“I was an important person!” Melody remembered another mother saying. “I managed people and budgets and got paid. Now look at me.” She’d gestured to the baby fastened to her breast. “I’m sitting here in the park, half naked, and I don’t even care who sees. And what’s worse is that nobody is even trying to look.” The woman detached her sleeping baby from her nipple and ran a soft finger over his pudgy cheek. “These breasts used to make things happen, you know? These breasts didn’t put anybody to sleep.”
Melody couldn’t help but stare a little at the prominent veins running beneath the woman’s fair skin, the darkened, engorged nipple. She’d tried to breast-feed the twins, had wanted to so badly, but had given up after six weeks, unable to get them on any kind of schedule and nearly out of her mind with lack of sleep. She watched the other mom hook her nursing bra closed and hoist the infant up on her shoulder, rhythmically thumping his back to elicit a burp. “I used to read three newspapers every morning. Three.” Her voice was softer now so as not to disturb the baby. “You know where I get all my news now? Fucking Oprah.” Her expression was rueful, but also resigned, her fingers making small circles on the baby’s back. “What can you do? This is temporary, right?”
Melody never knew how to join those conversations, so she didn’t. She’d sit and smile and try to nod knowingly, but what she would have said if she could have mustered the nerve was that before her daughters were born she was nothing. She was a secretary. A typist. Someone who blew off college because her father died the fall of her senior year of high school and her mother was checked out and Melody herself was paralyzed with confusion and grief. Not to mention her kind of shitty grades.
But then one day Walter sat next to her in their company cafeteria. He introduced himself and handed her a piece of chocolate cake, saying it was the last one and he’d grabbed it for her because he’d noticed she usually allowed herself a slice on Fridays. When Walt asked her out for pizza and a movie and only months later asked her to be his wife and only a year after that she became a mother to not one but two brilliantly beautiful baby girls? Well, that was something; then she became someone.
She leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe she could just doze for a minute or two. She thought about Nora’s coat and wondered if a new set of buttons would help. Something decorative—wooden or pewter or maybe a colorful glass button, emerald green maybe. She could do that, she could afford two sets of new buttons. Sometimes a small change could make all the difference.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After they saw Leo in the park, it took another three weeks for Nora to coerce Louisa out again and that was the day Simone spotted them leaving and asked if she could join. “I thought I saw you two skipping out of this particular ring of hell a few weeks ago,” she said, stopping on the front steps of the building to light a cigarette. “I live around here. Want to go to my apartment?”
In the weeks since then whenever they skipped class, Simone joined them and she’d completely taken over their weekly excursions. It was winter, and the only thing Louisa and Nora ever did now was go to the American Museum of Natural History because Simone had a family membership card and it was free or hang out at Simone’s apartment, which was always empty because both of her parents were attorneys who almost always went into the office on Saturdays. Louisa was sick of it. She wasn’t only sick of the deceit—she was certain it was just a matter of time before they were caught and then what?—she was sick of Simone’s apartment and even sick of the museum, a place she used to love because it was one of their family’s special destinations, one of the few Melody-approved field trips into New York, and what had seemed gleaming and exotic all through their childhoods—rooms with sharks and dinosaurs and cases of gemstones; live butterflies!—had been dulled over the past few months, tainted with familiarity and guilt and boredom.
And then there was Simone—the beautiful African American girl who always sat in the front row and finished her work before everybody else and wandered the room offering help to those who wanted it. She was a junior in high school, too, and Louisa had overheard the instructor say that Simone could probably get a perfect SAT score without too much effort. “Probably,” Simone had said, shrugging. Something about her made Louisa nervous. She seemed so much older than they were. She supposed it was just that Simone had grown up in Manhattan and was braver, more sophisticated. And she was free with her opinions of Nora and Louisa in a way that was discomfiting.