Collages by Joanna Neborsky

We’d been in Maine six months, but for the first three our kids had continued to Zoom with their Brooklyn school and then summer had come. And then it was the third week of September, and I was still trying to convince myself that one good thing about being in this place I’d never meant to be was that I might finally become someone other than I was. I’d put an alert on my phone two weeks before and signed on five minutes early to our kids’ new school’s PTA meeting. Sophie’s camera was off at first. I didn’t recognize her name until her face appeared, her background blurred.

More than twenty years before, Sophie had lived down the hall from me during our freshman year at NYU. We’d never been friends, but I’d spent so much time looking at her, bleary, walking to the bathroom; across the room at the few sticky-floored off-campus parties I attended and left early; or in the corner of the single classroom that we shared. “Sophie Frye,” she said, as the secretary of the PTA asked us all to introduce ourselves. My brain had a sort of jolt of recognition. Her face was her face, of course, but changed by time; it was further flattened by the Zoom.

I’d mostly referred to Sophie as Beautiful Partygoer, during those years at NYU. Our first month, she’d been chased down the street by a scout for Law & Order and had spent three weeks filming as an extra. It had somehow filtered to me through communal bathroom talk that Beautiful Partygoer was the name of the role they’d given her.

The Maine school, just south of Portland, had 250 kids. There were sixteen mothers and one father on the call. The three women who seemed most in charge talked about fundraisers and the now-canceled ice-cream social, planning pre-packaged snacks to drop off for the teachers during teacher appreciation week. COVID cases had risen again and the open house the week before had also been moved to Zoom.

“Lizzie!!!” Sophie messaged when I introduced myself. “OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE!!”

I tried, and then deleted, an all-caps response.

“Sophie!” I responded. “It’s been so long! How are you?!”

There was another woman on the call, Julie, also from New York. She raised her hand, first her actual hand, then her Zoom hand, and then she unmuted herself and emitted two short chirps until the president acknowledged her.

Julie and her husband, Justin, wanted to offer to buy an aquarium for the main entrance to the school. Their kids’ Manhattan private school had had an aquarium—“The shot of color first thing in the morning! The life!”—450 gallons, fish included. Julie suggested maybe different classes could take turns with upkeep each week or month.

I watched the principal, who was also present, bite down hard on her lower lip.

“Julie is making us both look bad,” Sophie wrote to me in a private message.

I laughed out loud, then realized I wasn’t muted, and everybody looked to where my square must have been on their screens. I saw the weird, distorted look of my face, half laughing, my face freezing then collapsing: I turned my camera off and put myself on mute.

“I wasn’t sure it was you at first,” said Sophie, when we met the next week for coffee after drop-off. She was the managing attorney for an immigration-law nonprofit. When I knew her in college, I’d pretended not to like her, but it still felt important, both then and now, that she like me. I had made no friends yet in this town but had decided maybe it was better this way. I liked my kids and husband. I walked the dog a lot and was listening to the audiobook of Middlemarch for the third time.

“It’s me,” I said, apologetic maybe. I held my hands up in the air and then felt dumb and put them down. We sat outside in linen pants and sandals, though it was almost October. I was still bracing myself for the arrival of Maine cold. Equally as bracing was this ominously unseasonable warmth.

“You look the same,” she said.

Sophie was still gorgeous, if a little fuller. I could tell by the way she pulled at her shirt before she sat down that she didn’t like being fuller, but I thought it made her even more beautiful than she’d been before. Youth was separate, less impressive—she’d had that gamine thing in college—but the weight she’d gained made her look more lustrous; it filled out her cheeks that might otherwise have looked wan.

I watched the way she held her coffee and tried not to notice whether the men who walked by stopped to watch her. In college, in downtown Manhattan, a place with no dearth of gorgeous women, men had often stopped to look at her when she’d walked past.

After that first coffee, Sophie got busy with work, then David went out of town for two weeks and I was consumed by kids and my new teaching job, standing at the grocery store with only half an hour until pickup, riffling through the hot plastic rotisserie-chicken bags, trying to find the one that looked least sad.

