“You’re always so hard on her.”
“I’m not hard—just honest. Her last show was a dog.”
Amanda agreed but would not say so. “This one sounds better. It’s about current affairs and she has a cohost—a veejay from the music channel.”
“A veejay? On current affairs? Why is that a better idea?”
“It’s different—”
“I’ll say.”
“You’re being negative again.”
“Look, Amanda, I can’t see how it will succeed. The audience for political talk shows—aside from Beltway wonks like me—is mostly retirees like my father, and believe me, they have no interest in what some moron veejay has to say about their Medicare.”
“Well, that’s the point,” Amanda returned, tired of Bob’s ever more far-ranging assertions of expertise. “The show isn’t aimed at your father. It’s airing on Friday evenings, for one thing. It’s aimed at younger people who don’t usually watch these shows—the sort of people who—”
“—are at home on a Friday night and eager to hear Susie’s views on the Federal Reserve?” Bob grinned.
“I’m sure it’s not going to be like that.” Amanda wiped up some crumbs with her hands. “Anyway, I just hope it works for Susie. She needs this.”
Chapter Five
CHRISTINE LED THE group of mothers into an enormous vaulted room replete with enough slipcovered sofas and chairs to fill a hotel lobby. Everything about the room felt as if it had been purchased in its entirety from a decorator’s showroom and reassembled here, right down to the artificial bonsai on a side table and the gilt-framed row of botanical prints above the mantel. Even the photograph of Christine’s children, propped on a grand piano, looked borrowed from a photographer’s studio. Amanda could only imagine the struggle and bribery that had produced such a wholly unnatural portrait of Austen, smiling cherubically in a sailor suit with his hair neatly combed to one side, a beribboned Victoria in his lap, her hands clasped in the folds of an elaborate velvet dress.
Amanda settled herself in an armchair and was nearly swallowed up in its cushions.
“My mother always warned me to avoid ‘drinking’ play groups,” Christine said as she poured out wine. “She knew one. Half the women in it got divorced, and the other half got cancer. Cheers.”
The women tittered and raised their glasses. The toast was broken by a shrill scream from somewhere in the nether regions of the house.
Amanda knew right away that the scream did not belong to Ben or Sophie; but she also knew that if a child screamed beyond the parental perimeter, Ben was the odds-on favorite to have caused it. Sure enough, a little girl came running into the room wailing, “Ben did it! Ben did it!”
“Meredith!” The girl’s mother rose anxiously. “Ben did what, sweetie?”
“Hit me with a truck!”
“Oh, Meredith, come here and let me see.” The mother cast an accusing look at Amanda.
Christine sighed and topped up Amanda’s already full glass. “Now you’re in trouble,” she whispered. “Your boy has injured the hundred-thousand-dollar child.”
Christine’s private nickname for Meredith Ripley derived from her best estimate of the cost of the fertility treatments that had been required to conceive the girl. Meredith’s mother, Patricia, was a well-groomed, weary-faced woman in her late forties. Until the miraculous birth of her only child, Patricia Ripley had worked as an executive at an international consulting firm. She described motherhood as “the hardest multitasking job I’ve ever held.”
Meredith gulped and sobbed while Patricia inspected a bump on the side of the girl’s head. Even with a wet face and disarranged pigtails, Meredith looked as if she had just tumbled from a Victorian etching. Her mother dressed her in exquisite pinafores and ruffled blouses bought at a boutique that specialized in European clothing. Amanda had ventured into this store once, shortly before Ben was born. The shop’s prices left her gasping, but she could not stop herself and paid seventy-five dollars for a tiny white linen sunsuit for Ben’s ride home from the hospital. When the day arrived, Amanda unpacked the beautiful garment from its tissue wrapping and somehow wriggled his resisting body through the confusion of straps and buttons. Unfortunately, the nurse neglected to warn Amanda that her baby’s first venture into the outside world would likely be accompanied by another colossal achievement: his first bowel movement. “Good God, it’s leaking out the collar!” Bob gagged as he raced to their front door, thrusting Ben as far away from him as a proud father’s arms could reach. That was the end of the sunsuit. It was also the last time Amanda bought clothing for her children that couldn’t be washed or, for that matter, sterilized.
