Charles jumped slightly when I opened the door, as if he were as startled as I was at the fact of his being there on our front step. My first thought: I wondered if Winnie knew her husband had come here, whether she had sent him. Or had he come without telling her?
“I owe you an apology,” he said as he took a seat at the kitchen table and looked around quizzically for any sign of Lila among the empty bouncy chair and toys scattered on the cork tiles.
“She’s asleep upstairs,” I explained, and he nodded, looked at the time on the microwave clock: one P.M.
“Of course she is,” he replied tightly. “Lunch nap.”
His brown hair was longer, floppier, than I had seen before, his face more gaunt than it used to be, but he was tidy. The pale blue Oxford shirt and navy chinos he wore under his smart black coat were spotlessly clean and pressed. I inwardly tsked myself for being so patronizing: Charles had lost a baby, not his marbles.
“I’ll make it quick then,” he continued with a smile. “I know downtime must be precious at the moment.”
He played with a spoon that was lying on the table. It was dirty, but I hadn’t had a chance to clear it away.
“I wanted to ask you to be patient,” he said after a pause. His eyes didn’t meet mine and I realized how hard this must be for him. Jack had been dead nearly ten months. “With Winnie. I know how she’s been with you since…recently. It must have been hurtful. I know how close you two have always been over the years.”
I tried hard not to let my expression change, yet my insides turned very cold at the mention of the past. Does Charles know? Did she tell him?
“But she’s just going through so much at the moment,” he continued, looking up. “It’s been so hard on us both, of course, but Winnie’s…Winnie’s a mother with no child, and she’ll just need some time to figure things out. So I wanted to tell you that I was sorry about how she’d been with you, and to say just hang in there for her. I know this must have been upsetting for you as well.”
I wanted to thank him for noticing, even in the depths of grief and mourning for his son, that their terrible loss might have had an effect on me, too. I had told myself so often that my feelings didn’t matter in the face of what Winnie and Charles were going through that the acknowledgment of that felt like a balm.
“And also to say congratulations!” he added, and gave a crooked smile. “Any chance of a peek at her?”
I spoke before I had really considered his question: “I’m sorry, but she’s such a light sleeper, she wakes at the slightest noise so I’d rather not disturb her.”
I didn’t know where that had come from—Lila could sleep through police sirens screeching down our road, through the washing machine in turbo mode, through a plane taking off from next door. That was selfish of you. Nevertheless, I was glad of my quick reaction. I was happy to see Charles, grateful for the empathy he had offered. But I didn’t want him near Lila. I still felt too sick about Winnie.
He left after that, promising to keep in touch, and when Lila woke up, I held her and held her.
I noticed that the moments I spent feeling grateful for my daughter—feeling arbitrarily blessed where Winnie and Charles had not been, wondering for how much longer my beloved baby and I might cheat tragedy—helped to take away some of the bitterness I felt about my replacement.
Seeing her at our party reminded me that Maggie was just Maggie, goofy and kindly, done up in an outfit clearly inspired by the bloggers she’d seen at the shows. I had to admit she’d looked good—just the right blend of cool and pretty. No wonder Tim had been interested—to my amusement, he’d checked as he helped Nick and me clear up afterward whether dresses over jeans were “a Thing.”
“Don’t ask me!” I’d laughed. “The only fashion I know about right now is of the leggings-and-cardigan variety.”
My pre-pregnancy wardrobe still felt as remote as my old life, not just because of the risk of covering designer silks in pureed sweet potato but because I suspected (I didn’t dare check) that most of it would no longer fasten over my still-domed stomach, my newly rounded hips, and a bottom that I could now feel jiggling behind me as I walked.
Pick your battles, Margot. You can torture yourself either over Winnie or over being fat, but you don’t have the energy for both.
Since I appeared to be powerless to stop my former friend’s name from beating in my brain like the chorus of a catchy song, I had decided to put dieting on hold. My weight always crept up when I was worried, as though the metaphorical burden on my shoulders somehow registered on the bathroom scales. It had been the same at school, thanks to Helen, and now my breastfeeding body seemed to hoard whatever I nourished it with as if expecting famine or drought.
