Rich and Pretty (25 page)

Rob worms through the crowd toward her. Lulu has vanished. The recessional will not continue. Lauren puts her bouquet of green roses on a seat, takes Rob by the hand. “Let's get a drink,” she says, loudly, to be heard over the chatter.

The day is cool, but the garden is so crowded that even the outside air feels warm. Food appears, and drinks. Dan and Sarah disappear to have their photograph taken on the front steps. Huck and Lulu disappear, too, then reappear. Huck tells stories in his booming voice, drowning out even the string quintet.

The musicians pack it in and leave. The DJ arrives. There are more appetizers, then more drinks, and finally the servers come through, collecting empty glasses and encouraging everyone to go inside, upstairs, to dinner, a buffet laid in the living room.

Lauren takes a plate—salmon, red potatoes, asparagus—and she and Rob sit on the steps, eating, watching the sky grow darker. It is night. They take their plates inside, deposit them back near the buffet. A girl in a black polo shirt whisks them away.

There are speeches and toasts, back in the garden. The chairs are gone, the lanterns are lit. The photographer moves through the crowd. He pauses before them, and Rob drapes an arm around her shoulder, pulls her nearer, and they smile. Huck makes a speech about the first time he held Sarah, and how a parent never stops holding his child. It's a good speech, but that's what he does for a living.

There are cupcakes filled with strawberry jam. They drink more whiskey. Lulu sings a song, then another, and there is applause, raucous, excited. She beams. The DJ begins to play music. The kids dance. Some of the older guests dance. Most of them go inside, to drink, tell stories, listen to Huck. She and Rob dance, then sit, and watch the dancing, watch the faces, and then, a couple of hours later, it is over.

S
arah's hunch is wrong.
It's a boy. Called Henry, for her dad, and then Andrew, for Dan's. He's small, a surprise given how big she got. The labor, which she's been privately terrified of for weeks, is simple. There is pain, yes, and it's a pain that is beyond any definition of pain she's previously accepted or understood, but it's brief, and in the end, there's the baby, and the pain diffuses, floats away like a cloud, and there's a dull, general atmosphere of fatigue, a warmth at the hips, an ache in the back, but there's also him, furious mouth pulling at her nipple, leaving her a little bit ecstatic, and even more spent. It's so animal it's almost like incest. She sleeps, and the baby is taken away, and then he is returned to her, and Dan is there, and she pulls on a gown, ties it up, her nipples sore and leaky against the thin cotton. When she is decent, Lulu comes, fragrant with perfume, then Huck, then Andrew and Ruth. Everyone wants to hold and kiss Henry, so they do, in turn, then they leave, and she sleeps and nurses and drinks cup after cup of iced water. A day later, Dan pushes her and Henry in the state-
mandated wheelchair to the curb, and they wrangle with the six-point harness on the as-yet-unfamiliar car seat, then drive home, very slowly.

She had steadfastly declined, those months, the opportunity to be showered with gifts, as is the custom. Lulu was horrified.

“This is just what people do,” she'd said.

“I just made everyone come and watch me get married. I'm not going to make them celebrate me again so soon.”

And here's the thing: Pregnancy gives you authority. No one wants to anger you, and if they do, you can display that anger without fear of seeming irrational. Pregnancy makes every emotion into a force of nature, something to be respected, honored, even. There was no shower: no white cotton onesies, strung on a line, no party games, no baby bottles filled with prosecco.

So, détente: an afternoon meet and greet, at her own apartment, not her parents' house, so Hank can nap in his own bed, or anyway, the little upholstered box in which he sleeps. Just a few snacks, most ordered in from the same service that brings the groceries: a plate of baby carrots and celery sticks with a bowl of garlicky hummus at its center, an arrangement of suspiciously perfect-looking strawberries and orange arcs of cantaloupe. She's put on a pot of coffee.

Meredith is first to arrive. A baby blue gift bag in hand, visage of a stuffed, soft monkey just visible between the twine handles. Meredith kisses her on one cheek, then the other, barely brushing up against her body like she's afraid of hurting her.
I just pushed seven pounds of arms and legs out of my vagina,
Sarah feels like telling her.
I can take anything.

“You look beautiful,” Meredith says.

“So glad you came,” Sarah says.

“I can't wait to meet the little man!” She grins. “Should I take my shoes off?”

Sarah shakes her head, guides Meredith into the apartment. The baby is snoozing happily, noisily, in the seat. His snore is surprisingly loud.

