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The Time Before
Lola sat in a chair. There was nothing special about the chair, other than that it was yellow, metal and old. She stared and her mind raced, curious if she was older than the chair, or if the chair was, in fact, older than her. She wore white. A delicate ensemble: soft pants and a slim-fitting t-shirt.
“Hi, Lola,” Ian said, sitting across from her, emerging as if from a fog. He was handsome. Twenties. Kind, pale blue eyes.
“Hello baby,” she said, smiling. Her face was numb. Her entire body was numb. As though her movements and feelings were telegraphed from some deeper, darker place and her body was following impulses issued forth eons ago.
They were alone in the room. The walls were cream-colored. The bed was adorned with a green blanket, white pillow and yellow comforter. Colors that made Lola’s skin crawl.
“How are they treating you in here?” Ian asked, placing his hand on her knee.
“She’s out of it most of the time,” another voice said from behind Ian. The form took shape in the fog. Lola’s father, Moses. Tall, powerful-looking. He placed a hand on Ian’s shoulder. “She’ll be all right soon enough.”
“Where am I?” Lola asked, her voice airy, distant and not altogether her own.
“You’re at the Apple Valley Psychiatric Center. Do you remember why you’re here?” Moses asked, his voice low and measured.
Lola nodded absently. Memories of a needle piercing into her. Her body going numb. The humming sound of a tube being inserted into her.
Walking out of the building. A woman, robed in black, kneeling by the highway with a sign reading, “Is This A Choice or a Child?” with a blurry image of a shapeless form somewhat resembling a baby on a tray, covered in blood and viscous fluid. The image made Lola’s skin crawl. In her mind’s eye, she swore the fetus on the tray twitched.
“Visiting hours are just about over,” another voice said. Ian stood, leaned down and kissed Lola’s cheek. Lola could see an orderly over Ian’s shoulder, standing in the doorway.
“I love you, Lola.”
Darkness in the room. Moonlight beyond barred windows. A cold metal chair. A poorly decorated room. Images of a bloody glob of meat twitching on a silver tray beside surgical equipment.
Is this a choice or a child?
Syringes filled with liquid. Injections and struggling. The taste of copper in her mouth as s
he broke the flesh of a young, muscular orderly. Her hair becoming unkempt. The smell of her own skin and sweat. Shoes without laces. Nights without much sleep, shadows dancing on the walls as those same walls seemed to inch in slowly. The air in the room growing stale. More syringes. Less fighting. Giving up. A bed that felt more like a coffin. Darkness. Deep and lonely darkness.
If Lola could, she would scream.
Never enough time. Lola had been putting the finishing touches on a row of cupcakes. She moved swiftly, yet applied the buttercream carefully, twisting her wrists and swirling the buttery deliciousness liberally. Checking the clock, she knew her deliveries to the various restaurants around town would be late. She needed to prioritize delivering the assorted baked goods to her private party clients.
First was a one-year-old girl’s birthday, with each of Lola’s sweets tinted an unsurprising pink. Next was a pizza party at one of her and her husband Ian’s favorite date spots, La Trattoria. When they got there, Lola ducked almost on instinct as kids threw spaghetti, pizza and slices of Italian bread around the dining room. The restaurant was like navigating a minefield of marinara, meatballs and more.
Lola pitied the servers who would be tasked with cleaning the dining room after that nightmare. As she left the restaurant, she was worried that somehow marinara had found its way onto her vintage Velvet Underground t-shirt or the banana-yellow shorts she had on. Thankfully, she was spared. She checked her curls, just in case.
“You look perfect, babe,” Ian said, sneaking in a squeeze of her rear as she climbed into the car. He was all-smiles, and Lola rolled her eyes.
“You should’ve seen it in there,” Lola said. “It’s like the parents don’t give a shit, they just let their kids go nuts.”
The third stop was at a house in the Palisades section of Resting Hollow, where she and Ian could probably never afford to buy a home. She rolled up a long, tree-lined driveway and delivered four huge cardboard boxes of blue macarons. This job alone paid her nearly nine-hundred dollars.
She slipped into the driver’s seat. “You still good with those?”
Ian sat with a repurposed Amazon box filled with individually-wrapped snickerdoodles in his lap. Every part of him wanted to tear the bags open and devour them, but he knew that Lola would kill him, so he remained seated, smelling the heady blend of cinnamon and sugar wafting through Lola’s Honda SUV.
“The temptation is too much for me, darling,” he said with a sigh.
“Is it now?” She leaned over and kissed him. He took a hand off the box and slipped it on the back of her neck, squeezing lightly. “Easy, tiger.”
