The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  “It’s okay,” Jill said.

  “And I’m sorry for other things,” said Amy. “Because you’ve been such a good friend, and I know you’ve been through a lot in your life. Your mother. And the whole fertility problem—”

  “Amy. All is forgiven.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I’m really sure.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, letting the conversation settle lightly down into the familiarity and safety of ordinariness. They both could have fallen asleep this way, staying on the phone and talking close until their voices slowed and stopped. Once, in college, they had done just that; Jill had awakened at dawn in the desk chair of her dorm room with the phone receiver pressed to her folded, hot ear, and to the sound of Amy’s even breathing.

  When they finally hung up now, Jill thought of how Amy was the only friend she wanted. Jill told herself this frequently. No new friends. This remained her theme as she made her way through the rest of her first winter in Holly Hills.

  The morning after the phone call, Jill Hamlin traveled through the downtown area of the suburb in her car, along the broad main street that was flanked by shops and trees, on her way to pick up Nadia from the birthday party of a boy in her class named Liam Rostower. The street was still arched and crossed overhead with Christmas lights and wires, though Christmas and New Year’s had passed. The town apparently kept its lights up until the last gasp of winter in the middle of January, at which point all indications of festivity would come to a halt, and workmen would stand on ladders unscrewing and removing jollity.

  Jill pulled into a parking spot in front of the pottery studio at the shopping center where the party was being held. She entered Going to Pot, and saw several other mothers crowding the vestibule, some talking on cell phones as they struggled to hold on to their children’s newly glazed vases or candy dishes. Going to Pot was a birthday mill; children at parties here were allowed to choose among four different generic ceramic pieces, which they would then be handed to paint and stipple and strew with glitter, and which would then be placed inside a roaring industrial kiln that was being stoked in the back room. At the end of the party, paper plates of birthday cake would be passed around, the birthday song would be hastily sung, the children would be reunited with their freshly glazed and fired creations, and then everyone would go home.

  It was not possible, at Going to Pot, to fail. You didn’t need to be artistic in order to bring home a passable piece of preshaped clay. Yet the creation that Nadia had made drooped to the side, unable to stand on its own, and Nadia’s hands had flattened it so that the opening was only wide enough to contain, what? A single blade of grass? A hair?

  All around them, children poked one another’s jazzy little creations, then deposited them with their mothers. Jill watched as the other children, their load lightened, preened and coupled and tripled, heads close, having a great deal to say. The only one with nothing much to say was Nadia, who stood off to the side, not particularly unhappy but simply exhibiting a kind of stillness that was in itself troubling to Jill. She took her daughter by the hand and led her through the chattering field of children. No one noticed that Nadia, the new girl at school this year, was leaving the party. Her absence would be felt only as strongly as her presence had been.

  That evening, Nadia’s little vase leaned against a container of coconut rice on the dining room table where Jill, Nadia, and Donald ate take-out Thai food from Bangkok House that he had picked up on his way home from the train station. Nadia struggled with her chopsticks, holding one in each hand and bringing them together to wrangle a single noodle of pad thai. Her face was shining with oil. Donald noticed the piece of pottery and lifted it up, turning it slowly, then said, “Where did you buy this, Jill? It looks valuable.”

  Nadia stared at her father, sensing she was being put on, but he betrayed no humor. Donald was a kind father, and time after time he was able to express love for Nadia in a playful way that Jill just couldn’t. “Mom didn’t buy that, Daddy,” Nadia finally said.

  “Oh no? What do you mean?”

  “I made it at Liam Rostower’s birthday party.”

  “Excuse me?” said Donald, wiping his mouth and putting his napkin down. “I’m supposed to believe you made this?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Nadia said. “I made it. Mom, tell him.”

  And so Jill was drawn reluctantly into the game, forced dully to confess to Donald that, yes, Nadia had made this vase. But why couldn’t she just go along with it? Why did it bother her that Nadia was too old for such a game? Why did none of this banter between parent and child come naturally to Jill?

