“I don’t know,” said Jane. “But I think I’ll only have weeks. I mean, after this unintended vacation—”
“This,” said Lillian, “is not a vacation.”
“No,” agreed Jane. “No, it certainly isn’t.”
“You know,” said Lillian slowly. “I read an article that said that women preselect careers that will allow them flexibility to care for their children. They don’t realize they’re doing it, but they do. So that when they eventually give up the jobs it’s no big deal.”
“I read that article too,” said Jane. “But not all women. Not me.”
“Of course not all women,” said Lillian. “Lots of doctors don’t. And lawyers. And politicians. And not you. But lots do.”
“Did you?”
“I did, I think. Without knowing it. Isn’t that strange? I wasn’t even thinking about children at the time, when I went into PR, but in a way, subconsciously or something, maybe I was. Or society was, on my behalf.”
“Society?”
“Yeah. I think maybe I was steered in a direction where I’d be earning less than my husband so that it would be no question that if one of us were to give up a job it would be me.”
“Really?”
“Really. I think so. And the thing is.”
“What?” Jane sat up straighter, and shifted the pillows behind her back.
“I was good at my job.”
“I’m sure you were.”
“No, really. I was good at it. I was organized, and I never missed a deadline, and I wrote really good press releases, and I could talk to journalists—”
“And did you love it?”
“Love it? No. I wouldn’t say that.”
“I love mine,” said Jane.
“Do you?”
“I do. I’m happiest when I’m there.”
Lillian was silent, contemplating this.
“I mean, usually. And now, there’s a lot of crap going on, and I hate not being there. I’m in such a panic, stuck here. I can’t stand it.” Jane stirred in the bed. She took a sip from the water glass.
“I know,” said Lillian. “But you have to be here. There’s no other option.”
“I know,” said Jane. “But the people I work with… I mean there’s some very heavy stuff going on, very heavy. It’s a big deal. And I need to be there.”
“But you’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“And the minute that baby comes out, that’s all that will matter.”
“Maybe,” whispered Jane, looking down. “But maybe not. Who can say?”
They were silent for a moment. Then Jane spoke. “And now? Do you miss it?”
Lillian sighed. “I don’t know. Yes, some of it. I miss the order of it, and the satisfaction of completing something, and having someone tell me I did a good job. I miss having deadlines. But missing it doesn’t seem… it doesn’t seem to be the point anymore.”
“You could go back.” Jane set the water glass carefully on the coaster.
“Could I?”
“Of course. Why couldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I’m… rusty. I’m out of practice. And if I were to go back, someone else would have to take care of the things I take care of now. The children and the shopping and the laundry—”
“You could hire someone. Tom could help. If you go back to him.”
“I thought you think I shouldn’t.”
Jane shrugged. “I do think you shouldn’t. But I think you will.”
“You think so? I don’t know. And if I do, well. That’s not what Tom signed up for.”
“But is it what you signed up for?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I signed up for. I just know where I am.”
Jane said abruptly, as though she’d been holding onto the thought for a long time and had finally decided to set it loose into the atmosphere, “Stephen’s going to stay home with the baby.”
“Stephen?” Lillian laughed. “Our Stephen? A stay-at-home dad?”
“Yes,” said Jane stiffly. “Is that a surprise?”
“It is,” said Lillian. “I just can’t picture it. The diapers and the bottles and the wrestling with the stroller—”
“But why?” persisted Jane. “Why can’t you picture it?”
“Because, well… because it’s Stephen.”
Jane said, with a pained look, “Why is it, in this day and age, that you would react like that? When if I said I was quitting my job you’d hardly blink? I’m the one who got an advanced degree. I’m the one who makes all the money. I’m the one who’s up at two in the morning, answering e-mails from Asia. Not Stephen. He sleeps like a goddamn baby himself. But I’m awake, working. Me.”
“I don’t know,” said Lillian slowly. “It’s just so hard to imagine. Stephen, and a tiny baby, alone all day.”
“But me and a tiny baby alone all day, you can imagine that?”
“I don’t know,” said Lillian. “Better, I guess.” She looked at Jane. “Well, I don’t know.”
“But it’s ridiculous even to question it! My salary is four times his.”
Lillian considered this. “When you put it that way—”
“Right,” said Jane. “When you put it into monetary terms it becomes a whole lot more clear.”
They were both silent for a moment. Finally Lillian said, “Jane? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No,” said Jane. “I know you didn’t. But that’s just the thing. Nobody means to judge like that. But they do.”
“I know.”
“Why? It’s 2008, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know,” said Lillian. “I don’t know. It isn’t how it should be, but—”
“But it’s how it is.”
Lillian shrugged. “Sort of, yes. Sort of, it’s how it is.” She put her hands to the top of her chest and said, reluctantly, “I’ve got to go down. The little prince is going to need to eat soon. I’m filling up.”
“Okay,” said Jane. “Thanks for the company.”
“Sure.”
