The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  She didn’t know what had made her lose it, but she was relieved that motherhood, with all its projects, absorbed her the way it had. She needed something to concentrate on, and there were times when she admitted to herself that it was a relief not to have to try to make it as an artist anymore. It was also a relief not to have to work at a nine-to-five job that wasn’t creative and couldn’t make her happy. She felt sorry for her workhorse husband Nathaniel, who still performed in the same old puppet shows on weekends and who, several years earlier, had uncomplainingly taken a day job as a news cameraman at CBS.

  They had sat down together and figured out exactly what it would take to raise their kids in the city; with ambivalence they’d applied to private schools for both kids after someone had suggested that they would have a decent shot at receiving financial aid. This was exactly what happened. Because of Nathaniel’s salary and the free apartment and the slashed-price schools, Roberta was able to stay home and continue to try to paint. They were among the least financially flush families in the grade, but their needs were far more modest than those of most families. It felt almost petty to sit here in the Golden Horn on this fall morning, complaining about the woman from Auburn Day who had called to hit Roberta up for a puppetry workshop and yet did not value her enough. It seemed, finally, spoiled.

  She didn’t want to be spoiled. She wanted to be someone who had a political consciousness and who didn’t simply live without thinking in an all-white patch of land in the most privileged city in the world. The field of whiteness bothered her tremendously. “How did we get so white?” she once asked Nathaniel.

  Roberta made a point of taking the kids all around Brooklyn to visit old friends who had moved there and also up to Harlem, where her friend Cindy Skye now lived in a renovated floor-through. There was a new charter school there, Cindy said, which was supposed to be decent. “You guys should move here,” said Cindy. “It takes some adjusting—the supermarkets are bad, and you have to go really far to get anything decent—but I love the neighborhood.” Roberta wanted her children to feel comfortable among nonwhite people and in an environment where money did not flow. She wanted them to learn that the world did not revolve around them—even though, quite often, it did.

  But mostly she wanted to be reassured that she herself had not closed up and changed and lost the vigor of her own political drive—along with her art. It was perfectly okay to be a stay-at-home mom (though she loathed that expression) with a real political consciousness that extended beyond the act of packing organic sunflower cookies and pesticide-free-juice boxes into her children’s lunch bags. It was perfectly okay to be one of the passionate, caring mothers who thought about the horrors of the larger world, and did what she could, in her small way, then picked up her kids at the end of the day and brought them home. There would be scales of laughter there, shouting, crafts projects—until one day, when the children grew up and left, there wouldn’t.

  And then what will you do? she often asked herself. How will you bear the rest of life?

  On Sunday morning, as if in answer to her own unhappy questions, Roberta would be flying to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as a volunteer with her reproductive-rights group. She would spend most of the next week driving a few South Dakotan women to and from the one clinic in the state where you could still get an abortion.

  Briefly, she and her friends had all gone through a short “political” phase, but then each of them had fallen out of it except Roberta. It had started after 9/11. On that day, all the parents—mothers and fathers, working or nonworking—had run to pull their children out of class. One of the few children who remained for a couple of extra hours at Auburn Day was a little dimpled boy who was in third grade at the time, Jackson Pershing, and whose similarly dimpled bond-trader father worked on the 102nd floor of the North Tower. Jackson’s mother had spent the day searching downtown for any signs of her lost husband. By breakfast two days later, with the ruins still smoking, the women sat in their usual booth and talked starkly about the end of the world and cried a little with their heads in their hands and wondered aloud what they could do and how they could manage to be “involved,” that floating and noncommittal word.

  Later, when the war in Iraq had begun, several of the parents supported it. Roberta had been appalled. Karen said at the time that Wilson thought the invasion was “horrible but necessary,” though he changed his position soon enough. Nathaniel and Roberta had watched the early war coverage on their small TV after the children were asleep. “Those dicks in Washington,” Nathaniel had kept saying. At one point during that newscast, he had gone into his dresser drawer and brought out his little drawstring bag of pot, as if to say that there was nothing to do about the problems of a bullying administration and a frightened country except, somehow, to forget them. Eventually the war was often no more than background din, not unlike the sound of plates and silver that could be heard all around the Golden Horn shortly after the start of the breakfast rush.

