The Seven Day Switch: A Novel, page 21
“Yeah,” Wendy says, napkin to her eyes. “Did you grow up eating nothing but oatmeal? I feel like I just made out with a ghost pepper.”
“Oatmeal would have been an improvement,” I say, and seeing her face, I add, “We didn’t have a lot when I was growing up.”
“I mean, presumably you weren’t too poor for Taco Bell,” she says. “Is there such a thing as that poor?”
I look at her hard.
She colors even redder than the salsa. “I’m an idiot. Sorry. I . . . it was a stupid thing to say. I had no idea.”
I smile weakly. How can I blame anyone around here for not relating to the feeling of being hungry? Their monthly mortgage payments would have bought me and my siblings a year’s worth of groceries. “It’s ok,” I say. “The hot salsa is probably punishment enough.”
“The heat was awful,” she says. “And then there’s the taste of foot in my mouth. I’ll be needing my second margarita soon.”
“Don’t get too trashed,” I tell her. “Even when we’re sober, it’s hard enough to play nice with each other.”
“But that’s the thing,” she says to me, around gulps of her drink. “That’s exactly what we’re doing wrong.”
“Dealing with each other?” I ask.
“Well . . . ok, yes. That isn’t what I was going to say, but sure,” she says, shaking her head at me. “When we switch back, I have no doubt we’ll probably never speak again.”
For some reason, the comment hurts. I take a glug of my margarita. And another.
“That’s right—feel the dark side,” she tells me. “Have a stiff drink in the Taco Barn. See how it feels to be a human person.”
“Why can’t you just make the cupcakes?” I blurt out. “They are so easy compared to last year’s cupcakes. Those had to be topped with volcanos that really erupted.”
“Zoey says you were supposed to make fifty cupcakes because there are fifty entries to the school science fair, and everyone who loses gets a cupcake. Is that right?”
I nod. “There can only be three real awards. That’s a lot of disappointed little scientists.”
Wendy snorts. “I cannot think of any less necessary cupcakes in the history of cupcakes. And that includes the time when there were three cupcake trucks parked next to each other downtown fighting for business.”
“What about all the kids who don’t win?” I ask her.
“They get the joy of doing science.”
I shake my head. “They also get cupcakes.”
“Not this year,” Wendy tells me.
“Wendy, please. I am going to have to make them myself if you don’t, and I’m going to be up all night tomorrow baking.” I narrow my eyes. “When exactly will we have time to switch bodies if I’m busy frosting fifty little DNA helices until four in the morning?”
She lets her head roll back and stares at the ceiling. This is exactly what my tween does when I’m being “unreasonable,” and I hate it.
“Ok, Celeste, imagine this. Imagine a world where instead of you creating an extra thing to do for the science fair, you go home and read an inspiring memoir.”
“Oh, that’s rich. I’ve searched your house and found only four books outside the self-improvement realm, and none of the spines are cracked,” I respond.
Wendy draws her phone like a Wild West sheriff in a gunfight. “E-books,” she says, showing me her digital library. It’s enormous. “Read ’em and weep. Literally, because I mostly read historical fiction set during World War Two.”
I stifle a smile, refusing to acknowledge that she almost made me laugh. “Well, fine. Let’s say I don’t make one little batch of fifty cupcakes, and instead I read a few chapters of”—I zoom in on Wendy’s most recently read title—“a novel about a French Resistance fighter who saves a brie factory from the Nazis. The end result? I stress eat a wheel of brie, and forty-seven kids leave the science fair without a, ahem, sweet taste in their mouth.” I salute my little pun internally. “In that group of children is one little girl who has the potential to cure cancer, but in that moment of losing at the science fair and being sent home with nothing, she decides to major in art history.”
“You’re telling me the kid who can cure cancer is so easily defeated that she gives up due to the lack of a consolation prize?” she asks me, amused. “I sure hope she gets cancer curing right on the first try! Also, why wouldn’t this hypothetical genius have won the Birchboro Hills Elementary School science fair, exactly? What kind of fair are you imagining? Is it full of former Nobel winners?”
