Everything Here is Under Control

by Emily Adrian

  Gabe turned up his hand as if I’d said something laughably illogical. I didn’t order this pizza because I was hungry.

  “Really?” he asked. “Then why’d you have one?”

  I don’t remember. All I know is that I cannot un-have him, and I have never, for a single moment, wished I could.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When Nina comes home the next day, I’m breastfeeding Jack in the kitchen and drinking one of Carrie’s beers. I am briefly terrified to be alone with her.

  “Getting your baby drunk?” Nina asks. Her eyes are shadowed with post-sleepover exhaustion. Her purple skinny jeans are stained with something—pizza grease or nacho cheese.

  Caught off guard, I can’t decide between putting my boob away and grabbing a receiving blanket to drape over it and the baby. I decide to do nothing, to fight sarcasm with sarcasm. “You want one?”

  “A baby or a beer?”

  “A beer.”

  “Um, I’m twelve?”

  “If Jack’s old enough, you must be.”

  “No thanks. The mother would kill me.”

  I smile. “Speaking of Carrie, what time does she get home?”

  Nina glances at the clock on the microwave. “Depends. Sometimes six, sometimes later.”

  “Like, how late?”

  She squeezes her shoulders, an exaggerated shrug. “Eight? Nine?”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Yeah, like if someone’s come from far away.”

  Carrie owns her own tattoo studio in Mansfield, the closest town with a main drag and a movie theater. She inherited the shop from her mentor, a woman who ran it for thirty years until she died of lung cancer.

  Carrie is famous for her tattoos. The Instagram account to which she posts pictures of her finished pieces has over two hundred thousand followers. Sometimes the tattoos get republished on Facebook or on Buzzfeed listicles of Fifty Tattoos You Wish You Had. I always recognize Carrie’s work when I see it. She’s known for inking—on strangers’ biceps, shoulders, or ribcages—particular characters of her own invention: a wild-eyed fox, a somber Hitchcockian gentleman. One character of whom the internet is especially fond resembles me. She has my asymmetrical eyebrows, my round nostrils and pursed lips.

  The explanation is simple: there were entire summers when all Carrie and I did was draw each other.

  With one hand pinning Jack to my breast, I use the other to wrestle my phone from my back pocket. I want to text Carrie to ask if there’s something I can pick up for dinner. The screen displays our most recent exchange. It’s from two and a half months ago—a message I barely remember sending, followed by a response I’m sure I never read.

  April 2, 2016, 2:34 a.m.

  Me: I’m in labor.

  Carrie: You’ve got this! I love you.

  Carrie and I have not regularly texted each other since the earliest years of our twenties, before phones were smart or punishing enough to preserve the conversation in one continuous archive, time-stamped and searchable. In the throes of active labor, hours I spent cursing my own mother’s name—after Jaclyn’s doctor extracted me via emergency C-section, she waited a mere eighteen months before squeezing out my brother, claiming the traditional method was relaxing by comparison—I, apparently, felt Carrie’s absence. Did I assume her number had stayed the same, as mine had, or did I imagine I was shooting a plea out into the void?

  Texting her again will force her to review the exchange, to remember my silence. What happened was I stopped checking my notifications at about six centimeters. And later, after Gabe sent around a postpartum shot of me with Jack—I looked gaunt, delirious—there were so many messages, all of them seemingly meant for someone else. Someone who could see straight.

  Still, Carrie’s text hadn’t been compulsory. It had been generous. The longer I stare at it, the more I worry her lukewarm reception of me and Jack on her front porch had less to do with ancient history than with this message, isolated and suspended at the top of the screen when it could have been long-buried in baby pictures, my frantic questions, and Carrie’s calm answers.

  I drop the phone on the table.

  “Do you guys eat dinner together?” I ask Nina.

  “Yeah. Mom brings something home.”

  “That’s so nice.”

  Nina looks skeptical. “What’s nice about it?”

  “I don’t know. When Carrie and I were your age, we never ate with our parents except on, like, federal holidays. Or Sundays.”

