The Ten-Year Nap

  “Oh. Well, I guess so,” said Amy. “But I don’t know what Penny could do for her. It’s not that kind of museum.”

  “Yes, but Penny obviously knows people in the art world. One thing leads to another. Brandy is off in South Dakota, and she’s completely out of the loop.”

  “Sure, okay. Not a problem. Karen,” Amy said, “this is so great; it’s like the Golden Horn on wheels. Can’t we just drive all night?”

  “Fine with me,” said Karen. “I love to drive.”

  They were comfortable and chatty and relaxed; the three other women were mildly talking about Brandy, and about Penny Ramsey’s small and earnest museum, and whether people had a responsibility to help other, less connected people. Yes, they agreed, they did. The others didn’t know it, but Karen was processing numbers in her mind during the drive, counting to herself and trying to guess exactly how much mileage came between exits, then checking the dashboard to see if she was right. She always came very close, with her innate feel for the way numbers unrolled and revealed themselves. Throughout her life, whenever there was a “guess the number of beads or nuts or candies in the jar” contest, she would always win, though the prizes had never been very interesting; once she had actually just won all the beads in the jar.

  The women were on a mission. It was a Saturday evening, and the four of them and the little girl were heading for the Nature Exploratorium upstate. The men and the boys had all left that morning for the father-son weekend; two coach buses had arrived at the school at seven A.M., and it was a safe bet that within a little while they had all begun to sing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” a droning, repetitive song that adults were supposed to hate but that secretly comforted Karen—not that she’d ever sung it or even heard it as a child.

  Among the women in the car, Karen was the only one who had never been to summer camp or had even had a weekend camp experience as a girl. Back then, summers were meant for sitting in a hot room and studying ahead in her textbook, Mathematical Concepts for Nimble Minds, or, when she got a little older, for working the cash register at the Ideal Dumpling Palace on Stockton Street in San Francisco, where her parents had cooked and hosed down dishes. Summers were not for singing or for living in a cabin tossing jacks and braiding lanyards.

  In the very back seat now, sitting alone and apparently content, Nadia had no memories or fantasies of camp either. She was simply a shy, uncommunicative little girl along for the ride, forced to accompany her mother on this trip. Jill and Nadia had taken the train into the city this morning and would be spending the night at Amy’s apartment. In all likelihood, Nadia Hamlin thought only about today and the day before. At any rate, she was still singing lightly to herself, as she often did, and Karen had no idea if she was particularly aware of the women’s conversation around her.

  They were not supposed to be going up to the campgrounds this weekend; instead, while the husbands and sons were upstate, they were supposed to be staying behind in the city. It had been an agreeable plan until a moment late this afternoon when Karen Yip, busy straightening up her duplex apartment on East Sixty-third Street, saw that her husband, Wilson, had forgotten to pack the night-vision goggles for the twins, Caleb and Jonno. She could not believe it; the goggles were still lying on the front hall table, where they had been all week. She had placed them there days ago so that Wilson would be sure to pack them.

  Wilson was a conscientious husband, and she had realized this was his future shortly after the two of them first met in the dining hall at MIT, side by side at the vegan steam table. Both, as it would turn out, were only temporarily vegan. All around them, students filled their plates with crumbling cakes of tofu, and lasagna prepared with soy or nut cheese. Easily forty percent of the students at the vegan table, she noted, were Asian, and not just from the subcontinent. And so there they were, Karen Tang from San Francisco’s Chinatown and Wilson Yip from New York City’s Chinatown, both freshmen, skinny, and slight. It was 1984, and Wilson, a nervous, hyperventilating type who played bass in a punk band on campus called Fermat, looked worried as he regarded the foods on Karen’s plate, and finally, though they were strangers, he spoke. “Sprouts have a fairly high incidence of E. coli 0157,” he blurted out.

  “You’re saying I should skip them?” Karen asked.

