Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  “So,” she said, and set her drink down on a book-crammed nightstand (there were the familiar textbooks, and a dog-eared copy of Catch-22). “Tell me why you want to be a lawyer.”

  He smoothed his hair with the back of his hand and tipped his glass against his mouth. “Ah, the cross-examination begins. How about you go first?”

  Sylvie shrugged. “With me it was dynastic. I didn’t really have a choice.” This was true, although she’d never actually proposed an alternate career to her parents. She was smart, she could write, and in light of her mother’s outsize successes, law seemed a given. But even though she was outspoken, and could be funny (and, like Richard, could occasionally even be mean), she had a far more conciliatory nature than Selma. She could sense injustice but lacked her mother’s boundless passion to correct it, to wade into battle over and over again. As a girl, she’d been fascinated with nuns, with the idea that you could go to a place cut off from the world, where your job would be to pray, and make bread, or cheese, or something simple like that. (Of course Selma had turned this knowledge into one of her prize anecdotes. “My daughter,” she’d say to her friends, and the audiences who turned out to honor her, “the first Jewish nun.”) Sylvie finished her drink, feeling the whiskey burn her throat, wondering, a little fuzzily, whether a man could be a cloister, a monastery, a place where you could be enclosed and kept safe from the world.

  “How about you?” she asked.

  He looked at her thoughtfully from where he stood in the center of the room. He’d kicked his shoes off. Barefoot, he looked even more like an overgrown boy, a kid who’d been allowed to stay up late. “The truth is, I wanna be president.”

  She stared at him a moment before starting to laugh. President! That was another surprise. Most of her classmates would have given an answer involving justice. They would have talked about suffering, and the law as a tool to address it; they would have given examples from their years digging latrines in the Peace Corps or their summers interning at Head Start in Harlem, or offered up some anecdote from their own lives: an uncle bankrupted after he couldn’t pay for his wife’s hospitalization, a field or forest despoiled by developers.

  “President?” she said, and Richard gave a charming shrug.

  “One thing you gotta know about me, Sylvie …” And, in an instant, he was sitting beside her again, one warm fingertip back at her neckline, then dipping lower. “I am nothing if not ambitious.”

  This was the moment she could have pushed him away and gotten to her feet, exclaiming indignantly that she wasn’t that kind of girl, that they hadn’t so much as been to a movie together, that he hadn’t even bought her a sandwich, let alone dinner. But she found herself both aroused and bemused by this half-drunk, earnest hick, with his bare feet and his plaid bedspread and his ambition. Was he serious about being president? Was he serious about her?

  “Tell me how it’s going to happen.” He kissed her cheek, then used his fingertips, delicately, to free her copper earring from her hair. “You’re going to get your law degree …”

  “Got a job lined up already. Manhattan D.A.’s office this summer,” he said, his voice low and confident, rumbling against her skin. “They’ll hire me full-time soon as I graduate.” He took her in his arms, eased her back onto the bed, and rolled on top of her. The one-quarter of her brain that was still processing information, instead of the feel of Richard’s mouth against her neck, was thinking, Drink talk. Although maybe not. Someone had to be president, so why not Richard? Good backstory; nice-looking; state school to please the common folk, a Yale law degree to delight the snobs and the intelligentsia. The world could do worse.

  “Then I’ll go into private practice for a while. Make some money. Build my war chest.” He bent down to tug at her boots, and if he noticed the three pairs of white athletic socks that came off with each one, he was nice enough not to comment. “Then I’ll run for the New York State Assembly. Then the U.S. Senate.”

  “They’re going to vote for you?” she murmured, as he climbed back onto the bed beside her. “They don’t like outsiders.”

  “Oh, the good people of New York are absolutely gonna vote for me,” he said, sliding his hand up her shirt and unhooking her bra one-handed. “We’ll have lived in Manhattan for years by then.”

  She pushed him a few inches away, lifting her body up on her elbows so she could see his face in the dim light. “We?”

  “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, Sylvie,” said Richard. “You’re a sweetheart,” he said. Before she had time to savor the compliment, to enjoy the taste of the word sweetheart, he added, “You’re also the most organized person I’ve ever seen. Your notebooks are something.”

