The Ten-Year Nap (9 page)

Geralynn Freund, divorced, fragile, a single mother without any apparent emotional support system, had stood naked, and the other women at the gym that day had stared, then stared at one another in appalled, tacit conversation. Not a word was said aloud about her in that locker room with the roaring showers all around and with the sound of hair being relentlessly blown into submission. But it was likely that she had been embarrassed about her appearance; no one had seen her at the gym since then.

Now Geralynn Freund walked along the street with her son Joshua beside her. He was a thickset boy who ate the last remnants of an icie, squeezing the blue and red slush from the flattened little cup. Amy said hello in perhaps an overly friendly voice, unable to modulate, and Geralynn said hello back.

After they turned the corner, Penny said, “It’s really sad. Are there any other treatments?”

“Oh, she doesn’t have cancer. Is that what you thought? She’s anorexic.”

“Oh.
Of course, right. It’s still sad,” Penny said. “She looks like she’ll blow away. She’s such a tragic figure.”

Amy had the impulse to tell her about the father from 14H who had died in the night. Penny would see that it didn’t really matter that Amy hadn’t known him, that still she was shaken, and that any of the terrible little family tragedies you routinely heard about could affect you. But Penny was distracted. She had stopped on the street and was looking ahead at something, so Amy looked too, watching as a man walked rapidly toward them. “A friend,” Penny said in a nervous whisper.

He was in his early thirties, with the kind of appearance Amy would have found attractive at an earlier age but one she’d now almost forgotten about. The men she knew tended to be financially absorbed husbands with carefully combed hair, dressed in business suits or stretchy weekend sports clothes. This man was small, boyish, good-looking, in a pale, pretty shirt and no tie, and with a ruffled head of brown hair and fair, freckly skin. For some reason she pictured his bare shoulders as probably freckled too.

“You’re here,” he said to Penny as he approached them. “I timed it right.” He was English, and that was a surprise. The English walk among us, Amy thought, and whenever they reveal themselves, Americans experience a moment of unaccountable delight.

“Amy Lamb, Ian Janeway,” said Penny.

He shook her hand and said, “Great outfits.”

“Don’t mock us,” Penny said.

“Sorry. You do look amusing. They should put you on
Style Bobbies
.”

“What’s that?” Amy asked.

“British television. Women dressed as police officers go round giving out fashion summonses. It’s the lowest thing in the culture.”

“Oh, tell Amy your family’s role in the downfall of British culture,” Penny said.

“We don’t have a role.”

“Your aunt’s role, I mean,” she said.

Then, to Amy, he explained, “Penny loves this fact, weirdly. My aunt Lesley worked as Margaret Thatcher’s personal assistant.”

“His
auntie,
” said Penny. “The great Mrs. Thatcher. The most powerful woman in the world during the Reagan years. The only way a woman could be taken seriously then was to be ultraconservative. Antifeminist. Basically, she never promoted another woman to her cabinet.”

“My aunt worshipped her,” said Ian. Then, to Amy, “In my family, we all worship powerful women.” He smiled slyly, and Penny laughed. She had turned slightly pink, Amy saw; even the round little tips of her ears had taken on color. Ian Janeway, it was established, was a curator at the National Gallery in London but was currently spending six months in New York working at the Met as a visiting consultant in the framing department. He also did freelance consulting to other museums.

“I looked at those prints of yours,” he said to Penny. “If you want to talk, call me later.”

“I will. When I’m done with safety walk.”

The two of them were looking directly at each other, and Amy felt the distorting sensation of watching the scene through a keyhole. Her view widened all around to include the details she had missed before. Penny and Ian were gazing at each other’s splendid self, each swelling slightly under the other’s gaze, blood probably flooding the appropriate parts. As they looked, they talked about “the prints.” Were there even any actual prints to be looked at, she wondered, or was this all some sort of code? Their conversation became increasingly exclusive and dull. Something was said about whether a person at the museum named Donna Belknap would need to take a look at the prints too.

