The Barter Read online

  Bridget hears someone clearing his throat behind her and steps aside for the man who’s been waiting to use the bank machine. In the frosty air-conditioning of the vestibule her nipples have become noticeable, and of course the guy looks at them as he passes her, of course he does. She swipes her sunglasses back down onto her nose furiously.

  You’re not going to cry, are you? Seriously?

  No, she is not going to cry. She’s going to try to think this through. Bridget marches back out into the harsh sunshine and starts up her car, rolling up the windows and blasting the air-conditioning—in the few minutes she’s been inside, the car has already become uncomfortable. She and Mark pay all their bills from a separate checking account they designated for that purpose. Well, Mark pays all their bills, yes, but she makes sure the electronic transfers happen on time. When Bridget stopped working, they did some financial housekeeping and agreed that it was better to have one untouchable account for bills and necessities and then one special, sort of discretionary account, which was to be separate—that way no payments would ever bounce, and they could see exactly how much they had to spend at any moment. Yes. A good idea. It should have worked. Except that money from the discretionary fund got used for necessities all the time, and then sometimes money from the bills-only account would need to be moved over to the spend-me-like-I’m-on-fire account, to keep them liquid between Mark’s paydays. Had they decided to consolidate everything after all? They must have. Think, Bridget. She could almost manufacture a grayscale memory of that conversation: Let’s just move everything into one place since the shifting back and forth is getting annoying. Okay, I’ll do it. Will you remember? I will, I promise. I’ll remember. I’ll do it the next time I have a minute and I’m online. Except which of them had promised? Which of them had come to the conclusion about what to do? Why hadn’t anybody clarified that they should move everything into the fucking account for which they actually had fucking debit cards, for Christ’s sweet fucking sake?

  And now she does cry a little bit, but out of fury and frustration and not humiliation. Although, yes, there’s some humiliation in it, too.

  * * *

  The funny thing was her mother had tried to tell her this would happen, or something like it.

  Hadn’t she? Yes. Bridget can remember this conversation, at least, quite clearly. In fact, at this moment, the memory of it could be said to uncurl in her mind, like some deranged, poisoned daisy in a burned-out lot, with all the same loathsome cheerfulness. Bridget, in her car, wipes tears from the corners of her eyes, but her chin has become a walnut, and she can’t suppress a sob that has nothing and everything to do with the bank and the money and the idiot mistake that has been made. (Oh, for God’s sake, don’t be so self-indulgent, you childish cow. There’s a dead woman in your house. This isn’t even your biggest problem.)

  She and her mother are at lunch at a pleasant-enough cafe—a mini-chain, one that specializes in sandwiches and soups and undrinkable coffee—near Bridget’s old office. Julie is ten weeks old, asleep in her stroller. The decision has recently been made—by Bridget or Mark or perhaps by both of them—that Bridget will not be returning to work, and Bridget has just gone in to her old office for a morning, to formally tender her letter of resignation at her law firm and to gather up the stuff from her desk.

  Bridget’s mother, Kathleen, drives down to babysit while Bridget has the valedictory conversations with her now-former coworkers, her now-former boss. HR will be in touch. The wheels are in motion. She’s about to be spun free from the machinery. Her mother is buying her a quick lunch and then heading back to her own office for the afternoon. It has taken Bridget the better part of three hours to extricate herself from a job she held for eight years, and trained herself to hold for another three years before that. But Bridget gathers that Julie has been her usual amiable infant self and made Kathleen’s morning an easy one.

  Opposite her mother at the table, Bridget swiftly answers a text from Martha. Yup. Easy cheesy. Everyone super nice about it. Then looks up to find her mother watching her with tears in her eyes.

  “Are you all right, Mom?”

