by Meg Wolitzer
“I’m just not interested in the women here,” Jill said simply over the phone to Amy during the first week that school started this fall.
“They can’t all be one way. There’s got to be one person you’d like. Even just one.”
“I’m sure there is.” Probably Amy was right, and there were all kinds of women pocketed away in their houses, including smart ones who read demanding books and were invested in what happened in the world around them and were also kind of a kick to be around. But Jill wasn’t looking for new friends. “I’m too old,” she said. Then she felt the need to add, sullenly, “You’re not, though.”
“What?”
“Penny Ramsey. She’s your new friend.”
“Oh. Well yes, true,” said Amy.
But Jill couldn’t imagine finding a new person to be close to. She had Amy and several others in the city, and they knew her and accepted her. They also accepted Nadia, treating her as if she were just like their own children, which she wasn’t. Amy’s son Mason tended to be sullen and entitled but was also clearly snapping smart. He knew everything about aeronautics and the cosmos and American history. When he was younger he read books with titles like Look at Me, I’m Benjamin Franklin! and for years had eaten breakfast on a plastic place mat with the presidents’ disembodied heads floating on a field of red, white, and blue, so that he had long ago internalized all their names and relevant dates.
A few years earlier, Jill had been at Amy’s apartment when Mason began talking about how William Howard Taft’s obese corpse had had to be lowered from his window in a piano box and how George Washington “was not the actual first president,” but instead someone named John Hanson was, having been elected in 1781 by the Continental Congress. Even Mason’s use of the word “actual” was somewhat depressing to Jill. Nadia would never have used that word; it wasn’t in her vocabulary, nor was “continental,” or “congress.” What Nadia knew about the American presidents could fit inside the tiniest of all the Russian nesting matryoshka dolls.
But it wasn’t just a lack of knowledge that distinguished Nadia from other children. Several times a week in the morning, she appeared in her parents’ bedroom and stood waiting for the alarm clock to ring, so that she could shut it off before her mother had a chance to. Jill did not know how this practice had started, and no matter how many times she asked Nadia to stay in bed, to please sleep in, the little girl always woke up first and walked silently into the master bedroom, standing there in anticipation of the tinny BIP BIP BIP clarion call.
“Wake up, Mom,” Nadia would say with great seriousness as she stood there.
In her guilt at her own ambivalence, Jill would reach out her long arms from the bed and sweep the solid and stoic Nadia against her. Their bodies in pale fairylike nightgowns collided awkwardly. “Good morning, sweet pea,” she’d say. “Let’s get the day started.”
But now, at eleven P.M. on a cold night in October, when Jill heard Nadia singing her strange folk song, she went into the room only briefly and then went back out. Nadia exhausted her, or at least her worries about Nadia exhausted her, and all she wanted now was to lie in bed and read the new book she had bought about the Civil War; always, every season, there was another new book about some underexplored facet of the Civil War. If Jill had become an historian, she might have written one of them, and she found herself sometimes critical of their content or style, as though she thought that she herself could have done better, which she knew was absurd.
And then she wanted sleep.
Unlike Nadia, Jill wouldn’t have trouble falling asleep tonight, because she had five milligrams of Noctrem to guide her down into the depths. She had taken it almost every night since moving here; it made life tolerable. Before she started taking Noctrem she’d suffered chronic insomnia. It had begun after her mother’s death, and over the years she had refused to take the sleeping pills she’d been offered. The drugs all had sedative effects, and she wanted to stay animated and alert the next day; she didn’t want to change her basic self, despite her grief and the way it would not let her rest. But in the past year, everyone had been speaking about the non-sedating power of Noctrem; they talked about it at dinner parties in the same animated way that, in earlier decades, they had once talked about important novels or plays.
Recently, though, there had been some reports of problems with Noctrem that had received attention in the science section of the newspaper. Very occasionally, someone on the drug did something bizarre in the middle of the night: A man in Pennsylvania walked out into the garden behind his house in the pitch dark and began planting sunflower seeds. A woman in California phoned the police and confessed that she had shoplifted a tube of Kiss Me Twice lipstick thirty years earlier. A woman on a transatlantic flight took the pill when she got on the plane, hoping to sleep the whole way, but found that the drug wasn’t working, and so she spent the trip sitting in her bulkhead seat filling in a very difficult cryptic crossword puzzle in the British newspaper, one of those tough ones that everyone in the UK seems constitutionally able to solve, with clues such as “Hounds who eat jam before Boxing Day? I’ll say that’s a bit of a muddle! (8).” When the plane landed at Heathrow, she awakened to find the puzzle on her lap, completely untouched. Instead of filling in the squares, the woman had apparently spent the flight happily drawing enormous circles over her breasts on the front of her white blouse with her pen while everyone walking up and down the aisle had watched her.
But most people tolerated Noctrem fine, Jill included. Without it, she did not know how she would ever shut down her anxieties about Nadia. Donald had gotten into bed at nine, as he did five nights a week. Jill felt widowed late at night, because he was rarely there to talk to her or rub her feet or listen to her worries about Nadia’s intellectual inadequacies or her descriptions of her own loneliness.