I couldn’t help but notice at our Christmas party how slim Maggie looked. I recognized it as the slenderness that comes of living off coffee, adrenaline, and not quite enough sleep. I was hardly banking eight hours a night myself, but the effect insomnia had had on my looks was rather different.
I had tried my best to compartmentalize my angst over the inevitable comparisons made between us both at work, but my replacement began crowding into my home life as well.
“Maggie’s so much fun!” Nick had declared one night a few weeks ago as he sat at the bottom of the stairs and unlaced his sneakers. He had left me with Lila and gone for a drink with his friend, only to find Maggie sharing a wooden bench with him in our local, too.
“What was she doing there?” I asked my husband sharply, and he looked up with a mischievous grin.
“What do you think?” He winked.
Of course I’m the last to know.
“She’s witty, she’s got great stories. Real life and soul, isn’t she? I can see how you had such a great time in Iceland together.” He smiled, the delight for his best friend writ large on his clean-cut features.
No doubt Maggie’s new slimline figure would now be topped up with the jittery first flush of whatever was going on between her and Tim.
Was I annoyed at the relationship? Absolutely. Tim was Nick’s best friend. Did Maggie’s sudden ubiquity, present if not in person then in almost every conversation Nick and I had that wasn’t about Lila, prickle my spine with irritation? Plans for the weekend, brunching as a foursome, asking them over for dinner. Of course. I acknowledged it as yet another personal failing of mine that I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm that Nick had for his closest friend’s new relationship.
I, who had never been described as the life and soul of anything, had winced and replied mechanically, “Yeah. Maggie’s great.”
Is it not enough that she’s taken my desk? Does she have to take my seat in the pub too?
When Nick and I had first got together, Tim had been a welcome third wheel in our relationship. We’d spent hours in the pub most nights of the week, chatting, playing cards, delighting in our shared sense of humor, the niche references we all got. I hadn’t been for a drink with Nick and Tim since Lila was born—it seemed crazy to pay for a babysitter for the sort of evening that felt even less enticing than watching TV on the sofa. Nor would it make sense for me to see Tim without Nick: An awkwardness that had never afflicted us as a three would have crept in—he was Nick’s friend, not mine.
Instead of finding a new way to socialize, they’ve just found a new me.
I felt forgotten, erased. Replaced. Just as I had when I saw Maggie’s picture from work on Instagram, my old desk decorated with a display of jocular friendship that I had never been the recipient of. Number 1? Where does that put me? Am I even in the top ten?
The first time Nick invited Tim and Maggie over for dinner, I spent it with what I thought of as a clown grin plastered onto my face: one drawn over the scowl beneath. Sitting up late with them as they drank beers and I lingered over a glass of tap water meant I’d be tired in the morning, when Lila woke as the dawn broke. Nick would offer
to help, but he couldn’t feed her and there was little point in both of us being awake. Nature’s lie-in.
But I could no more go to bed and leave the three of them together for another hour or so than I could ignore Lila’s cries or stop myself from scrolling through Maggie’s Instagram feed. I couldn’t quite articulate the sense—jealousy? danger? what did we say before FOMO?—but I knew that to give my replacement at work a run at the space I occupied at home as well was a bad idea. I had left Winnie once, all those years ago with Helen, and look what had happened.
Maggie sat in the chair I usually occupied when we had guests, regaling my husband and Tim with funny anecdotes from cool and smart places where I would no longer have fit in, about people to whom I’d have had nothing to say. She talked and laughed about the news, about current affairs that I no longer knew enough about to share my own opinions alongside theirs.
