The Ten-Year Nap (17 page)

“Go,” her mother said, to Jill’s surprise. “Write me letters. Have a wonderful time.”

Pouncey, as it turned out, encouraged the girls to succeed. “Please, Ms. Babcock,” Jill remembered saying to her teacher in her American Civil War seminar, her hand waving in the air, “I really have something to contribute.”

“I’m sure that’s true, Jill,” said the young and ironic Ms. Babcock, who was Jill’s first mentor ever. Ms. Babcock probably wasn’t more than twenty-five at the time but had seemed so powerful. She was amused and awed by the girls, and had had them reenact the Battle of Gettysburg on the playing fields of the school. They had tramped around in boots and in improvised blue and gray uniforms; they had fallen to their deaths, crying in their last moments, “Ah’m a-dyin’, brother of mah’n.” Then they had gone back to their dormitories in a pack, arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, and had written bold if overreaching papers with confident titles such as “General Lee in the Shenandoah: A Close Analysis” and “The Battle of Pea Ridge: A Turning Point in a Nation’s War with Itself.”

“Where are all you meek types? All the ones I’ve been reading about in that book
Setting Free Rapunzel
. The ones who have ‘complexes’ and can’t speak up?” Ms. Babcock asked. There was laughter among the girls who sprawled out around the big classroom table. “What? You haven’t heard that girls are supposed to be shy and inarticulate?”

The education at Pouncey had always been classical and rigorous, although generations earlier, back in the 1940s and 1950s, it was said that the girls there were mostly headed for their MRS degrees. Still, the students in those eras had rarely thought about the discrepancy between what they learned and what they were planning to do with that learning. Knowledge didn’t just evaporate and get released into the atmosphere like a gas. It stayed within you, filling you up and changing your cellular structure, so that by the time you graduated from Pouncey and went on to college or secretarial school or, during World War II, perhaps an aviation-parts factory or even an early marriage, you were different from the person you had once been. When Jill arrived at the school in the early 1980s, she imagined that her education would lead her to more education, which somehow would lead her and everyone she knew to a formidable life.

There in their New Hampshire cloister for four years, the loud girls were predictably loud, the quiet ones quiet, but despite their dispositions, they were now all in possession of facts and the ability to analyze a passage from just about any kind of book that existed. Everything they were taught was slowly absorbed by them on that green-gold campus. Over time, as Ms. Babcock and other teachers told them, many people would gravitate toward what they had. Men would be attracted to their intelligence and their capability, as would future employers, and the world would await the moment of their intellectual ripeness.

Upon graduation, Jill won the Vivian Swope Prize, given annually to “A Graduating Senior Who Demonstrates the Most Promise.” The prize had been endowed by the family of a brilliant Pouncey girl who had been accidentally killed long ago in the spring of 1931, during a senior hiking expedition, when she lost her footing and hit her head on a rock. Jill had seen only one photograph of her: Vivian Swope had worn her wavy hair with a big silk bow and had had an appealing overbite, but the photograph revealed nothing more, and she became a stock symbol of excellence unfulfilled. All the Swope winners, at the time of their win, had occupied a certain glancing, golden place at Pouncey. They were the ones who swanned and glittered, the ones with their hands perennially up in class.

Promise, it seemed, was everywhere at that school, but it was best embodied by someone superior whom you secretly tried to dislike but just couldn’t. Promise, for one, came in the form of Jill—back then still known as Jill Benedict—a member of the class of ’85. At Pouncey, Jill was tall, strong, naturally blonde, a field-hockey player who charged toward the goalposts. The Benedicts came from “good stock,” everyone said, which always made Jill imagine them all aswim in some kind of thick, nutritionally enhanced broth. She was brought up to be kind and intelligent but modest in a big, meandering, slightly unkempt house outside Philadelphia, with two laughing older brothers who had bedrooms that smelled of body odor and something indefinably male. (“Oh, poor innocent you, look, I’ll spell it out for you: S-E-M-E-N,” another girl had said one night at Pouncey after Jill mentioned her brothers’ mysterious room-smell.)

