“Brooklyn. Carroll Gardens.”
“Did you own or rent?”
“We owned.”
“That’s a pricey area, isn’t it?”
“We got a great deal on our place,” Elisabeth said, trying to sound breezy.
The conversation was beginning to feel like an interrogation.
“You owned in Brooklyn before it got super hot?” Melody said. She threw her head back. “Why can’t I be one of those people who make genius real estate decisions?”
Elisabeth felt proud of herself, though she said, “We just got lucky, buying when we did.”
“Maybe your luck will rub off on us, and Laurel Street will shoot up in value soon,” Melody said. “We were so glad when you bought that house. For the longest time, I thought no one ever would.”
“Why?” Elisabeth said. “Is it haunted?”
She was joking, but they all looked down into their laps.
“Mrs. Dillon’s mother did die there, and it was a terrible death, but no. I doubt it’s haunted,” Melody said. “It’s just that they were lazy. They didn’t take care of things. I remember walking into the open house, and there was this huge crack in the wall right there in the entryway. I pointed it out to Maureen, the listing agent. We’re old friends. I said ‘Maureen, that’s structural.’ And she said no, it wasn’t, it was a crack in the paint. I said, ‘I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, I know what I’m looking at.’ So then Maureen looked at me and whispered, ‘Suckers from the city seeking charm. That’s my only hope.’ ”
“Melody!” Stephanie said.
“What? I’m teasing. It’s such a nice house. The pride of the block. You got it inspected, didn’t you?”
“Where did you grow up, Elisabeth?” Stephanie said.
“California. Sacramento.”
“Are your folks still out there?”
She didn’t feel like telling the whole story, so she just said yes.
“That must be hard, being apart from your mom when you have a new baby,” Stephanie said.
Something she felt like talking about even less.
“Speaking of,” Elisabeth said. “I hope this isn’t too much information, but I should go home and nurse. I’m very—full.”
“We’ve all been there,” Stephanie said. “Isn’t it the worst? But don’t leave. I have an old pump you can use around here somewhere.”
“I brought mine.”
Elisabeth regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth.
She excused herself to go to the bathroom.
She had to pass through the kitchen to get there. The word EAT was spelled out on the wall in giant red metal letters. Perhaps Stephanie needed a regular reminder of what the room was for.
Elisabeth pinched her own wrist. Banana. She sounded obnoxious, even to herself.
Oh, but those women were awful.
In the bathroom, she set up the yellow pump on the counter, plugged it into the wall, slid the cups into two slits in her bra, and turned it on.
She stood against the sink and listened to the slurping sound of the machine as it extracted her milk.
She texted Nomi. I’m in hell.
Elisabeth waited for a reply, but none came. Even though she knew Nomi was probably putting the kids to bed, Elisabeth pictured her out for dinner with fabulous new friends.
At least she could sit in here alone for twenty minutes.
She wished she had thought to record the conversation, or that she had brought a pen and paper to take notes. Maybe there was a book in all this. The pitfalls of trying to make friends in middle age, or suburban moms who drink too much.
It was her way of drawing a line between them and herself, playing the observer so she didn’t have to care whether or not she fit in. She’d been doing it all her life. Andrew said she was like this because she was a writer, but he had that backward; she was a writer because she was like this.
When she got back to the living room, they were shouting over one another.
“The wine bar?”
“We go there all the time. The point is to shake things up.”
“Margaritas at La Paloma?”
“Closes at ten.”
“Lanchard’s,” Stephanie said.
“Eww, that place is nasty. Your feet stick to the floor.”
“It’s fun,” Stephanie said. “Plus, it’s where the construction crews go to drink after work. Nothing wrong with some eye candy.”
Gwen pulled on her trench coat with an enthusiasm that surprised Elisabeth. She hadn’t taken her for the stick-to-the-floor, eye-candy type.
“I’ve got to run,” Gwen said. “We leave for Hong Kong tomorrow and I still have tons to do.”
“Hong Kong?” Elisabeth said.
“I’m going for work,” Gwen said. “My husband is tagging along.”
“What do you do?”
“I teach East Asian studies at the college, but I’m on sabbatical this year. I’m also a photographer, so that’s what this trip is about.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Three months.”
Elisabeth felt crestfallen. Maybe she could walk Gwen home, at least. Test her hunch that the two of them might be friends.
When they moved here, she had imagined that the women in her neighborhood would be academics. Elisabeth fell in love with the house and didn’t worry about the rest. So much was up to chance. Somehow they had landed on a block full of upwardly mobile townies, plus Karen, who was from Minnesota and married to a professor, but still fit in like she had lived here all her life. Had Elisabeth and Andrew bought four blocks away, she might have lived next door to Gwen, and two doors down from Gwen’s friend, who taught narrative nonfiction. Elisabeth saw that other version of herself strolling along Main Street on the way to lunch with her new neighbors, and felt actual sadness over the loss.
“I should get going too,” she said. “I need to relieve Andrew. He’s been texting me every second.”
A lie, but the Laurels nodded knowingly.