“No, really,” said Jane. “I mean it. Thanks.” Her head dipped down. Lillian could see that her hair color needed to be redone. This tiny revelation made her feel suddenly tender toward Jane. It seemed to reveal a chink in the other woman’s armor; it represented a new set of vulnerabilities that it had never occurred to Lillian that Jane might have. But here Jane was, stuck in bed in the room where Lillian had grown up, subject, like all women in late stages of pregnancy, to the whims of nature and biology.
“Lillian?”
Lillian turned from the doorway. “Yes.”
“I’m—”
“What?”
“Never mind—”
“What?”
“You’ve got to feed the baby.”
“No, go ahead.” Lillian paused in the doorway. “He’s not even crying yet. Believe me, if he needed to be fed right this second I’d know it. We’d all know it. He doesn’t hold anything back.”
“That must be strange,” said Jane. “Is it?”
“Nursing?”
Jane nodded.
Lillian looked briefly to the ceiling. “It is, at first. It’s horrible, at first, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy because they’re lying. It’s not easy for anyone the first time. But after—”
“After what?” said Jane eagerly.
“After you get used to it, well.” Lillian paused, and in the mirror over the dresser she could see herself beginning to smile. “There’s something amazing about it. Something indescribable.”
“Try. Try to describe it.”
“I can’t, that’s the thing. But it’s… it’s very natural, and satisfying.”
“Satisfying, how?”
“Well. You’ve got this little helpless creature in front of you, and you’re the reason it’s alive, and if the whole world went away and if it was just you and him you’d be able to keep him alive. Only you. It’s ridiculously powerful.”
; On the television, the closing credits were rolling. Oprah was sitting on the beige couch next to the parents of the sextuplets, leaning so far forward toward them that she was practically in a crouch. “Wow,” Jane said soberly. “That sounds like something.”
“It is,” said Lillian dreamily. “It’s otherworldly.”
“God, I’m unprepared!” Jane beat the sheet lightly with her open palm. “And I really don’t like to be unprepared. Preparation is my thing, I’m always prepared. I thought I’d have all this time at home, to get ready.”
“Jane,” said Lillian fiercely, sitting back down on the bed. She felt she needed to make things right with Jane. From downstairs, she heard the baby wail.
“Go,” said Jane, nodding toward the door.
“Mom’ll get him, for a minute. Listen, Jane, you’re as prepared as anyone, you and Stephen.”
“But—”
“But nothing.”
“But you must have been more prepared than I am. Look at you! You’re so good at it. At being a mother.”
Lillian grunted. “You must be losing your mind, shut up here all day long like a prisoner.”
Jane pointed the remote control toward the television, and the screen went black. “You are, though. You’re really good. So… I don’t know. Together.”
“Together?”
“Absolutely. You know what you’re doing.” Jane was looking down at her lap. Impulsively, Lillian took one of Jane’s hands. It was small and pale, and the nails were filed neatly—short, the way Lillian imagined the nails of a pianist or a doctor would look. She expected Jane to pull away, but she didn’t, and they sat there companionably for several seconds.
“I don’t,” Lillian said finally. “I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m doing.”
“But—”
“No, not the faintest idea. I’m making it up as I go along. Sometimes I get so angry—”
“Everyone gets angry.”
“I don’t know,” said Lillian. She squeezed Jane’s hand once and let it go. “Do they?”
Jane nodded, and looked at her computer. “I get angry, at work, when things don’t go the way I want them to.”
“You do?”
“So angry. When people don’t do what’s expected of them. Nothing makes me more angry than that. You can’t imagine the reputation I have, with some people.”
“And does that bother you?”
“Not really.” Jane shrugged. “Not at all, actually. I think it’s a necessary part of doing business, of being as exacting as you need to be.”
Lillian sighed. “I don’t know. It’s an awful feeling, to lose your temper with your own children. You’ll see one day, I guess. Everyone does. I mean just the sensory overload. Sometimes it’s too much. You can’t keep your sanity.”
Jane smiled. “You make it look easy.”
“I’ve got you fooled, that’s all. That’s what most parents do. We’re all fooling, most of the time. You’ll see. But I’m scaring you. I don’t mean to scare you.”
Jane sat up and cleared her throat. “That’s okay. Not much scares me, usually.”
“Yeah.”
“But this does.”
The wail rose.
“Lillian!” called Ginny.
“Upstairs!”
“You come down right now and feed this poor baby! He’s chewing his fist off.”
Lillian rolled her eyes at Jane. “Gotta go,” she said.
“Okay,” said Jane. “Maybe I’ll try to take a little nap.” She leaned back on the pillow and closed her eyes.
“Jane,” said Lillian. “It’s going to be fine, you know it’s all going to be fine.”
Lillian closed the door behind her and stood outside for a moment, listening to the ding ding of the laptop coming to life and then to the furious tapping on the keyboard. This was no nap, and she could almost see Jane’s brain turning on, the synapses lighting up, carrying all that important, impenetrable information from one place to the next. She felt a little bit of envy at that, but it didn’t last long, because Philip’s cry had gone from needy to hysterical, and, like most of her thoughts these days, the envy, and the conversation that precipitated it, vanished quickly, until, by the time she had relieved Ginny of Philip—who was red in the face, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open—it was entirely gone.