During the October PTA meeting we messaged back and forth and I kept my camera off and myself muted and David came out to ask what I was doing because I had laughed so hard I’d woken up our younger son.

Right before the treasurer asked if anyone had remembered to keep the minutes, Julie launched into a proposal. A small contingent of Afghan refugees had been moved into the Holiday Inn two blocks from the school and she wanted to pay for all their kids’ school lunches; the principal had to explain to her that school lunches were, as of this year, free for all the kids.

“Are you doing restaurants?” Sophie messaged.

I didn’t know if I was doing restaurants, because I had no friends in town.

“Outdoors?” I messaged Sophie. “Until it snows, I guess?”

It was another month before we actually got together. I kept wearing David’s clothes to pickup and then became convinced that none of the moms talked to me because I was so schlubby, but also Casaubon had just died, and I always had my AirPods in. Our younger son turned seven—I’d invited Sophie to the party, but her kids were older and had another, different birthday party. I realized, calling the pediatrician to make our new seven-year-old his checkup appointment, that this meant I also had to get my IUD replaced. One of the draws of my new job was that it was the first in my grown-up life to offer health insurance, and it felt thrilling, bougie and indulgent, to be able to call a doctor whenever I needed. The year that Jack turned five we’d not been insured, and I’d gone to a Planned Parenthood in Brooklyn. I hadn’t been to a doctor since he was born. I shook the whole time, crying, half because I was afraid she’d tell me I had cancer and was dying and half because I worried the removal and the re-insertion would cost too much.

The kind PA who saw me that day had told me I didn’t need to get the thing replaced until seven years after it was put in. “It’s FDA bullshit,” she said, speaking very softly, her face close to mine.

“Five minutes in and out,” the Maine OB nurse said when she saw I was shaking. Her name was Taylor. She looked only a few years older than my children, straight, dark hair and lots of makeup. She talked to me softly, confidently, leaning forward as she did. She pressed the tips of her fingers together in front of her face, hands held horizontal, then folded the backs of her hands flat together to show how easy it would be, how the IUD would “fold right up.”

The OB came in and put the speculum in and reached up into me to pull the IUD out. The OB pulled and pulled and her face started to look strange and then worried. “It has little wings,” she told me, also watching me shake, having been warned, it seemed, by Taylor. “I just grab the bottom, the wings fold down, it slips right out.” She did the same thing with her hands that Taylor had. She pulled three more times. I could see her face begin to harden. Taylor stood very quiet next to me and my uterus contracted, a tight pinch and then a short stretch of cramping and I dug my fingers under the thin strip of paper into the linoleum of the chair.

“It’s not coming,” said the OB.

“I noticed that,” I said.

“We might—” she said. “Wait here a minute.”

My legs and feet were still spread by the stirrups, the cold metal of the speculum still in. She got the ultrasound machine, unscrewed and removed the speculum, the cold familiar metal slip of it. She got out the gel and wand and it was all the same as it had been when I was pregnant, her looking around with that long white stick inside me, me able to see only a mess of blacks and grays and whites up on the screen. “There it is,” she said, looking over at the muddle. “It’s embedded in your uterus.

“We’ll need to get a camera up there to get it out,” she said, the white wand still inside me. She walked me through my options: either the OR, or the procedure room in her office. “I can numb your cervix here,” she said, “but I can’t knock you out.”

“I don’t want to be knocked out. I like to know,” I said, feigning toughness. “I have a pretty high pain tolerance.”

Sophie and I had talked about this briefly. I’d had both boys naturally, within two years of each other. Her girls were three years apart.

She had said, deadpan: “I miss my epidural almost every day.”

The OB had no availability for the next three weeks, and she said I couldn’t rely on the IUD for pregnancy prevention. “You might bleed and cramp a little,” she said, “off and on.”

“For three weeks,” said David, obviously annoyed. I didn’t press on whether he was pissed about the fact that he would have to pull out in his forties or that I would be bleeding off and on and in near-constant low-level pain for the next few weeks.

