by Meg Wolitzer
“It’s okay,” Amy said lightly, and she turned over on her side, with a book opened before her like a prop. “No big deal.” She and Leo lay there like pieces of dry kindling in a tinderbox.
Penny Ramsey, she thought, had found a solution to the waning of love. Penny climbed the stairs of the kind of building that she would otherwise never enter, and undressed in a strange room. The British framer palmed and rubbed her breasts and held her to him, length to length, and his penis rose against her in happiness. How could someone like Greg Ramsey expect his wife not to take a lover? How could he ignore her longings for gentleness and empathy and aestheticism and humility, and instead strut around with his little Hong Kong–tailored suits and his squash racquet and the dull sheen of his unsavory money, and actually think it would be acceptable to her? Really, what was he thinking?
The story of anyone’s love affair was exciting and easy to listen to; it cost you nothing to hear about, or think about. You weren’t at risk of exposure yourself but could luxuriate in the simple, distant idea of it, which Amy did now as she lay on her side, facing away from her uninterested husband. She was soothed and engaged by the image of Penny and Ian. Still, she wished that Leo, good Leo—so much better than the apparently piggish Greg Ramsey—would put a hand on her shoulder and pull her back as if rescuing her, but he couldn’t know that this was being asked of him.
Without turning and looking now, she knew that Leo bore the expression of a faraway husband. But even so, she willed him to reach around her—not Vishnu but just a two-armed, desiring man—and neatly peel away the thin skin of her undershirt and do one of the things to her that he had been doing for so long that the pattern had been thoroughly established. He did nothing; his hands didn’t try to touch her, and she stayed facing away from him.
Deep into the soup of their long marriage it seemed to her that she was entitled to use Leo sexually once in a while. Married sex was strangely shape-shifting, and they gratified each other as circumstances required. At times it was the equivalent of parallel play. There were sudden, unexpected bursts of excitement punctuating long, fallow weeks during which she and Leo were like chaste roommates at a Benedictine college. Amy could pepper her face with benzoyl peroxide during sudden hailstorms of middle-aged, hormone-triggered acne, and Leo could feast on Thai take-out noodle dishes in a slick of hot red oil that fired and furred his breath, and neither of them cared all that much. Any moment together just represented one small and possibly poignant or ordinary moment in the long and varied story line of their marriage.
Leo kissed her shoulder, and the audible pock of his lips on her skin became his closing word of the night. It did not occur to him to think that sex might provide her with reassurance. He’d been sympathetic that day when she’d called him at work, first in the morning to tell him, shakily, about the young husband in the building dropping dead and then, later in the day, in near-tears, to tell him about what had happened to Dustin Kavanaugh and how it had partly been her fault because she’d been obliviously chatting with Penny at the time.
She had not told him about Ian Janeway; she’d promised Penny she wouldn’t. It used to be that Amy and Leo told each other all things, but now, in her awareness that he didn’t listen attentively to much of what she said about herself—and that he would probably need Ritalin to do it—she felt uneasily within her rights. The idea that her day could contain small mysteries was fine with him, for these tended to be limited to the home and the school and the coffee shop, none of which were places he usually wanted to know too much about. That was her territory; he knew she’d do what had to be done there.
“Good night,” she said in a small voice to her husband in the dark.
So he stayed in his territory and she in hers. His was filled with corridors, and invoices, and phone lines that sprang to life, and the wet slurp of the copy machine, and a continual cycle of meetings with other lawyers in a room where the lighting was the color of grain, falling in circles on a table that was the color of grain too, so you soon felt as if you’d dropped into a field of wheat where you would lie immobilized for years. Her territory was populated by thoughts of the husband in 14H, whose time on earth was up, and a sexually appealing English framer, and a few idling, good-hearted, occasionally self-doubting mothers, as well as an accomplished, ambitious one who apparently knew the secrets of the world, and was about to reveal them.