  Kathleen nods and begins to dig into her bag, an elegant short-handled tote that looks as expensive as it is, for a tissue. Kathleen keeps her tissues in a little case in her bag. Her bag is mostly filled with thoughtfully selected little cases of this type: She has a glasses case that opens on a nifty top hinge like the door of a DeLorean; a silver lipstick case she bought on a trip to Paris a half decade ago; a small makeup bag, because there is not a woman in Texas who doesn’t carry a makeup bag and sometimes two in her purse; an e-reader encased in a supple peacock-blue leather sheath; a cell phone protected in another leather sheath, this one a very pretty pale green. Things don’t just knock around together inside the bag of Kathleen Goodspeed, née Hanratty. She does not have stray crumbly gum wrappers or floury-smelling wrinkled tissues in her bag, and never shall she. Bridget watches her mother with admiration and bemusement as she removes from her bag the quilted lilac-and-pale-green-patterned case that holds, just so, a plastic packet of tissues.

  “Pretty,” Bridget says, indicating the case.

  “Yes, I liked it,” Kathleen says simply, her throat sounding full, and she blows her nose with no little efficiency, then says, “I’m sorry, Bridget. I’m happy for you.”

  “You’re that happy for me? You’re so happy you’re crying?” Bridget says, with a twinkle that feels forced. Because it is forced.

  Glancing down again at her phone, she decides to ignore the latest blip of Martha’s electronically wielded sarcasm. Did somebody already claim your stapler? And/or your paralegal?

  Her mother says, a trifle lamely, “I don’t mean to seem upset. There.” She compresses the used tissue in her hand. Kathleen is a tallish Texas beauty of a certain age, which is to say it is all still there: The hair is buoyant and thick and expertly kept; the figure is slender in the right places and pillowy in the rest; the skin is clear and wears its bronzer well. She remarried a few years ago. The guy is a bit younger than she and runs his own business. Something financial. Or maybe it’s real estate. But Kathleen kept her first married name, Bridget’s father’s name. She became Kathleen Goodspeed one day thirty-six years ago and will remain that woman for the rest of her life.

  Kathleen is the sort who doesn’t like to make a fuss over tears, and she has clearly decided to pretend that her brief, therapeutic cry has refreshed her: “I’m just thinking about you when you were a baby girl. And how I felt like I would do anything, give anything to protect you. You must be so excited to spend this time with Julie. You’ll see. Every day you’ll wake up and wonder how much more you could possibly bear to love a person.”

  Bridget looks at her sleeping, tiny daughter, a little bean in a blanket with caterpillars on it. “I know. I think—” She turns back to her mother and widens her eyes. “I think! Oh God, Mom. What did I just do? Is that mine?” She gestures wildly toward the baby and laughs, and her mother smiles, too.

  Kathleen has always been Bridget’s hero, but a particular kind of hero, the kind that also requires some protection of her own. Kathleen has had to enclose herself in a kind of armored carapace in order to be of use, more Batman than Wonder Woman. As the country song or the women’s movie script or the psalm goes, she has battled through hardships, mostly alone. All the money she’s ever had in her life—and by now, she has had a lot—she’s earned for herself. Perhaps it is enough for now to say that Kathleen Goodspeed knows whereof she speaks when she says, not very distinctly, over a wilted salad in a lame lunch joint near Bridget’s newly old office, “I just worry about you and Mark finding that it’s not easy on one income.”

  “A man is not a plan,” Bridget says, and rolls her eyes, and twinkles again to show that she’s not really angry, although she is, of course she is. What kind of a thing is this to say to her, on this day? Are they really going to have this argumen
t?

  Kathleen rises to the challenge. “That saying should really be ‘A man is not a job.’”

  “Raising a family is not a job?”

  “Oh, it’s work. But work is not a job. A job is a job. You know when you have one because you get paid for it.”

  Bridget’s annoyance reminds her of the one bad thing you can say about Kathleen as a grandmother: She never babysits. Hardly ever. Because she can’t. She’s still working. She took a week off to help Bridget at home when Julie was born, but she doesn’t babysit. She doesn’t even offer, not even to let Bridget and Mark go out for dinner on a Friday night, as Bridget would dearly love to do.

