Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

And she had the lurking impression of having spared them both from something—she was not sure what. She met his eyes again in the rearview. She knew how close she was to the edge but not that Helen Russo would appear, in just an hour’s time, at the botanic garden, to walk her back from it.

She and Mark had done everything they possibly could to start over after what happened with Helen Russo, leaving behind as many material vestiges of the life they’d built that had led her to Helen Russo, swapping out houses and social ties and school districts.

She is rattled by the person she became in Helen’s presence today, a person who, despite nearly six decades on the planet, proximate respectability, and the benefit of twenty years to absolve her of her indiscretions, suddenly feels guilty again.

She didn’t figure out how to be a mom to him—didn’t figure out being, period, really—until he was, as a person, well under way, so these interactions, lacking a solid foundation, tend to unfold haphazardly, stilted and with only a marginal likelihood of success.

“A sort of what, sweet?” she asks, and regrets her tone. If you rush Ben, you run the risk of throwing him off his game, doubling his articulation time.

Tonight’s guest list is a roster of couples who follow an unspoken mathematical formula: one half of the pair makes money, the other compensates socially or artistically.

It’s a careful, upstanding balance of doing good and saving face, precisely the right note struck between self-righteousness and hypocrisy.

“May I be excused?” Alma asks, appearing at her elbow with all the prim obsequiousness of a Dickensian governess. “I have to study.” She meets Julia’s eyes fully, a challenge, because it’s a Saturday and she’s a second-semester senior. “Sure,” Julia says, because she is afraid of Alma.

Someone, apparently trying to drive them all to self-harm, has turned on Joni Mitchell. She refills her own glass of wine.

Brady is annoyingly savvy and scarily successful, and also terribly prone to the type of faddishness only attainable by the elite: relaxation retreats in Rio, helicopter drive-bys of sacred ruins, live performances at corporate events by Poi Dog Pondering and Perpetual Groove.

How do you know a Notre Dame man when you see one? A joke Helen Russo made once. He’ll tell you.

he was somehow autonomously learning to function as a human being despite the fact that his mother was Julia, despite the fact that the botanic garden was the third place they’d visited that day in a demented roster of motion, after a hearty climb on the whale fountain at the park and a visit to see Captain and Tennille, the probably incestuous library hamsters, and it was only ten-thirty a.m. and the thought of the day stretching before them made her feel physically sick—despite

Helen—with her wide-legged linen trousers and her ergonomic sandals and her big round sunglasses holding back the flyaways of her gray-glinting ponytail—had one of those laps, a mom lap, a whole mom aura that just made you want to lean your weight against her, let her hold you up for a little bit.

had one of those laps, a mom lap, a whole mom aura that just made you want to lean your weight against her, let her hold you up for a little bit.

Even around Ben’s toddler friends Julia became stunted and awkward, addressing them by their full names—“Good morning, Ava R.” “That’s a very nice backpack you’re carrying, Evangeline; is that new?”—as though they were her employers, or very short visiting dignitaries, waiting to be impressed.

she should have been the one guiding her son around life’s roadblocks, teaching him scientific trivia that also had metaphoric self-help resonance pertaining to resilience and personal growth, but she was grateful not to be for that one moment, so very grateful to stand back and watch as somebody else did it for her.

Her ability to interpret the most basic conversational cues was all but dead; her social muscles had atrophied perhaps beyond hope. She was unsure of the etiquette, the first-date rules of friendship as an adult.

said, but she said it with some reluctance, because she did in fact want to impose, she realized; she wanted very much to sit across a table from someone

she did in fact want to impose, she realized; she wanted very much to sit across a table from someone who wasn’t a zombie like she was; she wanted to have a warm, easygoing adult friend with social skills and survival instincts and a big happy ponytail. She wanted, specifi...

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 felt Mark’s eyes on her sometimes and wondered what he was seeing, if everyone’s marriage ended up like theirs had, two people who’d once been mad for each other stranded on opposite sides of the kitchen, dimly aware of excess weight and emotional transgressions, Animaniacs-shaped pasta about to boil over on the stove, trying to remember how it had been before.

they all, she was certain, regarded her with pity and confusion—The rest of us got over that in the first few weeks, they seemed to be thinking. Why are you still like this over three years out?

pressing it to Helen, who took it in stride, knotting it around the strap of her bag, dismissive of its attached effluvia, once again emanating the hallmark of her effortless maternity in a way that she clearly took for granted and Julia would eternally envy.

that she was miserable, but that it wasn’t entirely surprising. Also, that she was not allowed to have the problems she had was another wrench in the system—or she was not, at least, allowed to refer to them as problems.

How to complete that sentence, though? I’m desperately unhappy. Congenitally ungrateful. Awash in constant panic, perpetually worried that maybe it’s always going to be this way.

She’d lost the knack, since she spent all her time conversing with a child, for making introductory conversation as an adult that didn’t sound either predatory or hostile; attempting to compliment one of Mark’s colleagues at a cocktail party recently she had accidentally said, “Do you always wear your hair like that?”

“What about you? How do you spend your days?” This particular phrasing was somehow worse than “What do you do?” She hated those questions, all, really, just dressed-up versions of “Who are you?”

