Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

And not just alcohol. On the Upper East Side, benzodiazepines are a girl’s best friend. Plenty of the Manhattan mommies I knew relied on prescription drugs, daily. Ativan. Xanax. Valium. Klonopin. Ambien—they had them all, and weren’t afraid to take them. Frequently, they mixed them with wine, as was the regular practice of a glam fashion designer and mommy of two whose head was frequently in her plate at an Upper East Side restaurant of the moment—at lunch. The women I knew took antianxiety meds to fall asleep. They took them in the middle of the night, when they woke up with their hearts pounding, panicking about schools or money or whether their husbands were faithful. They took them to calm their nerves before drop-off or a luncheon where they expected to encounter more frenemies than friends (the mere idea of seeing the Queen of Queen Bees at an event, with her sneering and snideness, made me want to reach for a flask). And they took them again when they wore off. I wasn’t judging, really. I used benzos myself to medicate for my phobia of flying, and one day in the school elevator, overhearing another mother, a perfect stranger, tell her friend that she hated flying and Xanax didn’t help, I turned to her and suggested, with great authority and no self-consciousness, “That’s because you have to take it with a Bloody Mary!” We had never seen each other before, let alone spoken.

  Some women will leave off their wine and their benzos as their kids get older. For them, these are a way to smother the stress of being in charge of your children and the people in charge of your children and everything around you, all the time. When the kids are older and in school all day and the hand-to-hand-combat phase of mothering begins to fade, so does their using. But for a portion of these mothers, drinking and drugs are more than a phase. For them, motherhood doesn’t just incite the urge to drink and mix; it masks it, providing a convenient pretext and deep cover. Everybody else is doing it. So no one notices. Some of the privileged mommies will develop “a problem.” At an Upper East Side AA outpost located in a church between the Prada and Ralph Lauren storefronts on Madison Avenue, exquisite, lean mommies decked out in Chanel and Céline and Valentino, all just a few blocks south, avail themselves of the program’s child care option so they can slip into a meeting. They are a secretive tribe within a tribe and they will never, ever tell. At parties, they will arrive early and carefully request something that looks like wine in a wineglass. At a moms’ dinner at Serafina, they will pass off tonic with lime as a vodka tonic. They will say they’re not drinking because of antibiotics, or a headache or an early appointment the next day. They will keep up appearances and save face, because that is the rule and the way. At their AA meetings, they will settle halfway into their chairs without ever really relaxing, rustling in place like slender, nervous racehorses, their faces tense with effort and worry. Really, it could be lunch at Le Bilboquet, the unmarked restaurant and gathering place of the tribe around the corner. All that is missing is the glass of wine.

  But wine cannot blunt the biggest anxieties. One of these, I realized after the evening at Rebecca’s, was dependency. The more I watched and listened and lunched and drank with the UES mothers around me, the more I saw that for many of them, their lives, happiness, and very identities hinged on things and people entirely outside their control.

  Economic dependency on their husbands, I came to believe, kept many of the women I knew awake at night, whether they realized it or not. The knowledge that their husbands could leave them for someone else, the simple realization that they could not support themselves without him, seemed to gnaw at some of the women I knew as badly as their hunger pain. Some told me, in hushed tones, that like their mothers and grandmothers, they had secret bank accounts where they stashed their allowances and other money they had access to “just in case.” Several women clued me in about “year-end bonuses” husband gave their wives—as if they were employees rather than partners. “My mother told me to get as much jewelry as possible from my husband. As insurance,” a woman told me wryly as we chatted on a playground bench about a mutual acquaintance’s spectacularly acrimonious and very public divorce. My interlocutress had graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy. She also had an MBA. But she had never worked.

