You Think It, I'll Say It(18)
Only five babies were enrolled in the swim class, but if Gretchen recognized me, she gave no sign of it. A strange intimacy existed between us as we stood in the water next to each other in our tank bathing suits or took turns holding our babies in the center of the circle while singing. (“Purple potatoes, and purple tomatoes, and Sadie is in the stew!”) Yet Gretchen and I never spoke to each other directly. Piper seemed good-natured, and I assumed that she was still nursing like a champ and that Gretchen was greatly enjoying not outsourcing her childcare.
Then, around the fourth class, Gretchen and Piper stopped showing up. The weird part was that I almost missed them. Without the tension created by my antipathy toward Gretchen, the half hour felt slack, and I realized for the first time that I found the swim lessons boring.
Another three months passed, during which my company laid off twelve hundred employees, including my boss and five other people in my department. My new boss was a twenty-six-year-old guy with an MBA—that is, he was three years younger than I was—and he told me that if I wanted to keep my job, I needed to work full-time and on-site. The next day, my motherin-law, who’d been walking with a limp for two years, was approved by her orthopedist to have her hip replaced; her recovery would last four to six weeks, and taking care of Sadie during that time was out of the question.
It wasn’t that I looked down on parents who put their kids in daycare, it wasn’t that I disapproved of them, or at least if I did disapprove, I knew enough to be embarrassed by my disapproval. I wasn’t a person compelled to broadcast my own choices in the hopes of making other people feel inferior. Nevertheless, on Sadie’s first day at Green Valley Children’s Center, I didn’t even make it out the front door before I burst into tears. I hadn’t felt that bad about some of the things that women having babies when I did, even in Omaha, were supposed to feel bad about—an epidural, formula—but the collapse of my carefully crafted childcare setup seemed like a failure of a different magnitude.
Although Adam and I had planned to bring Sadie to daycare together, a last-minute meeting had been scheduled at his office, so I was alone. Blinded by tears, I pushed open the front door of the center and stood in the parking lot, sobbing. I needed to get to my car, to hide, but I was so flustered that I couldn’t remember where I’d parked.
And then someone’s arms were around me—the someone was female, and her shampoo smelled like coconut—and she was saying, “It’s your first day, right? I saw you doing drop-off upstairs. But don’t worry, because, seriously, Green Valley is great. I was nervous, too, but now I love it so much.”
It took several seconds of collecting myself, and then of focusing on the woman’s face—she was still embracing me, and we were almost too close together for me to see her—to realize that the woman was Gretchen. I think she understood that I was recognizing her—perhaps I flinched—and she dropped her arms. She said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we were in the same—”
“I remember you.” I wiped my nose with my left palm. “I thought you were a stay-at-home mom.”
She laughed. “Well, Carl left me in March, which kind of threw a wrench into things.” Then she said, “It turns out my husband was having an affair since before I got pregnant, and now I’m single and working full-time. Life is full of surprises, huh?” I was taken aback and said nothing, and she added, “Really, though, I’ve been so happy with this place. I’ve learned a ton from the teachers.”
It was early July, almost a full year since Gretchen and I had met, although in a way we’d never met. Neither of our daughters had celebrated their first birthdays yet, and when I look back—our girls are eight now—I’m struck by how that was still the beginning of them becoming themselves and of us becoming mothers. In the years since, Sadie and Piper have learned to tie their shoes and ride bikes and read. They’ve had croup and stomach flu, their feelings have been hurt, they’ve lost teeth, they’ve performed in ballet recitals. I don’t know if it’s more improbable that Gretchen and I became each other’s closest friends or that our daughters did, too. Not that it’s all been easy for any of us—I had two miscarriages before the birth of my son, and Gretchen got engaged again but subsequently called it off. Sometimes when I see photos Adam took of me holding Sadie in the first month of her life, I can discern the faintly bumpy outline of cabbage leaves beneath my nursing bra, and I’m reminded of a particular kind of confusion that hasn’t entirely disappeared but has, with time, decreased.
That morning in the parking lot, I sniffled once more, then extended my hand to Gretchen. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Rachel.”
Plausible Deniability
“Stop me if I’ve told you this,” my brother says. “Libby read an article about how when you flush the toilet, tons of germs shoot up and coat everything nearby.”
“You’ve told me this,” I say.
“When she takes a shit, she’s started putting on a special T-shirt so that her regular clothes don’t touch the back of the toilet. But is she, like, nestling against the lid? She’s in the bathroom every morning way longer than I am, so maybe.”
“You’ve told me this,” I say again.
“Here’s the thing. If you’re an adult, whatever happens in there is between you and your god. Right? But she fuckin’ announces all this to me, and she’s even given the shirt a name—it’s her poop shirt. She hangs it on the back of the bathroom door next to our robes, this random pink T-shirt, and every time I see it, it’s like she’s rubbing my face in it.”