by Meg Wolitzer
There was a pause, and then the woman said in an uncomfortable, formal voice, “Actually, we’re never sure what our plans are year to year.” As though Roberta shouldn’t feel too cocksure that she’d be invited. She was the one volunteering her time and her expertise, and the school “wasn’t sure” what its plans would be next year!
Now, over breakfast at the Golden Horn, she told her friends about the call. “So call them back and tell them you realized you can’t do it this year after all,” Amy Lamb said. “Tell them you’re too busy.”
“That’s the thing. They know I’m basically available. I am at their mercy. We all are.”
It was morning, and the women were sitting in the back of the Golden Horn in the booth by the swinging doors through which the agile flamencan waiters pushed in and out in a continuous swiveling dance of eggs and coffee, eggs and coffee. The room was crowded, as it often was, and the friendly, ubiquitous owner brought them their water glasses and took their orders. Today, below a lit-up niche in the wall that featured a vase of acrylic flowers salted with dust and a small painting of Greek fishermen hauling in their catch, there were five of them. In addition to Roberta, Amy, and Karen Yip, there was Joanne Klinger, whose seven-month-old baby, Zachary, drowsed in a huge, fully loaded Magnetti Supremo stroller, its handlebar dangling with its own nets. The waiters had to dart around the stroller each time the doors swung wide, but they never complained. Also in the booth was Shelly Harbison, whom no one liked very much, but it was all right, because Shelly wasn’t around a great deal. She had her own infant at home at the moment with a babysitter, and she could often be seen heading off to various motherhood lectures and all-day workshops.
“The school never asks me to do anything except give money,” Karen said.
“You were a statistical analyst,” said Amy. “They can’t bring you in and have you demonstrate that for the boys. It’s not visual.”
“They could give her an abacus,” said Joanne Klinger.
“That’s a wee bit racist, isn’t it?” Roberta said.
“I’ve actually used an abacus,” said Karen, unfazed. “They’re amazing.” Then she added, “Actually, I’m thinking of going back to work. That headhunter called me again.”
“The headhunter always calls you,” said Amy.
Karen Yip seemed to go for a job interview every few weeks, dressing up beautifully in the kind of suit with little buttons like lozenges that she used to wear when she worked. Though she never accepted any of the jobs she was offered, she liked to talk about her interviews, as though they themselves were the point.
“The school never asks the fathers to come in,” Amy said. “To take a day off and do a workshop. It would never occur to them to ask.”
“And the thing is,” said Roberta, “most of the fathers would like it.” She paused, thinking about this. “I actually like it,” she said with a little surprise. “Talking to the boys about puppetry, even though it’s not the way I identify myself anymore. So really,” she added, “I can’t complain when the school calls. They know that I’ll do it and that I would be sorry not to. Just so long as I don’t actually have to become a puppeteer again.”
“I would have liked to know you then,” said Amy. “Hearing you use those little voices.”
“You didn’t know me as an artist, either,” Roberta said.
“We sort of do now,” said Karen. “All the projects you do with your kids. I love how creative you are.”
Roberta’s apartment had long been loaded up with plastic boxes of beads and sequins and containers labeled MARKERS and COLORED PENCILS. Her friends didn’t make the distinction between craft and art, the way Roberta did. It wasn’t that she didn’t love craft; actually she did, and some of her happiest times had been spent with her children, Harry and Grace, making a project that would engage them for a long while, until eventually it was relegated to a closet, where it would quietly decompose.
But craft also made Roberta think of the shadow of art in which it inevitably sat, and the loss that remained. In her other life, as she often thought of it, back before motherhood and puppetry, Roberta had been a figurative painter who lived downtown, where she had gradually become involved with the “puppet-making community,” a phrase that even now embarrassed her slightly to say aloud.
The puppeteers tended to all find one another eventually, and so it was not surprising that she had met her husband, Nathaniel Greenacre, twelve years earlier at a puppet show. It was one of those Saturday morning multiact shows that cater to children’s temperaments and attention spans; you would get a compressed and accelerated Hansel and Gretel, followed by a wordless wrestling match between two hands in white gloves, and then an incomprehensible Hungarian folktale with painted wooden marionettes that were long and menacing and lax-jawed. Roberta was part of the fourth act of the morning, a three-woman show with a barnyard theme.
She was pacing backstage with a pig puppet on her hand when she saw Nathaniel Greenacre rooting through a trunk for an errant puppet. “He can’t have run out on me,” he said.
“You never know. They have their ways.”
He smiled approvingly, and one half of his mouth lifted in a way that was sexually suggestive. Roberta was not someone to whom men were often instantaneously attracted. It usually took them an extra beat to warm to her, and she would have to make sure they saw her personality right away—her independence and nerve—and then they would become interested, if they were going to be interested at all. But Nathaniel Greenacre did not know how men usually perceived Roberta; he was much older than she was, and the pool of women he’d been drawing from in recent years tended to be in his own age range and wary from more than a few relationships—and in many cases a marriage or two—that had come undone.
“You in the next act?” he asked her, and she told him about the barnyard routine.
