by Meg Wolitzer
“Holly Hills wasn’t a bad place to raise the boys, all things being equal,” Alice said. “It’s actually prettier than most people think. The developers will destroy all the nature in the end, but until they do, I consider it mine.”
This suburb, it seemed, was jammed in places with plant life, and though most of the residents were busy with their jobs or kids and did not avail themselves of this, Alice, when she wasn’t at the hospital, did. It wasn’t that Jill’s friendship with Alice Ettinger made her love the township of Holly Hills; she was still aware of both the slight hollowness at its center and the correspondent need that people here had to make something happen: a crafts fair in the parking lot of the mall, the painstakingly rehearsed and admirable local opera group’s annual performance, which this year was to be Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. But no place was idyllic; Jill also disliked the self-congratulatory nature of the city that lay glistening in the invisible distance. She was here for now, and she had someone else to talk to who was intelligent and likable and with whom she didn’t feel as though she was just letting the rest of life fragment.
Jill told her about how she had planned to go into academia, and how, somehow, that hadn’t happened. “Oh, interesting. My parents,” Alice said as they went for a walk, “were both in academia, I guess you could say, but on the high school level. They were English teachers. They were like Mr. and Mrs. Chips. They always told us that if it were at all possible, we should try to find something we love doing, and preferably find it really early.”
“That’s smart.”
“Oh yeah. Because if you don’t, it’s really hard to find it later on. There are so many crap jobs in the world. So many incredibly boring ones. But the good ones keep you there. I mean, I never heard of anyone who quit being an astrophysicist.”
“You found a good one, right?”
“The hospital has been pretty good to me, generally. All of us in my family actually ended up doing something that we love.”
“My mother did something that she loved for a while,” Jill said. “She was an actress. She was even in the chorus of a Broadway musical.”
And then she envisioned the young version of her mother that she knew only through photographs, wearing a toga, standing on a Broadway stage, doing, briefly, the thing she’d always wanted to do most, back in a time that itself now seemed as remote as ancient Rome.
Chapter SIXTEEN
Oneşti, Romania, 1976
THE DAY WAS bright and cold as she stood on the steps in front of the entire country in order to be named a Hero of Socialist Labor. The leaders draped a medal around her neck, but by now she was used to this, for she had already been to the Summer Olympic Games in Montreal, which was why she was here, being celebrated in her own land, by her own people. Her mother cried, of course, holding a handkerchief to her face in the wind. The leaders gave a speech about how hard Nadia Comaneci had worked and how she had brought honor to the entire nation of Romania.
“Within this child is a hero of socialism and a hero of labor, which together, entwined, have created a vision and an imperative for the people of our great land. Within the body of this young girl is someone to look up to and someone for other young people to model themselves on. No matter what the field, young people must think, ‘I can work just as hard for the cause of socialism. I am capable, my body and my mind are strong. I can do what she has done, and bring honor to myself, and my family, and my socialist nation.’”
The crowd was so excited; she saw them in their thick dark coats, waving at her, ruffling their little Romanian and Olympian flags and raising placards that bore images of her face. She was the symbol of labor; it was so funny.
Later, in the car with Béla, traveling from one press conference to another, she was very tired, and she laid her head against her coach’s big shoulder. “Rest,” he said to her. “You are a socialist hero,” he reminded her with a laugh. “Heroes work very hard, and they need their rest.”
She was considered the hardest worker in her entire country. She had allowed him to put her through all the paces, training with him for four hours a day, six days a week, and letting him speak sternly to her when she could not do what he asked. She worked harder than anyone else. That was what was said by every mother and father in the country. “If you work as hard as little Nadia Comaneci,” they told their children, “the gold medals might be yours too. And you might be named a Hero of Socialist Labor, like Nadia.”
The children stared up at their parents from their steaming plates of sarmale, which was always so heavy it made them feel like lying down for hours after a meal. Nadia must eat only air! How else could she manage to be so light and so perfect? How else could she manage to work that much and to perform so well? She weighed eighty-six pounds when she attended the Summer Olympic Games and could practice her routines for hours and hours without stopping. They did not understand how she could be this way.
But at age fourteen, traveling in the car with her coach, she knew. The mothers and fathers told their children they must work, work, work. The children were puzzled and despairing, for they could never work that much, and they were exhausted even thinking about it. But really, if she could tell them the truth, it was that this had nothing to do with work. Work was for the parents who lay under the bellies of automobiles or arranged files or wore hairnets. Work meant that you came home tired, smelling of machine oil or meat or simply dead, cluttered-office air. Your body took on the worst reverberations of its environment, while hers took on only the best.
Maybe, she thought, she had been able to lift her body through space so that one day it would keep her from having to work as much as her parents and her relatives did. It would be insurance against having to end up in the automobile-repair shop or the filing room. It would keep her from such an end. As a gymnast, there was no end; there was only sky above, and a few particular spots on a set of rosined bars where you had to land.
