Primates of Park Avenue (28 page)

Sometimes, though, I miss the immaculateness of the Upper East Side, the sense of safety, its burnished, formal, sedateness. When I want to see my East Side girlfriends, or have an East Side experience—lunch at Sant Ambroeus or a browse at Charlotte Olympia or window-shopping along Madison—it’s relatively quick and easy to pop across the park. Many of my East Side girlfriends have children who attend school on the Upper West Side now, so sometimes we meet on my side of the world, too. Like so many other uptown dwellers, I cross over. But those two places—Upper East and Upper West—do feel very distinct to me still, as they do to most other New Yorkers. I can love and appreciate and embrace the difference, now that I’m no longer in the trenches on the East Side, trying to decode it all and fit in somehow.

I had to retire my Birkin. In Paris for a vacation, I consulted a doctor in the Sixth about a persistent numbness in my arm. The neurologists I had consulted in New York ruled out the serious things, but had no solution to offer, no root cause to suggest. I was unable to type, which was inconvenient, to say the very least, for a writer. I spent several days of our trip massaging my right forearm and fretting. The chic Parisian doctor sat behind her desk and like a chic Parisian, she took in not just my story of a writer being unable to write but also my outfit, my bag, every part of my outward appearance. Then she spoke in an emphatically French way. She blamed my heavy bag, pronouncing, “It’s zee Birkahn, or zee writing. You shoooze.”

Lily had twin daughters a year and a half ago, and she named me their godmother. I see the girls almost every Thursday and have taken it as my mission to dote upon and indulge them. They are energetic and curious and beautiful, Lily’s girls, and they are endlessly entertaining. Lily is more a mommy than anyone else I know, better at it and calmer about it than I ever was with only one baby at a time. Sometimes we talk about Flora, and she tells me that it does not get easier, or better, but that often she is happy, and I tell her that I think I understand.

My sons are big boys now. They can do all the things we so want our children to do in the West—read and write and do math, mostly. I urge them to make their beds, to get off their iPads, to write thank-you notes, to look grown-ups in the eye and speak politely. And then I get lazy about it and let them be. In the summer, we go out to the beach and I watch them swim in the pool and go on the tire swing. I see them come together with other groups of kids, kids they know and don’t know, on the beach and in the neighborhood, as I make chitchat with the mothers and fathers I know and the ones I don’t, taking in the fact that, even in a place as precious and curated as privileged the Upper East Side and its satellite, the East End, childhood can be rambunctious and unplanned and easy, and motherhood can be relatively simple. It can feel good.

A few times a year my husband and I travel without our boys—to Europe, mostly, and other places his business takes him—and while we are there, I pine for my children. I marvel at how different childhood and motherhood are from continent to continent, town to town, place to place. And how strange and interesting and touching the practices of the tiny tribe on a tiny corner of a tiny island I once studied seem from a distance. I think of the words of Charles Darwin, not the Darwin whose work has been oversimplified and deployed to justify ruthless self-interest and to rationalize the notion of “the selfish gene,” but of Darwin the father, the one who lost three children and mourned them so deeply that he was nearly incapacitated, and who joyfully helped his wife raise seven more to adulthood, and who balanced the work he loved with parenthood, and taught us so much: “The social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.”

Yes, I was feeling upbeat and compassionate and generous and sympathetic, not to mention good about myself as a mother and a writer, when we found ourselves at a family-friendly party on the immense, immaculate lawn of someone’s immense, immaculate home in the Hamptons not long ago. I had sold a book and delivered the manuscript. There was interest in Hollywood. In the small and gossipy circles I still spent time in, this was news, and people wanted to talk. Much of the talk was good-willed and supportive, the parents of kids my sons knew, people I had come to know through motherhood, expressing the hope that things would work out, that the book would be a success, along with a lot of joking inquiries about whether I would be naming names. As we chatted about that and other things, too, like where our kids were going to school now and how they liked it, my older son came over. He looked flushed and told me under his breath, “Mom, I don’t feel so good.” I turned to touch his forehead—he had a raging fever. “Go sit under that shady tree where nobody else is sitting with this water bottle, and I’ll be right there to take us home, sweetie,” I told him, scanning the party for my husband and our younger son.

