by Meg Wolitzer
“I don’t know,” said Karen. “Why do you say ‘at least’ they’re trying? Does everyone always have to ‘do’ something? Can’t they just enjoy their lives? I do.”
“But they’ve got no innate sense of imperative,” said Jill. “They have to make it up, and you can almost see the effort. All of them worked before, and all of them stopped.”
“Right,” said Amy. “Partly because corporate America didn’t love them.”
“How do you know that, Amy? Just because you wanted out forever?”
Amy paused for a moment. “I don’t know that it’s ‘forever,’” she said. “I think about working all the time. I am slowly heading toward some formal volunteer position; I don’t know why it’s taking me so long, but it just is. And I know that a group of women whose kids have started school and who are a little bored and want to put their former business knowledge to use and create some kind of start-up are supposed to be encouraged, right? That’s what my mother would say.”
“Not every idea should be encouraged,” said Jill. “Isn’t there something better that people can do with their time?”
“But I guess I don’t understand why you’re so concerned about what other people do with their time. Would you want them to judge the way you spend your time?”
The other women stayed upright on their mats, their spines straight, frozen in attention. They had never heard Amy and Jill, such close friends for so many years, speak fiercely to each other. They were slightly shocked and uneasily excited, listening to this.
“Back in the city,” Jill said after a moment, “you and Karen and Roberta all live in the center of commerce of the entire world, and yet you’ve chosen to drop out. Out here, everyone’s sort of agreed to drop out in a way, whether they work or not. I mean, they’re all staying away from the geographical epicenter, like it’s this hot stove.”
“I wouldn’t say I’ve dropped out,” Karen said, but no one replied.
“Who says the city equals life?” asked Amy. “Why are we assuming that? People live in all kinds of places all over America. Aren’t cities just these fake constructs? Didn’t you used to tell me something like that back in graduate school, when you were studying urbanism or something?”
“Yes, but I’m much older, and I see it differently now,” Jill said. “Donald and I left because of Nadia.”
“I just think your attitude could hurt you,” Amy said, more gently now. “You sound like you have contempt for the place where you chose to live.”
“‘Contempt’ is a very harsh word,” said Jill.
“I just feel protective of you. And my God, I miss you. You’re my closest friend. Don’t forget that I’m the one who got left behind.”
“I gather you’re adapting,” Jill said dryly.
“You mean Penny?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve told you, she is a really good person,” said Amy. “She’s interesting and smart, and she’s involved in all aspects of the arts. She said it’s really disturbing the way funding for the arts has been dismantled.”
“I don’t need Penny Ramsey to tell me that,” Roberta said. “It was that way when I left art school.”
“But it got ten times worse under the Republicans,” said Amy.
“Isn’t her husband a big Republican donor? Greg Ramsey?”
“He is, but it’s complicated.”
“Well, I hope you’ll both be very happy together,” Jill suddenly put in, laughing unpleasantly. The single syllable of her laughter came out like a gong in the echoing room.
“She’s not what you think, you know,” said Amy.
“I don’t think anything,” said Jill. “Why shouldn’t you be friends with her? It’s no more or less surprising than you becoming friends with anyone else.”
“Well, it would be less surprising than, I don’t know, Geralynn Freund,” offered Karen.
“Oh, poor Geralynn,” Roberta said. “It’s awful.”
“Let’s get started,” Jill said suddenly. She didn’t want to hear any more bulletins from her abandoned city life. And, she suddenly realized with an unexpectedly pleasurable feeling, she now hated Penny Ramsey.
So they turned on the DVD and began their makeshift yoga class. For once Jill was relieved not to talk but just to stay in one place and move her long body swiftly, fluidly. “Class” was an inexact word, because all they really did was sit in a row in front of someone’s plasma TV and assume an unbroken flow of vinyasa poses to an instructional DVD. But it didn’t matter; the class had been created, Jill knew, in order to provide some partial shape to their day, to give them purpose.
