150 PM Mia #2
But because Ava had started crying, everyone had stopped listening.
Sasha was gently bouncing the baby up and down, and handing her back to Marco, who was being descended upon by Emily.
She took Ava from him, and said, “Why all the chirping, my little piglet?” Her voice lifted by two octaves, and Mia felt herself becoming embarrassed, both for Emily and also for the situation at large.
Not knowing where to look or the polite way to react, she simply kept smiling, saying, “Oh, poor little thing,” over and over until she was confident that no one was paying attention.
A minute or so later, Marco and Sasha fell into a discussion about sleep training, their backs partially turned to her.
Mia touched her necklace. She adjusted her sunglasses and stretched from side to side.
Up until a few years ago, she had been able to talk with her friends about anything.
Now all anyone cared about was real estate and babies.
The real estate she could understand—when someone she knew bought an apartment, the first thing she did was immediately search Zillow to try to discern how much they’d paid for it.
The babies, on the other hand, were beginning to get to her.
Around her friends with children, all conversations inevitably tilted toward sleep schedules, strollers, passive-aggressive nannies, actually aggressive nannies, daycare waiting lists, projectile vomit, the introduction of various pureed fruits and vegetables, whether late vocabulary development was a sign of genius or autism, and the consistency of infant shit.
They treated these topics like they were world-changing and vital, as if Mia was the frivolous one for the actual world-changing and vital conversations she was trying to have with them.
Art, new restaurants, theater, deforestation, Muslim bans, the death of American democracy—they were all dismissed with the same condescension, as if the stuff that occupied Mia’s brain was trivial and inane and infinitely less important than whether an eight-month-old liked mashed-up bananas.
“My chirpy little piglet,” Emily said, still bouncing up and down in the water. “Why are you such a chirpy little piglet?”
And you couldn’t bring it up to them—you couldn’t say, for example, Hey, Sasha, could we not talk about Ethan’s pooping habits for once?
—because if you did, you proved that they were right and that you were a shallow, incorrigible hedonist; or your suggestion was interpreted as a direct attack, and they then felt compelled to respond to it with a sentimental, slobbery defense of their decision to procreate in the first place.
Mia had experienced this most recently with Satya Patel at a playground in Carroll Gardens.
A month ago they’d met there to catch up over sandwiches, and after thirty-five minutes of listening to Satya talk about how her son Rishi was so plainly smarter than every other three-year-old to have ever lived, Mia felt something inside of her crack.
“You know, Satya,” she said, “there are seven-point-six billion people on this earth that aren’t Rishi, and I happen to be one of them. Things are happening in my life too.”
Satya gawked at her, then turned to look at Rishi. He was sitting sluglike at the bottom of a slide, and Mia watched as he picked something up off the ground and promptly stuck it in his mouth.
“You can’t understand how it changes you,” Satya said to her, as if making her closing arguments in a criminal trial. “He’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and you just can’t understand that.”
Except she did. Mia did understand how it changed a person, because those changes were everywhere she looked.
Weird silences had started to creep into her conversations with Sasha, and no one seemed to be available for dinner anymore unless you planned it eight months in advance, and so far as Mia could tell this was how it was going to be for the rest of her life.
It had all happened so quickly. In her late twenties, when everyone was getting married, the transformations were gradual—you had the chance to adjust to someone’s new boyfriend or girlfriend, until eventually it seemed like they had always been there.
Babies were different—babies were tornados.
The wind picked up, the sky turned green, and suddenly a relationship that had been standing there for twenty years was ripped from the ground and carried away.
None of this was to say that she hadn’t considered it herself—one time she even got close.
Ever since turning thirty, Mia had sometimes got the impression that the world had rearranged itself so that the question of whether or not she should have a child of her own was literally the only thing she was allowed to think about.
Her mother emailed her articles about geriatric pregnancies, and her doctors asked insanely personal questions, and her Instagram was nothing but targeted ads for rubber giraffes and nipple cream.
Sometimes she toyed with giving in to it all.
Two weeks ago, when she went to meet her coworker Natalia’s baby, she’d held the tiny boy in her arms and found herself imagining a future where she also thought her child was a genius for eating gum off the playground.
That fantasy had lasted until she left the apartment and descended into the subway at Seventy-Second Street.
As she waited for the train, she’d remembered that she could fly to Barcelona tomorrow if she wanted to, then reached into her bag for her book.
