“The fucking San Remo,” Alice said. “Where are your parents?” She should have known the answer, of course, but Tommy rolled his eyes, continuing a different conversation.
“Oh, yeah, like they’d be helping with the kids before dawn. Or, you know, ever,” Tommy said. He was standing there, completely naked, carrying on a conversation. There were gray chest hairs, tight little coils like the springs that held in batteries. When he turned toward his closet, Alice noticed the slight droopiness of his butt, which felt unkind but also comforting, that she wasn’t the only human alive who was aging, that even Tommy Joffey—was her name Joffey now? No, no, she would never have done that—wasn’t immune. Tommy got dressed and closed the door behind him, and Alice rummaged through her drawers to find some clothes. Leonard had been right—there was a certain muscle memory in moving around the room. Alice knew which drawers to open, or at least some part of her did. She got dressed quickly and ducked out into the hallway, her phone clutched in her hand like a security blanket.
It wasn’t that Alice hadn’t wanted children. The timing had never been right. She’d had one abortion, with the first boyfriend she lived with, whom she had very much wanted to marry someday. He hadn’t wanted a baby, or at least that’s what he said until they’d broken up and he immediately had a baby with someone else. She had a list of names, though, and Dorothy had always been on it. For all of her twenties and thirties, Alice had believed that she would have children someday, until she didn’t anymore. It was like balancing a bowling ball in the middle of a seesaw. There were people who were so sure, one direction or the other, and then there were people like her, who had never really decided until one day they stopped paying attention and then got knocked sideways. One of the actors from The Odd Couple had had a baby when he was seventy-nine years old. Men never had to decide a thing.
The apartment was enormous. The hall she’d stepped into was long and dark, lined on one side with bookshelves and on the other with framed family photographs. Leo’s loud voice echoed from another room, and there was also the sound of a British pig that Alice recognized—it was important, when meeting small children, to keep up to date on their parasocial relationships with cartoon characters. Alice walked slowly, her socked feet silent on the wooden floor. Most of the photos were of the children—Leo as a Ghostbuster and his sister, Dorothy, as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man; the two kids in the bathtub, surrounded by a mountain of bubbles—but at the center of the wall was a photo from the wedding. From Alice’s wedding, to Tommy Joffey. She took a step closer, so that her nose was nearly touching the glass of the frame. In the photograph, Alice was wearing a floor-length lace dress, white, with cap sleeves and a giant bow under the bodice, a human present. Her hair was doing something she’d never seen her hair do, cascading over one shoulder like a swimsuit model’s. Alice couldn’t quite identify the look on her face—it was slightly more demented than joyful, flush with endorphins or terror, she wasn’t sure. There were photos of Alice richly pregnant, clutching the bottom of her massive belly as if the whole thing would fall to the ground if she didn’t hold it up. Alice reached down to her midsection, where the skin was soft and squishy, like rising dough.
“Mama!” a high voice called out from the next room. Alice crossed the hall and poked her head into an open doorway. The room—pink, with a canopied bed—was three times bigger than Alice’s childhood bedroom on Pomander Walk. A small girl was sitting on the rug, sharing tea with a stuffed bear equal to her size, if not larger. Alice felt her body flood with a feeling that she couldn’t quite identify. She wanted to wrap her arms around the little girl, to scoop her up and smoosh their bodies against each other. She wanted to do to Dorothy what Leo had done to her, hug her so hard that they both fell over.
“Hi, Dorothy,” Alice said. “Can I join you?”
Dorothy nodded, solemn with the importance of her task, and poured Alice a cup of pretend tea. Alice scooted over so that she was in between the child and the bear. There was a thunderous noise, and Leo leaped into the room, crashing into Alice and hugging her from behind. Tommy followed after.
After her friends had started to get married and have children, Alice had thought about the by-products of those decisions: an apartment filled with toys, sharing a bed with the same person forever, having someone nearby who potentially understood how to properly file taxes, breastfeeding, what exactly a placenta was and why some people ate it, what happened to love over time, if people found their own children tedious, if people hated their spouses, if she would be good at any of it. At first, it all seemed theoretical, the way teenage girls sometimes planned their future weddings, knowing that everything in their lives would be different when they actually got married but still doing it anyway, but the older Alice got, and the more of her friends actually went through with it, the more it shifted from a fun fantasy into a sad one. Marriage was clearly all about compromise, and parenthood so much about sacrifice, but like everything else that was difficult and unappealing, those conditions were much easier to stomach the sooner they were introduced.
“This tea is delicious, may I have some more?” Alice said. Dorothy nodded and took the cup back with her thick little fingers. “How old are you, you beautiful little person?”
“Poopyface is THREE!” Leo shouted, careening around the room until crashing headfirst into the gigantic stuffed bear. This made little Poopyface explode into tears. She stood up and screamed, her hands clenched into fists.
“Hoo boy,” Tommy said. “Come here, baby.” He scooped Dorothy up and carried her to a rocking chair in the corner, where he plucked a faded scrap of cotton attached to a pacifier. Dorothy took this object with both her hands and plugged her own mouth with immediate comfort that verged on the ecstatic. She moaned. “Go for your run,” Tommy said. “I’ve got this.” He sat in the chair and pulled a book off a nearby shelf. Leo army-crawled across the floor and set his head on top of one of Tommy’s feet. Alice didn’t know when she’d turned into a person who ran for fun, but she laced up a pair of sneakers by the door and went out into the world.
37
The doorman swung the front door open wide, tucking his body next to a six-foot-tall potted tree, one of two that flanked the building’s entrance. “Morning, Alice,” the man said in greeting. He was small, with a round face and a barrel chest inside his double-breasted coat. Alice felt terrible that she didn’t know his name, because she could imagine how many people who lived in this building never bothered to use it until it was time to write it on an envelope at Christmas.