And then, on the edge of the floor, one strays from her peers to look at a rack of Balenciaga. Even better, she is wearing lightweight trousers. I get her in my sights and, with a puff to my blowgun, quickly dart her in the buttock. She wanders, dazed, toward the fitting rooms, falling to the soft pile carpet in less than twenty seconds. As I drag her through the heavy curtain into the largest of the mirrored rooms, Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist and primatologist, who has made a career of studying the lives and blood work of olive baboons in Kenya’s Masai-Mara reserve, ushers me in and concedes, “You’re getting pretty good at this.”
We take her vital signs and draw her blood quickly, efficiently, knowing there is not much time. Our petite, well-dressed great ape will come to on the plush carpeting, see the half glass of champagne we have left on the table in the fitting room, and, blaming herself, be too ashamed to tell anyone what has happened. Meanwhile, we hit the street and head to Quest Diagnostics—the one on East Fifty-Seventh between Park and Lex. There is a skip in my step and I have the urge to whistle. I am eager to hear the story that her blood, still warm in its vials in my pockets, will tell us.
As I wrote this book, I had this daydream over and over, riding the M86 bus across the park, or jammed into the plastic depression that counts as a seat on the subway, or sitting on a bench on the edge of the playground, chatting with other moms and half keeping track of my kids. But the morphology of many of the Upper East Side mothers I knew from my older son’s school and my younger one’s playgroups—their bodies and faces—told a story of its own. Their gaunt visages and taut torsos and limbs that seemed always ready to spring put me in mind, as I passed them in the school hallways and ladies’ luncheons and galas we all went to, of an animal primed for fight or flight. Their fingers and thumbs flew across their iPhones and BlackBerries. Their jaws were clenched. Their brows were furrowed, unless they had had Botox injections there, in which case the story found expression in their mouths, which were frequently pursed or arranged in a tight smile, the kind that did not telegraph pleasure or happiness or relaxation but rather the very opposite: “Hi, I see you, but I’m in a rush.” Mostly, though, the tale was in their eyes—wide, alert, hypervigilant eyes that took in everything, like a gazelle endlessly scanning its surroundings, as if its life depended on it.
By now, I knew about the rites of passage and initiation ceremonies a privileged Upper East Side mommy went through. I knew her identity was forged, in part, through certain rituals that were all but explicitly agreed upon: making what narrators of eighteenth-century English novels called “an advantageous match”; passing a co-op board interview and undertaking an apartment renovation; applying to prestigious private schools for her children; attending grueling exercise classes daily; and participating in “Mommynomics,” the circle of charity luncheons and social and school events that allowed her to work on strategic alliances, solidifying or raising her social rank. But I often wondered what it felt like to be the wife of an alpha (or close-second beta) and the mother of young children on the Upper East Side. In spite of my having gone native, I would always be a late transfer to the troop , with less money than many of the women around me. I was low-ranking, and still a relative newcomer. So I couldn’t be sure my own feelings of stress and unease when I was at drop off or a school event or a playgroup were an accurate indicator of theirs. Over coffee, and after school meetings, some forthcoming Upper East Side mommies put words to what their faces were saying.
They said: “When the radiator bangs, I jump out of my skin.”
And: “Our daughter’s teacher told us she was having a hard time finding a group of kids to play with at recess and I burst into tears.”
And: “My husband tapped me on the shoulder to ask me something and it startled me so badly I screamed and fell off my chair. In my own home.”
“I know exactly what you should be writing about,” Candace told me breathlessly over lunch one day. She quickly retrieved something from her purse and popped it into her mouth. She had arrived late—“Brutal traffic,” she apologized—having learned just twenty-four hours before that her son had a concussion from a soccer game. Her husband was looking for a new job. Candace hadn’t slept well, I gathered; there were dark circles under her eyes. She had lost weight, too, and looked so thin she might break. I wanted to comfort her, but I also wanted to hear what she had to say, because Candace really understood the über-competitive, ultrasuccessful men and women whose lives I studied. She was married to one, after all, and as a high-end event planner, she had organized the baby showers and over-the-top kiddie birthday parties and charity soirees of some of Manhattan’s richest and most powerful players for years. She had seen them all at their worst, and with their guards down.
