by Meg Wolitzer
Maybe then it would finally be Amy’s turn to talk and Penny’s turn to listen. Leo doesn’t want to have sex with me, she could have whispered as they lay on the beach. But really, Amy could barely look at Penny now, and they lay side by side quietly for much of the morning. The day was as beautiful as the last, though for most people the vacation was coming to a close, and a slight depression colored their movements. The Frenchwoman who massaged lotion into her bare breasts every morning now did so with slower motions, like a lonely masturbator, her hand seeming to convey sadness at the idea that she would soon have to leave.
That night, a message was slipped beneath the door of Amy and Leo’s bungalow. “Your friend rests in San Juan at Hospital del Maestro,” it read in handwriting that was old-fashioned and beautiful and not American. “Vertebral lumbar fractures, very severe, but no spinal-cord damage. Surgical procedure performed. Long recovery period to be expec.” Amy relayed this message to Penny furtively the following morning on the beach, and it was accepted with a quick nod and, astonishingly, no questions about what would happen next: Would Ian be okay? Was there anyone to look after him? Would he ever be able to walk?
On their last day on St. Doe’s, Mason and Holden disappeared for so long that Amy became concerned. “They’re boys,” Leo said. “Leave them.”
But she needed to know where Mason was; it was a reflexive response, in such a moment, to want to gather everyone around you and take a head count. She’d tried to call Jill last night in Holly Hills in order to tell her what had happened here, hoping that Jill would somehow be sympathetic and horrified all at once, and say the right things. But the connection had been weak, and the call kept being dropped. She heard Nadia’s peculiar little voice answer the phone two times, then slip away.
“Nadia! It’s Amy! Is your mom there? Can you get her?” Amy had cried from her bungalow, as though her friend could save her. But then the little voice was gone, and the connection was lost. Amy’s friends seemed to occupy a distant world: Jill with her suburb and her unhappiness; Roberta with her frustrations and her activism and the girl in South Dakota she was trying to help. Those stories, at least from this tropical island, seemed unreal, and yet Amy wanted them to be made real for her once again; more than anything, she wanted them back.
Now she set off in search of the boys, walking quickly along the shore past the place where she and Penny had walked each morning until the accident, going beyond the joggers and snorkelers and resort guests pushing off in their kayaks. She went very far, and the beach curved around so she could no longer see the lodge or the bungalows. The scenery changed, sharply, and even the beach shrubbery turned less beautiful and became thick, thorny, dark. A sign read ABSOLUTELY NO GUESTS BEYOND THIS POINT, but Amy Lamb kept walking.
A crop of low buildings appeared, one after the other, like a shantytown, all of them constructed poorly out of big pieces of corrugated, unpainted tin, instead of woven bamboo and rush like almost everything else here. Shack after shack materialized, and black people looked out from the open doors that led into depressing rooms. She saw men sitting on old cots, smoking cigarettes. Briefly, Amy was startled and confused; there was a slum on St. Doe’s, hidden away past all the beauty and excess?
She walked past another doorway and looked inside, and there she found herself looking directly at Pierre, the lovely, shy man who had been teaching the boys how to surf. Pierre was wearing white underpants now and no shirt, and he was smoking. Rap music played softly behind him. This wasn’t a slum, she realized, it was merely employee housing, and he was taking a break. Pierre stepped quickly out of sight, and she didn’t know which of them was meant to be the more embarrassed.
UPON THEIR RETURN to the city, they found that Antonia Lamb had forgotten to water the Christmas tree as they had asked her to do, and so its needles had poured down upon the wooden floor of the living room and all over the Persian rug. “It’s a fire hazard now,” Mason had said when he saw the parched tree. Lightly he touched one of the ornaments, a golden painted ball he had made in school years ago, and another flood of crisp needles fell. The tree would have to be taken away sooner than they had planned. “I’m so sorry,” Antonia said to them. “I have been really involved with my women’s conference, I guess. Forgive me, kids.”