  Nina considers this. I wonder how much she understands about my history with her mother. “My mom would never let me skip dinner. She’s super uptight.”

  Before I can check myself, I’m agreeing. Carrie Hart is a lover of rules and rituals. An author of pro-con lists. Probably it’s unfair to classify a woman who leaves her child alone until eight or nine in the evening as uptight—in New York, the term would be negligent, or perhaps criminal—but from personal experience I know Carrie’s deep-seated caution can feel oppressive to a kid.

  Nina eyes me critically. My agreement was too automatic—and who am I, anyway, to insult her mother? She takes a breath, briefly withholding her complaints about Carrie, and then, for whatever reason—maybe I strike her as passively receptive, trapped in this chair with this baby at my breast—she releases them.

  “I just can’t with her right now. She wants to know everything. Every piece of homework I have, every grade I get, all my teachers’ names. If a friend invites me to do something, Mom wants to talk to their parents first—even if it’s, like, bowling. I mean, bowling. What does she think is going to happen at Leonard’s Lanes?”

  “Well . . .”

  Some of the more sinister events of my girlhood transpired at Leonard’s Lanes, but before I can phrase a delicate objection, Nina rolls her eyes. “Everyone knows Leonard’s a perv. We get our shoes and ask for lane twenty-two, far, far away from that creep.”

  “Good thinking.”

  It fascinates me, Nina’s ability to have a conversation. Will Jack ever be so sentient?

  “And even if something bad happens someday, what’s texting me every ten minutes going to do? Like, I’ll write back ‘I’m fine’ . . . ‘I’m fine’ . . . until suddenly I’m like, ‘Being murdered, actually. Send help!’”

  Jack has fallen asleep, lightly mouthing me. I try to avoid exposing myself as I yank up the triangular panel of my nursing bra. I mostly fail, and Nina’s eyes widen. I refrain from saying something inappropriate about the life stages of the nipple. Mine, once bottle-cap sized, now resemble coasters.

  “And what’s really frustrating,” she says, recovering from the shock, “is how she assumes Maxine is, like, bad news.”

  “Why does she think that?”

  “I don’t know. Because Maxine’s parents are rich? Because when we’re over there, her mom’s not breathing down our necks the whole time? Because she has a nose ring?”

  I had a nose ring. I obtained it during a school field trip to a long-defunct reformatory in Mansfield, now a popular wedding venue, a ready-made prison film set, and a place to take a hundred teenagers. The tour was not intended to educate so much as reward the sophomore class for selling more magazine subscriptions during our annual fundraiser than the freshmen, juniors, and seniors. Because Carrie’s parents had not allowed her to go door-to-door, neither of us had sold a single subscription, and I convinced her we were not obligated to endure the prize. We sneaked away from our group and walked to the town’s commercial strip, equal parts sleepy and seedy. She squeezed my hand while a man with a tarantula tattooed on his neck pierced a hole in my left nostril. It lasted half a year, until I got a job at Arby’s and my manager made me remove the ring. The piercing healed, leaving a scar that looks like a permanent pimple.

  “Is Maxine a good friend?” I ask Nina. “Do you guys watch out for each other?”

/>   Nina looks me in the eye. “She’s the best.”

  I nod, appearing to take Nina at her word. Privately I acknowledge it must be petrifying raising an adolescent in this town with firsthand knowledge of how adolescents in this town operate. Even I am tempted to present Nina with a list of things she’s not allowed to do: no joyriding the unpatrolled roads of Amish country; no hanging around boys who like to put bullet holes through Budweiser cans; no hitchhiking; no ATVs; no breaking into singed, abandoned buildings; no talking to anyone who tries to tell you the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights.”

  If I pretend Nina is someone else’s daughter—whom I never held against my chest, whose silky, newborn skin I didn’t slather in lavender-scented lotion—I understand that a list of forbidden activities becomes, in the hands of a teenager, a list of good ideas.

  But I don’t regret the years Carrie and I spent risking life and limb. How do you strip a kid of her essential fearlessness? Would you want to, if you could?

  Jack stirs in my lap, and I think, Yes. Duh.