“Temptation averted, kid. You keep that sugar comin’ and we’ll be good,” he said.
“She gave me an extra couple hundred bucks,” Lola said, holding up the wad of cash.
“Fuck yeah, baby! Dinner on you tonight,” he shouted.
With one last stop remaining, Lola was happy the week was wrapping up. She had a n
ew batch of delights to make for a whole different group of kids the upcoming week, but for the rest of Saturday and at least part of Sunday, she’d be able to relax with Ian. Her lower back ached from hunching over the butcher block countertop or kitchen table, decorating cookies in elegant scrawl or painting smiling faces on various woodland critters.
She placed her hand on Ian’s knee while they drove out of the Palisades and into one of the older neighborhoods in town, with streets lined with large colonials. Most of the houses were from the 1800s, with others from the nineteen-twenties added as Resting Hollow grew and as smaller towns began to spring from the rise of urban sprawl.
As they pulled up in front of the house (marked with pink balloons tied to maroon ribbon), Ian laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“The Yorks are here,” he said, pointing to a minivan with a Lakeside School bumper sticker on the back.
“Josh and Khloe?” Lola’s mind turned to the last time she had seen Ian’s friend Josh and his wife Khloe. How their baby had seemed to scream endlessly the entire time she and Ian had visited. It was the last time they would ever visit, as Lola could still hear the child’s roar in the recesses of her mind.
“Yeah, whose house is this?”
“Girl who found me on Instagram, I don’t know her,” Lola said as she checked the box of snickerdoodles.
Ian nodded. “Can I carry the box in with you? I wanna bust his chops a little.”
She shrugged, “Whatever makes the baby happy.”
***
She’d seen some riotous children’s parties in her time as a baker, but this was as if a Chuck E. Cheese threw up in someone’s backyard. Various Disney Princesses paraded around, screaming a barely-intelligible version of some pop song. A face painter doodled a variety of animals on kids’ faces, some of them oddly threatening. A multitude of assorted inflatable structures beckoned screaming children into their dark, bouncy recesses.
Two eight-or-nine-year-olds stood in the corner, firing Nerf pellets at a toddler leaning against a white fence. The child cried as the hard sponge-y bullets bounced off his face.
A baby sat in a mud puddle, gripping handfuls of muck, grass and filth and rubbing it all over her face and once-immaculate dress.
Children sprinted everywhere. Some shoeless, all roaring with their mouths agape in fury.
“Whoa…” Ian muttered under his breath.
“Babe, is that…?” Lola began, gesturing to a group of folks seated at a patio table under an umbrella.
Lola recognized almost every parent in the yard, except the young, frazzled mother who was frantically collecting the box of cookies from Ian. She thanked Lola, and when her husband walked over, Ian shook his hand. A forgotten friend. All Ian knew was that this guy had met someone, had a kid, and stopped coming around. Mark? Ken? Lola couldn’t remember, it had been so long.
She looked around the backyard more and recognized nearly every face. Some were foggy, others were still plain as day.
“You want a beer, dude?” Mark or Ken asked Ian.
“Sure man,” Ian said, shrugging.
In the house, away from the mayhem outside, Ian stood with Josh, Mark (yes, it was Mark, Lola was right after all), and the other dads who had once spent their nights out, having fun, but now found themselves busy with parenthood.
Lola sipped a White Claw as the moms around her discussed a recent sale at Target or Buy Buy Baby or whatever.
These were our friends. People Lola had spent hours with, drinking, partying, dancing. Living life. Having those long, late-night conversations. The kinds of conversations that draw people together and forge inseparable bonds.
Some were Ian and Lola’s bridal party members. Lola watched as Ian’s eyes darted from guy to guy in the group. She could tell he was getting overwhelmed and only for an instant, his eyes seemed to flicker in the light. He shielded them first, then took the sunglasses out of his t-shirt collar and slipped them on.
Ian’s roommate from when Ian had first moved to Resting Hollow from Lakeside played corn hole in a corner of the yard with Lola’s best friend’s husband.
Ian spotted Josh, standing beside the frazzled mom’s husband. They could be clones of one another. The same kind of boating shoes. The same 2XL polo shirt. Different colors, sure, but they were a symbol of suburban conformity. Miller 64s rested in their hands, perspiring from the shift of warm spring air to air-conditioned house. There was a wave of heat that flushed into Ian’s cheeks, and he felt his body tremble slightly. Lola placed her hand on his elbow to steady him. “You okay?”
“Yeah, no. Just the heat I guess.” Ian walked across the party and started chatting with some of his old friends. None of them seemed particularly interested and Lola watched as Ian went quiet, nodding along to the other guys’ conversations.
