SHE WOKE UP FROM THE FEW HOURS’ SLEEP SHE’D GOTTEN to feelings of bliss, followed closely by feelings of remorse. She really had let herself go. She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry. She stayed in her bedroom as long as she could, until hunger forced her to emerge, around noon, to find something to eat. Patsy watched her, suspiciously, but didn’t ask any questions. Pru wondered if it had even registered that she’d spent the night out of the apartment, somewhere, with a someone.
John called that afternoon, just to tell her that he was thinking about her. His voice was warm and close, immediately erasing Pru’s feelings of remorse. Patsy had Fiona’s little boy, Sean, over for a play date, so Fiona and Noah could get ready for their annual holiday party. At the moment, Annali and Sean were engaged in a particularly rambunctious game of wrestling on the furniture, so Pru moved into the bedroom and shut the door.
“What are you doing tonight?” he said.
“Fiona and Noah’s Christmas party. They decided to go ahead and have it, now that the streets are getting cleared. It’ll be a bunch of NPR people, and moms. My plan is to wander around feeling awkward and ill-informed.”
“Lucky NPR people, and moms,” he said. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too,” she said. Her toes curled.
“Can we see each other later?”
A thrill went through her. Plans for later. She loved plans for later. “I might could do,” she said.
“Good. Call me when you get home. Don’t meet anybody at the party.”
THAT EVENING SHE WORE THE BROWN FLORAL MARC Jacobs dress, with her knee-high lug-soled Frankenstein boots, and trudged through snow to the town house where Fiona and Noah lived. She’d met Fiona when they were both new to D.C. It seemed it was about two minutes later that Fiona had married Noah, quit her job, and started having babies.
She found Fiona in the kitchen, mixing up sangria. She wore a simple aqua halter top and jeans and she looked fabulous. Fiona had that touch—she could slap a picture she’d torn from a magazine on the living-room wall, and it looked like something from Metropolitan Home. Pru stood with her for a while, listening to the stay-at-home-mom lingo. It was like being in a foreign country.
“Seven hundred dollars for a Bugaboo!” Fiona was exclaiming. “It better freakin’ nurse the kid at the same time.”
“I love my Emmalunga.”
“I have an Inglesina.”
“I just use the Björn. That’s how I dropped all the baby weight.”
These were not, Pru realized, the names of Australian tennis stars of the 1970s, but baby transport devices. Nobody mentioned a Peg Perego. Evidently it was no longer the Rolls-Royce of strollers.
Ferberizing, they said. “I am always, always, always Ferberizing that baby!” “Oh, Gahd, if I have to Ferberize Lucrezia one more time, I’ll kill myself,” cried a sweet-faced woman with frizzy hair.
“Where do you take them to have them Ferberized?” Pru said to the mom who wore a Nirvana T-shirt and a white belt and looked like she might have a sense of humor. “Is it a drive-through, like Speedy Muffler?”
“We didn’t have to Ferberize Ezra. Ezra never cried!” exclaimed a statuesque brunette in an orange pashmina. “Never!”
“Jonah never stops crying,” chimed in another, throwing out her bony chest. “Never!”
Boys’ names clearly tended toward old Biblical names, among Fiona and Noah’s highly educated set. Pru thought maybe she should invent a baby of her own. Baby Nebuchadnezzar. “We had to take Nebuchadnezzar down to the Ferberizing station, in his Emmalunga,” she might say.
“Yasmina licked my breast today,” said the woman in the Nirvana T-shirt. She had a flat, adenoidal voice. “She’s four,” she added. “And then Henry can’t understand why I won’t have sex with him.”
That’s the dad, right? Pru wanted to say. But she didn’t. She could see why Patsy had never joined a group of moms. She remembered that, at the only community playgroup Patsy ever went to, the group leader asked if they had any requests, after “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” When Patsy shouted out, “Free Bird!” only one other mom laughed.
Fiona gripped her arm and said, “Come upstairs with me.”
Fiona pushed open the door to each of her kids’ rooms and peeked in, to make sure they were asleep. At the landing at the top of the stairs, she stopped and sat down.
“I’m fucking pregnant again.”
“Oh.” Pru sat down next to her. “Great, right? Great?”
“Cecily is only one year old. I’m still breastfeeding. Three kids under the age of five? What the hell am I going to do?”
“You’ll get help. Don’t you have a babysitter already?”
“It’s not just that. It’s everything else.” Fiona sighed and put her head in her hands.
“You know, I lose two years of my life with every baby. Two years. I feel like we were just getting to a normal life again. You know, we could actually go out to dinner without agonizing about a baby the whole time, or me running home to nurse. I was going to get certified to teach yoga. I was starting to paint again. Forget all that, now.”
“You’ll just do it, Fi. There’s lots of time to teach yoga.” Pru started to touch her back. Then she remembered that Fiona didn’t like to be touched, especially while she was still nursing a baby. Which was pretty much all the time, in recent memory, Pru had to admit. She floated her hand to rest on the floor, as if that was what she’d meant to do all along.
“You’ll just do it. You’ll be fine. Two years
