Ihated

Her husband David was a food writer for The Inquirer. They fit in right away, joining the other young parents that congregated on one end of our narrow, cobblestone street in South Philadelphia. They’d run the children ragged out there until sunset, all standing around drinking Molly’s cocktails, garnished with little sprigs of rosemary from her potted garden. No one explicitly said we weren’t invited to the daily happy hours, but without the excuse of kids, it felt forced and awkward the few times we joined.

I dreaded our run-ins outside my front door. Molly would overshare the details of their personal lives, adopting a fake sort of intimacy I’d hear her put on with all the neighbors.

“Lila only wants to wear the Elsa dress,” she’d once sighed over their five-year-old, a pile of teal sparkles and taffeta on their stoop. “David doesn’t think I discipline enough. He says I don’t want to do the hard part.”

“Ugh,” I’d said, like I got her. I’d just wanted to get inside and take my shoes off.

Or there was the time we were late for a reservation, when she intercepted us on the sidewalk to lament how she missed “those spontaneous, sitter-free date-nights.”

“It should be a good time!” I’d said, edging Paul towards our waiting Uber.

“We’ll see how good in nine months, right?”

She’d actually winked at me. How I hated her and her life and the casual stupidity of her assumptions. This comment was three days after my fifth miscarriage. The blind idiot was adding insult to injury. In that moment, I thought I couldn’t hate another person more than Molly Munley on my sidewalk.

It was an October Tuesday, six months into the pandemic, when my loathing for Molly began morphing into pity—albeit pity tinged with a shameful sort of sick delight and curiosity—when I first heard her husband fucking another woman through our walls.

I wasn’t working at the time. My boss at the ad agency had offered me the option of taking unpaid time off, to get some rest, and I’d taken her up on it. She’d been through IVF, she said, so she “got it,” though she’d never known the gruesome cycle I was caught in— two pink lines, then the nausea and exhaustion, then the ultrasound technician reaching for the tissue box, the merciful pack of Camels I’d allow myself after each one, a few months off to let my body heal, then starting over. Paul was doing well enough that we could manage without my salary, and it seemed like a good idea to take a break. I’d decided I’d use the time to read Proust, a long-held ambition, and it was in my bed, halfway through Swann’s Way, that I first heard them.

I dogeared my page, kneeled up in our bed, and cupped my hand around my ear against the wall. At first, I thought maybe David was watching pornography loudly, but I became certain it was a live event. I could hear the woman groaning. She sounded like an animal, and he, too, like it had been years since he’d felt such pleasure, which, maybe, it had. We’d never heard Molly and David having sex, though we often heard their two-year-old crying at night. Their bedroom and ours were parallel on our third floors, as I knew from the tour Molly gave me the one night they had us over.

It couldn’t have been Molly. She’d lost her job in early April, and

Cordova

when she found another gig doing makeup on the set of a teen vampire drama, it took her up to New York twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’d seen her drive off in their car that morning.

When it stopped, my heart was still pounding, secondhand embarrassment for David coursing through my body, and if I’m being honest, a little bit of glee.

“Could they be in an open marriage?” I suggested to Paul that night.

“Maybe.”

“And where were the kids, then? Napping? Watching TV?”

“Maybe with the sitter.”

“Maybe it was the sitter.”

Paul laughed. “Do they use one, now that he’s not working?” that weekend, I convinced myself I’d misheard. Molly, David and the girls were sitting on their front stoop in matching reindeer-patterned pajamas when I went out at 10 a.m. to get us bagels. The twoyear-old wore a tiny Santa hat. Her big black eyes like juicy olives, she stared directly into mine, laughing. Another neighbor was taking their photograph, her own kids scampering around us.

I wasn’t sure. David, we’d heard, had been laid off. The food scene wasn’t much to write about, those days. We spent the rest of the night gossiping, theorizing about the identity of the other woman, giddy with the drama of it. It disgusts me so much now, to think of our behavior.

“We’re doing our Christmas shot,” Molly said. “Some of us more willingly than others.”

She put her arm around David’s waist and her head on his shoulder. David was handsome in an understated way, with a dark beard and a perpetual aura of intense concentration. He’d always seemed quiet to the point of standoffishness, but we chalked it up to Molly filling all the empty airtime. He didn’t seem like a cheater to me, there in his adult-sized footed jammies.

“Mol made mimosas. Want one?” he asked.

“I’m good,” I replied. “You guys are too cute.”