“We’re not great,” she said. “It’s just a way to pick up a little cash. Please don’t listen.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he said. “Not to worry.”
Many puppeteers spoke in a dismissive, arch manner about their own and one another’s acts, preferring to think of themselves as performance artists who had been forced by necessity to work before child audiences but who were really meant to be wearing ectoplasmic structures on their hands made of neoprene and bubble wrap as they performed for other performance artists in somebody’s loft.
Yet here were Roberta and Nathaniel backstage at the cheerless auditorium of an urban YMCA. Several homeless Paul Bunyan types drowsed in the rows, waiting for the soup kitchen to open upstairs. Percussive children’s coughing emanated from the audience along with waves of audible restlessness. During the Hungarian act, after the strange marionettes teetered on tiptoe and clacked their jaws, and one of them cried out to another, “Count Szilagyi, I demand you pay me back my ten gold pieces!” a small boy in the second row shouted, “OH MOMMY, WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER?”
Several parents tittered in solidarity, and one even clapped. They were all held hostage to children’s demands and limited interests—parents and puppeteers alike. Sometimes now, over a decade later, whenever a movie or a play or even just a quarrel between Roberta and Nathaniel felt particularly unbearable, one of them would turn to the other and say, “OH MOMMY, WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER?”
When they first met backstage on that snowy day, she, at twenty-eight, was decidedly still young and he, at thirty-nine, was not. Roberta’s body was slightly squat, and her nose clearly too bluntly large for her face, though more than one sympathetic female friend had told her that she possessed a sort of soulful, Semitic look. One had even said she looked like Anne Frank, and then reassuringly added, “but in a really good way.” Roberta wore her wavy black hair with a few odd ceramic clips in it, as she’d done since college, and she had about her a certain recognizable artistic look that you either responded to or did not.
Nathaniel was older than anyone else Roberta knew and possessed a slightly bitter manner that was a
ppealing to her, because she did not yet know many older people and did not understand that this was a fairly common feature of them. Nathaniel Greenacre’s face was tired even then, at thirty-nine, and he kept his already gray hair swept off his face, long in back. He was a handsome and quiet pothead who had a trunkful of complex, ingenious felt puppets in his apartment in Brooklyn, which he shared with another puppeteer named Wolf Purdy.
When Nathaniel and Roberta first went to bed together a week later, he showed her every one of his puppets, trying them on for her in the swirled bed after sex, a gesture that seemed at the time like a pleasurably perverse, nearly sexual act in itself. His best puppets were a duo named Nuzzle and Peeps.
“You know, these could be a big hit,” Roberta recalled saying to him in that bed. “You should really do something with them.”
“I try,” said Nathaniel. “But you know how corrupt the puppetry world is.”
She didn’t, though. It was only a job to her, not a life, and she had thought of it as somewhat incestuous and low-level mean-spirited, in the way that any small and self-contained world often is. The smaller the world, the more territorial people behaved around it. But Roberta, a former figurative-painting student who had entered this field almost accidentally, thought that Nathaniel Greenacre understood hierarchies and social systems in a way that she did not. She gave him credit because of his age and the years he had clocked in puppetry and his demonstrable devotion to it. His puppet Nuzzle was a glossy-furred, golden brown creature that seemed part bear, part newborn baby, part wise guy, while the sidekick, Peeps, was a dazed and self-important chick, newly hatched.
Roberta thought right away that Nathaniel Greenacre had brilliance, though it was clearly underexploited and undersung. Sometime soon, she knew, he would become famous, a sardonic, fringy hero to the children who constituted what people were now calling “the juice-box generation.” It wasn’t as though Nathaniel’s puppets were matted with blood or saying obscenities, but they were a little off, in some original and essential way.
At first, after they married, Roberta and Nathaniel became a professional team, performing Nuzzle and Peeps shows at preschools and in the basement rooms of libraries around the city and in nearby suburbs. She was Peeps, giving the puppet a stringy little voice and the barest of stammers. They needed no one else, which was just as well, because no one else seemed to need them, either. Children’s puppet theater was not a very gratifying milieu. Once, as they set up their small stage in an all-purpose room, they were warned by a librarian, “Please don’t disturb the arrangement of chairs. As soon as you’re done, Narcotics Anonymous is coming in.”
The income they brought in back then was modest, but so were their financial needs. Roberta’s parents, Norma and Al Sokolov, the original crafts-centered people—both small, round-bodied, deeply connected to each other, and industrious—worked as a husband-wife team themselves and loved it. They ran a small company in Chicago that created centerpieces for banquets: accordion-tailed turkeys, bicolored maize, and oversized wooden acorns for Thanksgiving; miniature crèches for Christmas; and so forth. They had made a single, excellent investment with their earnings: one year, back in the late 1960s, on a business trip to a party-supplies convention in New York City, they had met a woman who also sold real estate and who knew of a “steal,” a walk-up apartment on the Upper East Side that she said would one day be valuable.
