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Authors: Alison Pace

Through Thick and Thin (2 page)

BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
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And yes, by the way, Meredith does in fact know that it isn’t technically called a Froggy, but something else that sounds like that. She’s also pretty sure that she should never call it, out loud, a Froggy. And she definitely should not say it in front of this other one, because it will, as probably so many things do, reveal her to be childless, urban, career-driven, and possibly even a spinster. All things, except for maybe the part about being a spinster, that Meredith has long maintained as not necessarily bad things. All things perhaps long maintained in Ridgewood, New Jersey, as not necessarily good. She makes a mental note to steal a closer look at the prized stroller, an informative glance. Because, and it’s not just people in Ridgewood who think this, it’s Meredith herself who thinks this, too: it’s one thing to be without your own child, it’s quite another to not be head over heels in love with and to not know every last thing about your new (still fairly new) niece, Ivy. The offspring of your sister, who isn’t just your sister, isn’t just a run-of-the-mill sibling, but your best friend in the world, the person with whom you shared everything. Until you didn’t.
For the last few steps of her approach, Meredith takes quick stock of this other one standing next to Stephanie. Both she and Stephanie are in sneakers, too, but they’re both in the kinds that are expressly not for running; Velcro is involved. They’re both wearing identical ski jackets, two-toned shells in black and royal blue, hitting mid-thigh, the kind that always puts Meredith in mind of snowboarders or men who live on the Upper West Side. They’re both wearing hats. This other one’s hair is all tucked up into her hat, no wisps or strands escape to frame her angular face, which is quite red from the cold. Stephanie’s hair hangs down, out of her hat. Stephanie’s hair, so recently thick and shoulder-length and dark brown, exactly the same as Meredith’s, is now thick and shoulder-length and dark brown with blonde and red highlights. Meredith thinks the highlights were a mistake, but has not said so. Meredith wonders if this other person has highlights, too.
“Meres. Hi, love,” Stephanie says stepping out from behind the stroller. They reach out to each other and hug, holding on for a moment. Meredith looks down over Stephanie’s shoulder into the froggieboo and smiles at the tiny slice of Ivy, just two tiny closed eyes peeking out.
“Hi,” she says, once she and Stephanie have separated, turning her attention, extending her hand, “I’m Meredith.”
“Hi, Meredith,” comes the reply, very happily, very perkily. “So great to meet you. I’m Caryn.”
“Caryn’s in my New Mommy Group and lives just a few doors down,” Stephanie explains.
“And since it’s not even ten minutes, we power-walked to get you!” Caryn volunteers helpfully, and Meredith thinks,
Annoying.
“Stephanie’s told me all about you. That’s so cool that you’re the restaurant critic for
The NY
and you know, I used to read your reviews first thing every week. Every Monday,
New York
would arrive and
The NY
would arrive and I used to go right to
The NY,
right away, to read your reviews. Loved them. Always used to go to the places you wrote about.”
“Thanks,” Meredith says cautiously, thinking to herself,
Why used to?
Caryn continues, “I mean, we still get the magazines but it’s just so much harder to get into the city for dinner these days.”
“I can imagine,” Meredith says and follows Caryn’s loving gaze down to her own little blanketed bundle in her own important stroller. “This is Ashley,” Caryn says joyously and Meredith smiles in the direction of the other baby, a purple-hatted one, who is not Ivy, whose eyes are wide open, and who is peering up into the brisk air looking mildly horrified.
“Hi, Ashley,” Meredith says, and then turns slightly and motions to Ivy in her stroller, and mouths to Stephanie, “Is she asleep?”
“She is. Finally,” Stephanie says, without any sound coming out. Ivy has not been big on sleep lately. To be fair, Ivy is not completely against sleep during the day, she has in fact dabbled in it, but she has not at all warmed up to sleeping at night. Meredith thinks that if she had a baby who didn’t ever sleep at night, she’d probably drive to the train station, she doesn’t think she’d “power-walk” there. “You can say hi to her at home, she’ll no doubt be up when we get back,” Stephanie offers.
“God,” Caryn says next, her eyes darting quickly from Meredith to Stephanie and back again, perhaps more for effect than anything else, “you two look
so much alike.
