by Emily Adrian
He laughs nervously. The creature in my lap produces a new sound, a cross between a cough and a quack. Only when I look down and see the grin stretched across Jack’s face—his eyes bright and fixed on our server—do I realize he has giggled.
Carrie, Nina, and I burst into cheers, inspiring yet another giggle. Jack’s second ever. The sound leaves me flushed. It’s a particular ebullience I haven’t felt since I was a child prone to flinging myself down grassy hillsides.
“What can I get you guys?” the kid asks, staring at his notepad and understanding nothing. He has no idea humans aren’t born sitting up, eating hot dogs, laughing. I might envy his combination of maleness and youth if I weren’t so pleased by my baby’s sense of humor.
I order the most expensive beer on the menu for five dollars and fifty cents. I let Nina design my hot dog for me and, too busy cooing at Jack, fail to listen to the toppings she rattles off. The server jogs away. Nina produces her phone, thumbs already twitching across the screen. In general, I’ve noticed, Ohioans are less captivated by their phones than New Yorkers, but Nina is an exception. It’s a relatively recent addition to her life, obtained halfway through seventh grade, but she treats the device like an appendage she acquired in the womb.
“How’s Maxine?” I ask.
It’s the ensuing silence more than the question that eventually causes Nina to look up. “What?”
“Maxine,” I repeat. “What are you guys talking about?”
Nina’s phone disappears beneath the table. “I wasn’t talking to Maxine.”
I don’t believe her.
Carrie changes the subject. “Hey, have either of you seen a Hillary sign on private property?”
The answer is no, but I lie and say, “Haven’t really been paying attention.”
Nina shrugs. “I’ve seen a couple of bumper stickers.”
“Doesn’t it seem weird that someone’s willing to stick signs all over town, but no one’s dared to put one in their own front yard?” Carrie asks.
“Maybe the hopefuls are from out of town,” I say.
“Then why canvas in Deerling? I mean, realistically, it’s a lost cause.”
Nina frowns at her mother. “Maybe you should put up a sign.”
“Seriously?” Carrie says.
“I mean, you’re voting for her, right?”
“Yes.”
“So, put up a sign. Maybe other people will see it and copy you.”
Carrie wrinkles her nose. Slogans and logos depress her. “We’re not lawn sign people, are we?”
“Maybe you’re not,” Nina says, smoldering.
Carrie lifts her hands. “Hey, if you want to put up a sign, we’ll put up a sign. We can erect a Hillary Clinton billboard in our yard if it’ll make you happy.”
Nina smiles at her mom, but it’s the way you smile at someone who has given you a gift meant for a much younger child. Why are mothers consistently several steps behind their daughters? Jaclyn never thought to warn me about anything—menstruation, credit card debt—until long after I was already dealing with it.
Guilt somersaults in my stomach. I should tell Carrie about the photos on Nina’s phone. For all I know, Nina has already messaged the Atlantic writer, and Deerling has already made headlines. I can’t bring myself to check.
My beer arrives, along with Carrie’s gin and tonic and Nina’s pop. Jack puts a hand on my pint glass, admiring the neon lights reflected in the ale. He’s like a seagull that way—drawn to shiny things.
“What about Maxine’s parents?” Carrie asks. “Think they’ll put up any signs?”
“They say they ‘don’t want to shove their politics down people’s throats.’” Nina makes air quotes.
Carrie seizes the chance to roll her eyes in solidarity. “Cowards.”
“Totally,” Nina says.
My hot dog appears before me. I know it’s a hot dog only because we are at a hot dog restaurant; the wiener itself is not visible beneath the chili sauce, the nacho cheese, the fried egg, or the Froot Loops.
“This is an abomination,” I inform Nina.
She beams with pride.
Trying not to squish Jack, I lean across the table for a handful of tater tots, a side dish we ordered to share. Carrie is making faces at Jack, pursing her lips and wiggling her eyebrows. He’s in love.
“He looks like you when he laughs,” Carrie says.
“I know. I can’t wait for Gabe to hear him.”