Lola watched as Ian bobbed his head absently. He looked down at his Joy Division t-shirt. A simple black with the Unknown Pleasures album cover on it. He still dressed like he was in his teens or twenties. Lola looked him over, then looked at her own clothes, comparing her outfit to the flowy sundresses, insect-eye sunglasses and absurdly floppy hats t
hat seemed all the rage at the moment. She liked that she and Ian seemed drawn together by their mutual disdain and “too cool for school” attitude. So many couples seemed to be clones of one another, even looking alike and dressing alike. Lola stood out. Not only because she was the only woman of color in the backyard, but also because she didn’t dress like a Stepford Wife.
There was never a time where Lola wished she and Ian fit in. Until now. Surrounded by the people she had once loved and had once loved her back.
Lola was alone.
She watched as Ian slipped from the group of guys and started toward her. Her thirty-five-year-old man in black.
An older woman, someone Lola didn’t recognize, sauntered over, clearly drunk and holding an empty cupcake wrapper. She handed it to Lola. “Here you are, darling, trash is under the counter.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No mother, Lola isn’t staff,” the mom of the birthday girl said. “Sorry, when she’s had a few white wine coolies, she gets confused.”
Mark escorted the mother-in-law back outside.
“Can we go?” Ian asked, quietly.
Lola nodded.
***
“Is that what life is now? Getting excluded from shit because we don’t have crotch goblins?” Ian asked angrily, sipping his Singapore Sling. Ian didn’t curse much, thanks to the firm upbringing provided by his mother, but when he did, Lola knew he meant it.
“Relax, babe,” Lola said. When he got like this, she knew it was best to feed him cocktails and good food. She might even let him pick a movie to watch that night. “The job was last-minute so maybe the party itself was, too?”
He nearly choked on his cocktail. “Did you see the same backyard I did? All that nonsense? For a child? They had a face painter, Lola. A face painter.”
She stifled a giggle and sipped her margarita. Memories returned of the last time she had had a girl’s night with the moms in that yard. It seemed like ages ago, when in fact it had only been a few years. Even then, the moms had kept checking their phones, staring at gray-black images of their babies sleeping in their cribs. Lola had seen the children as shapeless and amorphous blobs in the dark and yet somehow their parents had been able to tell the difference.
“Kid, they were all there. Every single one of our friends that are local. All of them.”
“I know,” she said. She didn’t want to think about whether or not she and Ian had been slighted by their closest friends, but the question was unavoidable. Truthfully, she had always believed it would come sooner or later, especially if she and Ian never had a child. But with the day finally here, it still didn’t hurt any less.
The decline in text messages and phone calls was noticeable, but Lola could forgive that. People get busy, she repeated in her mind. But to see them all together. That wasn’t something she’d prepared herself for.
“I know I shouldn’t be this mad, Lola. I’m sorry, I’m not mad at you,” he said, downing his drink quickly. He looked around frantically for a server. “Who’s a guy gotta blow to get a DWI around here?”
She laughed. Ian always flew off the handle when he was upset. He’s gonna be pissed about this for a while.
“I’ll tell you this: we need new friends. We’ll just, like, put out an ad. There’s gotta be other child-free couples in Resting Hollow. We can check Reddit. Maybe there’s a Facebook group or something.”
“So, we’re just going to cultivate new friends from the Internet?”
“That’s correct.” Ian reached for his drink and, as if propelled on its own, the glass spilled, sending ice and garnish off the table onto the sidewalk. “Shit,” Ian said, scrambling to clean it up. Little accidents like this were common with Ian. Especially in the beginning. Lola liked that her smart, broody boy was really just an enormous klutz. Glasses breaking in his hand. Knocking things over. Watches that died on his wrist. Cell phone batteries that died after a few hours. Especially early on in their life together, Ian had been like a lightning rod of bad luck. Little accidents continued to happen, but now Lola noticed them less and less. My little doofus. She shook her head and smiled, watching Ian soak up the fallen cocktail.
The server came over
“Another Singapore Sling?”
“Yes. And a glass of champagne. Two glasses of champagne.”
“Sounds good,” the server said, starting off.
“Wait! Can I get a baked potato? You have that here?”
“I can check, sir.”
Ian waved his hands frantically, shouting, “Thank you, I’m sorry, thank you.”
Lola reached over and placed her hand on his knee. “Baby, relax.”
“You’re being remarkably chill about this, kid. We were just dissed. Like, outrageously dissed.”
She shrugged. “We still have each other, babe.”
