by Meg Wolitzer
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Roberta. She poured a plastic measuring cup full of warm water over Grace’s head, where the hair came to wet points like multiple horns. Then suddenly, in her guilt, Roberta bent down and kissed that head, smelling it in all its neutrality and burgeoning essence of flower before the slow ruination began. All those art projects that Roberta had done with her children! All those many hours spent on craft, not art! She had enjoyed it; it had been blissful, it had been worth it, but now she bitterly felt yet again that she should have been out in the world doing art. The big male art stars of the late ’80s and ’90s hadn’t spent their time cutting Clorox bottles into pigs with their children, or stringing uncooked macaroni onto thread. They’d had wives to do that, or nannies, or studio assistants.
Out in the living room now, she heard the sound of Harry playing a video game. Pshoo, pshoo, pshoo, went the sonic air rifles as they smashed apart the pulp of asteroids. Nearby, not minding the noise, Nathaniel kept talking to whomever he was talking to, explaining his new and unexpected great fortune, as if unable to quite believe it himself. He was immodest in his description of what had happened to him; he’d been waiting far too long.
Maybe there were no second acts in American lives, Roberta thought, but really, were there ever more than a few first acts at such a late age? The world did not look with excitement upon a fiftyish, easygoing, lined-faced, long-haired dad who had been plucked from obscurity based upon talent. Usually, the only time that someone old was allowed to make it big was when he won the lottery. Then, everyone loved the spectacle of the person who had never thought anything good would happen to him: the immigrant janitor beside his wife, tears streaming for the cameras as the couple hold up the six-foot-long check. Blind luck excited everyone. But the idea that you might still have a creative shot, even now, in your fifties, had no romantic tinge. Roberta, for one, looked upon her husband with a surprisingly cold assessment.
Of course, he wanted to have sex that night. He would probably be walking around with a continual boner for the next five years, she realized, or for as long as Nuzzle and Peeps was a hit. He would probably stay hard into syndication. “No,” she said in bed after the children had been tucked into the bunk beds of their tiny room and the dishes had been washed in the sink and Roberta’s hands still smelled of a detergent rendition of lemon-verbena. “I can’t, Nathaniel. It’s been a big day.”
“I know. That’s why, honey pie; I’m feeling good. We could have fun.” He took her hand and placed it lightly on his penis the way a teenaged boy might do with a reluctant girl.
“Nathaniel, no,” she said, and then, for effect, she left her hand there for one extra second, unmoving, unfriendly, as though to underscore her lack of interest and set into relief his inappropriate excitement. Immediately, she knew that she was being mean to him. He was just a pulsing, happy man, improbably patient and improbably rewarded at the end.
Where is my reward? Roberta thought churlishly, almost in tears. Where is it, when is it my turn?
“I’m sorry,” she told Nathaniel, taking away her hand. “I know this is your big day. And I am really happy for you, and everything that’s happening.”
“It’ll work out to be great for you too,” he said. “If everything goes through, we’ll be able to move out of here.”
“What? We can’t give up our apartment,” she said. “It’s free.”
“But we can. We can just let it go. Tell your parents we’ve had a great run, but if it’s okay with them, we’re going to sell it and use the money toward an old house up in Harlem, where it’s more real, and more lively. One of those historic brownstones you’ve always loved. And you’ll be able to have a painting studio, not just a tiny dark corner. It’ll all be good,” he said.
“A painting studio? I am not an artist anymore, Nathaniel,” she practically spat out.
“So you’ve been lying fallow. I was, too, and look what happened.”
“No, you weren’t lying fallow. You weren’t successful, but you did the work. You supported us with your day job, and then you went out every weekend, stuffing those puppets on your hands and going to those libraries and schools and auditoriums. You just went and did it, but I didn’t. I didn’t go with you, and I didn’t stay a painter, either. I didn’t keep developing the way I was supposed to. I mean, I had talent, but I couldn’t stay on track. I was going to do that Old Children series, remember? With Anne Frank and everyone else who died young? I don’t know, maybe it was because my parents gave us the apartment.”
