Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “Please,” she said. “Sit. Tell us about yourself. You said in your email that you were a nanny in London? So I thought—” She laughed.

  “What?” Sam said.

  “I guess I thought you’d have an accent.”

  “Oh. No. Sorry. I was just there for the summer. I worked for a family with eighteen-month-old twins and a newborn. All boys.”

  “Dear God.”

  “It wasn’t as hard as it sounds,” Sam said. “I’ve been taking care of children my whole life. I’m the oldest of four, and I have nineteen younger cousins.”

  “My goodness.”

  “My mother never wanted me to babysit. She wanted me to get a waitressing job. She said it was more respectable. But I love working with kids.”

  “I was a waitress for years. There’s nothing respectable about it, believe me,” Elisabeth said with a smile. She pushed the tray of pastries toward Sam. “What did you think of London? I’ve liked it there, the few times I’ve been.”

  “I love it,” Sam said. “My boyfriend, Clive, is there. He’s English. I’m hoping to get back to see him as much as I can this year. It’s expensive, but his sister-in-law works for British Airways, so we can use her discount if we go standby.”

  “Is Clive a student too?” Elisabeth asked.

  “He—graduated.”

  Elisabeth wanted to ask more, but she could hear Andrew’s voice in her head: Boundaries.

  “What are you studying?” she said instead.

  “I’m a Studio Art/English Lit double major. My dad likes to joke that he’s not sure which is the more useless degree. He wanted me to major in economics.”

  “I’ve worked with a lot of former English majors,” Elisabeth said. “They turned out okay. Don’t worry.”

  “What do you do?” Sam said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Of course not. I’m a journalist. I was at the Times for twelve years.”

  “How exciting.”

  “It was.”

  Elisabeth did not say that a year ago, she and half her friends had taken buyouts, rather than risk getting laid off six months later.

  “Now I’m writing a book,” she said.

  “That’s incredible. Is it your first?”

  “My third.”

  “Wow.”

  “Do you know what you want to do after graduation?”

  Sam looked embarrassed. “Since I was a kid, I’ve loved to paint. But that’s not a job, obviously.”

  “It is for some people,” Elisabeth said.

  “I’d love to work in a gallery, maybe teach someday,” Sam said. She straightened her posture. “Sorry. I should have mentioned, I have lots of infant experience. I’m CPR certified. I have great references here in town. I did a bunch of night and weekend sitting my first three years of school.”

  “And three full days a week won’t interfere with your studies?”

  “Senior year,” Sam said. “Not too strenuous. Besides, every other year, I had a campus job in the dining hall and built my classes around that, so I’m used to it.”

  “Great,” Elisabeth said. She had a list of questions, but no idea where she’d put it. She felt like she should be asking more. She had gotten caught up in the pleasant conversation.

  Sam looked around the room. “How long have you lived here?”

  “A month.”

  Elisabeth and Andrew had started talking about leaving the city ten years ago, on their third date. They had gone to so many open houses, casting themselves into lives they weren’t ready to live—small farms on the Hudson, New Jersey Colonials with big backyards, even beach cottages in Maine, which, in mid-July, they could almost convince themselves they might stay in year-round.

  “You shouldn’t waste a realtor’s time if you’re not serious,” said her mother-in-law, apparently a champion of realtors’ rights.

  But Elisabeth could never be sure whether they were serious or not. New Yorkers reveled in complaining about the city: the crowds, the subway delays, the hassle. Every sane person wanted to go somewhere else. New Yorkers could best be understood not by where they lived but by where they talked about escaping to—L.A. or Portland or Austin or wherever they came from to begin with. And yet, when someone left, it shocked her.

  Her friend Rachel had moved to a suburb of Cleveland, her hometown. She spoke of its charms whenever they talked, repeating herself.

  “On Fridays in summer, they have beerfests at the botanical garden, and you can sit in the grass, drinking craft beers from a bunch of different breweries,” Rachel had said on at least five occasions.

  It sounded nice, but how often could a person drink beer at the botanical garden? Then what?

  To Elisabeth and Andrew, life in the city had never felt permanent, even though they both lived there for twenty years, longer than they’d lived anywhere else, including the places they called home. She had long wondered what would be the thing to make them go. A child, she assumed. But Gil wasn’t the reason. It was the situation with Andrew’s father; the situation with Andrew himself.

  Most days, Elisabeth didn’t know what she was doing at 32 Laurel Street. How, after all that searching for the perfect place, she had ended up here, in the middle of nowhere.

  Before they left, when anyone asked where they were moving to, Andrew would say, “Upstate.”

  She felt the need to add, “But not, like, cool upstate. Take wherever you’re picturing and add two hundred miles.”

  She liked that their house didn’t look like every other house on the block, at least. Their neighbors had torn down old capes to build monstrosities that extended to the furthest possible edges of their property.

  Their house was an original. Small but lovely. A glossy red door, ivy crawling up a white wooden façade that the realtor advised would need to be repainted every four or five years. Elisabeth and Andrew nodded, casual, when she said it, as if they hadn’t spent their entire adult lives in apartments, never taking on a home-improvement project more involved than changing a light bulb.

