by Emma Straub
Chapter 36
Astrid Is Ready
Astrid drove Birdie to the shop, dropped her off, and kept driving, her big car slow and heavy on the shadow-dappled roads. October was the most glorious month of the year—the summers could be hot and the winters snowy, but fall was perfection. She could drive these streets blindfolded, if there were no people or dogs to avoid, that was how deeply her muscles knew every turn. She drove past Spiro’s, past the grocery store, past Clap Happy’s red barn, past the YMCA, past Heron Meadows’s fat spider body, past the train station, past Porter’s house, past the church where Elliot and Wendy had gotten married, past the junior high school, past the high school, and around the roundabout six times, crisscrossing back and forth across town. Nicky had texted to say he was in town, and had stayed at Porter’s for the night, and would come over and visit in the late morning. Nicky back at home made her nervous—she knew he didn’t like Clapham, or maybe that he didn’t like her. With two parents, there was always someone else to blame for being difficult, but with one, there was no cushion. Astrid wanted to make their relationship better, even though whatever she’d tried to do to make it better usually made it worse. Giving him space, not getting angry when he was out late, the way she’d been with Elliot. She had tried to correct mistakes! That was the problem with being part of a family: Everyone could mean well and it could still be a disaster. Love didn’t cure all, not in terms of missed communication and hurt feelings during an otherwise uneventful dinner conversation. Love couldn’t change the misread tone of a text message or a quick temper.
She had called Nicky and Juliette individually and explained what had happened at Cecelia’s school. At this school. Astrid knew that she’d been distracted for the poor girl. If Barbara had died earlier, she might not have said yes to their idea of Cecelia’s coming to stay at all. Astrid was happy to have her—she loved Cecelia. The problem was Barbara. The problem was that she, Astrid, a woman, a person, turned out not to be made of steel the way her children thought she was.
* * *
—
It was the first time Nicky had been in Clapham since the twins were born. Three years! Astrid could remember when three years seemed like an eternity, when her children had to count their ages using quarters and halves because an entire year was an endless expanse they could not yet see across. Now three years seemed like days or weeks, except that Nicky was her baby, and long or short, fast or slow, any time without him within her walls felt like a tragedy. But who could she complain to? Porter and Elliot were used to living in Nicky’s charismatic shadow, and that wasn’t fair, she couldn’t complain to them. Russell was gone. And two out of three of her children lived within five minutes—Astrid also couldn’t complain to any of her friends, whose children had all moved to Los Angeles or Portland or Chicago, places that required airplanes and scheduled FaceTime dates so that their grandchildren remembered what they looked like. Juliette and Cecelia had come to visit two or three times a year, spending weekends here and there just for fun, to hit up the petting zoo and swim in the local pool, when Brooklyn got too sticky. It wasn’t that long, really—they weren’t estranged or anything horrible like that, he just didn’t like to come, and he liked to be by himself, and he liked to travel. Once children appeared, there were not limitless opportunities to visit. Astrid understood. It felt greedy, unseemly even, for a mother to hunger after her adult son’s love.
Astrid turned and found herself on Elliot’s street. She supposed that she had been headed there from the beginning. It was that way with children—they each wanted different things. Where one would always want to be cuddled and hugged, another would want space and silence. Astrid had tried, she had tried, to give each of her children what they needed, but it was an impossible job to do perfectly. She assumed he hadn’t seen his brother yet, and Astrid wanted to invite Elliot over for dinner—she wanted to have all her children and grandchildren in the house at the same time. It was such a simple idea—not for a holiday or a celebration, where one person was the center maypole, around whom everyone else spun, but just because they could, because they were all alive at the same time, and wasn’t it a miracle? The older Astrid got, the more she understood that she and her parents and she and her children were as close as people could be, that generations slipped away quickly, and that the twenty-five years in between her and her mother and the thirtyish years in between her and her children were absolutely nothing, that there were still people who had lived through the Holocaust, which had happened less than a decade before she was born, but which her children had read about in their history textbooks. It happened before you could blink. Her children had been children, and now they were adults; they were all adults here, now.
Astrid parked her car in Elliot’s driveway and then rang his bell, which was loud and electronic, an ostentatious imitation of bells. No one answered, and so she tried the knob and found that the door was open. The picture window in the living room showed Wendy and the boys outside. Wendy was on her knees tending to someone’s boo-boo. She was a good mother—tough but loving. Astrid respected Wendy, who seemed to have endless patience for two children who could be extremely trying. Astrid thought the twins were more difficult than her own children had been, but the 1980s were a different time, and less had been expected of her. They’d barely had seatbelts. She wanted to offer more to Wendy—more babysitting, more advice, more charming tales about Elliot and his siblings as small children, but she knew it would be unwelcome and so she kept her mouth shut. Whenever she had let herself start to babble about something tiny baby Elliot had done, the way he’d plop down on his fat diaper when he was learning to walk, Elliot would narrow his eyes and stare at her like she was asking about the current state of his bowel movements.
