by Meg Wolitzer
“It’s not a burden,” Amy said, although maybe, suddenly, it was.
“Well, thank you,” said Penny.
She told Amy more facts about Ian: how he had studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford and had hoped to be a painter, but had had a kind of minor nervous breakdown during his first term and was briefly hospitalized, then sent home. “The doctors decided he was just in over his head,” Penny said, “and that he needed more exercise and ‘fresh air’—they were always big on fresh air—and he basically agreed with them. He told me that he had far too many ideas for his artwork and that the visuals would keep him up all night. He was completely overstimulated, and he crashed. So he switched to art history, with an emphasis on Italian engraving, and finally he found his way into framing and then became a very good curator. But he’s still kind of emotional; it never went away. He’s also sort of boyish and romantic, which is part of what I like about him. He leaves me these long, nutty messages on my cell, these soliloquies. I guess I worry about him a little too; he’s so intense.”
Amy thought of the few men she had been involved with long ago, before Leo; their images were still individually preserved for her. She thought of those young men in their twenties whose arms were lined with light hair and whose stomachs hadn’t yet been tenderized by a continual influx of breakfast-meeting pastries and nighttime cookies, or by the long spiral freefall of middle-aged resignation. She remembered how, when you are so young, you rarely think about the direction or purpose of love. Instead, you just follow it wherever it goes. That was what she used to do all the time, and it was what Penny was now doing with Ian. Amy watched it all from a distance, like the crippled girl in a wheelchair in an old storybook, looking on as Heidi and Peter frolic and fuck on the side of a mountain.
“And listen, one thing. I really have to ask you not to tell anyone,” Penny said. “Not your husband, okay? And not any of those other mothers. Please promise. It’s important.”
“Duh,” Amy said—a word Mason used—smiling and pleased.
THAT NIGHT, when her son asked if one of his parents would read to him, Amy volunteered. She wanted the warmth of such an encounter, with Mason close beside her on his trundle bed, which was decorated with the remnants of old stickers glued and then half-peeled from the headboard. He was fast growing out of the desire to be read to, and soon the activity of reading aloud to him would stop forever.
“So which book tonight?” she asked, and to her mild disappointment he handed her Blindman and the Moorchaser by the Scottish writer Rachel Millar, which all the boys in his grade were reading this year. Blindman was the actual name of a character who had been born without eye sockets (was that even possible?) and who wandered a moor in a fully reconfigured and oddly futuristic nineteenth-century countryside, trying to avenge his brother Azajian’s death. The book was enormous, as all books were for children lately.
Amy was resistant to fantasy; whenever Mason asked her to read to him she said yes, but in recent years she had felt betrayed by the books. All those questing characters and that dire, apocalyptic imagery were exhausting and so depressing, not unlike watching the news out of the Middle East. Everything was bathed in waves of blood described by Rachel Millar as being “the exact colour of King Moloral the Second’s garnet ring.” When Mason was younger, she’d read The Secret Garden with him, because it was her favorite book when she was a girl, and she had wanted her child to love it too, regardless of his gender. He’d liked it enough to finish it—there was an outbreak of cholera in the plot, killing the protagonist Mary Lennox’s parents, and mysterious noise in the night—but Amy knew that Mason had never thought of it again and that it hadn’t held him the way these darker, bloodier, fantastical novels did.
“Okay,” Amy said, picking up his book now, “so where were we?” Her wrist ached slightly as she lifted it. The thick spine was crenellated and immodestly faux-filigreed.
“There’s a bookmark, Mom,” Mason said.
“Ah yes. Indeed there is a bookmark.” She read aloud: “‘Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Moorchaser Learns an Invaluable Lesson.’”
“Why is it invaluable?” Mason asked. “Why don’t they just say ‘valuable’?”
