Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  That was it. No apology for smearing the guy, no collective horror over what they’d done to him.

  Despite swearing off the group after that, Elisabeth thought to herself now that there was no harm in taking a look, just this once.

  The post of the moment, added after midnight, was from a woman who wrote that her husband was out of town on business, and there was a live mouse squealing and writhing around on a glue trap in her kitchen. It had managed to pull up a single leg, but the detached foot was stuck to the pad, along with the other foot, still attached to the mouse.

  I know some of you rave about TaskMaster, that site where you can book someone by the hour to move stuff/build furniture/run errands/whatever. Is it reasonable to reserve someone for an hour right now to come deal with this?? If I give a huge tip???

  Elisabeth put the phone down.

  * * *

  —

  She woke the next morning feeling relaxed. Friday. Sam arriving soon.

  Then Elisabeth remembered—no Sam today. No Sam for the rest of the month.

  Andrew left early for work.

  The baby was crabby. He could sit now, but still couldn’t crawl, and it frustrated him. He whined half the time. Elisabeth hated the sound. She felt awful for him. She placed him on his hands and knees, holding his stomach a few inches off the ground.

  “You’re almost there,” she said. “You can do it.”

  She played him some Raffi and gave him a wooden spoon to bang against a pot. Gil stuck the spoon in his mouth.

  At nine o’clock, she looked at her phone. Only an hour had passed since Andrew went to work. It felt like days. Elisabeth considered breaking her own rule and watching TV in front of Gil. But after flipping through the channels twice and finding nothing of interest, she decided it wasn’t worth the guilt.

  At nine-fifteen, while filling a bottle with formula, she realized she had forgotten to cancel therapy.

  “Shit,” she said.

  Violet wouldn’t let her back out this late. She would make Elisabeth pay for the session either way.

  She and Gil were still in their pajamas. Elisabeth plopped him in the center of her bed with three board books while she hurried to get dressed. When he started to cry, she added her cell phone to the pile of enticements.

  She put Gil in a fleece jumpsuit with a smiling elephant printed on the butt. She gathered diapers, bottles, toys, a change of clothes, the stroller. Maybe she would take him out to lunch after, make a day of it.

  Gil cried in the car, all the way to town. She wondered if he was teething. Faye had said to rub whiskey on his gums when the time came. This struck Elisabeth as something for which the authorities might come and take your child away, but she said she would keep it in mind.

  The public lot was full. She circled the small downtown four times before she spotted a tight space at a meter. Elisabeth squeezed into it, ignoring that her bumper was touching the car in front of her and the one behind.

  She unfolded the stroller like an accordion on the sidewalk, then lifted the baby from his car seat and placed him inside, tucking a thick blanket over him.

  Her appointment should have started six minutes ago. Violet would act put out, she was certain.

  Elisabeth rushed the three blocks to her office. As she crossed Calvin Street, a Hispanic woman coming in the other direction looked at the baby and exclaimed, as if she knew him.

  “Chiquito!”

  She made a face, puffing out her cheeks as far as they could go, then pretending to pop them.

  Gil laughed.

  Elisabeth gave the woman a strange smile, and kept walking. She scanned her memory. She felt certain she had never seen her before.

  Violet answered the door to her office with a disappointed look on her face. Then she noticed the baby and brightened.

  “Who do we have here?”

  “Sorry. The sitter called in sick at the last minute.”

  Elisabeth figured this small white lie would engender sympathy, and perhaps get her points for showing up at all.

  Gil had fallen asleep. She wheeled his stroller toward the couch, hoping he wouldn’t remember this. His mother, dragging him along to her shrink.

  “So,” Elisabeth said as she sat down.

  “So,” Violet said. She smiled without showing her teeth.

  She always waited for Elisabeth to go first.

  “I guess I’m stressed about the holidays, like everyone,” she said. “My parents are both coming to our house, which is definitely a bad idea. My father’s bringing a date. It’s not what I would have wanted for Gil, for his first Christmas.”

  “What would you have wanted?”

  “For the three of us to be left alone, I guess. Or not even that. A completely different family? No Christmas at all? I don’t do well with holidays.”

  “Do you have any happy memories of holidays when you were a child?” Violet asked.

  “No.” Elisabeth paused. “Did I ever tell you about my fear of houses? When my first friend got married and bought a house, I went to visit her. After she and her husband went to bed, I was sitting alone in their living room and I had a panic attack. I kept thinking of things they talked about that day—a new washing machine, a cookout they were planning. I couldn’t wait to get back to my New York apartment, and my not-real life.”

  “Why do you call it not real?”

  “In the city, you somehow always feel like things are in flux. My babysitter, Sam, she talks all the time about wanting to feel settled. I find being settled unnerving. The stillness is harder than I thought it would be.”

  Violet nodded. “So you create ways of making things unstill.”

  “Like what?”

  Violet shrugged, as if someone else had said the last words out of her mouth.

