Chapter 13 #2
“Oh, sure, we could do that,” Max would say in a voice that rang with a shoe yet to drop.
“I’d planned [some personal activity that had gone unmentioned], but sure, if you want to.
” The last time this happened—the train occasion—Max had created secret plans to meet up with a colleague, and Sloane realized—she should have realized this sooner—that while she mentally earmarked the times when they all took up the same space with no particular programming as family time, Max instead saw them as free spaces on the board, where he could use them individually, as a person who existed outside of their unit.
“Oh, you can do that, it was just an idea,” Sloane would say, and Max would protest that no, if she really wanted to they could do it, and she would say it’s not like I really want to it was just an idea, and he’d say well I can cancel, and then later he would say did you still want to do that thing (the train ride)?
And he’d say it in such a dubious voice that she’d suddenly feel she was fighting for her life over something she couldn’t possibly defend.
Why did she want to ride a train in a circle?
Just because it would delight Isla, which it probably would?
But there was all the faff to get there, and Isla needed a nap, and by the time Isla woke up it would already be late in the afternoon, and maybe next time she would just put this in their calendar so that when Max asked do we have any plans she could say yes, we have a plan to ride the train.
And Max would say, “A train?”
The point was that Max had ostensibly fallen out of love with Saturday mornings, but Sloane hadn’t, and Saturday with Isla was a many-splendored thing.
That particular Saturday morning, Sloane had given Max the go-ahead to do whatever it was he needed to do for his sanity—hers, as she told herself, was undisturbed—minus the throb of lost time, yet more sand in the hourglass of achievement—and anyway, she’d had the meet-up with Alex the previous evening and so didn’t need any particular adult time, not counting hers and Max’s Scheduled Evening of Marital Relations (a thing she had mentally earmarked, much like Family Time, when her sexual libido had first begun to noticeably lag, such that she never really felt like having sex—once it was started it was fine, she enjoyed it, but the desire to strip naked and exist in her body wasn’t going to happen organically, so it was much easier logistically to prepare herself rather than let it go so long that Max looked at her, puppylike, while she had to fight the urge to make excuses).
The days of their marriage revolving around frequent, spontaneous episodes of attraction (how handsy she got whenever she drank white wine, or the times they’d livened up their sex life with toys and silly games) were gone, and to Sloane’s knowledge, both were accepting of the fact that the lull was temporary.
Eventually desire would return, Isla would be less dependent on her, and Sloane would no longer be desperate to be left alone for five fucking seconds—unlike the current state of being, where a toddler was constantly tugging her clothes down for something, a less (more?) demoralizing version of a randy husband.
God, what Sloane wouldn’t give sometimes for five minutes alone, except that she was also so desperate for Isla to stay precisely as she was that she sometimes stopped breathing from the pain.
Sometimes, when Isla was sleeping in Sloane’s arms, Sloane would have to physically fight the urge to nuzzle her, to kiss her pink cheeks, her rosebud mouth.
It was a strange thing, motherhood. Sloane didn’t want to freeze Isla in time, nor did she want to go backward, nor did she want to fast-forward.
What she wanted, desperately, was to witness Isla in every form that Isla would ever take, all at once.
She wanted to know Isla’s future interests; she wanted to revisit the first gummy smiles Isla ever gave.
Everyone else had warned Sloane that she’d eventually want children again, it was just biology, but Sloane had no interest in other children.
Whenever she saw a fresh baby—fresh, her mind always said, like a vampire for milky breath—she never wanted another.
She wanted five minutes of her own baby, a quick, crack-pipe hit of the past.
Sloane understood that she would always feel that way; that parenting was relentless and unsolvable. Impossible that she could ever truly do right by Isla. But by god, she was desperate to try.
So, that weekend, despite her theoretical deadline for survival, she’d taken Isla to the park, played on the playground, let Isla spend forty uninterrupted minutes on the swing.
Isla had nuzzled her face, pretended to eat her nose, and as a rare treat, she’d fallen asleep quickly in Sloane’s arms, and though Sloane almost always felt crossly desperate for Isla to drift off so Sloane could return to her ebook or sit down with some emails or god forbid, scroll The Country Wife and let her brain restart for a few minutes, this time she had sat quietly with the ache of love she felt for Isla, the one that made her wonder how Max could get through his day choosing anything that wasn’t this.
But now, of course, they were well into the weekday drudgery where Sloane spent the first twenty minutes of every day hating herself for not being with her child.
The irony being that she would rather die than be a stay-at-home mom (no offense).
She’d always felt there was a two-part equation to happiness, a reason why romantic love wasn’t enough for a happily ever after, because you had to feel another passion, too.
You had to be productive in a way that was innate, ambitious to even the slightest degree, where if it wasn’t professional success you were after, then it was some other self-driven desire for something, the ambiguous Thing for which to Live.
The way some people tended gardens, and other people worked sixty hours a week so they could take a month off to travel every year.
For Sloane, it was an intellectual desire, a need to play with some thought or ponderance, and she had chosen sociology for the way it felt like the most productive output she could personally contribute.
Because if she could understand something fundamental about the way human beings innately deserved to live, then maybe it was possible to contribute some working understanding of how to ensure it.
