“Call your mother,” Portia thought, jolting awake the morning after the dinner party, the cold air hitting her exposed shoulder as it came uncovered. She was alone in the bed but hadn’t been for long. At three she’d been wakened by the suck, slap, of the refrigerator downstairs and noted then that Mark had only just gotten up. Which meant that he had previously come home, undressed, and entered the bed—all without waking her. Now he might be anywhere: in the bathroom, the kitchen, his office. He might be at Small World, drinking his habitual wake-up espresso and plowing through the Times. He might be at his desk in McCosh Hall. How much time would pass before they came back to it? And would they come back to it at all? This sort of thing had happened before, she freely admitted: little jolts of the needle, measuring the years they had lived together, little dots that had never connected to form any sort of linked narrative but remained in situational isolation, though Portia could remember each and every one of them, pain-filled nights of no sleep, bleary, acrid mornings. Somehow they had always passed. And this one, she supposed, would as well.
After all, it came to her, making her way downstairs and pouring herself what remained of the coffee Mark had made earlier that morning, they had both been tired. Mark had cooked single-handedly to give dinner to his friends and colleagues, and the evening had mired in… well, not strife. Not acrimony. But there was perhaps an absence of good feeling. It hadn’t been a disaster, just not a success. Not the warm welcome he must have wanted to extend to his new colleague from the old country. She ought to have tried harder, Portia thought. Stuck to local real estate (that staple of Princeton conversation) and supermarkets, the new plan for downtown, the ongoing restaurant black hole in which they dwelt. She ought to have sold the town the way she sold the university, and she had not done that, and for the worst of reasons: because she was tired and cranky and racked with… well, something, about the fact that she had gone to bed with a man who wasn’t Mark, and she had forgotten about the dinner and was predisposed to dislike anyone who walked in her door and required more than the most modest of effort on her part. She would apologize to him. Then she would call Helen and offer to take her to lunch, or out to the flea market in Lambertville, or something she might enjoy, and through this penance she would restore herself and her home.
Reaching into the refrigerator, she looked past the plastic wrap–covered bowl of goopy leftover chicken Marbella, not because it seemed unappetizing (the dish was, annoyingly, often better the next day), but because it now felt entwined with what had happened last night and bore a kind of taint. She put milk in her cup and placed the carton back on the shelf.
Portia resisted the unfurled New York Times on the kitchen table and took her coffee back upstairs, intent on working through four or five of the weekend folders before she got up properly. The Wild Oats receipt and its note were on her nightstand, left atop the unfurled paperback novel she had given up on the previous month. Portia’s heart sank anew. Her mother’s tone of command had an uncanny way of working itself through all media, no matter the filter or the remove. Even here, on this pink-striped slip of paper, there was a sense of imperative and imminent offense. How much time had passed since her call? The clock was ticking.
Mother and daughter had once been teammates, but never quite friends. Teammates, as Portia would discover in high school when she had actual teammates, were fine things. Piling onto the bus before the game, edgy with shared nerves, egging one another on with the genial, meaningless phrase C’mon, you guys!, collapsing back into the same seats for the ride home—that sense of striving in accord had been a sweet part of high school. Possibly the sweetest. But the camaraderie had not survived graduation, or even the off-seasons. Her teammates, passing in the school corridors in winter or spring, were downshifted to nodding acquaintances who had once been close, that past connection floating off like cotton candy on the tongue. They were not friends like the friends her mother instructed her to find, the kind her mother had in, it seemed to Portia, embarrassing excess.
Women friends, to be specific. Susannah was passionately clear about the necessity of women in a woman’s life. And not too many of them, but only the right ones. “You don’t need fifty best friends,” Susannah had told her after one especially gruesome day in seventh grade, when Portia had been roundly shunned by the rigidly patrolled popular crowd at Northampton Middle School. These girls, uniformly lithe and light of hair, held unchallenged sway over the choicest lunchroom tables (best visibility, best vantage, just… best). When Portia, employing a very deliberate air of cluelessness about the hierarchy of seating, had attempted to sit at the most rarefied table of all (she had rushed to the cafeteria to be first in line, for this very purpose), two extremely strident and highly amused blond girls had sent her very publicly packing.
“Why are you running after a crowd?” Susannah had said that night, over vegetarian chili and green salad from Bread & Circus. Her lack of sympathy, though hardly unexpected, was salt in her daughter’s wound. “Even if you succeed, what have you got? You’re just another face in the crowd. And that crowd,” said disapprovingly.
“But they’re nice,” Portia had said in pointless disregard of recent history.
“That I doubt. And even if it were true, nice is very much overrated. I’d like to see you go for more than nice.”
In any case, Susannah had gone on to explain, women do not bond in packs, or if they do, they do falsely, in the manner of clubs or sororities, with their artificial enclosures of dues-paying “sisterhood.” Portia should have real friends, soul friends, not birds-flocking-together-in-their-common-plumage friends. Not, Susannah would undoubtedly have said, teammates. Portia was going to require companionship through life. Confidantes. Counselors. Comedians with perfect timing. There’s something about the women in my life. Like the women who loved and valued Susannah herself.
