One of us—she’d gone to Catholic school; her mother’s youngest brother was a priest—had also converted to Judaism when she married but abandoned the conversion (as easily as stepping out of a pair of shoes that fit too loosely, one of us who was Jewish by birth but entirely unobservant—as three of us were—remarked, sotto voce, at a Christmas party at the ex-convert’s house) when the marriage ended. After she married for the second time, the children celebrated Christmas and Easter with their mother, a playwright, and her new husband, a psychologist, and Hanukkah and Passover with their father (he was a newspaper reporter) and his Jewish-by-birth TV-news-producer girlfriend (whom we knew, for although she wasn’t one of us, she sang in a choir to which two of us belonged and played violin in the community orchestra with another of us, who played the flute, and eventually we had all been introduced to her at concerts, in the lobby afterward).
All of us had grievances about the people we were married to, or whom those of us who dated had relationships with and were eventually disappointed by (because they turned out to be unavailable or because they were too available, because they would not marry again “under any circumstances” or because they were too eager to [re]marry, especially if they seemed desperate for help with the children of whom they had partial custody).
All of us were sympathetic to one another’s troubles—or at least all of us made sympathetic noises, and if we didn’t sympathize, we kept that to ourselves.
*
Nine of us were married to men, three of us married—or all but married—to women. One of us had once been married to a man and was now all but married to a woman. None of us had ever stayed at home full-time, year-round. None of us had ever had a nanny (it was not the sort of town in which one had a nanny), but we had all had babysitters—students at the college, mostly (those of us with children nearly the same age had often shared our sitters, or passed them around)—and sometimes foreign exchange students who lived in for a semester or a year and helped out. Most of us had made use of the university’s day care and early preschool.
Only two of us had ever wished to be at home full-time. (Those of us who taught were at home full-time every summer and for winter and spring breaks, which is plenty, all of us who taught said. One of us didn’t mean it.)
Almost half of us had Ferberized our children—let them “cry it out,” trained them, early on, to sleep in their own cribs in their own rooms—and the rest of us had variously shared our own beds with our children or made frequent exhausted trips to our crying babies’ rooms each night for months or years, or else had moved out of our bedrooms and into our children’s, sleeping on a twin bed bought just for this purpose and installed there, for months or years.
Four of us had had abortions. One of us had had multiple abortions while she was still in high school, long before we knew her. Four of us had tried for a long time to get pregnant, and three of the four had. Two with IVF.
*
One of us hated her husband but would never leave him, she told all the rest of us—that was how much she dreaded being alone. (This was not speculation on our part: she said it herself, though only after several glasses of wine, when she also confessed that from time to time she entertained a fantasy about her husband’s death. People are so solicitous of widows, she said wistfully. She looked around at us. Aren’t they? she asked. But none of us were widows yet. We didn’t know.)
One of us, who had been single when we’d all first met, had moved two thousand miles away when she’d married her husband, and at first she’d kept in touch, calling one or another of us at least once a week, sending letters and postcards, remembering all of our birthdays. But as the years had passed, we heard from her less and less frequently, and by now we hardly heard from her at all. (And even so, we still thought of her as one of us.)
One of us fell in love with her ob-gyn soon after she turned forty-four—and he fell in love back, although the two of them did not do anything (or much of anything) about it. They exchanged hundreds, perhaps thousands, of e-mails, and had long talks on the phone when they could manage it; they met for whispered, nervous conversations (was there anywhere in town that truly was private, she asked us rhetorically—where someone who knew one of them wouldn’t spot them out together and wonder what that was all about?) and twice, when they were sure no one was looking, hand-holding and kisses.
The kisses she told all of us about only after the affair was over—but it wasn’t an affair, all of us said (except the one who’d moved away, who didn’t know anything about it—who didn’t know anything about what any of us were up to anymore). There was no proper name for it, we all agreed (except for one of us, who at first suggested that what had transpired was what was called an emotional affair—and the rest of us, sensitive to language, sensitive to sentimentality, scoffed, and the one who’d said it, the only one of us who did not use scare quotes around “issues,” the only one of us who read the sort of magazines that featured articles about “emotional affairs,” backed down, agreeing with the rest of us).
One of us had been beaten—just once, but once was enough—by her first husband. One of us had not slept with the husband she’d had from the start—by now they had been married for eleven years—for at least the last six years, she said, and possibly it had been even longer. You don’t know? one of us asked. She shrugged. I didn’t start counting right away.
One of us, married just as long, swore that she and her husband had sex twice a week.
Most of us, however, did not speak of our sex lives at all, except sometimes to talk about what we had been like when we were teenagers or girls in our twenties. How wild we had been! we said. Or else: how sheltered. How cautious—or how reckless. How foolish. None of us claimed to have been wise. Were we wise now? Wiser, at least?
All of us wondered.