* * *
—
Elliot’s office door was closed. It was such a big house—Aidan and Zachary shared a room, and the other bedrooms, for additional children Wendy and Elliot might have had, were used for absurd purposes that they had brainstormed out of necessity: a home gym, a playroom, a library, for which they had purchased leather-bound, hardback books by the foot, books that they never even remotely intended to read. Astrid knocked on the door and waited for Elliot’s response. She heard him sigh, already exasperated, and then slowly turned the knob.
Elliot was golfing. That is, he was pretending to golf, with a video game on the TV screen. Astrid hated that he had a television in his office. That wasn’t an office, it was a clubhouse, a teenager’s fantasy of what grown-up life was like.
“Hi, Mom,” Elliot said, without turning around.
“How did you know it was me?” Astrid asked.
Elliot bent his elbows back in a faux swing, only a tiny controller in his hands, and whacked a pretend ball high into the simulacrum of a blue sky.
A score appeared on the screen, and then Elliot clicked a button, turning the screen gray; he tossed the controller onto his desk. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things, can I sit?” Astrid pointed toward the leather chair opposite Elliot’s desk. He nodded, and she sat primly, ankles crossed, with her purse on her lap.
Elliot picked up his phone off his desk and pressed some buttons. “Sure. I have a call soon, about a thing, but yeah.” He sat on the edge of his desk like an impatient high school principal.
Her heart was beating fast in her chest, thumping closer to the surface than usual. She looked at Elliot’s body, still as slim as when he was a boy. There was no fixed point in a person’s life, no definitive period. Yes, one’s friends from childhood always seemed like grown-up versions of children, and work colleagues were hard to imagine as adolescents with elaborate orthodontia, but when Astrid looked at her eldest son, she saw all of him at once: the sporty teen, the charming toddler, the inconsolable baby, the law student, the husband, the new father. All of them here, all of them exactly Elliot.
“I’m sorry,” Ast
rid said. Elliot had moved from the desk to stand before the window. She stood now behind him, both of them staring out at the lawn. Zachary and Aidan were outside, taking turns whacking Wiffle balls off a plastic T-ball stand. They swung their whole little bodies every time, nearly falling to the ground, no matter if they hit the ball or not. Wendy was sitting a safe distance away in an Adirondack chair. The boys were rough on people and things but not each other, and Astrid liked watching them wait patiently and rotate through their batting lineup of two.
Elliot stiffened. “Did Porter call you? Wendy?”
“About what? No, honey, I need to apologize to you.” She’d been doing it wrong; he didn’t understand. “It’s about Barbara Baker, actually. She was the one who told me that she’d seen you, do you remember?”
Elliot turned around to look at her. The sun was shining behind him, which put his face in shadow. “Jesus, Nicky was right, you are obsessed with Barbara Baker. It’s weird. Do I remember what?”
For a moment, Astrid wondered if she’d concocted the whole thing, if it had been a dream. But no: She could tell the difference between her imagination and her memory, at least most of the time. “You were in the seventh grade. I told you that someone had told me that they’d seen you. That someone had seen you. On the rocks, by the water. With that sweet boy, the one who moved away. And I told you to stop whatever it was that you were doing. That’s what I’m apologizing for.” It was too little, of course, too little and too late by decades. But still, Astrid felt something lift off her shoulders the moment the words were out of her mouth. “I’m sorry, my love. It must have had more to do with me than I realized. You weren’t doing anything wrong.”
Elliot cocked his head to one side. His face—what she could see—was impassive. “I don’t remember that,” he said. There was a thunk outside, but neither of them turned to look. The boys were cheering. One of them had connected and sent the ball sailing through the air. Wendy was clapping, and they could hear the sharp smacks of her flat palms.
“Your friend, Jack? His parents moved to California, to Berkeley, I’m pretty sure. Not too far from where Wendy’s from, actually. You don’t remember him?” Childhood was infuriating this way—she’d felt it over and over, when one of her children (all three of them!) would inevitably forget the words to a song she’d sung to them five hundred times, or a book they’d read, curled up together, six, seven, eight times a day, and then time passed and they had no recollection, and the information was stuck there in Astrid’s head, marked as important. Maybe this was just another Runaway Bunny, something that she’d weighed down with meaning over the years until it was an anvil around her neck, when really, it was her own anvil, not his. “Oh,” Astrid said. “Well. He was a boy, and you were close friends.” She stopped there.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Elliot said, finally. “It’s fine. I’m sure it wasn’t that bad, whatever it was.” Elliot’s phone began to vibrate on his desk, and he jerked himself away. “I have to take this.” He picked up the phone and said hello, and then he opened his office door and waited for his mother to leave. Astrid stepped into the hall and then Elliot closed the door behind her. She had done it. She had done it. Astrid lifted her chin and saw herself out.
