“These crickets are disgusting,” Elisabeth said. “Is that what they are? Crickets? They’re huge. I hate when they land on me, don’t you?”
Andrew shrugged. “None have landed on me, I don’t know.”
“It feels like this,” she said, and punched him in the arm.
He raised an eyebrow.
Notice the moments when you feel yourself growing resentful, Violet had said. Don’t assign value to them, just take note.
Nomi put it more plainly: You’ll probably loathe Andrew for a while after the baby comes. If he touches you, you might want to die. Don’t worry. It will pass.
Elisabeth didn’t loathe him. She had been lucky to find a man as kind as Andrew, a partner who understood her like he did. But so much had changed these past few months. Sometimes it felt like they were standing on opposite sides of a crowded room and could see, but not reach, each other. She wasn’t sure yet how or when the two of them would fit together again.
And there was the issue of the secret she’d been keeping, which Violet called toxic.
“It’s never the thing you’re holding back that kills the relationship,” Violet said. “It’s the holding back itself that does it.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” Elisabeth said. “But in this case, I think it could go either way.”
* * *
—
After Andrew left for work, she showered.
Children’s folk songs streamed from her phone, which she had left on a chair just outside the bathroom door. The baby was strapped into the bouncy seat on the tile floor. He started to cry halfway through “This Land Is Your Land.”
Elisabeth rinsed the conditioner from her hair and shut off the water. She had been trying to shave her legs for a week.
She wrapped herself in a towel and picked him up.
She stepped out into the hall and brightened to see a text from Nomi.
Brian’s acting weird. He’s either having an affair or planning something for my birthday.
Birthday, Elisabeth typed back. She didn’t need to think about it. Brian was capable of many things, but he wasn’t a cheater.
How can you be so sure?
Because he’s the last person on earth who would have an affair.
But isn’t it always the ones you least suspect?
No, it’s the ones you least suspect when it comes to murder. It’s the ones you suspect when it comes to infidelity.
They never had actual voice-to-voice contact anymore. There were no hellos or goodbyes, just an ongoing conversation that they picked up and ended several times throughout the course of a day. If her best friend called her on the phone, it would mean someone had died, or, back when they both lived in Brooklyn, that she was locked out of her apartment.
Any progress on a sitter? Nomi asked.
Interviewing someone in an hour.
Elisabeth’s friends in the city hired nannies from the Caribbean or Tibet, whom they paid to be the grandmothers their own mothers were not. You wanted someone who loved your baby and shared her intuition without judgment. Who did not drink wine on your sofa while the child cried, or tell you that you ought to cover your boob in mixed company.
She’d heard every variety of complaint from her friends about their parents’ odd post-baby behavior. Elisabeth would have gladly taken any of it over her own situation. Four months in, her parents still hadn’t met Gil.
Her father seemed to think she should bring the baby to him.
“Arizona is gorgeous this time of year,” he said. “It’s the perfect place for kids. They can run all over.”
“But he doesn’t run,” she said. “He can’t even sit yet.”
Her mother was on a Viking cruise up the Rhine when Gil was born. She sent him a cup and bowl handmade by nuns in Bucharest and had since made no overtures to come see him.
So many people—even people Elisabeth didn’t know—made comments about her mother. Nomi brought her own mother over for a visit when she was in Brooklyn. She had knitted Gil a blanket.
“Nothing better than being a grandma,” she said. “Your mom must be over the moon.”
Elisabeth smiled and nodded, knowing that Nomi’s mother was thinking of a different sort of family, one like her own.
Since her early twenties, she had been mostly free of her parents. They did not spend holidays together. Elisabeth never went back to California to visit. But the process of forming her own family had made her reflect more than ever before on the one from which she came.
She didn’t think she would care when her withholding, inattentive mother inevitably turned out to be a withholding, inattentive grandmother. But she did care, sometimes. Her parents loomed larger now than they had at any other moment in her adult life.
“We’re moving because I’m switching careers, but also to be closer to my mom and dad,” Andrew had said again and again in the weeks before they left, simplifying the truth, polishing it. “It will be such a relief to have their help.”
Elisabeth pressed her lips closed whenever he said it. In the abstract, Faye and George were thrilled to be grandparents. But they weren’t helpful. Whenever the baby pooped in her mother-in-law’s presence, Faye would hold him out to her, nose wrinkled, and say, “Somebody needs to be changed.” The one time Elisabeth asked her to take care of him while she ran to the store for ten minutes, she came home to find them watching Dr. Phil. The baby’s eyes were two full moons attached to the faces on Faye’s big-screen TV.
Faye was an elementary school teacher, which Elisabeth had assumed would mean she’d make an incredible grandmother. But it felt like Faye had gotten her fill of childcare at work. She would adore Gil, but she would not be responsible for him.
George doted on the baby, but he was distracted by his own problems lately.
