Chapter 1
The clatter of dinner that evening was familiar, monotonous, like the pain in her low back that never really went away.
For some months Sloane had also been desperate to become unaware of her perineum.
Not even for it to feel normal or even comfortable—that felt too high an ask.
To simply forget she had a perineal region would be bliss itself within the context of her daily aspirations.
Gradually she had been able to go minutes, then hours, then days and even weeks, and on the whole it felt as if she had impressively willed her way to nirvana.
But with the euphoria of forgetting her pelvic floor came the reminder that thirty-three years of bipedalism and gravity could never really be thwarted; that if it wasn’t one thing, it would be another.
If it wasn’t the third-degree perineal tear that had taken four months of woo-woo meditation and therapeutic fingering to heal, it was run-of-the-mill mortality—the helpless slip of a vertebral disc.
In these moments Sloane became overwhelmed by a rush of disappointment in herself. She was ordinariness incarnate.
Behind her, Isla, apple of her eye, object of a love so richly milk-sweet and cream-fat it sometimes felt erotic, banged on the tray of her high chair, not for the first time that evening and, with the way things were going, also not the last.
Bang. “Max,” said Sloane. Bang bang bang. “Max, she’s trying to get your attention.”
“Hm?” Max looked up from his phone. (His phone! His pressing emails! His fucking emails! His precious fucking news headlines!) “Sweetie,” Max cooed to Isla, “don’t bang your cup.” Then he returned to his phone.
Bang. “Max.” A deep, steadying sigh. “She wants more juice.” Bang.
“Did you see this about the new humanities dean?”
Bang. Bang. “What?” Sloane sampled the spaghetti from the pot of boiling water, gauging it not for the perfect degree of chewy al dente perfection as she had during her peak hostessing years, but for the slight quality of mush, for ease of chewing.
Fucking Christ, another bowl of spaghetti Bolognese felt like it might kill her in some unmistakably spiritual way, but it was the only thing Isla would deign to eat—the only thing Isla would even consider broaching the sanctity of her mouth.
Her sweet darling mouth, which was iron deficient.
A sweet innocent deficiency that was likely causing Isla’s poor sleep, her inability to stay down on her own, through the night, so that Sloane could do the same. Bang!
“The new dean. I told you, right? Crawford got MeToo’d.”
Briefly, Sloane considered saying aloud to her husband that no, Crawford didn’t get MeToo’d, he got the consequences of his own actions—or so Sloane had discovered months ago, back when Max insisted they have the entire department over in thanks for solving their little two-body problem (two academics in need of two jobs, with Sloane being the extra, undecorated body and therefore the problem; thus, the humanities department had strung her up to their chariot to be dragged through the city of Troy, or so it felt to Sloane on the scale of domestic humiliations).
Victoria Ellsworth hadn’t said a word about what she called the incident to anyone in the department, and then when she’d been up for tenure Crawford had voted against her, citing the fact that she was, quote, unprofessional, unquote. BANG!
“Max,” said Sloane, “the juice?”
“You want more juice, sweetie? Juice?” Max again put on the doting voice he always used to speak with Isla, the one that screamed girl dad, the one that Sloane had once been so sure meant she’d chosen the right partner in life—when she’d been so unassailably confident that the sexiest thing a man could be was tender with his child.
“You know,” he remarked, “we should really just give her water.”
Something inside Sloane turned briefly molten.
“Max, I—” I tried that. I’ve tried that. Are you—? Are you suggesting that I’m—? Do you honestly think that I—? (Sometimes her mind went white with unproductive rage.) “Okay, give her water, then.” See how that works out for you, fuckhead. Love of my life. Father of my child. Fucking fuckwit.
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” Max had slipped a hand over Sloane’s hip where she was angled on one leg, flamingo-like, beside the stove.
He smelled of his usual bergamot, the detergent Sloane bought for them, not at all like a sweet baby head or its constant, inexplicable waft of maple syrup.
Sometimes Sloane got alarmed by how much bigger he was than Isla.
Then Max slid by her, opened the fridge door, and bent to look inside.
“Nervous?” Sloane echoed belatedly.
“Where’s the juice?”
She gestured sightlessly. “Right there, behind the thing.”
“The thing?”
“Yeah, the thing. The fucking—the thing, Max, the thing.” Since Sloane had gotten pregnant, she’d had trouble remembering certain words.
It was like there was a sieve where her brain had once been.
Her brain, which was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How much of that value fell out whenever she couldn’t remember the word for the thing?
The thing, the thing where—with the. That thing.
(Had this single transaction put her twenty dollars in the red somehow?) Come on, Max, the thing!
Max announced profoundly, “Should I get out a new bottle? Looks like we’re out.”
“Max, we’re not out, it’s right—” Sloane hissed a breath she hoped he couldn’t hear as she walked over and shifted aside the thing. (Water pitcher.) “There, it’s right there.”
“Oh!” Max sounded delighted with himself, like a child who’d done something hilarious, like someone on Twitter (whatever Twitter even was now) who’d misread a line, accidentally read the word six as sex, hahahahahahahahahahahahaahaha!!! “So, how are you feeling?”
“About what?” BANG! Isla had thrown the cup.
Now Isla was whining about the dropped cup. “About the new semester?”
Sloane imagined saying: “You mean about the job? The job that I have? That I’ve done for like eight years? The one we met doing? The job that we both do? That job?”
But she actually said: “I’m a little nervous about Isla.”
“Oh, she’ll be fine, daycare will be good for her.”
“Well, sure, but you’re not the one who’ll be abandoning her.
” Sloane wiped some clammy sweat from her forehead and realized she wanted to stop breathing.
