If you read to Maria and Josephine at night, they wanted you to get into the bed, get right down under the covers with them, so they could, while you turned the pages, hold on to your hair with their left hand while sucking the thumb of their right. They wanted nothing less than complete and total fusion with the person next to them, but they’d take being nestled as close to you as possible and holding on tightly so you couldn’t get away. When they grabbed at my hair I couldn’t help thinking of the Rose of 1999 and 2004 and 2010 leaning across a table, arms crossed, eyes bright, focus piercing, ready to hear it all, ready to spill it all, saying So! to whoever sat across from her. Rose demanding and receiving connection. Every time Maria or Josephine demanded and received the closeness they deemed satisfying enough to fall asleep to, I would pray for God, or something like God, to send them someone, as early in their life as possible, who was delighted by this need and lived to indulge it.
Whenever I came through Rose’s front door they flung themselves at my knees the way I’d seen dancers throw themselves at their partners onstage—as if they were lashing themselves to their dearest mast—and it shocked me into gladness every time. They might have been doing it out of a half-remembered sense that I’d carried them out of cars and up staircases, too, like their mother. Or their desire for another sister, and their seeing that I was not like their mother, because I did not have a husband, caused them to mistake me for someone who could make them a trio. Maria and Josephine at two. They asked for me when I was not there, and when I was there they did not like it when Rose and I got involved in a conversation that did not concern them. We always let them interrupt us, and might have even welcomed their interruption. We no longer needed or wanted to analyze our lives for hours the way we did when we were younger.
Rose’s house was now, like my aunts’ houses, a place to laugh and eat and make cracks about how much wine we were drinking. Was it often a relief, at the end of a week, to take my place in the Impressionist painting Rose had made of her life, to feel the rustling of tutus and curls against my legs as the girls ran in between and around us, and nod as Rose held a bottle of expensive wine in the air as if to say Shall we? and Peter turned up the volume on the stereo? Yes. I belonged there in that house, but I was restless there, and tried to convince myself it didn’t matter. At a certain point, I decided, friendship was just like marriage. The idea of the two of you mattered more than the reality, and the form of the thing, not the thing itself, was what you counted on. You could stare at it and ask whether it was worth pressing hard on what filled the form, but I did not want to do that here. I could not bear ruining another relationship by demanding it be more than what it was, when what it was was perfectly fine.
What is going to happen to us? I wanted to ask her. All the time. But that would mean I was the little sister, forced by habit and proximity to mistake her for the only person I could trust to give me that answer.
We were forty-one.
If you move to New York to be motherless, you may feel a pain as you watch the city, over time, fill up with mothers, hundreds of them, strollers everywhere, so many of them you start to wonder if you are in fact not in New York but in Salt Lake City—an infinitesimally small pain, in the scheme of things, but one that I had a hard time chasing away. Nearly all of my friends in New York, and Rose’s friends, were married or partnered, a number of them with children, all of them living in apartments or houses they owned, and it narrowed my vision to the point of depression and made me forget that there were different ways to live a life. I hadn’t made good use of the freedom I’d insisted on, it seemed to me, and I’d started to wish I’d saved my money, stayed married, and bought an apartment. I’d started to wish I’d wanted children, too, but it wasn’t out of some yearning to be and know another animal. I thought being a mother would exempt me from having to be and know myself.
The mothers outnumbered the reasons I had for living. Said the depression. I knew I should force myself to meet someone or publish something that mattered to me, but I felt unsure of who to be next, and it left me unwilling to make my body or mind that flagrantly public. I’d lost faith that I could be trusted to discover what would make me feel as at home in the world as Rose seemed to be with those girls, and I was suffering—could I use the word?—from feeling the disparity between her apparent contentment and my confusion. From struggling to pretend, to Rose and to myself, that my love for her was not becoming shaded with envy and resentment.
