by Meg Wolitzer
He moved close against her and she could feel the convexity of his stomach. He was right, it was bigger than usual. “I could help you lose weight,” Amy offered.
“Thank you.” He kissed her head. “If it works,” said Leo, “and I stop hating my physical self so much, I think we can resume as planned.”
“So you’re not thinking of having an affair with Corinna Berry?”
“Corinna Berry is sleeping with Lisa Silvestri.”
“Lisa? Really?” She was amazed at this secret shift. Leo nodded. But then Amy realized that she hadn’t received one of those evening calls from Lisa recently, and she also remembered how Lisa had sat watching Leo dance with Corinna tonight. Lisa, she understood now, had not been watching Leo at all.
“But even if that weren’t the case,” Leo said, “of course I wouldn’t sleep with her. Why, would you have an affair? You mean you’re like Penny Ramsey?”
“No,” said Amy hotly. “I am not.”
“Good,” said Leo, and he pulled her on top of him in the way that he sometimes used to, so that at first she seemed as light and flexible as a paper airplane, and then, as she arranged herself on him, she became heavier, forceful, weighting him down.
Something would happen; it was imperative that it happen now, if only to create a line of demarcation between not-sex and sex. They were both full of food and drink, and the air seemed kitcheny, overly warm. She could smell wine on him and lifting off herself too, and it was as though they belonged together in their slightly ruined and filled-up state. As a teenaged girl, Amy had loved boys who were similar to her: unthreatening, slight, and narrow; she could imagine kissing them forever. She’d eventually exchanged all of that, but she’d never known she would exchange it for a middle-aged man who lay helpless, his body part bear, part man, part air mattress. She lay on him softly, and he kissed her in the full way he did back when they were young coworkers, co-conspirators. He kissed her without distraction but with the concentration that was required now in order to show that you were not distracted. This was middle-aged sex, married sex. Maybe it wasn’t the last hurrah of the body. There would be more of those, but how misguided they’d been to think that what had come before would last for the duration.
In the middle of your life you should have as much sex as you could, Amy Lamb knew, and do it now, don’t wait. It was an emergency disguised as a luxury. Leo kissed her faster now, and the wolfish sounds he made were like the ones he sometimes made in his sleep, dreaming. She buried her mouth under his arm, where the pheromones situated among the soft wires of hair inexplicably drew her in.
Love was stronger than reluctance, or at least you had to make it be. You had to do everything you could to return the husband to the wife, and the wife to the husband; to pull her on top of him with mouths open and the door locked, and a child sleeping somewhere on the other side of it. Nothing was connected anymore to the urgency of young love or to the possibility of sex flowering into family. Leo did what he knew she wanted him to do, his head lowering between her legs in the way a husband recalls what a wife likes, and then does it, bringing her those flowers or that certain kind of chocolate. She got up on her elbows and watched him briefly.
They had given up on sex in the same way they had partly given up on marriage, but here it was again in all its shifting weight and preferences. Amy lay back. She held on to his hair, as she had sometimes done in such a moment over the years. “I’ll need Rogaine,” he had once said, early on, after she had pulled so hard that he had felt a sickening follicular tug. But of course his hair had stayed intact. Even his retired father had a full head of hair, though its shoeblack color had turned to gray. Amy held fast to Leo’s hair, and she thought how tenacious they both were. “I’m going to come!” she said in a slightly operatic voice, as though he wouldn’t know this was the case. He always knew, just as she knew the same about him a few moments later. It was as if, in sex, they were forever describing all the action to a third party who could not see or feel anything. For some unknown and perhaps evolutionary reason, they often announced themselves in this primitive and warning way.
Then, at the end, they were both thirsty; he padded out to bring them water, knowing the path through the apartment in the darkness. The cup he brought her was an old plastic one that had belonged to Mason years ago. Amy saw the words Ahoy, Mateys, which were now half worn off like a rub-on tattoo. This had been married sex, followed by a drink from the old, fading chalice of their little boy, whose own essence was even now in his sleep rubbing off and changing, and was no longer what it had been. Why Mommy crying? Mason had asked her when he was very little.
