The Barter Read online

“I’m not even talking about the camera. Although that’s obviously good, too. It’s more like the news and the weather and the clock and the messaging other humans with vocabularies. How did women get through the day, I’m asking.”

  Gennie gives Bridget a half-wink over the top of her phone—she’s tapping out a message. “They talked to other women, probably. Instead. Like I should be talking to you. Instead. Of doing this.” She finishes, looks up. “But you know, compared to our washing machines, smartphones are like the least important advancement in technology for women like us.”

  Bridget smiles, but her tired brain is circling the words “women like us,” like something caught in a drain. But I’m not like you, I’m not, I’m not. I like you, but in my heart I’m not.

  Gennie goes on wryly, “Living without a phone might be boring, but if I had to wash my own dishes, I might as well go live in a box in a hole in the ground.”

  “A hole in the ground?” Bridget shivers and stands up suddenly, pretending she needs to stretch her legs. She is adept at pretending she has been listening when she hasn’t been, a skill she developed in her former life as an attorney, and which she’s certain will be useful once Julie starts to talk in earnest. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Let’s talk art camp. I’m listening.”

  “It’d be easier if we could do it in a neutral place and not at people’s houses, I know,” Gennie goes on, agreeing with an argument Bridget hasn’t even made. “But the playground’s too hot and the pool’s too crowded and the clubhouse is too much. I looked into it, believe me. But we’ll just make that a ground rule: If a kid has a meltdown at someone else’s house, no one can hold it against anyone. You know?”

  Bridget smirks and puts Julie on the ground so that she can cruise alarmingly between small, easily toppled tables and find bits of napkin to put in her mouth. “You’re thinking of Sandra.”

  Sandra is one of those mothers who finds a way to blame other mothers whenever her son misbehaves. At my house he never does that! Oh, but I guess I don’t leave stuff like that out for him to find. In the group of neighborhood mothers that Bridget and Gennie run with, Sandra is known as a bit of a pill, which, perversely, is just what makes her so indispensable—to Bridget, at least. As Bridget put it to Mark one night, crowing, a little drunk after all, “No one joins a mothers’ group—no one hears the words ‘mothers’ group’—without thinking, shit, that sounds awful—unless there’s a chance that they all might kill each other!”

  When Bridget first quit her job, she’d had not a single stay-at-home friend, and she knows that as new friends go, she is truly lucky to have found Gennie, and not only because of Gennie’s many lovely qualities. Gennie is the tacit leader of their small group of neighborhood mothers, and her friendship has paved Bridget’s way right into the center of their social set, a position she’s not sure she would have tried to achieve on her own steam. Because, actually, it had been more a sort of prurient anticipation of lurid mommy spectacles that drew Bridget into the mothers’ group at first: She’d imagined lunacies erupting over snacks and playdates, and she’d imagined herself retaining the slightly superior attitude required to be entertained by them.

  But the truth is she understands, even truly likes, these women of her new world. They are all kind of lonely, and they live near each other, and they want their kids to have other kids to play with, and really everybody is mostly pretty nice, in the way that people are. They’ve gotten to know each other, the mothers, at Friday evening neighborhood cookouts in the central green in their subdivision (Gennie organizes, texts everybody with details, makes sure people know what to bring), cookouts to which everybody comes early, with coolers full of snacks and drinks, and from which everybody leaves drunk, with their kids asleep and sticky in their strollers. Sandra’s the only one who says things like “I saw a kid with her nanny at the pool today and I just felt sorry for the little thing” and “I just think working mothers are kind of selfish, you know? Like, what could be so important about their jobs that they’d miss out on being with their own children?”

  Bridget’s law-school friend Martha tried to warn her against becoming too entrenched in what she calls the “mommy scene” when Bridget “opted out,” as Martha insists on calling it. “Before you know it,” Martha said, not quite winking, “you’ll have twenty things to do every day and you’ll be trying to figure out how you got so overcommitted when the whole point was to have all this time to focus obsessively on your baby. Basically, don’t hang out with any grown women who refer to other grown women as mommies. But even then you might not be safe.”

