The People Who Report More Stress Read online

  “Remind me, what do you do?” I ask on my way to the faucet. I know she’s a lawyer, something to do with human rights, but I ask anyway because I sense she’s about to ask me what I do for a living, even though I’ve told her several times before. I get tired of having to repeat myself. It gives away the upper hand.

  “I’m a lawyer,” she says.

  I hand her the water. “Right, of course. International …”

  “We’re suing the current administration over its use of drones.”

  “Interesting,” I say. I mean it. It does interest me.

  She digs into her large purse decorated in gold-plated touches and again pulls out her phone. The milliseconds on the timer are racing, but it hasn’t been even ten minutes. “And you’re in public administration—”

  “Health. Public health,” I say. “I research the effects of basic income and wages on societal health. I teach graduate students.”

  “Fascinating.” She doesn’t pretend to remember. “And do they all go work at the health department afterward?”

  “Several do, but some work in hospitals, some in grassroots nonprofits, some in unions. A few pursue doctorates. A couple end up at Best Buy.”

  Just then, Bobby’s voice pierces the small-talk balloon tied around our necks. “Mommy!” His elephant stomps follow, loud, then louder, until the leader of the pack reaches us. “Julio hit me. Will you tell his mom?”

  Alice looks at me and goes down on one knee toward Bobby, whose left nostril is exhibiting either last or next week’s cold. “Honey, we talked about this. Julio has two daddies.” Alice looks up again, but not nervously, more self-important. Poor thing, I think.

  “Where is his mommy?” Bobby presses, like a four-year-old. A brief but unmistakable silence follows. It occurs to me that I rarely have to witness or participate in this type of conversation. My small, insulated world takes place about forty years in the future, and I’m jarred by the unexpected time travel.

  “Bobby!” Alice reroutes the subject. “You must have done something to get Julio so upset.”

  As if on cue, my little wombat skulks into the room with a guilty but also aggrieved turbulence in his eyes and brow. We adopted Julio, and he looks nothing like me, not his hair, not his teeth, not his marshmallow face, but he is me, almost more so than I am. “Why did you hit Bobby?” I ask.

  Julio’s face goes blank, and he offers nothing, until my jaw tightens up. “He said he didn’t want to play with me anymore.”

  “C’mon, is that a good reason to hit someone?” I ask.

  Alice again looks up at me. But now her eyes are wide and barely white, as if her brain can no longer contain its thoughts and her pupils have become the primary egress. I’m not certain of what she is trying to communicate, but I suspect she doesn’t approve of my rhetorical question. She probably wants to tell me there is never a good reason to hit anyone. If that is, in fact, what she is thinking, I hope she doesn’t say it because I completely disagree. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate physical violence—I can’t sit through more than a few minutes of a Scorsese film—but there are degrees and root causes to everything. And sometimes, bringing someone to the brink of violence and then feigning displeasure when they commit the act is a bit, well, artful. Like when Andy Cohen eggs on the Real Housewives. But I don’t want to be the one to explain this. Not right now. This is not the kind of conversation one pre-K parent, male and brown, should have with another, female and white, and definitely not in a place without cameras and audio recording. You see, Alice strikes me as the kind of person who clutches her purse. The kind of person who makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong when all I’m doing is commuting. The kind who catalyzes increases in my cortisol levels and makes me rehearse soliloquies that I want to deliver in a full-throated kinda way as I walk briskly beside and past her on my way home. But I can’t say these things to Alice because she also strikes me as a good person. Someone who uses words like community and peace and diversity—probably cares about them too—and who would surely lecture me for not understanding what it’s like to be a woman in this world. She’s someone who probably knows the exact disparity in wages between men and women, down to the cent. Someone who knows intimately the feeling of walking into a room, elevator, or bar full of men, where expectations and judgment hang in the air, like pollen at the height of spring. Someone who has experienced violence in ways big and small that I’ll never know firsthand.

