by Meg Wolitzer
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 y
ou.”
“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.