That’s when she materialized before me—the Queen of the Queen Bees, the meanest of the Mean Girl moms. I had done well dodging her for many months, ducking into the stairwell whenever I saw her in the hallway at school, turning to real friends when I saw her at an event, and generally just praying she would pass. Now I made a little gasping noise in spite of myself, hoping she was on her way somewhere else. She didn’t usually bother with me—why bother with someone you don’t notice? Even viewed through the gauzy lens of cooperative breeding and caring, even when I made excuses for her in my mind—she had an eating disorder; her husband apparently cheated on her; it didn’t feel good to be her, even in all her this-season Chanel—she was, to me, beyond hard to take. The recent stories of her nastiness were legion. She told women, in front of their friends, that they were ugly, that they were stupid, that there was something wrong with their children. I thought her a crass bully, and even worse, an empress with no clothes, the Chanel notwithstanding. Because she was so rich and powerful, the people who rolled their eyes behind her back were too petrified to actually confront her about her nasty antics. School administrators looked the other way because she made big contributions. Everyone else took her put-downs meekly and sat at her table at events, hoping for a scrap of I didn’t know what. Business? Money? A ruffle or ribbon of her haute couture?

“Hi,” she said, sort of looking through me. My mind hopped and skipped. My head bobbled.

“Oh, sorry, my son is—” I began, rattled, looking wildly from side to side for an escape route. She couldn’t have cared less that I was talking and broke in as if I had no right to respond to her salutation.

“I heard about your story or book or . . . whatever. What’s it called?” She scanned the lawn for better prospects. I felt my older son touch my elbow.

I told her the name of the book and turned toward him to reassure him that yes, we were going, right now.

“That’s a good title,” she said flatly, her gaze alighting indifferently on my son for an instant.

“Oh thanks, we have to . . .”

“I guess your publisher gave it to you.” It wasn’t a question. It was an assertion. You can’t possibly have a good title in you, let alone a good book. Etc. I straightened up and turned to face her. She smirked.

“No, it’s my title,” I said, no doubt stiffly, staring her in the face now. My son coughed. She said, with a sarcastic smile, “Sure it is.” For one second I imagined doing what I had heard a woman who lived downtown had done when Queen Bee insulted her little son. She had, the story goes, put her hand on Queen Bee’s shoulders and intoned solemnly, “Nobody. Likes. You.” And then just walked away. She was like Paul Bunyan, this Woman Who Dared, whose legend lived on in song and gossip.

Now, before I could decide what to say or do, my reverie was broken by my son. As if in slow motion, obediently, after years of training, he was extending his hand toward Alpha Mean Mom, not knowing any better. I imagined myself, again in slow-mo, like an action hero in a movie, jumping across the distance between them, dramatically intercepting his hand and shouting “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” To save another mother from a dreaded beginning-of-school-year cold or fever. To look after her, as those who had shown compassion toward me had done, because she obviously needed it. I saw myself lying on the ground, my dress smeared with dirt and grass stains from my kind and heroic act. Mean Mom looked at me with surprise and gratitude.

And then it was a normal day on a bright lawn, and I did nothing as she took my son’s hand—limply, with no interest in him. I pulled him away without saying goodbye to her, and gave our hasty thanks to our hosts as I departed, having found my husband and younger son. And I noted with a satisfied smile, as I turned around for one last look at the party, that Queen Bee, who was also leaving, was wiping her eyes and her nose with the very hand she had used to accept my feverishly sick son’s greeting.

My son would be fine with some ibuprofen and a little rest, I knew. The sun was sinking lower in the bright blue sky and I felt a strong, slow swell of happiness come over me as our family drove home with the windows rolled down, taking in the beautiful afternoon.

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