The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  Amy thought of the young husband in apartment 14H falling dead months earlier and how the women in the lobby had speculated that his widow wouldn’t be able to stay on in the building for long. Suddenly Amy needed to know what had happened to that family. Were they gone already? Had they been forced out of The Rivermere? She imagined the mother and her two children sent whirling, coatless, into Isabelle Gordon’s terrifying and mostly unknowable universe.

  “I’m not sure you’re right,” Amy said to Roberta, but the basketballs in the gym suddenly sounded louder, and she began to feel sick. She thought she should be sitting in one of those folding chairs like the boys, her head dropped back, letting a woman from Nitz Away softly stroke her hair. But she also imagined the women from Nitz Away coming to these schools at the start of a day and setting up their tables and chairs and digging into the thick heads of hair of privileged children. Whose idea of a perfect job was this? Who ever longed for such a life? But maybe the pay was not horrible and the benefits were half decent, and you made of it what you could, and somehow it let you live. She saw that she had no idea at all about the different ways in which people lived.

  Mason approached her then and said, “Mom, I’m going to shoot hoops. You can go.”

  “I can go? Thank you, sir,” Amy said with forced jokiness.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Have a good day, okay?”

  If he’d had any idea of how upset she felt, she might have let him console her for once, at least a little. But of course he was unaware of these feelings, and it would likely be another forty years before he would really take care of her. Now Mason’s tie was aslant, slightly milk-dipped from his cereal bowl this morning, his hair raked through with fresh crop circles. His eyes looked past her to the other boys and their bouncing balls, and this was how it was supposed to be. This was the state you hoped to achieve. Her son would be all right on his own. He had things he needed to try without her.

  “So, Golden Horn?” asked Roberta.

  “Yes, please,” said Amy.

  “Look at you, you’re so upset,” said Karen gently. “It’s like you didn’t go to St. Doe’s; you went to a gulag.”

  “Hey, that’s very funny, Karen,” said Roberta. “Surprisingly very funny, for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  As they all started to walk out of the gym, Shelly Harbison fell in beside them. “Oh, you’re off to the Golden Horn,” she said. “Mind if I invite myself?”

  Sure, fine, join us, they told her in polite voices. But as they were about to leave, Shelly’s son, Dylan, came clattering up to his mother and hissed, in tearful shame, “I have lice,” and so, miraculously, they were released from her.

  LATER, WHEN AMY brought Mason home at the end of the school day, she turned the key in the apartment door and heard varying notes of female laughter. Going down the hallway she followed the sounds until she came to the living room, where a group of women sat in a circle on the sofa and the chairs that had been dragged in from the dining room for the occasion. “Amy,” Antonia called. “Come say hello.”

  The women of NAFITAS were in their sixties and seventies, a couple of them with dyed hair that fell on the mother-grandmother spectrum between apricot and snow, and others with hair that sprang out wild and gray. Some were slightly hunched over, their bodies curling slightly forward like jockeys in a race toward the end of time; others were tall, straight sitters, adherents of vinyasa and ashtanga and Bikram “hot room” yoga in the different towns and cities where they lived.

  The women dutifully introduced themselves. “Do you remember Marsha Knowles?” Antonia asked her daughter, gesturing toward a small, spry woman with straight silver bangs and the body of an old pixie. “You may have met her at the house when you were little. She’s a health educator in Toronto, and she came to my consciousness-raising group many moons ago to teach us not to be so apprehensive about our sexual selves.”

  Marsha Knowles laughed. “Oh yes, my motto in those days was ‘Have speculum, will travel.’ I still can’t believe my nerve. But I was young. I’ve become very modest in my twilight years.”

  “Ah, you’re still youthful, Marsha,” Antonia admonished, and the other women mildly complimented one another in the way that women often know how to do as easily as anything. Generic kindnesses fell from their lips without hesitation.

  Amy took a seat, feeling the strange formality of being a guest in her own living room and being outnumbered here. “We had a productive day today,” said Theda, a pigeon-breasted woman in a pretty shawl. “I went to a great seminar on whether, at our age, you should lower or raise your expectations.”