Chapter 37
Couples Massage
The first time, Porter and Jeremy had broken up in person, and so this time, it seemed fine to do it over the phone. Porter thought that her resolve would be stronger if she didn’t have to look at his face. She didn’t know why his face was so irresistible to her, but it was. Diabetics didn’t have to stare at a fridge full of Coca-Colas when they went cold turkey. Sometimes the easy way out was fine.
It was a weekday, and so Porter called the clinic. His assistant, whose name was either Stephanie or Tracy, Porter could never remember, put him on. Porter’s heart was beating fast, but she knew what she had to do.
“Hey,” Jeremy said.
“Hey,” Porter said. “Again. I know I’ve said it before, but this was all my fault, us doing this again. It’s not good for either of us. Right? Don’t you think?” She hated herself for asking the question, as if it was an open matter, still to be decided.
“That’s what you always say.” She could hear the smirk in his voice. Jeremy didn’t need to be sitting in front of her, Porter could see his face just as clearly over the phone.
“Yeah, well. This time I mean it. Bye, Jeremy.” She clicked the phone off before he had a chance to respond. Her tear ducts were dry, but her hands were shaking. Porter closed her eyes and took a deep breath. In the momentary dark, she could see it all: the two of them as idiot kids, herself in the parade, the cold waiting room, the first time they’d slept together afterward, the first time they’d slept together after he got married. Porter wanted to be better than she was. If her brothers were right, parenthood was all about making mistakes. Now that she was so close, Porter wanted to start making them by accident instead of on purpose. Maybe someday she’d tell Elliot that she’d listened to him. She exhaled again and then picked her phone back up. Porter scrolled through her contacts until she found what she was looking for. She hit Call and waited for a few rings. When Rachel answered, Porter got right to it.
“I have a plan.”
* * *
—
At four P.M., Porter was standing in a parking lot when Rachel pulled up. It wasn’t a Parade Crew day, and so she was free right after school. They were both bigger now, Porter saw, well past the point of plausible deniability. Rachel’s coat was open, her belly laughing at the idea of a zipper.
“Hi there, pregnant lady,” Rachel said.
“Hello there, pregnant lady,” Porter said back. They hugged, and Porter slung her arm around Rachel’s shoulders.
“So what exactly is happening here?” She pointed to the building they were standing behind. It was the Seascape Spa, never mind that the sea was hours away. “Pedicures?”
“Oh no,” Porter said, guiding her down the stone path toward the door. “You’ll see.”
The young woman inside took their coats. The sound of a babbling brook came from speakers in every corner of the room, which made it feel less like a brook and more like being caught in the bottom of a drain during a torrential downpour.
“I have to pee,” Rachel said.
“What else is new?” Porter asked, and knocked into her shoulder.
The receptionist offered them both mocktail mimosas—orange juice mixed with seltzer. “I think half a glass of champagne won’t hurt us,” Rachel said. “What do you think, Port?”
“For sure,” Porter said. The girl squirmed, clearly uncomfortable, visions of brain damage dancing in her head. “Just the orange juice is fine.” The girl melted, relieved, and left them alone in a room filled with overstuffed chairs and a large fake fireplace.
“Mmm,” Rachel said. She took a sip and then sank into one of the chairs. “I can almost taste the three drops of mediocre champagne she was thinking about pouring in.”
Porter took a sip too. “Oh yes. Hints of citrus.”
Two women poked their heads into the waiting room. “Couples massage?” said the taller, sturdier woman.
“Yep,” Porter said. She reached for Rachel’s hand. “Let’s do it, baby.”
Rachel laughed. “When you think about it, it’s more than a couples massage—it’s a quadruples massage.”
The tall, sturdy woman and her short, stout counterpart led Porter and Rachel down a dimly lit hallway into an even dimmer room. In it, there were two massage tables side by side, the covers pulled back in crisp identical triangles. In the center of each table was a divot—a hole.
“What in the world?” Rachel asked. She touched the hole with her fingers.
“It’s for your belly, miss. If you’d rather not, you can always stay on your side. But some of our clients prefer it.”
Rachel looked up at Porter. “You got me a ho
le.” She began to laugh. Her body shook, a cartoon Santa.
“I’m sorry for being an a-hole. I didn’t plan that joke, but I think it works, don’t you?” Porter asked.
Rachel offered a generous chuckle. “Wait, I still have to pee.” She toddled down the dark hallway while Porter took off her clothes and tried her best to maneuver herself gracefully under the cover. Her belly slid into the hole. It felt like swimming. She closed her eyes and listened to the flush from the bathroom, and then to the sound of Rachel making her way back in, and taking off her clothes layer by layer, with no small amount of grunting. Porter listened to Rachel climb up on the table and assume the same position.
“Aaaahhh,” Rachel said, from the face cradle. “This is great.”
“It hasn’t even started yet,” Porter said. She slid her left arm out from under the sheet and reached into the gully between the two tables. “Rach,” she said. Rachel picked up her face and saw Porter’s hand, then slid her right arm out to meet it. They clasped fingers. Porter wanted to tell Rachel that she’d finally done it, gotten rid of Jeremy, but as far as Rachel knew, she already had long before.