Amanda Bright @ Home

by Danielle Crittenden

  All day Amanda would monitor the clock in her office, imagining what Ben was doing—play, snack, lunch, play, nap, snack—and assuring herself that the separation was good for both of them. Ben needed to be with other children in a world bigger than his own; she needed to be in the big world, period.

  Then came summer, and the dappled green mornings that just begged you to come outside before the air grew thick and everything was stilled by the heat. On the drive to work Amanda would glimpse mothers pushing their babies to the playground or jogging with strollers along Rock Creek Parkway. They looked so unharried; their day seemed to stretch out before them like a bather on a towel. By contrast, there was not a single minute during the week that Amanda felt she could stop, hold, enjoy. When she came home at night, Amanda craved half an hour—just half an hour!—to change her clothes, go through the mail, reorder her thoughts. But there was dinner to make, and those dishes that had been sitting in the sink since breakfast, and the backed-up toilet, and the note reminding her to call the plumber whom she had forgotten to call again. Mostly, though, there was Ben, desperately tired and hungry, but equally desperate that she not leave his sight. He insisted that Mommy—and not anyone else—give him his bath; that Mommy—and not anyone else—put him in his pajamas and read him a story; that Mommy—and not anyone else—sing him his lullaby. Ben virtually ignored his father when she was around. Bob tried. He pleaded with Ben to let him, just this once, put him to bed. But Ben would have none of it. Amanda could not help but relent. Her son loved her with more physical intensity than any lover she had ever known, yet what he wanted from her was so simple and innocent: to hold her hand, to smell her hair, to fall asleep in her arms.

  What was Amanda to do? Everyone else insisted she should keep working. Her mother was adamant. Why, when she was thirty-two, Ellie Burnside Bright was founding the first-ever natural-birth clinic in Manhattan—and she was divorcing Amanda’s father. Imagine how strange it would feel not to go to the office, her mother warned. I did that, Amanda, I stayed home with you, and it practically killed me. Thought I’d bloody well go out of my mind sitting around the apartment reading women’s magazines, waiting for you to wake up. Remember when I nearly did go out of my mind? (Yes, Amanda did. Amanda had been four, or maybe five. Her mother left her with the cleaning lady and went AWOL for a day. Years later, her mother admitted to Amanda that all she did was walk through the park and wander up and down Madison Avenue, stopping somewhere for a coffee. Amanda might not have even noticed her mother’s absence if the cleaning lady had not been so distressed. She called Amanda’s father at work and said she had to get home and where was Mrs. Bright? Amanda played by the apartment door until she heard the key turn in the lock. Her mother burst in, and Amanda exclaimed, “Mommy, we were so worried!” Her mother pushed past her without a word and slammed the door to her bedroom, where she remained for the rest of the evening. The cleaning lady went home.)

  Amanda was too embarrassed to confess to her mother that she no longer took pleasure in going to the office. She was too embarrassed to confess it to herself. It cast doubt on the glorious certainty she had experienced the first day she had stepped through the Romanesque arches of the endowment’s building: At last, she had exulted, this is where I’ll be. This is who I am. Now when she passed under those same arches, she could only mutter weakly, This is who I must try to be. How, Amanda wondered, did the other mothers do it? How did they work through the pain without folding up like circus tents and taking the whole show home?

  Then, one morning, three months into her pregnancy with Sophie (and hey, what a barrel of laughs that was, running to the executive bathroom to vomit and dozing off at her desk after lunch), Amanda realized she could no longer do it. She experienced what her mother, in her feminist heyday, used to call a “click” moment, except in reverse: Amanda was waiting as usual for Bob to come running out of the day-care center like a hero in the “money shot” of an action movie just before the building explodes into a giant fireball. She was eating a package of soda crackers to quell her nausea. The entire scene suddenly struck her as absurd. What on earth am I doing? Ben needed her—needed her! This new baby would need her, too. Nothing else seemed important at that moment except those two facts.

