The Ten-Year Nap (20 page)

Today at breakfast, conversation meandered from Roberta’s creativity to the children’s art curriculum, to Amy Lamb’s friendship with Penny Ramsey, that sleek mother in the grade who ran a museum. Roberta had noticed that Amy talked about Penny Ramsey a lot lately, invoking her name with a certain private satisfaction, as though Penny were a celebrity. “I’m going downtown to meet her for lunch later,” Amy said now. “She’s giving me a private tour of her museum’s permanent collection.”

“Oh, that should be interesting,” said Shelly Harbison. “Getting a behind-the-scenes look. Let me know what it’s like.”

“I will.”

“Have you been to her apartment?” Shelly asked. “I heard it’s beautiful: all white. Where would your children be able to sit in an all-white apartment? You’d have to give them orders all the time about what they could or couldn’t do. No homework done in ink. No grape juice.”

Just then, Joanne Klinger’s cell phone rang and she turned slightly away from the others to take the call. In a second she got off the phone and explained that her mother-in-law’s friend had been planning to give her some hand-me-downs for the baby to wear and that the clothes needed to be picked up now. “Could I leave the baby with you?” she asked. Everyone said it was fine, so off she went. The other women kept talking and almost forgot the baby was in their midst until a few minutes later, when one of the waiters dropped and shattered a dish and Joanne’s baby, Zachary, was startled awake in his stroller and began to cry.

“Mommy will be right back,” Roberta said to the uncomprehending infant, and they all leaned their heads in so close that they must have looked like asteroids about to crash into him.

But Joanne did not return, and Zachary’s cries grew more insistent. Amy tried to call Joanne’s cell phone, but it went immediately to voice mail. “Hey, Joanne?” she said. “Are you on your way?”

Without saying anything, Shelly Harbison reached over and unstrapped the baby from the stroller. Shelly was someone for whom motherhood was everything; the other women all knew this about her, though until now they had understood it only abstractly. At breakfast sometimes she spoke ardently about her three children, and she was often carrying around a hot-button nonfiction sociological book with a motherhood theme. Years earlier, she had made them all reread that classic
Setting Free Rapunzel,
and in recent days she had urged them to buy
The Call of the Mild: Why Women Have Trouble with Aggression, and How It Holds Them Back.
The women at the table had periodically listened to Shelly’s pronouncements on subjects such as the friction between motherhood and work in the half-distracted fashion with which they listened to many of the stories that came their way across the booth at breakfast.

The baby arched and flailed now in Shelly’s arms and seemed in increased desperation. People at other tables began to take notice; across the way, a table of third-grade mothers from the school looked up from their own breakfast and whispered. Roberta knew one of them a little; she was the blandest mother in the whole school, perhaps the whole world, her face as round and closed as a pie.

The crying obliterated everyone’s words as well as all the ambient noise in the coffee shop. “Oh, what the hell,” Shelly said, and before anyone could understand what she was doing, Shelly had lifted her own blouse, exposing the enormous peach-colored cups of her nursing bra. She deftly snapped open a flap, revealing her right breast with its startlingly big, rough nipple and its reticulation of pale veins. Joanne Klinger’s baby, that fool, that bigamist, gamely and indiscriminately latched on.

Horror and silence descended upon the table. “Shelly,” Karen finally said, during the clicks and swallows of Zachary’s quiet feasting. “That is not your baby.”

“He doesn’t know the difference. Look at him.”

It was true that the baby looked peaceful; one hand played with the curve of this strange mother’s breast while the other reached up and gently twined her hair around his fingers. “I don’t know about this, Shelly. It seems weird to me too,” Roberta said. Then, nervously joking, she said to everyone, “I guess Joanne could nurse
Shelly’s
baby next. It could be like
Strangers on a Train
, with breastfeeding.” But no one laughed; they all looked down at their plates in dread and excited anticipation of the moment when Joanne would return.

