Chapter 19
Days to deadline: three. Prospects: abysmal.
Possibility of deadline abandonment: high.
Sloane couldn’t think of anything new or interesting.
All she had was her previous idea, the one deemed unacceptable.
Beyond that was the presence of a loud ringing noise, like the ongoing scream of a kettle, from which no cognition could be drawn.
Problems, or perhaps at this stage merely facts: Isla, the sweetest, most darling child alive, was also a violent sociopath.
While the headbutting had begun around the advent of Isla’s first birthday, the increase in muscle tone since then had taken things to a savage new degree.
Constancy of plagues aside—one such virus forcing Sloane to beg Arya to look after Isla for the length of a lecture, which he had cheerily done, which made everything somehow both better and worse—Isla had also begun shoving Sloane away when they arrived for daycare, not out of excitement to see her teachers, but rather a spiteful way to impress upon Sloane the force of her many disappointments.
It expressed some version of “Fuck off, Mother. Just take your pathetic apologies and go.”
“I feel like she’s starting to love me less,” Sloane confided in Max while scouring the internet for some way to escape actively brushing Frankie the dog’s teeth.
Admittedly, though, her timing had not been ideal, as Max was composing an email or perhaps researching word game strategies—Sloane was presently unsure and didn’t have the time or energy to ask.
Possibly this was her fault? She had lost interest in his interests.
She remembered, vaguely, having ample space and tenderness and romantic curiosity for the contents of Max’s mind, for the ways it twisted and turned to derive such fascinating conclusions.
The way his intellect was so fluid and capable; his vibrant sense of humor that took her so charmingly by surprise.
He seemed stressed these days; but then again, so did she.
“You’re not the one abandoning her every day, so you get a pass,” Sloane helplessly continued, hitting buy on some dog treats she hoped did not contain lead.
“And now Isla has an entire life separate from me with Miss Lily at the daycare. I’m losing her, I can feel it—and I also feel like, I don’t know, it’ll only go downhill from here, you know?
I’ve let her babyhood slip away from me without even noticing. ”
Sloane let out a deep sigh, realizing she hadn’t the faintest idea what to make for dinner.
For the last two nights Isla hadn’t touched her food, opting only to suck some ketchup from her fingers.
The doubts in Sloane’s competency continued unabated, as with the slow trudge toward mortality.
Memento mori, amen. “And I gave it all up for what, some teenagers who only sometimes do the reading? Who are mostly all scrolling their social media while I ramble on about frequency distribution?”
“At the very worst, Isla’s gone from you having ninety-nine percent of her love to ninety-five,” said Max, who managed to transfer his attention briefly from his screen to Sloane, although his eyes were the last to make it. “She still loves you the most.”
“Yeah, but that’ll end.” Sloane slumped down in her chair, though as usual, she had the distinct feeling she shouldn’t be sitting, that there was something else she ought to be doing, because eight thousand tasks remained unattended to or half-finished somewhere in the ether of her life.
“She’ll hate me the moment she turns thirteen, it’s just part of the cycle.
Which is fine, obviously. That’s her right as a woman and a citizen of the world.
” Sloane had once been told that her ability to rationalize aloud was impressively diabolical, a symptom of being too online.
To which she had pointed out that her job was to exist as part of society, she was literally a sociologist, burying her head in the sand was unacceptable, silence was violence, the end!
“This is all I get, and I feel like I’m wasting it. ”
Sloane remembered all the things left undone that she had previously not cared about.
Once she had been so grateful to Max for being the one to do the laundry, to clean the bathroom, to tend to the kitchen stove and the care and keeping of the butcher block, freeing up Sloane’s mind for other, less trivial tasks.
She used to be able to think about things!
Now she was distracted by the presence of grime, the NOW NOW NOW of Isla’s needs.
Isla deserved a clean home, she deserved a mother who looked up from her phone, who knew exactly what Isla liked and didn’t like because every moment of Isla’s life came from inside the sanctity of the mother-daughter bond.
At the same time, Sloane wanted to think more deeply about femininity as a social construct and the ways in which it was an unsolvable curse, specifically in re The Country Wife.
