A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  When the door clicked shut, she took a quick look at her lunch, now thoroughly chilled, and found her appetite gone. The nurse had not come by with magazines and Emily had not returned with her book. There was no clock in the room and Lil had no watch, but she guessed it was midafternoon. How would she pass the time until dinner? A twinge of despair passed through her. More than anything, Lil feared boredom. She slunk down in the bed, wrapped the covers tight around her, and pressed her hands to her eyes, sending bright sparks across her lids. It would be nice to sleep, she thought, but she knew sleep wouldn’t come, not now. She could no longer ignore the brightness of the room or the nasty truths crashing around inside her head. Had Tuck always been such a cold creature? To leave her alone in the recovery room? To leave her alone on Friday, as she bled and bled? To have advocated for her staying on at the hospital? So he wouldn’t have to take care of her? To see her suffering? Would the man she’d married have done such things? No, she didn’t think so. But then would she, four years earlier, have held scissors to him, just so that he mightn’t touch her? No, no. Tears arrived in her eyes with a sting. On the wall in front of her, just then, she noticed tiny spots of light, striped red, yellow, green, blue. She sat up to look more closely—where were they coming from?—and they disappeared. When she slunk down again, they reappeared. Maybe she was crazy. But then she saw their source: her ring, her engagement ring reflecting the late afternoon sun. How stupid, she thought, stupid, stupid simple irony. Like something from a Julia Roberts movie.

  But here she was sobbing again, and yet, she almost felt like it was someone else, some other girl, sobbing into her pillow, thinking these childish, petty thoughts that had somehow become her own: that she didn’t want to give back her ring, or her married name, or the handsome man she’d married, or his friends who had become her friends. She didn’t want to go back to being alone in the world and having no one to care for but herself—she had never really been good at taking care of herself anyway. And if she left Tuck, what would keep her here, in New York. Her job, her friends, yes, but what were such things compared to a marriage? She’d thought friendship so important before she married, but now she felt that her friends didn’t really know her—couldn’t really know her—as well as Tuck did, even if that knowledge made him hate her. There was no point, she’d realized lately, in trying to talk to most of them about anything important. If she complained about Tuck, they offered her quick solutions, the kinds of things you read in stupid women’s magazines. If she spoke of him positively, they glanced at one another nervously. They understood nothing. They hadn’t seen her at her most base, screaming until her chest ached, sobbing in bed and bleeding; nor had they ever made her happy the way Tuck did, made her feel that she could do anything, be anything. She had known she wanted him—and only him—from the first moment she saw him, striding up the steps in front of Low Library. And still, now, when he walked into the room, she forgot that the rest of the world existed. But perhaps this was the problem. Each time he walked into the room, she greeted him like a drowning woman clutching a life raft. And each time he walked out the door, her heart seized with panic that he was never, ever coming back.

  As the afternoon wore on, her eyes drooped and closed. The noises of the clinic—the squeak of the nurses’ rubber shoes, the clang of metal carts, the shouts and cries and chatter of patients—receded into a sort of background chorus, much like the traffic outside her apartment, which had kept her awake for one night, years back, when she and Tuck first moved in, then never again. Curled inside Emily’s soft sweater, the hospital blankets heavy against her legs, she slept a thick, dreamless sleep. When she woke, the sky pressed black against her window. The pigeons were gone. Someone had removed her lunch tray and replaced it with a dinner tray, the food still giving off faint wisps of steam. On the table beside her bed lay a copy of The Forsyte Saga—the copy she’d given Emily a few months back, after Emily had asked “What should I read next?” though Lil had never expected Emily would really read it. Lil had the same edition at home, a wan Sargent on its cover. She looked around the room. There was no suitcase, no shopping bag filled with clothes, no signs that Tuck had come by. She shivered a little in her sweater—she’d already begun to think of it as hers, rather than Emily’s—and realized that she felt something akin to relief. He was gone, finally. She snapped on the bedside light and ran her finger over the reproduced Sargent, a blushing girl, of about Lil’s own age, with red-gold hair and dark, serious eyes, who was, Lil supposed, meant to represent the doomed Irene Forsyte.

  Inside the book she found a note from Emily, saying that she hadn’t wanted to wake her, that she’d bring clothes and things for Lil early tomorrow. Which meant, Lil thought, that it was true, it was true: Tuck was gone. She stretched her arms over her head, plumped her pillows, and opened the novel, flipping past the introduction and the table of contents to the front page of the first book, “The Man of Property.” The epigraph, which she’d somehow never noticed, though she’d read the book twice, read: “You will say . . . ‘The slaves are ours.’”

