The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  Roberta thought about how, back in the first few days after the attacks on the towers, all the restaurants in the city had been packed. No one wanted to stay at home by themselves; she and her friends and their husbands and kids had met up at restaurants for dinner. The kids ate chicken fingers and drank milk from cups with lids and accordion straws, while the parents mostly drank strong drinks and talked and talked. They were pressed together at their tables, all the TVs overhead with their traumatic visuals, everyone joined together in the face of something new and strange. We’re all falling, Roberta had thought, and we’re all afraid.

  The people with jobs, she’d thought, had the relief of the office to go to after 9/11—the comfort of routine, and order, and the thrust of work: its depth, its concentration. Without those elements, you might feel lost and much more frightened. Though, of course, in a work environment you could get trapped in a stairwell; you could die there among the people you worked with instead of at home among the people you loved. Roberta’s daughter, Grace, only one year old on that day, had been too little to understand what was happening, but her son, at three, had been frightened, or at least had absorbed his mother’s fear and reflected it. At home that afternoon, for lack of a better idea, Roberta had gathered whatever she could find among the tubs of beads and pipe cleaners, and had sat down with Harry at the table and begun work on a gigantic crafts project. “Let’s come up with the best project we can think of,” she’d said. “Something really incredible.”

  So they’d decided to create an entire amusement park that after much thought Harry christened Fun Place, and for long periods of time they’d lost themselves in Fun Place, which in Roberta’s imagination existed as the opposite of the smoking charnel house that was now downtown Manhattan. It had carried them through the days and weeks that followed, until Fun Place possessed a Ferris wheel and a carousel and a cotton-candy stand with actual cones of fluff held in the hands of Lego figures. One day they got tired of it, or no longer needed it, and so they stopped work on it. Fun Place, put aside, began a typical trajectory of decomposition, and then it was gone for good. But craft had gotten them through those first uncertain weeks.

  In the restaurant now, the platters of sushi arrived, and everyone quietly admired the theatrical presentation of one another’s food. “So,” Amy said, “you saw the Ramseys tonight?”

  “Yes. Gliding by. They look very much together,” said Karen.

  “The happy couple,” said Roberta.

  “Wait, what’s this?” Nathaniel asked his wife.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “I think,” said Amy, “that everyone’s marriage is strange and private and some kind of secret bargain. And really, in the end, unknowable.”

  “That sounds profound,” said Nathaniel.

  “But I’m serious,” Amy went on. “All marriages are like that.”

  “Not ours,” Wilson Yip said. “Nothing dark or unknown there.”

  “I can confirm that,” said Karen, and she took his hand.

  Roberta, looking up at that moment, saw a figure pause outside the front window, where snow was starting to float down lightly in swaying strokes. It was Geralynn Freund in her big black shearling coat. She peered inside the restaurant like someone who longs to be sitting at a table with friends in candlelight. Suddenly she noticed Roberta, and it was like making eye contact with a feral animal; anxiety raced in both directions. Roberta waved her chopsticks, but Geralynn only smiled briefly, then turned away.

  “Wait, that’s that mother from tonight,” said Leo. “The one who got dizzy.”

  “Right,” said Amy. “Geralynn Freund. You know about her. I’ve told you.”

  “No you haven’t.”

  “Yes, I really have, Leo. More than once.” Amy sounded so irritated at him, almost angry, and everyone at the table noticed.

  “Sorry. I don’t remember.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  Leo abruptly stood up. “We should ask her to join us,” he said.

  Without seeking anyone’s opinion he pulled open the front door, letting the night wind into the small, dark restaurant and making all the candles gutter in synchrony, as if they were on a birthday cake, being blown on unsuccessfully. Everyone at the table watched the surprising pantomime of big Leo and little Geralynn out on the snowy street; Amy looked at her husband as he pointed and gestured, but Geralynn shook her head with regret. Still he would not relent, and finally they all watched as she shrugged, and then he opened the door to bring her inside.

