Hot Little Hands (23 page)

Staying in was unbearable, so for a while going out was the only option that worked. It was all—the bars, the openings, the shows, the house parties, warehouse parties, rooftop parties, stoop parties—research for her next essay.
What can I write about my generation?
she wondered.
The Y generation, the entrepreneurial generation, the trophy generation, the Obama generation, the 9/11 generation, the queer, the fun, the public, the digital, the boomerang generation.
From what she saw on her many nightly adventures, it seemed more fun to be someone living in this generation than someone standing apart from it, trying to analyze and write about it.

When she needed the analyzing to stop, there was sometimes alcohol but always Hank. There at the end of the night or beginning of the day to slip into her bed and fuck her until sleep. It was pornier and more banal than she would have liked. The power dynamic was always the same—he was in charge and she was in his thrall—and though sometimes she liked to challenge this way of doing things (“Yeah, suck that dick,” he'd say. “Which dick?” Amelia would ask, looking up with faux confusion. She'd point at it. “You mean this one? Right here?”), she was usually just glad for the complete distraction and oblivion that came with that kind of sex.

All of that worked for a while, until a year after she'd signed her book contract, when Amelia had turned around and noticed that a lot of her friends were actually progressing with their lives. Things were changing, in a way that seemed shocking. Gabby had graduated film school, and she was getting funding to make short films. Dana had met a guy she could viably be with long-term, and had actually fallen in love with him. Everyone they'd gone to school with was busy becoming what they had dreamed of becoming, what they'd trained to become. They were struggling and worried about the economy, and they had too many roommates and loads of debt, but at least they were moving forward.

Her sisters, too, were moving ahead in their careers, chatting excitedly at Saturday brunch about interviews and promotions and press conferences, while Amelia curled up on the beanbag and nibbled at her bagel, hoping nobody would ask her that dreadful question to which she never had a proper answer:
How's the book coming?

“It's not a book,” she always wanted to snap at people when they asked. “It's just thirty pages and a chapter outline. Your drafts folder is more of a book than my book is a book.”

She thought about returning to teaching, to save some money and pay back her advance. She thought about telling her agent and editor the truth, that she couldn't do it, that, for reasons that were opaque to her and everyone else, this thing that was difficult but doable for so many was actually impossible for her. She thought about moving to Argentina and changing her name, like a German war criminal. It seemed like there could be a wig involved in that somehow. And then, one afternoon this past August, just hours before the start of Hurricane Irene, when she had finished stockpiling canned goods and was waiting for her best friend, Seth, to come over and spend the weekend, she had flicked through her Netflix queue and watched
Blue Valentine.
And by the time Seth arrived, she knew what she had to do.

“Uh, that's not the message that movie's trying to convey,” Seth said, coming in with a paper bag of groceries in his arms.

“I'm ready,” Amelia said. “I know it. It's what I'm s'posed to do next.”

Seth, having been a bartender for most of his adult life, had a shrug-and-let-live attitude about even the biggest decisions. So his only moment of true consternation seemed to come when Amelia sat him down in front of a paused TV screen, with a bloated and balding Ryan Gosling on it, and told him that he should be the father.

“Think about it,” she'd said. “You're always saying you want a family someday. You're also always saying that you never meet anyone you like and you don't want to just screw around. We could have a baby!” She was kneeling on the couch beside him, gesticulating wildly. She felt like a politician. A preacher! A twenty-two-year-old woman whose iPeriod app said she was ovulating that very weekend and she better get to it!

“We love each other,” she said. “We're always going to be in each other's lives. You could have weekends. I could take vacations. I trust your diet choices. I know how hygienic you are. You're super hot and I have pretty nice cheekbones under here somewhere. Just please.” She fell onto him, her head on his chest, his heart beating against her temple. “Please go halfsies in a baby with me.”

Ryan Gosling was still frozen on the TV. A small child by his side. His hand pointing at something offscreen. His character had never regretted having that baby, Amelia thought. There may have been a lot of things he wished were different, but that wasn't one of them.

Outside, rain hit the fire escape and the wind whipped off the water and troubled the tree next to her window. She was glad she had brought her plants in before the storm hit. She was so busy thinking about this that when Seth first said okay, she didn't really hear him.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said.

“What?” She sat up.

“Okay.”

“Really?” She grabbed his shoulders. She was wild-eyed with joy. “Really really really?”

“Yes,” he said. “Let's go halfsies. All the way.”

“Holy shit,” Akiko said now. All three of the other girls sat staring at her, with no intention of moving, even though the line outside had grown, and the waitress had already delivered their change. “So you did it the natural way.”

“Well, as natural as it can be, with a gay guy. I took off my clothes and stood in the bedroom, in my underwear, trying to dance sexy to the
Grease 2
soundtrack. Then Seth did this freaked-out little yell. It was pouring outside but he ran down the street and bought a bottle of Beefeater, some tonic, and two forties. He drank a quarter of the gin on the stairs on his way back up.”

“And that was enough?” Dana asked.

“No. Then he made me shove all my hair up in a beanie. He changed the music to
FutureSex/LoveSounds.
And remember that old Marky Mark Calvin Klein poster I had up in my dorm room, freshman year? We got that out and stuck it on the wall above my bed for us both to concentrate on. Then we dimmed the light and I tried not to make a single sound to distract him from the task at hand. And the guy was a trouper. He was grossed out. But he trouped. Like, three times.”

“Did he stay over?”

“Yeah, on the couch. Then the next morning, I made us Froot Loops with chocolate milk and all he said was, ‘That was so wrong. But I'm glad we did it.' ”

“And what about you?” Gabby asked as they all stood up to go. “Are you glad?”

“Totally,” Amelia said. “I'm the happiest I've been in ages.”

