by Meg Wolitzer
“Honey, you’d better get cracking,” Amy told her son, who lingered, drowsing and swaying, in the bathroom. So Mason came in and began to dress, and she left the room to give him privacy, meeting him in the kitchen moments later, where he sat on a chair in a heap.
“Did you hand in that form I signed about the recycling plant?” she asked.
“Why do we have to go to a recycling plant?”
“It should be interesting.”
“You don’t really think that.”
“No,” she conceded. “I guess not.” They sat quietly for a moment. “Anything happening at school today?” she asked.
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
He was an intelligent and focused and sometimes thoughtful boy, but he rarely told her much that went on at school, unless it was something that had particularly upset or excited him. For all she knew, the boys wore Mardi Gras masks and fornicated with the teachers. But while nothing momentous usually happened to Amy during the course of a day, she could have spoken a monologue about all the quotidian details that filled her hours, if anyone wanted her to.
“Mason, do you ever wonder about what I do when you’re in school?” she suddenly asked him as he bent over his waffle.
He looked at her, confused. “Is this a trick?”
“No. No trick.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Stuff, I guess. Different things.”
He looked decidedly uninterested in the question, and she knew, from his answer, that she was a mystery to her child and perhaps to her husband—an unmysterious mystery—as perhaps many women were, everywhere.
BIP. BOOP. BEEP, went the alarms around the city and in the disparate suburbs and towns across the breadth of the entire country. COO COO COO COOOOO. AND LET’S CHECK ON THE WEATHER—They continued to rouse the sleeping women into a sometimes stinging memory of who they were and what, in the middle of their lives, they’d become.
“You’ve got your Vocab Ventures workbook, bud?” Amy asked Mason now as they walked toward the door of the apartment. More than once each week they turned back at this juncture, searching for some forgotten item of his. Amy was aggravated by Mason’s forgetfulness, but he was a boy, and some of her friends said that their sons were exactly like this.
“Thank God we’re here,” Karen Yip, the mother of twin sons, had said recently when they were all discussing the inefficiency of boys over breakfast at the Golden Horn. “If we weren’t, they’d be found dead in an alley.”
“Yes, without their homework,” another mother had added.
Today Mason had the Vocab Ventures workbook but had left his clarinet behind. He went and searched, and came up empty-handed. “Can’t find it,” he said. “So Mr. Livio will mark me unprepared. It’s not a big deal, Mom.”
“What kind of an attitude is that? Find it, please. Now.” Her own words struck her as hateful. She was irritable lately, as though it were his fault that she felt a little aimless. “Go on, honey,” she added.
Mason poked around, then suddenly he remembered something, and he dug into his backpack and retrieved the electronic object-finder that had been programmed for moments such as this one. He punched in a few numbers, and then they waited. A small voice began to speak elsewhere in the apartment, and Mason and Amy followed the muffled sound until they were standing in the doorway of his bedroom, where an android voice was repeatedly intoning Your-cla-ri-net-is-o-ver-here from the dark cavern beneath the bed. Technology had rescued him yet again, as it always would.
While her son gathered his things together, Amy walked to the window and hauled up the shade, so that the dim morning light became yellow, white, optimistic, spreading. She and Mason headed into the hall and rang for the elevator. When it arrived, the doors opened to reveal two women dressed for work, both in suits. “Morning,” one said.
“Morning,” said Amy.
They smelled of shampoo and a light creeping of scent, and they both seemed highly alert. Stepping into the elevator with Mason, Amy felt as though she must seem to them like a rumpled bed, or a sweet old farm animal. She endured the ride with her eyes closed. Down in the large lobby there was a small crowd standing around the doorman’s counter. On duty was Hector, a slender young man whose peaked hat was too big for his head, giving him the appearance of a child playing policeman. Today he was almost febrilely excited as he spoke to the various female residents who stood by him. The working women from the elevator glanced over only briefly but kept walking.
