TEN
Sasha
When Sasha was ten she had such an intense crush on Harrison Ford that sometimes she would lie in bed and cry with deep sorrow that they would never be together. She knew it was weird. He was a grown man and a famous actor and she was a child with a dawning awareness that little hairs were growing up and down her legs, and it all compounded into a tragedy so devastating that she could barely stand to watch him in movies when anyone else was in the room. Her brothers obviously noticed her mooning after him and taunted her mercilessly. Later in life, when she saw in some celebrity magazine at the nail salon that Harrison got an earring, she felt embarrassed all over again that she had been obsessed with someone so old.
Sasha had been falling in love with Cord before he told her about his childhood crush, but the revelation was probably what sealed the deal. They were lying in bed one night, slightly drunk, and she told him about Harrison.
“Did you ever feel that way as a kid?” she asked. “So intense and confused?”
“Yeah, totally. I was in love with Little Debbie,” he confessed.
“Who’s that?” Sasha asked, running a finger along his bare chest. “A neighbor?”
“No, the little girl with a hat on the box of snack cakes.”
Sasha sat up. “You were in love with the girl on the box of Swiss Rolls? Those little chocolate things that taste like wax?”
“I just thought she looked so nice. She had this wavy brown hair and a friendly smile . . .”
“Do you think maybe you were just really hungry?”
“Maybe,” Cord considered. “I really loved those oatmeal cookies with the cream in the middle.”
Sasha laughed and laughed. Together they made a list of cartoon mascots by fuckability. Sasha felt Tony the Tiger was the clear winner. He just exuded cis-male hotness with his big puffy chest and boundless enthusiasm. The Sun-Maid raisin lady was obviously also a babe, rosy-cheeked, wearing a peasant blouse and a bonnet. The Cheetos Cheetah would be a fun date, but they agreed he’d try to leave his sunglasses on during sex. The Jolly Green Giant was maybe even hotter than Tony the Tiger, but Sasha worried he would be a terrible boyfriend, spending all his time in the gym. He was ripped. “Oh, so you’re more into the Pillsbury Doughboy?” Cord asked. “More to love?”
“No, the Pillsbury Doughboy is too white. Not sexy!”
“Colonel Sanders?”
“Ugh, no! Also too white, plus the goatee!”
“The Quaker Oats guy?”
“Stop! All the human mascots are old men! Why do guys get the hot ones?”
“Like who?”
“Miss Chiquita?” Sasha countered.
“Smokeshow,” Cord agreed.
“Wendy?”
“No way.” Cord wrinkled his nose.
“Wait, so you loved Little Debbie but not Wendy? They’re the same thing.”
“Shut your lying mouth.” Cord shook her shoulder playfully. “Little Debbie is all kindness and cream-filled cakes. Wendy looks like Conan O’Brien with braids and smells like hamburger grease.” That settled, they turned off the lights and cuddled up, and as they fell asleep Cord whispered in her ear, “You’re grrrrrrrreat!” and Sasha knew he was the one.
Where Mullin was thunder and darkness, Cord was pure sunshine, always in a good mood, emotionally easy, a man of simple pleasures. He enjoyed so many things. When he took a first bite of food, whether it was a bacon sandwich or a seared scallop, he always paused and threw his head back in bliss as he chewed. “Oooh,” he’d moan appreciatively. “That’s nice. That’s just really nice.” When a server put a plate before him at a restaurant, he’d give a slight whimper that was nearly indecent, so full of lust and unselfconscious adulation. He rejoiced in the bounce of new sneakers, in the feel of sun on his face. He sang along to anything that he heard on the radio, even if he didn’t really know the words, even if it was crappy pop for teenagers. He was equally indiscriminate about movies, willing to sit through absolutely anything Sasha wanted, so together they watched every single movie with Catherine Keener, then everything directed by Nancy Meyers, and they both cried during Father of the Bride and had to rewind and watch the part again where Steve Martin plays basketball with his daughter.
