by Meg Wolitzer
Life in that office, at first, had been crisp and collegial. There was always more work being set before her, and always she could manage it, but eventually a low-grade familiarity set in that Amy tried to ignore, because when you really thought about it, so many elements of life were similar. The tasks at the law firm became at times interchangeable, and even the clients over lunch began to seem as if they could be siblings. The lawyers wore similar gray suits and silky ice-blue ties, or cream-colored tailored blazers. Someone became the “funny” one in the office, and someone else became the “irritable” one, and the firm took on aspects of a small and self-contained village. Amy became one of several female “nice” ones. She didn’t mind this role; it meant that everyone came to the door of her office and leaned against the frame and said, “What’s up, Amy?” or “We’re all going to Umbrella Sushi tonight,” or sat on the edge of her desk, wanting to reap her niceness personally.
Soon, when she and Leo fell in love, the job took on a new quality. She had seen big Leo Buckner in the corridors and at meetings, though the domains of their work rarely overlapped. He’d been there a year longer than she had and was a popular young lawyer, broad-bodied, dark, with an easygoing, sighing quality that appealed to everyone. Women were always flirting with him, practically climbing on him as if he were a genial, napping uncle.
Once Amy and Leo became involved, the other women backed politely away, as if in a formal gavotte. With an office romance, work had a shimmering, exciting aspect, and most days were punctuated by moments when she would see her curly-headed beloved in the corridor, and they would each remember what had happened the night before.
Then, finally, they were married, and there was the pleasure of being newlyweds at the firm. The work itself remained tolerable, even sometimes highly enjoyable. At night, eating take-out food in bed or watching TV together on the spineless futon in their starter apartment, they advised each other on work matters and deconstructed the idiosyncrasies and intentions of their colleagues. When Amy became pregnant, they agreed that she would leave the firm for an allowed twelve weeks and then return. It was raining on the day of her going-away party, and the sky outside the conference room was dark. This room had also been the scene of other going-away parties; one by one over the years, young lawyers were picked off either through opportunity or failure or having been sucked through the widening portal of motherhood.
“I’ll definitely be back in twelve weeks,” Amy had said in her brief, embarrassed goodbye remarks. “So nobody take my coffee mug.”
But twelve weeks proved to be nothing, and when the time was up, it was as though an alarm had suddenly gone off, sending electronic doves cooing, chickens squawking, and horses galloping—the entire rotation of animals in a clamor as if there were a fire in a barn—and yet she could just not get up. She could not leave the apartment, that crazyland of strewn burp rags and unironed miniature outfits and gifts of rattles and soft pillow-books that still lay with the detritus of their wrapping paper all around them. The garbage overflowed, the baby confused day with night, and anyone in her right mind would have wanted to run from that place and return to the sharp corners and fragrant tang of the office climate, with its industrial carpet and stuttering fluorescent lights that forced you awake in the morning like a flask of ammonia passed under the nose.
But a new mother was not in her right mind. Something overcame her, and her entire purpose was to save that baby, as though she were a superhero flying with arms outstretched through the metropolitan sky. Even a quick trip to the Korean market for yogurt and juice was interminable, and Amy ran the three short blocks back to The Rivermere. She could not leave Mason yet; she loved him too much for that. But neither could she turn him over to some woman from Jamaica or Guyana or Mount Olympus. She could not turn him over to the kindest, softest woman in the world; even a gigantic, gelatinous, floating human breast would not be good enough. She was the only one who could rescue him; their marrow matched, and everyone else’s was imperfect. She was the sole donor, and he drank straight from her tap. The hush of the office and the seduction of all the briefs and the clients and the conferences were worth nothing to her now.
Amy had observed the way lawyers treated other lawyers who had recently returned from maternity leave: They didn’t hide their impatience or their occasional distaste. She’d seen a jangled new mother on the phone with a pediatrician right before a meeting, whispering tightly into the receiver, “Last night his fever was 100.1, and before I left for work this morning it was down to 99.9, but our sitter just told me it’s back up again and that he’s crying a lot….” The other people in the room glanced at their watches, and someone came to the doorway and tried to look casual, smiling in a friendly manner, then mouthed, “Anytime you’re ready.”
Amy couldn’t become like these women yet. A law firm or a corporation could never give you what your baby did; it didn’t need you or love you. It could never flatter you enough. It didn’t say Amy, you are the one. You were just a tiny cog, and could a cog ever feel gratified? Was a cog ever proud? You were expected to devote your entire self to your job, coming home so late in the evening that you could get only five minutes with your baby, as if he were an overscheduled CEO. If you were going to miss so much of that tender baby-time, then shouldn’t it be for a job that was extraordinary? How, she thought, could you possibly choose a corporate law firm or a company’s soullessness, or even choose its bland products or components—its clients or textiles or pharmaceuticals or automobile air bags—over your baby’s hopeful, open soul? How could you choose any of this over the place on his head where the bones had not yet fully joined or over his puffed little mouth with the outline as beautiful as calligraphy?
