“You used to play with Vagabond, didn’t you?” he asked. “I remember, I saw you guys like a year and a half ago at Bowery Electric. I brag about it all the time to my friends now—you know, ‘I saw them before they were famous, when it was only a twenty-dollar cover and eighty people in the audience!’”
“Oh,” Claire said, deflating. “Um, yeah. That was me.”
“Why’d you leave the band?” he asked, a revolting curiosity all over his face.
“You know,” Claire said. “Wanted to try something new.”
“You sure picked the wrong time to get out, huh?” he said, laughing.
Claire’s eyes flickered to Amara, and an understanding passed between them. Together, they turned and stared at the guy, silent, heads cocked to the side as if he were speaking a foreign language until he cleared his throat and scurried away, muttering something about how he had to go meet a friend.
“Lord, people can be idiots sometimes,” Amara said.
“Yup,” Claire replied, and they sat in silence for a second.
“Well,” Amara said, “shall we do some shots?”
* * *
—
“So give me all the playgroup gossip,” Claire said after they’d taken their second shot and chased it with a beer. The open mic had ended, and the place had reverted to regular bar bustle. “Who’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Who’s having an affair? Who hates who?”
“Well, sometimes I wish Ellie would shut the fuck up,” Amara said.
Claire laughed so violently and suddenly that beer burst out the side of her mouth. “I could see that,” she said as she wiped it off the table with her napkin.
“And what else? I’m convinced Vicki is a hard-core pothead.”
“Okay,” Claire said, slamming her palm down on the table. “I’ve been wondering something. Does she speak?”
“Occasionally,” Amara said, smiling. “I think she’s just got a lot of beautiful things going on inside her own head. Either that, or her mind is a David Lynch–style horror trip. She’s the richest one of us all, even though you’d never know it. Her father was the CEO of some massive oil company. Honestly, besides Whitney, I don’t know if I would’ve become friends with any of them on my own, but now it’s a bit like we’re all war buddies. Perhaps I wouldn’t be immediate best friends with, say, Meredith if I met her at a party, but we’ve all been in the trenches of new motherhood together, so we’re bonded for life.” She stopped and took a swig of her beer. “Well, sometimes it’s that, and sometimes we’re fighting one another, all in our own individual armies, to conquer the territory of Best Mother of All. Gwen and Whitney are the favorites to win that war though. I’m just trying not to go the way of Joanna.”
“Joanna?” Claire asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh, Lord,” Amara said, then sighed, bracing herself for the explanation. “She used to be in playgroup with us. And then she had a nervous breakdown in the grocery store, of all places. She just lay down in the aisle, her kid screaming in the cart beside her, and wouldn’t get up even when other customers tried to help her.” Amara swallowed, Joanna’s hopeless face swimming in her mind. “Then her kid, upset and flailing about, knocked some cans off the shelf next to him and cut himself on the edge of one. So he was bleeding—I mean, not that badly, not like he was hemorrhaging, but still, bleeding—and Joanna just kept lying there on the ground, not doing anything.”
“Holy shit,” Claire said, her mouth open in shock.
“Yeah. Eventually, the people at the grocery store called the police to bring her home and to make sure the kid was okay, which, thank God, he was.” Amara shook her head. “We’d known that something wasn’t right, that she wasn’t happy, but we’d had no idea it was that bad.”
“So what happened to her?” Claire asked.
“Oh, the most predictable thing in the world. Her husband dumped her in a mental hospital for a stint and started dating a twenty-five-year-old who teaches Barre classes. So now she and her baby are living out in Jersey. Not the nice part, either.”
“Wait,” Claire said. “How have I been hanging out with you all for over two months now, and this is the first I’m hearing about her?”
“I know,” Amara said. “We never talk about her! Like she’s a bogeyman.”
“Bloody Mary. If you say her name three times into a bathroom mirror, she’ll come back and murder you all.”
“Or, worse, infect us with her bad mothering, with her bad life,” Amara said. “I feel so sad for her child—if she’d stayed married and stayed here in New York, that boy would have gone to fantastic schools, had all the opportunities, lived a charmed life. Instead, Joanna’s fighting for child support and desperately trying to prove she’s stable enough to hang on to custody of him. And he was already a difficult kid, even without all this. Oh, I can’t think about it anymore.” She shook her head. “What about you? Give me your gossip. Do you think we’re terrible rich ladies who should go back to work? Who do you hate?”
“None of you! I’ve actually . . . I’ve really appreciated how warm you all have been to me, treating me like a real person and not just the hired help,” Claire said. “I wasn’t necessarily expecting it, but I really liked you all, almost immediately. Well, except there’s this one mom who totally scared the shit out of me for the first few weeks there.”
“Ah, yes,” Amara said. “Sorry about that.”
“Everything’s . . . okay, right?” Claire asked.
“Yeah,” Amara said. Claire hesitated, like she wanted to ask something further—something about what Amara had been doing in Whitney’s office that day, something Amara did not want to talk about with anyone. So Amara put down her beer and scanned the room. “Hypothetical: one person, in this bar right now. You get to go home with him. Or her?”
“Mmm, him. Tried the her once, and it was fine, but probably more of a ‘fuck you’ to my megachurch than anything else.”
“You’re a megachurch baby? We are absolutely circling back to that,” Amara said as Claire squinted, scanning the bar and concentrating hard.
“Oh, him,” Claire said, then pointed at a bearded man standing at the bar with a bespectacled friend. He happened to look over as she pointed. “Shit!” Claire said, and she and Amara collapsed into laughter. “I’m pretty smooth. What about you? Or am I not allowed to ask that, since you’re married?”
“Oh, Daniel and I decided a long time ago to acknowledge that, even though we plan on spending the rest of our lives together, we’re still going to find other people sexy. Looking is fine. Touching is not. Unless it’s Idris Elba for me, or Charlize Theron for him. Those, we’re allowed.” She looked around. “Ah, I don’t know. Beardo’s friend is attractive enough, I suppose.” Claire nodded in agreement. “Now no more drinks for me, or I will be very unhappy at playgroup tomorrow. I’m going to close out.”