Amanda Bright @ Home (3 page)

“The downside,” Bob continued, “is that this is all going to fall heavily upon you. You’re not going to see much of me over the next few weeks—except on television. I’ll be the shadowy guy standing behind Frank Sussman.”

“That’s okay.” Amanda hoped she sounded like she meant it.

He took her hand again and squeezed it. “How was your day, by the way?”

Amanda flushed. What would Bob say about the pool, the club, the wine?

“Oh, you know,” she murmured. “The usual.”

Chapter Three

AMANDA STOOD IN the entry hall of her children’s school, awaiting noon dismissal. She had been coming to this same spot twice a day for two years, to pick up Sophie at twelve and then again to get Ben at three. Amanda had a lot of errands to run this afternoon and would have liked to fetch Ben early to spare herself a second trip, but the school was as strict about dismissal as it was about everything else. Amanda had already been issued one warning about pulling Ben from his nursery class “unnecessarily.”

The Center for Early Childhood, as the school was called, was housed in a converted mansion along one of the oldest streets in Cleveland Park, the fashionable neighborhood to the north of Amanda’s. Built at the turn of the twentieth century by a sugar tycoon with political aspirations, little remained of the mansion’s historical grandeur except for the white-columned veranda and elaborately worked lunette above the main entrance. Whatever elegant paths and gardens might once have constituted the front yard had been pulled up to accommodate a cement driveway and ramps for the handicapped; its brick facade was stained by the generations of pigeons that had congregated on an ugly fire escape tacked to one side. All the wood trim had been poorly patched and painted over the years, lending the whole house a shabby, institutional air. This shabby, institutional air, however, was what contributed to the school’s chic among the Washington elite. As the center reminded parents in its annual fund-raising letter, it ranked among the top preschools in the nation. It prided itself on accepting only the most academically gifted students. That these students were chosen almost without exception from Washington’s most gilded and prominent families was presumably a coincidence.

Amanda and Bob were neither gilded nor prominent, but they had something nearly as good: a connection. The director of the center, a woman named Sheila Phelps, was an old friend of Amanda’s mother from their feminist marching days. Phelps agreed to enroll Ben and Sophie as financial-assistance students because, as she put it bluntly to Amanda, “If it hadn’t been for your mother, I’d still be a housewife.”

The few other financial-assistance students came from the city’s poorest neighborhoods and were accepted, Amanda suspected, to lessen the incongruity between the school’s racially sensitive curriculum and its otherwise all-white classrooms. Yet as generous as Phelps’s aid to Ben and Sophie was, it caused Amanda great discomfort. None of the other parents was aware of the financial arrangement—Phelps naturally wanted it kept quiet—but it was glaringly obvious that Sophie and Ben had not been admitted because of their parents’ money or reputation. That left only one possibility, one that even Amanda herself would admit was unlikely: that her children were exceptionally bright.

Phelps had been blunt on this point, too, at least as it related to Ben (school policy allowed Sophie, as the younger sibling, to be enrolled automatically, regardless of her abilities). “Under normal circumstances, you understand,” Phelps had said, “we could not accept a student like Ben.”

Bob and Amanda had been sitting nervously in Phelps’s office, staring into a wall of certificates and awards, as Phelps went over the terms of Ben’s admission. She indicated a manila file at her elbow, labeled with Ben’s name. “Here,” she said, shoving the file across the desk. “Why don’t you just take a look.”

Inside was the seven-page application form Amanda had filled out the previous winter. It had asked her to list, among other things, “references” for her then three-year-old, as well as to describe his “academic strengths.” Amanda prided herself on being an easygoing mother and had always refused to rise to the bait whenever other mothers boasted that
their
toddlers were swimming or reading or speaking fluent French. But then, she had never before had to confront the Private School Application. What was she to write? “Can peel own bananas. Makes choo-choo noises. Barks at passing dogs.”

“You’ll see the results of Ben’s interview just below that,” Phelps directed.

