“Let me help you,” said Sadie, striding over and holding the door open.
“Mama!” Jack called.
“Mama will be right back, sweetie.” Awkwardly, the small woman attempted to guide the stroller past Sadie.
“Thanks,” she said irritably. “Could you hold my coffee?” She pulled off her sunglasses with a noisy clack—revealing the small, sharp face of Caitlin Green-Gold. Caitlin had changed. Her hair was blonde and her arms, which were bare, were sheathed in ropy muscles and tanned to fine cocoa. She wore a plain black dress, of matte jersey, in the wraparound style. On her left hand sat a disarmingly huge diamond embedded in the chunky platinum confines of a Tiffany Etoile band, much disparaged by Rose (“It’s masculine”), who had been known to while away an afternoon expounding on the hideousness of Tiffany’s recent inventions.
“Caitlin,” said Sadie. “Do you live down here now? Wait, sorry”—she jogged a few steps back toward Jack, who was trying to fling himself out of the swing—“let me get this boy down.” Freed, Jack ran through the gate and off toward the slide, now abandoned by Ava, Sophia, and Maude. “Sorry,” she said to Caitlin. She was unsettled to find that she was glad to see her. “Do you mind chasing after him with me?”
“No,” said Caitlin. “We can sit down over there.”
“We can try.”
“So, that’s Jack, right?” said Caitlin, once they were installed on the bench under the fig trees, Jack occupied—if only momentarily—with the captain’s wheel atop the play structure.
“Yes,” said Sadie. “And this is…”
“Oh,” rasped Caitlin distractedly, as if she’d forgotten the contents of her stroller. “Ismael.” By rote, she pushed back the canopy to reveal the infant’s sleeping face, which was a lovely pale brown color.
“He’s beautiful,” said Sadie honestly. He had a long, attractive nose, rather than the usual infant gumdrop, and a head of wispy black ringlets. “How old is he?”
“Eight weeks. And Jack’s two?” Sadie nodded. “I heard about it from Lil. She was so jealous.”
“He’ll be two in August,” said Sadie, deciding that she would not be baited into talking about Lil.
“Is he going to school in the fall?” asked Caitlin. Sadie sighed. She’d been getting this question a lot lately. The mothers in the neighborhood—like the mothers of middle-class New York, in general—were single-minded in their pursuit of the perfect preschool, and the process of getting their Zoes and Maxes into it. Ava and Maude and Sophia, of course, were all going to school in the fall, and Sadie had listened wearily as their mothers detailed the chosen institutions’ educational philosophies and the celebrities with kids on the rosters.
“I don’t think so,” said Sadie. “I think we’re not going to send him until he’s four, when he can go to public pre-K. But we haven’t really talked about it much.” It was true. Somehow, they never had time.
“Four,” rasped Caitlin.
“Yeah, we just felt like he has the rest of his life to be in school. He can spend a few years at home with his parents.” There was also the fact that they couldn’t quite afford it.
“Oh,” said Caitlin, in such a way that it was clear she felt this to be utter nonsense. “So you both work at home now?”
Sadie sighed. Caitlin had not changed. She still traded on forced intimacies. As always, she’d proceeded right to the heart of the matter—that is, asked a leading question. For surely she knew, from Lil—who knew from Emily and Beth and Dave—that Ed was often away. “No, I stay at home with Jack. Ed’s a filmmaker, a producer.” She still felt odd, pretentious, saying this. It sounded so glamorous, so West Coast, though the reality was ludicrously far from it.
“I know,” said Caitlin. “I saw Command Enter.” She did not say whether she liked it or not, which, Sadie thought, was either an indication that she hadn’t or a Caitlin-style calculation, meant to keep Sadie on her guard. “What’s he doing now?”
“Actually, he just left this morning on a big shoot.”
“Where?”
“Bosnia. He’ll be gone for a few months.”
This seemed, strangely, to impress Caitlin. “Wow, but that’s rough. I start losing my mind if I’m alone with Ish for more than a few hours. But I guess it gets more fun when they’re older.”
“It does,” said Sadie, though she’d found those early months enjoyable, too, in a very different way. “Sorry, hold on—” She ran over to the play structure, where Jack stood at the edge of a too-high drop. “Jack, come to Mama,” she said, positioning herself by the toddler slide, which he promptly shot himself down, landing at her feet.
“Do you miss your job?” asked Caitlin. And though this question followed the line of their conversation, Sadie still felt somewhat startled by it. None of her friends had asked her this, not directly, nor had they questioned her when she’d decided that she couldn’t go back—or, rather, that she couldn’t stay. For she had gone back, when Jack was four months old, and stayed for three days, weeping into the phone, as the nanny—pretty, devout, with the lilting tones of the Caribbean—complained that Jack wouldn’t take the bottle (“I’ll just give him the formula, okay? Maybe he like that better”; “No!”) and Jack himself screamed. “Do you think you’ll go back?”
“I don’t know,” said Sadie, though the truth was, she did know. She was done. Done with the whole corporate thing. Done with ushering through other people’s books. The debacle with Tuck’s book—Val had canceled his contract after Sadie left, without so much as a glance at his rewrites—had been the final nail in the coffin. She needed to stop wasting time, to write her own. And she had started, however hesitantly, in the dark hours before Jack woke, while she drank dark coffee with sugar, the only time of the day when she felt keenly focused, able to think. But she would not discuss this with Caitlin. Or with anyone, really, but Ed, who thought she should think about screenplays. “A publishing satire,” he suggested. “Or a Whit Stillman kind of thing.” Maybe, she told him.
“Have you been to the mommies’ group?” Caitlin asked, jerking her head toward Vicky and her cohorts, who stood huddled by the sprinkler, which was shaped like a rainbow.
“Yes,” said Sadie. “Horrible.”
“Oh. My. God,” agreed Caitlin. “So horrible. They, like, think that they’re liberal because they feed their kids organic baby food, but they’re like Betty Friedan’s worst nightmare.”
For the first time that day, Sadie smiled. “It’s true,” she said.
“Mama,” Jack cried suddenly, grabbing her finger and pulling her toward the bench. “Baby. Baby.” As they approached the bench—Caitlin trailing desultorily behind Sadie and Jack—a faint cooing noise began emanating from the big pram.
“He’s awake,” said Caitlin flatly. And he was. Kicking his thin arms and legs against his soft white blanket and gazing, alarmed, at Sadie and Jack, who arrived at his side first. A moment later, when Caitlin stepped into his line of vision, he let out a frantic wail. “Okay, okay,” said Caitlin, her face turning a bright scarlet. “Hold on a second.” She began rooting in the bottom of the pram. Pick him up, thought Sadie, her blood pressure rising perceptibly. Across the park, Vicky whispered urgently in the ear of her skinny friend, while the fat one shook her head from side to side, setting her jowls aquiver.
“Baby,” said Jack nervously. “Baby.”
“Would you like me to pick him up?” asked Sadie.
“That would be great,” said Caitlin, through gritted teeth.