  A few days later, at pick-up at the local public school, Jill walked through the groups of children until she saw her solitary daughter standing by the heating ducts. Nearby, two girls exclaimed together over some enormous fantasy novel called Blindman and…something. Blindman and the Moorcutter? The Moorcatcher? The Moorchaser? The fact that these first-graders could read such an advanced book startled Jill, and the fact that they could discuss it in an informed manner was equally alarming.

  “I like the part where the Moorchaser gets the gold bullion,” one of the girls said to the other. “And did you know there’s a surprise ending? Blindman turns out not to be blind after all. Even though he was born without eye sockets, he had tiny eyes in his nostrils. He could always see everything the whole time.”

  “I love surprise endings,” said the other girl.

  “Can you sleep over this weekend?”

  “I’ll check the schedule.”

  There wasn’t even anything particularly egregious about the exchange, but to Jill it was unbearable. With no adults watching, she bent down to the two girls and said, “Don’t you think that book is a little old for you? You’re only in first grade. Don’t you think it might make some of the other children feel a little bit bad because they can’t read it too?”

  One of the girls looked terrified and ran away. But the other girl held her own. “You’re Nadia Hamlin’s mom, right?” the girl said, and Jill realized, from her red hair and slightly popping eyes, that she was Juliana Gregorius, daughter of Sharon Gregorius, creator of Wuv Cards. Though all the children were dressed in casual school clothes, it was easy to see that Juliana was stylish and composed like her mother, and that Jill, in choosing this child to single out, had made a tactical error.

  “Yes, I am,” said Jill, slightly taken aback.

  “No offense, but she will never be able to read this book,” said Juliana Gregorius. Then she turned and walked away.

  No one had heard the exchange, either the aggressive way Jill had spoken to a child or the child’s devastating response. Of course, Jill was the inappropriate one here, but she would probably get away with it. Who would believe a six-year-old when she claimed that a perfectly respectable mother had approached her and told her she shouldn’t read a hard book because it would make other children feel bad? There had surely been a misunderstanding. Jill felt slightly crazed here in the pick-up area of this school, but she was not done yet.

  Her eyes probably looked wild as she made her way over to Nadia’s first-grade teacher. But Mrs. Kelleher, a veteran teacher in her sixties, with hair like yellowed lamb’s wool, had seen everything. She knew the score, and, of course, like most teachers, she preferred the girls who shone with possibility. Jill could see this now, as Mrs. Kelleher, a wide, thick-built woman, stood chatting with several of the mothers.

  Only in the enclosed universe of a grade school could such a homely and pursed woman be popular; only here could she be the one all the mothers tried to suck up to. Jill saw how readily seduced Mrs. Kelleher was by the mothers of the more precocious children, and she compared this response with the weary look that Mrs. Kelleher now gave Jill as she approached. No matter what Jill did, she would be unable to seduce Mrs. Kelleher into loving her daughter.

  But she had to find out about Nadia, one way or another, and she was in a very rare mode of confrontation, so i
t might as well be now. Without Amy around to practice on and possibly temper her words, she proceeded. “Mrs. Kelleher,” she said, thrusting herself into the middle of the group of mothers. “Hi.”

  Mrs. Kelleher’s eyes flickered back longingly to the other women. “Hello,” said the teacher, who was both an old pro and, Jill thought, kind of a cunt.

  “I just wondered how Nadia was doing in class,” Jill said.

  Mrs. Kelleher looked Jill right in the eye, then came close, moving them both away from everyone else, and said in a low, confidential voice, “Mrs. Hamlin, I was going to call you anyway. I have begun to have real concerns about Nadia. For a while I thought it was just the adjustment to a new school and a new environment, but it’s still going on. Have you thought of having her evaluated?”

  So this was an afternoon of honesty, and it was breathtaking. Jill had asked for it, and there was even something relieving about it. The usual falseness and strain were gone. “Yes, I have,” Jill said.

  “I can recommend someone in town, if you’d like,” said the teacher. “I’ll e-mail you tonight.”

  With the briefest smile, Mrs. Kelleher turned back to the other mothers, and Jill heard her say something about how Liam Rostower knew all about the origins of Groundhog Day. “During Sharing Circle, Liam told the class that the tradition might have begun in the fifth century, with the European Celts believing that animals possessed supernatural powers. He was quite the expert.” All the mothers grinned and smiled and popped up and down like groundhogs around the teacher.