Ah yes, the “play interview.” Amanda already knew it had not gone well. For twenty minutes, Ben had hunched shyly in his chair opposite the school’s psychologist and resisted instructions to stack plastic cubes and draw shapes in crayon. His poor performance was minutely recorded in two columns on a pink sheet, with a number scale that graded him on everything from eye contact to “motor patterns.” Amanda skimmed to the end, where the psychologist’s felt-tipped scrawl concluded that Ben suffered from “acute social anxiety” and possessed “poor scissor skills.” Before he could be admitted to the center, Phelps informed them, Ben would have to seek occupational therapy for his scissoring. The social anxiety, Phelps said, was something the school could take care of itself.

Amanda did not end up enrolling Ben in occupational therapy—occupational therapy for scissoring cost eighty dollars per hour. Instead she spent a few minutes with him each day over the summer cutting pictures from magazines. Ben mangled every bit of paper handed to him and, what was worse, seemed to delight in mangling the paper. “Look,” he would say proudly, holding up a face he had cut in half. Amanda would lose her patience, and Ben would burst into tears. She left off the exercises a few weeks into Ben’s first term and did not hear anything more from the school about his scissoring. By then there were other problems. The teacher called to say that Ben had pushed a child during recess. Next he was rolling balls of plasticine into missiles and launching them at the blackboard. He barged into lines. He would not join in singing during “circle time.”

Ben’s behavior inflamed the suspicion with which the other parents viewed Amanda. Except for Christine, whose son formed a fierce and immediate friendship with Ben, most parents resisted having their children play with him. Amanda launched a lobbying effort on Ben’s behalf. She volunteered at every school event and gamely manned a face-painting booth at the PTA winter carnival. The mothers she met were unfailingly friendly. They would exchange anecdotes about child rearing. But they would not take the further step of arranging a play date or suggesting a get-together for coffee. Amanda had attempted that step many times, only to be deftly rebuffed. (“I’d love to but with the kids’ soccer schedule everything is crazy right now. Maybe in a month or so …”) Amanda would wish, yet again, to pull her children from the school and send them somewhere else. But as Bob would patiently remind her, they could not actually afford a cheaper education for their children.

“He’s too young for public school, and we’re not eligible for aid at another school, so we’re stuck,” Bob would say. “Look, I don’t like our kids knowing only a bunch of Austens and Courtneys and Olivias, either. But what else are we going to do?”

And Ben had to go somewhere: Amanda did not need a professional to point out that her son was developing “issues.” Bob scoffed at the psychologist’s assessment of Ben and took his teacher’s reports lightly. “I was always getting into trouble at his age, and I turned out okay. We’ll speak to him about it, but don’t worry. He’ll be fine. Really.” And yet Amanda didn’t know if Ben would be fine, really. Those were the same words Bob and others had used to comfort her through the first two years of Ben’s life, back when she was working full time. Amanda did not like to recall those days when she used to sit in her cubicle at the National Endowment for the Arts, crafting press releases for events that would not get covered, while her toddler molded clay into dinosaur families and wondered where his mommy had gone.

She and Bob would drop off Ben every morning at seven-thirty, at a day-care center in a local church basement. She chose this center because of the women who worked there, silvery-haired church matrons whose voices never lost their soothing lilt as they pried Ben’s fingernails from her calves.
Come let’s see what’s in the dress-up box. Look at the beautiful pictures Josh is making with finger paint.
Amanda could hear Ben’s cries from the parking lot. Bob, guiding her by the elbow, implored her not to go back. “It will just make it worse—he’ll be okay in a few minutes.” But when the scenes didn’t improve, Amanda, at the church ladies’ insistence, ceased to accompany Ben inside. Bob took him in while she waited in the car with the windows rolled up and the radio switched on. Bob would come sprinting back, leap into the driver’s seat, and pull away before fastening his seat belt. “He’s getting much better,” he would say, without looking at her.

All day Amanda would monitor the clock in her office, imagining what Ben was doing—play, snack, lunch, play, nap, snack—and assuring herself that the separation was good for both of them. Ben needed to be with other children in a world bigger than his own; she needed to be in the big world, period.

