We Were the Universe E-Book

Kimberly King Parsons

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Feral' Jenny Offill, author of Weather 'Horny' Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl 'Hilarious' Chelsea Bieker, author of Mad Woman The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for a quick, idyllic weekend away. They'll soak in hot springs, then drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she's lost lately: her wildness, her independence and - most heartbreakingly of all - her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago. When she returns home, Kit tries to settle the routine of caring for her irrepressible young daughter. But in the secret recesses of Kit's mind, she's fantasizing about the hot playground mum and reminiscing about the band she used to be in with her sister - and how they'd go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. Keyed into everything that might distract her from her surfacing grief, Kit begins to spiral, and as her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasty blur, she starts to wonder: is Julie really gone?

Leseprobe

ALSO BY KIMBERLY KING PARSONS

Black Light

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Kimberly King Parsons, 2024

The moral right of Kimberly King Parsons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 135 1

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For my mother

No matter where we are

We’re always touching by underground wires

Of Montreal, “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal”

Part One

TINYTOADS

MY DAUGHTER IS BACKLIT BY THE SUN, WAVING and calling to me, but I’m split—half of me is here on the playground with her, half is in the past with the girl who taught me about negative space.

Gilda shouts, “Watch, Mama! Mama, watch!”

We’re at Hidden Wonder Park—Gilda’s favorite—and she’s found a new friend, one of these helpless kids she drags around and calls sister. Lit this way, they could be twins, though today’s sister is younger than Gilda and smaller: not much more than a toddler. They both have wild hair and skinny arms, plus the same unearthly beauty all children share. That eerie, opalescent skin, those unformed, boneless noses. Two fused girls, holding hands. They make a single shadow.

One of Gilda’s shoes is gone. You bring a kid to Hidden Wonder specifically to get a moment of peace, but she’ll keep sucking you in.’ Bring a book and you’ll never open it. Start tapping on your phone and this is the precise moment your child will fracture her tibia, poke some newborn in the eyeball.

I should stand up and look for Gilda’s sandal. I should. My body may be on this park bench, but astrally I’ve hurled myself back to freshman art class—Intro to Whatever, Whatever 101—my whole soul pulsing in that paint-spangled studio. The art girl was a wry genius with a heap of curly hair—she worked the easel next to mine. If you looked close, you’d notice this girl was always spattered, sparks dotting her forearms and cheeks, smears on her fingers, little fans of color on her neck. God knows where else the paint got to. I spent a lot of time imagining a tub of faintly rainbowed bathwater, the art girl stepping out of it.

“You watching me?” Gilda yells.

“Definitely,” I shout.

The studio was in the unrenovated part of campus, in a corrugated metal building we called the Art Barn. It was full of natural light but poorly ventilated. There was a constant, delicious reek of oils and solvents and dangerous glue—that semester, a bunch of us kept getting nosebleeds. Whatever carcinogens I likely sucked from the air, whatever sick, slow-growing seed may be lodged in my lungs, it was worth it. The art girl wore these concert T-shirts with the sleeves cut out huge—when she lifted her paintbrush, you could see all down the side of her. For weeks she quietly watched me struggle with some assigned still life—a bowl of fruit maybe, a chair. One day she touched the paint-speckled notch at her throat, made a sound there, turned her canvas toward mine.

There’s a bank of plastic spring-mounted animals near the playground gate. Gilda hops like a rabbit toward the fake rabbits, jerking the girl along. “Gentle,” I trill, hoping to god this sister’s arm stays in socket. She’ll wise up and escape soon, they always do, but for now she belongs to Gilda. “Remember we are gentle,” I say again for the adults, hoping nobody has noticed Gilda’s dirty foot. I beat being a teen mom by just a couple years, not that I look especially young anymore. I’ve always had to work hard to seem convincing.

The playground tug is such a bitch. It’s too hot today, too crowded. Even the qualified caregivers seem on edge. Out here, we’re all stars in the theater of parenthood. Each playground misstep requires a verbal assessment, correction, and redirection given to your child in patient, loving tones. One-liners delivered by parents, for parents. The kids don’t hear a thing. I shade my eyes and act like I’m looking close at my daughter.

The art girl gently explained light and dark to me. She tilted her head, brought her long hand to hover close to my failure. She said, “Can I?” and in my notebook she flipped to the first blank page, pinched a nub of charcoal. She made her case with a sketch of those famous, about-to-kiss vase people, and I let my heart go wild with the thought that something might happen between us.

“See, Mama?”

Gilda and her captive mount their rabbits and rock on them. The sister copies Gilda—one hand up to twirl a slow, invisible lasso.

“See us?”

Lord, Gilda, yes. I remind myself that all this neediness is just a phase, and a flattering one too. Like without me to confirm it for her, nothing in the world exists.

The art girl was super straight, but I ached for her that entire semester, always slow with hard truths. We became friends, a form of torture. She had an off-campus apartment, a bad spine and an oxy script, an inherited family parrot in her living room. She would play records and sit on her couch while I danced, not for her exactly, but if you walked into the art girl’s place at the right moment, you might have gotten the wrong idea.

“Are you seeing this, Mama?” Gilda yells. She and the sister stand up on their rabbits, prepare to make the short leap to Astroturf.

The art girl’s bird watched me dance too, jerked its slick head, cranked open and shut the pupils of its white eyes. It ate raw hamburger as a treat, and it would rip the shit out of your hair if you danced too close to its perch. You had to be calm, not get hysterical, while the art girl helped extricate you. “They live to be a hundred,” she told me once, grimly unhooking my braid from beak and claw.

“Are you seeing us up in the air?” Gilda shouts.

“I see the air,” I say.

Gilda’s too worried about me, too busy making sure I’m riveted, and that’s when the sister bounds off, breaks free. “Bye, fren!” Gilda’s girl screams. She shoots across the playground and hides behind another dark-haired girl, her real sister maybe.