  This was years before E. coli was to become a notorious poisoner of salad bars and bagged, prewashed greens. He shrugged and said, “I just thought you should have that information before you eat.” Then he spooned some pinto beans and caking brown rice onto his own plate and went to sit with the other members of his band. She stood there, conflicted, then scraped the contents of her entire plate into the trash. Wilson Yip struck her as someone both worried and thoughtful. He had been looking like that ever since that first encounter. In many ways, they found that their lives were parallel. In addition to the two-Chinatowns coincidence, they had each attended a public science-and-technology high school in their respective cities and had then wound up at MIT on nearly full scholarship. At age eighteen, both of them were still virgins, though periodically beset by silent, unbearable longings for other people, which they never summoned up the nerve to vocalize or act upon. And, like everyone else on campus, both of them were calisthenically limber in mathematics.

  When Wilson confessed to her that before he went to sleep at night he lay in bed reciting a litany of prime numbers to himself—Lucas prime, or maybe Mersenne, whatever the night seemed to call for (“For me, it’s like choosing a wine,” he had explained)—she was shocked, feeling that she’d located her other half. To this day, reciting sequences of prime numbers aloud at night was a ritual they both still enjoyed.

  Wilson remembered everything. Nothing escaped his nervous, fact-trapping brain, and so it made no sense now that he had left their twin sons’ goggles behind. The two sets of authentic, spy-grade night-vision goggles had been a present from Wilson’s boss at the bank, who was a bit of an armchair espionage enthusiast. For an entire month the twins had been patiently waiting to use them on the father-son weekend. Caleb and Jonno, two hemmed-in city boys, had longed for the moment when they could wear the goggles in the cold sylvan darkness of the campgrounds.

  As a rule, the twins did not take frustration well. Karen could picture their faces screwing up in disappointment when they realized the goggles weren’t in the duffel bag. It wasn’t an emergency, Karen knew. It wasn’t Jake Giffen’s EpiPen that Wilson had forgotten to pack, but still she was agitated by his lapse in the way she sometimes became agitated when certain details did not fall into place: when people were late, or when numbers did not agree. And so she had called Amy, sensing that her friend would convince her that, if it mattered so much to her, Karen could drive up to the campgrounds and personally deliver the night-vision goggles to her sons. Which was exactly what had happened. Even better, Amy suggested they could turn it into a group outing, and so she had convinced Roberta to come along too (her daughter, Grace, could go to a friend’s apartment for a sleepover), and also Jill, because Donald would be flooded with work all weekend anyway.

  So there they all were now, on the parkway heading northward eighty-five miles to a place where the natural beauty was abundant, even at this time of year, and the men and the boys had thought they would be alone for a weekend. “Is this a mistake, do you think?” Karen asked at the wheel. “Invading their privacy like this? The twins were really looking forward to using those goggles, but maybe they’ll be annoyed to see me.”

  “Enough with the goggles,” Roberta Sokolov said. “We are halfway there, Karen. I’m sure they’ll be glad to have them.”

  “Anyway,” Jill put in, “what do you think they’re doing that’s so private?”

  “I have no idea,” said Roberta. “Nathaniel probably feels so out of place.” This, Karen thought, was true; Roberta’s puppeteer/cameraman husband was like someone from the ’60s, and while he had always been nice to Karen, she never knew what to say to him.

  “Leo was dreading
it too,” Amy said.

  “At least Leo fits in,” said Roberta. “He’s part of that whole corporate world. Nathaniel hasn’t worn a tie in decades.”

  “Leo doesn’t fit in,” Amy said defensively.

  “Well, Wilson was looking forward to the weekend,” Karen said.

  “I can just picture them all,” said Amy, “dancing around a campfire half naked.”

  Karen dutifully envisioned the men dancing around a campfire, getting themselves all worked up, beating the skins of drums. She rarely came up with vivid imaginary scenarios on her own but was an astonishingly literal person, and her friends often teased her about this, telling her that although she had no imagination, they loved her anyway. They were right, of course; she had almost no imagination at all but tended to visualize the world as a series of orderly channels and corridors inlaid on a gigantic grid. Wilson visualized it this way too, and so, probably, did Caleb and Jonno, who both enjoyed math puzzles and Rubik’s Cubes but demonstrated no interest in the capriciousness of nature or in storybooks or generally in narrative of any kind. They came by it honestly; the entire Yip family was literal, focused, concerned mostly with the quantifiable.

