by Emily Adrian
“Just hers,” Carrie adds.
“Aha.” The man steps aside and lets us in. He introduces himself as Keith, and I realize Carrie has never actually met this person.
“Pardon my . . .” Keith gives his headgear an affectionate pat. “I’ve been taking tennis lessons. I’m not bad, but I could be better. Do you play?”
The question is aimed at Carrie. She shakes her head. “No, I never have. Do you know if Nina’s ready?”
“The girls are in the pool. We can go get them. Unless you’d like a tour?”
Before Carrie has a chance to decline, I say, “We’d love one. Your home is incredible.”
I can sense Carrie’s concurrent desires to laugh and to drag me from this man’s property.
Keith leads us through the rooms of his own home with the excitement of a child exploring an unfamiliar playground. Someone, at some point, was paid to decorate—we pass freestanding sculptures, exotic potted plants. We walk across Spanish tiles and beneath postmodern chandeliers. Entire walls are painted bright red, slate gray, or papered in black and gold. The refrigerator is stainless steel and cavernous enough to conceal several bodies. A central vacuum system makes dirt disappear. The light fixtures respond to verbal commands.
Twenty million is the amount of money that this man won playing the lottery. I know because Nina knows, because she’s heard him and his wife throw the number around in casual conversation, like it’s their favorite song or alma mater. According to Nina, the couple’s mood darkens only when they recall the chunk of cash the IRS decided to take. As if the IRS reviews fortunes on a case-by-case basis.
After making us climb one of two symmetrical staircases, Keith shows us a guest room. The attached bathroom features “both a tub and a shower, so you can go either way.”
Here, my ooh-ing and ah-ing yield to a helpless giggle. Carrie’s fingers dig into my upper arm. Amused in spite of herself, she sounds midwestern and friendly as she says, “Thanks for showing us around. This has been . . .”
“A real treat,” I supply.
Carrie wrinkles her nose. “Right. Exactly. But we should get going. The pool is just . . . ?” She waves, imprecisely, in the direction of the outdoors.
Keith holds up a finger. “One more thing. Kind of saved the best for last.”
At the end of the hall, he pushes open a soundproof door and welcomes us to the bonus room—named as if the others were obviously essential. The bonus room is a teenager’s paradise, complete with a ginormous television, gaming consoles, a foosball table, and several leather sectionals.
“Wow,” Carrie says. “This is a lot.”
“It’s extra,” I agree, borrowing a linguistic quirk of Nina’s.
Is this what Carrie meant by Maxine’s family being a bad influence? As a kid, I would have salivated over a room like this.
Tapping the tip of my baby’s nose, Keith says, “What do you think, buddy? You want to live in a big, fancy house someday?”
It’s true that Jack is taking in his surroundings with a sort of reverence. I don’t have the heart to mention to Keith that it’s the same way he looks around a grocery store or a McDonald’s restroom.
On our way to the pool, we run into Maxine’s sister, Trinity. Dressed in her Deerling Drive-in uniform—a burnt-orange polo shirt with brown-capped sleeves and a black miniskirt—Trinity looks like a bit player who stumbled onto the wrong film set.
“You must be Nina’s mom,” Trinity says, confidently matching Nina’s skin tone to Carrie’s. “And you”—she leans toward Jack, who’s bear-cubbing my shoulder—“are still the cutest thing.”
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.
Something about Trinity impresses me. She’s poised. At her age I wanted to sink through floors or, alternatively, to burn things down. Undignified urges that have recently returned.
Outside, Nina and Maxine are lounging in a pool shaped like a kidney bean, each of their bodies framed by a plastic inner tube. Nina’s braids are pinned to the top of her head at a safe distance from the chlorinated water. As we step onto the patio, she sees her mother and blinks, as if emerging from a movie theater into the brightness of midday.
She avoids my gaze entirely.
“Hey, baby,” Carrie says. “Ready to hit the road?”