  “The thing is,” said a small, delicate woman named Lee, the only black woman in the room, her head shaved close (recent breast cancer treatment, Antonia confided to Amy later), “I don’t think I have any more expectations. I have already done what I wanted to do. I knew that if I waited around forever, it wouldn’t come to me.”

  “Carpe diem,” said Marsha Knowles.

  “So I went to law school,” Lee continued, “and I worked in international trade law for twenty years. I loved it! My husband and I broke up amicably somewhere in the middle of that, and then I fell in love with my partner, Carol, who taught constitutional law for three decades before she retired.”

  “Someone should write up our stories,” said a tall woman named Janet. “Antonia could do it. We’ve got so many marriages and late careers, and some of us have had lesbian experiences and grandchildren—”

  “—with their own lesbian experiences,” said another woman. There was more rolling, unreconstructed laughter.

  “Sorry, I write historical novels,” said Antonia. “With an emphasis on novels.”

  “What’s your new one about?” asked Marsha. “Can you talk about it?”

  “Of course. It’s called Mitigating Circumstances, and it’s about three women in the Netherlands during World War Two, working for the Resistance.”

  “That sounds interesting,” said Theda. “My book group will buy it in bulk.” She turned to Amy then and said, “You’re very nice to let us take over your apartment.”

  “She’s used to it,” said Antonia. “She grew up with my CR group meeting downstairs once in a while and with the sound of female ranting.”

  “No one rants anymore,” Janet said wistfully. “And there’s still so much to rant about. There are no women running the world.”

  “There was Margaret Thatcher,” someone thought to say. “She had tremendous power.”

  “That was an exception. A freak moment in history,” said Janet, “and she was so conservative. Besides, it was a million years ago.” To Amy, she added, “Your generation was supposed to take over. Both the ranting and the running of the world.”

  “It’s not their obligation,” said someone else with a wave.

  “If it’s not going to happen naturally, then they have to be pushed.”

  “No one pushed us,” said Lee.

  Wine was poured in the middle of all this, and Antonia produced a burrata cheese she had bought that day at Camarata & Bello. It was tied up in some kind of leaf, which she unfolded now onto a plate that she passed around with crackers. The women ate the silky white spreading cheese hungrily and knocked back quantities of wine. They were older; they could do what they wanted. They weren’t asking for the world anymore.

  “I am willing to accept that the young generation is moving on in and dictating the way society will live,” said Betty Jean, a woman in a corner of the room. “Mortality is not a cause I feel I can take on. Although, as a political progressive, I’m used to losing almost all my battles.” The women nodded in sympathy. “I follow every single story about injustices toward women, and there are plenty,” Betty Jean continued. “But what with fundamentalist Islam and the threat of terrorism, it’s gotten even harder to get anyone to invest their energy in this. It’s as though there’s just so much political interest most people can sustain. It’s like that game Scis
sors, Paper, Stone. Terrorism is ‘Stone’ now, and feminism—along with everything else—is ‘Scissors.’ Terrorism wins.”

  Everyone agreed that it was much harder to keep the light lit, the rage fresh, and to find adherents to the cause. So much else had come in and demanded attention. “It’s not just terrorism,” said Lee. “It’s also technology; that’s a huge preoccupation out there. My son in Tampa, Florida, keeps trying to send me digital photos of my grandchildren, but I have no idea how to download them. I’ve basically stopped trying. Technology is one thing that’s beyond me.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Theda. “I am just not interested in mastering the Internet. I have enough in my head by now; I can’t learn this too. It’s like a whole new language. Didn’t we do enough already over the years?”

  “We did. One thing that bothers me in particular,” said Marsha Knowles, “is the way my grandchildren and their friends talk to people on the Internet. Or so-called talk, anyway. They have conversations with virtual strangers, and they pretend there’s a kind of intimacy there, with all that shallow language and all that shorthand. It’s so generic, and it’s all unearned! They don’t know each other; they don’t love each other. They don’t speak to each other the way we used to do when we were their age. The way we still do.”