Chapter FOUR
London, 1981
THE LUNCHES were always heavy, starting in soup and ending in trifle, and it was no surprise that as soon as she shook hands goodbye on the famous doorstep and had her photograph taken with whichever dignitary had been to lunch that day, she would need a few minutes alone in her office in her oxblood chair, supposedly “going over documents”—but actually, as her personal assistant, Lesley Janeway, knew, just closing her eyes and letting her head drop forward like a big doll with a broken neck.
Sometimes, when Lesley knocked quietly and received no answer, she would let herself into the office and see this display. Once when it happened, Mrs. Thatcher’s head flew back against the chair, and she cried out, “What!” as though her new, young, fair, freckled assistant had disturbed her during the delicate negotiations of a trade agreement.
People always approached Lesley Janeway to inquire about how the prime minister, “as a woman”—for that was the phrase they always used—had made it to the pinnacle of British politics, while many women apparently didn’t even grasp the raw basics and had no interest outside of the occasional carefully worded letter fired off to their MP about a dangerous crossing on their corner: “…and as a concerned mother and a faithful constituent, I hope you will look into this problem promptly. Yours, (Mrs.) Reginald Woodly.”
But Lesley Janeway knew that her employer felt that if other women wanted to enter the field, fine; if they didn’t, well, that was probably fine too. Mrs. Thatcher’s womanhood wasn’t an impediment, and whenever those British women’s groups tried to draft her to speak at their banquets, Lesley knew enough to rebuff them about half the time. Once, Mrs. Thatcher sent a letter to a group saying she wanted “lots more women coming forward,” but another time she said she owed “nothing to women’s lib.”
Lesley Janeway adored her. She could not imagine another employer, man or woman, who was as intelligent and uncompromising. Lesley’s mum had been badly treated by Lesley’s dad: He used to beat her, and one time he smacked her across the mouth and chipped two teeth. This had always enraged Lesley, who had managed to escape the council estate early and become a civil servant, ending up with a series of plum jobs at Whitehall, culminating in this one. Mrs. Thatcher seemed to like her too; she tolerated no stupidity from anyone, so Lesley tried never to give her any. She saw Mrs. Thatcher as a kind of lioness, sitting upright at her desk and softly roaring.
When Lesley got married someday, as she hoped to do, she wanted a marriage like the Thatchers’. Mr. Thatcher seemed to adore his wife, and Lesley imagined that he lay in bed with her at night and helped her strategize internationally. His own work was important, of course—on a smaller scale but of immense value. Lesley assumed that he liked the “international stage,” even if only at night, dressed in pajamas in their large bed. He would be protective of his wife, as anyone would want their husband to be, though no one ever thought she needed protecting. Oh, but she did, Lesley knew. In fact, there was a kind of fragility to Mrs. Thatcher; it could be seen in those moments when Lesley caught her napping or, once, when Mrs. Thatcher had had a touch of flu and needed her to pop down and get her some Beechams powder. Lesley wondered whether the PM cried sometimes in frustration when she was alone with her husband. She could picture Denis Thatcher holding his wife carefully in his arms. Her sprayed hair would be hard yet crushable; if he held her too tightly against him, her hair would probably make a crunching sound, like snow underfoot.
She was tough but fair, and she never wavered. She knew she had been right twenty years earlier when, as a member of the House
of Commons, she had made a hard decision about birching. Why, Lesley wondered, was it so wrong of teachers to want to strike their unruly students’ bottoms in the traditional way? The empire hadn’t collapsed, and neither had the world. Mrs. Thatcher, herself the mother of a somewhat willful son, had said in interviews that she knew she was right about the birching decision, just as she knew she was right about the other decisions she made much later when she became PM. It was essential to her constituents that she show her toughness and that she not become sentimental.