While they were on St. Doe’s, Amy’s mother had installed herself in the tiny study, as planned: The air mattress had been inflated, and her toothbrush and tube of organic sunflower toothpaste lay coiled on the ledge of the small sink in the guest bathroom. Amy had not seen her mother in six months, and while Antonia looked well, she also looked measurably older. Her hair, always silvered, was now silver. She was a dramatic-looking woman, prone to capes when she went outside; on her book-jacket photo she appeared vaguely Wiccan. Now she was here in the apartment, and the visit would have been fine, even welcome, except for what had happened on St. Doe’s, which Amy did not want to tell her about.
Penny had left a message on Amy’s cell phone the day after their families had flown home separately. “Amy, it’s me. Hope you had a good flight. Well, flights. Whatever. I’m just, you know, checking in. Give me a call, okay?”
Each time Amy thought about calling her back, she recalled Penny running away from Ian and not going back, and then easily lying on the beach the following morning. Amy just couldn’t find the energy to make the call. Finally, after three days in New York, she did call Penny back, and the conversation took place in the new, forced style they had developed after the accident. “So, have you heard any updates about Ian’s condition?” she asked Penny.
“No.”
“But you’ve called the hospital?”
“I will; I just can’t yet. I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. It’s such a mess. It’s really hard for me.” Penny suggested they could meet for coffee later in the week, but really, Amy knew, there was no point. There was no couple now, and so there was no friendship. It didn’t exactly end during the cell-phone call, the way the love affair between Penny Ramsey and Ian Janeway had ended the moment he had come smacking down onto the sand. But the friendship had no subject now, and they were both lost.
AT DINNER in the apartment that night, Antonia said, “My darling, why are you so melancholy? I can see it in your eyes. Even when you were a little girl I could see this.”
“Mom was melancholy?” Mason asked, interested. “We had that word in Vocab Ventures. Its synonyms are ‘mournful’ and ‘woebegone.’”
“She wasn’t generally melancholy. But she was very sensitive. All three girls were.”
Antonia had cooked dinner for the family: vegetarian lasagna, which she prepared well. After the Christmas tree negligence, she was proving to be a surprisingly unobtrusive houseguest, though maybe it was only because Amy still felt so peculiar about Penny and Ian that she hardly noticed her mother moving around her in the rooms.
“I’m not melancholy,” she said. “I’m just thinking about things.”
“If you want to talk, I’m here,” said Antonia. “Although not during the day tomorrow, because I’m at NAFITAS.”
“That’s an acronym, right?” asked Mason.
“Oh, my intelligent little grandson, yes it is. It stands for North American Feminists in the Arts and Sciences. Basically, it gives old friends a chance to get together. It used to be that all the women who liked one another had very specific reasons to hang around together. We were always having meetings, first against the terrible war in Vietnam, which is not unlike the terrible war in Iraq. But then, later on, when we had our consciousness-raising group, our cause became ourselves.”
Amy saw that Mason looked confused by this and probably bored, but he kept his face arranged in a position of politeness toward his grandmother, whose feelings he would never want to hurt.
“Naomi and Jennifer and I always wondered,” Amy suddenly said, looking at her mother, “what you and those other women did down there in the living room on those nights. Sometimes we thought you were hosting a séanc
e.”
“Yes, I guess we were raising the spirit of Susan B. Anthony,” Antonia said, laughing.
“I have her coin,” said Mason. “No one liked the shape or the size, Grandma, so it was taken out of circulation.”
“I knew that, and I was not surprised,” said Antonia, pouring herself more wine. “Oh, Amy, Leo, after my meeting tomorrow afternoon, I was wondering if I could bring a few of the women here for a get-together. Most of them are from out of town, staying at hotels.”
“Of course,” said Leo. “Not a problem.”
