The Privileges (6 page)

“Our family rules!”

Then something flickered in the reflected light on the pane her nose was nearly touching; she turned her head and there, in the kitchen doorway, was Adam. He still had his dripping raincoat on. There was no telling how much he’d heard but his head was cocked warily, like a dog’s. Cynthia hopped down to the floor, a little out of breath. The kids did the same and came and leaned against her on either side, still wearing their bandannas and sunglasses. Her nostrils flared with the effort not to laugh. She put her hands on their shoulders.

“Hello, dear,” she said in a bright voice. “The children and I have been gambling.”

After four years at Morgan Stanley, an operation so vast that Adam’s true bosses existed mostly on the level of gossip and rumor, a feeling of toxic stasis had begun to provoke him in the mornings when he arrived at work. It wasn’t all in his head; lately a number of his colleagues had been promoted over and around him, and when he asked about it at his review, the thing that kept coming up was that they may have been dullards and yes-men but they all had their MBAs. Why this should have impressed anybody was beyond him. In theory he could have taken a leave of absence and gone back to business school himself—lots of the firm’s junior employees did it at his age—but those people didn’t have children to support, and anyway Adam lacked the tolerance for the one step back that might or might not set up the proverbial two steps forward. He’d worked hard to get where he was and he couldn’t see giving up that ground voluntarily. The momentum of the business world was one-way only, a principle that should not be rationalized. He and Cynthia had a vivid faith in their own future, not as a variable but as a destination; all the glimpses New York afforded of the lives led by the truly successful, the arcane range of their experiences, aroused in the two of them less envy than impatience.

So he called a guy named Parker he’d met a few times playing pickup basketball at Chelsea Piers, and took him out to lunch, and two weeks later Parker had brought him on at a private equity firm called Perini Capital, an outfit with a shitload of money behind it but so few people working there that Adam knew everyone’s name by the end of his first day. The money, pre-bonus at least, was actually a little less than he’d been making at Morgan, but it wasn’t about that. It was about potential upside, and also about his vision of what a man’s work should be: a tight group of friends pushing themselves to make one another rich. No hierarchies or job descriptions; there was the boss and then there was everyone else, and the boss, Barry Sanford, loved Adam from day one. Sanford was a white-haired libertine who was on his fourth wife and had named the company after his boat. It was obvious to everyone that he saw
something of his young self in Adam, and though Adam didn’t personally see the resemblance, he was unoffended by it. The job’s only drawback was that it required some travel—the occasional overnight to Iowa City or the equivalent, to sound out some handful of guys who thought their business deserved to be bigger than it was. And strippers: for some reason these aspirants always had the idea that strippers were the lingua franca of serious money men. In truth Adam considered few things in life a grimmer bore than an evening at Podunk’s finest strip club, but he went along with it, because his job was to make these people admire him, a job at which he excelled.

His Perini colleagues, Parker included, were all still single; he’d go out for a few drinks with them after work but then the evening would start to turn into another kind of evening and he’d excuse himself and go home. Still, the new environment—the informality and irreverence, the clubby decor, the foosball table, the sense that they were bound not by any sort of dull corporate ethos but only by the limits of their own creativity—fit him perfectly; he felt he belonged there. Its best amenity, though he wouldn’t have said so to anyone but Cynthia, was that in the basement of the building, which was on Ninth Avenue, there was a swimming pool. Whenever he didn’t have a lunch, Adam would take the elevator all the way down, hang his suit in the changing room, and swim laps until he wore himself out. Sometimes there was a group of kids wearing floaties in the shallow end—one of the other, bigger companies in the building had its own day care—but most days he had the water completely to himself, his every stroke echoing off the walls, his heartbeat loud in his ears. It felt like stealing. Then he’d shower, put his suit on, and go back upstairs to his desk. Sometimes he’d have Liz the receptionist order him something to eat, or sometimes he’d just skip it and let the adrenaline carry him through until dinner. He was in the best shape of his life, and it was a boon to his job performance too, because he always thought more clearly when he was a little exhausted.

At school April’s first task was to esteem herself. They began with self-portraits, huge-headed, in which the bodies were an afterthought, apportioned roughly the same space on the page as a nose or an ear. The portraits smiled widely with crooked teeth, not because the children’s teeth were crooked but because teeth were hard to draw. They made lists of the reasons they liked themselves, lists of the things they were good at and the things at which they were determined to improve. They named the comforts of their homes—pets, siblings, favorite toys, or favorite places. One girl said her favorite place was Paris, but April took this to mean the imaginary Paris of the Madeline books. Her own favorite place was her parents’ bed, with her parents not in it, just her and a few stuffed animals and a juice box and a Disney movie on TV. She dreamed of this situation often, though in practice she usually had to be sick to attain it. Something told her, though, that it would be seen as babyish, and so she said the Central Park Carousel instead.

Less auspicious was the name project. A name, the students were told, had a secret history; it might connect you to the country from which your family had first emigrated, or to the language or the religion of that country, or even just to the family itself and the loved ones who had gone before. It let you know that you were not just some one-time phenomenon but an outcome, a culmination, the top branch of a majestic tree. Told to go home and conduct some research on why she was named April Morey, she saw her parents exchange a quick look before her mother answered.

