Excerpt
All the Mothers
Wearing nothing but ankle boots and a raggedy pair of panties, Sandy sits on the seat of a lidless toilet, holding the shield of a breast pump against her left boob, and searches social media for the other woman her baby’s father has a kid with. She is seething, and worried this anger will somehow seep into the milk and poison her daughter, who will grow up to be a mean girl who peaks in high school, but not worried enough to stop herself and calm down. Milk collects in a plastic jar one measly drop at a time. Her right boob leaks in sympathy with its left-side sister, dribbling down the soft rolls of Sandy’s stomach. The waste of those precious milliliters kills her, but only one hose of the breast pump is working right now and she keeps forgetting to buy a replacement. She keeps forgetting to wear front-opening clothes to work, which is why she is pumping half naked in the same bathroom her boss uses. Again. A hideous beige nursing bra hangs from a hook on the stall door. It is unlike anything she knew existed in her before life—with the heft and durability of camping equipment and coronas of milk stains highlighting how askew her nipples are. Next to it hangs the navy blue sack dress that seemed like such a great idea this morning. These days, no matter what choice she makes, it always seems to be wrong. She blames this on the other woman, a person her baby’s father has never mentioned, not once in over a year.
This is not the life I dreamed of when I was a little girl, Sandy thinks.
She is hunting for this woman like an FBI agent in pursuit of a serial killer, thumbing through various accounts, tapping pictures, enlarging them, following tags in pursuit of other tags in pursuit of . . . what? What would she do if she found her?
Her nipple is sucked in and out by the pretend mouth of the flange. It doesn’t hurt, which, no matter how many times she’s done this, is surprising, considering the intensity of the machine. It’s weirdly pleasant, actually. Not pleasurable, but . . . nice? Is that gross? Am I gross? Sandy wonders this for half a second. An ironic gift of single motherhood: she doesn’t have time to feel shame.
On the floor, the breast pump squawks in a pattern that is starting to sound like words.
“Wacko-wacko-you’re-a-wacko. Wacko-wacko-you’re-a-wacko.”
She hasn’t slept more than ninety continuous minutes in months. Even when her baby sleeps a long-ish stretch, maybe two or three hours, Sandy’s brain jolts her awake every few minutes, as if to alert her to the fact that she is alone in the deep dark forest. But she’s not. She’s alone in New York City. Alone with a baby.
Pump breaks at work have become her little treat. Three times a day she can microdose the paid time off that her job doesn’t actually offer. It is the only time all week she gets to zone out. She used to watch reruns of her comfort show on her phone. In twenty-minute increments, three times a day, she could lose herself in small-town Texas, where an extremely hot high school football coach offers unconditional love to the also extremely hot, adults-playing-teenagers on his team, a town where not even paraplegia and attempted rape are all that bad in the long run. If traveling to this world means hanging a humiliating pumping sign on the office bathroom door, it’s worth it.
Now Sandy scours the internet instead, looking for her. She examines pictures of women with nose rings and tattoos who look like they’ve never given birth, their waists doll-sized, their eyes glimmering with adequate rest. Other women show their children off proudly, and Sandy scans their faces for any resemblance to her daughter.
She enlarges an image with her fingers, her once well-manicured nails now bitten down to the quick.
That’s her! I found her!
Online stalking gives the same dopamine high and crash of a video game. The woman in this post is so unbelievably sexy. She has Bettie Page bangs and huge breasts, much bigger than Sandy’s, which have failed to fill a B-cup even while lactating. She taps deeper into the world of this woman, clicking, enlarging, until: no, that’s not her kid, it’s her niece.
It goes like this the whole break. She’s supposed to be modulating the speed of the breast pump to mimic the natural sucking rhythm of a real baby, but she ignores it, leaving the machine on full blast. Her eyes are so tired she can feel them discretely inside her lids as she strains to absorb every detail of these digital women. Her sockets are dry from lack of sleep, burning with the pressure of imminent tears.
Don’t cry. Not at work. A jagged rock flames in her throat, in her nose. Stay focused. She’s here somewhere. Just find her.
Everything is so swollen and cracked with hurt right now, and it’s all this woman’s fault. It has to be. Otherwise it’s Sandy’s fault, and then the hurt might never go away.
Finally, she sees it: a profile for atSOSanto. In the grid are pictures of graffiti murals and flowering trees and liberal political memes. Pretentious. Annoying. Sandy primes herself for a world of hate. No friends tagged, no people at all, until in the tenth row a short, curvy brunette holding the hand of a toddler with gleaming coppery hair. The woman is facing the ocean, her back to the camera. The child peeks over her shoulder, an oddly familiar smirk on her face, as though spying right back at Sandy, clocking her as the interloper she is. Even cast in shadow, the child’s eyes are a startling blue. The same blue as Sandy’s baby. In all her anger, Sandy had forgotten the other half of the other woman—the kid, her daughter’s sibling. The hatred she can’t let go of starts to melt away.
She dives deep. SOSanto doesn’t post often, almost never posts pictures of herself, and this half glimpse of the child is the only one in the grid. There’s not enough evidence to spin out a fantasy, as much as Sandy wants just that.
The pump break is almost over. Her right hand cramps from balancing her phone and scrolling. She switches the shield of the pump to the other side, her left boob loose with relief, her nipple raw and a little sore. With her left thumb now, she continues tapping each picture, methodically scanning the captions and comments for intel. One day she will have to explain to a surgeon how she gave herself carpal tunnel syndrome from internet-stalking on the toilet. She’ll worry about it then. Right now she’s so close.
She adjusts the placement of the breast shield, then, with her cramping hand, Sandy makes a major tactical error: she accidentally hits “follow.”
“Oh god no.”
Stupidly, instinctually, she un-follows, knowing it will all be in SOSanto’s notifications regardless. She shuts off her phone. Which accomplishes . . . nothing. Beads of sweat prickle at her temples. There is no way to win this game now. She looks at the bottle hanging off her boob. It measures a dispiriting 1.75 milliliters of milk, including bubbles. So actually more like 1.5 milliliters.
“Wacko-wacko-you’re-a-wacko . . .” whines the breast pump.
“No one asked you,” Sandy fires back.
She snaps off the machine, turns her phone back on and rests it on top of the toilet paper dispenser, rubs greasy lanolin on her nipples, starts to get dressed. What are the encouraging words I would like a friend to give me right now? she asks herself with forced cheer. If only a real friend were there to help, someone with the steadiness of an emotional EMT. None of the women she considers friends would understand what she is going through. They’d proven that to her already. An imaginary BFF will have to do.
Take a deep breath. Whoever she is might not check her notifications. She might not even notice.
Her phone chirps. The DM chirp. Still inching the zipper up the back of her dress, Sandy jumps at the sound. She grabs her phone, hands shaking, and it slips from her greasy fingers like a wet bar of soap, sailing toward the toilet bowl.
She dives into the toilet, catching the phone a second before it hits the water, feeling every bit as heroic as a football player in small-town Texas.
A direct message from SOSanto is waiting for her:
“Hi. Are you his new girlfriend?”
Sandy’s heart is beating in her hands, her stomach, her feet, everywhere except her chest. She feels dizzy.
“I’m honestly not sure anymore,” she writes back. “But I am his co-parent. We have a daughter.”
Sandy holds her phone in her hands, breathless. A second later she gets a response.
“Me, too.”
