Fern McAllister’s pocket is vibrating again, so she pulls her phone from her pocket and peeks at it beneath the tablecloth, hoping the move looks as if she’s simply fidgeting with her skirt. She’s ignored the buzzing several times, presuming it’s the doorbell app Mack installed that now shouts at her all day long. Because how could they possibly have survived all these years without the knowledge that the neighbor was walking her dog, or that the middle-school bus had just dropped off the kids it had been dropping off every afternoon at 3:25 p.m. since forever?
Bzzzzt.
Either the Huns have invaded the block, or someone actually needs to get ahold of her. She unlocks her screen.
“Don’t even!” Carolina clocks the move and flicks her head toward the neighboring table. “You’ll look like those Vitbags over there.”
“Ensuring that my children haven’t been horribly disfigured in a car accident isn’t Vitbagging, it’s parenting.”
Vitbag is Carolina shorthand for Valley shitbags, or the six men sitting nearby, downing absinthe and digitally insulting each other.
They’re on the back patio of a wine bar in San Francisco celebrating the engagement of their friend Emma’s daughter, Portia. Portia is an elementary schoolteacher like her mother. Her fiancé, Lyle, does something in tech like everyone else in the Bay Area. They met as students at Cal State Sacramento and graduated last year.
The notion that Portia and Lyle are twenty-three and already signing up to spend the rest of their lives together makes Fern itch. She and her friends—Carolina, Emma, Andi, and Chandler—hadn’t even met each other by that age.
Her screen lights to reveal a series of texts from her literary agent. Got a sec?
Fern has been a writer for twenty years. In the early 2000s, she traded corporate life for publishing hot takes in gossip magazines until she woke up one morning and looked at her husband. “If I have to write one more piece on a pseudo-celebrity sex tape, I’m going to drive an ice pick through my eyeball.”
Mack didn’t want her to do that. So, she got pregnant instead.
Three babies and four years later, she was twice as restless.
“There has got to be more to life than poop and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.” She was also in bed when she said this, only she hadn’t just woken up and she wasn’t talking to Mack. She had a baby attached to her boob, her husband was out of town for work, and Fern had picked up the phone to cry with the first person who answered.
It happened to be Andi.
“Why don’t you go back to work, then? You never planned to stay out forever.”
“Because the whole journalism industry decided to pack its bags and leave while I was busy with morning sickness and diaper changes. Nobody’s hiring.”
At which point Andi probably suggested Fern write a mommy blog.
But Fern didn’t want to spend time reading about other people’s lives. She wanted to go out and live her own.
Damn her and Mack for being so fertile.
“If you don’t want to write a blog, then pitch an article.” Andi was nothing if not a solution suggester. At the time, however, she was also childless. “Find something you can do with the kids in tow. I read an article about this woman who signed her whole family up to manage a community garden for a summer. They spent every day out there together, helping people manage their plots, and whatever else, I can’t remember. Apparently, it was transformative.”
Fern briefly tried to picture her life chasing three children across open fields and decided Andi had lost her mind. “Let’s do this, instead. You have a baby. Then try to give me the same advice.”
Thing was, though, Andi was onto something. Because the idea of pitching a story that she could research while also being a mother had her head spinning most of that night.
That summer, she wrote a series of articles about entertaining her children with zero-dollar activities, and it gained her a following with SFGate readers. The pieces were popular mostly because she skipped the no-brainer ideas—every parent knows to take their kids to the beach and watch for the free days at local museums. Fern and her kids instead spent that summer gathering rocks with the Northern California Geological Society. They attended open rehearsals for both the San Francisco Symphony and Opera. They learned to scrape barnacles from the piers of Sausalito. They watched veterinarians care for injured sea lions at the Marine Mammal Center and, by pure stroke of luck, were in the right place at the right time to witness the birth of elephant seal pups. That one generated a mixed reaction. Her daughter was riveted. The boys were grossed out into speechless silence.
Flash forward two decades, and she had three books under her belt. Her first two were essay collections about parenting—Aim at the Water! and Other Things I Tell My Boys followed by Dress Shoe, or Dead Turtle? Both were very popular—with the tidy group of people who read them.
Her third, Smart Girls Say Yes, came out eight years ago.
This book, like her others, was a series of essays. But it focused on the spring and summer of 1999, when Fern, Carolina, Andi, and Emma decided they’d had enough of needy bosses and cheating boyfriends. They were twenty-nine years old with professional careers and naturally perky boobs. If there was any time to live their best lives, this was it. And it all started with a commitment to one powerful sentence, “I’ll say yes if you say yes.”
The book did fine, on par with the others. But after having cried, sweat, and plodded her way to achieving a hat trick of underwhelming books, she lost her mojo.
“Maybe I’m not a writer, after all.” Fern remembers clearly the night she suggested to Mack that she might be ready to raise the white flag, though their now college-bound daughter was still requesting bedtime stories when the conversation took place. “I know I can write, but should I? Should I devote my life to something that pays me back in nickels?”
Mack responded by radiating the same calm that she’d married him for. “Money and attention aren’t the only worthwhile measures of success.”
“Just ask van Gogh, right?”
“If writing makes you happy, you should keep doing it.”
Therein lay the problem. “But I like things that like me back. Our children may drive me wild from the minute they wake up until the minute we chase them to bed at night. And yet, I know they need me and love me. I know my time with them is of value. I used to be able to rationalize the work of writing the same way—difficult, but worthwhile. Increasingly, though, it feels like a job for which I’m not getting paid.”
Fern has barely written a word in six years. Every once in a while, she teases her agent with the promise of a book proposal, but a tease is called a tease for a reason. Frankly, it is a miracle she still has an agent at all.
Now her phone is buzzing so much in her pocket that it’s beginning to feel sexually explicit. Given Carolina’s sudden distaste for cell phones, she looks to Andi for guidance. “My agent has texted me three times since I got here.”
“What?” Andi yawns, then blushes. “Sorry.”
Fern notices the dark circles under her eyes. “You sure you’re okay?”
Andi is a woman driven by so much loyalty and passion she’ll land herself in the hospital for fear of letting someone down. She once called Fern on the way to the prison, where she was headed to drop off a set of long underwear for a defendant who couldn’t sleep at night for the cold.
“I’m dead tired, to tell the truth. But it’s fine.”
“Is there any way you can cut back on how much travel you’re doing?” Fern suspects she knows the answer but it’s worth a shot.
“Someday. Just as soon as there’s world peace.” This level of cynicism is unusual, even for a woman who sees as much as Andi does. She catches herself and sighs. “Sorry, again. What were you saying?”
“My thing feels ridiculous now.”
“Better than tragic.”
Fern stands and pats her friend on the back. “Really, it’s nothing. I’m a big girl. I can figure it out.”
Then like a high schooler jonesing for a cigarette, she makes a beeline to the restroom to hide.