* * *
—
I had thought that extracting myself from my friendship with Rae would be tricky, that she’d resist, but it wasn’t and she didn’t. That night at Exeter, I waited in the parking lot for more than an hour—because I was amazed by the implications of my nonvirgin status and because I had Twizzlers to eat, I wasn’t bored—and finally the Honda Civic reappeared. When I climbed in, Rae expressed no contrition about abandoning me, and we listened many more times to the song “Joking.” I wondered if Noah would ever tell her what had happened, and if she’d confront, or even physically accost, me, but of course he had no more incentive to reveal anything than I did. I suspect that they weren’t in touch much longer.
All sophomores at Dartmouth stayed on campus and took classes for the summer, and it was at some point in July or August that I realized it had been a long while since I’d laid eyes on Rae, even from a distance. The only conversation I remember having with Isaac at Dartmouth after my trip to Manchester was when I ran into him that summer outside Baker-Berry Library and he confirmed that Rae had dropped out.
These days, Isaac and I almost never talk about Rae, though she crosses my mind with regularity; I’m far more troubled that she probably didn’t earn a degree from Dartmouth than that I had sex with her boyfriend. I’ve found no trace of her online, and in this void, I’ve created a biography: She works in public relations for a large and mildly nefarious corporation. She’s tough and powerful and makes a lot of money. She never wanted children and lives in a swanky apartment in a big city with her good-looking and (I can’t resist) slightly younger boyfriend. If you were to mention Isaac or me, she wouldn’t know who we were, but, upon consideration, she’d acknowledge that our names sounded vaguely familiar.
Bad Latch
Of the ten of us enrolled in the prenatal yoga class that summer at the Y, I was the second most pregnant, and the woman who was the most pregnant was named Gretchen. All of us sat on oversized rubber balls, and Gretchen always staked out the center of the front row, closest to the instructor. The first class, when we were supposed to go around and say our name, due date, whether we knew if it was a boy or girl, and where we were planning to deliver, she said August 18—my due date was August 29—and added, “Carl and I want to be surprised about the gender, because in our information-saturated world, it’s nice to still allow for some mystery and magic, right?” She’d turned around on her ball so she was facing those of us in the second and third rows, and she smiled self-congratulatorily.
She had a high brown ponytail and wore a mint-green tank top that stretched over her belly and cost sixty-two dollars, which I knew because I’d seen it at a maternity boutique full of clothes I couldn’t afford. “We’re delivering at home with a midwife,” Gretchen continued. “Drug-free and all that. And then I’ll be a stay-at-home mom because it’s like, if you’re going to outsource your childcare, why even bother to become a parent in the first place?”
Lest it seem like this class occurred in a place where you could get away with saying such things—Brooklyn, maybe, or Berkeley?—it didn’t. It occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, and I heard Gretchen repeat her comments verbatim—Carl, information-saturated, mystery, magic, home birth, drug-free, outsource—every Saturday morning for the next five weeks because the instructor liked us to reintroduce ourselves each time. The sixth class, Gretchen wasn’t there. Her absence meant that when we discussed which parts of our bodies were newly sore or swollen, a discussion Gretchen had consistently dominated, my concerns took precedence over everyone else’s.
At the end of class, as we lay under nubbly Mexican blankets while the instructor guided us on a visualization of our peaceful, joyous deliveries, I wondered how Gretchen’s home birth had gone. Or perhaps she was in labor at that very moment, simultaneously snacking on organic trail mix and breathing mindfully as stalwart Carl massaged her hips.
As for me, at the grocery store, strangers would look at my belly and say, “Any minute now!” Then at five A.M. on a hot Thursday, after a bunch of contractions, an epidural, a lot of pushing, and a lot more pushing, she arrived; we had known in advance she’d be a girl, and we’d decided to call her Sadie. Everything about her was otherworldly and astonishing: Her eyes were big and brown, her nose was tiny and upturned, and her mouth was set in a nonplussed purse. “She looks mad,” I said, and my husband, Adam, who was choked up, said, “We have a daughter.”