Ava was still crying, or chirping, or whatever it was she was doing.
Emily said, “She’s had us up since five o’clock this morning.”
“Five o’clock!” Mia knew her role in these things, all the lines she was supposed to say. “I don’t know how you do it.”
Marco ran a hand along the water’s surface. “She usually sleeps until around six thirty. We’re in a new place, though, so—”
“She’s in a sleep regression. She needs to work through it, but Marco insists on going to her if she cries for longer than four seconds.”
“I’m right here, Emily. I’m literally standing two feet away from you.”
Emily spun in a slow half-circle away from him, her fingers clasped around Ava’s ankles.
She waded deeper into the pool. Across the lawn, Nina Guzman tossed one of the bocce balls high into the air, and a few seconds later it hit the ground with a muted plunk.
Marco stared down at his palms. He said something under his breath.
“Well,” Mia said, “you guys must be exhausted.”
Emily laughed dryly. “Please. I’ve been exhausted for the last ten months.”
“She’s right,” Marco added. “I can’t remember the last time I felt like an actual human being.”
With a playful whoop! Emily brought Ava to her chest, gently patting her back.
“Yes, it’s been very hard for Marco. Not breastfeeding, getting seven hours of sleep a night instead of eight—you can imagine how badly we all feel for him.”
For a few seconds the air was still. Then Marco slammed his fists into the water, sending splashes that landed on Mia’s thighs. From the other side of the pool, Theo looked over at them. Ava cried harder.
“Here,” Marco said. “Give her to me.”
Emily didn’t look at him. “I’ve got her.”
“If you’re going to imply that I don’t help, then let me prove I can help. Give her to me.”
Emily patted Ava’s back again, then handed her over to Marco, who brought her to his shoulder and climbed out of the pool.
“Check her diaper,” she said.
“I know.”
“And you need to—”
But Marco was already walking away.
“Sorry,” Emily said. “Everyone’s just a little exhausted these days.”
The comment hung there; Mia thought about telling Emily there was nothing to apologize for, but then stopped herself and felt a small victory.
On the other side of the lawn, Mitch Reynolds told a joke too loudly—he said, “But you fuck one goat!”—and Nina Guzman laughed.
Sasha ducked beneath the surface of the water.
When she came up again a few seconds later, she slicked water from her hair.
Marco walked toward the house. As he was passing an empty chair, he grabbed hold of its back and flipped it to the ground.
Emily didn’t react; she swam over to the steps leading out of the pool, where she sat on the shallowest one, next to Theo.
Through the windows Ava’s crying reached a crescendo before trailing off for a few seconds.
Emily ran a hand over the top of her spine, her chin pressed toward her chest. Then she stood up.
Water dripped from her knees and thighs.
“Are you going to help him?” Mia asked.
Emily turned to face her, her eyes tired, her mouth pulled taut. “No. I’m going to get a drink.”
Sasha placed her hands on the pool’s edge, propelling herself out of the water. She adjusted the bottom of her bathing suit.
“Let me get one for you,” she said. “I was going to get one myself, and you’ve been up since five AM.”
Emily thanked her. Mia had a full glass of wine, but she was immediately hurt that Sasha hadn’t checked in with her too.
She wanted to ask if she would mind getting her something, if only because she wanted to know how Sasha would respond.
But she didn’t, and once Sasha was gone, she took a drink of her Sancerre and wiped a bit of sweat from her sunglasses.
She wasn’t sure whether she should say something else to Emily.
They weren’t friends, and on the few occasions that Mia had seen her over the last few years, anytime Emily had been kind to her had retrospectively felt competitive, as if she was trying to prove to Mia which one of them was a better person.
Was that why Mia now felt compelled to break the silence?
To explicitly lighten the air, while also signaling to Emily that she clocked her acting like a bitch?
Probably, but all that struck Mia as exhausting, particularly with it being as hot as it was, and with the Sancerre already working its way through her veins.
Instinctively she reached for her phone, but then remembered she’d left it in the house; she’d also forgotten to ask Adam for the Wi-Fi password.
She set her hands behind her, palms down on the hot stone, and lifted one of her legs from the water.
“Sorry, what was that?” Emily asked.
“Nothing.”
A bocce ball thudded in the grass behind them.
“Oh.” Emily dipped her hands into the water. “I could have sworn you said something.”