“If you want to be a painter,” Roberta was saying, “then you just have to keep working. You just have to work and work and get better at what you do. Then once that happens, you start to show it to people. Bit by bit, you might get attention. You can come to New York and sort of push it a little further.”
“I would really like to go there,” Brandy said. “That’s actually kind of my dream.”
“It’s a pretty good one.”
“I just think it would be awesome.”
“Why don’t you send me some slides of your work? Maybe I could pass them along to someone in the art world.”
“Wow. Slides?” Brandy said uncertainly.
“Do you know anyone with a decent camera?”
“Yeah, I think so. My friend Chrissy. Thanks a lot, Roberta.” Then, suddenly, she said, “The boy’s name was Tyler.”
“What?”
“Tyler Parvell. He’s in my fifth-period art class. He thinks he’s good at drawing, but in my opinion he’s basically a show-off.”
So they had that in common too: the two male art students with their vibrant, questing sperm. Roberta’s eyes became bright with tears. What could she do for this girl? She wanted to figure it out. The remark about “people in the art world” was boastful; Roberta had talent, but not enough ambition to give her talent an engine, and as a result she had bombed out of that unfair world a long time ago, when the male artists commanded all the attention, and she’d had to show her work in those makeshift galleries with other women, all of them made to feel a little bit defensive and second class. She knew hardly anyone in “the art world” anymore, and the use of the expression revealed her as the art-world outsider she was. The loser she was, along with Nathaniel. Yet, of course, she could actually get Brandy’s slides to an appropriate person, because she lived in New York and was connected to people who were connected to other people in the way that a teenaged girl who lived in Lorton, South Dakota, with a mother who worked at a cashier’s window at the Kubla Khan Casino was not. In the way that most people in the world were not.
She thought about how Amy Lamb had become close with someone who ran an entire museum. When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your children overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn’t seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.
But here in this motel room off the interstate, Roberta was once again struck for the first time in years by unmistakable ambition—not for herself now, for that wasn’t happening—but for this girl sitting on the bed whose fingertips glittered from the fries she ate, and who talked about art in a tentative but excited voice, as if it was an actual place she could visit, and as if Roberta Sokolov could take her there.
Chapter EIGHT
Naperville, Illinois, 1969
RUNNING A BUSINESS together had been Al’s idea, not Norma’s, though as the years passed they would tell anyone that they had “no clue” whose idea it had been in the first place, for it had become a partnership in every sense, and why try to unbalance it? But Al Sokolov was the ideas man and his wife, Norma, the execution gal, and together they managed to turn what they had once envisioned as a modest little enterprise into something big. They were now serving the entire metro and suburban Chicago area with their party decorations. Just this week, they had had to do a Woodstock theme. Norma had come up with the idea for the centerpieces: baskets that included an electric guitar, a naked man and woman clasped in an embrace, and sugar cubes nestled in a container marked “LSD.” That last bit had caused a stir, though they had had to insist to the customers that it was only a joke and that everyone at the anniversary party would surely know that.
“We are the last people in the world to hand out LSD to people,” Al had said that day when they had finished the whole order of centerpieces and were driving back to Naperville.
“I wonder what it would be like?” Norma asked. “Taking LSD. Seeing things that aren’t really there.”
Though they had lived through the ’60s, they had done so as suburban parents, and neither of them was experimental or sophisticated. “I don’t think we would like it,” her husband had said. “Apparently you feel very dizzy. Last year, you had that vertigo for a week, and you hated it,” he pointed out.
“True,” she said. “I did. But it would be interesting to see things. To have actual hallucinations. Maybe it would give us ideas for new centerpieces.”
“Oh, we got a request for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid today,” said Al.
They were driving home from downtown Chicago on a cold winter afternoon. At home, their only child, Roberta, little Bertie, was right now being fed fish sticks and canned corn by her grandma Ruth, who babysat for her every day and was a godsend. Norma Sokolov had not ever planned to go to work. She’d assumed that she would stay home with the baby, the way all mothers did. But then Al kept coming home from the company he worked for with these adorable little baskets for different holidays, and Norma couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Why don’t you add a few more silk flowers here and give it a whole-field-of-poppies effect? That was my favorite scene in The Wizard of Oz.”
Lately, they had joked that, between the poppies and the LSD, their business would be shut down by the FBI. They joked in such a manner all the time now, sitting across from each other at the big two-sided desk in their office in downtown Chicago. Norma had become a smart and competent businesswoman without having had any training. Al had worked for years in the field, laboring on the phone all the time with customers and distributors, his sleeves rolled up, inquiring as to the location of a stray order, peeling antacids out of their little foil containers because there was now so much to keep track of, and he could not handle it all without feeling anxious and sick. When it became clear that Norma was packed with original ideas, he brought her in, and they ventured out on their own, persuading his mother to babysit for little Bertie every day, and everything simply worked well from there on in.
