ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY, the women were waking up. Their alarm clocks bleated one by one, making soothing sounds or grating sounds or the stirrings of a favorite song. There were hums and beeps and a random burst of radio. There were wind chimes and roaring surf, and the electronic approximation of birdsong and other gentle animal noises. All of it accompanied the passage of time, sliding forward in liquid crystal. Almost everything in these women’s homes required a plug. Voltage stuttered through the curls of wire, and if you put your ear to one of the complicated clocks in any of the bedrooms, you could hear the burble of industry deep inside its cavity. Something was quietly happening.
BIP BIP BIP. By a bed on this Monday morning in fall, the first alarm went off in a house with cedar shingles in a small, buffed suburb, and a woman sat up, the prospects of the entire day rising before her. BOOP BOOP BOOP. Three towns over, there went another alarm, a full octave lower, and a woman broke the skin of consciousness in her colonial, blinking. “—A LOOK AT THE TRAFFIC. RANDY, WHAT’S HAPPENING OUT THERE?” Throughout the region, and in others not unlike it, in houses broader and more spread apart or else smaller and tightly bunched, the women awakened. Farther away, across unswimmable waters and over a nexus of highway and bridge, in the residential towers of the city, a whole other crop of alarms peeped and chirruped and wailed and beckoned.
They sounded in both suburb and city, on individual night tables beside facedown, broken-spined volumes being read for book group with titles like Bigfoot Was Here: A Father’s Letters to His Newborn Son from Iraq, and among curling school permission slips (“I, _______, allow my child, _______, to attend the field trip to the recycling plant”). The intensifying chorus of alarms urged the women to get up and go wherever the day would take them. Some would shepherd their children into huge, fully stocked, cornball American family vehicles, adjusting rearview mirrors and backing out into the world, while others would grab their children by their soft little hands and yank them like pull-toys into the mash of urban foot traffic.
One by one the women began their separate and familiar routines. Unlike in the past, there were no presentations to give, no fears of having to keep vast savannahs of information in their heads all morning, and then, at eleven A.M., having to recite it all aloud to a roomful of colleagues. Because now there were no colleagues, just as there were no conference calls or lunches with “a client.” All of that was over, and when the alarms sounded in the morning and the women were startled awake, they sometimes took a momentary dip into the memory of what they had left behind, and then, with varying degrees of relief or regret, they let the memory go.
COO COO COO COO COOOOOO. In a light-stippled apartment on Third Avenue in New York City, on the eleventh floor of a newish colossus of a rental building fashioned of glazed brown brick, an alarm called out in Amy Lamb’s bedroom. She was alone, as she always was when the alarm went off, for Leo had been awakened by his own Timex over an hour earlier, and had staggered like a newborn monster through the violet shadows to the bathroom and the elevator and the gym and then finally to the office. By the time the doves called to Amy, Leo Buckner was already at his desk in midtown, looking into the eye of a video device that sent a slightly convex version of him to the clients sitting around a platter of pastries in an industrial-park conference room in Pittsburgh.
As Leo went about the start of the workday, Amy slowly woke up. Her clock, which he had bought her as a recent birthday present from the Domestic Edge catalogue, and which, depending on the setting, made a noise like one of a variety of animals, today sounded like a flock of mourning doves. Leo and their son Mason were sent into a shared frenzy by gadgetry. The apartment, because of this, contained objects that blinked and hummed and made animal noises and sometimes actually spoke sentences in flattened android voices, remarking, Your-keys-are-o-ver-here, so clearly indifferent to where your keys actually were. But husband and son were content with the impersonal nature of electronics; they didn’t need these objects to love and embrace them, because Amy did, and that was enough.
“Mason!” she cried in a dry, fruitless morning voice. “Time to get up!” There was no response. It would have made much more sense if she’d simply gone into his room right away and hung over his bed like a jackal in a tree, the way some mothers did. “MASON!” she cried again, rasping but loud. Still nothing, and so Amy gave it a rest, standing in the middle of her pale bedroom and moving her head from side to side, listening to the internal neck pops and explosions. At age forty her physical self seemed to make much more noise and require so much more attention than it used to. She stretched her arms over her head, her body nicely thin but slightly battered by middle age, tight-nippled inside one of Leo’s oversized undershirts, which she wore to bed each night out of habit, because long ago he had said it was an erotic sight. For some reason, men often liked women in some sort of nominal drag, though Amy couldn’t remember the last time Leo had been all that excited by her. Maybe she should have had gadgets affixed to her body, she thought. Instead, married for thirteen years and in the middle of their life together, they often lay in bed at night like two tired prehistoric animals that had individually been out in the world for many hours, fighting for survival.
“What a stupid day,” Leo had said last night in the dark, and his hand halfheartedly, almost accidentally, bumped against her breast and stayed there. “Stutzman wanted to know when we’re going to be ready to go to court. I told him I can only do so much. That I’m not Vishnu. So he said, ‘Who’s that, a new associate?’”
“Oh God,” she said. “I remember that kind of thing.”
“It’s worse now. You always have to stop and explain what you mean. And you have to appease everyone. It’s an onslaught. Corinna and I basically just roll our eyes.”
Corinna Berry was his closest friend at the office. Once, long ago, Amy had been Leo’s primary work confidante, the one he had rolled his eyes with, but she had lost that tender role. “I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Everyone else manages,” said Leo. “It’s like they’re being thrown some bone that no one’s throwing me.” He added, dolefully, “I keep waiting for the bone.”
Whenever Leo expressed unhappiness about his job, Amy tried to find something to say that might be a comfort, even an anecdote about herself that could create a marital symmetry between them. “My day was bad too,” she’d said. “The pediatrician’s waiting room. Like typhoid central! And we sat there for a full hour.”
It was as though they performed small reenactments for each other in bed, depicting the different ways the day had been spent. When he described and acted out scenes from his life at Kenley Shuber, the law firm where she had once worked too and where they had first met, she easily pictured the toast-colored corridors, the conference room with its oak table and recessed lights. But as she began to tell him about her own day, he made polite, generic sounds of sympathy in his throat. She knew he could barely picture Dr. Andrea Wishstein’s waiting room with its streppy, fractious children on the floor pushing wooden beads along wire, and its pastels of clowns on unicycles lining the walls, and that he wouldn’t really want to picture it even if he could.
The paradox was that Leo adored her but wasn’t always interested in how she spent her time. Jill Hamlin, Amy’s closest friend since college, who had moved from the city last spring to the suburb of Holly Hills, had recently told her about a woman she’d met there whose husband had admitted that he swallowed their hyperactive son’s Ritalin every evening on the commuter train going home so he could actually pay attention at night when his wife told him about her day. “He couldn’t bear to listen to her without it,” Jill had told Amy. “He said he loved her so much, but that whenever she started to speak, he would automatically think about other things. He was so ashamed.”
“Are men’s stories inherently more interesting?”
“Yes.”
“Yes? You’re serious?”
“During my two-second career in film,” said Jill, “or at least right at the end, they kept emphasizing the idea of the four quadrants, like it was an Aristotelian concept. The four quadrants are: older male, younger male, older female, younger female. The fact is that both older and younger men and older and younger women—all four quadrants—will go see movies about men, but that only two quadrants—women, young and old, will go see movies about women. So right away there’s a huge discrepancy. But it’s the way it is.”
Amy saw herself on a screen, in afternoon light, walking down a city street to the dry cleaner, then sitting on a small chair at her son’s school, attending a meeting about the evacuation policies in case of terrorism. There was very little dramatic tension to these scenes; out in the audience, the men would start to rustle, and one by one they would leave the theater.
Mason, in bed, didn’t stir yet; the apartment remained still. Amy always left a few minutes’ leeway in their morning schedule, so now she picked up her laptop and sat with it on the edge of her bed in the dim morning room, checking e-mail. There were a couple of messages from friends in the city and elsewhere, and one from her son’s school with the subject line REMINDER: SAFETY PATROL TODAY, but the only message she opened now was from her mother. Up in the house in Montreal, Antonia Lamb wrote her daughter free-form e-mails roughly once a week. She was an historical novelist who only recently had made the change from typewriter to computer, and e-mail was still a novelty to her, the way once, decades past, answering machines had been a novelty too, and Antonia had recorded her own voice solemnly reciting the last stanza of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” as her outgoing message: “‘…Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.’ Please leave a brief message, and remember to wait for the recorded beep tone. Thank you.”