If making sense of the world meant unpacking forgotten labor movements or unearthing the origins of fascism or convincing hot girls to take public transportation, so be it.
Sloane understood in some esoteric way how things were supposed to work.
Sloane’s personal fixation had always been an eager blend of things.
Unfortunately—the reason her deadline loomed, days and days peeled uselessly back without any particular promise of resolution—she had a tendency toward pulpy topics, like cults and psychology.
Her first book had been about unruly women in history, which is why it had been well received by her predominantly female-identifying, overwhelmingly progressive liberal arts community.
Here, though, that sort of work was considered redundant, unnecessary, her expertise more history-minded than sociology, or so Burns had made clear when he’d questioned why she hadn’t had more to contribute at a mandatory department seminar (Sloane had been watching the clock, calculating whether she could beat last call at Isla’s daycare if she took the distance at a light jog).
“If you’re still interested in achieving tenure here, we’re really looking for you to focus on something a bit more … meaty,” the dean had said, by which Sloane was almost 99 percent positive he meant men.
Sloane had mentioned that conversation, and the kamikaze mission that was giving herself six weeks to conjure a fully developed research topic from thin air, to Alex, who rolled her eyes about as hard as it was possible to do without facing medical injury.
“I’m sure Skit would tell you to just write whatever makes the department happy,” Alex said.
“She’d say that once you could prove success by academic publishing’s standards, eventually you could do whatever you wanted. ”
“I take it you disagree?” Sloane said with a lilting tone of amusement.
“Skit’s industry is a dinosaur, so Skit thinks like a dinosaur.
It’s a coping mechanism. But you’re an academic!
It’s your job to be innovative, to inspire.
I mean, let’s be honest, a barista provides a service more universally valued than yours or mine, but we get paid more to do our jobs.
” Alex had pointedly sipped her latte. “So shouldn’t we be braver about how we do it? ”
“What does being brave even mean, in my case?” Sloane sighed, because once you accepted that your work was mostly frivolous, there was no real way around it. “Correctly identifying that the world is a lot bigger than some guy who plays golf?”
“Don’t get me started on golf,” said Alex, commencing an obviously well-trodden rant.
“I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I’d love to be rid of golf.
Every week my old partners did business on the green.
I was lucky—I’ve got a fantastic drive thanks to my antisemitic stepdad—but what am I supposed to tell every bright-eyed girl in The House?
That in addition to a 4.0 and a great ass, they needed a pitching wedge and a healthy tolerance for scotch?
Fuck off,” Alex finished conclusively, which was meant, obviously, as more of a playful comment, but which struck a chord in Sloane, who like all women had dealt with her own versions of Alex’s hoops.
“It’s hard enough trying to protect these girls while they’re still girls,” Alex said with a tinge of sadness.
“It’s much harder to reconcile my concerns for their womanhood.
What models do they even have, you know? ”
“It’s true,” Sloane agreed. “They’re told their paths are infinite, but really, they all boil down to these reductive little cults.”
Cults again, she realized, as Alex picked up the thread like an improv player. Yes, and. “Yes, I totally know what you mean—the feminine archetypes. Madonna and whore.”
“Do you think the distinction cleaves around whether you have kids or not?” Sloane wondered thoughtfully, playing again in her mental sandbox with the mommy blogs, the trad wives.
“Nah, only in fiction. In reality, there’s still Madonna mother and whore mother.
” Alex sipped her coffee, drumming her fingers on the table, the inner workings of her thoughts in tune with Sloane’s.
“Even inside the Madonna cult, there’s still a whore placement.
Sex positivity—whore, obviously. That’s uncomplicated, but there’s other versions.
Like: career advancement—whore. If they’re ambitious, it’s already too late. They’re already on the whore pipeline.”
“Are we whores?” asked Sloane, whimsically.
“Fuck yes, Sloane.” Alex grinned.
“You know, when I did my unruly women book, most of the women I featured weren’t mothers because I wasn’t.
” Sloane felt contemplative. “I was afraid, when I had Isla, that I wouldn’t have anything nuanced to say anymore.
All the greatest female writers were childless by choice.
It felt like choosing to be a mother meant giving up my own development—plus, pregnancy made me so stupid I can never remember the name of the thing in the fridge,” Sloane sighed, “much less generate anything of profound sociological value.”
“Okay, but value according to who?” Alex said, leaning forward in her seat. “According to some guy named Scott Burns?”
“God, well, that’s a lost cause. I think he mostly sees me as distracted.
” And she was distracted—the worst part of his opinion of her was that it was true.
Yes, she’d snuggled her daughter instead of thinking of the department.
She would always snuggle her daughter, she’d drop everything to come to her daughter’s aid, she’d clear her Saturday and choose Isla every goddamn time over the amorphous prestige of the University, and certainly over some optional department lecture.
It was a truth that went beyond the rearrangement of Sloane’s priorities to the reshifting of her entire self.
Sloane hadn’t fully realized that she’d begun thinking about something since then, but she felt the motion of something forming.
Something in her chest felt alive. Initially she’d thought it was the usual institutional rage, the one about Old White Men demanding that she cater to their tastes or else, but eventually she clocked that her mind was doing something it hadn’t done since before Isla was born.
It was … churning.