  “You’re hot for my notebooks?” she asked, her amusement back and growing stronger. Her notebooks, she had to admit, were something—cross-tabulated, color-coordinated, with different colors for each class and a different color ink for each topic.

  “You ever seen mine?” he asked, and leaned up on one elbow, reaching over to his desk and producing a battered black-and-white composition book. His handwriting was a mess, his notes were almost illegible, and, Sylvie noted a little smugly, he only ever used black ink. “I saw those notebooks, and I thought, That’s the girl for me.”

  Later, it would occur to her to ask the obvious question, which was Why? Of all the girls at Yale, many of whom took excellent notes, why had he chosen her? Later, she would wonder whether Richard had sought her out because she was Selma Serfer’s daughter, because her status (relatively wealthy, from an educated and influential family, a native New Yorker, resident of perhaps the one city in America where being Jewish wasn’t an automatic political drawback) had a luster that would make his own homespun, small-town scholarship-boy story even more impressive in contrast. But that night she didn’t ask. She let him take off her top, let him press his bare chest against hers, crooning her name—Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie—and thought that he had what she didn’t: an agenda, a plan. It was almost like a fairy tale: once upon a time, there was a boy from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who grew up to be president. Richard would write the story; he would draw the map. She would help him navigate, and together, triumphant, they would arrive at the destination he had chosen, where they would, of course, live happily ever after. Do you trust me? he’d ask her—this was on their second date, when he’d taken her to a matinee, and out for Chinese for dinner. They were in bed together, naked beneath the Kennedy poster, about to have sex for the first time (another detail she’d never shared with a reporter), and when he’d asked his question, she’d answered with the words of a bride: I do.

  They’d gotten married right after law school graduation, in a ceremony in Yale’s chapel conducted by a Supreme Court justice, one of Selma’s friends. Sylvie remembered Richard’s father talking too loudly, whacking her own father on the back repeatedly, and giving a drunken rehearsal-dinner toast in which he’d referred to Sylvie as “the little lady.” Selma had smiled tightly, and Richard’s mother had whispered apologies in the ladies’ room, but privately, Sylvie hadn’t been offended. Secretly, she’d liked the way it had sounded.

  Her parents had offered to help with a down payment for a place near them, on the Upper West Side, but Richard had refused.

  “I know they mean well,” he said, twisting from side to side on the narrow bed in his New Haven apartment, “but I just wouldn’t feel right, and I don’t know how to tell them without sounding like an ungrateful bastard.”

  “Well, let’s figure it out.” She got off the bed and sat cross-legged in the folding metal chair that was the only other seating in the room. Richard, meanwhile, sprawled flat on his back, arms and legs and even fingers extended, as if that would help the words come more easily. Sylvie picked up a notebook and, after considering her pen selection, chose green ink. “We’ll start off by saying how overwhelmed and grateful we are.”

  “Grateful,” he repeated, nodding. “Overwhelmed.”

  “And then we’ll tell th
em …” She paused, hearing Richard’s voice in her head. “That you think it’s important to make your own way in the world, like they did. To learn as you go.”

  “That’s not gonna sound like I’m an asshole?”

  “It won’t,” she assured him. That was the first speech, the first of many, that she’d helped him write … and never mind that she hadn’t completely agreed with its substance, that she would have been more than happy to take the loan and move into a place that didn’t have mice and a bathroom with barely enough room for a toilet and a tiny sink and a shower stall where the curtain stuck to your body unless you positioned yourself just right.

  They’d moved into the apartment on Court Street in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. Richard had gone to work at the D.A.’s office, as planned, and she’d been a summer associate in the trust and estates department of Richter, Morgan, and Katz. Two years later, she’d had Diana. A year after that, Richard had left the D.A.’s office and become a partner at a big firm downtown. Buoyed by his six-figure salary and the promise of bonuses, they’d moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, into a classic seven two blocks away from Central Park with a big living room and floor-to-ceiling windows, a place someone in Richard’s firm had found for them, perfect for entertaining. With its cramped kitchen and small bedrooms and lack of closet space, the apartment was less perfect for raising a family, but Richard hadn’t seemed to notice and Sylvie hadn’t complained. Years later, when he’d come to her in the hospital after Lizzie was born and said he was going to announce his run for the state assembly the next week, and asked if she was ready, she’d set the baby, fed and freshly changed and swaddled, into her bassinet, sat up as straight as she could without her stitches pulling, and told him, “Absolutely.”