“Something to share?” Molly asked me, grinning, and I laughed the forced little laugh I reserved for questions about the status of my uterus, which, as a childless 35-year-old, I was practiced at fielding. I shook my head. the next tuesday, though, it happened again. My pulse quickened as soon as I recognized the sound. It went on for longer this time, and afterwards I heard a female-sounding laugh, and David’s deeper one. There was no mistaking this for pornography. She’d moaned “David, David” while their headboard thumped against our wall.

“Enjoy,” I said, and as I walked away I glanced back at David. He did seem to have a glint in his eyes. But probably it was nothing, I thought. Probably I was reading too many novels. Probably it really had just been very realistic porn.

It started happening every Tuesday and Thursday around noon, each day that Molly was on set. I made sure I’d be home, so I could try to catch a glimpse of the woman stealing her husband, coming or going. I wasn’t doing much else with my sabbatical—reading, going on little runs, trying not to think too hard about the future.

I was failing at this last part. I often thought about Paul’s childless aunt and uncle. They spent their free time traveling and had beautiful, well-trained German shepherds. They conversed interestingly about the books they were reading, the movies they’d seen.

“They seem happy, right?” I’d said to Paul, one night, when we were curled up, watching TV. I teared up, and he went wordlessly to the fridge to get us beers.

I saw the woman only once. Hearing them finish one afternoon, I ran out to our roof deck to see if I could catch her leaving. I suspected she exited through the Munleys’ patio door, which butted up against a quiet alley, so she could come and go undetected. I was right. Pretending to water our deck plants, all I could see before she disappeared down the alley was that she was brunette, wearing a beige trench coat and white Nikes.

Once or twice, I saw David on the day of their rendezvous. I’d study his behavior for awareness that I knew what he was up to. Outside the coffee shop one Thursday afternoon, he seemed flushed and cheery, pushing the two-year-old in the stroller. He showed an uncharacteristic interest in the events of my morning, nodding vigorously when I told him I’d been to the car mechanic.

“Is Molly liking the new job?” I asked.

“Well enough, I believe. Lila likes that she gets extra TV time on Daddy days,” he replied, and I laughed, a little too loudly. Lila ran up and grabbed him around his pantleg.

“Do you have a favorite show?” I said, hoping that if I engaged her in conversation, she might let something slip about Daddy’s new friend, but she didn’t reply, hiding behind David: sensing my evil motives, I guessed.

I saw Molly, too, throughout this period, when she wasn’t working. She seemed distant to me. She said she was tired from commuting, but something else felt off. I heard her yelling at the girls more often through the walls.

She must know something’s wrong, I thought, and I waited expectantly for an explosive fight to break out behind the walls, for David’s possessions to be hoisted out the windows over the Munley’s flowerboxes for everyone to see. But the weeks went by, fall turned into winter, and nothing happened. Molly kept going to her job, the woman kept moaning on Tuesdays and Thursday, the two-year-old cried through the night, and three days before Christmas, we got their holiday card through our mail slot.

“I don’t get why she thinks we want this,” I said to Paul, passing the image of them all in their matching jammies. “I saw the live version. I see the live version every day.”

“They’re so happy,” he said, sarcastically, turning the card over. “And so fertile.”

He held up the back of the card so I could see it—an image of an ultrasound. My stomach flipped. It read: “Baby Munley #3, coming July 2021!”

“Jesus.” christmas came and went, and I avoided the Munleys as much as possible. Pregnant women generally make me uncomfortable, and I’d made the calculation; Molly would have been eight weeks when we received the card, barely six when she’d probably had them printed. it was mid-february 2021, a night so cold you felt it between your teeth, when Paul and I decided to start trying again. Okay, I’d said. One more time. Paul suggested he make a final batch of cocktails, “to celebrate,” and we both laughed darkly. One more time. Where had we heard that one before?

I found this offensively early to announce, a personal affront, an impudent confidence in the life growing inside of her that reinvigorating my hostility. I texted her congratulations, never wanting to seem the jealous, barren type. But then if I saw them out front, when I needed to run an errand, I waited inside until they’d cleared.

David’s affair appeared to have run its course, too. The sounds had stopped, not long after the Christmas card, and I figured, for better or worse, he was recommitting himself to the marriage. He seemed like a decent guy, overall, and infidelity aside, like a pretty good father. It was for the best, Paul and I agreed, that he’d gotten whatever it was out of his system before their third. Privately, I missed the drama, but I could still relish my secret knowledge of their flawed marriage, a little consolation prize David didn’t know he’d given me.