  I tell Nina, “It’s scary for your mom to have such a grown-up daughter, you know? It might take a second, but eventually she’ll realize she can trust you.”

  I believe Nina is not her mother. More crucially, I am certain Nina is not me. At her age I would never have looked an adult in the eye and spoken with any amount of candor.

  “She thinks I’m a baby,” Nina says.

  “She doesn’t think you’re a baby. She thinks you’re her baby. I know this sounds super weird, but when you have a kid, you feel like you have to protect them from the entire world forever.”

  Nina regards Jack. He’s lying across my thighs, his arms splayed. “Baby Jack versus everybody,” she says, reaching out to touch his downy head. I hold my breath, hoping he won’t wake up. He doesn’t.

  For the first time since he was born, I feel like I might be able to accomplish something unrelated to his livelihood. I can prove to Nina that her mother is a good one. My official stance will be that Carrie’s not uptight. Not paranoid, or obsessive, or lame. I’ll convince Nina her mom is the reason cars don’t crash and front doors remain locked. When it rains, Nina reaches into the depths of her JanSport, finds the umbrella Carrie planted there, and stays dry until the storm passes. Without her mother, Nina would not be free. She would be screwed.

  When I succeed in making this point, Carrie will forgive me. She will forgive me, at least, for knocking on her door.

  “I take it back,” I say. “Your mom’s not uptight.”

  Nina raises an eyebrow.

  “You know, when we were young, Carrie Hart was the coolest girl in Deerling. Nothing fazed her.”

  Nina looks torn between dismissing this information outright and accepting it as a gift. She starts to smile, but at the final moment her lips veer into a sneer. “But then she got pregnant.”

  “Yes,” I concede.

  “She was only five years older than I am now.”

  “Yes.”

  Nina lifts her chin. She’s a beautiful kid. She has Carrie’s warm brown skin and curly hair so thick that elastics snap in their effort to contain it. Only if you were to examine her blue-flecked eyes would you ever guess her dad was white.

  “Not so cool anymore,” Nina says.

  * * *

  Carrie brings home Chinese food. We eat in shifts, passing Jack back and forth between us. I refer longingly to the vibrating infant chair I left behind in New York. In our regular life, Jack has three parents—one of them is that chair. Its polka-dot hammock is the only physical space, with the exception of my arms, in which Jack is completely at ease. I ordered it from Amazon two weeks after he was born. The package arrived while Gabe was at work. Though illustrated, the assembly instructions were in Portuguese. I attempted to lay Jack on a couch cushion while I fiddled with the screws, the buckles, parts A through K. He screamed inconsolably; I wept and condemned the Fisher-Price Company. Remembering this scene causes residual rage to pinprick my palms.

  After Nina shuts herself inside her room, I say to Carrie, “Your kid is perfect.”

  Half an egg roll hanging out of her mouth, Carrie shoots me a wary look. “Who, Nina?”

  “Yeah. That one.”

  “She’s definitely not. Our girl has some serious flaws.”

  “Perfect flaws.”

  Carrie grins as she grabs a beer from inside the refrigerator door. She offers one to me, and I accept, and now it’s my first two-drink day in over a year. Since before I got pregnant.

  “I’ve been trying to decide if I should get her out of this town,” Carrie says.

  I wait.

  “The studio’s become reasonably profitable. And I have enough of a following now, I think I could move somewhere more central and still have steady work. But there are no guarantees, obviously. People always assume I’ve done so well in spite of my location, but I worry the shop’s success is because of it. There’s no competition out here. And besides, I don’t know how Nina would feel about leaving. She’s so attached to this Maxine person.”

  With her eyes on the ceiling, Carrie sips her beer.

  “Where would you go?” I ask.

  “I’m not even sure. I’d have to be able to afford a house, and studio space. But somewhere slightly more evolved would be nice.”

  “Hey, Deerling’s evolving. Did I spy a microbrewery behind the Buffalo Wild Wings?”

  “The beer’s flat.”

  “Damn.”

  “My parents are frequent customers though. Reminds them of home.”

