Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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He selected carefully: nothing with slogans, nothing overly sporty. But it was difficult to find anything without baseballs or soccer balls or team numbers emblazoned across the chest. He thought of Sarah and her pride over secondhand bargains. What would she make of this? James found a pair of sneakers hipper than the ones Finn had been given by the social worker. Blue Adidas with a seventies retro stripe, but tiny.
The clerk ringing through his purchases was blowsy, overly effusive.
“These are sooooo cute,” she said, folding a pair of jeans. “Totally popular for fall.”
The credit card had his name on it, but it was Ana’s account; would this piece of information have made the saleswoman less solicitous?
Only when she dropped Finn’s new shoes into the bag did James realize that if he swapped his laces for Velcro straps, he’d be wearing exactly the same pair.
Arrival
ANA AND JAMES and Sarah and Marcus had become friends slowly at first, and then suddenly. Within months of meeting, they were at the forefront of each other’s lives. It happened when Finn was a baby, the friendship springing to life alongside his own brand-new existence, month upon month.
It had started at the wedding.
The bride was eight months pregnant and could not stop laughing. James had a few, and he started laughing, too, until everyone between the rose walls of the hotel ballroom was laughing so hard that the justice of the peace, a tent of a woman, held up her hands.
“People! Come on, now! We have work to do! It’s supposed to be serious when you straight people get married!”
James and Ana were surprised to find that they had been seated at a table with the bride and groom. They had known the couple only a few months, though technically, James had known Sarah years ago, in college before Ana. He’d made the first mention of her in the winter.
“This woman I sort of remember invited us to dinner.” Ana was emptying the dishwasher. “I forgot to tell you.”
“Who is it?” Ana ran through a mental list of all the women James had known before her.
James frowned. “Odd. I don’t remember her name.”
Ana held a clean mixing bowl in her hand. She rubbed its glass belly with a dishtowel.
James typed on his BlackBerry, bent thumbs clicking. He didn’t even keep it in a pocket anymore; it had become an extension of his hand, a beeping carbuncle. “It’s here. Sarah. Her name’s Sarah.”
“Can you help me put these away?”
He said: “Why are you drying dishes that are already dry?”
Ana told Sarah that she looked beautiful, and she meant it. Sarah’s dress was a divable sea green, and this fishy aspect continued with her cropped, glossy black hair.
“Are you appalled by the wedding-ness of this wedding? I think I am.” Sarah pointed at a string of white Christmas lights winding around the windows overhead. They were in a basement ballroom; the small rectangular windows sat up high, near the ceiling, peeking out into bushes. Their shape and secret location near the ground—windows she would notice only if she stopped to tie her shoe—made Ana think of an old-fashioned prison on a main street in a small town. She expected to see ankles and feet pass by outside, through the shrubbery.
Sarah patted Ana’s knee and grinned. Of all the people here, Sarah had chosen her to lean into. Ana felt cozy.
“Something comes over you when you plan a wedding.” Sarah pretended to whisper her confession. “You start giving a shit about things you absolutely should not give a shit about.”
Ana laughed and told Sarah about the night before her own wedding, when she stayed up until 3 a.m. tying bags of tea with white ribbon because the wedding favor CD that James had made seemed suddenly inadequate.
“Okay, that’s pretty bad. You’ve made me feel better,” said Sarah, rubbing her hand over her stomach, which jutted out in front of her in a perfect circle, like a prosthetic. Ana did not flinch. She decided that she liked this loud, pregnant woman, a conclusion she hadn’t quite reached over the prior few weeks. Ana needed a new friend.
Across the table, James was face to face with Marcus, the groom. James did most of the talking, arms and hands punching. He sensed Ana watching him and looked over, gave her a quick smile midsentence, then turned back to it.
“Did you think it was strange that no one walked me down the aisle?”
“Oh,” said Ana. “I didn’t—”
“We’re orphans, Marcus and I. My parents are dead, and his are fuckwits.” Sarah chewed ice out of a water glass. “Usually, it’s totally fine, but today, I did mind. I feel like I can say that to you.” Ana nodded.
“Most of these people are work friends. Nice people. We haven’t lived here that long, really, when I think about it. It’s all pretty new.”
