From across the yard, Blair watches as Ben and Rebecca find subtle ways to touch while they listen to Whitney orate, like they still find in each other every last thing they need. They are childless, child-free, and so they have not yet been irrevocably changed, not like the rest of them. They speak to each other in fully composed sentences with civilized inflection. They probably still fuck once a day and enjoy it. Fall asleep in the same bed with their limbs tucked into each other’s crevices. Without a pillow wedged between them to separate her side of the bed from his, to imagine the other isn’t there.
Blair watches her best friend, Whitney, begin to drift as she wraps with Rebecca, in subtle search of her next conversation. Aiden, the loud man who sleeps on the other side of Blair’s barrier pillow, booms from the corner of the backyard. He has an audience, always an audience. He is building to a punch line she has heard before, he has caught Whitney’s attention as she passes, and Blair is painfully aware she is standing by herself. She looks for Jacob, Whitney’s husband, whom she spots with a couple she hasn’t met. A toddler with tight braids wedges herself between the mother’s legs. Jacob is gesturing to his house, drawing the shape of the roof with his finger, explaining a part of the design. He’s wearing his signature black T-shirt and black chinos rolled at the cuff, he is sockless in crisp white designer sneakers, his hair, his brows, the rims of his Scandinavian eyewear, it’s all intense and cool, but he’s so gentle. He lifts a hand in Blair’s direction, hello. She blushes, she has been staring. He is easy to stare at. Her eyes search again for his wife.
* * *
? ? ?
Whitney is speaking now to a group of mothers from her older son, Xavier’s grade. They have a group chat that Whitney rarely responds to, because she doesn’t know the answers to the questions they ask about the first-term project and the hot lunch menu and the deadline for ordering class photos. But she likes being in the group chat anyway. Sometimes she chimes in with an emoji, as she arrives at the office early in the morning to her third cup of hot coffee and the pleasure of silence and thought. Thumbs up. Red heart. Thanks for the updates! Nothing helpful, slightly mocking. Whitney can feel the women’s attention follow her now as she makes her way to say hello to their husbands, who stop their conversation, straighten their backs as they greet her.
* * *
? ? ?
Blair catches Rebecca’s attention instead, and it’s their turn for the pleasantries now. Blair can think only of the weather, always the goddamn weather, how early the evenings grow cool now, and then Rebecca’s grueling hours at the hospital, where she’s due in forty-five minutes. But Rebecca loves those grueling hours. The two women have nothing in common but their proximity. Rebecca offers herself to Blair as an on-demand medical encyclopedia, answering every text she sends about her daughter’s new rash or barking cough or itchy eardrum or grayish-colored poop. The kinds of things that can occupy Blair for days. Blair wonders how it feels to be so purposeful. To wear white denim to a family barbecue.
* * *
? ? ?
Rebecca’s eyes fall every few seconds to Blair’s seven-year-old daughter. She can’t stop looking at her. Wondering what it would be like to be here with her own. She lets herself run with this version of her future and it gets longer and longer and longer, like the scarf from the magician’s hat. The girl is drawing in chalk on the patio concrete with the twins, who are waiting for their turn with the rabbit. The two women watch Blair’s daughter together now, each pretending to be more amused by the children than they are.
* * *
? ? ?
Whitney joins them, her drink refreshed, and Blair and Rebecca come alive. She drapes her hand on Blair’s shoulder and pretends not to be annoyed by the chalky colors covering the twins’ palms. How sweet they are together, Whitney drawls, how good Chloe is with the littlest ones. She takes an inconspicuous step back, in fear of powdered handprints on her dress.
* * *
? ? ?
Rebecca tries to imagine what it’s like to be interested in doing this kind of thing, the hosting, the display. She has three minutes left and her brain will tick through all one hundred and eighty seconds because that is what it does. She, too, comments on Chloe’s good nature while the seconds tally.
“Delightful” is the word Rebecca uses. Blair smiles, downplays her only child’s perfection, but she is buoyed in the way only this kind of comment can achieve. As perfunctory as it might be.