“Anxiety,” Candace whispered urgently across the table now. “Your tribe of mommies and anxiety.”
“Right,” I said. I nodded, thinking. Then I ventured, “Um, what was that pill, Candace?”
“Ativan,” she replied matter-of-factly. She exhaled with a smile and fell back into the leather chair, her shoulders and face finally relaxed. She looked beautiful and radiant, just like herself again, and she said, “Shall we order some wine?”
Anxiety and stress are diseases of the West, afflictions of the WEIRD—anthropologist Jared Diamond’s acronym for western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic peoples. A look at the cross-cultural data regarding one reliable measure of out-of-whack anxiety, social anxiety disorder, makes the case nicely. While rates of social anxiety disorder in China, Korea, Nigeria, and Taiwan are all well under 1 percent, the US rate is nearly ten times greater. One in four Americans will experience severe and sustained anxiety at some point in their lives.
And city people are especially, extraordinarily stressed and anxious, researchers tell us. Packed streets and buses and costly clothing and food and shelter and the din of jackhammers, it seems, produce feelings of threat and diminish our sense of control, leading to high anxiety, high stress, and escalating rates of stress-related disease. Indeed, such city-niche-specific conditions have changed the human brain, altering our cingulate cortexes and amygdalae so they are, in a vicious circle if there ever was one, less able to deal with stress than those of our country cousins.
Stanford biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, my partner in crime in the Bergdorf daydream, has mapped out how stress, once an indispensable adaptation, got twisted around, creating the uniquely contemporary conundrum of chronic stress and its affective handmaiden, chronic anxiety. “For the average mammal,” he explains, “stress is three minutes of terror on the savannah. After which the stress is over. Or you are.” Stress evolved as a useful, extremely short-term, lifesaving physiological state: your heart races to pump oxygen; your lungs work harder; and your body turns off anything nonessential in the interest of immediate survival (being chased by a lion is no time to ovulate, grow, or put energy into tissue repair—that’s for later). With these brief bursts of terror come surges in stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Once the lion has been outwitted or escaped, the blood levels of these stress hormones go down.
Today, though, “we turn on our stress response for purely psychological states, and that’s not what it evolved for,” Sapolsky observes. Our blood pressure surges to 180/120 not in order to save our lives, but as we sit in traffic or worry about terrorism. And we can’t find the Off button. So, momentarily, adaptive stress becomes chronic stress and perpetual anxiety. These days, “the hormones that we used to secrete to save our lives are being secreted . . . continually, when we worry about the ozone layer or have to speak in public.” One of Sapolsky’s most important discoveries was that among hierarchical mammals, like baboons or humans on the Upper East Side, social rank can cause massive stress, changing up one’s blood, mind, and body, especially where rankings are unstable and individuals are jockeying for position. Now we were getting somewhere.
There is so much we
could learn from a drop of blood, which looks like a drop of wine, I thought as we sat at the table in the Upper East Side home of my brother-in-law and his wife on Passover. My older son loved this holiday, with all its ritualized food and hand washing and prayers. My little one adored the doting attentions of his older cousins and the songs, if not the sitting still. I had come to this tradition, and to Judaism, as I had to Upper East Side motherhood: through marriage. So, while my nieces and nephews and in-laws and husband went through the motions, it was all newish and fascinating to me, as it was to my children. At the point in the Haggadah when we list the ten plagues of Egypt, the punishments God rained down upon Pharaoh for refusing to release the Israelites from slavery, we dipped our fingers into our glasses, leaving a drop of wine on the edge of our plates, one for each plague. Frogs. Lice. Flies. Diseased livestock. Boils. Hail. Locusts. Darkness. As I listened, I listed in my mind another version of the plagues, the afflictions of the tribe of women I now knew so well: head lice. School applications. Capital campaigns. Traveling husbands. Intrasexual competition. SEC investigations. Divorce. I knew there were more. Lots more.
Thank God for a drop of wine.
