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TWENTY-NINE
The yellow house was quiet when they got in on the sixth morning and Hank was sitting on the couch alone. ‘Where’s Gabby?’ Ada asked and Hank gestured upstairs. He looked worse than she’d ever seen him and seemed to be wearing the same T-shirt as when they’d left, though all of his T-shirts looked basically the same to Ada. Hank told them that they’d weighed Orion the night before and he hadn’t gained enough weight – he used quotation fingers around ‘enough’, which seemed out of character – so Gabby had spent a lot of the night on breastfeeding forums. Ada said, ‘Like … on Reddit?’ and Hank said, ‘Yes, Reddit mostly,’ and Diana said, ‘Isn’t that the one with all the terrible sexists? What do they know about breastfeeding?’ and Ada said, ‘There’s a lot of other stuff on there.’
Richard said, ‘So what is Gabby doing now?’ and Hank explained that one of the suggestions to boost supply was to take a ‘nursing holiday’ which meant staying in bed with the baby for two days straight and letting them latch on you as often as they wanted. He said, ‘I thought we were doing fine … we were supplementing, you know … but Gabby seems really…’ and Diana said, ‘She’ll be blaming herself, which is very silly but here we are.’ Ada asked if she could go up and Hank shrugged and so she did.
When Ada opened their bedroom door, she saw Gabby lying on top of the covers in only her underwear, Orion lying next to her, cuddled in but asleep and not feeding. Ada could see Gabby had been crying. She sat on the end of the bed and asked, ‘How’s the nursing … holiday?’ and Gabby said, ‘Why did you say it like that?’ and Ada said, ‘Like what?’ and Gabby said, ‘Oh come on, you said it like “nursing holiday”,’ and Ada said, ‘I really don’t know what you mean, how else should I say those words,’ and Gabby said, ‘Can you get the fuck out of my room,’ and Ada stood up and left and walked down the stairs.
Hank tried next, carrying up Gabby’s water bottle, but he was sent away too. He said to Ada, ‘When she was pregnant, Gabby didn’t even want to breastfeed,’ and Ada said, ‘Women, am I right?’ and Hank didn’t respond. Diana went up next and lasted the longest and while she was gone Richard did a deep clean of the kitchen and then started on the downstairs bathroom. He popped his head out and waved a rubber-gloved hand when Diana came back down and said, ‘Should I?’ and she shook her head so he went back to scrubbing at the grout.
Ada realised they probably weren’t going to the beach today and she went from room to room, blazing and hurt, and then she saw an iPad on a bookshelf in the living room. She asked Hank to connect to Hulu and he did and didn’t ask why and she took it upstairs. She walked back into Gabby’s room and Orion was feeding now and Gabby was still mostly naked and lying on her side. Ada carried the iPad over and opened it in front of Gabby. Gabby said, ‘We don’t want screens around Orion,’ and Ada said, ‘He’s not looking, Gab, he’s focused on your boob,’ and Gabby looked down at him then back up. Ada said, ‘Did you know Top Model is streaming here?’ and Gabby said, ‘You mean the new ones?’ and Ada said, ‘Nah, the old ones. Peak crazy-Tyra era.’
Ada opened up season five – ‘Cycle five, Tyra didn’t do seasons,’ Gabby said – and hit play and Gabby watched and Ada watched and then Ada came downstairs to make dinner. They hadn’t gone to the store today so she went through Hank’s huge walk-in pantry and pulled out beans and tins of tomatoes and said, ‘Everyone OK with a veggie chilli?’ Hank said, ‘Yum!’ and she could see how hard he was trying. She said, ‘Hank, you should go upstairs, I think she’d like company as long as you’re quiet,’ and Hank went, clearly grateful to have been told what to do. Ada put on a podcast about Lean-In culture and started chopping a slightly soft red onion and zoned out until the food was done.
