The Ten-Year Nap (16 page)

One day, a large silver family van had pulled up parallel to Jill’s car, and the window lowered, revealing a redheaded woman. “I’m Juliana’s mom,” said Sharon Gregorius, leaning across the seat as far as her seat belt would allow. “I saw you at the class breakfast. I wanted to say hi and invite you to something. A kind of scheme of mine. Can you come? Forty-six Daniel’s Lane.”

So Jill, if only because she could not imagine what this meant—a
scheme?
—decided to go. In the Gregoriuses’ dining room, she went and sat at the maple table of the pale gray colonial along with several other mothers, eating those rolled-up turkey pinwheel sandwiches that were delicious but had long ago become a cliché: “the sundried tomato of our time,” Amy had said. The women themselves were not all one
type,
as she had condemned them in her mind. One of them was amusing and arch, and reminded Jill of a girl at boarding school who had once climbed onto the slate roof of the Westaway Refectory and planted a dildo on the weathervane. Another woman, a former therapist, had an empathic if slightly moony manner. Jill could imagine lying down on the couch in this woman’s living room and telling her about her mother and about her fears about Nadia. But, sternly, she did not allow herself to become socially involved with these new women. Jill had listened as Sharon Gregorius spoke. This was a business proposition, Sharon said. She was going to present to them the prospectus for the creation of a greeting card company called Wuv Cards, whose name had been derived from the bastardized phrase “I wuv you.”

“What differentiates this line of cards from every other,” said Sharon, “is that these are for kids.”

“I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but lots of greeting cards are for kids,” said the former therapist, whose name was Denise.

“True, but what will make Wuv Cards distinctive is the fact that they will be the only ones designed to be from kids to their parents. Look, I know that it’s extremely hard to break in any new product. I worked in the wall-coverings industry for ten years. It was always a lot easier to handle the tried-and-true, but whenever our sales team had to deal with something new, there was a certain enthusiasm about it. I haven’t worked since the kids were born, but I’m sure it’s still the same way. Or I hope it is,” she added with a laugh. “Now, these are just mock-ups; my kids helped me with the desktop publishing aspect. Once we get them printed for real, they’ll look much more professional.”

Sharon passed the mock-ups around, and the women wiped their turkey-hands on napkins and peered at the desktop-published cards, laughing a little or nodding, or politely saying they were quirky. One read:
“Mom and Dad, I messed up BIG TIME.”
And inside, it read:
“And I’m really sorry.”
On the cover of another:
“Mom and Dad, I have something I need to tell you.”
When you opened the card, you saw the words
“YOU WERE ADOPTED.”

“Sharon, this one’s funny,” said one of the women.

“I’m glad.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t really get it,” Jill found herself saying. She had barely meant for anyone to hear her, but now it was too late.

“Oh no?” said Sharon. “That’s not good. We’ll tweak it.”

“Sorry, maybe it’s me.”

“Well, I should explain what we were going for,” said Sharon. “In real life, parents would tell the
child
that he’s adopted, but in this case the child gets to pretend that his parents, who of course seem nothing like him—”

“No, I understand the concept. It’s fine. But I mean the whole thing…I guess I have to ask why would children actually spend their own money on these cards?”

Sharon looked so unhappy, and all the others grew quiet and unsmiling at Jill’s candor. She was already the interloper, and she was being subtly tested here at this lunch, and look how she’d behaved. The joke about adoption bothered her, but also both the idea and the name of the line of cards were clearly dumb. Couldn’t everyone see that? But the others had been sitting there looking at the mock-ups and thinking of putting money into this venture, and one of them was even taking notes on her BlackBerry. Jill began to feel sickish; the taste of the turkey pinwheel was suddenly gamey in her mouth. Was it venison? she thought, disgusted and a little panicky at the whole scene. Was it rabbit? Was it a
monkey
pinwheel? She could not bear being here in this house.

“It’s good to hear criticism,” said Sharon Gregorius evenly. “We really need that at this stage. So thanks for that, Jill.” Then, to the table, she added cryptically, “Jill worked in film.”