“Please, just let me read,” she said, and she started the chapter:
At the exact moment that the old clock in the Stillson Abbey tower began to chime, the Moorchaser was far from the village of Haddensdown-on-Clef. He had managed to slip past one of the Defenders and enter the Zone of Sorrow, from which no man has ever returned. But the Moorchaser, of course, was not a man; he was a Frailkin, and none of this species had ever entered the Zone before. As soon as he walked through the greenish copper gates with their twisted, strangulant vines, he felt something stir inside him. I am home, thought the Moorchaser, though surely this was not his home, nor had it ever been, except in a dream.
Mason’s eyes were already half closed. He was tired, but if she were to ask whether he was bored by the book he would say no, no, it was thrilling. What the hell is a “Frailkin”? she wanted to ask him. How can you expect me to say that word aloud with a straight face? She wondered how he could find this book thrilling; something was inside his brain, as small as a legume, giving him a fascination with the promise of worlds that did not exist.
Maybe it was just that the actual world of adulthood, with its long meetings and requirements that you sit still, was too disappointing for most boys to face head-on. Or maybe it was that boys were in need of a belief that something more intoxicating than this world lay ahead, as though to buffer them against reality after they stopped believing in the existence of Santa Claus. You could lose Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy all at once in a terrible massacre with severed limbs and fur and blood and veined wings and fluffy material everywhere yet still hold on to Frodo and the rest of Middle-earth at least until high school. At which point, in order to weather the pain of losing that last fantasy foothold, you discovered the sexual wonders of girls, with their outsized breasts, nimble tongues, and the geometrical welcome of their open legs. You replaced one type of fantasy with another, and then you never, ever had to lose that one.
“The thing you have to understand about boys,” an older, more experienced mother in the park had advised Amy long ago, “is that sometimes they’re very simple. Sometimes all they need is to be run like dogs.”
This had offended Amy a little; she’d felt she ought to be offended on behalf of all boys, everywhere, who could not defend themselves. But of course there was some truth to that remark. Amy remembered how once, when Mason was two, she had taken him to a mother-child swimming class at the Y and how afterward in the locker room, when she had dressed him and still stood naked herself, about to change back into her street clothes, he had suddenly pushed open the heavy door that led to the lobby, where dozens of old men and women sat. Through the pneumatic exhalation of the slowly closing door, she saw Mason make a break for the outside world, and in that second she understood that he might easily slip away from her forever.
“MASON, COME BACK!” she cried, and in a sense she had been crying it ever since. Frantic, naked, damp, Amy had reached for one of the towels that the Y provided. It was a small, niggling square, big enough either to cover her breasts or her pubic hair, but not both. In that moment, she had to choose: Which was worse for the world to see? Her breasts, she decided, and she ran skidding out into the lobby, frantically calling her son’s name and displaying her pubic hair to the elderly. A few people looked up from their drowsy conversations. One old man with pickety teeth smiled and waved when he saw her. She grabbed Mason by the arm; he was unperturbed as she yanked him back, but Amy was suddenly sobbing in relief and unable to stop.
“Why Mommy crying?” he had asked over and over on the bus going home. “Why Mommy crying?” Which had only made her cry a little more.
Years later, stripped of all its fear and desperation, the scene would become a funny anecdote at the Golden Horn. T
he women went around the table and each of them declared which body part, in that same situation, she would have chosen to cover with the towel. Roberta had shrugged, coming up with the only good answer: “I would have covered my face.”
So boys, in their wildness, were simple, and girls, static and contemplative, were complex. Boys ran and ran, and then, when they were eventually tired, they sat and took things apart and put other things together, while girls quietly braided friendship bracelets out of little snippets of colored thread and gave each other the chills and promised lifelong fidelity.
Amy, who had grown up among girls, had wanted a daughter and had been shocked when she had given birth to a boy. Her parents had sent a baby gift of a handmade doll, a definitively male blob with its own tiny penis, the whole doll stuffed with all-natural-fiber filler and encased in a stocking over its flesh-colored cloth, giving it a disturbingly realistic, soft-sculpture quality. The doll had never been a favorite of Mason’s, and once, when Amy was cleaning his room, she had screamed when she saw a line of ants crawling out of one of the doll’s nostrils. The filler, it seemed, was infested. She had flung the doll down the chute in the incinerator room, and Mason had never missed it, and had never wanted another doll in his life.
