The Ten-Year Nap (32 page)

Amy saw that Mason looked confused by this and probably bored, but he kept his face arranged in a position of politeness toward his grandmother, whose feelings he would never want to hurt.

“Naomi and Jennifer and I always wondered,” Amy suddenly said, looking at her mother, “what you and those other women did down there in the living room on those nights. Sometimes we thought you were hosting a séance.”

“Yes, I guess we were raising the spirit of Susan B. Anthony,” Antonia said, laughing.

“I have her coin,” said Mason. “No one liked the shape or the size, Grandma, so it was taken out of circulation.”

“I knew that, and I was not surprised,” said Antonia, pouring herself more wine. “Oh, Amy, Leo, after my meeting tomorrow afternoon, I was wondering if I could bring a few of the women here for a get-together. Most of them are from out of town, staying at hotels.”

“Of course,” said Leo. “Not a problem.”

“Thank you.” Then, turning to Amy, Antonia said, “I wanted to ask, have you thought any more about the possibility of becoming a public defender?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, the e-mails I’ve sent you. It’s a decent life, a good thing to do with a law degree, I think.”

“I’m not considering that, Mom,” Amy said tightly, “but I have been thinking about some kind of real volunteer work. Maybe a job with a literacy program or something.”

Leo looked up. “Oh yeah? Since when?”

“Since a long time,” she said defensively. “I’ve mentioned it.”

“Oh. Okay. Fine. Just asking.”

“I just never took it further. I don’t know why not, exactly. It’s been part of my long and very slow odyssey toward work,” she said.

“All that law school,” Antonia said, swirling the wine in her glass. “I sometimes wonder why you went in the first place. You could have taken more time after college, figuring out what you wanted to do.”

“Yes,” said Amy, “I could have.”

At the table, in the orange candlelight, Amy’s mother’s hair shone silver like a Susan B. Anthony dollar, and Mason’s hair shone polished brown, still so springy with protein, the color of the beautiful floors of the corridors that someday he would walk along. Leo looked from his wife to his mother-in-law, and then he quickly returned to the safest place: his own plate, where he hastily began to eat his dinner double time, calming himself with food, his shoulders rounded, his concentration on his dinner complete, apparently not wanting any part of this moment that had nothing to do with him. The conversation at the meal now continued mostly as a dialogue between grandson and grandmother. Mason happily showed off for this woman who loved him in a singular way that no one could object to, not even a quietly angry grown daughter.

O
N THE MORNING
of the first day back to school after Christmas vacation, the first snow fell upon the city. From the windows of their financial and legal towers, men and women peered out upon the natural phenomenon. The men thought of sleds and of their children and of being a child. And from those same towers or their apartments or the warm light of the small shops that lined the avenues, more than a few of the women wondered if their children’s boots from last year still fit. The men thought of freedom, and the women thought of necessity. With that first snow, everyone in the city looked up at once to admire its assertive but casual whirl. There was a shared sense of anticipation: Perhaps school would be canceled tomorrow. Perhaps work would be canceled too! But work was not one
thing,
and everyone knew that most offices would remain open and that life would go on as it usually did.

The first day back always had a kind of sad capitulation to it. At seven in the morning, Amy’s alarm rang out. Without telling her, Mason had changed the setting, so that instead of a dove-coo, there emanated from her clock a gentle whinnying, growing louder and more impatient as it continued.
NEIGH NEIGH NEIGH NEIGHHHH
, the horses called, nosing her harshly from sleep.

Amy awakened and began to shout from her bed. “Mason!” she called, but heard nothing in reply. She took a breath. “MASON, IT’S THE FIRST DAY BACK TO SCHOOL!” she cried. “COME ON, BUDDY!” The entire apartment was still. Leo had long gone off to the gym and the office, and Amy’s mother still slept deeply on her air mattress in the study—she wore earplugs, and slept through everything—and Mason slept deeply too. “I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO TELL YOU AGAIN!” Amy cried out. “WE HAVE TO GET THERE EARLY FOR LICE CHECK!” She wondered whether Penny would show up for drop-off, and she imagined them standing together and making an unpleasant attempt at small talk.