“…and by the time the paramedics got here he had already passed,” Hector was saying.
“It’s so shocking,” said a young mother whom Amy had frequently seen in the elevator, her young daughters twining around her legs. “He was what, late thirties?”
“Thirty-eight. Worked in equities,” said a mother from the ninth floor.
Amy was drawn to the counter too, wanting to feed herself with the awful information she already understood. A young husband on the fourteenth floor in the H line had died of a heart attack in the night. Amy heard in detail about the paramedics and the gurney, the oxygen mask, the repeated, violent attempts at CPR, the wife and children who in the end could do nothing for the dying man except cry. “Daddy, Daddy, take my good-luck owl-pellet key chain!” the five-year-old son had shouted, hysterical.
But it seemed that there was a postscript to the story. One of the women was saying something about the new widow in 14H and how she wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in the apartment now. “She hasn’t held a job in years,” the woman said. “There’s no way she could carry this rent herself. I predict that pretty soon they’ll have to move out.”
“Poor thing,” said one of the other women. “And those little kids too.”
“I was right there when it happened,” said Hector, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I saw it all. His lips,” he whispered, as if revealing inside information, “were the color of blueberries.”
Amy had only an indistinct idea of the identity of the dead young husband in 14H. She thought she could envision a round late-thirties face with thin, fair hair, and a slight slope of paunch beneath a white banker’s shirt, but families came and went in this building, revolving through the door. Here, in this monolith, you usually got to see other tenants’ apartments only on Halloween, when you stood hovering behind your child, peering with prurient interest through an open door into dim rooms with unfamiliar smells and the dancing light of a too-big plasma-screen TV, trying to formulate a sense of how other people lived.
Now the husband in his white shirt and loosened tie, who had maybe stood in his doorway last Halloween and held out a ceramic bowl, letting Yoda-masked Mason grab Kit Kats in both fists, was dead. His wife and two young children would have to move soon, and their life would change its shape and shade as if it were another ephemeral image on a plasma screen. The apartment would be repainted and given a new dishwasher and a new obsidian slab for a kitchen counter, then rented to some other young family who thought they could probably afford it, and whose life would begin here, and continue here at least for a while.
“We’ll be late,” Mason said now, lightly pulling Amy from the brace of doomy women around the doorman’s station, where she was poised, her eyes suddenly sprung with tears. She thought of that husband, whom she didn’t know, and then she thought, self-indulgently, of Leo and herself, and she imagined everything ruined, lost.
“Sorry,” Amy said. “I’m coming.”
Mason looked at her with curiosity. “Mom. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“So what happened?” he asked as they pushed through the revolving door.
“Oh, someone died, honey.”
They stood on the sidewalk and Mason grew serious. “Did you know that someone always dies? Every second? There. Somewhere in the world, someone else just died.”
“Yes, but this was right here,” said Amy. “Last night, a man died on the fourteenth floor. It’s very s
ad.”
“What was wrong with him?”
Amy paused. “He was old,” she finally said.
Outside now, the morning was startling in its clarity and temperament, a relief from the lobby, with its news of sudden death in the night. A handyman hosed down the sidewalk, the water running into the gutter and into the patches of earth by the curb with their rawboned urban trees. The air around the entrance of The Rivermere had a root-cellar funk about it. Every perfect fall day always forced you to think of that other perfect day when the city had been struck. But today Amy also thought about how this was a time in life when she was meant to be content. Her body remained slender, and her day was not yet spoken for. She had a close little family and a best friend whom she loved. The war in Iraq kept on going while really going nowhere, infusing everyone with helplessness, and there was still the real possibility of an act of terrorism, but people always said you couldn’t stay cowering inside your apartment. Instead, they insisted, you had to “live your life,” because it was all that any of us could do.