“Thank you.” Then, turning to Amy, Antonia said, “I wanted to ask, have you thought any more about the possibility of becoming a public defender?”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, the e-mails I’ve sent you. It’s a decent life, a good thing to do with a law degree, I think.”
“I’m not considering that, Mom,” Amy said tightly, “but I have been thinking about some kind of real volunteer work. Maybe a job with a literacy program or something.”
Leo looked up. “Oh yeah? Since when?”
“Since a long time,” she said defensively. “I’ve mentioned it.”
“Oh. Okay. Fine. Just asking.”
“I just never took it further. I don’t know why not, exactly. It’s been part of my long and very slow odyssey toward work,” she said.
“All that law school,” Antonia said, swirling the wine in her glass. “I sometimes wonder why you went in the first place. You could have taken more time after college, figuring out what you wanted to do.”
“Yes,” said Amy, “I could have.”
At the table, in the orange candlelight, Amy’s mother’s hair shone silver like a Susan B. Anthony dollar, and Mason’s hair shone polished brown, still so springy with protein, the color of the beautiful floors of the corridors that someday he would walk along. Leo looked from his wife to his mother-in-law, and then he quickly returned to the safest place: his own plate, where he hastily began to eat his dinner double time, calming himself with food, his shoulders rounded, his concentration on his dinner complete, apparently not wanting any part of this moment that had nothing to do with him. The conversation at the meal now continued mostly as a dialogue between grandson and grandmother. Mason happily showed off for this woman who loved him in a singular way that no one could object to, not even a quietly angry grown daughter.
ON THE MORNING of the first day back to school after Christmas vacation, the first snow fell upon the city. From the windows of their financial and legal towers, men and women peered out upon the natural phenomenon. The men thought of sleds and of their children and of being a child. And from those same towers or their apartments or the warm light of the small shops that lined the avenues, more than a few of the women wondered if their children’s boots from last year still fit. The men thought of freedom, and the women thought of necessity. With that first snow, everyone in the city looked up at once to admire its assertive but casual whirl. There was a shared sense of anticipation: Perhaps school would be canceled tomorrow. Perhaps work would be canceled too! But work was not one thing, and everyone knew that most offices would remain open and that life would go on as it usually did.
The first day back always had a kind of sad capitulation to it. At seven in the morning, Amy’s alarm rang out. Without telling her, Mason had changed the setting, so that instead of a dove-coo, there emanated from her clock a gentle whinnying, growing louder and more impatient as it continued. NEIGH NEIGH NEIGH NEIGHHHH, the horses called, nosing her harshly from sleep.
Amy awakened and began to shout from her bed. “Mason!” she called, but heard nothing in reply. She took a breath. “MASON, IT’S THE FIRST DAY BACK TO SCHOOL!” she cried. “COME ON, BUDDY!” The entire apartment was still. Leo had long gone off to the gym and the office, and Amy’s mother still slept deeply on her air mattress in the study—she wore earplugs, and slept through everything—and Mason slept deeply too. “I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO TELL YOU AGAIN!” Amy cried out. “WE HAVE TO GET THERE EARLY FOR LICE CHECK!” She wondered whether Penny would show up for drop-off, and she imagined them standing together and making an unpleasant attempt at small talk.
The gym, when Amy and Mason arrived, was a force field of sound. The boys, who had been apart for two weeks, responded with puplike happiness to one another’s company. The mothers and the handful of fathers stood talking while the boys whirled around them. Details of vacations were traded. One mother talked about a ski trip; someone else said she had lain in the sun, “not moving a muscle.” A father said his family had stayed in the city and skated together every night at the rink in the park. Over by the wall stood Isabelle Gordon the string theorist, telling another mother how she and her husband and kids had traveled to CERN, the particle physics lab near Geneva, so that she could visit the Large Hadron Collider. “It filled me with inexpressible awe,” she said. The other mother could only shake her head and smile.
