Fran clambered up the rocks. “I heard you and Van broke up in January. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’m okay.”
“I thought he might finally be over Bailey, but I guess not,” Fran said.
“Van and Bailey are together now?” Caroline was startled.
“Shit. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Fran grimaced.
“No, I’m glad you did. I’m just surprised. He told me so many times they wouldn’t ever be a couple. We had the conversation over and over.” Caroline felt woozy. Was she heartbroken? Was she furious?
“It’s the shampoo effect.” Fran shook her head. “Van never really got Bailey out of his system. He just kept hanging around her and every time she showed him the slightest interest, he’d fall headlong and fully in love with her again.”
Caroline felt a searing pain in her throat, the precursor to tears. She could see it: Van’s whole little group had been all over each other for thirty years, they’d never taken a break, never had the chance to regard one another soberly and ask if their friendships served them. They just had parties and got drunk and talked about each other, using one another as an excuse to never really grow up.
“Sometimes it seemed like Van had a different persona for the group,” Caroline said. “When he and I were together we talked about ideas, books, the environment. But then he’d be around the guys, and he’dsuddenly have an opinion on a basketball game, or he’d start talking in movie quotes.”
“I don’t think RJ has ever talked to me about a book.” Fran frowned.
Together, they satona boulder and watched the boys in their bright hats and jackets crouching over to examine the stones, tossing some into the water and making small piles with others, their sorting system as mysterious to Caroline as it seemed necessary to the boys. It was funny how kids wanted to work. They didn’t relax the way adults did, they never just flopped on a bench and stared at the sky, instead they took on enormous and futile projects as though they were jobs—to collect all the driftwood on the beach, to build a wall of sand to keep the ocean at bay, to dig a hole to the center of the Earth.
Van was a little like that too, devoting his whole career to the massive job of tending the sand dunes, preventing erosion to the beach. It was hard not to see deeper meaning there, Van’s abiding commitment to stability.
“So, did Van move into Bailey’s house?” It hurt to ask, but at the same time Caroline felt starved for information about him.
“Yeah.” Fran winced. “Kids change everything. I didn’t really understand that for a long time, but now I do.”
“They make you want to be with the kid’s mother? Or father?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I more just mean that you can have this really clear vision of yourself, of your life philosophy, and then the reality of having children makes it all murky. You think you’re an environmentalist and you only buy things secondhand and then suddenly you’re neck-deep in plastic toys. You keep your maiden name and then you can’t get your kids off an airplane because your passports don’t match. You do everything you can to be independent, to pay your own way, tolive exactly as you please, but then you have children and realize you have to stay in your lane, or you’ll break their hearts.”
Fran seemed to be getting emotional, and Caroline wanted to hug her but wasn’t sure if she should. Something was seriously wrong, and Caroline didn’t know enough to ask the right questions.
“Maybe those changes are just temporary?” suggested Caroline. “Having little kids looks really hard. Maybe once they get older you kind of get back to yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Fran said doubtfully. “I’m always having these moments where I’m about to lose my shit in the cereal aisle, and then I step back and realize that one day my kids will be in college, that I’ll look back and wish my kids were young again, and I get so guilty. Like I’m squandering their childhood feeling annoyed at them or wishing they could brush their own teeth. And don’t get me wrong, I love my children more than life itself, but there isn’t a day in my house where I sleep as much as I want, where I don’t cut someone else’s food, where I don’t pick up someone’s underwear off the floor. Hale is four. So, what? I have another decade of picking up his underwear? And then another two decades of paying for his haircuts and dental care and education and phone bill?”
“I mean, you should make him pick up his own underwear, but otherwise yeah, probably,” Caroline admitted, and Fran tried to smile.
“It’s not that I resent it, and it’s not even that I want them to grow up faster. I don’t! I will never be happier than when they give me a grubby kiss, or offer me a sticky hand, or I hear one of them singing to himself in the next room. But my point is that once you have kids you can’t make your own rules, because you’re taking care of your children for twenty years in the middle of your life, you’re stuck with whoever you decided to co-parent with, and then one day you wake up and the kids are gone and sure, you can be yourself again, whatever that evenmeans, but will you even know who that is anymore? What if you missed the love of your life in the meantime? Will you even know how to talk to your kids’ father like the person you fell in love with? Or will that person be long gone?” Fran pulled off her gloves and rubbed her eyes.
There was nothing to say to that. Caroline had no idea what it was like to live for anyone but herself. She’d never sacrificed a thing, never felt she had to. “Does everyone with kids feel this way? Like they’re stuck?”
“The women do.”
“Does RJ?”
“RJ does whatever RJ wants.”
“Does Augusta feel stuck?” Caroline asked.
“God, yes. She and Colin are even more screwed up than RJ and I are.”
“They seem so perfect.” That was truly the word that came to mind whenever Caroline thought of Augusta. Perfect. Kind of a bitch, honestly, but perfect.
“Colin’s been lying to Augusta his whole life. Their marriage is built around him lying and Augusta turning a blind eye.”
“He cheats on her?” Caroline suddenly remembered the hallway in Maine, Augusta up in the night while Colin was at the bar.
