A few days later we met for lunch, and sat on a sunny deck facing the river. I had put on the prettiest lipstick color, wanting a chance at a better first impression. We pushed our plastic chairs from the table to give our bodies room, moved our menus to the side. Tell me your story, we said, tell me all about you. Raised in New York, I told her, I felt at odds in Montana, where I’d lived for three years. The feeling wasn’t going away. Briefly, my job history, as if that were salient; I only cared to talk about being pregnant. She, too, dashed off minor biography, then talked pregnancy, our headline subject, and I accrued details. I needed to cement my conviction about what I was doing, which was anyway moot. This was coming. Compelled beyond my reason, my education, my writing, I had volunteered to be pregnant, craved it. Abby seemed grounded and driven and reasonable. Yet she had also been compelled. What was happening to our bodies, to us? And what about our marriages? Would they be okay? Abby’s husband wanted to stay home with the baby. Christopher had gone back to school for a counseling degree, was working new, lengthy hours as a therapist, and already I saw him less. When Abby said she was planning to start divinity school, I thought she was kidding. No: This is what we’re doing, we’re having babies. At the dawn of a friendship, which seemed like it might be remarkable for her intelligence and my candor, her placid security and easygoing generosity, it was news I didn’t want to hear.
“When are you leaving?”
“Don’t worry, in a year,” she said. “I still have to write my thesis.”
I was the late arrival in her Missoula life. She already had lots of friends, whom I met the next week at her boisterous shower, except for Ellen, who was out of town.
• • •
I was surprised a few years later to see Ellen at a party. Christopher and I had hired a sitter for Daniel, and I’d spent most of the evening seated and inert, my newborn sleeping in one arm, as Christopher brought me a plate of food, a glass of juice and seltzer. When Jack woke, and breathed deeper into his muscles, which I could feel against my ribs, I split open the front of my shirt and nursed him. Abby had long since moved to Palo Alto, which I struggled to keep in mind was not, of course, a personal rejection. Every time I passed her old house, those first months, I cried, empty, heartsore. It embarrassed me how acute my longing was for a miracle that would have changed her mind, made her stay. She hadn’t met Jack, my new baby, which seemed all wrong because she’d been so much a part of Daniel’s first year. In our rare and rarer calls Abby outlined theology courses, which I wanted to find interesting, but her busyness and excellent grades and philosophical investigation left me discouraged in my mousy accomplishments, my awareness that all aspiration had been bludgeoned by domestic repetition, by the mass of baby-boy particulars that occupied my brain. It was better to speak of the babies, pose polite questions about hers as I waited for the moment to describe my sons.
Ellen stood in the kitchen, regarding the guests as they got drunker. She had no glass, her arms folded. We seemed to be the only two not drinking. I said hello, she said hello, and I remembered our first awkwardness, but tonight we could summon our absent friend, and Ellen’s face lightened, and her talk flowed, a mix of affection and sarcasm and acute perception. It felt like a way to have Abby back, to affirm the importance of that friendship. We united in a benign mourning.
“I was watching you with the baby,” Ellen said. “You’re very good with him. You’re calm.” I thanked her, bloomed, asked after her son. Later I said to Christopher, “Just to be really seen. Just to be recognized.”
Ellen and I compared the eerie intelligence of our children, how riveted they were by the inner workings of things. Daniel was four, Thomas six months younger. “It sounds like they’d be friends,” I said. “You want to get them together?” I offered my house for the first playdate. We used them as the ruse, advancing toward each other, but not fast. I knew from Christopher that some people need to observe, take things in; they can’t be rushed. “Safety sensitive,” he used the term he’d learned in his training for “introvert.” The personality that has always compelled me, why I married Christopher: you won’t shudder and explode, you won’t unseat me, you won’t bite off pieces of me to feed yourself. I sought out people who promised safety. Ellen and I made a date for the next week, around her work schedule.