Right, Portia had thought, despondent and irritated. The irritation was for her mother, for making such a thoroughly unrealistic injunction. (In seventh grade, who has friends like that?) The despondency was for herself, because she suspected even then that she would never have friends like that.
And in fact, she had never had friends like that.
A quarter century after her exile from the coolest of tables in the middle school lunchroom, Portia had found neither those intimate traveling companions her mother had prescribed nor even the superficial reassurance of a group of women friends. She enjoyed her colleagues—or some of them—here at home and generally looked forward to the annual NACAC meetings, where she often joined a group of long-acquainted comrades to indulge in soul-cleansing portions of alcohol. Were these the friends her mother had alluded to? They were not. She never spoke to any of them between conferences, unless some professional necessity arose. Their interactions were limited to e-mail health alerts and holiday cards containing snapshots of their families. But she was not isolated. Who could feel isolated when bombarded daily by hundreds of teenagers? And she lived with Mark, after all! She went for walks on the canal with Rachel and Rachel’s dog. She was in a book group, though she tended to duck out at the height of the admissions season. (And whenever she didn’t like the book. Which actually happened quite a lot.) But it wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t what her mother had, had always had. In the Northampton kitchen the phone rang incessantly, not only with organizational updates for the myriad collectives, task forces, and Amnesty groups, but with glad women, distraught women, women in need of Susannah’s counsel and support. When Portia came home from school, they would be there before her, as often as not, cups of rapidly chilling herbal tea on the kitchen table and little soggy teabags oozing into the tabletop. The women would look up when she came in, their faces full of residual pain. (Her mother excelled at residual pain, Portia sometimes thought. She had a calling for it.) They seldom broke away from Susannah, and if for some reason they had to leave Northampton, they became the very women Portia and her mother would visit during school breaks: days of
local culture and activity punctuated by more of those long, long evenings over the kitchen table (nicer kitchen tables, generally, in much nicer kitchens). Her life with her mother had been a travelogue of these dearest friends, like the one who committed to her lover and followed her to Tennessee, and the one who left her husband and was suddenly a Harvard Law student. (She must have been planning that for a while, Portia would later understand.) Embarrasingly, even at the height of her high school career, the ringing phone was always for her mother. Even more oddly, this would not strike Portia as odd until years later.
Still, as the only fruit of Susannah’s loins, Portia had not exactly faded into the crowd of her mother’s women. She was special. She was perennially important, like the permanent number one slot on the to-do list. She was, she saw very early on, Susannah’s purpose and justification: her life project. And it would be wrong to suggest that this had not been heady stuff for a very long while. Portia had been introduced to her mother’s circle as a heroine taking shape before their eyes, Susannah’s own little light of mine. She had been the future something amazing, the proof in the pudding of what could happen when women did not allow themselves to be thwarted, limited, disrespected. She turned cartwheels at the potluck in somebody’s Northampton backyard, the joyful girl at whom everyone else smiled and nodded, the powerful example of what a free and strong female was supposed to look like.
Sadly, by adolescence, Portia was finding it harder and harder to keep that up.
Shining examples were not supposed to get sent packing from the cool tables, were they? Joyful girls were supposed to have friends, or at least scads of people who wanted to be friends. And free and strong women? Surely they never felt about themselves the way Portia felt about herself: addled by insecurities, endlessly halted by doubt. And also sure—quite sure—that she was losing, filament by filament, the respect of Susannah, her creator, who was going to be very disappointed when she discovered that her daughter, in whom she had invested so much effort, was turning out to be deflatingly normal, a garden-variety self-sabotaging female after all. This normal Portia would turn out to be a woman of unobjectionable looks (trim enough, tall enough, with brown hair like her mother’s and brown eyes like her mother’s and pale, freckled skin. Like her mother’s). Normal Portia would be obviously intelligent, but not what you’d call scary smart. Normal Portia was one of those people you could count on to listen to what you were saying and say, more or less, the right thing in return, but she wasn’t exactly a font of wisdom or comfort. Like Susannah. In her serene and knowing way. To her many dearly loved and loving friends.
Later, she would try to convince herself that the renegotiation of power in a mother-daughter relationship was an essential part of growing up, and perhaps that was a little bit true. She would also tell herself that she and her mother had grown apart at the normal time, when she was in high school, when daughters were simply supposed to leave their mothers in the dust. But that wasn’t quite true. She would try hardest of all to believe that there had been no incident, no great traumatic event parting daughter from mother, severing the unspoken bond, et cetera, et cetera, but that the coming apart had happened in increments so slight, she had not even noticed: glacial disentanglement, continental drift. And that, Portia knew perfectly well, was an outright untruth.
An incident. An accident. A rift.
All of the above, she thought grimly, which made her mother’s increasingly desperate, then increasingly hopeless, overtures ever more poignant. They went on for a long time: the last year of college, the first years of Portia’s new career (which baffled her mother), and all through the past decade at Princeton, when Susannah seemed at last to have begun to give up. Now their phone calls and visits were acrid, hollow ordeals of proximity and pretending, painful to all concerned but hardening, at least, into routine. They did not begin without anxiety on both sides, Portia knew, and they did not end without relief, also on both sides. And it might all have been avoided. And it might still be somehow salved, if Portia one day decided to take her mother back into their long-ago confidence. But that would never happen.