Husband and wife were never apart. They sat across from each other in the dusty office, and at night they lay against the padded headboard of their bed, looking at the ledger together and discussing business. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day deal, and some of Norma’s friends said they couldn’t imagine such closeness with a husband, but after a while Norma wondered how a marriage survived when you didn’t know many details of the other person’s day. What did you talk about? The weather? Vietnam? What was for dinner tonight: Oh, chicken again. Didn’t we have chicken last night? No, we had chicken Tuesday. Together, through their centerpieces and themed decorations, they talked about the world. They imagined what it would have been like if they’d gone to Woodstock. “I can just see you in the mud, Norm, with your blouse off and a string of flowers in your hair,” Al had said to her, laughing, and it was a ridiculous image, for they were similarly built, made for wear and tear, sturdy as tops.
Their little daughter, Bertie, sensing their unusual closeness, would sometimes clamber onto the bed at night, saying, “Me too, me too!” and they would draw her in and hug and kiss and reassure her. But she was on to something, surely, for she understood that her parents’ marriage, which had always been strong, was made even stronger by silk flowers and tiny elves and green or gold or orange leaves, always leaves, which were scattered everywhere, providing adornment for weddings and graduations and retirements and even, in their case, the simple passage of time.
Chapter NINE
IN THE NIGHT, just before husbands called out to wives during sleep and children called out to mothers, the women were often already awake. They lay suspended in bed, and so when the moment came, they didn’t even have to judder to attention before dropping a light female hand onto a trembling male back, or skittering down the hall toward
a dreaming child. But the women, who were still conscious then because of hormones or the delayed kick of a cappuccino that had been drunk too late in the day or a continual churn of anxiety that had become indistinguishable from normal metabolic rhythms, weren’t thinking about their families.
Late at night in New York City in November, with the street outside opaque and frozen, in the brief period before Leo Buckner grunted and shivered and called out in his sleep, Amy Lamb lay awake thinking about the couple. That was how she had come to think of Penny Ramsey and Ian Janeway all fall: “the couple.” Earlier that day, she had met them for lunch at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Ian consulted in the framing department. Penny had wanted to visit him there and then walk through the galleries, so she had called Amy in the morning and said, “Can I drag you out to lunch too?” surely confident of what the answer would be.
Intermittently throughout the morning, Amy had thought about the couple. They preoccupied her as she sat in the meeting at the school about the new parent newsletter. Amy often dreaded such meetings, yet felt it was her responsibility to attend them. Even before she arrived at the school she could already picture the usual suspects assembling in the room and the fruit platter that would be laid out on a table in front of them, as though they needed to be rewarded for showing up. She saw the large, hard strawberries staining the pineapple slices beside them; the translucent starburst jade of the sliced kiwifruit; the flesh-toned flesh of the out-of-season melon. Meetings at the law firm, Amy distantly remembered, had had only a fraction of the sense of pomp and urgency that these meetings did. The school meetings were somber and reflective, and tended to go on and on. The rest of life seemed as if it had been atomized, and somehow time itself appeared to have been bribed to stand still for these women alone.
The atmosphere in the music room at the Auburn Day School on this morning was clotted with smells of moisturizer and undereye-circle concealer and something indefinably, pheromonally female. The mothers smelled different from one another, but most of them smelled vaguely of nectar or gummi bears—fruity and girlish—and together in this big, bulky knot of mothers taking their seats among the stacked xylophones and zithers and cymbals and wood blocks, they all smelled good.
Often, in the middle of a meeting at the school, a mother would ask a free-associative question that wasn’t really a question at all. “My son takes soccer on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I sometimes find that he’s really exhausted the next morning. Do you think I should arrange for him to switch out of Tuesday-morning Latin, because basically he can’t even think until lunchtime? Also, I’m wondering whether the student-teacher ratio at the school is really where we want it to be?”
At which point, Amy would find herself doodling frantically on her napkin. Once, back when Mason was in kindergarten, she had gone to her first school meeting ever and had written “KILL ME NOW” over and over on the napkin. The short, dark-haired, slightly funny-looking, sympathetic woman sitting beside her had noticed it and been amused, and that was how Amy and Roberta Sokolov had become friends.
Today, at the meeting about the parent newsletter, Amy didn’t doodle. Her thoughts were mostly off with Penny and Ian, whom she would see when this ended. She was the token nonworking mother in their life, the ironic one who could dip in and out of these experiences and bring back a full report. Ian always listened to her in a good-natured but slightly confused way, whereas Penny seemed truly interested.
The discussion at the school was well attended. The usual collection of mothers had come, plus a couple of the ones who worked part-time. Dustin Kavanaugh’s mother, Helen, who ran a charity that helped to transmit enormous sums of money to the poorest people in the world, had graciously taken off an hour to help out. Even Isabelle Gordon the string theorist—everyone always referred to her this way—had taken it upon herself to show up, briefly postponing her study of the universe in favor of a school newsletter. She sat in the back of the room with her braid and fantastic shoes. She was poised at attention between Geralynn Freund, the anorexic mother, and the one full-time father in the grade, Len Goodling, who prompted a new wave of thought across the room about whether or not he had ever worked and whether he was rich or depressed or simply enlightened, the way some younger fathers on the horizon seemed to be.