The PM loathed sentimentality, and so did Lesley Janeway. They really had a lot in common, despite the difference in their stations and ages. Perhaps one day Mrs. Thatcher would turn to Lesley with her knowing eyes and say, “Why don’t you tell me about yourself.” But most likely she would never do that; she was often snappish with her assistant, which was understandable, for she was so busy. She sometimes called out, “Lesley, I need you right now!” or “Where is that report?” and her voice was as irritable and tough as anyone’s. You had to admire her for her refusal to accept second-rate behavior. Sometimes Lesley just wasn’t good enough at her job, and Mrs. Thatcher was right to be angry.
At first, upon hearing that a woman would lead the nation, some people had been bitter and biased. What they didn’t understand was that Mrs. Thatcher wouldn’t overturn tradition; she was a receptacle for tradition: Couldn’t they see that? No, all they could see was the fact that she wasn’t one of them.
But actually, Lesley Janeway thought, she was one of them. She pictured the PM back in her early days, just out of university, at dinner in someone’s flat. When the meal was through the women gathered in the kitchen, pitching in to wipe down plates, while the men stayed in the living room, smoking pipes and cigars. The women talked about a recipe for a new dish made with cold meats and salad cream while the men, in their halos of smoke, talked about politics and war and the small group of world leaders who mattered, casually dropping names as though they knew them personally.
Some of the men would go on to work at Whitehall. Mrs. Thatcher—Maggie—with a dish in her hand but drifting toward the living room and the scent of the smoke, would lead them all, and they would have had a laugh then to imagine that this could ever be the case. She would slowly prepare herself for the shift from kitchen to living room, from fragrant sink suds to fragrant smoke fumes. She would do it without complaining too much or constantly saying the world was “unfair” to women.
No one in skirts could get anywhere in today’s society without spine. You had to speak with hard, unfeminine edges and in carefully constructed paragraphs, and if your listeners’ interest began to flag, then you had to do something about it, perhaps metaphorically birching the lot of them. What would it mean if a woman made it all the way to the top of everything and then showed her soft side? Everyone would pile on her, and she would be drummed out of 10 Downing Street and never allowed back in.
But here she was, still inside. She had made it all the way here, to this huge desk and this huge leather chair, and this position of world influence, having just finished eating a traditional Yorkshire pudding for lunch with two representatives from Ghana. She was in no particular hurry now.
Lesley Janeway knocked on the door of the office, but there was no answer. She entered the room softly, and she waited.
Chapter FIVE
RISE, SORROW, ’neath the saffron sister tree,” the girl sang in a strange, minor key. Deep inside the house, with its various levels and echoing surfaces that gave off the forlorn quality that was often a side effect of newness, she examined the constellations lining her ceiling and sang to herself a song that was both melancholy and beautiful. Where she had learned it, her mother had no idea. Her daughter was a mystery to her and always had been.
The mother, Jill Hamlin, walking up the wide carpeted stairs toward her own bedroom, heard the singing and stopped in the hallway to listen. No one was really used to the house yet, and the little girl in particular seemed agitated at night—not that she’d been a solid sleeper back in the city, either. Jill paused at the top, then walked into her daughter’s bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, under the shaped spray of luminescent stars that Donald had glued there. “I heard you singing,” she said. “What’s going on in here, honey? You shouldn’t still be up.”
“I can’t sleep, Mom.”
“Anything on your mind?”
“No.”
She always said no when asked this question, and it was a slightly unsettling answer, making Jill worry that nothing much was on her mind as she lay on her back in this ideal suburban-girl’s bedroom, singing oddly and looking up at the constellations. In all likelihood she had no idea they were constellations but just saw them as green points of light that her father had affixed there to entertain her. The question that Jill frequently asked herself was: What did her daughter know?
The only sure answers seemed to be: The alphabet, in fits and starts. The names of colors, at least the main ones. Right hand versus left, from time to time.
The little girl’s knowledge was spotty and intermittent, which distinguished her from all the other children who cried out, “I’m brachiosaurus! My name means ‘arm lizard’!” as they galloped past their parents on the playground, or even the younger ones who pointed to stop signs while pinioned into car seats or strollers, observing drolly, “Octagon.”
