Everything Here is Under Control

by Everything Here Is Under Control (epub)

  Gabe steps off the escalator, hands in the pockets of his travel sweatpants, which have often doubled as my hangover sweatpants. Trapped in a pair of my prepregnancy jeans, those pants look like heaven to me. Something about Gabe is different. He’s more angular than I remember, less self-conscious.

  He looks, I realize, like somebody’s dad.

  Gabe does not immediately locate his own family among the strangers swarming the baggage carousels. His eyes land on Carrie first. I’ve often wondered if he searches crowds for her, if hers is the face mysteriously replicated on trains and across busy intersections. The leap of his eyebrows seems to confirm my theory, but then he looks automatically to the side of her, to me, as if Carrie’s presence simply indicates mine. As if it’s always been that way.

  “Dad!” Nina skips toward him. Gabe throws open his arms, unmistakably pleased and not at all surprised.

  He already knew she’d be here. The person Nina has been texting from back seats and beneath tables is not Maxine but her dad. When Gabe fretted about Van Morrison smothering our child, he was testing me, curious to see how faithful I would remain to my lie. I should have realized. Historically, none of us have had much luck keeping things to ourselves.

  If Nina resents Gabe for his long-distance parenting, his fairweather fatherhood, I’ve never seen the evidence. My suspicion is that she reveres Gabe the way some kids revere uncles or older siblings. What the two of them have more closely resembles friendship than the fraught, shameful codependence of parents and their children. Someday, I guess, Jack will have a long list of complaints about his dad, none of which will ring a bell to his sister.

  “Do you hate the Dairy Barn?” Nina is asking Gabe as they approach.

  “Yes.” The baby kicks his legs at the sight of Gabe. He knows him. No one could convince me otherwise. “I hate the Dairy Barn, but I love going there.”

  “Oh my god, same,” Nina says.

  “It’s a paradox. Hey, Care. Wow, how huge is this guy?” Gabe reaches for Jack. Carrie smiles as she hands him over. It’s obvious that mine is the only heart racing.

  “Mom doesn’t get it. She just hates it,” Nina says.

  “That’s because your mother is fundamentally sincere. She doesn’t share our taste for irony.”

  The ease with which Gabe kisses Jack’s head, it’s like they’ve never spent an hour apart. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Gabe will have a perfectly uncomplicated bond with each of his children. My dad’s great, I picture Jack saying on some dorm room floor, a bottle of beer clenched between his knees. But my mother . . .

  “Hi,” Gabe says to me.

  Was our relationship always prone to these subtle shifts of power? Has Gabe ever looked at me like he’s looking at me now?

  Like he knows he has won.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Carrie watches, careful to give us our space. It’s been years since we were all together, and it’s never been clear to me how much Nina herself understands about what happened and when.

  I’m starting to wonder if the answer isn’t everything.

  Gabe kisses me. For about three seconds, the rest of these people are secondary to the texture and temperature of the kiss, which conjures our yellow couch with the broken springs, the cast-iron pan that always smells faintly of the last meal we cooked, entire days we passed without saying their names.

  “Tell Amanda you’re not staying at the Super 8,” Nina prompts him.

  “We’re not staying at the Super 8,” Gabe tells me.

  She makes a proprietary grab for his hand. “And we’re stopping at the Dairy Barn on the way home.”

  “Nina,” Carrie warns.

  “And we’re stopping at the Dairy Barn on the way home.” Gabe’s smile is broad. Nina cocks her head at me as if to say, So there.

  Chastened, and conscious of my gritted teeth, I loosen my jaw and look over at Carrie. She’s ready with a commiserative roll of her eyes. “Tourists, both of them,” she says. “We can wait in the car while they cut the cheese. Gabe, did you check a bag?”

  “Nope.”

  “Great. Let’s get out of here, shall we?”

  Carrie walks ahead. Nina automatically falls into step with her mother, allowing Gabe and me a few moments of privacy. When he snakes his arm around my back, my relief is curtailed by my wish that he’d use both hands to hold the baby.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “You did what you had to do.”