  No, I don’t want to have those conversations with Bobby’s mom, not in my living room, and maybe never. Not because she’s wrong, but because there’d be no wiggle room to discuss solidarity and no space to strategize how we should wrest power from white men, who seem to walk away from all of our situations unscathed, their stress indicators unchanged, whistling even. To further complicate matters, we are both married to white men.

  She returns her gaze to her son. I ask mine to apologize; she asks hers to reciprocate. Their high-pitched sorrys drag out, long and inauthentic, but still an evolution. The kids waste no time barreling back toward my son’s bedroom.

  “I’ll take you up on that whisky,” Alice says, tying her long, loose curls into a ponytail.

  I notice, for the first time, that she has piercings in her ears. Many. At least five pieces of jewelry run along the ridge of each ear. How have I never noticed that before? Maybe I have. Maybe these are the details one forgets as they age. Or maybe she’s never before worn her hair up around me.

  “Neat or on the rocks?” I ask.

  “Neat,” she calls out.

  “You know, I have the ingredients for a Manhattan, if you prefer.”

  Alice meets me in the kitchen. She’s wearing slacks that are equally businesslike and chic—flowing material, loose then tapered, an imperfect gray, like spent charcoal. She is very emotive with her eyebrows, and here, again, they tell me that she’s pleased. “Yeah, sure. What a treat.”

  I fill the glasses with ice and water to chill them and grab the other ingredients from the pantry. It occurs to me then that I haven’t offered anything to the children. “Would Bobby want some mac and cheese? Julio never turns the stuff down.”

  “That would be great. Can I help?”

  I hand her a pot. She fills it up with water and hands it back to me. It’s heavier than I expect, and I fumble for a second, accidentally grazing her hand in the process. “Sorry,” I say almost involuntarily. Immediately, I regret being so deferential. She doesn’t respond, but instead scans the box of pasta. She’s wearing a gold band, but no engagement ring. I’m relieved. Literate women who wear engagement rings destabilize all my notions of feminism. I’m grateful this tradition seems to be falling by the wayside. I cover the pot on the stove. The splatters of tomato sauce on the white enamel are egregious all of a sudden. If she sees them, she’ll deduce those stains have been there since at least the previous night’s dinner because I was at work this morning. She’ll think we’re slobs. Truth is the stains have been there since Sunday. It’s Tuesday.

  I shake the drinks. She turns to the three small plants resting on the window shelf. She gently rubs the leaf of one and brings those fingers to her nose. “You should trim this basil. It’ll flourish,” she says.

  I’ve been meaning to, but I don’t tell her that. I just thank her for the suggestion. Then it crosses my mind that if she ever comes back to our place again and sees how much the basil has grown, she’ll feel pretty good about herself, as if she saved the linchpin in our urban herb garden. She’ll tell her husband or another mother that our home is missing a woman’s touch. In her mind, this, along with the untidy living room, and splattered red sauce, constitutes an unloving environment for a child. All at once, I feel overwhelmed by the need to tell her that I’ve had that basil plant for three years. Doing so will communicate that I must know what I’m doing because a basil plant doesn’t grow easily indoors in the window of a Brooklyn apartment. I’m certain of this because this is my fourth such plant. But I don’t want to anno
unce the hardy plant’s age in a way that will make me sound defensive. Maybe something like, Wow, I can’t believe how long that thing has survived. Then she’ll ask, How long? But instead, I wait too long, and she tells me that she likes our apartment.

  “Thank you,” I respond.

  “Small New York City apartments are the best,” she says.