Once, long before Jill was a graduate student or a film development person, back when she was young and just beginning at the Pouncey School in New Hampshire, she didn’t have to worry about what she would do with all her learning; that wasn’t meant to concern her. Learning and preparing were enough, and that had carried her through school. She had loved the all-girl residential environment; it was a relief not to hear the voices of boys everywhere, or even anywhere. Later on, as graduation approached, the boylessness caused all the girls to become a little agitated and skittish. But for a long time everyone felt that adolescent boys were as dominating and dangerous as rutting elk and that it was better to be kept apart from them during this vulnerable time, when girls’ intellects were first being formed.
Jill was also relieved to be out of her home, though she hadn’t known she would feel this way. Susan Benedict had often looked to her young daughter to make certain decisions, even ones that seemed trivial. When Jill was eight, the meter man had rung the doorbell of the house, and her mother had come into the living room, asking her, “What do you think I should do?”
“Well, I guess you should let him in.”
“But I can’t tell for certain that he’s really the meter man,” said Susan Benedict, and Jill recalled that she had looked as anxious as a child. The meter man was eventually let in, and Jill watched as her mother nervously followed him downstairs to the basement, making sure that he actually was who he said he was.
Jill knew, in such slightly disconcerting moments, that her mother was more frightened and tentative than other mothers, but Jill almost admired these qualities. They had a beauty to them, as though her mother were a flower, and all the other mothers were logs. During the times when Susan Benedict became excessively sad and said she needed to stay quiet for a few hours, Jill would come sit on the side of the bed in the dim master bedroom and talk to her mother about school and her brothers and a book she was reading. Jill’s mother would ask her questions and sometimes would tell her stories from when she had been an actress, and had appeared in a single Broadway musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, before giving up her career.
Jill never understood exactly what was wrong with her mother, only that she felt compelled to retreat from the family every once in a while. Jill would help her do this; her older brothers—scrambling, wild, independent—certainly never did, and her father was off in his office at the Benecraft shellac factory all the time. “It must have been really hard for you,” Jill’s friends said in adulthood, when she described those early days. But a sad mother isn’t so difficult to manage, at least not at first, when you don’t even realize she’s sad, exactly. Jill had actually enjoyed sitting on the bed beside her mother, hearing about her theatrical days.
“Don’t go into theater,” Susan had advised from the half-darkened room. “The life is very unstable. It was wonderful to be in Tennessee Williams plays, though; he was so brilliant, but the characters were ultimately always so heartbreaking. But just try to do something other than theater.”
“Okay, I will,” Jill promised. She had no interest in performing and could barely imagine her vulnerable mother standing onstage in front of an audience. Though, of course, the reality was that if such a person did get up onstage, her whispering voice and nearly translucent presence might well hold everyone in place, forcing them to look only at her. Susan Benedict sank
back into her bed like an aging Tennessee Williams character, and she was the compassionate, female presence whom the other people in the family loved but who needed them to make decisions such as whether or not to let the meter man inside.
Jill often sat with her mother in the bedroom, but she only revealed what she thought her mother could handle. When another girl at school accused Jill of being “too smart, and boys hate girls who are too smart,” she had kept the sting of the remark to herself; it would have upset her mother so much to tell her about it. This was how she had gotten through childhood. When it came time to go away to the Pouncey School in Weyburn, New Hampshire, Jill worried about leaving, but her mother made it easy for her.
“Go,” her mother said, to Jill’s surprise. “Write me letters. Have a wonderful time.”
Pouncey, as it turned out, encouraged the girls to succeed. “Please, Ms. Babcock,” Jill remembered saying to her teacher in her American Civil War seminar, her hand waving in the air, “I really have something to contribute.”
“I’m sure that’s true, Jill,” said the young and ironic Ms. Babcock, who was Jill’s first mentor ever. Ms. Babcock probably wasn’t more than twenty-five at the time but had seemed so powerful. She was amused and awed by the girls, and had had them reenact the Battle of Gettysburg on the playing fields of the school. They had tramped around in boots and in improvised blue and gray uniforms; they had fallen to their deaths, crying in their last moments, “Ah’m a-dyin’, brother of mah’n.” Then they had gone back to their dormitories in a pack, arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, and had written bold if overreaching papers with confident titles such as “General Lee in the Shenandoah: A Close Analysis” and “The Battle of Pea Ridge: A Turning Point in a Nation’s War with Itself.”