  The last time Bridget saw Martha, about a month ago, they’d arranged to meet up for drinks at a Mexican place while Mark put Julie to bed, not very successfully, and Martha’s husband, Graham, put their two kids to bed, in equally calamitous fashion. If their husbands were a little more competent they’d have dinner more often, they agreed, and then ordered another round of margaritas. It was then that Bridget told Martha about the summer cookout-and-drinking scene that Gennie had organized in their neighborhood, and Martha was drunk enough to sigh, “God, that sounds nice. Can I come sometime?” Which of course she could, and Bridget arranged it by texting Gennie that very moment. Then Martha changed the subject to something happening at work—she was at a larger firm than the one Bridget had left—and let slip some comment about how glad she was to have something to really do, you know? Something to keep her in the world when the kids felt overwhelming. And Bridget was drunk enough to say, “Gennie says she doesn’t understand women who get their identities from their jobs.”

  Martha snorted. “She’s five years younger than you. She opted out before she ever had a real job.”

  “You’re right.” Bridget nodded.

  “The first time you quote me to Gennie, I’d really like to know. I’d like for you to give me a call when that happens,” Martha declared.

  Mark, somewhat to Bridget’s surprise, can’t stand Gennie. “She’s too cute” is all he’ll say. To her face he’s as polite as an auditioning tenor, but whenever Bridget brings her up—which is, she’ll admit, weirdly often—he tends to grimace and shrug and be generally dismissive. While Bridget tries not to take Mark’s tepid judgment of her friend as anything more than a lack of interest, she can’t help but feel betrayed, a little, in the sense that Gennie is exactly the kind of person Bridget is supposed to want to be now. Gennie is a choice, essentially, that she, Bridget, made in order to benefit all three of them, and Mark should at least try to be consistent in what exactly he’s after in a wife. If it’s not Gennie’s best qualities—her humor, her charm, her thinness, her creativity and patience on rainy days—then Bridget will have to admit something she’s not prepared to admit, beyond the obvious fact that Gennie is a person and not a symbol, a convenient one that Bridget herself has constructed. She’ll never be as good at this as Gennie, even though she is what Gennie is now, even if in her heart she suspects she’s not.

  Gennie checks her phone again for the time. “We have to go soon. You’re coming to the mommy yoga class, right?”

  “Yep. My only exercise.”

  “You get plenty of exercise just chasing her around,” Gennie says cheerfully.

  “Do I?” Bridget watches Julie plump herself down on the floor, in frowning study of a found, probably unclean plastic cup lid that will within moments make its way into her mouth. She honestly cannot think of a single occasion when she’s chased Julie around. Bridget thinks this is something that mothers of boys do and assume that all mothers do also, because otherwise they’d try to trade their sons in for girls.

  “Well, you’re doing something right. You look great.”

  Bridget manages not to roll her eyes, but as she removes the cup lid from Julie’s chubby fist, prompting a bellow from the girl, she is forced to acknowledge that this is precisely the sort of blithe, perhaps willful generosity that Bridget associates with Gennie, because Gennie is
the one who looks great. She’s actually slimmer now than she was before she had Miles—Bridget has seen her wedding pictures, over at the house. Gennie has milkmaid skin, chestnut hair, and a twinkly air, and wears only delicate, handmade jewelry. Just looking at her makes Bridget happy. And, of course, jealous. But mostly happy.

  “Gennie, you are a force for good,” Bridget says, again without quite thinking what she’s saying, but this time she means it.

  Gennie’s cheeks flush prettily, and she smiles with real pleasure. “So I guess that means I should go punch that huffy guy with the newspaper right in the neck.”

