Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

This is how Mark—scientific, marvelously anxious—has always looked at the world, as a series of choices made or not and the intricate mathematical repercussions thereof.

the woman’s face registers in her brain belatedly, clad in the convincing disguise—that invisible blanket—of age.

Hers has not been a life lived under the threat of too many ghosts; there’s only a small handful of people whom she has truly hoped to never encounter again, and Helen Russo happens to be one of them.

It can be hard to tell, in the suburbs, whether an eccentrically clad woman carrying around a single organic cabbage is nomadic or expensively disheveled.

that old worry, so familiar to her, that you haven’t meant to someone as much as they meant to you—but

imparting her parental platitudes, her pithy one-liners, her candid confessions, all with the confidence and ease of a person who actually enjoyed her life, astonishing to Julia at the time because she herself did not.

In fact, the plot points of her life over the last two decades are myriad; so much bloomed from that time, toxic and otherwise, tiny green shoots sprouting from ravaged land. A new job, another baby, a doubled-down commitment to her marriage, and then, after that, the way things relaxed into routine: the accrual of acquaintances and the maturation of her children and the adoption of a tiny black terrier mix named Suzanne, the embroidery of daily existence, fabric softener and presidential elections, the dogged forward march of time.

Her former self would be astonished to see her now, a woman with standing fellow-mom coffee dates and a special Nordstrom credit card and a relative sense of peace.

Suzanne treats Julia’s every reappearance—whether she has been gone five minutes or five hours—like a sweepstakes, eyes wild and body vibrating with excitement. Suzanne is the most obsessed with Julia that anyone has ever been, more obsessed with Julia than Julia has ever been with another living being, including her children. It is flattering—if at times unnerving—to be loved this much.

the dog, like a cat, like her daughter, has a specific set of boundaries, desires constant attention but on very rigid terms. “Fine, fine, fine.” She

there are never not things that need doing in the kitchen,

Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes.

She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop.

Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel.

because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

she wishes the girl made a little more noise when she walked—she has a tendency to appear mournfully from the shadows like a gravedigger—but

the preparation, labor-intensive enough to feel impressive but not so much as to preclude her also doing nineteen other things simultaneously. She knows better than to expect much help from her children.

She wishes—horribly, a not uncommon desire when speaking to her daughter—that she could simply evaporate from this conversation. She feels, too, unbelievably tired, stymied by gravity; so much of motherhood has, for her, been this particular feeling, abject disbelief that she’s not only expected but obligated to do one more thing.

she’d just been hoping that the conversation on what Alma referred to as incremental veganism, like many conversations with teens, could be swept under the rug within a few days, replaced by something uniquely, inexplicably pressing.

She halfheartedly attended prenatal yoga classes before Ben was born, unaware at the time that the breathing exercises therein would aid her not during childbirth but instead, two decades later, in violence prevention against her teenage daughter.

“You told me you’d think about our cutting out animal products as a family,” Alma says, with an affected measure in her voice that makes Julia want to push her down a well.

around his waist, the collapsible water bottle that she recently likened to a colostomy bag.

“Tough crowd in here,” Mark says, putting his arm around his daughter; she mewls some protest but lets him, even leans her head against him, sweat and all. Julia herself has not been in such close physical proximity to Alma in ages; she emits a powerful radiant energy that keeps her mother, though notably not her father, whom she likes a lot more, at bay.

Mark comes to kiss Julia, and Alma watches them, repulsed. They are a family whose clock is always slightly askew, affections misplaced and offenses outsized. But it’s better, she thinks—please, God, it must be better—than the complete absence thereof.

Sometimes she catches herself thinking thoughts like these—I forgot to pay the lawn guy; Suzanne’s dog food delivery comes on Wednesday—and she’s amazed by her own ridiculousness.

“Life is a struggle for us all,” she intones sometimes, to make Mark laugh, watching the asshole day trader next door yelling at his contractor, or a squirrel suspended upside down stealing seed from their cardinal feeder, but they’re no different, really; she has grown comfortable dwelling in her own ludicrous minutiae.

it is a point of astonishment, really, how improbably lovely ...

the street signs and the artisanally preserved cobblestone roads, station wagons and all-terrain strollers, acres of dense manicured foliage, palatable lawn signs, self-conscious displays of affinity for particular tradesmen, self-conscious showings of tepid political affiliation, plaques commemorating nothing at all, and you weren’t even allowed to drive normally; not infrequently she’d find herself on a street with a speed limit of 15 mph, like something out of olden times.

Everyone liked to think their suburb was the best suburb, but really they were all the same, slight variations in proximity to the lake or degree of amorphous “diversity” or “historical significance” but ultimately a wash.

