The Barter (3 page)

It is a sign of something that I'm even considering this. It is a sign that some corner has been turned,
Bridget thinks, as if being stern with herself somehow excuses it.
But this can't go on. This is worse than sleep training. I'm being chased out of my own house by a ghost, like Ms. Pac-Man.
So she will offer the ghost . . . something. A talisman. Or maybe it's more like a payment.
I'll pay up.
Julie is so little and easily pleased, she'll never miss whatever it is Bridget takes away
to give to the ghost—who will . . . what? Pick it up in her hands? Flow through it like a sunray? Or shove it hungrily into her mouth?

But Bridget is trying not to go into that dark place—she's trying to be reasonable and practical about it, which seems possible at least while she's here, in the coffee shop with Gennie.

Gennie takes one of Julie's hands and swings her arm gently in space. “I thought maybe we could come up with a budget cap for the craft projects so nobody gets too crazy—you know some of the mommies will make this into a bigger deal than it needs to be. Yes,
hello
, sweet pea,” Gennie says to Julie, who, judging by her grasping and reaching and grunts of effort, seems to want to change mothers. Gennie's son, Miles, meanwhile, is playing quietly on the floor with some kind of nontoxic wooden puzzle. “I do hate to sound judgey about other moms. I do.”

If only I could talk to Mark.
If only. But even if Mark could see the ghost, which he can't, he's never around, and at any rate the two of them aren't exactly in the practice of solving problems together. Not now. Maybe they were once, but not anymore.

The very first person Bridget realized she couldn't talk to about the ghost was, of course, Mark. The ghost is invisible to him, even though she stands over his bed every night. Even though she's there waiting when he comes home close to midnight and crawls into bed with his wife, and she's there in the hallway when he rises early to beat the traffic in. Throughout the dark hours, Bridget is a sentry for Mark and Julie both, overtired nerves sensing and scenting, seeking the ghost, imagining where she might be. She's never far. And every night, while Bridget lies in bed, fluctuating between stiff terror (
she's here, she's right here with us
) and helpless half-wakefulness (
the hallway, the top of the stairs
), punctuated by periodic visits to Julie's room
to stand guard over the baby while the ghost flickers near Julie's window, Mark is asleep.

More frightening than the ghost is the suspicion, which Bridget briefly entertained, that she might be utterly bonkers, a complete lunatic. But as far as Bridget can tell, she is not insane, inasmuch as she knows the ghost is real. Mark may not see the ghost, but he
smells
it—she's seen his face change when he enters a place the ghost has recently occupied, as if he's smelling something off and is too polite to mention it. Since Bridget's been at home, Mark has become cagey about anything that might be construed as a critique of Bridget's housekeeping. He made one harmless comment too many when Julie was small and still up half the night, and Bridget laid into him with real ferocity, whisper-screeching that he could do them all a favor and sweep the kitchen himself if he was so sick of catching crumbs on his fucking socks, which, by the way,
I wash for you so what exactly is your problem exactly?
It's not a sexist thing in him, not really—he's just never been as tidy or fastidious as Bridget, and even before she quit her job to stay home, Bridget was doing most of the housework. Almost all. Mark helps with laundry and handles the trash and does ineffectual puttering things, like pruning the houseplants. Which is actually fine, really fine—she'd rather do it herself and know it's been done right than have to nag Mark to be sure he wipes the little rim behind the toilet seat. It's only when Bridget is exhausted that she minds.

And she's exhausted all the time now.

Gennie says, “Sometimes I wish that we could all just hang out
without
talking about the kids, because inevitably we start
comparing
the kids, I don't know how it happens but it always, always does. And then I think, well, Jesus, what the hell would we all talk about if it
weren't
for the kids, you know? So that's part of why I really want to make this work. I just want to give us something we can share and do together, as a group, without it becoming a competition.”

