“What are you doing?” Tommy was wearing a slim-fitting exercise outfit, with the sweat stains and damp hair to match. He looked much the same as he had in her office, but with a tighter haircut, and an even slimmer face. It had worked—something had worked. Alice thought about Tommy’s head on her shoulder in the taxicab, and whispering in his ear. Maybe that was the key—telling people exactly what you wanted, the actual truth, and then getting out of the way.
“Nothing,” Alice said. She straightened up. “We live here. You and me.”
“That’s right. See also: sky is blue, grass is green. Any other shocking revelations?”
“We live here all the time,” Alice said.
“Well, notall the time,” Tommy said, rolling his eyes. “Can you imagine? How embarrassing!” He was making a joke, but the joke made Alice feel ill. “Is this a weird way of telling me that you want to buy another fucking house? Zillow is not your friend, Alice. Just put the phone down in the middle of the night. One country house is plenty.” As Tommy talked, Alice could picture it—a white house behind a hedge, a gravel driveway. Someone else cutting the grass. “Plus my parents’. And they’re having the pool redone this year; the kids will love it.”
Alice had overheard sentences like these a thousand times. The way she had survived life at Belvedere was by channeling her envy intosuperiority. Two-thirds of the student body would have described themselves as middle class, a category that Alice did not think usually included access to privately chartered airplanes and houses on Caribbean islands, cottages on Long Island, or full-time help in the home. Leonard had told her, flat out, that he made more money than most of his friends but they had less money than most of her friends, because his money was their only pot, so to speak, and most of the kids at Belvedere were sitting on several generations’ worth of booty. New Yorkers were experts at flipping their everyday struggles (carrying heavy bags of groceries, taking the subway instead of driving a car) into value points, and Alice had years of experience making herself feel better because she didn’t have a family compound in Greenwich or a horse or a Range Rover. Now that she seemed to have all these things, in addition to a sweaty Tommy Joffey in their shared bedroom, Alice didn’t know quite what to do. This was how all the time travel movies she’d ever seen ended—in13 Going On 30, Jenna Rink came out of the house in a wedding dress. Bill and Ted passed their history class. Marty McFly got a Jeep. Then the camera slid backward, revealing the whole, perfect scene, and faded to black. InTime Brothers, in between rescues, Scott and Jeff went to their favorite pizzeria. No one was ever standing in their pajamas, trying to remember their life.
The bedroom door swung open, whacking Alice’s right side.
“Mommmmmmy!!!” A small body was attached to her shins. It felt like being attacked by a friendly octopus—there couldn’t be only two arms. Alice thought she might fall over, but she didn’t, bracing herself against the wall. The child was clamped on tight. Alice set one hand lightly on the top of its head. Was this the boy or the girl in the photo? Alice knelt down to get a better look.
“Hello there,” Alice said. It was a boy—not the boy she had interviewed at Belvedere, but close. His eyes were the same—Tommy’s, on a smaller face—and the thick, beautiful hair. Alice looked for herselfin the child’s face but could not find herself anywhere. It felt like complimenting someone on their resemblance to their child only to have them say,Well, you know, they’re adopted.“What’s your name, again? Firetruck, is it? Xylophone? Remind me, will you?”
The boy giggled. “Mommy, it’sme, it’sLeo.” He burrowed himself into the tiny shelf of Alice’s lap, knocking her gently to the ground. Despite having apparently given birth to two humans, Alice’s body felt tight and strong, stronger than it ever had before. She wondered how much money she’d spent on personal trainers, but decided it was better not to know.
“Oh, yes, that’s right,” Alice said. “Leo. And what about your sister? Umbrella? Zimbabwe?” She could feel the name rolling around in her head—Alice could almost see the letters swimming into place, like alphabet soup. These children were hers, no doubt about it. Hers, and Tommy’s. Alice was a mom.Mommy? Mama?Her own mother had eventually decided that she preferred being called by her first name, because there was only one real mother—Gaia, Mother Earth. Alice felt the skin around her neck go blotchy with panic.
