Chapter 21 Gwen #2
Gwen spat out the response too quickly and immediately worried it gave the impression that she was disapproving.
“Not that I have anything against it,” she clarified.
Leigh looked at her with a quizzical expression, eyes squinting.
“You weren’t ever curious?” Leigh asked.
Was there something erotic in the way she’d posed the question? Or was Gwen imaging that?
She stared at Leigh’s lips, considering.
What would it be like to kiss them? They were incredibly plump, the bottom lip more than the top.
Bee-stung, that was the term. They were the types of lips modern women aspired to, the types of lips people paid money to obtain.
Gwen knew Leigh would never inject anything into her face, though.
She couldn’t even be bothered to wear ChapStick, as evidenced by the vertical lines of her dry lips.
Gwen imagined kissing her, transferring some of the gloss on her own lips to Leigh’s.
“No, not really curious,” Gwen said. “Is that weird?”
Leigh shrugged. “You might be very straight. It happens.” Leigh said it like heterosexuality was an unfortunate ailment, like nearsightedness.
“When did you first kiss a woman?”
“A woman? In college. But I kissed a girl in elementary school.”
Gwen felt her mouth drop. “Elementary school?”
“Yeah. This girl named Bonnie,” Leigh said. She looked pensive. “Nobody is named Bonnie anymore.”
“So you knew that young that you were . . .”
Gwen wasn’t sure what word to use.
“Curious about girls?” Leigh said, refusing a label.
Gwen nodded.
“Sure,” Leigh said. “I mean, when did you know you were curious about boys?”
Gwen remembered back to second grade, when a boy from Calgary transferred to her school midyear.
He was placed not only in her class, but in the seat next to hers.
His name was Alex, and he had a buzz cut and a dimple on one side when he smiled.
She liked how he pronounced about like a boat.
On his second day sitting next to her, she wore her favorite underwear, the pink ones with the lace trim and the Strawberry Shortcake decal.
She unfolded the waistband of her skirt just so, hoping he would see the lace trim.
It was such a strange thing to do for an eight-year-old.
Where had she learned this seduction? She couldn’t even remember if he noticed, if he said anything to her.
The point was not to get a reaction from him; the point was to see herself in a new way.
“Elementary school,” Gwen said.
“Right. See?”
“Some women are . . . late bloomers, though, right? Like, they realize in their forties that they’re bi or whatever?”
Leigh shrugged. “Sure. Happens all the time. Though I have to think there were inklings all along and that shit just gets repressed. We all want to be normal, whatever the hell that means.”
Gwen had thought she knew what it meant.
She’d thought her life was deliciously normal.
She had the career she’d planned to have, a husband who was decent by anyone’s standards, and now June.
She was the American dream personified, and she was more lost than she’d ever been.
What could she chalk it up to? Postpartum depression?
PTSD from her medical mishaps? A more generalized existential crisis?
Just thinking about these possibilities, how it was likely a combination of all of them, she started to cry.
“Oh, honey, what’s wrong?” Leigh said, sliding over a few inches on the couch, putting her hand on Gwen’s arm.
“I don’t know. I just feel so . . .” She started to get choked up and wasn’t sure she had the words to finish her thought. She eked out two words: “Not me.”
“You’ve been through a lot,” Leigh said.
Had she? Gwen wasn’t sure. She kept telling herself she was fine.
Didn’t other mothers deal with these types of things all the time?
C-sections, mastitis—these were par for the course.
What was wrong with her? She was used to seeing herself the way her employer saw her.
Her annual reviews always included cliché phrases like “rises to the occasion” and “ducks in a row” and “tough as nails” and “doesn’t take things lying down.
” This woman she’d become was an easy crier, a hot mess.
“You have,” Leigh said, somehow knowing that Gwen needed this validation, this reassurance. “You’ve been through a lot.”
Leigh took June from Gwen’s lap and set her on the floor mat with Belle. Then she inched closer again to Gwen, their thighs touching. Leigh reached a hand around to Gwen’s cheek, gently pulled Gwen’s head to rest on her shoulder.
“Why am I always crying around you?” Gwen said, embarrassed.
“It’s okay,” Leigh said. “Let yourself cry.”
And Gwen did. She cried there on Leigh’s shoulder, her tears dampening Leigh’s blouse.
Leigh remained very still, not shifting in her seat at all.
If Gwen cried on Jeff’s shoulder, he wouldn’t be able to just sit there.
