A prominent conservative writer and thinker, Toronto-born Crittenden was launch-editor of the Women’s Quarterly in the early 1990s and has been published in a huge range of publications. Her controversial response to the feminist movement, ‘What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes The Modern Woman’, brought her much attention on its publication in 1999, and her profile grew when she was appointed to write the Wall Street Journal’s first ever piece of serialized fiction.
The result was the light-hearted but pithy ‘AmandaBright@home’ which described the life of a highly educated, working, Washington mother who gives it all up to stay at home and tend her children. The following article is the story’s first instalment.
It happened whenever Amanda returned from Christine’s: She felt asphyxiated by the cramped chaos of her own tiny house.
It was your typical Cleveland Park row house, a narrow brick job from the ’20s crammed alongside other narrow brick jobs from the ’20s. There was not much to recommend it except that it was not, repeat not, a tract house in the suburbs.
They’d bought it during the Washington real-estate slump of the mid-1990s. Never mind that if Amanda and Bob were different sorts of people they could then have afforded a Palladian-windowed, multilevel, four-bedroomed, two-and-a-half-bathroomed ‘Manor Home’ in a development named something like Badger Run Estates. They had looked at one of those places precisely once during their transition from apartment-dwelling, one-child family to house-dwelling, two-child family. They had driven away so quickly their car left tire tracks in the newly planted sod.
‘I don’t want to spend my life commuting,’ Bob muttered as they sat waiting for an interminable light change at a six-lane intersection near a shopping center where you could buy, right away, with no money down, a reclining mattress.
‘I never want to be more than a two-block walk from a good cup of coffee,’ replied Amanda, and that’s all they said for the next 45 minutes until the bridge that took them back over the Potomac hove mercifully into view.
That was before she knew Christine Saunders and her two-acre ravine lot, her cherry-lined driveway and her commodious, mock-Georgian brick mansion with its massive ‘media’ room, ‘chef’s’ kitchen and skylit halls. Everything vanished in that house: the children, the toys, even Christine’s husband, who kept an office somewhere in the basement. The few times Amanda had actually met him were as he emerged, blinking like a ferret, to ask if anyone had seen his car keys.
Amanda struggled with the lock on her front door while trying to balance Emily on her hip and save Ben’s fingers from amputation by the hinges of the outer screen. The inner door opened with a rush, and the three of them tumbled over a pile of rubber boots and stuffed animals.
‘Ugh! Kids! Why do you leave these things right here, where Mommy can trip?!’ Amanda dropped her bags beside the mess. ‘OK, just go – go upstairs, do something, watch a video, I don’t care.’ The children ran off hooting in triumph.
She still felt a bit tipsy from the Chardonnay she’d drunk at Christine’s. They had spent the afternoon by the swimming pool at Christine’s country club. Afterward they had repaired to Christine’s backyard, where the kids laid claim to an elaborate play set and the two women settled into their sun chairs brandishing plastic picnic glasses filled with wine.
Amanda rarely drank in the afternoon, but in the Saunders’ household the afternoon bottle was something of a ritual, even on a weekday. She couldn’t say she strenuously objected to this ritual; indeed, the wine worked upon her like a mild anesthetic and quelled the anxiety Amanda had felt all afternoon watching the other women at the club.
She’d stood knee deep in the kiddy pool in her faded and stretched bikini trying to look dignified while Ben spat water and Emily screamed in terror at the tiny ripples lapping at her waist. For some reason Amanda and her children were the only ones creating a spectacle. The other mothers lay upon their chaises longues as still and majestic as the gilded figures on Egyptian sarcophagi, their wrists and necks banded in gold, their possessions propped around them. Or they wandered serenely over the lush, landscaped lawns, their groomed hair glinting in the sunlight, a genetically perfect clone or two trotting along obediently at their heels.
They reminded Amanda of prized thoroughbreds retired from the track, content in their new vocation as brood mares. Personal trainers kept their bodies buffed and toned purely for aesthetic pleasure, not because the women had any need to exert themselves physically. Where would they exert themselves if they could? Out here in the Maryland suburb of Potomac, there were not even sidewalks. When these women were not at the club they were chauffeuring kids around (preferably in a Mercedes station wagon), flexing, at most, their right foot upon a gas pedal.
Yet it was not so much the wealth of Christine and her clubmates that Amanda envied. It was their apparent sense of ease. Every single one of these women had been raised, like Amanda herself, to spend her life steadily climbing a trajectory toward some professional goal. They’d gone to college; they’d devoted their 20s to succeeding in some company; and then, boom, here they were applying their highly trained brains to the problems of toddler management and running their homes with the skill and organization with which they’d run entire departments.
Yet it didn’t seem to bother them – certainly not the way it still bothered Amanda, a full three years after she’d left her job at the National Endowment for the Arts. Nor did it seem to bother Christine.