The discussion today was unofficially led by Laurie Livers, who had once been editor in chief at a major publishing house. Earlier in her career, Laurie had been the person responsible for plucking the manuscript of Bigfoot Was Here: A Father’s Letters to His Newborn Son from Iraq out of the so-called slush pile, and as a result her fortunes had been tied irrevocably to those of the slender, emotional, epistolary memoir. The book had remained on the best-seller list for over a year, and Laurie had followed up the success by publishing that financial expert’s self-help book on gaining personal wealth, Beggars Can Be Choosers, but despite her swift elevation, she left publishing to have a baby, and then eventually another one, and had never returned to work. She was the mother who habitually stood in place in the lobby selling Auburn Day paraphernalia, while the boys and their mothers whirled all around the nucleus that was her unmoving form. She was as familiar and imperturbable a fixture as a guard outside Buckingham Palace. Everyone said Laurie was invaluable to the school, but what they meant was, they were glad that she enjoyed selling that crap, for they didn’t.
The way she now talked about the school newsletter was likely the same way she had pitched Bigfoot Was Here to her colleagues. “This book is about bravery and loss,” Laurie Livers had probably said. In the classroom at the school, she leaned forward in her chair and said, “Auburn Days, our parent newsletter, will make you aware of the community around you. It will be the vital link between you and your sons.”
“Aye aye,” said Len Goodling.
A mother sitting in a nearby seat squinted slightly and waved a small white hand. “I have to say, I’m a little concerned about finding a good font for the newsletter,” she said. “I think it’s important that the look be right. And so I’d like to suggest Courier 12.”
“Courier 12 looks exactly like it was written on the Smith-Corona typewriter I used in high school,” said Laurie.
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” said the other mother, Sari Handler, who everyone knew to be a bit of a dunce. She was the same person who had once, during a discussion of the upcoming woodwind concert, somehow referred earnestly to “Taco Bell’s Canon in D.” (She had also, apparently, when the boys were studying dictators, insisted that “Baby Doc” Duvalier was a pediatrician, though Amy thought this anecdote had to be apocryphal.) “My feeling is that Courier 12 gives it a homier quality,” Sari Handler said now. “Like something from the past.”
“Then maybe we ought to use Butter Churn 12,” Amy put in. There was a light spurt of laughter, and several of the women looked up to see who had said that, and one of them was Geralynn Freund. Her smile appeared almost concave, giving her expression a rictus-like, death’s-head aspect. The conversation among the women in the room ground on, and several other women were drawn in, drafting their own powers of logic and reason and knowledge into service now. Someone groaned and complained, and someone else said, “Can we move along here?” Isabelle Gordon was looking at her watch—one that had no hands or numbers, just inexplicable overlapping translucent circles that moved in a pattern, suggesting a specific time only to her—and smiling apologetically; she needed to get back to her office at the research institute. Palatino 12 was eventually mentioned as a compromise font, and after a show of hands, it won. All this for a newsletter, Amy thought, with content about upcoming field trips that would prove to be as thin as a haiku:
Please send ten dollars
To the planetarium
Their gift shop is neat
The women continued to talk, their conversation moving in widening, overlapping circles that were rhythmic and hypnotic. A couple of the mothers inched or ambled toward the door. Amy willed herself out of the gabble and tran
ce. It was almost time for lunch at the museum, she realized, looking at the clock, and so she slipped quietly from the music room, relieved to be going past the rows of hard knees and the bags swelling with children’s soccer jerseys and rolled yoga mats and beautifully wrapped birthday presents. Some of the mothers had lacrosse sticks casually leaning against their chairs, as though they were part of a team of female athletes on a break, instead of mere stick-carriers for their sons. Also leaving the room at that moment was Geralynn Freund. Out in the hallway, the two women converged.
“I’m not very good in groups,” Geralynn Freund explained.
“This could have gone on forever. And the conversation was ridiculous.”
“Yes,” said Geralynn. “It was.”
“Sometimes the meetings are a lot better,” said Amy.
“True.”
“But when they’re like this, you just feel life passing you by.”
Geralynn agreed. She shrugged her small body into a black shearling winter coat that made her look like someone rolled up in a rug, although it also seemed to Amy that there wasn’t a coat in the world that would be thick enough or warm enough to protect her. The women pushed through the double doors. Cold sunlight flowed in, and Geralynn Freund stood in it for a moment, blinking rapidly, then smiled and hurried off.
Where did she have to go? Amy wondered. What was her day like? What did she do with herself, her hair spiky and damp, her body like a rope knotted here and there to make elbows, knees, a head? Amy could see Geralynn walking for hours and hours, calculating in her head how long it would take to burn off the calories of the kiwifruit and pineapple slices she’d eaten, until it was time to return and pick up her son.