by Meg Wolitzer
“Who is it?” Antonia asked.
“It’s us.”
“Yes?”
“We need to talk to you.”
Antonia pulled open the door. She had a pencil between her teeth, caught there as though it were a rose and she were dancing the tango. It seemed, in that first, stark moment, as if they had interrupted something sexual in nature. Their mother whisked away the pencil and said, “What is it, girls? You know I’m working. It’s the middle of my workday.”
“Amy got the curse,” Naomi said without preamble.
“What?”
“My period,” Amy muttered, looking down at the floor in a kind of obscure shame.
“Her period,” Jennifer echoed, pointlessly.
“Oh. Well, did you go get the sanitary pads from my bathroom? They’re under the counter.”
“No,” said Amy, and though she was twelve years old, she began to cry. She stood outside the open door of her mother’s office with the view of the desk and the typewriter and the empty pink cans of Tab, and the tears dropped. She knew, somehow, that she only wanted her mother to go show her the secret place where the napkins were kept—the kind that women wore back then, as thick as submarine sandwiches—and to sit down with her and say a few corny phrases about maturity that Amy and her sisters could mock later on. She wanted it all, the way it used to be, before all the hypnotized mothers had started disappearing into guest rooms or real-estate offices or travel agencies, telling their children, “This is my time.”
A sound now caught in Antonia’s throat. Her face grew pink, and she softened. “Honey,” she said. “Oh, honey. You’re upset.”
“No I’m not,” Amy said, now weeping.
Her mother swiftly pulled her against her. “Look, I didn’t realize. I was lost in thought. This is a very, very big deal. I’m glad you interrupted me.”
“You are?”
“Absolutely,” said her mother. “Congratulations. I should have said that right away.”
The three girls and their mother spent the rest of the day going to Steinberg’s to buy the big pads as well as the junior tampons that were as thin as swizzle sticks, and then Antonia had simply closed shop for the afternoon and sat around with them making kettle corn and ironing their hair. The following morning, she returned to her study, and the door was shut.
As they grew older, the early experience of having once had a mother who was available all the time—an iconic figure like the Statue of Liberty, raising a glass of milk and serenely handing it over—lost its clarity. Had Antonia ever truly belonged to them? Yes, yes, she had, and the ownership had been extraordinary, though they had taken it for granted. They’d had her during the day, and their father had had her at night; it had been a system that seemed to work well. But now she belonged to everyone: to her “muse,” as she said with irony, and to her publisher, and to her earnest friends in her consciousness-raising group. Her daughters never really got her back exclusively. And anyway, as Naomi pointed out, they were more independent themselves now too. The older two had become focused on the habits and particularities of boys, and all three of them could prepare their own snacks and could help check over one another’s homework. Still, the pain of the loss had been as real as anything—as startling as blood in the underpants—and then, after a while, it began to fade. It was just like waking up from a dream in tears: You weren’t sure what you’d been so upset about, but you were just relieved that it was over.
Now, at age sixty-nine, Antonia Lamb was still prolific, although her mostly female readership had diminished over the past few years, perhaps finally exhausted by her big, historical, unapologetically feminist novels, which over time kept coming and coming, as if somewhere a bookshelf was toppling, its contents relentlessly falling upon everyone’s heads. She had won all the significant Canadian literary prizes; her work “spoke to the frustrations and yearnings of women everywhere,” according to the judge of an awards committee back in the mid-1970s, describing Antonia’s first novel, Turning Around and Going Home, from the podium at a book festival in Toronto.
Antonia Lamb had walked onstage that night in a gunmetal-gray crushed-velvet gown, and spoke in her slow, intelligent voice. She’d said, “I’m going to talk tonight about gender, power, and the insidiousness of self-censorship. You might think these subjects have nothing to do with you, but you would be wrong.” The women in the seats had listened well, their faces uptilted in devotion. She was a minor heroine to them during a time when feminism seemed like an electrical current that would convulse the world in perpetuity. But in the end, the audience had shuffled out of the dim glow of the auditorium and returned to their lives, some of which would be adequate, some awful, and who knew what had happened to most of them over time.