She took the first four folders from the pile and set them down on the bed, then climbed in with her coffee. The bed was simply made but warm, Mark having introduced her to certain European necessities like the divine duvet. She plumped the pillows behind her back, sipped her coffee, took up her pen, and read.
Stressed-out girl from Belmont, math team, tennis team, violinist in the local youth orchestra, fund-raiser for the women’s shelter. Mom an engineer. Dad an engineer. Older brother at Yale. She wrote about her grandmother, who’d left Ireland in the 1950s because no one seemed willing to educate her and came to Boston, where she remained uneducated. “Going to college has been my goal since childhood,” the girl concluded her essay rather portentously. “I’ve seen what happens to people who are not granted this opportunity.”
Maybe Yale would take her, Portia thought, marking the reader’s card with comments from the two enclosed references (“One of those faces I look forward to seeing in my classroom.” “Hardworking and sensitive student.” Sensitive? Portia thought). Colleges, Princeton included, did try not to create dire family stress by admitting one sibling and rejecting another, unless there were overwhelming differences in the quality of the applications. No undeserving applicant ever rode in on the coattails of a brilliant older sibling, of course, but no admissions officer relished being the cause of some drunken outburst at Thanksgiving twenty years hence, along the lines of: “You know you’re not as smart as Johnny. You couldn’t get into Princeton.” Good luck at Yale, she silently told the girl, shutting the folder and putting it aside.
The next folder belonged to a classic campaigner. In addition to the common application with its Princeton supplement material, transcript, test scores, and recs, he had accumulated a two-page CV that memorialized every move he had made since entering the ninth grade, an eight-by-ten glossy photo in full baseball regalia, and a page of game-related statistics. There was a packet of newspaper clippings, and three unrequested testimonials illuminated the applicant’s team spirit, competitive rigor, and moral caliber. Portia, alerted to the presence of this extra stuff by the thickness of the folder, rigidly avoided looking at it until she had made her way through the application proper, in the same order and at the same pace she read every other. That way, when she finally arrived at this figurative and literal padding, she was reassured by the fact that her impressions had already been formed not by the egoism of the publicity blitz, but by the lack of academic intensity already inherent in the transcript, the serviceable writing of the essays, the hearty but nonspecific recs. Then, having ascertained the gist of the unsolicited material, she put aside these later impressions and tried earnestly to forget them, forcing herself to think her way through the application one more time, making sure that her resistance to his personality had not overly directed the box she checked.
Go for It! was his mantra, she supposed. Or, Sell Yourself! The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease! Don’t Hide Your Light Under a Bushel! Ask for What You Want! Never Ventured, Never Gained! The impulse to hawk one’s virtues, to demand affirmation, to politely but firmly request the prize, was so American, she thought, sighing. Being unmoved by it seemed unfair, like an unannounced reversal of the rules. In this dossier, after all, was the spirit that had crossed the prairies, the go-getting attitude that had built empires of business and culture. The fact that it so turned her off was downright unpatriotic, she thought regretfully, setting aside the folder and taking a long drink of her now tepid coffee. Two down. Two more and she would get dressed and go into the office: a decent overture to a decent day’s work.
She hadn’t made it past the data pages when the phone rang. Portia looked at it, considering. The bedside phone had no caller ID, but far away downstairs a stilted, computerized female voice made an accompanying declaration to the empty kitchen:
“Call from… a… nony… mus… . Call from… a… n
ony… mus.”
This little feature was supposed to make life easier. It was supposed to give you a heads-up that a pollster or telemarketer or simply the person you least wanted to talk to was on the line, but in practice there were far too many calls that seemed to carry the designation “a… nony… mus.” The antiquated phone in her mother’s house, and the undoubtedly antiquated Vermont network it was attached to, quite often announced itself as “a… nony… mus” but sometimes, maddeningly, as “Out of… area” or even “Hart… land… Ver… mont.”
Sighing, she closed the folder.
“Portia?”
She still had her finger in the file, as if she had the option of declining contact. “Hey, Mom.”
“Mark tell you I called?”
“I got in late, I’m sorry. I didn’t have a chance. You know, you can always try my cell if it’s important.”
Instantly, she regretted this. What was she saying? That her mother shouldn’t call unless it was important? That there had to be an “it,” and it had to be “important”?
“So did he tell you?” her mother asked. Even from this distance, she sounded on the edge of some hysteria. Was it a disease? Was that it? And Mark had known and somehow forgotten to mention this? Because he was angry at her? Because she had supposedly been rude to a woman who was rude to her first? And in her own home!
“He didn’t tell me!” she said, sounding a little hysterical herself. She was bracing herself for words with Greek roots: metastasis, diagnosis. Things ending in oma. Technical terms that everyone understood. Stage three. Stage four. Palliative. Hospice. But her mother was talking instead about a girl who had a baby. Or wanted a baby. Or—no, this was it—had a baby she didn’t want. What did it have to do with anything? And she was laughing about this now:
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