“Where are all you meek types? All the ones I’ve been reading about in that book Setting Free Rapunzel. The ones who have ‘complexes’ and can’t speak up?” Ms. Babcock asked. There was laughter among the girls who sprawled out around the big classroom table. “What? You haven’t heard that girls are supposed to be shy and inarticulate?”
The education at Pouncey had always been classical and rigorous, although generations earlier, back in the 1940s and 1950s, it was said that the girls there were mostly headed for their MRS degrees. Still, the students in those eras had rarely thought about the discrepancy between what they learned and what they were planning to do with that learning. Knowledge didn’t just evaporate and get released into the atmosphere like a gas. It stayed within you, filling you up and changing your cellular structure, so that by the time you graduated from Pouncey and went on to college or secretarial school or, during World War II, perhaps an aviation-parts factory or even an early marriage, you were different from the person you had once been. When Jill arrived at the school in the early 1980s, she imagined that her education would lead her to more education, which somehow would lead her and everyone she knew to a formidable life.
There in their New Hampshire cloister for four years, the loud girls were predictably loud, the quiet ones quiet, but despite their dispositions, they were now all in possession of facts and the ability to analyze a passage from just about any kind of book that existed. Everything they were taught was slowly absorbed by them on that green-gold campus. Over time, as Ms. Babcock and other teachers told them, many people would gravitate toward what they had. Men would be attracted to their intelligence and their capability, as would future employers, and the world would await the moment of their intellectual ripeness.
Upon graduation, Jill won the Vivian Swope Prize, given annually to “A Graduating Senior Who Demonstrates the Most Promise.” The prize had been endowed by the family of a brilliant Pouncey girl who had been accidentally killed long ago in the spring of 1931, during a senior hiking expedition, when she lost her footing and hit her head on a rock. Jill had seen only one photograph of her: Vivian Swope had worn her wavy hair with a big silk bow and had had an appealing overbite, but the photograph revealed nothing more, and she became a stock symbol of excellence unfulfilled. All the Swope winners, at the time of their win, had occupied a certain glancing, golden place at Pouncey. They were the ones who swanned and glittered, the ones with their hands perennially up in class.
Promise, it seemed, was everywhere at that school, but it was best embodied by someone superior whom you secretly tried to dislike but just couldn’t. Promise, for one, came in the form of Jill—back then still known as Jill Benedict—a member of the class of ’85. At Pouncey, Jill was tall, strong, naturally blonde, a field-hockey player who charged toward the goalposts. The Benedicts came from “good stock,” everyone said, which always made Jill imagine them all aswim in some kind of thick, nutritionally enhanced broth. She was brought up to be kind and intelligent but modest in a big, meandering, slightly unkempt house outside Philadelphia, with two laughing older brothers who had bedrooms that smelled of body odor and something indefinably male. (“Oh, poor innocent you, look, I’ll spell it out for you: S-E-M-E-N,” another girl had said one night at Pouncey after Jill mentioned her brothers’ mysterious room-smell.)
Jill wasn’t necessarily destined to be a Swope winner, but in the end, death clinched the prize for her. In Jill’s junior year at Pouncey, her mother became noticeably more withdrawn and sadder than she’d ever been. No one understood; everyone just let her sleep late and tried to be understanding, and gave her time to herself when she was in a particularly unresponsive mood. Then, one morning in spring, Susan Benedict walked into the family’s garage, which stood separate from the house, stuffed the tailpipe of the Cadillac with her husband’s balled-up dress socks, and sat in the idling car in her nightgown and coat until she lost consciousness and finally died.
One of Jill’s brothers had called her at school with the news and said, “Jill, listen to me. I have to tell you something really, really terrible.” He made a sound like a croak, then a belch. “Mom committed suicide.”
To which Jill responded, dumbly, “Will she be okay?”
“What? No, listen to me. She died.”
“Mom died?”