At the mention of Gabe, Carrie straightens. “Do you guys have any plans for the next few days?”
“Not really. I mean, we’ll spend some time with Jaclyn.”
“But you’ll keep staying with us, right?”
“Um . . .” I shift the baby higher on my lap. Carrie assumes I’ve filled Gabe in, that he’s expecting the four of us to welcome him at the airport tomorrow morning. “I guess I was thinking we’d get a room.”
“In Deerling? You mean the Super 8?”
“I think so?”
“Don’t take your infant to the Super 8. Just stay with us.”
“Yeah,” Nina chimes in. “Please.”
“I’ll ask Gabe what he wants to do,” I say.
“He’ll want to stay with Mom and me,” Nina says.
I watch as she submerges a straw in her Coke then covers the top of the straw with her finger and lifts the bottom end to her mouth. Carrie used to drink her pop in the same annoying way. I regret letting Nina order my food. It’s almost a thing I could eat, if not for the garnish of sugarcoated cereal. I’m suddenly starving—too starving to do anything except pick off the Froot Loops and endeavor to stomach the rest.
A shadow of disappointment crosses Nina’s face. I try to ignore it.
Oblivious to my mood swing, and maybe a little bit buzzed, Carrie says, “You know, when I was pregnant, I always pictured this.”
“Dinner at Happy Dog?” It seems possible. Carrie’s pregnancy cravings went way beyond pickles and ice cream. I remember her crushing a handful of Cool Ranch Doritos into an open can of baked beans, grabbing a spoon, and going to town.
“You and me, hanging out with our babies.”
Nina looks disturbed to be categorized with Jack, who is heavy-lidded, starting to slump against my abdomen. He always falls asleep in the loudest places. It’s the silence of a dark room at bedtime that he finds offensive.
When Carrie was pregnant, I was no more inclined to imagine myself with a baby than I was to imagine opening a 401(k) or dying the gray out of my hair.
“I didn’t think it would take thirteen years for you to have one,” Carrie admits. “Why’d you guys wait so long?”
I look down at Jack as his eyes close. I’m speechless. None of our friends in New York have children. Gabe and I are thirty-one; we started trying to have a baby when I was still twenty-eight. My feeling has always been that I proposed parenthood at the earliest possible moment.
But how much longer has the last decade felt to Carrie? Time does not necessarily slow down after you have a baby, but the conditions of your life change so constantly that each month constitutes an era, each year a lifetime.
I say, “I guess we were waiting to become adults.”
Carrie laughs and eats a tater tot. “Not a prerequisite, as it turns out.”
She would claim to be talking about herself, but we both know she means me.
* * *
In the fall of our senior year, Carrie was sick.
Gabe, who grew up with three identical golden retrievers—whom he can still tell apart in old photos—once explained the phrase “sick as a dog” to me. Allegedly, certain dogs are prone to vomiting without any kind of warning onto the center of the living room carpet.
Carrie did not vomit onto the carpet, but she did vomit into the toilets at school, on the grass surrounding the track, i
nto an empty Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket, and once, bewilderingly, into the glove compartment of my mother’s car. Whenever I encounter a depiction of pregnancy on TV, I’m amazed at the ease with which the writers have downplayed the first trimester. Puke appears only for comic effect—for instance, when the woman is in her boss’s office, her performance under review—and always into a conveniently located trash receptacle. We see the woman’s eyes dart from side to side as she struggles to remember the date and duration of her last period.
By the next scene, her stomach protrudes adorably beneath a perfectly fitted T-shirt.
Carrie and I learned at an age younger than most that there is nothing adorable about the first trimester. Carrie was so sick that I sometimes insisted she must have eaten a bad clam strip or drunk the warm, murky water produced by the fountain outside the science labs. I wanted to take her to the ER, particularly during her ninth week when she couldn’t keep anything down—not toast, not her prenatal vitamins, not watermelon slices, not the antinausea meds her GP had reluctantly prescribed after noting that “some ladies” were “grateful” for their morning sickness, thought to indicate a healthy pregnancy. As Carrie gripped the toilet, struggling to breathe through the bile climbing her throat and blocking her nasal passages, I fretted to her mother, “This can’t be normal! This is so fucked up!” and Mrs. Hart shushed me. She pressed a cold washcloth to the back of Carrie’s neck and said, “Hart women have rough pregnancies.”