* * *
—
It was a month later that I saw Gretchen again, this time at the weekly breast-feeding support group hosted by the maternity boutique whose clothes I couldn’t afford. By then Sadie was sleeping at night in a carpeted cat box between Adam and me, and we’d removed everything but the fitted sheet from our bed, all in an effort to get some rest while not smothering her. Also, I was finding nursing unbearable. The moment of her clamping on was like someone biting your skinned knee, and whenever she turned her head toward my chest, rooting, I was filled with dread. Intermittently, I’d place huge green cabbage leaves on my boobs, between my bra and skin, a recommendation I’d read on a website, though I’d yet to experience any decrease in soreness.
Adam had returned to his office a week after Sadie’s birth. I, meanwhile, would have a three-month maternity leave before resuming my job four days a week, one of which I’d work from home. On the days I couldn’t be with Sadie, Adam’s mother would come to our house to babysit. Although my job was considerably less cool than what I’d once imagined doing with my life—my employer was a multinational food manufacturer that, as it happened, was the number one seller of infant formula, which I wasn’t planning to use—my flexible childcare arrangement made me feel as if seven years with the company and a good relationship with my boss were paying off.
The breast-feeding support group occurred in a room accessed by a curtained-off doorway at the rear of the boutique. Despite the swankiness of the boutique’s merchandise, this room was filled with furniture whose best days had come and gone: Three mismatched, stained couches and a handful of chairs formed a lopsided circle. Scattered about were those C-shaped pillows I had believed until shortly before Sadie’s birth were meant to alleviate the discomfort of hemorrhoids but now knew were platforms for nursing babies. When I entered the room, eleven or twelve other women, all with infants, were chatting, about half of them with their breasts fully or partially displayed; instead of being differentiated by their personalities, the women were differentiated by their nipples. I’d carried Sadie inside in her car seat, and I set it on the floor behind an empty chair, along with her diaper bag, and lifted her out.
Mother-baby duos continued to trickle in as the support group’s leader, a gorgeous and slender woman wearing a crocheted turquoise sundress, got things rolling. “I’m Niko,” she said. “I’m the mom of Scarlett, who’s six and has self-weaned, and Declan, who’s four and loves breast-feeding. I’m passionate about helping moms like you give this beautiful, natural, and super-healthy gift to your little ones.”
As with prenatal yoga, we were then supposed to go around and introduce ourselves. Gretchen went third, and after she’d said her name she said, “And this is Piper, who was born via C-section after a grueling twenty-six hours of labor. I was like, ‘No drugs! No drugs!’ and Carl was like, ‘Gretchen, seriously, you’re superwoman,’ but then there was an umbilical cord prolapse, so it was out of my hands. On the upside, Piper’s nursing like a champ.”
“If your delivery didn’t happen how you wanted, it’s important to grieve,” Niko said. “At the same time, don’t underestimate how amazing it is that now you’re literally sustaining her with your own body.”
The next person who introduced herself was named Jessica, her baby was Ethan, and both of them began to cry as Jessica described how challenging Ethan’s tongue-tie made breast-feeding, which caused me to perk up with interest. Introductions were then stalled for twenty minutes as other mothers mur
mured support and a discussion of positions occurred. Niko was soon on her knees crouched over Jessica, maneuvering Jessica’s left breast, though she looked around at all of us as she said, “Breast-feeding shouldn’t hurt. We wouldn’t have survived as a species if it did, right? So if you’re in pain, what it probably means is that you have a bad latch.”
