In the morning, the commute flows through Harlow Street like a parade. Parents herding toddlers to preschool. Hollering city kids on scooters. Twentysomethings on bikes dodging cars, on the way to the kind of underpaid marketing job she used to have. This eclectic part of the city was once full of young Portuguese families who couldn’t afford to buy homes anywhere else. Now, they’ve turned their properties over to people paying prices they never dreamed of seeing fifty years ago. Like Blair and Aiden, who have a mortgage so high that the number no longer feels real.
They march past the houses lined like monsters’ teeth, unmatched and crooked, million-dollar rebuilds wedged between leaning, unloved Victorians biding time with painted brick. Vogue had called it the next coolest neighborhood in the world, something people cited as though it justified two million dollars for a semidetached house with a rotting basement and original avocado-colored toilets. They turn right off Harlow, past the poorly aged bakeries and the few remaining stores that imported clothes from Lisbon. The long-standing leases are coming to an end, and one by one the storefronts have flipped to cater to the money. Low-rise hotels where the black coffee is three dollars a cup. Kitschy plant shops and vegan grocers and overpriced children’s boutiques. Blair works in one of them twice a week, five-hour shifts, and this week her second shift is today. She’ll open the store in an hour. She answers to a twenty-seven-year-old named Jane who covers operating costs with a loan from her parents that she will never pay back. They sell linen bonnets and wooden toys that the parents like more than the children do.
Jane was a camp counselor and thinks she knows kids, but she does not know mothers. Blair circles items in the buyer catalogs that will actually sell, shows the customers who walk in off the street something they don’t know they need. She’d first thought about working there while browsing for Chloe’s birthday gifts, thinking of how much she’d enjoy curating the shelves. How the store could deliver a better experience for customers. Matte-finished wrapping paper in pretty pastels with long whimsy ribbons for the gifts. Themes for the window displays and tables organized in color stories. Wide straw baskets filled with seasonal items that moms like her buy on a whim. It was one of those times when the words were coming out before she gave herself the chance to think.
I help her out, she has found herself saying to friends when they ask about the job, as though she is doing it for free.
I think it’ll be good for you had been Aiden’s reaction when she got home and felt the wash of regret. As though she were a nursing-home resident who signed up for weekly bingo.
Whitney had been more encouraging, clasping her hands together with more enthusiasm than is natural for her. Isn’t that great! She’s lucky to have someone as experienced as you are.
Blair hugs Chloe outside the junior school doors as the bell sounds, and is relieved to have gotten there on time. Until she sees a group of second-grade mothers she knows chatting together. One of them looks up and catches Blair’s eye. She has no choice but to walk over. To muster a cheery hello.
They are wearing heeled shoes. They have blown their hair nicely. They wear coats on trend for the season. A lawyer, a psychiatrist, an executive vice president. One of them has lost forty pounds and now sells real estate after not working for a decade. She calls it her midlife rebirth, says she has never been happier. They talk about being in their prime and “owning their forties,” their language like the flex of a bicep. Blair studies them, tries on pieces of their lives in her mind.
How are things? they always say. Things. There is nothing specific to ask her about.
Morning drop-offs and the occasional volunteer duty are all they can manage, unlike Blair. Blair is there for every pickup, every pizza lunch duty, every birthday party, every playdate, every concert, every book fair. Every fucking parent council meeting.
Being this involved seemed like a noble decision at first. And the care and attention it required of her had felt more satisfying than writing ad copy for chocolate bars and laundry soap. She didn’t miss the buzzing open-concept office like she thought she would. She didn’t miss a wardrobe that required hangers, casual with a hint of business. She couldn’t remember feeling fulfilled by the intellectual exercise of work, although she knows she had been. She had once loved the mix of creativity and marketing, coming up with the perfect phrase, the bang-on concept. She had been exceptionally good at it. She had five campaign awards with her name on them. She’d felt, sometimes, like a genius—her boss had used that word, had jumped up in brainstorming sessions and scribbled her idea in the middle of the whiteboard and circled it five times while she tried desperately not to look chuffed.
But that career didn’t feel like her anymore, not once she’d become a mother. Only Chloe had felt worthy of her time and her energy and her focus. She felt high off the baby those first early months. She would breastfeed her at night and stare into the dark and wonder about how she could ever give a fuck about a tagline again. She was supposed to want it all. And have it all. She wasn’t supposed to let motherhood yank her away. But there hadn’t been room inside her for anything else except the baby.
It hadn’t felt sacrificial at the time. Devoting herself to motherhood and the domesticity that came with it had made her happy, at first. And Chloe does make Blair happy. Immeasurably. It is everything else that has happened along with Chloe, the changes in herself and her worth and her marriage that happened so slowly they were imperceptible. Where she’d once felt motherhood had given her so much more than she’d had before, now she could only see it as having taken everything away. Now she cannot reconcile the love she has for her daughter with how confined she feels by the privilege of being her mother.
These are the feelings she hates herself for having. These are the things she’ll never say aloud to anyone.
“We wish you could come,” one of the women says to her, hiking her very nice bag up on her shoulder. They’ve been discussing a moms’ weekend out of the city, in July. A rental in the Berkshires. Blair doesn’t often go away without Aiden or Chloe, but when she does, the anxiety before she leaves is all-consuming—and then the freedom of being away from them is intoxicating. She is equally unsettled by both. The women will drink too much wine, they’ll gossip about other people’s kids, agree about every zeitgeisty thing in the news cycle. There was a time when Blair felt plugged in. Now she’s found herself on the periphery of everything that matters to everyone else. She’ll come home feeling shittier than when she left.
“I know, me too. But we’ve got a thing that Saturday, a birthday thing. Next time, though.”
She’s the first to leave the conversation, says something vague, again, about a courier delivery. She doesn’t have the energy today to perform, to try earning their respect yet again. The stay-at-home mom of only one, the martyr. Sometimes she wishes she’d had more children to justify how little else she has going on in her life.
She checks her phone as she walks home, but there is no reply from Whitney. Busy, she is busy. Doing things working people do, her head full of big, lofty solutions to big, lofty problems in a stratosphere Blair does not pretend to be familiar with anymore.
And yet she always makes a point of replying to Blair’s texts in the continual conversation they pop in and out of through the week. Checking in on each other, making plans for the next glass of wine. Blair has never liked drinking, but it’s a way in. She senses Whitney let go of her usual intensity when they’re in person at the end of the day, spending time together around the children. She feels Whitney slowly unfurrow. She begins to look more focused on the words Blair is saying instead of being elsewhere, and the noise of the kids eventually ceases to irritate her. It is the wine, of course it is the wine, but Blair would also like to think it’s her company.
But being with Whitney has the opposite effect on Blair. Blair is not unwound when she’s with her, she is fueled. The thought that Whitney might suspect she’s the most exciting part of Blair’s week is humiliating. And yet because there’s not much to tell Whitney about, she makes piddly things sound like more than they are. She regrets it afterward, every time. Whitney doesn’t care about who wrote what in an email that confused the treasurer on the parent council, and what Blair did to defuse the situation before the entire fundraiser was canceled.
It’s insignificant.
But Whitney kindly pretends it isn’t. She gives Blair the dignity of listening to her talk for an hour about a fucking bake sale that raises less than two hundred dollars a year.
Sometimes, though, while she’s meandering, she can feel Whitney studying her. Like she’s looking for an ingredient that she herself is missing. She isn’t sure if this is true, or if she just wants to believe it is. But there are moments when she senses Whitney wants to know what it feels like to care about the things that Blair cares about. To look at her own child and feel the way Blair does when she looks at hers. She lifts her chin. At least she has that.
4
Mara