The doctors said it was just a matter of time. We had no trouble getting pregnant, there were no issues in my bloodwork, I had a normal shaped uterus, an appropriate BMI, and I was on the right side of forty. Eventually, most women like me would take home a baby. That’s what they said.

I had a sense from the beginning this time might be different. My nausea was worse; I was laid up with the most horrible fatigue. Suffering the symptoms of pregnancy, without confidence that there’s a living baby in store at the end—it’s a special kind of gut punch I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

At the first ultrasound at eight weeks, we saw a heartbeat, and I almost got excited. But, we’d been past that point before. When we got our testing back, confirming my instinct that she was female, confirming she was genetically normal, I started letting myself feel a little hope. We passed sixteen weeks, the farthest we’d made it before, and I caught my mind drifting to strollers and binkies and cribs, how we might turn the sad spare bedroom into her nursery. I wouldn’t dream of planning a shower, but I started a secret registry, selecting tiny objects no one could see except myself.

When I returned to work, I was visibly pregnant, and my boss cried when I stood up to show her my belly on the Zoom screen. People wanted us to succeed. My mom—who’d had no trouble with me and my sisters, who’d told me I should start journaling to deal with the trauma, who didn’t understand it, but felt my pain, I knew, like it was hers—she was in her church every other morning for us, begging God that this time it would be okay.

There came a point when I couldn’t hide it from the neighbors, anymore, though it terrified me to let them in on our news. The more who knew, I’d learned, the more I’d have to share my grief with if anything went wrong. I knew the pain, too well, of other people’s embarrassment when they asked how I was feeling close to a once-meaningful due date—a store clerk who’d sold me ginger lozenges, Paul’s college friend he texted but forgot to update. It was awkward all around.

Filled with dread, I accepted the neighbors’ gleeful exhortations of “another girl on the block!” The moms all warmed to me, offering hand-me-downs and labor tips. Molly Munley was especially ecstatic. Our girls would be best friends, no doubt, just a few months apart and sharing a wall. She started asking me to take walks with her, and I agreed. Her pregnancy no longer felt like an existential threat, and though it was hot, the walks were a welcome respite from the weird tentativeness of indoor socializing that second pandemic summer.

In typical fashion, she opened up too widely for my comfort on our first walk. She told me she and David were fighting. He’d left the other day for an entire day and wouldn’t say where he’d gone. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her what the problem was. It had been a long time since I’d thought of the other woman, but I worried my expressions might betray my once insatiable curiosity, my secret knowledge of David’s betrayal. Molly being Molly, she volunteered more, anyway, unasked.

She said it was always about sex. She said they rarely did it, that her sex drive was way higher than his. “And I’m the one who’s been pregnant or breastfeeding for like six years straight now.” I nodded, hoping my cheeks weren’t visibly reddening. I said I could imagine how hard that might be.

We walked past a park with children playing. She became unusually quiet, and I wondered if I should change the subject to fill the void. With the new baby coming, she finally said, there’d be even more pressure on them, money-wise. David just needed to find something, any kind of job. He was waiting for the perfect thing, something that probably didn’t exist anymore, but it was getting so hard, being the only one to pay the bills. She stayed up late worrying about their future.

I felt a wave of renewed pity for her then, but she quickly pivoted, as if disoriented by her real vulnerability, to a B-list celebrity playing a sexy new vampire character on her job. She told me about how funny he was, how he’d invited the Munleys to his house “out east,” though she didn’t think it was a good idea to travel that close to her due date.

She stopped walking for a minute to show me the picture on his IMDB page.

“Yes, he’s wearing blush, and yes, I applied it.” in july, molly had her baby, and three months later, I had ours. It was a c-section, and the doctors told me there would be shaking, when they pulled her out and the hormones crashed. I think my hormone crash was bigger than usual, because I shook and cried when I heard her screaming, and didn’t stop, Paul tells me, until the next morning. Those early days are a fog to me. She was fat and red-faced and healthy and strong. We named her Emily. i was rocking emily, just weeks old, in our living room one day when I heard through the walls the most awful wails. Molly was crying. I couldn’t make out any words, but her tone was so desperate and pleading, I’d thought it was Lila throwing a late-night tantrum at first. The door slammed after a while, and I peeked through our shutters to see David getting in their car and driving off. david returned a few days later, and I guessed the marital discord had resolved itself, because Molly invited me over for a “playdate” with the infants while he cooked dinner with the older girls.

