This Time Tomorrow(68)

“Okay,” Rebecca went on, “but want to know my actual favorite fact about Leonard Stern, that I learned literally this morning on Wikipedia? He married the woman who played Dawn’s mother in the movie!” Rebecca cleared her throat, and Alice sat up, suddenly paying full attention.

“No waaaay,” Jamie said. “The woman from that show? About the kids?”

“Yes and yes,” Rebecca said. “Dawn’s mother was played by actress Deborah Fox, who was also on the classic eighties television show Before and After School.”

It was the image Alice had of her—the bosomy teacher. Alice closed her eyes and could see the whole credit sequence of the TV show—a sitcom about a woman who adopted a houseful of kids and was also their school principal. It had aired on Saturday mornings in the 1980s, and the optics of it were terrible, a multiracial cast of kids and the plump, sweet white lady who saved them. Deborah Fink was Deborah Fox, an actress. And she had married Leonard after costarring in his movie.

“Wow,” Alice said out loud. There was always more to learn. How many more surprises did Leonard have that she would discover someday? Alice laughed to herself, thinking of Leonard and Debbie and Sarah Michelle Gellar at Gray’s Papaya, the fun house mirror version of her family.





55



The Rothman-Woods lived near the upper Montclair stop, in a big blue house with a porch swing. It was only three blocks from the train station, but Alice came so rarely that she kept having to check that she was walking the right direction. She flipped the phone around in her hand so that it was pointing the way she needed to walk. After only two wrong turns, Alice could see it, the blue floating into view. Montclair’s sidewalks were already crunchy with leaves, and the trees seemed to be more full of birds than in Brooklyn. Some houses had already started decorating for Halloween, and headstones dotted the front lawns of Sam’s street. Her next-door neighbor had a row of pumpkins leading up to their stoop, and when she got closer, she saw that Sam did, too.

“Hey,” Sam said. She was sitting on the porch swing, rocking herself back and forth with her toes.

“Hey!” Alice said. She shoved her phone in her pocket. “It only took me twenty-five years to get here.”

“Oh, please,” Sam said. Both her hands were spread flat against her belly, which was not flat—it was huge, a perfect half circle. “New Yorkers think they’re the center of the world. It takes less time to get here than it does to get to wherever the twenty-five-year-olds live now. Queens?”

“Bushwick, I think.”

“Right. It’s just New Jersey. Oof.” Sam let her sneakers flatten against the wood porch, and the swing slowed to a stop. Sam pushed herself up to standing, her belly in full, triumphant view.

“Wow,” Alice said. She hadn’t seen Sam very much when she was pregnant before. They had been at dinner at some dark restaurant when Sam whipped out a sonogram photo, the tiny little astronaut profile that would eventually be her eldest, and after that, it was their regular hectic schedule, trying to squeeze in a March dinner that became an April dinner, and so on—Alice had seen photos of Sam and Josh on vacation in Puerto Rico, Sam’s belly poking out in between the polka dot slices of her bikini, but even before Sam and Josh had moved to Jersey, even before the kids were born, it wasn’t ever like it had been in high school, where they just talked on the phone from the minute they walked in the door until the minute they fell asleep, and where they slept in each other’s bed every weekend. It was like watching a plant grow in stop motion. “You look amazing.”

Sam rolled her eyes. “I assure you that I do not feel amazing, but thank you. Let’s get a drink and then we can sit?”

Alice nodded and followed Sam through the front door. “Where are the kids?”

“The kids? Well, Mavis is in the backyard, and this one’s in here.” Sam pointed to her belly.

“Right,” Alice said. “That’s what I meant.” She remembered Sam’s lists of girl names: Evie, Mavis, Ella. Pregnancies were fragile things—it wasn’t shifting the world’s balance. Sam had had miscarriages before, and maybe she had again. That was Alice’s biggest question, the one Leonard hadn’t answered because she hadn’t known to ask it—were all those other kids, those other lives, still happening, somewhere? She thought so, but it was impossible to know for sure.

Sam pulled open the fridge and took out two cans of fizzy water. “Pamplemousse okay?”

Alice nodded. The house was so big, like something on a TV show, one of the sitcoms that she and Sam used to watch after school, like Debbie’s show. Rooms big enough for siblings and parents and guys hoisting boom mics over all of their heads. Sam led them out the back door. Mavis was on the little wooden play structure they had, dangling upside down by her knees, with Josh standing next to her, his waiting arms ready to catch if she needed to be rescued. Alice waved, and Josh waved back, unable to leave his post. That was fine—they both knew she was there just for Sam.

“Forty’s not so bad,” Sam said. “You struggling with it? The idea of it?” She popped open her can and took a long sip. “God, being pregnant is like always being hungover. I am always thirsty, and I always have to pee, and I never want to get up to go to the bathroom.”

“No, it’s fine,” Alice said. “That part’s fine.”