Everyone took their bowls upstairs and ate on the floor of Gabby and Hank’s bedroom and Gabby said to Ada, ‘I don’t know if I should have this much spice while I’m nursing,’ but she ate most of her bowl. Diana cleaned the dishes, and Ada watched the cycle-six makeover episode with Gabby while Hank scrolled his phone in the corner and their dad did the mosquito guards. They said good night and went back to the tiles. When they settled on the couch, Diana poured Ada a glass of wine and said, ‘You were so wonderful for your sister today,’ and for the first time in the entire trip Ada wanted to go back to London. She sent Stuart a photo of her kissing the open magnum of wine and then said ‘miss you’ because she had nothing else to say to him right then.
Ada opened Tinder while her mum set up The Amazing Race on the TV (once she’d realised it was a show about travel and not athletics, she’d been surprisingly amenable) and poured stuffed pretzel bites into a big bowl for them to share. Her phone took a moment to calibrate and figure out where she was. The first option to come up was a Gloria, forty-two, divorced, looking to make friends.
Ada stared at Gloria, tanned and glossy blonde, smiling over a bright blue cocktail that matched her eyes. She tried to imagine being fucked by Gloria and found that Gloria was too gentle and fumbling. So she imagined fucking Gloria and that worked a little better but then she wondered if Gloria really was just trying to make friends. If she was then this whole fucking-a-woman thing was a terrible misunderstanding and Ada could only apologise. She swiped left.
Ada continued swiping through Go Gators and big cars and a MAGA hat and an ‘I AM A DEMOCRAT, MAGA NEED NOT APPLY’ bio but they were all men. Maybe Gloria was the only queer woman in Sarasota and Ada had written her off too quickly. She considered why she wasn’t considering men and decided it had something to do with Stuart but not much to do with Sadie. Ada swiped a little more and saw ‘they/them’ in the profile and a cute face under a sweatband. She paused and then saw that the person in question was only nineteen and decided it was time to change her age range. 18–50 was probably too wide a net when all genders were fish.
Ada realised that even if she matched with someone, she’d be unable to meet them. The rental car wasn’t insured for her and anyway she was terrified of driving on the wrong side of the road after two years of not driving at all. There were no buses and hardly any footpaths outside their gated community, so she reflected that unless there was a very bored housewife she hadn’t noticed three doors down, this was probably a non-starter. She was trapped in the cold tiles with her wonderful parents and she might go insane. Maybe access to public transport had been all that held her together as a teenager, and she felt a little wave of sympathy for American kids.
Her mother sat on the couch and put the bowl between them and Ada messaged Mel and told her about the Tinder offerings. She wondered how Gabby had made friends here and figured they must all be Hank’s old friends, ‘which must be THRILLING,’ she wrote to Mel. Richard walked into the room and looked at the pretzel pieces and said, ‘What are those,’ and Diana said, ‘Oh, they’re very gourmet, they pair beautifully with this Californian Chardonnay,’ and Richard said, ‘We have got to get your mother out of Florida.’ Ada scrolled Twitter a bit while she watched the TV.
Ben had got the role he’d auditioned for and now all of his tweets ended with #rehearsallife and Ada dutifully liked them. The show was an all-male production of A Doll’s House and Ada had said to Sadie that she felt uncomfortable about it but the production team was all queer so maybe it was interesting to, like, queer the domestic in that way. And Sadie had said, ‘I know you have to say that because your mate is in it but I honestly think it’s total shit. That is a show about like … the feminine and the masculine in a deliberately trad sense, I just don’t get how you’d, I don’t know, make that work. I mean all power to the team; I guess we’ll see if they pull it off.’ Ada said, ‘It opens after you leave London unfortunately but I promise to send you my most scathing thoughts about it,’ and Sadie said, ‘Make sure you do,’ but this whole conversation happened a couple of weeks ago now.
Ada had assumed Sadie had forgotten about it but the night of the packing party she’d said, ‘How’s your mate’s gay Ibsen going?’ Ada had shown her some of Ben’s tweets and Sadie had said, ‘Wait, the children are being played by adult men too?’ and Ada said, ‘Yes but they’re extremely twink-adjacent.’ Sadie had laughed and then said, ‘OK, do not say that outside this room.’