That night, Jack kept coming out of his and his brother’s room saying that he couldn’t fall asleep and needed me to help him.

“You just close your eyes,” I said.

“I can’t,” he said.

David was asleep already. I was reading, cramping. “There’s nothing I can do to help,” I said.

“Can you come lie with me?”

This was his new Maine thing. He would come out long after they’d brushed their teeth and I’d read to them and his brother had fallen asleep. Jack would stand and stare at me.

“I can’t sleep,” he’d say.

“Just close your eyes,” I’d say, though I was also on the couch, reading or watching TV on my computer, because I had to trick myself to sleep.

“They just open up again,” he said.

I’d been having this recurring thought, every night when I lay in bed with him, that one night his brother’s top bunk would fall on top of him, and I would try to gauge how quickly he might be able to roll away were this to happen, considered setting up the beanbags next to his bed more methodically, going into their room in the middle of the night and carrying him into bed with us.

“You’re sure it’s solid?” I would say as calmly as I could to David, who had put the beds together. Each time we’d moved he’d taken them apart and put them back together, and each night, as I put the boys to bed, I stared at the seams where the wood met, touched the slats that held Henry’s mattress above Jack’s, and tried to force myself not to imagine the crush of bone and soft internal organs as his brother’s mattress and all that wood came down onto him.

“I think I have to go to New York,” I said to David the next week. I thought maybe, vaguely, it was the hormones. Though the IUD had been stuck like that for the past seven years, I suddenly felt its presence constantly. The cramping had continued, as had the bleeding, and Sophie, my only real local prospect for friendship, had been subsumed by work, and I was crying spontaneously at different points throughout the day.

“For work?” said David, about this trip that I’d proposed out of nowhere.

I thought of lying, emailing a random editor and setting up a coffee meeting that I’d then pretend might turn into work, but I did not. “For mental health,” I said.

There was art to see, and a friend of mine had had a baby during the pandemic whom I hadn’t held yet. My friend’s husband worked in tech, and he’d just sold a bunch of stock and they now owned a whole house with an empty basement apartment where they’d said that I could stay.

I said, “Just four days.”

I got a seventy-nine-dollar bus ticket that left early in the morning.

The first two days were perfect. I saw art, held my friend’s baby. I walked for hours around the city, because I didn’t have to get up the next morning to make breakfast or pack lunches or make sure the boys had their folders and their extra masks and water bottles, snacks in their separate pockets so they wouldn’t accidentally eat them during lunch. My last full day I tried to FaceTime the kids six times, but I kept getting texts saying they were playing, Dad was cooking, they were at Henry’s soccer game. It rained and all the coffee shops were too crowded and the bathrooms I used to sneak into in Manhattan were all locked or now only for employees. I got soaked and bought three six-dollar coffees and a seven-dollar umbrella that broke on my way to the subway and I almost wet my pants letting myself into my friends’ basement, throwing my bag down, my hands frozen and my phone almost falling out of my pocket while I peed.

Another friend invited me to outdoor drinks with a friend of hers whom I knew vaguely. I’d seen her at birthday parties, a few playdates, over the years. I felt too tired but also didn’t know when I’d next be back in New York, so I said yes and ate the half jar of Jif I found in the basement cabinet because the idea of spending money again on another meal made me feel insane.

My friend’s friend was tall and striking, not beautiful, but so specific-looking: a big, long nose; large eyes; thick, long black hair. Her kids were younger, went to one of the hippie private schools deeper in Brooklyn that made all the parents sign up for volunteer shifts shelving books and cleaning classrooms, as if to somehow absolve them of the guilt of their school’s privateness. She wore oddly shaped, loose-fitting clothes that looked inexplicably expensive, though whenever I’d complimented a thing she’d worn, she’d always claimed she “thrifted it somewhere.” Her husband’s family had a country house upstate that, I knew from Instagram, was where they’d spent most of their pandemic. “They got a really awful case of COVID,” my friend told me before she got there. “The whole family. She was hospitalized for two weeks.” We started to talk about it and then my friend’s friend said she didn’t want to talk about it and set her drink down so hard that it sloshed in the glass and I sat back farther in my chair.