  * * *

  Oh, it takes them many, many long minutes to gather all of their things, all of their snack cups and sippy cups and half-finished lattes. And the act of stuffing the rest of the apple crumb pastry that Bridget has forced herself to eat only half of into a paper sack and thence into the trash causes her a real pang (three dollars, plus think how delicious it would have tasted after yoga, warmed in the car by the sun), to add to the pangs already in process: The pang of guilt for poor Floppy Bunny, destined for some ghostly subsummation that Bridget can’t think about right now, not when an hour’s worth of normalness with Gennie and the kids have pushed the ghost to the back of her mind. An ongoing, aching pang of love, constantly tolling like a huge distant bell, for her darling baby. And with it, a similar, nonstop pang of low-level remorse or something like it for her old life and her old job, which wasn’t God’s work but was hers, in a way that she liked. Pangs for Mark, even, of the sexual, envious, and doubting varieties. Part of the reason she’s been going to yoga classes with Gennie is to try to recapture some of her own former spryness and energy, her vim, as they might have called it in the nineteen fifties, because some stubborn part of her persists in believing that Mark might actually notice.

  But in fact there is a text from Mark on her phone, as Bridget discovers once she has gotten Julie into her car seat and settled herself behind the wheel to follow Gennie’s car to the yoga studio. (Could they have carpooled? Would it have saved a polar bear if they had carpooled? Index under “pangs: first-world problems, caused by.”)

  b home late tonite. sorry. love.

  It’s not his fault.

  It’s not anybody’s fault. But it would almost be easier if she believed he was having an affair—with, say, some frisky young developer at his mobile gaming company, a pixieish, overpaid recent college graduate bending over for him in the heat of the server room late at night.

  It’s not another woman, though; it’s just work. She knows because she was the same way before she quit her job to stay home with Julie. Bridget and Mark have been married for two and a half years now, and before Julie was born, they had still had appliances from Bridget’s bridal shower they’d never used. Vacation time they’d never taken accrued like cholesterol in their calendars; unread magazines piled up in slick stacks under the coffee table, so high sometimes that it seemed the table’s legs must be about to lift off the floor.

  They still haven’t taken a vacation, actually. That’s the joke. How could they now, on one income? Ha ha ha. A week full of ha’s. It’s not his fault. And she’s not so cruel as to throw that irony in Mark’s face.

  Other than the ghost, the only thing that makes Bridget feel terror, real terror, is the thought of how dependent they are on the guys—young, slick, prone to handing out business cards—who own Mark’s company, PlusSign. (It’s called “PlusSign” because it’s a digital gaming company, Mark once explained to her, in an email from the office his first week on the job. If they made dog collars or shoehorns, they’d be called “Plus Sign.”) The little boat of Bridget and Mark and Julie is now entirely afloat on the sea of PlusSign; for better or worse, they have entrusted their small family’s fortunes and future to two young men in their late twenties who made an enormously popular mobile game in which you run from house to house in an increasingly complex warren of animated subdivisions, sneaking into people’s homes and robbing them, the old-fashioned way, while they sleep. Stuffing their belongings into a sack—which, in a metaphor that Bridget supposes is the analog of Mary Poppins’s carpetbag, expands infinitely to accommodate your loot—while you caper and cavort and race the sunrise and other robbers. In this game, you get extra points if you stop to clean out your victim’s refrigerator.

  Bridget rereads the text from Mark on her phone, then turns her eyes to the rearview mirror to gaze at Julie, snug in her rear-facing car seat and looking expectantly into the mirror Bridget has affixed to the car’s back window, so that both of them—just inches away from each other but cocooned in their separate seats and facing in different directions—can look at reflections of each other, just like they’re doing now, whenever the fancy strikes them. Bridget raises her phone to the rearview mirror and takes a picture of Julie, smiling into two mirrors at her mother. She sends it to Mark. She doesn’t expect a reply, although a reply would be nice. She looks at the picture of her daughter, her daughter with her clear hazel eyes and her beautiful lashes and the curls of dark hair just now growing long enough to fringe her shell-pink ears.