  Carrie’s parents met in Cleveland when they were both thirty-

  five, both already once divorced. They moved here when Carrie was six and Mr. Hart accepted a tenure-track job teaching theology at the local Christian college. That her parents took some amount of pleasure in small-town life was obvious. Her dad enjoyed his detached garage, where he spent Saturdays tinkering with antique engines and building sturdy patio furniture. Each new family who moved to Country Club Drive—grandly named for its proximity to Deerling’s rinky-dink golf course—received a pair of cherry-stained Adirondack chairs as a welcome gift. The chairs flanked front doors or fire pits, defining Carrie’s street as one where people not only sat outside, in plain view of their neighbors, but talked to one another as they did so. Her mom always had a gaggle of church friends, women who delivered Pyrex containers of chicken soup to anyone who so much as sneezed during Sunday service. Rosalind Hart was a public librarian for over twenty years; she led story time twice a week and knew the name of every child between the ages of zero and eighteen. To say she was beloved is an understatement.

  “Are your parents good?” I ask.

  “Yeah. My dad and Nina are like this.” Carrie crosses her fingers. “Another reason not to leave.”

  “He hasn’t retired yet?”

  “No. He’s too attached to his students.”

  My mom used to say of Carrie’s father, “He sure makes yours look bad.” Mine moved to South Bend when I was in fourth grade, my brother in third. He still calls us on our birthdays to ask a series of rapid-fire questions about our jobs, our relationships, our apartments. As if the speed and volume of the interrogation will mask his indifference.

  Lately, I understand that parenthood is an all-or-nothing venture. I don’t know if this revelation softens or hardens my attitude toward my father.

  “And your mom?” Carrie asks, stiffening. “Is she getting close to retirement?”

  Carrie’s reluctance to mention my mother pierces me with shame. Carrie has a habit of defining people by the worst things they’ve ever said.

  “Nope. I’m not even sure she’s heard of it.”

  Jack spits out his pacifier and screeches at the ceiling fan. Excited by his excitement, I kiss his cheeks and murmur, “You like that? You like the spinny fan? It goes around an
d around and around . . .”

  Carrie is fidgeting in her chair, peering down the neck of her empty beer bottle. “The thing about moving is, I want to move toward something. I don’t want to pack up our lives and take Nina away from everything she’s ever known just for, like, my own self-esteem.”

  Clutching Jack beneath his armpits, I count the fan’s rotations and hold perfectly still. “New York,” I say, aware of Carrie watching me, “is expensive. Insanely so.”

  She tosses her bottle into the recycling bin beside the fridge. The clatter of glass on glass startles Jack from his ceiling-fan reverie. Carrie and I both cringe, expecting him to cry, but his scandalized expression slowly fades.

  “New York never crossed my mind,” Carrie says.

  * * *

  Later, when Jack and I are doing our 3:00 a.m. laps between the living room and the kitchen, we find a shopping list left on the counter:

  • Bread

  • Turkey for sandwiches

  • Diet Dr Pepper

  • Raisin Bran

  • Chair for Jack?

  Carrie’s handwriting is so familiar to me. Forty years could pass, and I would still recognize the shape of that question mark.

  The Walmart in town is open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. I can remember it closing exactly once in my life, during a power outage. My mom and I were among the aspiring shoppers circling the parking lot like fish in a bowl, confused by the number of empty spots, the dark oblivion beyond the supercenter’s glass doors. “What are we going to do?” Jaclyn lamented, laughing at herself but genuinely unsure.

  Jack may cry in the car, but at least I’ll have an excuse to ignore him.

  Deerling is deserted until we get closer to 71, where an exit sign directs long-haul truckers to our fine dining options. The drive has put Jack to sleep. Outside Walmart I am delighted to find a shopping cart rigged with a contraption that allows you to dock an infant car seat where you would normally place a more substantial child.

  Before deciding a doctor would deliver our baby at Mount Sinai, Gabe and I met with a Brooklyn-based midwife who implored me to spend the first weeks of my son’s life at home—ideally, topless and in bed. “Let other people bring you food and wash your dishes. Your baby’s first few weeks will set the stage for the rest of his life.”