Husband and wife lay in their bed high up in The Rivermere in the middle of the night, their party clothes still cobwebbing the two chairs in the room. It was a weeknight, much too late for them to be awake, but they were awake anyway. The plastic cup was warm from the dishwasher, but the water they drank was cold and delicious.
SPRING ARRIVED, though the snow stayed on the ground longer than it should have, and the streets of the city were strategically spread with puddles and pools. The boys jumped into them, annoying their mothers, and an old woman in The Rivermere skidded on the curb outside the building and broke her hip. Slowly the days lengthened and lightened.
Out in Holly Hills, the township awakened into the new season. The air was highly pollinated, and watery-eyed mothers watched their children run around the backyards and up and down the wide streets. Jacob’s Path exhibited its particular beauty, and the realtors cruised through the neighborhoods with potential buyers, offering patter and pointing. All the lawns had been tended and the bushes sculpted, and Donald took Nadia around their property with a pair of electric clippers, letting her try them herself. “She’ll cut her hand off,” Jill said as she watched them go. “She can’t use electric clippers.”
“She’ll be fine,” said Donald with certainty, not even looking back. Nadia ran ahead of him into the grass.
In May, Nadia performed at a small recital in the city that included the voice students of Anna Milofsky. It was held on a Saturday in a borrowed classroom at the Juilliard School. The other students were all teenagers: boys in jacket and tie, and lithe girls in strapless dresses, their hair drawn back off their emerging women’s faces. Nadia wore a sashed green velvet dress that she had chosen herself at a children’s store in the Holly Hills Shopping Plaza, though her mother was slightly perplexed by the choice, the insistence on green, until Nadia started to sing the unannounced second of two songs:
“Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously.
For I have loved you well and long,
Delighting in your company.
Greensleeves was all my joy,
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my lady Greensleeves.”
Her voice was slightly tremulous and too small in the drafty classroom, but her pleasure at singing was transparent to everyone listening, and this was obviously the most persuasive reason for lessons. Donald lowered his camera and forgot to take pictures; he and Jill were made submissive before their daughter.
Later that night, after a celebration dinner at a Szechuan restaurant on the West Side that they used to love, they got into the family van and began to drive home. Nadia was already overwound and sleepy, and her head fell against the seat, her hand still holding the program from the recital, now curled. In darkness the family left the city that had once belonged to them, and on the highway the buildings receded like objects being discarded one by one. Goodbye, Chrysler Building, Jill Hamlin thought; goodbye, Citicorp Center; goodbye, Empire State Building. Goodbye, unmentionable ghosts of those once-unloved towers, made lovable in their loss.
When they had first moved to Holly Hills and Jill had feared she’d made a mistake, Amy had said to her, “Think of this as a specific part of your life. It doesn’t have to be forever. Anyway, who can think in terms of foreve
r? Think of it as one chapter in a biography written about you: Chapter Eight—Jill Hamlin: The Suburban Years.”
This was what Jill thought of now in the car, for these were the suburban years. The city was all light and silhouette; Holly Hills even at Christmas could never compete with the massive effect. But the city also seemed both crazily inhuman and human. How could people live like that, on top of one another, always running, so competitive, always looking toward the next thing? And how could people live any other way, so separate and alone in their individual houses and delineated, proud plots of land? It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.
One day recently, Jill’s neighbor Alice Ettinger had invited her to come watch a delivery at the local hospital, and Jill, though squeamish about the blood and the pain and the drama of the experience, had accepted. She thought of herself as she looked at the young, frightened woman in labor on the half-cranked bed, shivering in a gown peppered with teddy bear icons, an epidural taped to the white flesh of her back, preparing herself for the improbable task. This was what I never got to do, Jill thought, and she watched tensely as that woman pushed and pushed the baby out into the suburbs and the world.