Today, even the subject line of her e-mail was provocative and, to a daughter, irritating:
A THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT YOU COULD DO
NEXT
Amy opened it, and found:
A,
It occurred to me: what about a public defender? Let’s discuss. Am making my plans for NAFITAS (my women’s conference in NYC) this winter. Cannot wait to come stay on your air mattress and spend time with you and L and, esp., sweet Mason.
xoxo
Mom
To her mother’s thinking, Amy had apparently once confessed to her: I am lost in the woods in the middle of my life. You were once lost too, so tell me what to do. Antonia Lamb remained preoccupied with the fact that her middle daughter no longer had a profession and that perhaps she already was the totality of what she would ever become. Amy’s sisters had stayed on in Canada: Jennifer was a gerontological social worker, and Naomi worked for the slow-food movement, promoting agricultural biodiversity. Naomi, in particular, spoke a great deal about her work; she was a bit of a grind, always very literal, but if you were the slow-food movement of Canada you would want her as an advocate, because she would put in long and thoughtful hours among the herring spawn and the red fife wheat, and she would never leave, except briefly to have children, but then, once they were in day care, she’d be back for good.
“You girls will be able to do just about anything you want,” Antonia had told her three daughters when they were young, taking a tug on her first cigarette of the day. Feminism had recently landed in Canada; apparently the longing and ability to write historical fiction had always been inside Antonia, but it had taken a political upheaval to disgorge it. Once it was brought out, life in the house changed. Antonia warned that she was no longer going to be able to spend all afternoon with the girls when school let out for the day. She had a job now, she said, and it was no different from anyone else’s job. She created an office in what had once been a guest room, and she made sure the girls were set up with their homework or a game or a book, and then she told them, “This is my time,” and went inside and shut the door.
At first, it was a shock to have their mother so close and yet unavailable. They were stung by her absence, as though it was a personal affront. Together, Amy, Naomi, and Jennifer learned to make no-bake fig bars and toasted cheese sandwiches and to vacuum. They fought, shrieking at one another as they slammed through the house, motherless. They felt so sorry for themselves, and over time they pretended to be blind and wandered the rooms, nearly knocking into furniture, and they sat and sang the saddest songs they knew—including the one about the ghost of the girl who sold cockles and mussels alive alive-o—and they acted out the orphanage scenes from Jane Eyre. They were no longer allowed to disturb their mother during the day, Antonia had gently made clear, unless it was a “life or death” emergency. Somehow, they got through the months and the years of this routine, only occasionally interrupting her when something big came up, although each time it happened they were hesitant to knock on her door, because they knew she would be annoyed, at first, to be torn from her moment of concentration.
Amy got her period for the first time late one afternoon when her mother was working. Did that count as “life or death”? She and Naomi and Jennifer had stood out in the hallway in the slant of sunlight through the high single window, debating this point in whispers.
“You could bleed to death,” Naomi, one year older than Amy, had said philosophically. “You could exsanguinate. It’s happened before. Though it’s not really likely. Is your flow heavy?”
But Amy didn’t really know what “flow” meant; she was not yet versed in the language of womanhood and didn’t want to be. Who would? And she also didn’t want her sisters here, assisting her; it felt a little too orphanlike. She imagined Jane Eyre finding blood in her underpants one morning at Lowood School and having to be helped out by tragic little Helen Burns. The girls would have had to crack the ice in the basin in order to get some water for Jane to wash herself. Now the three sisters stood with their fists paused over the surface of their mother’s door. Finally, hesitantly, they knocked. There was no answer, so they knocked again, and the knocking soon became a fusillade.
“Who is it?” Antonia asked.
“It’s us.”
“Yes?”
“We need to talk to you.”
Antonia pulled open the door. She had a pencil between her teeth, caught there as though it were a rose and she were dancing the tango. It seemed, in that first, stark moment, as if they had interrupted something sexual in nature. Their mother whisked away the pencil and said, “What is it, girls? You know I’m working. It’s the middle of my workday.”
“Amy got the curse,” Naomi said without preamble.
“What?”
“My period,” Amy muttered, looking down at the floor in a kind of obscure shame.
“Her period,” Jennifer echoed, pointlessly.
“Oh. Well, did you go get the sanitary pads from my bathroom? They’re under the counter.”
“No,” said Amy, and though she was twelve years old, she began to cry. She stood outside the open door of her mother’s office with the view of the desk and the typewriter and the empty pink cans of Tab, and the tears dropped. She knew, somehow, that she only wanted her mother to go show her the secret place where the napkins were kept—the kind that women wore back then, as thick as submarine sandwiches—and to sit down with her and say a few corny phrases about maturity that Amy and her sisters could mock later on. She wanted it all, the way it used to be, before all the hypnotized mothers had started disappearing into guest rooms or real-estate offices or travel agencies, telling their children, “This is my time.”
A sound now caught in Antonia’s throat. Her face grew pink, and she softened. “Honey,” she said. “Oh, honey. You’re upset.”
“No I’m not,” Amy said, now weeping.
Her mother swiftly pulled her against her. “Look, I didn’t realize. I was lost in thought. This is a very, very big deal. I’m glad you interrupted me.”
“You are?”
“Absolutely,” said her mother. “Congratulations. I should have said that right away.”
The three girls and their mother spent the rest of the day going to Steinberg’s to buy the big pads as well as the junior tampons that were as thin as swizzle sticks, and then Antonia had simply closed shop for the afternoon and sat around with them making kettle corn and ironing their hair. The following morning, she returned to her study, and the door was shut.
As they grew older, the early experience of having once had a mother who was available all the time—an iconic figure like the Statue of Liberty, raising a glass of milk and serenely handing it over—lost its clarity. Had Antonia ever truly belonged to them? Yes, yes, she had, and the ownership had been extraordinary, though they had taken it for granted. They’d had her during the day, and their father had had her at night; it had been a system that seemed to work well. But now she belonged to everyone: to her “muse,” as she said with irony, and to her publisher, and to her earnest friends in her consciousness-raising group. Her daughters never really got her back exclusively. And anyway, as Naomi pointed out, they were more independent themselves now too. The older two had become focused on the habits and particularities of boys, and all three of them could prepare their own snacks and could help check over one another’s homework. Still, the pain of the loss had been as real as anything—as startling as blood in the underpants—and then, after a while, it began to fade. It was just like waking up from a dream in tears: You weren’t sure what you’d been so upset about, but you were just relieved that it was over.
Now, at age sixty-nine, Antonia Lamb was still prolific, although her mostly female readership had diminished over the past few years, perhaps finally exhausted by her big, historical, unapologetically feminist novels, which over time kept coming and coming, as if somewhere a bookshelf was toppling, its contents relentlessly falling upon everyone’s heads. She had won all the significant Canadian literary prizes; her work “spoke to the frustrations and yearnings of women everywhere,” according to the judge of an awards committee back in the mid-1970s, describing Antonia’s first novel, Turning Around and Going Home, from the podium at a book festival in Toronto.
Antonia Lamb had walked onstage that night in a gunmetal-gray crushed-velvet gown, and spoke in her slow, intelligent voice. She’d said, “I’m going to talk tonight about gender, power, and the insidiousness of self-censorship. You might think these subjects have nothing to do with you, but you would be wrong.” The women in the seats had listened well, their faces uptilted in devotion. She was a minor heroine to them during a time when feminism seemed like an electrical current that would convulse the world in perpetuity. But in the end, the audience had shuffled out of the dim glow of the auditorium and returned to their lives, some of which would be adequate, some awful, and who knew what had happened to most of them over time.
And here was Antonia Lamb’s middle daughter all these years later on a Monday morning in fall, a woman of forty, who, unlike her mother, had never been deeply in love with her work. Becoming a lawyer had made sense to Amy for a long time; she’d been on the debate team in high school and had thrown herself into the excitement and tension of the meets and the internecine drama of the club itself. She’d had a long flirtation with the team captain, a confident goofball from down the street named Alan Bredloe, who had memorized all the lines to Inherit the Wind. They mock-debated each other on subjects such as euthanasia and pesticides and the sovereignty of Quebec; they once even debated the topic “Is there a quantifiable thing called ‘love’?” ending up in the slippage of a long kiss and with hands moving around under each other’s clothes on the Bredloe family couch.