” And Meredith thinks that the
God
, it really does come out sounding like
Gawd
. “It’s like you’re twins!” she exclaims.
“We’re only eighteen months apart,” Stephanie answers proudly. Stephanie had taken, throughout their adult lives, to informing people of this fact, happily, sweetly, even when they hadn’t inquired. It was only recently that Meredith had started to hear this statement as something of a declaration of victory, as if Stephanie was pointing out that she had accomplished so much more, had acquired so much more—the husband, the house,
the baby
—and yet she’d only had a relatively short head start.
“Oh, that’s so cool,” exclaims Caryn, as she and Stephanie both pull back on their strollers and maneuver their froggieboos through graceful one hundred eighty degree turns. Their movements are almost perfectly in tandem; they look to Meredith so much like a practiced skill, like a water ballet, only on land and with strollers. Once everyone is turned and facing away from the station, the three (or, wait, make that five) head slowly, so as not to jostle, in the direction of Linwood Avenue. Meredith is in the middle, thinking she’d rather be on the outside of Stephanie. Stephanie takes one hand from the handle of her froggieboo and slips it through Meredith’s arm.
After a moment, Caryn leans forward, almost across Meredith, and says, “See, Stephanie. You guys, you two, so close in age and everything and so close. There’s an argument right there for having your second baby right away.” Meredith raises a subtle eyebrow at Stephanie. Perhaps the eyebrow is too subtle though as Stephanie, as far as Meredith can tell, seems to have missed it altogether. Once Stephanie and Aubrey’s white brick house is in view, Meredith remembers and focuses her gaze on Ivy’s triumphantly green stroller.
It’s called a
Bugaboo.
A
Bugaboo Frog
to be exact. She was close enough.
two
lasagna
Once they’re standing on the sidewalk in front of Stephanie’s house, just in front of the gate, Caryn thrusts her arm out to shake Meredith’s hand again.
“Meredith,” she says, “it was a pleasure to meet you.”
Meredith takes the offered, gloved hand, shakes it, and says it was a pleasure for her, too. It was not a pleasure. It was a ten-minute walk in the cold during which Caryn talked mostly to Stephanie.
Meredith tries, with a certain though not complete degree of success, not to take Caryn personally, not to see her very existence as an affront. But it’s not like there wasn’t an occasion or two during the walk when Meredith didn’t consider how much nicer it would have been if Caryn weren’t there.
“Stephanie says you come out to visit all the time,” Caryn says, and Meredith nods in agreement, says yes, even though she doesn’t. Visit all the time. She should, or at least she should visit more than she does.
“So, I’ll look forward to seeing you again,” Caryn adds on.
“Yes,” Meredith says again, and maybe the way she says it, maybe it’s a little blankly.
And with that, Caryn turns to Stephanie, tilts her head to the left and then to the right. “See you Monday for lunch after music class?” she sings more than says.
“See you then,” Stephanie says, smiling broadly, happily, and the way she says it, it’s not even a little bit like she secretly hates her. Stephanie has always had a much greater capacity for love than Meredith has. They have both always thought so. Even when the term “a greater capacity for love” was used euphemistically, in college, when Stephanie was going through her recreationally slutty phase, they still believed it.
“Here, Meres,” Stephanie says once they’ve walked through the gate and she’s backed the stroller flush against the stoop and climbed up the few steps, “Just grab that end, and help me get this up the stairs and inside?” Before Meredith has even made a move for the stroller, Ivy, sensing an imminent cosmic disturbance, wakes up and starts to cry. Meredith looks to Stephanie, unsure of what to do next, amazed, as she has been before, at how Ivy manages to put her entire being, her heart and soul, into her crying.
“It’s okay,” Stephanie says, to both of them, Meredith thinks. And then, as she grabs the back of the stroller, Ivy’s crying ceases, just like that. Meredith, again, is amazed; even though peace is so fleeting for babies, so fragile, and so tenuous, so is despair. Which is nice, she thinks; it almost makes up for the peace being so fragile in the first place.