She never mentioned what had happened in those weeks and months after giving birth. Never mentioned the postpartum depression, never mentioned the running around in the night that, I always suspected, had led her to decide to become pregnant. She acted as if none of it had ever happened. Never told me if she had grown to love Peter more, so much more that it made her stop asking other men to give her what she’d thought she needed, or was there someone other than Peter. Or whether what had happened after she gave birth chastened her and made her worry that she could kick that storm up again if she wasn’t careful, or whether she was just, you know, too fucking tired to bother. If she felt guilty, or remorseful, or ashamed, or what, for having cheated, a word we did not like to use but that’s what it was, and did she know why we did those things, looking back. Never told me if she got jealous when she stood in the Strand looking at the table of new releases, or became furious when she paged through The New York Times Magazine and saw a piece she could have written in her sleep.
I told myself I understood this strategy for self-preservation, when I really kind of hated her, and did not want to hate her, for having the balls and the guts to control the story like the publicist she was—for making it look like she was all better now, like she’d buried all her bodies way down in the ground, in a place where nobody would ever find them, and for appearing to have so much going on in her new life that she didn’t have time to remember where she’d dumped the people and things that had stopped mattering to her, and didn’t care that she couldn’t remember. Rose had also developed a habit of changing the subject if we got too near a topic she’d rather not engage with—and because she had been the one to officially lose her mind, I let her. While making note of every time she did. Which made me the older sister: suspicious and keeping too careful a score.
Instead of telling each other what we really thought, she and I spent a lot of time talking about other people. Rose loved, like Jimmy had loved, to hear me talk about the endless parade of absurdities that could befall a person when they taught at a private school in Manhattan, and I didn’t mind. Telling her these stories allowed me to laugh about them instead of being tortured by them, and I had been teaching for long enough that there was much more torture in being around the young than there was endless amusement—the boys could tell I was more their mother than a slightly older classmate, and it made dealing with them very difficult, because they already had one overbearing bitch with deepening laugh lines in their life, and did not appreciate having to come to school and deal with another, and it was also becoming harder to laugh as I watched the girls flaunt their bodies, and harder to listen to them demand dress codes that let them flaunt them, and harder to feel sympathy for them when they blamed misogynist double standards for keeping them from this very important right to wear uncomfortable scraps of clothing to school. Watching the dawdling streams of essentially preverbal five-year-olds pass through the lower school in the morning filled me with an intense longing to teach kindergarten. If you taught kindergarten, you would always know for sure that you were the adult in the room and that you were inarguably the person in charge.
Mostly Rose and I talked about what she and the girls were up to, and the fights she and Ann Marie would get into over the girls, and about the mothers Rose knew. I could never hear enough about these women. Whenever Rose sat next to them on playground benches as they bitched about their sexless marriages or the pass-agg comments, Rose’s words, some other mother had slung at them in the lobby of a yoga studio, she kept her mouth shut the way she did back when she had to report a story, which led to these women mistaking Rose’s silence for compassion and telling her things they didn’t tell the other mothers because Rose didn’t judge them out loud. They told Rose everything, like who they were making out with in cars driven for secrecy to Bay Ridge Costco parking lots, or the accidental-seeming third pregnancies that were actually last-ditch bids to keep an ATM of a husband chained to the premises. Some of them had taken to calling her in tears from childhood backyards or cabins in Vermont about texts unanswered and overtures denied, and very accidental, and very unwanted, second or third pregnancies, and Rose would tell me that she wondered if listening to these women, sitting next to them waiting for them to give up the goods, and they always did, scratched the same itch that reporting did—laying the traps, collecting the bodies, feeling the energizing heat that came from standing close enough to someone else’s sticky situation and then the cool breeze of relief that came from knowing you could always get back into your rental car and drive away. Whether being in the middle of the commotion and chaos generated by Maria and Josephine satisfied, at least for the time being, the need she’d always had to be in the middle of some action.
Do you miss it? I asked.
What I don’t miss is having to convince a bunch of assholes that I’m good enough to print.
I took the hint and changed the subject.
