“They were optimists, your friends,” said Wesley. “They saw something in you.”
“But can you imagine it, entrusting your child to two people who have never changed a diaper? Am I right, Ana?” Diana turned to Ana, who put down the peanuts slowly. “Do you have any experience with children? I had the impression you two did not even want children.”
Ana was surprised by the question. The holidays and evenings they had passed in one another’s company had run on the momentum of the quotidian: the mortgage rates, the garden, the traffic problems.
“It wasn’t about want,” she said. Then, to James: “You never told them?”
James rubbed his hand across his forehead.
“We can’t have children,” said Ana.
Wesley reached a hand down to the floor, as if searching for something in the carpet. Diana didn’t blink.
“You waited too long,” she declared. “It is not your fault, of course. This is how it is here.”
Ana could feel each one of her particles circling, trying to remember where to land.
“Jesus, Mom. It’s nobody’s fault,” said James.
“In a cosmic sense, certainly, but medically, the doctors must have given you reasons. There were tests, am I correct?”
“It’s personal, Mom,” said James tightly.
Finn tired of the puzzles and began circling the room like a shark, pulling at a coffee table book, pointing at a vase of hydrangeas.
“Don’t touch!” called James. “Gentle!”
“Diana, tell them about the cottage,” said Wesley, nervously redirecting the room. “Ah, yes. We might go to a new cottage this year with Michael and Jennifer,” said Diana. “In Quebec, while workers renovate the other one.”
“You hate cottages, Mom,” said James.
“Michael said there was a high-quality washer and a dryer.”
Ana watched Finn carefully and tried to make sense of her anger toward James, the sensation that she might just pick up the table lamp beside her in one hand and crack it down on James’s head, watching pieces fly across the room, hair and blood clinging to the ceramic edges. What was the thing she wanted him to say to this woman?
He was not going to rescue her, so she tried: “I …” said Ana above Finn’s babble and Wesley’s murmuring to him. Heads turned.
“It was a difficult time for me,” said Ana. “But I don’t think about it anymore.”
“Because you have the boy now,” said Wesley conclusively. “It makes perfect sense.”
Ana shook her head. “No, no, it’s not that—”
“We don’t really have him,” interrupted James. “It’s probably temporary. It depends on Sarah—”
The ramble was halted by Finn’s squealing car sounds as he raced two coasters along the floor.
Diana stood, clearing James’s empty glass and drifting on her stockinged legs to the kitchen. Her heels left half-moon indentations in the carpet as she walked.
Ana needed for Finn to stop his wailing so she could make sense of the chaos, locate exactly the source of the slight. She knew that a moment had passed, and they had all survived it somehow. But then she glanced at her husband, who looked wild. He was red-faced, his hair strangely mussed.
Ana stood and turned to the kitchen, feigning an offer of help, though there was never anything to do.
“This is nice,” said Ana, picking up a small glass from the window ledge. It was a little bigger than the lid of a shampoo bottle, and covered in tiny painted flowers.
Diana wrung a sponge at the sink. She placed it in its dish and looked at Ana. “Oh, yes, that’s Wesley’s. A tea glass from Tunisia.”
“Tunisia? What was he doing there?” Ana had only one image of Wesley spanning the years, courtesy of James: in a windowless office, with a giant ledger open in front of him, like Bob Cratchit.
“There was a business opportunity,” said Diana. “We actually considered moving there at one point. Can you imagine? James and Michael with their blue eyes.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“I don’t think I would have been functional there,” she said. “Water?”
Ana nodded, and she drew them each a glass of water from the tap. They stood, sipping.
“Did you see there will be a new development? Condominium tower. Right by the train tracks,” said Diana.
“We came the other way.”
“I hope it means we can get more funding for the library,” said Diana.
They finished their water and smoothed their skirts, but as they were walking toward the door, Ana stopped: “What did you mean, functional? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Ana,” she said, a quick, deep-voiced response that suggested Ana was right to press further. “It’s difficult to be a mother.” She paused. “Don’t tell James I said that.”
Ana shook her head.
“It is more than just giving up your freedom, or your marriage, in many ways. It’s a loss of an idea of who you are. And they will tell you: ‘Oh, you get an abundance in return, you get it back, it’s simply different.’ But that’s not quite true. What is true is that you are altered, and I suppose it depends who you were to begin with, if you have the kind of genetic structure that can withstand such change. Does it make sense?”
“I don’t know. Maybe,” said Ana, caught in Diana’s unyielding gaze. “Did you feel like you’d been changed enough already before you had kids? By the war?”
Diana flinched and looked away, and Ana recognized a misstep on her part. They would remain in the realm of abstractions.
“Perhaps in some way,” said Diana. “I sympathize with you. I can’t say I regret my children. Of course I care for them. But I do sometimes wonder what was lost to me.”
Footsteps outside the door passed, and Ana felt as if she was about to be caught in something illicit. James would never believe this; he always said that his mother had locked away the sentient part of life. She had once cut her hand on a can opener and strode into the living room where the boys were playing, a newspaper wrapped to her wrist, blood speckling the ground behind her. “There has been an accident,” she announced like a town crier, before dialing a cab with her other hand. Wesley loved to tell this story, but James didn’t see it as valor, the way his father did. He saw it as a way of defying her family, announcing that they were, for her, not a source of comfort. There was nothing she could possibly need them for.
And now this confession and warning by the kitchen door. What was Ana to do with it? The illness in her head bloomed.
The door swung open, and Finn stood at their knees.
“Hungry,” he said. Diana moved to meet his hunger. Cupboards opened and drawers rattled and food came forth for the boy, pieces of cheese cut in tiny squares, which he placed in his mouth with chipmunk propulsions, humming cheerfully, oblivious to the eyes of the women. Ana watched her mother-in-law, imagining that she was seeing in Finn her own son in a different kitchen, and she, a young wife forever new in a foreign country where the cheese had the consistency of soap.
Ana looked upon the boy and rooted around for some kind of feeling. It was there, but not the texture or the size she sensed was required. Still, she could feed him if he was hungry. Not all women could do this. The apartments of Ana’s youth had empty refrigerators, still slimy from the previous tenants, burned-out bulbs. As a teenager, she was often a dinner guest in the homes of her friends. Ana loved these evenings, reveling in the overflowing plates of chicken and bowls of vegetables, quietly taking in the large families with their regular seats at the table, the mother and father like dollhouse figures that had been placed at either end. (Who were those friends? What were their names? Ana had lost all of them, like a bough shedding ripened fruit, as she moved from school to school.) And then, out of fairness, she remembered sitting next to her mother in their favorite restaurant, against the banquette, while the waiter flirted with them both. And Ana drinking her Coke, nestled against her mother’s arm, and the two of them content in their quiet.