Ada opened her Messenger app and scrolled to Sadie’s name, the last messages between them from days ago, on the train coming home from Liverpool. She copied a tweet of Ben’s that said ‘lunch breaks with my little dollies #rehearsallife’ and pasted it in then said, ‘How many of these dolls will be fucking by opening night do you think?’ She paused then sent it and felt secure because Sadie was definitely asleep so she didn’t need to expect a reply.
Diana patted Ada’s leg and pointed at the television. ‘You’re missing the man yelling at his wife about a map!’ she said and Ada said, ‘Which man with which wife?’ and Diana said, ‘I haven’t learned any of their names, I’m sorry.’ Ada looked at the TV and then at her mother watching the fighting contestants and wondered how she really felt about Gabby’s day in bed. Diana had never seemed particularly interested in babies – she told Ada that kids didn’t get interesting until about five and that Richard had been the baby-friendly one of the two of them. But Ada had never considered until now the labour that went into keeping an infant alive and wondered if her mother’s view was shaped by her general listlessness. Ada sometimes felt she had inherited this trait, but sometimes felt her work ethic exceeded her mother’s – it really depended on the project.
When Ada was growing up, particularly after they moved to Sydney, she watched other mothers bake intricate concoctions for the school fundraisers and run the City 2 Surf every year looking to improve on their time. These Sydney mothers sewed delicate hair pieces for dance recitals and had strong views on the lunches that were available in the school canteen. Ada’s father resembled these mothers in a lot of ways but they were wary of his interest. Ada had assumed as a child that these women didn’t have jobs, but as she grew up she saw that often wasn’t true. They worked for money but they worked at being professional mums too.
Diana, by contrast, pursued a life without friction. She enjoyed her job at the council, developing projects with local artists and reading endless funding proposals. But she was gone by 5 p.m. every day, if not before, and she would often take long lunches to walk or swim or eat eggs at an all-day breakfast cafe. She had the kind of sunny disposition that put people off scolding her, and as far as Ada knew she had resisted any suggestions at career advancement precisely so she could stick to her comfortable pace.
Ada always had a hair piece for her recital but it was bought, usually by her father, or sometimes gifted to her by a sympathetic mum who viewed her own mother’s neglect as something other than benign. Diana was unbothered by these intrusions into her maternal space, telling Ada that if they were going to waste their time, she may as well benefit from it. Though they had moved to the city, Ada saw in her mother a coastal resistance to escalation, and while it annoyed her on occasion, she had come to view it as something like radical. Why shouldn’t a life be lived for pleasure? Why shouldn’t a woman be coddled?
There was something in Diana now that Ada had never seen before. A fierce desire to be near Orion, a seeming willingness to orient their lives towards him. But was it him or Gabby, this new Gabby who was so much easier to love?
On the third day, Ada had asked Gabby about Orion’s name, saying immediately, ‘It’s so beautiful just I guess I’ve never met anyone who’s actually called that.’ And Hank said, ‘Well, on our first date we went stargazing—’ and Gabby said, ‘Hank, you don’t need to tell them the bullshit we told your parents, we can tell them the truth.’
Gabby explained that the first time she saw Hank naked she discovered a series of moles on his lower back. ‘And I told him they looked like Orion’s belt,’ and when she said this Hank looked slightly awkward but said, ‘No one had ever got that close to them before I guess.’ Ada said, ‘Oh!’ and Diana said, ‘You were a virgin, darling?’ and Gabby said, ‘Mum! No!’ And they had all laughed until they were gasping, Gabby saying, ‘I can’t believe you just said virgin to Hank,’ and Diana shrugging in her easy unbothered way. Ada wondered now what her mother would alter to keep Gabby laughing like that, and where Ada fitted in.
She looked up again and Diana was asleep on the other end of the sofa so Ada watched the end of The Amazing Race episode because Diana would want to know who was eliminated. While she was watching her father came over and picked up their empty pretzel bowl, taking it wordlessly to the kitchen. She poured herself another glass of wine from the bottle on the table, kept chilled by the air conditioning, and she stayed awake just long enough to see the fighting couple go home.
THIRTY
30/09/2017
Stuart Parkes
07:45