  Here the women sat now on this late fall morning in their usual booth, no longer marching or really political or consistently involved, except for Roberta. Being political wasn’t like being an artist; everyone was “welcome.” No one told you to stay away. No one said that you weren’t male enough or phallic enough and that your canvases weren’t big enough or didn’t have enough broken doll heads attached to them. Her involvement in the reproductive-rights outreach group was participatory and immediate.

  But Roberta was not yet willing to give her news over to the maw of breakfast conversation, where it would join all the other percolating remarks. “Oh,” Joanne Klinger might say, “that’s really admirable, Roberta. I think it’s so great that you’re doing this. You’re both creative and political.” They would reflect upon the slippery and melancholy nature of time and what kind of debt an individual owed the world. The environment might be mentioned next, for they could all imagine their children wandering lost through a poisoned planet, in which fish lay with flapping gills on the shores of half-gelatinous rivers, and the polar ice caps had been reduced to a broth, and there was no such thing as winter, and this was their children’s inheritance, and yes, it had been the parents’ fault, for they hadn’t done enough to stop it in time. The group of women at the table might soon become depressed and quiet.

  Finally, in the haziest of transitions, someone might ask, “Did you read the op-ed piece about that aid worker who was killed in Darfur? I knew her sister at Wesleyan.” Or else, “Have you seen Geralynn Freund lately? She looks worse.” Or, “Is everybody getting excited about the father-son weekend?”

  Today at breakfast, conversation meandered from Roberta’s creativity to the children’s art curriculum, to Amy Lamb’s friendship with Penny Ramsey, that sleek mother in the grade who ran a museum. Roberta had noticed that Amy talked about Penny Ramsey a lot lately, invoking her name with a certain private satisfaction, as though Penny were a celebrity. “I’m going downtown to meet her for lunch later,” Amy said now. “She’s giving me a private tour of her museum’s permanent collection.”

  “Oh, that should be interesting,” said Shelly Harbison. “Getting a behind-the-scenes look. Let me know what it’s like.”

  “I will.”

  “Have you been to her apartment?” Shelly asked. “I heard it’s beautiful: all white. Where would your children be able to sit in an all-white apartment? You’d have to give them orders all the time about what they could or couldn’t do. No homework done in ink. No grape juice.”

  Just then, Joanne Klinger’s cell phone rang and she turned slightly away from the others to take the call. In a second she got off the phone and explained that her mother-in-law’s friend had been planning to give her some hand-me-downs for the baby to wear and that the clothes needed to be picked up now. “Could I leave the baby with you?” she asked. Everyone said it was fine, so off she went. The other women kept talking and almost forgot the baby was in their midst until a few minutes later, when one of the waiters dropped and s
hattered a dish and Joanne’s baby, Zachary, was startled awake in his stroller and began to cry.

  “Mommy will be right back,” Roberta said to the uncomprehending infant, and they all leaned their heads in so close that they must have looked like asteroids about to crash into him.

  But Joanne did not return, and Zachary’s cries grew more insistent. Amy tried to call Joanne’s cell phone, but it went immediately to voice mail. “Hey, Joanne?” she said. “Are you on your way?”

  Without saying anything, Shelly Harbison reached over and unstrapped the baby from the stroller. Shelly was someone for whom motherhood was everything; the other women all knew this about her, though until now they had understood it only abstractly. At breakfast sometimes she spoke ardently about her three children, and she was often carrying around a hot-button nonfiction sociological book with a motherhood theme. Years earlier, she had made them all reread that classic Setting Free Rapunzel, and in recent days she had urged them to buy The Call of the Mild: Why Women Have Trouble with Aggression, and How It Holds Them Back. The women at the table had periodically listened to Shelly’s pronouncements on subjects such as the friction between motherhood and work in the half-distracted fashion with which they listened to many of the stories that came their way across the booth at breakfast.