“The best thing for him is to have this time with the baby so he knows he can do it,” Stephanie said.
“She’s right,” Debbie said. “I never did that, and to this day Craig calls me every ten minutes when he’s home alone with them. ‘Deb, where do we keep the Band-Aids?’ ‘Deb, where’s the little spoons?’ ”
Stephanie sighed. “As my mother always says, there are only two kinds of people in the world: women and children.”
Elisabeth promised them she would nip in the bud this problem that she didn’t actually have.
Everyone made their way into coats and out onto the lawn. Gwen had managed to slip off without notice. Elisabeth envied her to an unhealthy degree.
It was a warm, balmy night, probably the last of its kind until spring.
They ambled down the sidewalk.
When they reached her house, Elisabeth said, “Thanks for everything. That was so much fun.”
The porch light went on. Andrew appeared at the door.
“Let your wife come out with us,” yelled Stephanie, as if Elisabeth was the life of the party, even though they’d barely spoken to her all night. “Can’t you spare her this once?”
“Go!” Andrew said, too eager. The baby was asleep. His mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway. He was probably loving having time alone to watch sports or porn or videos of golden retrievers jumping into swimming pools.
“Are you sure?” Elisabeth said. She gave him a look, which she hoped made clear that this was an opportunity for him to be her hero, or for her to murder him when she got home, depending.
“Have fun,” he said.
When they reached the corner, Stephanie said, “By the way, I can’t stay late, guys, I have to go to Hong Kong tomorrow.”
<
br /> The rest of them cackled.
“It’s like, we get it, Gwen, you’re important,” Debbie said. “You went to Yale. Big whoop, so did I.”
Debbie went to Yale?
“She’s one of those selfish, childless people,” Pam said.
“Pam!” Karen said.
“What? There’s something unnatural about a woman who doesn’t want kids. We all know that.”
“Would you want to have kids with Christopher?” Debbie said.
“You guys, our new friend is going to think we’re awful,” Karen said, looking at Elisabeth. “The thing is, Gwen can be a show-off. Her husband works with mine at the college. Different departments, but they’re both on some committee, and we seem to get thrown together at these boring faculty events. So that’s why we have to include her in book club. Her husband—he’s an acquired taste.”
“He’ll hit on you within five minutes of saying hello,” Debbie said.
High school never ended. It just took on different shapes, new casts of characters. Elisabeth had only recovered from the real thing when she went away to college and met her best friend, the person who understood her better than anyone.
She missed Nomi more than she had since the day she left Brooklyn.
* * *
—
They had to walk through campus to get to town. Elisabeth noted a small group of college girls standing at the bus stop, wearing basically nothing. She wondered where they were going dressed like that in the middle of the week. They had on far too much makeup, and shoes they couldn’t walk in. They looked like overgrown toddlers, unsure of their footing. Sometimes she was so glad to be old.
Pam hooked her arm through Elisabeth’s, in a show of forced intimacy.
“Tell us about your husband. He’s—an inventor? I think that’s what someone told me. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Elisabeth said. “He was a consultant until recently, but he’s had this idea in mind for years, and he decided to go for it.”
She tried to sound enthusiastic.
“What’s the idea?” Karen said.
“It’s a solar-powered grill.”
She expected them to ask her to explain, as most people did when the grill came up.
But Melody exclaimed, “He was on Shark Tank!”
“No,” Elisabeth said.
“Yes! I remember the solar-powered grill. It had a clever name. Fun Sun? Bun Sun?”
“That wasn’t him.”
Melody frowned. “Oh.”
They reached the edge of town, and Stephanie tripped in the crosswalk, teetering into a food-delivery guy in his twenties. Stephanie grabbed hold of him to steady herself, then said out loud, “Debbie, feel this arm, it’s like a hunk of marble.”
The kid appeared to be as horrified as Elisabeth felt.
When they got to Lanchard’s and sat down at the bar, the Laurels were so loud and rude and annoying that people kept giving them dirty looks, and Elisabeth had the urge to shout, I’m not with these women!
She glanced around the room. There, at a table in the corner with half a dozen other girls, was Sam.
Elisabeth’s relief upon seeing her was perhaps out of proportion with how close they were. Sam had only been watching Gil for a month. Still, Elisabeth was fond of her.
The sight of Sam felt like being rescued.
On Sam’s first day, Elisabeth had purposely scheduled a therapy session at ten so she would be forced to leave the house. But it felt too soon to go to the office space she had rented as a place to write. After therapy, she went to the campus art museum. Standing in front of a painting of what looked like a blood-splattered mermaid, she began to panic. What had she been thinking leaving her precious child with a stranger, a virtual child herself?
She nearly jumped when a wrinkled woman with white hair touched her elbow and whispered, “How old is your baby?”
Was she a mind reader? Had Elisabeth hallucinated her?
“The way you’re swaying,” the woman said.
Elisabeth realized that she was moving her hips left and then right, left and then right.
“All new mothers do it, even when the baby isn’t there,” the woman said. “Like when you get off a boat and still feel it rocking.”
