Momfriends

by Ariella Papa

  “No, I see his food gets eaten. I put it out every morning, but there’s no sign of him.”

  “He’s totally pissed at us,” I say. Then it’s back to the impression. “I’ve abandoned my cat. I’ve abandoned my feline.”

  Steve laughs. “It’s so nice to see you in a good mood.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I have a feeling I know where this is going.

  “You look really pretty today,” he says.

  I am tired, but sometimes, you have to get over your tiredness. I stand up and take Steve’s hand.

  “What?”

  “C’mon,” I say. I bring him into the bedroom. I can do this. After this evening, I think I can do anything. Even have sex with my husband.

  It all starts familiarly enough. But then Steve goes for my breasts, which are exposed in my unfastened nursing bra.

  “Um, you know, maybe they could be off-limits, for tonight,” I say. I don’t really wait for his response. I secure the hooks on my nursing bra and put my breasts away.

  “Oh, ok, sure,” he says. We begin to kiss again, but then I start thinking that I am not really getting as turned on as I usually do. Nothing is happening. Steve sticks his fingers into my underwear and somehow I wrestle his fingers away. I kiss him more vigorously. I am trying to prove to myself that I am into this.

  “Is everything ok,” he asks.

  “Fabulous,” I say. But the more we kiss, the more I actually start to panic about what is going to happen. I don’t think I can do it. My vagina is only starting to heal, right? I never want to feel the kind of pain I felt there again. What if sex undid something? Worse, what if I get pregnant again?

  “You have a condom right?”

  “Yes,” he says. I am disappointed. No contraception would be grounds for calling it off. Now I have to go forward. We keep kissing. I am waiting for Abe to cry, so I can dash out of the room, but nothing. This is going to happen. I am a mom, now. Cavorting like some trollop doesn’t seem right.

  Steve has my underwear off. His boxers are off too. We are heading into the home stretch.

  No way.

  “Um, Steve,” I say, sitting up at the same time. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “What? Really? Why?”

  “I just . . . I don’t know . . . I can’t. I’m not feeling it. Mentally or physically.”

  “Ok,” he says. He is pulling up his boxers. He is going to sulk.

  “I’m so sorry. It’s not happening for me, and I don’t want to force it.”

  “No, you don’t,” Steve agrees, halfheartedly. “When do you think you will want to? Not force it. Do it.”

  “I really don’t know. I thought I would have by now.” I feel awful about all this. I hope he knows that. But I can’t. My good mood is slowly deflating. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s ok,” he says. He rubs my arm and then pats my shoulder. I still don’t want to be touched. What if I never did? “Have a good night, love.”

  “You too, honey,” I say. He rolls over and within a minute, I hear him snoring. He is disappointed, but not enough to stay awake and think about it. His exhaustion won out.

  Me? I have a lot on my mind. Liz, a nanny, Claudia, Pam. And the fact that the closest I would come to sex any time soon was already smudged on my toes

  Chapter 10

  Claudia Sets Sail on a Sea of Rulelessness

  I needed written guidelines. I thrived on instructions. When cooking, I always followed a recipe, never improvising. When I played the violin, I kept my sheet music in front of me. Whenever I went on a trip I liked to have the directions written out neatly in a series of Post-its that I stuck on the dashboard.

  There had to be instructions for this. I’m sure if I had done my research I would have found some online guidebook or a discussion group to have me navigate through whatever it was I was doing.

  Though I wasn’t actually doing anything. No one could argue otherwise. I was just having lunch.

  I had my excuse ready if I was ever questioned. I had a folder in my bag that I planned to whip out if anyone came along and questioned why Keith and I were having lunch together. I could point to the folder and make up a meeting about something. Anything. He worked in talent. I would think of something talent related. I should have had my excuse prepared but I didn’t. It wasn’t like me to be so unprepared.

  But if I did have an excuse at the ready that it would be a virtual admission to Keith that I knew we were doing something wrong. I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit that. He was acting so blasé about the whole thing.

  Except occasionally when he held my gaze until I had to look away. And once again I had that feeling that I had to either cross my legs or climb across the table onto his lap.

  But nobody could possibly question this, could they? They couldn’t. We were two colleagues having lunch in the office café. If we were really doing anything illicit, I am more that sure we wouldn’t be right there in front of everyone. He asked me to lunch and I went. This is what people did. All around us were other coworkers dining together. Not everyone picked up their lunch and returned to their cubes and offices to work through without looking up.

  No, people were having innocent, platonic conversations and experiences. There was nothing untoward about it.

  Except that I found myself having trouble looking at Keith. And when I did look at him, all I did was look at his mouth, at his lips, at his hands.

  And I couldn’t eat. My stomach was churning in knots. I had already had one mishap in which the food I scooped up refused to stay on my fork. The whole idea of eating was made more difficult by the way Keith was looking at me. He looked at me like I was transparent.

  I could barely concentrate on the words he was saying. I was nodding and “mmm-hmming.”

  I wished I knew what was and was not acceptable. There had to be a way to do it, but what was it? What was I doing?

