Everybody Has Everything (7 page)

“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.

A
NA 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.”

Now Ana recognized what was strange about the small crowd: Barely anyone in the room looked older than fifty. Ana remembered the old schoolhouse where she had been married, with James’s great-aunts and -uncles in their wheelchairs in locked positions tucked away in the corners like umbrellas.

On the edges of the empty dance floor, a small child swayed by himself, wearing a rock ‘n’ roll T-shirt—ABCD split by a lightning bolt, like the logo for the band AC/DC—with a blazer over it, hair hanging in his eyes. How old? Ana had no idea.

She had seen the boy earlier, in the bathroom. As Ana stood at the automatic dryer, his little hands had suddenly brushed
against hers, grabbing at the warm air, his body up against her skirt.

“Oliver, don’t be rude!” The boy’s mother had appeared, pulling him away. Ana smiled, shrugging lightly. “I’m so sorry,” said the mother, unfolding a soft towel from the stack by the sink. She rubbed furiously at the boy’s hands. He looked at Ana quizzically, silent. “Were you smart enough to leave yours at home?”

Ana sighed internally, knowing what she’d find at the next step of this conversation. “I don’t have kids.”

And so it came: the pause and the nervous rebound. “Right, I get that, absolutely,” and the exaggerated eye roll at the small, wet child. It surprised Ana how often mothers played up their misery, as if she would find it comforting to pretend they would switch places with her.

Eighties pop rock blasted from the speakers. In daytime, this room would probably be used for a conference, a PowerPoint presentation to bored executives trying to keep their tortoise necks from snapping down to sleep. Ana attended these kinds of meetings and had occasionally led them. She knew the closed air of this kind of room, the scent of boredom, the water glasses and pens lined up next to blank tablets of paper. She didn’t like to think of Sarah’s wedding shadowed by the ordinary in this way.

“You forget all about the wedding when you realize you’re in a marriage,” said Ana, her eyes now on James, who was still talking.

“I know. We’ve been together so long, I’m not sure why it mattered at all to Marcus. His traditional side appeared as soon as I showed him the pee stick.”

Then came the sound of knives clinking on glasses and a small cheer. Sarah rolled her eyes at Ana with a smile that discredited the eye roll. Marcus leaned across the table and gave his bride a kiss, so deep and certain that Ana looked away. James did not. He let out a whoop.

When Ana turned back, Sarah was beaming and cackling, her big sound bouncing below the DJ’s music like an extra track. The cake appeared, carried by two sweating women in manly black vests and white dress shirts. Three tiers of white buttercream icing, ribbons of chocolate down the side. A round of applause. There were no figurines on top. Ana remembered picking her bride and groom: James thought it would be funny to use two black people, or a pair of women. In the end, he let her pick, and she panicked and chose two that were so small her mother drunkenly asked if they were children.

The women placed the cake directly in front of Ana, which set off fireworks of flashing cameras.

“Oh, no, no. I’m not—” said Ana, sliding her chair closer to James, out of the way of Sarah and Marcus and all the years that this photo would exist in computer in-boxes and dresser drawers.

The sound in the room was beginning to bother her. A thrumming filled her skull, and her body craved the cool of the sheets waiting for her at home. The edges of her eyes blurred.

James saw Ana cringe a little and knew what was happening. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into it. She tried to stem his worry.

They were equal now. All that work to clear the tubes of their nests of cysts, and it didn’t matter: According to the
celebrity doctor, Ana had an “inhospitable” uterus—no visitors allowed. Its walls were thin as onionskin, unable to support anything. And James’s sperm had low motility. They were too lethargic to broach those walls anyway.

Now they had the information, the perfectly balanced failure. A year ago, they had agreed upon the circumstances under which the long, gruesome trail of appointments and injections would end, and today they had kept their covenant. No more stirrups and pills. No more bloody syringes and bruised thighs. No more electronic wands.

James had a new plan now. Even as he was explaining to the table why vegetarianism was an untenable ethical position, the other part of his brain had him sweeping into Rwanda. He had been there once, during the rebuilding. He had opened the door to a church, and children came tumbling out like jelly beans from a machine. He imagined himself on an airplane back from Africa. Finally he’d be one of those dads he always got seated behind. But he would be bouncing and expertly soothing the new baby, a baby with no one besides them. Ana was in the seat next to him, holding a baby bottle. They could do that. It would be good for everyone.

But then, there were risks: trauma; fetal alcohol syndrome; the stigma of being a racial outsider … He glanced at Sarah’s swollen stomach. Maybe they could borrow a healthy uterus for a while and grow their own.

Ana did not know what thoughts were racing through James’s mind or why his eyes on her smiled sadly. She wanted to show him that she was all right, to let him know that it was possible to be happy for someone else. She gave him a small kiss on the neck. She was trying to remind
him of something that she herself was working hard to remember.

A year later, Ana watched James through the kitchen window, open for the first time in months. He looked medium. His brown hair had thinned at the top of his head to reveal a little gleaming planet that hoped not to be discovered. When he turned sideways, the silhouette of a small belly emerged from his untucked shirt, surprising her.

Ana rapped on the window. James waved. She pointed to her wristwatch. He nodded.

Ana had discovered the pipes had broken when a smell led her to the basement, where shreds of toilet paper and purple-black sludge coated the drain in one corner. James had handled it, which meant that when Ana came home from work the next afternoon, there were three men in her frozen, broken yard, and James, too, each of them drinking a beer out of the bottle. James had gloves on; the men did not. One was Romanian and two Italian, though they considered themselves Sicilian, really, James informed her later, in the bathroom, his mouth filled with toothpaste. The tinier the country, the more divided, James noted. (Ana thought:
What about Andorra?
But she didn’t say it out loud.) He prided himself on always knowing something significant about everyone within eleven minutes of introductions.

The pipes had been replaced, but the yard remained ripped apart. James and Ana had decided to leave it until spring, and now it was spring and James stood in the very center of the frozen lawn like a spoon in a bowl of hardened pudding, with two rolls of sod at his feet. James knew a little about gardening—he had interviewed some organic farmers in
California who discovered ammonium sulphate in their fertilizer—but not enough to save the lawn.