He would have to try to talk her out of her tears.
He would shift in his seat, clear his throat, say he had to go to the bathroom.
Gwen’s discomfort pained him. And the fact of that pained her.
Gwen’s breakdown was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. Before Gwen could lift her head from Leigh’s shoulder, Nathan was coming into the room, looking surprised to see them.
“Uh, hi,” he said, announcing his presence.
Gwen sat up straight and used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe her eyes. Leigh stood to greet her husband.
“I’m sorry, I’m having a new-mom meltdown,” Gwen said by way of explanation, wanting to ease Nathan’s mind of any anxieties.
The skepticism was obvious on his face as he looked at Gwen, then back at his wife.
“Meeting got canceled so figured I’d come by, see if you and Belle wanted to head to the sandwich shop.”
“Let’s all go! We can eat at the park! A little outing!” Leigh said. “What do you think, Gwennie?”
Gwennie. Leigh had never called her that before. The existence of this new nickname felt like a special kind of intimacy.
Gwen, sensing Nathan’s uneasiness, said, “Oh, I don’t have to—”
“Enough,” Leigh said. “We’re going.”
Nathan went to get the sandwiches while Gwen and Leigh took the babies to the park.
Neither of them had a picnic blanket, but they had a plethora of swaddling blankets that they laid together to make a patchwork quilt.
The babies seemed enthralled with their new surroundings, grabbing at the blades of grass, eyes squinting in the sunlight.
“It’s nice to get out,” Leigh said, tilting her head up toward the sky.
Gwen had to admit that, yes, it was nice to get out. It was the type of thing Jeff was always suggesting she do.
“I can’t wait for Belle to be old enough to use the playground by herself,” Leigh said. “Can you even imagine? We could bring a game of fucking Scrabble and drink a bottle of wine while they do the monkey bars.”
Gwen let herself think ahead to this future, the two of them still friends when the girls were five, six, seven years old.
“That feels a hundred years away,” Gwen said. “But it sounds nice.”
“Yeah, time is a bitch right now. Bedtime feels a hundred years away.”
Nathan trudged his way up the hill with the plastic bag of sandwiches and sat on one of the swaddling blankets. He looked very stiff and uncomfortable in his work attire, and Gwen felt very stiff and uncomfortable in his presence.
He passed them their sandwiches and then unwrapped his own. After his first bite, there was a smear of avocado on the side of his mouth. It was large and obvious, but Leigh didn’t say anything.
“So Leigh says you’re a lawyer?” Nathan said, speaking with his mouth full after taking a second too-big bite.
“God, baby, chew and swallow, chew and swallow,” Leigh said.
Gwen felt herself blushing, mortified by Leigh’s public shaming of her husband. She was talking to him like he was a toddler. Nathan didn’t seem fazed, though. He wiped his mouth with a square of paper towel, though he missed the avocado smear, and awaited Gwen’s response.
“Yes. A lawyer,” she said.
“What kind of law?”
She hadn’t talked about this, her career, in ages. It felt like a past life, as believable as her saying she was a seamstress in eighteenth-century France.
“Corporate law. It’s really quite dull,” she said with a laugh.
She did not want to talk about work. June squealed, as if sensing her mother’s shift toward sadness, and Gwen lifted her from the grass, cradled her in the crook of her arm.
“When do you go back?” Nathan asked.
This was why she didn’t want to talk about work.
She had spoken to human resources, and they had agreed to extend her leave because of the mastitis complication, the additional recovery.
Still, she was set to return in two weeks, which felt like no time at all.
How would she be recovered from anything in two weeks?
She could not imagine zipping up one of her pencil skirts, putting on her heels, leaving June at the day care center they’d picked midpregnancy.
“I’m supposed to go back in a couple weeks,” she said.
She picked up her sandwich with her free hand, then set it back down without taking a bite. She felt suddenly nauseated.
“This country is so fucked up,” Leigh said.
“Maybe she wants to go back to work,” Nathan said.
Their relationship seemed rooted in being each other’s devil’s advocates. Maybe they liked this kind of tension, the constant challenge of it, the push and pull. Maybe this was the excitement Leigh needed to stay.
“She’s told me she doesn’t,” Leigh said.
Gwen wanted to hide in the tube slide while they discussed her life choices.
“Oh my god, did you see Angeni Luna’s post after the Cincinnati shooting?” Leigh asked Gwen, turning her entire body away from Nathan to shut him out of the conversation.
“I did,” Gwen said.