The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  Apparently in Europe, according to an Italian mother at the school, it was rude to ask someone a question like that within seconds of meeting. Instead, dinner parties in Paris or Rome were spent arguing about politics or films or chatting about trivialities, and no one’s feelings got hurt by anything that was said, and no one discreetly tried to change any subject that came up. At the end of a long, fragrant, loose-limbed evening, everyone often disappeared separately into the night without ever having learned what the other people at the party “did.” There had been no feverish networking, and nobody had tried to hump the leg of someone who had slightly more power. But here in New York City, and all across the spread of anxious, professional America, it was different. Here, you were often defined by how you spent your day.

  Amy understood that if she didn’t have a job, then at least she was meant to load her life up with elements of meaning. Some women had date books scribbled densely with entries like “Work on triptych” or “Visit the lost boys of the Sudan.” She did stuff envelopes sometimes for a reproductive rights organization that Roberta Sokolov had gotten all of them involved in; she shelved books in her son’s school library every week, standing in the placid blonde-wood room with its satisfying fish-tank low-hum of near silence; and she went to parent meetings. But somehow, over time, she realized that she had chosen for her life to be loosely filled, not packed in tight with hard stuffing.

  She and Penny Ramsey were nothing alike, Amy knew, and yet today, dressed in identical orange safety vests, the uniform equalized them, as if they were prisoners in matching jumpsuits. One of them could have been doing time for shoplifting, the other one for running a child sex ring, but it didn’t matter now; the uniform rendered them both anonymous and interchangeable. Together Penny and Amy walked past shop windows and the green canopies of apartment buildings where idling doormen stood, and past trees that were just starting to drop their leaves into gutters and onto the windshields of parked cars.

  “I wonder if the boys learn a particular kind of maleness at the school,” Penny finally said. “A Lord of the Flies kind of thing. I know their aggression is held in check, but I feel like it’s still there, like I can almost see it.”

  Between moments of holding slides and transparencies of vanished New York in her fingers and between her back-to-back meetings, Penny Ramsey apparently obsessed in the same ways that Amy did. The school, both of them agreed now, could feel unrelentingly male and competitive, and also, conversely, somewhat precious. They were both made uncomfortable with the implicit elitism. Memorizing poetry was an integral part of the curriculum, and once, when Amy went in for a parent meeting, she had spied a second-grader walking in the hall alone, a finger moving dreamily between nostril and mouth, muttering to himself, “‘In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.’”

  Before each holiday break the school observed All-School Day, when boys raised glasses of grape juice and recited the Auburn Day Pledge. There was also the upcoming Father-Son Weekend in the late fall, when the men and the boys took those same coach buses upstate to a nature center and stayed in cabins on an overnight. And the school celebrated Hand-in-Hand Day, when the boys were paired with underprivileged ones from neighborhoods to the north. On that day, visiting boys flowed into Auburn Day beneath the cerulean flag. They played the home team in an exhibition of basketball and wrestling, and received a baked-ziti meal. At the end of the afternoon they were each given an electric pencil sharpener and a pack of fresh, blunt pencils, and then all the boys in the building, black, white, Hispanic, poured back out into the world unchanged, and the world itself remained unchanged, and Amy always felt a brief unease and sadness that was carried off on the swell of noise.

  “Do you think,” Amy asked Penny, “we’ve gotten everything all wrong? The school. The life here. All the things we need to keep it going.”

  Penny looked at her. “Are you my long-lost twin?” she asked. “Sometimes I think about moving far away from the city. But then I remember my job, and that’s the thing at the center of it all for me. I love it. I am never bored there. But right, this whole life…I know I agreed to it, and I know the school is amazing in a lot of ways. My daughters’ school is too. But it’s a big effort to keep all the plates spinning. I try to talk to Greg about the way we live, but oh, that’s pointless.”