  It was Shakespeare, apparently, The Merchant of Venice. One of her favorite plays, yet she couldn’t recall the line, nor who spoke it. She turned the page and began reading of the Forsytes “at home”—a party for the engagement of young June Forsyte to Philip Bosinney, an architect. The marriage, Lil knew, would never take place. Phil would fall in love with Irene, the unhappy wife of June’s uncle Soames, and then he would die, crushed under a carriage wheel. June would become a spinster, a bit of a kook. Irene, having tasted real love and passion, would leave Soames. Many years later, she would marry again—this time happily—to Soames’s cousin Young Jolyon, an amiable, left-leaning artist.

  All this knowledge was, suddenly, too much for her. She could not read of June’s engagement, not right now, knowing what the future held for the girl, fictive though she was. She could hear the crunch of bones as the carriage wheel bore into Phil Bosinney.

  Slowly, Lil closed the book, curled back on herself, and drew the covers up around her shoulders. She was tired again. Very tired. And her head ached. Why had she said that to Emily, earlier, that she should have married Young Jolyon instead of Soames? The metaphor was untrue, imprecise, sloppy. Since leaving Columbia, she’d let her mind go. She no longer thought about things with the rigor of a scholar. I want to be that person again, she thought. Tears, genuine ones, came to her eyes again, and she shook her head against the pillow, as if to ward them off. How can I be that person again? She closed her eyes and pressed her cool palms to them. Jolyon instead of Soames. Ridiculous. Irene had married Soames for money, not for love. The opposite of Lil, really, and a mistake of truly tragic proportions, as Galsworthy made all too clear. Though nothing, Lil supposed, compared to marrying for love, only to wake one morning and find it vanished. Or, she thought, to wake and find it had never existed.

  fourteen

  One morning in June, Sadie Peregrine wheeled her son, Jack, west on Grand Street to the new Seward Park playground, and took her accustomed seat under the shade of the young, vulnerable fig trees that shaded the southern rim of the main play area, with its thick rubber matting and developmentally appropriate jungle gym. At five that morning, Ed had kissed her good-bye, grabbed his orange gym bag, and headed to JFK. By nightfall he would be in Sarajevo, shooting his and Jonathan’s next film, about journalists who hunt down a war criminal. This time their little fledgling company—just he and Jonathan and a bunch of interns—was producing, in conjunction with Miramax. “Out!” said Jack, thrusting his body in the direction of the swings. “Out! Out!” To their left, a group of young mothers—well, mothers of roughly her own age—were engaged in hushed, fervid conversation, their eyes flicking ominously toward Sadie, their ringed hands clutching tall pink paper cups bearing the black, retro logo of the coffee shop just west of the park. Their toddlers waddled up the fat lacquered steps that led to the baby slide, gripping the shiny red handrails with small, chubby fingers, shri
eking and squawking and shouting “Mama!” and “Mah-mee!” as they made their precarious ascent.

  On the other side of the park, to Sadie’s right, a fleet of spring-mounted metal ducks wobbled atop shiny round bases, their long beaks set in expressions of exaggerated forbearance. In the three months she’d been coming to this park, she’d never seen a child go near them, perhaps because a clique of wool-clad Orthodox women had staked this area for their kaffeeklatsch. Today, as always, they chattered loudly in Yiddish, arms folded across their chests, eyes tracking their multitudinous broods as they ran in circles around the perimeter of the playground, just inside the edges of the safety mat, shrieking and squawking in their own, slightly more guttural style, their dark, smocked dresses and sweater vests oddly pristine and charmingly outmoded, the clothing of storybook children. Every so often, they reversed directions and shouted out the name of one of their numbers: Shlomo, Hudl, Chani, Tzipporah, Shoshana, Gitl, the names of Sadie’s Goldschlag ancestors, who had, like so many of their kind, lived in this neighborhood a hundred years prior, straight off the boat from Russia. They’d all left—for Brooklyn, the Bronx, Long Island. All but her childless aunt Minnie, her grandfather’s sister, who had married the neighborhood dentist and taught school at P.S. 110 on Cannon Street and bought her apartment in the union co-ops. The few remaining Goldschlags—cousins of her mothers, out on the Island—were still furious that she’d left the place to Sadie (“What does she need it for? With all that money from the father’s side?”), never mind that she and Rose had been Minnie’s most frequent—sometimes only—visitors in recent years, that they’d brought her uptown for lunch every Sunday.