“So there you have it,” Jill said now at yoga. “They made an overture of friendship. They tried to include me. And they were nice, and at least one of them seems like she might even be interesting. But there are two words for why I am not becoming friends with these women: ‘Wuv Cards.’”

They laughed, for it was easy to laugh and all hold the very same views; they had always done it, and it was like breathing. But Amy, unrolling her yoga mat in Jill’s sunny living room by the potted fig tree, said, “I don’t know. Maybe you’re being hard on them.”

“How so?” Jill said.

“I know you have a lot of regrets about moving here. Maybe you didn’t give them a fair shake. But at least they’re trying to do something with themselves now that their kids are in school. I mean,
I
haven’t figured it all out for myself yet, and Mason’s in fourth grade.”

“I don’t know,” said Karen. “Why do you say ‘at least’ they’re trying? Does everyone always have to ‘do’ something? Can’t they just enjoy their lives? I do.”

“But they’ve got no innate sense of imperative,” said Jill. “They have to make it up, and you can almost see the effort. All of them worked before, and all of them stopped.”

“Right,” said Amy. “Partly because corporate America didn’t love them.”

“How do you know that, Amy? Just because you wanted out forever?”

Amy paused for a moment. “I don’t know that it’s ‘forever,’” she said. “I think about working all the time. I am slowly heading toward some formal volunteer position; I don’t know why it’s taking me so long, but it just is. And I know that a group of women whose kids have started school and who are a little bored and want to put their former business knowledge to use and create some kind of start-up are supposed to be encouraged, right? That’s what my mother would say.”

“Not every idea should be encouraged,” said Jill. “Isn’t there something better that people can do with their time?”

“But I guess I don’t understand why you’re so concerned about what other people do with their time. Would you want them to judge the way you spend
your
time?”

The other women stayed upright on their mats, their spines straight, frozen in attention. They had never heard Amy and Jill, such close friends for so many years, speak fiercely to each other. They were slightly shocked and uneasily excited, listening to this.

“Back in the city,” Jill said after a moment, “you and Karen and Roberta all live in the center of commerce of the entire world, and yet you’ve chosen to drop out. Out here, everyone’s sort of agreed to drop out in a way, whether they work or not. I mean, they’re all staying away from the geographical epicenter, like it’s this hot stove.”

“I wouldn’t say I’ve dropped out,” Karen said, but no one replied.

“Who says the city equals life?” asked Amy. “Why are we assuming that? People live in all kinds of places all over America. Aren’t cities just these fake constructs? Didn’t you used to tell me something like that back in graduate school, when you were studying urbanism or something?”

“Yes, but I’m much older, and I see it differently now,” Jill said. “Donald and I left because of Nadia.”

“I just think your attitude could hurt you,” Amy said, more gently now. “You sound like you have contempt for the place where you chose to live.”

“‘Contempt’ is a very harsh word,” said Jill.

“I just feel protective of you. And my God, I miss you. You’re my closest friend. Don’t forget that I’m the one who got left behind.”

“I gather you’re adapting,” Jill said dryly.

“You mean Penny?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve told you, she is a really good person,” said Amy. “She’s interesting and smart, and she’s involved in all aspects of the arts. She said it’s really disturbing the way funding for the arts has been dismantled.”

“I don’t need Penny Ramsey to tell me that,” Roberta said. “It was that way when I left art school.”

“But it got ten times worse under the Republicans,” said Amy.

“Isn’t her husband a big Republican donor? Greg Ramsey?”

“He is, but it’s complicated.”

“Well, I hope you’ll both be very happy together,” Jill suddenly put in, laughing unpleasantly. The single syllable of her laughter came out like a gong in the echoing room.

“She’s not what you think, you know,” said Amy.

“I don’t think anything,” said Jill. “Why shouldn’t you be friends with her? It’s no more or less surprising than you becoming friends with anyone else.”

“Well, it would be less surprising than, I don’t know, Geralynn Freund,” offered Karen.

“Oh, poor Geralynn,” Roberta said. “It’s awful.”