Now Ana recognized what was strange about the small crowd: Barely anyone in the room looked older than fifty. Ana remembered the old schoolhouse where she had been married, with James’s great-aunts and -uncles in their wheelchairs in locked positions tucked away in the corners like umbrellas.
On the edges of the empty dance floor, a small child swayed by himself, wearing a rock ‘n’ roll T-shirt—ABCD split by a lightning bolt, like the logo for the band AC/DC—with a blazer over it, hair hanging in his eyes. How old? Ana had no idea.
She had seen the boy earlier, in the bathroom. As Ana stood at the automatic dryer, his little hands had suddenly brushed against hers, grabbing at the warm air, his body up against her skirt.
“Oliver, don’t be rude!” The boy’s mother had appeared, pulling him away. Ana smiled, shrugging lightly. “I’m so sorry,” said the mother, unfolding a soft towel from the stack by the sink. She rubbed furiously at the boy’s hands. He looked at Ana quizzically, silent. “Were you smart enough to leave yours at home?”
Ana sighed internally, knowing what she’d find at the next step of this conversation. “I don’t have kids.”
And so it came: the pause and the nervous rebound. “Right, I get that, absolutely,” and the exaggerated eye roll at the small, wet child. It surprised Ana how often mothers played up their misery, as if she would find it comforting to pretend they would switch places with her.
Eighties pop rock blasted from the speakers. In daytime, this room would probably be used for a conference, a PowerPoint presentation to bored executives trying to keep their tortoise necks from snapping down to sleep. Ana attended these kinds of meetings and had occasionally led them. She knew the closed air of this kind of room, the scent of boredom, the water glasses and pens lined up next to blank tablets of paper. She didn’t like to think of Sarah’s wedding shadowed by the ordinary in this way.
“You forget all about the wedding when you realize you’re in a marriage,” said Ana, her eyes now on James, who was still talking.
“I know. We’ve been together so long, I’m not sure why it mattered at all to Marcus. His traditional side appeared as soon as I showed him the pee stick.”
Then came the sound of knives clinking on glasses and a small cheer. Sarah rolled her eyes at Ana with a smile that discredited the eye roll. Marcus leaned across the table and gave his bride a kiss, so deep and certain that Ana looked away. James did not. He let out a whoop.
When Ana turned back, Sarah was beaming and cackling, her big sound bouncing below the DJ’s music like an extra track. The cake appeared, carried by two sweating women in manly black vests and white dress shirts. Three tiers of white buttercream icing, ribbons of chocolate down the side. A round of applause. There were no figurines on top. Ana remembered picking her bride and groom: James thought it would be funny to use two black people, or a pair of women. In the end, he let her pick, and she panicked and chose two that were so small her mother drunkenly asked if they were children.
The women placed the cake directly in front of Ana, which set off fireworks of flashing cameras.
“Oh, no, no. I’m not—” said Ana, sliding her chair closer to James, out of the way of Sarah and Marcus and all the years that this photo would exist in computer in-boxes and dresser drawers.
The sound in the room was beginning to bother her. A thrumming filled her skull, and her body craved the cool of the sheets waiting for her at home. The edges of her eyes blurred.
James saw Ana cringe a little and knew what was happening. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into it. She tried to stem his worry.
They were equal now. All that work to clear the tubes of their nests of cysts, and it didn’t matter: According to the celebrity doctor, Ana had an “inhospitable” uterus—no visitors allowed. Its walls were thin as onionskin, unable to support anything. And James’s sperm had low motility. They were too lethargic to broach those walls anyway.
Now they had the information, the perfectly balanced failure. A year ago, they had agreed upon the circumstances under which the long, gruesome trail of appointments and injections would end, and today they had kept their covenant. No more stirrups and pills. No more bloody syringes and bruised thighs. No more electronic wands.
James had a new plan now. Even as he was explaining to the table why vegetarianism was an untenable ethical position, the other part of his brain had him sweeping into Rwanda. He had been there once, during the rebuilding. He had opened the door to a church, and children came tumbling out like jelly beans from a machine. He imagined himself on an airplane back from Africa. Finally he’d be one of those dads he always got seated behind. But he would be bouncing and expertly soothing the new baby, a baby with no one besides them. Ana was in the seat next to him, holding a baby bottle. They could do that. It would be good for everyone.
