40.
I woke the next morning at 7:22, stunned that Ian had slept through his 3:00 and 5:30 a.m. snacks. Maybe there was an upside to being at Dad’s after all. Maybe my room had secret powers. Maybe the mean queen on the ceiling had cast a spell on Ian. I tiptoed out into the foyer. Dad’s shoes were gone from under the chair and there was a note on the table and money: Home tonight. Pick up some sirloins? I envisioned another night with him and felt instantly done-in. There were Christmas cards from people who worked for Dad lining the chest by the wall. Young guys, all with short crew-cut hair, all smiling with three kids. I thought of how things had been a year earlier, when Ian was just an about-to-be-aborted grain of rice and Will and I lay on his bed at Columbia, studying for the SATs. I remembered Will’s face when I was going down on him after we napped. I missed his body, missed it wrapped around mine. John and Yoko. I looked at the marble bust of a woman on a pedestal in Dad’s corner, her arms, legs and head chopped off. I felt like her.
Ian woke up, his wails streaming hollowly down the hallway. I leaned over his Pack ’n Play and picked him up, wondering if it was possible for cheeks to be any chubbier, and held him above me, making him fly. Will’s voice blew through me like a cold gust. “I want to give him up.”
I remembered what Vanessa said and tried not to think about anything else. “Let’s go get some yarn today,” I said to Ian. I nursed him for a long time, then bundled him up, cramming him into the sack and walking the fifteen blocks to Stash. We clanged the cowbells right after it opened.
Carmen popped up from behind some shelves by the window.
“Thea!” She beamed. Her hair was down and in a jagged, punk-looking part. I wasn’t sure, but I thought she’d put streaks in. “It’s been ages. How are you?” She crossed the store and peered into the sack. “And look who you’ve brought!”
“Hi, Carmen.” I was so happy to see someone outside of my normal cesspool of a life that I could have kissed her, and did. Ian lifted his head and kicked, also finding it hugely refreshing.
“Oh my God, what a butterball,” she said, giggling. “Wow.” She made an O face and Ian was transfixed, unblinking.
“So I finished an attempt at the bikini,” I said, pulling it out of the bag and laying it on top of a white shelf. “It took me long enough, right?”
“Well, I can imagine your hands are a bit tied.” Carmen said, still ogling Ian. I remembered the last time I was there, she said she’d been trying to get pregnant.
“Now I want to do one with teal and royal-blue zigzags,” I said. “It’s funny how you get these urges, right? I’m, like, possessed now. I have no intention of wearing it, but I have to make it.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, nodding vigorously, studying the bikini. “It’s like once the urge takes hold … But this one’s fantastic.”
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s fantastic,” she repeated. She picked up the yellow top and draped it across her white tank top. “I love how it turned out. It looks homegrown but in this very cool way. It looks like it would sell for five hundred dollars at Barneys.”
“Yes! Totally,” she said, strutting around with the top. “The Brazilians? Who are always waxing themselves silly? Some rich Brazilian would snap this up in a second.”
“They like skimpy stuff more, no? To show off their waxes?”
“Yeah, but I could see them, you know, wearing it a little stretched out, maybe even bunching up a side.” She bunched up her own fuchsia underwear, under her skirt. “The thing about crochet is that it drapes so nicely. It’s got the whole drape-hug thing going for it.”
“Maybe I should try and sell it,” I said.
“I’ll sell it for you!” she exclaimed. “Believe it or not, I sell a ton of stuff in here.” She pointed to the hats with colorful nubs and the baby sweaters hanging from the rafters on hangers attached to fishing wire. “I know it seems like no one’s ever in here, but some days I make more money from the clothes than the yarn.” She held the top up to the window, seesawing it back and forth in the air. “I’ll sell it for you. Not for five hundred, though. Three hundred feels like the right price point to start. Two ninety-five.”
“Whatever you think,” I said. “It’s a much more compelling prospect than trying to lose twenty pounds.”
“You just had a baby,” she said, looking me up and down. “You look great.”
“Thank you,” I said, running my hand along the pudge hanging over my jeans, the pudge that wouldn’t budge. “I’ll just say thank you.”
“You know,” she said, arranging the bikini top on the shelf and folding the ties over, “self-loathing is the evil curse of the twenties. I see that now that I’m thirty.”
“You’d really be willing to hang it up?”
“Definitely. Like I said, I love it. I’ll put my money where my mouth is. And how about I get ten percent if it sells?”
“At least that, you designed it, after all,” I said. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you,” she said with exaggerated politeness.
She helped me pick more colors—a bright teal, a gorgeous spectrum of oranges and reds and a purple and green that went strangely well together—exactly the colors I’d imagined in my head, only better.
“I can see how you’d get obsessed with yarn,” I said. “Some of them are so beautiful, and they’re so different, how they’re made, how they hold dye. Even if you make something in one color, there’s so much to look at with the variations.”
“It can get addictive,” Carmen agreed. “I have women who come in here and buy tons of yarn, you know, for later projects, but then they don’t do anything with it. They just have to own it.”
Ian started to squirm around in the sack, so I undid the clips and pulled him out.
“So how’s it going?” Carmen asked. “Do you like being a mother?”
“My dad once told me the best way to answer a question you didn’t know how to answer was to compliment the question,” I said. “Interesting question.”
“You’re right, what was I thinking, asking that?” She pushed Ian’s sock, which was close to falling off, over his ankle. “Can I hold him?”
“Sure.” She took him, gripping his bum. “God, what an angel,” she said. “Such a yum. He’s got the perfect-shaped little baby face. Like a Gerber baby. I’ll bet everyone says that, right?” She brushed her cheek against his head. “How’s your boyfriend?”
“Not so good,” I admitted. I rolled my eyes and she made a sad face. I’m not crying in front of her, I told myself. I’m not. It was important that she thought I was tough and could handle things. “Anyway, thank you again,” I said pointedly. “Thanks for offering to sell it for me.”
“Fingers crossed,” she said.