Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,53

and took it back to her table and nursed it.

Ever since Laura’s trip Marie had been acting maddeningly clingy and babyish, which Laura hated except in the moments when she secretly enjoyed it. A part of her liked the sick-day feeling of sitting up late at night after Marie claimed to have had a nightmare, reading Madeline in a purposely boring monotone until Marie finally passed out, lips cutely parted and drooling slightly on Laura’s arm. Less cute were her uncharacteristic lapses in potty-trained-ness, which both of them found jarring and humiliating, though Laura did her best not to act ruffled. Her day care wasn’t the greatest, just a group of kids and their caretakers hanging out in an older Polish lady’s fluorescent-lit basement, and Laura worried that they were probably snappish when kids wet their pants. But she couldn’t afford anything better. It was only thanks to the work she’d done on the album that she could afford day care right now at all. She couldn’t let herself dwell on it.

The patrons of Oslo at ten thirty in the morning on a weekday ran a predictable gamut. There were the neighborhood’s rich-hippie moms (in Laura’s imagination, in her darker moments, everyone with children except her was rich). These women all seemed to be friends with one another; their older kids ran around in the park together while the younger siblings relaxed in their strollers. When Laura was with Marie, she could socialize with them a little bit, in a superficial way, but when she wasn’t she became invisible to them again. It was fine, she got it; they had to stick together with their own tribe. They somehow had correctly intuited that she wasn’t one of them.

And then there were the young people, who were, confusingly, probably Laura’s exact age. But she could tell in an instant, just from their clothes and the women’s makeup, that they didn’t have kids. They talked with enormous gravity about a TV show they’d watched, which wasn’t as good this season as it had been in previous seasons, then segued into a conversation about a guy one of them was dating. As if it made any difference who you dated or what TV shows you watched!

There was also a woman, sitting by herself near the entrance of the coffee shop with a large iced coffee at the big square communal table, with a tiny baby in a woven wrap. It was probably one of her first times venturing out of the house with the baby, whose livid-pink head was barely visible within the wrap. She had been one of the young people a couple of weeks ago—pregnant, but still able to care about trivialities deeply, unable to imagine not being able to care. Now she wasn’t a member of any of the coffee shop’s constituencies. Her baby cried, that steely newborn wail, and she soothed it inefficiently with bouncing when really the only thing that was going to work, Laura knew, was feeding it. Laura tried to force herself not to pay attention, to focus on her own life, what she was going to tell Callie, how she was going to make it make sense.

No matter how she put it, though, Callie wouldn’t understand, because she was a young person like the ones in the corner, the ones wearing recently purchased clothes without stains or holes except ones they chose or intended. To Callie, eschewing months’ worth of nights like the one they’d had in Philly because you had to take care of your daughter didn’t make sense. To childless people, children were a logistical problem to be solved: find a way to pay for and arrange childcare, and you were free. They didn’t understand that even when you weren’t with your child, the child continued to exist in a part of your brain that you had to consciously work to silence, or as a low hum of anxiety that colored everything. Either way, you were fucked. Either way, pleasure and creativity were sacrificed entirely, or only permitted in small doses.

She would tell Callie that it wouldn’t always be like this, that soon Marie would be older and wouldn’t need her as much and they could try again. She didn’t know whether that was true. She hoped that it was.

* * *

Later that day, Laura ran into Matt at day care pickup, and when he asked if she and Marie wanted to go to the park with him and Kayla, she said sure.