FICTION

Tribe

By Sara Levine     VOLUME 58 No. 1

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They had been on the sand with their daughter since seven, tunneling and castling, running ankle-deep in surf. But now the sun was high in the sky, baking their tired tingling skin, and farther down the beach, families gathered with fried chicken and radios. An oily voiced DJ threatened to play the best of the eighties all morning long. “Let’s get out while it’s good,” Max said.

It was Lake Michigan. Ellie was three years old and called it the ocean.

They picked their way along the water’s edge, Kay’s and Max’s bodies humped with bags, shovels, sand molds, sodden beach towels. Unencumbered, Ellie trotted between them, scampering and sniffing the beach like a little dog. This is the perfect day, Kay thought, though it had been only half a day. Ellie stopped to look at a half-buried stick, but Max kept walking. His long legs shot out like a scythe and mowed her down.

“Sorry, baby!” Max muttered, dropping keys and ice cream money into the water—a five-dollar bill and three crisp ones—and as the waves came up, the money bobbed, the keys sank, and the parents snatched at their possessions. Max stepped on his keys, Kay and Max bumped heads, Ellie sobbed, and it was just then that Jocelyn Andrews, whom Kay hadn’t seen in more than a year, called out from the top of the beach.

A familiar voice, but an unfamiliar body, bore down on them, its face swathed in large rectangular Italian-looking sunglasses.

The last time Kay had seen Jocelyn Andrews was a lunch downtown—near Jocelyn’s office. Ellie was four months old, and it had been so odd for Kay to be in public without her that she’d sat on the banquette feeling light and weirdly self-conscious, as if she’d just had a growth removed from her chin. The restaurant was too swank, too “downtown.” When a servile waiter came round with silver tongs and a bread basket, asking them to choose their roll, Kay had quipped, “I choose her role,” ogling Jocelyn’s wraparound silk dress, and immediately felt exposed, appalled really, as if she had revealed—to both Jocelyn and the waiter—that motherhood hadn’t caused bliss to seep from every pore. If only Kay could take things lightly, if only she could not care that she had pea stains on her blouse. But the strangest thing was that Jocelyn, after asking after “the baby,” had casually mentioned to Kay that she looked forward to being pregnant. She was forty-three. “So we’ll see,” she said airily. “I refuse to do IVF.”

Now she stood before Kay and Max, her big ripe belly pushing out between two slices of brown bikini. Jocelyn pregnant. Kay could barely mask her shock. She was due in November, and it was a boy.

Congratulations were made, and Ellie was introduced, almost like a sample ware.

“Adrian and I have narrowed it down to four names, so go on, give me your honest thoughts. The first one is Graham.”

But Ellie squirmed in Kay’s arms, impatient with dilatory grown-up talk. “Mama, I want to go.”

“Harper.”

“Now, Mama!”

“Taylor.”

“You said ice cream!”

“Reed.”

“They’re kind of similar really,” Max offered.

“Oh Max!” Jocelyn laughed, as if scolding a naughty boy. Kay ran the names together to see what stood out: Graham Andrews, Harper Andrews, Taylor Andrews, Reed Andrews. No, they were all terrible. Were they naming a newscaster? “Kay, you’re not saying anything.”

“Because I’m thinking,” Kay said, shifting Ellie on her hip.

Why should Jocelyn even care what she thought of their names? Why invite other people in? Kay dug her toes into the sand and felt an abrasive, complicated pity for Graham Harper Taylor Reed Andrews. For her wedding five years ago, Jocelyn had built a website. You could not only follow the registry progress and post tributes on the bulletin board, you could also view a PDF of Adrian’s hand-written proposal. If you clicked on the vacation scrapbook, photo after photo launched of the couple grinning, arm in arm, usually on a beach, Jocelyn clad in skimpy bathing suits. “What if Jocelyn’s ex sees this?” Kay had said anxiously. Max replied, “I imagine that was the idea.”

“Where’s Adrian?” Kay glanced up the beach.

“Sneaking coffee. Well, I like Graham because then we can call him Cracker! But Adrian’s trying to drum up votes for Reed.”

“Naming isn’t a game,” Kay said primly and immediately regretted her tone. Clearly everything was a game to Jocelyn. A project. That bantering tone, that almost sickening levity. It should have been a big deal, Jocelyn’s being pregnant well past forty, but she was taking it for granted, like everything else in her charmed life. “How are you feeling?” Kay asked.

“Fantastic. We just got back from the Dolomites. Hiking, swimming, I did everything. Even in the first trimester, no morning sickness I couldn’t just ignore.”

Jocelyn’s famous willpower—why did it make Kay recoil? When Kay had been pregnant, Jocelyn had firmly recommended she “get one of those Polish nannies; otherwise, you’ll never get to the gym.” Kay had shrugged off the comment, but now, as she hoisted Ellie farther up her hip and whispered to her daughter to wait, she saw, as if she were contemplating something more powerful and real than her own soft, disheveled, beach-blown body, Jocelyn’s muscled shoulders, well-farmed skin, coppery hair, highlighted and beautifully cut. Jocelyn would manage motherhood as she did everything else in her life. “I Time,” she used to say, when she explained her need to go to the gym, read a book, get a pedicure, or be apart from her husband, from whom she seemed to be apart most of the time anyway.

“And what have you been up to?” Jocelyn said.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Kay said. She had a horror of conversations where she had to account for herself. Even as a child, she’d frozen when asked to summarize a day at school. What had she been up to this year? She worked full-time, and Ellie was a toddler. That and a morning at the beach had obliterated the details.

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SARA LEVINE is the author of the forthcoming novel The Hitch (Roxane Gay Books) and the novel Treasure Island!!!, which LitHub named as one of “The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages” and horror writer Paul Tremblay nominated as one of “The 10 Best Books of the 21st Century” in the New York Times. She co-edited The Broadview Anthology of Short Fiction and wrote the afterword to the Signet Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.


VOLUME 58 No. 1