  Gil reached for Sam now and cooed, unwilling to be left out of the conversation.

  “Is it okay?” Sam asked.

  “Of course.”

  She took hold of him, held him up in the air. In that way one does with an infant, she spoke to Elisabeth through him. “I can tell you are an exceptionally smart young man, Gilbert,” she said. “I think we’d have lots of fun together.”

  He grabbed hold of her hair, and they both laughed.

  Elisabeth beamed. “Look how good you are with him.”

  “He seems like such a sweet one.”

  “He is. We got lucky.”

  Her eyes still on Gil, Sam said, almost absentmindedly, “Do you think you’ll have more kids?”

  A strange thing to ask during a job interview. But then, she was young enough to believe this was a simple, unloaded question. And hadn’t Elisabeth recently complained to Andrew that it gave her the creeps how everything here seemed hidden? In the city, she found it unsettling that lives were on display. People fought or ate lunch or tweezed their eyebrows right in front of you on the subway. But her neighbors here, darting out their front doors and straight into their SUVs with plastic smiles and apologetic waves, were worse.

  “I only ever wanted one,” Elisabeth said. “Andrew, my husband, he’d have five. So, who knows what will happen.”

  Didn’t she sound carefree? Unbothered. Willing to leave it all up to chance. She thought of the two embryos, frozen in liquid nitrogen at a storage facility in Queens.

  Andrew had nightmares about them.

  Four times a year, they received a bill from Weill Cornell in the amount of two hundred and sixty-two dollars. The storage fee was the same no matter how many embryos a person had, so every time Elisabeth saw that bracketed number 2 on he
r statement, she felt a tug of annoyance at the cost.

  In the early days, when doing IVF was still a theoretical, they read an article that said there were more than a million frozen embryos around the country that would likely go unused. Couples who had produced children in this way and didn’t want to have more found themselves in limbo—unable to discard what could potentially become their child, but unwilling to bring that child to fruition.

  Andrew said it wasn’t fair to create those potential lives and then just leave them there. He made her swear they would never do such a thing.

  She thought to tell Sam all this now, but resisted.

  “It’s time for Gil to eat. I’ll get him a bottle,” Elisabeth said, rising to her feet. “I do breastfeed, but I supplement with formula.”

  She went into the usual monologue. “I’ve always had a low supply. I was taking forty herbs a day for the first three months, and tying myself in knots. Three different lactation consultants. This disgusting tea that made my sweat smell like maple syrup. Pumping after every feed, every two hours, even in the middle of the night. Then I decided to throw some formula into the mix and be done with it.”

  The intensity of her shame had surprised her at the time. Even now, she’d be loath to say it to another mother.

  “I once read that Charles Manson was breastfed,” Sam said brightly. “Ever since, I’ve figured that it can’t possibly matter one way or the other.”

  Elisabeth smiled.

  “Are you sure I can’t get you anything to drink?” she said. “I made coffee.”

  “Coffee would be great if it’s no trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble at all.”

  3

  AS SOON AS ANDREW GOT HOME, Elisabeth thrust the baby toward him and said, “Can you hold him for a sec? I have to pee.”

  When she called him at work earlier to say she had hired a sitter, Andrew said, “I can’t wait to hear more about her tonight.”

  Translation: I’m busy. Stop talking.

  From the start, theirs had been an egalitarian marriage. He cooked; she washed the dishes. He vacuumed and did laundry and mopped the kitchen floor. She cleaned the bathroom, which most people thought was the worst chore of all, when really it was the easiest. If either of them did more than their share, it was Andrew, no question.

  But it sometimes seemed like the baby was only hers. At first, it was a biological thing. But Gil was four months old, could take a bottle, and still she did all the night feedings, all the mental calculations of knowing when he needed more diapers and lotion and clothes.

  “His pants are getting tight. I think he’s ready for the next size up,” she said a week ago, and Andrew made the mistake of asking, “What size does he wear now?”

  In part, she knew, this was a function of Andrew’s new job and the fact that she was more often physically present at home. She was technically still on maternity leave, though that was a murky concept when you worked for yourself. But Elisabeth couldn’t help fearing it was more than that; that parenthood had redefined the terms in a way she hadn’t expected.

  By the end of the day, she felt exhausted and resentful and spent. Hiding in the bathroom was a greater solace than any spa she had ever been to, as relaxing as a vacation in Saint Barts.

  Twenty minutes passed, and she was still on the toilet, scrolling through pictures of the baby on her phone. This was what happened—the urge to escape Gil fulfilled, Elisabeth pined for him. The first day home from the hospital, she got teary at the thought of his moving away to college.

  “You’re going to live at home and commute,” she told him.

  She had never before missed something as it was happening.

  Elisabeth texted Nomi.

  I hired a sitter.

  Great! What’s she like?

  College senior. Wants to be a painter. Adorable. We talked for two hours.

  Why?

  She was interesting. (And it’s possible I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone besides Andrew in weeks.)

  A moment later, her phone lit up with what she assumed was Nomi’s response, but instead her sister’s name appeared.