At this point Bridget realizes that Gennie has actually been talking to her about something on and off for a few minutes. A summer project Gennie's come up with for all the neighborhood families with little kids. And she ought to at least pretend that she's listening to her, her good friend Gennie. (
But oh God, this,
this
is a matter of life and death: There is a dead person in my house who stands over my bed at night, and sometimes over Julie's, and I might be crazy or I might just be tired—of course I'm tired—but oh God, Gennie, I couldn't tell you, I couldn't ever tell you in a million years what I'm really thinking right now, and it's not just because you're what I'm not, not really, not in my heart, not even though that's also what I am.
)

It's the art camp. Gennie has been talking about the art camp she's been trying to organize for the summer, an idea she may have read about in a magazine or just come up with on her own, so creative and kind- and sweet-hearted is she: Gennie and Bridget and the other mothers they know with young children will each take turns hosting an art camp morning once a week all summer long. Week one at Gennie's: Make your own superhero capes, design your own sidekicks! Week two at Pilar's: Finger painting outside on the deck and sidewalk chalk! It sounds fun. It's a nice idea.
Please, oh God, let this be the end of it, let us escape the ghost and have art camp. Floppy Bunny will be fine. In her mouth.

To prevent herself from thinking of the ghost—from clutching at thoughts of the ghost the way one clutches a handlebar, and for the same reasons: the instinctive physical reaction to fear, the sensation of falling—Bridget bends down to Julie and lands a series of kisses,
swock
after
swock
, all over the dear little musk-smelling head of the child in her lap. As Bridget does so, she is aware that Gennie is watching her do it, and that the look on Gennie's face is tender and appreciative but also, and here's the slightly menacing thing, proud. Bridget has seen this expression before, on Gennie's face and on the faces of other mothers they know, and to her, that familiar expression says,
We got you. We so got you.

Bridget's phone buzzes in her skirt pocket, and she plucks it out from under Julie's plumply diapered butt and peers at its screen, entertaining half a second's hope that it's Mark. But in fact it's Martha, an old friend from law school who is also a mom and also an attorney (although Bridget supposes she can no longer call herself that, strictly speaking).

quick q? about estates. ur my only hope. call me!

She is too tired. She puts the phone on the wobbly little table in front of them. Gennie has taken the opportunity to check her phone, too. Like all the mothers they know, they live and die by their phones. “I know that women used to do this without smartphones,” Bridget says by way of apology, “but I can't imagine how.”

“What, you mean motherhood?” Gennie smiles absently. She's still reading something on her screen. “Yeah, it does seem impossible. I take a picture of Miles every day, probably.”

“I'm not even talking about the camera. Although that's obviously good, too. It's more like the news and the weather and the clock and the messaging other humans with vocabularies. How did women get through the
day
, I'm asking.”

Gennie gives Bridget a half-wink over the top of her phone—she's tapping out a message. “They talked to other women, probably. Instead. Like I should be talking to you. Instead. Of doing this.” She
finishes, looks up. “But you know, compared to our washing machines, smartphones are like the
least
important advancement in technology for women like us.”

Bridget smiles, but her tired brain is circling the words “women like us,” like something caught in a drain.
But I'm not like you, I'm not, I'm not. I like you, but in my heart I'm not.

Gennie goes on wryly, “Living without a phone might be boring, but if I had to wash my own dishes, I might as well go live in a box in a hole in the ground.”

“A hole in the ground?” Bridget shivers and stands up suddenly, pretending she needs to stretch her legs. She is adept at pretending she has been listening when she hasn't been, a skill she developed in her former life as an attorney, and which she's certain will be useful once Julie starts to talk in earnest. “Sorry, I'm sorry. Let's talk art camp. I'm listening.”

“It'd be easier if we could do it in a neutral place and not at people's houses, I know,” Gennie goes on, agreeing with an argument Bridget hasn't even made. “But the playground's too hot and the pool's too crowded and the clubhouse is too much. I looked into it, believe me. But we'll just make that a ground rule: If a kid has a meltdown at someone else's house, no one can hold it
against
anyone. You know?”

Bridget smirks and puts Julie on the ground so that she can cruise alarmingly between small, easily toppled tables and find bits of napkin to put in her mouth. “You're thinking of Sandra.”

Sandra is one of those mothers who finds a way to blame other mothers whenever her son misbehaves.
At my house he never does that! Oh, but I guess I don't leave stuff like that out for him to find.
In the group of neighborhood mothers that Bridget and Gennie run
with, Sandra is known as a bit of a pill, which, perversely, is just what makes her so indispensable—to Bridget, at least. As Bridget put it to Mark one night, crowing, a little drunk after all, “No one joins a mothers' group—no one
hears the words
‘mothers' group'—without thinking, shit, that sounds awful—unless there's a chance
that they all might kill each other
!”