And here was Antonia Lamb’s middle daughter all these years later on a Monday morning in fall, a woman of forty, who, unlike her mother, had never been deeply in love with her work. Becoming a lawyer had made sense to Amy for a long time; she’d been on the debate team in high school and had thrown herself into the excitement and tension of the meets and the internecine drama of the club itself. She’d had a long flirtation with the team captain, a confident goofball from down the street named Alan Bredloe, who had memorized all the lines to Inherit the Wind. They mock-debated each other on subjects such as euthanasia and pesticides and the sovereignty of Quebec; they once even debated the topic “Is there a quantifiable thing called ‘love’?” ending up in the slippage of a long kiss and with hands moving around under each other’s clothes on the Bredloe family couch.
Amy liked the beauty of debate, the way you could bark at another person until you wore them down, which meant you had won. “Your reasoning is so faulty it’s pathetic, Bredloe,” she said to Alan, and he said, “You think so, Lamb? You really think so?” “Yes, as it happens I do,” she said. “And in the next two minutes I shall prove it.” They were fifteen years old, and they sparred with each other in the way that high school debaters did, but they both felt as though they were also in training for a greater sparring that would take place when they were much older. Whenever Amy debated, her face grew hot, and she felt charged with the same preening vigor that people felt when they exercised or, supposedly, had sex.
Years later, after high school and then college, Amy was among the bloc of English majors in her class who gamely applied to law school. They knew, these English majors, that literature was an open field and law school was an enclosed pasture, but they were practical too. No one would take care of you forever; the world would not love and protect you. You had to know how to do something well. This was different from a passion for your work, and while it was always best to have one of those, no one could give it to you or tell you how to acquire it.
Off in law school, the jousting spirit from those long-ago teenaged debates was mostly absent, and so was the quiet, self-conscious serenity of sitting in a chair reading the great novels. Instead, you had to be passive and accept the idea of the largeness of the law and the smallness of the self. You had to learn how to think like a lawyer. Some people were giddy to do this. A few of the women in Amy’s law school class had always wanted to be lawyers; they had felt it when they were six years old and went around making extemporaneous arguments, in response to which their mothers had looked at them with surprise and pride and called them Clarencina Darrow. Maybe the mothers had been lawyers themselves, a pioneer variety that worked in labor law and always seemed aggrieved, because “the system,” that Escher drawing of steps and turrets and impossible angles, was rarely manageable. Amy knew a couple of law students who were obviously brilliant, and who loved the intellectual rewards of some legal texts. Their excitement and their brilliance astonished her. She had also met a woman in law school named Maura who was absorbed by the concept of justice. When she was young her father had been given a forty-year sentence for drug trafficking. He was a grizzled con now, unrecognizable. Maura had gone on to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and was currently th
e dean of a midwestern law school. She’d developed her fascination with the law because of the marijuana that her father had stored at home in bales, as though the entire suburban house was a silo.
But without a passion, said one of the other former English majors in Amy’s first-year class at Michigan over pizza one night, eventually you were in trouble. The law didn’t come with passion already embedded in it, as somehow Amy had thought it would. You needed to develop it and stoke it yourself. Without it, you had to pretend you felt strongly about your profession when really you didn’t. But what was an English major supposed to do after college, asked another one of those pizza-eating law students: go work for Beowulf? Yes, said someone else, Beowulf, Grendel & Schwartz. They all laughed bitterly, and then they threw around some more literary law-related jokes for a while, trying to protect the fragile sense of superiority that was rapidly abandoning them. “Mr. Kurtz, he dead. He dead from boredom during Contracts class,” said Amy. Someone else said, “I had a farm in Africa. I went there after my nervous breakdown during law school.”
