It’s morning. How did it get to be morning?
My girls are in the kitchen, looking annoyed, wearing their bright pink backpacks. They seem slightly happy to see me at first, but then catch themselves and revert to haughty preteen aloofness. Though they are twins and look exactly alike (except for the fact that Olivia currently has blue hair), they really aren’t very much alike as far as their personalities go, though they do share a history and a certain measure of divorce-inflected trauma. Olivia is the creative, outgoing one, and her grades suffer for it, but she is far better company, albeit rather lazy. She is so charming, though, that it doesn’t matter. Not to me. I expect that she will bring me an incredible amount of trouble in years to come, but I am hoping that most of it falls on her father. I’ll probably have to worry more about Jane, who is the cerebral one, the one who most takes after me. She even wears her hair like I do, blond and straight and cut at her shoulder, which must make her father uncomfortable. Not that he would ever say anything about it.
“You guys ready to party?” I say to them.
“Mom, not yet,” says Jane. “Maxim’s party isn’t until this afternoon.”
“Your father just dropped you off here and left you? All alone?”
“Well, he’s coming back, now,” says Olivia, sheepishly. “We called him, since you weren’t answering the door.”
A united front. It was most likely Jane who called him, but Olivia is backing her, which is a bad sign. Usually, my only way to deal with them in an effective manner is to divide them up.
“It’s my weekend,” I say fiercely. “I don’t want to see him. He isn’t allowed to come here. Text him and tell him that you’re fine now—that I let you in, that everything is okay.”
“We called him, though,” she says. “So now he’s worried. He just wants to make sure.”
There is a knock at the door and then Ben just opens it right up, which is fucking ridiculous.
“Oh, go ahead and just come in, then!” I yell. My ex-husband is definitely not the first human adult I want to see this morning, or really any morning.
“Girls?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, we’re all fine,” I say. “You can go ahead and leave now.”
Ben Fotopolous divorced me, so I’m not sure why he’s always trying to edge his way back into my life. He’s a beautiful man in a way that I have always found annoying, except when I am fucking him or trying to make other people jealous. He is kind and solicitous. He is my same height, and he is strong, and slender, and pale. He has one Greek grandfather, one Chilean grandmother, and the rest of him is Anglo, but certainly not WASP. Flawless skin with dark hair. Warm eyes. Nice dick. He’s funny and a good listener, and he has always been an attentive father, which is one of the reasons I picked him out to fill me up with kids. He’s a high school history teacher with a Bolshevik streak. Even after marrying me, he never stopped teaching in the Brooklyn public school where he first interned with AmeriCorps and then later took a job.
His job is the one that Jane and Olivia respect right now, since they are still in the world of school, where teachers are the ultimate authority and where grades are the ultimate currency. Teaching “big kids” is super-impressive to them, and my outright bribes aren’t. Plus, Ben has custody, so he’s the one who makes sure they get fed and get to school, and he deals with all of their tawdry little emotional problems.
Like how he used to deal with all of my tawdry little emotional problems. Only they are grateful in a way that I never was. And they can still grow and change and learn, whereas I am done growing up and definitely done changing, and I guess he finally figured that out.
“Big birthday party today, right?” he asks me, smiling.
“Yeah, the whole family is coming. Even Henley, for some reason. He’s flying in from China. I guess he needs money.”
“What’s he doing in China?”
“Embarrassing himself. Probably embarrassing the country. I think he likes the attention. I think he hopes that someday he’ll be kidnapped as one of the heirs to the Nylo fortune and held for leverage. That’s when he’ll finally truly find out how much he’s worth to us. Boy, will he be surprised.”
“How are you doing, Caitlyn? Are you feeling okay?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that? Look, the girls are fine. You are fine. I am fine. You can go now. You are the good parent and I am the shitty one. Are you girls ready to have fun?”
Olivia and Jane ignore my whining. They finally set down their backpacks.
“Yay,” says Olivia pathetically.
“Have a good time, girls,” Ben says, and turns to leave.
“Bye, Ben,” I say.
5
I let my children walk all over me, as usual. They are civilized about it. We order food from wherever they want, like every time. For lunch, that means we get Chinese dumplings delivered from Ginger House in Flushing, Queens. The dumplings are only about eight dollars an order. Getting them delivered to my Townhouse costs fifty dollars. I am not one of those world-disdaining elites who doesn’t know how much things cost. I am one of those tight-fisted penny pinchers who loves the steady jangling increase of coins in my coffers.
We also get lemon chess pie from Two Little Red Hens, which I am more excited about. I eat a few dumplings with the girls in solidarity. We talk about games, about school, about boys, about movies. Olivia is going through some kind of crisis with one of their friends, who is evidently
