“Ava, don’t you get burned out?”
Ava considered a moment. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I weren’t doing this,” she said. “The one thing I’m proud of in life is I left that fucking bureaucracy and actually managed to help people.”
Milly looked down at her sandwich, stung by the words. She could feel tears welling, though she wanted to be more adult than that.
“Oh, honey,” Ava clucked. Milly wanted to feel her mother’s hand on her own, but Ava didn’t put it there. “You know what I mean. I meant in my career. Of course I’m proud of you.”
That couldn’t have felt more cursory, as far as Milly was concerned. Milly dropped her voice. “You know, I turned out okay, Ava. I hold my life together. I have a steady job. I have a good relationship.”
“I love Jared!” Ava interjected.
“I know you do,” Milly said. Ava certainly loved Jared. Partly, Milly knew, because Jared came from the kind of old-money German Jew family Ava had always wanted to be from. WASPy Jews, instead of Ava’s shtetl stock.
“And you know I’m proud of you,” Ava said. But, Milly thought, she sounded irritated at even having to say it aloud. Milly knew it was time to get off this subject — it would just take her down a wormhole of bad feelings.
“I’m proud of you, too,” she told Ava.
“That’s sweet,” Ava said.
They fell into several seconds of awkward silence. Milly thought about her own pills, the antidepressant she’d been taking. Wellbutrin. After several months, Jared had said to her, “Something’s wrong, Millipede, you have to face it. And going on a mild-to-moderate med for your mild-to-moderate depression—mild to moderate, like the doctor said — does not mean you’re going to go down the same road as your mother. But you can’t stop ignoring that you have depression. You feel it every day, and so do I.”
So Milly had gone on Wellbutrin. And — it had helped? She was fairly certain she felt somewhat less. . what? Sad? That sense that it would all never be quite right, that that shadow of dread would always be there, flickering, sometimes rising up forcefully and forcing her down into the bed, into a book for hours as though it were something she could physically crawl into and close around herself, or out of the stifling sadness of the apartment and into the East Village for those long, long walks, just trying to figure it out, to think her way out of that vapor-like sadness. And sometimes the tears that would come out of nowhere on those briskly paced walks, Milly not even really caring who saw her crying quietly.
She wanted so badly to tell her mother about it. But she wouldn’t let herself. It was just too awful, the implicit accusatory nature of it—Look what you’ve given to me! That she and her mother might share this awful monster, this mindbeast that plagued women and made them crazy, made them major hassles for the people in their lives — neurotic Jewish women! — was far more than Milly could deal with. So, as they sat there in awkward silence, Milly did what she’d learned to do her whole life: look outward to other people and what was plaguing them.
“So this cutie, Mateo,” she asked, “does he know about his mother?”
Ava’s own eyes lit up; she, too, was clearly relieved that they were moving on, talking about other people and their problems.
“I don’t think he really knows yet,” Ava said. “Ysabel had him for only about a year before she went into St. Vincent’s for the last time, when Mateo went to Ellen’s house. My God.” Ava sighed. “That she went through with that pregnancy and that he came out normal and alive. That’s a miracle.”
“Did she consider”—Milly paused a moment—“having an abortion?”
“She couldn’t,” Ava said — then, portentously, “Catholicism. Even though her family mostly cut her off when they found out she had AIDS and didn’t want to see her. She couldn’t bear asking them to raise him, so she asked me to sign papers to be his legal standby guardian until he found the right home.”
“Who was the dad?”
Ava laughed bitterly. “She didn’t know. She disappeared and went sexually cuckoo for a while. She was gussying herself up and going to clubs and not even telling guys she was positive. A few months after that, she got sick enough to qualify to come live in the house when a bed opened. And a few weeks after that, she finds out she’s pregnant. So that’s when we got her on AZT and — well, voilà,” Ava said, gesturing back in the direction of the group home and meaning Mateo. “That’s why the kid was born HIV-negative.”
“Mmm,” Milly said, still thinking about the little boy they’d just left behind with his crayons. “Why don’t you just adopt him? You have room.”
“Me?” Ava hooted. “With my schedule? Why don’t you?”
After lunch, Ava went back to the East Village and Milly got on the LIRR in Brooklyn and took the train out to Jared’s family’s house in Montauk. This was a yearly Labor Day — weekend ritual.
“Are you okay from your day with Ava?” Jared asked her, kissing her, when he picked her up at the train station. Jared looked handsome, she thought, with his fresh flush of tan. He’d come out here the previous day.
“It was fine,” Milly said. She didn’t want to bore Jared with a recitation of all the usual feelings she had after seeing her mother. “She took me to a foster home in Fort Greene. Oh my God, Jared!” She put a hand on his arm as he drove. “I wish you could see this little boy who was there, Mateo. He’s four and he’s such a talented drawer. He was drawing these really scary, mean-looking monsters, so I got down on the floor with him and drew him a friendly monster, and when I told him that, he just gave me this heartbreaking, deadpan look and said, ‘Monsters aren’t friendly.’”
Jared chuckled distractedly, negotiating a curve. “The kid’s right. Monsters aren’t friendly. They wouldn’t be monsters if they were, and we’re just doing kids a disservice telling them that there are friendly monsters, like the Cookie Monster.”
“That’s exactly what Ava told him! She was indignant that the nun who runs the house — who, by the way, is a total butch lesbian — that she wouldn’t let the kids watch TV, even Sesame Street.”
“Well, you know something?” Jared said, slightly cutting her off. “Monsters are monsters. AIDS and mental illness are AIDS and mental illness. They’re not cuddly.”
This took Milly aback. “Mental illness? What’s that supposed to mean?”
He glanced at her. Milly sensed he was dismayed by what he’d just said.
“I’m just saying,” he said, “any disease — AIDS, mental illness, cancer, Parkinson’s, Lyme like my sister has — we’re better off just calling them what they are and dealing with them and not putting a cuddly name on them.”
Milly was silent. She really didn’t know what to make of that. Instead, she wondered what Mateo was doing at that moment. Did he ever play with the other boys?
“Well, I have something to tell you,” she at last said to Jared. “Sister Ellen — that’s the butch nun who runs the boys’ home — she kind of strong-armed me into saying that you and I would come out weekend afternoons and make art with the boys.”
“Oh, she did?” Jared laughed. “To Brooklyn?”
“It’s not that far out in Brooklyn. Just the Q to Atlantic/Pacific.”
“We go to the studio on weekends and make our own art.”
“I only go Sundays anyway.”
Jared glanced at her sidelong but said no more.
Twenty minutes later, they were on the big porch overlooking the beach with Jared’s family, drinking rosé, while Jared’s dad put burgers on the grill for them. They put on sweatshirts and jeans for the annual beach bonfire with the same group of neighbors Jared had spent Labor Day with since he was eleven, then came back up to the house around midnight and had sex for the first time in two weeks in the twin bed Jared had spent childhood summers in. The room smelled and sounded like the ocean, and Milly was blessed to feel safe and protected in Jared’s honey-fur arms as he fell asleep and, moreover, to acknowledge she felt that way for once.