They were letting the talk stall, and the boredom was meant to drum all but the devoted away, which would mean that Amy, after being drawn in, was now being encouraged to leave them to each other. But still she listened, because her middle-aged life was often barren of sex now. The ground had been partly stripped and strafed, and you didn’t even realize it until you found yourself standing on the street with an excited, secret couple, around whom entire luxuriant fields flowered. They continued to talk about the prints and about Donna Belknap, their voices soft and vague, each sentence ending with a suggestive rise. In the background, faintly, Amy heard some sort of commotion. It was an annoyance.
Go away,
she thought,
I want to hear this.

“What time will you be finished?” Ian asked.

“I think we have another hour.”

“You work all day, and then you have to trudge around. That’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” Penny said.

“No, it isn’t.”

Amy watched them smile at each other and shake their heads at the joke that didn’t even have a point. In the distance, those other voices kept calling out, and as Amy stood watching Penny and Ian Janeway, she became aware that one voice was meant for them. “Help!” it cried now. “I’m being mugged!”

Finally, as if lifting herself out of a stupor, Amy snapped her head away from the couple, turning to see a small crowd on the corner, with the bobbing form of a boy in the middle, dressed in an Auburn Day uniform.

“What the fuck is that?” said Ian, and he sprinted toward the commotion, Penny and Amy following. The crowd split apart, and it was revealed to be comprised entirely of boys, none older than around fifteen, all of them black, wearing big, unseasonal jackets. On the ground sprawled the Auburn Day boy, a sixth-grader named Dustin Kavanaugh, unhurt but crying. Ian tried to grab at one or two of the boys, but they were too fast, their ripstop nylon jackets swooshing past.

“Ian, don’t,” Penny said. She put a hand on his arm—the first public touch between them. “Just go.”

“I should chase those shits,” he said, breathless.

“No, it’s too late. Go.”

And so, dismissed, Ian left, while Amy frantically pressed the button on her walkie-talkie to summon the school. Through tears, Dustin Kavanaugh explained that he had been walking along with his earbuds in his ears, eating a bag of little fried corn curls and listening to music.

“Oh, honey, are you hurt?” Amy asked the boy, crouching down and giving him some tissues from her pocketbook.

“No,” he said shakily, blowing his nose. “But they got my iPod.” Then he added, “And I met them before.”

“You did?” Penny asked. “Where?”

“On Hand-in-Hand Day.”

Whoosh,
thought Amy, picturing the well-meaning but still troubling Hand-in-Hand Day struck from the calendar of the Auburn Day School. The white boys would stay forever with the white, the black with the black, the Hispanic with the Hispanic, and even that single designated day of unity would be shut down. Who knew if these were really the same boys as the ones who had come in to play sports and eat baked ziti? The school might never even try to find out.

The security guard from the school arrived along with a policeman, and after the women gave him all the information they could, the guard coolly asked for their safety vests and walkie-talkie, as if they were being stripped of military rank. There were no excuses; an Auburn Day boy had been mugged right on the block they were patrolling. They should have been able to break it up as it started, or stop it before it happened, but instead they’d been standing in a dreamy cluster with an Englishman, briefly forgetting the real reason they were here on the street in these orange vests.

Only now, as the guard and the policeman tended to Dustin Kavanaugh, did Amy see how upset Penny had become. She seemed stunned, nearly unable to speak, so Amy thought to take her to the Golden Horn. In the coffee shop, leaning against the aqua booth, Penny said, “I just feel so bad. It’s my fault that this happened.” She began to cry softly, and a couple of people looked up in curiosity. Penny pulled napkins from the dispenser and wiped her eyes.

“No it’s not,” said Amy, though she thought, it’s
our
fault. “Even if we’d been paying attention, they probably would’ve followed him around the corner. Don’t you think?” she added, wanting reassurance herself.

“Maybe.” The two women sat glumly in the muted din.

“Thank God he’s not hurt.” Amy added, “We could send him something.”

“A new iPod,” Penny tried, blowing her nose. Her skin was so pale that the brief release of tears had inflamed her whole face. “I heard he likes show tunes.”

“Yes, show tunes, he loves them.” All the mothers had heard this about Dustin Kavanaugh, and it was always mentioned with a certain knowing inflection.

“Those kids, those muggers, they’re going to listen to his iPod and get a big surprise,” said Penny. “‘The Circle of Life’ from
The Lion King.
” Both women, despite the somberness, began to laugh a little.

“And you know, we’re going to hear from Dustin Kavanaugh’s mother, and I don’t blame her.”