Maxine and Nina slip from their inner tubes into the water and heave themselves gracelessly over the pool’s edge. Maxine’s suit is a bikini, which seems to be performing a Wonder Bra–esque function, accentuating her newest, most symmetrical body parts. Nina’s is a sporty one-piece, presumably chosen to hide what isn’t there. It’s lime green, slightly pilled. Endearing.
The girls go upstairs to get dressed. Maxine’s father offers us cocktails, and I nearly accept, but Carrie steps on my foot to silence me. We wait in the foyer, hovering close to the door. The girls reappear and hug each other goodbye. Their embrace is prolonged, and I wonder if something happened between them—a heart-to-heart or a late-night fight they’ve already resolved.
My hope is that Carrie, in the seclusion of her car, will release the laughter she suppressed in front of Maxine’s father. But she’s quiet as we round the driveway, quiet as the gates close behind us. It’s the way she used to get after I had persuaded her to cut class but failed to deliver on a promised adventure.
Nina is receding inside a similar gloom.
She’s mad at me.
I had forgotten, but I remember now, how easy it is to offend a kid her age. She’s so afraid of being belittled or dismissed that she convinces herself it’s happening even when it’s not. That morning in the bathroom, I was tired. Too tired to shame white supremacists on the internet.
“Nina,” I say.
Her grunt is noncommittal.
“Say you win the lottery to the tune of, I don’t know, twenty million. What do you buy first?”
With a sigh, Nina plays along. “Um, I’d take a trip somewhere awesome. Australia. No, Tokyo. No, Los Angeles.”
Carrie snorts.
“What would you buy?” Nina asks me. “A car stereo?”
“Maybe a brownstone in the East Village.”
“And then a car stereo?”
“Sure. If there’s anything left over.”
“Mom?” Nina says. “Your turn.”
Carrie says, “I don’t know. I’d probably invest half, donate the rest.”
“That’s not the game,” I say.
“How is that not the game? The game is I win the lottery and do what I want.”
“No, the game is choosing the first thing you’re going to buy. Investing takes a minute.”
“Oh, but closing on a twenty-million-dollar brownstone is instantaneous?”
Nina groans. “Mom! Just play the game!”
“Fine.” Carrie closes her eyes, and she keeps them shut for a second too long. The road is narrow and I’m tempted to grab the wheel—passenger-side steering is a game we used to play—but then her eyes pop open. “An original Basquiat. I’d hang it in the kitchen and every morning, drinking my coffee, I’d look at it.”
Nina says, “That’s so you.”
I say, “You’re going to hang a Basquiat in your kitchen? In Deerling?”
Carrie shoots me a look. “What’s wrong with my kitchen?”
“Nothing. All the citrus-shaped pottery would go great with some neo-expressionist street art.”
Carrie’s shoulders shake. Finally, laughter rearranges her face, creasing her eyes and lifting her cheeks. Carrie’s liable to wake the baby laughing so hard, but I don’t even care.
“You’re so damn sarcastic,” she says. “How have you not grown out of that? Do you ever say something and mean it?”
“She doesn’t,” Nina laments.
“I do. To other people. Just not to you.”
“There it is,” Carrie says, knuc
kling tears from her eyes.
“There’s what?” Nina asks.
“The truth.”
A minute later, Nina looks up from her phone and announces, “A painting by your Basquiat guy sold for fifty-seven point three million dollars last month.”
“Shit,” Carrie says. “I’m going to need a bigger Powerball.”
The road widens as we get closer to town. Farms yield to schoolyards and junky apartment complexes. Deerling’s downtown used to be semiquaint, with a bakery, a hair salon, and an antique store, before Walmart set up shop and ran everyone out of business. Main Street’s last standing attraction is a fountain, its granite bottom layered with nickels and dimes, in the center of a small park. Technically, Carrie and I met there, age seven. Softly, gravely, she informed me I had been occupying one of two operative swings for over ten minutes. It was only fair that she have a turn.
I conceded. Though tentative, Carrie radiated a moral authority. She was right. To stay on the swing—the cold of the metal chains seeping through my gloves—would have been wrong.