Which, again, was a topic that had been soundly rejected, and so she was back where she started, with an incurable research obsession that was worth the same to her department as having no research at all.
“Do you want to have sex?” Sloane asked in a fit of desperation.
“Oh, sure.” Max stood without removing his eyes from the screen.
Eventually he looked at her, his mouth in a cheeky little grin, and Sloane felt a flood of fondness that was mixed with …
observation. Max looked tired; he looked suddenly much older, like she’d blinked at some point five years ago and arrived at this moment, and couldn’t remember now if the age in his face was new.
Reliably, though, Sloane’s brain was quick to acknowledge that with things as they were in Gaza and the Congo and the Sudan, she could not reasonably afford to think of growing old as anything but a blessing, even if it meant she lost some elasticity here and there and so did Max.
“Honestly, the real fuckery about getting older is this absurd resistance to looking old,” Alex said when she joined Sloane for coffee later that week.
“Which is ridiculous. Because as I tell The Girls all the time, getting older increases your value as a woman. It’s a gift.
” She sipped her coffee with a shrug. “Needless to say, they don’t believe me. ”
“In fairness to them,” commented Sloane with that same diabolical rationalization, “there is a very palpable tipping point where becoming undesirable as a sexual object diminishes the mythology of your acceptance by men. But since that acceptance was a myth to begin with, the loss is imaginary, and yet absolutely crushing at the same time.”
Alex nodded, a tangent clearly forming behind her eyes.
“One of The Girls—Fawn, who’s a real pain in my ass,” she added, rolling her eyes in a way that was laden with wry affection for The House’s current president, “once pointed out that if I thought it was true that getting older was a gift, then wasn’t it hypocritical to cover up my gray hair?
And I had to tell that little asshole that I wasn’t a hypocrite because I don’t dye my hair. ”
Sloane cut a glance sideways to Alex’s perfect highlights, and knowingly, Alex grinned.
“Yet,” she said with a pointed sip of her coffee. “I’m not a hypocrite yet. It’s not my fault she didn’t think to ask if I have gray hair. I still pull them out like a normal person.”
“There’s a fine line, though, no pun intended,” said Sloane, who had indeed been about to launch into a discussion of crow’s feet.
“I always think about how much of what we do is for us and how much of it is for, you know, the feminine mythos. I used to think getting Brazilians was disgustingly infantilizing until I realized they actually improved sex. And if it bothers me so much to look older, is Botox then the more empowered choice?”
“God, I should lock you and Fawn in a room together.” Alex rolled her eyes.
“I believe Fawn’s stance on this is that feminine conventions of beauty are just another form of exploitation.
Then again, who knows if that’s actually her opinion.
Fawn is addicted to playing devil’s advocate—she loves to argue, but she can’t take a meaningful stance on anything to save her life. ”
“Really?” This was vaguely interesting to Sloane.
“Really.” Alex’s nod was long-suffering and firm.
“She’ll go to bat for a stranger if it suits her but stab her best friend in the back.
There was a whole thing last year, one of the girls got in trouble with the University for a political post that went viral and Fawn tried to—” Alex waved a hand.
“Long story. The point is, it’s impossible to tell what Fawn actually cares about or believes. ”
“Do you often disagree with her?” asked Sloane, intrigued enough to have temporarily forgotten the host of other quandaries in her head, like how her daughter would probably one day hate her.
She felt grateful to Alex for that reprieve, even if she didn’t quite know what to make of Alex’s position on the matter.
“The fact is that we can argue about all of this until we’re fucking comatose and it won’t matter,” Alex said.
“The problem is systemic, institutional. The problem is the patriarchy, and the answer to literally every question is that of course we’re being exploited.
Of course we are. But does that necessarily mean we are also powerless?
The only way to win is to be in the room.
Whatever it takes to sit at the table is the empowered choice,” Alex concluded.
“So then what is choosing not to even acknowledge the table?” Sloane asked, thinking of The Country Wife, who sat primarily at her husband’s table and presumably didn’t ask herself these things.