He rolled his eyes and smirked. She did, too.
He said, “I didn’t like them anyway.”
“You don’t like anybody.”
He smiled and looked her in the eyes. She knew he was about to say something cheesy, and she waited for it, struggling to contain her smile.
“I like you, babydoll.”
There it is.
Ian sat on the porch, cigar in one hand, glass of wine in the other. He didn’t care about the potential headache he’d have the following morning; it was the cost of doing business. He was still angry about the party and absently checked his phone, imagining an apology from Josh or any of the other parents/friends he had seen in the yard earlier that day.
No texts came. There was an anger that had risen in his chest that he hadn’t felt since long before he met Lola. She’d never seen him explode. Not really. He’d gotten frustrated and annoyed but never to the levels he had in his youth. He remembered his childhood vaguely and swore that the house and world had seemed to tremble at his rage. Childish fantasy. As though he were some walking-talking force of destruction. A lifetime of reading comic books and watching horror movies. Ian laughed at the thought of his angry young self rampaging around his mother’s farmhouse on the outskirts of Kirkbride’s Bluff.
Lola came out of the house, bowling ball bag in hand. In it, she kept her weed bowls, and when she took one out that resembled a mushroom, Ian flashed her a peace sign and she laughed.
“I’m sorry I was such a brat earlier,” he said, taking a long drag off his cigar.
“It’s okay,” she said, kissing his cheek.
Deep down, he knew why they were excluded. It was obvious. When Ian was single, his guy friends would do “couples nights” with each other and exclude him from those, too. Why should it be any different now that they have a bunch of kids?
“We should just do it,” he said, shaking his head, staring down at the firepit he had built with his father-in-law last spring.
Lola finished taking a hit from the bong and looked at him. “Do what?”
“Have a kid.”
She laughed. “You’re drunk.”
He shook his head. He could feel tears beginning to form. “I know this sounds crazy, but like, we need our friends, right?”
She shrugged. “We have friends. So they all went to a birthday party without us, so what? Saves us fifty bucks for a piece of plastic the kid will forget about in four months.”
“This is gonna keep happening until we’re excluded completely. Maybe we already are. Excluded, I mean.”
“I don’t think so, babe, that’s just crazy,” Lola said, taking another hit. She wiped a tear from his face. “Aww, Ian.”
Shirley Manson sang on the record player. Ian shook his head, wiping the tears with his sleeve. “Maybe you’re right.”
Lola stared at him. “It’s a big decision, Ian. We can’t just want to have a kid because our friends are being dickheads, right? Do people do that?”
“I don’t know, people have babies for all kinds of dumb reasons. Ted and Margot had their second kid just because they wanted two. Literally, that’s the reason Ted gave me before their kid was born.”
“What’s their second kid’s name?”
Ian shrugged. “Who gives a shit?”
“Not nice,” she said. Lola re-packed the bong. “That can’t be the real reason, though. After last time, I worry about any reason, to be honest.”
“Last time, we weren’t ready. My point is: us having a kid to retain our friendships doesn’t seem as crazy to me as any other reason, you know?”
“I guess,” she said, taking another hit. “Like, are we supposed to just upturn everything and baby-proof the house? I mean, you have that cheesy Magnum P.I. mustache. I love it, but are you just supposed to shave it, shop at Old Navy like those other dads and complete your transition into a boring suburbanite? You hate wearing khakis.”
“I do, that’s very true,” he said, taking another puff from his stogie.
“Am I supposed to replace all our band and movie posters with ‘Live-Laugh-Love’ picture frames? Am I supposed to trade my vintage t-shirts for a C-section scar and stretchy pants with permanent spit-up stains on them?
Ian laughed. She was high. He could always tell based on the way she organized her thoughts, how erratic they became. How scattered. Her eyes never got the glassy sheen of a normal stoner’s, instead remaining their deep gold-flecked brown orbs surrounded by a sea of white. He kissed her deeply. “You’re the best.”
“Yeah I know,” she sa
id, taking another hit of the bong.
Ian and Lola sat on the couch, watching Jaws on a large projection screen in the basement. Onscreen, Alex Kintner was being devoured by the shark. The basement itself was also the garage and laundry room, and they loved how it afforded them extra storage and a place for their portable projector. Putting Ian’s old apartment couch down there and setting the place up for the occasional movie night made perfect sense. In the winter it could be chilly, but the rest of the year was perfectly fine.
“I love when Brody shoots that motherfucker,” Lola said. “I could make that shot.”
“Oh stop it,” Ian said. “Boat sinking? Perfectly leveled off?
You’re not a tough New York City cop.”