  Yet when someone else came up with a starter image—men dancing in the woods, for instance—lately Karen had found herself gently nudged toward a desire to shade in the rest of the details. So now she dutifully tried to visualize Wilson sitting between Caleb and Jonno, and Leo beside Mason, and Roberta’s lanky husband, Nathaniel, and their son, Harry, and the collection of highly imposing husbands in the grade, including Penny Ramsey’s short, thick, bantam husband, Greg, and their son, Holden, and all the other men and boys. She carefully placed them in this setting; the smell of pine would mingle easily with the smell of wild boar being roasted over a fire, and then suddenly, through a clearing in the trees, four women and a little girl would appear, feminine and flushed, bearing goggles.

  THEY ARRIVED at almost nine at night, and Karen steered the big car into the makeshift parking lot at the entrance to the campgrounds. The coach buses were gone and would return tomorrow afternoon to take the boys and their fathers home. The Yip car seemed out of place here, a remnant of the paranoid city. It was a jumbo SUV, and Wilson had begun leasing a series of them since right before the twins had been born, ten years earlier, at only thirty-two weeks’ gestation. Karen’s water had broken one morning when she was shopping at Camarata & Bello. She had been standing by the sloping glass of the meats counter in the rear of the store while the butcher sliced mortadella for her with a knife like a scimitar. As the blade buried into the meat, she suddenly felt a sharp pull, as though she herself were being cut, and she said, “Oh my God.”

  Then there came a slap sound like wet laundry being dropped, and she understood it had come from her, though she felt no connection to the sound at all. But there was some sensation then too, and Karen looked downward with dread and saw that the white tiled floor below her had been splashed with water. The woman next in line took Karen’s arm and said, “Honey, your water broke. You have to get to the hospital.”

  “It’s too early,” Karen cried.

  “Oh, they’re open,” the woman said with a laugh, then abruptly stopped, realizing.

  In the hospital the doctors said that the babies would have to be delivered within twenty-four hours. When it became clear that Karen’s cervix was not going to open, she was taken into a delivery room and her stomach was swabbed bright rust with antiseptic. The obstetrician, a stylish woman who looked, as Roberta had said later upon seeing her, like a buyer for designer sportswear, seemed almost irritated that Karen had not found the discipline to keep her water from breaking, to keep those babies in place until near their due date. Karen felt like a negligent mother who has forgotten to strap her infants into their car seats and has instead let them hurl freely through space. Everyone told her it wasn’t her fault, she had done nothing wrong, but she still felt furious with herself and forcefully ashamed. A month later, when Caleb and Jonno were released from the NICU, their lungs finally mature, Karen was obsessed with conveying them in perfect safety, as if to make up for her earlier, inexcusable lapse.

  On the morning the twins came home, the first of the cars that Wilson would lease sat high up on its haunches at the curb on Fifth Avenue in front of the hospital. Wilson slid Jonno and Caleb into their car seats in the same order in which they had been delivered into the world. Karen’s mother, Chu Hua Tang, had flown in from San Francisco and had been there in the car that morning too, helping to transport the babies, braying at her son-in-law in rapid Chinese, saying, “Do it this way! No, not like that. Too tight around the neck. Do you want your sons to end up stupid?”

  Karen was often made breathless by her mother’s insults to Wilson, but he just received them indifferently; because Chu Hua was not his mother, he said, the words could not disturb him. That day outside the hospital, Wilson and his mother-in-law even seemed to be co-conspirators, and Karen felt like a visitor who’d had nothing to do with the creation of these tender fraternal twin boys. The babies still seemed alien to her, and the car itself did too. Cars like this, Karen had thought at the time, were for large American families with children who sprawled out playing with Game Boys and decks of Uno, who littered every available surface with their garbage, who sucked juice boxes into convexity as if on life support. The Yips would not transform into such a family for years, if ever.

