by Meg Wolitzer
In the voice of someone starting to make a toast, Marsha Knowles said, “I want to thank all of you womenfolk for being so brave and so curious.” She was often on the road, going to houses like this one all over Ontario, speaking to the consciousness-raising groups that had sprung up in the past several years like newly planted little maple saplings. Just a week earlier she’d flown up to Moosonee to talk to a dozen housewives.
Now Antonia Lamb sat forward on her chair and watched as Marsha Knowles, who looked a little bit like a performing seal, inched out of her velour pants and her faded, slightly depressing cotton briefs with elastic that left pale pink teethmarks impressed upon her white skin, then scooted up onto the Lambs’ couch, where a sheet had been laid for the occasion. It was one of Amy, Naomi, or Jennifer’s bedsheets, and a tiny pattern of strawberries ringed the edges. Briefly, Antonia wanted to take it back and give her an old picnic blanket or a frayed beach towel. Marsha Knowles took something metallic and glinting from her leather bag, and as the speculum caught the light, Antonia inhaled hard, as though she herself was about to be violated. But the speculum would be used only on and by Marsha Knowles; this had all been planned in advance.
Everyone adopted a studied pose of nonchalance; all these women went for internal checkups every year, paid for in full by the National Health. But away from the small cubicles and nurses, the speculum seemed like a medieval weapon. Without saying a word, Marsha did some quick preparation, lay back on the strawberry-edged sheet, and then, smiling smartly, she waited as the women lined up in order to get a look.
They might as well have been on line at a buffet, so calm and polite and orderly were they. Antonia went first; after all, someone said, it was her house. So she approached the supine figure of Marsha Knowles, who was like a baby awaiting a diaper or a chicken awaiting basting—domestic images both—but, however you described it, certainly it was evident that she was vulnerable, splayed, totally still, a tableau vivant for the new world order. Antonia peered hesitantly in, the reading lamp angled just so, the light thrown across this woman, illuminating this entrance to her body. Antonia Lamb looked in through the parted, vivid space and saw the dark and the light, the walls and the ceilings. She almost thought she saw stalactites and stalagmites; there were no clear channels there, but instead everything in the female anatomy was apparently dense and complicated, just like life itself. No path was ever easy or smooth.
Antonia gamely continued to peer into the gleaming time tunnel. She would be a novelist; she would inspire others like her. Her husband and children would accept this change in her and would embrace it. One of the women in the group would soon realize her own lesbianism. Another woman would die of cancer within a few years. Life was difficult and strange; this was obvious to anyone who really paid attention. But mostly, as Antonia Lamb, age forty, looked into the opening between the sturdy legs of a school guidance counselor from Toronto—a woman she now hoped never to see again—she visualized the future as something vast and gleaming, not blunt and knowable.
Her daughters Naomi, Amy, and Jennifer wouldn’t need to be tough and complaining and groundbreaking, as Antonia and her friends now were. For these girls there would be no Popsicle-cold speculums slid with excruciating self-consciousness into oneself in the bright light of someone else’s living room, G&Ts and crackers and cheddar-cheese balls rolled with nuts on a nearby sideboard and the snow whirling outside the dark windows.
Instead, all the women’s daughters would become a generation of postspeculum feminists. They would grow up to be women who would live with men and children in a kind of harmony previously unseen in the world. Their marriages would be far better than Antonia and Henry’s was; there would be no department secretary on the side, with her sad jar of candy. There would be only love and equality. As sinks filled with dishes, a woman might grab a sponge or else a man might; there would be no difference between the sexes, and no one would ever be surprised by men in aprons, women slung with tool belts, or men shouldering babies and women running board meetings. Everyone would work, everyone would have power, everyone would help out at home. The daughters would recognize the enormous changes their mothers had set in motion, the no turned irrevocably and historically into yes, and they would be grateful. Antonia would start her historical novel in the morning; she would do something new with her life now, expanding its dimensions.
“Well, goodness, what’s so fascinating in there? Haven’t you seen enough already?” asked one of the other women in a nervous and jocular voice, poking Antonia lightly, for apparently she had been standing in the lamplight transfixed, unable to turn away.
“Sorry,” said Antonia Lamb, quickly stepping aside so that the next woman could have a look at all that lay ahead.
Chapter THREE
SO HERE IT WAS, what lay ahead. When school let out every afternoon, the landscape was a mosaic of women and children. It didn’t matter where you lived—whether you led a vertical life in the city or a spread-out, horizontal one anywhere else across the broad surface of the country—at three o’clock, the outdoor world was at its highest pitch of manlessness. As the double doors of schools swung wide, the children were released back to you, and just for a second it felt as though the separation had been extended and arduous, instead of having been just seven hours long and involving the loose and easy peregrinations of mothers.
Amy Lamb, waiting for Mason to appear, would have liked nothing more than to grab him hard, roughly hug him, then buy him some ice cream or roasted nuts on the street and walk home side by side. Often, when they walked together, he would first speak nearly in monosyllables, but then the snack would open him up as if it contained truth serum, and he would tell her pieces of information from his day.