Her desire to leave the city had been as intermittently fierce as Donald’s; in spasms she had felt an ache for safety and lawns, as though somehow lawns themselves could provide safety, and shrubbery and fences could create a fortification against nuclear holocaust. Forty-eight miles away, the entire city might one day tilt and slide into the river, but the residents of Holly Hills would survive. At first, after September 11, the exodus from the city had been slow and deliberate, not immediate and hysterical, the way the real estate agents roaming the suburbs in their cars had probably secretly hoped but would never say. Instead, throughout that fall and into the start of the new year, city people occasionally left, trading in footage for acreage.
Some left with candid sadness, suspecting that this meant that being young was over. Soon the men, who had once gone clubbing, began to worry that they would be wearing thick, feminizing sweaters on weekends and operating garden tools that quaked in their unsure hands. The women, for their part, pictured themselves chopping scallions forever at an island in the center of an enviably big and futuristic kitchen. Jill and Donald had taken several years after the attack to consider the idea of selling the apartment and leaving, before they finally got up the nerve or the resignation and acted swiftly. Having done so and then having settled into the house on Jacob’s Path, Jill had immediately begun longing for what she’d voluntarily given up.
Holly Hills had seemed, at the buildup to the move, like a seductive and reasonable alternative to the city; it gave its residents ample ammunition against the question Why would you ever live there? Because, you could respond, it was less than an hour away from the city, and it had an enormous slate-and-glass public library as well as a Pacific Rim fusion restaurant that featured a bar where you could order wasabi oyster shooters. The schools were equipped for the twenty-first century and were tuition-free. The town had an arts center that, the winter before, had performed the entire cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen over four nights, with strudel warming on a hot plate and Kaffee mit Schlag available in the lobby during intermission. Afterward, all the couples who had attended left the parking lot in a long line of cars, their high beams fli
pped on in the darkness of such an unusually late night for this neck of the world. Vapor swirled in the headlights. They sat in their cold cars, yawning but happy; everyone felt that they had received something unusual that evening, that they had been nourished by it, that their lives here were not entirely mall-dominated or at all empty, as some people in the city assumed.
What more could you want from a place? Wasn’t it enough that there was a palpable attempt to create an alternate, tolerable world? Wasn’t it enough that everyone out here had apparently said, “The city does not have to have a claim on us forever. We can go far and wide, into green lawns and broad, quiet streets, away from the possibility of terror, and no matter what happens, we will still be who we are.”
But sometimes in the darkening afternoon, when the new house was spectacularly quiet, Jill knew that she had partly used the attack on the towers as an excuse to leave. It had simply accelerated, not precipitated, their departure from a city that increasingly seemed hard and ruthless. Besides, she remembered how much she herself had liked growing up surrounded by greenery, first as a young girl outside Philadelphia and then later on at boarding school. Nadia craved the outdoors too; it seemed selfish to keep her under constant watch in the city. She was not a child who needed culture and sophistication in order to be complete. Actually, did any child ever really need those things, or was this just what parents told themselves? The move had been inevitable; something had been bound to make them jump, and this, they told everyone, was it. She always had the sense that someone she loved was about to leave, that there would be an imminent experience of loss. It was better to be the one who leaves, Jill thought, than the one who is left.
“I don’t know,” Donald had said of the name Holly Hills when they had first been driven around to look at the older, well-tended houses on the market and the newer, starker ones. “It sounds to me like a porn star.”
“Well, then that’s a plus,” the realtor had replied cheerfully at the wheel.
Now, each morning, Donald made the four-minute drive to the train station and stood on the dew-damp platform with his briefcase and newspaper, like a throwback to an earlier era. There were always several women there, but it was primarily men on that platform, while at home many of their wives slept on for a little while longer, waiting to be awakened by their own alarms.
Jill was always among the population of the sleeping, and when Donald left the house and drove away, she stayed behind with Nadia, the child she could not understand: flesh of her flesh who wasn’t really of her flesh at all, though if she said this aloud, she would have seemed cold. So she said nothing, and her silence was interpreted as the silence of any mother who loved her child so hard and so fiercely that she never had to say a word.
DO YOU KNOW anybody yet?” Roberta Sokolov asked right away as they positioned themselves on their rubber mats on the living room floor. “Not that I’m rushing you.”
“I know a few people,” said Jill.
“Name names.”
“Leave her alone,” Amy said. “She’ll come around.”
It was the morning of Columbus Day, and Amy, Karen, and Roberta had taken the train out to Holly Hills. The purpose of the visit was the casual yoga class that the four of them had been running for the past couple of years in rotating homes. Today was Jill’s turn, and so the group had dutifully convened here at 11 Jacob’s Path. Nadia, who was home from school today, had followed her mother from room to room all morning, asking if she could help straighten up. Jill gave her a little bowl of potpourri to put in the guest bathroom, and she thought how strange it was that she had become someone who had potpourri on hand. Back in the city, no one she knew had potpourri.
“I actually did meet some people recently,” Jill said. “They were fine. But I don’t think we’re going to be friends.”
“Why not?” asked Roberta.