The gym, when Amy and Mason arrived, was a force field of sound. The boys, who had been apart for two weeks, responded with puplike happiness to one another’s company. The mothers and the handful of fathers stood talking while the boys whirled around them. Details of vacations were traded. One mother talked about a ski trip; someone else said she had lain in the sun, “not moving a muscle.” A father said his family had stayed in the city and skated together every night at the rink in the park. Over by the wall stood Isabelle Gordon the string theorist, telling another mother how she and her husband and kids had traveled to CERN, the particle physics lab near Geneva, so that she could visit the Large Hadron Collider. “It filled me with inexpressible awe,” she said. The other mother could only shake her head and smile.

The school conducted lice checks twice yearly, and always the mothers worried that their sons would be identified as the bringer of insects, the pariah. Today someone had released a few basketballs from the hanging net bags where they had been stored over vacation like coconuts, and now many of the boys were shooting hoops in their jackets and ties, while some of the others slumped on folding chairs to have their heads checked.

Mason plopped down on one of the chairs, and a heavy black woman in a medical coat that had the words “Nitz Away” stitched over the breast pocket stood above him with a long metal barber’s comb and something that looked like a nail file, raking through his hair so that little patches of scalp suddenly appeared and then disappeared. How white his scalp was beneath that dark mass, Amy thought each time the woman lifted his hair. The whiteness of the scalp was like the whiteness of bones, revealing the self in a way that was always ghoulish when it was displayed. Karen’s twins, Caleb and Jonno, sat side by side on the next bank of folding chairs, nearly napping, as two bored women sifted through the silky blades of their hair.

Amy kept looking toward the doorway, waiting for the moment when Penny and Holden might walk in. But when Holden Ramsey finally entered the gym, he was trailed only by his babysitter Clementine.

“Penny didn’t bring Holden today?” Karen asked right away after she came up beside Amy.

“No.”

On the telephone after vacation, Amy had told each of her friends about the accident, describing the fall and the shock of seeing Ian’s face and the unresponsiveness of Penny. “I know you’re upset with her,” Karen said now as they talked. “And I think it’s immoral to cheat on your husband, as you know. But it would have been pretty hard for her to just rush over to him in front of Greg.” All around them came the sound of basketballs thudding and the occasional silverware sound of lice-scavenging tools. “What did you expect her to do, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Ian was lying there. It was horrible. You should have seen it, Karen. So yes, I guess I really expected her to go to him. Even out of some kind of instinct.”

Roberta, who had just deposited Harry on one of the chairs, said simply, “You idealized her. Please don’t object; you know I’m right. We all had a fucking transference to Penny Ramsey. And anyway, it’s been so long since we had someone to idealize. We’re all so separate with our little scheduled lives and our kids.”

“I know,” said Amy, and she had a darting, sad image of Jill, who was probably right now behind the wheel of her car, in the slow morning traffic in front of the grade school in Holly Hills. “She was my big project. But I think I need something more worthy of my time.”

“Hallelujah,” said Roberta.

“But I still think,” said Amy, “that she could have done the moral thing.”

“And what, lose everything?” said Roberta. “Oh, Amy, think about it.”

“I am thinking about it. It’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

“She had an affair,” said Roberta. “It was very exciting. It made her feel not middle-aged. It’s like the life force: knowing that someone wants you and that you want him and that you’ve created a secret world together.”

“But she still needs her real life,” said Karen. “Her married life. It provides the foundation for this other life. Greg Ramsey makes it all possible for her.”

“Greg Ramsey is so
depressing
,” said Amy. “You saw the way the other men chose him at the father-son weekend. The way he needs to be seen as so dominant. And you should hear the way he talked on vacation. The things he talked about. Indie rock. Money. Always, money.”

“Greg Ramsey supports her and their kids,” Karen persisted. “If their marriage broke up, she would lose her whole way of life.”

“Penny Ramsey actually has her own big job,” said Amy. “We’re here hanging around at lice check, and she’s probably already at her office running a meeting.”