Nadia’s special talent was not a talent for work; it was a talent, above all, for cleverness. She would keep her body like a little girl’s as long as she could. Now they called her a Hero of Socialist Labor, but none of them understood the way she really saw it. Her cleverness would help her later on, perhaps, when it wasn’t enough just to fly through the air in the darkness of an enormous arena, with the whole crowd holding its collective breath to see exactly how you would land: whether you would fall to the mat with your face in a howl of agony and self-recrimination, or whether you would land on the balls of your feet and shoot your arms into the air and let the people love you, as they longed to do.
Later on, she would want more than this. Béla already spoke to her about how he and his wife could have such a different life in America. “I would be rewarded fully for my work if I lived there,” he said. “And you would too.”
But it was not work! Why did everyone keep saying that?
She knew that the time for work would probably come one day, and that her medals would no longer be enough to keep her from the fate of her mother and father. They should have won the medal for Hero of Socialist Labor, not her. She knew that she would grow up and her body would thicken, and her sparrow frame would change, and she would no longer be exempt. By then, she would have taken notice of the rest of the world, and she would want to join it. She saw herself in darkness, crossing a border into another country. But that would be a long time from now. She was only fourteen, and she did not have to worry about survival or about what that new life would be like. For now she was a Hero of Socialist Labor and a gold medalist at the Summer Olympic Games. Her work was play, and this was the secret that she ought to whisper to all those children who wondered darkly how she did it. Work is play, or at least all good work is play. All work that is pleasurable feels pleasurable in the same way that play once did.
“I have Nadia working very, very hard,” she had heard Béla say to someone on the telephone in his studio. “I have her working six days a week. She is my most receptive student. She never com
plains.”
This is not work, she should have explained. This is something else. But she didn’t tell him, or anyone else, because maybe they would have taken back the medals hanging heavy on their silk ribbons, if they knew.
Chapter SEVENTEEN
TO: ROBERTA SOKOLOV < [email protected]
FROM: BRANDY GILLOP < [email protected]
Dear Roberta,
Hey, how are u? So I got my friend Chrissy who has a camera to take the slides of my paintings, and here they are, sent to u as an attachment. I think they came out alright but I am not sure because I have never done slides of art before. Please just remember Chrissy is not a “pro.” (And neither am I.) I hope they look the way u think they should. I know there’s not a lot here. But it’s a good thing I am graduating from Lorton HS this year because, guess what, they are completely getting rid of art in the curriculum and replacing it with Business Skills for the Workplace. Thank u soooo much for agreeing to take a look at these.
xox
Brandy
TO: BRANDY GILLOP < [email protected]
FROM: ROBERTA SOKOLOV < [email protected]
Dear Brandy,
It was so great to hear from you. Your slides came out really well, I think. One of the paintings—the one of the old woman in the rocking chair—feels a little generic, I’m afraid. If you don’t mind, I think I won’t include that one when I send these to someone. Now I just have to figure out WHO that someone should be. The person I was going to send them to—the friend of a friend, who runs a small museum in the city—is apparently no longer reachable. (Long story…) So I will have to rethink this whole plan. But I will ask around, and I am sure that I will find someone within the next week or so. Please remember, Brandy, that you are very young, and that while no one is going to offer you a gallery show, someone might want to offer you an internship. If that happens, I could maybe also ask around about getting you a cheap apartment share in Brooklyn, where all the kids like yourself live, and a job waiting tables, or something. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, all is well here; life is busy with husband and kids and the chaos that is our daily life, but I will get back to you as soon as I hear from the gallery person I end up sending your slides to. Stay warm, say hi to your mom, stay away from Tyler Parvell (ha ha, I know you will), and keep doing your art.
xox
Roberta
When Nathaniel Greenacre called his wife from the television station one afternoon and said he was coming home from work early because he had something to tell her, she immediately thought all the thoughts she had been primed over the years to imagine: He no longer loved her. He was leaving. He was dying. Roberta saw him dead, his long, gaunt body in a simple, unvarnished coffin. He would probably want to be buried with puppets on his hands. “It’s something good, babe,” Nathaniel said, though he insisted on telling her in person. She could not remember him ever, over the course of their marriage, making such a dramatic gesture. There were no surprises with Nathaniel. Everything he did was usually understated, laconic.
By the time he made it back uptown on the subway and arrived at the apartment, she had to leave to pick up Harry and Grace at their schools, and so he accompanied her there, which he had never done before. “So tell me this thing already,” she said as she walked with her husband in the chilly sunlight. “Don’t drag it out. It’s making me very nervous.”
Nathaniel stopped on the street and turned her toward him, taking her wrists in his hands. “It’s happened.”
“What?”
“We were getting ready to do a remote, and then there was suddenly all this downtime because one of the anchors couldn’t get back from the story about the fire on the ferry.”
“What fire?”
“Breaking news. Forget it; no one hurt. So we were just sitting around on the soundstage, and I took out the puppets.”
“Which puppets?”