We continued walking, side by side.

On Thanksgiving, a few days later, I saw Molly corralling her girls down the block. We were heading to my parents’ house across town.

I had Emily in a onesie that said “My First Thanksgiving” on the front with a little knitted turkey.

“Oh, that’s adorable,” Molly said. She looked unusually wan without makeup on and smelled like she’d already started drinking. I asked her where they were headed, and she let out a weird snicker, though I wasn’t sure what the joke was.

“Down to Zoe’s,” she replied, referencing another neighbor.

When I didn’t ask where David was, she must have known I’d heard their fight, because she stopped and just looked at me, as if her gaze could bypass my eyes, reaching deep into my head to the secret I’d been keeping. She rubbed her baby’s back through her chic body sling, the kind I could never get right with Emily, and hastened the girls along.

The two of us sat in their basement while the babies lay next to each other on their white, faux-fur rug. Molly was on her third glass of wine, she said. Did I want one? I said yes, to be polite, and she started telling me about the fight with David I’d heard, in a loud voice that undoubtedly carried upstairs.

Molly had slept with the B-list actor, she confessed. It was after the new baby was born, and she’d had to go back to work right away, and she just wanted to feel like she was alive and like someone actually appreciated how quickly she got her body back. I made a mental note about how Molly must have seen my post-baby body, like a blow-up snowman peacefully deflating, though it didn’t bother me or Paul, I didn’t think.

She said she felt she had to be honest with David, that honesty about how unhappy she’d been and how she’d acted out would bring them closer, but it was a miscalculation. David would have preferred to stay in the dark, she said, but confronted with her cheating, he’d had some kind of come-to-Jesus moment about their marriage.

“It didn’t matter to him all those years we didn’t have sex except to procreate. It was this thing, this stupid fling, something I totally owned up to, that set him off,” she said. I looked towards the staircase, nervously.

“Don’t worry.” She sloshed her wine glass upwards in the direction of the stairs. “He’s already heard this. At the end of the day, he can pretend this is about infidelity, but we both know it’s an excuse for his loss of interest in his family, and his own issues of sexual inadequacy, and all sorts of other types of inadequacy.” he moved out, and then later she and the girls did. The tropical flowers in their window, unmaintained, withered quickly. They listed the rowhouse, and it sold quickly for ten thousand over asking, a tribute to Molly’s stylish finishings. But even with the money, she’d told me, she would have to rent. She couldn’t get a mortgage on just her income, and David wouldn’t be able to offer much support. She said she was taking the girls to LA, back where her family was, where she’d have better job prospects, where they could find a nice place by the sea. It broke my heart thinking about those three girls, that far from their father.

She set the wine glass on a side table, teetering close to the edge, above where the babies were noisily gnawing on the Munleys’ collection of wooden toys. I pushed the glass back a few inches, and she started sobbing, the same plaintive wails I’d heard weeks prior. We heard David turn the speaker up higher from the first floor. He was playing Peppa Pig songs for their girls.

That was the moment. That was the moment in time when I should have told her what I’d heard. Maybe it would have gutted her. But maybe it could have saved her marriage, provided leverage in the fight, guilted David into staying.

Instead, not knowing what to say, I just hugged her. When I went upstairs on my way out, she stayed in the basement. David pretended to busy himself with dinner, not making eye contact as I walked out their door.

“How could he not stop her from doing that,” I whispered to Paul, one night, rocking sleepless Emily in my arms while he sat bleary-eyed across from me on our bed. “How could he let her be that tempestuous?”

“Maybe it’s for the best,” he said. “He cheated and got away with it, and then he blew up their family, anyway. He must have been toxic.”

I made a loud shushing sound to quiet the baby, holding her in a position like a football some Youtuber suggested might help her sleep. I told Paul I felt responsible, like my inaction was just as much a cause of the disintegration of their marriage as their own cheating hearts.

“But just because we’re happy now, and they’re not, it doesn’t mean we took it from them, right?”

“You’re tired,” he said. “You should stop thinking about it.”

I looked over at him, and then down at the baby. I wondered whether someday, I’d get a holiday card from Molly, maybe with a new man, with a return address in a wealthy neighborhood.

“Right,” I said.

I knew then I’d hope for the card every year. Emily slept, finally, and nothing but silence passed through our walls.