Sisterland (49 page)

When the teacher arrived, toting little drums and bells, she had us introduce our children but not ourselves, after which we sang and danced for the next forty minutes. The class culminated with a conga line that snaked around the room as the adults shouted the lyrics to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” A few weeks later, when I convinced Jeremy to
come with me to a class so he could see how adorable Rosie looked while pounding a drum, I asked him afterward what he thought, and he said, “It was fine.” “You didn’t like it?” I said. “No, it was cute,” he said. “It was just kind of tedious.” Which made it clear, given that the class was a weekly high-water mark in entertainment for Rosie and me, that Jeremy could never have been a stay-at-home parent.

During that first class, as we moved around the room, reconfiguring ourselves, Hank and I exchanged general pleasantries of the sort I was also exchanging with the mothers—as Rosie reached for a bell, he’d say, “Almost got it!” and I’d say, “So close and yet so far,” and we’d chuckle warmly. It seemed to me there was a slight charge in the classroom, the surprise of the other mothers at Hank’s presence. After all, at a parent-child music class in Clayton, a man was rare enough and a black man was basically astonishing. And then there was the fact of his defined biceps and flat abdomen—I’d seen it when he’d lifted Amelia onto his shoulders and his shirt had risen—while most of the mothers, even the skinny ones, were still lumpily post-pregnant.

And then, while everyone sang “Goodbye to Rosie, we’ll see you next time,” I patted my daughter’s bottom and realized, touching wetness, that she’d had a blowout. The next thing I realized, after I’d quickly gathered up my diaper bag and carried her to the bathroom, was that I had no clean diapers with me.

I looked down at Rosie lying on the changing table totally naked, smiling impishly, and I considered pulling the dirty diaper out of the trash and putting her back in it, but the thought of rewrapping her in that warm mustard-colored sludge was just too disgusting. So I sat her up, guiding her arms into a clean onesie, snapping it over her chest, while the onesie’s legs hung behind her bottom like the tails of a tuxedo. I lifted her and opened the door of the bathroom, and in the hall, walking by, were Hank and Amelia.

“Sorry to bother you, Hank, but do you have a spare diaper?”

“Sure,” Hank said. “Threes okay?”

Rosie was still in size 2, but I said, “Perfect. I feel so dumb.”

“It happens to all of us.”

As he passed me the diaper, I thought of asking if he and Amelia wanted to go to the smoothie place where I was planning to get lunch, but it felt a little weird to issue this invitation to a man instead of another mom.

Then he said, “Hey, you guys want to come with us to the Bread Company? Amelia is very into their mac and cheese right now.”

“We’d love to,” I said.

The diaper alone
would have been enough to make me like Hank, but it was about ten minutes after we’d sat down with our food that I knew I could be true friends with him. First the name of Jeremy and Courtney’s department head, Leland Marcus, came up, and with no hesitation—and this was before either of our spouses had tenure—Hank said, “I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but the one I can’t stand is his wife.”

“I know!” I said. “She’s so rude.”

“I swear, at the potluck at the Vogts’ I saw her spit a bite of food on the floor. Intentionally, I mean. And we weren’t outside.”

“Before Jeremy and I got married, she basically told me that no woman can be a good worker and a good mother.”

Hank laughed. “Classic.”

After we’d moved on to talking about what solids Rosie was eating and how old Amelia had been when she’d learned to walk, a John Mayer song began playing over the speaker system, and Hank gestured toward the ceiling and said, “Can I just say that I knew from the start this guy was all wrong for Jessica Simpson? It was so obvious he was going to leave her heartbroken.” My surprise must have registered on my face, because Hank said, “You disagree?”

“I just can’t believe you know that Jessica Simpson and John Mayer dated.” I was pretty sure Jeremy didn’t know who either Jessica Simpson or John Mayer was.

“Courtney leaves copies of
Us Weekly
lying around the house,” Hank said. “What can I say? Resistance is futile.”

“Really, Courtney reads
Us Weekly
?”

“Are you kidding? She subscribes.”

“And do you open them up or just look at the covers?”

In a good-natured voice, Hank said, “Kate, that’s a very personal question.”