“Mr. Bregman showed us a nebula.”
“Was it nebulous?” she asked.
“What?”
“Nothing. A joke.”
She felt peaceful on these walks home from school. Back in the apartment, Mason would noodle around with his homework, then he would IM his friends, and finally he would wander into the kitchen, where Amy might be doing something at the counter, and invite her to play cards. Always she accepted, and they sat at the table with the cards making little licking sounds on the surface as they were slapped down, and he might give her more details about the awesomeness of Mr. Bregman, who had told the boys that until recently, mankind in its hubris had thought it knew everything about the universe, but it turned out that what could be seen and understood of the universe made up only four percent. “The rest they call dark matter and dark energy but they don’t even know what it is. It’s unknown. They only know about four percent. It makes you think,” Mason had said, turning over his top card.
But today they could not walk home together and could not sit at the table playing cards and talking about school and about the mysterious deep, partly open bag that was the universe. Today, like some women all around the city and the country, Amy would perform safety duty at the school, a responsibility that fell to her once a year; she had unknowingly signed on for it the moment she had given birth. No, she thought, she had signed on for it the moment when the bliss of full-bore unprotected sex had created a tumbleweed of cells that had rolled along, gathering volume and requiring, so many years later, that she shed her vanity and put on a bright orange woven plastic vest, drape a whistle around her neck, and grab hold of a walkie-talkie. Then she and her safety partner would set off into the world.
The bright chaos of the afternoon could be felt everywhere now. Children, giddy at being released for the day, jabbered and howled and did karate moves in the cool air. Amy Lamb, stepping out onto the sidewalk, felt that she might just as well have been wearing a clown nose and big floppy shoes, so touchingly absurd did she feel as she walked the beat. The school asked that two parents from different families show up each day to patrol the local streets. Then they would march side by side, knowing, in their hearts that beat beneath the weave, that ultimately they could not protect the
ir children.
“Dear parent of MASON LAMB-BUCKNER,” a letter from the Auburn Day School had read, “you and your safety partner, parent of HOLDEN RAMSEY, should meet in front of the school at 3 PM on MONDAY.” The letter always used the word “parent,” as opposed to “mother,” and once in a while a father did come, and the other mothers tended to fuss over him, as though he needed special treatment for actually leaving the floor of the stock market before the end of the day. Or else the one father in the grade who didn’t work might show up. His name was Len Goodling, and he could sometimes be seen standing thoughtfully for a moment during the day in front of the window at Camarata & Bello, looking in at the prepared salads as if they were porn. His wife worked in advertising, and she almost never came to the school; she was as invisible as many of the fathers.
“If we were a decade younger,” Roberta Sokolov had said recently, “we’d have husbands who did safety walk.”
It was true that their husbands, while mostly decent sweetheart-men who had changed many diapers, were not equal partners in child-raising or homemaking. It wasn’t just that they held down full-time jobs; they had given so little thought to this world that they would be stumped. They could not “buy curtain rings,” Karen Yip had once said. They could also not, someone else had also insisted, purchase a class present for their child’s teacher. If given that task, they would only bring her something inadequate: a Whitman’s sampler from a drugstore, with all the different types of chocolate delineated on the inside of the cover of the box. When they were left in charge of a child for the day, they invariably did something wrong. How many times, someone remarked, had you seen a man pushing a stroller, and then you looked down and noticed that the baby was wearing only one sock. “Wait up! Wait up!” a female passerby would call from farther back down the street, running toward the man and child with the teeny rogue sock in hand.
But such characterizations weren’t accurate, someone else said. And even if they were, the deficits weren’t fatal. It wasn’t as if these men would take their children out naked in winter and drop them in the woods. It wasn’t as if they would starve them. But the husbands they lived with were part past, part future. They were not the future itself. They were not, apparently, the fruits of feminism, offered up to the daughters of its founders as a perfect gift.
Change always required slightly longer than a generation. Amy and her friends took note of the occasional younger men, the ones around age thirty, who stayed home while their wives worked. God, they looked so different from the forty-year-old husbands. Those younger men had more youthful, narrow bodies, or was it just that, by virtue of not working, they had been freed of the monkey-wear that corporations required? The younger husbands wore T-shirts advertising the rock bands and lobster shacks of their youth. They had goatees and stylish geometric spectacles. They held their babies against themselves in fabric slings. Their wives, slightly shaky but calm, eased back to work, knowing that the babies would be at home with someone who loved them as much as they did.
Men and women were still both evolving; the younger men proved it because they could handle all of this, and the younger women proved it because they were comfortable letting the men handle it. Once in a while you would find a forty-year-old husband like Len Goodling, but his appearance at the school in the afternoon was confusing; it threw off theories about how the world worked. You were initially pleased by him, but then after a short while you felt slightly annoyed. He seemed like a loiterer here in the world that the women had formed for themselves.
Today Amy had made arrangements for Mason to go home with Karen Yip’s twins, Caleb and Jonno, and so here she was now in the orange vest. Penny Ramsey, who had arrived at the school a few minutes late, appeared beside her, looking flushed. Snapping shut the clasps of her own vest, she said, “Sorry. Back-to-back meetings.”
