The Privileges (12 page)

But the whole blowup stayed with her, particularly the indictment of her children, or at least of the way she was raising them. That was beyond the pale. Even if you’d spent the previous night in Bellevue, she thought, you should know better than to go there. It wasn’t the first time she’d reached the conclusion that, on the subject of children, most people were full of shit. What was supposed to be the point of denying them anything? Who decided that not having things that your parents hadn’t had either was character-building somehow? Narcissistic bullshit. Your children’s lives were supposed to be better than yours: that was the whole idea. And what was the point of getting hung up on how much things cost? You were expected to complain when things were, or seemed, more expensive than they should be: braces, for instance, which their dentist said both kids were eventually going to need. Fifteen grand, probably, before that was all over. But the fact was they could afford it. They spent sixty thousand dollars a year just to send their kids to school
and they could afford that too. They knew or observed plenty of people—in their neighborhood, in their own building—richer than they were; still, they already had much more money than Cynthia had ever seen as a kid, even during the flush times. In fact the very notion of “flush times” was one that Cynthia did not care to revisit. And as far as the kids’ characters being shaped by money, it was clearly untrue because money itself was one area where you saw the fundamental differences between them. The two of them fought less and less as time went on; there was little ground for competition or envy because they just didn’t want the same things. April was a thoroughly social animal, obsessed with preteen perks and downright lawyerly when it came to the question of their early acquisition. She’d been given her own cell phone this year, because that was a safety issue; but just last week Cynthia had bought her a pair of Tory Burch shoes for Christmas—to be honest, it thrilled her somewhat, just on the level of pride in her daughter’s precociousness, that April had even asked for them—and before that there’d been a kind of mini-scandal at school when some kids she knew in the grade ahead of hers were caught trying to pay for lunch at Serendipity with a parent’s credit card. You could hold them off for a while, but any parent knew that it wasn’t about possessing all these things so much as it was about asking to be trusted, to be let into the world a little more, and in that light Cynthia couldn’t see the argument for saying no to very much. That the lines should stay open, that she should always be the first person April would come to about anything and everything—that was the important consideration, and she wasn’t going to risk losing her daughter’s confidence over something as stupid as other people’s bitchy judgments of her privileges. She knew April already had a bit of a mean-girl rep at school, but as far as Cynthia was concerned, wailing over that kind of natural social stratification was more about the mothers’ egos than the kids’. April could handle herself just fine. In truth Cynthia couldn’t help but be a little impressed by the fantastic amount of ingenuity April put into appearing two or three years older than she was. The great irony, of course, was that Jonas’s complete lack of interest in whatever his own peers were doing or
buying or watching made him seem like he was about forty years old.

But there was no getting out of certain forms of sibling togetherness; she had to take them to see that dentist again before they left for Costa Rica, for instance, and even though April was furious about having to miss ballet, Cynthia had made this appointment six months ago and if they missed it this huckster was booked until summer. She picked them up at school, and even though they were running late they had to take the subway instead of a cab, because for the past three weeks Jonas’s homeroom teacher had been doing a unit about conservation and air pollution and if Cynthia had to hear another word about the fucking ozone layer she was going to scream. They crossed 87th and at the storefront gap that led to the subway entrance they found themselves converging with a guy pushing a baby in a stroller—actually not a baby at all, Cynthia saw, more like three years old, a kid who, by virtue of still being strollered around at that age, was clearly running the show. Beautiful boy, though. The father was a good-looking guy too, very expensively tousled. All four of them did that little no-you-go-first dance at the top step, and even though it only took a second, Cynthia was suddenly conscious of impatient people mustering behind them.