Jill wasn’t necessarily destined to be a Swope winner, but in the end, death clinched the prize for her. In Jill’s junior year at Pouncey, her mother became noticeably more withdrawn and sadder than she’d ever been. No one understood; everyone just let her sleep late and tried to be understanding, and gave her time to herself when she was in a particularly unresponsive mood. Then, one morning in spring, Susan Benedict walked into the family’s garage, which stood separate from the house, stuffed the tailpipe of the Cadillac with her husband’s balled-up dress socks, and sat in the idling car in her nightgown and coat until she lost consciousness and finally died.

One of Jill’s brothers had called her at school with the news and said, “Jill, listen to me. I have to tell you something really, really terrible.” He made a sound like a croak, then a belch. “Mom committed suicide.”

To which Jill responded, dumbly, “Will she be okay?”

“What? No, listen to me. She died.”

“Mom
died?
”

Panicking, Jill had run across the playing fields, slipped into the woods, and sat in a patch of dirt, crying in a howl until she was ready to return to the world. The next day she somehow got down to Philadelphia for her mother’s funeral, and it was arranged that she would take her final exams at home over the summer. Her room was packed up and sent on after her.

Her mother’s suicide note had said that she loved her family more than she could ever say, but that, as they all knew, she had always been “emotional,” and lately she had been unable to feel any happiness at all. “I don’t understand why she couldn’t talk to us,” Jill’s father had said to anyone he could corner in those early days after the death. Bob Benedict knew his wife was troubled. Now it was as though he would be made to inhabit the pain he’d never understood. “Why didn’t she say she was suffering so badly?” he said to his children in tears. “Why didn’t she tell us the extent of it?” Susan Benedict had always seemed to Jill both sensitive and special. Her melancholy nature was simply a part of her that other people had known about and had always accepted with alternating irritation and patience.

When Jill returned to New Hampshire in the fall, having spent a long trance of a summer in the house with her shattered father and helpless, sobbing brothers, she had changed in ways that everyone could see. When she spoke in history class, she was quieter, less desperate to be heard, but more eloquent. At meals in the faculty dining room, teachers passed her paper on the Industrial Revolution from hand to hand. On the grass, playing field hockey, she knocked a battered puck around as if it were Death itself.

Sentiment rushed toward Jill Benedict like something flowing downhill. Everyone knew now that she was better than the rest of them. They suddenly saw what they hadn’t quite been able to see before: that she was uncommonly intelligent and would likely do big things with her life. Jill, it was decided, was the member of the class of ’85 most deserving of the Swope Prize. Even her classmates who had held aspirations in this direction now conceded the point over a late-night secret Kahlúa session in the dormitory. They drank right from the stash of miniature bottles stowed inside the hanging shoe-bag in someone’s closet. “Jill Benedict will so totally get it,” they told one another philosophically. “There’s no point in pretending she won’t.”

And so Jill received it, on a wooden platform at graduation, on a bright spring morning. Vivian Swope’s surviving younger sister, by 1985 a handsome copper-haired woman in her sixties, handed her the scroll bound in lavender ribbon. Jill remembered that the woman wore a large gold oval Pouncey ring on her finger, engraved with the Latin
“Ad omnia parata,”
the school’s motto. “Prepared for everything.” The ring caught the light as the woman read from her written remarks.

“This is for promise,” she said. “My sister Vivian never had a chance to fulfill her own promise. By giving you this award today, Jill, we acknowledge and honor your past achievements and those that are yet to come.”

I
N THE LIVING ROOM
in the middle of yoga, Nadia Hamlin appeared, standing over the women the same way she stood over her mother in the morning. Gradually they became aware of her, and someone pressed the remote control. Nadia had an
Ahoy, Mateys
towel with her that she now spread out on the floor to use as a mat. “Nadia,” the other women said. “How are you? Are you enjoying your big new house?”

“I like it a lot,” said Nadia softly.

“Come join us,” said Karen Yip, patting the floor, and Jill watched as her daughter sat down and tried to form her legs into the lotus position. But she wasn’t flexible or poised; she was nothing at all like little Nadia Comaneci had once been. She fiddled around on the floor for a while, yanking on her left leg, and finally Jill bent over her and said quietly, “Do you want to do something else? Maybe go get a book and sit in the corner and read a little?”

“Okay, Mom.”