Amy liked the beauty of debate, the way you could bark at another person until you wore them down, which meant you had won. “Your reasoning is so faulty it’s pathetic, Bredloe,” she said to Alan, and he said, “You think so, Lamb? You really think so?” “Yes, as it happens I do,” she said. “And in the next two minutes I shall prove it.” They were fifteen years old, and they sparred with each other in the way that high school debaters did, but they both felt as though they were also in training for a greater sparring that would take place when they were much older. Whenever Amy debated, her face grew hot, and she felt charged with the same preening vigor that people felt when they exercised or, supposedly, had sex.
Years later, after high school and then college, Amy was among the bloc of English majors in her class who gamely applied to law school. They knew, these English majors, that literature was an open field and law school was an enclosed pasture, but they were practical too. No one would take care of you forever; the world would not love and protect you. You had to know how to do something well. This was different from a passion for your work, and while it was always best to have one of those, no one could give it to you or tell you how to acquire it.
Off in law school, the jousting spirit from those long-ago teenaged debates was mostly absent, and so was the quiet, self-conscious serenity of sitting in a chair reading the great novels. Instead, you had to be passive and accept the idea of the largeness of the law and the smallness of the self. You had to learn how to think like a lawyer. Some people were giddy to do this. A few of the women in Amy’s law school class had always wanted to be lawyers; they had felt it when they were six years old and went around making extemporaneous arguments, in response to which their mothers had looked at them with surprise and pride and called them Clarencina Darrow. Maybe the mothers had been lawyers themselves, a pioneer variety that worked in labor law and always seemed aggrieved, because “the system,” that Escher drawing of steps and turrets and impossible angles, was rarely manageable. Amy knew a couple of law students who were obviously brilliant, and who loved the intellectual rewards of some legal texts. Their excitement and their brilliance astonished her. She had also met a woman in law school named Maura who was absorbed by the concept of justice. When she was young her father had been given a forty-year sentence for drug trafficking. He was a grizzled con now, unrecognizable. Maura had gone on to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and was currently the dean of a midwestern law school. She’d developed her fascination with the law because of the marijuana that her father had stored at home in bales, as though the entire suburban house was a silo.
But without a passion, said one of the other former English majors in Amy’s first-year class at Michigan over pizza one night, eventually you were in trouble. The law didn’t come with passion already embedded in it, as somehow Amy had thought it would. You needed to develop it and stoke it yourself. Without it, you had to pretend you felt strongly about your profession when really you didn’t. But what was an English major supposed to do after college, asked another one of those pizza-eating law students: go work for Beowulf? Yes, said someone else, Beowulf, Grendel & Schwartz. They all laughed bitterly, and then they threw around some more literary law-related jokes for a while, trying to protect the fragile sense of superiority that was rapidly abandoning them. “Mr. Kurtz, he dead. He dead from boredom during Contracts class,” said Amy. Someone else said, “I had a farm in Africa. I went there after my nervous breakdown during law school.”
Oh, they laughed and laughed as their English classes receded like a shoreline, and together they silently grieved the loss. But then law classwork took over fully; snow discharged itself upon the Michigan campus all winter, and the former English majors separated, thinking of themselves only as law students now. They were as exhausted and capable as anyone else, sitting in the law library with wet coats slung over the backs of chairs, their heads bent to read the legal writing that, no matter how hard they studied it, would not sing or attempt metaphor.
Amy worked in trusts and estates for Kenley Shuber—T&E, it was called—an area that women tended to be drawn to more than men, because, she speculated, it had a big personal-relationship aspect to it. In a way it was a relief after three years of law school for Amy to be good at what she’d been trained for, but later, when it was time, she willingly exchanged the law firm for the long and astonishing inhalation of motherhood, which itself, over time, had gradually been exhaled. Her son Mason was ten years old now and in no need of close watching or nursing. She didn’t have to be there for him all the time anymore, but she was. And though the mornings could be sluggish and harsh, she still loved the period after the school day ended, when they spent a little time together that wasn’t rushed.
“Do you know the story of Achilles and how he was dipped into the River Styx as a baby, except his heel didn’t get wet?” Mason might suddenly say as they walked home, and she would say no, please tell me. The chance to hear the story of brave but tragically vulnerable Achilles, as rendered by her son, was hardly a reason not to work, or at least it wasn’t meant to be. But the hours between three and six P.M. comprised his clearest, brightest window of time and, by association, hers too.
Increasingly, lately, there were fewer stories about Achilles. There were empty segments of time in the day, and Amy had become highly aware of them. She had only infrequently regretted being at home with Mason when he was little; there had been boring times and maddening times, but there were moments when he wanted only her, and there were also sudden bursts of the extraordinary. There was always so much to do: There were lists and plans and schedules that were essential to a well-run household and that were still laughably, almost hysterically, tedious. You, the brainy, restless female, were the one who had to keep your family life rolling forward like a tank. You, of all people, were in charge of snacks. Your hands tore apart the cellophane on six-packs of juice boxes, while your head cocked to hold a cordless phone into which you spoke the words “Maureen? Hi, it’s Mason Buckner’s mom. I’m calling to set up a playdate with Jared.”
You had to say “playdate”—that nonword that had been so easily welcomed into the lexicon—and you had to say it without irony. Certainly, you could also focus the thick, keen lens of your intellect on the greater world if you wanted. You could anguish over the war that ground on far away on another continent—and Amy did dwell on it periodically, hopelessly, during the day—but you would have to do this on your own time, between plans. You were the gatekeeper and nerve center and the pulsing, chugging heart of your family, the one whom everyone came to and needed things from. You were the one who had to coax that unconscious child from his bed, day upon day.
She took a breath now, then called, “MASON! I ALREADY TOLD YOU IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP, BUDDY!”
To her surprise, many of the words that she said to her son lately each morning came out in the same slightly irritated voice. “Are you like that too?” Amy had recently asked Jill, who had taken the train into the city. The two of them were sitting in the back booth of the Golden Horn, the place where their group of women had breakfast a couple of times a week and where Amy and Jill often used to sit before Jill defected to Holly Hills.
In the late morning, after the world had settled itself down, the room was steamed and spiced behind its glass front, and the women stayed put for a long time. The owner and the waiters knew their habits and never bothered them or hustled them from the booth. “Do you find yourself shouting at Nadia like some kind of drill sergeant,” Amy asked, “even though you hate the sound of yourself, and you don’t really know why you’re doing it?”
Jill looked up, startled. “Yes, I do. I say to her, ‘Nadia, move it.’ Or, ‘Let’s get cracking.’ I’ve been given this entire, terrible vocabulary.”
“Me too. What have we become?”
“Whenever really young women meet either of us they probably look at our lives and think to themselves that they never, ever want to have kids,” said Jill. “We’re like a cautionary tale. Why would they possibly want to give up their fun, erotic life of freedom for this bossy, scheduled thing?”
“Ah, fuck them, those hypothetical really young women,” said Amy. “They know nothing about anything.” They both laughed a little and then were briefly silent as they poked at the eggs on their shining plates.
Out in the world with your child, you were only occasionally complimented or rewarded. Amy remembered how once, years earlier, before Mason was even in preschool, it had rained for days, the city saturated and desolate, all the unworking mothers and young children and nannies forced indoors. She and Mason had been penned into the apartment and the carpeted playroom on the top floor of their building. One morning, desperate, Amy said, “You know what, kiddo? I am taking us to a museum,” even though at the time he was the kind of boy who would need to be chased through galleries and clattered after down fire stairs.
But there was a Magritte show there that day, and she loved Magritte. To her surprise Mason had stood and actually stared without moving at The Son of Man, the painting of the man with the green apple in front of his face. Fleetingly, insanely, she worried that Mason was autistic. But no, he was just interested, so she had started lightly explaining about Surrealism, and Mason had listened closely and asked questions. An old woman who stood nearby came closer and said to Amy, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but overhear you and your little boy. He is wonderful, and you are wonderful with him. What pleasure you must take in each other.” Then, the bonus: “You both look so happy.”