The other women streamed through the revolving door. In various parts of the city and in surrounding towns off the highways came the rest of them. Soon they would be depositing their children at the mouths of schools and kissing their heads and watching them disappear inside, and then the women would be free. They could have all the covered malls and plazas and fields of the suburbs, and all the buildings and shops and museums of the city if they wanted, and all the open air as well. The day waited for them with its bounty and its freedom, which their husbands almost never had anymore and swore they didn’t even want. How it had ended up like this, no one really knew. This wasn’t supposed to have happened.
But on a day as beautiful as this one, the sensations of despair and regret were mostly obscured by pleasure. All around the country, the women opened their front doors and stepped outside to take what was theirs.
Chapter TWO
Montreal, 1972
SOMEONE BETTER CLOSE the shades,” one of the women said with a big, loony laugh, and then everyone else laughed too, their voices rowdier than usual, because they had been drinking gin and tonics for the better part of an hour, and there were no children underfoot or husbands looming in doorways, casting long shadows as they asked when dinner was or where we keep the scissors. Even Henry Lamb had been banished for the evening, and he was one of the best ones, a mild and introverted man with wings of fair hair that floated up in static on either side of his baldish head, and who had never devoted too much thought to the idea that women had been given a raw deal in society. He was an academic, and he could have found blatant bias right there in the small pie of the Economics Department at McGill, if he had looked.
Right now his wife Antonia had forcibly barricaded him upstairs in the Lamb house with their three small daughters, as she sometimes did, and the girls made him play a board game with them called Race to the Province! that had myriad shifting rules that even he, with his Ph.D., could not follow. These three smart little girls certainly could, though. One flight below in the plant-heavy living room, the members of the consciousness-raising group spoke with individually tended flames of intensity about the role of women in the world today. Their voices rose up in columns and flumes and spirals.
A few straggler women rang the doorbell, and Antonia let them in. They stamped their feet on the rough mat, breathed their cold-night curlicue breaths, and then entered the house. They dropped frosted coats on the bench in the front hall, then went in to join the warm, bright, crowded female forest that had formed in the living room. By half past eight, Antonia Lamb tapped on a glass.
“I’d like to suggest,” she said when the partly soused women were quiet, “that everybody take a quick slug of what’s left of their drinks, because the drinking portion of our evening is about to end, and the enlightenment portion is about to begin.”
“Uh oh,” put in a woman named Carol Bredloe, who lived down the street. “You know what that means.”
There was light snickering, and someone else said, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
Final guzzles were taken of the G&Ts, and the glasses were placed on available surfaces, resting on copies of coffee-table photography books, volumes on economic theory, paperback novels, and the coffee table itself. Antonia looked around in slight dismay, picturing all the overlapping wet rings that would sully the wood and wondering what kind of cleaning fluid she should buy tomorrow at Steinberg’s.
Stop, she told herself. Don’t think about cleaning fluid now, of all times. Get outside yourself and try to be more than a housewife; this is 1972, for God’s sake, and women are changing before everyone’s eyes. Think about that change right now. Think about the evolution of women. Think about what is taking place here and in the States and across the ocean in Europe and all over the world. Think about what is going to happen in this very room tonight.
Antonia had invited a woman named Marsha Knowles to come up from Toronto to give a demonstration to the consciousness-raising group. Every month for the past year, one of the women in the group cooked a casserole in a Pyrex dish, usually something with a lid of scorched cheese and some kind of ground meat underneath, and then baked a fruit crumble and brought out bottles of gin and tonic water and a bowl of ice and several bottles of Zinfandel, and banished her husband and children for the evening, opening her home to the other women. Since they had been assembling, the group had covered a great deal of ground, talking about subjects ranging from “Does It Matter If I Achieve Climax?” to “Nurturing a Political Awareness” to “How to Raise Confident Daughters and Soulful Sons.” After the first few shy, tentative meetings, the talk became bolder. Often tears flowed in these living rooms, and once in a while a bolus of anger suddenly shot from someone as if from a blowgun.