The school conducted lice checks twice yearly, and always the mothers worried that their sons would be identified as the bringer of insects, the pariah. Today someone had released a few basketballs from the hanging net bags where they had been stored over vacation like coconuts, and now many of the boys were shooting hoops in their jackets and ties, while some of the others slumped on folding chairs to have their heads checked.
Mason plopped down on one of the chairs, and a heavy black woman in a medical coat that had the words “Nitz Away” stitched over the breast pocket stood above him with a long metal barber’s comb and something that looked like a nail file, raking through his hair so that little patches of scalp suddenly appeared and then disappeared. How white his scalp was beneath that dark mass, Amy thought each time the woman lifted his hair. The whiteness of the scalp was like the whiteness of bones, revealing the self in a way that was always ghoulish when it was displayed. Karen’s twins, Caleb and Jonno, sat side by side on the next bank of folding chairs, nearly napping, as two bored women sifted through the silky blades of their hair.
Amy kept looking toward the doorway, waiting for the moment when Penny and Holden might walk in. But when Holden Ramsey finally entered the gym, he was trailed only by his babysitter Clementine.
“Penny didn’t bring Holden today?” Karen asked right away after she came up beside Amy.
“No.”
On the telephone after vacation, Amy had told each of her friends about the accident, describing the fall and the shock of seeing Ian’s face and the unresponsiveness of Penny. “I know you’re upset with her,” Karen said now as they talked. “And I think it’s immoral to cheat on your husband, as you know. But it would have been pretty hard for her to just rush over to him in front of Greg.” All around them came the sound of basketballs thudding and the occasional silverware sound of lice-scavenging tools. “What did you expect her to do, exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Ian was lying there. It was horrible. You should have seen it, Karen. So yes, I guess I really expected her to go to him. Even out of some kind of instinct.”
Roberta, who had just deposited Harry on one of the chairs, said simply, “You idealized her. Please don’t object; you know I’m right. We all had a fucking transference to Penny Ramsey. And anyway, it’s been so long since we had someone to idealize. We’re all so separate with our little scheduled lives and our kids.”
“I know,” said Amy, and she had a darting, sad image of Jill, who was probably right now behind the wheel of her car, in the slow morning traffic in front of the grade school in Holly Hills. “She was my big project. But I think I need something more worthy of my time.”
“Hallelujah,” said Roberta.
“But I still think,” said Amy, “that she could have done the moral thing.”
“And what, lose everything?” said Roberta. “Oh, Amy, think about it.”
“I am thinking about it. It’s what I’ve been thinking about.”
“She had an affair,” said Roberta. “It was very exciting. It ma
de her feel not middle-aged. It’s like the life force: knowing that someone wants you and that you want him and that you’ve created a secret world together.”
“But she still needs her real life,” said Karen. “Her married life. It provides the foundation for this other life. Greg Ramsey makes it all possible for her.”
“Greg Ramsey is so depressing,” said Amy. “You saw the way the other men chose him at the father-son weekend. The way he needs to be seen as so dominant. And you should hear the way he talked on vacation. The things he talked about. Indie rock. Money. Always, money.”
“Greg Ramsey supports her and their kids,” Karen persisted. “If their marriage broke up, she would lose her whole way of life.”
“Penny Ramsey actually has her own big job,” said Amy. “We’re here hanging around at lice check, and she’s probably already at her office running a meeting.”
“Amy,” said Roberta, exasperated, “so maybe Penny Ramsey has many impressive qualities, like a lot of the women we know. But she works for a nonprofit, and she probably couldn’t support her family, at least not the way they live. What do you think she makes at that museum?”
“No idea.”
“Whatever it is, it’s not remotely enough to manage with three kids and private school and clothes and food and vacations and child care and the kind of life she got herself into. Greg is the one with the investors, the big corporate one. He and Penny have to keep the whole thing going all the time. I know it’s like a horrible trap, but it’s what they chose, and so now they’re stuck.”