Leo giggled again, his soft, damp hands now pressing against Alice’s cheeks. “Poopyface,” he said. The boy was so lovely to look at, like a little Italian putto, and Alice liked the way his hands felt on her skin. She put her own hands over his. Alice didn’t know if she could talk to Tommy, but she could talk to Leo. This was what she was good at—crouching low, feeling the warm breath of a small person. Leo was probably four. No—he was definitely four. Alice knew. It was the same feeling as waking up in a hotel room and not remembering where exactly you were, or where the bathroom was.
“No, no, it’s not Poopyface,” Alice said. Leo scrambled off her and ran down the hall, screaming “Poopyface” over and over again.
Tommy peeled off his shirt and then balled it up and tossed it into a hamper. The shorts and boxer briefs were next. It was nice to see himin an adult body again, but Alice looked away. It was too intimate, too naked. Standing nude in the lamplight, inelegantly bending over to pull off one’s underpants—there wasn’t anything more naked than that. Sex required closeness, and therefore a limited view. Here, from across the room, Alice could see everything. She shut her eyes and pretended to have something stuck in her eyelashes.
“Are you still going to go for a run?” Tommy asked. Alice heard him go back into the bathroom, and then the sound of the water in the shower.
“Yes,” Alice said. She was desperate to get out of the room, the apartment—she wanted to go back to Pomander. She wanted to call her dad. “Can we, uh, just talk about the plan for the day? I’m feeling a little, I don’t know, foggy.”
“You know, I thought I could avoid this problem, marrying a younger woman. I didn’t think the dementia was supposed to start quite this early.” His voice bounced off the tiled walls.
“Come on,” Alice said. Tommy’s birthday was only a week after hers. She would always remember it, so close to her own, hovering there on the calendar as if it were written in invisible ink that only she could see. Was this how they talked to each other? Alice felt like she was still in teenager mode, unable to say how she really felt about anything, capable of only sarcasm and feigned irritation. She looked at the date on her phone—it was October 13. The day after her fortieth birthday. The chute had spit her out at the same time she’d gone in, only now, she had managed to knock the car at least partially off the track. Alice wanted to call her dad, but she was afraid. She wanted to call Sam, but she was afraid. Mostly she wanted to do both those things in private, because she wasn’t sure how they were going to go, and Alice didn’t think she was a good enough actress to play off her reactions. If her father was fine, would she know it? If he was dead, would sheknow that? Alice didn’t know anything for sure, not yet. Tommy emerged from the shower, a towel around his waist.
“Okay, okay. Forty is the new thirty.” He put his hands up in defense and leaned away from her. “I’ve got Leo and Dorothy for now, you’ll hang with them after your run, then Sondra is coming at ten. You go visit your dad, then the party is at seven. Whatever else you want to do, up to you!” Tommy kissed her on the cheek. He was being cheerful because it was her birthday week. Somehow this was clearer to Alice than anything else.
“Dorothy,” Alice said. “Got it.” There was a window on the far side of the room, and Alice walked over to look out of it. Below her, Central Park stretched out like a carpet. The lake, a part of the park Alice had never paid much attention to because it seemed like it had been built for tourists, was right below. To their left, she could see one pointy tower. One tower out of two.
“The fucking San Remo,” Alice said. “Where are your parents?” She should have known the answer, of course, but Tommy rolled his eyes, continuing a different conversation.
“Oh, yeah, like they’d be helping with the kids before dawn. Or, you know, ever,” Tommy said. He was standing there, completely naked, carrying on a conversation. There were gray chest hairs, tight little coils like the springs that held in batteries. When he turned toward his closet, Alice noticed the slight droopiness of his butt, which felt unkind but also comforting, that she wasn’t the only human alive who was aging, that even Tommy Joffey—was her name Joffey now? No, no, she would never have done that—wasn’t immune. Tommy got dressed and closed the door behind him, and Alice rummaged through her drawers to find some clothes. Leonard had been right—there was a certain muscle memory in moving around the room. Alice knew which drawers to open, or at least some part of her did. She got dressedquickly and ducked out into the hallway, her phone clutched in her hand like a security blanket.