Then came summer, and the dappled green mornings that just begged you to come outside before the air grew thick and everything was stilled by the heat. On the drive to work Amanda would glimpse mothers pushing their babies to the playground or jogging with strollers along Rock Creek Parkway. They looked so unharried; their day seemed to stretch out before them like a bather on a towel. By contrast, there was not a single minute during the week that Amanda felt she could stop, hold, enjoy. When she came home at night, Amanda craved half an hour—just half an hour!—to change her clothes, go through the mail, reorder her thoughts. But there was dinner to make, and those dishes that had been sitting in the sink since breakfast, and the backed-up toilet, and the note reminding her to call the plumber whom she had forgotten to call again. Mostly, though, there was Ben, desperately tired and hungry, but equally desperate that she not leave his sight. He insisted that Mommy—and not anyone else—give him his bath; that Mommy—and not anyone else—put him in his pajamas and read him a story; that Mommy—and not anyone else—sing him his lullaby. Ben virtually ignored his father when she was around. Bob tried. He pleaded with Ben to let him, just this once, put him to bed. But Ben would have none of it. Amanda could not help but relent. Her son loved her with more physical intensity than any lover she had ever known, yet what he wanted from her was so simple and innocent: to hold her hand, to smell her hair, to fall asleep in her arms.

What was Amanda to do? Everyone else insisted she should keep working. Her mother was adamant. Why, when
she
was thirty-two, Ellie Burnside Bright was founding the first-ever natural-birth clinic in Manhattan—
and
she was divorcing Amanda’s father. Imagine how strange it would feel
not
to go to the office, her mother warned. I did that, Amanda, I stayed home with you, and it practically killed me. Thought I’d bloody well go out of my mind sitting around the apartment reading women’s magazines, waiting for you to wake up. Remember when I nearly
did
go out of my mind? (Yes, Amanda did. Amanda had been four, or maybe five. Her mother left her with the cleaning lady and went AWOL for a day. Years later, her mother admitted to Amanda that all she did was walk through the park and wander up and down Madison Avenue, stopping somewhere for a coffee. Amanda might not have even noticed her mother’s absence if the cleaning lady had not been so distressed. She called Amanda’s father at work and said she had to get home and where was Mrs. Bright? Amanda played by the apartment door until she heard the key turn in the lock. Her mother burst in, and Amanda exclaimed, “Mommy, we were so worried!” Her mother pushed past her without a word and slammed the door to her bedroom, where she remained for the rest of the evening. The cleaning lady went home.)

Amanda was too embarrassed to confess to her mother that she no longer took pleasure in going to the office. She was too embarrassed to confess it to herself. It cast doubt on the glorious certainty she had experienced the first day she had stepped through the Romanesque arches of the endowment’s building:
At last,
she had exulted,
this is where I’ll be. This is who I am.
Now when she passed under those same arches, she could only mutter weakly,
This is who I must try to be.
How, Amanda wondered, did the other mothers do it? How did they work through the pain without folding up like circus tents and taking the whole show home?

Then, one morning, three months into her pregnancy with Sophie (and hey, what a barrel of laughs that was, running to the executive bathroom to vomit and dozing off at her desk after lunch), Amanda realized she could no longer do it. She experienced what her mother, in her feminist heyday, used to call a “click” moment, except in reverse: Amanda was waiting as usual for Bob to come running out of the day-care center like a hero in the “money shot” of an action movie just before the building explodes into a giant fireball. She was eating a package of soda crackers to quell her nausea. The entire scene suddenly struck her as absurd.
What on earth am I doing?
Ben needed her—needed
her!
This new baby would need her, too. Nothing else seemed important at that moment except those two facts.

“Bob,” Amanda said, as tires screeched against pavement, “I can’t do this anymore.”

She saw he knew exactly what she meant.

They didn’t discuss it until later, when they sat down at the kitchen table after dinner to work it all out. Bob conceded that Amanda’s modest salary only covered the child care and the weekly cleaning lady, bills they no longer would be burdened with if Amanda stayed home. He earned enough to pay the mortgage and their household expenses. But if she quit there would be no extras: no new car as they had hoped, fewer dinners out, no refurbishing of the house. Government, Bob reminded her (as if she needed reminding), was not like the private sector. He could not increase his billings or hope for a bonus. His salary was his salary. They would just have to pray that none of the pipes burst.