ONCE UPON A TIME
Every time Jess was pregnant, Clara had been the first to know. Which, initially, was a product of circumstance. They hadn’t even been friends the first time, instead, just two women who lived in the same university residence and happened to be in the kitchen together late on a Saturday night. But what transpired between them that night, and in the months and years to follow, would stitch their stories together, a ragged patchwork, the fabric of two lives running parallel. Marked by all the usual milestones: love, loss, and heartbreak. Marriage and mobility. Motherhood and all its trials multiplied by the power of two.
Parenthood, Jess observed from her perspective smack dab in the eye of the hurricane, was—if you were lucky—like friendship, a story without end. The alternative too awful to contemplate. But what this also meant, of course, was that it never stopped, there were no breaks from the possibility of something new and worse to worry about around every single corner.
And if you only knew how low the stakes had been, Jess would mutter to her former self, that idiot woman who’ddriven herself crazy serving homemade organic purées to her first baby. But not the second baby, because there hadn’t been time for that, and everything poor Miles ever ate came from a pouch packed with nutrients brewed in a processing plant, which only compounded Jess’s guilt when she thought about it now, considering all her youngest child had to contend with. So very stupid. Even though none of it was her fault, Jess had been assured, but so often that she’d started wondering what suspicions drove everyone to be so emphatic. Did they all know something she didn’t?
These days, with her children old enough to go out into the world and be wounded in all kinds of ways that had absolutely nothing to do with her, Jess finally knew why well-meaning people implored new parents—so cruelly, it had seemed at the time— to “enjoy every minute” of the baby years. Because the baby years are really hard. But see, every minute you’re enjoying your baby is a minute when you aren’t fretting about orthodontia, puberty’s increasingly early onset, and the risks of human trafficking, all the while trying to schedule intensive speech therapy into an already over-scheduled family life. And how do you live a coherent narrative out of that kind of chaos? Where was the through-line in the anxiety, in all the mess?
It was a question that only underlined Jess’s passion for the old stories, established and contained. Archetypal. Stories that came with resolution and made sense of life’s terrifyingly infinite possibilities. Imagine:Once upon a time there were two friends who chattered, a boy who didn’t speak, and a woman who grew as big as the universe.
“Fairy tales,” Jess would lecture in her work. “Some of them are older than any other cultural artifact you’ll ever encounter. Crossing cultures, and passed down through theages, and they belong to you. To all of us. The building blocks for our understanding of the world and how it works.” Anyone who’s ever read a Grimm story, she determined, would be able to fathom ISIS, for example. Gruesome beheadings, torture, cruelty, terrible chance and destruction. Nothing new under the sun.
There were people who had never heard these stories, though, or at least the versions that hadn’t been watered down, the stories about little children lost in the woods and the birds that peck your eyes out. About wicked stepmothers who get their just deserts and witches roasting in ovens. For some readers, it was all about the gingerbread house, everything Disney and sweetened right up.
But you missed something, Jess would insist, when you skipped the tragedy, the violence, the thirst for justice, the vengeance. These stories were a way to understand the world. Curses from nefarious godmothers or a witch with an apple. The Little Mermaid, who traded her voice for a pair of legs and an earth-bound life, transactions and intentions that do not go as planned.
CLARA’S ROOM
1998–1999
Clara Summers had been poaching eggs. She was known for culinary tricks, whereas the other girls on the floor thought macaroni from a box was a special occasion. And when Jess came into the kitchen, she was hit by the smell, the suggestion of something tainted. She gagged at the eggs, and Clara saw it. Glancing up from the stove with alarm, she said, “Oh, you’ve been crying.” Jess’s first inclination was to back right out into the hall.
Jess hadn’t been looking for company. The kitchen door was soundproof, mostly; smell-proof, too, apparently. She’d assumed that everybody was out for the night. There was a charity thing going on in the campus pub downstairs, and Jess could feel techno beat beneath her feet, vibrations underlining her nausea. She’d been looking for the soda crackers in her cupboard, something dry and bland, the only kind of food she’d been able to stomach all week.
“It’s the smell,” she said. “The eggs.” But she couldn’t turn and run. She’d been admiring Clara Summers from afar since the beginning of the year, her easy self-possession, her worldliness. Her other-worldliness. Clara was older, hadtaken two years off after high school and gone travelling with a boyfriend who was now her ex. She had stories of yurts and kibbutzes, while Jess had never been on a plane. Clara knew things. If there was a person Jess could confide in, perhaps Clara was the one.
“I’m pregnant,” Jess told her, putting her unfortunate situation into words for the first time. “I think,” she said. “I know.” The week before she’d taken four tests, bought one at a time. Disbelieving the results of each one, the stupid stick with its glaring positive, two pink lines where there should have been one, marching straight back to the drugstore to purchase another test, the one that, she hoped, would deliver the result that she was looking for. “Honestly, I can’t believe it.”
Clara said, “Really?” She pointed with her spatula at the pot and said, “You want me to throw this out?” The eggs were nearly set.
“No,” said Jess, who headed to the couch in the corner and knelt on its arm. She opened the window and stuck her face against the screen to breathe in the cold winter air. Outside, snowflakes were falling, illuminated by the streetlights’ glow. The museum across the road was lit up for a gala that was miles away from her life. She exhaled. “That’s better.” Even though the screen was dusty, she could almost taste the metal, and she knew the relief of the fresh air would only last a minute.
“How far along?” Clara asked.
Jess had to think about it. “Since October,” she said, removing her face from the window, turning back towards the room. “When it happened. So two months, I guess?” And she really didn’t like the sound of that. Two months was such a solid block of time, whereas in the back of her mind, where all these weeks she’d been keeping track, the situationhad been tenuous, mostly hypothetical. Until the nausea started, kicking her butt.
Clara turned the stove off and came over to sit by Jess on the sagging couch, her profile lit up by the small artificial Christmas tree blinking on the table beside her. “And you feel like garbage, right? Everything makes you want to puke. And you’re so unbelievably tired.”
What a relief it was to really be seen. “Yeah, exactly,” said Jess. “I slept for eighteen hours last night. But I still keep thinking maybe it’s mono.”
“It’s not mono.”
“Maybe it could be—”
“It’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” Clara said. Of course she did. “It happened to me.”
And this was something, Clara poaching eggs on a Saturday night. That a person could go through this kind of catastrophe and come out the other side. Jess asked, “What happened?”
Clara rolled her eyes, very dramatic. “Oh, man, it was a disaster.” She’d been on the pill but had been on the road so long that she’d run out, and then on a rickety bunk in a hostel in China, the condom broke. “Not long after my period—I thought we’d be all right. We decided to take our chances, and then when we were in Singapore later, I realized. And abortion is legal in Singapore but you have to be a resident, so after a while it just seemed like the only thing we could do was just go home. Which meant, yeah, that everybody knew—his parents, and our friends, which was mortifying. It all became such a big deal.”
“And your parents?”
“I couldn’t tell my parents,” said Clara, shaking her head. “They’re really religious. They only tolerated me being with Alex at all because we were travelling, which technically isn’t ‘living together.’ Abortion would have been a step too far. But Alex’s family was really good to me.”