  It’s a planned response, one he rehearsed in his head on the plane.

  “I shouldn’t have needed to do it.”

  “In a perfect world, no.”

  “But this isn’t a perfect world.”

  “Correct,” Gabe says. “This is Ohio.”

  Nina is beckoning for us to hurry up. Gabe moves ahead, urgently closing the distance between him and his daughter.

  * * *

  He and I ride in the back seat with the baby between us. Watching Gabe make fart noises against Jack’s bare feet, coaxing his first froggy giggles into bona fide laughter, a kind of vacancy washes over me. I press my forehead against the window and slip into a deep sleep, dreamless and impervious to Nina’s chatter, Jack’s noises, Gabe and Carrie’s small talk. When I wake up, Carrie and I are alone together in the parking lot of the Dairy Barn, amid the life-size, galvanized cow statues, whose bellies are embedded with speakers.

  The cows blast country hits of the nineteen-nineties. “Achy Breaky Heart.” “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” Carrie is watching me in the rearview mirror.

  “Gabe took the baby inside,” she says.

  “I figured.”

  “They’ll be back in a second. Nina wants buckeyes, and Gabe wants some kind of mustard?”

  “Yeah. The spicy mustard.”

  Carrie twists in the driver’s seat and examines me the way you examine a knot in your shoelace or a Scrabble board—something you need to solve.

  “You guys can stay at the Super 8, if that’s your preference.”

  I shake my head. “We’ll stay with you. It’s only another two weeks, right?”

  As if staying with her has been some kind of hardship.

  Carrie takes a breath. “If this is too difficult for you, we don’t have to keep trying.”

  “If what’s too difficult?”

  “All of us, together.”

  This topic feels ambitious, like something I shouldn’t attempt to navigate for another month or two—however long it takes Jack to sleep more, nurse less. Until I can no longer feel the seam of my jeans rubbing against my scar tissue.

  “Carrie, you’ve done nothing but make things easier for me.”

  The comment catches both of us off guard. Carrie smiles, and I avert my eyes. “Okay. I’m glad. Still, I get that it’s awkward. All of us being together is completely optional. We can have Gabe keep us separate, if that’s what you want.”

  Our original plan was to drive to Ohio for Nina’s thirteenth birthday. Jack and I were going to stay with my mom, but Gabe wanted to spend at least a few nights at Carrie’s. He was looking forward to introducing Nina to her baby brother, but he’d made no reference to my exact whereabouts during this meeting. In my head, I was drinking a glass of wine at my mom’s kitchen table, my jealousy a fair price to pay for my freedom.

  The night I left New York, this plan was irrelevant to me. All I wanted was Carrie. Specifically, Carrie’s hands on my baby.

  Now she and I are alone together—truly alone together, no infants on our laps or children hanging off our sleeves—for the first time in years. And already, Gabe and Nina are emerging from the Dairy Barn, plastic shopping bags hanging from their wrists.

  “Do you want Gabe to keep us separate?” I ask.

  “No,” Carrie answers quickly. “I’m over it.”

  “You are?”

 
“Look, it was rough at the time. But I never loved him. You know that, right?”

  Simultaneously, Gabe and Nina pull open doors on either side of the car. The smell of fudge clings to their clothes. It’s a sticky, headachey smell—but I can remember how appealing it used to be.

  A piece of strawberry licorice dangles from Nina’s mouth.

  “Have a good time hate-shopping?” Carrie asks brightly.

  Gabe leans into the car and drops the baby into his bucket seat. “Sorry, buddy. Kind of a rough landing.”

  Jack whimpers.

  “Dad spent sixty bucks,” Nina says.

  As Carrie starts the car, the baby starts to cry. I am chasing an errant thought, one I want to trap and isolate before it can slip away. If she never loved him—if she never loved—if she never—

  “Amanda?” Gabe says, like he’s already said it once before.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think he’s hungry?”

  “He’s always hungry.”

  * * *

  Something is up with Carrie’s front lawn. The grass is askew. Flattened, maybe, but only in parts. As we approach, we realize someone has mowed a phrase into the grass. Mowed messages are a Deerling tradition—a celebration of high school football victories, or a fun way to wish your neighbors a spooky Halloween.