  A while later, sitting at the kitchen table with Nadia, Jill watched as her daughter ate her snack and struggled over her homework. One hand held a pink cupcake, squeezing it a little too hard, and the other held a pencil in a forced grip. Jill glanced down at the workbook, noting the dense paragraph of text on the page and the various questions that were meant to be read and then answered at the end:

  Why does the farmer want to sell the old nag Gypsy?

  Do you think it’s fair?

  What would you have done with Gypsy?

  Jill knew that Nadia could barely read these words and would need her mother to hover above her and sound out each syllable in a way that would give both of them a reassuring but false sense that Nadia herself had been reading. She watched Nadia struggle for a while as the sky outside the kitchen window grew darker and the street lamp by the curb automatically popped on and the day shifted into evening, and soon Donald would come home on the train with the other men. They would hear his footsteps in the front hall and the rustle of paper as he thumbed through the day’s mail on the front hall table. Then, giving her father a few courteous seconds to acclimate himself, Nadia would spring up from whatever she was doing and fling herself against him with wanton abandon. Donald, smelling of office and train and newspaper print, would gratefully accept the tackle.

  Until then, though, Jill and Nadia would sit together at the table, and the story of the farmer leading his nag across a grassy meadow would remain an abstraction. The cupcake detritus that dotted the surface of the text would prove more compelling than the text itself. Nadia would apply a damp index finger to each crumb, then put it into her mouth, wistfully recalling the lost pleasure of the snack. But the trail of crumbs would always lead back to the farmer and the nag, in whose company Nadia Hamlin would be forced to live, perhaps forever.

  So the sky became dark, and the farmer and the nag waited in the field. Jill, watching her daughter’s baffled expression and tired eyes, finally said, “I think that’s more than enough, honey, don’t you? You’ve been working hard for a long time. Let’s just stop.”

  “But there’s more to do.”

  “It’s okay,” Jill said.

  Nadia asked, “Did you used to do your homework with your mom when you were little?”

  “Sometimes.”

  There was a pause, and then Nadia said, “Where is she again?”

  “She died, remember?” Jill said, her throat sticking unexpectedly for her mother, even now, after all this time. The feeling just went into hiding and then reappeared at moments like this one, when you had to seem stoical and not full of sensation. “It was a long time ago,” Jill told her daughter. “We’ve talked about that.”

  “Right,” said Nadia. Then she said, in a matter-of-fact voice, “I had another mom too, once. But she couldn’t take care of me, so you had to do it.”

  “I wanted to do it. I’ll always want to.”

  Nadia kept looking at Jill gravely, and after a moment she placed a hand on Jill’s hand, patting it. Then she said, “You’re sure we can stop working now?”

  “Positive.”

  Jill recognized her daughter’s bravery and knew that it wasn’t appropriate for her to have to be so brave—to need to suit up every day and face an army of children with manifesto-length novels about Moorchasers under their arms, and a teacher who didn’t draw enough gratification from teaching her, and nearly a full hour at lunch when Nadia would sit ignored at the end of a long table, chewing a soft sandwich. Her eyes would give her the appearance of being lost as she sat at lunch in the cafeteria by herself, and in her strangely beautiful little voice Nadia would sing her folk song about the saffron sister tree.

  The following Monday, Jill had Nadia evaluated. She took her to a testing facility in a small office building in downtown Holly Hills, where Nadia sat in a room with an enthusiastic woman named Mrs. Jantzen. After a few hours Nadia emerged looking tired; even Mrs. Jantzen looked tired. The tests had been too much, and school was too much, and everything was too much. It was impossible to miss this.

  Nadia’s test results were not surprising, though even so they provided a severe blow to the narcissism of a parent. Jill and Donald sat in a small room while Mrs. Jantzen explained the various areas in which Nadia had shown significant cognitive lags. She said the words without any blame or embarrassment; she was used to delivering news like this to parents. Nadia was not so unusual to her, nor was she “as bad as you think,” Mrs. Jantzen said.