Carrie and I met for real on the first day of junior high, where kids from each of Deerling’s elementary schools merged into one student body. Carrie had gone to the newer elementary school, with the up-to-code playground and the real gymnasium. I had gone to the old one. My brother and I qualified for free lunch—we would find a week’s worth of faded blue vouchers in our cubbies every Monday morning—until 1994, when our mom was promoted at the DMV.
Assigned to the same sixth-grade homeroom, Carrie and I recognized each other from the park, but neither of us admitted it. She sat in the desk next to mine. The teacher kept confusing Carrie with the only other black girl in the class. Carrie was tall, lean, with an abundance of gravity-defying curls. Kim was short, chubby, and wore her straightened hair in a low ponytail. After mixing them up a third time, the teacher laughed. “You two look so much alike,” was her apology. “I should make you wear name tags!”
So far under her breath that only I could hear, Carrie said, “Yeah, that wouldn’t be racist at all.”
She was the one who introduced me to sarcasm, the subtle power of negating the truth. But she never taught me to use it sparingly. Moderation was Carrie’s specialty, not mine.
Today the park downtown is cluttered with lawn signs. As we approach, I expect advertisements for the county fair or the local nursing home’s karaoke night. But the signs are vibrant, professional. Political, I realize. Someone has driven at least fifty of them into the grass, and they all say, i’m with her.
Carrie’s excitement is immediate. “Look!” she says to Nina, tapping a fingernail on the window. “Hillary signs!”
“Yeah,” Nina says. “Coolness.”
“Oh, come on. You were just asking me if we’re the only democrats in Deerling! Looks like we’re not.”
Carrie hangs a right past the park, slowing and admiring the signs as if they’re flowers she planted herself. Rarely optimistic and never delusional, Carrie is nonetheless charmed by these signs, as if each represents a citizen of Deerling both old enough and registered to vote. In reality, the entire display must be the work of one or two radicals, tops.
Still, I sympathize with Carrie’s compulsion to drive slowly, to linger in the moment. She may be searching for reasons to finally leave Deerling, but isn’t she also searching for reasons to stay?
I refrain from saying what I’m thinking, which is that the park is municipal: city employees will tear down the signs within an hour. Instead, I opt for a platitude, sincere and Ohio: “A sight for sore eyes.”
Carrie agrees.
* * *
The next day is hot, and Carrie wants Nina and me to go with her to the town pool, but Nina has cramps and a bad attitude and is “sick of swimming, anyway.” Personally, I want nothing more than to submerge myself in cold water, but the logistics overwhelm me. Do I have a little hat for Jack? Will he sleep? Will he cry? Will he poop? Will one of Carrie’s old suits fit me, and will my lopsidedness—the result of the baby gradually favoring one side—be obvious?
No matter how many boobs are on display, I know some midwestern mom will shoot me the stink eye for nursing in public.
I decline. Aware of my ambivalence, Carrie tries again. “You sure? I’ll hold Jack while you swim.”
It makes me emotional, turning down an invitation that in my prebaby life I would have accepted without a second thought. It’s a raw, completely unreasonable grief. I shake my head, and while Carrie loads up her gym bag with snacks and trashy magazines, I hide myself in the guest room.
A crisis of bodily fluids ensues. Jack’s fluids, not mine. I’ve just slid a clean diaper under his butt, when he releases a torrent of mustard-hued poop. In the three seconds it takes for me to produce a second clean diaper, he pees. Straight into the air so that the urine arcs, splashing against his belly and pooling in his armpits.
The moment he is rediapered and outfitted, he regurgitates sour milk all over his onesie.
The onesie says, tiny but mighty.
A half hour has passed since we entered this room. The air is warm and stale. Carrie is at the pool, and Nina has gone back to bed. Is it too late for me to apply to college? Maybe I could learn a trade. Carpentry, or silk-screening.