  They were quiet for a moment. “I obsess a lot about all of this too,” Amy said, “and it becomes an exercise in self-flagellation.” Then she added, “In case you were wondering, that’s what I do with myself all day.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Self-flagellation.” When Penny just looked at her, still not understanding, Amy mumbled, “Just a joke. About what women like me do all day. You know, the ones who don’t work.”

  “Ah.”

  Conclusively now, she knew that Penny Ramsey didn’t wonder about what women like Amy did all day without a job to go to. Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness. Happiness didn’t seem to be determined primarily by whether or not you worked; one of the most ebullient mothers in the grade, Ronnie Prager, hadn’t held a job since she’d left Wall Street years earlier. Ronnie liked to say she had been around for every milestone in her children’s lives instead of having to get a call at work from a babysitter at the same moment that Tokyo was on the other line: “Mrs. Prager, Anderson has something he would like to tell you.” “Hello, Mommy, it’s me, Anderson. I sat on the toilet with the musical seat, and I did my business into it.” Either Tokyo or Anderson would have had to give, Ronnie said. They would have had to vie for her attention in that crucial moment. “Hanging up on one of them wouldn’t have been fatal,” she had admitted. But what made it easy to choose was the fact that she hadn’t loved her job enough to miss it hugely after she gave it up. “I made money for rich people,” she’d explained to the women. “I knew they would do just fine without me.”

  Another mother, Hannah Lowry, was high up at an advertising agency and said she would never quit, no matter what. The salary was essential, she said, and she was stimulated by the work and the tension and the wild pace of the agency; she liked the fact that you had to fight for accounts, proving yourself over and over, as if you had never proved yourself before. “I thrive in that whole environment,” she had said. “The competitiveness makes me feel great. Makes me feel young. I knock myself out running around, staying in that room with my creative team until someone figures out exactly what was missing from a campaign, and everyone just gets it, and we all scream in relief. I just love it.”

  There were occasional slightly odd moments between the working and the nonworking women, inevitably; Amy recalled that a year earlier, as class mother, she’d e-mailed the other mothers in the class, asking them if they would please bring a thematically appropriate dish to the boys’ Roman Banquet. Various women who worked or didn’t work wrote back that they would bring “gemelli pasta with puttanesca sauce,” or “baked Giudea artichokes,” or “chicken Fra Diavolo,” but one mother, a financial planner named Jane Stark, had quickly written back, “Great! We’ll bring apple juice,” which had caused Amy to forward the e-mail to Jill without a note of explanation.

  Amy and Penny walked a little farther now, their conversation moving faster, easier. Penny began to talk about the stresses of running a museum, and Amy felt herself settle in to the good feeling of being the recipient of this kind of talk. “You’re probably really overextended,” Amy said.

  “I am, yes. It’s hard when you have virtually no endowment.”

  “Will you get a break soon?”

  “Christmas. We’re going to St. Doe’s.” Amy remembered hearing that St. Doe’s was the kind of place where very wealthy families went for vacation; the island was privately owned by a billionaire from Melbourne whose company made those wholemeal biscuits called Bing-Bongs, which apparently everyone in Australia and New Zealand ate, either plain or smeared with Marmite. “The
whole island is still unspoiled,” Penny said. “Like almost nothing else is anymore.”

  Together the two women thought of the spoilage of the world. In the middle of a green ocean, singled out and exempt, was this place called St. Doe’s, where Amy and Leo, in the pressure and dance of their monthly expenses and anxieties, could not afford to go, but where in a few months Penny would be lying down lightly on a beach. The women were quiet as they rounded the corner onto Ninety-first Street. Amy saw a brief slash of color that looked like Mason’s windbreaker, and she turned toward it instinctually. Mason walked among several boys and a tall black babysitter, and stationed in the middle of the group was Penny’s son, Holden. The boys were eating icies, those little fluted paper cups of rainbow-colored Italian ices that turned their tongues and lips and the skin around their mouths an uneasy, drowning-victim blue. Amy was suddenly reminded of the dead husband in the building, with his own blue lips. His image floated for a moment, then rippled and disappeared.