But then, there were risks: trauma; fetal alcohol syndrome; the stigma of being a racial outsider … He glanced at Sarah’s swollen stomach. Maybe they could borrow a healthy uterus for a while and grow their own.
Ana did not know what thoughts were racing through James’s mind or why his eyes on her smiled sadly. She wanted to show him that she was all right, to let him know that it was possible to be happy for someone else. She gave him a small kiss on the neck. She was trying to remind him of something that she herself was working hard to remember.
A year later, Ana watched James through the kitchen window, open for the first time in months. He looked medium. His brown hair had thinned at the top of his head to reveal a little gleaming planet that hoped not to be discovered. When he turned sideways, the silhouette of a small belly emerged from his untucked shirt, surprising her.
Ana rapped on the window. James waved. She pointed to her wristwatch. He nodded.
Ana had discovered the pipes had broken when a smell led her to the basement, where shreds of toilet paper and purple-black sludge coated the drain in one corner. James had handled it, which meant that when Ana came home from work the next afternoon, there were three men in her frozen, broken yard, and James, too, each of them drinking a beer out of the bottle. James had gloves on; the men did not. One was Romanian and two Italian, though they considered themselves Sicilian, really, James informed her later, in the bathroom, his mouth filled with toothpaste. The tinier the country, the more divided, James noted. (Ana thought: What about Andorra? But she didn’t say it out loud.) He prided himself on always knowing something significant about everyone within eleven minutes of introductions.
The pipes had been replaced, but the yard remained ripped apart. James and Ana had decided to leave it until spring, and now it was spring and James stood in the very center of the frozen lawn like a spoon in a bowl of hardened pudding, with two rolls of sod at his feet. James knew a little about gardening—he had interviewed some organic farmers in California who discovered ammonium sulphate in their fertilizer—but not enough to save the lawn.
Ana surveyed the kitchen. The risotto ingredients were lined up in small ceramic bowls as if waiting for a cooking show close-up. Ana wore an apron James had sewn years ago in his high school home economics class: WOK WITH JAMES, it said in black iron-on letters across the chest, a reference to a popular TV show Ana had never seen.
James slammed the back door, letting in a gust of cool air.
“How can you not be wearing a coat?” asked Ana.
He leaned over her three-ring binder, reading the recipe in its plastic sleeve.
“This looks great.” Then: “I’m not cold. That apron is still fucking hilarious.”
He plugged his iPod into the dock in the next room and returned midsentence, speaking over the music, telling Ana about the band, which included a tuba player. This enthusiasm reminded Ana of a time during their courtship when James would arrive at her apartment in the middle of the night—3 or 4 a.m.—just as the black crust of the sky was breaking. He had a key by then, and wouldn’t wake her, but would stand for a moment at the side of Ana’s bed. She would press her eyelids closed, feigning sleep. After a few minutes of heavy breathing, if he was still there, she would open her eyes. James never went out at night in those days without the paramedic’s shirt he’d bought at a secondhand store in Kensington market. It had blue crosses on the shoulders and a polyester sheen made Day-Glo by James’s sweat.
“How did it go?” Ana would ask, watching him vibrating with eagerness to tell her what had happened to him and what she had missed with her early-to-bed rhythm, her morning-person status.
“Excellent,” he’d grin, his tongue broad with drink. “I got right to the front around midnight.”
James would wear the shirt to cut through the crowd, calling: “Excuse me, excuse me! Paramedic coming through! Medical! Injured woman!” He did this when the lights were low, timing it perfectly so the music was just beginning, and the crowd was distracted but not drunk enough to be ugly. Oh, man, it was miraculous: The fans parted for this compassionate professional.
Ana was charmed when she heard the story the first time, and laughed. But later, she came to identify the gag as a piece of a bigger problem. James got older, but his great sense of entitlement stayed around: the stacks of unpaid parking tickets; his clear conscience over buying a shirt, wearing it, and then returning it to the store a day later. He had many theories, rationalizations about Dada and culture jamming and upending a system that was inherently disadvantageous to … well, not him, maybe, but people who didn’t even recognize they were disadvantaged. Somehow, it was his duty to get the best of the world. After a while, Ana tuned out that particular strain of James, the yammering of the kid from the suburbs justifying why his hand was reaching for the last piece of cake.