Between Halloween and Christmas, Carrie was hospitalized twice for dehydration. She lost ten pounds and missed twenty days of school. Her mother was forced to confess Carrie’s secret to the administration so Carrie could complete her assignments from home and graduate on time.
In the same two months, I missed nine days of school. I wouldn’t let Carrie go to the hospital alone. Armed with a list I’d printed from the internet of everything that might ease a pregnant person’s symptoms, I drove to the drugstore and bought Tums, digestive enzymes, ginger candies, hemorrhoid cream. At Carrie’s house we camped out on the couch, watching hours upon hours of reality television and eating pudding from individually sized containers. I tried to amuse her by echoing random lines of dialogue in a grating falsetto. Her laughter was feeble at best.
Eventually, my mother summoned her latent authority and forbade me to cut class. “The two of you are different people,” Jaclyn said. “Only one of you is pregnant, and only one of you is going to college next year.”
I no longer knew if I was going to college. Leaving Ohio, now that Carrie couldn’t, became an imprecise pipe dream. What I never explained to Jaclyn or to anyone else was that Carrie’s pregnancy—though devastating—was a kind of consolation. Months before her chosen method of birth control (luck) failed her, when Carrie, with her good grades and raw talent, seemed to have all the options in the world, it had already become clear that hitting the road with her best friend was not her top choice.
The summer before our senior year, something between us had soured. We had been studying each other’s faces, making the same jokes, fighting the same fights, and loitering outside the same fast food establishments literally all our lives. My willful opinion was that our boredom with Deerling sometimes masqueraded as boredom with each other. We needed a change of scenery, that was all. The more I begged Carrie to make plans—one school, one apartment, one future to be shared between the two of us—the more she distanced herself. Slowly at first: Summer nights alone with her sketchpad. Sunday morning sermons with her parents. A boyfriend who threatened to eclipse me completely.
And then we were seniors. Pregnant, Carrie needed me. Is it ridiculous to say it felt like I had won?
The only college I applied to was thirty miles away.
After New Year’s, when Carrie’s nausea had more or less subsided—and we had heard the gallop of the baby’s heartbeat, and Carrie had named the baby Nina, Nina Evelyn Hart—our homeroom teacher made us fill out a survey in service of some kid’s project on teen pregnancy.
• Did you know that five out of every two hundred girls become pregnant by the age of nineteen?
• Did you know that teen pregnancy rates are even higher in states that practice abstinence only education?
• Did you know that two students at Deerling High School have missed class due to pregnancy complications this year?
No, no, no, I replied to every question. Carrie wasn’t even showing yet; claiming absolute ignorance seemed best. Teen pregnancy? Never heard of it.
I glanced over at Carrie’s desk, worried I would catch her hyperventilating.
In response to question number three, she had written, I’M ONE OF THEM.
CHAPTER NINE
“When are you and Gabe driving back to New York?” Carrie asks me, checking out the view from our room. Fireworks are already exploding over the Cuyahoga, but from our glass-encased suite on the fourteenth floor, we can barely hear them.
Too full of hot dog to pillage the minibar as planned, Nina is lying with Jack across one of two queen beds, tickling the souls of his bare feet. Yesterday I tried to book a separate room for me and the baby, but Carrie insisted I save my money: we could all share, no problem. I regret it now. The prospect of trying to keep Jack quiet while Carrie and Nina sleep causes more than a hundred and twenty-four bucks worth of stress.
“No firm plans,” I tell Carrie. “He has the rest of the summer off, so I guess we’ll play it by ear.”
Nina looks up. “Can we take him to the Dairy Barn?” she asks.