  That’s the best backhanded compliment I’ve heard in a while. Our apartment is small, but more so because her place is twice as big. She and her husband bought their home before they moved into the neighborhood. They’re about the same age as my husband and me, and neither practices a particularly lucrative profession. Her husband does some sort of eco-friendly design work, mostly consulting, I think. That’s what he told me when we visited their place for Bobby’s birthday at the beginning of the school year. The husband was perfectly friendly, but also tense in a way that made me tense. Whenever I left the center of the party to grab a beer or use the restroom, he’d follow. It crossed my mind that he was attracted to me. If we’d been in a gay bar, I’d have been certain of it. But last fall, I think he was just uncomfortable. I was the only non-white parent at the party—and maybe the only one ever to set foot in their home—apart from the Japanese mom who was there for all of twenty minutes before leaving her white husband at the party with both of their kids. I wished I’d done the same, but my husband and I have this rule about both of us being present in situations where queer families are underrepresented. We both try to be there. That’s the rule. Come to think of it, the Japanese mom probably had a similar arrangement with her husband, with respect to multiracial families, and my husband and I were her exit strategy. Whatever the reason, Alice’s husband kept following me around their tremendous apartment and asking if I needed anything. It was a stressful dynamic that led me to drink more, until the stress was submerged and the fear that everyone at the party thought I was too much of a lush to be parenting—never mind same-sex parenting—floated to the top. And yet, from the truncated conversation with Alice’s husband that day, I was able to retain that they received financial help from their parents to buy their massive place—too big, in my opinion. This is, in part, why I don’t care for Alice very much. It rankles me dearly to meet so many white people who use their inheritances and no-interest loans to buy homes in previously Black and brown neighborhoods, while (probably) secretly questioning—or allowing their parents and drunk uncles to—the spending habits of poor Black and brown people, as if slavery and Jim Crow and wage-law chicanery and redlining aren’t still lurking, as if poor white people don’t also buy wide-screen TV sets and phones and sneakers.

  The water boils, and Alice accommodates the colander inside of the sink. I put on an insulated glove because the pot has gotten too hot, including the handle. Whenever I do this, I’m reminded that I’ve never seen my mother or my aunts prepare for heat in this way. Their tolerance is frightening. I don’t know if it’s a Latin American thing or a woman thing or an age thing. A part of me thinks magical realism is to blame.

  “Phil and I haven’t been to the movies in ages,” says Alice, apropos of nothing I can decipher, leaving me to wonder if I zoned out mid-conversation. “When was the last time for you?” she asks, backing away from the rising steam.

  Phil! Of course! That is certainly his name. Of course. If she hadn’t said it just now, his name would have remained forever captive in an inaccessible fold of my gray matter. Phil’s face, however, is clear and present. This is a special ability I have: I never forget a face. It’s even crossed my mind to find someone who does this type of research: facility with facial recognition. But what use would I be? And to whom? Besides, it should be said, I am inclined to remember a man’s face more clearly than a woman’s. For example, I could give a sketch artist a pretty confident description of Phil—sandy brown hair, beleaguered chin, hapless jowls, scar above his left eye—but Alice’s would be broader. Even now, with my back to her, I’m hard-pressed. Red hair; rounded, long face; green, maybe blue, eyes. That’s the best I can do. But I’d know her if I saw her. That’s for sure.

  I can’t quite isolate it, but I’m starting to feel as if there’s a strain of misogyny in my analysis of Alice. Why should she, after all, carry the brunt of my distrust for one couple or generation or entire racial category? I take a swig of my Manhattan and try to engage meaningfully. “Hmm … The last movie we saw … It was the most recent Star Wars. On our birthdays, we usually take the day off work, catch a movie, and have a nice lunch.”

  “Gosh. That’s great. You guys have better relationships than we do.”

  Now, apart from the party at Alice and Peter’s place a few months ago, a couple of school meetings, and all the half-hearted smiles in the hallways during drop-off, this is the first time that Alice and I have ever truly socialized, so I’m not sure what she means by you guys. I assume she means gays. And maybe she meant just that, you gays, but the Manhattan went to her head and tongue, and she slipped.

  “My brother and his husband are the same way,” she continues matter-of-factly. “They enjoy each other and do romantic things like that. How long have you two been together?”

  I have no problem answering these types of questions, but since I don’t know where this conversation is headed, I’m feeling like I don’t have control, and so I pause a moment.