“Mamaaaah,” Gilda says, and runs to me, mournful. “She left. Did you see she left me?”

I palm her hot head. “I saw, Gilly. Deep breaths,” I say. I take a few of those too, jerk myself from my pining, pigmented past, reassemble here in the heartbreaking now. Poor Gilda. Loss is the lesson life teaches, ready or not.

Thank god she’s amped on fruit leathers, fully tweaked from corn syrup, and it doesn’t take her long to move on. She runs from me, full force to the play structure.

The art girl’s creepy parrot—the way its eyes would dilate and contract, dilate and contract. It never said a word, but because it could have, you got the feeling it was planning something vile.

I USED TO HAVE a better brain. Clean and organized, the wires soldered just so. A headline I read this morning, ungodly understatement, “Motherhood Not Best Thing for Women’s Mental Health.” I have a scrolling list like everybody: oat milk, milk-milk, butter, make that dentist appointment, pay my sliding-scale therapist. That’s all fine, but I’ve got these memory hemorrhages too, Technicolor scenes that barge into my thoughts.

“We go down the slide,” I yell to Gilda, but she presses on, scrambles up hot metal, ruins the flow for a glum boy waiting at the top. She crawls around him, pushes down the ladder, shoves against the line of pissed-off kids. I say what I have to say, and Gilda does exactly what Gilda wants: our contract.

“I didn’t do that,” she shouts, waving her hand like a wand at where she’s been, what she’s done. I can’t tell if she’s simpler or more complex than other three-year-olds. She tells these tremendous lies, no shame. She has her own room, but she’s always slept with Jad and me, and sometimes in the mornings we’ll wake up damp in her little puddle. She’ll rub her eyes, her hair all crazy.

“That’s not pee,” she’ll say. “That’s champagne.”

Co-sleeping is what my attachment parenting message boards call this lifestyle—family slumber, family bed. As Gilda’s gotten bigger, bed wrestling is maybe a more apt term, slumber struggling.

“Help,” she calls, now low in the slack loop of a swing. Not the goddamn swings. I come here to sit, not push. What I want to do is not get up for a good long while. I want to drink this iced coffee, the one I bought but can’t afford, my daily middle- class lie.

“Mama, push,” whines Gilda, pitifully pumping her soft legs. I shake the ice in my cup, pretend not to hear. I give her a thumbs-up and wait it out.

Eventually, she runs to a group of kids playing under the slide. She says something I can’t hear, and they turn and squint up at her. I can tell she’s being an asshole by the cock of her head. She’s recently learned the word stupid, and I have to fake surprise every time it falls from her tiny mouth. What is surprising, and a relief, frankly, is that she hasn’t learned the complete phrase yet. Stupid- butthole- bitch is a thing I say to myself, maybe louder than I realize. An incantation—I do it snapped to a beat. Stupid- butthole- bitch when I lock myself out and Jad has to come home and let us in. Stupid- buttholebitch when I burn Gilda’s macaroni. I hate the word butthole above all else. It’s a punishment to say it.

There it is—Gilda’s gleeful voice: “You soupid rats.” I don’t want to intervene, but now I have to stand up, make an effort.

“No thank you. No, ma’am,” I loudly say, like Look how very shocked I am. The good parents are watching.

A boy from the underslide crew glares at me, then at Gilda. He’s shorter than she is but sturdier, with inflamed cheeks and a big round head.

“Shoe,” I sing, pointing to the dusty, flipped-over sandal I’ve spotted near the fence. “We wear shoes in the park.” This is partially a distraction and partially an act of ass covering, a lesson I learned when Gilda was tiny and the world at large seemed compelled to point out her messy hair and unsocked feet to me all day long.

Gilda runs off, but the underslide kid goes too. He intercepts the shoe, holds it out of reach. Gilda sets her jaw, shows her tiny bottom teeth. I’m grateful again for how bald her anger is, thankful I can so clearly see when rage gathers in her.

“Gilly, remember we are kind,” I say, but the boy is wielding the shoe now, has it cocked above his head.

“Hey!” I say, and clap three times to break the spell. Gilda is too close to this maniac, too far from me. “Hey, kid!” I yell. I’m not performing anymore, smile gone from my voice. I give a wet, two-fingered whistle that scatters the chirping grackles and stuns everyone—children and parents alike. Time stutters. People turn their heads, look to see who has made such a vulgar sound. The kid drops the shoe, runs fast to the big vacant rabbits.

I stand there feeling obscene with my hand at my mouth, then wipe my fingers on my sleeve. My mother used to call us home with that whistle, her terrifying trick, a whipcrack my sister and I couldn’t help but run toward.

“Kind,” I say, soft. Gilda doesn’t even pick up the sandal, just leaves and goes to grab at the hanging rings, not because of what I’ve done but because she’s Gilly, wild and vibrating, utterly disobedient, wanting to be everywhere at once.

I sit down, heart thudding, and roll through all the ways I’d die for her. I’ll throw myself on that trash can over there if it turns out to be an explosive device. I’ll shield her with my body if poison rain starts spewing from the sky, eating everybody’s flesh. It’s too horrifying to imagine something real.

When Mom was pregnant with Julie, my parents had me pose for a picture on a tricycle they’d gotten at a garage sale. Mom held the camera—also secondhand, same sale—and my dad was the one telling me to smile. Just as the flash popped, I was aloft, tricycle and all, wheels spinning, high over my dad’s head. He’d seen what my mother missed, a rattlesnake in the scrub behind me. The photo is marred by his blurred pink hands, the long streak of his arms. I’m smiling in the frame, unaware, no threat in the shot. At this point in my life, I have no way to tell pure memory apart from the image itself—the photo has shellacked my experience. This is the type of story I’d fact-check with Julie, but she hadn’t arrived yet.

“I was dead then, Kit,” is something she used to say about those pictures from my early childhood, before she was born. “Not dead,” I’d say, “unalive,” which is a very different thing. Of course now dead really is the right word for what she is.