Jill began to tell them about how, a few weeks earlier, she had received an invitation from one of the mothers in Nadia’s first-grade class at the local public school. Her name was Sharon Gregorius, and Jill had seen her at drop-off in the line of vans and SUVs and the occasional hybrid electric car. Back doors were flung wide, one by one, and the chauffeur-mothers called out, “Bye! Have a good day! Bye! Bye!” and then continued on along the mazy wooded roads and commercial turnpikes.
One day, a large silver family van had pulled up parallel to Jill’s car, and the window lowered, revealing a redheaded woman. “I’m Juliana’s mom,” said Sharon Gregorius, leaning across the seat as far as her seat belt would allow. “I saw you at the class breakfast. I wanted to say hi and invite you to something. A kind of scheme of mine. Can you come? Forty-six Daniel’s Lane.”
So Jill, if only because she could not imagine what this meant—a scheme?—decided to go. In the Gregoriuses’ dining room, she went and sat at the maple table of the pale gray colonial along with several other mothers, eating those rolled-up turkey pinwheel sandwiches that were delicious but had long ago become a cliché: “the sundried tomato of our time,” Amy had said. The women themselves were not all one type, as she had condemned them in her mind. One of them was amusing and arch, and reminded Jill of a girl at boarding school who had once climbed onto the slate roof of the Westaway Refectory and planted a dildo on the weathervane. Another woman, a former therapist, had an empathic if slightly moony manner. Jill could imagine lying down on the couch in this woman’s living room and telling her about her mother and about her fears about Nadia. But, sternly, she did not allow herself to become socially involved with these new women. Jill had listened as Sharon Gregorius spoke. This was a business proposition, Sharon said. She was going to present to them the prospectus for the creation of a greeting card company called Wuv Cards, whose name had been derived from the bastardized phrase “I wuv you.”
“What differentiates this line of cards from every other,” said Sharon, “is that these are for kids.”
“I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but lots of greeting cards are for kids,” said the former therapist, whose name was Denise.
“True, but what will make Wuv Cards distinctive is the fact that they will be the only ones designed to be from kids to their parents. Look, I know that it’s extremely hard to break in any new product. I worked in the wall-coverings industry for ten years. It was always a lot easier to handle the tried-and-true, but whenever our sales team had to deal with something new, there was a certain enthusiasm about it. I haven’t worked since the kids were born, but I’m sure it’s still the same way. Or I hope it is,” she added with a laugh. “Now, these are just mock-ups; my kids helped me with the desktop publishing aspect. Once we get them printed for real, they’ll look much more professional.”
Sharon passed the mock-ups around, and the women wiped their turkey-hands on napkins and peered at the desktop-published cards, laughing a little or nodding, or politely saying they were quirky. One read: “Mom and Dad, I messed up BIG TIME.” And inside, it read: “And I’m really sorry.” On the cover of another: “Mom and Dad, I have something I need to tell you.” When you opened the card, you saw the words “YOU WERE ADOPTED.”
“Sharon, this one’s funny,” said one of the women.
“I’m glad.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t really get it,” Jill found herself saying. She had barely meant for anyone to hear her, but now it was too late.
“Oh no?” said Sharon. “That’s not good. We’ll tweak it.”
“Sorry, maybe it’s me.”
“Well, I should explain what we were going for,” said Sharon. “In real life, parents would tell the child that he’s adopted, but in this case the child gets to pretend that his parents, who of course seem nothing like him—”
“No, I understand the concept. It’s fine. But I mean the whole thing…I guess I have to ask why would children actually spend their own money on these cards?”
Sharon looked so unhappy, and all the others grew quiet and unsmiling at Jill’s candor. She was already the interloper,
and she was being subtly tested here at this lunch, and look how she’d behaved. The joke about adoption bothered her, but also both the idea and the name of the line of cards were clearly dumb. Couldn’t everyone see that? But the others had been sitting there looking at the mock-ups and thinking of putting money into this venture, and one of them was even taking notes on her BlackBerry. Jill began to feel sickish; the taste of the turkey pinwheel was suddenly gamey in her mouth. Was it venison? she thought, disgusted and a little panicky at the whole scene. Was it rabbit? Was it a monkey pinwheel? She could not bear being here in this house.
“It’s good to hear criticism,” said Sharon Gregorius evenly. “We really need that at this stage. So thanks for that, Jill.” Then, to the table, she added cryptically, “Jill worked in film.”
“So there you have it,” Jill said now at yoga. “They made an overture of friendship. They tried to include me. And they were nice, and at least one of them seems like she might even be interesting. But there are two words for why I am not becoming friends with these women: ‘Wuv Cards.’”
They laughed, for it was easy to laugh and all hold the very same views; they had always done it, and it was like breathing. But Amy, unrolling her yoga mat in Jill’s sunny living room by the potted fig tree, said, “I don’t know. Maybe you’re being hard on them.”
“How so?” Jill said.
“I know you have a lot of regrets about moving here. Maybe you didn’t give them a fair shake. But at least they’re trying to do something with themselves now that their kids are in school. I mean, I haven’t figured it all out for myself yet, and Mason’s in fourth grade.”