“Our kids are fucked,” my friend’s friend said. “Just face it. All of us. Dan and I have been talking about going off the grid somewhere up by you, northwest of Portland, build something sustainable and solid where we can hunker down.”

The night was perfect, still unseasonably warm, but we all wore jackets and all the outside tables had groups of two to five sitting at them, leaning close to one another, laughing, talking, the lights from the street, the passing cars. I hated living in Maine, I’d thought, each day walking around the city. I’d only ever felt good or safe or alive in New York. As this woman spoke, I wanted to crawl across the table to her, knock the drinks and the shared plate of french fries over, climb on top of her and pull her hair like Jack pulled Henry’s hair when he was angry, until she promised she would take it back.

“I don’t . . . ” I started. “If this year has taught us anything, I think we just don’t know,” I said.

“We know it’s going to be more and more chaos,” she said. “It’s not like our kids will go to fucking college. It’s not like there will be any type of safety, any type of continuity to the lives they live.”

The next morning was my last one in New York, and I went running in the park just like I’d gone running almost every morning all the years that we’d lived in Brooklyn. The night before, walking home, I’d had the sensation again of the bed falling on Jack. I’d called David when I got back to the apartment, but he hadn’t answered. At 2 am, I’d texted, “Can you just send me a picture of the boys when they wake up?”

“Watch out,” I heard, entering the park that morning, sludgy and hungover. And then tires screeched, and then a force so hard and fast, thin rubber into my ass, up the small of my back, and then briefly flying, the hard shock of asphalt on my hands and knees and elbows, the way the pain felt sure and solid, coursing slowly up my back and shoulders, not unlike relief.

“What the fuck?” said the cyclist whose bike had run into me at full speed. He wore purple Lycra.

“Of course,” my friends said later. “Lycra! Fucking bikers.”

“But it was my fault,” I would repeat each time.

It was.

He wasn’t hurt at all.

“Fuck,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I stood up, shaky, not sure what hurt and what didn’t, what was and wasn’t bleeding. I was standing. My phone wasn’t damaged. My friend’s basement keys had dug into the palm of my hand, and it bled. My back and neck felt rattled, stiff and maybe misaligned or something. Both my elbows had been scraped and bled.

“It was my fault,” I said again. “I’m sorry.”

The guy looked confused, I thought, that I wasn’t angry. I watched as he became less angry. “Are you okay?” he said. “Your elbows?” I nodded, looking again at their bleeding, more bikes speeding around us. Runners ran by, stared.

“I’m fine,” I said.

He looked at me, examined his bike.

“I’m so sorry again,” I said.

I walked across the park. My body clenched in unexpected places. My elbows bled, sore and stinging. My friend looked shocked as I limped into her apartment instead of down into the basement. She walked past her sobbing two-year-old, new baby on her hip, and touched my bloodied skin.

“Fucking bikers,” said her husband, from in front of his computer.

“It was my fault,” I said, but quiet enough that only my friend heard me. She found an empty Tums canister and poured whiskey in it, sipped from the bottle quickly. “For the bus,” she said.

I’d almost forgotten about the IUD except for the sporadic cramping. I had phantom pains all over. Was it my back, my neck, my brain? Sophie called that week and asked to get a drink, as her work schedule had finally lightened, and I almost said I couldn’t make it. It seemed so like her, so like my idea of her, that she could finally fit me in.

“Before the holiday bullshit takes over,” she said. It was almost Thanksgiving.

“Go,” said David. “You said you liked her.”

“I do,” I said, thinking of the Sophie that I’d known in college and whom I’d hated for no other reason, really, than how beautiful she was.

A few weeks after we had met again, David made me find a picture of her online. “That’s her?!” he said, incredulous. I looked at him hard to try to figure out what he was asking, what he was thinking. It wasn’t a great picture. “She’s not . . . ” he started. I could see him trying to figure out what to say and wondered about all the things he wasn’t saying. He shook his head and kissed me on the mouth instead.

