And oh so different from where Richard is—gone away on a year-long fellowship to teach poetry in Rome, living in a little pensione over a tavern. She doesn’t even really know what a pensione is, because she’s not the sort of woman people invite to pensiones, but he wants her to come. He wants her. That’s what all these texts are about. He wants her. In the fever dream of the last months, kissing in doorways, making love in the shower with the water running so Fritzie couldn’t hear them, they’d worked out a plan to be together. She was meant to be already on her way there. Instead, she’s in the overcrowded, godforsaken Northeast, barely able to breathe, and since he’s been out of her sight, everything between them feels to her as though it could fall apart at any moment. All her plans, so carefully stacked up in her head, are like dinner plates that have all started to wobble at once.
“You know, I think you’re supposed to be talking to me,” Fritzie says, leaning on her hand with her elbow propped on the table. She’s exhausted from the flight, a red-eye that got them into JFK at midnight, New York time. That would have been bad enough, but they were still on England time, so it felt like it was five a.m. They caught the flight after taking a train to Heathrow from the countryside, where they’d been staying with Tessa’s mother, Helaine. Plan A had been that the visit would go so well that Helaine would be thrilled to keep Fritzie for the school year and allow Tessa to go to Rome—but Helaine had been horrified at the idea. The whole visit had unraveled rather suddenly and there’d been a terrible row, and Tessa and Fritzie had left in a huff.
So that meant Plan B: New York. And the guy she hadn’t talked to in nine years.
By the time the plane landed at Kennedy and they’d checked into the Hyatt, Fritzie was too keyed up to sleep. Jumping on the bed and turning the lights on and off. This morning her eyes are puffy and the skin underneath them looks smudged, and her straight brown hair, always tangled, is truly a wild bloody mess, and her personality has gone to hell besides. She screeched when Tessa had tried to comb her hair, cried when she had to brush her teeth. So, fine. Tessa is just going to try to get through the day. Today and then the next day and the next, and by then, maybe by then she’ll have scoped everything out, decided how to proceed.
“Gaia’s mum says that mealtimes are very valuable times to be together, because that’s when you can teach me about life,” Fritzie says.
Tessa has heard enough about Gaia’s perfect mom to last her entire lifetime, and she particularly isn’t having any of it right now. She says, “Well, when I figure out life, you’ll be the first to know. Now finish your eggs.”
Fritzie sits up straighter and makes her eyes go round. “You always say that people should just eat what their stomachs tell them to eat and they don’t have to finish the food on their plate just because some people think wasting is a bad thing. You said that. And now you’re telling me I have to finish my eggs. So which is it?”
Tessa feels her jaw aching. “Fritzie. Please. Just stop.”
“Stop whaaaaat? What am I doing?”
“Stop being so bloody ornery.” She puts her fingers on her temples. Fritzie slumps back in her chair, chewing on a lock of her hair, and swinging her legs against the table leg, and watches the cook and the waitress, who are flirting with each other.
When Tessa feels calmer, she smiles and says the thing the counselor said she should reiterate often: “Listen, Fritzie, we’re on the same side, you and I. We’re both tired, but let’s try to have a good day, all right?”
Fritzie picks up a spoon and tries to get it to stick onto her nose, her newest obsession ever since she’d seen it done on YouTube.
“Why did you have me anyway?” she says in a dangerous voice, and as soon as she starts to talk, the spoon falls to the floor with a clatter. The waitress looks over, startled.
“Well. I wanted you,” Tessa says slowly. Which is not altogether precisely true. Fritzie was actually the product of a drunken night, a little mistaken encounter really—and actually Tessa was forty at the time and stupidly didn’t think she could get pregnant, and then—oops!—there Fritzie was, thumping around in her uterus a few months later like she owned the place.
Fritzie is shaking her head. “Nuh-uh. I heard Grandmum telling Pearl that you had me by accident, and that you thought it was going to be fun raising a kid, but now you think it’s too hard and you don’t like it anymore.” She doesn’t look at Tessa while she says this, simply keeps rearranging the flatware, moving it all around. “It’s okay if that’s what you think,” she says, thrusting her chin out. “I don’t care.” Her fingernails are dirty, her face has a smear of jelly on it, and there’s something sticky tangled in her hair.
“That is not true,” Tessa says. “I love you very, very much!” She feels her blood pounding in her head. It’s horrifying, the things her mum says. And within earshot of a child! In the thick of the fight, Helaine accused her of being the worst mother in the world. And, who knows, maybe she is. It certainly doesn’t come easily for her. She loves Fritzie, she does, but she’s just no good at handling everything.
Motherhood has so many stipulations and rules, and so many people with opinions about how you’re doing. Even before Richard came along, she had trouble paying attention to everything. She gets caught up in her own projects—the maths problems she loves to work on, and her grad students she needs to advise, and she forgets stuff. Like dinnertime. How is it that there have to be three meals made and served every damn day—seven days a week? Who made that the norm? Life has become a series of commands she is required by law to say: Eat your food, do your homework, be quieter, get away from the stove, stop talking, hurry up, not that channel, take a bath, go to bed.
And Fritzie seems smarter and tougher every year. Only eight years old—and already her huge saucer eyes are exhibiting a wounded, blaming expression that Tessa finds alarming. Has she somehow caused this in her child? Has she already ruined her? Not given her a proper family?
“Tell me about my bio-daddy,” she’d demanded one night, and Tessa had had to take a deep breath. Him. What was she supposed to say?
“Well,” she said slowly, “as you might imagine, he was very handsome, and he was younger than I was, and so charming.”
“Why isn’t he with us then?”
“I knew him for just two nights. And that was it between us. We went our separate ways.”
“Two nights? Why didn’t he want to stay with me?”
“Well, he didn’t know about you.”
“How come he didn’t know about me?”
“Because I didn’t tell him.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
Tessa found herself launching into the biological explanation about sperm and eggs, how it was the woman’s job to carry the fetus, (they had a tiresome, protracted moment about the weirdness of the word fetus) and that the man can escape scot-free, never knowing what his contribution was. In fact, men needed to be told. Women had to tell them.
Fritzie was bouncing on the bed on her butt. “Why didn’t you tell him you had a fetus?”
How to go into this? “Because it wasn’t that kind of thing. It wasn’t a forever thing. It was just two very, very lovely nights.”