  The baby arched and flailed now in Shelly’s arms and seemed in increased desperation. People at other tables began to take notice; across the way, a table of third-grade mothers from the school looked up from their own breakfast and whispered. Roberta knew one of them a little; she was the blandest mother in the whole school, perhaps the whole world, her face as round and closed as a pie.

  The crying obliterated everyone’s words as well as all the ambient noise in the coffee shop. “Oh, what the hell,” Shelly said, and before anyone could understand what she was doing, Shelly had lifted her own blouse, exposing the enormous peach-colored cups of her nursing bra. She deftly snapped open a flap, revealing her right breast with its startlingly big, rough nipple and its reticulation of pale veins. Joanne Klinger’s baby, that fool, that bigamist, gamely and indiscriminately latched on.

  Horror and silence descended upon the table. “Shelly,” Karen finally said, during the clicks and swallows of Zachary’s quiet feasting. “That is not your baby.”

  “He doesn’t know the difference. Look at him.”

  It was true that the baby looked peaceful; one hand played with the curve of this strange mother’s breast while the other reached up and gently twined her hair around his fingers. “I don’t know about this, Shelly. It seems weird to me too,” Roberta said. Then, nervously joking, she said to everyone, “I guess Joanne could nurse Shelly’s baby next. It could be like Strangers on a Train, with breastfeeding.” But no one laughed; they all looked down at their plates in dread and excited anticipation of the moment when Joanne would return.

  Seconds later she did appear, her arms loaded with shopping bags. She saw the empty stroller and then the nursing baby, and she must have thought, Wrong, wrong, wrong, as her brain pooled with some dark, maternal chemical. She said, “What the hell are you doing, Shelly?” Then she dropped the bags and swept her baby back up, making him unlatch so quickly and unexpectedly that there was a hollow pop, like the breaking of a vacuum seal on a bottle of Snapple. The unloved nipple was left exposed, a wet point that punctuated the morning. All eyes in the room saw it. It radiated light and heat.

  “He was getting hysterical,” Shelly said defensively, tucking it back inside. “We called your cell. What was I supposed to do, let him keep crying?”

  Shelly and Joanne argued in a petulant, tearful way; both were highly upset and neither knew exactly why. All the women at the table were aware that there had been an obscure violation, with sexual overtones and suggestions of domination. Do we own our babies? someone later mused. Are they objects, no more than little radio-controlled vehicles that aren’t allowed to be separate from us? And, someone else had ventured, isn’t the act of nursing itself obliquely sexual? Men put their mouths on our breasts during sex, and we love it! We squash their heads down against us and hold them there. Roberta knew of an outrageous case in which a mother had actually had her baby briefly taken away from her by Child Protective Services because she had admitted to a friend that, whenever she breast-fed, she felt slightly aroused.

  Life with a baby was as primitive and powerful as life with a lover. You could never really tell where one body ended and another began; the lines were drawn as crudely as if they had been rendered by a child. When Shelly had nursed Joanne’s baby, they’d all entered some strange territory of thought. They didn’t understand it, exactly, but they knew it was as bad as if Joanne had returned to the table and found another woman giving a blowjob to Joanne’s husband.

  Now Joanne stuffed her bewildered baby back into the stroller and hurried out of the Golden Horn, with Karen following after her. Shelly turned to the women who remained in the booth, miserably asking, “Was it so terrible, what I did? I wasn’t trying to overstep my bounds. I was only acting on instinct.”

  But the rest of them hardly knew what instinct really meant anymore; it had been a long time since they’d nursed their own babies. Almost nothing in their lives seemed biological or pure; everything had to be considered and reconsidered.

  The incident would be talked about briefly among some of the mothers in the grade, and it would even be talked about among a scattering of mothers from other schools, who gathered in other coffee shops: the Copper Skillet, the Sizzling Pan, and, in a suburb not too far away, The Parthenon, which was located on the side of a busy turnpike.