  Mrs. Jantzen handed Jill the box of tissues that sat on her desk beside a paperweight with the words “Children are like snowflakes,” and a pad of Post-its advertising a timed-release, pediatric-dose drug for hyperactivity. Jill blew her nose and let herself cry into a handful of tissues, and she tried to listen as the woman explained that Nadia might do better if she had a “shadow teacher,” someone who could help her through the day and give her the time and attention that Mrs. Kelleher apparently could not. “And the good part is that it can be paid for by the state,” said Mrs. Jantzen.

  “That’s the good part?” said Donald. “Great. I was waiting for the good part.”

  “You will have to petition for it,” Mrs. Jantzen went on, unperturbed, “and probably even sue, but you will get your way in the end. It’s a big pain in the ass, pardon me, but it’s just the way it is.”

  “Are you saying we have to do this?” Donald asked. “That we are obligated to have her singled out in this way?”

  Mrs. Jantzen shook her head. “No, Mr. Hamlin,” she said. “Some parents prefer to put their children in a special school. That’s a family decision, based on circumstances. But at any rate, you tell me she is struggling. And when I look at these results, I would have to agree. Why should Nadia have to struggle so much? It seems unkind to me.”

  In the car on the way home they sat silently. Jill was reminded of their many visits to the fertility experts years earlier, and how they had left those offices with a similar sensation of heartbreak. There was heartbreak everywhere: in losing a mother, in missing your closest friend, in wanting a child, in raising a child. But off at work all day, Donald was cordoned off from his daughter’s limitations. When he returned home from the city at night, Nadia’s loving nature was so appealing to him that she probably seemed to be the most articulate and unusual child on earth. Maybe he had even been serious about the beauty of her bud vase. Maybe he was so much in love with her that she shimmered with greatness, blinding h
im. This was a good thing, Jill realized, but it did not help right now, in the car, as Donald slipped his hand briefly into his suit jacket, against his heart, as though he’d been shot.

  That night, he was as playful with Nadia as ever. He danced her around the living room and sat with her on her bed before sleep, and together they read a pile of picture books. Jill peered into the room and saw them going over some of the books they had read when she was three and that most of the other children had long ago discarded. For Nadia, these books were more than nostalgic; they were like life itself.

  Jill went to call Amy. “It’s me,” said Jill.

  “What’s up?”

  She paused. “Nothing,” she finally said. If she began to talk about Nadia now, over the phone, she would become upset. So she would talk to Amy in person, not that it would do any good, for Amy knew only what it was like to raise a boy whose mind was capacious and honeycombed, filled with everything imaginable. “Nadia and I are coming into the city one day after school this week,” Jill said. “I have to get her a spring coat. Can I see you then?” Amy said that she was still feeling bad, and that though it had been a week already, she hadn’t said anything to Leo about his fake receipts. She was reluctant to make a date with Jill. “I’m not feeling very social,” she said. “Oh, come on, Amy, it’s just me,” Jill said, and Amy relented.

  The women arranged to meet on Thursday afternoon; Mason had a piano lesson then, and Amy said that if Jill wanted to, she could come sit with her during it, and they could talk. So Jill took Nadia with her on the train into the city, and bought her the spring coat she needed, and they met up with Amy at a music school in the East Nineties where children had been learning piano and flute and voice for over a hundred years.

  The two women and the little girl sat together in the drafty anteroom, and around them swept shuddering scales, and the opening gambit of “Für Elise,” and the theme from “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” all of it seeming to represent childhood itself, so familiar was it and so frequently the province of a parent’s desires rather than a child’s passion. It would probably not have occurred to Amy that Mason didn’t need to study piano. Did she think this solid, fact-gathering boy would grow up and become Noël Coward, with a crowd of good-looking young people gathered around him at a party, everyone singing old favorites? Many of the boys and girls of America were now as oversubscribed and overextended as executives. Their mothers were their secretaries, keeping track of the children’s calendars, running slightly behind them as they went from piano lesson to fencing to papermaking to martial arts to the homes of other children and then back out into the world. Jill would not keep such a schedule with Nadia. She would not be part of this particularly American obsession, and she knew this now.