“The thing is, if you don’t want me in your store, then fine, I won’t go in your store—”
“Right, right—”
“But then, you don’t get my business—”
“Right, right—”
“And what is this contempt, then? Right? What’s the expectation?What are we supposed to do, stay in the goddamn house all day and watch the tampon channel? Like, sorry, I’m not—”
“Giving up everything—”
“Right. You’re the same person. You have a right to—”
“Theo says: ‘Just stay home.’ But what the hell does he know? I mean, he comes in at eight—”
“And he never gave up anything. He doesn’t know what it’s like. No one tells you what—”
Then, atop the symphony of exigency, a baby began to moan. Then another set free a wail. Soon, all three had shaken off their flannel blankets and uncoiled from their baskets to lie across their mothers’ bodies. The sounds of soothing were as loud as the babies’ cries. Plastic toys were shaken. Songs and murmurs. Breasts appeared from sweaters.
All those years that James had been in his office, women had been having this conversation. It came to him as a major revelation that the city was lived in all the hours of the day, and often not by him. He felt strangely left out, as if the city had been duplicitous, a disloyal friend. Borrowed. He had never really known it after all.
James put on his jacket and stepped into the day. The sidewalks were clean, crowded with sunlight.
James tried to imagine what Finn was doing at that moment. He knew there would be a nap at some point, and he liked that idea: all the little cots laid out on the floor, a shuttered room, dark and silent, in the middle of the workday. He felt a little envious of all they were permitted.
James walked until he was in the mall, which he had covered on the show once, gleefully, as a kind of Ellis Island of shopping. Turbans, saris, burkas, baseball caps backward on the heads of brown boys, their underwear waistbands exposed. A celebration of the interstice of commerce and immigration. Or something like that.
James headed toward the most expensive corner of the mall, a children’s store with fall displays: kids in rainboots with animal snouts on the toes; umbrellas resembling frogs. He grabbed a basket. After staring at the labels for several minutes, he realized that the child’s age determined the size. Finn was two and a half, so he piled size threes in the basket. James thought, Wouldn’t it be great if the size were still the age? Give me the forty-twos, please.
He selected carefully: nothing with slogans, nothing overly sporty. But it was difficult to find anything without baseballs or soccer balls or team numbers emblazoned across the chest. He thought of Sarah and her pride over secondhand bargains. What would she make of this? James found a pair of sneakers hipper than the ones Finn had been given by the social worker. Blue Adidas with a seventies retro stripe, but tiny.
The clerk ringing through his purchases was blowsy, overly effusive.
“These are sooooo cute,” she said, folding a pair of jeans. “Totally popular for fall.”
The credit card had his name on it, but it was Ana’s account; would this piece of information have made the saleswoman less solicitous?
Only when she dropped Finn’s new shoes into the bag did James realize that if he swapped his laces for Velcro straps, he’d be wearing exactly the same pair.
Arrival
ANA AND JAMES and Sarah and Marcus had become friends slowly at first, and then suddenly. Within months of meeting, they were at the forefront of each other’s lives. It happened when Finn was a baby, the friendship springing to life alongside his own brand-new existence, month upon month.
It had started at the wedding.
The bride was eight months pregnant and could not stop laughing. James had a few, and he started laughing, too, until everyone between the rose walls of the hotel ballroom was laughing so hard that the justice of the peace, a tent of a woman, held up her hands.
“People! Come on, now! We have work to do! It’s supposed to be serious when you straight people get married!”
James and Ana were surprised to find that they had been seated at a table with the bride and groom. They had known the couple only a few months, though technically, James had known Sarah years ago, in college before Ana. He’d made the first mention of her in the winter.
“This woman I sort of remember invited us to dinner.” Ana was emptying the dishwasher. “I forgot to tell you.”
“Who is it?” Ana ran through a mental list of all the women James had known before her.
James frowned. “Odd. I don’t remember her name.”
Ana held a clean mixing bowl in her hand. She rubbed its glass belly with a dishtowel.
James typed on his BlackBerry, bent thumbs clicking. He didn’t even keep it in a pocket anymore; it had become an extension of his hand, a beeping carbuncle. “It’s here. Sarah. Her name’s Sarah.”
“Can you help me put these away?”
He said: “Why are you drying dishes that are already dry?”
Ana told Sarah that she looked beautiful, and she meant it. Sarah’s dress was a divable sea green, and this fishy aspect continued with her cropped, glossy black hair.
“Are you appalled by the wedding-ness of this wedding? I think I am.” Sarah pointed at a string of white Christmas lights winding around the windows overhead. They were in a basement ballroom; the small rectangular windows sat up high, near the ceiling, peeking out into bushes. Their shape and secret location near the ground—windows she would notice only if she stopped to tie her shoe—made Ana think of an old-fashioned prison on a main street in a small town. She expected to see ankles and feet pass by outside, through the shrubbery.
Sarah patted Ana’s knee and grinned. Of all the people here, Sarah had chosen her to lean into. Ana felt cozy.
“Something comes over you when you plan a wedding.” Sarah pretended to whisper her confession. “You start giving a shit about things you absolutely should not give a shit about.”
Ana laughed and told Sarah about the night before her own wedding, when she stayed up until 3 a.m. tying bags of tea with white ribbon because the wedding favor CD that James had made seemed suddenly inadequate.
“Okay, that’s pretty bad. You’ve made me feel better,” said Sarah, rubbing her hand over her stomach, which jutted out in front of her in a perfect circle, like a prosthetic. Ana did not flinch. She decided that she liked this loud, pregnant woman, a conclusion she hadn’t quite reached over the prior few weeks. Ana needed a new friend.
Across the table, James was face to face with Marcus, the groom. James did most of the talking, arms and hands punching. He sensed Ana watching him and looked over, gave her a quick smile midsentence, then turned back to it.
“Did you think it was strange that no one walked me down the aisle?”
“Oh,” said Ana. “I didn’t—”
“We’re orphans, Marcus and I. My parents are dead, and his are fuckwits.” Sarah chewed ice out of a water glass. “Usually, it’s totally fine, but today, I did mind. I feel like I can say that to you.” Ana nodded.
“Most of these people are work friends. Nice people. We haven’t lived here that long, really, when I think about it. It’s all pretty new.”