“Get stuffed, I totally could. I was a crack shot back in the day,” she said. “Dad used to take me shooting almost every weekend. Been a while, but that shit’s like riding a bike.”
He chuckled and kissed her cheek, returning his focus to the movie.
“We’d be cool parents, I think,” Lola said out of the blue. “I could definitely pass my sharpshooter skills on to a kiddo.”
Oh? Ian squeezed her thigh. “Most definitely. You’d be a killer mom. Definitely the hottest.”
She kissed his cheek. “What if we did it?”
Ian smiled. “It’s not like we don’t have the space. We have the guest room upstairs. No one visits anyway.”
“Your mom might—” Lola began, then caught herself. “You’re right.”
He stared into her eyes. “Do you really think we can do this?”
“We can. The real question is if we’re ready.”
Ian loved how honest Lola was. She kept him grounded. When he had been getting his master’s, there had been so many times he had wanted to bail out, but she had kept him steady. He loved her for it. He knew he needed her in his life forever.
“Do you think we’re ready?”
She shrugged. “I worry about what happened last time. I worry that somehow, I’m not able to. But then I think, ‘if not now, then when?’”
“Well, last time, we weren’t ready. Last time was an accident. Now, we’re ready. Possibly as ready as we’ve ever been,” Ian said, taking her hand. “I know my reaction today was ridiculous. You know how I get. I take things hard. But I just think that, if we want to get our friends back, and in some capacity reenter the world of socializing at the same time, while they all took years to child-rear—”
“Did you actually just use the term ‘child-rear’?”
He laughed. “I did. I'
’m rolling. If we wanted to squirt out a baby, then we’d have a support system around us. We’d be last to the party, sure, but hey, it’s always cool to be fashionably late.”
“Maybe. I dunno.”
He took her face in his hands. “If we’re ever going to do it, now is the time. We’re so far removed from what happened when we first got together. That’s not even another chapter, that’s like an entirely different book, you know?”
“You really think so? What if my body is fucked up from last time? You know the statistics with black women and babies, Ian,” she began. “I just… I don’t know, but like, deep down, I do know. I think this is our next great adventure.”
“Baby, whatever that adventure is, all I know is that I want to be by your side. If it’s too dangerous for you to have a baby, then we make a difficult decision again, right?”
“I guess. I don’t want my head all messed up like last time,” she said, softly. “It was so scary. Being in Apple Valley. Being in the hospital.”
They kissed.
“You’re the strongest woman I know. I think whatever is in the cards for us, you can handle it.”
Onscreen, a yellow inflatable raft ripped to shreds washed up on the beaches of Amity Island, blood mingling with the foamy water.
The conversation was replayed, night after night, week after week, and Ian warmed up to the idea of having a kid running around. He readied himself mentally for late nights and early mornings. He regularly woke up in the middle of the night anyway, for reasons unknown, so that was nothing particularly new.
Lola was warming up to it, too, and after a frank discussion about their finances, the two mapped out how their lives might actually be with the addition of a child.
One night over dinner, Ian sat, running through the spreadsheet he had put together of their finances. “It costs the average middle-class white family in America around three hundred thousand dollars to raise a child in this country. Can you imagine that?”
Lola didn’t seem to hear him; she was busy slipping a cake into the oven.
“That seems like so much money. That’s like… I don’t even know, babe.”
“Sweetie. You make a great living. I do okay with the baking. I’ve thought about it too, and yeah, it’s a lot. You think I haven’t read the stats on black women having babies a million times by now?”
Ian nodded. “That’s another thing, babe, I worry about you having the kid. I worry about what might happen if—”
“Sweetie,” she said, stepping closer and sitting in his lap. “I think we can honestly do this. It won’t be easy. But nothing worth doing ever is, right?”
“I just worry about the last time, like, I worry about how your body would react, knowing we didn’t go through with it the first time,” Ian said, softly. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I remember how it broke you.”
She nodded. “I know. We weren’t ready then. We are now. We’re both who we were meant to be. Hell, we had only been dating for a short time back then. I think anyone in our situation would’ve done the same.”
“You’re right. Like always,” he said, kissing her on the neck.
“If we’re going to do this, now is the time. Imagine how much fun it’ll be to have a little you or little me running around this place?”
He smiled. “A little you, preferably.”
“Is that right? So you’re a ‘daddy’s girl’ kinda guy? I feel you,” she said.
“Another you in this world would be a wonderful thing,” Ian said with a smile.
The next morning, Lola stopped her birth control.
Within a month, after multiple nights of frenzied, passionate sex, life began to gestate inside Lola.