  “Bob,” Amanda said, as tires screeched against pavement, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  She saw he knew exactly what she meant.

  They didn’t discuss it until later, when they sat down at the kitchen table after dinner to work it all out. Bob conceded that Amanda’s modest salary only covered the child care and the weekly cleaning lady, bills they no longer would be burdened with if Amanda stayed home. He earned enough to pay the mortgage and their household expenses. But if she quit there would be no extras: no new car as they had hoped, fewer dinners out, no refurbishing of the house. Government, Bob reminded her (as if she needed reminding), was not like the private sector. He could not increase his billings or hope for a bonus. His salary was his salary. They would just have to pray that none of the pipes burst.

  As Amanda watched Bob punch away at the calculator, scratching down the numbers that represented their livelihood, it occurred to her for the first time the sacrifice she was asking of him. He had fallen in love with a woman whose ambition matched his own. And now she had just rolled the boulder of their shared expenses completely onto his shoulders and was expecting him to carry it without resentment or complaint. She searched his face for a reaction, and it came when he glanced up at her across the table: Amanda saw confusion in his eyes, as if he were trying to realign his vision of her, like someone attempting to refocus his binoculars on a bird whose quick flight had caused its image briefly to split in two.

  Amanda’s colleagues reacted to her decision with less-disguised bewilderment. They shook their heads sorrowfully, as if they had just lost another comrade in battle—All that promise, to be cut down so early in life! Her boss, a childless woman of fifty, added to the mood of requiem by praising Amanda for her “great courage.”

  Predictably, Amanda’s mother took the news the worst. This is not rebellion, Amanda, she lectured over the phone. This is reversion. You can always have a husband, you can always have children, but you can’t always have you. And Amanda, you are throwing the you part away. Throwing it away! Where is that daughter of mine who used to talk about making a difference in the world? Where is the little girl who marched around the bedroom chanting songs about women’s power? What do you have to say to her?

  The truth was: nothing. Nothing at all. Amanda remained silent as Ellie Bright begged her to reconsider, just as some years before she had begged Amanda to reconsider getting married so young, at twenty-six, the first in her circle of friends.

  “Mom,” Amanda interrupted. “Aren’t you always saying feminism is about choice?”

  Ellie Bright paused. The pause, in its way, was more intimidating to Amanda than her mother’s yelling—the short silence that precedes an even greater explosion.

  “So isn’t what I’m doing a choice?” Amanda ventured, a little more timidly.

  Her mother snorted. “Of course feminism is about choice. It was just never about this choice.

  “But suit yourself.”

  And with that, her mother hung up the phone.

  For the first few months of her unemployment, Amanda tried to persuade herself that she was really, truly exercising a choice that should be available to all women. She took even a brief, rebellious pride in her decision and complained to Bob about all the ways society discriminates against mothers, just as she used to complain to him about all the ways society discriminates against minorities and the poor. But as the novelty of her situation wore off, and as Amanda sang “Itsy Bitsy Spider” for the umpteenth time to Ben while longing to lay her miserably fat pregnant body down upon the bed, she had to admit that it wasn’t bravery or rebellion that kept her going through these long and unproductive days. It was guilt. Guilt had driven her to leave her job. Guilt kept her singing mindless s
ongs and playing clapping games with Ben. Guilt was the emotion that eclipsed all others in her heart when she anticipated the arrival of the new baby. Amanda was home because she feared the hurt and anger in fifteen years, when two sets of eyes would look upon her and mutely ask, Why did you do that to us?