  Someone carried over a chair, and Geralynn sat shyly among the couples. All she ordered was miso soup, and she barely put the small lacquered bowl to her mouth; it was as though she had ordered it simply to warm her hands. They talked about school, and the boys, and a movie that had just gotten good reviews, though the people at the table who had seen it insisted on not spoiling the plot twist for the ones who hadn’t. Then, at one point, Roberta politely said to Geralynn, “So, what’ve you been up to?”

  Geralynn put down her bowl and looked a little hesitant. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve been really busy lately.”

  “With what?” asked Amy.

  “Well, I know I used to see some of you at the gym,” said Geralynn. The women tried to look innocent, as though they weren’t sure they could remember ever having seen her there. “But I stopped going because of my situation,” she added. Again, everyone tried to appear neutral, polite. “And then it occurred to me,” Geralynn went on, “that, you know, there ought to be a special gym where people with eating differences could work out and not feel self-conscious or as if they had to explain their choices to everybody all the time.” She shrugged. “So I started one. I’ve rented a space in SoHo, and I have investors and a client list, and we’re opening in three months. When I started looking into it, I found out that there’s a big, unexploited consumer base of women with eating differences. We’re calling the place SlimGym.” She laughed tightly. “I only hope we don’t get sued by the beef-jerky people.”

  The women were shocked, impressed, a little bewildered; they congratulated Geralynn and told her that this was wonderful news. She gave them more details: Len Goodling, the full-time dad, was one of her principal investors. They had made the deal one afternoon during pick-up at the school, waiting for the boys to appear. They’d gotten to talking that day, and Len, who had apparently made a killing years earlier in cord-blood storage technologies, prompting him to retire at thirty-seven, was looking to invest in something new and also be a bit hands-on.

  Later, after dinner was over, as Roberta and Nathaniel climbed the four flights of stairs to their apartment, Roberta was bothered by how casually Geralynn had used the strange phrase “eating differences.” Uneasily, she knew that Geralynn was one of those people who didn’t really want to be cured, that she seemed to be one of the women who probably logged on to pro-anorexia websites and posted self-righteous messages. Maybe this was actually going to be a so-called pro-ana gym, with members who all longed for their bodies eventually to resemble nothing so much as long twigs of dried beef jerky. Whatever the case, Geralynn seemed in charge, and, oddly, she did not seem lost.

  As Roberta continued up the stairs to her apartment, she and Nathaniel passed a boxed set of cassette tapes called Learn Italian the Maria Tornello Way and a jigsaw puzzle of Big Ben, no doubt missing crucial pieces—a chunk of the London sky, perhaps, as if the atmosphere were a skin that could be punctured. To be anorexic, like Geralynn Freund, she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand this now, for maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version. Roberta had been sitting around with her friends talking about their lives, and sitting with her children for so long now too, and yes, it had been wonderful, yes it had been essential, but now she wanted some of that time back. She wanted to have a roomful of paintings to show for it, even slightly immature and awkward ones like
Brandy Gillop had. She wanted the feeling of propulsion that Brandy possessed.

  She was ashamed of what she had done, or not done, really, to Brandy. The girl e-mailed her from Lorton, South Dakota, a couple of times a week, “just checking in,” she said, or “wondering how things are going.” Roberta was initially supposed to have passed along her slides to Penny Ramsey, although because Penny Ramsey was no longer Amy’s friend, it wasn’t doable. Then Roberta was supposed to have asked around and gotten someone else to send Brandy’s slides to, except this was around the time that Nathaniel got his big break. Roberta had become distracted by Nathaniel and then resentful, and she had stopped dwelling on helping Brandy Gillop. She thought less frequently about helping her, and when she did think about her, it was with mild and unwarranted annoyance. So she had still done nothing with the girl’s slides. They remained in a desktop folder on her computer. To her own mortification, she had done nothing at all for Brandy Gillop after promising her the moon, and she still couldn’t bring herself to write to her now, even to say, “I fucked up,” or “I was negligent,” or “I was jealous because everybody except me seems to get up and do their art and find success, regardless of their circumstances,” or, simply, “I have no excuses. I’ll get moving on this right away.”