  Carrie’s jaw drops. “Does that say . . . ?”

  In capital letters, the grass says, trump that bitch.

  We continue idling in the street, all of us needing a second to decipher the phrase—to turn the first noun into a verb, the second into a particular person.

  Gabe takes out his phone and snaps a picture.

  “What the actual fuck?” Carrie says.

  “Um,” Nina squeaks.

  I point wordlessly at the driveway, which is littered with campaign signs. The same pro-Hillary slogan that invaded the park and the garden outside the library, now battered, slashed, and strewn across the gravel.

  Nina starts to cry. Parking along the curb, unwilling to drive over the i’m with her wreckage, Carrie puts a hand on her daughter’s leg. “It’s okay, baby. I mean, it’s disgusting, but we’ll fix it.” Nina’s tears have granted Carrie the eerie calm that moms get when someone’s head thuds against a bookshelf.

  Nina says, “This is my fault.”

  All at once, the rest of us go, “What?” and the commotion frightens Jack. He looks at me, dumbstruck. I give him my index finger to hold.

  “It was Maxine and me. We put the signs in the park, and in front of the library, and, um . . .”

  Carrie narrows her eyes. “And where else?”

  “The golf course . . .”

  “And?”

  Nina sniffles. “High school football field. But nowhere else, I swear.”

  Carrie looks nauseated. “Why would you do that?”

  “Um, I guess to see if we were the only Democrats in Deerling?”

  “Well, Neen, I think you got your answer!”

  “Hey,” Gabe says, “there’s nothing wrong with being politically engaged. I’m proud of you, honey.”

  In the front seat, Nina twists to give her dad a tight smile. His opinion, though sweet, carries no weight. It was foolish to think Carrie needed me to bridge any gaps between her and her daughter. The two of them could not be more ensnared in each other.

  Carrie says, “There’s political engagement, and then there’s sheer stupidity. It’s not actually legal to stick signs all over city property. And this?” Carrie gestures to her lawn. “How did this happen? Who did you tell?”

  “We didn’t tell anyone!”

  “Then someone saw you. Someone who knows where you live.”

  “No one saw us! We did it in the middle of the night!”

  “Jesus Christ, Nina.”

  “You liked the signs. You got all excited when we drove past them.”

  Carrie lets her head fall into her hands. I’m staring at the driveway, at the volume of the debris. “Where did you guys get so many signs?” I ask. “You must have had hundreds.”

  “We ordered them off the Internet,” Nina says.

  “How,” Carrie demands.

  “Maxine has a credit card.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s for emergencies.”

  “The threat of a Trump presidency is an emergency,” Gabe says, his tone still proud, delighted. “That must have been a massive delivery. Where did you stash them all?”

  “We had them delivered to the drive-in while Trinity was working. She stored them in one of their garages for a while. Then she borrowed her boyfriend’s truck and helped us set them up.” Nina dries her eyes with the back of her hand. Pride has seeped into her tone too. Across the street, a neighbor pulls back her curtains. Her gaze darts between us and the grass. Does she know it’s vandalism? Does she think Carrie did this to her own property?

  “This is what you’ve been doing when you spend the night at Maxine’s house,” Carrie says.

  “Only the last few times.”

  “I thought you guys were swimming. Playing foosball. Making fudge.”

  “No one makes fudge, Mom.”

  “When I was a kid, we made fudge.”

  “No.” I interject on the grounds of historical accuracy. “We didn’t.”

  Nina whips around. “Of course you didn’t.”

  “Okay.” Gabe unbuckles his seatbelt. “I’m going in first. I’ll take a quick look. Make sure nothing’s, uh, amiss. You guys wait here.” He hops out of the Subaru before anyone can argue. He cuts across the lawn, his feet landing in the middle of the B. On the front porch, he examines his keyring—crowded with keys to the high school, our building in Ridgewood—and slides one into Carrie’s front door.

  “He has a key to your house?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer.