Jill followed behind her, telling her friends that she would be right back and not to continue without her. Mother and daughter walked down the corridor toward the playroom, and Jill watched as Nadia stood at her bookshelf, pulling out one book after another, examining the covers with squinted eyes. Jill knew that Nadia couldn’t read the names of the titles yet. At age six and in first grade, she was still not a real reader, although at the end of last year, her pretty, neophyte kindergarten teacher back in the city had assured Jill and Donald that this would come with time. Nadia frowned over the lineup of picture books on her shelf, selecting one based on its cover illustration. She tucked the book under her arm; she did look good, as though she was a very young student skipping off to her morning class in Bioethics and the American Dream.

But Nadia wouldn’t be able to survive in a world where she would need, if not raw intellect, then at least a certain kind of pack-oriented female dynamism. Now Jill watched her daughter walk back out into the living room, holding a book in her hands that she could not read. Over the rest of the hour, to the gentle instructional voice of the yoga DVD, the four women repeatedly rose up on their haunches on their little blue rubber rectangles and sank back down. They folded and unfolded their arms and legs, and lifted their heads like animals at a drinking pool in the Serengeti. They did the downward dog, the dragonfly pose, and countless salutations to heavenly bodies. They metamorphosed into animals, and trees with roots that spread like long fingers through the ground, holding themselves steady, and they became grateful to the sun for warming them and the moon for simply providing nighttime beauty. The DVD ended, and there was silence. But from the corner of the room, where Nadia sat with her book now, they heard her distinctive singing voice. The women opened their eyes.

“Nadia,” said Karen. “That’s so pretty. What is it, honey?”

Nadia shrugged shyly. “Just a song,” she said.

“
Rise, sorrow…”
repeated Karen. “And what’s the rest?”

“’Neath the saffron sister tree,
” Jill quickly put in. “It’s some Russian folk song, we think, but we don’t know what it is.”

“I’ve heard her sing it before. The words are beautiful,” Karen said. “So sad and haunting. I always like hearing you sing, Nadia. You have a really nice voice.” She turned to Jill and said, “You should get her singing lessons out here. I think she’s very good.”

“Oh, thanks,” said Jill, but she was sure that Karen was simply being kind. Nadia did have a sweet if unusual voice, but Jill had mostly been struck by the fact that Nadia’s voice stood out from the other children’s. “Okay,” she said, “we should probably end. Want to do an
om
?”

They all tried one now, sitting quietly and closing their eyes again and chanting the single syllable. Jill opened an eye and saw that Karen was looking at her. They both smiled and laughed slightly, and then the others broke their concentration too.

“Sorry,” said Karen. “I can never do this with a straight face. You know,” she said, “maybe we should end with Nadia’s little song instead. With actual words that are pretty. That seems more fitting. Would it be okay if we did that, Nadia?”

The little girl nodded, and Jill knew that Nadia had no idea of what Karen was talking about. They all said they liked the idea, and so they closed their eyes, Nadia too, and in unison they chanted
“Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree.”

They repeated the melancholy line a few times, and various thoughts of female friendship and loss and anything else that occurred to them were given entry into their brains.
“Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree,”
they said over and over.

Roberta Sokolov thought: How can Jill live here? It feels so empty. And why am I here now? My friends can be kind of monotonous. How did I end up with them?

Karen Yip, a former pure mathematics major and superior manipulator of numbers, thought:

Amy Lamb thought: I wonder what Penny is thinking about. The New York seaport at the turn of the century? Or her lover Ian Janeway? I should call her and say hi. Would anyone notice if I slipped into the bathroom and called her on my cell phone when yoga is over? I definitely feel like calling her.

Jill Hamlin thought:
Rise, sorrow?
What do those words really mean? Is Nadia depressed? Is she lost and alone and confused? What if they had given us the plump, laughing little girl in the next crib? Everything would have been different. But if they had given us that other little girl instead, then maybe Nadia would still be living in that orphanage, in a room full of girls, all of them ignored, unloved forever. And it’s just unbearable to think of her going unloved. Oh, I have to talk about it all with Amy. But look at Amy over there, sitting on her mat and probably focused only on Penny Ramsey. Just look at her; she’s lost to me.