  Elisabeth nodded toward the baby. “What are you supposed to do when your model is utter shit, and you want better for your own kid? But at the end of the day, you’re still yourself.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” Violet said. “It seems to me like you’re doing a great job so far.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that. But it’s easy to hide your faults from a baby. How do I do it when he’s older? Sometimes I think Andrew and I couldn’t be more different from our families. Other times, I’m afraid we’re doomed to become them.”

  “How so?”

  “A million different ways. I think of what my mother did when I was a kid, confiding in me about my father’s affairs. Needing me to indulge her every insecurity. A child shouldn’t be so aware of her mother’s demons. A child shouldn’t know her mother has demons at all. Is that right?”

  Violet, annoyingly, did not respond.

  When Elisabeth was up late with Gil, when he got the cradle cap, when he had a particularly revolting diaper situation, she thought of how her parents must have cared for her in these same ways. What did you owe the person who made such sacrifices on your behalf, sacrifices you would never remember?

  As Elisabeth pictured things she and Gil would do together when he grew, memories of her own childhood returned—the way her father let her stir milk into his coffee in the mornings; how her mother sat her down beside her at her dressing table and taught her how to apply lipstick. Her father taking her and Charlotte to the bird sanctuary. Her mother reading them Beatrix Potter. These had been buried beneath what came after.

  The bond between parent and child was all-consuming, and yet its power was not cumulative. It had to be remade again and again throughout the course of a lifetime. A mother could do everything right early on, and still, if she failed to renegotiate the terms, all would be lost.

  “I look for mothers everywhere,” Elisabeth said. She didn’t want Violet to think she meant her, so she added, “At least I did in my twenties and early thirties. I wanted someone to show me how to b
e. But that never happened. Times that are supposed to be about family bonding or celebrations are hard for me. I suck at going on vacation. I’m a ruiner of festive moments.”

  Violet looked interested for once. “Give me an example.”

  “I went into a deep depression at a Jimmy Buffett concert one New Year’s Eve,” Elisabeth said. “We got there and I was fine, and then all of a sudden I started acting like a huge bitch for no reason. Poor Andrew was sitting beside me, not knowing what to say, as oversize yellow balloons with smiley faces painted on them bounced off our heads. We left after three songs. Who does that?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Violet said, as if patients came in every day complaining of Jimmy Buffett–induced despair. “What about it depressed you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Give it a minute. Think.”

  Elisabeth tried, but she felt like she was making up an answer, not having some kind of epiphany.

  “Maybe it was the sense of community. The shared love of Hawaiian shirts and homemade hats and rum drinks. The joy they all exuded. I wish I loved anything half as much as those people loved Jimmy Buffett.”

  “Community,” Violet said. “That makes sense.”

  “It does.”

  She scribbled something in her notebook, then looked up. “When was this?”

  “Years ago.”

  “So the feeling of not having a place you belong, it’s not new. Not necessarily to do with moving here.”

  Elisabeth considered this, the rare wise observation on Violet’s part.

  “I guess that’s right,” she said. “I was alone a lot as a kid. Inappropriate things happened around me, and I didn’t know what to do with them. It’s yet another reason why I resent my parents’ money. No one feels sorry for a rich girl with terrible parents. In most people’s eyes, my problems weren’t problems at all.”

  “How are things with Andrew?” Violet asked.

  “Fine. Good. He keeps pushing for a second baby.”

  “Even though he knows you don’t want one.”

  “He thinks I do secretly want one, but I’m scared.”

  Violet looked skeptical.

  “Maybe he’s right,” Elisabeth said, feeling suddenly protective of Andrew. “He knows me better than anyone. There was a time I didn’t know if I even wanted one. Now I can’t imagine life without him. Then again, we got so lucky with Gil. I don’t want to tempt fate. Our family’s chemistry feels—delicate. A daughter would be especially terrifying. I’d ruin her for sure. Everything is so good. I don’t want to jeopardize that.”

  “You say things are so good. But you and Andrew never tell each other what you mean,” Violet said. “He still has no clue about all that money you gave to your sister.”

  “It was a loan,” Elisabeth said.

  It felt shameful that Violet, whom she didn’t even particularly like, should know this about her, and not Andrew, the person she was closest to in the world.

  “Have you thought about couples’ counseling?” Violet said, as if it was the first time she had mentioned the idea.

  She brought it up at almost every session.

  “I can’t see either of us doing that,” Elisabeth said.

  Violet closed her eyes. Annoyed or asleep, it was hard to say.

  When the session ended, Gil had just woken up and was chattering away in the stroller.

  “Thanks,” Elisabeth said as she wrote out a check. “I’ll see you next Friday.”

  “Actually, I won’t be here next week,” Violet said.

  “Taking a vacation?”

  There was always this moment at the end. Elisabeth had made herself vulnerable, and now time was up. It was like having someone switch on the lights at an orgy.

  Violet seemed uncomfortable with the question. “Yes.”

  Elisabeth wanted to ask where she was going, the way she would ask any other person who had just told her she was going somewhere. But she knew Violet would consider this boundary crossing.

  “Did you ever see that movie What About Bob?” Elisabeth said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Bill Murray? No?”