We met outside, close to the water. It was finally colder: we wore coats and I wore a knit hat and drank whiskey. I told her about my trip to New York, but not about the bike. She told me about work, her husband getting annoyed about how busy she’d been, her daughter being courted by and then falling out with a group of sixth-grade girls.

“I’m terrified of what comes next,” she said. “Female adolescence is no fucking joke.”

“My IUD is stuck,” I said out of nowhere a couple of minutes later. We’d been talking about her daughter, hormones.

“What do you mean stuck?” she said.

“They misinserted it,” I said.

She made a face and waited for me.

“It’s embedded in my uterus,” I said. I thought of a bodega umbrella, cheap and black and broken, stuck inside me.

“Jesus,” she said, signaling the waiter for another round for both of us.

“It’s called a hysteroscopy,” I said.

“One of those little cameras,” she said. Her second pregnancy had involved endless complications and her daughter had been born ten weeks premature.

“The uterus heals itself, the OB said.”

“I could drive you,” said Sophie.

“She said I should be fine to drive.”

“Oh, let me drive you,” Sophie said. “If I have to work from home another day, I might murder someone. I’d be so grateful for an excuse to put on pants.”

David had said he had to work and I had been annoyed but also told him the OB had said I should be okay so long as I could wait a while after.

“You’re so tough,” he said. With Jack I had walked home from the hospital twenty-four hours after labor; and both David and his mother loved to tell this story. My previous labor had been long and painful, scary, and the second had felt so easy by comparison. Of course, after that walk and a gaggle of friends packed into our apartment, me nursing on the couch and David finding serving platters for all the food that everyone had brought us, toddler Henry sipping from someone’s wine and then spitting it at her and saying that her juice was bad—after all that, I had spent two days on the couch mostly only nursing and feeling like death.

“What if I promise to work the whole time I’m waiting,” said Sophie. “You can even drive us back home. Let’s say I need the change of scenery.”

“I’ll buy both of us lattes after,” I said.

“A date!”

My back still hurt from the bike, but I’d started running again. My elbows were mostly healed, though Jack still asked to look at them sometimes when I lay with him in bed. David kept forgetting about my appointment and I had to remind him again that morning that he had to do pickup as I packed the lunches.

“You have a Zoom?” he said.

“My IUD,” I said.

We’d had sex only twice in the three weeks since the failed removal. Both times he’d come on my stomach and then looked embarrassed even though we’d been together sixteen years.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said each time, and I’d laughed at him.

Sophie drove an electric car that was silent. She wore a flannel button-down and Bean Boots, fitted jeans and a wool cap.

“Thanks again for doing this,” I said.

“I even got to skip drop-off,” she said.

Sophie and I had a class together junior year, but it was a large one. We were in the same recitation section. I saw her float past sometimes; Beautiful Partygoer, I’d think, and I’d redden, look down at my oversize sweatshirt, my dirty jeans, feel my face get hot. The last time I saw her, it was late and I was blocks from campus. I did this often, walking around after spending almost the whole day in bed. I had largely stopped attending classes. I was maybe going to get kicked out.

That night Sophie looked annoyed and angry. She was lit up by the streetlights, her makeup smudged. “You okay?” I said. She didn’t tell me what had happened. I remember thinking, even as—probably because—she looked so angry, how much power she must have. Thinking I wouldn’t feel how I always felt then if I only looked like that.

“Sophie,” I said.

“Lizzie,” she said.

No one calls me that, I thought.

We walked all night, but we didn’t talk about how smudged she was. I wanted, I think, for something awful to have happened. I wanted her to sob, confess some violent interaction. I thought maybe if that happened, she’d have no choice but to be my friend.

We talked a long time about nothing, sat on a bench on the East River. We’d both had shitty, fucked-up childhoods, but no worse really than most everyone I talked to then. We both had one very good and very complicated friend who lived in another state and whom we missed. None of it is worth recounting. I knew we probably wouldn’t ever talk again.

