Girl dinner, p.5
Girl Dinner, page 5
“Welcome, welcome,” said Professor Villanueva, and there was the dimple again. “You have thirty seconds to get your affairs in order and then, please, phones away. For the next fifty minutes, you have nothing to ponder except the meaning of existence and whether this is indeed oatmeal on my tie.”
There was a low rumble of obligatory laughter.
“Please,” said Professor Villanueva, with the bashfully sardonic motion of both hands. “Don’t encourage me.”
12:00. Nina hastily hit refresh on the window of her recruitment portal.
Congratulations! You are cordially invited back to—
“Time’s up,” said the professor, and possibly it was Nina’s full-bodied rush of relief, but when she locked eyes with him just then, she couldn’t remember ever having seen a more arresting shade of green. The sensation dropped hungrily into her vagina as Professor Villanueva leaned casually against the desk at the front of the auditorium, crossing his ankles right over left.
“Now, who can tell me,” he invited, “is there such a thing as free will?”
7
It was the following week, on a Monday, when Sloane got the email from a woman named Britt Landau.
I’m sure you have a lot going on—I certainly know what those early days back at work are like!—but Alex was adamant that you’d be the perfect fit for our girls—
Alex as in the woman Sloane had met last week. Alex, with whom Sloane had had a potentially ill-advised coffee, though she’d come out of it light as air, as if a burden had gently lifted.
“Do you hate me?” came from the doorframe of Sloane’s office, and Sloane looked up, slightly bug-eyed from the glasses she didn’t technically need at this distance. Still, her eyes had been hurting and she was on day two of a migraine, as she always seemed to be these days. Isla’s naps had been disrupted all weekend, maybe teething, maybe the cruel pain of abandonment, maybe the sightless eldritch terror that was a sleep regression, it didn’t matter the reason. The point was that Sloane was not, regardless of explanation, prepared.
“You can say it,” Alex added with a sigh, falling into the chair opposite Sloane’s desk. “I’m a monster. I’ve added yet another thing to your plate. I brought you a cappuccino with oat milk,” she added, almost in the same breath, setting it down beside Sloane’s ancient desktop. “It’s decaf, don’t worry.”
Sloane had told Alex last week during their coffee date that she was still breastfeeding, which meant her caffeine intake was still limited, as was her ability to take pills for her headaches, or for anything really. She knew her milk supply was dropping but Isla wouldn’t eat anything consistently enough for her to stop nursing completely, and anyway she loved it, sort of. There were definite moments when she loved it uncomplicatedly, the closeness and the hand-holding and the sweetness of time with nothing more pressing to do than nurture the baby she adored—but admittedly, the constancy of that love was fading; now it was pockmarked and brittle, the joy easily upended by the dread. The stronger Isla got, the less Sloane was able to keep her daughter from yanking her blouse open in public. She’d never thought twice about breastfeeding out in the open, but it took on a slightly more insidious, humiliating flavor when she couldn’t say no.
At the time Sloane confessed it, Alex had then relayed a story about breastfeeding her then-almost-two-year-old while standing upright in the DMV line. “Honestly, I still miss the cuddles,” Alex had said, and astoundingly, had not proceeded to add anything about when Sloane should stop, as all other adult humans seemed to do. “Seriously, people are bugging you about that? Dude, whatever,” Alex had said with a flick of her golden hair. “Who is anyone to judge you for what you do to get through the day? We’re all just trying our fucking best.”
The words melted again like butter through Sloane’s consciousness, drawing her gently back to the moment. To the version of Alex who stood now in her office unexpectedly, holding a coffee that Sloane hadn’t asked for—that she hadn’t needed to request.
“You think I should hate you?” Sloane echoed, reaching gratefully for the cup.
“Well, I assume you got the email from Britt. I was trying to beat her to it and ask you about it in person, but sometimes it’s easier to just let Britt do Britt.” Alex gave Sloane a wry smirk as if Sloane would know what that was like; she said it in the same tone with which she described the antics of her son, Theo, who was apparently some sort of jock prodigy, not that Alex (uncoordinated, more of an indoor cat, per Alex) knew what to make of that. “Anyway, look, it’d be a huge favor to me, and I really don’t think it would be much work for you.”