  Did he know that I was married? He must have. I was wearing a wedding ring. I needed to do the ethical thing—I needed to remind him that I was married, just in case he was going into this under false pretenses. I made sure to turn my ring toward him as I held my fork and cut my chicken, but he wasn’t looking at my hand.

  This whole thing was banal. He couldn’t possibly really be interested in me. There wasn’t anything about me that men would be interested in. Interviewing. Maybe this was an informational interview. Maybe he wanted to join my department. Except, he wasn’t interviewing me. He wasn’t asking me anything. He kept talking.

  He was telling me some story about some large animal—an elk? a buffalo? a moose? I wasn’t sure—that ran across the road in front of him somewhere on the West Coast. Washington maybe. It was so hard to concentrate.

  I definitely hadn’t said much so far, but I had to figure out a way to work Peter into this conversation. I thought of Peter. I actually pictured his face instead of only contemplated the idea that having a husband made it wrong to be doing whatever this was. I pictured my children sitting on Peter’s lap as he read Guess How Much I Love You.

  What was I doing? This wasn’t me. I wasn’t an adulterer, even if it was a lunch adulterer. Whatever it was, I wasn’t a good one. I hated being bad at something.

  “Well, I should head back up,” Keith was saying. “I have to run a casting session.”

  “Oh, do you do that a lot?” I asked. Suddenly, I wanted to prolong this lunch, even though it terrified me. Although he had been the one who did most of the talking, maybe if I kept asking questions I could get him to keep talking.

  “Yeah, it’s becoming my new responsibility. I think it’s about time I got a little more responsibility here. Everyone knows the Coop is an idiot.”

  I didn’t know that everyone knew that. I sure didn’t. I thought Annabelle Cooper, the head of the talent department, always seemed like she had her stuff together. She was intimidating. Keith continued on to give some specifics about the ways he excelled in his department. But I
sensed that he was winding down. He started to stack up his cutlery on his plate, which I took as my cue to do the same. We were leaving the cafeteria. I could figure that out without reading the written direction.

  This was ok. I hadn’t done anything. No one had caught me. It wasn’t the most enlightening conversation. It would never have to happen again. I would get away scot-free. Guilt-free. I was innocent of all charges. There’d been nothing to worry about. I had no use for written instructions, after all.

  We got to the elevator bank and stepped on the elevator together. We weren’t the only ones on the elevator, so there was no chance of impropriety. He pressed thirty-seven, his floor. I expected him to press the button for my floor. I waited, but he kept talking about all the things he did in his job and how crazy busy he was. He didn’t seem to realize that I had to stop at my floor, too. It was unbelievably impolite. I leaned across him and pressed thirty-nine for my floor.

  As I reached across him, he leaned slightly into me. I moved away quickly and hoped no one else on the elevator noticed. There was no way they did, but I noticed. I looked at him, and he didn’t appear to be acting or talking any differently. Maybe he hadn’t done anything. Maybe I was inventing things. Maybe I was losing it.

  Someone was getting off the elevator, walking between Keith and me. I took a couple of steps away from him, to give myself some space, but I wanted to step closer. He had touched me, but now I wasn’t sure. I was thrown off my game. At floor thirty-five, everyone else got off and it was j the two of us. He was still acting as though nothing had happened.

  My whole body was tense. I was holding my breath. I was expecting him to kiss me. Even though our lunch hadn’t impressed me, I was suddenly feeling aware of how alone we were, how anything could happen.

  But nothing did. The doors opened on his floor, and he stepped out. I thought my knees were going to give out. He stepped off and put his hand against the elevator door to keep it open. He turned back to look at me.

  “We should do that again,” he said.

  I didn’t trust my voice to speak, so I nodded.

  “Maybe an off-site this time,” he said, with the hint of a smile. He took his hand off the door and it closed. I leaned into the elevator wall and tried to compose myself for the next two floors.

  Our lunch was on Tuesday, and every time my phone rang for the rest of the week, I looked expectantly at the caller display for his name.

  It didn’t come. I knew I could remedy this. I had to pick up the phone and call him. It was easy enough, but if I called it would mean I had done it. I would be starting something, initiating it. I couldn’t let myself do that. It was against my rules.

  But the thought of Keith was beginning to consume me. I was two separate people. There was one me who went on the way I always did, trying to straddle this line between work and family. Then there was this other me who constantly thought about him. It was amazing. He was becoming my goal.

  Throughout my life I always attempted to achieve one thing at a time. I always got what I set my mind to get. And now everything was confused because what I thought I wanted, what I set to be my current goal, was getting the two wild cards that were my children into Brookese, but all the time I should have been researching ways to work with them on their behavior to find out what mysterious X factor Brookese was looking for was spent thinking of Keith.

  Since grade school, my mother and I worked out a system of organization that we used to plan my achievements. I plotted everything out on index cards, and the more index cards I got led to the potential of color-coded tabs and index card file holders. My mother had three shelves in her house devoted to planning my past accomplishments. But I couldn’t very well plan this goal out the same way I did everything else. So I was devoting the energy I used for that to staring at the beige walls of my office or the beige walls of my bedroom (I never even realized they were both the same color) and trying to recall every detail of what Keith said at our lunch.