They discussed countries far away where terrible things were happening and I, no time for the headlines anymore, could only nod along in theatrical outrage. They were people of the world, these three dynamic occupants of my newly upholstered vintage dining chairs; the farthest I had gone that day was to a café two streets away. Remaining and not contributing made me feel pathetic, but leaving them—pleading nursery rhyme fatigue and tomorrow’s childcare—would have felt worse. Maggie seemed only too ready to pick up the slack in my home as well as behind my desk.
Suddenly I hated Maggie with an intensity that filled me with sadness. My replacement’s easy charm and ability to make friends, and Winnie’s accusation, her implied judgment and disapproval, fused in my brain into comprehensive proof of my own selfishness and flawed character. Pride, narcissism, thoughtlessness piled into a constant feeling of guilt I pushed around with me just as I did Lila’s buggy. A reminder of the reasons I was never chosen, never number one, always on the outside. The reasons that had led to what happened at school.
I continued to scrutinize Maggie’s digital life: more breakfasts, more selfies, more shoes. I watched and rewatched a video loop of Maggie dancing in front of a wall of blue disco balls with Holly and Amma, at the sort of industry party I had given up attending soon after I met Nick because they were full of office juniors and thrusting types who were dissatisfied with their jobs. I was running Haute’s fashion desk by then, and all I wanted to do was cozy up on the sofa with my new boyfriend.
Winnie had come to a couple of fashion parties with me at the very beginning. We’d cobbled together outfits between us that we were convinced looked impressive: cheap vintage, faded hand-me-downs, ancient T-shirts that we slashed and customized. We went on other people’s invitations, senior members of the team at Haute who I knew would never use them because they were old and lazy and had kids or other unfathomable reasons for passing up the multitude of invitations to eye-widening events that were couriered to their desks.
They were just like I am now—of course they didn’t bloody want to go.
But Winnie was right, I never fitted in at those things anyway.
Back on Maggie’s feed, I balked at a picture of her wearing the pink version of the blue sparkly sweater I had ordered in Paris while pregnant and then worn for our party. I was irritated but felt smugly superior, too: Maggie was following my lead even now. I fumed after recognizing a stylized shot of a flat white in an earthenware cup beside a milk-bottle vase of wildflowers as having been taken in the new coffee shop down the road, and then reading the caption: “They do good coffee in suburbia!” Sneering at my life, even as you try to make it your own?
One night, my phone glowing on my knee as I fed Lila back into a deep sleep, I noticed the pink sweater in a piece on the Haute website, with the headline “Sparkle isn’t just for evening!,” and gave a short, hot gasp of indignation. I can’t decide whether I’m more annoyed that she ripped off my idea or that she ripped off an idea that I said as a joke.
Beneath it, a lone comment—nobody ever commented on the website—under the username HelenKnows: “Long live Maggie Beecher! Let’s hope that boring Margot never comes back.”
I tried not to think about it.
At the end of January, I would be halfway through my maternity leave and I was heartbroken at the prospect of leaving Lila. For me, time was slipping through my fingers, but Maggie was using it to shore up her position.
I texted Moff the next day, just a one-line “How’s things?,” the equivalent of clearing one’s throat in a meeting to remind people of one’s existence. And I was crushed when, three days later, I got the reply: “All great, don’t worry about us. Maggie such fun!”
I flung my phone down onto the sitting room carpet next to where Lila lay and wept so loudly and for so long that my daughter stopped batting at the dangling toys above her and flicked wide, worried eyes toward her mother.
“Oh, my precious, I’m okay,” I sobbed, scooping Lila into a hold and snuggling into the folds of her soft baby-skin neck. I noticed the new issue of the magazine on the sideboard as I did so, still in the cellophane wrap it had arrived in. I used to know what was going on every page of it.
This month, I didn’t even know who was on the cover.
* * *
IT WAS RARE for Moff to find somebody among the horde she thought of as “civilians” that she deemed attractive enough to put on the cover of the magazine. My boss was an exacting body fascist, unashamed of the high aesthetic standards that made her title one of the most prestigious on the newsstands.