Something else I don’t actually remember: the snake was a baby. My mom snipped it in two with a pair of garden shears and my dad pulled off its young rattle. He put it on a string, and I wore it around my neck all summer, the tiny thing so new it didn’t make a sound.

After Dad left, he stayed on in our small town, not because he wanted to be near Julie and me, but because it was easier to be somewhere familiar, driving the same roads, shopping at Flip Mart, listening to the same bugsong every night. He mostly managed to avoid us while we were growing up, which was some feat—the smallness of Wink, Texas, can’t be overstated— but then our mom mostly avoided us too, and she was the one raising us. Even the laziest, most unfit parents can hustle when they perceive danger, is my point. It’s not heroic—it’s biology.

Rattles are good luck, silent or not. I’m sure my mom still has the thing somewhere, in one of her filthy coffee cans or rotten shoeboxes, and I wonder how it might look around Gilda’s neck. Then I think, That’s a choking hazard, you absolute butthole.

There was a boy in my high school with a pet python called Monty. What a dork this boy was! He had burgundy bedsheets, a misstep by a well-meaning mother, I realize now, an attempt to hide stains. Instead, the boy’s whitish streaks proudly crusted. The bed stayed unmade, begging for bodies, though the dork never invited any of us girls into it. Curious, I would have climbed right in, stains or no. I would have let the dork do whatever he wanted to me—this is the way I’ve always been. Instead, he played it cool, and my friends and Julie and I smoked his dirt weed. He’d open Monty’s glass tank and all the other girls would scream and scatter. Not me. I fed on their fear. I let the dork drape me with Monty, let the creature coil his way under my T-shirt, tight around my waist, hungry for heat.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Julie asked, flustered and innocent, barely pubescent. But I knew exactly what I was doing. I was okay sitting besnaked in a beanbag chair, trying to look like a girl who knew how to fuck. On the dork’s wall there was a poster of a porny model, fake blond and naked with a snake belting her hips. My mentor.

Bleach, we need more of it at home. Jad’s oat milk, the milk-milk, the butter.

Gilda zips past, alone and quiet. Other children screech together, sonics blistering the pavement. Their screams are joyous, like the chorus of Julie’s favorite psychedelic pop song. An infectious, happy track about being sad, begging the feelgood hormones to flood your depressed brain. She used to play it over and over.

“C’mon, chemicals!” shrieks the singer.

Pete, my best friend and easily one of the smartest people I know, says when he sits still and listens there is only silence lapping at the sides of his mind. He says it’s blank and black and soft in there, the dark foam rubber of nothing, a squishy mat like the ones he and I used to stand on together in restaurant kitchens. I wanted to punch him when he told me that—I was so envious.

“Everything moves right through me,” he said, “that’s how stupid I am,” and I said, “No, not at all, you’ve got the whole game figured out.”

Come on, brain. Come on, chemicals.

I’M FAKING ASTONISHMENT at Gilda’s monkey bar prowess when I notice a woman sitting beside me. How long has she been here? Like me, she has a book resting face down in her lap. Like me, there’s a huge coffee on the bench next to her. By the way she scans the shrieking bodies, I can tell she’s got a child in her charge. Occasionally she stands for a better look, then slowly lowers herself down.

“Bit of a crowd,” she says in a British accent so strong it would stand out anywhere, especially here.

I say, “Sure is,” and there’s an extra southern lilt in my voice, a full-blown drawl, like my body wants to assert its origins too.

There’s a big, curved gem hanging from a slim chain around this woman’s neck. It’s rippled like water, milky. It’s sea glass or Lucite, maybe aquamarine. I have no idea if the thing is manufactured or organic, if it’s heavy or featherlight, solid or hollow. I’m not sure if it’s expensive or something her kid made, but the color—I’m certain because it’s my color, as much as a shade can belong to a person—is celadon, greatest green. I want to put this woman’s charm in my mouth, suck it like candy.

She sees me looking and touches it, smiles shyly. Celadon and I begin to have the sort of conversation I’m used to having with other moms, the kind where you don’t quite hear each other, don’t exactly turn your head, where you speak noncommittally about whatever is directly in front of you.

“I’m surprised so many are here today,” she says. “It’s quite hot.”

“Humid,” I say, and Celadon stands, shields her eyes.

She’s a lot older than me, and so much more stylish. She’s wearing cropped, high-waisted pants, navy blue, and they look formal and anachronistic, faded and moth-eaten, like something a Titanic deckhand drowned in. Gaucho, I think, but I’m not sure that’s right. Her white T-shirt is threadbare, inside out and too big, knotted at the waist. It’s her husband’s, is my guess, and it’s sexy as hell on her. Her arms are strong and tan, and she’s curvy—bedecked, as my mother would say—and clearly not wearing a bra. The unexpected, absolute certainty of this undoes me, always. How do people get on with their lives when bralessness is near? There are brass buttons on the hips of her pants, nonfunctional, I suspect, because I see a side zipper, the true point of entry. Her pants make me think of fucking on a yacht on open water. I bet Celadon fucks in the sea, not the boring old ocean.

Nearby, a baby is learning to walk, lurching away from its mother. What a creep I am, lusty in front of all these kids, these nice, normal people under the full sun.

When Celadon stands again, some small piece of paper—a receipt maybe, or something more important—falls to the ground and skips into the wind.

“Oh,” I say, “your—”

We watch the scrap roll over the Astroturf, tornado itself toward a trashy little tree. I consider running after it, diving for it, but Celadon only squints into the sun and says, “Doesn’t matter.” She feels around in her pockets. “No idea what that was,” she says, not looking at me. “Gone now.” She’s careless, carefree.

She sits, balls her fists, presses them to her closed eyes. “I have such a headache,” she says. “Little shits are brutal today.”