It wasn’t that Alice hadn’t wanted children. The timing had never been right. She’d had one abortion, with the first boyfriend she lived with, whom she had very much wanted to marry someday. He hadn’t wanted a baby, or at least that’s what he said until they’d broken up and he immediately had a baby with someone else. She had a list of names, though, and Dorothy had always been on it. For all of her twenties and thirties, Alice had believed that she would have children someday, until she didn’t anymore. It was like balancing a bowling ball in the middle of a seesaw. There were people who were so sure, one direction or the other, and then there were people like her, who had never really decided until one day they stopped paying attention and then got knocked sideways. One of the actors fromThe Odd Couplehad had a baby when he was seventy-nine years old. Men never had to decide a thing.
The apartment was enormous. The hall she’d stepped into was long and dark, lined on one side with bookshelves and on the other with framed family photographs. Leo’s loud voice echoed from another room, and there was also the sound of a British pig that Alice recognized—it was important, when meeting small children, to keep up to date on their parasocial relationships with cartoon characters. Alice walked slowly, her socked feet silent on the wooden floor. Most of the photos were of the children—Leo as a Ghostbuster and his sister, Dorothy, as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man; the two kids in the bathtub, surrounded by a mountain of bubbles—but at the center of the wall was a photo from the wedding. From Alice’s wedding, to Tommy Joffey. She took a step closer, so that her nose was nearly touching the glass of the frame. In the photograph, Alice was wearing a floor-length lace dress, white, with cap sleeves and a giant bow under the bodice, a human present. Her hair was doing something she’d never seen her hair do,cascading over one shoulder like a swimsuit model’s. Alice couldn’t quite identify the look on her face—it was slightly more demented than joyful, flush with endorphins or terror, she wasn’t sure. There were photos of Alice richly pregnant, clutching the bottom of her massive belly as if the whole thing would fall to the ground if she didn’t hold it up. Alice reached down to her midsection, where the skin was soft and squishy, like rising dough.
“Mama!” a high voice called out from the next room. Alice crossed the hall and poked her head into an open doorway. The room—pink, with a canopied bed—was three times bigger than Alice’s childhood bedroom on Pomander Walk. A small girl was sitting on the rug, sharing tea with a stuffed bear equal to her size, if not larger. Alice felt her body flood with a feeling that she couldn’t quite identify. She wanted to wrap her arms around the little girl, to scoop her up and smoosh their bodies against each other. She wanted to do to Dorothy what Leo had done to her, hug her so hard that they both fell over.
“Hi, Dorothy,” Alice said. “Can I join you?”
Dorothy nodded, solemn with the importance of her task, and poured Alice a cup of pretend tea. Alice scooted over so that she was in between the child and the bear. There was a thunderous noise, and Leo leaped into the room, crashing into Alice and hugging her from behind. Tommy followed after.
After her friends had started to get married and have children, Alice had thought about the by-products of those decisions: an apartment filled with toys, sharing a bed with the same person forever, having someone nearby who potentially understood how to properly file taxes, breastfeeding, what exactly a placenta was and why some people ate it, what happened to love over time, if people found their own children tedious, if people hated their spouses, if she would be good at any of it. At first, it all seemed theoretical, the way teenage girls sometimes planned their future weddings, knowing that everything in their liveswould be different when they actually got married but still doing it anyway, but the older Alice got, and the more of her friends actually went through with it, the more it shifted from a fun fantasy into a sad one. Marriage was clearly all about compromise, and parenthood so much about sacrifice, but like everything else that was difficult and unappealing, those conditions were much easier to stomach the sooner they were introduced.
“This tea is delicious, may I have some more?” Alice said. Dorothy nodded and took the cup back with her thick little fingers. “How old are you, you beautiful little person?”
“Poopyface is THREE!” Leo shouted, careening around the room until crashing headfirst into the gigantic stuffed bear. This made little Poopyface explode into tears. She stood up and screamed, her hands clenched into fists.