It had made Amy’s day. No, it had made her life. She had carried these remarks around all these years like an amulet. And now, this morning, standing in her bedroom and calling to her son across the length of the apartment, she tried to remember them all over again, for such moments were rare. She had no office environment in which everyone saw everything and gave commentary and backslaps. Instead, she and Mason were always off on their own, and except for the stray remarks of strangers or friends or even, once in a while, the pediatrician, Dr. Andrea Wishstein—“Mason, you were excellent with that strep test. Lots of kids practically break my wrist when I try to get a swab”—mostly they had to take pleasure in the moments that no one else would ever witness.
Amy quietly appreciated her child, not during the precocious moments, for those seemed prepackaged for anecdote and narcissistic gratification, but during the small, almost unnoticeable ones. She observed the way he suddenly stopped near a homeless man on the street and whispered forcefully to Amy, “We have to give him money, Mom. We have to.”
So Amy, who had become more and more inured to the tableaus of poverty and mental illness that appeared on the glittering streets of the city and who over time had given less to the homeless until essentially she gave no handouts at all but instead grimly walked on and just wrote a modest check each year, was uneasily made more human by her son. He made her give out money, person to person, and so she gave it. She had no idea whether there was something awful and knee-jerk reflexive in the act of stopping, giving a small amount, and then walking on, but she couldn’t think it through; with her son’s coaxing, she and Mason just gave out dollar bills to the men who sat smoking on the grate outside the newsstand by the subway, and no one saw. Their life together, which had its distinct rhythms and drama, was generally invisible to everyone else; sometimes she thought they were like performers in a flea circus between shows, doing their microscopic tricks only for each other.
“MASON!” Amy called now from her bedroom. “ARE YOU UP? YOUR CLOTHES ARE FOLDED OVER YOUR DESK CHAIR! PUT THEM ON!” There was a pause, a serene silence. “ARE YOU PUTTING THEM ON?”
Mason was certainly not dressed yet. He was probably still inert, his skin roasted warm from sleep, the sheets and his torso and his long feet all the same elevated temperature. “MASON, YOU HAD BETTER GET GOING THIS MINUTE!” Amy cried.
While his mother called to him and his father sat in his office and talked to corporate clients in Pittsburgh and gathered up receipts from his travel expenses, Mason slept on in his faraway room. Amy slipped a shirt over her head and pulled on some pants and went to wake him up in person. She walked out of the dark bedroom and down the hallway where the walls, tipped in shadow, held photographs of herself and Leo dazed and pink on their honeymoon. Beside them were pictures of Mason at various ages, and then there was a photo of Amy’s parents and one of Leo’s parents. Finally there was a photo of brown-haired, sweet-faced, average-looking Amy and tall, blonde, patrician Jill on a spa weekend three years earlier at a place called Wildwood Spur, which had had a last-minute Internet special, and so Leo had said sure, sure, you both should definitely go.
She had been so excited to get away with Jill; it would be like college again, they said. They hadn’t known that soon enough Jill would move out of the city and that they would no longer see each other a few times a week. When Jill finally moved, Amy felt the loss in a sickened way that she didn’t like to express, because at age forty it was commonly held that as long as you had your family beside you, all would be fine. A family was like a little frontier cabin tossed through the world, caught up in its storms and ravages; but if you all stayed inside together, you would be safe, and contented.
At night at the spa that weekend, in their separate double beds, the two women had lain on their backs and told each other significant details from their lives of long ago that they had somehow neglected to reveal before. Jill told her that once, as a teenager, she had come upon her depressed mother at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, sobbing, and had simply turned and walked out of the room without asking what was wrong or ever referring to it again. Amy said, “You can’t blame yourself. It was probably always chemical, but they just didn’t have the information back then.”
“I know. I just have this image of her. I can’t get rid of it; it’s always going to be in my brain.”
“Maybe it should be,” said Amy. “It was who she was. At least, it was part of it.”
“You would have really liked my mother,” Jill said finally. “I know she was fragile, but she was such a nice person.” Then she wiped at her eyes with her fingertips, and said, “Tell me your thing now.”
So Amy told her about how she’d once sat in the corner of a party when they were both freshmen at Penn, and a beautiful woman had come over to her, and they’d started talking. Somehow, the woman had ended up sitting on the arm of the chair, and a little while later, she’d leaned down and kissed Amy on the mouth, and Amy had kissed back. The woman was a lesbian who was androgynous and stylish in a man’s tuxedo shirt and studs, the sleeves rolled up to reveal long slender wrists, and her hair cut short in back and falling across her eyes in front, making her look a little like James Dean.
“You mean that girl who lived in French House?” Jill asked, astonished. “Aptly?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like it?”
“Well, yes,” Amy said. “It was exciting, actually.”
“I can’t believe you never told me this.”
“I guess I was confused by it then. I didn’t know that you could be excited by something you’d never desired before.”
“At least not consciously desired.”
“I don’t think I’m much of a lesbian,” said Amy. “But I did like the idea of trying on a life.”
“I’d like to do that too,” said Jill. “Just try on another life for a few days. Although I guess you could say that that’s what we’re doing now. And I could get used to it.”
But they both knew that this wasn’t really true; the siren song of their own lives already quietly urged them back. They had taken their BlackBerries with them up here to this small spa in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and both of them had received text and voice messages from husbands and children, asking rudimentary household questions and sending electronic bursts of love and need. The weekend was a relief, but it also began to seem a little long. They had sat at a table in the balsam-paneled dining room, with the mountains visible like a sketch through the windows and the din of other women’s voices all around them. Sparse leaves of salad were strewn across plates as though blown there accidentally. A couple of women at a table in the corner were on a juice fast, sitting stoically before a decanter of sea-green fluid.
“There are times,” said Jill from her bed that night, “when I feel as though Donald and Nadia are completely helpless. I know it’s mostly my fantasy, but I feel as if they can barely survive in my absence. That it’s like I’m leaving newborns.”
Amy had nodded. In the span of ten years, this was actually the first time that Leo and Mason had ever been alone together for an entire weekend. Whenever they were supposed to go off for a few hours without her, she always dutifully sent them with the things they needed. They had come to understand that whatever they required would just magically appear before them. So when they became thirsty on an outing to the park, they reached into the cooler she had given them and pulled out a bottle of lurid blue or orange sports drink she had placed there. If Mason skidded on the ground and opened a window of skin on a knee, Leo could ferret around in the room-temperature compartment of the cooler and dig out the Band-Aids and the tube of antibiotic ointment that Amy had provided. She would pack provisions for an entire brutal winter if she had to. Always, her husband and her son would find them and use them, and always they would expect to find them.
Now, in the apartment in the morning, the darkness of the hallway ran like a tributary into the living room, becoming a glazed pool of light at this early hour. The apartment was too expensive, but Amy took her cues from Leo, who attended to their finances in the tiny study, the place where her mother would sleep when she came to visit in the winter for her women’s conference. Leo often sat at the rudimentary desk that the catalogue called Sven, which housed all the bills and invoices in its pigeonholes. As long as Leo didn’t throw his hands up, saying, “We’re fucked,” then they could keep going on like this. Amy didn’t want to know all the specifics about their financial situation, or at least she preferred to clothe herself in a loose understanding of what they could and could not afford. The apartment was “a nightmare,” Leo sometimes said, and yet they managed. The spa weekend, however, had been “doable.” She often turned to him for such cryptic pronouncements and vague reassurances.
Once she started looking with any depth at their money, she became anxious and quickly backed away from her own curiosity. She knew this was childlike and irresponsible, but it had become a habit. Money was one of the topics that had been quietly worked out over time in their marriage, just the way their sexual life had been too. In the beginning, they had been commendably open with each other, listing all the people they’d ever slept with. “Give me their names, I’ll kill them one by one,” Leo had told her, and to Amy’s surprise this had pleased her. They said what they liked and did not like in bed. Humiliated but brave, he had admitted that he liked his nipples “you know, sucked a little,” for starters. “I cannot believe I just used the word ‘nipples’ and ‘sucked’ to describe myself,” he had then said, laughing with a honk of anxiety.