  Over the years Sylvie had decorated their apartment, choosing dishes and furniture that looked good enough for dinners for twelve and cocktails for forty but could withstand the assault of children; a pair of couches slipcovered in canvas, good Persian rugs. After Lizzie came home she hired a nanny named Marta, who lived two subway stops down from their old stop in Brooklyn. Richard’s work, his campaigns, the researching and the scheduling and the speechwriting, kept her as busy as a full-time job would have, and the extra set of hands turned out to be invaluable. The girls, Lizzie especially, loved Marta, the soft-boiled eggs and toast fingers she’d cook for breakfast, the chicken and rice she’d prepare for dinner. On the weekends they begged to be taken to her apartment, where Marta lived with her husband and two teenage sons.

  As soon as she was on her feet, Sylvie swapped her maternity clothes for power suits with towering shoulder pads, which she’d wear with sheer black panty hose and sneakers, the better to walk miles on the sidewalks, distributing window signs and pamphlets. Instead of colorful beads and inexpensive bangles, she had the pearls Richard had given her as an anniversary gift, and a drawer full of Hermès scarves. Once he was elected, she managed his district office, helping handle constituent service, ghostwriting his speeches, doing research, drafting bills. She did step aerobics in the 1980s, spinning in the 1990s, yoga and Pilates in the new millennium. She did Atkins, and South Beach, and Weight Watchers, and Weight Watchers online. She kept those twenty pounds off, and made other improvements. Any woman would have if she’d seen herself in the Times, in a picture snapped at a press conference, hair flying around her head, mouth hanging open and double chins on full display. Now Sylvie’s hair was chemically straightened every three months and dyed every two. She’d had a breast reduction and a tummy tuck when she was thirty-five, and liposuction done on her chin and cheeks ten years after that. She wasn’t thin—at least, not the bone-thinness of some of the other ladies-who-lunched and politicians’ wives she’d met, women who looked, in real life, barely more substantial than the cardboard cutouts of the president that people posed with while waiting in line for the Washington Monument—but she was thin enough so that she didn’t cringe every time she saw a picture of herself.

  Of course, not everyone approved of her choices. “You look so ordinary,” Ceil once cried, years ago, after they’d split a bottle of wine at lunch. Ceil had apologized, thinking that she’d insulted her friend, but secretly, Sylvie had been pleased. Ordinary was good. Ordinary meant that no one would notice you, or post your picture, or make fun. Ordinary meant that they’d leave her alone, her and her daughters, and that was all the blessing Sylvie could wish.

  Sylvie’s mother was even less impressed with her daughter’s efforts. “What happened to you?” she’d ask, staring at her, perplexed, as if she could no longer recognize her own daughter. Sylvie remembered her mother’s reaction the first time she’d brought Richard home, three months after Leonard King’s funeral. Her mother had studied Sylvie’s husband-to-be from across the table, watching as he struggled to eat her brisket, which had been roasted until each slice had the consistency of a scab. “He’s going places,” Selma had said, tapping one knobby finger against her red lips, while Sylvie washed the dishes and Richard and Dave watched football in the living room. “But I think he’s the kind of man who just needs a woman along for the ride.” Sylvie hadn’t answered. She knew the truth was that Richard didn’t just need her along for the ride, he needed her help, her advice, her behind-the-scenes counsel … and, unlike her mother, she’d never craved the spotlight. She didn’t mind invisibility or a permanent spot in the passenger’s seat.