Together, Meredith and Stephanie maneuver the stroller—or let’s call it the
Bugaboo
now that we know not only its importance, but also its name—up the side steps and into the small laundry room that leads through to the bright and airy country French-inspired kitchen. The air smells like Bounce, and like something else, too. Air maybe, the air you can’t ever smell in the city because there’s always too much else. Everything here is open. Beyond the kitchen, through an archway, is the living room—family room rather—and it all looks so effortlessly perfect. This house, where Stephanie and Aubrey and Ivy have only recently arrived, already feels so lived in, stretched out in, but not cluttered. Organized and neat but not sterile or stifling. Stephanie’s rooms have always been nice rooms, inviting rooms, the rooms you might see in the background of a J. Crew catalog: natural and fresh, clean with a preppy flair. Meredith is so often reminded of a J. Crew catalog when she is at Stephanie’s, because of things like the white-painted hooks where she is presently hanging their jackets, and because of Aubrey. She’s always thought of Stephanie’s husband, Aubrey—and she means this, really, in only the complimentary way—as being from the J. Crew catalog of husbands. If only, she has thought on occasion, there actually was such a thing.
“Okay,” Stephanie says authoritatively as she unsnaps Ivy’s down onesie, the one that Meredith has admired from afar. On colder days in New York she has thought the world would be nicer if she had her own down onesie to swaddle herself within. “Someone is going to watch her
Baby Mozart
in her bouncy seat!”
As Meredith watches the swift transfer of Ivy, through the kitchen and into her bouncy seat in the family room beyond it, she almost says,
Are you sure?
But she catches herself, and is glad she did, because she thinks it wouldn’t have come out the way she means, which is more along the lines of,
Is there something else that I’m supposed to do?
more,
Am I supposed to be better at this, to want to play with Ivy more before she is relegated to the baby bouncy seat?
Meredith opts for saying nothing and follows Stephanie’s lead through the kitchen and into the family room and watches as Ivy is once again snapped, secured into the bouncy seat. Two deliriously chubby arms stretch into the air toward Stephanie.
“Da Da!” Ivy says.
Stephanie looks annoyed, just for a flash, before saying, “Yes, Da Da.”
“Da Da Da Da Da Da! Da Da Da Da!”
Stephanie picks up the remote and aims it at the flat screen TV mounted on the wall. She talks to Meredith without facing her as she scrolls through the DVD menu options on the screen. “I’m sure you want to play with her and all, but I think the
Baby Mozart
is good for right now. I think she’s wound up and the
Baby Mozart
works wonders at chilling her out.”
The lava lamp shapes and soothing colors of the opening scenes of the
Baby Mozart
DVD fill the screen and Ivy’s vision, and she is instantly mesmerized, becoming almost as globular as the images on the screen.
Meredith and Stephanie, from where they have finally sat on the couch, both sigh exaggeratedly, loudly, in unison. Ivy turns to look at them, her eyes momentarily wide, perhaps perplexed, and just as quickly returns her complete and utter focus to her
Baby Mozart.
As she stares at the screen, she opens her mouth and keeps it that way.
Meredith, from her reclining position on Stephanie’s couch, is suddenly very aware of how her body feels, the way she sometimes is whenever she isn’t busy. It happens sometimes when she comes here, or even when she’s home alone, whenever it is that she sits down, relaxes, stops for a minute. She notices how strange it feels, so foreign, it’s almost like it hurts. She wonders if staying home, as Stephanie does now, if being a mom, not going to work anymore, feels anything like this? Or is it the exact opposite? Is it in fact so much busier, busier than she ever could have imagined, in her most frenetic dreams? Everyone stares at the screen.
“Thank God for
Baby Mozart
,” Stephanie says.
“It’s like a baby tranquilizer,” Meredith marvels.
Stephanie adds, “It’s a whole series,
Baby Einstein
, there’s a ton of them, did you know that?”
Meredith shakes her head,
No, I didn’t.
“Right, no, I mean why would you?” Stephanie says quickly, “But really, thank God for them, for all of them.” Stephanie pauses for a moment, marveling at the screen, before adding in a slightly different voice, a higher tone than the one she usually speaks in, “And thank God for the blonde, very skinny, not freaked-out-at-all mom who pops up at the end of each DVD and talks about how she developed the whole
Baby Einstein
series. The one who doesn’t make you feel like a tremendous underachiever just because you can’t imagine finding the time for a shower that lasts longer than forty-five seconds, let alone find the time to start an educational media empire.”
BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
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