I laugh at how blunt she is, how refreshing. Moms in Hidden Wonder don’t generally refer to children as shits, not out loud anyway, not to strangers. This isn’t Shady Park out by the bus stop, where some of the moms smoke and the kids are wild and trampling, the seesaw murderous. You take your kids to Shady Park to toughen them up, get their asses kicked a little. Hidden Wonder is a different place.

There’s a small gold hoop high in the cartilage of Celadon’s ear, same glint as the buttons on her pants. Some women have this ability to look cool and put together, no matter the circumstance. Clothes and accessories are “pieces” on them.

There’s a masala stain in the shape of a marlin on the ass of the overalls I’m wearing. I recall the meal, though I don’t remember sitting in it. By the time I noticed the fish, he was forever. I see him every time I wear these, yet I keep wearing them. I don’t like spending money on clothes, and the stain feels like part of me now, fated and deserved, a gross mystery for the unfortunate people in my wake.

I’m not trying to impress anyone, and Jad has never complained. “Ooh, I like when you wear these,” he said just this morning. He was hugging me in our dim bedroom, chin resting on top of my head. He moved his big hands around my ribs, under my T-shirt, down to cup my ass in grubby underwear. “I can get all the way in there,” he said breathlessly, but instead of turning me on, this made me feel sexless: a big, baggy pocket, personified.

A pocket sums me up, pretty much. I’m done with the diaper bag, and yet I still have to carry all the bullshit that was in it. In the bib of my overalls: my phone, a spare fruit leather, a pouch of organic apple mash, Gilda’s EpiPen. Wasp sensitivity runs in Jad’s family and I’ve become obsessed and paranoid, annoying and sad, like the peanut moms. In my actual pockets are crayons, my keys and wallet, and a chocolate kiss for bribing, melted probably, hot as it is. I’m not a Kleenex carrier. In my family, we were against them. They make you sickly, was my mom’s idea. The body is an efficient machine—it knows what it can get away with. Buy a pack and your nose starts dripping, she claimed. Same with ChapStick, which causes your lips to stop producing their own gunk. What we carry around determines what we need.

Celadon stands again, glares at the springy animals. I’m thrilled to see there’s a stain on her pants too, her gauchos, if they are gauchos. It’s a black streak on the thigh, could be a handprint. You try to wear something cute and your kids use you for a napkin. She sits and turns to me, leans close.

“I felt my menstrual cup,” she says. “Just then.”

“Oh,” I say, putting the words together.

“Inside,” she says, a stage whisper. Her breath moves my hair. “Do you use one?”

It’s an unusual question, though not as unusual as you might think among women who have had children. Once you’ve been slit open by a surgeon or taken a shit in a birthing tub, a whole glittering world of conversational topics emerges.

“What?” I say. “Oh, no. I should, though.”

“The environment,” she says.

“Cheaper,” I say. “You like it?”

“I’m getting used to it,” she says. “You can really see what’s coming out of you. I like that quite a lot.”

She draws both hands together to make a bowl, stares into it, and grimaces. Her hair is black and thick, cut blunt. I’m relieved to see it’s very unwashed, like mine. I want to make a bodily confession too. I could mention that my uterus swells when I walk upstairs, how it feels like it’s going to fall right out of me. Just as I’m formulating this as a question—has Celadon experienced this same terrible blooming?—Nancy comes through the gate with bratty Riley, who is crying like always. She unbuckles him from his stroller, lets him loose to be annoying in a new setting. She gives me a big wave, walks to the bench. She’s wearing overalls too, goddamn it.

Nancy and I met almost four years ago in Attached at the Heart, a community program for new moms. I left those classes feeling terrified, the stakes suddenly sky-high. Instead of getting a failing grade, something I had a lot of experience with, I could potentially fail a whole-ass person. But Nancy finished the course reeking with newfound confidence, and in my bleak postpartum fog, I clung to her. Did she want to go for a walk while our children napped in their slings? Did she want to come over for a cup of coffee, maybe listen to some records? The babies would take turns bawling while Nancy tried, for months, to lure me into her essential oil cult. Our friendship never really cemented.

She and Celadon glance at each other, give tight, unfamiliar smiles. The menstrual cup, full of blood, falls away, gone to the place where all promising playground conversations go to die.

Nancy stops right in front of me, looming, blocking my view of Gilda. She is giddy to talk about the package thieves in our neighborhood.

“Out of control,” she says, shaking her head. “They go right behind the delivery guys. They stalk the trucks.” She pulls a tube of cream from her fat diaper bag, some cloying floral, and gums up her hands with it.

We live in Pivot, a suburban mid-city between Dallas and Fort Worth. Most of the real crime happens in those real cities, but any time we get a car burglary or a spritz of graffiti, Nancy starts slavering.

“They don’t even care what they take. They stole diapers from my neighbor,” she says.

Riley has stopped crying. He sits in the shade next to Gilda, who is turned away from him, making a pile of dirt. Does this qualify as parallel play, which is developmentally appropriate, or is this Gilda being weird? Either way, I can’t blame her for ignoring Riley—his snot-chapped face, his grabby hands.

“A baby was printed on the side of the box. Like, clearly, it was Pampers,” Nancy says. “Who would do that?”

“I don’t know, somebody with a kid?” I say. “Diapers aren’t cheap.”

“Exactly,” Nancy says, missing the point.

Celadon drinks deeply from her coffee, and I calmly state that a package thief isn’t the same type of person who breaks into your house and slits your throat while you’re sleeping. Nancy cringes at the gash I’ve made, the gore I’ve brought to the playground. Does Celadon notice that her blood has jumped to my mouth, to this new conversation?

“Yuck,” Nancy says. “Yuck! That’s not what I mean. But it’s a continuum, you know?” Nancy aims this question mostly at Celadon, who says nothing.