But back in the beginning, it intoxicated her to be with someone who handled everything, everyone. This was new to Ana, who had paid her mother’s bills at nine, worked after school at the doughnut shop at thirteen, wiping the drink fridge clean of broken juice bottle shards and bugs entombed in gelatinous substances.
In the beginning, she wanted to curl up inside James’s certainty. She loved him, she loved him, and how he fell into bed next to her those late nights. His slick skin, sweat and beer. The lean muscle of his thigh flung open on the sheets. She pulled him closer in his paramedic shirt.
From the window, Ana watched James outside in the yard. He stared up at the darkening sky, which was much too light for stars. But she took note of the fact that he looked anyway. He was hopeful. She felt something shift inside her, as if, to make room for all this love, she would have to rearrange her insides. James was gigantic that way. When she wanted him, she wanted all of him. When she didn’t, he felt murderous, unstoppable. A superhero gone mad on a busy downtown street. It had been a while, Ana realized, since she had experienced the scope of her love.
Not wanting to linger on this absence, she turned to her vegetables. While James showered, Ana walked through the house, placing small glass pots of candles on the mantel, on ledges. She turned down the lights, put a single bloodred gerbera in a white vase in the center of the table. Her hand moved across the place mats and linen napkins. In the living room, as she half lowered the blinds, a man walked by, his hair softly blowing, his spine curved, hands in pockets. He looked up, and their eyes locked. Ana marveled that while he was a grown man, he was still far too young for her to romance, to have sex with, even to know. At thirty-nine, she was too old not just for boys but for full-fledged adults. A male temp at work had called her “ma’am” the other day.
But Ana knew also how she looked through the window: “good for her age.” Attempting a moment of private flipness, she thought: My body has not been ruined by childbirth. She savored it, then abandoned the thought as too cruel.
Ana turned her head to a flattering angle, but when she glanced sideways, the man had already walked on. All she could see was concrete and an old oak tree that threw moving shadows across the line of parked cars.
The baby was in a blue-checked sling across Sarah’s body like something worn by a contestant in a beauty pageant.
“Hands-free,” Sarah joked, waving her glass of wine. The baby nursed covertly. Only the extra crescent of Sarah’s pale chest peeking out of the sling confirmed to everyone in the room that there was a naked breast close by, and a mouth upon it. Each discomfort provoked by this was unique to its owner.
It had grown late, but Ana did not want them to leave. These dinners, which Sarah and Marcus protested over in the beginning, had become regular Friday night gatherings, always at Ana and James’s house, with the excuse that they were all working together to break Sarah’s maternal isolation. Sarah complained about the “mommy circuit,” as she called it. She liked to mock the neighborhood mothers with their fear of strangling stroller straps and sudden infant death syndrome and uneducational toys. They bored her. She described a kind of narrowing that happens to women when they have children, a trivializing. Ana listened, rapt, to the traveler returned with her tales. She had a colleague, Elspeth, with secret children. She hid them away from the men in the firm, like Jews in attics. Occasionally she confided in Ana, usually when complaining about the nannies.
But the mothers Sarah knew existed entirely in public. They met in the daylight in coffee shops and at baby yoga classes, speaking of nothing but their children. The mothers had left their jobs and were shrinking, hunkering down, backing into their stalls. At first, during these litanies, James cast concerned glances at Ana that she could feel, though she refused to meet his eye.
“I like it,” she told him later. “Sarah knows about us. I like that she doesn’t treat me like an outsider.” And so he was relieved to be able to enjoy it, too, this refracted life that might have been theirs (that might still be theirs, she reminded herself).
Tonight, Marcus and James were talking about Jesus. James had recently finished a segment for his show about a new church that gathered in movie theaters downtown. James was bulimic when in possession of fresh information; as soon as it came in, it had to come out.
“Jesus is back in vogue. These kids relate to Jesus like he’s straight out of Japanese anime.”
“Yes, but at the end of the day, you have to see it as completely fictional, right? You can enjoy the fairy tale, but it’s sad, isn’t it, to see grown people subscribing?” asked Marcus, in his question mark–inflected way. James’s own sentences were stubby and leached of doubt.