“What do you mean?”
“We had to take it, and it let us have a life here. But maybe it spoiled me, and look, we’ve been living in this neighborhood where we don’t belong. Everything’s so expensive, and everything’s a little dull and basically predictable.” She paused and realized she was breathless. “I didn’t go into art thinking it was a life-or-death matter. It wasn’t like I had to paint my way out of a little town in South Dakota.”
“Well, art isn’t always about survival,” said Nathaniel.
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t hang around with artists anymore. I love my friends, but we’ve been sitting in that coffee shop for so long.” She paused. “We’re like the Hopper painting Nighthawks. Except we should be called Dayhawks.”
“You’re so hard on yourself,” he said, touching the edges of her hair.
Roberta felt herself soften at his desire to make her happy now, in the first light of his own happiness, which was perhaps the first unclouded happiness of his previously disappointing adult life. “I don’t think living somewhere more interesting and diverse will inspire me,” she whispered.
“But we’ll have to see now,” he said.
She did like the idea of getting away from the soporific routine she’d fallen into. They would leave here. She would burn for a long while at the insult of her husband’s shocking ascent, but she would hide her jealousy from him and from everyone she could, for it made her seem like a bad person, and she wasn’t bad. You weren’t supposed to feel this way. You weren’t supposed to feel it toward your own husband. He was supposed to be inextricable from you, and the two of you were meant to make your way through the world as a two-backed beast. She thought of Karen Yip, who out of all of them was particularly ardent and protective toward her husband. Karen had been repelled back when she’d heard about Penny Ramsey’s affair. Women like Penny Ramsey, married to hustling, coarse men, were the ones who were meant to feel resentment toward their husbands, not women like Roberta, whose own husband was authentic, original, true.
Nathaniel should have let her become Peeps again for television; he should have given her that, but, primly, he would not. He would withhold it from her. He wouldn’t be the one to inflect her day with meaning. Instead, he would give her a beautiful house in Harlem with a studio filled with light and the possibility of new, more interesting friends.
Immediately upon thinking about friends, Roberta felt guilty, and she e-mailed Amy and Karen right away and made plans to have breakfast tomorrow morning at the Golden Horn. She’d tell them Nathaniel’s news there, and they’d be surprised and happy and even a little tearful. Shelly Harbison, if she happened to be in the booth, would probably scream. A year from now, Nathaniel would have risen to the top of children’s programming with Nuzzle and Peeps and the dopey stoned Wolf, and Roberta would observe his success from her artist’s studio in her house in Harlem, where she would stand at an easel, a paintbrush held inches above the surface of the canvas, still not yet ready to touch down.
TO: ROBERTA SOKOLOV < [email protected]
FROM: BRANDY GILLOP < [email protected]
Hi Roberta,
Just checking in! I know it’s only been a couple of weeks since we wrote to each other, but u said u’d let me know who u decided to send the slides to. So I don’t mean to be a bother, but if its alright it would be great if u could let me know. I’ve been working on a new series of paintings called “Behind the Train Tracks.” T
yler Parvell got kicked out of school permanently for selling meth, by the way. I will definitely not miss him. But I do miss u.
xoxxo
Brandy
On a night in late January, all the parents of the fourth-graders at Auburn Day came to school for second-semester Open House, one of the two evenings in the whole year when every parent, father and mother both, put in an appearance. They walked up and down the halls on their best behavior. Emptied of the boys, the school looked beautiful at night; the floors of the halls gleamed and the walls were thick with drawings and posters whose overarching theme was, according to an enormous piece of hand-lettered oaktag, Prehistoric Man. As the parents wandered along the hall, they each looked for their own son’s particular contribution, following the chronological story of dumbstruck mankind trying to find its footing in the bleak and milky darkness of the nascent world.
