt and CJHS gym shorts. A girl with long black hair sat in the front row, hands clasped in front of her like she was on her knees in church. A boy and a girl sat in the second row, holding hands across the space between their desks. The boy had a crown made out of duct tape. August, already rolling his eyes, clapped.
“Cecelia!” Ms. Skolnick said, with genuine enthusiasm. “Yes! Come on in!”
Cecelia made her way to the seat next to August and tucked her bag by her feet.
“Now, hello! As most of you know, this club will move to the woodshop next week in order to get down to business, but we’ll spend the first session planning in here. It’s a remarkably quick process, and superfun! Let’s start by brainstorming! For those of you who weren’t here”— Ms. Skolnick winked at Cecelia—“last year’s theme for the float was Lord of the Rings. Anyone care to start? Anyone want to take the chalk?”
The boy with the duct-tape crown sprang to his feet, held his palm open for the chalk, and then spun back around.
“My lady,” he said, and dropped to a knee. He held the thin white piece of chalk over his head like the world’s tiniest sword.
His girlfriend, a redhead with a Fortnite T-shirt, bowed and then slid out of her desk, took the chalk, and walked to the blackboard, swinging her hips like she were a Victoria’s Secret angel.
“WTF,” Cecelia whispered to August.
August leaned closer. “Oh, yeah, it’s like that. Megan and James have been going out since fifth grade. They’re probably going to get married. She apparently goes down on him in the bathroom every Friday during lunch. Not that I want to spread rumors! But that is what people say. They do theater tech, and that includes floats, I guess.”
The redhead, Megan, got to the blackboard and cleared her throat.
“Bob’s Burgers!” said the kid in tie-dye. Megan wrote it down slowly, in bubbly letters.
“Into the Woods!” said James. “Or, just more generally, fairy tales.”
“Elizabeth Taylor,” August said. When Cecelia turned to look, surprised that he’d spoken, he said, “What? As long as I’m here, might as well contribute.”
Fifteen minutes later, the following list was on the board: Bob’s Burgers, Into the Woods/fairy tales, Elizabeth Taylor, 1001 Arabian Nights, Rock and Roll, the 1980s, Shakespeare, the Empire State, and Clapham FTW. August got up to go to the bathroom, and as soon as he was gone, the girl sitting in front of Cecelia turned around.
“Hey,” the girl said. She was the one wearing all black, down to her fingernails and eyeliner. “You’re Cecelia, right?”
It didn’t sound promising. “Yeah?” Cecelia said, as though she were unsure of the answer.
“I’m Melody,” the girl said. “Seventh grade.”
“Hi,” Cecelia said.
“Can I ask you something? Well, two somet
hings, really.” Melody waited.
“Okay,” Cecelia said.
Melody leaned halfway across the expanse between their desks, and after a moment’s hesitation, Cecelia leaned in the other direction to meet her there, their heads nearly touching.
“You’re friends with August, right? Is he gay? He’s gay, right?” Cecelia’s eyes were level with Melody’s temple, and she watched the thin skin move in and out as Melody breathed.
“I don’t know,” Cecelia said. It actually hadn’t occurred to her, which instantly made her feel very, very stupid, even though of course she didn’t know if it was true. Her generation—at least at home—had been open-minded, at least that’s what her father said, with awe, you kids are all so open, even though the alternative seemed like choosing to live in a previous incarnation of the world, like the people who were into steampunk and wore stovepipe hats. But who knew if that was true here. This was how rumors worked—no matter if something was true or not, if it sounded like it might be true, and was something you hadn’t actually imagined yourself, then truthfulness seemed triply more likely. Who cared if Megan and James really had sex, or did whatever, in a bathroom? If everyone said they did, what was the difference? That was how she’d ended up in Clapham. Obviously Cecelia hadn’t understood as much as she thought she had about the way her generation worked.