  Jack whines.

  A minute later, Gabe reappears and beckons us inside. No one has smashed the windows; no one is lurking behind the shower curtain or crouched in the basement. Pulling the baby out of the car, I offer to mow the rest of Carrie’s lawn. “I just need to nurse Jack first.”

  She shakes her head. “No, I’ll do it. Or Gabe can do it.”

  “You think Gabe knows how to start a lawnmower?”

  She smiles, but barely.

  I follow Carrie inside, where her keys hit the kitchen table with an exasperated clatter and she pinches the bridge of her nose. She’s mad and unnerved and embarrassed—all things that residents of Deerling County have made Carrie and her family feel a thousand times before. In order to make her next move, Carrie needs privacy, and Gabe and I qualify as the opposite of privacy. We are the audience she most resents. I understand, but because Gabe is looking at her with his arms folded, his expression stern, I’m forced to stay in the room. I’m responsible for him, for dispelling whatever parental authority he thinks he can claim.

  The other person for whom I’m responsible begins to weep, fed up with this day, which has been far from tailored to his needs. I take a seat and pull out my boob, glowering at the rest of them. However much Carrie and Gabe and Nina would like to escape this moment, at least they get to endure it with their clothes on.

  Nina is leaning back against the counter, gripping the ledge of the sink. Her posture leaves her so exposed, the stance almost appears defensive, like someone bluffing, Go ahead, hit me. “I’m sorry,” she says, no longer tearful.

  “For what?” Carrie asks.

  “I don’t know. You choose.”

  “That’s not how apologies work.”

  “Give her a break,” Gabe cuts in. “She didn’t do anything wrong. She was peacefully protesting the political climate.”

  Carrie says, “Really, Gabe? You can’t think of any reason I might be mad?”

  Gabe frowns, stumped by the p
op quiz.

  Carrie turns to me. “What about you?”

  I point to the baby’s face buried in my breast. “I’m kind of in the middle—” The look Carrie gives me transports me back to girlhood. How often did one of us corroborate the other’s story in front of a suspicious parent or ensure, with spontaneous transgressions, that a teacher punished us both equally? “Okay. It seems like you’re mad that Nina did all of this behind your back. That she lied about her plans and snuck around town in the middle of the night. Also, personally, I’m concerned that Trinity’s boyfriend was even marginally involved. I mean, we’re talking about an unknown male entity with a driver’s license. That’s a red flag for me.”

  “Thank you,” Carrie says.

  “Oh, come on,” Gabe says. “It’s not like they were drinking, or tipping cows . . .”

  Nina turns a palm toward the ceiling, a gesture I’ve seen her dad perform in countless moments of incredulity.

  “. . . They were trying to make a difference!”

  “This is Deerling,” Carrie says. “Nothing Nina does is going to make a difference. Best-case scenario, no one lays a finger on her, and she and her friends get to feel like they tried. The worst-case scenario—believe me, Feldman—is so much worse than this.” She gestures in the direction of the defaced lawn. Then she turns to her daughter. “Nina, it has occurred to me that if raising you in this town makes you want to change the world, that’s probably the best result I could have hoped for. But could you please wait a second before you go full activist? Could you be a kid a little while longer? You’re twelve, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m thirteen!” Nina bellows, causing Jack to spit out my nipple and release his own earsplitting cry. “And if it’s too dangerous for me to express an opinion in this town, then maybe—maybe!—we should move!”

  With all the righteous, hopeless fury of a tenured teenager, Nina storms out of the kitchen and slams her bedroom door so hard the walls around us shudder. I am trying to snap the panel of my nursing bra into place, but Jack is crying and I’m flustered, fumbling. It’s Carrie who takes the baby from me. Jack falls silent the same moment an engine growls to life in the front yard.

  I rearrange my shirt and go to the window. The woman from across the street is outside in her pink tank top and matching Keds, erasing the pro-Trump obscenity, mowing in straight, determined lines. She has schoolteacher hair and khaki shorts down to her fleshy knees. Without pausing her efforts, she gives me a dutiful wave: Nothing to see here.