  Many people were out there planning and plotting their own futures. Even Geralynn Freund apparently had big—if disturbing—plans. Nathaniel and his agent were on the phone all the time; Nathaniel walked around the apartment with the cordless phone earpiece attached to his head like a businessman, taking notes while he asked questions like, “So what’s their counteroffer? Is there any way we could get a little more at the back end?” Roberta’s resigned husband was now alert and verbose and ambitious. He pushed ahead, demonstrating the notion that work could pave your entire life with meaning. Roberta thought of Nuzzle and Peeps, and she longed to pull them off her husband’s hands, and off Wolf Purdy’s hands too. While the men just stood in incomprehension she would cut the puppets up with a pair of shears, even though those puppets were probably soon going to make it possible for her and her family to live in a great house uptown. If she still didn’t become an artist after they moved there, it would be nobody’s fault but her own.

  Every few days over the next six weeks Brandy Gillop, thinking of the future, e-mailed Roberta, asking her whether the slides had been sent out to anyone yet and then whether for some reason Roberta was angry with her. And then, finally, whether Roberta was in fact still alive. For why would this woman from New York City have shown such a great interest in helping her, only to suddenly become indifferent and disappear? Hello? Brandy would write into the ether. Hello? Hello? Is this still your correct address? Are u there, Roberta? Hello?

  Chapter EIGHTEEN

  Lorton, South Dakota, 2007

  BECAUSE THERE was no day or night inside the casino, Jo Gillop did not know when to get tired. And because she didn’t, she found herself surprisingly alert and in good spirits most of the time. Lots of girls disliked the casino, and in the break room they said that they would rather be anywhere but here. One girl insisted she would rather stand in the boiling sun and pump gas than stand in the cool of this room and hand out rolls of chips, but that was crazy thinking. It was true that the men in their string ties and the old ladies with the buckets of coins that they carried the way fishermen carried chum could be awfully depressing. But the casino was always awake, cranking along with the sound of good cheer, and when you were here, it was easy to forget about everything else in your life.

  So now, on her shift, sitting on her stool behind the window, Jo Gillop forgot about her ex-husband, who paid no child support and never would; Jo had raised Brandy single-handedly for the past ten years. “Like a one-armed bandit,” she had told her friend Ricki, who sat at the next window. Jo forgot about the fact that she had car payments to make and that her mother was deteriorating daily from Alzheimer’s and was going to have to be put into a facility out in Vermillion, and who was going to come up with the money to pay for that? Jo also forgot about the way that Brandy had been cut loose by that woman from New York who had promised to help. She forgot all of this, and she forgot about the fact that the world was getting more and more expensive, not to mention violent. At night, when she came to work at the Kubla Khan Casino, she walked in through the employees’ entrance and put on her red blouse and name tag and sat behind her window with a feeling of relief and anticipation.

  The other girls were so nice. Everyone talked about their love lives: The younger ones told stories from the world of online dating and sex and no-good men, while the older ones, like Jo and Ricki, dispensed practical advice. Jo was done with men. She would have nothing to do with them ever again; it was too bad she wasn’t a lez, she said, making the others laugh, scandalized, because that would have been just fine with her. Even the men who flirted with Jo here in the casino were of no interest to her; she was forty years old, and she didn’t need that anymore. Everything she wanted in life she could get right here; the Kubla Khan was like an entire society. And Brandy was working here at the window on her other side, part-time.

  Brandy had no interest in this place; it wasn’t where she wanted to be, and surely it wasn’t where she would be for very long. She hated the casino, and always said, “Mom, how can you stand it here? Look at these people. It’s like a walking graveyard. Why don’t they just kill themselves now and get it over with?” Jo sometimes had to tell her daughter not to feel superior, but it was the role of young people to be superior. The two Gillops sat side by side on their stools making change, which was so easy because of the new cash registers that were like computers and almost let you sleep as you worked, if that was what you wanted.