  The moment became quiet, interior, sliding into the regretful, and Amy, somehow feeling it all too, remembered that she was the host, and was somewhat responsible for the mood here. “You know,” she thought to say, “it would be nice if you could at least download your grandchildren’s photographs. I use a computer and a BlackBerry. But I know nothing compared with my son. He knows it all.” Then she called out, “Mason!” There was no answer, of course; he was in his room with the door closed. “MASON, CAN YOU COME HERE?” she called. “AND BRING YOUR LAPTOP!”

  Soon her son brought his laptop into the living room and sat cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table. He gave the women a brisk but gentle tutorial on all the points that had scared off a few of them previously and that their brains had sometimes felt too crowded for until now. As they asked questions and listened, they saw that there was in fact still a little more room.

  Then, as Mason was about to close the lid of the laptop, he said, “Can I show you something? There’s a sound—like, a certain frequency—that only kids can hear, and it actually hurts our ears. But the weird thing is, nobody over thirty can hear it. Their ears aren’t sensitive enough anymore.” He located a website, clicked on it, and the women listened keenly.

  There was no sound at all. There was absolute silence, and yet Mason put his hands to his ears and made a face. The women looked at one another and shrugged.

  “Is this a prank, Mason?” asked Antonia. “None of us can hear a thing. Are you pulling our leg?”

  “No, Grandma, it’s real. I swear. See, like I said, it’s a high-pitched frequency that my ears can hear but yours can’t. No offense, but you’re all too old.” The women all laughed, though Theda pretended to put a gun to her head.

  “Oh yes, that’s true,” said Marsha Knowles. “We’re all too old for many things. We’re packing up our tents now.”

  Amy too had heard nothing; the screech of technology and the heraldic trumpets of the future had eluded her as well. She was probably halfway through her life, bumping ahead. In the diminishing but clarifying light of late afternoon in her living room she could see the lines in the faces of her mother and her mother’s friends, and the furring of pale hair that softened their profiles. She saw, briefly, the way the world rarely stopped to salute you or admonish you, regardless of what you had or had not accomplished.

  THAT NIGHT, before bed, Antonia Lamb stood in the kitchen in her white nightgown like an apparition, talking on the phone. Amy came into the room and saw her there: Antonia had loaded up her face with night cream, which made it glisten in the dim kitchen as though marbled, like the counter at which she stood. Her hair was pulled back off her face, and through the nightgown Amy could see the intimation of her mother’s small, low-slung breasts. She did look like someone who would not be able to hear a high-pitched whistle; she seemed slightly flummoxed, a senior citizen who has lost her way in a municipal building.

  “Well,” Antonia was saying into the phone, “did you defrost the pork loin yet? Really? I’m certain it’s in there. Probably under a gallon of ice cream. Yes. Yes. I know, it’s ancient, it’s bound to have that awful freezer taste. Remember the ice cream we had that summer? Butter brickle?” She laughed lightly, then said, “Do you want to go look for the pork loin while I’m on the phone? No? All right, then, Henry, I’m sure you’ll find it. She’s fine. She’s just walked into the room, in fact. Say hello.”

  Antonia turned and said to Amy, “Your dad is on the phone,” and handed her the receiver.

  “Hi, Dad,” said Amy, and there was her father’s voice, asking her about life in New York.

  “Next time your mother comes down, I’m going to come with her,” he said.

  She imagined her father lying beside her mother on the air mattress: her body more majestic with age and his a little smaller, like a terrier. He still taught economics at McGill, though he was thinking of retiring soon. “I send you my love,” Henry Lamb told his daughter, and Amy sent hers back too, then handed her mother the phone. Talk returned to the subject of the pork in the freezer; Antonia seemed genuinely anxious that Henry should locate it. He did, over the remainder of the phone call, and then he placed it on the counter in their own kitchen up north, where it would unfreeze itself slowly over the passing hours and become a meal he could cook for his wife when she came home from her travels.

  “Well,” said Antonia to Amy after she was off the phone, “I guess I should say good night. And say thanks for letting the women of NAFITAS come for a visit today. And for letting me sleep on your floor and get to spend all this time with Mason. He’s such a marvelous boy.”