  “You chose your career, I chose my kid,” Bridget says brightly, but this feels like a line that’s being read to her from a cue card somewhere behind camera. Other lines of this type that she has delivered today, while saying good-bye to her former coworkers: I just want to be there when she has her firsts, you know? And, They’re only little once, and these years are so important. And via text to Martha, Uh, excuse me, counselor, don’t you have to go file or email something while I’m breast-feeding my baby?

  “How do you mean, sweetheart?”

  “I just mean, you chose your career,” Bridget says tiredly, not even sure now what she meant to say in the first place.

  Her mother looks at her, quizzically at first, but then hurt. “No, I didn’t.”

  Bridget is forced to backtrack merrily—horrible, horrible. Of course this is the most wounding thing she could have said to her mother, possibly the worst thing she has ever said to her, ever. And where did it come from? The same place where she stores all of her special little excellent digs for Mark, no doubt. “Oh, I know you didn’t really have a choice, Dad wasn’t around, how else were you going to keep a roof over our heads, the whole thing. I just mean, you made sure that you were working instead of . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what you might have done differently.” Bridget sighs and rubs her eyes, wishing for a cosmic eraser. “I mean, Mark and I just did the math, and it made more sense this way, for me to stay home. Compared to day care.”

  Kathleen actually laughs, but there’s no joy in it. “You’d better get out that calculator again, sweetie. You think you didn’t make more as an attorney than someone who works at a day care place?”

  “No, I know. I just mean compared to what we’d be taking home. Minus the day care.”

  “I don’t see it that way. What about your retirement savings? What about the money you’re not saving while you’re not working? What about the years of advancement in your career that you’re never going to get back?” Kathleen leans forward, then seems to make herself sit back again. “I’m sorry. You know I don’t want to sound like I’m sitting in judgment on you. You and Mark should do what you think is right for your family.”

  “We are, Mom. We are.” But because she is still annoyed, Bridget adds to herself, And thanks so, so, so much for your permission. Mom.

  “Look at this baby girl,” Kathleen says warmly, gazing at Julie in her cotton blanket in her stroller. She’s sleeping hard, like she never wants to wake up. Bridget takes a deep drink of coffee from her paper cup and looks at her sandwich. She’s never been so tired. She’s never been so hungry. She’s never been so angry at her mother.

  Who leans into the sacred tent of air above her sleeping granddaughter, smiling with delight, and murmurs to Bridget without even looking at her, very much as if she is remembering something, “You know, someday you are going to want your own money, sweetheart, and not because of you. Because of her.”

  * * *

  Bridget finds herself at the curving green entrance to her own neighborhood before she quite realizes that she is driving in the direction of home. She’s almost out of gas entirely, but some kind of mother-autopilot function in her brain has kicked into gear, navigating her to safe harbors while she woolgathers. Rather than taking the right turn toward her house, however, she turns left, toward Gennie’s. Gennie and Miles are likely to be at home because it’s just past Miles’s naptime. After ten months of friendship with Gennie, Bridget knows Miles’s naptimes almost as well as she knows Julie’s.

  As she pulls onto Gennie’s street, she is constructing the story. Took Julie outside with me to pick up the paper from the driveway and locked myself out! Took Julie with me on a quick dash to the grocery store and forgot my house key! But of course, she has her house key—it’s on the same key ring as her car key. Who keeps her house key separate from her car key? No one. She’ll have to tell the truth. I am afraid of a ghost in my house. Please take me in and give me a cup of coffee and a pair of underwear.

  Julie is still asleep, so Bridget detaches the car seat from its base and carries it toward Gennie’s front door.

  Looking back on it, she’s not sure why she didn’t notice anything different when she approached Gennie’s house. Surely something might have tipped her off? But she is oblivious to the clues—the cars parked at the curb, the two strollers folded up on Gennie’s porch—and walks right into her lowest, stupidest moment like a dog roaming into one of those invisible electrified yard barriers that are advertised in airplane seat-back catalogs along with all the other solutions to first-world problems, like automated cat feeders and bulb-changing poles for light fixtures embedded in vaulted foyer ceilings.