As I got closer to many of the Upper East Side mommies around me, and others continued to keep their distance, I became more and more preoccupied with what “belonging” might mean—to me, and to the women who were now my friends, and to the ones who were not. Part of me wanted to fit in and be embraced by everyone in my adopted troop. Primates are, after all, deeply affiliative and highly pro-social, characteristics that set us apart from other species: as with chimps and baboons and macaques, connections with others mean more to us than just about anything else. Even if we are slightly cynical moms from downtown. I was still shaken by having been, all those months before, a playdate pariah. I knew that such “hazing” was not uncommon among primates of the human and nonhuman variety, and I doubted that the exclusions and performative back-turnings had ever been precisely personal. But I still harbored, in the most primitive parts of my brain, the fear that I might be excluded again. Everyone wants to fit in—whether they are hippies in Berkeley, PTA moms in Omaha, or TriBeCa transfers—those who depart the Upper East Side to move downtown. Part of me was now hell-bent on towing the line: dressing to fit in, helping with school committees like everyone else, going to luncheons. Meanwhile, my front brain puzzled over what would happen if I didn’t or couldn’t. How did you fall out, and what happened then?
Divorce and diminution of income—the DD plagues, as I came to think of them—seemed to be two events that could precipitate getting drummed out of the group. Once a woman is divorced, she likely won’t have the money to play at the same level—buy the tickets for the events, join the flyaway parties to St. Barth’s and Paris and Miami. There will be fewer invites for this reason—and another one, too. Women who are divorced often ignite fears that “it can happen to me, too” among her peers. And that “she’s on the make and may try to steal someone’s husband.” As one divorced member of the tribe told me, “It’s bye-bye for me. Third wheels are scary.” A divorced tribe member may keep a friend or two, but find she has a significantly circumscribed social life.
It was no doubt frightening to think your life as you knew it could fall away because your marriage fell apart. But the story I really couldn’t shake was about a woman I’ll call Lena. After the crash in 2008, the story goes, she and her husband lost almost everything. The oceanfront Hamptons home. The classic eight–classic seven combination on Park. They pulled their kids out of prestigious private schools, where they had once been big donors and board members, giving them a measure of influence over whose kids could get in, which in turn gave them massive cultural capital. Gone. They moved to 110th street. Without telling anyone, Lena took at job at an upscale department store in an upscale mall in an upscale Manhattan suburb. Seen one way, this was an act of simple necessity. But seen another way, it was brave, because it was a step down. Several women she knew showed up at the store one day, and were shocked to discover that Lena was “on the other side” now, bringing them shoes to try on. Other friends might have rallied around Lena and organized a shopping excursion en masse to the tony store where she worked, to give her a day of great commissions. They might have reached out, and buoyed her up. I liked to think that I would have. Instead, Lena’s no-longer-peers simply avoided her. This didn’t surprise me, somehow. But it angered me. It served to remind me of the foreignness of some of the women around me, the divide between what they felt and how they acted, and how I did. It was as if they lived in a caste system, and Lena was now forever tainted, ritually impure. She and her plight were terrifying—and she became a taboo object. Perhaps these women believed that Lena would find it humiliating to be around them, but I doubted it. And was that any reason to abandon a friend?
“It’s almost like the attitude in this world, when your girlfriend is down, is ‘Sink or swim’ ” a woman who was newly divorced from her wealthy and powerful husband explained to me over coffee. Queen of Queen Bees would no longer speak to her, she explained, and I suggested she might be better off for it. But I knew how her ostracism, the being dropped, must feel, and I felt sorry for her, as I did for Lena.
Eventually, the story goes, Lena and her husband left town. I was interested and relieved to hear that she had become a Buddhist, and was happy. But to a certain set of women, she no longer exists. “I think she moved to some hippie place? And joined a cult or something?” is how a woman I asked about Lena’s story described it. She was dead.