Holly Hills, Jill announced to Donald one day, was not hell. There was no holly, and there weren’t many hills, but still, Holly Hills is not hell. Say it five times fast. With Nadia more involved in school, Jill began to get to know a few other local mothers. They started to call the house, and slowly Jill unfurled. She never made friends with Sharon Gregorius and that group of women who had been involved with Wuv Cards, though, oddly, that business venture would eventually become a great success. Six months from now, the four mothers who had been at that first, stressful planning luncheon would appear on the Home Shopping Network holding up their greeting cards, and the orders, astonishingly, would rapidly come in.
What struck Jill mostly about life here was that she did not compare it with life in the city as frequently as she used to. The city seemed as if it no longer required her presence, the way that once, in her human arrogance, she had felt it did. The buildings would stay, God willing. The lights would blur together, and the subway below would make it all tremble like glassware on a shelf. Jill and her family would be gone for a long time, perhaps for good, though they would come back to visit frequently. There were yoga classes, and lunches with Amy. She and Amy might never live in the same place again, she knew, until they were old and their husbands were dead and they shared a cottage somewhere by the sea. Once a week after school now, Jill took Nadia on the train to sing for Anna Milofsky in a room at the music school. Jill sat outside in the hallway, a place where mothers always sat.
Sometimes she read a history book; other times she looked over her daughter’s homework or made notes with a stylus on her BlackBerry about a new speech therapist she had meant to call for Nadia or a math tutor who she had heard was wonderful. Sometimes she was busy and engaged, and other times she was so tired she immediately fell asleep. Once, during a fifteen-minute nap in the middle of Nadia’s voice lesson, Jill dreamed that she was a girl again herself, playing field hockey at the Pouncey School, flying across the field with her stick in hand, heading toward something in the distance that she couldn’t yet see.
In the mail one day, Jill received a letter from Pouncey inviting her to come to the seventy-fifth reunion of all the past winners of the Vivian Swope Prize, given to “A Graduating Senior Who Demonstrates the Most Promise.” She accepted, and though Donald thought it would be a great weekend trip for all three of them, after thinking about it she said no, she thought she might want to go by herself.
There in New Hampshire on a Saturday afternoon at the beginning of June, all the promising girls, long turned into women, gathered on the green. The afternoon was clear, just as it was in their memories of school, but now the air had a kind of loamy, almost fecal tang to it, which was not what they remembered. Memory is snobby, a magnet picking up only the choicest filings: sunlight, breeze, ageless buildings, the brick scrubbed and woolly with ivy. The day was beautiful, but still it smelled embarrassing in a way, as though they themselves were responsible. In fact, a nearby wheelbarrow of fertilizer was the locus of that smell. A stranger couldn’t know and might not have cared that once, long ago, these women had trod all over this lawn.
Their footsteps had been much lighter then. Their feet had been smaller, narrower, and not yet swelled from years and years of bad but irresistible shoes and from the onslaught of pregnancies, after which most women shoot up one whole shoe size. The actual shoes had been different over time too: penny loafers, pumps, Pappagallos, buffalo sandals, and briefly those anvil-shaped, cloddish things called Earth Shoes, and then, eventually, penny loafers again, because most things in the world are circular, even footwear.
If only being young traveled such a circular route. If only a girl, practically cracking apart with promise, could grow up and live her life, feeling a healthy supply of pleasure and a modest amount of disappointment and then, just when it seems as though it hadn’t been worth it—just when she begins to inhabit a kind of dour existential awareness—she becomes young once more. Miraculously, she becomes as clean and hopeful as the pennies she once worked into the slots of her shoes.
