I shudder. “That’s spooky. Palm trees in Ohio.” Jack is asleep, but Carrie knows better than to test her luck by sitting down. She continues to sway. It’s tempting to sneak out of the room and crawl into bed, but talking to Carrie is an addictive pleasure. Given the chance, I’ll stay here until dawn.
“Well, Nina’s obsessed with them. She says Maxine’s parents have traveled. Maxine’s parents know about cheese made from animals other than cows. Maxine’s parents treat them like adults.”
“Big deal. It’s 2016. Any redneck can invest in some spreadable goat cheese.”
When Carrie resists laughing, I tell myself it’s because she doesn’t want to startle the baby.
“My daughter thinks I hate her best friend,” she says.
“Do you?”
Carrie presses her lips into a line. “No. But I see through her.”
“You see through her,” I repeat.
“Sure. She’s one of those kids who wants to feel important and admired, so she’s found a younger girl willing to look up to her, mythologize her, whatever. She’s, you know, poetic. She has song lyrics scribbled all over her backpack. She’s chatty and charming.”
“Some girls can’t help being chatty and charming. You never could.”
Rolling her eyes, she says, “I wasn’t like that. I think you’re remembering yourself.”
“No . . . Carrie, I worshipped you.”
“Why?” She sounds disgusted.
“I don’t know. All the usual reasons. Because you were gorgeous and talented. And when boys took you to the drive-in, you stuck to your usual order of three coneys with extra onions.”
Carrie wrinkles her nose. “Those are terrible reasons.”
I shrug.
Jack makes a sleepy, satisfied chuffing sound. Carrie brushes her lips against his forehead. It’s so easy for her to love him. She knows what a baby is, and how briefly he will inhabit this hot-water-bottle form before becoming a person. To me, Jack’s personhood is still notional. When I think about his future, more than excitement or curiosity, I feel hope. A desperate kind of hope that makes me wish I were religious so I could pray for his safety.
“I don’t think you worshipped me,” Carrie says. “I think that’s a convenient way to remember things. As if I had some kind of power over you.”
“All right. I’m sorry.”
“I’m just saying, the admiration was mutual. I think we actually had a remarkably healthy friendship. I’m still waiting to feel as comfortable with another person as I did with you when we were kids.”
Gabe has a theory that no one has more than five friends. You may think you have twenty, but you’re kidding yourself. No more than five individuals are genuinely pleased to attend your birthday party. No more than five will visit you in the hospital, let you borrow their family’s house upstate, or remember the results of your last visit to the allergist.
By Gabe’s definition, Carrie and I are not friends. But I do think about her every day. Often I have trouble convincing myself we are not the same person, living out alternate versions of one life.
Did I worship her?
Not exactly. As a kid, I loved her and loathed her with a kind of recklessness typically reserved for loving and loathing oneself.
We’ve been taking turns letting our guards down. The moment one of us veers toward sincerity, the other’s hackles go up. To tell Carrie what she wants to hear now would mean betraying Gabe. And however it looks, that’s not what I’m trying to do.
I stay silent too long. Resentment radiates from Carrie.
“I’m glad you were comfortable,” I say.
“You weren’t?”
“I was. Mostly.”
“Was there something else I should have done? To make things easier for you?”
I’m too tired for this. “I’m not a comfortable person, like, in general?”
She exhales through her nose. “Right.”
I offer to take the baby back. Slowly, Carrie uses her whole body to lower Jack into my arms. The deadweight of him is so satisfying. He’s the most substantial thing I’ve ever made.
I stand up, yawning. Carrie’s looking at me like I owe her something—and it’s true, I do, but it’s almost beside the point. She and I both understand why I drove from New York to Deerling—five hundred miles with a baby in the back seat, both of us crying more often than not—and turned up on her doorstep utterly unannounced.
Carrie Hart is the best mother I know.
* * *
Gabe is a model father. When he’s home, he tends to our son with a patience that is not willed or performed but innate. A patience of which he seems completely unaware. On our best Saturdays—when Jack has slept an extra hour or when one of Gabe’s colleagues has had bagels delivered to our apartment door—I watch him whisper sweetness into our son’s ear, and I’m charmed, contented. The sight of them together is sexy in a way that has nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the smug, animal satisfaction of having made a healthy baby with a good man.
If you ask Gabe’s parents—and if they were a few drinks in and feeling honest—they would specify that he’s a little too good. Overachieving, or even overcompensating for something (me). Mr. and Mrs. Feldman, along with all of our friends in New York—who ask us about parenthood as if it’s an exotic destination where they haven’t yet vacationed—note how often Gabe goes beyond the minimum dad duties. He carries Jack out of the room for diaper changes without passive-aggressively presenting the baby for me to sniff. He holds Jack face-out, so that the baby is seated in the crook of his right elbow, for hours at a time. He talks to the baby in a voice that is half Raffi, half Grover, even though the baby is too young to laugh and can only gaze at his dad with solemn appreciation.
Meanwhile, I keep a mental list of all the things Gabe doesn’t do.
Gabe has never
• trimmed the baby’s fingernails,
• checked the baby’s temperature,
• wiped away the cheese that forms in the rarely exposed creases of the baby’s neck,
• put socks on the baby’s feet,
• refilled the plastic dispenser with a fresh stack of wipes,
• scheduled the baby’s next checkup, or
• turned the baby onto his front for ten supervised minutes of “tummy time”—a ritual that is both ineffably crucial to the baby’s development and, judging by the baby’s screams, absolute torture.