Seconds later she did appear, her arms loaded with shopping bags. She saw the empty stroller and then the nursing baby, and she must have thought,
Wrong, wrong, wrong
, as her brain pooled with some dark, maternal chemical. She said, “What the hell are you doing, Shelly?” Then she dropped the bags and swept her baby back up, making him unlatch so quickly and unexpectedly that there was a hollow
pop,
like the breaking of a vacuum seal on a bottle of Snapple. The unloved nipple was left exposed, a wet point that punctuated the morning. All eyes in the room saw it. It radiated light and heat.

“He was getting hysterical,” Shelly said defensively, tucking it back inside. “We called your cell. What was I supposed to do, let him keep crying?”

Shelly and Joanne argued in a petulant, tearful way; both were highly upset and neither knew exactly why. All the women at the table were aware that there had been an obscure violation, with sexual overtones and suggestions of domination. Do we
own
our babies? someone later mused. Are they objects, no more than little radio-controlled vehicles that aren’t allowed to be separate from us? And, someone else had ventured, isn’t the act of nursing itself obliquely sexual? Men put their mouths on our breasts during sex, and we love it! We squash their heads down against us and hold them there. Roberta knew of an outrageous case in which a mother had actually had her baby briefly taken away from her by Child Protective Services because she had admitted to a friend that, whenever she breast-fed, she felt slightly aroused.

Life with a baby was as primitive and powerful as life with a lover. You could never really tell where one body ended and another began; the lines were drawn as crudely as if they had been rendered by a child. When Shelly had nursed Joanne’s baby, they’d all entered some strange territory of thought. They didn’t understand it, exactly, but they knew it was as bad as if Joanne had returned to the table and found another woman giving a blowjob to Joanne’s husband.

Now Joanne stuffed her bewildered baby back into the stroller and hurried out of the Golden Horn, with Karen following after her. Shelly turned to the women who remained in the booth, miserably asking, “Was it so terrible, what I did? I wasn’t trying to overstep my bounds. I was only acting on instinct.”

But the rest of them hardly knew what instinct really meant anymore; it had been a long time since they’d nursed their own babies. Almost nothing in their lives seemed biological or pure; everything had to be considered and reconsidered.

The incident would be talked about briefly among some of the mothers in the grade, and it would even be talked about among a scattering of mothers from other schools, who gathered in other coffee shops: the Copper Skillet, the Sizzling Pan, and, in a suburb not too far away, The Parthenon, which was located on the side of a busy turnpike.

But sitting in this booth now, on the day it happened, Roberta was already tired of it as an anecdote; in fact, there was far too much anecdote in all their lives. All she could think was, OH MOMMY, WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER?

S
O ON SUNDAY MORNING
Roberta Sokolov was in South Dakota, driving at dawn to a small town called Lorton that was, according to the GPS that glowed on the dashboard of her rental car, exactly 192 miles away from her present location. She and the other volunteers had flown in from New York City the night before. Lying in bed in the motel, Roberta remained awake and sensitive to every smell and sound that thrived around her. The room was infused with ambient smoke, which reminded her of her husband, with his thin joints held between thin fingers. In the room next door, someone watched a police procedural on television, and Roberta could hear the dialogue: “Did you check under her fingernails?” “I checked.” “And?” “Nothing.”

But finally, somehow, she slept, and then the wake-up call came, and she now stood peppered by light hail in the parking lot behind the motel. One of the other volunteers handed around mini-muffins and cups of coffee from the bleak breakfast buffet, and then they all nodded to one another and somberly got into their cars to head off all over the big, roughly cut rectangle of the state. With the South Dakota sky dark and huge, Roberta steered the Chevrolet Cobalt out of the parking lot and went to pick up a sixteen-year-old girl named Brandy Gillop who lived with her mother in Lorton. Brandy’s parents were divorced, Roberta had been informed, and Brandy’s mother had told the intake people that she felt terrible that she couldn’t drive her daughter to Sioux Falls, but there was no way she could get off work at the casino where she was a cashier, and, besides, her car was in the shop.

Twice during the drive, with her coffee cup in its holder and public radio softly playing, Roberta had called Nathaniel at the TV station, because she could sense the increasing presence of her own apprehension.

“Hey, baby,” Nathaniel said. “You okay? You in the car?”

“I am not only in the car; I am in the heartland of America.”