“Sorry,” she said to the dad, “you go ahead,” and she smiled before she realized that he was not even looking at her but instead, uncertainly, down the steps themselves. She had a vestigial memory of pissing off rude strangers while pushing April around in one of those strollers, and also a mother’s instinctive assumption that men are overmatched by small children. “Guys, go on downstairs,” she said to April and Jonas. “Not through the turnstile.” She turned back to the father with her most prim smile as other commuters swirled into the open lane created by the kids’ departure and said, “Can I give you a hand carrying the pasha here?” Suddenly his eyes seemed to focus on her, and he gave her a very winning smile, though without nodding or shrugging or otherwise acknowledging that she’d spoken. He did not even seem to notice the swarm of hostile strangers struggling to get past him, which was an admirable
quality, Cynthia thought. Or maybe there was something wrong with him.

“Yes, thanks,” he said at last. “That’s really nice of you.”

He didn’t move and so she went around to the front of the stroller and picked up the strap between the front wheels, even though that meant she would be the one backing down the stairs. He lifted his end by the handles and they started down slowly.

“So you’ve obviously been in my position before,” he said. “Beautiful kids.”

She smiled, looking down at her feet for the next step. In front of her, the little boy’s eyes opened slightly.

“Easy to see where they get it from,” the father said.

“Thanks. Well, you too. He’s a knockout.”

“So, I guess this is like the meet-cute,” he said, and she laughed, even if she didn’t quite know what he meant. People flowed all around them. She tried to find April and Jonas but couldn’t turn her head far enough to see them. “My name’s Eric, by the way,” he said.

“Cynthia.”

“Hey Cynthia?” he said. He bent from the waist, and so she knew she was almost at the bottom step. She had to lean forward suddenly just to hear him. “This was so nice of you. Look, this is going to sound bizarre, but do you live in this neighborhood? I would hate to think that I’ll never see you again. You are a really beautiful woman.”

“I’m sorry?” Cynthia said.

“I can’t believe I said that,” Eric said, and it seemed exactly like he was telling the truth. He was probably an unemployed actor. His wife was probably some corporate lawyer who felt guilty for not spending more time with her son, while her husband spent his afternoons in the playground collecting phone numbers from au pairs.

They were now both standing on the cement floor inside the station, still holding the stroller between them, a couple of feet off the ground. People hustling down the stairs brushed past them as if they weren’t even there. She knew that the longer she just stood there, the more emboldened he would become. She could feel herself turning red.

“Do you do this a lot, Eric?” she said.

He knew how to stare into a woman’s eyes, that was for sure. “I know I’m being insanely forward,” he said, “but I’m not sorry, because two more seconds and I was never going to see you again. I know you’re married. I’m married too. It doesn’t have to be about that.”

What?
she kept saying to herself, as if she were deaf to whatever she was thinking.
What?
His son’s eyes were half open and on her, as expressionless as if he had just sentenced her to death. It made Eric himself seem like some sort of superman to know that on some level he’d forgotten that the boy was even there.

She put her end of the stroller gently on the floor and turned and walked away as fast as she could. Jonas and April were standing by the nearest turnstile with that look of infinite sarcastic indulgence kids always wore when they had to wait for you. Cynthia panicked for a moment, thinking that they would surely ask her what all that was about and knowing she was still too rattled to make up an answer; but they didn’t say a word, they couldn’t have cared less. They turned and ran their MetroCards through the slot and walked ahead of her down the steps to the express track.

Cynthia was neither offended nor flattered, really—mostly she just thought it was hilarious. She couldn’t wait to tell Adam about it. It did bother her a little bit to think that this kind of unsanctioned activity went on without her, that she was not a part of it, even though she had no desire to
be
part of it—married strangers hooking up in earshot of their kids. Who knew? Maybe this sort of decadence went on all the time. There was a time when she might have at least led the guy on a little bit just to shock herself, when anything that new to her would have presented itself in the form of a hypothetical dare.

