Chapter 5 #2
Sloane jerked upright from where she’d been sitting on the cold stone bench outside the University daycare, clutching Isla to her chest like a shield and dropping her phone on the ground in the process.
Isla, in turn, let out a shrieky barrage of nonsense, and Sloane’s blurry eyes focused belatedly on a woman approximately her age.
The woman stood opposite Sloane wearing a red blazer over fashionable black trousers, with matching red lips and an air of perfection achievable only by some sort of cross between Helen of Troy and Anne Boleyn.
“Sorry to startle you.” The woman looked genuinely sorry, in a way that was so lovely and kind that Sloane wanted to cry all over again. “First time at daycare?”
She gestured to Isla, and Sloane realized belatedly how silly it was to have to say aloud, “No, it’s day five.”
“Oh, it compounds,” the woman assured her. She looked too fashionable to be a professor; unlikely to be a grad student. “Mine cried for the first four weeks.”
“Four weeks?” echoed Sloane, as if she’d just been told her flight was canceled and wouldn’t be rebooked until tomorrow.
“I’m not saying it’ll definitely be that long,” the woman said quickly, “but if it does take that long, it’s still normal.” She took a seat beside Sloane, fixing her attention with palpable sweetness on Isla, who now clung shyly to Sloane. “She looks about … eighteen months? Is that right?”
“She’s eighteen months, yes.” Sloane became aware of a fractional degree of ease in herself, a melting.
She had the sense the woman was making idle conversation purely to calm her, and she was grateful for it.
She was exceedingly grateful to talk about Isla specifically, because outside the cult of motherhood that was almost troublingly online, most people seemed to hope that Sloane would stop.
Sloane, in fact, often hoped that she would stop.
She could feel herself becoming less interesting, her capacity for thought shrinking down.
This, the feeling that at all times she was Isla’s mother in disguise, just Isla’s mother in a trench coat trying desperately not to be caught except by someone who might understand, was a condition Sloane understood could not possibly last forever—like babyhood, the complete reorientation of her life would eventually change again.
That was the point of venturing out among the adults and reclaiming her passions, the things that had once brought her such fulfillment and joy.
Things that existed in a separate box from Isla, like the accolades that were about as taken with Isla as Isla could be moved to bat an eye for them.
And in a broader sense, Sloane was profoundly thankful to not be asked “what would make it better,” for which there could be no reasonable answer.
No one so far had been able or willing to increase the hours in the day.
For the record, Sloane was technically willing to do her job at night, when Isla was sleeping, just to avoid the tearful drop-offs; to circumvent the sense that needing to do her own work and fulfill her own desire for personal, intellectual, and adult satisfaction was more pressing than Isla’s desire to read Trains, Trains, Trains!
for a fourth fucking time. Sloane was willing to eat spaghetti Bolognese every goddamn night if that’s what it took.
But nobody ever asked how much are you willing to suffer. They only asked what do you want.
“That’s a great age.” The woman, whose shirt was not stained and in fact looked to be magically unwrinkled silk, began playing peekaboo with Isla with the practiced ease of an exceedingly Good Mother.
“How old is yours? Are yours.” Sloane wasn’t sure whether to imply the existence of one or more children. She had once been asked while holding Isla on a particularly unkempt day if her older children were in school, which had felt somehow both innocuous and viscerally insulting.
“Just one, a boy. He’s three now and all the baby fat’s somehow melted off.” The woman smiled wistfully at Isla. “Look at those cheeks.”
“I miss her breath,” Sloane said before she could stop herself, and she was about to explain it, that Isla’s breath when she’d been only breastfeeding smelled so fucking heavenly that Sloane wanted to bury herself in her daughter’s gummy mouth, when the woman suddenly lit up.
“Oh, I know! Everyone thought it was so weird, but I was obsessed. To be honest, I even thought Theo’s farts smelled good. Like french fries in a hot car,” the woman said dreamily.
Sloane laughed aloud, and the woman played one more peekaboo with Isla before picking Sloane’s phone up off the ground, shifting slightly to hand it to her. “Sorry if this is a little strange, but— Would you want to go get a coffee?” the woman tentatively asked.
“Oh, thanks so much for asking, but I have some work to do before my lecture this afternoon,” is what Sloane didn’t say.
She couldn’t understand why she didn’t say it.
It was a little strange, and Sloane wasn’t the kind of person to socialize with strangers—that was more Max’s bag than hers.
More importantly, she’d brought Isla to daycare that day because she had to work, and no other reason was a compelling one to be away from Isla.
Except that in the five minutes she’d been talking to this woman, Sloane suddenly felt like a person again, which she hadn’t technically realized she still was.
And anyway, how long would a coffee take? Thirty minutes?
Thirty minutes was still long enough to betray Isla, but in that sense, Sloane was already a traitor. So, she said, “I guess I could use a coffee.”
The woman smiled. “I’m Alex, by the way,” she said.
I had coffee today with my friend Alex, Sloane imagined herself saying to Max. My friend Alex said she even liked the smell of her baby’s farts. I told you it wasn’t weird!
If Isla had cried that day at drop-off, maybe Sloane wouldn’t have gone.
Maybe she’d have changed her mind and stayed behind, replanting her nose in her daughter’s T-shirt and deciding four weeks of tears was too much to ask of anyone’s sanity.
Perhaps in that alternate universe, the path before Sloane didn’t alight so ethereally before her, doom’s cavernous maw snapped safely shut with the splutter of a candle flame.
But Isla didn’t cry. Instead, when Sloane set her down in the play area, Isla just toddled over to one of the squishy foam blocks and pulled herself up on it like a meerkat, giving Sloane a regal salute as if to say, good for you, girl. Good for you.