“And dangerous,” added Sarah. “I had a horrible incident in my class just before the baby. I was hugely pregnant and I actually told a student: ‘You can wear your hijab in here, but know that it changes nothing about your fate.’ ”
“Wow,” said Ana. James laughed, slapping his knee.
“I was so hormonal!” said Sarah. “But this girl is impudent, truly. She’s a total bitch. She makes fun of nerds.”
“Is she popular?” asked Ana. These were the only terms through which she could understand high school: popular and unpopular. When her mother had settled them down long enough, Ana had often been popular and felt guilty for it.
Sarah didn’t answer, because James had moved into the space. “Diehard secularism is just as dangerous as institutionalized religion.” Ana knew this speech. “Secularism becomes religious, then you have Stalinism, all the iconography of religious faith in a secular package.”
“What are you saying?” Marcus was smiling, always smiling. This placidity was broken only by a small, angry scar below his lower lip in the shape of check mark, a hint of past violence. He seemed to take great pleasure in James, which surprised Ana, and was a relief to her, too. James’s verbal girth had become less appealing to people over the years. Ana didn’t say this to Sarah. She didn’t want to draw attention to her petty worries. She was sure that the smallness of her inner life would appall Sarah, that this was not how Sarah wanted to think of her new friends. She often got Ana to talk about her life with her mother, her itinerant upbringing among the downtown artists and drunks. These stories made Sarah red with excitement, and they woke up Ana, too. She felt breathless sometimes to talk about herself in this way, as if she were recounting the racy chapters in a book she had read. But there were details Ana would not share, because she knew they would sour the bohemian fantasy. She didn’t tell Sarah about the famous blues musician who breathed cigarette smoke onto her hair and ran a finger under the collar of her sweatshirt when she was eleven years old, stopping there only because her mother entered the kitchen. That time, her mother did something: She slapped his hand away. A week later, they moved again.
“We need to take it back to Jesus,” said James.
“You propose living by Jesus’s doctrine?” asked Marcus.
“Well, I mean, I can’t, but even people who reject Christianity dig Jesus. Who’s not down with Jesus?”
Sarah shifted and unstuck the baby, who emerged endlessly out of the sling. A magician pulling a toy snake out of a hat.
“He’s a long guy,” said James.
Finn made a hissing sound, then burped. Sarah patted his back, and he flopped over her shoulder. James saw the baby’s reflection in the living room window, his head bobbing. He looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost, this bald kid. James wondered if anyone would be offended if he made this observation out loud. Marcus was easygoing, but it was hard to know for sure; the women were the ones bonding in this foursome. They went for lunch when James was on the road for work. What did they talk about? James tried to imagine Ana talking about him, their sex life, his balding head.
James wondered if Marcus possessed a less genial side. He couldn’t figure out where to place him yet, if he should invite him to play hockey or take him to a lecture. He couldn’t quite see a future with Marcus in it. Marcus didn’t smoke.
“Does anyone want to hold him? I’m pretending to ask politely, but I’m actually begging,” said Sarah.
“I will.” James rarely saw his nephew and nieces, though they lived only a half hour from his home. Holding his nephew as a baby, he had felt that he was holding a mewing, grotesquely small version of his brother. He kept expecting the baby to sit up and say: “So, Jimmy. I made an awesome trade today! Markets are up!” The boy bucked and twisted in his arms. But when held by his mother, as if to make a point, he softened, even cooed. This had seemed to James to indicate a future mean streak. He had kept his distance since.
But Finn was more of a public concern. Happy in all arms, he seemed to belong to everyone. Finn sat propped in James’s lap, facing outward with his legs straight in front, shaking a plastic cup. “Ba,” he said. “Babababa.”
“Exactly,” said James. James had developed an unspoken narrative in which he and Finn had a special bond. He did not tell Ana how it made him feel, this warm bag of socks over his shoulder, the pleasure he got when Finn moved his penny-shaped mouth.
He was certain that Ana was still heartbroken, as sick inside now as after the third miscarriage, when she vanished for four days, leaving only one voice mail. She returned in the same clothes she’d left in, walked past James in the foyer, and straight into the bathroom. While she showered, James looked in her purse and found nothing, until, at the bottom, his fingertips touched a layer of sand. Sand! She had driven all the way to Lake Superior, she finally told him, her hair wrapped in a white bath sheet, seated on the edge of the white duvet. She had gone to see the rock in the shape of the old woman, and she’d slept in a motel with a sanitation sash across the toilet and a hundred channels. Those were the only details she shared.