“That’s the kind of dad I want to be,” Cord said, rubbing his wet cheeks with a blanket. “But probably tennis instead of basketball.”
“You’re the country club Steve Martin.”
“But not as funny.”
“But not as funny,” Sasha agreed sadly, and Cord pouted.
Sasha knew he would be a wonderful father. His niece and nephew worshipped him. Cord was goofy and spoke to them in funny accents, he convinced them the Easter Bunny was a close personal friend, he pretended to think the spring in a gag can of nuts was a real snake and screamed upon opening it at least twelve times in a row.
While they were in agreement that they wanted children, they had only ever talked about it in the vaguest of terms, without a time line or any sense of urgency, but in June Cord’s best friend, Tim, had a baby and Cord started getting broody. Sasha had only ever heard of the phenomenon in women, or maybe chickens, but there was no other word for it, really. Cord wanted babies. Walking down the street, Cord started checking out strollers the way some other men might ogle women or motorcycles, letting out a low whistle and turning to watch them roll away. “You know that one’s the new YOYO that folds up smaller than a suitcase,” he might remark. Or “That’s the UPPAbaby Vista. You can add a rumble seat for a second child underneath.” He dragged Sasha to Picnic in Cobble Hill so that he could buy Tim a baby present, spending a solid hour selecting tiny pajamas and a little rattle shaped like a taxicab. When they visited Tim at his apartment, he even followed Tim into the baby’s room to watch a diaper change, announcing that he might as well start learning how to do it.
Tim’s wife looked at Sasha wide-eyed, and she shook her head with amusement. “We’re not pregnant. He’s just excited.”
“About diapers?” she asked.
“Cord is a very enthusiastic person,” Sasha snickered in reply.
Sasha didn’t know what would happen to her business when she had a baby; she was a one-woman design shop without a human resources department, so she supposed she would just have to take a pause on projects and hope her clients would come back to her on the other side. She had one client, a Brooklyn-based company that made bed linens, that she had been with since their launch. She’d designed their logo, their website, their packaging, and their subway ads. Another client, a luxury hotel in Baltimore, had hired her to design everything from their restaurant menus and matchbooks to the eight-foot sign above the entrance. She had a craft beer brewery, an organic baby food meal-delivery service, a 3D-printing vendor, and an (admittedly weird) Chinese Swedish restaurant. She could get them all through their holiday campaigns and then, she hoped, take her maternity leave in the spring when things calmed down. It was terrifying to contemplate, but she didn’t see any other options.
“I just picture you as this badass mom,” Cord told her later that night. “Doing your job with a baby strapped to your chest.”
“And then teaching the baby how to use Photoshop?” Sasha asked.
“We’ll teach the baby to do both our jobs so we can cuddle all day,” Cord promised, snuggling his nose into her hair.
“You seem like you’re ready, huh?”
“I am. Are you?”
“I’m getting there.” Sasha nodded. Her friends were starting to have babies too. It no longer seemed crazy or irresponsible, and there was something incredibly cool about imagining a tiny human that was half Cord, half her. She could already picture him talking to the baby in weird voices, pretending the bathtub was a wild ocean, dancing around the living room with a child in his arms. He would pour all his natural silliness and joy into parenthood, and their home would be happy and full.
Sasha called her mom to talk it through. “Sasha, there’s never a perfect time to have a baby,” her mother said. “Your dad and I were flat broke when we had Nate, but it all worked out. You’re healthy, you’re in love, and you’re under forty. In my day they would classify anyone over thirty-five as a ‘geriatric mother’ and make you wear a shameful paper bracelet at the hospital. Get on the stick.”
