by Meg Wolitzer
“We had Nadia tested,” she began, and soon the spell of Amy’s unhappiness and self-absorption seemed to lift temporarily as she listened to Jill’s story. Nadia sat off to the side, her schoolbooks unopened on her lap. Instead of doing work, she was brushing the hair of one of her homely little doll horses that had—in addition to four legs, a mane, and a tail—long, blonde woman’s hair and false eyelashes. Jill imagined a line from a commercial for the toy: Does your little girl dream about riding horses but also about being a slut?
“This must be really hard on you and Donald,” Amy said. “I wish you’d told me about some of this, about the extent of all your worries.”
The two women sat together with the music playing all around them. Nadia, Jill noticed, was now crouching on the floor, brushing the hair of her horse/woman, and as she did, she sang to herself. At first, she sang a song about “lucky landlubbers” from the children’s TV show Ahoy, Mateys, and then something about the seasons changing that she’d learned at school, and then, finally, she sang her usual song: “Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree…”
Later, when Jill tried to re-create the moment for Donald, she was unable to tell it in a way that gave it the real resonance it had possessed at the time. Nadia was playing with her doll and singing to herself, and the music that had been rising and falling from the practice rooms suddenly stopped, as the teachers in those different cubicles coincidentally seemed to want their students to take a break at virtually the same moment. A lone harp was plinked for a few cocky extra notes, then it paused. The hallway of the music school was silent, except for Nadia’s folk song. As Nadia sang, and as Amy and Jill sat there, a tall woman with black hair in a topknot walked by. She was a well-respected voice teacher named Anna Milofsky, a fifty-two-year-old Russian émigrée who taught here one afternoon a week as a favor to the school. On all other days she taught classes at Juilliard.
But Jill knew none of this yet. That information would come later. Now, Anna Milofsky went slowly down the narrow hall, carrying a libretto in her hand, and in the middle of the respite from sound coming from the practice rooms, she stopped.
Jill looked at her curiously, not understanding. Amy figured it out first. “Jill,” she whispered. “She’s listening to Nadia.”
“Oh, get out of here,” Jill whispered back, but weirdly it did seem to be true. Anna Milofsky was listening to Nadia singing her little song. “Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree,” Nadia sang.
“Excuse me, who is this girl?” the woman asked.
“My daughter, Nadia,” said Jill.
“She’s quite good. She has transposed the song into a minor key and then made some adjustments.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jill said, standing up from the bench. She and Anna Milofsky were the same height; usually no other woman was as tall as Jill.
“I am also amused by her wit,” said Anna Milofsky.
“Excuse me?”
“Her song. She has made a new arrangement. She heard it one way, and she changed it so that it’s quite different.”
“We really don’t understand,” said Amy. “My friend’s daughter sings all the time, and she sings this folk song a lot.”
“We adopted her from an orphanage in Siberia,” Jill explained. “My husband and I think maybe she learned it there, before we got her.”
Only now was Nadia paying attention to the conversation taking place around her. She glanced up with some trepidation at her mother and Amy and at this woman who looked like a large, gentle bird with silky dark wings.
“This is not a folk song,” said the voice teacher. “Is that what you think it is?” Both women nodded. “Oh my dear,” she said, addressing Nadia. “I think you heard this somewhere else. Do you remember where it was, darling?” Nadia shook her head no, but her face was pink with pleasure. “I will sing the real version, which you cleverly transposed.”
The voice teacher began to sing. The words of Nadia’s song merely rearranged themselves in emphasis, the end of one syllable moving to become the start of another. Now, as Anna Milofsky sang, it was easy to see how everyone who had heard Nadia Hamlin singing had mistaken her words all along.
Nadia’s version went: “Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree.”
While Anna Milofsky’s version—the real version—went: “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.”
So there was no saffron sister tree; there was no command for sorrow to rise. That melancholy, peaceful mantra, which Nadia had sung to comfort herself over the years, and which the women had chanted as they sat on their yoga mats, was now revealed as being something mundane. Jill made a sound that was like a moaning little cry. There was a sharp bit of a laugh in there too, because it was absurd to have imbued shy, hesitating Nadia with mournful and semi-magical unknowableness—to have made her into myth—when in fact she was plainly present, and Jill had been the one to wrap her in something that did not exist. All children were unknowns, Karen had said; they slipped in and out of knowability over time.
Nadia went down the hall to the water fountain with Anna Milofsky, the two of them talking a little about music. Amy took Jill’s arm. “I know we all thought it was this beautiful, mysterious lyric,” said Amy. “But look! It’s something else, okay?” Jill didn’t say anything. “Don’t use those test scores against her, Jill. Just don’t.” But still Jill couldn’t really speak. “Remember that day in the Golden Horn,” Amy said, “when she was a baby and you asked me if I liked her?”
“Yes.” Jill nodded, ashamed.
“She’s got her things, definitely,” said Amy. “Okay, so we know that now. And maybe she’s got music too. Just don’t be so sure about everything being the worst. Don’t be so convinced all the time.”