“I am just so unhappy,” a woman might say with quiet fury, and she would go on to talk about her husband, who simply did not understand why he had a moral imperative to empty the dishwasher once in a while. “Would it kill Martin to do some chores around the house? He thinks it’s all meant for me to do. I mean, is there some logical connection between handling silverware and possessing ovaries?” the woman would ask, and the others would dutifully tell her no, there was no logical connection, and that she, and all of them for that matter, had a right to demand change. “When we got married, did I sign up for this?” the woman would continue. “Did it say in the ceremony that I shall be the person in this relationship who empties the dishwasher for all eternity?”
“Um, I don’t think there were dishwashers when you and Martin got married,” someone else put in, trying to be helpful.
Henry, Antonia knew, was not overtly sexist, like some of the husbands. Still, she had never entirely gotten over a moment that had taken place in 1969, when, at the Economics Department Christmas party, she had walked past his office and come upon him kissing his department secretary. Ginny Foley was a homely, pale little thing, all red hair and anemic milk-skin, in elephant bell bottoms, and it wasn’t that Antonia felt threatened by her, but she did feel a tremendous rush of betrayal and a secondary wash of personal inadequacy. How was it that tall and graceful and articulate Antonia was not enough for her husband, who had to seek succor in little Ginny Foley, whose hands smelled of mimeograph sheets and who kept a jar of sour candy always filled on her desk? Economists would wander by and absently plunge a hand into the jar whenever they liked.
In the car going home from the Christmas party that night, Henry had been in good spirits, unaware of Antonia’s angry, hurt simmer beside him. “I saw you,” she said simply.
“You saw me?”
“With your stupid stupid department secretary.”
He put a hand over his eyes, the way a child does, thinking it might render him invisible to everyone else. “Henry, you’re driving,” she reminded him. He told her how sorry he was. He’d been drinking, he said, and Milt Berkman had passed around a joint. The Doors had been playing on the stereo that had been set up i
n the hall, and everyone at the party had felt festive and had let loose a little, “especially the Keynesians,” he added. He told her he had never done anything like that before.
So what could Antonia do? She forgave him, for it had only been a kiss, and a kiss with Ginny Foley, and Henry was so hangdog and apologetic.
But although they recovered, the pieces of the marriage resettled; she knew she could never love her sheepish, academic, distracted husband in exactly the same way. By the time feminism appeared in her life two years later, Antonia was ready to receive it. The women’s movement would give her an imperative. It would also be her big distraction; it would be her Ginny Foley. The novelty of the meetings, the solidarity, the big-hearted conversations with other women, gradually absorbed and transformed her. Soon she was speaking in ardent ways about real and important matters.
She told her consciousness-raising group that she had always wanted to be an historical novelist and that she had an idea for a book, and they said, “Good for you,” and “We know you can do it.” The morning after the group met at her house, Antonia Lamb would wake up and start writing the opening of a novel called Turning Around and Going Home, about a schoolteacher in nineteenth-century Ontario who begins an erotic relationship with a local farmer. She imagined the farmer as being the temperamental opposite of her husband: visceral instead of intellectual, hard-muscled instead of wiry and academic-thin.
Lately, a few of the women in the group had complained that their sexual lives were disappointing and that their husbands were eager to screw and then happy to dive headfirst into snorey sleep. The men needed to be educated in the various components of female body parts, someone said, and in order to do that, the women needed to be educated too.
Enter Marsha Knowles. Yes, enter Marsha Knowles, Antonia Lamb thought in her living room. For on this evening Marsha Knowles, a middle-school guidance counselor in the greater Toronto school district, who had been invited here as a special guest, produced the black leather bag she had brought with her, a bag that had once belonged to her dead father, a doctor who would have been appalled by its current usage. Marsha Knowles was in her thirties, with dark hair shorn close to her head. She was a good-natured woman who seemed embarrassed at nothing, a trait that soon became clear to everyone in the living room.