“Oh, right, Helen. She will be very upset. Anyone would.”

Helen Kavanaugh dressed as though she were the chairwoman of a bank, though she hadn’t held a paying job since right after college. Her stockbroker husband had made particularly good investments for them. As a result she was allowed to be motivated by something entirely unrelated to money, which distinguished her from almost everyone they knew. She was head of an antipoverty charity, and she was relentless in her involvement. Always, she was soliciting money; always, she was speaking at another banquet. Her altruism was entire and
wowing
. There was no hidden narcissism embedded in it. It was a force that awakened her in the morning and put her into the stiff shell of a suit and took her out the door. Mostly, the demands of the city didn’t allow for the purity of altruism; usually, altruism got mixed into other things, so that everyone ended up “doing what they could” and leaving it at that. Amy had always admired Helen Kavanaugh but now felt personally afraid of her too. She could hear Helen’s meeting-ready voice on the phone tonight, saying, “Amy? Hi there, Helen Kavanaugh. Listen, we ought to talk about the incident.”

Everybody would be talking about the incident, Amy realized now. “We’d better get out of town on a rail,” she said to Penny.

“With little hobo sticks.”

Amy pictured the two of them walking side by side along train tracks. She saw herself playing a harmonica, and the scene was oddly peaceful. What if they could both escape their lives just like that, riding boxcars, ambling forward forever, unscheduled and untraceable?

“Everything I do leads to something like this,” Penny said.

“What does that mean? You’re responsible for a whole string of muggings?” But Amy knew that her role was to be passive and listen, perhaps in a way that no one ever listened to Penny Ramsey, a woman who had few free moments in which to sit over a plate of eggs or the spokes of a grapefruit half or an iced coffee riddled with chemical sweetener, the little ripped packets scattered all over the table, and just talk.

Penny stirred her seltzer with a straw, sending the ice chiming. “No,” she said, and then her eyes filled again. “God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a mess.”

“It’s okay,” Amy said.

“I’m in such a strange place. You think that your marriage and your whole life are going to be one way, and then suddenly, guess what, they’re not. You know?”

Amy just kept looking at her. “Yes,” she finally said.

Then Penny said, “I know you figured it out before, on the street. I could tell.”

Amy paused. “Ian,” she said carefully.

Penny nodded. “I’ve never done anything like that. But Greg is so totally corporate now. And he has zero misgivings about what his investors do.”

“Which is what?”

“Call it ‘munitions,’ among other things. Getting rich off funding this war, and war in general. I shouldn’t be saying any of this; I know it’s disloyal. Greg would tell you that his investors also build children’s hospitals. But he was different once. He tells me I don’t understand. That I should stick to the Triangle Factory fire and photomontages of…Hart Crane and the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge. Like he even knows who that is.”

Amy thought of Greg Ramsey with his good shirts and nugget-sized cuff links and his hands-free cell-phone headset. He was a small, thick, vain man of forty-one, a scrapper, a success, and she suddenly remembered him at the Dads’ Pancake Breakfast last spring, standing front and center at the griddle, lofting his browned discs into the air while a few other fathers struggled over the uneven heat with their own spreading, unflippable islands of pale batter.

Amy was here in this booth now in order to say to Penny Ramsey, “You can talk to me.” This was her line, and she didn’t even mind it. She suddenly wanted Penny to like her and be comforted by her; she wanted to appear like a soothing person who didn’t judge others. Amy said her line easily. At which point Penny said, “I’m glad it was you here today.”

Had you been sitting across the room at the Golden Horn at the time of this conversation, you would have noticed the way the two women inched their asses closer across the booth and leaned their heads forward, as if they themselves were having a love affair.
Oh, female intimacy!
Amy thought with longing. She had missed it so much since Jill had left the city. She recalled lying across Jill and Donald’s bed on a weekday afternoon last year, before it was time for school pick-up, trying on clothes that Jill was thinking of giving away to a thrift shop. They’d talked about how their bodies had changed over time and how you had to accept this and not dwell upon it; each of them insisted to the other that she looked as good as she had looked back in college, and it wasn’t really untrue. “The thing about clothes,” Amy remembered Jill saying, “is that you never know which one will end up being your favorite and which one you’ll never wear—and will be just like throwing your money down the toilet.”