Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart.

She was about to demur, reflexively, because declining invitations was one of the perks of being tied to small children,

Marriage was trying; marriage was burying the hatchet. But they had not buried any of their hatchets; instead she’d covered the hatchets with an assortment of decorative hand towels and they were both pretending that the hatchets didn’t exist.

she often felt like someone had unrolled a large and debilitatingly heavy rug on top of her.

She wishes—desperately, like she once recalls wishing she could undo the experimental haircut she’d given her only Barbie—that she could travel back

You couldn’t not be filled with wonder in a moment like that; it was how the universe hooked you and reeled you in to parenthood, having fattened you up with all that promise, the miraculous fact that your baby had eyebrows.

Something that has always astounded her, particularly since her children were born, is how truly, consistently bad the universe is at time management; instead of meting out crises at manageable intervals it seems to deposit them in erratically spaced piles, like the salt trucks in the winter, each pile containing a rainbow of miscellaneous emergencies.

She had a tendency, she knew, to turn people into her enemies before they’d actually had a chance to wrong her, just for the sake of cleanliness.

“Good luck, okay?” She heard in Helen’s voice—felt it in her gut—the shellacked pleasantness she knew the woman used for exchanges with cashiers and telemarketers.

She couldn’t believe how much more livable the world seemed with him around.

It was a knack you had to pick up, letting someone adore you.

And when you fell for someone, she realized—she had never fallen like this before—you started to fall for yourself a little bit too.

removed optimism of a person refusing to think too hard about what’s to come, the same deluded maybe-it-won’t-be-so-bad attitude with which she has previously approached dental procedures and childbirth,

Was she expecting that they’d hug? That they’d suddenly morph into a much more amicable pair of people, flop onto the bed together and discuss male entitlement and reproductive rights and the difficulty of finding flattering formal wear?

She has identifiers for the constantly rotating roster of interns—Overly Earnest Listening Face, Fictional Dietary Restrictions, Just Discovered Feminism—and thinks of this one simply as Gauchos.

“You want to get some dinner? What are you in the mood for?” Xanax. An entire pack of cigarettes. Several horse tranquilizers.

“I know it’s dorky,” Alma says somberly, gesturing to the TV, “but I really, really love it.” Julia recognizes it, that edge-of-adulthood progression: tightly wound and hyperconscious teenage preferences—dictated for centuries, inevitably, by a tasteless few—giving way to the awareness that you’re allowed to like some of the things that you’re not supposed to like, that doing so may distinguish you, and that someone else might also like the forbidden thing, or simply witness you liking it and love you for it. Her daughter is piecing together her own interior rule book; this seems as marvelous a development as her learning how to crawl.

one of those depressing capitalist Saturdays where the day would end with their trunk filled with four thousand rolls of toilet paper and a giant tureen of laundry detergent and a box of Cheerios the size of a crib and maybe also an actual crib, or the car seat, something material for the child they’d yet to meet.

she lay in bed making her lists, convincing herself that if she obsessively did the things she was supposed to do it would make up for her lack of desire to do them.

an impossibly tall, black-eyed brunette who looks like she rides horses and probably used to haze people at sleepovers.

now that her own babies are taller than she is and have no trouble taking her petty cash and enumerating her flaws, Julia understands the fairy-tale villain impulse to consume the babies of other people; she would like nothing more than to take this little invertebrate in her arms and smell its neck.

how refreshing she’d found the woman’s outright rejection of conversational pretense.