She Was Like That

New and Selected Stories

Kate Walbert

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781476799452
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 selection, a New York Times Editors' Choice book, and longlisted for the Story Prize—from the bestselling, highly acclaimed National Book Award nominee, She Was Like That is a "piercing, intimate, and exquisite" ( Publishers Weekly ) collection of new and selected stories that capture "the joys and anxieties of motherhood" ( Star Tribune, Minneapolis). In these twelve deft, acutely funny, and often heartbreaking stories, "Walbert captures with an unusual combination of restraint and rhapsody" ( The New York Times ) the questions women ask themselves and the definitions assigned to them as wives, mothers, and daughters. Her characters are searchers, uneasy in one way or another. They yearn for connection.In the riveting opening story "M&M World, " a woman is plunged into panic when she briefly loses one of her daughters at the vast and over-stimulating Times Square store. In "Slow the Heart, " a single mother tries to ease tension at the dinner table with Roses and Thorns, the game she knows the Obamas played in the White House. In "Radical Feminists, " a woman skating with her two children encounters the man who derailed her career years earlier. And in the poignant, "A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes, " a mother reflects on the nursery school project that preceded her son's autism diagnosis. This is a deeply moving, resonant collection from a writer "rightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability of women's lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn" (NPR).

PLAYDATE

Matilda’s mother apologizes for calling so late, but she wonders whether Caroline might be free for a playdate? Like, tomorrow?

“Matilda’s had a cancellation,” she says.

Liz searches the kitchen drawer for Caroline’s Week-at-a-Glance. It’s ten already and she’s had her wine; down the hall the baby nurse, Lorna, is asleep with the twins and Caroline; Ted’s out of town. What the hell is Matilda’s mother’s name, anyway? Faith, Frankie, Fern—

“We could do an hour,” Liz says. “We have piano at four-thirty.”

She can picture her clearly: a single woman who hovers in the school hallways wearing the look that Liz has come to associate with certain mothers—a mixture of doe-eyed expectancy and absolute terror, as if at any minute they might be asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or the current policy on plagiarism; the school being one of those places where mothers are kept on their toes and organized into various committees for advance and retreat, their children’s education understood as a mined battlefield that must be properly assaulted. Didn’t she just see her last week at the enlightenment session? A talk given by a Dr. Roberta Friedman, Professor of Something, entitled “Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety; or, How to Let Go and Lighten Up!” But now, for the life of her, Liz can’t remember whether she and Matilda’s mother exchanged two words, just the way Matilda’s mother balanced on the edge of her folding chair taking notes, the intentional gray streak (intellectual?) of her cropped hair, the fury of her pen.

“Oh, God, that’s great,” Matilda’s mother is saying. “I just need to keep Matilda from losing her gourd.”

“I understand,” Liz says.

“Do you?” says Matilda’s mother. “You do?”

---

Her name is Fran, apparently. Fran Spalding. Liz has looked her up in the confidential, you-lose-it-you’re-screwed Parent & Faculty directory. She and Matilda live across the park from the school, on West Eighty-sixth Street. Does anyone not live uptown? Liz wants to know, but she asks the question only of herself, so there’s no answer, just the relative quiet of her studio—a big loft in what was once considered Chinatown. Liz spends most mornings here spinning clay into pots and teacups and dessert plates. At this hour there’s little interruption, just the occasional rumble of a garbage truck and the low chatter of the radio and her own mind: Fran Spalding, daughter Matilda, West Eighty-sixth. They’ll go today after school. They’ll cross the park in a taxi, mothers and daughters, and aim for the apartment building, three-forty-something, where Fran Spalding and Matilda live, and go up to the fifteenth floor, 15A, she knows—the address listed in the second section of the directory, the front pages clotted with emergency numbers and please-put-in-a-place-of-prominence evacuation routes.