I cross my arms. “It’s just nice to hand out cupcakes,” I say.
“It’s nice to have meaning in your life. Baking consolation prizes isn’t meaning.”
“Is being mean your meaning?”
Wendy puts a finger up and then takes a long, long drink of margarita. “Celeste, for real, I have been you for almost a week now, and no matter how much I now appreciate the intricacies of your life, I still do not totally understand your choices. If I comprehend correctly, you somehow dedicate your entire life to the comfort of three people, two of whom do not even have fully formed frontal lobes. Additionally, the moment you get free time, you spend it doing things for complete strangers’ kids. Things that largely go unnoticed and unappreciated, like science fair cupcakes and unpaid Ubering. Yesterday night I went to that big event with Hugh, and everyone was dressed up and on their absolute best behavior, and I—well, you—looked straight-up stunning. And still, literally no one wanted to talk to me—you—except Jaina, and I suspect only her because you and Hugh bought a table at her private school fundraiser. You don’t even have kids in private school! How can you possibly tolerate that?”
I shrug. “It’s not as bad as all that,” I say.
Wendy scoffs. “The minute someone asked me what I did for a living, the conversation was dead. No one knows what to say to you. Your life path is the conversational equivalent of asking about a bad rash. Is that how you really want to roll?”
It’s like she whipped a BB gun out of my nice big handbag and shot me in the forehead. I’m not dead, but I’m furious. “You,” I tell her, putting my margarita glass down hard, “are awful. Just awful. And I was just starting to think you might be human.”
“Hey, I was being sympathetic,” she says.
“You were being rude. Do you know how much I’ve done for you since we switched bodies?” I ask her. “For your kids?”
“Let me play devil’s advocate: What exactly have you done that a housekeeper couldn’t?”
If I were a cartoon, smoke would start coming out of my ears. “You want to know what I’ve done? Taught your kids to cook, for one thing. Taught them to get off the stinking couch. You have an eleven-year-old who didn’t know where the washing machine even was and an eight-year-old who can’t make toast. He told me he had literally never used a toaster before.”
Wendy looks sheepish but shakes her head. “You can’t understand. When I get home from work, I haven’t seen my kids in hours,” she tells me, as if I haven’t been her for a week. “I miss them; I care about them; I think about them all day. If Linus wants toast, I’m happy to make him toast.”
“But not dinner,” I say sharply. “As far as I can tell, your kids are surviving on pizza bagels alone.”
She rubs the back of her neck. “Celeste, does it matter what they eat on any single day, as long as they are fed, safe, and healthy? Honestly. Be real.”
I think of this question. The old me would have said no. Fed kids who are loved . . . of course that’s good enough.
But the me of this moment isn’t so sure. “They need to see you modeling good food choices. They need to eat organic so they don’t get Red Number Three disease, and avoid excess carbs so they don’t get bullied, and eat the rainbow every day even though there are really only so many blue foods. And they need to eat local. Being the family food gatekeeper is one of the last acts of useful environmental activism,” I say.
“I think we read the same mommy blogs,” says Wendy. “I’ve heard all that before. But unless you have nothing to do all day but cook, it just translates to ‘You have to be perfect all the time, in every way, and do nothing that doesn’t better the childhood of your precious offspring, or you’re a parenting failure.’”
I frown. “Is it women staying at home with their kids that you have a problem with,” I ask Wendy, “or just ME staying home with my kids?”
“It’s how you do it, Celeste,” she says, and my name comes out with such a weight of compassion that I find myself leaning forward to listen further, or maybe to get ready to slap her, if the need arises. “We both know there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with choosing not to work outside the home. If you can’t earn enough during the day to afford childcare, then it can be absolutely necessary. Conversely, if you just don’t want to work and can afford not to, fine, be my guest, Mrs. Moneybags. But what you do, the designer baked goods and the perfectly planned birthday parties, the vegan organic school snacks and the sanctimonious health tips—that would offend me whether you did it during the day or after working hours. You are basically creating busywork to make the rest of us feel bad. Most women need to work, not just for money and health insurance but because we want to have a life outside of our kids.”