Panicking, Jill had run across the playing fields, slipped into the woods, and sat in a patch of dirt, crying in a howl until she was ready to return to the world. The next day she somehow got down to Philadelphia for her mother’s funeral, and it was arranged that she would take her final exams at home over the summer. Her room was packed up and sent on after her.
Her mother’s suicide note had said that she loved her family more than she could ever say, but that, as they all knew, she had always been “emotional,” and lately she had been unable to feel any happiness at all. “I don’t understand why she couldn’t talk to us,” Jill’s father had said to anyone he could corner in those early days after the death. Bob Benedict knew his wife was troubled. Now it was as though he would be made to inhabit the pain he’d never understood. “Why didn’t she say she was suffering so badly?” he said to his children in tears. “Why didn’t she tell us the extent of it?” Susan Benedict had always seemed to Jill both sensitive and special. Her melancholy nature was simply a part of her that other people had known about and had always accepted with alternating irritation and patience.
When Jill returned to New Hampshire in the fall, having spent a long trance of a summer in the house with her shattered father and helpless, sobbing brothers, she had changed in ways that everyone could see. When she spoke in history class, she was quieter, less desperate to be heard, but more eloquent. At meals in the faculty dining room, teachers passed her paper on the Industrial Revolution from hand to hand. On the grass, playing field hockey, she knocked a battered puck around as if it were Death itself.
Sentiment rushed toward Jill Benedict like something flowing downhill. Everyone knew now that she was better than the rest of them. They suddenly saw what they hadn’t quite been able to see before: that she was uncommonly intelligent and would likely do big things with her life. Jill, it was decided, was the member of the class of ’85 most deservi
ng of the Swope Prize. Even her classmates who had held aspirations in this direction now conceded the point over a late-night secret Kahlúa session in the dormitory. They drank right from the stash of miniature bottles stowed inside the hanging shoe-bag in someone’s closet. “Jill Benedict will so totally get it,” they told one another philosophically. “There’s no point in pretending she won’t.”
And so Jill received it, on a wooden platform at graduation, on a bright spring morning. Vivian Swope’s surviving younger sister, by 1985 a handsome copper-haired woman in her sixties, handed her the scroll bound in lavender ribbon. Jill remembered that the woman wore a large gold oval Pouncey ring on her finger, engraved with the Latin “Ad omnia parata,” the school’s motto. “Prepared for everything.” The ring caught the light as the woman read from her written remarks.
“This is for promise,” she said. “My sister Vivian never had a chance to fulfill her own promise. By giving you this award today, Jill, we acknowledge and honor your past achievements and those that are yet to come.”
IN THE LIVING ROOM in the middle of yoga, Nadia Hamlin appeared, standing over the women the same way she stood over her mother in the morning. Gradually they became aware of her, and someone pressed the remote control. Nadia had an Ahoy, Mateys towel with her that she now spread out on the floor to use as a mat. “Nadia,” the other women said. “How are you? Are you enjoying your big new house?”
“I like it a lot,” said Nadia softly.
“Come join us,” said Karen Yip, patting the floor, and Jill watched as her daughter sat down and tried to form her legs into the lotus position. But she wasn’t flexible or poised; she was nothing at all like little Nadia Comaneci had once been. She fiddled around on the floor for a while, yanking on her left leg, and finally Jill bent over her and said quietly, “Do you want to do something else? Maybe go get a book and sit in the corner and read a little?”
“Okay, Mom.”
Jill followed behind her, telling her friends that she would be right back and not to continue without her. Mother and daughter walked down the corridor toward the playroom, and Jill watched as Nadia stood at her bookshelf, pulling out one book after another, examining the covers with squinted eyes. Jill knew that Nadia couldn’t read the names of the titles yet. At age six and in first grade, she was still not a real reader, although at the end of last year, her pretty, neophyte kindergarten teacher back in the city had assured Jill and Donald that this would come with time. Nadia frowned over the lineup of picture books on her shelf, selecting one based on its cover illustration. She tucked the book under her arm; she did look good, as though she was a very young student skipping off to her morning class in Bioethics and the American Dream.