All the mothers and fathers studied their sons’ drawings and writings with a kind of depraved love and pride. Each illustration of cave people and each line of prose was exclaimed over, low in the throat. In the classroom a few moments later, the young male teacher made a few remarks about the curriculum, and as everyone got up to go meet the next teacher, there was a commotion from the side of the room, and Roberta turned to see the anorexic mother Geralynn Freund slumped down in her chair looking white, ghastly.
“Lie back,” said an orthopedic-surgeon father.
“I’m so sorry,” Geralynn Freund said. “I got dizzy. I think I got up too fast.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“Lunch, I guess.”
“And what did you have?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Lie back,” he repeated, and this time she obeyed. The other parents milled around uncertainly, but Geralynn said that she was completely fine, that they were making too much of a fuss, and that everyone should go. The father and a couple of other parents stayed, but all the others shuffled out of the room, talking in quiet, worried voices about her. Was there a friend they could contact? Her doctor? No, she’d said, she was fine, really, and soon she stood up and smoothed down the front of her pants legs and smiled a little, and left the room with the others.
The evening chugged on. The parents went to meet the math teacher, and the Latin teacher, and the science teacher, and then, briefly, the art teacher. Roberta watched, a little amused, as one of the most extreme businessman fathers squirmed in captivity while listening to the earnest art teacher say “pastel” and “homemade tempera paint” and the line “…and finally we’ll be making our own Calder’s circus.” The father desperately began to finger the cold and silent PDA clipped to his belt, as if willing it to come to life.
In the hallway between classes, Penny and Greg Ramsey materialized. They looked the way they always did on the rare occasions when Roberta had seen them together. Standing here in a couple, they gave off neither friction nor distance. From farther down the hallway, Roberta saw that Amy saw them too; Roberta watched Amy glance over at them, then say something quietly to Leo. But if Penny Ramsey was aware that all these other wives and even their husbands knew the story of her love affair and its awful conclusion, it didn’t come across. “Hi,” Penny said to Roberta. “Good to see you.”
Greg Ramsey gave a small smile. “Hey, how’s it going?” he said. His collar was stiff, his silvery tie straight. He held his head rigidly as he and Penny walked to the science room. Probably he had never learned about his wife’s lover; they were still married, after all. Or else maybe he knew everything, and they had struck a deal. But he certainly had no idea that all these women milling in his midst knew everything. Penny, beside him, didn’t speak. The Ramseys were almost shocking in their lockstep serenity.
So many people seemed to have what they wanted, Roberta thought. So many people quietly took what they needed. I should be Peeps, she was reminded with renewed, angry despair. I shouldn’t be punished. I should at least get to be Peeps, to be part of a hit show, to get to go to a really great job every day and feel the feeling that work can bring you. I could even be one of the lesser puppet characters: Crinkle, or Thistle. Nathaniel shouldn’t keep me out like this. But it was his moment, it was his show, and he had politely told her as much. He wanted to do this without her. They were a team in their marriage, but nowhere else. Roberta watched as the Ramseys walked into a classroom at the end of the hall: Greg held the door open for his wife, his hand on the small of her back as she went inside, her face lifting as she prepared to greet the next teacher.
When the school presentations were over, the Sokolov-Greenacres, the Lamb-Buckners, and the Yips had dinner at Shin-ba, a Japanese restaurant around the corner from the school, where they sat at a round table in the front window. A candle burned in its globe in the center of the table, and everyone was slightly distracted by the clock and by the babysitters, who surely had their own eyes on the clocks at home. After all, this was a school night, a work night. The women turned away from the table briefly to call home on their cell phones. Their parallel, echoing conversations flared up: “Hi honey…” “No, I said nine-thirty, then no more video games.” “All right, you can eat one, but no more than that…. Yes, put her on…. Hello, Sharmila!”
“So how was your winter break?” Wilson Yip asked everyone. “You guys go anywhere good?”
“That feels so long ago already. But nah, we don’t do that kind of thing,” Nathaniel said. “Not our style. We’re shut-ins.”