Meredith considers the baby. He's so small, but so much bigger than he'd been only weeks ago. She pantomimes her excitement, lest she wake him, clasped hands, open mouth, a gasp. Mouths:
He's gorgeous!
The exclamation mark is implicit. She perches on the edge of the sofa, looks up at Sarah. “Tell me everything,” she says.

“Everything is good.” Sarah sits. The air-conditioning whirs to life. “I mean, you know.”

“I don't, but I can imagine.” Still whispering. “Just look at that face!” Meredith seems almost overcome.

“Thank you.” It has occurred to Sarah since giving birth that it might be easier to accept compliments relating to her offspring had she adopted. Thanking someone who praises his beauty seems to be tacitly endorsing that she and Dan are themselves beautiful and somehow responsible for this. She just says thank you but doesn't entirely mean it. Henry, young as he is, is an entity independent of her. “How are you?”

“Oh, you know.” Meredith waves this question away.

Sarah does know: She knows that her matchmaking has been successful, and since the wedding Meredith and Jamie have been seeing each other constantly. She'll marry him, Sarah's sure of it. Meredith will ask Sarah to be her matron of honor. The couple will probably be very happy.

“You look good,” Sarah says. She's not sure what else to say. She's not interested in talking about the baby: Almost every conversation ends up being about the baby, and they're not interesting. She's been hungry, starving, actually, for a real conversation, one about a book, about someone's experience at work, a bitter complaint about a relationship, plans for a vacation—anything. But now, confronted with Meredith and the opportunity to have such a conversation, she can't think what to say. She needs Lauren. Profane, honest Lauren. They will have a real conversation.

The buzzer rings once more, and she realizes that of course she won't have to make conversation today, after all—when playing hostess, you never get to speak to anyone in any satisfying detail. They're not there to talk to her anyway; they're there to coo, to give presents, to pay respects.

It's Fiona, who's taken the elevator up with Lulu and Lulu's friend Sharon, Auntie Sharon, a silver-haired, soft-spoken woman, a photographer of great renown, one of Lulu's closer friends. Sharon is carrying a big tote bag—Lulu has no doubt prevailed upon her for some photographs of the new mother, or, more likely, one of herself and grandson. Sarah's eye falls first though, on Fiona, the swollen tautness of her belly. As etiquette decrees, a warm hug for Sharon, whom she's not seen since the wedding, then a quick hello to her mother, then an embrace, the first she means, with Fiona, so tall and expansive, pulling her nearer to her body, its leaking nipples.

“You didn't tell me,” she says. “Congratulations.”

Fiona brushes this aside. “It's your party,” she says. “But yes, now you see.”

“Playdates! We'll have playdates.” Sarah finds this genuinely exciting. She closes the door.

The right gift eluded Lauren.
Her initial thought had been a blanket. Then she had a drink, one night, with Jill, poor Jill, eager for some female companionship. Jill had e-mailed, Jill had called, Jill had kept the nanny on late one Wednesday evening and Jill had met her at an annoying Cuban-cum-French place that had always driven Lauren crazy but Jill chose, and Jill paid, so she went. She drank rosé, listened to stories about Jill's nanny, who seemed to be the only connection to reality in Jill's life. Jill's nanny was a painter, and her boyfriend was a photographer whom Jill described, more than once, as sexy, which was an intriguing admission. Lauren used the opportunity to do some focus grouping.

“Whatever you do, don't get her a blanket,” the first thing Jill said, upon being asked the best baby gift, without knowing that's just what Lauren had planned on.

She didn't protest, didn't counter that it was Missoni. Jill knew, Jill must be heeded. So, no blanket. Lauren spent a few days in the stacks at various bookstores, putting together a list of the least-boring children's board books, the ones with the best pictures, the ones with the least-sexist stories, but then she remembered that she worked in books, and such a gift would seem like something plucked from the free table at work. The big-ticket items were a possibility—a stroller, a crib, a high chair—but there was nothing special in those, the presents a wealthy aunt would send.

“A Tiffany rattle?” she tried.

“Very WASP,” Jill said. “Perfectly good taste, perfectly useless.”

Uselessness was the point, but it did have the feeling of anonymity; a silver rattle is what your husband's employer's human resources department would send by way of congratulations.

Lauren assumes the doorman at Sarah's building knows her, but he doesn't. He looks at her, looks at the box in her hands, understands, and says, “Burton?” The doorman rings the apartment without asking her name, waves her along.

