“Well, I guess so,” said Jess, “because at a certain point you’d have to.”
“No, I meant, Iwantedto tell you,” said Clara. They were walking through Egypt, Greece, and sub-Saharan Africa now. “But I think I was trying to figure it all out for myself first. I’mstilltrying to do that. And there’s never really an optimum time to spring that kind of news.”
“Because you knew I was going to freak out,” said Jess.
“Yeah.”
“And I did freak out, when Nick told me,” said Jess. “Of course I did. Because it’s always so much. Sometimes it just seems like motherhood has taken you over completely.” They were making their way down the stairs, where totem poles rose up to the glass ceiling. Ideas about the top of the totem pole were a cultural misunderstanding, Clara had learned somewhere along the line. It was the figures near the bottom that had a kind of supremacy, the necessary strength for a foundation. You could climb to the top of a totem pole, and where would you be? That much closer to the sky. But then what?
“Maybe it has,” Clara dared to admit, once they reached the main floor. “Taken me over, I mean. But is that such a bad thing? Because it’s really like I finally know what the point is, of my life, of everything. Nothing else I’ve ever done has seemed as meaningful as being this baby’s mother.” She wrapped her arms to hold Lucinda close. She was being provocative, but it was the truth. Even though so many women had worked so hard so that there could be other choices, Clara was choosing this one.
“Life is long,” said Jess. “Remember that? You’re the one who told me. A baby can’t be everything, not forever.”
“I never said anything about forever,” said Clara. “I’m thinking about right now, these few months ahead. For the first time in my life, I think I know what it means to be present. I’m here. I’m really here.”
“But see, that’s what we weren’t sure of,” said Jess as they arrived at the atrium, where the others were waiting.
Bella and Miles were squirming and wriggling, impatient, Adam on his phone again, and Nick all out of place. She’d left him all alone, Clara realized, and she wonderedhow she would feel if their roles were reversed. It had been a very long time since Nick hadn’t been where she needed him to be. She said to Jess, “I swear,” as everyone scrambled to their feet at the sight of them. She said to the rest of the group, “I’m sorry. I just had to get away from the dinosaurs.” Grabbing Nick’s hand, she squeezed it and repeated, “I’m sorry.” He squeezed it back. Thank goodness he squeezed it back. She might run away, and even if he couldn’t find her he’d wait for her forever. She’d never been so sure of anything, and that was why they worked.
Jess said, “I suspect lunch will probably cure all.”
Bella slipped in between Clara and Nick and nudged her. “Remember? The tarts?”
“I remember,” Clara said. She smiled at this funny little girl who had her mother’s face, reminding Clara of all the stories about her friend that she knew but would never tell.
HERE AND NOW
MONDAY, MAY9,2016
The Charlotte Nordstrom Institute for Folk and Fairy Tales’ Board of Directors was threatening a coup. Jess knew this sounded over-the-top, too much like her colleagues Nancy and Imelda, who had imagined the carpet was a conspiracy, but it was true. The Board of the institute where Jess had worked for nearly her entire career, where she had been expecting to succeed the executive director, Edith Morningside, when she retired in June, had decided to shift in a new direction. They wanted to hire somebody’s nephew, a young hotshot, Elliott Lubbock III, a man just barely out of school. But he had done a co-op program in information studies, spent a few seasons dabbling in fintech, and now he was looking for a new pursuit. The general feeling was that he had connections that could bring in a lot of money. The Board chair had paraded him through the office the week before, where he shook hands and was affable, as if it were an election. And maybe it was.
“Plus, he’s a man,” Barbara “Babs” Corningware, another Board member, pointed out. “Might be nice to add some diversity.” Everybody who worked for the Institute was a woman, except for Todd in IT.
And because of the composition of the Board—seven men and three women, every one of them white—nobody seemed to find Babs’s perspective unreasonable; or if anybody did, they kept their mouth shut. As did Jess, because she served on the Board as a non-voting member, and if she spoke up, it would be seen as speaking on her own behalf, instead of in the Institute’s best interest.