They decided to start trying to get pregnant. Sasha had friends who had begun telling people as soon as they decided, saying, “We pulled the goalie,” and it always made Sasha laugh because what were they really saying except that they were about to have a lot of sex? So instead of informing the entire Stockton family that they were embarking on a bonefest, they just made a note of the start of her last period and had sex five days in a row two weeks later. It didn’t work the first time around, and Sasha was surprised at the disappointment she felt at the brown spot in her underwear, but when her period was a single day late the second month she ran out to the drugstore and bought four pregnancy tests.
“You can’t tell right away,” Cord said, squinting at the tiny print on the instructions.
“But I’m too antsy to wait!” Sasha peed on the stick anyway and there next to the control line was the ghostly pink of a second line.
“That’s not a line.” Cord shook his head.
“I think it is, it’s just very pale.”
“I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “Let’s wait and see if it gets darker.” They put the test on the bathroom counter and cooked dinner and returned to peek at it again an hour later.
“It’s still pale, but I think it’s there,” said Sasha.
“Oh, but look.” Cord read the instructions again. “It says the results are only valid for the first thirty minutes.”
“Argh, fine, we’ll do it again in the morning. It says your pee is less diluted in the mornings anyway.”
The next morning the ghostly line was still there, the day after that it was a bit darker, and by the time Sasha took the fourth pregnancy test it was solid magenta. She was pregnant.
If Cord had been a hen who was broody, Sasha suddenly felt like a hen who was nesting. Looking around the limestone, what she had previously seen as clutter now looked like proper hazards: the vintage oyster-and-pearl glass-topped coffee table, the midcentury tasseled Italian bar cart with its array of expensive poisons, the bone-china lamps with frizzled old wires snaking the floor. There were hundreds and hundreds of opportunities for cuts or bumps or electrocution, and Sasha felt like she might break out in hives just thinking about it.
“Cord, I think we should set up Georgiana’s room for the nursery,” she suggested over breakfast one morning. Cord was drinking coffee and eating a bowl of cereal—he had mixed three kinds together and was using what seemed to be a serving spoon to deliver the sugary mush to his mouth.
“Let’s use my old room.” He chewed. The milk looked gray.
“But your room is on the fourth floor and I think we want the baby on the third with us.”
“Won’t we just have the bassinet in our room for the first few months anyway? My mom always says we slept in a little basket on the floor of their room.”
Sasha tried to imagine Tilda putting the baby on the floor in a basket and then surrounding it with matching napkins and flowers. Tonight’s theme is Forty Winks! “Okay.” Sasha tried a different approach. “I also heard you can hire a consultant to come in and babyproof the apartment. They show you all the things that might be dangerous to a baby.”
“Oh my God,” Cord laughed. “We don’t need to pay someone to tell us that we live in a death trap. Let’s just not worry about this now. The kid won’t be able to get into trouble until he can crawl, so that’s a full year away.” Cord lifted the cereal bowl with both hands and drank the last of the syrupy milk, a small Cocoa Krispie clinging to his lip.
“A year?”
“At least. Let’s just enjoy being pregnant.”
Enjoy being pregnant. Men so often did enjoy their side of it. But Sasha let it go. She really was too tired to argue, the pregnancy already sapping all of her energy. She had once read that ants took two hundred short naps every day, and that seemed enormously appealing to her. She was just exhausted, and according to the internet she wasn’t even allowed a sugar-free Red Bull.
The following Wednesday Sasha rode her bike down to Vara’s loft for a Drink and Draw. Of course she could only participate in half the evening’s activities, but honestly, missing out on Vara’s wine was no great loss. She set up her easel next to her friend Trevor and listened as everyone gossiped: A classmate had started sleeping with a prominent interior designer and suddenly was selling paintings all around the Upper East Side. Another classmate had been named artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and everyone made a point to say how great it was while privately seething with jealousy. Sasha didn’t have much to add; she had been in her own world lately, but she was happy just to lose herself in the conversation.
