Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

“We’re not,” Sarah says. “We’re good. We’re happy. We’re just getting started.”

“That’s what I meant,” Lauren says. She laughs.

“It’s still possible,” Sarah says. This is what she most wants to tell Lauren, what she most can’t tell Lauren, because it will make Lauren mad, and maybe she’s right to be mad, maybe it’s condescending to hear this from someone who’s only three months and nine days your elder. Lauren, beautiful Lauren, smart in a way Sarah will never be, of the world in a way Sarah will never be, powerful in a way Sarah will never be. She can do anything, and seems not to know it.

“What is?” Lauren’s stood, is tidying up, despite being admonished not to.

“Anything,” Sarah says. She means it. “Anything.”

“Maybe,” Lauren says.

After a while,the baby starts crying. It begins as a snuffle, what sounds like a sneeze, something involuntary, then it turns out to be voluntary, then it turns out to be loud. Lauren slips on her shoes, slips out the door, Sarah, on the sofa, her nipple elongated and purple, vanishing into the baby’s mouth. Lauren remembers, when the elevator reaches the lobby, that she meant to get Sarah another glass of water before she left. She’s heard that breastfeeding mothers need lots of water.

It’s near October, but still, the heat is a palpable thing. The air is a soup. The city smells. It’s getting darker but only marginally cooler — one of those nights when there’s lots of crime, and it’s too hot to touch anyone. She’s not hungry, it’s impossible to be hungry in this kind of weather, and she’s not interested in anything. Even watching television at home sounds unpleasant. She could take the train from right near here, but she decides to walk. She can walk in a straight line, but walking down those stairs and going underground is another thing she doesn’t want to do. She’s read somewhere the temperature on the subway platform rises from the heat of the arriving trains.

She rarely thinks much about the apartment on Eleventh Street, and Sarah’s right — it seems more remote than things that happened a decade before they lived there. Memory is odd, in that respect. It was small, that apartment, but it had its charms. The bathroom had a pretty view, over an adjacent backyard, to a community garden, one very well tended. The window was in the shower, the windowsill where they kept their bottles of shampoo and shaving cream. She could shower and look down at all that green and feel something.

Her mother had said nothing, or very little, when she explained that Sarah was having a baby.

“That was fast, they just got married. . when?”

Lauren had been able to picture her mother, doing the mental calculations. Her mother had not brought them anything to that apartment on Eleventh Street, not even a plate of cupcakes, though she had taken them out to the Japanese restaurant around the corner one night, her, Sarah, Gabe. She remembers the look on her mother’s face when she realized that Gabe was probably going back to the apartment with them, that there was absolutely nothing — no sense of propriety — to stop him from doing so. They’d fucked once, Lauren remembers, in that shower, Gabe behind her, their hands braced on that windowsill, the two of them looking down at that community garden.

Her mother would do the math, of course, that is the sort of woman she is.

“She was pregnant before the wedding,” Lauren explained. “Nothing planned. It just happened. So we kept it quiet.”

Her mother offers only an I see . What Bella Brooks sees, what she has to say, it’s all a mystery to Lauren. She feels implicated in this, that she scares her own mother, that her mother is so careful when they speak, so fearful of saying the wrong thing, being the wrong kind of person. Worse still, that she’s not wrong. She loves her mother, but her mother’s responses to things drive her crazy. She knew every thought going through her mother’s mind as she told her about Sarah and her baby: disapproval — sex before marriage, a baby barely inside wedlock, the tacit lie to all those wedding guests. It’s classless.

Then, maybe more to the point, what about her, Bella? Will she be a grandmother, will Lauren ever marry, have a baby? The one without the other might, might be forgivable. It’s a shame to deny someone who’d be so gifted a grandmother the opportunity to be one.

Bella’s disapproval would vanish, though, if she ever came to the city, saw Henry, saw Sarah’s cool and charmless apartment, the nice sofa, the prettily wrapped presents. Certainly Sarah’s the daughter she always dreamed of, the daughter she thought she’d be getting. Lauren’s annoyed by her mother, yes, but always feels appropriately guilty about the fact that her mother annoys her.

Lauren is supposed to call Rob. She’d told him she would, that morning, but now she doesn’t want to. Has no interest in it, in hearing his voice, in talking to him, in trying to communicate to him what she wants or doesn’t want to do, in hearing what he wants or doesn’t want to do. What she wants is to walk, through the city, and think about nothing in particular. When she first lived here, in that apartment on Eleventh Street, sometimes she’d just walk for hours. She felt so proprietary about the city then, the city in which she’d previously always been just a visitor. In for the day, for school; in for the weekend, with Sarah. Then, at twenty-one, in for real, in this city, her city. It feels like a long time since she just walked around, not going anywhere in particular, making her way in the general direction of home, but free to stop if something — a slice of pizza, a folding table covered with used paperbacks — catches her eye.

Sarah thinks that long-ago abortion is causing her pain, after these many years. It’s touching, and telling, very Sarah. For all her money, all her sophistication, all her worldliness, there’s something so naive about her. For Lauren’s second abortion, which she’s never told Sarah about, she went with Gabe; the same clinic, where she’d had a nice experience, or a nonhorrible experience. It was at the end of things, Gabe asking her to marry him, trying to convince her to do this with him, have a baby, make a life, that it would work, that it would be wonderful. She couldn’t make him understand: that she knew it never would.

“I’m not supposed to pressure you, or question your choices.” Gabe had a huge, very prominent Adam’s apple. He was so much taller than her it was right at her eye level. “But Lauren.”

That second time was harder, she admits that. Gabe, tears in the corners of his eyes. A good man, a great man for someone else. He’d gone out to get maxi pads, sorbet. He still asked her about getting married, even after, but with less optimism, with something like heartbreak. If it wouldn’t have worked before that day, it certainly wouldn’t have worked after. From that moment on, nothing between them was the same. Sarah doesn’t know any of this, no one does — a secret you keep from your closest friend is one you share with no one. And she is that, after all this time, isn’t she, Sarah, her closest friend?

It’s the sort of evening that makes you feel very small in the world. Maybe she will give up the apartment and sell the cute little vintage sofa and go to Portland, maybe she’ll buy a dog, and learn to drive stick, and become a vegan. Maybe she’ll stay here and marry Rob and have a baby and time it to the birth of Sarah’s next baby and their children will be best friends just as they are best friends and every Sunday they’ll get together for a big, communal dinner, a roast chicken, on colorful porcelain plates. Sarah thinks anything is possible, but of course, for Sarah, anything is possible. Lauren has never quite believed that.