Each time these children made another pronouncement, some delicate part of Jill was crushed a little bit more. She had understood early on that she was only at the very beginning of what might prove to be a long sequence of slights and insults. She would bravely fend off each one over time, her hands held up to her face against the battering. Her daughter, though, was oblivious of her own failings, but on the day when other people began to point them out to her, Jill’s heartbreak would be complete.
“Well, you should go to bed now,” Jill said needlessly, because her daughter was already in bed and what more was there for her to do, knock herself unconscious with one of the heavy china dolls that sat on her window seat? Apparently she had inherited Jill’s own insomnia. Maybe not inherited it, exactly, but absorbed it through the shared, circulating air. Jill stood up in the dim room and moved to the door.
“Good night, Mom.”
“Good night now. Love you lots.” And then that was it; Jill Hamlin left her little girl alone and awake, then walked silently across the pale carpet that covered so much surface area of this house, the way sand covers desert, or is desert. Suburban houses were inextricable from their carpeting; part of the point of living here seemed to have to do with the softness beneath your feet, both inside and out on your lawn, all of it replacing unforgiving wood and pavement and jackhammered asphalt. She wondered how frequently her daughter thought about their life back in the city. Many experiences seemed to pour through her without her reflecting on them.
They had been living in the house in Holly Hills for only a few months, but it had been over four years now since they had brought her home at age twenty-three months from the Tuva Infant Custodial Centre, an orphanage situated in southern Siberia. You were supposed to want to “inhale” your baby all the time; in those first few months, Jill did not. She could not tell anyone her feelings, not even Amy Lamb. She told Amy everything else, including, recently, how much she and Donald had made on the sale of their apartment, and about her long-ago grief over her mother’s suicide, and now about the current of loneliness that ran through this big, modern house, but she had never told Amy about the heart fashioned of ice that pounded inside her. It was mostly shame that kept her from saying anything, but lately, too, the move had changed the pace and flow of the friendship. Jill and Amy couldn’t just pop out and see each other, meeting for a quick coffee, or join up to go to a movie at noon, sitting among the other women and the old people. Even in their conversations on the phone recently, it seemed that all Amy wanted to talk about was Penny Ramsey.
“You’d like her a lot, actually,” Amy had said.
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br /> “Great,” Jill said mildly, not having any idea whether this was true, for Penny Ramsey wasn’t really a person to her but remained simply an idea that had been mentioned over the years by the other women: the mother at their sons’ school who slid past you in her perfection and achievement, making you look at yourself in dismay and say, Oh well. She had been pointed out to Jill once or twice; Amy or Roberta would say, “That’s the one we told you about.” But she didn’t want this phantom mother to be colored in and wholly realized, preferring to leave her at the conceptual if well-dressed level. She wanted Amy to talk about her only occasionally and not actually to become good friends with her. She wanted to be Amy’s only intimate friend, even though, ironically, she was unable to tell Amy the most intimate thing right now, which was her rising fear about Nadia not being quick, not being exactly right.
So many women who adopted older babies from Eastern Europe found that the children had attachment disorders; it was more common than most people knew. But Jill had never heard about the mother of an adopted baby having an attachment disorder; there were no references to this in the literature. The baby’s original name was Manya, which had immediately brought to mind a stocky, grinning woman in a field, with a scythe. Jill had met some mothers online through the vast adoption network who gave their foreign-born daughters clever, contemporary American names such as Jenna or Harper or even eccentric names like Pandora. Jill was determined not to do that, and so she chose a new name that seemed culturally appropriate and also had had meaning to her personally long ago when she was a girl.
Nadia Comaneci had been the fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast who, with her talent and slight, bendable tulip body and Eastern European discipline and unknowability, was the gold-medal star and international crush of the 1976 Olympics. Jill, nine years old at the time, had lain on her bed in Philadelphia watching Nadia Comaneci on TV and, later, had listened repeatedly to the piece of seafoam piano music called “Nadia’s Theme,” imagining what it might mean to whirl through space like that, to be mosquito-light, to land exactly where you wanted.