The music cranked up again from the practice rooms. Mason returned to his dutiful interpretation of Beethoven, but there was no evidence of soulfulness in his hands. The harpist down the hall wantonly pulled at a string. The hour was late, and the music teachers were likely yawning as they shepherded their students through the end of their lessons.
Nadia’s song had only been a jingle from a television commercial; it was as American as could be. Nadia had heard it frequently in the apartment, certainly, when she was very little and Jill had planted her in front of the TV in her high chair in desperation, trying to find a way to entertain the child she didn’t yet know at all and was somewhat afraid of. Nadia might very well have a difficult life, but apparently she had an unusual ear. Her song was no longer melancholy, and never had been.
FROM TIME TO TIME, when he really thought about it, it bothered Donald Hamlin deeply that his wife was friendless. “I am not friendless,” Jill insisted, but this did not assuage him. She mentioned Amy and Roberta and Karen, but he waved them away. His point was that Jill had no friends here in town, and although she did not want any, it was clear that she needed some, and quickly. The city seemed farther away, and the lives of the people there, while still vivid to her and filled with carefully described drama—Penny Ramsey’s love affair and subsequent abandonment of her injured lover; Roberta’s e-mail relationship with that girl she was bent on helping; Leo Buckner’s low-level, everyday corporate cheating—were separate from Jill. Amy and the others were elsewhere, and Jill was here, in this town whose name maybe did sound like the name of a stripper, as Donald had once said, for it had a similar appeal: big, open-legged houses with wings and extensions; wide, seductive lawns; all the parking spaces you could ever want; and yet you couldn’t find substance or love.
Or, at least, you couldn’t find them if you didn’t want them. Jill knew there were women here she might like, but she still did not plan to look. She had developed, as Donald said, pathologically introverted tendencies in midlife.
“Locally, you are friendless,” he persevered.
“You’re my friend,” she tried. “And you live locally.”
“That is a very pathetic statement. You know what
I mean.”
“You don’t exactly have many friends, Donald. And you don’t know anyone in Holly Hills.”
“True, but I’m a man. We have our poker friends, and we cling to our wives like koalas. Plus, I’m only basically here during the day on weekends. What am I supposed to do, start up a conversation with the other fathers at the bagel place? ‘Is that poppy seed you’ve got there, buddy? Me, I’ve got sesame, and it’s still warm.’”
The bagel place was a common destination for the men on Sunday mornings; they took their children with them in the car for company, and they lined up in the small, crowded store that smelled so wonderfully oniony, pointing to the different metal baskets, then walked out carrying a hot, lumpy bag and headed back home, their circuit completed.
“No, I don’t imagine you starting up a conversation in the bagel place,” Jill said.
“The primary difference,” Donald said, “is that I’m fairly happy here, or anywhere, really, and you’re not.”
It was the primary difference, Jill Hamlin thought from time to time, between someone whose mother had killed herself and someone whose mother had not. But this distinction, like so many others, had been lost. Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposed to have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.
When Jill finally made a friend in Holly Hills, the act of friendship was done almost against her will, against her better judgment, in secret, in darkness, in sleep. How strange this was, in retrospect. She was not looking to replace Amy Lamb, who would never have to be replaced. But even so, Jill Hamlin needed other people around her. She did not believe this, though, until she was forced to become aware of it.
One night, when, as always, she could not sleep, Jill took her usual dose of Noctrem, and then added another five milligrams for good measure. She walked around the house, checking doors and lights. It was midnight; everything was in order. She looked in on her sleeping daughter. Nadia had begun being “shadowed”—what an ominous word, as though she were being stalked by a pedophile—during the previous week at school, and so far the results were encouraging. For the first time all year Nadia had been able to keep up with the work, Mrs. Kelleher had said, and the teacher had sounded pleased; maybe she actually wasn’t an awful person. Maybe she was just realistic and would look out for Nadia now that she knew she was getting the help she required. Jill, for her part, had become a kind of shadow-mother, and Nadia absolutely needed the big protective shadow that Jill threw across her. This week too, Nadia had taken her first singing lesson in the city with Anna Milofsky, who had invited her to be a private student, and she had enjoyed herself. Though Nadia had real talent, she was not a star like her namesake, Nadia Comaneci. She lacked the take-charge attitude of that other Nadia, the extreme self-determination, and the shockingly mature skill. Instead, she was just a girl, intently practicing.
“We sang scales,” Nadia had said after the lesson, “and I am going to practice them every day in my room with an egg timer. Do we have an egg timer, Mom? Miss Milofsky says we should get one.”
Nadia was on an upswing! Jill thought, and she supposed this ought to have been enough to get an anxious mother to sleep at night, but it was not.
Jill returned to the bedroom and lay down beside her husband. “You’re here,” Donald said in appreciation. “My socially aloof wife. Quick! Get under the covers with me.” She did, and they touched, striped pajama top to white nightgown, and the sensation, even through all that material and the veil of the double-dose nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic Jill had swallowed, was arousing. They made love in the darkness of the silent house, and then she fell into sleep beside him.