*
We would get together for dinner or for lunch, two or three of us or a small group of us or all of us at once (except the one who’d moved away, and—if her husband wasn’t otherwise engaged—the one of us who was referred to as a Bobbsey Twin from time to time by one of us), and we would complain or brag about our children and we would complain about the people we were married to or dating. We’d complain about our jobs, our weight, our hair, our lives, mostly (but not always) good-naturedly, and we would tell stories and repeat good jokes we’d heard. We talked about what we’d been reading and what movies we had seen with husbands, wives, partners, or dates; we talked about the news and about trips we’d taken recently to New York City or Chicago or LA or Washington, DC, about the plays we’d seen, the art museums we had visited, the restaurants we’d eaten in.
We talked about our parents—those of us who still had parents. Two of us were orphans. Two of us had lost one parent, one of us when she was still a child. She was the one of us who hated her husband, who daydreamed about his death but would not divorce him. She was the one of us who was an orchestral cellist.
*
We were musicians, painters, poets, playwrights, and professors. One of us was a museum curator, one a psychotherapist. One of us had opened an art gallery the year before with the woman she’d just married; one of us had left a longtime job as an administrator in the School of Humanities and Arts at the university and was now enrolled in cooking school (she was the one who spoke of “issues” unironically). The one of us who taught high school taught English and advised the drama club, was the faculty adviser for the student newspaper and literary magazine, and coached a poetry performance team. (She also wrote short stories, but only two of us knew that about her.) The one who fell in love with her ob-gyn was a painter. The one who had adopted the child she had been foster parenting was the one who had been married once, so long ago that she could not remember married life—she was the museum curator.
One of us sang early music and gave piano and voice lessons privately. One of us was an astronomer—she was the outlier among us, the only one, we teased, who had a head for math. We would hand her the c
heck to work out when we all went out to dinner.
(In truth, the one of us who sang professionally and gave music lessons was better at arithmetic than the astronomer was. None of us except her knew it.)
One of us was a professor of comparative studies (she was the one of us whose daughter was in China, the one of us who had not slept with her husband for the last six years). She had served on a faculty committee with the astronomer ten years ago at the university and then soon after had run into her at the opera house downtown, during intermission. The professor of comparative studies, like the astronomer (who was the only one of us who had never married—who had never even lived with anyone), had gone to the opera by herself, and the two went out for drinks afterward and enjoyed a lengthy conversation. Our circle was still incomplete then; the astronomer was quickly adopted into it.
Had the astronomer been the last addition? None of us were sure. Both the museum curator and the gallery owner (who’d worked for over twenty years in other people’s galleries and dabbled in photography and sculpture), who’d come into our circle through the painter—who herself had come to us, we were almost certain, through the art history professor—had become our friends around the same time. The rest of us, we were also almost sure, had all already known each other. But it was so hard to remember—we had all been so much younger then. Practically children, we liked to say, and then we’d laugh. We didn’t know anything then, we said. We were so innocent!
And optimistic, one of us said.
Yes, and optimistic, all of us agreed, although not all of us remembered it that way.
*
We had all been friends for a long time when the painter fell in love with her ob-gyn somewhere between her first (and only) office visit and their third exchange of e-mails after it. She told us everything about what had happened between them except for the kisses—I was ashamed to tell you that, she told us later—but none of us held it against her. Not the kisses, and not the secret. We all had secrets, even though we all behaved as if we didn’t.
*
All of us were smart, reasonably well informed (all but one of us read or at least skimmed the daily New York Times, three of us watched the nightly news on television, all of us listened or said we listened to NPR in our cars), and passionate about particular causes (education reform, public transportation, the environment, health care, homelessness). Ten of us had graduate degrees. One of us, in addition to the poet among us, wrote poetry (this was not a secret; even her students and her two grown children—she was the art history professor and enthusiastic convert to Judaism, whose daughter had dropped out of Cornell—knew all about it), and one of us read poetry (which surprised the rest of us, and in particular the poet and the art history professor who wrote poems in her spare time). The one who read poetry was the astronomer, who said that poetry was the only sort of thing worth reading, other than the journals that she was obliged to read and The New York Times. One of us, who wrote popular novels, was insulted by this (she told some of us, and we told her she was being silly—even the poet among us told her she was being silly, though secretly she was insulted too, as the astronomer did not read contemporary poetry, only famous long-dead poets).
One of us—the one of us who had until two years before been in administration at the university and who had a teenage son from her first marriage and two young stepchildren thanks to her third husband (who’d left his young wife for her)—read only magazines and cookbooks now and didn’t mind (or didn’t seem to mind) when we teased her about this. One of us had a weakness for thick Hollywood biographies, and one of us read mysteries and literary thrillers (the poet among us insisted that the latter was an oxymoron). One—the novelist—could not bear, she said, to read other people’s novels, and read only memoirs. The poet read novels. The cellist read the letters of the famous long dead. The playwright read plays and European history. (It was impossible for any of us to recommend anything to read to any of the rest of us, or to give each other books as gifts—and yet, stubbornly, we did both anyway.)
The one of us who was an English teacher at the high school was the only one of us who read short stories for pleasure, and one Friday night when nearly all of us had gathered at the home of the astronomer, she spoke of a story she had read in which the protagonist, a man of thirty-five, reflected that he was at “the age of grief.”