Oh, they laughed and laughed as their English classes receded like a shoreline, and together they silently grieved the loss. But then law classwork took over fully; snow discharged itself upon the Michigan campus all winter, and the former English majors separated, thinking of themselves only as law students now. They were as exhausted and capable as anyone else, sitting in the law library with wet coats slung over the backs of chairs, their heads bent to read the legal writing that, no matter how hard they studied it, would not sing or attempt metaphor.
Amy worked in trusts and estates for Kenley Shuber—T&E, it was called—an area that women tended to be drawn to more than men, because, she speculated, it had a big personal-relationship aspect to it. In a way it was a relief after three years of law school for Amy to be good at what she’d been trained for, but later, when it was time, she willingly exchanged the law firm for the long and astonishing inhalation of motherhood, which itself, over time, had gradually been exhaled. Her son Mason was ten years old now and in no need of close watching or nursing. She didn’t have to be there for him all the time anymore, but she was. And though the mornings could be sluggish and harsh, she still loved the period after the school day ended, when they spent a little time together that wasn’t rushed.
“Do you know the story of Achilles and how he was dipped into the River Styx as a baby, except his heel didn’t get wet?” Mason might suddenly say as they walked home, and she would say no, please tell me. The chance to hear the story of brave but tragically vulnerable Achilles, as rendered by her son, was hardly a reason not to work, or at least it wasn’t meant to be. But the hours between three and six P.M. comprised his clearest, brightest window of time and, by association, hers too.
Increasingly, lately, there were fewer stories about Achilles. There were empty segments of time in the day, and Amy had become highly aware of them. She had only infrequently regretted being at home with Mason when he was little; there had been boring times and maddening times, but there were moments when he wanted only her, and there were also sudden bursts of the extraordinary. There was always so much to do: There were lists and plans and schedules that were essential to a well-run household and that were still laughably, almost hysterically, tedious. You, the brainy, restless female, were the one who had to keep your family life rolling forward like a tank. You, of all people, were in charge of snacks. Your hands tore apart the cellophane on six-packs of juice boxes, while your head cocked to hold a cordless phone into which you spoke the words “Maureen? Hi, it’s Mason Buckner’s mom. I’m calling to set up a playdate with Jared.”
You had to say “playdate”—that nonword that had been so easily welcomed into the lexicon—and you had to say it without irony. Certainly, you could also focus the thick, keen lens of your intellect on the greater world if you wanted. You could anguish over the war that ground on far away on another continent—and Amy did dwell on it periodically, hopelessly, during the day—but you would have to do this on your own time, between plans. You were the gatekeeper and nerve center and the pulsing, chugging heart of your family, the one whom everyone came to and needed things from. You were the one who had to coax that unconscious child from his bed, day upon day.
She took a breath now, then called, “MASON! I ALREADY TOLD YOU IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP, BUDDY!”
To her surprise, many of the words that she said to her son lately each morning came out in the same slightly irritated voice. “Are you like that too?” Amy had recently asked Jill, who had taken the train into the city. The two of them were sitting in the back booth of the Golden Horn, the place where their group of women had breakfast a couple of times a week and where Amy and Jill often used to sit before Jill defected to Holly Hills.
In the late morning, after the world had settled itself down, the room was steamed and spiced behind its glass front, and the women stayed put for a long time. The owner and the waiters knew their habits and never bothered them or hustled them from the booth. “Do you find yourself shouting at Nadia like some kind of drill sergeant,” Amy asked, “even though you hate the sound of yourself, and you don’t really know why you’re doing it?”
Jill looked up, startled. “Yes, I do. I say to her, ‘Nadia, move it.’ Or, ‘Let’s get cracking.’ I’ve been given this entire, terrible vocabulary.”
“Me too. What have we become?”
“Whenever really young women meet either of us they probably look at our lives and think to themselves that they never, ever want to have kids,” said Jill. “We’re like a cautionary tale. Why would they possibly want to give up their fun, erotic life of freedom for this bossy, scheduled thing?”
“Ah, fuck them, those hypothetical really young women,” said Amy. “They know nothing about anything.” They both laughed a little and then were briefly silent as they poked at the eggs on their shining plates.