  “The very type of woman who is drawn to a master of the universe type,” Manhattan clinical psychologist and author Stephanie Newman told me when I asked her about anxiety and economic dependency in her Upper East Side practice, “may well end up feeling marginalized in her own home, fearful that she cannot fend for herself and support her children.” And if things do go wrong in her marriage, “divorce may be no solution, in practical and emotional terms” observes Rachel Blakeman, LCSW/JD, “for a woman whose self concept is entirely wrapped up in having a perfect marriage.” For many such women, there is no way out of this conundrum—being married to a rich and powerful man—that had at first felt like The Answer.

  “She shouldn’t flirt with other women’s husbands!” women told me pointedly about a beautiful French mother and investment banker, a mom at another school, when I asked why so many of the mommies at our school seemed ambivalent about her. She was a transfer to the troop, having married a wealthy New York native, and she apparently found the tribe’s sex segregation practices as bewildering as I did. Like me, she could often be seen talking to men at the kids’ birthday parties and concerts. Probably drumming up business, I figured, and trying to have a little fun. I found her glamorous and smart, and always searched her out. I made a point of putting my husband in her path, too. Wasn’t any woman who flirted with him doing me a favor? If he was in a good mood, my life was easier. And safe fun and titillation didn’t seem like much to ask in exchange for a lifetime of commitment. But for women who felt their marriages and motherhood were their entire identities, and their husbands their only lifelines, I came to realize, flirtation was anxiety inducing, even terrifying. It suggested the possibility and stood as a reminder that it could all be taken away.

  Some of these women were economically dependent not only on their husbands, but on their husband’s parents. Much of the spectacular wealth on the Upper East Side is intergenerational, which can lead to strangely infantilized relationships between young adults (and not-so-young adults) and their parents or in-laws. More than one woman described to me the strange pressure of needing to please one’s in-laws because they held the financial purse strings. “My husband basically stands to inherit a lot and that gives his parents very real power over our lives,” she explained simply as we walked behind the group on a school field trip. Chatting about school tuition, which she said her in-laws paid, had led us here. She showed me her iPhone calendar, reading off a series of appointments and luncheons to which she would ferry and accompany her mother-in-law the next week. “It’s not that I don’t want to help out. It’s that there’s this unspoken script that I owe it, because they bought our apartment as a wedding gift, and my husband works for his father’s business.” Another women described a typical Upper East Side situation: she and her husband wanted a place of their own out at the beach for themselves and their two young children. Her husband’s parents had nixed the idea, saying their own place was much bigger, they had room for them there, and so their plan didn’t make “sense.” Her in-laws were being generous, financially and emotionally, but it cost the younger generation something, because they were also being controlling. “It would be nice to feel like we were the grown-ups,” she told me flatly. “It would be nice to have our own place and some independence.” Her situation is more common than not in the tribe I studied. Many very wealthy people in my town are, on some level, waiting for their even wealthier elders to die, with mixed feelings about it.

  Other rich women I knew on the Upper East Side had money of their “own”—but often this meant being financially dependent on and emotionally beholden to their fathers. “I’m not complaining,” one woman told me about her parents’ significant wealth, wealth she and her sister stood to inherit, wealth she benefited from every day in the form of her bankrolled apartment and trips to Aspen and child
ren’s educations. “But it’s weird for my husband.” Often, a husband works for his powerful father-in-law, or trades on his father in law’s cultural capital to forge his own business, professional relationships, and deals. Rarely is this state of affairs uncomplicated, because economic dependency is almost never free. Rachel Blakeman, a social worker and psychoanalyst on the Upper East Side told me, “No matter how good the deal feels financially, being beholden to someone else for your well-being and that of your kids is often emotionally costly. It can create resentment, insecurity, and all kinds of issues for a person and in a marriage.”

  Our ancestors, women who gathered (and some who hunted, as Agta women still do today) had autonomy and a voice in their communities and power in their partnerships because the food they brought in, the calories they supplied, made them indispensable. Not much has changed. And so, often, the women I studied and knew and had coffee with seemed something even beyond economically dependent. In many instances their very identities seemed continent and relational, hinging on their relationships—to their friends and in-laws and parents, but most of all to their husbands and children. If you are not in a perfect marriage—and who is?—then how can you be a powerful man’s perfect wife? If you do not have perfect children—and who does?—then how can you be a perfect mother, or even a good one? And how can you save face? Divorce is not an option, and neither is trading in the imperfect children you love for perfect ones. Many of the women I knew suffered from the strange, culturally specific anxiety of being an extension of and reflection of someone else. In this sense, even their identities, their very selves, were not precisely or entirely their own.

