by Meg Wolitzer
Amy and Leo now took turns taking Mason to school in the morning. Leo disliked having to skip the gym every other day, and he worried that he was arriving at his desk far too late, but he found that it wasn’t a tragedy and that his clients would manage if he arrived at a more reasonable hour. Amy still looked forward to the days when she took Mason to school; she had been doing it for so long that it had become part of what she expected. Sometimes the mornings were hectic and unpleasant. She had a meeting with a client first thing and could not afford to be late, yet she couldn’t get Mason but of bed.
“DO YOU KNOW HOW IMPORTANT IT IS THAT YOU GET UP RIGHT NOW?” she would cry to him, but maddeningly there would be no answer.
Sometimes, he simply could not find whatever book he was reading; it was certainly not one of the Blindman series anymore. The long novels of Rachel Millar had finally been abandoned in favor of another series, by an Englishman named Sebastian Sunderland, whose Starfish Island trilogy involved an underwater cave populated by creatures who had the ability to regrow severed limbs at will and breathe perfectly in the silent depths of the ocean. Blindman and the Moorchaser: Book the Third had been placed on a high shelf in Mason’s room; he would likely never look at it again until the day when he became a father reading to his own child.
One morning when they were about to leave the apartment for school and then for work, Amy could not find her briefcase. “Oh God, where is it?” she repeated. “Where did I leave it? Oh, this is bad.”
“What’s going to happen, you’ll be marked unprepared?” Mason said.
“I’m serious; it’s important.”
Mason produced his electronic object finder, which, she had recently learned, he had programmed to include his mother’s most essential belongings too, ever since she had gone back to work. He pressed a code into the plastic device, and they both waited. Momentarily there came a corresponding, faraway, android voice. Your-brief-case-is-o-ver-here, it said, and she and Mason ran through the apartment in search of the sound.
There, in the bedroom, under a pile of silky clothes that she had worn yesterday and had neglected to put away, so tired was she last night, was her briefcase, with the brown leather surface and the golden metal clasp that made a gratifying noise when the nub was pressed into its groove.
Your-brief-case-is-o-ver-here, the object finder repeated, and she picked up the briefcase and opened it, checking the contents, seeing that all the papers were there, all the directions for the day. Your-life-is-fi-nite, the object finder told her. No-one-knows-a-ny-thing. But-do-not-stop. Do-not-fal-ter. Do-not-wait. It-is-late-in-the-day-but-I-think-there-may-still-be-time.
ON THE AFTERNOON that Amy deposited her first, fairly modest paycheck, she went into a small bookstore near her office and bought Leo a copy of The Magic Mountain. Slowly, over the weeks, she began to notice that the red satin bookmark moved from page to page like a hand on a clock, collecting heft behind it. Leo was tired at night, but she watched him make his way through the book she had bought him. He had lost a little weight, but particularly with his reading glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose, he did look like his father. But she looked like her mother, and there were worse fates than that.
Penny Ramsey remained mostly an absence. On the rare occasions when Amy saw her on the street, Penny was with Holden or her teenaged daughters, and once she was with Greg. Or else Amy was with Mason, and the two women simply smiled and said hi, how are you; how are the kids; how’s school going for them; how’s the museum; I hear you’ve started at a law firm—is it going well? And then each of them barely waited for the answer. But always Amy imagined that one day she would see Penny alone, and she would say something to her of significance. It had been over a year now, yet that still hadn’t happened.
Could you tell me something, please, Amy would ask: Was our friendship real back then? Did you actually even like me at all? Did you love Ian? Did you love your husband? Do you love him now? Wasn’t that whole thing crazy? Do you even know what became of Ian, finally?
Amy had lost track of Ian Janeway; he’d never replied to her letter, not that she’d expected him to. Sometimes she imagined him in London, still recovering and obsessive and hopelessly lost, unsteadily making his way up the stone stairs of the National Gallery assisted by two metal canes, each step sending jags of pain humming through the thirty-three vertebrae of his spine.