The women on the grass would never again be girls, but their sense of girl life, at least here at the Pouncey School in Weyburn, New Hampshire, on the first weekend in June, was vivid, fertilized. They had come from various parts of the country to be here, taking smallish planes to the airport or traveling by car or bus from the cities and suburbs and occasional rural towns in which they lived. They had circled this date on their calendar months earlier, though each of them had other upcoming appointments that were more pressing: MAMMOGRAM: 10:15 (NO DEODORANT OR BABY POWDER), or BOOK GROUP. FIRST 320 PAGES OF SWANN’S WAY. The weekend visit to Pouncey, however, was a beacon in the future all spring. Rains fell in different regions of the country. Spouses fought. Children turned their eyes to whichever screens persuasively glowed, and the persuasion was always similar, anywhere in America.
The Swope winners waited with anticipation to return to the place where they had been young and promising and had been given a serious education without limits, and were told to soar, and where once they had never even heard of a mammogram—had thought it was, maybe, like a telegram? Where once the skin of their body had encased very little fat but had held mostly the collection of those hanging bags that were your organs, as pink and bright as party balloons that no one would ever see.
Jill had driven six hours north on June 3 and had parked in the faculty and visitors’ lot, right by the new gym, which she vaguely remembered had been built several years earlier after an aggressive capital campaign. Back in the 1980s, Jill Hamlin’s era, the girls had gone to ballet class in a small gym with a dark wooden floor and, weather permitting, had played field hockey out on this very lawn. Someone was always spray-painting orange goal lines on the grass, and yet the grass itself had lived to tell the tale.
The gathered group of Vivian Swope winners gave off no particular impression, as they were of such different ages. The older ones looked a bit alike; there was that waist thickening and the dulling of the hair, which a good salon could spin into gold. The youngest ones, graduates from the late ’90s and even later, looked exceptionally chic and might have been mistaken for current Pouncey students, the ones from Belgium or Dubai whose parents had sent them across oceans with steamer trunks to study here at old Pounce. They exchanged business cards, and probably some kind of networking took place, and it was highly useful, though really, when women networked with one another, they knew that elsewhere, men were doing this same thing and that the men’s networking would likely lead to greater amounts of money and more access.
“Margie Allenberg, Naples, Florida, class of ’63,” a thin, tan, tennisy woman said, walking up to Jill with an outstretched hand. The women from all the different eras exchanged names and geographical
locations and also, because it actually seemed appropriate in this context, asked one another what they “did,” and what they had done with their lives. What they had done with all that promise. One was a vice president in charge of marketing for a hotel chain; one was a physician with the U.S. Navy; another taught anthropology at the University of Michigan; and several of the very oldest ones said that they were retired teachers or librarians, or that they were homemakers. A woman from the class of ’92 said she was a dominatrix and then began to laugh shrilly and said she was just kidding, she really designed sportswear. One of the women close to Jill’s age was a veterinarian, one worked part-time, and another said that she was right now between careers.
Jill, when asked, told another woman, “Actually, I’m basically a shadow-mother.”
“Pardon?”
“My daughter has some learning issues. We had to hire a shadow-teacher for her at school, but I think I’m sort of a shadow-mother. I have to be around a lot, arranging things, and so, you know, I’m there.”
Jill took out a photograph of Nadia, and the woman said how pretty she was. Jill would be a shadow-mother for a couple of years more, she knew. Eventually she and Nadia would each have to move on, but that would be a while from now. Jill imagined going into the storage area in the furnished basement of their house, finding the box marked “Course wk., NYU,” and thinking about what it would be like to rewrite her dissertation after all this time and maybe try to publish it as a nonacademic book, as Donald had once suggested. There was still a bottomless readership for books that had anything to do with the Civil War. The basic ideas in the dissertation were sound, if underdeveloped. She would have to open up the writing, to see where it would go if she didn’t have a thesis committee looking over her shoulder. Was the dissertation itself corroded into bread crumbs or something resembling human remains? In all likelihood it was still there, intact. She would take a look at it one day when she worked up the nerve.