Nancy wants our block to teach the package thief a lesson. She says we should get together and box up something horrible. “I mean really bad,” she hints. “Like what?” I keep asking, but I can’t get her to say shit or piss or jizz, no matter how hard I try. I’m messing with Nancy for Celadon’s benefit, showing off. Then Gilda is screaming because there’s a bug in the dirt, and Riley is screaming because screaming is his very favorite thing to do. Nancy and I lope over to them, no real choice.

There’s a jolt at my chest—the phone vibrates in the bib of my overalls. I suspect it’s Jad, calling to see why there’s a lull in my incessant stream of Gilda photos, but it’s my mother, a hard pass. She has a bunch of greasy cats, all with the same name: Friend. I know they’re swirling slick around her legs as she calls from her sticky kitchen, her sweatpants coated in fur. When it’s time for the Friends to eat, she tosses great handfuls of kibble onto the linoleum like chicken feed. Out her window is Wink, spiteful little town, people driving by, judging the rusted car parts or paint cans or whatever-the- fucks she keeps stacked out there, a pile of used kitty litter growing like a great pyramid in the side yard.

I decline the call and deal with Gilda—“We don’t break anything we can’t make,” I say about the June bug she begs me to smash—and when I turn around, Celadon is gone. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye, sorry I didn’t get a good full-body look at her as she walked away.

I sit on the bench, and Nancy takes Celadon’s seat. The vibe gets chaste.

“Who was that?” Nancy asks. “What’s her deal?”

Her deal is she’s hot and interesting, I want to say, unlike some people. “No clue,” I say. “I thought you knew all the moms.”

Nancy beams like it’s a compliment. “Not every mom,” she says. She sighs, drums her fingers on the bench. “You know, something like glitter would be good,” she says—again with the fucking package trap. “Confetti! Or that invisible ink the banks use.”

“Invisible,” I say. Gilda is spinning in circles with her arms out. When Julie and I used to do that, Mom told us we’d get worms. Same with chewing with our mouths open or staying in the bath too long. Anything we did that annoyed our mother: worms.

“Not invisible,” Nancy says, trying for the word. “Permanent.” I feel a half-assed tenderness for her, annoying as she is. We moms are all so tired, so scattered. “I want these thieves to know who they’re dealing with,” she says.

“Oh, they know,” I say.

Riley is spinning now too, but when Gilda notices, she stops, runs away. “They’re so cute together,” Nancy says. She says she and Brad are thinking of having another kid, asks if we are too. Motherhood is dementia—Nancy and I have had this exact conversation before. She’s like those people at lunch who talk about dinner. Isn’t this enough? Our hands are full.

“Longest relationship of your life,” she says. “Everyone should have a sibling.”

“Totally,” I say. I open my mouth and pop my jaw, stare right at her, cruel.

Nancy takes a quick breath. My story, my deal, sweeps across her face. “Oh, god,” she squeaks, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I say.

She blinks fast, touches my knee.

The dark part of me keeps going. “Listen, I’m agreeing with you. I loved having a sister.”

This is fine. Sister doesn’t touch the person under the word. To say sister to a damp-eyed acquaintance, that’s not about Julie. Nancy being sorry—anybody being sorry—that’s not my business. These peripheral condolence-givers don’t know what they don’t know, and now they never will: the specific chip in Julie’s front tooth, the way she pronounced the word penguin—“peen-gwun,” for the record.

“I’m just . . . ,” Nancy says. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks,” I say, and I’m grateful for that, truly. “Sorry for your loss” is the car that drives you back to civilization, away from where you’re stranded. We cruise past the awkwardness, and I lob Nancy a fat, soft question.

“Y’all got a busy day today? We sure do,” I say. “Gymnastics.”

“Soccer and the library,” she says. “Busy, busy.”

“Groceries,” I say.

We lean hard into pleasantries. We talk about the heat index, bad, and the air quality, worse. I tell Nancy I’m going out of town for the weekend, sans Gilda, for the first time ever. She seems to judge me for that but doesn’t say anything, just smears sunscreen on Riley while he screams. Gilda goes down the slide, looks over at me like she deserves a prize.

I check my phone. “We’re fixing to leave soon.”

“All right, woman, y’all go on,” Nancy says, relieved, though we both know there is no soon at Hidden Wonder, no timely exit even when you need one. It will take me a good half hour to wrangle Gilda, to coax and bribe her away. Nancy still has time to hard-sell me a copper aromatherapy locket— “Carry peace everywhere you go,” she says, trying her oily pyramid scheme again.

Nancy, with her serious, sad-cow eyes, is wearing her frizzy hair in a low braid like me. Her overalls are a darker denim with wider legs, but our sneakers are the same brand. Neither of us wear socks. It must look like we’re farmers or painters or like we’re on some sort of team, second stringers, sitting on this bench. The visual appeal of overalls on a grown woman, if there is one, is the potential to make the wearer look adorable. I was adorable in college—I could sit on any cute girl’s lap without crushing her, boys used to toss me into swimming pools. For a while I was petite, which is what you are when you age out of adorable. Now I’m just short. Unadorable, unadored. Loved of course, but that’s a different thing. As a fashion statement, overalls say, “No comment.” They’re great for tamping down your desire, for neutralizing the entire situation of your body. I got mine on sale.

IT’S NOT THAT I want to masturbate in the vestibule of the Tiny Toads gymnastics class, specifically. There’s nothing particularly erotic about the clown-colored interior and the frigid air-conditioning, the dead-eyed caregivers sitting in folding chairs, scrolling on their phones. The vibe is institutional, bureaucratic, like an auto-body repair shop or the DMV, only there’s a bunch of friendly amphibians painted on the walls, children screaming in the background, the faint aroma of shitty diapers. This isn’t my precise kink or anything, it’s just that Tiny Toads is where, twice a week, I come a little bit alive, in this hour where Gilda is fully occupied, when I’m not responsible for anybody but myself.