  Amanda drank the last dregs of a take-out cappuccino. Glancing around the school’s entry hall, she recognized a couple of mothers in tennis whites chatting by the water fountain. Clusters of nannies formed an archipelago around the front doors. Amanda nodded at a father whose daughter Sophie occasionally played with. He was the only male among them, referred to in whispers by the other women as “the at-home dad.” Usually he sat alone, on the floor in a corner of the lobby, gazing straight ahead with the subdued, gentle eyes of a Labrador. He was married to a fierce trial attorney whom Amanda had met once, at parent-teacher night. The woman had arrived directly from the courtroom in sharp heels and an expression that had not finished grilling its last witness. Occasionally, Amanda and the dad waited together. They had discovered, in the snatched moments between picking up and delivering children, that they shared a mutual interest in politics, and Amanda enjoyed his semi-ironic takes on the day’s news. Today, however, he was trying to pacify his eighteen-month-old son, who was writhing and thrashing to free himself from his stroller. Amanda crumpled her cup and tossed it in a trash container next to the women in tennis whites. They acknowledged her with the briefest of smiles. Amanda returned to the spot where she had been standing, beside a huge potted palm.

  The bell rang, and instantly the narrow stairwell became a downspout gushing noisily with nursery students.

  “Mommy!”

  Sophie gripped the banister while struggling to carry a huge cardboard—gosh, what was it? A butterfly? Children jostled past the little girl, but she steadied herself and edged sideways down the steps.

  “Mommy, look!” Sophie tried to hold up the cardboard to show Amanda. A boy raced by and nearly sent girl and artwork flying. Amanda rescued both at the bottom of the stairs.

  “What have you got, darling?”

  “It’s the divethtive system!” Sophie exclaimed, recovering herself.

  “The digestive system?”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s beautiful.” And it was, sort of, with its colorful squiggles and bits of glued-on pasta to represent what Amanda guessed was food passing through the intestines. She wondered vaguely where she would hang it.

  “Are you hungry, honey?”

  “Yes!”

  A mother of one of Sophie’s classmates stopped them on the veranda.

  “Hey,” she said. “I saw your husband on television this morning.”

  Amanda stepped to the side of the exiting stream and the mother joined her, clutching her own son’s hand. She was attractive in an expensive way, her frosted hair cropped and feathered and her eyes nearly invisible behind tortoise-rim sunglasses. Amanda could not remember the woman’s name.

  “You did?” she replied, surprised. “Bob was on TV?”

  “Uh-huh. I was at the gym so I couldn’t follow it that well. It was some press conference—something to do with Megabyte?”

  “Oh—yes, the antitrust case. Bob’s leading the Justice department’s investigation.” Amanda wondered why she felt the need to stress that.

  “Wow.” The woman nodded, impressed.

  “Mommy, can we go to Burger Chalet?” Sophie interrupted.

  “Yes, sweetie. I mean no, sweetie. We’re going to go home and then do some errands. The vacuum cleaner’s broken and we need to return your library books.”

  “And we’ve got Suzuki, don’t we, Christopher?” the woman said to her son. “Violin,” she confided to Amanda. “He’s very gifted but he won’t practice.”

  Sophie tugged impatiently on Amanda’s arm. The mother smiled in understanding and gave a gentle wave of her hand.

  “We should get our children together sometime. Christopher and I often lunch at the club, don’t we, Christopher?”

  Sophie kept up a steady chant to go to the Burger Chalet. At the top of the school’s driveway, Amanda hesitated, waiting for the other mother to pull out in her silver Mercedes wagon before she went to her own car.

  “Mommy, ith over there!”

  “I know, darling. Let’s let the others go first.”

  Amanda unlocked the Volvo and managed to wedge the digestive system into the trunk. She strapped Sophie into her child seat. Sophie fished around the upholstery and came up with a half-gnawed cookie.

  “Oh, Sophie—don’t. How long has that been in there?”

  Sophie bit into it. “Ith good.”

  Amanda sighed and settled herself in the driver’s seat. She switched on the car radio.

  “I want ducky music!”

  “No ducky music. Mommy wants to listen to the news.”

  “Ducky music!”

  “No. Daddy is on the news.”

  “Daddy on the news?”

  “Yes. Listen.”

  A male announcer was giving the five-day forecast.

  “That Daddy?”

  “No. Wait.” Amanda scanned the other channels but it was past the hour and the news was already over.