“Oh, so now I’m the one making YOU feel bad here.”
“Actually,” she tells me, “you’re the one making both of us feel bad, because all of this is at the cost of your own happiness. If sewing kids’ clothes and cooking three-course weeknight dinners and slicing SunButter sandwiches into the shape of 3D endangered species lights you up and fills up your heart, then fine. Tell me that’s the case, and I’ll lay off. But if you’re just competitive mom-ing on Facebook to try to make others feel they’re losing at something that’s unwinnable . . .”
I say nothing. Do those things light me up? The lunch boxes, the craft projects, the meal planning? I don’t know. Maybe, kinda, sorta?
I’ve wanted my own kids since I was the boys’ age. That’s when I started taking care of my own siblings while my mom was at work, and that’s when I felt most of use. But even before then, I had a dolly with me everywhere. I changed her diaper, cooed to her, burped her after her “bottles” of water that dribbled down her plastic chin.
But those days are coming to an end. And after that . . . I don’t know what will become of me.
“I rest my case,” she says into my silence.
“Can I ask you a question, Wendy?” I finally say. “What about you? Does your lifestyle light you up? After work, which I now understand is a consultancy that tells other insanely busy people how to take on yet more in their lives, you come home to two sweet but pretty demanding kids. You shove subpar food into them, basically do their homework on their behalf, and then let them watch TV while you clean up their messes, cover for your husband, and torture yourself on a basement spin bike.”
Wendy makes sort of a dismissive noise. “You just described the second shift,” she says to me. “You’re finally understanding how ninety-nine percent of the female population lives.”
“Well, let me tell you, the second shift first-degree sucks.”
Wendy actually laughs.
“Pardon my French,” I add, feeling the margarita acutely. But still I go on. “Your life would be so, so much easier if you taught your clients to stop bugging you after hours, made your kids do some chores, and asked your husband to, you know, participate in the family.”
She lets out a joyless laugh. “In the week you’ve been there, have you had any luck with Seth?” she asks.
I shake my head. “But I’ve had some luck with Davis,” I reply too quickly.
Wendy nearly snorts her margarita. “Don’t even start with all that. Davis is a work friend,” she tells me. “I’m not having an affair.”
“I know. Seriously—I can tell. But he’s nuts about you. You may be leading him on.”
“I’m not leading him on!” she says. “I’m trying so, so hard not to lead him on,” she amends. “He’s an amazing guy. He deserves the best.”
“He seems to think you’re the best.”
“Well, what does he know?” she jokes.
I shrug. “It seems like he knows you pretty darn well. He knows you’re a workaholic with a secret soft spot for the underdog,” I say, thinking of that meeting we took with the director of the halfway house. “He knows all about what’s important to you and what’s important to your kids. Unlike me, I think he even knows what makes you tick.”
A blush of recognition crosses her face. “You’re right, Celeste. Davis is amazing. He makes me smile, cares—there’s no question I could love him if I wasn’t married. But I am. And yes, the situation isn’t perfect, but if it’s what it took for me to get my kids . . .” She shrugs. The sentence doesn’t need to be finished, not for the sake of any mother I’ve ever met.
Maybe that’s what makes me soften at last. That realization that no matter how different Wendy and I may be, we are in complete alignment on this most vital thing. There is nothing, literally nothing, we wouldn’t do for our kids, and it starts before they are even born. Whether that means the way my mom worked eighteen hours a day so that we could eat, Wendy selling herself out for a baby, or me setting aside everything else to make sure my children get the perfect childhood I always dreamed of. How much we all give up, we mothers. How much we willingly hand over. Our bodies. Sleep. Sometimes safety. Often passion. And, of course, our dreams. We’ll give up our very dreams, if that’s what it takes to see to theirs.
To my surprise, Wendy reaches over the table and puts a napkin in my outstretched hand. “Don’t cry, Celeste. Don’t cry for me, at least.”
“I’m not crying,” I tell her. But I do dab my eyes with the napkin and give her a meek little smile. “It’s the margarita. Is that server ever coming back to take our order?”
