by Meg Wolitzer
But Nadia wouldn’t be able to survive in a world where she would need, if not raw intellect, then at least a certain kind of pack-oriented female dynamism. Now Jill watched her daughter walk back out into the living room, holding a book in her hands that she could not read. Over the rest of the hour, to the gentle instructional voice of the yoga DVD, the four women repeatedly rose up on their haunches on their little blue rubber rectangles and sank back down. They folded and unfolded their arms and legs, and lifted their heads like animals at a drinking pool in the Serengeti. They did the downward dog, the dragonfly pose, and countless salutations to heavenly bodies. They metamorphosed into animals, and trees with roots that spread like long fingers through the ground, holding themselves steady, and they became grateful to the sun for warming them and the moon for simply providing nighttime beauty. The DVD ended, and there was silence. But from the corner of the room, where Nadia sat with her book now, they heard her distinctive singing voice. The women opened their eyes.
“Nadia,” said Karen. “That’s so pretty. What is it, honey?”
Nadia shrugged shyly. “Just a song,” she said.
“Rise, sorrow…” repeated Karen. “And what’s the rest?”
“’Neath the saffron sister tree,” Jill quickly put in. “It’s some Russian folk song, we think, but we don’t know what it is.”
“I’ve heard her sing it before. The words are beautiful,” Karen said. “So sad and haunting. I always like hearing you sing, Nadia. You have a really nice voice.” She turned to Jill and said, “You should get her singing lessons out here. I think she’s very good.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Jill, but she was sure that Karen was simply being kind. Nadia did have a sweet if unusual voice, but Jill had mostly been struck by the fact that Nadia’s voice stood out from the other children’s. “Okay,” she said, “we should probably end. Want to do an om?”
They all tried one now, sitting quietly and closing their eyes again and chanting the single syllable. Jill opened an eye and saw that Karen was looking at her. They both smiled and laughed slightly, and then the others broke their concentration too.
“Sorry,” said Karen. “I can never do this with a straight face. You know,” she said, “maybe we should end with Nadia’s little song instead. With actual words that are pretty. That seems more fitting. Would it be okay if we did that, Nadia?”
The little girl nodded, and Jill knew that Nadia had no idea of what Karen was talking about. They all said they liked the idea, and so they closed their eyes, Nadia too, and in unison they chanted “Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree.”
They repeated the melancholy line a few times, and various thoughts of female friendship and loss and anything else that occurred to them were given entry into their brains. “Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree,” they said over and over.
Roberta Sokolov thought: How can Jill live here? It feels so empty. And why am I here now? My friends can be kind of monotonous. How did I end up with them?
Karen Yip, a former pure mathematics major and superior manipulator of numbers, thought:
Amy Lamb thought: I wonder what Penny is thinking about. The New York seaport at the turn of the century? Or her lover Ian Janeway? I should call her and say hi. Would anyone notice if I slipped into the bathroom and called her on my cell phone when yoga is over? I definitely feel like calling her.
Jill Hamlin thought: Rise, sorrow? What do those words really mean? Is Nadia depressed? Is she lost and alone and confused? What if they had given us the plump, laughing little girl in the next crib? Everything would have been different. But if they had given us that other little girl instead, then maybe Nadia would still be living in that orphanage, in a room full of girls, all of them ignored, unloved forever. And it’s just unbearable to think of her going unloved. Oh, I have to talk about it all with Amy. But look at Amy over there, sitting on her mat and probably focused only on Penny Ramsey. Just look at her; she’s lost to me.
Rise, sorrow, the women all chanted, and their sorrows obediently rose, and kept rising.
Chapter SIX
Philadelphia, 1962
I WOULD LOVE to see you in The Glass Menagerie,” Bob Benedict said to the young woman who sat in front of a smeared mirror in the open space backstage. The place was unheated, but all the actors wore shirtsleeves, for the play tonight had been Summer and Smoke, and the setting was moistly southern. This was the first Tennessee Williams production that Greasepaint Amateur Theatricals had attempted, and there had been some difficulty coaxing these long-held Philadelphia accents into patient southern drawls, but in the end the entire cast felt pleased with its progress and infused by a moody sexuality that floated over into the audience as well, bringing the serious young businessman Bob Benedict backstage and into the sightline in the mirror of Susan McCrory, resident ingénue. She turned around.
“I don’t think I could carry that yet,” she said softly, but she was pleased at the attention. The businessman came to see all the Greasepaint productions, attending by himself and then, after the curtain calls, appearing backstage with a bouquet of lilies for her in damp paper. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, only sort of plain in his dark suits and horn-rims, yet after a while, seeing him show after show bobbing and grinning in the mirror, Susan began to appreciate his thorough lack of artifice, especially when compared to the men of the theatrical troupe, a mix of the narcissistic, the frankly homosexual, and the “character-actor” peculiar. All the performers were deeply aware of themselves in relation to the world; everything they did seemed somehow as if it were being done onstage. Their laughter during table reads had a patent falseness about it, as though they imagined they were secretly being observed by a Broadway producer who would step out from the wings and say, “I have been quietly watching all of you, and there’s one of you whose mannerisms I have been most impressed by—not only when in character but also when simply sitting at the table, responding to the performances of others.” And then he would name a name and take that person with him to New York, where he or she would be deposited in short order upon a Broadway stage.