  But they needed the car, Wilson had insisted before the babies’ birth, and she understood that he had been waiting for much of his life to own a car like this. SUVs hadn’t existed when he was growing up, but there had been boatlike Lincoln Continentals and station wagons, neither of which his family had owned, of course. No one they knew growing up had even owned a bad car. So the wet dream of those two types of automobiles had fused into one and created a car that looked like this one: big and fat as a pregnant wife, but as powerful as her husband.

  The SUV, in Chu Hua’s eyes, was a golden coach, and she behaved as if it were a present for her. Of course, for every noise Chu Hua made that indicated how excited she was by Wilson and Karen’s money, she made another one to indicate her displeasure with some detail of their lives. The car was beautiful, she had declared, but the upholstery was “cold and leathery.” That’s because it’s made of leather, Ma, Karen had wanted to cry, but she’d said nothing.

  That morning had taken place a full decade ago, and now Karen rarely drove their car anywhere outside the city, except in the summer, when she took the boys upstate to their summer house. And here were Karen and her friends in the parking lot of the campgrounds, sitting in the stilled car. “What do you think they’re doing right now?” Jill asked as they sat there. “What do men do when women aren’t around?”

  “I don’t want to know,” said Roberta.

  “Maybe they form a little consciousness-raising group, like my mother and her friends used to,” said Amy. “My sisters and my father and I had to stay upstairs. My mother told me that one night, back in the early seventies, they looked into another woman’s cervix.”

  “Imagine if you’d come downstairs,” said Jill, shaking her head.

  “Did they eat their own placentas too?” Roberta asked. “They used to do that back then.”

  “No one really did that,” said Amy. “It’s sort of a myth. Or maybe a few women did, forever giving feminists a bad name.”

  “I really don’t think feminists have a bad name,” Karen said. “I just don’t think it’s a necessary name. It’s part of the past. It’s some angry, old-style image.”

  “Don’t tell my mother that,” Amy said. “She hates when women our age don’t call ourselves feminists. I think she thinks we ought to do it almost in honor of her and her friends.” Uncertainly, she added, “I call myself a feminist. You don’t?”

  “Theoretically I do,” said Roberta. “It’s not like it usually comes up. You don’t have to put it down on medical forms or anything. But of course I’m a feminist. They accompl
ished a lot.”

  “Yes, and look how equal we are.”

  “Don’t blame them,” said Roberta. “It’s not their fault. People blame mothers all the time, and it’s deeply unfair.”

  “You’re always blaming your mother for something,” said Amy.

  “My mother? Well, that’s different,” Roberta said, and they laughed.

  “It’s so quiet in there,” said Jill after a moment. “I can’t believe even the boys aren’t making any noise.”

  “I think,” said Amy, “the boys are playing video games, and the men are on conference calls.”

  “No,” said Karen. “They wouldn’t do that. It’s not allowed. ‘Leave your work behind,’ the note from the school said.”

  “I was kidding,” said Amy.

  Karen was reflexively protective of Wilson; even a joking kind of criticism that included him as part of a group made her uncomfortable. He was the most ethical and elegant husband of all of them, with his hairless face and body and shining black hair and long hands, and she would be reminded of this fact as soon as she saw him at the campgrounds. Her eye would go directly to him, as if only he were illuminated, separated from all the others by some kind of special goggles she would be wearing that showed the world in Wilson-vision. Everyone else would fade away until all she could see was him.

  “We’re going camping, and camping’s fun,” Jill’s daughter Nadia said.

  “Not really camping, honey,” said Jill. “Just a quick visit into the woods to give the twins the goggles that they left behind. It’s freezing outside.” They all got out of the car, and Karen popped the trunk, her breath rolling through the cold air as she scrabbled inside for a few flashlights that she’d thought to bring and the two sets of goggles. “So let’s see these amazing objects,” Jill said, and then, on an impulse, Karen took one of the pairs of goggles out of its box and attempted to strap it to her own head. But the rubber strap was meant for the much smaller head circumference of a child. She loosened it, flicked a switch, and the night became a sickly yellow.