On the way home Sam raced ahead of us through the grass, stopping abruptly in the picnic area.

“Call me,” Sam said. “What’s that mean?”

I looked up with horror.

“It means Call me,” said Harris. “Someone wants someone to call them.”

“But why is it on a chair?”

I shrugged, like God only knows.

“Is it free?”

“Well, it might belong to someone who put it here—”

“It’s kind of cool,” Harris said, plopping down in the chair. “Maybe we should grab it. For the backyard.”

I cocked my head: Really?

“What?” he said. “You love stuff like this.” Sam sat on his lap.

I didn’t say anything. It was hard for me to gauge the translucency of the situation. How obvious was it that this was the chair my lover used to step on to climb into my window? That I—I, Mama—had painted CALL ME?

“We can put it under the linden tree,” I said.

“Just be glad you can still feel it. I feel a little . . . numb now. Dead down there.” I wondered if she was making it sound worse than it really was. Sometimes I did that to compensate for people’s lack of imagination. But I had plenty of imagination so maybe I should take all of this down a notch. “There’s no hormonal drive now so it all becomes mental,” she continued. “I have to create a narrative that makes it possible, otherwise it starts to feel like rape.”

This was new for her? I’d always had to get out ahead of sex, dig an inclined trough so it could flow easily downhill. Being walloped, pounded by lust was very recent. Very. I told Mary about body- versus mind-rooted arousal. “It sounds like you used to be body-rooted.”

“Oh, definitely,” she said, laughing, “but I don’t even recognize that person now, my old lustful self. I can’t imagine doing the things I did.”

I was far outside of Monrovia when I started walking back to the motel. As I came down to Earth I wondered if I’d misunderstood the fork in the road Mary had been talking about. I’d thought the two paths were:

sex with Davey  vs.  a life of bitterness and regret

But maybe the road split between:

a life spent longing  vs.  a life that was continually surprising

like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

I lay on my bed with wide-open eyes, shivering but somehow unable to get under the covers. I could hear the murmur of Harris’s voice on the phone; he was telling someone what had just happened. I imagined getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn’t discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped. We ran like horses, but we weren’t horses, so after the initial hugs there wasn’t anything to do there in the grass. Everyone started checking their phones to see if their partners were calling and they weren’t. Not yet. We hadn’t been gone long enough. Soon it was just a million women waiting for their mates to call, to be needed, and then to fall into panic and guilt, to be torn, which was our primary state. Start the revolution here, now, in this field? Or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped? Of course there was no decision to make because we were all already home, not in a field. There was no collective tipping point. Most of us wouldn’t do anything very different, ever. Our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children and they would hate this about us enough to do it a new way. That was how most change happened, not within one lifetime but between generations. If you really wanted to change you had to believe that you were both yourself and your baby; you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life. Of course the danger was in risking everything, destroying everything, for nothing. As I had done tonight.

I tried to watch a TV show everyone was talking about, but all the references to sex and marriage and infidelity made me weep and that’s what the show was about. I almost wished for an FMH flashback just to be taken out of the present, even for a second. The NICU was hell, but we were together in it, it was part of our long history. Even if I started a new, more open relationship immediately after the divorce and stayed with that person for fifteen years, it wouldn’t be the same stretch of life. Coming into ourselves as parents and adults—none of that would happen with anyone else. If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holding memories as a couple so they made a kind of safe basket in a rough and arbitrary world—not just for Sam but for us.

When I didn’t pack my bag for Monrovia on Wednesday morning (why would I go?), Sam and Harris both seemed disappointed. Sam wanted another pizza night and Harris wanted a break from our silent, relentless war. Fair enough. As I drove I suddenly realized these nights apart were probably the first steps toward divorce. Divorce, of course. I gasped alone in the car. I had truly believed we would break through at some point. I could still imagine the older versions of us, laughing fondly about something the other one always did.

Harris walked into the kitchen as we were finishing up. He paused, watching us smooth on the monkfruit-sugar frosting. I held my breath.

Almond cookies with jam in the middle, grain-free banana muffins, carrot custard—even when they turned out all wrong Harris always gobbled them up, which was the highest praise. Praise I maybe couldn’t live without. I was suddenly united with a long lineage of women who fixed everything through food; terror can really strip you of your modernity.

If he eats a cupcake we’re going to be okay.

He paused.

“There’s cream in the middle,” Sam said with great urgency. We were both praying.

But Harris was only looking for something and it wasn’t in the kitchen after all.

“Okay, here’s my take,” she said. “Just ride it out. A lot of women destroy their lives in their forties and then one day they wake up with no periods and no partner and only themselves to blame.”

That had the ring of truth to it.

“So, you think I should just smooth things over?”

“I know that’s not the hip thing to say, but yes.”

“I don’t know if I”—I gasped—“can physically do that. Swallow my desires like that.”

Cassie sighed.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”

While I squeezed our child and brushed hidden clusters out of their hair, Harris informed me (my forehead) that he would be throwing a brunch next Sunday.

“To celebrate Caro’s new single ahead of the release.”

“Of course.”

I couldn’t believe it. This was where his focus was?

“Do you want me here for it?” I asked, trying to imagine Caro and me in the same room. This brunch didn’t really fit into the theory of their secret affair, unless it was a “hidden in plain sight” kind of thing. Still, wouldn’t he have a better time without me there? “I could help set up and then leave for a few hours. What kind of food were you thinking?”

Harris looked up at the kitchen ceiling and shut his eyes as if I’d just said something beyond the pale.

“I’d like to be with a person who actually wants to be here,” he whispered. Not to me but to himself or the gods.

“Have you been anywhere fun lately?” a long-haired man asked me after describing Cancún.

“No,” I said, “but I’m just realizing this dynamic I have with my husband where I express my problem so dramatically that I become the problem, which makes me desperate to win back his favor. It’s a cycle that keeps us from ever moving forward with our issues. I think my mom did this, too.”

“Sounds like you could use a vacation!” said the long-haired man, smiling and moving away from me.

“This all started with a vacation!” I called out, but he was already in the garden.