“You want me to be your sorority’s faculty advisor?” Sloane asked, a little confused. She’d been in a sorority, at her mother’s urging, a fact she’d thoughtlessly shared with Alex the previous week. Sloane’s faculty advisor had been an eighty-year-old woman named Nancy who was semi-retired. She’d only ever come to the faculty brunch they threw to celebrate the girls on honor roll, which was paid for by the parents’ club, so it was one of the few things Sloane participated in, again because her mother insisted.
Alex’s house, however, was nothing like Sloane’s had been. They’d walked by it on their way back from coffee, with Sloane pausing to take in the absurdity of The House’s elegance. She’d begun to capitalize it in her mind, probably due to the way Alex spoke about it. The House required a great deal of maintenance. Similarly, The Girls. As in, The Girls were all so promising, so full of life. “Honestly, I wish I’d been like that when I was their age,” Alex wistfully confessed. “I was more concerned with boys and parties. Plus I’m pretty sure we were all a little misogynistic then. I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but the subliminal messaging in TeenBop was ‘Hate yourself, girl!’ and I was nothing if not diligent about it.”
Something about Alex’s easy intimacy had spurred Sloane to say, “I think I was a pick-me girl.”
“Oh god, were you not like other girls?” Alex’s laughter then was contagious. Their coffee date stretched into ninety minutes before Alex had to run—she had only been on campus for a meeting she’d had with the administration that morning. She was actually a human rights lawyer who worked remotely for a firm in the city that Sloane had later googled. Alex had won a landmark case about a month before, one of several over the course of her career.
“Look,” Alex said then, leaning across Sloane’s desk with a slightly grim look on her face, “I know it sounds very rah-rah girlhood and all that, but we desperately need a new faculty advisor. Our last one got poached by Georgetown—that was inevitable, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how unreasonable the University can be—and we can’t operate without one, per campus rules. And I really think you’ll like everyone in the alumnae club—Britt included.” Alex gave Sloane a conspiratorial wink. “It’s just that she’s the head of a PR firm and has twins, so, you know, time is money.”
That was certainly true. With motherhood, the number one thing that had changed about Sloane’s life was the value of her time. If she wasn’t with Isla, then every minute had to have a purpose, because otherwise it was a minute that could have been spent with Isla but wasn’t. Everything in Sloane’s life had to be for sleep (so she wouldn’t die) or for work, or for Max, or for Isla. This was so clearly none of the above.
“I don’t know, Alex—I mean, I can appreciate that you’re in a bind, but I’m only an adjunct—”
“You’re still faculty! And I don’t see you going anywhere anytime soon—”
“And with the time commitment, and me getting less time at home as it is—”
“Bring Isla,” said Alex, without hesitation. “We’ve got a meeting this week to go over The Girls’ new member education programming and to review academic standards with The House after bid night.” Again, Sloane couldn’t help hearing the proper nouns: The Girls. The House. “You can meet the rest of the volunteers. We’re pretty much all working moms, so we get it—someone’s always got an eye on all the kids, there’s plenty of kid-friendly snacks. We do have the occasional boozy brunch, you know, for self-care,” said Alex with a teasing smile. “But you don’t have to commit to that. And they’re useful to know, I promise. The smartest women I’ve ever met in my life. And Britt gave me this lipstick,” Alex concluded with a playful shrug.
It was, Sloane admitted to herself reluctantly, the perfect red for Alex’s skin tone, and seemed to be successfully transfer-free, which her own lipstick was not. Isla looked like she’d been attacked that morning, and all because Sloane had kissed her cheek unthinkingly—thinking only that she, an elite member of the educated class, might look fractionally more capable or less dead with some lipstick on.
