Sandwich

by Catherine Newman

How are you an adult? is one question I don’t ask. Are all those little girls nested inside you like matryoshka dolls? is another. All those summers of the kids with their sticky hands and sticky faces and excitedness! “Just sentimental,” I say instead, and kiss her perfect rosy empath cheek.

It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at—the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.

He is sometimes mysterious, this man, and often maddening, but he smells like home.

to Nick, and he says, “Of course not!” “Nicky, no! Say I have to.” “Oh, okay,” he says. “You have to.” I can hear Chicken complaining to him about his breakfast and why he doesn’t have it yet. “But do you wish I wouldn’t?” I say. “Mom, try not to hurt your own feelings for no reason,” Willa says. This is sensible advice.

I can already see the veins threading across her breasts, her body mapping out its plans for the baby. I do not tell her she looks like a fertility goddess.

Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.

“Have you ever been angry, Nick?” my dad asks him. “I’ve known you for—what?—thirty years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you angry.” “I’ve seen him angry,” I say. “I’ve made him angry.” “Well, you’re the right tool for that job,” my dad says, which is accurate.

On the tram, Willa grills me about the four Hogwarts houses in the Harry Potter books. “Don’t help her,” she says to everyone. “Go.” All the names of everything have oozed out and away from the drainage holes menopause has punched into my memory storage. “Dumbledore,” I say, and Willa laughs. “Good, Mom. Dumbledore.” “No, no,” I say. “Not Dumbledore. Jesus. I read these books to you, like, eleventy zillion times. Dumbledore?” “Still not Dumbledore,” Willa says. “Whiffenpoofs?” I say. “Yup,” she says, laughing. “Snivelin? Weaslyton? Fuck.” “You got them all,” she says. She is laughing so hard she’s crying. “Good job.”

“It’s funny that conceiving and conceiving are the same word,” Willa muses. “Sometimes it seems like conception is actually the opposite of having an idea.”