Alternate Side(7)

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

Rachel, too, was dolorous about the impending end of her college years. “So, so tired of being asked what comes next,” she’d said between gritted teeth when she and her mother had run into Sherry Fisk on the block. There was so much Nora could have said, knowing that when Rachel graduated what came next would be so fluid and various: maybe this job, maybe that guy, maybe one city or another. Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn’t recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am. She remembered a lunch the year before, when Suzanne had seemed unusually glum. “I don’t know—sometimes I feel as though I should reinvent myself,” Suzanne said, poking at her asparagus. “I mean, how many sideboards can you have distressed, and then distressed again because the client didn’t think they looked distressed enough?” She sighed and added, “Don’t you ever wonder how we all wound up here?” And before Nora could say, Yes, I do, I think about it all the time, I’m so relieved I’m not the only one, Elena said drily, “What is this, existential Thursday?” Leaving the restaurant, Elena turned to Nora and Jenny and mouthed the word “Menopause,” and Nora had almost hated her at that moment, even though she and Elena had known each other since a childbirth class more than twenty years before and had been having lunch together almost that long.

Nora wondered where Rachel was now. The plan had been for the four of them to go to an outdoor classical music concert in Central Park after dinner at the Greek restaurant nearby, but the plans had gone awry. Nora had forgotten that she had a business meeting with a potential donor who was in from the Hamptons for one day only to check the paint colors in her apartment renovation. Rachel had gotten a text, made a yelping sound, said, “I’m sorry, guys, but I absolutely have to take care of something,” and blown out the door. So Charlie and Oliver had trudged off together and had wound up having wings and a pitcher of beer at a bar Oliver recommended.

“He didn’t get carded?” Nora said.

“He’s got a fake ID,” Charlie said.

“Oh, great.”

Charlie shrugged. “Where did our daughter get to?” he asked.

This time Nora shrugged. Changes of plans were more common in their household than sticking to them. After the twins were born, Nora had learned at a Mommy and Me class that the most important thing she could do to keep her marriage intact, other than practicing her kegels and installing double sinks in the bathroom, was institute a date night. Their first date night Oliver spiked a fever and they spent the evening walking the floor with a mewling baby. Their second date night they talked about how crazy their first one had been, and whether Rachel was meeting her developmental milestones before Oliver, and whether Charity, their nanny, was as good as she seemed. Their third was canceled because of a business meeting Charlie had, the fourth canceled because Charity had to take her sister to the emergency room. Nora couldn’t remember when they’d dropped date night, but the routine of cancellation continued now in almost every arrangement they made. A dinner party Nora had to attend alone after the state commissioner of banking wanted to have a drink with a group at Charlie’s firm and Charlie was afraid to miss it. A professional conference Nora couldn’t go to as Charlie’s plus one because of a new press preview she needed to handle personally at work. Once they tried to factor the twins in, the possibilities for cancellation became infinite.

They had miraculously all managed brunch the day before, and had walked home through the shimmering August air of Central Park together. Rachel had stopped to look at the memorial plaques on the park benches, and to read them aloud. For Robert A. Davidson, Who Loved the Park. Joan and John, Fifty Years and Counting. Happy Birthday, Janet—Have a Seat!

“?‘Maisie, sorely missed, 1999 to 2012,’?” Rachel read. “Oh, Mommy, look. That would make her only thirteen years old.”

“It’s probably a dog,” Nora said.

“What?”

“Lots of people do this for their dogs. I bet Maisie was a dog.”

“Because a teenage girl is too threatening?” Rachel said. Nora sighed and shook her head as her daughter trudged along next to Charlie. Oliver dropped back to Nora’s side. Coming toward them was first one double stroller, then another, both inhabited by toddlers of the same age. “My peeps,” said Oliver, smiling.

“You have twins,” people had said when they first met Nora and Charlie, with that knowing look. New York City was lousy with twins, twins that meant you and your husband had had sex like normal people for a year or two, then like people charting ovulation on a graph in the bathroom, then like people whose relationship consisted mainly of one giving herself shots of nuclear hormones while yelling at the other. Twins meant a doctor’s office with your eggs in a dish and your husband’s sperm in the little vial they’d given him to fill in a closet, along with some fairly tame porn. When the Nolans’ pharmacy put Nora on hold, the recorded message said it was the number-one purveyor of fertility medications in the New York City area, as though that were an achievement.

When she’d first pushed a double stroller Nora had wanted to hang a sign on the front: THEY ARE NOT THAT KIND OF TWINS.

“I don’t know why you care,” Charlie had said.