“You could use an extracurricular,” Max pointed out later, when Sloane brought it up as if it were a silly thing she wouldn’t possibly do—be faculty advisor for a sorority. Tonally, it was all very I mean, seriously, Max, who could possibly have the time and energy for that? “It might look good to the University for you to be more active outside of just lecturing. They’d have a more compelling reason to install you on a tenure track, if that’s still something you’re set on doing.”
Right, one of her frivolous expectations, job security and/or some vote of confidence in her proficiency at the thing she happened to know a lot about, not that she could get into that again. “But who knows how much time it’ll take, Max. And what am I supposed to do with Isla? I mean, Alex mentioned brunch, and maybe sometimes meetings in the evenings—”
“I’ll take Isla,” Max said breezily, as if it were no big deal, as if he took Isla all the time, as if he’d been clamoring for more time with Isla and his pleas had simply gone unheard. “You’re allowed to take some time for yourself, Sloane.”
“But it’s not for me, technically—”
“Sure it is. You need time to be around adults.”
“By that logic, so do you.” But Max played tennis at the University with a few of his department faculty twice a week after classes and did long bike rides with his recreational road cycling team at least three times a month. Sloane and Max went to dinner with Max’s friends on occasion, with Isla in tow, probably every few weeks. Both their social lives had definitely taken a hit since Isla’s birth, but Sloane’s was dead in the water in a way that Max’s was not. And on purpose! Sloane had always been more concerned about Max’s sanity than her own—her love for Isla was so consuming, so richly rewarding that Sloane never felt resentful of motherhood’s undeniable pitfalls, nor did she necessarily long for stimulation outside of oxytocin and the pot-roasting VidStars she scrolled while Isla slept. But it didn’t seem, from Sloane’s perspective, that fatherhood was quite the same. Max’s happiness was dependent on breaks from his child that Sloane had never personally felt she needed.
But the thought of brunch with Alex—with Alex’s friends, who also missed the smell of their babies’ farts and could tell Sloane what shape her jeans should be and whether her forehead necessitated bangs and how to successfully force-feed Isla iron so that, for once, Sloane could escape the inevitable, unbearable shaming by her pediatrician—that felt pleasurable in a way it never had before. It did not require Sloane to change shape or rearrange her priorities. She could be among others of her kind. She was a sociologist, for fuck’s sake, this shit mattered, and that she was having to explain that to herself right now (to herself!) was suddenly hysterically absurd.
“Well, I guess I could try one meeting,” Sloane said without waiting for Max to contribute, or maybe he already had and she hadn’t been listening. She knew she’d harbored some resentment toward him since parenthood had taken its toll on his fundamental sexiness—he was still hot, obviously, it was just nominally less arousing when he failed to accomplish certain tasks or suffered from the executive dysfunction he protested not to have—but Sloane, too, had degraded a bit from the attentive wife and perfect hostess she’d once been, the Good Mother in waiting that was the Good Wife. Her ability to multitask, to listen to him while arranging her face in a way that suggested interest, was not at its most exceptional.
“Exactly,” said Max, like any contemporary supportive spouse who did not conform to their mothers’ gender roles and who did not cheapen her sense of individuality and who was, all in all, a really wonderful father. Sloane entertained the thought of offering him a blow job. In previous iterations of themselves, she had been the more sexually demanding of the two, a dynamic that had seen oceanic shifts since Sloane’s sixth month of pregnancy. Other women got horny during the gestational period, but not Sloane. She got sciatica.
“What do you think about sex tonight?” Sloane suggested, in a tone not unlike the one an hour prior when she’d suggested pizza for dinner. (There was a 40 percent chance Isla would eat it and more importantly, it wasn’t spaghetti, and most importantly, it wasn’t spaghetti that Sloane had cooked.)
“Yes,” said Max instantly, leaping to his feet to kiss her sweetly behind the ear. “Please.”
“Assuming that Isla actually goes down and stays down.”
“Yes. Listen,” he said, turning over his shoulder to speak to Isla, who sat spreading sauce around in her high chair tray, “Daddy needs this. Go straight to bed, okay?”
“You know,” Sloane gently teased, “if you really wanted to be comfortably sure I didn’t get trapped in there with her, you could always be the one to put her down.”