The Upper East Side culture they lived in was itself a major plague on my tribe of mommies, it seemed to me. The pressure to conform, the drive for perfection, and emphasis on appearances and keeping up appearances on the Upper East Side are extraordinary and unrelenting. My realization, early on in my life there, that I had to get dressed up to run to the corner for milk, was just the tip of the iceberg. You would have to be socially tone-deaf not to sense the pressure to be perfectly turned out, perfectly groomed, perfectly coiffed, and always at the right event with the right person at the right time. But there is something deeper going on, too. Lena’s story taught me that like the social worlds of the Bedouin and the Roma, the Upper East Side is an honor/shame culture. Shame and the fear of not fitting in or falling out or being ostracized, rather than the fear of going to hell or prison, are the main means of social control. And on the Upper East Side, as in China or among certain tribes of native Americans, one can lose one’s honor or one’s “face”—not the physical thing that you talk and eat with and put makeup on, but your prestige, reputation, indeed your very self. Marcel Mauss wrote of the Pacific Northwest Indians that
Kwakiutl . . . noblemen have the same notion of “face” as the Chinese. . . . It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no feast that he had a “rotten face” . . . To lose one’s face is to lose one’s spirit, which is truly the “face,” the dancing mask, the right to incarnate a spirit and wear an emblem or totem. It is the veritable persona which is at stake, and it can be lost in the potlatch just as it can be lost in the game of gift-giving, in war, or through some error in ritual.
Or, Mauss might add today of the women I studied, it can be lost by losing your money. Or having bed bugs.
While bedbugs and head lice are an inconvenient and stressful fact of life for people all over New York City, for a privileged Upper East Side mom like my friend Gina, they are something else. Gina sobbed for days—not just because getting rid of them is so expensive and time consuming and exhausting. And not only because she was covered in itchy bites, and could find no relaxation, only stress, in her bed at night. And not just or even primarily because the family might not be able to sell the apartment for several years after, owing to new laws requiring sellers to disclose that their largest asset has had a pest problem. No. Tina was mostly very, very afraid that her friends would find out. Her identity hinged on hosting playdates and having a perfect home, among
other things. Bedbugs suggested the frightening possibility of being ostracized from the group. “Nobody will come here anymore!” she told me. If her kids didn’t have a social life, neither did she. And we know what happens to the socially unaffiliated in an affiliative, hierarchical world: social death (and even physical death, if you’re a baboon).
Many of the mothers I knew shared Tina’s heightened sense of social shame and humiliation—not only about catastrophic life events like divorce or going broke, but about that extra five pounds or having a kid who needs occupational therapy or being unable to afford two weeks in Aspen. In an honor/shame culture, a world where you are expected to have not one dimple of cellulite or one stray hair, a world where your entire being hinges on what you give away at a potlatch, or how you keep your home, or having kids without problems, losing face is easy. There is no sin, and probably no god—the tribe was monotheistic by tradition but largely post-religious—but there is shame. As foreign as we might find it, once you enter into the cultural logic of losing face, it’s clear how the very possibility of such public humiliation could stress you in real ways. Their exhausted, gaunt faces. Another drop of wine.
Candace was almost always right about the tribe, and, following her lead, I did indeed discover that there was an anxiety gender gap of sorts. Women in developed countries (but not those in undeveloped ones) are, remarkably, twice as likely to suffer from anxiety disorders as are men. But I had thought my tribe would be an exception. After all, I knew from firsthand experience that being a relatively privileged NYC mommy conferred a crucial advantage: the ability to buffer oneself from catastrophes like being sick with no insurance or not having the money to feed your children, but also from the assaults of everyday big city life, by means of a massage or a weekend in the country. I figured with their exponentially greater wealth and private planes, their three-week Caribbean/Aspen (or Turks and Caicos/Vail) vacations and weeklong girls getaways to Canyon Ranch, the places on Further Lane to get them further from the madding city crowds, the über-wealthy mommies from my sons’ school and playgroups should be exponentially calmer. Wouldn’t having your children in the very best school, or having the best possible nanny, one procured through an agency that charged a very hefty fee to partner parents with the crème de la crème of caregivers, give one a degree of calm and confidence about their well-being? I presumed all this should be enough to quell anyone’s worries. And that any other stress and anxiety was something the women I knew created themselves, by fretting about the wrong things and failing to be in the moment and enjoy all they had.
Primates of Park Avenue Page 16