Interstitial #6
“But her French toast was amazing.”
“She always pulled over for little kids selling lemonade.”
“Always.”
“She couldn’t knit. She tried to learn but she was terrible at it.”
“She made the best brownies.”
“Her hands were always cool and dry.”
“She cried if an animal died in a movie but not necessarily if a person did.”
“She was always awake first.”
“Her coughs were loud but her sneezes were quiet.”
“She reminded us to look at the sky.”
That’s the best one, so they all look at the sky through the windshield and out their respective windows. They’re doing that
just as Simone pulls into their driveway, and they understand that Simone has given them not only a ride home, but a gift:
the gift of focusing on Theresa and letting their squabbles go, if only for a moment.
“Out you go,” says Simone. “Water and Advil, ladies. Water and Advil.”
Inside, Mae wonders if her sisters notice that the lights are just as their mother always left them at night, with a single
table lamp on in the living room, like a ghost light in a theater.
Calvin is in the kitchen, drinking a cup of tea and reading something on his laptop.
He looks up when they troop in. His face, bathed in laptop light, looks happy and relaxed.
“There they are, the Shipman girls!” he says.
“Have fun?” He sounds so hopeful that they all nod and say yes, yes, so much fun that they got a ride home from Simone, so much fun that they have to go back for Mae’s car in the morning.
They do not say we’re barely speaking to Mae, and they do not say we can’t believe she went to your wedding.
They do not say we still cannot believe you had a wedding for Mae to go to.
“Okay,” says Calvin. “I can take you back in the morning. Kara went to bed after the kids were settled.”
“The kids settled?” asks Natalie. “All of them?”
“To a man. They did play a little bit of musical beds. Evangeline wanted to sleep with Leo, so she’s in Mae’s bed. Mae, I
took him out for the bathroom and put him in his crate. Evangeline came with me and held Cinnamon’s leash. Scarlett and Caspian
are in Natalie’s room. Kara changed Caspian’s diaper. Everybody did great.”
“Wow,” says Natalie. “Thank you, Dad.”
When Mae goes to her room, she finds that Evangeline is really spread out in Mae’s bed. How can someone so small take up so
much room? Mae tries to move Evangeline but she’s dead weight.
“I’ll sleep with you, Jordan,” says Mae, appearing at Jordan’s door like a hallucination.
“I don’t think so,” says Jordan. “I’m still pissed. Also, you had all that coffee. You’ll never sleep again.”
Mae climbs into Jordan’s bed anyway and says, “I’m asleep already.” And somehow, against all odds, she is.
Natalie can’t sleep. Scarlett has pushed her all the way to the edge of the bed, and her drinks and her thoughts and her worries are roiling around in her stomach and in her head.
She’s thinking about Mae telling her and Jordan they’ve been too hard on Calvin, and she’s wondering if Mae might be right.
She’s picturing her father’s face lighting up when they all came in together.
She’s wondering what Austin is doing right now.
But she knows what Austin is doing. She knows he’s sleeping because he has to be up in just a few hours, and if he’s not sleeping then he’s worrying about the cow with mastitis, and running through his endless to-do list in his mind.
The to-do list on a farm is constantly growing.
There is always something to repair or call about or buy or put on the list for next year.
Scarlett makes a little grumbling sound and pulls the covers off Natalie. That’s it. She’s not going to sleep. Natalie swings
herself out of bed and peeks at Caspian, asleep in the portable crib. He’s so big for that thing. This is probably the last
week he’ll be able to use it. She tiptoes down the stairs. In the kitchen she pours a glass of milk. It’s such a cliché, the
farm wife with the glass of milk, but so what. She likes milk; she believes in the nutrients it provides. She believes in
the dairy industry at large. She thinks milk is a very natural way for humans to nourish themselves. (It also helps absorb
alcohol, if you believe some people on the internet.)
If Natalie is up in the night at the farm she likes thinking about the cows slumbering in the fields in the warm weather or
the barn in the winter, unbothered by all the worries with which humans consume themselves. Most of what we worry about, thinks
Natalie, is so futile, unworthy of the brainpower we grant it, and yet, here we are. When she’s up in the night in Rye, it’s
the presence of the ocean that comforts her, almost within arm’s reach, waves coming in and receding, constant, ominous, reassuring.
She hears a tread on the stairs, and now here’s Jordan, in a set of expensive pajamas, black, edged with white piping. She startles when she sees Natalie and says, “I didn’t know anyone was up. Mae snores like a truck driver.”
“Night milk?” Natalie holds out her glass. “Or I could pour you your own. I could even make yours chocolate and warm it up!”