The sight of him calmed her, legitimized her; surely it was unethical to use your children for this purpose, but first of all it seemed like everyone did to some degree, and second of all—of this she was certain—it was better than the alternative, using them for nothing at all.

Should she tell Helen about her slipshod parenting philosophy, one that could be basically boiled down to doing better than her own mother?

About Mark’s totally elusive but semantically impressive job that allowed them to pay for their dumb suburban house while also keeping him away from said house most of the time? About the minutiae of her days with Ben, serving him sickening circles of hot dog and green beads of edamame, scalding her wrist testing his bathwater, reading him Snuggle Puppy for the thirty thousandth time, trying to keep him alive and teach h...

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

the strangest thing I remember about having young children is how interminably the time moves, just these days upon days upon days, and every single one of them feels a million years long, but then suddenly months have gone by, enough time for a new baby to be born or one of the kids to start kindergarten, or college for God’s sake, and it— The amount of time I’ve lost contemplating that passage of time is—well, really kind of astounding.”

Narcoleptics Anonymous, she called it in her head: she and Mark had a standing dinner date every other Wednesday, a whole stupid rigamarole where she put on lipstick and didn’t let herself wear a nursing bra and they went to Randolph Street or Lincoln Park or occasionally some exalted hole-in-the-wall in a distant and ominous suburb, and during the drive they talked about all the regular boring things that regular boring parents talked about while dating under duress, though they’d both rather have been sleeping or masturbating or watching The Sopranos on separate televisions:

the whole time she felt high on something, on adult conversation or social stimulation or possibly just Helen herself.

noting, distantly, that the amount of money they now spent on an average night out (dinner plus cocktails plus babysitter plus subscription to premium cable channels that babysitter enjoyed watching after kid went to bed plus take-out stipend to keep babysitter decadently fed and unembittered) was almost as much as a plane ticket to Greece.

Every day her head spouted out a frenetic ticker tape like cable news ranging from the quotidian—call plumber re: powder room sink, almost out of peanut butter—to the philosophical—Ben’s new dentist looks like Gorbachev, do other people spend as much time as I do feeling sad about fat animals—and at night she couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.

She wished she hadn’t bothered with the regular-person bra, the only not-sports-or-nursing bra she owned, which was ridiculous because she’d stopped breastfeeding two years ago and was not remotely athletic, but her nursing bras were just more comfortable; she should at least be allowed to be comfortable if they were going to persist like this, suffer the indignity of what had become of their dialogue without two sharp smiles of underwire digging into her sides.

She promised she’d be present and lively; she promised she’d never be the mother whom you missed when she was away but who disappointed you when she actually showed up. But

She’d been happy when he was born, happier than she could believe; she should have known it wouldn’t last.

Nobody had warned her about all of the loneliness involved, his early mornings and her militant breastfeeding regimen that first year, the weird noises the kitchen floor made at night when she padded across it in search of ill-advised snacks, the way you stopped diving into bed together and started falling, anticlimactically, into unattractive REM sleep where you snored or murmured or conversed, mechanically, about the grocery list.

He’s watching her, a mix on his face of disenchantment and hope that sort of breaks her heart, like he’s expecting her disappointment but holding out for the possibility that she’ll come at him, instead, with whatever it is he wants, rescue, or joy, full-throated parental acceptance. There has always been a schism, for her, between what she wants to do as a mother and what she actually does; she has never quite trusted her instincts, never quite been able to venture into territory that feels too soft or tender.

I think the world of you, she can’t bring herself to say, and somehow Ben seems to sense this, ceding her, as he always has, more than she deserves.

She’d fallen asleep with his warm weightlessness in her arms, awakened at intervals to take inventory of his features. And what followed, eventually: a kind of wholeness that she’d never before experienced and would never again,

I’m not sure why I’m so sad or I don’t think I’m cut out for this. She cannot, now, entirely reconcile that baffling baby with the young man sitting across from her.

Another query bordering on delusion, but she isn’t sure what to say, because perhaps it is part of the fun. Perhaps foresight is overrated. Perhaps there are a hundred thousand ways to make a decision but those ways lead to only a handful of outcomes.

The look he’s giving her is so too a look of his younger self—vulnerable and imploring, seeking something from her, comfort, assurance—that she nearly rises from the couch, goes to him like she would to lift him wailing from his crib, but she checks the impulse.

there was a decent likelihood that she wouldn’t answer the phone, and that even if she did answer, her historical reaction to any type of crisis, large or small, was either to laugh or to leave the room in pursuit of a drink.

“Look, though,” he says, “I turned out okay, didn’t I?” Her son the rule follower, her son who wants everyone to like him, who wants, always, to do the right thing. “You turned out very okay,” she says. The best person. Better than I ever could have dreamed of.

He smiles radiantly upon her, rewarding her, as he always has, for doing the bare minimum.

she was distracted by the interior of the house, which was messy and chaotic and elementally lived-in in the most glamorous way imaginable; she walked in and immediately felt like she was in someone’s home, a legitimate Capital-H Home, not like her own house, where nothing was charming, because charm didn’t just make itself. The texture of their life!

There must be some perfect medium that neither of us has struck,” Helen mused. “Because Pete is never gone, and it’s driving me to distraction.”