When her satisfaction became too painful to sit next to, I would turn down plans with her and the girls to work on a novel that, by that point, four years after I’d started it, she must have assumed was nothing but a fabricated excuse. And I would write, in fact wrote a lot, partly just to ensure it was not a fabricated excuse, but the sentences were dead on the page. They were too elegant and said nothing. I kept at it, thinking something living would have to erupt, but I was too intent on making sure no one could tell the person writing them was angry or lonely. No one ever saw those pages, but they were a forest I liked to go walking in. The paths were well-worn and kept me out of harm’s way. Typing and erasing, typing and erasing: it lulled me. Drugged me.
When I could not write I scrolled through men as if they were boots or hotel rooms or duvets on sale. It made me sick but I did it for hours, sometimes, falling asleep with my face on my phone, because I thought it was my responsibility as a single woman to be that dedicated in my search for happiness. I’d run into Mark once while I searched. He’d run into me, too, and sent a message.
You did this to us, it said.
That put me off scrolling for a while.
A few weeks later I saw him at the Strand, wearing the same short-sleeved navy T-shirt, same gray jeans, same sneakers: three notes in a chord I didn’t mind hearing again. Saw his face, in profile, from yards away, talking to another man also wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. A green canvas knapsack on the floor by his feet, looking new but already marred by a black ink stain at one of the corners. Yards away, and four years later, staring at his cheeks and remembering how the bit of skin just next to his ears could taste of warm salted butter. I turned around and left the store.
Another woman might have been inspired by her students’ refusal to live under a bullshit regime and would have written Mark to say no, the patriarchy did this to us, but even if I marched in the street shouting against that regime with hundreds of other women, I didn’t think I’d ever be convinced that forces other than my own heart and mind had left me this stranded.
But when Rose and I laughed together over those women I could believe again that we weren’t just anybody, and it could make me feel better about still having to jockey for dryers at the laundromat on sweltering Saturdays in August, and could, sometimes, make me feel smug and heroic about sleeping alone—that is, at least for as long as we sat in Rose’s kitchen or backyard calling these women amateurs for having meltdowns over unanswered texts or for getting caught making out with the bartender they were having it on with, drinking and rolling our eyes at the way they wrung their hands over potential and omnipresent toxins, or rolling our eyes at their husbands and their Sun Records T-shirts and the way these guys overexplained everything to their children as they walked into bodegas and out of the subway, as if they thought being a parent meant being a docent at the museum called Life. I knew a lot about the lives of people I experienced mainly as faces floating over wine glasses, a lot more than those people might have suspected, and I enjoyed believing, as I nodded while one of these women went on about her Twilight addiction, or went on about how she fired her nanny when she discovered the nanny was letting her children eat Doritos, that Rose and I were still on the same team: spies in the house of unexamined privilege.
In the end, Rose and I were just anybody: two women whose friendship ended because one had a family and the other did not. Because one had money and the other did not. Because one had been determined to make peace with her decisions and the other was not.
Just before Christmas that year, my landlady informed me that she needed to sell the big old Victorian that she owned and I lived on the top floor of. Divorce proceedings, she’d said. She would put the house on the market in the spring, it would sell soon after, and we would probably all—she, her two twentysomething daughters, and myself—have to move out by June. I did not, again, have enough money saved up to afford what it would cost to find a new apartment and move into one. I had very little savings, not only because I’d been paying Rose back for the loan that let me leave Mark, but for the same reason she’d bought all those face creams and shoes back when we lived together: I could not imagine a future worth putting away cash for. I’d been trying not to think about the things I’d been buying, and how large the balance on my credit card was growing. It would have been slightly cheaper to drink heavily, but new coats and Pilates classes and expensive candles from France made me feel that I had my act together when it might have been falling apart, and alcohol could leave me with my wounds throbbing and floodlit.