She didn’t sound judgmental. But Elisabeth imagined she was wondering why the mother of an infant was alone in a third-rate art museum on a Monday.
“Have a good day,” she said, and walked straight home.
The closer she got, the faster she moved. Her nipples pricked with pain. Sam wasn’t expecting her. She might have stuck the baby in the crib and gone off to study in another room, headphones blocking the sound of his cries. Or maybe she was shooting up in the basement. Elisabeth’s urge to protect Gil was so primal that, by the time she entered the house and poked her head into the living room, she was already picturing her hands around Sam’s throat.
They were on a blanket on the floor. The baby on his back, staring up at Sam, cooing as she talked sweetly to him.
Sam noticed Elisabeth and said, “Hi there.”
“I left my laptop,” Elisabeth said. “I’m so out of it.”
She went up to her room, closed the door, and slept for the next three hours.
Since that day, she had rarely gotten any meaningful work done. She left the house after Sam arrived and went downtown. Sometimes she ran errands. Sometimes she read in a coffee shop. Sometimes she walked to her office space and jotted down ideas, and sometimes she went intending to do so, but ended up falling asleep on the floor.
But after that first day, Elisabeth never worried about Gil when he was in Sam’s care. She recognized this for the gift it was.
Now, at the bar, Elisabeth was drawn to Sam’s side. She needed the company of someone familiar, someone she actually liked. The thought entered her mind that her babysitter was out at a bar on a Wednesday, and was supposed to work tomorrow. But Elisabeth couldn’t exactly judge when she herself was here.
“Hey,” Elisabeth said when she reached her.
A pretty brunette next to Sam smiled up.
“Hi! I’m Isabella!” There was a pause before she added, “The roommate.”
“Of course,” Elisabeth said, though she didn’t think Sam had ever mentioned her by name.
“Have you guys been here long?”
“Long enough,” Sam said.
“Sam was in her pajamas sketching a picture of her grandmother an hour ago. We had to drag her out,” Isabella said.
“It’s for a class,” Sam said, defensive. “This senior showcase thing. I wasn’t just like sitting there, drawing my grandmother.”
“Her fiancé left on Monday night and she’s still moping,” Isabella said.
Fiancé. Sam had never called him that, had she?
“Right,” Elisabeth said. “How was his visit?”
“Great,” Sam said, sounding forlorn. “Too short.”
Sam’s roommate said, “Can I ask you a question? I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but—we only come here because our friend Shannon is a genius who skipped two grades and is only nineteen. Why would anyone over the age of twenty-one come in here by choice?”
Sam looked mortified.
Elisabeth laughed.
“I have no idea,” she said.
Sam stood then, and turned her back to Isabella and the other girls so that she was only talking to Elisabeth.
“Sorry about my roommate, she’s a little drunk,” she said.
Sam eyed the Laurels, laughing uproariously, guzzling white wine at the bar.
“I’ve never seen anyone here order anything but beer,” she said. “I didn’t even know they served wine.”
“It’s entirely possible those women travel with Chardonnay in their purses,” Elisabeth said. “They’re my—frien
ds. Book club? Neighbors. I sort of got dragged here against my will.”
“Me too,” Sam said.
“Actually, I think I’m going to head home,” Elisabeth said. “I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “It was good to see you.”
Elisabeth paused, then said, “Want to walk back with me? It’s nice out.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “I’d love to.”
“I don’t want to take you away from your friends if you’re not ready.”
“I’m ready.”
Elisabeth said a quick goodbye to the Laurels.
“That’s my babysitter,” she whispered. “She’s really drunk. I think I need to get her home.”
“Oh, aren’t you sweet,” Stephanie said. “Come back when you’re done, okay?”
“I will,” Elisabeth lied.
Walking out to the sidewalk, she felt like herself for the first time all night.
“Confession,” she said. “I just used you as my excuse for leaving. I owe you one.”
Sam smiled.
“Andrew’s home with the baby?” she asked.
“Yup. His first time alone,” Elisabeth said. “Well, actually, he wasn’t alone. My mother-in-law came over.”
“It must be nice having family nearby to help.”
“Yeah,” Elisabeth said. “To be honest, she’s not very helpful, though. If anything, we moved here to help them, though we’re supposed to act like it’s the reverse. My father-in-law lost his business a couple years ago, and since then, things haven’t been right with him. He’s the greatest guy, but something’s off. Something other than the fact that they are basically penniless now. He’s mad at the world. He wants us all to change our lives and rebel against the system.”
“Oh,” Sam said, and looked confused.
For all that they had chatted in the last month, they rarely spoke about themselves or their families. They talked about Sam’s schoolwork and the news and celebrities, and the baby. Safe subjects.
Now wasn’t the time to get into George and the Hollow Tree; the fact that Faye was secretly shopping at Costco to avoid a lecture or that George had recently written half a dozen angry letters after seeing a guy on the evening news whose three Saint Bernards died from eating dog food contaminated with salmonella.
Friends and Strangers Page 13