  “Okay,” she relented. “Ducky music.”

  Amanda merged into the street to a chorus of singing waterfowl.

  Chapter Four

  BOB MIGHT HAVE at least called her to give her a heads-up, Amanda thought irritably. Maybe he had called her.

  When she arrived home later in the afternoon, after picking up Ben, there was a message on the phone but it wasn’t from Bob. It was from Susie. How long had it been this time? Five weeks? Six? Susie lived only a few blocks away but Amanda heard from her less frequently these days than when they had lived in different cities. Susie never rang up just to chat. She would burst into Amanda’s life without warning, like a fire truck roaring down the street, sirens howling. Amanda how are you I need to see you right away.

  Actually there was not one but three messages from Susie. “Hi, are you around? Thought I might come by this afternoon. Got some news I want to tell you.” “Amanda, where are you? If you get this, try me on my cell.” “Amanda, you won’t be able to reach me for the next little while. Why don’t I just stop by your house around four?”

  It was closer to five when Susie arrived, right at the moment when Amanda decided her friend wasn’t going to show up after all. Amanda was about to race out to the supermarket—there was nothing for dinner again—and, well, here was Susie. Amanda made iced tea and sent the children upstairs to watch a video. The two women sat down in the back garden, and Amanda waited for Susie to reveal the reason for her visit.

  “Gorgeous day.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve wasted most of it inside, at the spa.” Susie extended her long fingers to display a fresh manicure. “Tangerine. What do you think?”

  “Very summery.”

  “I think it suits me.”

  “It does.”

  “You should go there—they do a great facial.” Susie rambled on for a few minutes about the other treatments she had received—everything, it seemed, short of having a new face applied. Her skin had been sandblasted clean like a Chelsea warehouse and troweled with Austrian mud. “It’s fabulous. It sucks out all the impurities …”

  “How Germanic.”

  “… then there’s this new vitamin C cream they slather on you that really makes your skin radiant.”

  Susie paused, expectantly. Amanda agreed she looked radiant. “But you don’t need creams for that. You always look stunning.”

  It was true. Amanda had known Susie long enough to become inured to her looks, but she could never be unaware of them completely. Susie possessed the kind of beauty that affected the very molecules in a room. The child of a white mother from an old New England family and a black professor of economics from Chicago, Susie had been blessed with the unexpected features that elevate great beauty over run-of-the-mill prettiness: bronze
skin and silky hair, eyes that were widely spaced apart, a full mouth set in a delicate chin. Had Susie ended up in a city like New York or Los Angeles, she might have faced more serious competition from starlets and fashion models seeking bigger prizes than best-looking girl in Wichita or Kalamazoo. But Susie’s ambition to be a political commentator had brought her to Washington, where beauty is notoriously scarce outside cherry blossom season. Her unconventional package—this face, this figure, plus an opinion on the latest education bill!—had taken her very far indeed.

  “Thanks, but it’s getting harder.”

  “Come off it.”

  Amanda shifted restlessly in her deck chair, wishing Susie would get to the point. Long experience had taught Amanda that Susie wouldn’t anytime soon. Once Susie had gained her attention, she would keep it, indifferent to the maternal alarm clock inside Amanda that was frantically ticking off the minutes she had left to get to the store, the minutes before the video would end, the minutes before the next round of demands would come clumping down the stairs.

  “Have you heard from Liz lately?” Susie asked, changing topics. Amanda wondered what Liz had to do with Susie’s news. Liz was a friend from college who had moved to upstate New York and joined Amanda in the ranks of unemployed maternity.

  “I spoke to her last week. Why?”

  “I just wanted to know how she’s doing.”

  So the news wasn’t about Liz.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Still obsessing over her house?” Amanda didn’t quite like the edge to Susie’s tone. Susie seemed interested in Liz these days mostly as an object of sport.

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘obsessing.’ She’s re-covering her sofa, if that’s what you mean. And you know Liz—she’s doing it herself, the slipcover, everything.”