“Nuzzle and Peeps, of course. I was entertaining the troops; doing a kind of slightly filthy version of my kids’ act. And we’re all there, the other cameramen, and they’re kind of encouraging me, and I don’t notice that someone else has come in.”
“Oh God.”
“Why do you say ‘Oh God’? Who do you think I’m talking about?”
“I have no idea. It just sounds like a big moment.”
“It was. It was Irwin Mester.”
“The head of the network?”
“Right. He’s standing there watching me do my act, and nobody tells me he’s there, nobody stops me, and I’m really on, doing those voices. And the guys are all laughing a lot, and apparently Irwin Mester is laughing too. Then I saw that it was him. I’d never seen him before, but of course I recognized him from all the photos on the wall: Dear Leader. And he told me that my act was very funny, and he asked if I’ve ever done it professionally. Professionally! I had to restrain myself from saying, ‘Oh, only every weekend for the last thirty years.’ But he wanted to know if I was interested in talking to the people in children’s programming. Apparently, they’ve been in fruitless discussions about trying to find something with ‘crossover’ appeal, and he thought maybe this was it. So he took me downstairs to the executives at children’s. Irwin Mester took me himself! He went with me into their suite and interrupted a meeting. They were really startled. And he had me do Nuzzle and Peeps for them, right there. It was surreal. They were all sitting around drinking little bottles of water, and I’m standing there with my puppets, doing the voices. They started laughing. Oh, Roberta, we talked a lot, and they said I’m getting a show.”
Nathaniel looked as if he were about to cry. She pulled him toward her and kissed him, and other people saw this moment and glanced over and smiled as they kept walking. It was a sudden instance of emotion just popping out of the day.
“This is incredible,” Roberta said.
Nathaniel would come to describe himself as the person on the longest failure-to-success curve in the history of children’s entertainment. He was fifty-two years old when he got his break. It was never supposed to go like this. Because he had not made it all those years ago, he was never meant to make it. He had been a failed person; they had each long ago stopped wondering and had each stopped striving. As soon as Nathaniel had taken the job as a cameraman, they had known that was the end of his puppetry dream. But now it wasn’t.
“I have to call Wolf as soon as we get home,” Nathaniel said as they approached Auburn Day. “He will be just fucking floored. I’m going to have to tell him he’d better smoke less weed and start practicing.”
“What do you mean? He’s going to do the show with you?”
“Of course. He’s Peeps.”
“I used to be Peeps,” Roberta said with sudden intensity.
“But that was over a decade ago.”
“Yes, I stopped when Harry was born.”
“I know, but then when the kids got older you said you never wanted to do it again, you hated it, it wasn’t who you were, and that was fine, babe. Wolf, he’s my Peeps. He still doesn’t mind all the crappy venues. Wait until he hears this; he’s going to be making real money. And we are too. Lots of it, if it goes as planned. I can quit my day job. At least, I’ll still be going to the network, but I’ll be heading downstairs now. Goodbye, heavy camera that is ruining my back. They want to start putting this together fast. They’re going to bring in some writers and a show runner; same guy who did Ahoy, Mateys. Boy, I guess I’ll finally need an agent.”
“I think I should do Peeps,” Roberta persevered. “I was the first Peeps, Nathaniel, and we’re married. Doesn’t that give me an edge? Also,” she added, somewhat pointlessly, “Wolf doesn’t even have kids.”
“That’s not a prerequisite.”
“He’s a pothead,” she tried.
“Look, I have to let him do it,” said Nathaniel. “He’s put in all this time.”
He would not be moved. Wolf Purdy was a marginal person but he was Nathaniel’s friend; he had been doing the vo
ice of Peeps at libraries and in the auditoriums of YMCAs on weekends, intermittently, for a full decade. That had to be worth something. If a reward came to Nathaniel, then a reward would come to Wolf as well. Roberta, in wanting to be the voice of Peeps now that there would be some real gratification in it, knew that this was how the story went. She thought:
“Who will cut the wheat?” said the Little Red Hen.
“Not I,” said the Duck.
“Not I,” said the Cat.
“Not I,” said the Dog.
“Not I,” said Roberta Sokolov.
At home at night, Nathaniel, who almost never made phone calls, monopolized the telephone, calling everyone he knew. The puppetry community was lit up with the fact that one of its own had gotten a sudden big break. No doubt there was bitterness emanating from some of the little apartments and houses where the other puppeteers lived, the spaces where men and women who forced the hollow skins of creatures onto their hands practiced all the time. “Fuck,” a puppeteer could almost certainly be heard to say, after the usually melancholy and terse Nathaniel Greenacre telephoned to reveal his news.
“Fuck,” Roberta said to herself as she listened to Nathaniel exclaim happily on the telephone in the distance while she helped their daughter, Grace, wash her hair in the clawfoot bath in the one small bathroom.
“What?” Grace said, whipping around, spattering water. “Mom, what did you say?”
“I said ‘fug.’ It’s a word.”
“I thought you were cursing. I thought you were cursing at Daddy.”