When the nude model arrived a murmur of approval rippled through the room. The model was hugely pregnant, at least eight months if not nine. The other artists were thrilled—drawing a figure in such an extreme state was exciting—but Sasha felt herself studying her body in a different way. Instead of the perfect basketball she’d come to imagine, the woman’s belly was low and egg-shaped, her belly button poking out like a thimble. The veins in her breasts were visible, weaving blue and purple beneath her skin. As Sasha drew, she felt more awake than she had all week. Somehow seeing this naked stranger made her own pregnancy real.
“You’re so quiet,” Vara whispered, coming up behind her.
“I’m just drawing,” Sasha answered, using her thumb to smudge the pencil lines of the model’s hair.
“You’re not drinking,” Vara continued.
“Oh my God, Vara,” Sasha snorted.
“Do you think your tits will get that big? Probably not. But, ugh, maternity clothes are so gross. Are you going to be one of those annoying pregnant ladies who suddenly starts wearing polka dots? Promise me you won’t start dressing like some adult baby.”
“Vara, when I have a reason to discuss the sartorial choices of breeders I will do so. Now stop it,” Sasha said. Vara smiled smugly and left her alone.
Once Sasha was eight weeks along and had confirmed the pregnancy with a doctor who let her listen to the little hummingbird heart on the scanner, she called her mother to share the news.
“Oh, Sasha! This is so exciting! Tell me everything! How did it happen?”
“Mom! God, yuck! I’m not going to talk about that.”
“Lord, no! I didn’t mean literally. Sorry, don’t tell me how it happened. Just bravo! Bravo to you both! Are you nauseous? Are you sleeping?”
“I’m good, Mom, just tired. But really excited. How are you? How’s Dad?”
“Oh, well, we’re fine. Hold on, honey, I’m just going to run downstairs.” Sasha heard the muffled sound of her mother stomping down the carpeted steps and swooshing down the hall. A door creaked open and closed, followed by another creak and slam. Their dog barked anxiously. “Okay, I just didn’t want your father to hear me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the pantry.”
Sasha laughed. Her parents’ pantry was notoriously overflowing with jars of pickles and red sauce, so she must have been jammed up against the heaving shelves. “Why?”
“Your father is being very private about this, but he has been having some shortness of breath. He has that inhaler for his asthma, but it just isn’t helping.”
“Jesus, Mom! Is he okay?”
“The other night he scared me to death. He coughed for an hour and was just wheezing.”
“Okay, what day was this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, well, you know there was no reason to worry you. We already have the boys breathing down our necks here, so the last thing we need is to have you worry.”
“Of course I’m going to worry, Mom. Can you get him to the doctor?”
“I made him an appointment for tomorrow, I just have to get him to go.”
“Can I come along?”
“No need, sweetheart. Your father wouldn’t want us to make a big deal about it. He keeps saying he’s just out of shape. He gets winded starting the motor on the boat. You know how that thing only catches with a big yank. I’m always afraid he’s going to give one of us a black eye the way he rips at it,” she chuckled. “Okay, I’m going to get out of the pantry now. Don’t tell your dad I told you. And I’m so excited about your news, Sasha. I’m sorry to have changed the subject when this should have been a happy conversation all about you!”
“Oh, I know you’re happy for me, Mom. I can’t wait for you to come help me set up the nursery.”
“I’ll be there whenever you’re ready, Sasha.”
They said goodbye, and Sasha hung up and frowned at her phone. She suddenly felt so far away. In a fit of frustration, Sasha stalked into the sitting room and scooped up two dozen jewel cases of old CDs, dumping them into a bag. She opened the skinny drawer of a marble-topped side table and gathered up the assorted ballpoint pens, ancient Post-its, and paper clips and dropped them in as well. She moved through the room like a madwoman, tossing in old magazines, a dusty embroidered pillow, a remote control that paired with no discernable device, a ziplock baggie full of old batteries, and a small ship in a bottle that could have been worth a fortune but most likely was not. She didn’t care. Before anyone could catch her in the act, she stomped the bag down to the basement, let herself into the alley, and buried it in the neighbor’s trash can.