“
Amy,
” said Roberta, exasperated, “so maybe Penny Ramsey has many impressive qualities, like a lot of the women we know. But she works for a nonprofit, and she probably couldn’t support her family, at least not the way they live. What do you think she makes at that museum?”

“No idea.”

“Whatever it is, it’s not remotely enough to manage with three kids and private school and clothes and food and vacations and child care and the kind of life she got herself into. Greg is the one with the investors, the big corporate one. He and Penny have to keep the whole thing going all the time. I know it’s like a horrible trap, but it’s what they chose, and so now they’re stuck.”

Amy thought of the young husband in apartment 14H falling dead months earlier and how the women in the lobby had speculated that his widow wouldn’t be able to stay on in the building for long. Suddenly Amy needed to know what had happened to that family. Were they gone already? Had they been forced out of The Rivermere? She imagined the mother and her two children sent whirling, coatless, into Isabelle Gordon’s terrifying and mostly unknowable universe.

“I’m not sure you’re right,” Amy said to Roberta, but the basketballs in the gym suddenly sounded louder, and she began to feel sick. She thought she should be sitting in one of those folding chairs like the boys, her head dropped back, letting a woman from Nitz Away softly stroke her hair. But she also imagined the women from Nitz Away coming to these schools at the start of a day and setting up their tables and chairs and digging into the thick heads of hair of privileged children. Whose idea of a perfect job was
this
? Who ever longed for such a life? But maybe the pay was not horrible and the benefits were half decent, and you made of it what you could, and somehow it let you live. She saw that she had no idea at all about the different ways in which people lived.

Mason approached her then and said, “Mom, I’m going to shoot hoops. You can go.”

“I can
go
? Thank you, sir,” Amy said with forced jokiness.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing. Have a good day, okay?”

If he’d had any idea of how upset she felt, she might have let him console her for once, at least a little. But of course he was unaware of these feelings, and it would likely be another forty years before he would really take care of her. Now Mason’s tie was aslant, slightly milk-dipped from his cereal bowl this morning, his hair raked through with fresh crop circles. His eyes looked past her to the other boys and their bouncing balls, and this was how it was supposed to be. This was the state you hoped to achieve. Her son would be all right on his own. He had things he needed to try without her.

“So, Golden Horn?” asked Roberta.

“Yes, please,” said Amy.

“Look at you, you’re so upset,” said Karen gently. “It’s like you didn’t go to St. Doe’s; you went to a gulag.”

“Hey, that’s very funny, Karen,” said Roberta. “Surprisingly very funny, for you.”

“Thank you.”

As they all started to walk out of the gym, Shelly Harbison fell in beside them. “Oh, you’re off to the Golden Horn,” she said. “Mind if I invite myself?”

Sure, fine, join us, they told her in polite voices. But as they were about to leave, Shelly’s son, Dylan, came clattering up to his mother and hissed, in tearful shame,
“I have lice,”
and so, miraculously, they were released from her.

L
ATER, WHEN AMY
brought Mason home at the end of the school day, she turned the key in the apartment door and heard varying notes of female laughter. Going down the hallway she followed the sounds until she came to the living room, where a group of women sat in a circle on the sofa and the chairs that had been dragged in from the dining room for the occasion. “Amy,” Antonia called. “Come say hello.”

The women of NAFITAS were in their sixties and seventies, a couple of them with dyed hair that fell on the mother-grandmother spectrum between apricot and snow, and others with hair that sprang out wild and gray. Some were slightly hunched over, their bodies curling slightly forward like jockeys in a race toward the end of time; others were tall, straight sitters, adherents of
vinyasa
and
ashtanga
and Bikram “hot room” yoga in the different towns and cities where they lived.

The women dutifully introduced themselves. “Do you remember Marsha Knowles?” Antonia asked her daughter, gesturing toward a small, spry woman with straight silver bangs and the body of an old pixie. “You may have met her at the house when you were little. She’s a health educator in Toronto, and she came to my consciousness-raising group many moons ago to teach us not to be so apprehensive about our sexual selves.”