  “Mama, out,” said Jack.

  “Okay, sweetie,” said Sadie, depositing her own pink cup of coffee on the bench. She knelt in front of him, doubled the knots on his red canvas sneakers, and unbuckled the stroller’s belt.

  “Ga,” shouted Jack, taking her hand and pulling her past the toddler slide, toward the swings.

  “You don’t want to go down the slide?” she asked, pausing.

  “No. Gah.” This was, for some reason, his word for swing. It had taken Sadie several weeks to figure this out.

  “You’re sure?” It worried her, just slightly, that he preferred to play with her—or with other adults, or alone—than with other children, not because she feared he was missing some sort of developmental milestone, but because she suspected, at times, that in her own quest for solitude, her own refusal or inability to make nice with the neighborhood mothers, she was, in some way, thwarting Jack’s burgeoning need for the company of kids his own age. And yet, the very term “playdate” made her want to slit her wrists. “Maude and Sophia and Ava look like they’re having a lot of fun.”

  On cue, Maude’s and Sophia’s and Ava’s mothers muted their chatter and turned to look at Sadie and Jack. “Oh, hi,” called one, waving. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Yes, you did, thought Sadie. “Hey,” she called, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

  “Minga,” said Jack, raising his arms to be picked up. “Mommy. Minga.” This word was still a mystery.

  “Swing?”

  “Minga!” Good enough, she thought, and hoisted him up onto her hip, then headed toward the empty row of black bucket swings, the eyes of the three mothers heavy on her. They were dressed alike, in jeans and T-shirts and Birkenstocks. One was fat and taciturn, with a low, ironic voice, and a frown permanently etched onto her chubby doll’s face. Another, freckled and painfully thin, radiated an anxious energy that set Sadie’s teeth on edge. The third woman—she who had deemed Sadie worthy of a hello—had the small, drooping eyes of a basset hound, a pink, robust complexion, and a tendency toward cheerful, exuberant gestures. Her name was Vicky. She’d moved into Sadie’s building at the same time as Sadie, just before Jack was born, found her henchwomen, and launched a neighborhood “mommies’ group,” which met each Wednesday afternoon at various pet-free, peanut-free apartments, to drink watery decaf, debate the merits of Huggies versus Pampers (versus the sleeper, Seventh Generation), and compare notes about the various tradespeople they employed to renovate and clean their apartments.

  In the foggy months of Jack’s infancy—those final, sepia-toned weeks before September eleventh, and the wretched ones immediately following—Sadie had attended on occasion, thinking these women would become her friends. Instead, she found a scene reminiscent of junior high: the mothers discreetly sniping at one another and forging hard alliances from which Sadie was excluded. She had, perhaps, arrived too late to the party—their children were all a bit older than Jack—but more likely she was just constitutionally unfit for these sorts of situations. She tried gamely to keep up her end of the conversation—“Huggies seem to work better for Jack”—but she knew they could sense her irritation and boredom, she knew they considered her prickly and superior, and she knew that perhaps she was, and that she shouldn’t be, because they were all in this together, weren’t they? Still, she found herself sighing and rolling her eyes, as Vicky slyly denigrated a neighbor who’d placed her daughter in daycare at four months. And still she went to the meetings, bearing cake or cookies or flimsy plastic containers of strawberries, because she was, frankly, desperate for the company. They’re not so bad, she told herself. They’re nice. And they were, indeed, better than nothing, better than being completely and entirely alone with a mysterious infant and despairing for one’s city, one’s world, oneself. Ed had been in Toronto on the eleventh, had finally come home at the end of the week, not for lack of trying, but he was gone often after that, at the office late, or in L.A., or on location. Sadie insisting that she would be fine, fine, then bursting into tears when he called home. “I’m so tired,” she’d say. “I’m just so tired. But I’m okay.”