“Oh. No.” Wendy gives a little laugh. “I sit in her section whenever I come here, and I never order anything but chips and drinks,” she tells me. “We can’t eat dinner and drink this many calories. Not if I’m going to get into my normal clothes when I get my body back.”
“Who cares if you do, Wendy?” I gesture to the bias-cut skirt and flowing blouse I chose this morning. “These clothes are nice, and you can breathe in them. And besides,” I say as I wave the server over, not just for some darn tacos on the double but also for another drink, “Davis likes these clothes.” My eyebrows arch high to the sky.
She sighs. “Davis is a good man,” she says.
“He is. And he would like you wearing anything. Or better still, wearing nothing.”
WENDY
The thought of Davis follows me home that night, haunts me as I politely tell Hugh I have a raging yeast infection and need space, get ready for bed in the closed bathroom, and then slip under the covers ten minutes later, after he is already fast asleep. I wish I could take time, while I am being Celeste, to talk to Hugh, to understand him better, but I am so afraid if I do, after all Celeste and I have shared these few days, I’ll learn that he’s not a unicorn, that a helpful partner isn’t too much to hope for. And if I start to think that, what hope is there left for my marriage?
I think back on Celeste’s words. Could she be right that despite what I promised Seth twelve years ago, when the yearning for a baby had become so strong and so blinding I would have given up a kidney in the negotiations, I deserve better now?
I’m not brave enough to ask. Not again. Asking could be the thing that finally kills our unspoken agreement that we will let each other be, and in exchange we will be able to hold on to what we have and maybe, someday, make it better. I am tough; I can do almost anything I set my mind to, but I don’t think I can survive upsetting that delicate balance.
It’s because I once tried that awful conversation years ago that Davis and I became friends. Seth was in a tenuous equilibrium with his art, where it earned almost exactly as much as it cost us, and my business was growing faster than I could keep up with it. And then I got pregnant with Linus. Neither Seth nor I had really discussed the terms of a second baby in the way we had with Bridget, but I seem to remember we were both there for it in the actual moment, no cajoling or promising necessary. Seth was besotted with Bridge; he was possessive of her when we went out as a family, loved her rough-and-tumble spirit, and let her into his studio from time to time to play with little whatnots he made expressly for her. Now on to baby number two, Seth responded in all the right ways. But his own joy was pretty muted by six months in, as it became clear that I was getting too tired to run the house and the childcare single-handedly. I was behind on laundry, behind on everything, and one Saturday I fell asleep while I was on the floor right in the middle of a game of pretend with Bridget. When I woke up, it was because she was screaming bloody murder. She had half eaten a Tootsie Roll while I was out cold, lost it in her frizzy baby curls, then gotten it hopelessly stuck in a wad of hair and gone to find Daddy to get it out. I ran toward them, screaming in a panic, and watched as Seth cut the disgusting wad of candy out of her hair with scissors while Bridget sobbed. The look he gave me was chilling. Not angry, not compassionate. Just annoyed. It was the look you’d give an employee who’d screwed up her job royally.
After that, things had their ups and downs until Linus was just about to start 4K, and the wheels came off. At the encouragement of my naive sister, I waited until Seth’d had a good day in the studio, poured him a glass of wine and myself a half glass, and nestled up to him on the couch. He told me he wanted to rent a new studio with an outdoor courtyard so he could add some smelting back into his process. He knew of just the place, an old factory turned makers’ space in the city, short walks from the art museum and three important galleries, so the schmoozing would be built right in. Thinking the cost of studio rent was a fair trade for getting a little help at home, I quickly said yes and then introduced my own ask.
“I’m having trouble keeping up with everything right now.” My mouth spilled over with reasons. “It’s the work,” I told him. “I never thought the company would grow so fast or be so popular. I don’t want to miss out on the career opportunities, but by the time I pick up Bridget from school and Linus from day care, get them home, feed them, bathe them, and get them tucked into bed, I can barely keep my own eyes open. If you could just take the lead with the kids on the weekends, my life could be a lot more doable.”