I watched for her car. She leaned deep into the backseat, her feet on the sidewalk. She took a long time, as I stood at the window. Then she lifted a sleeping child out, all her strength and torque in managing her way up from the bent position without jostling him. She eased the car door shut with a slow hip, opened my gate. Thomas’s head lolled off her shoulder, the straps of his polar fleece hat draped in the same direction. “I’m sorry,” Ellen said. She spoke to me but looked at her son. “Just fell asleep on the way over.” There was no question of waking him. We all knew that, not to interfere with the children’s plans on our account. Some of us practiced it more diligently than others. “He’ll probably wake up soon,” she said.
She settled the drowsing boy on Daniel’s bed, where my son inspected him before returning to his trucks and plastic animals on the freshly vacuumed carpet. Ellen declined coffee and tea and water. We shared updates of Abby, incredulous that anyone had started divinity school—started anything!—with a new baby. I was relieved we knew the same details, that Abby didn’t favor one of us with better intimacies. Ellen nudged her son, but he slept on, severe seriousness plastered over his face. She looked over at him about once a minute. Later, failing again, she said, “This is a little embarrassing.”
“Don’t worry at all,” I said to be kind. I was perplexed by the tenacity of her discomfort. Hadn’t motherhood taught all of us to give up formality, to relinquish the hope for plans carried through?
“I guess we should make another date. You could come to my house.”
“Great, yes.” I wanted to know her, this smart lawyer with the wry outlook, this woman who respected the heart’s sobrieties. This woman who’d watched me with a newborn and told me I was doing it right. Ellen talked about the politics of motherhood, the confusions of leftover feminism, rather than the daily mess and the obvious obstacles. I loved that. She said, How about I call and we’ll set something up, and I said, Sure, anytime.
Little by little, my patience rewarded, Ellen revealed herself. First the defining items, where she was raised, which law school, what her husband did, how she landed her job at the firm. I was used to deeper talk mixed with trivial musings sooner—the way women talk, assuming we will inevitably be intimate, so we may as well get there—but I’d be cautious. Ellen needed reassurance, even if I couldn’t tell why. I wouldn’t beg for her confidences, which she showed sparingly, which she guarded against some unknown threat. When she was almost relaxed she mentioned she’d been a nightclub DJ through college and in her twenties; she’d get to bed at dawn. We laughed and laughed. What music did you play? Did you dance? She shook her head, the faraway of it all, our youthful personas assumed to broadcast what we were capable of, what we dared. I could picture a DJ—though not Ellen—elevated on the raised stage, her black T-shirt, the dark club, the frantic focus of discs and knobs, the shouted requests. A DJ, I told Christopher! Here’s the Ellen you can’t see, only I’m allowed to see her this way! The incongruous picture boasted too much frivolity for my subdued, introspective friend, until I realized the job provided the perch apart, her safe discretion. She could be visible, never known. Well, I would know her. “My new best friend,” I told him. He nodded, used to my loyal passions, how they flared and dimmed, serially.
One hot night, several months into the slow unwrapping, I invited Ellen for dinner. Her husband, Laurence, was away, and she brought her boy. Our sons, if not true friends, accepted being together. Christopher and I sat under the canvas umbrella with Ellen, the table laid with food and plates, cool taking over the air, darkness deepening the backyard. Thomas and Daniel started to chase our cats, who ran up against the fence and darted away, the children after
them, their limbs in all directions. “We’re herding cats!” they chanted, screaming with laughter. We hadn’t noticed the boys loosening, having fun, and it unnerved but pleased us, the sign that they were normal as well as exceptional. I’d made penne with garlic and cauliflower and a tart of nectarines and blueberries, cookbooks still open on the counter. Ellen didn’t eat. She dished spoonfuls of food onto her son’s plate, but the boy didn’t eat either. “Can I get you something else?” I said. “Would he like macaroni and cheese?”