“But you won’t be that way for long, I bet,” said Karen leadingly, and then Nathaniel appeared unabashed as he spoke about his recent good news and about the development of his upcoming television show. Roberta watched as he revealed himself proudly, in person. Perhaps none of the others could imagine ever wanting to be a puppeteer, of all things, but they could definitely understand what it meant to desire success, and to be successful.
Everyone raised glasses of Suntory beer in celebration of Nuzzle and Peeps, which was “in heavy negotiations,” as Nathaniel told them, his mouth shaping the words almost lustily. He was someone who had never before been “in negotiations” at all. He drank his beer and made a few slightly disingenuous remarks about how no one ever knew whether or not a show would make it past its pilot or whether it would be a hit even if it did. Then he participated in the conversation that Leo initiated, about intellectual property rights as pertaining to puppet characters and whether Nathaniel was adequately represented legally.
“You should call Ned Bertucci at Selker Dean,” Leo said. “They do entertainment law exclusively. I could give you his e-mail.”
If Nathaniel hadn’t had his success, Roberta knew, then he would be sitting at the table in unconnected and beery silence. But now her husband had somehow gotten himself deep inside the private club of professional success; he had said the password, and the thick door had swung open, welcoming him in, and he was in a cool oaken room, sitting stunned but confident in a club chair.
They all talked about a few things that had happened in the news that week. They talked about “the way things were going” in the U.S., and here the conversation became despairing and melancholy. It was like secretly hearing the men sing the folk song “Donna Donna” that night in the woods, their voices reverent as they grieved for the death of the poor calf with the mournful eye.
“I often feel, lately, that we’ve lost control of everything in this country,” Nathaniel said.
“I know, it’s true,” Amy agreed. “It’s hard to think that, because then you have to face up to everything that’s happened. Everything that’s been done to this place.”
“I was so patriotic when I was growing up,” said Leo. “Whenever we would sing the national anthem, I would get sentimental. Now I feel so cynical about it.”
“But if you face up to what’s been done,” said Wilson, “then it’s like waking up from a bad dream—”
“—and the dream’s still going on,” Roberta said. “That’s what you meant, right?”
“Right,” said Wilson.
“Oh well, better have another Suntory, then,” said Nathaniel. “Nothing else to do about it except get shit-faced. Oh, miss!” he pretended to call to the waitress.
There was mild laughter, then some attention was paid to the actual need for refills. Briefly, the men talked to the men, and the women talked to the women. This happened sometimes in the middle of a group meal; the table would suddenly self-select by sex. The men were talking about finances now, while the women dipped down briefly into various subjects: how Dustin Kavanaugh had apparently come out of the closet to his parents this week, announcing that although he was only twelve, he already knew he was gay, and how his mother, Helen, the powerful and selfless charity figure, had embraced him and said if he ever wanted her to spearhead a gay charity, she would, but that meanwhile she and his dad would just love and support him; how Hand-in-Hand Day had indeed been ripped from the school calendar, perhaps forever; how Jake Giffen had needed to use his EpiPen on a field trip to a botanical garden, because his seatmate had eaten a bag of kettle chips cooked in peanut oil; how vermin of some sort—giant hard-shell cockroaches, one version of the story went; weevils, went another—had been discovered among the tubs of mango-chutney chicken salad and quinoa at night at Camarata & Bello, and the store had been shuttered by the Board of Health, much to the unhappiness and secret thrill of its customers, who loved and craved the food but had always felt like hostages to the fuck-you prices; how the mother of Jackson Pershing, whose bond-trader father had been killed in the World Trade Center, would be getting married in a few months to her son’s former science teacher, Mr. Bregman, and how the boy’s entire class was invited to serve as ushers at the wedding.
Wilson Yip heard the edge of the conversation about Jackson Pershing and was drawn back in. The other men came too; dinner conversations had invisible strands, which you held on to and followed. “That’s great about Laura Pershing getting married again,” Wilson said. “I knew her husband. He was a nice guy.”