“Okay, fine, whatever,” Melody said. “Second question. Is it true you got kicked out of your old school for sleeping with someone you met on the internet? How did they find out? Your school, I mean. Because . . .”—here Melody paused and took a breath—“. . . because I’ve been talking to a guy who’s a freshman in the high school and he’s friends with my older brother and nothing’s happened yet but he said that in two years, when I’m a freshman and he’s a junior, he wants to take me to junior prom, which actually seems sweet, but he’s not, like, my boyfriend, and I definitely don’t want to get kicked out of school. What do you think?”
Cecelia sat back up and shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
Melody stayed where she was, clearly still waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know,” Cecelia said. “That doesn’t sound like something that could get you kicked out of school. Tell your parents, maybe?”
“Oh, they know,” Melody said. She nodded vigorously. “But good, good. Okay. Thank you!”
Ms. Skolnick had pushed herself off the desk. She grabbed a mug, checked to see that it was empty, and said, “Okay, everyone! Time to vote! Grab a piece of paper, write down your vote, then pop it in!” Cecelia was happy for the interruption. She tore a small corner of paper out of her notebook and hunched over. August slid back into his seat.
“Voting time? You better vote for mine.” He hunched over, too, as if they were taking a test and he didn’t want her to cheat off his page. Maybe they were.
Ms. Skolnick walked up and down the aisles, holding her cup out like a beggar, until everyone had dropped their folded choices in. When everyone had put in their vote, she walked back to her desk.
“Anyone care to tally?” Megan sauntered back to the board like a bored Vanna White.
In the end, it was a gentle victory for Clapham FTW, which had squeaked ahead by a single vote.
“Well, okay,” Ms. Skolnick said, surprised. “Not really sure what that means, but we can make it work.”
“Maybe it can be round, with a gazebo in the middle,” Cecelia heard herself say. “You know, like the town? I don’t know. Maybe that’s dumb.” More than anything else, Cecelia was mad at her parents and Katherine for making her second-guess her every decision.
August gasped. “That is actually a really good idea.”
Ms. Skolnick nodded, and the rest of the Parade Crew turned around to look at Cecelia, their dark horse.
Chapter 27
Wendy Asks for a Hand
Wendy had called and asked Porter to meet her at Spiro’s, which wasn’t like her at all. Porter didn’t actually think she’d ever seen Wendy eat a meal in a Clapham restaurant, and she’d been married to Porter’s brother for a decade. Drink iced coffee, maybe, while cutting grapes in half for her sons or asking questions about the provenance of the meat in the hamburger, but never actually just dig in and eat. Porter was curious but also hungry. She left the house twenty minutes earlier than she needed to and started driving.
Now that she’d been inside Jeremy’s house, parking in front didn’t seem like such a big deal. She put the car in park but didn’t turn off the engine, just in case. It was a weekday morning, and she assumed that Jeremy was at work, but his wife could be home. She could be at the grocery store, or at the YMCA, or at the bank, or getting a manicure, or volunteering at their kids’ school, or cooking at a soup kitchen. Porter spent a considerable amount of time picturing her doing each of those activities and more, each one getting more and more virtuous until she couldn’t help but believe that Kristen was donating a kidney to a stranger while simultaneously reading to the blind. Kristen was good and she was bad. Kristen was beautiful and she was ugly. Kristen was thin and she was fat. Kristen had made all the right choices, right from the very beginning of her personhood, including but not limited to what kind of underwear to wear under which clothes, what kind of haircut to get, what kind of sex to have on which date, what to say after someone told you they loved you, what to say when someone said they wanted to marry you. She had done everything right, and Porter had limped along, making her silly, stupid mistakes, all the while thinking that there would be time to correct the course. Now she was pregnant and sitting in a running car like a getaway driver, her eyes fixed on the front door.