Eventually she told me that she’d given our TA a blow job after class. She said she hadn’t wanted to, but he kept asking. She twisted her face so that it looked like she was choking. She said she didn’t want to because she hated blow jobs but she’d thought maybe because he was older he’d be able to reciprocate but he did not. She made a joke about the years of study it might take to locate the clitoris. She slipped her dirty feet out of her shoes and turned toward me with her smudgy eyes, which I couldn’t quite look at.

A week later, I was in the computer lab close to the sophomore dorm where we all went to do our homework. It was 1999: most kids had computers, but not the way kids have computers now. There was a lounge where people got coffee and hung out, where the internet was more reliable. Someone said Sophie’s name in some context I don’t remember. The tone felt like admiration.

“You know she gave her Liberalism and Its Philosophical Critics TA a blow job,” I said.

Another girl turned toward me, looked me up and down in the way twenty-year-old girls look one another up and down. I was wearing the same jeans and sweatshirt that I wore almost every day in college.

“Who,” she said.

“Don,” I said, “the TA in a class we have. She sucked him off.”

The night that Sophie and I walked around, she’d used that phrase and I’d said it out loud to myself back in my dorm room.

“How would you know?” one of the guys said.

I felt hot, started sweating, shrugged, and left.

I didn’t leave my dorm for another three weeks, but I felt less small that day. It felt like power, saying what I said.

That day at the OB, I walked into the waiting room and said, “All set!”

We walked in silence to her silent car, and she looked twice more at me, and I smiled and she smiled back. I’d thrown up three times after the procedure, dry-heaved a few more times after that.

It had taken longer than the OB had thought it would and when it was over she let me stay a long time in the procedure room by myself.

“Do you want me to put in the other one or do you want to come back?” she said.

I didn’t want, maybe ever, to go back there, so I waited half an hour until my body had stopped shaking, until the convulsions in my uterus, the waves of pain, had slowed.

Taylor brought me pretzels and a juice box and I said, “Let’s just get this over with.”

“It’s much more stuck than I thought,” the OB had said as she pulled and pulled with the camera also up inside me and Taylor worked so hard to stay still beside me, and I went to a place in my brain I am so good at going, where my body stays tense but the pain starts to feel, if not pleasing, then at least familiar and affirming, somehow right.

A few months later, David and I were talking. I think it was around my birthday. I always get sort of monstrously depressed around my birthday. The kids had gone to bed and we were up late reading, listening to music. I was in the one chair that David didn’t mind ruining, so I could let the dog sit in my lap. It had started snowing. It felt like goodness, I guess, which is an absurd idea, sitting inside in the warmth like that. I had said something about this, trying to explain it, or maybe I was crying and I felt I needed to explain it, seeing as the night was nice and I didn’t want David to worry, seeing as sometimes he gets exasperated when I cry like that. He looked at me, though, in the way he sometimes looks at me, which I’ve always thought of as his trying, his grasping, even as I know—and it’s one of the reasons that I love him—he won’t ever know what’s happening inside my brain, inside my body, on nights like that.

I let the dog fall off my lap and I walked toward him. Jack was sleeping better by then. I straddled David and I kissed him and then I pulled his pants down and we fucked. Whatever it was to walk around with what he had inside him, I wanted to pretend that somehow, another century from now, another million nights like this, a little bit of it might stick.

On the drive home, Sophie made a joke, and I thought again of telling her how bad it had been, more painful than either of my labors is what I thought of saying, in part because I thought it might tee her up for another epidural joke and I would laugh again. At one point, Taylor had whispered to me, “It’s never taken her this long, that thing is so stuck,” and I had choked out a sort of laugh. “You’re so tough,” she whispered to me as the OB asked if I needed a break and I said just please get it, and she yanked and yanked and my uterus contracted and more blood came out. They took a bucket of it out of the room after the procedure. Taylor didn’t look at me as she collected all the metal tools. They clanked as she pulled the sopping pads from underneath my ass.

I thought of telling Sophie about all of it as we kept driving. I liked her so much. But I didn’t want to watch her face change—it had always seemed so perfect to me—as I talked.