When Bridget first quit her job, she'd had not a single stay-at-home friend, and she knows that as new friends go, she is truly lucky to have found Gennie, and not only because of Gennie's many lovely qualities. Gennie is the tacit leader of their small group of neighborhood mothers, and her friendship has paved Bridget's way right into the center of their social set, a position she's not sure she would have tried to achieve on her own steam. Because, actually, it had been more a sort of prurient anticipation of lurid mommy spectacles that drew Bridget into the mothers' group at first: She'd imagined lunacies erupting over snacks and playdates, and she'd imagined herself retaining the slightly superior attitude required to be entertained by them.

But the truth is she understands, even truly likes, these women of her new world. They are all kind of lonely, and they live near each other, and they want their kids to have other kids to play with, and really everybody is mostly pretty nice, in the way that people are. They've gotten to know each other, the mothers, at Friday evening neighborhood cookouts in the central green in their subdivision (Gennie organizes, texts everybody with details, makes sure people know what to bring), cookouts to which everybody comes early, with coolers full of snacks and drinks, and from which everybody leaves drunk, with their kids asleep and sticky in their strollers. Sandra's the only one who says things like “I saw a kid with her nanny at the pool today and I just felt sorry for the little thing” and “I just think working
mothers are kind of selfish, you know? Like, what could be so important about their jobs that they'd miss out on being with their own children?”

Bridget's law-school friend Martha tried to warn her against becoming too entrenched in what she calls the “mommy scene” when Bridget “opted out,” as Martha insists on calling it. “Before you know it,” Martha said, not quite winking, “you'll have twenty things to do every day and you'll be trying to figure out how you got so overcommitted when the whole point was to have all this time to focus obsessively on your baby. Basically, don't hang out with any grown women who refer to other grown women as mommies. But even then you might not be safe.”

The last time Bridget saw Martha, about a month ago, they'd arranged to meet up for drinks at a Mexican place while Mark put Julie to bed, not very successfully, and Martha's husband, Graham, put their two kids to bed, in equally calamitous fashion. If their husbands were a little more competent they'd have dinner more often, they agreed, and then ordered another round of margaritas. It was then that Bridget told Martha about the summer cookout-and-drinking scene that Gennie had organized in their neighborhood, and Martha was drunk enough to sigh, “God, that sounds nice. Can I come sometime?” Which of course she could, and Bridget arranged it by texting Gennie that very moment. Then Martha changed the subject to something happening at work—she was at a larger firm than the one Bridget had left—and let slip some comment about how glad she was to have something to really
do
,
you know? Something to keep her in the
world
when the kids felt overwhelming. And Bridget was drunk enough to say, “Gennie says she doesn't understand women who get their identities from their jobs.”

Martha snorted. “She's five years younger than you. She opted out before she ever
had
a real job.”

“You're right.” Bridget nodded.

“The first time you quote
me
to Gennie, I'd really like to know. I'd like for you to give me a call when that happens,” Martha declared.

Mark, somewhat to Bridget's surprise, can't stand Gennie. “She's too cute” is all he'll say. To her face he's as polite as an auditioning tenor, but whenever Bridget brings her up—which is, she'll admit, weirdly often—he tends to grimace and shrug and be generally dismissive. While Bridget tries not to take Mark's tepid judgment of her friend as anything more than a lack of interest, she can't help but feel betrayed, a little, in the sense that Gennie is exactly the kind of person Bridget is supposed to want to be now. Gennie is a choice, essentially, that she, Bridget, made in order to benefit all three of them, and Mark should at least try to be consistent in what exactly he's after in a wife. If it's not Gennie's best qualities—her humor, her charm, her thinness, her creativity and patience on rainy days—then Bridget will have to admit something she's not prepared to admit, beyond the obvious fact that Gennie is a person and not a symbol, a convenient one that Bridget herself has constructed. She'll never be as good at this as Gennie, even though she is what Gennie is now, even if in her heart she suspects she's not.