Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,91

look on her face. Then she noticed the baby and brightened.

“Who do we have here?”

“Sorry. The sitter called in sick at the last minute.”

Elisabeth figured this small white lie would engender sympathy, and perhaps get her points for showing up at all.

Gil had fallen asleep. She wheeled his stroller toward the couch, hoping he wouldn’t remember this. His mother, dragging him along to her shrink.

“So,” Elisabeth said as she sat down.

“So,” Violet said. She smiled without showing her teeth.

She always waited for Elisabeth to go first.

“I guess I’m stressed about the holidays, like everyone,” she said. “My parents are both coming to our house, which is definitely a bad idea. My father’s bringing a date. It’s not what I would have wanted for Gil, for his first Christmas.”

“What would you have wanted?”

“For the three of us to be left alone, I guess. Or not even that. A completely different family? No Christmas at all? I don’t do well with holidays.”

“Do you have any happy memories of holidays when you were a child?” Violet asked.

“No.” Elisabeth paused. “Did I ever tell you about my fear of houses? When my first friend got married and bought a house, I went to visit her. After she and her husband went to bed, I was sitting alone in their living room and I had a panic attack. I kept thinking of things they talked about that day—a new washing machine, a cookout they were planning. I couldn’t wait to get back to my New York apartment, and my not-real life.”

“Why do you call it not real?”

“In the city, you somehow always feel like things are in flux. My babysitter, Sam, she talks all the time about wanting to feel settled. I find being settled unnerving. The stillness is harder than I thought it would be.”

Violet nodded. “So you create ways of making things unstill.”

“Like what?”

Violet shrugged, as if someone else had said the last words out of her mouth.

Elisabeth nodded toward the baby. “What are you supposed to do when your model is utter shit, and you want better for your own kid? But at the end of the day, you’re still yourself.”

“That’s why you’re here,” Violet said. “It seems to me like you’re doing a great job so far.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that. But it’s easy to hide your faults from a baby. How do I do it when he’s older? Sometimes I think Andrew and I couldn’t be more different from our families. Other times, I’m afraid we’re doomed to become them.”

“How so?”

“A million different ways. I think of what my mother did when I was a kid, confiding in me about my father’s affairs. Needing me to indulge her every insecurity. A child shouldn’t be so aware of her mother’s demons. A child shouldn’t know her mother has demons at all. Is that right?”

Violet, annoyingly, did not respond.

When Elisabeth was up late with Gil, when he got the cradle cap, when he had a particularly revolting diaper situation, she thought of how her parents must have cared for her in these same ways. What did you owe the person who made such sacrifices on your behalf, sacrifices you would never remember?

As Elisabeth pictured things she and Gil would do together when he grew, memories of her own childhood returned—the way her father let her stir milk into his coffee in the mornings; how her mother sat her down beside her at her dressing table and taught her how to apply lipstick. Her father taking her and Charlotte to the bird sanctuary. Her mother reading them Beatrix Potter. These had been buried beneath what came after.

The bond between parent and child was all-consuming, and yet its power was not cumulative. It had to be remade again and again throughout the course of a lifetime. A mother could do everything right early on, and still, if she failed to renegotiate the terms, all would be lost.

“I look for mothers everywhere,” Elisabeth said. She didn’t want Violet to think she meant her, so she added, “At least I did in my twenties and early thirties. I wanted someone to show me how to be. But that never happened. Times that are supposed to be about family bonding or celebrations are hard for me. I suck at going on vacation. I’m a ruiner of festive moments.”

Violet looked interested for once. “Give me an example.”

“I went into a deep depression at a Jimmy Buffett concert one New Year’s Eve,” Elisabeth said. “We got