I finished peeing and finished the saltines and wiped and flushed and washed my hands and gulped some water. To indicate interest is already to expose oneself to humiliation. To admit the existence of a desired object is to admit that to be rejected by the desired object, to admit that the desired object’s disappearance, one of the two always inevitable, even if only in death, will be painful. Or maybe it’s that to desire something is to believe that you know it, and if you’re wrong about the knowing you feel foolish and if you’re right you’re still wrong because to know something or someone in one moment is to know a version of that thing or person that can only exist temporarily, that must and will eventually change, that cannot and will not ever reassume the precise form in which you first desired it. Anyway, probably Dominique had taken my interest as a simple interest in friendship, which it also was and which was also embarrassing, to desire this different and lesser kind of intimacy, but less so, not as embarrassing as wanting to devour her, not so embarrassing that it would be impossible to face her at work, at our next gathering, should I run into her at the grocery store, etc. In short, could have been worse was my ultimate determination as I dried my hands. Having reached this conclusion I allowed myself to indulge the thought that I had been nursing since the end of Sandra’s story, which was that only someone born and raised in this ass-end, middle-of-nowhere, this so-mediocre-only-clichés-can-describe-its-mediocrity, this alleged city whose culture was as dead as the land surrounding it was fertile, only someone born and raised here could, one, have a lesbian conversion at the age of are you kidding me forty-one in, two, a Home Depot, and, three, manage not only to experience homosexual desire along the vector of heterosexual desire but also, in her interpretation of that homosexual, that is quote-unquote nontraditional, desire, reify traditional gender roles in the most stereotypical way. I tossed the saltine sleeve in the bowl and flushed again. You, I said to my reflection in the mirror, are a real bitch. Perhaps, I thought as I left the bathroom, I could sneak one more sleeve of saltines from Sandra’s kitchen on the way back to the living room, stash them in my purse, eat them in my parked car before I drove home, which was not, thankfully, so far away.
* * *
—
In the living room, Sandra was collecting glasses and Dominique was standing, rummaging in her purse. Fran was looking at her phone. I stashed the crackers in my own purse, was heading to the spare bedroom to collect my son, when I heard Fran’s voice, high, thin, already, always already, pitched at a whine. “Wait,” she said, “don’t you want to hear my story?” Sandra was bent over the coffee table, reaching for a wine glass. Fran’s head swiveled from right to left. “The kids aren’t even up yet.” This was true. Though also Dominique had not told a story, not to the group at least, which meant that no one wanting to hear Fran’s story—and I took for granted that no one did—could be chalked up to accident rather than malice. Two out of the four of us had bared our souls, the wine was gone, it was getting late, we should be getting home now, shouldn’t we, the babies would want their own beds.
Sandra stood. She set the wine glass back down. “Fran,” she said, “I think everyone wants to—”
“No,” Fran said. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t stand, sound angry, just the whine, which was always there, growing, yes, I’m afraid the word is shriller. “No,” she said again. “No, you need to listen to what I have to say.” Sandra sat back down. I slid two saltines into my mouth. Dominique sat, her phone in her hand. She glanced down, typing, maybe she was sending a text. “Look, you’re all imagining yourselves,” Fran said, “as people in some kind of story.” The way she said story, like it was a dirty word. “Like you”—she looked at Sandra—“you had a weird feeling in a Home Depot and so you just had to leave your husband? Or you”—she looked at me—“so a guy fucks you over once, and, what, you can’t ever have a healthy relationship again?” She shook her head. “I don’t buy it. Everyone makes choices. Do you know how many women raise children alone? We’re not special because we were left. Or because we left. A bunch of self-centered—” She shook her head. “And okay, you all probably think I’m an asshole, whatever”—she waved her hand—“I don’t care. And I’m not trying to be an asshole, I’m sure you think I am but I’m not. I could give a fuck. The point is, who cares about understanding why. The point is there is no reason. No one has a plan for you and your life doesn’t have a soundtrack, it’s just a series of”—she shrugged—“accidents and split-second decisions and coincidences and demographics, where you live and when you were born and who your parents were and how much money they had.” She glared at me. “I know you think I’m an idiot but I’m actually not. I wanted a supportive group of single mothers I could share colic stories with, not a bunch of self-aggrandizing pity partyers. Like anyone cares.” She shouldered her diaper bag. “And look, for the record, I’m”—she turned to Sandra—“an actual lesbian, and how my child was conceived, it’s a fascinating story. Which I will never tell any of you.”