Leo Buckner was a big, blunt, thickset man, a commercial litigator with curling black hair and a slightly flattened, dazed face like a boxer. Right away in the beginning, after they met at the law firm, when they lay together after sex in the wet fluency of love and unalloyed joy, they sometimes wandered into rudimentary conversations about money: how much they each made and how much they hoped to make eventually. Neither came from a family with a great deal of money. Leo’s father had run a magazine stand in the lobby of an office building, and his mother had been a housewife. Though this was very different from Amy’s own childhood, spent with her sisters and their novelist mother and economics professor father, financially it wasn’t really that different at all. There had never been much money in evidence in the Lambs’ house, or at least what there had been was buried in plain sight, allowing the family to take annual trips to France, where they stayed in bad hotels and rented a Citroën that Henry Lamb, in a madras shirt, drove tensely along twisting mountain roads. The Lambs had been neither rich nor poor, and their money had quietly moved across their life.
But that was back during a reasonable time. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the cost of everything was high and the relative worth of everyone had become public information. Money, unlike in the past, always showed itself in full. Amy Lamb and Leo Buckner lived with their son in this huge, homely rental building with a high turnover rate on the east side of the city. The awning read “The Rivermere,” though their avenue was situated near no river. The names of her friends’ buildings—the ones whose owners or management companies had had the vanity or energy to name them—mostly made no sense, either. One friend lived in The Cardiff, another in The Chanticleer. The lobby of The Rivermere was a virtual wind tunnel, so that the elevators occasionally had to be pried open, and the apartments were marbled and bright, ringed by big square windows that looked out upon the expanse of the city. The top floor of the building held the playroom where, when Mason was younger, he used to waddle through the carpeted space that, no matter how many air fresheners had been slapped onto the walls, retained an ambient diaper stink. Mothers and nannies sat on the carpeted window ledges, bored, calm, flipping through magazines or children’s clothing catalogues from Vermont, or else lightly chatting and trying not to inhale too deeply.
When Amy and Leo had first moved in, the playroom had been a big draw. Of course, back then Amy had imagined in some deluded way that Mason would use that playroom forever. She’d pictured him as an eternal toddler, someone she could sit near and keep an eye on and occasionally take to a museum in the rain to see the Magrittes. She had not really understood that he would get older and tramp off into the world, and that the playroom would eventually go unused by him, taken over instead by a new generation of babies, who waddled and crawled and licked and grabbed and sat stunned in that sunlit, shit-tinged aerie.
New York City was an island unreachable by most people in America, and somehow even the taint of horror and fear that had fallen over it in 2001 had given it a dented, temporary quality that made it seem even more valuable, in the way that fragility always increases the price of a thing of beauty. They had rented their apartment in its bulky, unbeautiful fortress at the height of Leo’s flushness as a lawyer. The Rivermere was for young families moving rapidly forward; no one was expected to stay in these overpriced rented apartments for years and years, and yet Amy and Leo weren’t able to buy an apartment elsewhere and leave.
There were always alternatives to this kind of draining urban life. If you were determined to stay in the area, you could move to one of the other boroughs, as all the practical or adventurous people did, and you could live there decently. Early on, Amy knew couples who had nosed deep into neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The middle class extended its reach, reconfigured its range of territories. Narrow art galleries and cybercafés grew on patches of street beside check-cashing stores and rundown walk-in dentistry centers. Strollers abounded on craggy sidewalks in the steep shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Those neighborhoods were overrun with families now, and if the new residents were incidentally knocking out the low-income dwellers, they couldn’t really think too much about it; they would surely become squeamish, and then the whole plan would fall apart. The less game couples Amy knew went to nearby suburbs or to quaint and faraway towns with a single, narrow main street and one not-great restaurant that closed at eight, forcing everyone into their homes for the night, as though desperadoes roamed freely and there were townwide curfews.
You had to love the companionship of your family unambivalently in order to live up there, Amy thought. You had to be willing to stay put in those dark-wood-trimmed old-house rooms as night fell. But Amy and Leo would neither go to Brooklyn nor buy a house in an outlying town. Though it wasn’t prudent for them to stay in their apartment, they stayed anyway.
“We’re like the Jews in Berlin before the war,” Leo had said, and Amy told him the analogy was obnoxious, and that his great-aunt Talia, who had been in Dachau, would have been offended if she’d heard him. “I only mean that we refuse to see what’s happening,” he added. “We are demented and irrational.” But still they did not leave.
Over the years the steep increases in rent at The Rivermere were frightening. You had to live for the moment, Amy Lamb understood, treating even real estate as if it had an existential dimension. The rent battered and shook them; it sucked the money away from them each month as if it were stored in the wind tunnel of the lobby. Mason’s school tuition drained them too, and Amy still thought uneasily that he should have gone to public school, like the rest of the country’s children did. They had tried to get him into a public gifted program. (“It’s like winning the lottery, and we won, we won!” the father of an accepted child had cried, actually jumping up and down as he spoke.) But Mason had only scored in the ninety-seventh percentile, not the ninety-eighth, and so he had been knocked out of the running.
When Amy and Leo went to look at the local public elementary school, they and a hundred other parents had stood in the low-ceilinged cafeteria/gymnasium with its exposed pipes and boilers and flickering lights. There was no money for the arts. Their son would not paint or throw pots on a wheel or play an instrument. He would be artless—literally and figuratively. There were no sports to speak of, either, and the student-teacher ratio was discouraging.
“So, do you think we can do the private-school thing?” she had hesitantly asked Leo as they walked outside after the tour.
“I don’t know.” He sounded pinched and sour.
She wished they had liked the school more; it was integrated and democratic. Over the doorways you could read the quaint words that a hundred years ago had been cut into stone: “Girls’ Entrance,” and “Boys’ Entrance,” though now girls and boys poured in through either door, watched over by a tough-looking female guard with a nightstick. In theory the school was an enclosed utopia. But this was New York City, where life was impossible and dear and the schools were a splintered mess, except for the ones where the parents banded together and served as substitute teachers and librarians and held one long, perpetual bake sale to rescue a school from a slide into indigence.
“Can we at least figure it out?” Amy asked Leo.
“Now? Right now?”
“No, I don’t mean now, obviously. What are you so angry with me about?”
But he ignored her question, and on the corner of First Avenue in a light rain, with his shoulders slumped against the onslaught of the future, Leo pressed the calculator function on his BlackBerry and ran some numbers, then sighed in a dramatic manner and said yes, yes, he thought they could actually do it, at least for a while. “It’ll probably be a big mistake,” he warned. “And we may have to pull him out later, when it will be much harder.”
Leo made a fine income by most American professional standards, and yet as a salaried associate at a small, second-rate firm—not a partner, not a rainmaker—his earnings placed them at the crux of the city’s striving and diminishing middle class. The school that Mason eventually attended seemed almost a direct rebuke to the unhappiness of the morning that they had spent in that dark cafeteria. It was beautiful, orderly, all-boy. Close attention was paid by thoughtful teachers. But Amy and Leo were shocked when it came time to pay Mason’s tuition twice a year, and when the American Express bill appeared in the mail as thick as a long, torrid novel, its many pages detailing the folly of the previous month. They spent too much at every turn, writing checks and charging meals and purchases, throwing bills and hailstorms of coins at cab drivers and handymen and the tolerant Hispanic waiters at the Golden Horn. Here, they seemed to cry, take it all. Money was forced away from them in the wind tunnel, but then the wind eventually shifted so it blew the other way, bringing more money with it.
In his own bedroom in the apartment now, Mason slept on obliviously. Over his head, warplanes hung on fishing wire, and on his shelves were stacks of board games that were barely used. By now almost all children had made the transition into games played upon screens, though their parents and grandparents still stubbornly kept buying them the latest editions of Battleship and Stratego, trying to seduce them back toward the last embers of the pre-microchip world.
“Mason, honey,” Amy said in the softest voice, as if in penance for all the shouting. “It’s time to get up.”
She looked into his wide, beautiful face, at the slender nose and deer-brown hair. His eyes batted open and he said, thickly, “Five minutes?”
“No, sweetness, sorry,” Amy said. “I already gave them to you.”
“Oh.” He blinked a few times, then said, “Can you name all the U.S. presidents who were left-handed?”
“What? No, I can’t.”
“Try.”
“I can’t try. It’s not something you try.”