  Gennie opens the door, and the first thing Bridget notices is that her friend doesn’t seem the least bit surprised to see her. But then Bridget’s appearance registers and Gennie’s beautiful hazel eyes widen slightly. Because she’s Gennie, though, she seems at once to know what to do.

  She stage-whispers, so as not to wake the baby, “Bridge! Come on in, the others are all here already, we’re having coffee and wrapping up—but come with me to my room first, we can put Julie in there—” Bridget is already following Gennie through the door into the foyer, coming into full view of the mothers, all of them, casually pretty in striped boatneck tees and denim miniskirts, draped tanks and slim poplin cargo capris, sleeveless blouses and linen skirts, arrayed across Gennie’s living room looking as well turned out as young Southern mothers usually do and, taken as a group, absolutely and stomach-clenchingly terrifying, at least to Bridget, in this moment, as she sees herself imprinting on their collective consciousness the certainty that something is wrong. “—and that way she won’t wake up until she’s ready to call for mama—hey, guys, sshh, Julie’s sleeping, be right back.”

  Gennie puts her hand gently at the small of Bridget’s back, both guiding her away down the hall and seeming actually to shield her from view. Gennie’s house is, as usual, not just immaculate but comforting and lovely—there are flowers, something was baked this morning, the coffee is special. Bridget knows from experience that the other mothers’ homes are this way, too, and that they do it all themselves, proudly—never, ever in a million years would they hire another woman to help them; they are as far beyond help as they are beyond reproach. Southern women make the effort. It’s one of the commandments Bridget herself grew up with. Kathleen, as a single mother raising Bridget on a bank clerk’s salary, cleaned house every weekend, and kept her nails done.

  Meanwhile the children are all playing on Gennie’s spotless rugs and haven’t so much as looked her way. It’s a consolation that at least the kids aren’t wondering why she looks like such shit. It’s like one of those nightmares, Bridget thinks, where you’re naked in the grocery store, or where the toilet you’re using turns out to be in the middle of the public library.

  Gennie goes on, “I’m so glad you could make it after all. I thought you might not be coming or something, but then I thought, Julie’s probably napping at some off-hour and she can’t get away. Here. Let’s—let me draw the blind real fast so it’s not so bright. Just put her on the floor? Between the bed and the door? And that way you’ll hear her for sure when she wakes up.”

  “Thanks, Gennie,” Bridget manages. I am not going
to cry. Kindness is not what makes you cry. Cruelty deserves tears, but not empathy, not tenderness of spirit. Keep your shit together.

  But then. “You look tired, hon,” Gennie says feelingly, and that does it. Waterworks. Heart-deep misery. Slim, tanned arms around her shoulders. “What is it, Bridge? Is—is it Mark?” Gennie asks, hesitant. “Are things okay with you guys?”

  Bridget snuffles a little bit, and instead of answering, she requests a tissue. It’s perverse, not correcting her friend’s assumptions immediately. It is unfair to Mark. But what can she say, really? “I’ve just had a tough morning.”

  Gennie is silent and fetches her a box of tissues from the master bathroom. She watches Bridget wiping her face and blowing her nose. Bridget is afraid to look at her. She knows that her nipples have hardened again in the frosty air-conditioning of the house, clearly visible beneath her tank top, again. She has a feeling that she’s also displaying a shadowy delta of her pubic hair through her thin, stained pants. Her feet are dirty. Worse, her child is dirty. Julie is all crust and crumb, and she smells as if she might actually be sleeping in a pooped-up diaper—allowing this to happen is probably the true cardinal sin of motherhood. Bridget thinks, I look like a woman who has fled her home. I am a woman who has fled her home.

  Finally, Bridget’s conscience demands a say in this whole embarrassing tableau. “Mark’s fine—we’re fine, I mean. He had nothing to do with it. I’m just . . . freaking out.”

  Gennie is quiet a moment longer, then says, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Bridge.”

  “I would tell you if there was anything to tell, I swear.”

  “Don’t feel like you have to. It’s okay. I just want to make sure you’re safe and taken care of. As your friend—” Gennie pauses delicately. “When was the last time you saw him?”