  “Holden!” called Penny, and her son, a popular, dominating, masculine boy with a big head of dark blonde hair, turned in her direction. “How was school?”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll be home for dinner. Tell your sisters to wait for me, and we can all eat together.”

  “Mason!” Amy called too, as if she herself were drowning. She had always felt perplexingly anxious on the rare occasions when she saw her son from afar, under someone else’s watch.

  “Hey,” Mason said.

  “Did you have a good day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great!” Amy said, too invested in this conversation.

  He indicated goodbye with a vague movement of his wrist. He would not express his connection to her now or even act like it really existed. Holden Ramsey held a gaming device in his hand, and Mason wanted to be absorbed in it. The electronic music hummed, and the device bleeped as all the boys struggled to have a look. So Mason turned away from his mother, willing her to please let him go back to the handheld device, and to the icies, and to Holden and the other boys, and to whatever he could salvage of the dwindling day.

  “Clementine,” Amy heard Penny say to her sitter, “did you take enough money for the groceries?”

  “Yes,” said Clementine. “And if the broccoli looks no good to me, Penny, I shall get cauliflower. They are both cruciferous vegetables, and quite nutritious.”

  “Perfect.”

  The babysitter and the mass of boys turned the corner, while the mothers watched them go. “Cruciferous,” said Penny. “Wow. I really would be lost without her. She is on top of everything. When you have a full-time job you just have to cross your fingers and hope that everything goes fine without you there. So far I’ve been really lucky.”

  “Lucky” was a word that came up frequently when any of them discussed the kind of lives they led here. They all knew that most women in the world had a far narrower band of choices, if they had any choices at all; they knew that only a tiny percentage were able to stay home and that most simply had to work, no question about it, and that the survival of their families depended upon it. They knew that most women were not, in these particular and unusual ways, lucky. But among the lucky ones, there were sometimes unlucky stories about working mothers and child care, involving a babysitter who was found to have published a cheerful but sadomasochistic sex and drug blog, or who had gone on a weeklong trip to visit her family in Trinidad and was never heard from again. At first, fearing that she had been abducted or murdered, the mother called everyone she could think of, finally locating the sitter’s cousin, who coolly said, “Inez? Oh, she’s good. She has a new job taking care of a famous movie star’s kids, though I am not at liberty to say who.”

  Then there was a story that had achieved the status of urban legend within this insular world. All the mothers seemed to know it, but none of them actually knew the person it had supposedly happened to. It involved a woman who was about to go back to work in public policy and so had hired a babysitter for her three-year-old daughter. The job was rigorous, and everything was fine until one day, after the mother went to the office, she realized she’d left some documents at home, so she took a taxi back to her apartment. While riding up Broadway, the taxi stopped at a light, and she noticed huddled on the sidewalk a beggar woman with a beggar child, wrapped in a blanket and holding a sign that read PLEASE HELP US WE HAVE NO MONEY OR SHELTER.

  It was the blanket she recognized first. Her mother-in-law had crocheted it for her. Confused, the woman thought, What are those homeless people doing with my blanket? But then she realized that those homeless people were her babysitter and her three-year-old daughter. Every morning while the woman went to the office, the sitter had been taking the little girl out to beg on the streets.

  If the story were true, it was awful; if it were untrue, it had been invented as a misogynistic, cautionary tale for any mother who might think about leaving her child to return to work. Could you ever trust someone else to watch your baby? Could you ever find a way to reconcile the dissonant spheres of motherhood and work? Articles in women’s magazines continually posed these same questions, though the answers seemed to change from month to month: Yes you could! No you couldn’t! Amy had heard the urban legend and had been scandalized like everyone else, but in truth she was also relieved that she had never had to leave Mason all day when he was small and that these particular worries had never been her own.