  I was running around in circles because the rational me, the smart logical me, knew that Keith hadn’t really said anything of merit at that lunch. This couldn’t end well. This wasn’t the right thing to do. I didn’t even know how to properly fantasize about Keith. I couldn’t really do it without feeling guilty. There was going to be consequences if I did anything. When you deviated from the path in front of you, the life path, the rules, there were consequences. No one could break the rules without consequences. My mother always taught me to follow the rules. I lived my life by them.

  I was strangling myself on the rules.

  So on Friday, I got a haircut. I didn’t go to the guy who had been cutting my hair into a bob for all the years I lived in New York. I found solace in a stranger. It was unplanned. I left the building for my usual cup of cappuccino and I looked across the street at one of the chain haircutters. I had this feeling that if I didn’t do something major, I was going to do something impulsive and maybe this could be an innocent little bit of both.

  “Cut it,” I said, to the large Russian woman who wrapped a towel around my neck. I had never said anything like this before. I had had virtually the same cut since junior year of high school. “Just cut it all.”

  “How you wan?” She asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “I want it short. I want to do very little to my hair in the morning. I don’t even want to know it’s there.”

  “You gon cry when I finish?”

  “No,” I said trying to sound at once emphatic and confident. “No matter what, I will not cry.”

  “Ok,” she said. She picked up a bunch of my hair and started cutting away.

  It was the best twenty dollars I ever spent. I didn’t know it was even possible to get a haircut for twenty dollars in Manhattan.

  “Wow,” my assistant, Jennifer said when I walked back in. I couldn’t tell if it was a good or bad wow at first, her face went through so many stages of shock. “It’s like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens meets early Halle Barry via Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but this confirmed my suspicions that Jennifer really wanted to get into the creative side of production.

  “I love it,” she said.

  “You do?” No one had ever said that to me about my hair.

  “It makes you look at least seven years younger.”

  “It does?”

  “It’s quite a departure for you.” I had never really had girl talk with a woman before.

  “It is.” I nodded and then did what I can only consider a giggle. It was a foreign sound.

  “I love it, love it.”

  “Thank you,” I said and went into my office to battle my way through a bunch of emails that were stacking up. . . .

  But I couldn’t concentrate. I desperately wanted to go down to Keith’s floor and walk back and forth in front of his cube until he told me how good my hair looked or better yet, invited me in to lie across his desk.

  So I did the next best thing. I had Jennifer set up a meeting for me on his floor in a conference room that was only accessible by taking the road in front of his cube bank. I am a problem solver.

  But he wasn’t there on my way up to the meeting. I walked by again later when I pretended I had forgotten something, so I could look for him. I went to the bathroom, hid in the stall for a minute, came out, assessed my hair and walked back. Still no Keith. This was ridiculous. It was totally high school. I bet high schoolers could have given me tips on how to be cooler. Molly Ringwald could have shown me a thing or two.

  I had called this meeting, but I had little to contribute. I kept looking up at the door, expecting him to walk by, but he didn’t.

  And then he did.

  He looked in to the conference room I was in and did what I can only describe as a double take. I caught his eye and smiled. He slowed down a little and kept looking in through the window. I sat up straighter in my seat. That contact gave me a high. I somehow stumbled my way through the rest of the meeting.


  When it was done, I strode by his desk. I was trembling a little. The idea of seeing him, maybe another conversation, was almost too much to hope for.

  I didn’t know how to play these games. I almost didn’t look at him when I walked by. I almost couldn’t, but he stopped me.

  “Nice hair cut,” he said. I was sure I turned red.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I did it on a whim.”

  He looked at me. Everything that was happening was an invitation. It was hard to remember that we were in the middle of an office and not get swept up in it.

  “Well, I should get back to my desk,” I said.

  “Do you have any big plans for the weekend?” he asked. I felt, no I knew, in that moment I knew that he didn’t want to me to leave. Whatever was going on between us was real, almost tangible.

  “No not much,” I said. I wished I had something exciting going on this weekend. I had the playdate we were encouraged to attend for Brookese. I couldn’t tell him about that.

  “Well, enjoy,” he said.

  I think I nodded, but I couldn’t manage to say anything else. I took the elevator up two flights, even though I tried to always to take the stairs. After that encounter, I wasn’t sure I could trust my legs.

  And for the rest of the day, I felt completely ungrounded. None of it seemed real. I replayed it in my head, but it felt like a dream. I kept reaching up to my hair, and it wasn’t where I expected it to be. Plus, everywhere I went, I was getting all this attention, from people who were surprised by my new ’do. The day care teachers complemented me. I saw Giovanni’s mom and she told me I looked fantastic. Jacob didn’t recognize me right away, and Emily said, “Mommy look retty,” which made me feel better than when she told me she loved me.

  It was a beautiful night and still bright out when I walked the kids back. I felt the weather on my neck and imagined it was Keith’s fingers. I liked his hands. I wanted his hands. I hoped that Peter would be working late so I could spend a little time pretending my hands were Keith’s. It was as close as I could get to him. For now.