Natalie had been so angry with Jordan at the bar, she’s been angry at her since they cleaned out the storeroom, but then Mae
dropped her own bombshell and Natalie isn’t sure who to be mad at. Everybody? Nobody?
Jordan winces and shakes her head. “No, thank you.”
“Oh, that’s right, you don’t drink milk.”
“Well, that, and I can’t have chocolate at night. Do we have bourbon?”
“You want more bourbon?”
“Just a tiny bit.”
“Good man.” Natalie locates the bottle and finds a rocks glass for Jordan. She pours, considers, pours herself a tiny bit
too, like an eighth of a finger, and puts the glass of milk in the refrigerator. She’ll give it to one of the kids in the
morning; that milk is far too hard-won to waste. They each take a seat at the island.
“What’s keeping you up?” Natalie asks. “Besides the snoring.”
A look passes over Jordan’s face and then disappears. “Generalized dark night of the soul,” she says. “Some work stuff. And,
my god, Mae was at the wedding? And nobody told us?”
“I know,” says Natalie. “I’m flabbergasted. I don’t understand. How could she not tell us? How could she”—she lowers her voice—“how
could she like Kara, and keep it a secret? It’s like she’s been having an affair with Kara behind our backs!”
Jordan sips her bourbon, then stares into her glass, letting a puff of air out of her pursed lips. “I mean, she wouldn’t be
wrong to think that we wouldn’t be receptive to it.”
“Preach.” Natalie rattles the ice in her glass. “I’d say that’s an understatement.”
“Is that what’s keeping you up too?”
Natalie sighs. “That, and . . . I don’t know.”
“The internet trolls?”
Natalie nods; suddenly her eyes are full and she doesn’t trust herself to speak. When she’s gained a shred of composure she
whispers, “I wish I didn’t care so much. Why am I letting a bunch of strangers crawl under my skin and stay there?”
Jordan is silent for a moment, like she’s really thinking about it. “I think what may have happened,” she says, “is that the
world held a mirror up to you, and you didn’t like what you saw.”
“But that’s not fair,” says Natalie.
“Not fair of me to say, or them to do?”
“The latter, mostly. We’re just living our lives, and no matter what we do, everybody hates us for something.” She pauses.
“Is this how Harry and Meghan feel?”
Jordan snorts. “Maybe.” Then, “Yeah, probably.” Then, “Aside from the article, what do people hate you for?”
Natalie thinks about it and begins to tick her list off on her fingers. “Let’s see. The hardscrabble Vermonters hate us for
being organic. We have to create a buffer between our land and theirs, you know, to make sure that whatever they’re fertilizing
can’t get on our land. They hate us for creating a buffer. They hate us for selling off some of our stock so we could repopulate
with organic cows; they thought that was disrespectful to the former owners, who were their friends. They hate us for selling
our milk for so much more, but it’s really expensive to run an organic farm so of course we have to sell it for more. That’s
just economics. They think that we think we’re too good for the public schools—”
“Do you think that?” asks Jordan.
“Sort of. I mean, other way around. We think the public schools aren’t as—well, aren’t the same as they are in Lenox, let’s put it that way.” Lenox has excellent public schools. All three of the Shipman girls are products of them, of course.
“Diplomatic,” says Jordan.
“The people in the feed store laughed the first time I bought Carhartts, and I could feel them getting ready to hate me too.
But I need Carhartts! Lined Carhartts! I do actually milk the cows. It’s cold out there in the early morning.”
“Fair,” says Jordan. “Lined Carhartts don’t seem unreasonable.”
“I could tell they thought I was buying them to look cute.”
“You do look cute in them.”
“Well, thank you.” She smiles briefly. She’s running out of fingers. “And now these people online! The vitriol. The judgment.
I didn’t ask for any of this.” She massages her temples.
Jordan clears her throat.
“What?” says Natalie.
“Didn’t you, though?”
“Didn’t I what?”
“Ask for it.”
“No.” How dare Jordan. “Who asks for vitriol?”
Jordan rubs at an imaginary spot on the island with her thumb and, without looking up, says, “Didn’t you open yourself up
to it the first time you called yourself a tradwife? Or called yourself anything, and wanted people to pay attention?”
“What? No.” Natalie hurries to explain, to make it right. “That’s just a hashtag. To get more views. But the beliefs behind it are
real. It’s a movement back toward tradition. Traditional doesn’t mean bad. But people get it all mixed up. I mean, even you—you
don’t hate me, but you don’t like me enough to help me.”
“Of course I like you. I even love you. By law, I have to. We’re sisters.”