“Am I broken?” Meredith asked plaintively.
“There, there, you’re not broken, darling, but it is a bad bump.”
The other women exchanged awkward glances. Amanda murmured that she would go get Ben, but at that moment her son entered, pulling fiercely against the hand of Christine’s nanny. In contrast to Meredith, Ben—dressed in sale-rack army shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a ferocious dinosaur—could not have appeared more guilty.
“Mommy!” he cried at the sight of his lone ally. He freed himself and charged head-on into Amanda’s stomach. “I didn’t do it!”
Ben’s denial provoked a fresh round of outraged screams from Meredith. The mothers looked to the nanny, a slight, nervous woman from the Philippines, who addressed herself to her employer. “This boy hit little girl with truck, ma’am. I tell him to say sorry but he say no.”
“I didn’t!” came Ben’s muffled voice as he buried his face deeper into Amanda’s lap.
“Ben,” Amanda said, gently tugging on him until she had gotten Ben to look up at her. “Tell Mommy what happened.”
“Meredith’s head,” Ben insisted, “got in the way of my truck.”
“Huh,” Patricia sniffed. “I think a time-out is in order. At least, that’s what I’d do.”
“Ben,” Amanda continued, “if you don’t say sorry to Meredith right now, we are going home. Do you understand?”
“No!”
“Ben!”
The little boy walked sullenly over to Meredith. “Sor-ry,” he spat out with as much contempt as a five-year-old can articulate. He shambled past her back to the playroom. The little girl looked helplessly to her mother.
“You stay away from that boy,” Patricia warned her in a hushed, but not hushed enough, tone. “He’s violent.”
Meredith bit her lip and nodded, and was led away by the nanny.
“Well!” Christine declared. “Boys will be boys, won’t they? Who needs some more wine?”
The mothers lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. Amanda stewed in mortification. Patricia would not look at her. The two other mothers, Kim and Ellen, offered her weak smiles. Every child in the play group had, at some point, launched a surprise assault against another, but Ben was thought to possess unique nuclear capability. Amanda knew that if it weren’t for Christine, she would have been drummed out of the group long before. Amanda had tried to drop out herself, but Christine had been adamant that she remain. “I know Patricia can be rude—you know how ridiculous she is about Meredith—but really, Kim and Ellen would be devastated. And Victoria adores Sophie. So do all the girls.”
Amanda yielded to the flattery but, even now, remained puzzled by Christine’s interest in her. Christine once remarked that it was “so refreshing” to be in the company of someone “who is interested in things,” but Amanda couldn’t help but feel that Christine viewed her essentially as a new project, another room to redo or piece of furniture to refinish. It was in this spirit that Amanda had been introduced to the group—“Y’all are going to love Amanda. She’s a bohemian”—but her novelty was clearly less appealing to the others. Kim and Ellen were polite and affable, but then, as Amanda had discovered, they were relentlessly polite and affable. Even the rounded tips of their manicured fingers and toes reminded Amanda of the shores of a coastline
whose jagged edges and distinctive outcroppings had long been smoothed away. Amanda sometimes suspected that she could confess to murdering both her children and Kim and Ellen would nod sympathetically and say yes, they too had buried many infants in their basements, but if you placed open boxes of baking soda around the house it helped to absorb the smell. The first time Ellen and Kim had met Amanda, they greeted her with the feigned enthusiasm with which they accepted their children’s “finds” from the backyard. Patricia, on the other hand, had immediately fired off a series of laserlike questions that might reveal Amanda’s “point.” What sort of work had she done before she quit? Was she on any of the committees at the school? What did her husband do? They all registered surprise when Amanda answered that her husband worked in government. Amanda could see the question marks in their faces—Government? How do they afford it?—followed by the conclusion: she must come from money. So that’s why Christine brought her.