“No problem,” Amy replied benignly.
Together, now, the two women walked in synchrony, observing a kind of silence that had less to do with a seriousness of purpose than a low-level social awkwardness. Penny Ramsey, the director of the Museum of Urban Vision, was likely still thinking about her back-to-back meetings, Amy thought. The museum, which occupied a townhouse down in Chelsea, was small and underfunded, and while most of the mothers in the grade agreed it was a very worthy place, whenever they went to a museum it was usually the Met or the Modern or the chalk-white helix of the Guggenheim instead of the small Museum of Urban Vision, with its modest, tender reminders of lost New York.
Sometimes the museum displayed photographs, other times artifacts from the tenements of the Lower East Side or even menus from turn-of-the-century restaurants that featured prices that seemed to have been made up by children. Ninety-five cents for a steak dinner! Twenty cents for a side of parsley potatoes! What world was that? Vanished, snuffed out, gone. The boys from Auburn Day had been invited to the museum last spring in order to trudge through the galleries, shepherded by Penny Ramsey herself. During their visit, they had looked at old, preserved photos of poor children playing stickball on the streets of the city, circa 1900. Dead, all dead, thought Amy, who had been a class parent that day, as she peered at images of those hungry, scuffed little mortal boys banging their sticks together. The Auburn Day boys, well-fed and clean and forced to gorge on undiluted history, had let their eyes roll up into their heads as they clomped along the groaning floorboards, but the director hadn’t seemed to mind their indifference. She was gracious and good-natured and unflagging, both in her own museum and out in the world. Her picture and her husband’s appeared on the social-events pages of the newspaper once in a while: Penny Ramsey shining with emollient and sequin, Greg Ramsey thick and bland in tuxedo.
Now, on safety walk, Penny, perfectly formed and small, wore her golden hair upswept and pulled into a vortex in the back; it was as though, Amy thought, all her secrets could be located somewhere deep inside that vortex, including what it was that allowed her to run a museum and be a patient, hands-on mother to three children and a wife to her demanding, entitled husband and yet still show up here nearly on time for safety walk. She was lovely without being a narcissist. She held an important job that she valued and that she hadn’t traded in for full-time motherhood or even for a less-challenging, diminished version of itself. She hadn’t been entirely swayed either by domesticity or by ambition but had managed to calibrate and temper both desires.
Where most of the mothers in the grade felt they had had to give up so much, Penny Ramsey seemed to have given up nothing. As the story went, she had briefly gone on leave from her job when her children were young, but had always held fast to her place in the world. She was said to be an exceptionally loving mother too, appearing at her children’s concerts and soccer games and throwing her arms around them afterward, crying “Yay!” Penny hadn’t gradually let go of the museum or, like the other women, the law firm or the film production company or the statistical analysis job or the puppet theater or even, in the case of Laurie Livers, a mother in the grade whom they knew slightly, the major publishing house where she had once been editor in chief.
How did you manage to figure everything out? Amy wanted to ask Penny as they walked along the street. This was the first time over all these years that they had ever been alone together. Now was the chance to say: I think you are some kind of unusual creature; I think you are magic. Something was supposed to give, Amy thought. It almost always did.
The fall afternoon was beautiful and chilled like a bottle that had been put in the freezer briefly, then removed. With this day as a surface, they might even have enjoyed safety walk, but Amy was too self-conscious. She cast sidelong looks at Penny, whose face was delicate, indisputably intelligent, and, Amy thought, subtly stoic. In the nineteenth century she would have been a homesteader, standing on her property with her hair in a loose bun and her rifle cocked.
“How are things going for you this year?” Penny asked. “Off to a decent start?”
“Not bad. You?”
&nb
sp; “Fine. Work’s good. Holden’s happy, I guess. I rarely see any of my kids these days.”
So that was what gave. Amy uncurled slightly to think that Penny’s life was not thoroughly in balance. “I see a lot of mine. Maybe you’re better off.” This was disingenuous, but it was the kind of thing people said.
“Everyone thinks that boys have an idyllic relationship with their mothers,” Penny said.
“I know. It’s supposed to be the fathers who tangle with the sons, while the mothers get off easy.”
“I think that used to be true for us. When Holden was little, I once wore a faded old nightgown, and he said, ‘Ooh, Mommy, I like your ball gown.’” Amy laughed at this. “But lately, he seems tough to me, as if he’s trying to be like his father, making deals.”
“I know what you mean. Mason does little things—little man things. Though I do know it’s age-appropriate.”
“But it’s depressing too, don’t you think?” said Penny with sudden intensity. “Losing them to manhood. To being sort of removed.”
Perhaps Penny wasn’t judging her at all, wasn’t trying to calculate how Amy possibly filled her nonworking days. Almost no one came out and directly criticized other women for choosing not to go back to work, but Amy knew how it appeared. She no longer had the excuse of having a young child at home to use as a human shield against all questions about what she “did,” which was the first thing anyone ever asked when they met you at a dinner party.