Introductions never did get all the way around the circle, and the hour was finished—it concluded with Niko reading aloud a poem that rhymed lactation and revelation—before I’d said my own or Sadie’s name. I set my daughter back in her car seat, hoisted the diaper bag onto my shoulder, took all of us out to the car, and drove home, stopping on the way to purchase a 1.45-pound container of powdered formula. Fixing Sadie a bottle that afternoon felt at first like a transgression and then, as she accepted it unfussily, like a relief. I planned to alternate between formula and breast milk, but within a week, I’d stopped nursing altogether and was using my employee coupons to buy formula in bulk; needless to say, I didn’t return to the support group.
* * *
—
The third place I crossed paths with Gretchen was at infant swim lessons. By that point, Sadie was six months old. The lessons occurred on Tuesday mornings, which was the day I “worked” from home, though my original plan to get things done while Sadie napped had been delusional and I’d basically given up on it. To seem productive, I sent frequent emails to my co-workers.
Only five babies were enrolled in the swim class, but if Gretchen recognized me, she gave no sign of it. A strange intimacy existed between us as we stood in the water next to each other in our tank bathing suits or took turns holding our babies in the center of the circle while singing. (“Purple potatoes, and purple tomatoes, and Sadie is in the stew!”) Yet Gretchen and I never spoke to each other directly. Piper seemed good-natured, and I assumed that she was still nursing like a champ and that Gretchen was greatly enjoying not outsourcing her childcare.
Then, around the fourth class, Gretchen and Piper stopped showing up. The weird part was that I almost missed them. Without the tension created by my antipathy toward Gretchen, the half hour felt slack, and I realized for the first time that I found the swim lessons boring.
Another three months passed, during which my company laid off twelve hundred employees, including my boss and five other people in my department. My new boss was a twenty-six-year-old guy with an MBA—that is, he was three years younger than I was—and he told me that if I wanted to keep my job, I needed to work full-time and on-site. The next day, my mother-in-law, who’d been walking with a limp for two years, was approved by her orthopedist to have her hip replaced; her recovery would last four to six weeks, and taking care of Sadie during that time was out of the question.
It wasn’t that I looked down on parents who put their kids in daycare, it wasn’t that I disapproved of them, or at least if I did disapprove, I knew enough to be embarrassed by my disapproval. I wasn’t a person compelled to broadcast my own choices in the hopes of making other people feel inferior. Nevertheless, on Sadie’s first day at Green Valley Children’s Center, I didn’t even make it out the front door before I burst into tears. I hadn’t felt that bad about some of the things that women having babies when I did, even in Omaha, were supposed to feel bad about—an epidural, formula—but the collapse of my carefully crafted childcare setup seemed like a failure of a different magnitude.
Although Adam and I had planned to bring Sadie to daycare together, a last-minute meeting had been scheduled at his office, so I was alone. Blinded by tears, I pushed open the front door of the center and stood in the parking lot, sobbing. I needed to get to my car, to hide, but I was so flustered that I couldn’t remember where I’d parked.
And then someone’s arms were around me—the someone was female, and her shampoo smelled like coconut—and she was saying, “It’s your first day, right? I saw you doing drop-off upstairs. But don’t worry, because, seriously, Green Valley is great. I was nervous, too, but now I love it so much.”
It took several seconds of collecting myself, and then of focusing on the woman’s face—she was still embracing me, and we were almost too close together for me to see her—to realize that the woman was Gretchen. I think she understood that I was recognizing her—perhaps I flinched—and she dropped her arms. She said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we were in the same—”
“I remember you.” I wiped my nose with my left palm. “I thought you were a stay-at-home mom.”
She laughed. “Well, Carl left me in March, which kind of threw a wrench into things.” Then she said, “It turns out my husband was having an affair since before I got pregnant, and now I’m single and working full-time. Life is full of surprises, huh?” I was taken aback and said nothing, and she added, “Really, though, I’ve been so happy with this place. I’ve learned a ton from the teachers.”