  She also hated being a lawyer. She’d survived law school, where you could read about the great cases and argue about procedure and precedent and justice, but being a lawyer, especially in trusts and estates, wasn’t about justice; it was about moving mountains of paper from one side of the desk to the other. When Diana was born Sylvie had left her firm and grabbed hold of new motherhood like a drowning woman clutching a piece of driftwood. Twelve weeks had stretched into six months, then a year, then three, then four, and when Diana was five she’d gotten pregnant again, not entirely accidentally, although Richard thought otherwise.

  Diana had been a handful—headstrong and bossy, walking at nine months and uttering her first word—“more!”—at ten. Then, when Lizzie came along, after a difficult pregnancy and an emergency C-section, she was underweight and wrinkled, like a tiny and miserable old man in the pink dresses Selma brought to the hospital. Lizzie was also illness-prone, allergic to everything but the air and sometimes, Sylvie suspected, that, too. Between the two girls—Diana with her demands and her schedule and her Gifted and Talented enrichment classes, Lizzie with her acid reflux and her asthma—not even Selma expected Sylvie to go back to work. There were doctors’ appointments to make and keep, games and practice to organize and witness, play groups to attend and homework to check and at least one frantic trip to the doctor or the pharmacy to pick up penicillin or replace a lost inhaler every month.

  Eventually, it became easier to let Marta take the girls down to the subway or load them into cabs, to let her take Diana to her rehearsals and practices and deal with Lizzie’s music lessons and bad moods. Marta, who was Sylvie’s mother’s age, short and no-nonsense, with lace-up orthopedic shoes, cardigan sweaters, and gray hair drawn back in a bun, was endlessly patient and, after her own boys, delighted to have two girls to dress up and coddle. Marta was patient in a way Sylvie wasn’t. She could handle the elaborate arrangements for playdates and keep straight the names of the mothers of the girls’ friends and the dosage of Lizzie’s allergy medicine while Sylvie focused on her husband’s work, her husband’s world. Marta could deal with the girls, but only she could take care of Richard.

  And look where that had gotten her, she thought, as the car glided out of the tunnel and up Eighth Avenue, past fast-food restaurants and dry cleaners and drugstores and the ubiquitous chain coffee stores that had sprouted on every corner. Look at her now. The numbness she’d felt since the rest stop restroom was starting to scare her. It wasn’t right. Shouldn’t she be crying, weeping, wailing, on the telephone with her husband, pleading with him to leave his young pla
ything behind? Yet she didn’t feel like crying, or begging. She felt as if she’d been frozen, until she let herself think of her daughters, how they would be dragged down into the mud, how they would be shamed. Then she felt herself swelling with fury, and that scared her, too, because it was so atypical. She got annoyed—what wife, what woman, didn’t?—but she could count the times over the years that she’d been truly furious at Richard on one hand, and have several fingers left over.

  The car pulled up in front of their building. There were photographers clustered on the sidewalk, a dozen of them, sweating in the heat, some with television cameras and others with digital cameras, plus a few reporters holding notebooks and tape recorders, outnumbered by the photographers and video people. In this case, Sylvie reasoned, everyone knew the story. It was the images they were after, the money shot, the picture worth a thousand words of the disgraced wife lifting the cup to her lips and taking her first bitter sip. Derek put the car in park, then turned to face her. “How about we go around the back?”

  “No,” she said. She wouldn’t be bullied, she wouldn’t be shamed, she wouldn’t slink through back doors as if she was the one who’d made a mistake. She had raised her head, reminding herself that she was Selma Serfer’s daughter, when the first of the photographers spotted the car. In an instant, they were surrounded.

  “Sylvie!”

  “Mrs. Woodruff!”

  “Sylvie, any comment on the senator’s affair?”

  Clarissa winced. Derek squared his shoulders and opened his door, then hers. “Just stay close.” Sylvie grabbed her purse. She left her panty hose crumpled on the floor of the car, pushed her feet back into her shoes, bent her head, and stepped, barelegged, onto the sidewalk. She tried to make herself as small as possible, head tucked into her chest, arms tight against her sides, ignoring the shouts of “Mrs. Woodruff!” and “Is it true he paid the girl off to keep quiet?” and “Did you know about the affair?” and “How long’s it been going on?” and “Are you planning to divorce him?”