All that evening, looking at the still life on her plate, the roasted scallions and seasoned beets and arugula untouched, I went back and forth between insult and frustration. I’ll have her over again, I resolved, entice her. I tried to make myself indispensable to my friends, a tactic I’d learned chasing down the gazes of my self-absorbed parents: need me. How necessary it was for me to offer and provide, to establish that I would attend to her. I felt unaccusable that way; I didn’t like that such safety had to be the prominent compass, but it was me.
In the next months, I invited Ellen, and the conversation was rich, the observations pointed yet nuanced, the recognition of motherhood challenges mutual, and she never ate. I made my best dishes: sausage with black-eyed peas, grilled salmon marinated in grated ginger and soy sauce, cucumber salad. She ate none of it. I gave up. She was not comfortable with offerings, a fact I finally accepted. She was teaching me to look away from her, yet she’d chosen me, a woman intensely conscious, ready to pull apart each gesture, detail, mood, and ask what it meant. When she came over with Thomas, I’d leave her a glass of water on the counter. I had learned not to hold it out to her.
A couple of years later, she and I were at the farmers’ market, the kids beside us. In my bag I had lettuce and garlic, fresh cheeses, local honey. She wasn’t shopping, but entertained me with her commentary on the scene and people around us. We came to a stand with wide-leafed chard and exceptional cauliflower in white and purple. “I just hate cauliflower,” she said. She sounded ready, a disclosure that had been needing to escape. Was she thinking of that first dinner at my house, the offending dish on the table? Why didn’t you say? I thought, wishing to relive the evening. I would have made something you liked.
• • •
By age six, Daniel and Thomas were devoted and entwined, and Ellen and I were connected in the most dire way: for them. We praised them for finding each other, quietly praising ourselves. In our numerous daily phone calls we checked our opinions: Those big kids who commandeer the slides? They’re too big! Those bulk bins at the health food store? There’s corn meal on the floor, someone should clean up the raisins. We found elite security in agreement. And we both had our second sons. Jack was two, her son just a few months old. We applied to the private school with the solar panels and the prize-winning math team. The doors would open, of course they would, our brilliant children bound together for their academic careers, and we would car-pool and sit next to each other at school plays and know each other for decades. As we filled out the applications, we phoned back and forth. What did you put for his interests? Do you see how many “volunteer” hours they require! When the rejection letter came, I phoned Ellen, not my husband. I felt scared Thomas had been accepted. If she sent him out of our orbit, would I lose her, too? But he’d also been rejected, and our momentary joint wrath turned to fun we could have at the expense of ourselves—How much we’d thought it mattered! This was our merry joke, meant to distract us from our real dread, unaccountable disappointment.
• • •
The phone rang after we’d gone to sleep. Ellen was at the ER with Thomas, who’d broken his leg. She asked me to come and get her infant son, so she and Laurence could concentrate. I dressed, got there, found them through the admitting doors. Her face was tight and pale, her natural beauty invisible behind worry. Laurence didn’t even make eye contact, pulled down deep. I looked for Thomas, but he’d been taken away, the family stranded in a gaping room. She offered the baby. I think he was about four months old then. “Can you bring him back in the morning?” she said. “He’ll need to nurse.” I carried him outside, uneasy with his smallness, and adjusted the lanky straps of Jack’s car seat to fit him. I brought him home like a prize, a found kitten, waking Christopher as I settled him into the crib near our bed. I fell asleep listening to my best friend’s infant make his noises, the sounds she must have documented every night, as if I had finally entered her sequestered heart.
In the morning I brought him to the hospital room, where Thomas’s face was turned from the door, his expression dim and blank, not with pain, but with the spooky absence of pain. Ellen took the baby, asked after his night. We consulted over how many hours he’d slept, his mood on waking and on the ride over. I didn’t say I wished I could have nursed him for her, saved her the trouble this particular morning. Or maybe I did say that. We would have laughed, our conspiracy of crude truths. We always pushed deeply into the inane and the grotesque of motherhood, into the dictates and phobias of our culture, gave each other permission to have really bad days and say so. Her face assumed more of its character as she found her baby’s gaze. Finally, I had done something for her. She had trusted me, letting me drive away with her baby into the unpredictable night, and when the midnight came that I brought a son to the ER, she’d be there for me, too.