  “My pleasure.” Then Amy suddenly said, “You know, I never wanted to be a public defender. That was always your idea.”

  “Oh. Well, it was just a thought.”

  “I wouldn’t be passionate enough,” she tried to explain. “And you’d need to be passionate for that job. Otherwise your clients wouldn’t even have a chance.”

  “That makes sense to me.”

  “You were always so passionate,” Amy added. “Back when you started writing.”

  Her mother smiled slightly. “I didn’t know you noticed. You three girls seemed very wrapped up in your lives. I needed something to do, and I always loved to write. Work changed everything. For me, work is anti-death.”

  “I think it was really a big deal to have a mother who suddenly wanted something,” Amy said, “and was also really good at it.”

  “I tried to set an example.”

  “You did.” She felt her throat constrict and was ashamed at herself for the petulance she could already feel. “Just because things become possible,” Amy said, “it doesn’t mean that everyone has something they’re all that good at.”

  “Oh, come on, you’re very smart,” said her mother, “and very capable. You’ve always been that way.”

  “And I expected things of myself,” Amy said. “But not everyone is that driven. And not everyone is really talented. And also,” she said, “sometimes it’s too difficult to make it happen.”

  Amy recalled herself and her sisters standing outside their mother’s door, banging with their fists, telling themselves they were undermothered, when in fact for so long they had been so well and fully mothered by their intelligent and creative and adoring mother that surely her mothering would have a long half-life.

  But all they knew, then, was that Antonia had said, “This is my time,” and that she’d gently closed her door. The girls played Jane Eyre once in a while over the years; they imagined themselves orphaned by their wonderful mother and even, somehow, by feminism itself—that word that sounded to them so formal and unappealing. It sounded, Naomi had once said when th
ey were girls, like the name of a brand of menstrual pads: Feminism: for the days when you really need a little extra protection.

  “Oh, darling, I know it’s complicated,” said Antonia now. “Sometimes you have to cobble things together. But you could have found something to do in recent years, couldn’t you?” she asked kindly. “Some sort of thing that would matter and would also make you feel good?”

  “I feel good,” Amy said, her voice stiff. “Good enough.” Then she said, “I don’t know why I haven’t found it. I thought I was going to.”

  “Well, you’ll keep figuring it out,” said her mother. “We did, or at least we tried. We put it together and hoped that everybody got at least a little of what they needed. But back then it was the beginning of everything. We were the early ones. I know we got some things wrong, but we did try to do right by everyone. And now I guess it’s out of our hands.”

  THE NEXT DAY, after Antonia had taken a taxi to the airport to return to Montreal, Amy found the receipt. She was deflating the air mattress in the study, listening to the soft hiss of release, when she noticed some papers that must have been knocked out of place by her mother. The room was so small, and it would have been difficult not to have disturbed something in it. The papers lay scattered on the Sven desk, having apparently fallen from one of the pigeonholes. Amy glanced through them without much interest; here were some of Leo’s hotel and restaurant and store receipts from his business trips that he was apparently planning to submit to his firm as expenses. And then here was another one, but it was peculiar; some typing at the top had been whited out by hand, ready to be Xeroxed, she supposed. Across the top Leo had written, in pen, “Client Gift.”

  The bill was for $233.00, and at first she didn’t know what it was or why that number sounded familiar. Then she recalled the woman in the gift shop on St. Doe’s: “Two hundred tirty-tree,” the woman had said, musically, as Amy admired the paperweight with the coral and turquoise inside. Then Amy had bought it for her mother, who had loved it and said she would use it for all her manuscripts, as Amy had suggested. Leo had never gone into that gift shop or any other one. He would have been magnetically repelled from a small room jammed with unnecessary decorative things. As a boy he’d had to accompany his own mother to gift shops and women’s clothing stores and sewing shops with their strips of rickrack and rolls of muslin and denim. He hated entering fussy, decorative places like that, and Amy understood that he had certainly not gone into the gift shop on St. Doe’s but was simply passing off the purchase of the paperweight for her mother as a client gift, expecting to be reimbursed by his firm.