If Amelia was worried she might not fit in with her friends anymore, she didn't find a new group or instant community at the prenatal yoga class she started attending at Yogaga on Manhattan Avenue. While the woman behind the desk smiled at her nicely enough, Amelia sensed the other students looking at her with judgment. She was two months' pregnant now, and not showing at all, and she was probably the youngest person in the room by ten years.

The yoga itself didn't feel right, either. They moved from cat-cow into a slow sun salutation into warriors one and two. There was no down dog because it made a lot of pregnant women nauseous, and there was no plank pose or chaturanga because people's bellies would get in the way. The instructor told them the classes would help them breathe through the pain of childbirth, but Amelia couldn't see how that could be true when there was no pain in the class to breathe through. She didn't see how the practice was teaching anyone kindness or compassion, either, when everyone basically ignored her.

In the changing room after class, she listened to the other women chatting about their ob-gyns and midwives, and the pros and cons of getting a doula. It was clear from their conversations that after they got changed, they were heading either back to work or back to other, already-born children. Amelia had neither of those things to return to, and the most she could do was learn the other women's names and say hi and bye to them upon arrival or on her way out. None of them bothered to learn hers.

It was after a midday yoga class one Wednesday that Amelia came outside and saw her sister Jane waiting on the curb, drinking coconut water from a can through a straw.

“What are you doing here?” Amelia asked. Jane was a deputy press secretary at the mayor's office and usually worked through lunch, and often dinner, too.

“Mom told me you came here. I thought we could talk. Have you had lunch yet?”

“No.”

“It's on me.”

“Really? Sweet.”

“Well, actually, it's on Mom.”

“Oh.”

“Wherever you want.”

Amelia took her to Peter Pan bakery, where she got a jelly donut with vanilla cream. Jane got a cup of coffee.

“So,” Jane said when they'd sat down. “Let's be honest. I never really liked your blog. I couldn't see what the big deal was. I can't even say that I planned to read your book.” She reached back with both hands and tightened her ponytail. She was all business. It was clear why the family had chosen her as its emissary. Not only was she closest in age to Amelia, she was also a professional communicator. She maintained eye contact and an earnest facial expression as she said, “But now—now I've changed my mind. I think it's a mistake to have this baby. I think you should get a termination and finish your manuscript. Seriously.”

Amelia stopped licking the jelly off her fingers. “You never liked my blog?”

“Well—” Jane looked down at her cup until her eyes were obscured by lashes. She was the only one of the girls who'd inherited their mom's long eyelashes. “I guess we were all kind of annoyed by your references to eighties movies and obsession with nineties pop culture. You weren't even alive when most of that stuff was happening, or you were too young to know about it, anyway. The only way you know about
Footloose
or the Bangles or
Punky Brewster
and
Sassy
magazine is from us. It just seemed kind of posey and fake.”

Amelia lowered her donut hand to the counter. “ ‘We' were all annoyed? Were the four of you sitting around talking shit about me?”

“No, but—”

“There are other places to find out about the nineties, you know,” Amelia said. “The Internet for one. And second”—she looked up at the ceiling—“the Internet.”

“I know,” Jane said. “I've changed my mind now. I like it. I want to read your book. I was probably just jealous. Who doesn't want to quit their job and write all day and publish a book? I mean, except you.”

“I used to want that,” Amelia said.

“You still do.” Jane sat back in her chair. “You're just scared, paralyzed. That's why you did the baby thing.”

“No, I want the baby. It's weird. I actually feel happy for the first time in ages.”

“That's just the bonding hormones talking.”

“Oh, thank you,
New York Times Magazine.
”

“I'm just saying, you don't
really
want it.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Mom said you don't.”

“Mom doesn't know.”

“Mom's a therapist.”

“Mom's not my therapist.”

“But Mom's your mom.”

“That's true,” Amelia said. “She's your mom, too.”

“I know.”

The girls sat in silence for a second.

“Have you ever noticed that even when she's talking on the phone, she's liking photos on Instagram?”

“I did notice that!” Amelia said. “She's not just liking them, she's leaving comments. Once she left a comment for me while I was on the phone with her. I confronted her about it, and she tried to deny it.”

“She's so clueless.”

“I know. How do her clients take her seriously?”

The girls shook their heads, and then Jane checked her phone. “I have to go,” she said. “I have two meetings back-to-back, and then a date.”

“Ooh. With who?”

“Some guy.” She shrugged. “Off OkCupid.”

“What's he like?”

“Cute, sporty, ethical investment adviser. Could be good. What are you gonna do now?”

“I have to go home and fill out my yoga journal.”

“That's it?”

“It's important to fill it out every day.”

There were baby clothes to buy, and car seat manuals to read, and decisions to be made about the birth, but it really didn't amount to anything like a full-time job. Amelia understood now why maternity leave didn't start until the weeks just before a baby arrived. She got into the habit of taking the subway—the G to the E to the 6—uptown to have lunch with her mother, sitting in the waiting room reading books about how to attachment-parent without ruining everyone else's brunch until her mom had a break between clients. But when Amelia started to show at fifteen weeks, her mom put an end to this, claiming that nobody would want to see a psychotherapist whose smart, talented Manhattan-born-and-bred daughter had decided to put her career on hold at twenty-two and have a baby with a gay man who wasn't her boyfriend.

Seth hated being called a man. He was ten years older than Amelia, but he desperately wanted to be called a boy, and he even more desperately wanted to date boys. He came along for her ultrasound at eighteen weeks, and complained the whole way up First Avenue.

“He was really smart and it seemed so obvious that we would be great together. And I was just about to ask him out, when this little twink, this annoying bear-hunting little twinkie rat wandered in, and they left together immediately. He didn't even say goodbye.”