Julia, meanwhile, felt static, like she’d been embalmed. She wasn’t sleeping; her internal monologue had taken on a caffeinated, nervy quality, the unpunctuated warbling of a crackpot, and she was aware—in her rare interactions with fellow adults—that her external monologue might be exhibiting some of the same mania.

she felt entirely unmoored, brooding, usually while staring pensively into the middle distance like a disenfranchised Victorian nursemaid.

Julia, on the rare occasions she slept, frequently awakened preemptively dreading whatever was to come and retroactively dreading what had already elapsed,

She had long since stopped trying to envision his days out of both boredom and jealousy.

She stared at him, this man who wanted to fix everything. The solutions to his own problems tended to be less complicated than hers; they always had been. She was so lonely it had started to feel like a corporeal affliction.

It was a cliché to be this person; she got bored just thinking about it, the sadness over nothing, the fact that she was resentful of the easiest life in the world. And yet she couldn’t help herself.

stretch out on a big warm rock like a sacrificial offering and just, for a little bit, not have anyone staring at her. But now she felt bad, bad for looking forward to being away from their child and bad for not being better at structuring her time, for not filling her free hours with cultural stimuli and age-appropriate acquaintances.

Ben’s arrival was, as always, a balm; he appeared like a sunbeam in the kitchen doorway, cheek pillow-creased and big eyes still blinking away sleep, his stuffed giraffe dangling from a tiny hand. She felt her heart open, her face relax in a smile, her joy, in such short supply, reserved exclusively for him. “There’s my guy,” she said, and his face opened too and she lifted him into her arms, kissing both her son and his giraffe good morning, breathing him in, the sun itself.

“Are you sad?” Ben asked, surprising her, and she swallowed the impulse to cry, though surely he was used, by now, to the sight of her tears. “Of course not,” she said into his head. “Mama’s so happy.” She felt wisps of his hair between her lips. She had the urge sometimes, fierce and instinctual, to eat him. “Sweet, my sweet, you make Mama so, so happy.”

false cheer bordering on mania. She had not been paying attention.

Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart. She dreamed sometimes of violent deaths, her Subaru crushed beneath a semi; a swim in Lake Michigan that ended in slow downward slippage, her feet dusting the cold silty grains of its deepest point. And it comforted her to think about it, about how nothing was forever, how even the monotonous vise grip of her existence could be obliterated by the intervention of nature or circumstance.

“Mama’s fine, lovey,” she said, taking refuge in the parentally sanctioned use of the third person. She’d never had a proper set of tools, but it had mattered less before; now there were others involved.

The loneliness of motherhood; the deadly ennui of the day-in-day-out. So much life around her, this electric little person cocreated by her warm industrious husband, a man more comfortably attuned than she to the mundane vagaries of normal life, and all she could think was that she wished she were alone.

The amount of energy it took—she thought of her insides sometimes as a slowly leaking battery, an acidic alkaline fizz eating away at her organs—the amount of effort it took to bring her voice to a register he’d recognize.

Ben was tiny, a wisp, and serious, so much so that she worried, often, whether he was enjoying his life as he should be. His gazes were penetrative and mature, his silences meditative and monastic. He was making her nervous; she focused on the road.

The items on Ben’s agenda for the day were “TP ghost bowling” and “G is for Going on a Germ Hunt,” his midday snack a single organic graham cracker. It would be hard for anyone to rally enthusiasm.

He always willingly kissed her goodbye and returned to her in the afternoon drowsy and proud, proffering modified toilet paper rolls and unidentifiable creatures made from Q-tips.

All bets were off when someone else’s child was misbehaving or having a tantrum, everyone watching but avoiding eye contact, like when a stranger had a mental breakdown on the subway, a mix of superiority and voyeurism, thank God that isn’t me plus ooh, what’ll she do next?

“Please, Benji,” she said desperately. “Mama’s got places to be.” Mama’s got to be alone today or she might self-immolate.

She stroked his fine dark hair, her tiny, tiny boy. And she was filled with guilt, base-level guilt over the fact that this impossibly small person was so attuned to her moods, conversant not only in English and beginner Spanish but also in the peaks and valleys of his mother’s vacillating emotional state; she’d sworn since before he was born that she would never make him worry about her the way she always worried about her own parents, but it had happened anyway; she had let it happen anyway.

“Don’t worry about Mama,” she said, though she knew it wasn’t that simple, and suspected, darkly, that the damage had already been done, that she’d failed at her one job. “Don’t ever worry about Mama.”