  She doesn’t wait for my response: “Phil and I just celebrated our twelfth.”

  “Twenty years! Next month, it’ll be twenty years,” I half-shout.

  My enthusiasm was unexpected; her eyebrows tell me so.

  “Wow. That’s great,” she says.

  I mix in the powdered cheese. We call the kids to eat and float behind them, like boxing coaches, offering water and milk, and reminding them to chew carefully and to wipe their faces before getting up. I’m grateful for Bobby’s healthy appetite because Julio mimics everything he sees, and if Bobby had eaten one shell of macaroni, Julio would have too. They clean their plates. Again, they race off.

  “Five more minutes,” Alice calls out to Bobby after his footsteps have disappeared.

  “Did you hear that?” I bellow toward Julio, but nothing is returned.

  Alice offers to wash the dishes, but I point to the dishwasher and make up something about how filling it is one of my favorite things to do. I tack on a passing, joke-y reference to OCD. But then I wonder if she or someone she knows has OCD. It’s no joke. I regret saying it.

  “Would you like another drink?” I ask almost instinctually. In this way, I am exactly like my mother, who doesn’t like people but is an irreproachable host.

  “Oh, no, I really shouldn’t.”

  I motion toward her empty glass. She picks it up quickly, and the dregs of Manhattan fly onto the jute rug and dissolve. She hands the glass to me without mentioning the minor faux pas and proceeds to scan our coffee table. A collection of short stories by Raymond Carver rests atop a stack of books. My husband rescued it from a box on a nearby stoop over the weekend. I wish Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies or anything by Paul Beatty was visible instead of stacked perfectly beneath Carver’s Cathedral. She asks me if I’ve read Adichie’s most recent novel. I haven’t. I don’t know if I want to. She says she can lend me her copy. I don’t want to commit to anything. I smile and attempt a head sway that ends up looking like a drunken bobble. I hope she sees, No, thank you, without me having to say it. The moment passes.

  “I better start gathering—Bobby!” she calls out, interrupting herself. It’s only been forty minutes. “It may not be pretty when we try to leave. He can get … Well, let’s just say, loud.”

  “Julio is the same.”

  “This was fun,” she announces on her way to the door. “Let’s do it again.”

  I don’t know that I would have classified this as fun, but it certainly wasn’t what I’d feared. “Sure,” I say. But all I can think is that I’ve been worried Julio is having most of his play dates with white children. This is a cause for concern because his ideas
of self, of normal, and of beauty are forming, and it matters who surrounds him now, lest he spend a lifetime undoing. It’s difficult enough finding children’s books and TV shows that reflect our real world.

  “Great. I work a flex-schedule on Tuesdays,” Alice tells me as she pulls up the calendar app on her phone. “We can start in the playground and move to one of our places if the weather turns.” She sits on a short stool in the hallway and zips up her leather boots, nice equestrian-style boots, a stiff and imposing black leather.

  I wasn’t prepared for these problems. I’d spent years comforted that, if we ever had children, they would grow up around a diversity of races and ethnicities, but now, playgrounds once full of Black and brown children are almost exclusively white. And most of the remaining non-white families are at least one generation away from flex-schedules. “Cool,” I say, feeling like a traitor.

  “Bobby!” Alice calls out again. We hear nothing in response. I know they’re hiding. She smiles at me, but I can see the frost spreading across her face. Something has changed. Something is coming. And then: “Robert Walden Hayes!” The boom in her voice is that of an angry sitcom mother. Her eyes dart nervously around the room.

  Walden? Hayes? Robert? Bobby Hayes had the ring of a scrappy 1950s high school football player or a fallen member of the IRA, but Robert Walden Hayes is a future president of the United States, and possibly related to a previous one. Her family’s ambitions fill the room. I already miss the vibe we had moments ago.

  Alice is on one foot, leaning, a forward slash inside the doorframe. She unzips the boot she’d only just zipped up. “Please don’t,” I say. “I’ll go grab him.”