What happened next was not something she would ever remember but instead would later have to piece together like the details in a detective story. She had only thought that she was asleep. She had thought this, much the way that the Noctrem user on that transatlantic flight—thinking she was filling in the British cryptic crossword in the newspaper but instead actually drawing circles on her blouse with a magic marker—had thought the same thing. Actually, Jill was in a Noctrem-induced twilight state, and she rose from the bed at two A.M., still in her nightgown, bent down to put on a pair of running shoes, and then took her keys from the night table and walked downstairs. Her eyes must have been open, for she did not miss a single stair. She disarmed the security system so it would not go off when she opened the front door, and then Jill walked outside onto Jacob’s Path.
She had never even seen her suburban street in the middle of the night, but it was incontestably beautiful with the curlicue wrought-iron street lamps on and the houses dark and almost hidden behind their shaggy cutouts of trees and bushes. Occasional houses revealed one single lit window, and in each case the color was unusual and delicate, whether it emanated from a perpetual golden surface light over a stove or the aqua glint of a tiny flat-screen guest-bathroom night-light, guarding the little soaps and hand towels and potpourri and serving no other obvious purpose. Lights on inside a house provided the sensation of lives lived. Even if you slept throughout the whole time that those lights shone, you still might like to have fallen asleep knowing that they were there.
Jill never understood why she had chosen 21 Jacob’s Path. Had she chosen, say, 23 Jacob’s Path, she would have wound up at the door of the unfriendly Glesser family, who would probably have called the police. Later, Karen Yip would speculate that it was because 21 was a Fibonacci number. “Karen, I don’t even know what Fibonacci numbers are,” Jill had said. “I mean, I’ve heard of them, but that’s about it.” Karen told her that Fibonacci numbers—which formed a sequence, each one equaling the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.—notoriously existed liberally in patterns throughout nature in a fashion that was a wonder to mathematicians and to those of a spiritual bent. Perhaps, she said, Jill had simply been drawn to 21 in the same ineffable way. But the more likely explanation, Jill thought, was that the house, unlike all the other houses on Jacob’s Path in the middle of the night, showed some movement in its front window, and perhaps Jill had noticed it.
Jill Hamlin, in her nightgown and running shoes, rang the doorbell of 21. There was no answer, and so she rang a couple more times. The chimes were deep and melodic, and finally a woman came to the door. She was slightly older than Jill, with brown hair that did not hold a hairstyle for long, and she was dressed in a T-shirt and green surgical pants. She and Jill had passed each other once or twice in their cars on the street, and they had nodded but had not stopped to introduce themselves. Alice Ettinger was barely around; the hours she kept were unpredictable.
“Hello,” said Jill from the doorstep. The woman just stared at her. “I don’t think we’ve met,” Jill continued. “We live down the street.” The words were spoken so innocently, and the woman considered the situation, trying to make sense of it.
“Look, I’m not sure you know this, but it’s two in the morning,” Alice Ettinger finally said, and her face had softened in the presence of this sudden strangeness, for she clearly thought Jill Hamlin was mentally ill or brain-damaged. “I think you should go home. Is there someone else in your house?” she asked slowly and gently. “Do you live with someone?”
“My family.”
“That’s good. Let’s take you to them. They must be worried. Hold on, I’ll get my coat. Stay right there, okay?”
The spell began to lift then; maybe the word “family” had served as a trigger antidote to the powerful drug Noctrem and its unpredictable, if rare, side effects. But by the time the woman came back with her coat, Jill had mostly returned to herself, woozy, shocked, and found that she was standing on the front doorstep of 21 Jacob’s Path in the middle of the night in her nightgown. “Oh God,” Jill said. “Oh God. I can’t believe this.”
“It’s okay,” Alice Ettinger said, slipping on her coat and stepping outside. “You’re safe now,” she said.
“What?”
“That thing happened to me, I think. A side effect of Noctrem!”
“Noctrem? A side effect? You mean like that woman on a plane who thought her blouse was a crossword puzzle?”
“Yes.”
“Or that other one who phoned the police because she’d shoplifted as a child? I read that article.”
“Yes, yes!”
“Holy crap!”
They both began to laugh out loud. Alice Ettinger, divorced for ten years, her kids in college, a labor and delivery nurse who had come home exhausted only half an hour earlier after assisting at a birth at the local hospital, let Jill Hamlin into her house. They sat in the den, and Jill, recovering from her brief chemical trance, apologized repeatedly and expressed her horror and embarrassment at having simply rung the doorbell of the house of a stranger in the middle of the night. It was insane!
They would have various conversations over the rest of the lingering winter and into the spring. When the weather grew warm enough at the end of February, Alice and Jill drove to the town park and the recreation fields. They brought Alice’s field guide with them, and they crouched down in the bushes, running their hands through greenery like women in a supermarket examining produce.