From what Elisabeth could tell, most children in their new neighborhood went to day care part-time or else stayed home with their mothers.
Debbie across the way was a housewife married to an insurance salesman. The other women on Laurel Street had the sorts of job titles that might be all-consuming, but could also be clever terms for doing nothing: Melody was a realtor. Pam taught yoga. They seemed to be home at all times.
Elisabeth supposed they could say the same about her. There were few things more humiliating than meeting a stranger at a party, having him ask what she did for a living. I’m a writer, she would say, and invariably the stranger would get an uncomfortable look on his face. Have you—published? was always the second question, warily asked, and when she said yes, two books, his expression would grow terrified, like she might be about to try to sell him those books from out of the trunk of her car.
It was better when Andrew was beside her. He bragged in a way she could not about herself. Her first was a bestseller, he might say. Or Simon and Schuster gave her a three-book deal.
That third book, due in a year and not yet begun, was the reason she needed to hire someone to watch Gil. Elisabeth didn’t even have an idea yet. It was unlike her. Usually, as she wrapped up one project, she was already well into thinking about the next and eager to start. She had expected that by now she would want to get back to work. Instead, her ambition was something she remembered vaguely, yet couldn’t seem to conjure.
She knew from friends’ experiences that the search for a sitter could be worse than dating but similar—some were duds, and you knew right away there was no chemistry, yet you still had to go through the motions of an interview. Sometimes you liked someone who chose somebody else. Nomi had hired a woman on the spot who turned out to be faking her references. That had petrified them both.
When Elisabeth told her neighbor Stephanie that she was looking for someone, Stephanie said this was the best part of living in a town that was home to a small women’s college.
“I’ve used a couple
of the students, and they were good,” she said. “Good enough. No one burned the house down.”
Elisabeth thanked her for the suggestion and suspected that Stephanie didn’t love her children half as much as she loved Gil.
But in the end, she decided to try a college student. She could get someone three days a week to start, ease into things. If the arrangement didn’t work out, the end of the semester would make for a natural parting of ways.
A week ago, Elisabeth had pushed the stroller over to campus, a flyer in hand.
“Can you point me toward College Hall?” she asked a girl with close-cropped hair.
The girl stared back, then pulled out an earbud.
“Sorry,” Elisabeth said. “College Hall?”
The girl pointed to a red-brick building with turrets at the top.
Inside, the space was hushed, dim. Stephanie had told her there was a bulletin board where people from off campus could post requests for help. But the walls in front of her were lined with portraits of the school’s presidents—twelve somber-looking white men with varying degrees of hair loss and, at the end of the line, a black woman with a triumphant smile. Elisabeth stared at her until the baby squawked, a reminder of her purpose.
She turned a corner. There, between the open doors of the registrar’s office and Alumnae Relations, was a large corkboard, with papers pinned all over. One advertised a potluck supper at the local Presbyterian Church. Another, the need for volunteers at the animal shelter. Most were from mothers like her, looking for sitters, though unlike her, the others only wanted someone a few hours a week, or to call on date night.
As Elisabeth took it all in, a man’s voice broke the silence. The sound startled her.
He came into view a moment later. Silver haired, handsome, in a gray blazer and dark jeans, walking beside a student who wanted to know if it was possible to get an extension on a paper because, she said, her grandmother had died.
The man showed no sign of sympathy.
“I’ll need a copy of the obituary,” he said.
Harsh, Elisabeth thought. Peculiar.
You couldn’t marry a guy who taught at a women’s college. It would be like marrying a gynecologist. There was something pervy about it.
Or maybe there wasn’t.
For some time now, she’d been attempting to be less judgmental. While trying for a baby, she read a blog post about how a woman’s negative thoughts could harm her fertility. From then on, every time she wanted to say something judgy, Elisabeth said the word banana instead. There were entire days when her speech came out like a letter censored during World War II: “And I love my sister, but she can be so banana. I know this guy she’s dating is banana, but does she deserve anything but banana after that whole banana thing with the banana guy?”
One night she dreamed she gave birth to a banana.
* * *
—
Four potential sitters called in response to the ad. She had already ruled out three of them.
The first, Silvia, was, to Elisabeth’s surprise, not a student but a woman from El Salvador with grown kids of her own.
Silvia critiqued Elisabeth’s way of burping Gil; she suggested he was cold and should be wearing one more layer. This didn’t bother Elisabeth. Because she often believed she was the only person who knew what the baby needed, it was an interesting change of pace to have someone come along who thought she had no idea what she was doing.
She planned to offer Silvia the job, but at the last minute, Elisabeth thought to ask how she’d come across the flyer.
“I work nights, cleaning, at the college,” Silvia said. “I’ve been looking for a good second job.”
“But if you already work nights and you were to take this job, when would you sleep?”
“I don’t need much sleep. I’ll nap when the baby does.”
Was that normal? For a sitter to nap on the job?