* * *
—
At least this is what I think she said. What I remember her saying. I think at least I got the tone right, her anger, and also the register, the word demographics shooting out from between her withered lips, I mean that was memorable. I do tend to think I’m the smartest person in every room and it doesn’t help that lately I have been. Fran was, certainly, the first to leave and she did not attend our gatherings after, which were, perhaps understandably, less regular. In the moments after she spoke I remember thinking that if she was in some way correct she was, however, not right. That of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but that to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that’s what narrative’s for. I believe this, people of a certain sensibility believe this. Mostly it’s harmless. Though perhaps sometimes you find yourself doing things because you think the narrative arc calls for it, or because you’ve grown bored with your own plot, things you shouldn’t do because they will, these things, hurt the other characters in your story, who are not characters after all, but people. But then people do evil often and with less elaborate justifications.
Dominique and I collected our children, walked out to our cars together. I’d sobered up, Fran’s speech like a slap to the face, my cheeks were even red, though that was probably from embarrassment and/or the wine I’d been drinking. “Well,” Dominique said as we reached her car, which was parked a block closer to Sandra’s house than mine. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I nodded, kept walking, but then Dominique said, “Wait,” and I turned around. “Do you think,” she said, “what Fran said, about how one guy—” She paused. “I mean, is that what you think happened?” I considered this. “No,” I said. “I think, actually”—my back was against Dominique’s car now, so that I was facing not her but the other side of the street—“what was deadly about that, that guy, is how much I liked it. Not that he screwed me over but how, later, what I remembered was that it felt—right. I mean I felt, sure, I felt embarrassed, too, describing it, it was so clear how sort of manipulative—but not having to make any decisions. Like, I couldn’t call him, he could only call me. And since he had a family, since he had all these family commitments, if I wanted to see him it had to be when he had time, even if I was busy. It felt—I mean it also felt terrible, I never knew, I could never quite trust—and if I ever got upset because I wanted to see him more, because I wanted to introduce him to my friends he’d get cold, just immediately he’d shut down, he’d never try to comfort me or apologize or—he’d just shut down, usually he’d just leave and if I was lucky after a few hours he’d come back and I’d better be done crying. But when I thought about it, especially right after, right after it ended, usually what I remembered was feeling like—like oh, this is what I can do, this is what I’m meant to be used for. I do know”—I looked over at Dominique—“I do know how that sounds. But basically the problem was I liked not having to decide. And so that meant, one, this kept happening to me, this kind of guy, and, two, when I did try to decide, I mean romantically, I just—I was just no good at it. Both because I didn’t have any practice and because I couldn’t trust myself, couldn’t trust my gut when it told me what I wanted because apparently what I wanted was a married guy whose house I wasn’t allowed to see.” I smiled at Dominique. She did not smile back. “Um,” I said, “what about you? What”—I shifted the weight of my son’s car seat from my right arm to my left—“what do you think happened? To you?” “Well,” she said, “for a bit after, I hated myself. At first because of course eventually he stopped sleeping with me and then later because I realized what he had been, what I had let—what I felt like I had let happen. And then I didn’t trust anyone, and then I was angry. I slept with a lot of men during the angry bit, I was rather cruel to them. And then,” Dominique said, and she raised her eyebrows, “I went to therapy and sorted a lot of this out. Have you considered therapy?” “Oh god,” I said, laughing, “on my salary? On our health plan?” “I could give you some names,” Dominique said, “if you wanted. A lot of therapists, good ones, work on a sliding scale.” I shifted the car seat again and smiled, shook my head. I had imagined us as allied, allied in our difference: her with the accent and the functional bookshelves, me with my all but PhD. Okay by difference I mean superiority. “That’s so nice of you.” I was walking backward, toward my car. But if she thought the answer was therapy, well. “Let me think about it?” Dominique shrugged, opened the passenger-side back door. “Offer’s on the table,” she said.