  The women now walked on. They passed a couple of Amy’s friends and said their hellos; Penny seemed to watch with sociological interest, for she really didn’t have a sense of the climate around the vicinity of the school at three in the afternoon. Then they passed Geralynn Freund, the mother in the grade with the obvious eating disorder. She was so little and dog-scrawny that you always had to look away from her for a moment. She had gone through a harsh divorce several years earlier, it was said, and so, in her misery, had ended up falling back on her adolescent anorexic ways. For a while she had spent a good deal of time at the Flexon Gym, poised on a stationary bicycle in spinning class; Karen Yip had once sat beside her there and had said that Geralynn was frightening in her rapaciousness for exercise.

  Another time Amy had seen Geralynn in the locker room at the gym, casually undressing, revealing her naked body to all the women, facing away from her open locker in such a way that everyone could see each individuated tendon and bone and ball-socket while she ran a roll-on deodorant into the deep concavity below her twigged arm. Geralynn was like one of the corpse-models in that exhibit that toured the civic centers of the world, showing dead people with their skin removed, participating in the sorts of activities they supposedly would have enjoyed when they were alive. Corpses golfed, or tossed a Frisbee, as though to distract themselves from the terrible realization that they were dead.

  Geralynn Freund, divorced, fragile, a single mother without any apparent emotional support system, had stood naked, and the other women at the gym that day had stared, then stared at one another in appalled, tacit conversation. Not a word was said aloud about her in that locker room with the roaring showers all around and with the sound of hair being relentlessly blown into submission. But it was likely that she had been embarrassed about her appearance; no one had seen her at the gym since then.

  Now Geralynn Freund walked along the street with her son Joshua beside her. He was a thickset boy who ate the last remnants of an icie, squeezing the blue and red slush from the flattened little cup. Amy said hello in perhaps an overly friendly voice, unable to modulate, and Geralynn said hello back.

  After they turned the corner, Penny said, “It’s really sad. Are there any other treatments?”

  “Oh, she doesn’t have cancer. Is that what you thought? She’s anorexic.”

  “Oh. Of course, right. It’s still sad,” Penny said. “She looks like she’ll blow away. She’s such a tragic figure.”

  Amy had the impulse to tell her about the father from 14H who had died in the night. Penny would see that it di
dn’t really matter that Amy hadn’t known him, that still she was shaken, and that any of the terrible little family tragedies you routinely heard about could affect you. But Penny was distracted. She had stopped on the street and was looking ahead at something, so Amy looked too, watching as a man walked rapidly toward them. “A friend,” Penny said in a nervous whisper.

  He was in his early thirties, with the kind of appearance Amy would have found attractive at an earlier age but one she’d now almost forgotten about. The men she knew tended to be financially absorbed husbands with carefully combed hair, dressed in business suits or stretchy weekend sports clothes. This man was small, boyish, good-looking, in a pale, pretty shirt and no tie, and with a ruffled head of brown hair and fair, freckly skin. For some reason she pictured his bare shoulders as probably freckled too.

  “You’re here,” he said to Penny as he approached them. “I timed it right.” He was English, and that was a surprise. The English walk among us, Amy thought, and whenever they reveal themselves, Americans experience a moment of unaccountable delight.

  “Amy Lamb, Ian Janeway,” said Penny.

  He shook her hand and said, “Great outfits.”

  “Don’t mock us,” Penny said.

  “Sorry. You do look amusing. They should put you on Style Bobbies.”

  “What’s that?” Amy asked.

  “British television. Women dressed as police officers go round giving out fashion summonses. It’s the lowest thing in the culture.”

  “Oh, tell Amy your family’s role in the downfall of British culture,” Penny said.

  “We don’t have a role.”

  “Your aunt’s role, I mean,” she said.

  Then, to Amy, he explained, “Penny loves this fact, weirdly. My aunt Lesley worked as Margaret Thatcher’s personal assistant.”

  “His auntie,” said Penny. “The great Mrs. Thatcher. The most powerful woman in the world during the Reagan years. The only way a woman could be taken seriously then was to be ultraconservative. Antifeminist. Basically, she never promoted another woman to her cabinet.”