After the first shoot in which I had had my picture taken for the magazine, Moff explained reassuringly, out of nowhere, that she’d arrange for my cheeks to be slimmed in Photoshop afterward. When I saw the final images, the small but insistent fat pad under my chin and the tops of my thighs had also vanished, and my eyelids had been lifted. Evidence enough that Moff didn’t consider me cover material, had I ever expected the chance.
The face that shone out from the glossy front page of this month’s issue wasn’t the usual bronzed Hollywood actress or youthful neon pop star. In fact, it took several moments for me to recognize it, to transliterate it from the woman who had sat at my dining table only last weekend, offering toast crusts to Lila, to the woman in the photograph, hip cocked and eyebrow raised, cleavage displayed in skintight gold chain mail, the epitome of glitz, glamour, sophistication, and worldly success. Cover stars are the people everybody else wants to be.
SINGLES ON TOP, ran the cover line. WHY I DON’T NEED A BABY TO HAVE IT ALL.
I had the sudden sensation of falling down a deep hole that had opened up within me. My heart beat in my temples, my vision throbbed. My eyes stung with tears of jealous anger. If this wasn’t a direct assault, what else could it be? This was Maggie saying in no uncertain terms that she’d won: beautiful, confident, thin, young looking, and, most important, childless, the way fashion editors are supposed to be. The way Moff wanted them to be. These were the qualities she looked for in her staffers, not saggy tummies and laughter lines; Moff was Maggie’s champion now, not mine.
Maggie was living her dream job on the most coveted spot in the magazine. I might have been the most in love I had ever been in my life—in many ways, the happiest and most contented during my hours with Lila—but I couldn’t quite remember anymore who I was. Most days, I felt as though I and the baby were the same person: freshly hatched and intensely vulnerable to every new shock.
I remembered when I used to press onto the train alongside the rest of the rush-hour crowd, used to elbow my way through the mob to my front-row seats at fashion week as a matter of course, and couldn’t believe these two versions of me were related, let alone sharing the same body. Then again, that body looked so very different now anyway: heavy and mottled around the thighs and stomach, with pendulous, veined breasts that hung to my rib cage rather than sitting pert on my sternum. Hardly a cover girl, barely even a young woman anymore.
I studied my face at length in the b
athroom mirror. A purple bag under each eye, broken thread veins along the swoop of my nose, high red patches on the apples of both cheeks. I was tired and unhealthy, the unrest in my head manifest in the way the world saw me. I looked dreadful: I looked like a loser. No wonder Maggie had won.
“Won what?” Nick said later, after I had shown him the magazine. “She’s scored a cover, sure, and that’ll be great for her career once you go back and she no longer has a full-time job.”
“But it’s a dig!” I wailed. “A dig against me, because I had a baby and I’m not fabulous or single anymore.”
“I for one am very glad you’re not single anymore,” he said, pulling me close, and gave me the sort of lingering kiss that would have thrilled me once but now just made me impatient. “Have you actually read the piece? It really doesn’t seem like a dig to me. She hardly mentions babies, really. It’s more about how being single doesn’t have to mean feeling sad. That’s what Tim said, anyway.”
“You knew about this?” I couldn’t believe Nick hadn’t said anything. I remembered Winnie’s text: You could have warned me. Was this how she had felt? As though someone else’s happiness had excavated her insides?
“Look, ’Go, she told him about it a while back because she wrote it before they met and obviously now she isn’t really single anymore. I didn’t know about the cover. Doesn’t it make you feel better that she’s all single and fabulous here, but in reality she’s bonking a man who thinks cycling shorts are the last word in cool?”
I gave a wobbly smile: Nick was right—another overreaction. Just as my nightmares about Winnie and her poor dead baby loomed large in the dark but receded during daylight so as to seem almost hyperbolically ridiculous, so the panic and anxieties about Maggie that I worked up during the long hours spent alone with Lila could be defused merely by voicing them. They crumbled to nothing when Nick was around, even though they had seemed so incontrovertible, so terminal and dreadful, when I was by myself.
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