Later Greta drove me to the train station in Portsmouth. I had made plans for that night to see an old boyfriend, Alex, from my undergraduate days in Boston. We’d been texting steadily for a month, ever since I had found out I was going to New Hampshire. He’d had one marriage, and it had been short, brutal, and intense, like a punk song that kept ringing in his ears. He’d been telling me that he wanted to buy me a steak dinner. The juicy steak soon became a metaphor for something else in our communications. It was disgusting. I didn’t care. My brother had a sick baby and my mother was depressed and I hated my job in addition to other significant features of my life. I would be his steak, if that was what it took.
Greta thanked me and held me tightly and I could smell the sweat from the day on her. She was wearing new glasses, bifocals, no makeup, a sweatshirt, jeans; the old Greta was gone. “You know what the hardest part about all of this is?” she said. “Leaving our family behind.” “We’re always going to be here for you,” I said. “Just a phone call away. Or a really long drive. But probably not on a holiday weekend, because traffic’s going to be a bitch.” “Please don’t kid around like that,” she said. “Promise you’ll come visit.” She grabbed my hands. “Promise you’ll come and see her,” she said. I promised. Then I got on the train to Boston.
That was two years ago. I haven’t seen Alex since, though sometimes we text, and once he asked me to send him a naked picture, and I laughed and laughed, so for that I thank him, because who doesn’t need a good laugh? And I’ve only seen David and Greta and Sigrid a few times since they’ve left town, but mostly I have found myself resisting their sadness when I have so much of my own. Everything was quiet, though not silent, between us. I wanted to believe everything was fine. I asked them to come visit, so did my mother, but there was always a reason why they couldn’t, and then they stopped offering reasons entirely, so we stopped asking for them. I talk to my brother once a week, his voice a low, calm rumble. The house behind him is quiet, there’s no street noise, no sirens, no cars, no tough New Yorkers arguing a floor below. I imagine the air in their house just hovering, sweet, static, calm air. Greta posts pictures of their garden on Facebook, the seeds she is planting, all labeled in a row. He took a picture of her, squinting in a sun hat, crouching by the dirt. “New babies,” she wrote next to it. There were no pictures of Sigrid posted. Just other forms of life, growing in the earth.
Indigo Has a Baby
Indigo has a baby and I don’t go to see it for a long time. It’s not that I don’t care about seeing her baby, it’s that I don’t care about seeing any baby. Also I know what will happen. I have been down this road before. Once I see the baby I will have seen the baby. I need to see the baby when it is little, so that someday when I see the baby when it is grown or at least not a baby anymore I can say, “I remember you when you were this big.” It’s all a setup for a later scene to occur at a holiday party, or in a café, or, realistically, on a street corner, two grown women nodding enthusiastically at the size of an uninterested child tugging on its mother’s hand. Once you were small. Now you are big.
“Why haven’t you come to see the baby yet?” says Indigo. A message she leaves on the phone. Noncombative, but making a point. Wheedling. Not a question she actually wants answered. “I’ll be home all day. I don’t ever go anywhere. It’s just me and the baby. So just come over. We’ll be here.”
What will happen after I see the baby is that Indigo will become exceedingly busy with her life for a very long time. Say, five years or so. Then she will have time again to see me. Then she will desperately need to see me. Where has the time gone? What have I been doing? Oh, yes, parenting. But by then I will be a different version of me (or, worse, perhaps the same version) and she will be a different version of her and we will look at each other with different eyes. You had a baby and I didn’t and here we are. Do you remember when . . . ? Yes! Yes. Sure.
I text her back so I don’t have to answer her specific question, the rhetorical status of it unclear. I say, “I’ll come on Saturday.” I break brunch plans with my mother, and I move my morning session with my therapist an hour earlier.
I know the minute I go to see that baby, my friendship with Indigo is over. I liked being friends with her. She was my most beautiful friend, physically, spiritually. She was always so healthy. She quit corporate America to become a yoga instructor and she stopped eating anything that came from a cow, and it showed in her tingling white teeth and her lustrous, enormous hair and her skin, which glowed a luxurious caramel color. Any ailment I had, she could suggest an herbal remedy for it. Or a specific stretch. Indigo and me, doing backbends in her living room, my blood racing to my face, and I’m thinking: I always wanted a friend like this. I will miss those backbends, Indigo. They really did help with my stress.
I go to a children’s store in my neighborhood, pink, chirpy, cheerful, and buy the baby a book, The Giving Tree, a dire story about a selfish child sucking the life out of an enabling tree. (That tree has no agency, is what I’ve always thought.) But that is the book you buy a baby. I’m certain Indigo has five copies of it already. I’m too late to be the first at anything. I also buy a stuffed rabbit, its floppy ears draping softly in a sea of pastel tissue paper inside the gift bag. This, too, I know she has multiple versions of, more or less. There is nothing original I can offer this child. I am obligated to make an offering, however, a virgin to the gods, a stuffed animal to a new baby. If I lay this gift on the altar, will you promise me I’ll never get pregnant? I make sure to get gift receipts for both.
At the therapist’s office, I am hostile, and physically awkward, head hanging low, shoulders slumped, hunched over at the waist in the dark leather chair. I could have sat on the couch, but I would like to resist all temptation to curl into the fetal position and die. And that’s what the couch is saying to me. Sit on me and die.
This is only the fourth time I’ve visited my therapist in the past six months. She has been leaving me voice mail messages, suggesting I set up an appointment. “Why don’t you check in?” she says. Now I’m here and I can’t look her in the eye. Isn’t it enough that I’m in your office? is what I want to say to her. Don’t I get points for making it in the first place? And now you want me to perform, too?
I’ll admit that each time I’ve seen her I’ve spilled my guts and felt cleansed. Then I become convinced I never need to see her again. Soon enough my well fills and she seems to know just as it’s reached its brim, and that’s when she phones me. I don’t pick up, ever. I let her talk into the air. Let her stew. I don’t know why I’m mad at her. She’s just doing her job. But shouldn’t I feel better by now? It’s been seven years.