  “Thank God that’s over,” Candace exclaimed over lunch once her husband had transitioned to his new job. I thought she meant it was stressful to be unsure where he would land, or to contemplate a period of time without income. But Candace shook her head. “No, I mean I can relax now. I had to look really good every second while he was out there because that’s how it is here, especially if you’re asking people for something. Pass me the bread.” There it was—that unique stress. In this honor/shame culture, having a high status husband made you a high status wife. But having a great-looking wife—beautiful, with an enviable body and wardrobe and social connections to wives of other powerful men—could also reinforce and even boost a husband’s own social rank and professional status. Candace’s husband did, in part, owe his career to how good Candace looked in her Azzedine Alaïa dresses, to her social dexterity, her ability to charm just about everyone. Wives were their husband’s expensive baubles and bottles of wine, proof of their awesomeness, and husbands were their wives’ meal tickets. Talk about anxiety. Another plague. Another drop of wine. Another glass. And another.

  And then there is the final plague, the one that broke the Pharaoh’s will, and broke his heart. After the lice and the boils upon his people, after the plagues of frogs and darkness, still the Pharaoh would not relent. And so God said, Now I will take every firstborn son, passing over and sparing the Israelites.

  When Candace called me one day on the phone, fighting back tears, she taught me another lesson about anxious mommies, one that was, in retrospect, stunningly obvious but had entirely eluded me. She was hiding in the bathroom, she told me, so that no one could hear her. Her son had recovered nicely from the concussion that had taken them to the emergency room, or so it had seemed. After a week of “brain rest” in a dim room, with no reading or screen time, and another week without any physical exertion, he was back up and running, as funny and smart and energetic as ever, just like his mother. But there was something else now, fourteen days after the accident. I felt my heart speed up as Candace told me this. I took a deep breath, as silently as I could, so that no matter what it was, I could be calm for her. Then she said, desperately: “His tooth.” His tooth? I wondered. Just his tooth? I felt a wave of relief but she went on urgently. “It’s gray. It looks horrible.” She began to sob. I murmured that it would be all right, and asked what the dentist had said, and played for time, listening. All in a rush now the words tumbled out: it was just an accident. A dust-up. He and the other boy had collided. There had been some blood. That was all. He was fine. But now the tooth had gone gray. Killed by the impact. “It’s dead in the mouth,” Candace said, sounding faraway and sad.

  I could hear my toddler son playing with pots and pans on the floor of the kitchen. I had set him up there so I would have time to talk. But in my mind I was seeing all the pictures on all the living room walls in all the apartments I had viewed with Inga, all those months ago. None of those children in those portraits had a gray tooth. I considered how a single imperfection could feel catastrophic, like a massive, overpowering wave that took your entire identity as a good mother, a person who feels safe, away from you, pulling you under. Candace cried and cried and as I cradled the phone to my ear and told her that it would be all right, everything would be fine, I instinctively reached down and cradled my belly, too. Because there was more to it, still.

  It was a perfect tooth that had been killed. It was the Pharaoh’s child and every child, taken by God. It was just a tooth. It was just a story. But it meant that something was wrong and it was a sign that things could go more wrong still. It meant that we could lose them. It was the ghost at the heart of so many Manhattan mother behaviors that seemed to me, until just then, incomprehensibly crazy. The need to be perfect and have a perfect life, the jousting on the sidewalk and the stressing over strollers and nontoxic mattresses and the fights to get him into the right school, hiring someone to teach her how to ride a bike—these are the baroque, bizarre flora and fauna that spring from a terrain of damp, fertile panic. Please, I thought, another drop of wine.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Rainy Day