“James Garfield Herbert Hoover Harry Truman Gerald Ford Ronald Reagan George Bush the first one and Bill Clinton,” he said in a big release.
“Well. Well. That’s very good,” she said, and truly she thought it was, though it left her with nothing much to say in response. He sometimes just came at her like this with facts; to her they seemed random, but to him they were part of a beautiful system in which an array of presidents sashayed back and forth across his consciousness, grasping pens or quills in their left hands.
He sighed now and lifted himself from the bakery warmth and human smell that churned below his covers. She wanted to pull him back onto the bed and heave him into her lap, though he was ten years old and his legs were long and gangly, and it would have been approaching incest at this point if she had done that. But she longed for him, as well as for the version of herself that had been his mother when he was small. Remember when we saw the Magritte painting of the man with the green apple? Amy wanted to say now, and perhaps he would remember, and inexplicably both of them would begin to cry.
But Mason was finally out of bed, standing and urinating in the tiny slice of a bathroom connected to his bedroom, making a sound as loud as glass being struck with a hammer. He was awake and in no need of cuddling from his mother, and was already thinking about what awaited him at school. Someday, Amy thought with an astonishingly sharp sadness, her little boy—who told her all about the left-handed presidents and about Achilles with his undipped heel, and who until very recently had held her hand while walking along the street, and with whom she experienced fits of closeness that made life seem not just not pointless but pointed—would likely be sitting in an office behind a sealed window, looking out upon a city or an industrial park. Amy briefly remembered her own view from the window of her office at Kenley Shuber and how sometimes, in the afternoon, she would take a break and stand for a minute with her forehead and the palms of her hands against the glass.
Life in that office, at first, had been crisp and collegial. There was always more work being set before her, and always she could manage it, but eventually a low-grade familiarity set in that Amy tried to ignore, because when you really thought about it, so many elements of life were similar. The tasks at the law firm became at times interchangeable, and even the clients over lunch began to seem as if they could be siblings. The lawyers wore similar gray suits and silky ice-blue ties, or cream-colored tailored blazers. Someone became the “funny” one in the office, and someone else became the “irritable” one, and the firm took on aspects of a small and self-contained village. Amy became one of several female “nice” ones. She didn’t mind this role; it meant that everyone came to the door of her office and leaned against the frame and said, “What’s up, Amy?” or “We’re all going to Umbrella Sushi tonight,” or sat on the edge of her desk, wanting to reap her niceness personally.
Soon, when she and Leo fell in love, the job took on a new quality. She had seen big Leo Buckner in the corridors and at meetings, though the domains of their work rarely overlapped. He’d been there a year longer than she had and was a popular young lawyer, broad-bodied, dark, with an easygoing, sighing quality that appealed to everyone. Women were always flirting with him, practically climbing on him as if he were a genial, napping uncle.
Once Amy and Leo became involved, the other women backed politely away, as if in a formal gavotte. With an office romance, work had a shimmering, exciting aspect, and most days were punctuated by moments when she would see her curly-headed beloved in the corridor, and they would each remember what had happened the night before.
Then, finally, they were married, and there was the pleasure of being newlyweds at the firm. The work itself remained tolerable, even sometimes highly enjoyable. At night, eating take-out food in bed or watching TV together on the spineless futon in their starter apartment, they advised each other on work matters and deconstructed the idiosyncrasies and intentions of their colleagues. When Amy became pregnant, they agreed that she would leave the firm for an allowed twelve weeks and then return. It was raining on the day of her going-away party, and the sky outside the conference room was dark. This room had also been the scene of other going-away parties; one by one over the years, young lawyers were picked off either through opportunity or failure or having been sucked through the widening portal of motherhood.
“I’ll definitely be back in twelve weeks,” Amy had said in her brief, embarrassed goodbye remarks. “So nobody take my coffee mug.”
But twelve weeks proved to be nothing, and when the time was up, it was as though an alarm had suddenly gone off, sending electronic doves cooing, chickens squawking, and horses galloping—the entire rotation of animals in a clamor as if there were a fire in a barn—and yet she could just not get up. She could not leave the apartment, that crazyland of strewn burp rags and unironed miniature outfits and gifts of rattles and soft pillow-books that still lay with the detritus of their wrapping paper all around them. The garbage overflowed, the baby confused day with night, and anyone in her right mind would have wanted to run from that place and return to the sharp corners and fragrant tang of the office climate, with its industrial carpet and stuttering fluorescent lights that forced you awake in the morning like a flask of ammonia passed under the nose.
But a new mother was not in her right mind. Something overcame her, and her entire purpose was to save that baby, as though she were a superhero flying with arms outstretched through the metropolitan sky. Even a quick trip to the Korean market for yogurt and juice was interminable, and Amy ran the three short blocks back to The Rivermere. She could not leave Mason yet; she loved him too much for that. But neither could she turn him over to some woman from Jamaica or Guyana or Mount Olympus. She could not turn him over to the kindest, softest woman in the world; even a gigantic, gelatinous, floating human breast would not be good enough. She was the only one who could rescue him; their marrow matched, and everyone else’s was imperfect. She was the sole donor, and he drank straight from her tap. The hush of the office and the seduction of all the briefs and the clients and the conferences were worth nothing to her now.
Amy had observed the way lawyers treated other lawyers who had recently returned from maternity leave: They didn’t hide their impatience or their occasional distaste. She’d seen a jangled new mother on the phone with a pediatrician right before a meeting, whispering tightly into the receiver, “Last night his fever was 100.1, and before I left for work this morning it was down to 99.9, but our sitter just told me it’s back up again and that he’s crying a lot….” The other people in the room glanced at their watches, and someone came to the doorway and tried to look casual, smiling in a friendly manner, then mouthed, “Anytime you’re ready.”
Amy couldn’t become like these women yet. A law firm or a corporation could never give you what your baby did; it didn’t need you or love you. It could never flatter you enough. It didn’t say Amy, you are the one. You were just a tiny cog, and could a cog ever feel gratified? Was a cog ever proud? You were expected to devote your entire self to your job, coming home so late in the evening that you could get only five minutes with your baby, as if he were an overscheduled CEO. If you were going to miss so much of that tender baby-time, then shouldn’t it be for a job that was extraordinary? How, she thought, could you possibly choose a corporate law firm or a company’s soullessness, or even choose its bland products or components—its clients or textiles or pharmaceuticals or automobile air bags—over your baby’s hopeful, open soul? How could you choose any of this over the place on his head where the bones had not yet fully joined or over his puffed little mouth with the outline as beautiful as calligraphy?
“Please,” she said to Leo, “isn’t there a way I can put it off? Just until the baby is big?”
“You could go part-time,” he said.
“That never works. They call it part-time, but that just means it’s nine to six, five days a week, for sixty percent of your salary, instead of having to be available twenty-four hours a day. And very few people with real influence work part-time.”
So Leo sat down in the study at the Sven desk they’d put together so poorly that the drawers opened at awkward angles. He stayed in the light of the gooseneck lamp for a long time, and finally he walked back out into the living room, where Amy now sat with Mason fastened onto her nipple, as always. It was midnight. She looked up in anticipation, and Leo, in a Rutgers T-shirt and boxers, unshaven and unwashed, said, “Yeah, all right, for a while longer, if they’re okay with extending your leave.”
“Really? Oh, great. I just wasn’t ready to think about any of that. You are God.”
“Yes, that’s right. I am God.”
So slowly the baby gifts got put away, and several thank-you notes actually got written, and there were even some evenings when Amy and Leo watched an entire video and cooked a roast chicken and felt the stirrings of shoots of young, dear, new-family happiness bumping up through soil. She loved the small-animal care that an infant required. Nursing became easier, a perfect example of supply and demand; her economist father would approve. Her baby came to life, became more of a person, and there were times when she could not wait for him to wake up from a nap, because she longed to play with him. Desperation was replaced more frequently by pleasure, and Amy knew that staying home with a baby was her right, and she did not judge it or wonder if it had been a mistake. They didn’t discuss exactly when she would return to Kenley Shuber, though once in a while Leo told her that the partners were making noises of unhappiness about her absence or that someone had said, “Too bad Amy L. wasn’t here for that whole business with the Genzler estate.”
