“No thanks. The mother would kill me.”
I smile. “Speaking of Carrie, what time does she get home?”
Nina glances at the clock on the microwave. “Depends. Sometimes six, sometimes later.”
“Like, how late?”
She squeezes her shoulders, an exaggerated shrug. “Eight? Nine?”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Yeah, like if someone’s come from far away.”
Carrie owns her own tattoo studio in Mansfield, the closest town with a main drag and a movie theater. She inherited the shop from her mentor, a woman who ran it for thirty years until she died of lung cancer.
Carrie is famous for her tattoos. The Instagram account to which she posts pictures of her finished pieces has over two hundred thousand followers. Sometimes the tattoos get republished on Facebook or on Buzzfeed listicles of Fifty Tattoos You Wish You Had. I always recognize Carrie’s work when I see it. She’s known for inking—on strangers’ biceps, shoulders, or ribcages—particular characters of her own invention: a wild-eyed fox, a somber Hitchcockian gentleman. One character of whom the internet is especially fond resembles me. She has my asymmetrical eyebrows, my round nostrils and pursed lips.
The explanation is simple: there were entire summers when all Carrie and I did was draw each other.
With one hand pinning Jack to my breast, I use the other to wrestle my phone from my back pocket. I want to text Carrie to ask if there’s something I can pick up for dinner. The screen displays our most recent exchange. It’s from two and a half months ago—a message I barely remember sending, followed by a response I’m sure I never read.
April 2, 2016, 2:34 a.m.
Me: I’m in labor.
Carrie: You’ve got this! I love you.
Carrie and I have not regularly texted each other since the earliest years of our twenties, before phones were smart or punishing enough to preserve the conversation in one continuous archive, time-stamped and searchable. In the throes of active labor, hours I spent cursing my own mother’s name—after Jaclyn’s doctor extracted me via emergency C-section, she waited a mere eighteen months before squeezing out my brother, claiming the traditional method was relaxing by comparison—I, apparently, felt Carrie’s absence. Did I assume her number had stayed the same, as mine had, or did I imagine I was shooting a plea out into the void?
Texting her again will force her to review the exchange, to remember my silence. What happened was I stopped checking my notifications at about six centimeters. And later, after Gabe sent around a postpartum shot of me with Jack—I looked gaunt, delirious—there were so many messages, all of them seemingly meant for someone else. Someone who could see straight.
Still, Carrie’s text hadn’t been compulsory. It had been generous. The longer I stare at it, the more I worry her lukewarm reception of me and Jack on her front porch had less to do with ancient history than with this message, isolated and suspended at the top of the screen when it could have been long-buried in baby pictures, my frantic questions, and Carrie’s calm answers.
I drop the phone on the table.
“Do you guys eat dinner together?” I ask Nina.
“Yeah. Mom brings something home.”
“That’s so nice.”
Nina looks skeptical. “What’s nice about it?”
“I don’t know. When Carrie and I were your age, we never ate with our parents except on, like, federal holidays. Or Sundays.”
Nina considers this. I wonder how much she understands about my history with her mother. “My mom would never let me skip dinner. She’s super uptight.”
Before I can check myself, I’m agreeing. Carrie Hart is a lover of rules and rituals. An author of pro-con lists. Probably it’s unfair to classify a woman who leaves her child alone until eight or nine in the evening as uptight—in New York, the term would be negligent, or perhaps criminal—but from personal experience I know Carrie’s deep-seated caution can feel oppressive to a kid.
Nina eyes me critically. My agreement was too automatic—and who am I, anyway, to insult her mother? She takes a breath, briefly withholding her complaints about Carrie, and then, for whatever reason—maybe I strike her as passively receptive, trapped in this chair with this baby at my breast—she releases them.
“I just can’t with her right now. She wants to know everything. Every piece of homework I have, every grade I get, all my teachers’ names. If a friend invites me to do something, Mom wants to talk to their parents first—even if it’s, like, bowling. I mean, bowling. What does she think is going to happen at Leonard’s Lanes?”
“Well . . .”
Some of the more sinister events of my girlhood transpired at Leonard’s Lanes, but before I can phrase a delicate objection, Nina rolls her eyes. “Everyone knows Leonard’s a perv. We get our shoes and ask for lane twenty-two, far, far away from that creep.”
“Good thinking.”
It fascinates me, Nina’s ability to have a conversation. Will Jack ever be so sentient?
“And even if something bad happens someday, what’s texting me every ten minutes going to do? Like, I’ll write back ‘I’m fine’ . . . ‘I’m fine’ . . . until suddenly I’m like, ‘Being murdered, actually. Send help!’”
Jack has fallen asleep, lightly mouthing me. I try to avoid exposing myself as I yank up the triangular panel of my nursing bra. I mostly fail, and Nina’s eyes widen. I refrain from saying something inappropriate about the life stages of the nipple. Mine, once bottle-cap sized, now resemble coasters.
“And what’s really frustrating,” she says, recovering from the shock, “is how she assumes Maxine is, like, bad news.”
“Why does she think that?”
“I don’t know. Because Maxine’s parents are rich? Because when we’re over there, her mom’s not breathing down our necks the whole time? Because she has a nose ring?”
I had a nose ring. I obtained it during a school field trip to a long-defunct reformatory in Mansfield, now a popular wedding venue, a ready-made prison film set, and a place to take a hundred teenagers. The tour was not intended to educate so much as reward the sophomore class for selling more magazine subscriptions during our annual fundraiser than the freshmen, juniors, and seniors. Because Carrie’s parents had not allowed her to go door-to-door, neither of us had sold a single subscription, and I convinced her we were not obligated to endure the prize. We sneaked away from our group and walked to the town’s commercial strip, equal parts sleepy and seedy. She squeezed my hand while a man with a tarantula tattooed on his neck pierced a hole in my left nostril. It lasted half a year, until I got a job at Arby’s and my manager made me remove the ring. The piercing healed, leaving a scar that looks like a permanent pimple.