One wall of the room is a huge two-way mirror, tiny gymnasts contained on the other side of it. I’m invisible to Gilda and she’s content behind glass, touching her toes, flailing in the ball pit, standing in line for the froggy hop. My focus shifts to the pissed-off mom pacing in front of me, chewing gum and yelling into her phone. She’s wearing acid-washed jean shorts, and a deodorant ghost haunts the belly of her black T-shirt. “I did call y’all during business hours,” she smacks. “It rang and rang and rang and rang and rang.” Those many rings charm me. She’s even younger than I am—maybe a true teen mom— but like the rest of us, she looks exhausted. “Send somebody’s ass out here to fix it,” she says. “Now.” I love how loud she is, the unselfconscious way she stalks the lobby.

I cross my legs, squirm in my seat. Jad once told me he looks around every room he’s in to see who he can take in a fight. It’s not because he’s violent—he never even raises his voice—he says it’s just that people always try to mess with the tall guy.

“I’ve never noticed you doing that,” I told him.

“Why would you?” he said. “It’s a seconds-long calculation between me and me.”

What a pair the two of us are in our own minds, me trying to fuck every room, him trying to kill it.

From the gym I hear Miss Jasmine’s bouncy words of encouragement. Jazzy, as the children call her, is cheering, helping them tackle the balance beam. She’s gorgeous in the two-way mirror, light and movement, heat and sound, neon against the backdrop of cadaverous lobby dwellers. Jazzy is not the type who snorts powders or pops pills—she is high on her sole purpose. She trampolines her worries away. She’s leaping across the gym mat of life, streamers trailing. I’ll never have the energy of Jazzy again—I never had it. I only want to feel her hum, her life force. When I fantasize about her, I fixate on the two of us naked, comparing skin. “This is what pregnancy does,” I’d murmur, opening my arms for her. “These are my blown-out elastin fibers.” I want to be stretch-marked all over her, draped across that tight body.

I touch my phone—tiny porn machine—but keep it tucked in the bib of my overalls, obviously. I uncross my legs, cross them again. When Jad comes home tonight I’ll sneak off to the bathroom. Shower or sink running, I’ll hide from my family and tap out my highly specific, highly disgusting search terms.

The porn I’ve been watching too much of, is, well, porn. Jad knows about it, he once claimed to be into it—how hot, his horny wife—but lately it feels like something I should downplay. I don’t want him worrying about the mother of his child behind some locked door, the oven timer going off, something burning on the stove. Even when I’m alone, I watch my selections without sound, in case a participant says something accidentally hilarious or genuinely disturbing. Catchy as a TV jingle, a snippet of dialogue from an early, formative scene haunts me still: “All right, boys,” said one gangbanger to his brethren, “let’s get in those guts and bust some nuts.” Now I’m a muter for life. Women and women and men and men, every sweaty permutation in absolute silence. Grainy amateurs, slick professionals. All the jiggling and bulging, the stretched magic, angles going from good to great. People clumped together in my hot, filthy brain. Action rising, tapping and more tapping, windows opening on the little screen, the same phone I use to talk to my mother and pay my electric bill. Scenes popping up unbidden, triggers I’ve touched by mistake, links leading me to spectacular, accidental worlds. A rush, my flexing feet, then the absurd reality of the tiny tits and asses in my palm, sexy people no bigger than my thumb. The fun ends with a swift maternal urge to check every performer’s ID, make sure they’re all legal, well paid, and hydrated.

I’d never watch porn in public, but when a delivery guy comes through the door of Tiny Toads, bell clanging behind him, I imagine he’s here for Jazzy, that my fantasy has bled into the real world. He’s wearing his all-brown garb, the summer version, with the little shorts. He’s got those tan, muscular calves they all have. He drops a package on the front desk, scans it with his plastic gun, belches, and clangs back out. Jad could take him, I decide.

The thought of a distant, bloody-minded, fucked-with Jad—it does something for me. Feeling generous, I invite him into the vestibule, a replacement for the delivery guy. A threesome, I fantasize about it constantly—men and women, one of each, just men, just women, Jad and not Jad, etc.—but I’d never have the nerve. To be naked with the person inside of you, I can handle that, but to be so blatantly seen, nobody blinded by tits and proximity—no thank you. Being caught from across a room or even the length of a bed, it scares me. This is probably why I can’t stop thinking about it.

“Tuck, friends! Tuck! Let your knees say hello to your belly,” Jazzy chirps.

Maybe together, Jad and I could pull the exuberance out of Jazzy, could suck her out of her, steal it away. If I were brave, I could bring her home and we’d do all the things people do to each other, even silly things. Like could Jad somehow stack us? Do me, then her, then me, then her? I’ve seen it done— though I’m not sure about the setup. In porn they’re never helpful, always leaving out the mechanics, the prep. Why not show the recipe for the dish too? Not just a picture of the half-eaten thing, gaping on a plate?

I close my eyes. Now Jad is nowhere and Jazzy is replaced by Eddie, the line cook at my first restaurant job. He pushed me against the wall like a cop, my ponytail wrapped around his fist. I’m moving around in my vault, picking up the past and looking at it. There’s the Kristy or Kristen or Christine who slid her underwear off at a campus dive bar, kicked it onto the dark floor. That redhead in the changing room at the public pool last week—Jad’s type—who locked eyes with me, then swept her sundress up and over her head. There’s Celadon, my new friend, her green charm a pendulum in the air as she sways over me, head tipped back. Look at the cool white underside of her jaw, a soft spot to hook your finger.

A tiny toad, not mine, breaks free from the trampoline line and pounds on the two-way mirror, pinning me back to the bleak room. He cups his eyes and tries to see into the waiting area, which of course he can’t. “Git, Josiah!” barks True Teen Mom, who has ended her phone call and is now flipping through a Honda repair manual. She speaks to her kid with such contempt, I don’t think I could love her after all.