Out in the world with your child, you were only occasionally complimented or rewarded. Amy remembered how once, years earlier, before Mason was even in preschool, it had rained for days, the city saturated and desolate, all the unworking mothers and young children and nannies forced indoors. She and Mason had been penned into the apartment and the carpeted playroom on the top floor of their building. One morning, desperate, Amy said, “You know what, kiddo? I am taking us to a museum,” even though at the time he was the kind of boy who would need to be chased through galleries and clattered after down fire stairs.
But there was a Magritte show there that day, and she loved Magritte. To her surprise Mason had stood and actually stared without moving at The Son of Man, the painting of the man with the green apple in front of his face. Fleetingly, insanely, she worried that Mason was autistic. But no, he was just interested, so she had started lightly explaining about Surrealism, and Mason had listened closely and asked questions. An old woman who stood nearby came closer and said to Amy, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but overhear you and your little boy. He is wonderful, and you are wonderful with him. What pleasure you must take in each other.” Then, the bonus: “You both look so happy.”
It had made Amy’s day. No, it had made her life. She had carried these remarks around all these years like an amulet. And now, this morning, standing in her bedroom and calling to her son across the length of the apartment, she tried to remember them all over again, for such moments were rare. She had no office environment in which everyone saw everything and gave commentary and backslaps. Instead, she and Mason were always off on their own, and except for the stray remarks of strangers or friends or even, once in a while, the pediatrician, Dr. Andrea Wishstein—“Mason, you were excellent with that strep test. Lots of kids practically break my wrist when I try to get a swab”—mostly they had to take pleasure in the moments that no one else would ever witness.
Amy quietly appreciated her child, not during the precocious moments, for those seemed prepackaged for anecdote and narcissistic gratification, but during the small, almost unnoticeable ones.
She observed the way he suddenly stopped near a homeless man on the street and whispered forcefully to Amy, “We have to give him money, Mom. We have to.”
So Amy, who had become more and more inured to the tableaus of poverty and mental illness that appeared on the glittering streets of the city and who over time had given less to the homeless until essentially she gave no handouts at all but instead grimly walked on and just wrote a modest check each year, was uneasily made more human by her son. He made her give out money, person to person, and so she gave it. She had no idea whether there was something awful and knee-jerk reflexive in the act of stopping, giving a small amount, and then walking on, but she couldn’t think it through; with her son’s coaxing, she and Mason just gave out dollar bills to the men who sat smoking on the grate outside the newsstand by the subway, and no one saw. Their life together, which had its distinct rhythms and drama, was generally invisible to everyone else; sometimes she thought they were like performers in a flea circus between shows, doing their microscopic tricks only for each other.
“MASON!” Amy called now from her bedroom. “ARE YOU UP? YOUR CLOTHES ARE FOLDED OVER YOUR DESK CHAIR! PUT THEM ON!” There was a pause, a serene silence. “ARE YOU PUTTING THEM ON?”
Mason was certainly not dressed yet. He was probably still inert, his skin roasted warm from sleep, the sheets and his torso and his long feet all the same elevated temperature. “MASON, YOU HAD BETTER GET GOING THIS MINUTE!” Amy cried.
While his mother called to him and his father sat in his office and talked to corporate clients in Pittsburgh and gathered up receipts from his travel expenses, Mason slept on in his faraway room. Amy slipped a shirt over her head and pulled on some pants and went to wake him up in person. She walked out of the dark bedroom and down the hallway where the walls, tipped in shadow, held photographs of herself and Leo dazed and pink on their honeymoon. Beside them were pictures of Mason at various ages, and then there was a photo of Amy’s parents and one of Leo’s parents. Finally there was a photo of brown-haired, sweet-faced, average-looking Amy and tall, blonde, patrician Jill on a spa weekend three years earlier at a place called Wildwood Spur, which had had a last-minute Internet special, and so Leo had said sure, sure, you both should definitely go.