AUGUST
William did not typically do laundry on his own, but he was down to his final pair of underwear, and Ginny had gone to the Essex outlets with Lillian and Rachel and the kids. Instead of waiting to ask her about it he decided to gather up a lump of clothes from the dirty clothes hamper.
He put the clothes in, mixing lights and darks in a haphazard manner that was somehow satisfying. He added what he thought was the correct amount of detergent. He was on his way up the basement stairs when the strange noise began. It sounded, to William, rather like the noise a man would make dying on the battlefield in some ancient war before modern weaponry was invented: all hisses and gurgles.
He returned to the basement and stood in front of the machine, watching it. As he watched, it seemed to give a shudder of resignation or despair and then stopped working altogether.
“Jesus Christ,” he said aloud. He kicked the machine tentatively, the way one might kick the fender of a car one was considering buying, and stepped back for a moment. Nothing. He crouched as low as his protesting quadriceps would allow him to crouch and inspected the cement floor for signs of water damage. Nothing. He unplugged the machine from the wall, plugged it back in, and pressed all the buttons he had pressed already. Nothing, nothing, nothing. “Forget it,” he told the washing machine. “Just forget the whole thing.”
Going up the stairs, he took a childish pleasure in stomping his feet as loudly as he could. Standing in the center of the kitchen, he looked around. The kitchen was not up to Ginny’s usual standards. It was not, he thought, even close. In the sink sat a haphazard pile of cereal bowls, some with errant Cheerios floating in watery milk.
He opened the dishwasher to put them in, but the dishwasher had been run but not unloaded. He thought about unloading it, but to do that he would first need to clean off the counter above the dishwasher, which was sticky with a hexagon of something that was possibly, but not definitely, orange juice.
He looked in the sink for the sponge and found it crushed under the cereal bowls, like the victim of a terrible car wreck. The sponge was cold, and suspiciously sticky itself, and he decided to look on the shelves in the basement where Ginny kept cleaning supplies to see if an extra sponge might be found there.
Walking across the room from the sink to the table, his foot kicked a princess-themed sippy cup and sent it skittering under the counter. He bent to pick it up and knocked his head on the edge of the counter.
“This,” he said to nobody, “is absolutely absurd.”
He left the kitchen mess and went in search of the paper, then discovered that it had never been collected from the driveway. He retrieved it and moved toward the den to sit and read.
In the den he found the pullout couch unmade, sheets and a white blanket sitting in a hump in the middle of it. There was a pile of Olivia’s toys in each corner of the room, as though they had been dispersed north, south, east, and west on purpose, and as he crossed the room to reach his recliner one of the toys—which he had not touched, he could swear to that with utter certainty—began to sing an overly cheery rendition of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.”
He moved again to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He had forgotten to eat breakfast. That, perhaps, was contributing to his foul mood. Eventually he located a container of yogurt, and he had set it on the sticky counter and was rooting around in the dishwasher for a spoon when Stephen, coming around the corner, shouted, “Stop!”
William turned. “What?”
“That’s Jane’s. That yogurt, it’s Jane’s.”
“Oh,” said William. “I didn’t realize we were shopping individually these days.”
<
br /> Stephen was wearing boxer shorts with little coffee cups all over them, and a black T-shirt faded to gray. “No, we’re not. I mean, not for everything. It’s just the yogurt. It’s just that that’s the only thing Jane will eat before noon, and I really want her to keep her strength up.”
“No worries,” said William. “I’m putting it back. See?”
“Dad, I’m sorry—”
“Not a big deal,” said William crossly. “I can eat something else. I can eat anything. I’m not pregnant.”
“No,” said Stephen. “No, you’re certainly not.” He cast his eyes around the room.
“Geez,” he said. “Bit of a mess, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say,” said William. “I was just about to tackle it.”
“I’ll help,” said Stephen. “Jane went back to sleep. I’m letting her sleep as much as possible.” He peered at the clock over the microwave. “Geez, is that the time? Already?”
William found a paper towel and some spray to clean the counters, and together he and Stephen worked to stack the clean dishes on the counter. Then they developed a system whereby William took care of everything to the right of the dishwasher while Stephen put away everything on the left. When the dishwasher was empty William loaded the cereal bowls into it and swept the toast crumbs from the table into his hand and shook them into the sink. He was contemplating unearthing the vacuum cleaner when Stephen said, “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“How much do you know about these—what are they again—mortgage securities? No, wait, mortgage-backed securities.”
William could not, after all, locate the vacuum cleaner. Its usual spot in the kitchen pantry was empty. He said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening. Say again?”
“Mortgage-backed securities. I think that’s it.”
“Sounds familiar. But where the hell is the vacuum?”
“I hadn’t heard of them. Until the other day. From Jane. But I haven’t really been paying attention to much these days, outside of what’s going on here.”
“Oh. Well. If it’s Jane’s world you’re talking about, that’s all completely foreign to me.”
“Yeah. Me too. But she—”
Just then the front door opened and in walked Ginny and Lillian and Rachel. Lillian was carrying the car seat, from which a tiny fist was waving, as if for emphasis. Olivia formed the rear of the parade. She was struggling with a massive bag that said “Carter’s” on the side.
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 20