Gilda’s often so close to me I can’t get a good look at her, but there she is now, moving in the framed glass. She’s uncoordinated but enthusiastic. Her favorite part of gymnastics is the gold leotard—“leo turd,” she says—that she wears over sparkly silver tights. This outfit is pilled and baggy because I wash it so much. Unlike my wardrobe, I keep Gilda’s clothes spotless. Our landlord pays for water, and I get a euphoric throb when I have one big load in the washer and another in the dryer—for me, midwash even beats the feeling of clean and folded and put away. When Julie and I were kids, everything was dingy and we barely noticed. I don’t remember Mom ever changing our bedsheets, though she must have. The first time I spent the night at a friend’s house, I buried my nose in her pillow, inhaled the powdery, angelic scent, said, “What is that?” She put her face where mine had been. “I don’t smell anything,” she said. “Just clean, I guess.”

Gilda’s taller and skinnier than the other kids, her black hair tangled and wild, her brows intense. When we’re at home or outside, she is kinetic and zipping, but enclosed with other children, she turns inward. Sometimes, in line for the tumble mat or the uneven bars, she zones out in her metallic uniform, chews on her lips. Back straight, face placid, she’s odd and silent, a beautiful, terrifying robot. Other kids, short and shouting, whiz around her, indifferent.

I lean back in my chair, look up at the industrial ceiling tiles. Directly above my head, a dead tube light flickers, blinks itself awake. It hums, dims to almost nothing, then glows brightly at me, the boldest bulb in the room. All through the tadpole circle and the goodbye song, I feel interrogated, spotlit. It’s a relief when the gym doors open and the kids start rushing out. Gilda comes last, Jazzy leading her by the hand.

“Kit—quick question,” Jazzy says. She’s wearing peach leg warmers, sweet god.

Gilda runs to me and I pick her up. She puts her face into my hair and hides.

Jazzy glistens—that skin! Her plump cheeks are pink and there’s a cleft in her chin, marvel of collagen. Before I can get too excited about what she might say, she asks again if I’ve had a chance to pay this month.

“I’ll check tonight,” I say, like I have some accountant at home, a team of financial advisors to consult.

“No problem,” she says, chipper. Great, then I’ll just keep my eighty dollars, I think. Tiny Toads gets paid after Jad does on the fifteenth, not a second sooner. Jazzy grabs her high ponytail with both hands, splits it to pull the elastic tight. There’s something written on her palm in purple marker. When I make out the word, it gives me a hot, lusty stab. It’s my name, blocky and upside down, but it doesn’t mean anything—just a reminder.

“Thank you so much!” Jazzy says, and smiles. “Bye, my love,” she says to Gilda, who is hiding still, one hand down the neck hole of my shirt.

“Thank you,” I say.

In another life I’m on my back, Jazzy’s inky hand pressed on my sternum, pigment sweating off.

IF ANYBODY WANTS to see me in person, they have to meld into my ridiculous day, Gilda’s rigid routine. Pete joins us on our afternoon walk. He talks and talks as I push Gil in the stroller. She’s getting too big for it. If she doesn’t sit with her knees bent, her feet skim the sidewalk. She folds herself in, gangly. When she wants me to stop, she skids her glittery plastic sandals on the ground like brakes.

“You packed yet?” Pete asks.

“Not yet,” I say. “I’ll do it when you-know-who goes to bed.”

Two months ago, Pete’s longtime boyfriend, Brian, dumped him. Pete was shocked, then devastated, then hellbent on healing. He busied himself planning a heartbreak trip, and he’s insisting I join him too. “I’ll pay your way,” he begged. “You know I need my moral support bitch,” he said, though really I’m just a shelter dog with heartworms and a skin condition, my own complicated problems.

Not many people in my neighborhood like to leave their air- conditioning—the few we pass on the sidewalk glance down at my smooshed daughter and judge me.

She’s very tall for her age, I hope my face says.

I’m caffeinated already, but we stop by Splits so Pete can grab a coffee too. When we come through the doors, Christian, my favorite barista, says, “Little Bit! Back again?”

Gilda beams at him, then pulls the stroller shade down to hide her flattered face. Christian gets busy with a hemp milk latte, and I watch Pete silently redesign the gaudy menu fonts, the outdated décor. The aesthetic is even worse than he knows. Splits has a double life. In the evenings, it skews— they dim the overhead lights and turn on colored gels, take away the pastries and start pushing cocktails. The baristas slip into these white lab coats and a terrible DJ shows up to spin spirit-crushing dance hits. The theme is confused—a disco crossed with an urgent care. Splits is so close to my house, none of this bothers me at all. They could play nothing but ska and do actual colonoscopies in the back and I’d still come here all the time.

Pete pays and Christian asks if he can give Gil a treat on the house: a cookie the size of her head. Sugar is a bad idea but I give in, hoping it will keep her occupied while Pete and I talk.

Back outside, I scan the wilds of Pivot for anything of interest. The stunted, crispy trees on my street, a sea of soft black asphalt, a deranged red squirrel chittering from a power line. I keep interrupting Pete to name everything in turn, point out shapes and numbers, any glint of gold we happen across—Gilda’s favorite. This counts as quality parenting, but walks are right up there with the playground for me, the tiniest bit of a break. Usually I keep the ride rough, jerk Gil around a little, cheerfully yell her name—if she falls asleep this late in the afternoon, I’m fucked—but today she’s focused and alert.

Pete’s indifference to Gilda means she is, of course, obsessed with him. She calls him Hair, like that’s his name, because before he got his fancy job he used to dye his brown waves wild colors. Pete and I met just a few miles from here, in college. We were both waiters at Easy Cheesy, this ridiculous fondue place near campus. I instantly recognized in him the things I saw in myself—here was somebody with a mighty death drive, somebody bighearted who was also kind of a fuckup, someone who was not exactly overflowing with impulse control. We’ve changed a lot since then. Now Pete writes pharmaceutical copy, and despite not having a background in science—when I met him, he was a theater major—he’s apparently very good at it. “I sell drugs,” he sometimes tells guys in bars. Now I have Gilda and do nothing dangerous or interesting with my days.