The word “delightful” makes Whitney wonder where her undelightful son is. She can’t see him in the backyard. Blair said she last saw him a half hour ago, standing at Mara’s fence with his face between the slats. He is never where he is supposed to be. Whitney has warned him to be on his best behavior, to entertain the smaller children, to be friendly. Just this once. Just for her. He should be out here. The magician is nearly done.
Maybe he just needs a moment alone. Blair says this slowly, quietly, wondering if she shouldn’t.
* * *
? ? ?
But no. Whitney will find him.
Can’t he just do what she asked him to? Can’t he be more like Blair’s daughter? She thinks of his perpetual pouting, of how it borders on a scowl, people asking why he’s in a grumpy mood when it’s just the way he looks. Long faced. Morose. In need of a haircut he won’t agree to. She moves quickly through the house calling his name. The pantry. The living room. The basement playroom. She shouldn’t have to do this in the middle of a party with fifty-odd guests in the backyard. Is he hiding? Has he sneaked the iPad again? Xavier! Must he always push her buttons like this? She hurries to the third floor and opens the door to his room, and he is there, on his bed, with the stolen loot bags for the children emptied around him. Every last one. There is chocolate on his face and on the sheets. He is licking the icing from a cookie wrapper stickered with another child’s name.
“XAVIER! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” She swoops to rip the licked cellophane from his hands as he shrieks and recoils from her. “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
Xavier’s face crumples and his bottom lip curls down like that of a child half his age, and she will not allow the irritating whine that will crescendo next, the whine that makes her want to smack him. “NO!” she shouts, grabbing him by the arm as he whimpers and goes limp. She cannot stand him like this. “GET UP, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”
But then she lets go. Because she realizes the jovial purr below has deadened.
The party has gone silent. There is only the thump of her furious heart in her ears. And the ringing of her own venomous, murderous yelling. The familiar echo of her rage. The fear of possibilities registers. And then she notices. The wide-open window. Everyone has heard.
The shame pulls her to the ground. To the nest of discarded satin ribbons from the cookies, the ends cut like the tip of a snake’s tongue.
She knows then what she has lost.
NINE MONTHS LATER
1
Blair
Thursday Morning
It’s five thirty in the morning on a Thursday in June. Blair Parks sips her coffee and thinks about her husband spreading the thighs of another woman as wide as butterfly wings.
She imagines him smelling her. And then tasting her, his tongue circling, flicking.
Blair’s hand covers her mouth. She puts her cup down.
She can’t sleep. But she’s been doing this in the morning now, indulging these obscene thoughts. Nothing feels good about starting her day like this, but it helps to satisfy her obsessive worrying so she can move on. Otherwise, she’ll find herself consumed when she doesn’t want to be. Staring at the shelf of stain removers at the store, the ones in commercials that desexualize middle-aged stay-at-home mothers like her, while she imagines a younger woman’s mouth filled with her husband’s semen.
She pours a second cup that won’t taste as good as the first and thinks about how hungry she is for something more. Although what, she can’t name. The problem isn’t just boredom. Or a wistful longing. Not her sedate, ten-year marriage and the ticking clock to complete irrelevance. Is this normal? Is this how other women her age feel?
The idea of saying any of this aloud, to anybody, makes her diaphragm tighten. More than usual. It’s better to lift her chin and quietly face whatever hour is ahead of her. And the next hour after that, lest anyone suspect she’s this miserable. It’s beneficial for everyone, she knows, if the indifference takes over. If she soldiers on, without the energy to care about what it is she really wants. Or how she really feels when her alarm goes off in the morning.
Vulnerability, she knows, is something she should work on, something women are now supposed to exercise like a muscle. The books and podcasts and motivational speakers have told them so. She tries to admire the ones who admit they’ve made choices they regret and resolve, loudly, to change. But that kind of upheaval is not for her. She cannot see any other life for herself. And she cannot separate the shame of having gotten it all so wrong.