It was early July, almost a full year since Gretchen and I had met, although in a way we’d never met. Neither of our daughters had celebrated their first birthdays yet, and when I look back—our girls are eight now—I’m struck by how that was still the beginning of them becoming themselves and of us becoming mothers. In the years since, Sadie and Piper have learned to tie their shoes and ride bikes and read. They’ve had croup and stomach flu, their feelings have been hurt, they’ve lost teeth, they’ve performed in ballet recitals. I don’t know if it’s more improbable that Gretchen and I became each other’s closest friends or that our daughters did, too. Not that it’s all been easy for any of us—I had two miscarriages before the birth of my son, and Gretchen got engaged again but subsequently called it off. Sometimes when I see photos Adam took of me holding Sadie in the first month of her life, I can discern the faintly bumpy outline of cabbage leaves beneath my nursing bra, and I’m reminded of a particular kind of confusion that hasn’t entirely disappeared but has, with time, decreased.
That morning in the parking lot, I sniffled once more, then extended my hand to Gretchen. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Rachel.”
Plausible Deniability
“Stop me if I’ve told you this,” my brother says. “Libby read an article about how when you flush the toilet, tons of germs shoot up and coat everything nearby.”
“You’ve told me this,” I say.
“When she takes a shit, she’s started putting on a special T-shirt so that her regular clothes don’t touch the back of the toilet. But is she, like, nestling against the lid? She’s in the bathroom every morning way longer than I am, so maybe.”
“You’ve told me this,” I say again.
“Here’s the thing. If you’re an adult, whatever happens in there is between you and your god. Right? But she fuckin’ announces all this to me, and she’s even given the shirt a name—it’s her poop shirt. She hangs it on the back of the bathroom door next to our robes, this random pink T-shirt, and every time I see it, it’s like she’s rubbing my face in it.”
“In the toilet germs?” I ask.
“In the disgustingness of her humanity. Does she want me to cheat?”
It is six thirty-three on a Friday morning in February, about forty degrees, and still dark. We’re running east on Pershing toward Forest Park. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I leave my apartment at six-twenty and get to Mark’s house by six-thirty. They live in a brick colonial—stately on the outside, cluttered and dog-hair-filled when you step in—and if he’s already stretching in the driveway when I arrive, it usually means he awakened before his alarm went off and is in a bad mood. If I have to text him because he’s still inside, maybe still asleep, it means he’s equanimous. Occasionally, it even means he and Libby had sex the night before.
“I doubt the shirt has anything to do with you,” I say. “I think she’s just existing.” I add, “She doesn’t want you to cheat, Mark. Don’t cheat.”
Though my brother is next to me and I’m not looking at his face, I know his exact expres
sion as he mutters, “Said like a man who’s never been married.”
* * *
—
It’s while I’m parking in the garage adjacent to my law firm—I live in the suburb of Clayton and work in downtown St. Louis—that I feel, in my pocket, the ping of an incoming email. When I glance at the screen of my phone, I can see the first sentence, but I postpone reading the entire message. This way, an anticipatory pleasure—if I am being honest, the purest pleasure of my life these days—imbues the otherwise mundane six minutes it takes to ride the garage elevator to the lobby, cross the lobby to the other bank of elevators, and rise to the fifth floor, where I’m deposited at the glass entrance of Grant, Molyneux, and Molyneux.
I greet Gloria at the front desk and my assistant, Rosemary, outside my office, set my briefcase on the desk, sit, and read the email on my phone; the phone’s smaller screen feels more intimate than my computer. Like almost all the others, the message is one paragraph, with neither greeting nor sign-off; rather, it ends with a YouTube link.
Even as a child, I remember being enraptured by this piece—how the long orchestra statement of the first theme builds and builds in excitement and then the violin and viola enter in octaves in a seemingly random moment. When I was younger, I thought it sounded like how flying would feel. And the second movement has to be some of Mozart’s most beautiful and sad music ever—apparently, he wrote it shortly after his mom died.
The link is to Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman playing the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta. It was recorded in 1982 with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and is twenty-five minutes long, and I am seven minutes in when I hear someone saying my name.
You Think It, I'll Say It Page 6