“Didn’t Courtney just win some major science prize?”

Hank grinned. “I know, right?”

I said, “So are you a full-time stay-at-home dad?”

“Funny you should ask. That’s a topic of debate in the Wheeling household. I used to be a high school art teacher, and after Amelia was born, we decided, okay, I’ll hang out with her during the day, and I’ll work on my painting during her naps.” He rolled his eyes. “Which has mostly resulted in me not setting foot in my studio from one month to the next, but I do know all the words to
Hop on Pop
.”

“ ‘Up pup’?” I said. “ ‘Pup is up’?”

Hank smiled. “The truth is that Courtney comes home at four, so I could go to my studio then, which is just in our attic, but at that point in the day, all I want to do is drink a beer and chill out.”

“I hear you.” Then I said, “Wait, Courtney comes home at four?”

“Am I getting Jeremy in trouble?”

“He comes home at five-fifteen, which isn’t terrible. But he’s pretty strict about not keeping different hours from nonacademics. He leaves the house every day at eight forty-five.”

“Well, there you go. Courtney leaves at seven.”

My motherly judgmentalness—different from but overlapping with other kinds of judgmentalness I’d harbored during my life—snapped on. Courtney had a five-minute commute but was away from Amelia for nine hours every weekday? Then I thought,
Don’t be like Xiaojian Marcus
. “Did you guys consider sending Amelia to day care?” I asked.

“We checked some out, and Courtney was okay with them, but I was the one who resisted. So Courtney said, ‘Then why don’t
you
stay home with her?’ She was half-kidding, but the more we talked about it, the more it actually made sense.”

“We sent Rosie to that place on Hanley for about a month,” I said.
“Then she got an eye infection and ended up in the hospital, and I quit my job after that. Not that the infection was the day care’s fault, but I just didn’t know I’d worry about her so much.”

Hank and I looked at each other, and he said, “You love them more than you ever imagined, right? And it’s terrifying.”

And so our
two families became friends, then good friends, and eventually best friends. The next week, following music class, Hank and Amelia and Rosie and I returned to the Bread Company, and as we were heading back to our cars after lunch—Amelia was going home to nap, and Rosie had already fallen asleep in her car seat—Hank said, “Hey, you guys should come for dinner this weekend.” Which we did, walking the half block from our house to theirs, and we sat in their backyard and they grilled; they made vegetarian shish kebabs, a bean salad, and a loaf of bread with black olives in it. For dessert, I’d baked brownies from a mix, which I hadn’t thought twice about beforehand but by the end of dinner had the impression the Wheelings wouldn’t have done. Bake brownies, sure. Just not from a mix.

We left at seven-thirty, before either of the girls could have a meltdown, and as we were leaving, Courtney called out, “Come back tomorrow morning, and I’ll dig up some of Amelia’s old clothes for Rosie.” This was what I would come to most appreciate about our friendship with the Wheelings—that our interactions had a frequency and logistical casualness I hadn’t experienced since college with anyone besides Vi. Because of how close the Wheelings lived to us and because our families were similarly structured, we didn’t have to plan in advance the way I’d learned you did in adulthood; I could avoid those multiday email exchanges with the wife in the other couple over which restaurant or whose house, kids or no kids, what time, what could we bring? Then I’d look for a sitter, whom we’d pay twelve dollars an hour, or, if our friends were coming to our house, I’d spend two days cleaning and grocery shopping and cooking, all the while questioning whether getting together with these people was more enjoyable than Jeremy and me just ordering takeout and watching
TV. When I expressed my doubts aloud, Jeremy would say, “Is this one of those situations where I’ll get in trouble for
not
disagreeing with you?”

But with Courtney and Hank, one family could call the other at five-fifteen and say, “Do you guys want to come here for pizza?” Or sometimes, that fall, the three of them would walk over after we’d eaten our separate dinners and I’d put Rosie to bed and the rest of us would watch
American Idol
. Soon Hank and the girls and I were meeting up nearly every weekday. We’d walk across Skinker Boulevard to Forest Park and push the strollers around the zoo, or just unfold a blanket above Art Hill and let the girls play in the grass; this was where Rosie took a step for the first time. At Thanksgiving, the Wheelings came to our house along with Vi and my father.

