Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

“I’m assuming these are them,” she said.

She gestured toward the young women all around. They were laughing in a group by the stoplight; sitting on the front porch of a dorm; rushing along, hunched forward from the weight of their backpacks. Photos in an admissions brochure come to life.

“No way,” Andrew said. “These girls look like they’re in the sixth grade.”

They crossed paths with a dozen of them now, jogging in formation. Their white windbreakers gave off a satisfying swishing sound as they passed, two by two.

Most of them smiled at the baby, asleep in the sling on Elisabeth’s chest.

Elisabeth smiled back, tried to appear cheerful. She had been in a snit since Andrew woke up and said he’d forgotten to tell her they were having dinner at his parents’. The early evening hours after he got home from work were her only chance to be alone, or to have a real conversation with him. She didn’t want to give them to her in-laws.

They came to the halfway point of the pond, marked by a rope hanging over the water from a thick branch. Elisabeth pictured drunk teenage girls in cutoffs swinging back and forth, shrieking as they let go. Still making the kinds of bad choices that ultimately didn’t matter. Their lives all ahead of them.

“These crickets are disgusting,” Elisabeth said. “Is that what they are? Crickets? They’re huge. I hate when they land on me, don’t you?”

Andrew shrugged. “None have landed on me, I don’t know.”

“It feels like this,” she said, and punched him in the arm.

He raised an eyebrow.

Notice the moments when you feel yourself growing resentful, Violet had said. Don’t assign value to them, just take note.

Nomi put it more plainly: You’ll probably loathe Andrew for a while after the baby comes. If he touches you, you might want to die. Don’t worry. It will pass.

Elisabeth didn’t loathe him. She had been lucky to find a man as kind as Andrew, a partner who understood her like he did. But so much had changed these past few months. Sometimes it felt like they were standing on opposite sides of a crowded room and could see, but not reach, each other. She wasn’t sure yet how or when the two of them would fit together again.

And there was the issue of the secret she’d been keeping, which Violet called toxic.

“It’s never the thing you’re holding back that kills the relationship,” Violet said. “It’s the holding back itself that does it.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Elisabeth said. “But in this case, I think it could go either way.”

—

After Andrew left for work, she showered.

Children’s folk songs streamed from her phone, which she had left on a chair just outside the bathroom door. The baby was strapped into the bouncy seat on the tile floor. He started to cry halfway through “This Land Is Your Land.”

Elisabeth rinsed the conditioner from her hair and shut off the water. She had been trying to shave her legs for a week.

She wrapped herself in a towel and picked him up.

She stepped out into the hall and brightened to see a text from Nomi.

Brian’s acting weird. He’s either having an affair or planning something for my birthday.

Birthday, Elisabeth typed back. She didn’t need to think about it. Brian was capable of many things, but he wasn’t a cheater.

How can you be so sure?

Because he’s the last person on earth who would have an affair.

But isn’t it always the ones you least suspect?

No, it’s the ones you least suspect when it comes to murder. It’s the ones you suspect when it comes to infidelity.

They never had actual voice-to-voice contact anymore. There were no hellos or goodbyes, just an ongoing conversation that they picked up and ended several times throughout the course of a day. If her best friend called her on the phone, it would mean someone had died, or, back when they both lived in Brooklyn, that she was locked out of her apartment.

Any progress on a sitter? Nomi asked.

Interviewing someone in an hour.

Elisabeth’s friends in the city hired nannies from the Caribbean or Tibet, whom they paid to be the grandmothers their own mothers were not. You wanted someone who loved your baby and shared her intuition without judgment. Who did not drink wine on your sofa while the child cried, or tell you that you ought to cover your boob in mixed company.

She’d heard every variety of complaint from her friends about their parents’ odd post-baby behavior. Elisabeth would have gladly taken any of it over her own situation. Four months in, her parents still hadn’t met Gil.

Her father seemed to think she should bring the baby to him.

“Arizona is gorgeous this time of year,” he said. “It’s the perfect place for kids. They can run all over.”

“But he doesn’t run,” she said. “He can’t even sit yet.”

Her mother was on a Viking cruise up the Rhine when Gil was born. She sent him a cup and bowl handmade by nuns in Bucharest and had since made no overtures to come see him.

So many people—even people Elisabeth didn’t know—made comments about her mother. Nomi brought her own mother over for a visit when she was in Brooklyn. She had knitted Gil a blanket.

“Nothing better than being a grandma,” she said. “Your mom must be over the moon.”

Elisabeth smiled and nodded, knowing that Nomi’s mother was thinking of a different sort of family, one like her own.

Since her early twenties, she had been mostly free of her parents. They did not spend holidays together. Elisabeth never went back to California to visit. But the process of forming her own family had made her reflect more than ever before on the one from which she came.

She didn’t think she would care when her withholding, inattentive mother inevitably turned out to be a withholding, inattentive grandmother. But she did care, sometimes. Her parents loomed larger now than they had at any other moment in her adult life.

“We’re moving because I’m switching careers, but also to be closer to my mom and dad,” Andrew had said again and again in the weeks before they left, simplifying the truth, polishing it. “It will be such a relief to have their help.”

Elisabeth pressed her lips closed whenever he said it. In the abstract, Faye and George were thrilled to be grandparents. But they weren’t helpful. Whenever the baby pooped in her mother-in-law’s presence, Faye would hold him out to her, nose wrinkled, and say, “Somebody needs to be changed.” The one time Elisabeth asked her to take care of him while she ran to the store for ten minutes, she came home to find them watching Dr. Phil. The baby’s eyes were two full moons attached to the faces on Faye’s big-screen TV.

Faye was an elementary school teacher, which Elisabeth had assumed would mean she’d make an incredible grandmother. But it felt like Faye had gotten her fill of childcare at work. She would adore Gil, but she would not be responsible for him.

George doted on the baby, but he was distracted by his own problems lately.

From what Elisabeth could tell, most children in their new neighborhood went to day care part-time or else stayed home with their mothers.

Debbie across the way was a housewife married to an insurance salesman. The other women on Laurel Street had the sorts of job titles that might be all-consuming, but could also be clever terms for doing nothing: Melody was a realtor. Pam taught yoga. They seemed to be home at all times.

Elisabeth supposed they could say the same about her. There were few things more humiliating than meeting a stranger at a party, having him ask what she did for a living. I’m a writer, she would say, and invariably the stranger would get an uncomfortable look on his face. Have you—published? was always the second question, warily asked, and when she said yes, two books, his expression would grow terrified, like she might be about to try to sell him those books from out of the trunk of her car.