As it would turn out, Amy Lamb saw Penny Ramsey alone one day at the end of that spring. It was during the evening rush hour in the subway below Penn Station. Amy was walking quickly in a crowd toward the trains after work, when she glanced into one of those brightly lit, nonfat frozen-dessert stands to which women are often drawn, needing a vague trace of sweetness at the end of the day. Penny Ramsey was perched on a stool in the tiny space, taking a few hurried spoonfuls of milk, sugar, chemicals, and air from a cup. A briefcase and a good, candied-looking pocketbook were at her feet, and in her left hand was a sheaf of slides that she was holding up to the light.
Amy would have said something to her; it was all so long ago already, and neither of them thought about it much, and she wasn’t angry with Penny anymore, and it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But Penny, she could see, was working. She was working even now, after hours, sitting at a frozen-dessert stand, because work often expanded and lapped over the edges of anyone’s day. Penny was thinking about something that had nothing to do with Amy or Ian or being a friend or being in love or walking away from her injured, overexcited lover. Actually, she was thinking about mid-nineteenth-century bromine daguerreotypes, and whether she ought to build an entire exhibition around them at the museum, and Amy felt it was only right to leave her alone. She watched as Penny Ramsey looked and looked at those slides in a long moment of concentration. Then Penny dropped her cup into the trash, picked up her briefcase and pocketbook, and slipped off among the crowd of people heading for all the different trains that flowed like separate rivers from this single station.
IN THE GOLDEN HORN on a Monday morning at the very end of the school year, the owner, Adnan Veysel, said to a waiter, “So where have the ladies in the back been? I don’t see them very often.” The waiter, young, uninterested, shrugged and proceeded to spray a table with blue liquid from a bottle, then wipe it away and place buntings of napkins and silverware on its surface.
“Maybe they went to another place,” the owner said in answer to his own question. He had noticed that the back booth was less frequently full in the mornings at the start of the school day, or at least that the women who came and sat here lately were not the same ones he had been seeing for years. He saw some younger ones these days, with baby carriages and strollers. Their voices often sounded excited, and they had so much equipment that they practically decorated the booth with it. Over time he would probably start to forget about the regulars; this new crowd would become the new regulars.
But now, though, he still thought about the women who until recently had come here most mornings. He had never known any of their names, and he saw them only briefly when they first walked in, and then perhaps from above, if the place was particularly busy and he ended up bringing them their water glasses or even their orders. He recalled looking down at the tops of their heads and the parts in their hair as they sat and he stood. He thought of them as the ordinary-looking brown-haired one who always smiled at him right away; the very tall and pretty blonde one—she’d already stopped coming here so much earlier, but he still remembered her; the slightly thick-built one with the nose; and the Asian one, who always figured out the bill. Different women had joined them from time to time, but it was the four originals who no longer came very often.
He might see one of them sometimes, or maybe another, but they didn’t appear consistently anymore, or in a group. In the past they had always lingered after the breakfast rush. They overtipped the waiters, he’d noticed, leaving amounts of money that seemed to have nothing to do with how much food they had actually ordered.
But as he thought
about it now, he decided that he could not believe they had gone somewhere new; it just didn’t seem like something they would do. He imagined that they felt a kind of loyalty toward the Golden Horn, as if it were their school or their house of worship, and that this feeling had held them in place over such a long stretch of time. For his own reasons he was glad that it had. But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to many people for their generosity, advice, and good conversation. These include my mother, Hilma Wolitzer, my friend Deborah Copaken Kogan, who has been so smart and encouraging, and Stacy Schiff, Cathleen Schine, Martha Parker, Erin Cox, and Grey Hirschfeld. Many thanks to my amazing agent, Suzanne Gluck, and to my wonderful editor, Sarah McGrath. Finally, my gratitude goes to my family: my loving sons, Gabriel and Charlie, and my husband, Richard Panek, for all his essential help.