  Whenever Elisabeth asked if she’d seen a movie, or read a novel, or an article on the front page of the Sunday Times, Violet said no. Elisabeth wondered if she simply consumed nothing of the culture, which was odd in its own right. Or if telling Elisabeth she had read something would, for Violet, constitute sharing.

  Elisabeth called Andrew from the car to discuss.

  “How can you be expected to pour your soul out to a person who won’t tell you even the most minor details about her life. Is that normal? What do you think?”

  Andrew said, “I think therapy is making you worse instead of better.”

  At home, she found a Christmas card from Sam in the mailbox.

  Elisabeth tore it open, baby still in her arms, as if Sam herself might pop out of the envelope.

  She wished she had gotten it together to send Sam, or anybody, a card. She knew she was supposed to have one made up with an adorable picture of Gil on the front, the sort of cards she’d been receiving for weeks from friends. But the thought exhausted her.

  Elisabeth had the urge to text Sam, but that would be strange, wouldn’t it, reaching out to her at home?

  She texted Nomi instead: I hate Christmas.

  Fa la la la la! Nomi wrote back.

  12

  TWO WEEKS PASSED IN A HAZE of shopping for presents nobody needed and going to parties no one wished to attend.

  At Andrew’s office gathering, people stood around cubicles, making forced conversation—men and women who spent all day together as it was, and their spouses, who weren’t overly interested in knowing one another, plus the student workers from the lab, who were just there for the free beer.

  The goth couple whose wedding they had attended in November showed everyone cell-phone pictures of their honeymoon in Reno.

  Bowls of pretzels and M&M’s sat on the conference room table, like it was a nine-year-old’s birthday party.

  Elisabeth talked to a junior with a handlebar mustache. He told her he’d grown it to play Ophelia in a gender-blind production of Hamlet.

  “The director wants us to really lean into it,” he said.

  She remembered then, Andrew coming home and telling her about it, saying, “I’m probably not smart enough to understand, but can’t they just do Bye Bye Birdie for once?”

  Elisabeth told the kid that she and Andrew couldn’t wait to see the show.

  “Andrew’s the best,” he said. “We all love being on his project. He’s a really good mentor, you know.”

  She nodded, though she actually hadn’t known until then.

  Starting the day after Thanksgiving, whenever Elisabeth ran into any of her neighbors, they mentioned Stephanie Preston’s annual holiday bash. Debbie pronounced it legendary.

  Elisabeth was trying to think of an excuse for why she couldn’t go, when Debbie mentioned that Gwen would be there.

  “She’s back from China,” Debbie said. “Her husband, Christopher, have you met him? He came home early, apparently. She ended up cutting her trip short. Probably wise not to leave Christopher home alone too long, if you know what I mean.”

  Stephanie sent paper invitations with RSVP cards. The postage stamp was a miniature photograph of her kids eating candy canes.

  Adults only. Formal attire required.

  “So, not my ugly Christmas sweater then?” Andrew said as they got ready.

  “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars,” she said.

  Elisabeth wore a royal-blue fitted dress with three-quarter-length sleeves, and nude heels. Taking in her reflection in the bedroom mirror, she felt pleased. She looked almost exactly like her old self, dressed up for a night out. Her hair was g
etting long, but she was afraid to let anyone around here touch it. Soon they would go back to the city for a visit, and she’d see Zachary, who had been cutting her hair for a decade.

  Since Sam was gone and they weren’t going far, they’d asked Faye to babysit.

  Gil was already in bed when she arrived.

  “If he wakes up, call me and we’ll come right back,” Elisabeth said. “We’re only a few houses away.”

  Faye rolled her eyes.

  “Go,” she said.

  Elisabeth and Andrew descended the front steps and walked to the curb.

  “A rare moment alone together,” he said.

  She smiled, nodded.

  Neither of them said anything after that.

  They used to sit across from each other in restaurants four or five nights a week, and just talk. Now she struggled to think of something to say that wasn’t about Gil. Her thoughts spiraled—were they content? Would they go the distance? Or when Gil was old enough to stop needing them, would they realize there was no them anymore?

  What constituted a happy marriage?

  At Stephanie’s house, the front door was cracked open. The sounds of the party drifted outside.

  There was a table in the front hall covered with blank name tags and Sharpies. A sign in a plastic frame read WELCOME! PLEASE TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES AND LEAVE THEM AT THE DOOR. YES, WE’RE THOSE PEOPLE.

  “I’m not taking my shoes off,” Elisabeth said. “My toes look awful. This dress will look all wrong with bare feet.”

  “I support you,” Andrew said.

  He bent to fill out a name tag, then stuck it to her chest.

  Elisabeth looked down at what he’d written: Yes, I’m THAT person.

  She peeled the sticker off.

  They hung their coats on a rack beside the table. The banister leading upstairs was wrapped in fake green garland. A plastic Santa the size of a small child stared at them.

  Laughter traveled out from the kitchen.

  “We don’t have to stay long, right?” she said.