“I thought I heard the sound of an eagle flapping.”

“Yes, you did. Very perceptive.”

“I miss you,” he said. “Boring day here. Just entertaining the crew with a little puppet action.”

“I miss you too.”

Nathaniel had encouraged Roberta when she’d first brought up the possibility of this volunteer job. Recently she’d taken tentative steps, hosting an envelope-stuffing session for reproductive rights in their cramped apartment, and dragooning her friends to sit around her little living room and write notes that they would stick into the invitations to something called, inanely, Roberta thought, A Very Special Evening for Choice.

“Hi,” her friends had inscribed. “This charity means a lot to all women. Hope you can make it.”

She had asked them to come, and they came. They were good that way; if you asked them to do something, they did it, though of course she was always the one who organized anything political in nature. Mostly they struck her as only mildly political at best; if pressed, they would reveal politics that were sound and empathetic, but they didn’t get riled up the way she did. “Why am I the only one who obsesses like this?” she had recently asked Amy. “We share the same views. Why am I the one going out there?”

“It just takes the rest of us a long time to move,” Amy said. “I guess it’s a kind of procrastination. I have it and you don’t.”

“Ha,” said Roberta, remembering her languishing canvases.

But it was true that there were differences between her and them. A few of them had changed their names when they got married. “I want to have the same last name as my kids,” one of the women had explained when Roberta inquired. “It helps when I go to the pediatrician. And I love my husband, so who cares?” Most of them didn’t seem to think this was at all retro; they were much more accepting of one another than Roberta was. Even the powerful and enlightened Penny Ramsey had changed her name.

“Do you realize,” Roberta had said in the living room that day, “that most of us in this room are probably too old to ever need an abortion again?”

“And we’re way too old even to be egg donors,” Karen had added. “I always see those ads: ‘Women, are you 35 or younger? Earn $7,000.’ How did they decide that that was how much our eggs are worth? Doesn’t it seem arbitrary? I’m sure there’s an economic model, but I have no idea of what it is.”

“Our
eggs aren’t worth $7,000,” said Amy. “We’re all too old. They wouldn’t even do the ultrasound. They’d use the ejector seat in the waiting room.”

“Oh, they would always have rejected me on the spot,” Jill said lightly, and a couple of the others looked up, startled, suddenly remembering the infertility anguish that she had gone through.

“Sorry, Jill, sorry,” they intoned, but Jill just waved their apologies away and kept on working.

“I always feel a little insulted,” said Karen. “Are our eggs so terrible? So defective that there’s really no one who would want them? They’re better than nothing.”

“You know,” Amy said, “if it makes you feel any better, I’ll buy your eggs. And I’ll give you cash. Twenty-eight dollars and fifty cents.”

All the women laughed, and they returned to the quiet shuffling of envelopes, but the subject of aging and failing and losing fertility and sexual vibrancy had been raised and couldn’t be dropped now. Over time their bodies had changed, the parts loosened, unscrewed a little, and once every so often, a crazy, mixed-up hair poked out from chin or nipple, and fertility was rapidly on its way to a complete fade-out in the imaginable future—if it hadn’t faded out already.

“But the thing is,” Karen said suddenly, “that’s partly why we have kids. In addition to perpetuating the human race, and the fulfillment factor, and all that. Because even if you can’t be young, you can be attached to someone who is.”

The other women murmured that this was true. Someone said, “The children are everything,” and there was a moment of quiet emotion, as each of them thought of their offspring, those idealized, miniaturized versions of themselves. Roberta, too, was made silent with reverence when she thought of Harry and Grace, the last of her really ambitious productions before her actual art had been stopped by some invisible force.

She thought of the children again now, while she was on the road in South Dakota. Nathaniel had said that he would take care of everything in her absence; the kids could go home with friends in the afternoon, and he would pick them up when he left work. She knew, of course, that he would forget to send Grace with money to buy chips from the vending machine at school and that he would neglect to help Harry study for his vocabulary test of words pertaining to the text of
Charlotte’s Web
(“arachnid,” “boastful,” “porcine,” “mortal”). She knew these lapses, but she already forgave him for them.