  AT A moment I couldn’t precisely pinpoint, I had flipped. A couple of years into life with children on the Upper East Side, I found myself less a participant-observer than a participant, less an insider/outsider and more a person for whom there really was no “outside” anymore. My connections downtown had all but faded—I saw those friends, many of whom were unmarried artists and academics, at Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas. Then they read to my children and showered them with goodies and gifts and poked loving fun at me about my transformation, which they considered comprehensive, bizarre, and somehow endearing. They were right that I was changed. We were no billionaires, to be sure. Our home on Park Avenue was far from huge (though I did have an entire closet just for my handbags). I insisted that my children do chores. I didn’t throw them a huge yearly birthday party, and when they were invited to something I considered over-the-top—a Yankees game in seats in the first row right behind home plate, a party at someone’s Hamptons home complete with pony rides and tightrope walkers—I made sure they understood how lucky they were. I did not want my children to think that all of life was one fantastic first-class experience after another. I did not want to set their expectations high, or deprive them of the ability to find pleasure in simple places and in simple things.

  But I was an Upper East Side mommy now, because I had come to care about the things my Upper East Side mommy conspecifics cared about: Where my kids went to school. Whether I was doing enough for them. Whether my children’s teachers knew what they were doing. Whether my friendships were not only gratifying and healthy for me but also useful—to me, to my children, and to my husband’s career. I wanted a comfortable, curated life. I wanted a killer body, and beautiful clothing and shoes by Dolce&Gabbana and Prada, even if I got them on sale, and the kind of great hair color that required the expense of tending to it every other month. I wanted a house at the beach. Unlike many of my Upper East Side girlfriends, I also wanted to work—to write things I was proud of. But, like them, I wanted to be a good wife and like them, I wanted most of all to be a good mother. Not a good enough mother, but one who did everything I was supposed to do, everything I possibly could, for my children.

  Like an Upp
er East Sider, like the person living in the industrialized West that I was, I thought of motherhood in a certain way. I subscribed to the script of intensive mothering, even as I knew that it was peculiar to my privileged niche, and possibly self-destructive. Motherhood, in the world I first observed, then adopted and finally embraced, meant giving life, and then exhausting yourself, sacrificing parts of yourself, sometimes joyfully and at other times with irritation and aggravation and anxiety, protecting it. I fretted and worried alongside the other privileged mommies I knew, sure. Sometimes, I was a nervous wreck about my children. Like Candace, I might find myself, for a few hours or a day, shattered by a gray tooth and all it suggests. But, like everyone around me, I was conditioned by years of plenty and pediatricians and preschools, desensitized to the immediacy of danger by living as I did, cosseted in a high-rise and riding around in a cushiony SUV. Because of this safety halo, aided and abetted by living in a state of ecological release and abundance and vaccines, I, like all Westerners, took risks with my offspring that our ancestors and contemporary hunter-gatherers, who live as we did for nearly our entire evolutionary prehistory, would never have dreamed of.

  Valuing “independence”—theirs and ours—we place our newborns in bouncy seats on the floor while we shower and hire nannies we don’t know, or know only through word of mouth or a service, to try to get a little something done, rather than carrying them continuously and handing them off to a close relative for a few minutes or hours at a time. We put our babies on sleep schedules and feeding schedules, rather than following their lead about when they’d like to eat and nap. And, astonishingly to mothers and fathers in other cultures, we actually leave our infants alone in wooden crates far away from us, all night long. There, they sleep on their own . . . and cry. Many are the anthropologists who report describing this practice to traditional people—hunter-gatherers and foraging agriculturalists who let their babies sit and crawl next to fires and allow their toddlers to play with axes and machetes—who are appalled by what they see as our unfathomable and cruel negligence toward our infants. When they are informed that we frequently let our little ones “cry it out,” they are initially disbelieving, then horrified. How, they demand, can we be so callous toward the most precious and dependent of things, a baby?