Meanwhile, Jeremy and Courtney started getting coffee in the afternoons, though apparently they only went to buy it together before returning to their separate offices. “You’re allowed to drink your coffee with her,” I said. “I won’t think you’re on a date.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s that neither of us has time.”

Before getting to know her, I’d been intimidated by Courtney—the night I’d met her, at the Marcuses’ long-ago department holiday party, I’d heard her explain her research using about seven words I didn’t know in just two sentences—and my intimidation didn’t disappear. But that first time we had dinner at their house, there was a moment when she and I had carried plates into the kitchen and we could see in the backyard that Jeremy and Hank were trying to get Rosie and Amelia to give each other five, and Courtney said, “Look at those daddies’ girls.” I felt then that she and I were sharing the double luckiness of not only having good husbands but knowing we had good husbands.

A few minutes later, when we were back on the deck eating brownies—the Wheelings were polite enough to pretend they were delicious as opposed to merely adequate—Courtney said, “Do you run, Kate? I’m looking for a running partner.”

“Not for a while.”

“But that means you
have
run in the past. What was your pace?”

“I don’t even remember. It wasn’t impressive.”

“I go to Forest Park at five Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, so if you change your mind—”

Jeremy laughed. “I don’t think Kate would get up at five if our house was on fire.”

“Thanks,” I said. To Courtney, I said, “How far do you go?”

“Around the park, which is what, six miles and change?” She wasn’t bragging; she said it so matter-of-factly that it was as if she didn’t realize it was worth bragging about. She added, “It can be a little sketchy down by Kingshighway, so that’s why I was thinking, safety in numbers.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, which was a lie that I wished were the truth. I was slightly surprised to hear Courtney refer to the sketchiness of the Central West End; the comment seemed racially fraught, or at least easily enough interpreted as such that I myself wouldn’t have made it in front of Hank.

The next morning, when I went back to their house to collect Amelia’s hand-me-downs, Courtney had three canvas bags from science conferences waiting by the front door. She said, “I promise there are no tank tops that say
Princess
in sparkly letters. Don’t you hate that shit? As if the kid is even literate.”

I saw that she’d separated the bags into shirts, pants, and dresses; I also saw that all the visible clothes were the same brand of organic Swedish cotton. “Is Amelia’s name in them?” I asked. “Or I can just write down what everything is so we remember to—”

Courtney waved a hand through the air, cutting me off. “It’s all yours to keep. We’re done.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. “My uterus is closed for business.”

When Jeremy and
I had walked home from the Wheelings’ after shish kebabs and brownies, I’d waited until we were two houses past theirs and said, “I really like them.”

Jeremy said, “Someone has a friend crush.”

“On him or her?”

He laughed. “Either way. They’re an attractive couple.”

“The whole interracial thing is interesting,” I said. “Don’t you think? I wonder how much they’re aware of it on a daily basis.”

“If you mean does Hank know he’s black and does Courtney know she’s white, I suspect the answer is yes.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I’m sure they get comments from time to time. I mean, we’re not living in Brooklyn. But they’ve been together since college.”

“Where’d they go?”

“Harvard.” Jeremy hadn’t said it in a particularly meaningful tone—his best friend from high school had gone to Harvard—but it was a reminder of some of the differences between us. “Hank paints, I think,” Jeremy said. “Has he mentioned that?”

“A little.” Then I said, “How about this? I promise not to fall in love with Hank if you promise not to fall in love with Courtney.”

We were one house away from ours, and I was pushing Rosie in the stroller; she had just gotten a second wind and was making high-pitched squeals. Jeremy was walking slightly behind me, and he patted my rear end. He said, “How could I ever fall in love with Courtney when I’m married to this?”

The night of Vi’s prediction, we watched TV until
twelve o’clock, at which point the world didn’t end and my sister announced that she was hungry. In the kitchen, she went for the leftover lo mein first, eating it from the carton, still cold. After she’d polished it off, she moved on to the eggplant, which she heated in the microwave. She tilted the plate toward me and said, “You really don’t want any?”

“I ate dinner about six hours ago.”