“Please,” she said to Leo, “isn’t there a way I can put it off? Just until the baby is big?”
“You could go part-time,” he said.
“That never works. They call it part-time, but that just means it’s nine to six, five days a week, for sixty percent of your salary, instead of having to be available twenty-four hours a day. And very few people with real influence work part-time.”
So Leo sat down in the study at the Sven desk they’d put together so poorly that the drawers opened at awkward angles. He stayed in the light of the gooseneck lamp for a long time, and finally he walked back out into the living room, where Amy now sat with Mason fastened onto her nipple, as always. It was midnight. She looked up in anticipation, and Leo, in a Rutgers T-shirt and boxers, unshaven and unwashed, said, “Yeah, all right, for a while longer, if they’re okay with extending your leave.”
“Really? Oh, great. I just wasn’t ready to think about any of that. You are God.”
“Yes, that’s right. I am God.”
So slowly the baby gifts got put away, and several thank-you notes actually got written, and there were even some evenings when Amy and Leo watched an entire video and cooked a roast chicken and felt the stirrings of shoots of young, dear, new-family happiness bumping up through soil. She loved the small-animal care that an infant required. Nursing became easier, a perfect example of supply and demand; her economist father would approve. Her baby came to life, became more of a person, and there were times when she could not wait for him to wake up from a nap, because she longed to play with him. Desperation was replaced more frequently by pleasure, and Amy knew that staying home with a baby was her right, and she did not judge it or wonder if it had been a mistake. They didn’t discuss exactly when she would return to Kenley Shuber, though once in a while Leo told her that the partners were making noises of unhappiness about her absence or that someone had said, “Too bad Amy L. wasn’t here for that whole business with the Genzler estate.”
Then it became clear that she would not return at all. Her mother was upset, and even had Amy’s sister Naomi call from Edmonton, Alberta, to try to coax Amy into becoming a lawyer for the international slow-food movement. “You know, Jonathan and I have found a good life for ourselves in slow food,” Naomi had said,
as though reading from a script that Antonia had prepared for her.
When Amy officially left the firm, her position in trusts and estates was immediately filled by a young, unmarried woman who also happened to be a marathon runner. Leo’s stories from Kenley Shuber became like folktales, and the landscape in which they took place seemed outdated, as though they were set in Constantinople or Old Bavaria. Amy began to care less about her former life and the work she had done. All her T&E expertise became irrelevant to her. She continued to stay home, and in a kind of postnatal Zeno’s paradox, the baby grew bigger and bigger without actually achieving bigness.
It had been ten years now since she had stopped working, and for a few of those years she and Leo had had occasional, circular conversations about the possibility of Amy going to another law firm. It would be tough, she knew. Work wasn’t like a trolley; you couldn’t just jump on and off. Lawyers did their own word processing now, and she would have to learn how. Also, the state bar had a continuing-education requirement that needed to be satisfied every few years. The longer she was away, the more difficult it seemed to go back. She periodically thought about work, imagining a new warren of offices and seeing herself wandering past cubicles and kitchenette or standing motionless before a bank of elevators. Once, early on, Amy had gone for an interview for a job at a huge firm, and at first it seemed to go well, but at one point the head of personnel began to ask her a series of questions that involved material she hadn’t thought of for years. She took a long time to answer; she became quiet and increasingly inarticulate, so that he finally asked her, gently, “Everything okay?”
“Yes, fine.”
“You seem a little uncomfortable with these questions.”
“Oh, no, not at all.”
“Great, just checking.” He looked at his notes, then said, “I assume you’re familiar with Juxtapose BriefScan, right? So I should begin with—”
“Excuse me?”
“Juxtapose BriefScan.”
It was worse when he repeated it; the syllables still didn’t form into words that made any sense. “I’m afraid I don’t know what that is,” Amy said. Then, desperately, laughing a little, “It sounds like a tongue twister.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Does it? I never thought of that. Well, it’s the name of the legal software we use now.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with it. I’ve been sort of removed from everything.”
The rest of the interview remained awkward, flat, and she left with her face baked and pink. She couldn’t tell Leo about her shame; she didn’t want to address it directly, and when she picked up Mason at Jill’s apartment, where she’d dropped him off for the interview, she took him home and sat in his bedroom for a very long time, reading a marathon of picture books aloud to him, as if in a children’s version of Bloomsday. Mason was warm and heavy in her arms, smelling of watermelon shampoo. Being there in that little circle with him was as gratifying as it would ever get, and fuck anyone who said otherwise. Fuck the law job she no longer had; it wasn’t intellectually rich or all that much fun. It wasn’t debate team. Fuck T&E. Fuck the office rituals and the arcana of legal language and saying “Good morning” to dozens of people each day and having to do Secret Santa each year. Fuck Juxtapose BriefScan.