It’s a playdate, a date for play; Caroline duly apprised of the plan this morning as she and Liz waited for the school bus on Lafayette. Around them, Cooper Union students bunched up like blackflies, bluebottles in window corners, at every DON’T WALK.

“Who?” Caroline says.

“Matilda. She’s in your class. You know. She wears striped shirts.”

“Does she have a cat?” Caroline asks.

“I have no idea.”

“Does she want to play My Little Ponies?”

Liz looks down at her daughter. “Who doesn’t?” she says.

Caroline shoves her hands in her pockets and swings one leg. She leans against a filthy meter tattooed with stickers advertising things: 800 numbers for important advice; someone staying positive with HIV.

“I’ll go,” Caroline says, as if going were a question.

“Great!” Liz says. “Here comes the bus!”

The school bus is the big yellow kind, exactly the same as the one Liz once rode to elementary school, in that faraway place, that faraway land known as rural Ohio. Here, in lower Manhattan, the bus seems too large, wrong, a dinosaur lurching through the veering bicyclists and throngs of pedestrians, the construction cones and smoking manholes; a relic of a thing, a dirtied yellow shell, an empty chrysalis whose butterfly has flown the coop. Inside, a handful of children are spread front to back, their expressionless faces gazing out the smeared windows, their ears plugged. Her own school bus, her Ohio school bus, had burst with noise and the boys who wouldn’t move over and then, later, would.

The bus stops; its doors open. Liz releases Caroline’s hand and waits as she ascends the high steps and disappears down the aisle. In an instant, she reappears in the window seat closest to Liz, her backpack beside her like a twin. Liz waves and smiles; that she has refused to buy headphones and the machines into which they fit remains a constant source of outrage to her daughter, though on this morning Caroline seems happy enough, smiling back, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue as the doors close and the school bus lurches on.

---

“First, the golden rule: never compare your own childhood experiences with those of your children,” Dr. Friedman had said, her glasses pushed to the tip of her nose. “This is a fruitless exercise, unhealthy and counterproductive. Best to remain alert; to look on the bright side; to, whenever possible, accentuate joy.”

Liz pounds the clay on the wheel and straightens her miner’s cap, a figment of her imagination but one that works relatively well in focusing her thoughts away from the business of children and onto the clay. The twins are presumably in the park with Lorna, sleeping in their double stroller or being pushed, side by side, in the swings meant for babies. Lorna is a pro. She will have bundled them up and thought to bring nourishment—formula or the breast milk that Liz pumps every evening; her breasts have nearly expired, she thinks, they’ve hit their expiration date. And Caroline is safely in school, repeating the colors of vegetables in Spanish or sitting at a small round table having what’s known as Snack: individual packages of Cheez-Its (they’ve all complained!), or free-of-hydrogenated-oils-and-corn-syrup-though-possibly-manufactured-in-a-factory-traced-with-nuts animal crackers. The point is, Liz has five hours before she needs to take the subway uptown: five whole hours. It is nothing and everything. It could stretch out before her like an eternity if she has the will, or it could evaporate in a single moment.

Concentrate, she thinks.

In the bright light of the cap, Liz sees the spinning clay take form and her own hands, aged, fingernails bitten to the quick. She has written Fran Spalding’s cell phone number across her knuckles, in case she forgets, or there’s a problem, or the world blows its cork: a possibility, a probability, apparently, but for now she’s going to concentrate. She’s not going to think about that.

---

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an important message from the New York City Police Department,” says the subway voice over the loudspeaker five hours later. Liz stands half in, half out of the subway car, a new habit; she always waits until the last passengers have pushed past before she fully commits to sitting down.

“Remain alert. Keep your belongings in your sight at all times. Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious package or activity on the platform or train, do not keep it to yourself. Tell a police officer or an MTA employee.

“Remain alert, and have a safe day,” the voice adds as the doors shut.

