But in theory, at least, it seemed very doable. We would schedule our classes at different times. We would try to overlap only on nights when Jason was sleeping over and could stay a few hours on either end. I would cook. It was just as easy, I told myself, to cook for three as for one even if it did yield fewer leftovers, and that way someone else could shop before and clean up after. We would split living expenses. It was going to be easy. There was no way it would go wrong.
Of course if that were true, there’d be no story. As everyone knows, saying there’s no way things can go wrong precedes only by moments their actually doing so.
We got a dog from the pound, Uncle Claude, for practice parenting and extra love and silver lining—if I couldn’t have my own small cute apartment all for me, if I had to have a great big house and share it with lots of people, at least that meant I could also have a dog. Uncle Claude was an angel dog, a Border collie mix, a genius (smarter than many of my students), a relentless, even compulsive, chaser of balls, a tremendous shedder (which we didn’t realize until it was too late), and needer of a large backyard. So we found a house with a yard that was large indeed and huge inside as well. Four bedrooms so everyone—even the baby—got her own. Three baths so no sharing on that front either. A large kitchen, a nice porch, and lots of light. Even though I would have enjoyed another few months of freedom, we thought it best to do as much of the moving in and getting our lives settled as possible before Jill became too pregnant. Even in a city as liberal as Seattle, some people might be reluctant to rent to a family like ours. Three female roommates is nothing, but draw one a taut, rounded body over skinny legs, and suddenly we’d be a cult, a cause—at the very least, a lot of trouble.
Plus it was summer, so we had the time to do it. And it was fun. We culled our furniture, throwing out the worst pieces, each feeling like we’d gained a whole two-thirds of a house of new things. We shopped for bath mats and throw pillows. We bought candles and lamps and an afghan. It’s amazing that even on so little money you can buy belonging, stability, commitment. Living alone, I realized after I wasn’t doing it anymore, had felt like waiting, and so having a plastic grocery bag looped over a drawer handle felt reasonable. Now we were nesting. Together, we felt worth a real trash can. Together, we were making a home—for the baby but also for us. It wasn’t that I felt undeserving when I lived alone. I had painted my bathroom after all. It’s just that most things didn’t seem worth it. What need had I for a real trash can? It had always annoyed me that people live in relative squalor for years, but the moment they become engaged, they need matching towels and sheets and expensive cookware (even when they do not cook). But moving in with Jill and Katie, I decided it isn’t that newlyweds feel deserving because they are suddenly married; it is just the first time it seems worth the effort. I learned many things over the subsequent months, but the first and most lasting was the weight—of family, of being part of a unit—that one simply doesn’t have on one’s own. It was friendship too of course. And though I didn’t recognize it at the time, it was motherhood.
It was also sick. Literally. When I was in second grade on a field trip to the zoo, I started a chain reaction on a bus that inspired the resignation of my first-year teacher, a woman who, by all accounts, was quite gifted in the classroom but simply chose, once I had revealed it to her, something other than the reality of seven-year-olds. Robbie Stafford, sitting across the bus from me and three rows up, leaned calmly into the center aisle about fifteen minutes into the trip and threw up his breakfast. “Ewwww,” said Lizzie Donavan next to him. “Epic,” said Mark Manther, whose boots were splashed but only a little and whose older brother supplied a steady stream of slang we were mostly too young to understand. “Gross,” said Monica Sorrenson behind him. “Uuuuuurrrrrreeeeph,” I said and leaned over into the aisle with my breakfast as well.
One vomiting kid seemed gross or cool, depending on your perspective. Two, though, boded ill in our collective seven-year-old brain. Perhaps we were being poisoned. Perhaps the bus was leaking dangerous fumes because it wasn’t really a bus at all, and we weren’t actually headed to the zoo but to a secret site for kidnapped kids. Maybe it was just the smell. But Eric Hynes behind me, Susan Jenson, Kelly Levine, and Harold Potter (I wonder where that kid is and what his life’s like now, considering), all leaned over and threw up too. Maybe even other kids after that. By then I was pretty unwell and had lost count. Chain reaction second-grade vomiting, much of it unaimed, would drive anyone out of teaching. On my worst days in the classroom, I give thanks that at least I am not Miss Avramson.
The point of all of which is that other people throwing up makes me throw up. It’s not so much the smell, though that doesn’t help, as the sound—the retching, the violent cough just before it happens, the smack of all that digestive matter meeting porcelain/sidewalk/bus floor. Jill’s latent morning sickness, awakened by Elise’s miscarriage, never went back to sleep. Nor did it restrict itself to mornings. Jill yacked most days until about month seven. And therefore, so did I. I couldn’t help it. Vomit is very unsettling. It would make anyone want to puke. I don’t care how ridiculous that sounds.
So much throwing up, so much rumination, so much packing and unpacking, so many roommates again for the first time since I was a sophomore in college. I was drowning a little bit in everything. I was overwhelmed. And there was only one thing for it. The first thing all the responsibilities and machinations of motherhood made me realize was that I still needed mine. So the first Friday after we all moved in together, I got in the car and drove north over the border to see my folks.
I found my parents on the porch with my grandmother who was pretending to inspect the flower boxes but was really having a cigarette. They all smiled when they saw me, but their faces lit up when Uncle Claude trotted around the corner of the house at my feet.
“Hey baby,” said my grandmother, and then bending down, “Who’s this?”
“Meet Uncle Claude,” I said, “your great-grandpuppy.”
“You got a dog,” squealed my grandmother, rubbing Uncle Claude’s upturned belly with her non-cigarette hand.
“He’s adorable,” said my mom, elbowing to get some Uncle Claude space too.
“She,” I corrected, pointing.
“Uncle Claude is a boy’s name,” my father said reasonably.
“Nonetheless.”
“Oooo, who are you? Are you a girl? I’m so happy to meet you,” my grandmother cooed to the dog.
“What possessed you?” my dad asked.
“Well, we have a house with a yard now so we could.”
“If you can have a dog,” my grandmother said, “you should. There’s something wrong with people who can have dogs but don’t.” This was one of her rules of which there were many (such as not dating Yankee fans—her dating advice long before it was mine).
“Big yard,” I said. “And I needed a silver lining.”
“How is the new housing situation going?” my mother asked, still not looking up from the dog. “How’s living together so far?”
“It’s good,” I said, but not very convincingly. “It’s fine. A little hectic. A few more people around than I’m used to. They never go home after dinner anymore.”