  “I’m calling your mother,” Ed kept saying, his voice low and tight. “She needs to get down there and help you. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  Her mother, of course, thought that a new baby was no cause for any special treatment. “I wore my regular clothes home from the hospital,” she told Sadie three hours after Jack’s prolonged entry into the world, while Sadie lay, stunned and starving, in a high bed at Roosevelt Hospital. “And a week later I was back at my League of Women Voters meeting. I was the chair then, you see.” Still, at Ed’s behest—her mother loved Ed, despite constant complaints about his proclivity for “raggedy sneakers”—Rose came down on weekday afternoons to “help,” crowing loudly about the neighborhood, which she still viewed as the teeming ghetto of her youth. Her concept of help, however, was generally limited to expounding on the myriad ways in which the care and upkeep of babies had degenerated in the modern era. “Whole landfills are devoted to disposable diapers,” she said, as she sat on the couch eating the babka she’d picked up at the East Broadway Bakery, and observing Sadie as she emptied and cleaned out the diaper bin. “I can’t believe you’re not using cloth.” Sadie reminded her mother that she’d had a full-time nanny—the blonde, glamorous Michelle, who’d cared for Sadie until she started first grade—to change and launder those cloth diapers.

  “She walks in the door,” Sadie complained to the mothers, from the depths of Vicky’s faux-Stickley couch, Jack splayed out in her arms, a stream of milk drying on his jowl, “and says, ‘A cup of coffee would be nice.’” The mothers clucked with disapproval but offered no sympathy. All of their mothers, it seemed, supplied them with weekly casseroles and babysat on demand and paid for sessions with postpartum doulas, the very notion of which would have made Rose Peregrine choke with scorn. “I think you need to explain your needs to her,” Vicky counseled. “She doesn’t understand that you need help. You can’t expect her to be a mind reader.” The others nodded in agreement. “Maybe,” Sadie replied skeptically. The problem with these women, she was beginning to see, was that the insularity of their concerns made them strangely self-centered, which in turn left them strangely immune to compassion. In devoting their every thought to their c
hildren and their households, they had become like children themselves, utterly convinced that ultimate justice lay in the firm rules that governed their days—the cry-it-out and no-dairy-until-age-five and siblings-should-be-spaced-two-years-apart—and that anyone who veered from these laws was doomed, if not to misery, then at least difficulty. She could feel herself being pulled under, pulled into the narrow confines of their world: the playground politics (“We invited Ella to Ava’s birthday party and then we weren’t invited to Ella’s party!”), the inane competitiveness (“Sophia was holding her head up by the time she was a week old, but that’s very unusual”), the crippling anxiety (“The doctor said to give her soft cheese, but what does that mean? How soft? What kind of cheese exactly?”).

  Sometimes she saw them solo, at the candy shop on Hester, buying organic, unsulfured dried fruit or single-estate, sustainably grown baking chocolate, or at the coffee shop, sipping cappuccinos and plying their babies with scones, and they were always perfectly nice, causing Sadie to ease up on her previous judgment and to wonder what exactly was wrong with her, what defect Rose had somehow inflicted on her that led her now, as a supposedly mature adult—a wife, a mother—to forcibly isolate herself and her child from the social fabric of her new neighborhood. They were fine people, they just weren’t her people.

  But her people—her real friends, of whom she now seemed to have dispiritingly few—were all still in Brooklyn. Just a few stops away on the F or the J, but somehow they were all so busy. Beth had Emma—almost a year now, a sweet, chubby girl with wispy blonde hair like her half brother, Sam—and her writing, with its endless deadlines, and had found friends in her neighborhood (Sadie’s old neighborhood, it pained her to think). Emily had work and school and Josh, with whom she was still in the early, obsessive stage of romance, and Clara, too, whom Josh had gotten into a special, intensive outpatient treatment program at the clinic’s Westchester campus, which was great but required a lot of time. And Lil, well, Lil had stopped speaking to Sadie after everything went wrong with Tuck’s book, though the truth was, she’d pulled away the minute Sadie announced she was pregnant. Tal, of course, was no longer her friend and she tried not to think of him (though sometimes—even after all these years—she found herself noting a song or a book or an idea to mention to him, before remembering, Oh, I can’t). Dave was often away—touring, recording—and when he wasn’t, he was fully occupied with his music friends, many of whom had babies of their own, babies they toted with them to dinner, to midnight shows at M Shanghai and Galapagos, babies they dressed in miniature Star Wars and Clash T-shirts and took to “Rock-a-Baby” classes at the Brooklyn Brewery, where they tossed Shakey Eggs in time to “Ziggy Stardust” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” and the first track from the new Radiohead album. But these were not Sadie’s people either, not exactly, much as Dave—and, perhaps, Sadie herself—would have liked them to be.