“Well,” Cynthia said, muting the TV, “Dad and I talked about a lot of different names. We would sit on the couch in our old apartment and try them out on each other back when I was pregnant with you, say them out loud to see how they sounded. And there were a few we liked, but we kept coming back to April. April Morey. It just sounded the most beautiful to us.”

Her dad smiled, and patted her mom’s leg.

“That’s it?” April said.

They looked as confused as she was. “Also,” her father said, sitting forward on the couch, “it’s a pretty unusual name. Not a lot of other Aprils in the world. We wanted a name as special as you are.”

They’d given her her name not because somebody else had had it, but because nobody had? “Was there ever another April in our family?” she asked. They looked at each other again, and shook their heads. “Why didn’t you name me after a loved one?”

“A loved one?” Adam said.

April nodded. “A dead loved one. That’s what a lot of people do. Or somebody from the old country.” Her mother punched her father in the thigh, and that, it shocked April to realize, was because he had been about to laugh.

“Where do we come from?” she demanded of them. “What country?”

Stunningly, they seemed less than sure. Adam knew his father’s family had come from England, but he didn’t know where in England specifically, nor how many generations ago that had been; his mother’s family was part German and part Dutch. Cynthia knew her father’s ancestors were Russian, unless he’d been lying about that too, and as for her maternal grandparents, her mother had always refused to discuss them.

“Was there something special about the
month
of April?” April asked. There wasn’t. No historic event had taken place then, no anniversary or birthday, though they did offer that if April’s birthday had actually fallen in April, they would have named her something else.

“What would you have named me instead?” she persisted. The revelation that she, April, might just as plausibly have been Samantha or Josephine or Emma, that only chance was behind the whole solemn question of her identity, made her feel worse than ever. She could see that her parents were now upset, but she was angry at them and didn’t care. They kept coming back to beauty, but it was a beauty she couldn’t comprehend and that she wasn’t at all sure her teacher would consider a satisfactory completion of the assignment.

Ms. Diaz was nice about it, of course, but there was nothing to be done about the jealousy engendered by the other, longer name-essays that went up on the walls above their lockers, stories of honored relatives and cool languages and religious rituals tended through the
generations. April felt as if her family came from nowhere, and, more puzzlingly, that this suited her parents just fine.

The next unit was family traditions. The teacher took pains to define this idea as broadly as possible; still, what traditions did April’s family have? They hardly ever did the same thing even twice. They had no ancestral home they returned to, no church they attended (her mom had gone to church as a child but April had heard her say that she hated it and was glad she never had to go again), no special place they liked to travel to—indeed, having been someplace on vacation once, like Nantucket or Vail or Disney World, even if they’d had a good time there, was usually cited as a reason not to go there again. Even their Christmas tree wasn’t in the same spot every year. April knew her own grandparents so little that she sometimes mixed them up in her head and was shy about talking to them on the phone. She had one uncle and no aunts, just something her mother called a step-aunt, whom she’d only ever seen in a photo in her parents’ wedding album.

Soon the whole temper of the assignment had changed, in April’s mind, from an exercise in self-discovery to an indiscriminate hunt for what Ms. Diaz, for whom she would have died in any case, wanted to admire in her. It seemed perfectly defensible to start making things up. She wrote down that her family went to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral every Sunday, and that they were considering a trip to Jerusalem for Christmas. Her grandmother on her mother’s side, who was named May, had lost her parents as a girl but had gamely made her way from Holland to America by boat. Every summer April and her cousins gathered for a reunion at the family estate on a mountain in New Hampshire. It was so big that some of her distant pioneer relatives were buried in a small graveyard right there on the place.

Adam and Cynthia read these notions on the wall beneath their daughter’s self-portrait on Parents’ Night, mute with amazement. April’s teacher couldn’t really believe this stuff, could she? Yet she had posted it right there with all the other handwritten, dubiously spelled histories of perseverance and hardship. They already felt conspicuous, as they always did at these school functions, as the youngest couple in the classroom; at twenty-nine they were still
strikingly young, by Manhattan standards at least, to be parents at all. Jonas’s best friend in kindergarten had once slept over for a whole weekend while his father took his mother to London for her fiftieth birthday. Every Parents’ Night Adam and Cynthia were a kind of generation unto themselves, and it didn’t take much, in that context, to awaken a vestigial unease about being in some sort of trouble they didn’t even understand. When Ms. Diaz, deep in conversation with some kid’s father who was surely old enough to be their father too, smiled at them from across the room as if to say that she would be with them in just a moment, they smiled back warmly until she turned away and then Cynthia squeezed his arm and they got the hell out of there.

When she’d first stopped working outside the home, as the expression went, the kids were toddlers with unsynchronized nap schedules and so Cynthia’s brain was pretty much indentured to them; even apart from the physical exhaustion, it was a struggle just to find a little interior space for herself, a little space in which to
be
herself, when they were so present and so vulnerable and so demanding every minute of the day. The only time that truly felt like her own was late at night when everyone else was asleep, when she would stay up and watch movies and savor the day’s one cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window; but even that came at a price, since the sleep she lost made the next day’s selflessness harder to maintain.