The light shifted; something inside the house had moved—the cat, maybe—and Porter drove away before waiting to see what it was. She drove past the clinic, slowing down enough to make sure that Jeremy’s car was in the lot. She thought about the cloth seats of his Honda, stained from years of abuse, and wondered how Kristen’s labors had been. Her pregnancies. Had she been sick, had she slept? Had she delivered vaginally, with no drugs, a Madonna of the birthing center? Or had she circled a date on the calendar and gotten a bikini wax in preparation for surgery, just to look nice? Porter felt a wave of nausea roil through her esophagus and pushed the button to roll down the window. It was sick, what she was doing, and she knew it. It was sick but it was also giving her the same kind of tingly feeling she’d had in high school and college when she saw someone she had a crush on, and no one else had to know, not yet. Humans deserved things they kept private. She wanted what she wanted. Everyone had their kink, right?
By the time Porter circled back to Spiro’s and went inside, she found Wendy already taking up prime real estate at one of the large booths. Wesley Drewes was on the radio, his sonorous voice talking to callers about the Clapham Harvest Festival, and the annual hordes of leaf-peeping tourists that would soon descend upon the Hudson Valley, taking up parking spots and restaurant tables, filling hotel rooms and campgrounds. The festival was in mid-October every year, and it was a big weekend for the town, and for Clap Happy. If every person who came to Clapham that weekend bought one of her cheeses, Porter could retire at forty. The highlight for Porter was the parade, which featured floats built and helmed by students. The year she rode on one as the Harvest Queen was a disaster, but as a spectator, she always enjoyed it.
Porter squeezed into the booth opposite Wendy, who had half a grapefruit in front of her, and a plate of toast and cottage cheese.
“Hi,” Porter said. “How are you? How’s everybody? Gorgeous day outside, isn’t it?”
Wendy shook her head. “You don’t have to do that.”
Olympia swanned by with a stack of dirty dishes in each hand. She paused. “Pancakes?” Porter nodded.
“Okay,” Porter said, relieved. “Are you okay? Why did you want to see me?” She ran a hand over her belly. It was something she’d observed in other pregnant women, too, the insatiable urge to touc
h yourself, as if to simultaneously remind yourself of your double existence and as an attempt to connect to the person on the other side, like someone touching one side of the glass in a prison visiting room. “Birth tips? Parenting advice?”
Wendy shook her head. “Not really, but we can certainly talk about that, if you like. I know you’re more, well, earthy than I am, but so much of it is unnecessary: the essential oils, the eye mask, the mix CD of birth songs, doulas. There is stuff you should actually take to the hospital: socks, pajamas, a good breastfeeding pillow, a change of clothes for . . . Oh, I guess you don’t have to worry about that.”
“For my imaginary husband? Yeah, I don’t think he needs extra clothes.” Porter felt irrationally annoyed. “So what was it? That you wanted to talk about?” She could be having breakfast with her goats, or sitting in her car in front of a veterinary clinic, she didn’t need this. If she wanted judgment, she could call her mother, or Rachel. And there were plenty of women who had had babies who could tell her what was bullshit and what wasn’t.
“Okay. Two things. So, one of the things that Elliot and I had been putting off forever, for whatever reason, is making a will. But I decided that I would go ahead and do it. Which was fine. It’s just a piece of paper, right? I’m a lawyer, we know how it works. But the one thing you have to do is choose someone who will be your children’s guardian if you die.” Wendy paused and then hiccupped. When had she started to cry? Porter had never seen either Wendy or Elliot cry, not at their wedding, not at the birth of their children. Elliot hadn’t even cried, at least not in front of her, when their father died. “And we choose you. If you agree to be chosen. I know that you’re about to have a baby, and that you are one person, so feel free to say no. Astrid is too old, my parents are too old, and on the other side of the country. I don’t have any siblings. Your brother Nicky is a pothead. Which leaves you. You’re local, so they wouldn’t have to move and leave their whole lives. You love them, they love you. They might not always show it, but they do. We would make sure that you had enough money for everything you needed. The house, if you wanted. Or the money from the house. If we’re dead, we don’t need it, you know?”