It had been almost a year since Amanda and Christine first met at the parents’ coffee at their children’s pre-school. In all that time she’d never once heard Christine express a doubt about having thrown over a promising career as an intellectual property lawyer. Bob told Amanda that his colleagues at the Department of Justice still cited an article Christine had written 10 years ago for the Chicago Law Review. Yet the only time Christine made reference to her former career was to joke how poorly it prepared her for dealing with children. ‘It’s not like knowing the doctrine of contributory infringement helps me get Vaseline out of Victoria’s hair.’
Now, re-entering her own narrow, disorganized house only increased the nasty pressure inside Amanda’s head. There were Legos strewn about the small living room and a half-finished puzzle in the hallway. A pull-toy left on the stairs just screamed lawsuit.
But it wasn’t only the child clutter: There was grown-up clutter too, clutter in which she had once taken a defiant pride: I’m not a housewife. I am at home to care for my children – not to ‘make a home.’ One day I will be returning to the office where I belong. Until then we can get by with the fiberboard bookshelves from college and the loveseat we bought when we moved in together, and the lamp from my grandmother, and the milk crates we once thought made funky record holders. It was the same pride she’d taken in driving the old Volvo instead of trading it in for the suburbanite’s vehicle of choice, the minivan. Now it all seemed to her – well, cheap.
God, it was a quarter to six. She’d have to get dinner started. Maybe they should just get take-out – although it would be the second time this week. How was she going to justify it to Bob? ‘Sorry but I spent all afternoon at Christine’s club and didn’t have time to make dinner.’ ‘We were at Christine’s house drinking and I forgot to stop at the Safeway.’
No, this was not going to do. Amanda opened the fridge. It was overflowing with cartons and plastic containers but nothing that could be used to prepare dinner for two adults: peanut butter, bread, yogurt, juice boxes, eggs, leftover macaroni and cheese, the congealed remains of a cheese pizza ordered in the night before. She searched through the drawers but came up with only a spoiled head of Boston lettuce, a bunch of celery, some lemons and an unripe avocado. Her elbow knocked over a container of grated parmesan cheese, sprinkling everything with a fine white powder like freshly fallen snow.
‘Damn!’
‘Uh-oh, Mommy use a bad word.’ Emily wandered into the kitchen stark naked, trailing one of Amanda’s scarves.
‘Emily,’ said Amanda tensely, ‘why did you take off your clothes?’
‘I’m playing Indians with Ben,’ Emily replied complacently, shaking her long brown curls. ‘I’m an Indian princess. Will you tie this on me, Mommy?’ She held up the scarf.
‘No, Mommy will not tie this on you, Emily; it is Mommy’s good scarf,’ Amanda said, snatching the scarf away. ‘And you are not Indians,’ she added irritably, ‘you are Native Americans.’
Emily burst into tears. Amanda sighed and took the child into her arms.
‘B-b-but I want to b-b-be a-a-n-Ind-d-d,’ Emily sobbed, ‘a-a-a Natif Merkan princess.’
Amanda wiped her daughter’s tears with her sleeve and draped the scarf around the thin, shivering body, arranging it, as artfully as she could, to resemble a three-year-old’s conception of what Natif Merkan princesses wore if Natif Merkan princesses shopped at Nordstrom’s.
‘Just this once, Emily,’ Amanda warned. ‘Next time use a towel.’
‘Natif Merkins don’t wear towels,’ Emily said indignantly.
‘Well, they don’t wear Mommy’s scarves either, sweetie. Off you go.’
‘I’m hungry,’ she replied, not moving.
The telephone rang. Emily did not budge. Upstairs, Ben began shrieking for his lost princess.
‘Go!’ said Amanda pleadingly.
‘I’m hungry!’
Amanda answered the phone. It was Bob.
‘Hi, hon. What’s going on there? It sounds like you’re surrounded by Apaches.’
‘Actually, I am,’ said Amanda, pushing Emily out the kitchen door and closing it behind her, setting off a second set of shrieks to join in chorus with the first.
‘Can you talk for a minute? I’ve got some great news.’
‘Uh, yeah – sure.’
‘Do you think you and I could go out for dinner alone tonight?’
Amanda brightened immediately. ‘I’ll have to find a sitter – ’
‘Maybe Hannah could come over from next door. We won’t stay out late.’
‘OK, I’ll ask and call you back. What’s the news – tell me quickly.’
Bob was unusually breathless. ‘It looks like the DOJ is finally going after Megabyte. The whole antitrust thing. It’s war. And I’m going to be in charge – well, sort of. I’ll tell you more at dinner.’
‘Oh, Bob!’
‘Yes – very exciting. Call me back.’
And it was exciting, yes. But as Amanda struggled to untangle the vacuum from the hall closet (stepping over the weeping Emily and ignoring the yelling upstairs that was growing closer), she wondered why Bob’s news left her feeling suddenly bereft. At the very moment the walls of the house seemed to be caving in, it seemed as if her one ally and partner had just been dropped a rope to pull himself up, out and away from her.
Amanda switched on the vacuum and began to suck up the cheese. The only upside about vacuuming, she realized, was that it drowned out the screams.