On New Year’s Eve, at a party thrown by a writer we knew, across the street and half a dozen houses down from the apartment Rose and I had shared, wearing a dress I’d put on the credit card because I wanted to look as expensive as everything in the brownstone I’d be standing in, Rose told me that Peter had bought her and the girls a house in the Catskills. As she showed me pictures on her phone that I did not inspect too closely, I smiled and said Oh how wonderful! We talked for a good hour about her plans for the kitchen, and I realized once again that I could have been an actress, given how easily I heaved all my true feelings aside to take on other, more expedient ones, when the demand arose. Soon we got involved in a conversation with the women standing next to us, one of whom was another writer who’d also just sold a book, a memoir. The writer was saying that she was going to take some of the money and buy a dilapidated Victorian in Cape May. As the group of women crowded around the writer’s phone to look at a slideshow of the house, I slipped away to get my coat. It was well before midnight. On my way out, in a front room so packed I was pretty sure no one would notice, I took a bottle of Veuve Clicquot off a sideboard crowded with crudités and cheeses and fruits and slid it into in my bag.
In the cab home my mind grew dark, as my students liked to say of sentences that did not uphold the consensus. It was never a compliment, always an apology. They liked to reassure their classmates that despite the dark or depressing or emo thing they’d just read out loud, they were fine, it was fine, they were just having a bad day, they didn’t know what had gotten into them, they were just playing around with an idea that was kind of dumb, forget it, and my heart would break for them, for us, because they lived in a world that made them feel they had to hide behind trees after standing in an open field singing a song that told a truth. But sometimes they sounded secretly proud of themselves while disowning themselves, and then I was glad, because often what they were shrugging off were true, searing, potent sentences. I believed in their sentences, loved their sentences, even when it was very hard to love the students who wrote them, but as the cab sped down Ocean Avenue I decided I hated every single one of mine, hated myself for thinking any of them were worth the tortured hours. Two books had not brought me the psychological or financial safety that two houses could. They had not changed me or changed my life. I should not have asked that of them, should not have demanded that they bring me what only spouses and houses and children could bring you, but I had not known any better. I must not have wanted to.
In the apartment I sat down at the desk in my bedroom—a plank of unfinished pine set in an alcove window by my landlady when she learned I wrote—and poured myself a glass of champagne. A few more glasses of champagne, almost the whole bottle.
I drank and stared at the moon. My landlady’s cat, which liked to nose itself into my apartment if I forgot to shut my door all the way, crept into the room and leapt onto the desk. It stared at me, tail ticking, then crawled into my lap. I tried to feel grateful for my landlady and her kindness; for this cat who found me solid and warm enough to fall asleep to. For my limbs, my teeth, my hair, a paying job, with health insurance, that did not require me to show up from June 16 to August 20. For breasts and ovaries free of cancer. For never seeing one of my books in a box of free junk on a Brooklyn sidewalk. For the student who just before break sent me an email saying that I had single-handedly restored his faith in literature. But my mind did not want to be bullied. I drank and sank deeper into this old thought: Why should she have everything?
I never wanted any of what she had and yet I called it everything. For in New York it did matter what things looked like from the outside, more than I ever imagined it would, and I had not quite been prepared for the part in the story of your life, around forty or so, where you really start feeling, not as a hunch but in your bones, that all your maniacal work might have been worthless and you really are failing yourself now, and because you can’t bear to think about your own failings you start looking around at what other people are doing and having because maybe flagellating yourself through comparison will launch you into some burst of actual, redemptive motivation. No one would ask Rose what she was doing with her life: those girls made the answer obvious. I was the only person who would ask her that question, and if I asked her I wasn’t sure I would get the truth. Or ever had.
What was I doing with my life? Persisting in fits and starts in some weird quiet version of rebellion against domesticity that, because it was not a bravura performance that could inspire a cause, a cult, a movement, or a movie, was illegitimate.
Why don’t you just live upstate with us for the summer and save some money? Rose said, when I told her what was going on.
That would not be a good idea, I said.
If refusing her help hurt her feelings, and I think it did, she did not make that clear to me.
Are you okay? she said.
I told her I was fine.