He craved things that moved, though, and in the early years he ran cars and trucks along the floor, although once in a while, if a friend were over, he might lift one and casually smash it down on the other boy’s head. Amy would force him to apologize, the way other children had been forced to apologize to Mason at other moments. “Sorry,” intoned the insincere apologist. “Sorry for taking your Burning Engine Monster Truck. Sorry for breaking your skull.” Sorry, sorry, sorry, for everything I have done and will likely do over my lifetime.
Amy and Leo had tried to instill in Mason some kind of spiritual consciousness from an early age. Leo, who presided over an informal, condensed seder for them and his parents every year, with the Jews skipping fast across the parted sea as if on a moving sidewalk at an airport, had casually dropped God’s name now and then when Mason was small. But Mason had shown so little interest that it was as if his father were talking about some distant, elderly relative who was a pharmacist in Indiana. Mason was a literalist, interested not in God but in nebulas. He was scientific, list-oriented, not at all spiritual, yet just when Amy decided he was one thing and not another, he invariably said something that changed her perception of him.
When he was seven, he had confided in her before bed one night, “Mom, I am frightened of the escalator. Also, the yellow part in eggs. They look up at you like eyes.” The fears had been so strange but also human and understandable. The following day, walking home after a birthday party that had featured an overstimulating magician, they stayed silent for a while, slowly separating themselves from the images of flapping scarves and squealing, spontaneously exploding balloon dachshunds. The sky was a beautiful pale color, and she had suddenly asked him, “Mason, does time pass slowly for you, or fast?”
She had been thinking of his vulnerability, and of herself as a vulnerable girl growing up in Montreal during the long lead time before adolescence. Life had been so slow back then. Summers were spent in a hammock with a succession of realistic teen novels from the library, eating the crumbling crust of an ice cream bar and standing in the driveway with the garden hose, washing her father’s car. Her sisters, Naomi and Jennifer, could be found inside at the kitchen table, pushing new subject labels into the slots of the dividers in their notebooks. Their mother was often locked in her study writing or off at a women’s meeting, and their father was teaching summer classes.
Mostly, as Amy recalled, back then she thought that she would be a girl forever, breastless and unencumbered, and that she could loll around and read books as long as she liked. She thought that adulthood, when it came, would naturally pass as slowly as childhood had. The insult had been that none of that was true and that now, at age forty, Amy felt she barely had time to read books, even though she had no job. Girlhood had evaporated, with only a few photographs and report cards and friendship bracelets as primary-source evidence that it had ever existed.
But Mason, when she asked him that question on the street, simply looked at her and said gently, “Mom, that question is really queer.” He meant it in the way that boys meant it: Mom, no offense, but please don’t ever ask me about this kind of thing. It will do neither of us any good. So back and forth she went over time, giving him distance, then pressing in close.
When Amy turned and looked at Mason now in the bed, she saw that he was asleep. His hair had that slightly smoky, rotting smell to it, but his face was almost transparently innocent in this first stage of sleep. Mason was so big; his head smelled, and his feet did too, sweaty inside his ribbed athletic socks and those heelie shoes with the wheels embedded in the soles, as though boys needed extra propulsion, when in fact they could run and run on their own steam for long distances. He was sometimes so ardent and tender, but increasingly she glimpsed bits of what she considered a kind of male remove, as Penny had mentioned. Maybe this was the thing that would make it possible for him to go out into the world eventually. For months now he had been in the process of building an elaborate catapult, and he was independently developing a studious interest in warplanes. Once, in his sleep, she had heard Mason fitfully mutter, “Heinkel He51B…” and “Vought Corsair F4U…”
Amy left her son’s small bed and went off into the other, big bed, where she belonged. Leo was already there, with a glass of milk and a plate of big, commercially soft-baked cookies and with pages of legal briefs spread all around him. Though he was a solid, tall, somewhat homely man with slightly crushed features, she had always loved the way he looked.