  But Jo Gillop didn’t want to be asleep. Her life had been a story of fuckups: She’d gotten pregnant out of high school and married the “father,” the smiling dummy Roy Gillop, who of course had had no fatherly bone in his body, and things had gotten worse from there. So when Brandy got pregnant by that slick and stupid boy Tyler Parvell, Jo had cried and then begged her to go to Sioux Falls to have a procedure, even though Jo was personally sickened at the idea of it. Jo Gillop had had a tough life, and it was still not so hot, but coming to the casino every day was far and away the best part. In this bright and restless world, you were never bored; the men admired you, and the other girls were your companions, and you could always hear the cheerful music, the rough sorting of chips, and, every once in a while, the sudden excitement of coins falling against coins when someone in the distance hit the jackpot.

  Chapter NINETEEN

  THE MOVING VAN was parked on the street in front of The Rivermere at a quarter to eight one morning in early February, with various men in matching red T-shirts swarming it; briefly, there was no way to tell whether the furniture was going to go in or out, and then it became clear. Nearby in the driveway stood a young mother in her thirties in a down vest with a couple of small kids nearby, trying to direct the traffic of their belongings. “Moving out?” Amy asked automatically. The woman nodded. This was the widow in 14H, an ordinary, pale ash blonde with the beginnings of dark roots. What had Amy imagined: that the woman would be dressed in black all these months later, that she’d be wearing a mantilla, that she would wear her grief so openly that anyone could recognize it right away?

  The other mothers in the building had been right; she hadn’t been able to stay here all that long and would probably now have to go somewhere smaller, less expensive, maybe a suburb or town, even briefly staying with a sister or parent. The widow in 14H stood in front of the building on moving day in the way that a husband usually would, trying to deal with the very busy, indifferent movers who spoke only Hebrew. “That box is upside down,” she told them, but no one seemed to hear her. “Joshua,” she called to a child. “Come away from there. You’ll see all your stuff when we get there.”

  “Good luck,” Amy told her. “Wherever you go.” The woman smiled distractedly, nodded, then turned back to the de
ep opening of the enormous truck.

  “That’s the one whose husband died, isn’t it?” asked Mason as he and Amy turned the corner onto the street.

  “I think so.”

  The building, she had heard one of the other mothers say in the elevator last week, now had its own defibrillator, which of course would make the rent go up even more, the mother had added.

  “Maybe she’s getting remarried,” said Mason. “Like Jackson Pershing’s mother.”

  “I doubt it, honey. It’s kind of soon.”

  “You would never get remarried, right?” he asked. For him there was only Amy and Leo, forever and ever, bound into marriage and family and immortality. Then, when she said nothing, he said, a little less surely, and almost to himself, “I know you wouldn’t.”

  A month had gone by since Amy had found Leo’s faked receipts, and still she had not told him she’d seen them. One day, a few weeks earlier, he had taken them from his desk. She’d let the silences between them lengthen more than usual, but it was unclear to her if he even knew this. Amy hadn’t been able to stand Greg Ramsey for his insistence upon grabbing everything in sight, when really, as Karen had implied once, men like Greg were just doing what they were meant to do. But Leo had never seemed to have that kind of arrogance; he was decent, a worker bee, devoted to his family, and yet in an accidental moment in the study she had seen evidence of another part of him that she’d somehow never noticed before.

  Tonight, though, there would be oppressive, enforced togetherness for Amy and Leo at the Kenley Shuber dinner-dance at the Waldorf-Astoria. Once upon a time, when she and Leo were both lawyers at the firm, this had been an annual event she actually looked forward to, if only because they got to put on evening clothes and drink a better quality of wine than they were used to. Then, when they went home at the end of the evening, she and Leo would undress and lie in bed, deconstructing what the other lawyers had said and how everyone had looked. They would make fun of a few of the overtly sucking-up associates, and Amy would be critical of a couple of the wives who had seemed, from the vantage point of one’s late twenties, nice but dull.