Norma and Al believed her and bought it, renting it out right away. And though they were difficult parents over the years, more impressed by each other than they were by their daughter or her artwork (“I realize,” Roberta had said to them once during a terrible argument in her twenties, “that my paintings do not display the creativity and brilliance of, oh, an Easter centerpiece made of shredded-plastic grass and cheap dyed eggs”), they were shockingly generous upon her marriage to Nathaniel and gave the newlyweds the New York apartment.
If only the place were better. The rooms were shot through with light but breathtakingly small: two little square bedrooms and one old, corroded black-and-white bathroom on the fourth floor of a walk-up building in the East Seventies, near the river. Roberta and Nathaniel would never have chosen to live in this neighborhood, which seemed more static and dull than they had ever imagined for themselves. They should have been living in Brooklyn, or even up in Harlem, which despite its dangers was becoming popular—anywhere but here. Theirs was the kind of building where the mostly elderly neighbors left items they no longer wanted on the windowsills of the stairwell, so that as you descended like Alice down the rabbit hole, you might come upon a pair of singed but usable oven mitts and a softly rotting paperback copy of All Quiet on the Western Front. Yet the apartment was theirs free and clear, and they had no money to move somewhere more exciting and diverse, and they were in love, and so they would figure it out. Later, after the two children were born, the close quarters became more oppressive, and Roberta was reminded of the feeling she got from crouching behind a puppet theater with other puppeteers, everyone elbow to elbow.
For a long time the Sokolov-Greenacre family managed. Now, though, Grace and Harry were eight and ten, and a couple of the mothers at the Golden Horn occasionally warned Roberta that eventually the children would reach an age when their bodies would begin to develop (“Grace will get boobs, Roberta”) and that it would no longer be appropriate for them to share a room. For the time being, though, the children had bunk beds and remained inseparable.
Roberta pretended to her friends that she agreed that someday soon the children would need their own rooms, but she knew that from a practical standpoint it could never, ever happen. Harry and Grace would share this room long into the years when he grew constant boners and she did indeed develop breasts, and both of them staggered in and out of adolescent storms with no warning or reason. The free apartment in this age of impossible real estate would belong to Roberta and Nathaniel forever, and they would remain in it along with their children, regardless of the fact that they belonged elsewhere.
After Grace was born, Roberta had stopped doing puppetry completely, and though the enclosure of the apartment had depressed her at times, she’d also seen it as a refuge from the long, damp mornings of children’s theater. Nathaniel still valiantly dragged himself around to libraries and schools with his friend Wolf, performing Nuzzle and Peeps, but Roberta didn’t miss the work at all. When Grace started kindergarten, Roberta thought hard about rejoining Nathaniel on weekends, but when she figured out the calculus of such an arrangement she saw that it would never make sense. She would be paying a babysitter almost the same amount of money she would be earning herself. There was no reason for her to leave the children, except some indistinct one that had to do more with the generic idea of working—of wanting to “do something”—than with logic.
So she stayed home and tried to paint, but nothing happened at the easel. It was excruciating. She helped Harry and Grace with their crafts projects, using the same care and attention she’d given to painting. Her children loved doing crafts with their mother. They weren’t self-critical yet; instead, they just kept creating more and more things.
How wonderful to be free of self-criticism, Roberta often thought. This lack of self-consciousness and condemnation was probably a fleeting state. Back when Grace was in preschool, and it had been her turn to select a body part during the Hokey Pokey, she had sung, “You put your nipples in, you put your nipples out, you put your nipples in, and you shake them all about….” The young teachers, poker-faced, had gone along with it but couldn’t resist telling Roberta about it at pick-up. “She was just completely comfortable with herself,” one of the teachers had said with admiration. “It was so lovely to see.”
Roberta wanted Grace to be free enough to say and do and create what she wished and not care about other people’s opinions. Unlike her mother, she would be a real artist, and she would be ambitious; she would rise.
Artistic talent, Roberta Sokolov thought, was like the soul; in the absence of
an actual product, you couldn’t prove its existence. Nathaniel had no question that Roberta’s talent was slumbering but still present. He imagined it as a kind of positive entity, able to exist underground for decades, and was sure that one day, when the circumstances were right, it would emerge, intact.
In art school in Providence, she had been a serious figurative painter. How was it, she had asked Cindy Skye during portraiture class, that almost no one in the world looked exactly like anyone else? That the slightest flare of nostril or convexity of forehead could make one person entirely different in character from someone else? And how too did children become what they did over time?
When her own children were small, Roberta had had the idea to do a series of paintings based on famous people who had died young, showing what they would have looked like had they been given the chance to grow old. In addition to the obvious inclusion of Anne Frank, she would paint Princess Diana as an elderly, beakish dowager, and the murdered and violated child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey looking old and ridiculous and vain. The series was going to be called Old Children.
She’d tried to begin work on it during Grace and Harry’s afternoon naps. The first of the paintings, Anne Frank, came out timid and unformed, suggesting very little about the nature of innocence or loss, or the banality of evil. It suggested nothing. The woman in the portrait looked like no one who had ever lived. One eye was slightly larger than the other. Roberta’s skill for portraiture had apparently disappeared, just like brilliant, vivid Anne Frank. Poof.