The Dairy Barn is a highway-side institution, a purveyor of cheeses, pepperoni sticks, ice cream, mustards, jams, and assorted kitsch—socks adorned with specific breeds of dogs, picture frames that make it look like Jesus is gazing beatifically at your own kid, and T-shirts that say i cut the cheese at the dairy barn in deerling.
Even for a local it’s a lot.
Carrie uses her mom voice. “Do you think he would enjoy going to the Dairy Barn?”
“It’s, like, our only tourist attraction,” Nina says.
“Gabe’s from here,” Carrie reminds her.
Nina squints, like she has registered this fact only dimly, if ever.
“He’s not from here,” I say. “He lived in Deerling for one year.”
“A formative year,” Carrie says.
“How about the pool?” Nina asks. “Or the dump?”
“Yes. We can do both.” Carrie is perched on the windowsill, her back disconcertingly close to the glass. I follow her gaze to the bed, where Jack’s face is in the process of crumbling. He rubs at his eyes, rocks his hips. He wails.
I scoop him up. Though freshly changed, fed, and burped, he is distraught. When shushing and swaying proves ineffective, I announce I’m going to take a walk with him, grateful for an excuse to leave the room. Before I can slip away, Nina jumps to her feet. “Can I take him?” she asks, already reaching.
I hesitate. “You want to walk with him?”
“Yeah. I want to help.”
In Jack’s entire life, only Gabe and Carrie have ever taken him out of my sight. Charging a thirteen-year-old with his care seems reckless, perhaps illegal, but Carrie is looking at me hopefully. She wants to reward her daughter’s interest. Nina has spent plenty of hours fawning over Jack when he’s happy, but this is the first time she’s offered to step in when he’s sad.
Carrie and Nina have been getting along all night. I’m supposed to say yes.
Forever in my friend’s debt, I hand over my screaming infant. “Stay on this floor,” I tell Nina. “And come back as soon as he calms down.”
“I will,” she promises, and her gravity cannot conceal her delight. She’s like a teenager turning the key in the ignition for the first time. If my baby weren’t the family sedan in this scenario, I would be impressed.
“They’ll be fine,” Carrie says. The heavy door clicks shut. “They’re right outs
ide.”
My hands are on my face. My palms are cold and sweaty. “Look,” I say, trying to outrace my mounting anxiety, trying to disguise it as something else. “I don’t know if Gabe will have time for all that stuff.”
“What stuff?” Carrie asks.
“The dump, the pool, the fucking Dairy Barn.”
“What do you mean? I thought you had no firm plans.”
“I mean, I’d like his help with the baby. And we should spend some time with my mom, not to mention some time as a family. Just the three of us. It’s been forever.”
She slides her thumbnail between her front teeth. “It’s Nina’s birthday tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“Nina’s birthday is the whole reason for your trip. And it’s not like we’re planning to abandon you with the baby. Everyone’s going to help. Even Nina is starting to bond with him. Can’t you be happy about that? I mean, they are siblings.”
Carrie looks down at the retro hotel carpet. She studies its threat-level-orange honeycomb pattern. Then she changes her mind and looks me in the eye.
I wish it didn’t break my heart, Jack having a sister. I have fantasized about alternative versions of my life in which it doesn’t bother me at all—Gabe and I meeting in our midtwenties, New York City. On our third or fourth date he confesses to me that he has a daughter, the result of a brief and otherwise unremarkable relationship in high school. He loves her to pieces; he visits twice a year; he and the girl’s mother are on friendly terms.
In the fantasy, I take a deep breath and say, “Okay.”
Once Gabe asked me, “Is it because you didn’t help make her?” We were drunk on a futon in Nashville. It was New Year’s, and we had driven down to Tennessee after spending Christmas in Deerling. The conversation was the kind you can only have hundreds of miles from home, as if words unheard by the artifacts of your everyday life are somehow off the record.
“No,” I said, my face half-buried in a pillow. Everything in the Airbnb we had rented—the towels, the futon mattress, the insides of the water glasses—smelled like pulled pork from the restaurant downstairs. “It’s because it feels like I did.”