“Earth to Mom,” Jonas said. A train was already there at the express platform, its doors just sliding open, and the kids had quickened their steps to catch it. She ushered them along in front of her, where she could see them; when the doors opened, they stepped inside, and then a voice from on board the train roared, “Hold the door!” She heard a ticking sound; it was the cane of a blind man,
white-haired, wearing an old blue blazer, a baseball cap, and enormous wraparound sunglasses. He seemed angry about something, or at someone. “Hold the
door!”
he yelled again, though someone, not Cynthia, was already holding it. His cane swung incautiously at about ankle level, swatting the base of the seats, the pole at the center of the car, the door frame, and people’s legs. She couldn’t tell whether he was actually orienting himself this way or just panicking. She took another step back, to avoid the cane’s arc—not because she feared it would hurt, but because she didn’t want to send the man any kind of false information—and then it happened: the doors closed with their two-note chime, and she was on the platform and they were on the train, and as it pulled out she saw the look of terror on Jonas’s face, though he might well have been terrified mostly of her, banging her hands on the glass and screaming
Wait
.

Even before she’d reached the end of the platform the train was moving too fast for her, and there she was, watching the train lights shrinking away from her down the tunnel. She couldn’t turn away from it. She could feel that the strangers behind her had stopped moving too: nothing was moving anymore but that train. “You got kids on that train?” a voice said behind her, a young voice, a man’s voice. Misfortune made everyone familiar with you. “How old are they?”

Cynthia turned around and tried to answer but could not. She could actually see a black circle forming at the edges of her own vision.

“Go to the booth and ask for a transit cop,” the young man said—he was wearing a huge Knicks jersey.
“You
go,” someone else said to him contemptuously. “You’re going to send this woman up the stairs? You can’t see she’s about to pass out as it is?” Over their heads she heard a gathering roar, and she thought at first she was fainting but it was a real roar, there was another express train pulling in beside them. Two people were holding her gently by the elbows. The children had disappeared into a tunnel: it didn’t seem real. “What’s your name?” an older woman’s voice said.

Cynthia got on the first car of the train and groped her way to the
locked front door that faced forward into the darkness. She understood it was a stupid idea but the logic of the situation was all dream logic now and she didn’t feel there was anything to discuss. The children’s fear filled every cell of her. She had to go find them. She had to put her face flat against the glass in order to see past her own reflection, even though there was nothing to see for a long time but the track and the steelwork that held open the tunnel and the ghostly local stations they sped through without stopping. Finally she felt the train slowing down beneath her feet and the lights of the platform at 59th Street floated toward her. She burst out onto the platform and only then did it occur to her that there was no real reason to think that the kids had gotten off here at all, maybe they were still crying on the train as it continued on its long loop beneath the city, but then she saw a cop farther down the platform and the cop had his hands on two children’s shoulders and the two children were April and Jonas.

“You’re
here?”
the cop said, not very sympathetically. “I just radioed 86th Street to look for you there. That wasn’t real smart, getting on another train.” The kids were staring at her with the blank expression of kids overhearing their parents fight. Even an hour later Cynthia couldn’t remember much about how she got them back up the stairs and into the bright street and into a cab and back home, but she didn’t recall any of them saying a word the entire way.

She made Adam sleep in the kids’ room that night, so they could both stay in the big bed with her. The next day she kept them both home from school. Adam was a little surprised but put it down to erring on the side of caution: they were quieter than usual, it was true, but it was hard to tell—even for April and Jonas themselves—how much of their anxiety was still their own and how much of it came from being treated so solicitously, as if something terrible had happened to them. He told them both how proud of them he was for being so brave and for being smart enough to ask for help from a police officer, just like they should have. He said that anytime they wanted to talk about yesterday, he was there for them; but that was not Cynthia’s approach. She sat the kids down together and asked
them what questions they had, about what had happened yesterday, and about why Mommy hadn’t gotten on the train with them, and when they came up with nothing, she took that as evidence of how traumatized they were, how quickly you had to act before what was in them buried itself so deeply you were never going to get it out again. She let them return to school the next day but was so worried for them that she sat them down to talk again as soon as they got home, just to compensate in case she’d made a mistake. That night April woke up sobbing from a nightmare. Ten minutes later both kids were sleeping beside their mother and Adam was curled up in Jonas’s short bed watching the shadows, awake but too tired to get up and turn the nightlight off.