  E…I HATE to ask, but is there any way you can spot me $200? I’ll pay you back ASAP—the deal’s going through next week!

  A familiar knot in her stomach.

  Sure, Elisabeth wrote back. No prob.

  She hated the feeling this thing with her sister always aroused in her.

  She toggled over to the BK Mamas as a palate cleanser. It was an instinct beyond her control, like a stutter or a twitch. Someone had posted the saddest story, about a child abused in foster care. There was a related online petition. She signed without reading the particulars. Her eyes filled with tears. Why had she logged on to this page? Elisabeth was certain she had come looking for something, but she couldn’t remember what.

  She sensed Andrew’s presence outside the door.

  “Hon. You okay in there?”

  His polite yet passive-aggressive way of asking why the hell she had been in the bathroom so long.

  She stood and flushed the toilet.

  “People are monsters,” she said when she emerged.

  “Hmm?”

  “Something I read online. You don’t want to know.”

  “Okay. We should get going, huh?”

  “One time years ago, your belt was on the bed, so I hit myself with it to see how it felt, and Jesus Christ, it’s barbaric. How could anyone do that to a child? I didn’t even hit myself very hard and it hurt so much.”

  “Well, you have a low pain threshold,” he said.

  “I do? How do you know?”

  “You think a cricket landing on you feels like getting punched in the arm.”

  * * *

  —

  On the way to his parents’ house, he told her they didn’t have to stay for long. His mother had said it would do his father good to see the baby. She was worried about him again.

  “He’s been holed up with those files for the past three nights,” Andrew said. “She says he needs a distraction.”

  “Or she does,” Elisabeth said.

  For some time now, her father-in-law, George, had been consumed by an idea. Months ago, he told Elisabeth how it came to him when he overheard a stranger yelling into a cell phone about how America was no longer a global superpower.

  “He said, ‘This hasn’t been the greatest nation in the world for sixty years. That’s just something we tell ourselves,’ ” George recalled. “It pissed me off. For the rest of the day, I wondered why. Was it a feeling left over from grammar school, where each morning we pledged allegiance to the flag and meant it?”

  After that, George started to notice a pattern. More and more, the conversations he had came back around to the sorry state of things, how life was getting worse instead of better.

  “There’s no protection for the little guy anymore. No accountability from higher up,” he explained to Elisabeth. “We’re on our own. It’s like a hollow tree. That’s how I think of it. On the surface, this country looks more or less like it always did. But there’s nothing inside holding it up. No integrity, no support. Doesn’t matter if the leaves are green and the trunk is tall. A hollow tree can’t stand for long.”

  In the downstairs guest room that also served as George’s home office were toppling stacks of newspaper clippings and printouts meant to back up his theory, as if someone might arrive at any moment and ask him to prove it. Dozens of handwritten notes, scrawled on Post-its, were stuck to the wall.

  Her mother-in-law grimaced whenever she walked in there, like she had stumbled upon a serial killer’s lair.

  “What is the point of this, George?” Elisabeth heard her say once.

  “The point is people blame themselves when it’s systemic. The citizens of this
country should be taking to the streets, not popping antidepressants.”

  “And what exactly are you going to do about it?” Faye said.

  Since Andrew was in kindergarten, George had made a good living with a small fleet of Town Cars he owned. He and a handful of employees shuttled people to and from the airport and around the valley. Three years ago, George decided to reinvest in the business. He used some of his and Faye’s retirement savings to buy three brand-new Lincolns. The timing could not have been worse. Six months later, Uber came to the area, offering cheaper fares and immediate bookings, and wiped out his company.

  Eventually, George started driving for Uber himself. Faye told Elisabeth it was awful, diminishing. The pay was an insult. Half the passengers were drunk college kids. George could lug three heavy suitcases through the airport and up someone’s front stairs, and still get just a thank-you in return, if he was lucky.

  “The app says customers don’t have to tip,” Faye said, disgusted. Elisabeth was astonished to hear her say the word app.

  For a while, Faye reported that George was in bed by seven most nights, that he had no appetite, that he wouldn’t talk much, which wasn’t like him.

  Then, instead of being depressed, George became obsessed—with the Hollow Tree, with the plight of the common man. Andrew was annoyed that instead of getting a new job, and facing what had happened, George now spent all his free time on this pointless endeavor. Elisabeth thought the whole exercise was a kind of therapy, a means of exploring what had happened to him, without having to make it personal, which wasn’t George’s way.

  “If you still hate it here in a year, we’ll go back,” Andrew said now, in the car.

  “I don’t hate it, exactly,” she said. “Besides, I’ve seen Bridges of Madison County. Once the wife moves to her husband’s hometown, she never leaves. All she gets is one weekend of passionate infidelity with Clint Eastwood.”

  “At least you have that to look forward to.”

  They didn’t actually live in his hometown, which was run-down and somehow perpetually gray no matter the weather. Their house was twenty minutes away in the nearest college town, a place where Elisabeth had imagined attending lectures and eating Ethiopian food, and availing herself of all the best parts of an intellectual-adjacent life.