Max laughed at her clever, clever joke. It was only for humor, after all. Everyone knew Max used those ninety minutes to decompress alone with Frankie the dog, that slut, the two of them catching up on the latest prestige drama that everyone but Sloane had already seen.
But in the end, Isla did fall asleep within a reasonable time frame, and Sloane texted Max to meet her in their bedroom, and they were both naked within seconds. She began with a charitable blow job and Max went down on her in a perfunctory way as Sloane closed her eyes and told herself to come as quickly as possible, because Max was adamant about prioritizing her pleasure, primarily in the sense that if he didn’t bring her to the throes of ecstasy he’d take it not as a personal failure from which to ambitiously learn, but a disappointing turn of events. She closed her eyes and tangled her fingers in his hair and enjoyed that her clitoris was more sensitive now, somehow, postpartum. She ran her hands over her husband’s shoulders and dug into her personal file of erotic fiction, unveiling the slightly shameful visual of her TA’s hands (his name was Arya, as she’d learned from his email address) and the imaginary sequence of being fucked on a nicer, cleaner version of her desk while the door remained flung open, risk of punishment be damned. She thought, absurdly, of Alex Carlisle’s red lipstick while Max curled his fingers around the quaking elevated peaks of Sloane’s thighs.
Of course, orgasm was ultimately an easy formula with an experienced partner of over five years. It didn’t matter what Sloane thought about. Fatefully speaking it was always inevitable that she was going to come.
8
The final day of fall recruitment reunited Nina and Dalil, the only two of their initial rush group who had been extended invitations by The House. It was a dream of a Sunday morning—dewy beams of sun fell in weightless tendrils across the scenic stretch of campus, cocooning the creature that was the University off-duty, hung- over and still abed. To Nina, clearer-eyed and more awake than it seemed she’d ever been before, it had all the ethereality of a wish. All the girls were dressed in white, and it felt like a baptism, or at least how Nina imagined a baptism would feel. There seemed to be both an agreement that this was silly—well, maybe not silly—possibly campy, which was like silly but with a sexier quirk of the lips—and also, in some way, profound.
On the final day, each of the potential new members was assigned a girl they’d spoken to before; someone who would conceivably vouch for them in the hours preceding bid night. It was a last shot, either to cement a bid or to lose, in effect, everything.
The girls processed from The House with their voices joined delicately in song, like living angels. Nina spotted two of the girls she’d spoken with, then three, then four. Each sister stepped forward to claim one of the potential new members. The girl Nina had laughed with the day before about an old sitcom stepped up—and chose Dalil. Nina held her breath, knowing someone was coming for her, but not knowing what it meant, or who it would be. She was one of ten girls left on the sidewalk, then one of seven, one of four … three … two …
She was last on the sidewalk when she thought she saw Fawn Carter take a step from the center of the house’s rose-lined path. Toward Nina? Her breath caught in her throat. Surely it wasn’t allowed. Could that mean—?
Dreamily, she watched it happen in her mind. Fawn’s lovely fingers; the gleam of a heady swallow along the notches of Fawn’s throat. Rays of sun crowned both their heads from on high, a benediction and a blessing. Birdsong and benevolence. No need to playact when the thing between them was love—when the end of the story was fate.
Motion blossomed, petals of The House unfurling in outward peals of heavenly reach. But of course it wasn’t Fawn progressing toward her from the roses. Be realistic!
The girl coming to collect her was Tessa. Reality coalesced again, and Nina exhaled sharply, relieved.
“I don’t get it,” Jas said later. “Why is it a good thing that it’s Tessa?”
“Because Tessa is friends with Fawn.” Nina didn’t want to have this discussion with Jas, who obviously didn’t care, but Simone was busy and Adelaide was still hoping Nina would choose her own house. Adelaide had, in fact, been the representative of her house to spend the morning with Nina. So, obviously there were worse things.
“But aren’t they all friends with each other? Isn’t that the point?”
Jas was being purposefully unhelpful. “They’re still human, Jas. Some are closer friends than others.”