The package is unwieldy, but not heavy. She's settled on some ridiculous clothes, the sort no reasonable mother would buy for her own child: a tiny, cashmere cardigan; a gingham button-down shirt with faux mother-of-pearl buttons; a pair of velvety corduroy pants, bright green; a very small fedora; an honest-to-God sailor suit, with navy blue shorts, crisp white smock, and neckerchief printed with tiny anchors and cartoon whales, all meant to be worn when he's a much bigger boy—she's even accounted for season and his relative age, buying the sailor's suit in size 12 months, so Henry can wear it at some point next summer. She's also bought a photo album, or a blank book anyway, bound in green leather, and plans a lecture about how no one gets actual printed photographs anymore, but there's something about flipping through the pages of an album that scrolling around on a telephone cannot replicate.

Sarah answers the door. She looks very different, at first, and it's because Lauren's mental image of Sarah is Sarah on her wedding day. Sarah looks, now, nothing like that. Her hair looks thinner, somehow, or flatter, which is odd, given the day's humidity. Summertime Sarah's hair is usually so voluminous. There's a hardness, too, to her face—she's lost weight, that's what it is.
There's that residual glow, of pregnancy, which has mellowed into the satisfaction of the parent. Lauren wasn't sure what she expected—dark circles under the eyes, maybe, a general harried air—but she knows that Henry's a decent sleeper, actually, eats his fill like clockwork, then dozes and mews in his little sleeper, attached to their bed. It makes a certain kind of sense that Sarah would have a perfect baby; it's of a piece with the general expectation, in her life, of perfection. She looks good. She looks like her younger self, and it's a look that seems better, more beautiful, now than it did then.

“Hi!” As she kisses Sarah, Lauren spies the small crowd in the apartment. She wills herself into party mode.

“You're here.” Sarah pulls her into the apartment, closes the door.

It is cold inside, almost like a refrigerator. The apartment smells, as it always does, of nothing at all. It's like a hotel, she's always thought, Sarah and Dan's apartment, anonymous, incongruous, well ordered and maintained, like a model home.

“Is he awake?” She's seen the baby already, of course, but only the once, at the hospital, Sarah sleepy and crazed-looking, Dan sweaty and pleased. Newborns are never all that cute unless you have a genetic stake; Henry looked like a red alien, or how she imagined a turtle might look, without its shell. Lauren oohed over him, left them with some flowers, then, the next day, had some groceries delivered to their apartment, including many ready-made dinners you needed only heat in the microwave. She's wanted to give the new family their space; this has been her gift to them. She thinks she knows what new parenthood entails: sleepless stupor, casual nudity, marital bickering, forgetfulness, anxiety about in
oculations and insurance. A new parent needs time to process this, doesn't need to spend her days making chitchat with gawkers.

“He's dozing, but he'll be up soon.” Sarah leads her into the living room, where Meredith, Amina, and two older women she doesn't recognize are stabbing baby carrots into a bowl and having a conversation in an exaggerated whisper speak that's frankly every bit as loud as normal conversations. Lulu and Fiona, who is clearly pregnant herself, her long, elegant body somehow made longer and more elegant by the rise of her stomach, are just offstage, in the kitchen, where Lulu is doing nothing to keep her voice down.

The baby is in his seat, amid all this general hubbub, a blank expression on his face, lips set in a perfect little pucker, his cheeks moving, almost imperceptibly, as he snores. The hair on his skull looks almost drawn on, like the lines of a pencil. He's sweet; babies are designed to seem sweet.

“You know everyone,” Sarah says, her tone carrying a clue. “You remember my aunt Sharon? And my colleague Carol?”

“Of course! How are you?” Lauren offers a hand to both the women, unsure which is Sharon and which is Carol. It doesn't matter. She hasn't seen Amina or Meredith since the brunch, the Sunday after the wedding, an understated, hungover occasion. She and Rob sat with Sarah and Dan and the four of them ate quiche and pastries and mostly ignored the rest of the guests. The three of them exchange half hugs and half kisses, as is the custom. Their trip together—bathing suits and bangles, sunscreen and that pristine water—seems like something that happened to someone else.

“Can you believe this kid? I'm dying to wake him up,” Meredith says. “I can't wait to get my hands on him.”

Sarah disappears into the kitchen.

“You better not,” Amina says. “My sister says the one rule is never wake a sleeping baby.”

“How are you supposed to resist, though?” Meredith stares longingly at the baby.