Free Everybody Has Everything by Katrina Onstad Page A

in the beginning, it intoxicated her to be with someone who handled everything, everyone. This was new to Ana, who had paid her mother’s bills at nine, worked after school at the doughnut shop at thirteen, wiping the drink fridge clean of broken juice bottle shards and bugs entombed in gelatinous substances.
    In the beginning, she wanted to curl up inside James’s certainty. She loved him, she loved him, and how he fell into bed next to her those late nights. His slick skin, sweat and beer. The lean muscle of his thigh flung open on the sheets. She pulled him closer in his paramedic shirt.
    From the window, Ana watched James outside in the yard. He stared up at the darkening sky, which was much too light for stars. But she took note of the fact that he looked anyway. He was hopeful. She felt something shift inside her, as if, to make room for all this love, she would have to rearrange her insides. James was gigantic that way. When she wanted him, she wanted all of him. When she didn’t, he felt murderous, unstoppable. A superhero gone mad on a busy downtown street. It had been a while, Ana realized, since she had experienced the scope of her love.
    Not wanting to linger on this absence, she turned to her vegetables. While James showered, Ana walked through the house, placing small glass pots of candles on the mantel, on ledges. She turned down the lights, put a single bloodred gerbera in a white vase in the center of the table. Her hand moved across the place mats and linen napkins. In the living room, as she half lowered the blinds, a man walked by, his hair softly blowing, his spine curved, hands in pockets. He looked up, and their eyes locked. Ana marveled that while he was a grown man, he was still far too young for her to romance, to have sex with, even to know. At thirty-nine, she was too old not just for boys but for full-fledged adults. A male temp at work had called her “ma’am” the other day.
    But Ana knew also how she looked through the window: “good for her age.” Attempting a moment of private flipness,she thought:
My body has not been ruined by childbirth
. She savored it, then abandoned the thought as too cruel.
    Ana turned her head to a flattering angle, but when she glanced sideways, the man had already walked on. All she could see was concrete and an old oak tree that threw moving shadows across the line of parked cars.
    The baby was in a blue-checked sling across Sarah’s body like something worn by a contestant in a beauty pageant.
    “Hands-free,” Sarah joked, waving her glass of wine. The baby nursed covertly. Only the extra crescent of Sarah’s pale chest peeking out of the sling confirmed to everyone in the room that there was a naked breast close by, and a mouth upon it. Each discomfort provoked by this was unique to its owner.
    It had grown late, but Ana did not want them to leave. These dinners, which Sarah and Marcus protested over in the beginning, had become regular Friday night gatherings, always at Ana and James’s house, with the excuse that they were all working together to break Sarah’s maternal isolation. Sarah complained about the “mommy circuit,” as she called it. She liked to mock the neighborhood mothers with their fear of strangling stroller straps and sudden infant death syndrome and uneducational toys. They bored her. She described a kind of narrowing that happens to women when they have children, a trivializing. Ana listened, rapt, to the traveler returned with her tales. She had a colleague, Elspeth, with secret children. She hid them away from the men in the firm, like Jews in attics. Occasionally she confided in Ana, usually when complaining about the nannies.
    But the mothers Sarah knew existed entirely in public. Theymet in the daylight in coffee shops and at baby yoga classes, speaking of nothing but their children. The mothers had left their jobs and were shrinking, hunkering down, backing into their stalls. At first, during these litanies, James cast