She felt better, she told him, and she was sorry.
James stood outside the door to the bathroom as she showered, wondering if he should get angry, wondering if this great writhing hatred within was visible to her. He did not want to find out, so he brought her tea, rubbed her back as she fell asleep on the new sheets he’d bought to replace the ones she’d bled into, the ones onto which she had leaked their lost child.
* * *
James watched her, carrying in an apple green lacquered Asian serving tray with a pot of decaf coffee, four mugs. Finn giggled while Ana poured the coffee.
“Oh, Ana, it’s always perfect here,” said Sarah, leaning back with her coffee, one hand stroking a forest green silk throw cushion.
“It really is great,” said Marcus. “It’s like a hotel.”
“Tell me about work. Tell me about the crazies,” said Sarah.
Ana pictured Christian. He was junior but she had worked with him on several cases, most recently researching a patent infringement. He appeared at her office door far too often, breaking the silence of the fifteenth floor, where Ana and her fellow neck-bowed research lawyers clicked away. Christian brought with him his litigator chatter, his unmet high-fives and golf scores.
Ana described how Christian insisted on using a billfold instead of a wallet, and the way he demonstrated this characteristic constantly. He played off the partners’ vanities, researching their past successes and bringing them up in meetings, wide-eyed: “Oh, wow, I studied that case in first year. You killed! Oh, wow!” And the men above her adored it. Even as they shushed him for his obviousness, their bodies inflated before her eyes, their cheeks reddened with pride.
Ana was surrounded by men all day, and had been for years, but she didn’t understand them, really, their shimmery foreheads, their noise, their presumption.
Sarah listened, asked Ana questions that no one else asked her about intellectual property. “What’s the infringement?”
“Oh—it’s nothing. It’s a tech company suing another tech company over storage device interfaces.” Sarah nodded lightly, her mouth pursed in listening. “I give the opinion. They ask for it, I give it.”
The men drifted off into a separate conversation about hockey. James talked from down on the rug with Finn, who attempted to pull himself along the edge of the coffee table. Every few minutes, James would grab him and make farting sounds on the baby’s belly, and the boy squealed with delight.
Ana’s certainty that she was dull was offset by the wine, which had the effect of speeding her up. So she told Sarah how there was a new young temp on her floor, a meek young woman merging documents for special projects.
“Special projects!” said Sarah. “I love that. Makes me think of birthday parties for handicapped people.”
This girl, Ruth, was off-putting. She hovered with a half smile, hoping someone would talk to her. The other day, her cardigan was buttoned wrong, and it dangled lopsided off her torso.
“I didn’t know if I should pull her aside and tell her.”
“What did you do?” Sarah asked. “I know what I’d do.” (Only later did this aside come back to Ana. In the night, she jolted awake: What would Sarah do? Why does she know so easily?)
“I did tell her, but late in the day. Around three. She was mortified, too, and since then, she’s seemed kind of angry with me. She walked right by me yesterday, and not even the office nod.”
“That’s fucked,” said James. Ana startled. She hadn’t known he was listening.
“Is it? She’s the youngest woman on our floor, she’s not even a lawyer, and I criticize how she looks. Doesn’t that affirm a certain currency for her?” Ana frowned. “Maybe I did it because I’m threatened.”
“But you were trying to help her,” said Marcus.
“But I only drew attention to her. I didn’t help.”
No one said anything, and in that silence, Finn grew frustrated, unable to walk more than a few steps along the coffee table without falling. He sputtered: “Bababa! Ba!”
“Oh no!” said James, grabbing Finn under the armpits. James held him out for the pass, and both Sarah and Marcus stood up quickly, extending their arms.
“Oh!” said James, holding Finn under the armpits, jokingly waving the baby back and forth between his parents. “Who loves me more? Who loves me more?”
“Here,” said Sarah, stepping forward, blocking Marcus with her body. Ana tried to find Marcus’s face, offer a small smile to diffuse the puff of humiliation in the air, but he was looking to the side, and Ana was stuck with it, this unreceived grin.
