Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

she has left the entirety of her children’s vehicular instruction up to their father; for all the driving she has done in her adult life she could not bear to shepherd her children through this particular rite of passage, a rite that would literally take them even further away from her than they already were.

There’s a judgmental little iteration of her psyche who stands on her shoulder sometimes and assigns designations: The Kind of Mother Who (fill in the blank): Reeks of Cigarettes at Preschool Pickup, Is Not Good at Drawing Hearts, Lets Her Kid Eat Funyuns. Today she is, apparently, the kind who almost has a panic attack at admitted students weekend.

“We put you in this daycare when you were a baby,” she says, remembering. “It was supposed to be one of the best in the area but they— I remember I brought you there for the first day and they showed me the room where they had all of the kids take naps and it didn’t have any windows and there were these tiny cots lined up along the walls, like a little doll prison, and I pictured you sleeping in one and I started crying right there; I ended up taking you home. I couldn’t stand to think of you taking a nap in a place like that.”

Her daughter’s capacity for feeling things was almost a little scary; every joy and heartbreak burst from her with force, tantrums giving way to radiant happiness in a matter of seconds. But she had been what Julia always wanted: a child who felt secure enough in the world to tell it how she was doing.

Alma hurtled; she foisted and barnacled; she began breathless tales in midsentence, too excited to give any sort of preamble.

all anyone seems to be talking about lately is the departure of children wrecking or rekindling marriages, and it’s not clear to her if her own marriage is a candidate for either.

Julia studies her, this girl she’s been studying her entire life, watching her daughter grow from shy pigeon-toed preschooler to surly adolescent, the years passing merciless and blinklike.

is also, she acknowledges, the thing she wished her own mother would have said to her, ever. I’m here if you need me. She wonders how much of a difference something like that makes, the mere awareness that there are people nearby thinking about you, not hoping you’ll break down but ready to help if you do.

Had she known then what she does now—that it would all come to matter so little; and also that she wasn’t as weird as she’d thought, that there had surely been potential there for friendship, for community, for something other than utilitarian loneliness—she may have lingered longer, enjoyed her schooling instead of simply trying to get through it unnoticed.

the dog goes about one of her favorite reconciliatory pastimes, trying to lick the inside of Julia’s mouth.

One perk of having money is the disguises it allows you to buy, big shapeless alpaca capes and artisanal yeti boots and three-hundred-dollar mother-of-the-groom dresses that cover your abdominal paunch and cap silk crescents over your drooping shoulders.

Aging has turned Julia not into her mother but instead into another kind of stranger entirely, one who drapes herself in shapeless pieces of gray cashmere, one whose eyes crinkle leaflike at the corners whether she’s frowning or smiling, one whose frown is subsequently difficult to distinguish from her smile. She

“Just because I liked to be by myself,” he continued, rolling onto his back. “Just because I liked science, like there’s something sinister about that. They all just regard me as this—anomaly, and they decided a long time ago that they didn’t care about the details, and now they just kind of act like I’m not there, or if I am it’s the me from twenty years ago. And that’s better than— I mean, I know it’s not the same as—”

The old Helen Russo impulse again, to entertain your way out of any crisis.

Compulsively, she starts straightening the items on top of her dresser—such an underwhelming production, marital discord in the suburbs, in your fifties; part of her misses the athleticism of their early days, the slammed doors and heavily punctuated obscenities, the anticipation of reconciliation. Now she is tidying.

he turned to them and proved himself immediately to be the type of man whose gaze grazed a woman’s body like it was just a routine part of making her acquaintance.

summer camp. “Maybe all four of us can go next time,” Mark said, and smiled at Julia, like either of them could afford a gym membership, let alone a trip to Europe, like they were a foursome now, he and she and these two boring people she’d met eight seconds ago.

stomach, lest anyone had forgotten. Julia would have started a drinking game for herself, clocking the number of references to the pregnancy, but she’d already almost finished her glass of wine. Brady, who had all the finesse of a large adult rutabaga, sidled in close to her to refill it.

she’d never quite gotten the hang of female socialization but she understood that it had a lot to do with protecting your currency, and she could tell that by admitting this to Francine she’d just inadvertently relinquished some of her holdings.

She could not imagine what it was like to be this woman, a woman so in control of her life, so confident of her place in the world that she could casually diagnose someone else’s nonexistent problems while still keeping an ear tuned to the oven timer.

cigarette bobbed as she spoke. “And there’s a giant oil painting of one of their wedding photos in the upstairs hall? Like, life-sized? I wonder where that field is where they take all their pictures.”

great deal of generational wealth; Julia had not taken much with her from her early life, but she had learned, by example, that it was easier to get mad at someone than to tell them you were scared.

me.” They lapsed into quiet; her face felt numb. She didn’t know what she wanted. She never really stopped to think about it for too long, never identified anything beyond a vague desire for something good, some ephemeral notion of happiness, whatever that meant.