When I was growing up, we lived across the street from the Dewdneys, a couple whose youngest daughter, Ashley, was six years older than me. Their house was like any other in the neighborhood: cats roosting in windows, shingles littering the lawn after summer storms. Ashley Dewdney was an honor student, which meant her picture hung on corkboards in the supermarket, the library, the bowling alley. When she left for Notre Dame, she had what my brother called Mormon hair, and when she returned home five years later, she was driving an Audi packed with elaborately wrapped Christmas gifts. At their mailboxes, bathrobes cinched tight against the cold, Ashley’s mother explained to mine that her daughter had been recruited by a firm of financial analysts during her senior year of college. She had money now and expected her money to proliferate. Her short hair reflected sunlight. She went by “Ash.”
I had never heard of a financial analyst. The marriage of the two words was nonsense to my ears. Still, I decided I would become one, for the express purpose of one day popping the trunk and sheepishly asking my family to help me carry the loot inside.
I unsnap the bottom of his onesie, and Jack begins to wail. He is tired of being pinned to the floor, tired of being messed with.
“I don’t know what you want,” I mutter at him. But it’s a lie.
What he wants is to be held tenderly but firmly against my chest while I power walk through a climate-controlled world, waving to women with high-pitched voices and dogs with jingly collars. What he wants is to lie nose-to-nose on the bed while I sing pop songs from my mother’s childhood. What he wants is to nurse and nurse and never get gas.
My phone rings. When I see his name on the screen, I think, He knows. Of course he knows. Gabe is the one person from whom I’ve never successfully kept a secret.
With an ache in my throat, I say, “Hi.”
“Hello.” In that languid, late-night radio voice.
The silence between us, which should be strained, is warm and pleasurable. I can’t help it—when Gabe speaks, I feel his fingers on my ribcage. I picture our graves side by side. Love is absurd.
“What are you doing?”
We never ask each other how we’re doing. Only what and where and why. Implicit in these interviews: Shouldn’t you be here with me?
“Sitting in my empty classroom.” Gabe taught his last day of school yesterday. “Packing up my desk.”
“Get anything good this year?”
“You know how, last year, a girl gave me a mug with my own face on it?”
“Your mug shot mug.” The mug shot mug travels back and forth between our apartment and the high school. Gabe does
n’t believe in thermoses or to-go cups. He likes to walk down the street sipping from an open beverage, as if all of Queens were his living room.
“Well, this year, a student gave me a mug with a picture of myself holding last year’s mug on it.”
The baby is startled by my laughter.
“And which do you prefer?” I ask Gabe. “Mug shot mug or perpetuity mug shot mug?”
“They’re both so good.”
We slip into another silence, and this one lasts too long. Desperately, I want to present him with a worthy anecdote, but my best material—Maxine’s mansion, Carrie dating Tyler Cox—would reveal what he maybe, probably, already knows. “My mom got a cat,” I offer.
“Oh?”
“Van Morrison. He pooped in her neighbor’s sandbox.”
Gabe hesitates, then says, “The cat’s not sleeping in the same room as the baby, is he?”
“No.”
“Because I’ve heard of cats curling up on kids’ faces at night.” Gabe’s voice contains a tremor of parental anxiety. The tremor is genuine; no one has told him I’m not staying with my mom. I could break it to him right now: I’m here with Carrie and Nina. They’re beautiful. Neither of them can stand me.
I’m afraid the information would hurt him more than I already have.
“I won’t let Van Morrison smother the baby.”
“How is he sleeping, by the way?”
A loaded question.
“Some nights are better than others.”
“I feel like I haven’t seen you guys in forever. I feel like Jack’s going to be a completely different baby by the time I get there.”
I should apologize. It’s in my best interest to apologize, and I want to do it, but I want something else more.
Isn’t Gabe the only person in the world who can offer me relief? Not momentary relief while I scarf down a microwaved burrito—or even half a day while I get my hair cut and challenge a parking ticket—but actual, permanent relief.
Instead, when I begged him for it, he said, “You’re the one who wanted this.” As if either of us had any idea what we wanted. Does Gabe think that because I’m female—or because I was so close to Carrie when she had Nina—I already understood what a baby was? Does he assume that because I have a body designed for childbirth, I am also designed to be screamed at and sucked dry and spat out?