Interstitial #10
Natalie doesn’t actually need help with dinner. (From Mae? Please.) But she heard Jordan’s and Mae’s raised voices so she’d sent Evangeline as a small emissary.
“Did you forget that I can’t cook?” Mae asks, sulking her way into the kitchen.
“If you can chop, you can cook.” Natalie sets Mae up with an onion, a cutting board, and a knife. “Careful you don’t cut yourself,”
she says. “The knives in this house are so dull. They’re a disgrace to knives. I don’t think they’ve been sharpened since
before Mom got sick.” Mae sets to work on her onion. Natalie clears her throat and says, “Hey, have you looked at any of my
accounts since you’ve been here?”
Mae shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I usually keep up. I guess I got busy with Leo. Is there something new I should see?”
“No,” says Natalie quickly. “Nope, nothing new. I haven’t posted any new content since I’ve been here, actually.
I’m sort of taking a little break.” She’s popped online a couple of times to check the comments on her accounts, and then she’s popped right back off with her insides churning, her stomach tied in knots.
Nobody is talking about the lovely photos of the farm in the article, and how adorable her children are, and what a beautiful family she and Austin have created.
Nobody cares that she can milk a cow and that her children are growing up virtually screen-free and that Evangeline has assisted at a calving.
Everyone is talking about Austin’s quote.
She crouches down and looks in the lower cupboards, the ones with all of the random items like the giant lobster pot and the
little ramekins they use only for lobster butter. It’s been years since they’ve cooked lobster here!
“What are you looking for?”
“A lemon zester. There’s no proper lemon zester here. I’ll just use a cheese grater. It’ll do. Now, chop, please.”
Her phone rings: Austin.
Mae says, “Are you going to answer that?”
“No,” says Natalie.
“Want me to answer?”
“No,” says Natalie.
Mae gives her a funny look. “Everything okay?”
“Of course!” She makes her voice as chipper as can be. If Natalie gets into it now with Austin, she will never get this dinner
on the table. She may start screaming and never stop. She’ll call Austin later, or tomorrow, when she can scream in peace.
“Nat?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know all of this?”
Natalie, the cheese grater in hand, looks at her little sister. “Know all of what?”
“All of this—” Mae’s gesture includes the whole kitchen. “Like, what a lemon zester even is.”
“Doesn’t everyone know what a lemon zester is?”
“Well, sure, okay, maybe that’s self-explanatory. But all the rest of it, all the stuff you do online, the food you make,
the kids, all that stuff. How’d you go from where I am to where you are, and how’d you get there so fast?”
With great care and kindness, Natalie doesn’t say, I was never where you are. By the time she was Mae’s age she already had a husband, a farm, two kids. “How’d I become a real grown-up, you mean?”
“Exactly! Yes, that. How’d you become a real grown-up?”
“Well. I guess it happened little bit by little bit, but also sort of quickly. I learned as I went. It was sort of the snowball
effect, you know; once we started a family, once we had the farm, there we were, and we just kept going. Rolling down the
hill.”
“But did you know, ahead of time, that you’d end up here?”
Natalie thinks about this. “No,” she says. “Not really. I mean, I hoped, I guess, but I didn’t know any of it ahead of time.”
She thinks some more, letting the thoughts really pile up on each other while she rubs the lemon against the grater, making sure not to hit the pith.
There are so many things you don’t know about motherhood until you become a mother.
You don’t know about the physicality of all of it.
First, there is labor, of course—shocking, violent in its way, rife with fluids and tearing and other savage acts.
Then comes the nursing, the sharing of one’s body that is in many ways more intimate than sex.
Your body, on demand, for the purposes of keeping a tiny human alive.
Eventually the nursing ends, yes, but still you have not reclaimed your body as your own.
And perhaps you never will. Children use your body as a jungle gym.
They put their sticky fingers on your face, your arms, in your hair, your mouth.
They follow you to the bathroom, sometimes into the bathroom.
They cannot get enough of you! They curl their bodies, shrimplike, into yours.
They want to sleep near you, on you, practically in you.