Then it became clear that she would not return at all. Her mother was upset, and even had Amy’s sister Naomi call from Edmonton, Alberta, to try to coax Amy into becoming a lawyer for the international slow-food movement. “You know, Jonathan and I have found a good life for ourselves in slow food,” Naomi had said, as though reading from a script that Antonia had prepared for her.
When Amy officially left the firm, her position in trusts and estates was immediately filled by a young, unmarried woman who also happened to be a marathon runner. Leo’s stories from Kenley Shuber became like folktales, and the landscape in which they took place seemed outdated, as though they were set in Constantinople or Old Bavaria. Amy began to care less about her former life and the work she had done. All her T&E expertise became irrelevant to her. She continued to stay home, and in a kind of postnatal Zeno’s paradox, the baby grew bigger and bigger without actually achieving bigness.
It had been ten years now since she had stopped working, and for a few of those years she and Leo had had occasional, circular conversations about the possibility of Amy going to another law firm. It would be tough, she knew. Work wasn’t like a trolley; you couldn’t just jump on and off. Lawyers did their own word processing now, and she would have to learn how. Also, the state bar had a continuing-education requirement that needed to be satisfied every few years. The longer she was away, the more difficult it seemed to go back. She periodically thought about work, imagining a new warren of offices and seeing herself wandering past cubicles and kitchenette or standing motionless before a bank of elevators. Once, early on, Amy had gone for an interview for a job at a huge firm, and at first it seemed to go well, but at one point the head of personnel began to ask her a series of questions that involved material she hadn’t thought of for years. She took a long time to answer; she became quiet and increasingly inarticulate, so that he finally asked her, gently, “Everything okay?”
“Yes, fine.”
“You seem a little uncomfortable with these questions.”
“Oh, no, not at all.”
“Great, just checking.” He looked at his notes, then said, “I assume you’re familiar with Juxtapose BriefScan, right? So I should begin with—”
“Excuse me?”
“Juxtapose BriefScan.”
It was worse when he repeated it; the syllables still didn’t form into words that made any sense. “I’m afraid I don’t know what that is,” Amy said. Then, desperately, laughing a little, “It sounds like a tongue twister.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Does it? I never thought of that. Well, it’s the name of the legal software we use now.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with it. I’ve been sort of removed from everything.”
The rest of the interview remained awkward, flat, and she left with her face baked and pink. She couldn’t tell Leo about her shame; she didn’t want to address it directly, and when she picked up Mason at Jill’s apartment, where she’d dropped him off for the interview, she took him home and sat in his bedroom for a very long time, reading a marathon of picture books aloud to him, as if in a children’s version of Bloomsday. Mason was warm and heavy in her arms, smelling of watermelon shampoo. Being there in that little circle with him was as gratifying as it would ever get, and fuck anyone who said otherwise. Fuck the law job she no longer had; it wasn’t intellectually rich or all that much fun. It wasn’t debate team. Fuck T&E. Fuck the office rituals and the arcana of legal language and saying “Good morning” to dozens of people each day and having to do Secret Santa each year. Fuck Juxtapose BriefScan.
Not working, she and her friends sometimes reminded one another, did not mean that you did nothing. There was always some complex skein of projects to do, but lately Amy had been restless and had been thinking of getting a steady volunteer job. Maybe she would work for a literacy program; she thought she’d probably enjoy teaching adults to read. She’d have to ask her friend Roberta Sokolov about this, for Roberta was the one among their circle who was propelled by activism. Roberta lived in a walk-up building with her husband and kids, and her son was on financial aid at the school. Essentially, she was lower on the food chain than Amy, and the two of them joked about their descending status, and how their other friends had far more money than they did. Yet Roberta made time each week to go to meetings about reproductive rights or work a phone bank for progressive causes, and she “did what she could,” a phrase that no one could really question, because only you knew how much you were able to do.
It seemed, finally, that they all needed to stay in motion. A few years earlier, during a family visit to Canada, Amy’s social-worker sister, Jennifer, had talked about how she sometimes asked a new client, “So, what kinds of plans do you have for yourself?” Often the clients were old or depressed, or both, but sometimes their eyes went from dead to sharp upon being asked that question, and they came out with startling soliloquies having to do with their own desires and sense of mortality. Everyone wanted forward motion; everyone wanted to be part of something that moved.
Today, though, Amy Lamb was only involved in the small and persistent tasks that awaited her. Buy asparagus, she remembered, picturing the erotized shoots bundled together in red rubber bands, embedded in crushed ice at the gourmet market Camarata & Bello, where she would soon be heading. Get Pap smear. And, as the subject-heading of the e-mail from the school had just reminded her, Show up for safety walk.
Safety walk at the Auburn Day School was a task that Amy did once a year, but today the idea of it made her surprisingly anxious. Her safety partner was to be Penny Ramsey, a woman whom Amy and her friends in the grade had been half glum about since all their sons were in the pre-K program at the school. The mothers had rarely spoken to Penny Ramsey, except in the most basic ways at parent get-togethers. But what Amy had gathered about this mother was enough to depress her a little. She was so accomplished and serene. Every part of Penny Ramsey’s life managed to function in cooperation with every other part. She was tiny, golden-headed, pretty, intellectually rigorous; wife to an aggressive young hedge-fund manager and mother to an extroverted, confident son and two sylphlike teenaged daughters.
Most impressively, Penny Ramsey worked in a full-time, real and powerful way, not in one of those vague “consulting” jobs some women held, where the hours were flexible to the point of non-existence. There were a few other intellectual mothers in the grade who worked in interesting fields, but you could usually see evidence of the strain of their complicated lives and feel the breath of time upon them. They had folders clutched in one hand and a child’s science project involving a potato and a battery in the other; they rarely lingered; and they never sat in a booth at the Golden Horn before going off to work.
The entire world, of course, was studded with competent, bright women who held difficult and responsible jobs: physicians, human rights advocates, presidents of universities. They were referred to casually in the news every day, and Amy sometimes wished that there were an asterisk beside their names and that at the bottom of the page you could read the backstory: how this woman had come to make this all happen. Whether she had been struck by a thunderbolt of purpose. Where motherhood had appeared in the sequence, if it had appeared at all. Where ambivalence lay. Whether her husband—if he existed—was uncommonly wifely, staying on top of the small and domestic and social and emotional and aesthetic details of the life they shared, so that the powerful, Hydra-headed wife would not have to manage them alone.
One of the mothers in the grade, Isabelle Gordon, was a theoretical physicist with a particular interest in string theory, and she looked not tormented and overcome but happy. Amy had seen her recently balancing a tray of sliding, homemade cupcakes for her son Ty’s birthday. It was true that the cupcakes bore smears of oddly gray frosting that seemed like the outcome of a radical FDA experiment in food coloring, but so what? There was Ty, dancing around his mother excitedly as she carried the tray into the building. “Cheer up, Ty,” Isabelle had joked with him. “You seem a little down. It’s your birthday. Have you totally forgotten?” Isabelle Gordon had a weird, thick braid down her back but also a surprising propensity toward good and stylish Italian shoes. She wasn’t any one thing. She couldn’t be turned into a cliché about the absentminded scientist or the nerd-mother. She was nice and an original; she knew the other mothers’ names, and she had agreed to come into Mr. Bregman’s science class this year to talk to the boys about string theory.
Amy and her friends were impressed as well as puzzled by Isabelle Gordon. They had no idea of how she managed her life, and they could not apply her techniques to themselves. All of them had started off with similarly good educations and linear desires. Their minds were fast, but Isabelle Gordon’s mind roared through the heavens. No one had any idea of who she really was. They knew that she loved her son and that she loved string theory. The two sides of her life did not have to do battle like fiery forces. She lay in bed with multiple dimensions heaving before her, and maybe her son floated past in one of them, contentedly eating a cupcake with frosting the color of newsprint.
But Penny Ramsey, Amy’s safety partner, was in a different category. Even with her petite feminine style and overlay of maternal patina, she possessed power in the hard-shelled, armed male world.
She had never relinquished this for a single second but had held tight over the years. She was interesting but not odd; she was an advertisement for work and motherhood and glamour and a refusal to compromise. All of which made Amy think, this morning, how much she didn’t look forward to the afternoon’s safety walk, when she would have to spend two hours patrolling the streets with her.