During the day Susan McCrory worked at her low-paying job as a nursery school teacher in downtown Philadelphia, but every evening she went to rehearsals, and for the past two nights she had been onstage in the auditorium of a church in front of a small, though not humiliatingly small, audience. She had become accustomed to praise, and knew that as long as she stayed in amateur theater, she would always do well. She was an unusual combination of shyness and self-display, a very pretty if slightly too broad-shouldered and tall, vividly blonde girl of nineteen who knew she wanted to act professionally. She didn’t have enough money yet to try to become an actress in New York City, though she planned on doing so in the next few months. Her roommate, who owned a Brownie camera, had agreed to take head shots. And then, in March, during the nursery school’s vacation, the plan was that Susan would go to New York, sleep on her aunt’s sofa, and answer ads for casting calls that she had circled in the pages of Backstage. If she had any luck, she would give up her life in Philadelphia, move in with her aunt, and have a go of it; if she had no luck, she would return home and try again the following season.
But until vacation, Susan McCrory would continue to perform with Greasepaint, this friendly if slightly sad-sack collection of housewives, office workers, and professionals. Community theater was always a mixed lot. Dr. Carlson, who was given most of the male leads and whom Susan was usually asked to kiss at some point during a production, was the only one in the troupe not referred to by his first name, out of respect for his medical degree. He was a married obstetrician of thirty, weak-chinned but vain. Susan had played opposite him last spring in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and when it came time for them to kiss, his lips had been pinched and prissy as he turned his whole body at an angle that would give the audience the most generous view of his face.
But Bob Benedict, businessman—Susan liked the alliteration—seemed, compared
with this crowd, pleasingly manly and lacking in self-congratulation. He appeared unaware of the way his body moved in space as it parted the curtains and came toward her, holding out a cone of flowers. Apparently no one had ever taught him to be coy or boastful.
They began dating, and he took her out in his big green finned Cadillac to steakhouses with tasseled menus, and then they started making love every weekend in his bachelor apartment. Susan had herself fitted for a diaphragm and was moved into an adult world that, while not exactly as she’d imagined it to be, seemed at least like a decent facsimile. Bob loved her desire to be an actress, and he escorted her home each night during the brief run of a production. The other cast members all murmured, “Hi, Bob,” or “What did you think, Bob?” as he strode backstage.
But then she changed it, she shifted the rhythms, she almost ruined everything, as her mother had feared she would. Susan insisted on going to New York, as she’d planned to do, and it was there, at an open call for a black-box production of something forgettable, that she was discovered. Her lines at the audition included “I am Mary, the mistress of the loom. I sit and weave and weep and keen. I am Mary, the mistress of the loom.” Though she was not cast, one of the producers said he had a friend who was currently casting the chorus for the new Broadway play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and he told Susan to give the friend a call. She sang and pranced for that man, and when he asked her if she’d ever worn a toga—technically a stola, he told her, for that was the female version of the toga, though most people didn’t call it that—she’d said, “In an earlier life,” and he’d seemed amused by this and gave her a part.
“GOOD LUCK ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY,” the other members of Greasepaint Amateur Theatricals had written on a banner they taped across the doorway of the rehearsal room in the basement of the church in Philadelphia. Dr. Carlson gave her a kiss as dry and obscure as a piece of scrimshaw and shook her hand and told her to stay in touch, but really this was it. She wouldn’t return to these southern sets where she was always being stage-directed to fan herself or “drink a sweating cold glass of lemonade,” or wipe the back of her hand across her brow. She wouldn’t return even to see their productions, because then she would be made to observe herself from the outside: how much like high school plays these plays had been and how embarrassing, in retrospect. She didn’t want to see herself accurately; she couldn’t bear the idea of such clarity.
In the beginning, after she moved to New York, Bob Benedict telephoned her every day, and at the end of the conversation he told her he loved her. But soon, when Susan was off singing around someone’s scuffed, upright piano in a walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village and drinking in a bar with all the other chorus kids after a rehearsal, it became clear that Bob might soon lose her to this new life, and so he became anxious, calling frequently, laughing too much, nervously asking her if she loved him.
Her mother Margaret said to her, “You know that Bob Benedict is a very good man and that the Benedicts have lots of money—Benecraft Shellac—and we don’t, and I don’t know how you will survive unless you have someone like him to provide for you.” Margaret McCrory had always worried intensely about money, so much so that she sometimes wore herself out from her despair, and had to lie down in bed for a couple of days in order to recover. All the women on Susan’s mother’s side of the family had always been a little sensitive this way. Once, Susan’s father, who had come to New York to visit his daughter, sat with her in the kitchen of her aunt’s apartment and showed her what kind of a budget she would need to keep if she continued working as a chorus girl. “There won’t be any leeway for extravagance,” he said to her, as if she’d ever known extravagance before.