And when they’ve loosened their grip on you, there’s your partner, patiently waiting his turn—because his body is lonely,
and it longs for connection with yours, which is not lonely, which may never be lonely again. The world feels free to comment
on your body. The world has earned this right. You’ve lost the baby weight! You haven’t lost the baby weight! Things move and jiggle and loosen and tighten; hormones surge and abate; hair sheds then grows thickly back—wavy sections
crop up where the hair used to lie flat and smooth. It’s past your shoulders now, and the next day it’s down your back. Your
skirt is too long, it’s too short, it’s indecent, it’s puritanical. You’re not doing enough, wait, slow down, you’re doing
too much, you’re going to hurt someone, probably the very children you have been doing all of these things for.
But there’s more! These children expect that you can provide answers to all of their questions, even though, when nobody is
looking, you must subtly google: How many people are in the world? Why is there fog? How does your heart work? Can a worm
think? Do I see the same red you’re seeing?
She cannot say all of this to her sister; she can say none of this, when it comes down to it, because she doesn’t know how
to encapsulate it. So she says, “Let me show you a better way to chop that onion.”
Mae’s mouth twists. She doesn’t want to be shown a better way! “What’s wrong with this way?” she asks.
“Less efficient. And see how much you’re wasting?”
Mae looks down and says, “Not really.”
Natalie takes the knife out of Mae’s hands, slides the cutting board over in front of her, and demonstrates how to cut with
the grain of the onion.
“Wow,” says Mae, looking at Natalie with such wonder that Natalie feels a surge of pride. “I never knew that.” She reclaims the knife, takes up the second onion, and goes to work on it. She’s clumsy at first—and to be fair, the knives do need to be sharpened—but soon she gets the hang of it.
“Okay, Food Network star,” says Natalie approvingly, and Mae grins.
After she had her children Natalie saw her own mother in a different light, and she had so many questions for her.
Did you go through this? she wanted to ask her mother.
Did you feel all of these things? But of course she must have!
Theresa had given freely of her own body in all the ways Natalie was now doing and had never
said a thing about it, about how she had navigated the vast canyon that lay between the warmth of motherhood and the sheer
exhausting physicality of it all.
Natalie had waited too long to talk about all of this with Theresa, and then Theresa was sick, so she didn’t ask her, and
then she was gone, and it was too late, and now she will never know what her mother thought about any of it.
In the winter, Lenox kids went sledding at Gould Meadows in Stockbridge. Natalie is looking at her adult baby sister now,
but she’s seeing Mae all bundled in her snowsuit at age four or five, barely able to walk because Theresa had put so many
layers on her. She’s watching the three of them in age order on their bright orange family-size sled: Jordan in the back,
her long legs extended; Natalie in the middle, always in the middle; Mae cross-legged in the front. An invisible push from
behind, and off they went. Mae used to laugh so hard the whole way down that the entire hill could hear her. Now here she
is, standing in front of Natalie, looking for someone to tell her it’s all going to be all right.
Mae looks down. She says, “I just wonder what Mom would say, seeing what a mess of things I’ve made. Seeing where I am.”
“You haven’t made a mess—” Natalie is interrupted by Calvin, breezing into the kitchen, saying, “Hello, ladies! Any snacks around?” He takes a carrot slice and pops it into his mouth. From far away, Kara sneezes. “I heard,” says Calvin, “that Cinnamon ate Evangeline’s tooth.”
“Natalie, this looks beautiful,” Kara says. They are all in the dining room, ready to sit.
Scarlett and Evangeline have set the table, without complaint, in a way Mae doesn’t ever remember doing herself at such a
tender age. With two working parents their dinners on Galway Court were often chaotic; the older girls would have homework
spread over the dining room table right up until it was time to eat; then, as soon as everything was cleaned up, Theresa would
work on lesson plans or grade spelling tests and Calvin would read through student essays. Natalie’s table, by contrast, is
gorgeous. Who even knew they had matching linen napkins in this house? Who knew they had candles; who knew you could snip
a couple of hydrangeas from the bush on the garage side of the house and, bam, instant centerpiece?
“Thank you, Kara,” says Natalie, icily at first, and then more generously, “Mae and the girls helped.” All Mae did was chop
an onion, and now that the dinner is complete, Mae can see that there’s a tiny charity sprinkling of onions on the salad,
but otherwise Natalie was giving her busywork, no different from the coloring books she pulls out for the girls when they’re
at a restaurant or the waiting area of an airport.