All Adults Here(4)
“It’ll be fine, Mom.” There was a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, and Cecelia watched it swing back and forth as they drove over the bridge. Taxi TV blared, and Juliette silenced it with her thumb. It was a beautiful day—blue sky, no clouds, no traffic. It almost made Cecelia sad to leave the city, but then she thought about going back to school in September and having her best friend not speak to her and having everyone else assume, because she was leaving, that she was the guilty party—shaming her! Cecelia Raskin-Strick, who had slept with her American Girl dolls until she was twelve, just last year! And they weren’t even soft plastic! And then she wasn’t sad, at least not about leaving. For the rest of the ride, her parents stared out their respective windows and Cecelia looked over the driver’s shoulder, trusting that he was going the right way.
Chapter 3
Eau de Goat
Porter’s bathroom smelled like goats because Porter smelled like goats. She couldn’t always smell it herself, certainly not when she was with the animals, but once she came home and got into the shower, the steam opened up her pores and the whole room bloomed into a barnyard. It was worse when she smelled like cheese, mostly because other people tended to be more likely to attribute the cheese smell to her own body, whereas when she smelled like the goats, the animals were clearly to blame.
After graduating from Hampshire College, Porter had moved back to Clapham fast, like a rubber band pinged across a room. Her father had been dead for two and a half years, and being at school in Massachusetts had felt so absolutely dumb, but her mother had insisted she stay. What was the point? her mother had asked. What would she do in Clapham but sit around and mope? Porter thought that if she was going to find her father anywhere, in whatever form, it would be at home. And so she came back, reverting quickly to her teenage habits, but with part of her family cleaved off, as if her father had been a dream. It had been like learning to walk with a limp—tough at first, but then she got so used to it that she couldn’t remember what life had felt like on two solid feet.
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She’d worked as a substitute teacher at the high school, then at the Clay Depot, a high-end pottery store on Main Street. When she was nearing thirty, Porter’s childhood friend Harriet converted her parents’ land into an organic farm, and then they bought some goats and read some books on fermentation, and now, almost eight years later, Clap Happy Goat Cheese was available in shops in New York City and at every restaurant in Clapham and at specialty cheese shops around the country. Harriet had sold Porter the land and her share of the goats (there were two dozen altogether) and moved to Oregon with her husband, and so now the dairy was Porter’s alone.
It was maybe because of the goats that the idea of getting pregnant on her own didn’t seem all that scary. She was used to assisting reproduction, to having a hand in creating life, even if it was goats. Sperm banks were stud farms, and she’d grown up around enough farmers to know how biology worked. Really, it was mainstream, heteronormative couples who were doing the crazy thing, picking a partner based on what, a sense of humor? Where they went to college? What they did with their tongue when they kissed? And then having a baby. Why didn’t everyone pick one person to marry and then pick the sperm they wanted separately? Also, fathers died, anyone could die, didn’t people understand that? You couldn’t ask one person to be your everything, because that person could be taken away. Would be taken away, eventually. Obviously it would be ideal to have a partner to help with the child once he or she was born—she wasn’t a fool, she knew she had only two hands—but she didn’t want to wait until she was forty. Maybe if she lived in a bigger place, where the dating pool was larger, she wouldn’t have felt in such a rush. But Porter knew everyone in Clapham who she could possibly have sex with, and there were no golden tickets on that list.
There were romantic partners Porter could have had babies with: Jeremy, her high school boyfriend and first love, who had wanted to marry her at eighteen and now lived across town with his perky wife and their two school-age kids; Jonah, her college boyfriend, who smoked weed more often than he ate food, and who had moved to Vermont and seemed to be a professional Bernie Bro Facebook ranter; Hiro—the boy she’d slept with once during the relationship with the pot smoker—a Japanese student who had no social media and an ungoogleable name, so she’d lost track of him. The sex hadn’t been good, but what was good sex? He could have been a good husband, a good father, who knew? And he probably was, with someone else. Then there were the guys Porter had slept with after college: Chad, the lawyer, whom she’d found both sexy and boring, like a human baseball game; Matthew, the underemployed waiter she’d dated for a few months, who had another girlfriend but sometimes still texted late at night, little empty speech bubbles forever appearing and disappearing after Hey, thinking about you; Billy, the guy she’d met on vacation in Puerto Rico, who was on his own vacation from Wisconsin, and whom Porter was fairly sure had a wedding ring tan line; and then Ryan, her most recent boyfriend, the only one since college whom she’d actually introduced to her family, who probably didn’t love her, and most definitely didn’t want kids. Accidents happened, but Porter had been on the pill since she was a junior in high school, and since then they hadn’t happened to her. All the while, her friends had endless engagement parties, weddings, baby showers, births, like so many rocket ships zooming away from her. Both of her brothers had children, and at least one of them, her niece, Cecelia, was the greatest child to ever be born. Porter was ready to zoom, too, and so she stopped waiting for a pilot to appear.