The Broadway play opened, and was of course a hit, and every night Susan sang and danced, and changed back into her street clothes in a room with a half-dozen other overheated girls, and then stayed out very late. After two months of this she was wound down and underslept, and caught viral pneumonia. She lay on the daybed in her aunt’s apartment, where Bob, who had driven up from Philadelphia, sat beside her all afternoon in the slatted light from the Venetian blinds. Susan was weak and sick, and for reasons she never really understood, Bob took that opportunity to propose to her. “You can’t go on like this forever, can you?” he asked gently. “You’ve had the experience of being on Broadway, and it was what you said you always wanted. Now you’ve done it; it’ll be in your scrapbook. But you want other things too, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I definitely do.”
He enumerated them. “Marriage,” he said. “Taking care of a home. Motherhood, certainly. We both said we want a family on the soon side.”
She conceded, through the codeine, that she did want these other things and that she didn’t want to lose him.
The night before the wedding, Susan briefly thought about killing herself. There was no reason for this thought, but still she imagined jumping off the roof of their hotel and landing in an alley with her long white legs scrambled and her pretty blonde head caved in. It would be the last moment of attention she ever received, she thought with some dark, vicious satisfaction.
But she couldn’t do it. She married him, and the wedding went well, even if none of her friends from the chorus could attend, because it was a Saturday afternoon and they all had to be in the matinee. That night, after vigorous sex in the suite at the hotel with her very pleased husband, the newly minted Susan Benedict slept for twenty hours straight. When she woke up, Bob promised her that she would love her life with him, and that she would “want for nothing.” He actually spoke those words, as though he were reading them from the script of a bad play.
“Thank you,” she said, speaking her own awkward line.
Once in a while, in their Tudor house down a private road outside Philadelphia in the middle of the day, with the air smelling of rain and the maid vacuuming discreetly in the living room, she would think about how the joke she had made to that casting director had turned out to be true: In a previous life, she had worn a toga.
Chapter SEVEN
THERE HAD BEEN a time in the world when art was art and craft was craft, and everyone knew the difference. Art could be spotted right away, because the real thing was rare and gave off a particular sheen—and also because the artist could usually be found lurking nearby, anxious to know what you thought about “the work.” But craft was all over the place, splayed out on folding tables at country fairs, or on drop-sheeted floors of houses and apartments where children were in residence. With art, you might be said to have a good eye; with craft, mostly what you needed were hands.
Roberta Sokolov had both. She’d long known about the art part; had known it when she was a standard-issue, politically active, bohemian girl in a magnet high school in the Chicago suburb of Naperville; and had still known it throughout art school and even afterward, when she was trying to make it as a painter in New York City during the early 1990s—the era of the white male painter, her friend Cindy Skye called it. “Every era is the era of the white male painter,” Roberta had said. Back in the ’90s, art dealers went trolling for young men who rubbed steel wool and glued doll heads onto their huge canvases and then stood belligerently in front of them with folded arms. The dealers were often seduced, if only by the physical magnitude of the work.
But when Roberta tried her version of this, the dealers weren’t drawn to her the same way they were drawn to the men with their huge, frenetic canvases. Sometimes she was invited to participate in group shows, or in women’s group shows, which inevitably took place in a gallery no one had heard of—Ovum, or the Marilyn Heinberg Artspace. She tried to show off her good, capable, figurative paintings, but few people paid attention. It was better, Roberta eventually thought, to paint quietly, discreetly, expecting nothing and asking for nothing. Maybe, if you were lucky, something good would happen to your career; for the first few years after art school, Roberta Sokolov had believed this. But still almost no one came to the quiet cor
ners where she painted.
For a long time, whenever people asked her about what she did for a living, she always said, “Artist,” though that implied that she was compensated on a regular basis, which wasn’t true. Then, during the period when she began to support herself by becoming a puppeteer, she would tell them, “Puppeteer and artist.” In recent years, she’d say, “I used to be an artist and a puppeteer, but then I had kids. I still try to do some art when I can.” But her voice was stiff, for she knew that the financial necessity of puppetry had eclipsed art, and then, finally, motherhood had eclipsed both, bringing with it the thing called craft, which was ubiquitous in both childhood and motherhood.
Now, no one in her daily life had even known Roberta back when she had been an artist; they just had to take her word for it that she had been one and that she was good. Because of Nathaniel, though, people still thought about her in terms of puppetry. Just yesterday morning, the annual call had come from the woman in the special-programs office at Auburn Day, hitting Roberta up for a one-day puppetry workshop. Each fall this same woman phoned with the same request, and each fall Roberta said yes, as they both knew she would. Because her son, Harry, was on financial aid there, she felt slightly guilty and grateful, besides which she genuinely liked doing things for the school. It really wasn’t a big deal to come in and perform her little puppet demo. So this time, when the woman from Auburn Day telephoned, Roberta said to her, “You know, you could probably just save yourself the call each year by putting me down as a permanent yes.”