Amanda sank lower, if that were possible, into the chair cushions. She stared through the tall windows at a terrace framed by boxwoods and the flat glint of a swimming pool just beyond. Patricia kept glancing in the direction of the playroom and at one point disappeared for a few minutes “just to check.” She reported that the nanny had plopped all the children in front of a video (Thomas the Tank Engine, she added, to the mothers’ approval). This smoothed the atmosphere somewhat, and Amanda relaxed a little, knowing it was unlikely that Ben would launch any new assault so long as there was a television switched on.
Then it was Christine who startled them.
“I may as well tell you all,” she said matter-of-factly. “You probably would have noticed anyway. I’ve chosen a very special present for my fortieth birthday. When Brian asked me what did I want—diamonds? a trip to Venice?—I told him, ‘Honey, I want my thirty-year-old face back.’ ”
“That’s fabulous, Christine!” Ellen exclaimed immediately. “You deserve it.”
“What are you going to get done?” Kim asked eagerly. Kim was their resident scholar on beauty treatments. Every week she seemed to be undergoing some new treatment that promised to shave a year off her appearance. At their last gathering she had arrived with a swollen, blistered face. Amanda thought she must have had some terrible experience with a sunlamp, but Kim explained that she had received a “chemical peel”—a procedure that scorched away the top layer of her skin. Kim said the red blisters would fall off and expose the soft, youthful layer of skin below. The blisters disappeared as predicted, but Amanda could not detect any real difference: Kim’s skin shone as any surface will, given regular and attentive polishing.
“Not a lot,” Christine replied. “Eyes, forehead, chin. It won’t be a full face-lift, not yet, just a general tweaking.”
“Thank goodness I don’t need anything,” said Patricia, patting her sagging cheeks.
“Christine’s not doing it because she needs to. She’s doing it because she wants to—right, Christine?”
“You’re nice to say that, Kim. I wish it were true.” Christine arched her neck so the women could examine the sorry decline for themselves. “Look at these banjo strings,” she said, strumming an imaginary surplus of skin below her chin. “And my eyes—these hoods make me look like a lizard.” The women strained forward and shook their heads. “So what the hell? I think of this as an offensive rather than a defensive action. I don’t want to turn into one of those old horrors you see at the club—you know, the kind who show up one day with their faces stretched tight as cellophane.”
This last observation provoked protests all around—“Oh, Christine, you won’t become one of them,” “Really, you’re beautiful the way you are”—but Amanda also detected a slight unease, as if Christine had just raised the ante among them. Ellen’s hands rushed to check her own neck while Kim discreetly probed the skin around her eyes. Only Patricia seemed unperturbed. “It’s all in the genes, you know. My mother is seventy and looks fantastic. Never had to do a thing.”
Amanda didn’t know, frankly, what to think. Part of her was too horrified to react. Why would Christine carve herself up to fit some male fantasy of how she should look? Wasn’t this akin to other barbaric practices foisted upon women by patriarchal societies, a North American version of genital mutilation? Yet it was difficult to imagine Christine as being anybody’s dupe when Amanda contrasted her indignant opinions with the composed figure of Christine herself—smiling, inviting them all to join in her plan to triumph over age and gravity.
At last Amanda found her voice. “Does Brian want you to do this? I mean, is he pushing you to do it?”
“Oh please.” Christine waved away the very suggestion. “Brian supports whatever I do. He thinks I look great now. He’ll be happy when I look even better. No, I’m doing this for me.”
Christine’s finality of tone hinted that it was time to move on to another topic, but Amanda couldn’t let it go. “Because sometimes women, if they’re insecure—”
“Oh, honey, I’m secure,” Christine said, with a flash of irritation. “My fate doesn’t rest on Brian’s opinion of me. Look, I do the bookkeeping in the family, and let me tell you, if he left, I’d be more than secure. I’ve taken care of that.”
“So have I.” Kim giggled, and Ellen nodded.
“Heck, I’ve got an entire investment portfolio that Steve doesn’t even know about,” Patricia remarked lightly. “I built it up when I was working. I think of it as my ‘disaster-relief fund.’”
“You know, a friend of mine gave me the name of a terrific lawyer—just in case. She just went through a hellish divorce.”