---

The taxi barrels across Central Park, through its odd scattering of tunnels; blocks of stone rise on either side of the road as if the taxi were plummeting through earth. Above loom the barren trees, leafless and gray, or the blotched white of sycamores; once, aeons ago it seems now, orange flags were unfurled along this same route. Then, thousands of people, all of them vaguely smiling, had wandered the paths like pilgrims in a dream. No one appears to be smiling now. They hurry along, wrapped in their coats, the day leaden, darkening; an Ethan Frome day, Liz used to say in college, to be clever, though she wasn’t particularly, unable to decipher the strange manners and customs of the East. She hasn’t thought of that in years.

Fran pays the driver, while Liz, in back, unbuckles Caroline and Matilda, leaning over them to push open the door. “On the curb,” she’s saying. “Watch your step,” she’s saying. “Grab your gloves.” Fran gestures for them to follow her into the building entrance, where two men in uniform hold open the large glass doors, bowing slightly as Fran passes.

“Partner!” one of them says, high-fiving Matilda. “Who’s your buddy?”

“Michael,” Fran says, arrested at the WELCOME threshold. “This is Matilda’s friend Carolyn.”

“Caroline,” Liz says; she can’t help it, raw nerve. Anything else she would let slide, she tells herself. Truly.

“Of course,” Fran is saying. “Caroline.”

“Buddy bear,” Michael says to Matilda. “Look at you.”

They look. How can they not? Everywhere there are mirrors, reflecting them, reflecting Michael and the other guy, reflecting the bounty and the grandeur of it all—potted green plants with white lights, garlands, a cone of poinsettia, and even, on a pedestal between the elevator banks, an elaborately carved stone urn containing—what? Liz wonders. Dead tenants?

“This is lovely,” Liz says.

“It’s home,” Fran says. She rings for the elevator, the girls crowding next to her. In an instant there’s the ping, and then the doors slide open. Another man in uniform smiles as they all step in; there is a small chair in the corner for sitting, though he clearly prefers to stand.

“Hey, Matty,” he says. “How’s the Go-Go?”

Go-Go, Fran explains, is the cat, their cat, who recently contracted a hot spot. A hot spot, she tells Liz, is an itch that can’t be scratched.

“Wow,” Liz says.

They rise in mechanical wonder and then stop, abruptly, on eleven, where the elevator doors slide open to no one.

“False alarm,” the man in the uniform says, releasing the doors and driving them onward, upward. The girls stand stock still; they all stand stock still.

“Are you allergic?” Matilda says to Caroline.

“The cat,” Fran says to Caroline.

“Are you allergic to cats?” Matilda says. She wears pink plastic barrettes and a striped shirt underneath a pink jumper. “Caroline,” Liz says. “Did you hear—”

“No,” Caroline says. She hunches beneath her huge backpack, carried solely for fashion, or just in case. In it now, Liz happens to know, is a palm-size notepad on which Caroline draws the details of her day and a purple-lipsticked Bratz doll that she treasures, received on her last birthday from Ted’s mother, who, Ted said, meant well.

“Lots of people are,” Matilda says.

The elevator stops.

“North Pole,” says the man in the uniform.

“Thank you,” says Fran.

“Thank you,” says Liz.

“Thank you,” says Matilda.

“Thank you,” says Caroline, walking behind Liz and tripping her, accidentally on purpose. “Caroline,” Fran’s voice soars in from ahead. “How do you feel about strudel?” But neither Caroline nor Matilda is listening, or hungry, for that matter; released from the grip of the elevator, the girls run down the poorly lit hallway playing some sort of imaginary game, knocking into doors and taking corners at high speed.

“Matilda Beth,” Fran yells after them. “That’s one.” She pauses. “Don’t let me get to two.”

Matilda stops and grabs Caroline’s hand, pulling her toward what must be A—an unassuming door with a child’s drawing taped over its peephole. It is always the same, Liz thinks, in these pictures: the mismatched ears, the round eyes, the name sc...