  “Baby girl,” Bridget announces, “we are not going to yoga.”

  Because the strange fact is, sometimes she wants to see the ghost as much as the ghost seems to want to see her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rebecca Mueller, pretty and much admired, married at an age that was not exactly young. She didn’t marry for money, although she probably could have. But what made her accept John Hirschfelder, with his handsome wood-frame house and his large acreage west of town shot through with feathery cypress trees and sunburned grass, was not exactly love, either.

  She married two months after her twentieth birthday, in the second year of the century. She left her father’s immaculate brick house in town—the unused piano, the gas lamps, the heavy, severe parlor furniture, the lock of her mother’s hair—and moved to the new house that John Hirschfelder had inherited along with sixty acres of good land when his parents died. In the months leading up to the wedding it was said, and Rebecca herself often felt, that if her mother were still alive she might not have married a farmer.

  Why did she marry him then. Well. Rebecca and John had always known each other. They’d gone to school together in the stout brick schoolhouse in town. But she’d gone to school with other boys, too, whom she’d always known, who had annoyed her when she was younger, and who had grown into men who stopped by the house to try to impress their suitability on old Dr. Mueller and his daughter. At the time that Rebecca Mueller married him, she couldn’t articulate why she’d chosen John over the others. He had a handsome face, and a good sense of humor, and long, browned hands. She liked him. She’d always liked him. She wasn’t especially easy to please—oh, yes, some might say she was impossible—and she liked him.

  In fact John was generally well-liked among the few hundred Texans—mostly second-generation and immigrant Germans—who peopled their town, a thriving ten-road outpost in the lower-central latitude of the state. Even before he somehow managed to convince Rebecca Mueller to marry—and to marry him, of all people—the town loved to tell and retell how young Hirschfelder had lost both parents to influenza within days of each other. The town loved even better the story of how he, their only child, barely well enough to walk himself, had made sure his parents were buried properly. He was a favorite in town. He was a favorite of Dr. Mueller’s, and Rebecca’s, too.

  Rebecca knew that her old friend had seen a terrible year. The deaths of his mother and father had made him grave and intent. John’s father had purchased a new acreage the spring before his death, and John was now responsible for the improvement of that land, besides the acres that were already producing. He had two outbuildings to construct, and half of the upstairs rooms in the new house still weren’t finished. The farm’s prospects excited and terrified him at once, and John was smart enough, even at his age, to admit that. But not to just anyone. />
  He admitted it to her, one soft evening early in the spring following the hard months in which he’d buried his mother and father. He came by the Doctor’s house to take Rebecca for a drive—or, rather, to steer them both out to where the town’s perimeter met the roads that led out toward the farms and then relinquish the reins to her so that she could drive, as she loved to do. Riding down these country lanes in his parents’ buggy was something they had done together since before they were teenagers. Better to do it in the evenings, when the earth seemed to give up in a long, slow gasp the heat it had collected all day.

  Now that they were older, of course, this kind of behavior actually meant something—it wasn’t the companionableness of childhood, or even the stormy friendship of their adolescence, but two grown people, a man and a woman, climbing into a buggy together to ride out into the country. In other, less wild and independent places, they would already be considered a scandal. They were no longer children.

  All this Rebecca knew. That night in the buggy, she wore a sage-colored dress and a fierce look. She could see the road opening out in front of her, and she almost felt that she could see straight through the man next to her on the unembellished, flat seat. The boy she’d grown up with had been completely transformed, wrung out by what the winter had done; for the first time in his life he had been made to understand what it meant to be a man. The change in him was so absolute, she saw, that he expected everything else in the world to have undergone a similar shift of gravity. Including her.

  Maybe there was something scandalous about them after all, she thought. They made each other nervous.

  “I’m feeling tired and different these days, Beck,” John said to her that night, when he’d finished telling her about his plans for the farm, and about how certain smells or tunes, certain slants of light, affected him in ways he couldn’t always predict or account for—“peculiar moments,” he called them.