“I have one, too, but quite frankly, Steve doesn’t stand a chance if he walks out. Not that he would want to walk out, of course.”
“No. But you’ve got to be prepared,” Christine acknowledged. “We can’t be like our mothers’ generation. They went into marriage practically blind.”
“You can say that again.”
“A few months ago I walked into a Starbucks, and there was the mother of my best friend from high school—working behind the counter. Her husband left her after thirty years. Thirty years!”
Amanda, subdued by this turn of the conversation, took a cracker from the untouched cheese plate and marveled at her own blindness. For all her professed independence, what steps had she taken to protect herself? When she gave up her job, the thought did cross her mind that she was surrendering what her feminist professors used to call “economic power.” But somehow it hadn’t felt that way. Amanda and Bob continued to divide the household tasks, viewing their new arrangement as simply a change in the form of their partnership. They were still equals, making different contributions to what remained a joint enterprise, the Bright-Clarke household. Or so Bob had characterized it in his typical attorney fashion, and she had agreed. It had seemed like an enlightened, egalitarian approach to a situation that was otherwise unthinkably traditional. Now it all struck Amanda as mad. Even Ellen and Kim had the wit to prepare themselves, while she, Amanda, had blithely thrown her lot in with Bob in every way, relying—so carelessly!—on the tenuous power of affection to carry her through these years of unemployment. Suddenly she felt like a tightrope walker who looks down and notices that she has been crossing without a net.
“Well, I think you’re courageous, Christine,” Kim was saying. “I’ve sort of been thinking of getting my eyes done.”
“Gosh,” exclaimed Ellen. “Maybe we should all go together. Make a field trip of it. I’ve always hated my nose.”
Amanda struggled to pull herself up in her chair. “I don’t know. It just seems a lot to put yourself through—surgery.” She knew it was a retreat.
“Spoken like a thirty-five-year-old.” Christine smiled. “You don’t have to worry yet. You have great skin.” She cast her eyes over Amanda appraisingly. “But have you ever thought about doing something with your hair?”
That evening, Amanda toweled herself off in front of the bathroom mirror and studied her body from every angle. She
turned sideways and backward. She raised her hair and let it tumble down. She moved in so closely she could see the grayish pores of her nose and then stepped back to judge the effect of her features as a whole. She tried to do this all without flinching, in the detached manner of an accountant logging assets and deficits. Perhaps it was the lighting—the unflattering brightness of the overhead light that cast some parts of her in high relief and others in shadow. Or maybe it was because she was focusing upon herself all at once, instead of in pieces, as she usually did, so that she could appreciate her nice calves and ignore her thighs. But the longer she looked, the worse her body appeared. When she finally turned away from the mirror Amanda wished she could wrap herself in a chador rather than this thin towel.
Bob lay on their bed in his boxer shorts, reading legal briefs. He was frowning slightly and marking passages with a highlighter pen. He did not look up when Amanda padded past him to fetch her pajamas. Crouching self-consciously behind the open closet door, Amanda pulled on her night uniform (an oversized T-shirt of Bob’s, a pair of cotton sweatpants). What was Bob’s real opinion when she passed by him like she did just now? Did he quietly revile the sight of her loose buttocks? How often had his eyes traced the faint tributaries of stretch marks that riddled her belly? And what did he think of her breasts? … During their courtship, when Bob had greeted every newly unveiled attribute of hers with surprise and delight, he had been captivated by her young breasts. Years of being put to utilitarian use feeding babies had toughened her nipples and caused the breasts themselves to hang charmlessly, like week-old party balloons.
She went to the bed and curled up uneasily beside him. Amanda waited for a single warm gesture that would banish her fears, that would make them seem hysterical and crazy. Bob continued marking his briefs. His bare chest rose methodically with his breathing; his gut, which had been firm when they met, rolled over the rim of his shorts. Occasionally Bob would announce that he needed to lose ten pounds, but he did nothing about it. Was Bob indifferent to the shape of his body—or indifferent to Amanda’s opinion of it?
Amanda Bright @ Home Page 5