“Let’s get started,” Jill said suddenly. She didn’t want to hear any more bulletins from her abandoned city life. And, she suddenly realized with an unexpectedly pleasurable feeling, she now hated Penny Ramsey.

So they turned on the DVD and began their makeshift yoga class. For once Jill was relieved not to talk but just to stay in one place and move her long body swiftly, fluidly. “Class” was an inexact word, because all they really did was sit in a row in front of someone’s plasma TV and assume an unbroken flow of
vinyasa
poses to an instructional DVD. But it didn’t matter; the class had been created, Jill knew, in order to provide some partial shape to their day, to give them purpose.

Once, long before Jill was a graduate student or a film development person, back when she was young and just beginning at the Pouncey School in New Hampshire, she didn’t have to worry about what she would do with all her learning; that wasn’t meant to concern her. Learning and preparing were enough, and that had carried her through school. She had loved the all-girl residential environment; it was a relief not to hear the voices of boys everywhere, or even anywhere. Later on, as graduation approached, the boylessness caused all the girls to become a little agitated and skittish. But for a long time everyone felt that adolescent boys were as dominating and dangerous as rutting elk and that it was better to be kept apart from them during this vulnerable time, when girls’ intellects were first being formed.

Jill was also relieved to be out of her home, though she hadn’t known she would feel this way. Susan Benedict had often looked to her young daughter to make certain decisions, even ones that seemed trivial. When Jill was eight, the meter man had rung the doorbell of the house, and her mother had come into the living room, asking her, “What do you think I should do?”

“Well, I guess you should let him in.”

“But I can’t tell for certain that he’s really the meter man,” said Susan Benedict, and Jill recalled that she had looked as anxious as a child. The meter man was eventually let in, and Jill watched as her mother nervously followed him downstairs to the basement, making sure that he actually was who he said he was.

Jill knew, in such slightly disconcerting moments, that her mother was more frightened and tentative than other mothers, but Jill almost admired these qualities. They had a beauty to them, as though her mother were a flower, and all the other mothers were logs. During the times when Susan Benedict became excessively sad and said she needed to stay quiet for a few hours, Jill would come sit on the side of the bed in the dim master bedroom and talk to her mother about school and her brothers and a book she was reading. Jill’s mother would ask her questions and sometimes would tell her stories from when she had been an actress, and had appeared in a single Broadway musical,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, before giving up her career.

Jill never understood exactly what was wrong with her mother, only that she felt compelled to retreat from the family every once in a while. Jill would help her do this; her older brothers—scrambling, wild, independent—certainly never did, and her father was off in his office at the Benecraft shellac factory all the time. “It must have been really hard for you,” Jill’s friends said in adulthood, when she described those early days. But a sad mother isn’t so difficult to manage, at least not at first, when you don’t even realize she’s sad, exactly. Jill had actually enjoyed sitting on the bed beside her mother, hearing about her theatrical days.

“Don’t go into theater,” Susan had advised from the half-darkened room. “The life is very unstable. It was wonderful to be in Tennessee Williams plays, though; he was so brilliant, but the characters were ultimately always so heartbreaking. But just try to do something other than theater.”

“Okay, I will,” Jill promised. She had no interest in performing and could barely imagine her vulnerable mother standing onstage in front of an audience. Though, of course, the reality was that if such a person did get up onstage, her whispering voice and nearly translucent presence might well hold everyone in place, forcing them to look only at her. Susan Benedict sank back into her bed like an aging Tennessee Williams character, and she was the compassionate, female presence whom the other people in the family loved but who needed them to make decisions such as whether or not to let the meter man inside.

Jill often sat with her mother in the bedroom, but she only revealed what she thought her mother could handle. When another girl at school accused Jill of being “too smart, and boys hate girls who are too smart,” she had kept the sting of the remark to herself; it would have upset her mother so much to tell her about it. This was how she had gotten through childhood. When it came time to go away to the Pouncey School in Weyburn, New Hampshire, Jill worried about leaving, but her mother made it easy for her.