Pete and Brian used to throw these beautiful dinner parties, and once, Jad out of town and no babysitter free, Pete said it would be fine if Gilda came with me. I spent the night pulling her away from blown glass and gaping electrical outlets, keeping her from climbing up Pete’s leg. She mauled a sushi boat while well-dressed people watched. She put her little fist in Pete’s whiskey and he handed her the crystal tumbler like she’d earned it, then went off to pour himself another.

“Blue truck, Gilly. Look at the blue, blue truck,” I say.

“I want Hair to push me,” she whines, and Pete says, “Noted,” and puts one finger on the sticky plastic handlebar.

“How are you holding up?” I say.

“Biggest mistake of his life,” he says, shoulders back. He’s had time to metabolize. When he first told me about Brian ending things, Pete was so racked with sobs I could barely make the words out. It was three a.m. but I picked up his call anyway. I was already awake, staring at the ceiling, racked with guilt. Nobody ever gets racked with anything good. I’d slid out from under Gilda, who was damp and gummy in a pair of these awful flame-retardant pajamas my mom keeps sending her. I had to pommel-horse over Jad, longest husband, and step out into the hallway.

“Oh, babe,” I whispered to Pete in the dark, “what an absolute shithead,” but then Gilda was crying too, wailing from the bed, saying, “Mama, come back to me. Mama, where did you go?”

Pete steps over a smear of dog shit. “Huge mistake, a hundred percent,” I say. “Who does he think he is?”

“Did I ever tell you he loves cops?” Pete says. “Loves them! If the kids next door had a party, or their music was too loud, or if one of their cars was blocking our driveway, he’d call the cops. Or, like, if somebody stood on our street too long, he’d call the cops! ‘People stop to return text messages,’ I said. ‘People look at directions!’ ”

“Jesus,” I say. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Plus his taste in clothes. And the fact that we’d exhausted all topics of conversation. He doesn’t have interests. You have to be into something, you know? Even if it’s, like, fly fishing or, I don’t know, zydeco.”

I only knew Brian filtered through Pete, just as Pete only knows Jad filtered through me. On rare occasions when Brian and I were left alone in a room together—say, if Pete got up to clear the table at their place—the two of us would get smiley and quiet. We’d look out the window or competitively stroke the dog’s head.

I’d talk directly to Brian’s border collie. “Hello, sweetheart! You like that? You like the ears most of all!” Or I’d ask some drab random question, like “Have you ever been to Hawaii?,” and Brian would look confused. Had we been talking about travel before? We had not. “I’m shy of them” is something Gilda says about certain people, even if they are old friends, even if they are family.

“I mean,” I say, “he was always so boring.” As soon as I say it, I know it’s too much.

“Yeah,” Pete says, blinking away hurt. “Exactly. Whatever the fuck, just, Jesus, have something to say.” He pulls at the neck of his sweaty T-shirt. “It’s boring here. I’m ready for some fun,” he says.

My enthusiasm for this trip is mostly theoretical. Pete plus me plus a plane ride away—all the arrangements I’ve had to make for Gilda—it hasn’t been fun accounting for each disrupted bath and nap and bedtime, the ripple of these variations, what a monster she’ll be when I get her back. I kept wanting to tell Pete no, absolutely not, let’s try again in a few years, but he firmly made his case—our case—a long, long list of things to escape. For example, humidity. For example, annoying, well-meaning Jad and shithead motherfucker Brian. A mom who never calls—Pete’s—and a mom who won’t stop calling—mine. My weird message boards and the constant scroll of Pete’s social media accounts. His memes and trolls, family bigots blocked and forgiven, unforgiven, reblocked.

“You’re part of my healing journey,” he whined, though Pete and I don’t exactly have a legacy of wellness together. Not so long ago, we were bad influences. We’d tug out each other’s vicious inner teenagers, drive them around town, unleash them at parties and bars, hold stall doors closed while they got high. Once, just before I got pregnant, Pete dropped me at home blackout drunk, bleeding from the mouth. That’s when Jad grounded me from Pete, said we weren’t allowed to play together for a while.

“Isn’t it kind of neat?” I tried the next day, Jad throwing open our bedroom shades to the satanic morning light. “How alcohol thins the blood? How a tongue can be so bleedy?” He’d brought me a cup of coffee, but it was scalding, too brutal to drink, and he’d set it on the nightstand just out of reach, some dirty interrogation trick.

“What the hell happened?” Jad asked, but I was possibly the least qualified person in the world to answer that. “It was all Pete’s idea,” I said, mystery solved, Pete squashed under the bus. My half of the story was lost forever, puked out in taco-laced ribbons down the side of Pete’s Volvo, but Jad needed me to know his side. A loud, spooky version of me at two a.m., red mouth dripping, not understanding how doors work, that a knob is something you turn. Jad rubbing his socked feet around on the porch to sop up my blood.

I thought I’d have to finesse the fuck out of it, but Jad was fine with the trip.

“You sure Gilda won’t be too much?” I asked, giving him an easy out.

“Not at all,” he said, cheerful. “You should go! We’ll both benefit.” Jad says time away lets you appreciate all the good in your life. I didn’t say that leaving also lets you more clearly see the daily frustrations that grind us to dust, grievances vast and insignificant, overlapping and separate, petty and stupid, conscious and buried.

A hatchback crawls down the street, young country blaring. “Can’t wait to unplug from work,” Pete says.

I’m plugged into nothing. I have no deadlines, no personal ambition, no professional goals of any kind. I’m dedicated to aimlessness and my adorable, needy family. Pinning Gilda down, brushing her tiny teeth, slicking her hair into disobedient pigtails. Endless, invisible, critical labor. Dishes. Laundry. So much mopping.