If Mimosa had been alone, truly alone, as she had so often been as of five weeks ago, she would have turned on the radio. But now the hush enveloped the car as Mimosa pulled up to a stop sign.
There were four cars at the four-way stop, three in addition to Mimosa’s.
First the car to Mimosa’s left passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Next the car to Mimosa’s right passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Then the car across from Mimosa passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Now it was Mimosa’s turn. She was horrified, paralyzed.
Yet it was her turn, and so she drove.
* * *
Early evening, and Sam was driving. A deep blue summer night, birdsong paired with silence. Stopped at a red light, they watched a woman push a stroller across the gleaming crosswalk.
“This town,” Mimosa said bitterly as the light turned green.
“What?” Sam said.
There was a row of dark trees, the kind of trees that ought to be Christmas trees. They looked strange here, in the heart of the summer, standing upright against the heat.
“Filled with doppelgängers of me,” Mimosa said. As she said it, she could see them — furrowing their brows the same way over the list of ingredients on a jar of tomato sauce, struggling the same way to wipe the shit out of the rolls of fat on their babies’ thighs.
Sam gave half a laugh. Mimosa glanced back to check on The Queen. The backseat was dim, but she sensed that the baby was awake.
“Yeah,” Sam said in that flat way of his. “That’s why I love you. ’Cause you’re just like everyone else.”
She craned her neck further, caught a glimpse of her accomplice’s dark alert eye.
Mimosa had been very organized, before all this. She’d had plans to start a small business. Somewhere on her computer there were spreadsheets.
“Just because they, what, have the same stroller we have?” Sam said as he pulled into their driveway.
He got out and opened the door to the backseat and unlatched The Queen. The Queen spat up on him, just as so many babies all over town were spitting up on their fathers.
* * *
It was eerie, more than eerie, it was nauseating, to see them standing at the gas station, their hair wilting in the heat just like hers, their bodies at the same stage of post-birth flab.
* * *
There was a doppelgänger in the produce section. Perched in the woman’s shopping cart, a sleeping infant in a handy detachable car seat identical to the handy detachable car seat of The Queen. Mimosa hid behind the bananas and watched. The woman held a real lemon in one hand and a lemon-shaped container of lemon juice in the other. She dropped the lemon into her cart, put the container back on the shelf, and began to walk away. Then she turned around to swap the lemon for the container. Then, she changed her mind again, put the container on the shelf once more, and returned the lemon to her cart.
Mimosa recognized the indecision born of exhaustion, that familiar fuzziness. This sizzle of recognition propelled her toward the woman.
“I did that just last week,” Mimosa found herself saying.
The doppelgänger, now studying the nutrition information on the container of lemon juice, didn’t react. Boldly, Mimosa raised her voice a second time.
“I have a hard time choosing between them,” she said. Her voice seemed an intrusion in the cool, tranquil supermarket.
The doppelgänger turned to her with a radiant smile, and Mimosa reacted with a radiant smile of her own.
“I know!” the doppelgänger said, as though they were in the middle of a conversation. “It’s like, convenience versus authenticity. I can’t believe that squeezing a lemon sounds like too much of a hassle, but that’s just where I am in my life right now, you know?”
So much did Mimosa know that she had to blink back a pair of tears.
“How old?” the doppelgänger asked, turning her smile on The Queen.
“Six weeks,” Mimosa said.
“Mine too!” the doppelgänger exclaimed. “Well, six and a half. Just started smiling for non-gas reasons last week. Look, you’ve got to join my moms’ group for babies born in June.”
“Oh,” Mimosa said, revolted and fascinated.
“Mary Rogers,” the doppelgänger said, sticking out her hand.
“Mimosa Smith,” Mimosa said.
“Mimosa!” Mary Rogers said. “That’s quite a name.”
“My mom’s favorite drink,” Mimosa explained, as usual. Mary Rogers didn’t yet know that, aside from her name, Mimosa was just like any other plain Jane.
* * *
It was there, damp with sweat, in the pocket of her sundress. She reached down and squeezed it during dinner. She’d made pasta and now she didn’t know why she’d made something that required water to boil. The night was already devastatingly hot.
“Want me to hold her?” Sam said across the small breakfast table. They had a dining room with a dining table, but they had yet to use it. Mimosa held The Queen with one arm and with the opposite hand clenched the piece of paper torn magnanimously from Mary Rogers’s shopping list. On one side, Mary Rogers had scrawled the name of the café where the moms’ group was meeting this week; on the other side, brown rice, prune juice, paper towels, oli-. It felt so intimate to have this scrap from another woman’s list, her items jotted just as messily as Mimosa’s always were.
Mimosa insisted on holding The Queen, even though the baby’s warmth was increasing her own temperature by a degree or two.
“You need to eat your food,” Sam said.
The Queen is my food.
“It was stupid to make pasta in this heat,” she said.
Sam shrugged, pressed a forkful into his mouth. She could tell he agreed.
“Let me take the baby,” Sam said, “so you can eat.”
She pitied him, and willed herself to pass the baby. The Queen kept it together for twenty seconds before starting to shriek. He stood up, bounced her, didn’t do it quite right. Mimosa refrained from critiquing his technique. They couldn’t be put into words, anyhow, The Queen’s particular needs. After a few minutes he was forced to return the baby to her mother. The Queen quieted instantly, offensively. Sam carried the plates to the sink and put them down hard.
* * *
The women threatened to overwhelm the café, these women with their strollers and sandals and sundresses, staked out at two large tables and encroaching upon a third. Mimosa struggled through the doorway with her stroller. She was stuck halfway in, halfway out, when it occurred to her that she could still escape. It could still be just her and The Queen, alone together.
“Hi! Welcome!” one of the doppelgängers cried out — Mary Rogers, she assumed, though it was impossible to know. “Come on over!”
And they all turned their heads, their tired faces reflecting her tired face. They were gesturing to her, they were scooting aside to make room.
For the first time in a long time, Mimosa knew exactly what was required of her. She glided across the café and took her place among them. She was given a seat and an iced tea. She pulled The Queen out of the stroller and began to nurse her, idly, as the others were. So this was all she had to do: sit here, nurse her baby, blend in.
But then the questions began. How many weeks? Where’d you deliver? Pounds, ounces? How’d you pick the name? When do you go back to work? Have you figured out child care? What’s the nap schedule? Sleeping much at night yet? So flustered did she become that she said the wrong birth date, the tenth instead of the twelfth, but was too embarrassed to correct the mistake, because one of the doppelgängers had already gone into raptures about the fact that her baby had been born on the same day.