She had maybe already stopped breathing just now, without noticing.
The very normal thing that she was about to do, that all mothers did—that certainly all mothers without her socioeconomic privilege did—was actually the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
She hadn’t even wanted kids! Until she did.
And now suddenly she was carrying around the atavistic weight of all the mothers before her whose children had been abandoned for eight hours a day, sacrificed on the altar of pointless labor.
Not pointless. She cared about her work.
She took great pride in it, had always loved teaching, found sociology to be endlessly interesting in an esoteric way.
But recontextualized by the tiny human being who depended on her for food, sleep, and comfort, it all just seemed kind of oppressive, or maybe that was what came of watching too much mommy content on VidStar.
(Which wasn’t even to mention the trad wives!
What a trainwreck. Sloane’s sociologist brain couldn’t look away.)
“That’s true.” Max kissed the back of her neck as Isla began to try to escape the high chair.
But wouldn’t it be nice to return to work?
Sloane was neither a housewife nor a “trad” one, and there was only so much time one could devote to poop consistency or creative ways to sneak iron into food.
Wouldn’t it be invigorating in some way to rejoin the realm of adults, who neither threw things nor had to be talked down, as with hostage negotiations?
To have five minutes to stare at the water stain she could only assume would adorn the ceiling of her new adjunct office?
Precious time to dissociate; time for devoted, unrelenting calculations about how to make thirty-five undergrads care more about the principles of sociology than how they’ll next get laid.
Impossible. Fucking Sisyphean. Of course, as with parenting, the trick was consistent methodology.
You simply had to teach to the person who was most enthusiastic to be there, as Sloane had said last year—no, fuck, two years ago now—to a bright young female student who was interested in pursuing her doctorate.
You can’t think about all the yawns, the eyes glazing over—if you let that take you down, then you’ll never get through the day, much less the semester.
You have to assume you’re reaching someone, but it’s not your job to actually see it happen.
It’s not your job to know during any given lecture how many of those students will actually go on to become something great—it’s only your job to give them the tools, the curiosity to do it.
Sloane used to just say bullshit like that on command!
It used to just pour out of her, it was honestly amazing.
“Max, can you—?” Isla was nearly out of her high chair now, valiantly approaching flight, and though Sloane prided herself on not being the sort of mother who fretted all the time about possible injury, everything her darling daughter was or ever would be was contained in that precious, partially formed skeleton head.
“Baby girl, just wait two more minutes, dinner’s coming—”
Isla commenced an eldritch howl.
“Juice!” cried Max jubilantly, presenting her with it.
Isla promptly threw it on the ground. For the record, Max didn’t do the cooking because Sloane had always cared more about food; she liked preparing food, she enjoyed cooking, she loved eating.
(She used to do the fasting thing, where she only ate two meals a day, and she didn’t want those two precious meals to be Max’s idea of culinary delight—she wanted fucking pasta.
She wanted pasta and fucking cheese!) Now, of course, she couldn’t remember why she’d ever insisted on such a thing.
At this point she imagined handing the spatula to Max and hearing wait, where’s the pot?
To which she would inevitably reply it’s right there, behind the thing.
Eventually Sloane dished the spaghetti into bowls, into the carefully styled ceramics that had been her pride and joy for so many years.
She said, “Max, the dog?” and Max charitably looked up from his phone and fed the dog.
She said, “Frankie, sit,” and Frankie did no such thing, so she said again, “Frankie, I said sit,” and she thought for a second about how she had loved the dog so much before, when Frankie had loved Max and only Max and Sloane had thought that was fine actually, the dog was a living thing, it didn’t have to love her, but then she’d had Isla and fallen prey to the erotic motherlove and realized Frankie was a real drain on resources.
She went inside to fill two water glasses from the thing and realized it was almost empty.
Fine, Max could have the cold water, she didn’t care anymore.
She set down Isla’s food, said, “Blow on it for her.” She set down Max’s food and then her own. She refilled the thing with water.
“I guess Daddy isn’t eating,” said Max playfully, in his doting voice, to Isla, which was how Sloane realized she had forgotten to put out the silverware. Her back hurt and she briefly folded over, trying to relieve the pressure. Max came up behind her and got a fork.
One fork.
Just one.
He returned to feed Isla, who knocked the spoon away from her mouth. “Isla, come on!” he yelped at her. Come on. Be cool, bro. Come on. As if that meant fucking anything to an eighteen-month-old.
“Isla.” Sloane turned her voice sweet, dulcet, gentle. “Isla, try a bite? Mm, spaghetti, yum!”
Isla again batted the spoon away and looked sweetly, dulcetly, gently up at her.
“All done,” announced Isla proudly. Not a single bite eaten.
It was the day before the first day of fall semester—the day before Isla would learn the meaning of desertion, the day before Sloane returned to work and became, again, a person.
Seven days before she received a message in her inbox from Britt Landau asking a personal favor—a message claiming that Alex Carlisle had asked specifically for Sloane.
Dr. Sloane Hartley fell into her chair with a sense of dismal failure, the likes of which she had never experienced before, only to realize that she didn’t have anything to eat with.
Max reached out a big hand, covering hers with his own, smiling the smile that had once driven her halfway to orgasm. They were different from other parents, from other marriages, theirs was a revolutionary union, if she needed something from him she only needed to ask!
“Try to take on some extracurriculars this year,” Max suggested. “It might reassure Dean Burns.”
Yes, Sloane thought encouragingly to herself, prove your worth to Burns. The problem is you’re just not doing enough! Unfortunately, with all that free time and extra energy she’d had since giving birth, she simply couldn’t summon the will to argue.
“Yeah,” she said, “good idea,” and stood up to get a fork.