Her phone rings: Austin.
Mae says, “Are you going to answer that?”
“No,” says Natalie.
“Want me to answer?”
“No,” says Natalie.
Mae gives her a funny look. “Everything okay?”
“Of course!” She makes her voice as chipper as can be. If Natalie gets into it now with Austin, she will never get this dinner on the table. She may start screaming and never stop. She’ll call Austin later, or tomorrow, when she can scream in peace.
“Nat?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know all of this?”
Natalie, the cheese grater in hand, looks at her little sister. “Know all of what?”
“All ofthis—” Mae’s gesture includes the whole kitchen. “Like, what a lemon zester even is.”
“Doesn’t everyone know what a lemon zester is?”
“Well, sure, okay, maybe that’s self-explanatory. But all the rest of it, all the stuff you do online, the food you make, the kids, all that stuff. How’d you go from where I am to where you are, and how’d you get there so fast?”
With great care and kindness, Natalie doesn’t say,I was never where you are.By the time she was Mae’s age she already had a husband, a farm, two kids. “How’d I become a real grown-up, you mean?”
“Exactly! Yes, that. How’d you become a real grown-up?”
“Well. I guess it happened little bit by little bit, but also sort of quickly. I learned as I went. It was sort of the snowball effect, you know; once we started a family, once we had the farm, there we were, and we just kept going. Rolling down the hill.”
“But did you know, ahead of time, that you’d end up here?”
Natalie thinks about this. “No,” she says. “Not really. I mean, I hoped, I guess, but I didn’tknowany of it ahead of time.”
She thinks some more, letting the thoughts really pile up on each other while she rubs the lemon against the grater, making sure not to hit the pith. There are so many things you don’t know about motherhood until you become a mother. You don’t know about the physicality of all of it. First, there is labor, of course—shocking, violent in its way, rife with fluids and tearing and other savage acts. Then comes the nursing, the sharing of one’s body that is in many ways more intimate than sex. Your body, on demand, for the purposes of keeping a tiny human alive. Eventually the nursing ends, yes, but still you have not reclaimed your body as your own. And perhaps you never will. Children use your body as a jungle gym. They put their sticky fingers on your face, your arms, in your hair, your mouth. They follow you to the bathroom, sometimes into the bathroom. They cannot getenough of you! They curl their bodies, shrimplike, into yours. They want to sleep near you, on you, practically in you.
And when they’ve loosened their grip on you, there’s your partner, patiently waiting his turn—because his body is lonely, and it longs for connection with yours, which is not lonely, which may never be lonely again. The world feels free to comment on your body. The world has earned this right.You’ve lost the baby weight!You haven’t lost the baby weight!Things move and jiggle and loosen and tighten; hormones surge and abate; hair sheds then grows thickly back—wavy sections crop up where the hair used to lie flat and smooth. It’s past your shoulders now, and the next day it’s down your back. Your skirt is too long, it’s too short, it’s indecent, it’s puritanical. You’re not doing enough, wait, slow down, you’re doing too much, you’re going to hurt someone, probably the very children you have been doing all of these things for.
But there’s more! These children expect that you can provide answers to all of their questions, even though, when nobody is looking, you must subtly google: How many people are in the world? Why is there fog? How does your heart work? Can a worm think? Do I see the same red you’re seeing?
She cannot say all of this to her sister; she can say none of this, when it comes down to it, because she doesn’t know how to encapsulate it. So she says, “Let me show you a better way to chop that onion.”
Mae’s mouth twists. She doesn’t want to be shown a better way! “What’s wrong with this way?” she asks.
“Less efficient. And see how much you’re wasting?”
Mae looks down and says, “Not really.”
Natalie takes the knife out of Mae’s hands, slides the cutting board over in front of her, and demonstrates how to cut with the grain of the onion.
“Wow,” says Mae, looking at Natalie with such wonder that Natalie feels a surge of pride. “I never knew that.” She reclaims the knife, takes up the second onion, and goes to work on it. She’s clumsy at first—and to be fair, the knivesdoneed to be sharpened—but soon she gets the hang of it.