Not working, she and her friends sometimes reminded one another, did not mean that you did nothing. There was always some complex skein of projects to do, but lately Amy had been restless and had been thinking of getting a steady volunteer job. Maybe she would work for a literacy program; she thought she’d probably enjoy teaching adults to read. She’d have to ask her friend Roberta Sokolov about this, for Roberta was the one among their circle who was propelled by activism. Roberta lived in a walk-up building with her husband and kids, and her son was on financial aid at the school. Essentially, she was lower on the food chain than Amy, and the two of them joked about their descending status, and how their other friends had far more money than they did. Yet Roberta made time each week to go to meetings about reproductive rights or work a phone bank for progressive causes, and she “did what she could,” a phrase that no one could really question, because only you knew how much you were able to do.
It seemed, finally, that they all needed to stay in motion. A few years earlier, during a family visit to Canada, Amy’s social-worker sister, Jennifer, had talked about how she sometimes asked a new client, “So, what kinds of plans do you have for yourself?” Often the clients were old or depressed, or both, but sometimes their eyes went from dead to sharp upon being asked that question, and they came out with startling soliloquies having to do with their own desires and sense of mortality. Everyone wanted forward motion; everyone wanted to be part of something that moved.
Today, though, Amy Lamb was only involved in the small and persistent tasks that awaited her. Buy asparagus, she remembered, picturing the erotized shoots bundled together in red rubber bands, embedded in crushed ice at the gourmet market Camarata & Bello, where she would soon be heading. Get Pap smear. And, as the subject-heading of the e-mail from the school had just reminded her, Show up for safety walk.
Safety walk at the Auburn Day School was a task that Amy did once a year, but today the idea of it made her surprisingly anxious. Her safety partner was to be Penny Ramsey, a woman whom Amy and her friends in the grade had been half glum about since all their sons were in the pre-K program at the school. The mothers had rarely spoken to Penny Ramsey, except in the most basic ways at parent get-togethers. But what Amy had gathered about this mother was enough to depress her a little. She was so accomplished and serene. Every part of Penny Ramsey’s life managed to function in cooperation with every other part. She was tiny, golden-headed, pretty, intellectually rigorous; wife to an aggressive young hedge-fund manager and mother to an extroverted, confident son and two sylphlike teenaged daughters.
Most impressively, Penny Ramsey worked in a full-time, real and powerful way, not in one of those vague “consulting” jobs some women held, where the hours were flexible to the point of non-existence. There were a few other intellectual mothers in the grade who worked in interesting fields, but you could usually see evidence of the strain of their complicated lives and feel the breath of time upon them. They had folders clutched in one hand and a child’s science project involving a potato and a battery in the other; they rarely lingered; and they never sat in a booth at the Golden Horn before going off to work.
The entire world, of course, was studded with competent, bright women who held difficult and responsible jobs: physicians, human rights advocates, presidents of universities. They were referred to casually in the news every day, and Amy sometimes wished that there were an asterisk beside their names and that at the bottom of the page you could read the backstory: how this woman had come to make this all happen. Whether she had been struck by a thunderbolt of purpose. Where motherhood had appeared in the sequence, if it had appeared at all. Where ambivalence lay. Whether her husband—if he existed—was uncommonly wifely, staying on top of the small and domestic and social and emotional and aesthetic details of the life they shared, so that the powerful, Hydra-headed wife would not have to manage them alone.
One of the mothers in the grade, Isabelle Gordon, was a theoretical physicist with a particular interest in string theory, and she looked not tormented and overcome but happy. Amy had seen her recently balancing a tray of sliding, homemade cupcakes for her son Ty’s birthday. It was true that the cupcakes bore smears of oddly gray frosting that seemed like the outcome of a radical FDA experiment in food coloring, but so what? There was Ty, dancing around his mother excitedly as she carried the tray into the building. “Cheer up, Ty,” Isabelle had joked with him. “You seem a little down. It’s your birthday. Have you totally forgotten?” Isabelle Gordon had a weird, thick braid down her back but also a surprising propensity toward good and stylish Italian shoes. She wasn’t any one thing. She couldn’t be turned into a cliché about the absentminded scientist or the nerd-mother. She was ni
ce and an original; she knew the other mothers’ names, and she had agreed to come into Mr. Bregman’s science class this year to talk to the boys about string theory.
Amy and her friends were impressed as well as puzzled by Isabelle Gordon. They had no idea of how she managed her life, and they could not apply her techniques to themselves. All of them had started off with similarly good educations and linear desires. Their minds were fast, but Isabelle Gordon’s mind roared through the heavens. No one had any idea of who she really was. They knew that she loved her son and that she loved string theory. The two sides of her life did not have to do battle like fiery forces. She lay in bed with multiple dimensions heaving before her, and maybe her son floated past in one of them, contentedly eating a cupcake with frosting the color of newsprint.
But Penny Ramsey, Amy’s safety partner, was in a different category. Even with her petite feminine style and overlay of maternal patina, she possessed power in the hard-shelled, armed male world.
She had never relinquished this for a single second but had held tight over the years. She was interesting but not odd; she was an advertisement for work and motherhood and glamour and a refusal to compromise. All of which made Amy think, this morning, how much she didn’t look forward to the afternoon’s safety walk, when she would have to spend two hours patrolling the streets with her.