“Hi,” she said, climbing onto the bed and then moving across the papers and sitting down lightly on his chest. “Need a break?”
“Whoa, nelly,” Leo said, holding up his hands, and at first she thought he was being playful too, but when she kissed him, his breath scented with generic cookie ingredients, she could tell from how tentatively he formed his mouth to hers that nothing was going to happen.
“I can’t now,” he said. “There’s the Pittsburgh thing.”
“Which one is that?”
“The lunch meat people. The salmonella defense.”
“Well, maybe if you actually were Vishnu,” she said, “that would be better.”
“What?”
“The joke you made last night. What you said to Stutzman at work, and then he didn’t know who Vishnu was? He thought he was a new associate?”
Leo seemed to marvel that Amy had retained this slight and trivial anecdote, for of course there was no parallel; when she told him stories about her day, he often did not remember them. He was not interested enough to remember them and refer to them again, and they both knew that, but at least he could be interested in her now sexually. A husband was supposed to want sex more frequently than a wife; word had it that a wife was the one who was allowed to be grudging about it. And sometimes Amy was grudging, for by the end of the day she was so tired, which Leo could never understand. “What are you so tired about?” he’d ask.
Women who worked were exhausted; women who didn’t work were exhausted. There was no cure for the oceanic exhaustion that overwhelmed them. If you were a working mother you would always lose in some way, and if you were a full-time mother you would lose too. Everyone wanted something from you; you were hit up the minute you rose from your bed. Everyone hung on you, asking for something, reminding you of what you owed them, and though the middle of each school day or workday seemed to be open and available, this wasn’t the way it felt. Meanwhile, husbands often crashed ahead as if they, like their sons, had wheels in their shoes. Husbands sometimes wanted sex, and always wanted money, and stock tips, and wines, and good components for their audio systems. They seemed to want everything they could get their hands on.
But now, in bed at night, Leo didn’t really want her.
In recent years he an
d Amy had taken turns being equally uninterested. The death of the married libido had been widely reported; it had happened to them too, as it had happened to many others. Now you were supposed to make an effort about such matters. Sex was meant to be a project, just like an assignment at work or a child’s diorama. In order to keep yourselves from falling into indifference, you were meant to go on a “date” once a week. Shelly Harbison, a woman Amy knew from the school, said that she and her husband Alan got dressed up and went to dinner and a movie every Thursday. “And,” Shelly had said, “we have a rule that we’re not allowed to talk about the kids.”
“That must be hard,” one of the other women remarked.
“Yes,” Shelly admitted. “It is. It’s actually harder than you think.” She paused, considering this. “You run out of things to say when you take the kids out of the picture,” she said forlornly. “You start to realize just how much they dominate your thoughts and all your conversation. There are these silences.” She paused again. “Once, I looked around the restaurant, and the whole place was silent. They had all forbidden each other to talk about their kids. You could hear everyone’s silverware and glasses.”
But Amy and Leo did not go out on date night, did not force themselves upon each other in a formal way, and still there was silence between them. He looked so unhappy now. “Sorry, Amy,” he said, extricating himself from beneath her.
“The old reverse Lysistrata trick,” she said softly, embarrassed, and he smiled and apologized again. She was wearing the undershirt he supposedly liked to see her in, and she smelled nearly edible from her pomegranate body wash, yet it didn’t matter. She wondered if he sensed that she had climbed on him because she was anxious and overwhelmed and couldn’t stop thinking about all that had happened today.
“I’m just too crazed,” said Leo. “It wouldn’t be fun.” He grabbed another cookie and put it into his mouth, then picked up a file. He ate to calm himself, she knew, and to entertain himself. The cookies were a tiny treat, a coda at the end of something long and strenuous.