“Honey, you’d better get cracking,” Amy told her son, who lingered, drowsing and swaying, in the bathroom. So Mason came in and began to dress, and she left the room to give him privacy, meeting him in the kitchen moments later, where he sat on a chair in a heap.
“Did you hand in that form I signed about the recycling plant?” she asked.
“Why do we have to go to a recycling plant?”
“It should be interesting.”
“You don’t really think that.”
“No,” she conceded. “I guess not.” They sat quietly for a moment. “Anything happening at school today?” she asked.
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
He was an intelligent and focused and sometimes thoughtful boy, but he rarely told her much that went on at school, unless it was something that had particularly upset or excited him. For all she knew, the boys wore Mardi Gras masks and fornicated with the teachers. But while nothing momentous usually happened to Amy during the course of a day, she could have spoken a monologue about all the quotidian details that filled her hours, if anyone wanted her to.
“Mason, do you ever wonder about what I do when you’re in school?” she suddenly asked him as he bent over his waffle.
He looked at her, confused. “Is this a trick?”
“No. No trick.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Stuff, I guess. Different things.”
He looked decidedly uninterested in the question, and she knew, from his answer, that she was a mystery to her child and perhaps to her husband—an unmysterious mystery—as perhaps many women were, everywhere.
BIP. BOOP. BEEP, went the alarms around the city and in the disparate suburbs and towns across the breadth of the entire country. COO COO COO COOOOO. AND LET’S CHECK ON THE WEATHER—They continued to rouse the sleeping women into a sometimes stinging memory of who they were and what, in the middle of their lives, they’d become.
“You’ve got your Vocab Ventures workbook, bud?” Amy asked Mason now as they walked toward the door of the apartment. More than once each week they turned back at this juncture, searching for some forgotten item of his. Amy was aggravated by Mason’s forgetfulness, but he was a boy, and some of her friends said that their sons were exactly like this.
“Thank God we’re here,” Karen Yip, the mother of twin sons, had said recently when they were all discussing the inefficiency of boys over breakfast at the Golden Horn. “If we weren’t, they’d be found dead in an alley.”
“Yes, without their homework,” another mother had added.
Today Mason had the Vocab Ventures workbook but had left his clarinet behind. He went and searched, and came up empty-handed. “Can’t find it,” he said. “So Mr. Livio will mark me unprepared. It’s not a big deal, Mom.”
“What kind of an attitude is that? Find it, please. Now.” Her own words struck her as hateful. She was irritable lately, as though it were his fault that she felt a little aimless. “Go on, honey,” she added.
Mason poked around, then suddenly he remembered something, and he dug into his backpack and retrieved the electronic object-finder that had been programmed for moments such as this one. He punched in a few numbers, and then they waited. A small voice began to speak elsewhere in the apartment, and Mason and Amy followed the muffled sound until they were standing in the doorway of his bedroom, where an android voice was repeatedly intoning Your-cla-ri-net-is-o-ver-here from the dark cavern beneath the bed. Technology had rescued him yet again, as it always would.
While her son gathered his things together, Amy walked to the window and hauled up the shade, so that the dim morning light became yellow, white, optimistic, spreading. She and Mason headed into the hall and rang for the elevator. When it arrived, the doors opened to reveal two women dressed for work, both in suits. “Morning,” one said.
“Morning,” said Amy.
They smelled of shampoo and a light creeping of scent, and they both seemed highly alert. Stepping into the elevator with Mason, Amy felt as though she must seem to them like a rumpled bed, or a sweet old farm animal. She endured the ride with her eyes closed. Down in the large lobby there was a small crowd standing around the doorman’s counter. On duty was Hector, a slender young man whose peaked hat was too big for his head, giving him the appearance of a child playing policeman. Today he was almost febrilely excited as he spoke to the various female residents who stood by him. The working women from the elevator glanced over only briefly but kept walking.
“…and by the time the paramedics got here he had already passed,” Hector was saying.
“It’s so shocking,” said a young mother whom Amy had frequently seen in the elevator, her young daughters twining around her legs. “He was what, late thirties?”
“Thirty-eight. Worked in equities,” said a mother from the ninth floor.
Amy was drawn to the counter too, wanting to feed herself with the awful information she already understood. A young husband on the fourteenth floor in the H line had died of a heart attack in the night. Amy heard in detail about the paramedics and the gurney, the oxygen mask, the repeated, violent attempts at CPR, the wife and children who in the end could do nothing for the dying man except cry. “Daddy, Daddy, take my good-luck owl-pellet key chain!” the five-year-old son had shouted, hysterical.
But it seemed that there was a postscript to the story. One of the women was saying something about the new widow in 14H and how she wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in the apartment now. “She hasn’t held a job in years,” the woman said. “There’s no way she could carry this rent herself. I predict that pretty soon they’ll have to move out.”
“Poor thing,” said one of the other women. “And those little kids too.”
“I was right there when it happened,” said Hector, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I saw it all. His lips,” he whispered, as if revealing inside information, “were the color of blueberries.”
Amy had only an indistinct idea of the identity of the dead young husband in 14H. She thought she could envision a round late-thirties face with thin, fair hair, and a slight slope of paunch beneath a white banker’s shirt, but families came and went in this building, revolving through the door. Here, in this monolith, you usually got to see other tenants’ apartments only on Halloween, when you stood hovering behind your child, peering with prurient interest through an open door into dim rooms with unfamiliar smells and the dancing light of a too-big plasma-screen TV, trying to formulate a sense of how other people lived.
Now the husband in his white shirt and loosened tie, who had maybe stood in his doorway last Halloween and held out a ceramic bowl, letting Yoda-masked Mason grab Kit Kats in both fists, was dead. His wife and two young children would have to move soon, and their life would change its shape and shade as if it were another ephemeral image on a plasma screen. The apartment would be repainted and given a new dishwasher and a new obsidian slab for a kitchen counter, then rented to some other young family who thought they could probably afford it, and whose life would begin here, and continue here at least for a while.
“We’ll be late,” Mason said now, lightly pulling Amy from the brace of doomy women around the doorman’s station, where she was poised, her eyes suddenly sprung with tears. She thought of that husband, whom she didn’t know, and then she thought, self-indulgently, of Leo and herself, and she imagined everything ruined, lost.
“Sorry,” Amy said. “I’m coming.”
Mason looked at her with curiosity. “Mom. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“So what happened?” he asked as they pushed through the revolving door.
“Oh, someone died, honey.”
They stood on the sidewalk and Mason grew serious. “Did you know that someone always dies? Every second? There. Somewhere in the world, someone else just died.”
“Yes, but this was right here,” said Amy. “Last night, a man died on the fourteenth floor. It’s very sad.”
“What was wrong with him?”
Amy paused. “He was old,” she finally said.
Outside now, the morning was startling in its clarity and temperament, a relief from the lobby, with its news of sudden death in the night. A handyman hosed down the sidewalk, the water running into the gutter and into the patches of earth by the curb with their rawboned urban trees. The air around the entrance of The Rivermere had a root-cellar funk about it. Every perfect fall day always forced you to think of that other perfect day when the city had been struck. But today Amy also thought about how this was a time in life when she was meant to be content. Her body remained slender, and her day was not yet spoken for. She had a close little family and a best friend whom she loved. The war in Iraq kept on going while really going nowhere, infusing everyone with helplessness, and there was still the real possibility of an act of terrorism, but people always said you couldn’t stay cowering inside your apartment. Instead, they insisted, you had to “live your life,” because it was all that any of us could do.
The other women streamed through the revolving door. In various parts of the city and in surrounding towns off the highways came the rest of them. Soon they would be depositing their children at the mouths of schools and kissing their heads and watching them disappear inside, and then the women would be free. They could have all the covered malls and plazas and fields of the suburbs, and all the buildings and shops and museums of the city if they wanted, and all the open air as well. The day waited for them with its bounty and its freedom, which their husbands almost never had anymore and swore they didn’t even want. How it had ended up like this, no one really knew. This wasn’t supposed to have happened.
But on a day as beautiful as this one, the sensations of despair and regret were mostly obscured by pleasure. All around the country, the women opened their front doors and stepped outside to take what was theirs.