She’d never fully understood his choosing her, and the fact of it, until that moment, had made her believe in something large and ethereal, proof of some divine construction, the corporeality of love.

had. And she thought of herself, so wildly out of place, an awkward outlier who didn’t understand the rules; she thought of her life before she’d met him, its crisp solitude. She didn’t know then, couldn’t know, how much she’d come to miss her solitude, to crave it; she didn’t know then that sometimes she would wish for it back, that sparse, easy life lived entirely on her terms.

And suddenly, looking Helen in the eye, the door opens up before her as it had the first time they’d met, the feeling that she’d known this woman for a very, very long time, that there wasn’t anything she wasn’t allowed to say. A generosity she’d never quite returned.

There are days I’m delighted to be alone. Where I’m just bowled over by how unencumbered I feel. My life is my own, my days are my own. I can do anything I want in the world, at any moment. The punishment for that, though, is—well, peaks and valleys. I can fly high for a good stretch but the longer I’m happy, the harder the comedown. I guess that’s just—physics.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to tell each other everything, and there’s also, in a marriage, simply not enough context; there is not always enough common ground; there will always be spots where you don’t align, pockets where you can’t both

God, how nice he was, a niceness that shone more brightly beside her own lack thereof, like a new car parked next to an old one—she

“You looked happy,” he said, and it broke her heart, because she hadn’t been, and he was the person in the room who was supposed to know that.

It had started happening gradually, a slow, subtle slippage, like freezing to death. And she watched it happening, little fissures forming, tiny bulbs of uninspired but logical ideas blinking over Mark’s head at intervals, the house lights coming on: Oh

Maybe this was how everybody’s lives unfolded, just a series of maybe we should decisions made or not, succumbing to the silent lure of peer pressure without even realizing it.

Once you started making major life decisions, she realized, you came to see how dangerously easy it could be, their inherent magnitude somehow dwarfing their seriousness.

as yet unfulfilled desire to understand what it meant to be an adult.

Mark chatted with his parents every Sunday and she marveled both at the tedium of the details he shared and at how raptly his parents seemed to listen, responding to his tales of car maintenance and road construction as though they were all huddled around a campfire.

she decided then that she would borrow, as her own, the unfiltered transcendent delight that appeared on her husband’s face, because marriage was—wasn’t it?—all about sharing, stories and toothbrushes and feelings you were supposed to feel at the moment you were supposed to be feeling them. She would borrow liberally, she decided, for everyone’s sake, and because it was on offer: Mark had love to spare.

“That stuff was popular when Dad and I were dating.” “Back in 1840?” Alma says darkly. But then her voice brightens in the way it only does for people who aren’t her mother: “Oh

How nice it would be, to be together again, the four of them at the table, Suzanne weaving figure eights around their feet hoping for scraps and Alma entertainingly expounding on her hatred of her class valedictorian and Mark telling them about some hidden gem sushi place in Midtown, Julia just sitting back, taking them all in, her people in their rightful places.

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.

She has to admit that it feels better to be this person, the person who is trying and succeeding, the person with an intact family she never wants to lose.

It took her a while to identify the feeling she was feeling—it was so subtle and so anomalous, and, ultimately, so short-lived—as happiness. It crept up on her quietly, not elation but equanimity. She was not inordinately happy—it was not crazy happiness, not full-throated wild happiness—but it was there, a calm she wasn’t used to feeling, a sense of oneness with the world, with her days. She slept deeply and dreamed vividly; she floated through her workdays with serenity, having unearthed new reserves of patience and empathy and the ability to turn a blind eye to people she ordinarily wanted to murder.

she found she cared less, was spending less time in her head and more looking outward, preemptively scoping the landscape for whomever would soon be inhabiting it, the baby who wouldn’t be inside her forever.

seemed ludicrous that you could lean so heavily on something so childish when you were doing something as inherently unchildish as having a child yourself, but there she was, remembering her mom’s advice and actively combating it, even though she wanted to die.

not, in fact, so different from her own brain when Ben was a baby, as 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.

I was trying to forget. I was at a gas station, trying to abandon him. I was out of my mind; that happens sometimes.

Now that it’s all behind her, 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.

Children, for all their selfish myopathy, were excellent at seeing through insincerity, could usually tell when someone was faking it; Ben had always had incredible radar for adult malaise.

They are a family with a capacity for forgetting, or at least pretending to forget; they are a family with an inherited lineage of willful blindness.