  But sitting in this booth now, on the day it happened, Roberta was already tired of it as an anecdote; in fact, there was far too much anecdote in all their lives. All she could think was, OH MOMMY, WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER?

  SO ON SUNDAY MORNING Roberta Sokolov was in South Dakota, driving at dawn to a small town called Lorton that was, according to the GPS that glowed on the dashboard of her rental car, exactly 192 miles away from her present location. She and the other volunteers had flown in from New York City the night before. Lying in bed in the motel, Roberta remained awake and sensitive to every smell and sound that thrived around her. The room was infused with ambient smoke, which reminded her of her husband, with his thin joints held between thin fingers. In the room next door, someone watched a police procedural on television, and Roberta could hear the dialogue: “Did you check under her fingernails?” “I checked.” “And?” “Nothing.”

  But finally, somehow, she slept, and then the wake-up call came, and she now stood peppered by light hail in the parking lot behind the motel. One of the other volunteers handed around mini-muffins and cups of coffee from the bleak breakfast buffet, and then they all nodded to one another and somberly got into their cars to head off all over the big, roughly cut rectangle of the state. With the South Dakota sky dark and huge, Roberta steered the Chevrolet Cobalt out of the parking lot and went to pick up a sixteen-year-old girl named Brandy Gillop who lived with her mother in Lorton. Brandy’s parents were divorced, Roberta had been informed, and Brandy’s mother had told the intake people that she felt terrible that she couldn’t drive her daughter to Sioux Falls, but there was no way she could get off work at the casino where she was a cashier, and, besides, her car was in the shop.

  Twice during the drive, with her coffee cup in its holder and public radio softly playing, Roberta had called Nathaniel at the TV station, because she could sense the increasing presence of her own apprehension.

  “Hey, baby,” Nathaniel said. “You okay? You in the car?”

  “I am not only in the car; I am in the heartland of America.”

  “I thought I heard the sound of an eagle flapping.”

  “Yes, you did. Very perceptive.”

  “I miss you,” he said. “Boring day here. Just entertaining the crew with a little puppet action.”

  “I miss you too.”

  Nathaniel had encouraged Roberta when she�
��d first brought up the possibility of this volunteer job. Recently she’d taken tentative steps, hosting an envelope-stuffing session for reproductive rights in their cramped apartment, and dragooning her friends to sit around her little living room and write notes that they would stick into the invitations to something called, inanely, Roberta thought, A Very Special Evening for Choice.

  “Hi,” her friends had inscribed. “This charity means a lot to all women. Hope you can make it.”

  She had asked them to come, and they came. They were good that way; if you asked them to do something, they did it, though of course she was always the one who organized anything political in nature. Mostly they struck her as only mildly political at best; if pressed, they would reveal politics that were sound and empathetic, but they didn’t get riled up the way she did. “Why am I the only one who obsesses like this?” she had recently asked Amy. “We share the same views. Why am I the one going out there?”

  “It just takes the rest of us a long time to move,” Amy said. “I guess it’s a kind of procrastination. I have it and you don’t.”

  “Ha,” said Roberta, remembering her languishing canvases.

  But it was true that there were differences between her and them. A few of them had changed their names when they got married. “I want to have the same last name as my kids,” one of the women had explained when Roberta inquired. “It helps when I go to the pediatrician. And I love my husband, so who cares?” Most of them didn’t seem to think this was at all retro; they were much more accepting of one another than Roberta was. Even the powerful and enlightened Penny Ramsey had changed her name.

  “Do you realize,” Roberta had said in the living room that day, “that most of us in this room are probably too old to ever need an abortion again?”

  “And we’re way too old even to be egg donors,” Karen had added. “I always see those ads: ‘Women, are you 35 or younger? Earn $7,000.’ How did they decide that that was how much our eggs are worth? Doesn’t it seem arbitrary? I’m sure there’s an economic model, but I have no idea of what it is.”