• • •
A few years later, I sprained my foot, biking in flip-flops. Pain stealthy while it traveled to the bone, I walked the bike out of the intersection to a gas station, where I asked for ice, ignoring how bad the foot felt, or not feeling it yet. As I applied the ice, propped outside against a white wall in the shade, the pain screamed forward. I couldn’t get the bike home or get myself home. My family was out of town, so I called Ellen. Our friendship was reliable ballast in my daily life, Ellen the one I called when I felt my bitchiest and sharpest, when I felt depleted and overwhelmed, who groaned and laughed with me at how all our time and talent were enslaved to our children.
“I fell off my bike,” I said, needing to be that little again.
“Do you want me to come get you?” Her voice was flat patience, consideration.
“No, I’ll be okay.” We hung up. I sensed that this involved politics between us we’d never used. I tried to think of another friend but then called Ellen back. “Please come and get me, I need you, please.” Something in me always made it hard to ask for complete attention, afraid I’d be accused of selfishness or, worse, ignored. And something in her made it hard for me to ask her.
She left her kids with a sitter and drove to me. I climbed into the front, mostly by arm strength, while she lifted the bike into the back of the SUV. Absent our precious and encompassing focus of the children, we were not talkative. She monitored the road. I was embarrassed to have pulled her away from other things and glad she didn’t look at me, examine my naked need.
“Do you want to go to the doctor?” she said.
“No, that’s okay.”
“I’ll drop your bike at your house,” she said, “if you want to go.”
“Okay.”
She drove me to the clinic, where I made my slow way through the glass doors and across marble to the elevators, and I was glad, as I guarded the ghastly pain, that I had let myself ask her. Yes, this will take us further in, tighten us. As promised, she left the bike on my lawn.
• • •
As the boys grew and enrolled in separate schools and Thomas had dance class and Daniel started Aikido, I realized I’d never seen Ellen without the kids, save for that short drive. I had other friends for not-mothering time, women without children who met spontaneously for late drinks or a quick river float, who said yes to a last-minute movie. Spontaneity—always a little risky for me—was not part of this friendship. We provided each other with an antidote to the long, long loving boredoms of parenthood. We provided each other with good company. I counted on Ellen’s solemnity, her structured beams and mortar. She liked my mischief and sense of play. Settled, shoes off
in her living room, we would watch our sons, unknot their laces, sweep up their abandoned LEGO pieces with our arms, and converse in surreptitious undertones, vocabulary chosen to elude them. Did we talk of our hearts’ desires, our ruinous disappointments? No. We talked, albeit smartly and with absolute candor, even splendid vulgarity, about the thorny demands in raising our kids, our resentments and frustrations, our terrifying moments of uncertainty, the traps of masculinity we hoped to teach our boys to avoid. We felt stronger. Everything deserved comment, their dreams, whether or not they liked bacon, if they’d learned how to lie, which mittens they preferred. How badly we wanted to go to the bathroom without talking through the closed door, just once. So, without them, we would have no need for the hushed aside and sideways affection, more assumed than demonstrated. We would have had to talk directly to each other and confront a troubling truth of our friendship: something blocked further intimacy, real knowing. She barely mentioned her work, and I didn’t ask, because confidentiality in a small town was hard enough. Anything she said about her marriage concerned only parenting decisions (on the other hand, I told her the details of my marriage; inspecting me and Christopher, seeking her reactions—our history, our tensions, our time in bed, our happiest privacies). When she mentioned law-firm politics, glancingly, I couldn’t picture my Ellen involved. A busy stride down a hallway, depositions? I thought of it like this: let the world have the lesser Ellen in her temporary assignment. Her real work—devotion to her sons, her other masks dropped—she chose to share with me. But, lacking a complete picture, I wondered at who she was, the whole of her.
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