But it was both. Jess had been instrumental in growing the Institute, in modernizing its practices and raising its profile, making it relevant, creating vital community connections. And it was a fact that Jess could have been making more money someplace else, but the value of the work she was doing and its extraordinary nature had always seemed entirely worth the difference.
This made it particularly galling now that the years she’d invested in the Institute, along with her value and experience, were being wholly dismissed.
“It’s infuriating,” said Miranda, a librarian who’d been working there almost as long as Jess. “He wouldn’t know the difference between a folk tale and a Little Golden Book.” They were having their standing Monday lunch date at the restaurant down the street, a place specializing in healthy salads and vegan rice bowls. “It’s sexism, it’s nepotism. It’s all the isms.”
“He’s such a worm,” said Nahlah, who was fervently on Jess’s side. Nahlah, Jess’s neighbour, had joined the Institute part-time three years ago when Jess hired her to work in fundraising. She had worked in philanthropy before her kids were born, and she wanted to get back into it now that they were in school. This was not nepotism necessarily, because Nahlah’s work was excellent, though Jess supposed it depended on your perspective.
They talked about what was now her impossible quandary. In order to fight for the job she wanted, Jess would have to backtrack on so many of the gains she’d made—she’d need to work late, give up her Wednesday half-days, and the one day a week she worked from home. The Board would be expecting a skills upgrade. Edith herself, who was actually on Jess’s side, had tried to pitch the situation as not a big deal—“You’ve just got to prove yourself,” she said, shrugging. Like Elliott Lubbock III, Edith was unmarried and had no children, and so she too had had less to balance in the whole work/life conundrum. Unlike Elliott Lubbock III, however, Edith did not claim that sleep was unnecessary and wasn’t forever rhapsodizing about “24/7 pingability.” Elliott Lubbock III loved a buzzword.
“I really do want to hear about the party, though,” said Nahlah. The celebration for Lucinda’s first birthday had been on Saturday. Nahlah and Miranda both knew Jess had advised Clara that a big party wasn’t necessary. Clara didn’t need the extra stress, and Lucinda was too young to understand any of it. First-birthday parties were really for the parents, even though a better celebration might have been to put the kid to bed early and indulge in a bottle of wine. But Clara wasn’t drinking, and nobody ever put Lucinda to bed. Any time they tried, she spent the whole night screaming.
“We love having her with us,” Clara insisted when Jess would suggest that a firm bedtime might help establish a routine, and Jess might have called bullshit if she’d heard that from any other mother. With Clara, however, she believed it. There was something in her delivery, her ease in the moment as she held her child in her arms. So languid, cool, and certain—sometimes Jess could see traces of thelong-gone Clara in the woman her friend had become, that radiant girl who’d saved her one night a thousand years ago.
Jess’s advice to Clara about first-birthday parties was also self-serving. The last thing Jess wanted to do on a Saturday afternoon was attend a small child’s birthday party. Her own children would only be bored and stir up trouble when there was no one their age to play with. But because accepting advice was against Clara’s religion, the party would proceed.
Adam buttoned up the clean shirt he’d just ironed. “You don’t need to get all fancy,” Jess had told him. A T-shirt would suffice at Nick and Clara’s, and Clara would likely be wearing no clothes at all—she’d spent most of the last year feeding Lucinda, flashing her giant breasts unabashedly, magnificent and horrifying at once.
But Adam dressed up anyway, because he wasn’t great with advice either, and pleats were in his programming. He’d taken Miles to hockey that morning while Jess and Bella did the gymnastics run, one of Jess’s favourite parts of the week because she got to spend fifty minutes in a nearby café with a giant mug of coffee reading the new Lauren Groff, which was sprawling and resplendent.
Jess couldn’t recall if Clara had attended Bella’s first birthday, which they’d held at a restaurant since their old place was too small for the occasion. It had been so long ago. And even if she could remember, it didn’t matter, because missing Lucinda’s party was not an option. The party was a big deal; they’d sent invitations in the mail.
Nick greeted them at the door, urging them inside, reminding them to keep their shoes on because everyone was out back. Everything was just getting started.