Silvia looked Elisabeth up and down. “You sure that baby came out of you? You’re tiny.”
Other people had asked the same question, which Elisabeth presumed they meant as a compliment, but it felt accusatory. Though she was naturally thin and petite, her body was foreign to her now. The pouch of skin where her flat stomach had been. Her breasts, still small, yet newly droopy. Her hips were wider, her feet too big for certain shoes. All this, she knew, was supposed to be distasteful to her. It was, sometimes. But it was also the proof of what had happened in that body, the thing she had done that was somehow both ordinary and extraordinary.
The second candidate, a sophomore with a blue streak in her hair, answered her phone in the middle of the interview. She didn’t say, I’m sorry, I have to take this, it’s an emergency, she just held up a finger while Elisabeth was midsentence and said, “Hey.”
The third had only ever worked with older kids, as a camp counselor. She didn’t support the baby’s head when she held him. Elisabeth snatched Gil back, a tad overdramatic, and said she’d be in touch.
* * *
—
The fourth candidate was due at nine. She had sent an email in response to the ad, saying she had spent the previous summer working as a nanny in London. Elisabeth knew better than to get her hopes up, but she could not stop entertaining visions of Gil being adored by a loving, yet firm, British woman.
Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins.
Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp.
At five to the hour, Gil asleep on her shoulder, she watched a plump young brunette in a baggy T-shirt dress and flip-flops come up the block.
The girl walked past the house without slowing down.
Elisabeth decided it must not be her.
She had made coffee and put out muffins and croissants, as if she were hosting brunch. She did the same for the others. The girl with the blue streak in her hair had asked if she could take the leftover pastries to go.
Elisabeth had never interviewed anyone for a job before. When she was younger, she would have imagined that by the time she was doing so, she’d know how. That just being on this side of things conferred authority, control.
She pulled up her to-do list on her phone. Dinner at Faye and George’s. Shower. Babysitter. WRITE? She sometimes added things to the list that she had already done, so that she could check them off later. A question mark after an item meant there was no way she was going to do it.
The doorbell rang right at nine, and there stood the girl in the T-shirt dress, a huge smile on her face. Had she kept walking so she wouldn’t arrive early? Or had she gotten lost?
“You must be Sam,” Elisabeth whispered, pushing the screen door open with one arm as she cradled the sleeping baby in the other. “I’m Elisabeth. And this is Gil.”
“Hi,” the girl said softly. Chipper, that was the word for her tone.
She stepped inside, looked around.
A soft blue rug ran the length of the front hall, exposing on either side the hardwood floors beneath. To the left was the large, sunny living room. To the right, a wooden staircase with a white banister. Midway up the stairs, there was a stained-glass window, which Elisabeth had loved as soon as she walked in for the first time, knowing then, before she had seen a single room, that they would buy the place.
“I love your house,” Sam said. “It has such a peaceful vibe.”
Elisabeth almost snorted, but then took stock of herself: her plain white button-down and black leggings. Her bare feet, her hair up in a loose bun. The silver tray of pastries; Simon and Garfunkel playing on the Bose. The baby in his soft white pajamas. She could see how it seemed peaceful from the outside.
The girl couldn’t tell what was in her head. Elisabeth liked that.
“Oh my goodness, look at his curls,” Sam said.
It was what most people said when they saw Gil for the first time. The words filled Elisabeth with a foolish degree
of pride, as if she had designed him that way.
He was born with a full head of golden hair, which made him special from the start. Nurses came to her hospital room just to see the curls.
They all called Elisabeth Mom, and Andrew was Dad.
The first time it happened, the nurse was not much older than Sam.
“You should take three Motrin, Mom,” she said. And, “Mom, press the button if you need to get up. Don’t try to stand on your own yet.”
In her stupor, Elisabeth wondered whether the girl really thought she was her mother. Was she?
Later, Nomi told her nurses did this so they didn’t have to learn the names of parents they would know only for forty-eight hours. Elisabeth thought maybe it was also meant to help the parents catch up to what had happened, saying the words over and over, until they felt like the truth.
“What can I get you, Sam?” she said now. “Coffee? Pellegrino?”
“Nothing, thanks. I’m good.”
Sam kicked off her shoes.
“You don’t have to,” Elisabeth said, but the gesture pleased her. None of the others had thought to do it.
“I should wash my hands,” she said.
Elisabeth pointed at a narrow door. “Powder room.”
The handwashing seemed to take a long time. It felt odd, oppressive, to wait in the hall. Elisabeth went and sat down on the sofa.
The baby woke up from his nap.
“Hello, my love,” she whispered. “There’s a friend here to meet you.”
It occurred to her then that Sam wasn’t English.
When she came in, Gil was sitting, assisted, in Elisabeth’s lap, big blue eyes open wide.
Sam gasped.
“He’s beautiful,” she said, and Elisabeth loved her at once.
Friends and Strangers Page 2