Significant Others by Zoë Eisenberg

Author:Zoë Eisenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2023-12-19T20:05:59+00:00

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In the morning we woke early and went across the street, a Saturday, the day still too young for tourists, just local families staking claim on the grass with plastic tables and canopied tents, their kids shrieking toward the break with bare feet. I’d never been much of a swimmer; I liked to wade in and stand. Usually Jess teased me about this, she could swim miles if she wanted, but that day she stood next to me in her navy one-piece, the sun buttering our shoulders as the water lapped around my belly like a large animal.

I’d been thinking about money. Or, more accurately, I’d been anxious about money, a dilation of the brief conversation I’d had with Quincy at the bar. I knew Jess planned to help, and Quincy had offered, but what did help mean—how much and how often? It wasn’t only money I worried about but my time, and the understanding it would soon be given one singular focus, and who would I become when I gave it all away like that? What would I do with myself? I told this to Jess, and she slapped at the water, sending disciplinary spray in my direction. “Something tells me you’re going to be pretty busy.”

“No, I know, but that’s what I mean.”

Jess had recently brought home a pamphlet about school districts and day cares, which was alarming. I hadn’t expected to have to think about those things before the baby arrived, but apparently there were interviews, wait lists, not only for the day cares, but the pediatricians. The number of things I didn’t know to think about only underscored the smallness of my own world, the meager tunnel I had created for myself, an earthworm burrowing to and from the gym and bar and home and back and nowhere else, oblivious to the expanse that existed outside the safety of my own sad little passage. I looked down at the bowling ball of my stomach protruding from my bikini bottom and thought how this was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me, and even though I was genuinely excited about it, it also made me sad, because it was such an ordinary phenomenon. An everyday miracle. Something that had been happening to billions of women for billions of years.

Jess must have sensed something shifting in my brain because she reached out and grabbed my wrist gently, swung our arms back and forth between us. “Don’t worry,” she said again. “We’ll figure it out.”

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