The poet said, I think I know that story, and the psychotherapist said that she thought she knew it too. The cellist said, Wait—what? Thirty-five is the age of grief? What does that mean for us?
It means that the writer of the story is still in her thirties, said the poet, and all of us laughed. But after a moment one of us—the astronomer, in whose living room we all sat with our wine or Diet Coke or seltzer—said, Still. Maybe it’s true anyway.
Then what would that mean for us? one of us—the one of us who sang early music, whose husband was a decade younger than she was, who had just last year had twins—asked. She made the question sound as if it were a joke.
It would mean that we are in the age of postgrief, one of us—the painter—said. And the poet, who had just been left abruptly by the woman she’d been living with for fourteen years, said, Oh, let’s hope so.
*
The painter was the youngest of us. She had a four-year-old son, but the ob-gyn she fell in love with was not the doctor who’d delivered him. That doctor had been female, and she had delivered all our children, except those who’d been adopted and the newest ones, the twins. None of us could remember now which one of us had seen her first and recommended her to all the rest of us. But it had been two years now since she’d given up her practice, so suddenly that none of us had even managed to get a referral from her (the one of us who’d had the twins last year, who sang songs written over a thousand years ago, was already seeing a fertility specialist by then, who had referred her to an obstetrician with particular experience with those with “elderly primigravida” in their forties).
We hadn’t even realized how dependent we were on the doctor we had all been seeing for so many years (two of us got our Zoloft prescriptions from her, and all of us had told her things we hadn’t even told each other) until she was gone. She didn’t even say goodbye! we said. (One of us had heard that she’d left town to tend to her dying mother; another had heard that she had fled town, leaving not only her practice but also her husband for a woman whose child she’d delivered; one of us had heard that she was, in fact, still in town, but in hiding—that she was being treated for advanced breast cancer and was not about to spend the time she had left taking care of us and all the other women in her busy practice—including her lover? one of us, the playwright, who it seemed could not resist saying this sort of thing, could not keep herself from asking, and the rest of us hushed her.)
The playwright had been the first to see the new ob-gyn—he had been recommended by a sometime colleague in the university’s theater department, where our playwright friend would teach a class occasionally—and she had found him genial but generally unimpressive (of course, we had all been so devoted to our former gynecologist, it was going to be hard for anyone to live up to our standards). Three of us had scheduled annual exam appointments with other ob-gyns who’d been recommended by a colleague or a client, but in the meantime the painter, overdue for her checkup, kept the appointment she’d already made with the doctor recommended by the set-design professor to our playwright friend who’d found him wanting, and then she fell in love with him.
The rest of us never met him, and what she told us made it difficult to form a picture of him: he was kind, he listened to her, he asked a lot of questions she liked answering, he acted as if everything she said—as if she—mattered. He was sweet. He was so nice.
And that’s enough? some of us asked. (Not that every one of us wasn’t thinking the same thing. The rest of us were just polite enough to wonder silently.) Our friend the painter was quiet for a moment. But finally she said, Haven’t any of you ever fallen for s
omebody because he was kind to you? All of us said no, we hadn’t. But most of us, in that very instant, suddenly remembered a crush on a divorce lawyer, a particularly sympathetic-to-our-side marriage counselor, a gentle periodontist. A yoga teacher. The always-friendly mailman.
None of us had ever let it go beyond a crush, however. (Briefly, we all asked ourselves if a partial explanation for this would include our having so effectively concealed how much we appreciated the divorce attorney/mailman’s kindness—for if our friend, with her small, demanding son and the pressure to complete her new series of paintings in time for a scheduled show in New York City, and her brooding, handsome, trumpet-playing husband, had fallen in love because of kindness, surely he, the ob-gyn, had fallen in love back because of her appreciation of his kindness.) But there was this too: none of us who were married, we were certain, would have let our marriages be threatened by mere kindness—only passion. And those of us who had been married but now weren’t had no recollection of so desperate a need for kindness that it bloomed into a crush, and the one of us who’d never married had no experience of it—we had no idea what she was talking about.
*
But it didn’t matter. The romance (such as it was) was doomed to fail. Our friend had known this from the start; she supposed that her beloved had known too. She was an artist of some note, married to a jazz musician also of some note—and even so the two of them, along with their precocious, high-strung son, were always on the brink of a financial crisis; she dressed like a Gypsy, wore her hair down to her waist, drove a twenty-year-old pickup truck, and was a supporter of numerous left-wing causes. She had nursed her son until the week before his fourth birthday, when he had weaned himself. And the ob-gyn was a Republican; he wore suits and ties; he owned more expensive cars than he and his wife, an anesthesiologist, could possibly drive—a collection of cars, he called them. He had once spoken of a patient as a “breast-feeding fanatic” because she refused to supplement her nursing with bottles of formula as had been suggested by her pediatrician, she’d reported at an office visit. Honestly, can you believe that? he had asked our friend. The baby isn’t gaining weight and she refuses to give him a bottle!
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