All Adults Here(40)

Wendy sat in her home office, a room with no purpose other than organizing their lives. She worked twenty hours a week, a minuscule amount, in New Paltz, and she loved those twenty hours like she loved oxygen. She loved the boring parts, the tedious parts, the scrolling through emails until she forgot what she was looking for. She loved the watercooler, mostly because it was never her job to change it when the supply was getting low. She did not buy the toilet paper; thrillingly, she didn’t even replace a roll when there were only a few squares left. She was responsible for neither making her co-workers’ lunch nor ensuring that they ate it. Her home office was supposed to be a space where she could do work if she needed to, and she did answer an email inside its walls from time to time, but really it was just a nicely designed closet. It was where all the family’s papers were filed, the things no one wanted to look at but were afraid to throw away: previous years’ taxes, health insurance forms, bank statements. The room had a window overlooking the backyard, which was strewn with large plastic toys in primary colors, oversize baseball bats, and shrunken basketball hoops. Elliot wanted them to be athletes, though thus far both boys had shown an aptitude only for total destruction. It was a beautiful day outside, and a breeze blew the tree branches. Wendy wondered how much wind it would take to blow the whole house down.



* * *



—

She had pushed for Chappaqua, Bedford, Scarsdale, something that would have made the commute into the city seem like a doable crunch, and not the soul-crushing plot of a deranged workaholic, as it was from Clapham. This was before she was pregnant. Elliot had almost agreed. Minty-breathed Realtors had driven slowly past town landmarks, past top-rated public schools, past quaint houses and brand-new ones. She nearly had him, but then she’d gotten pregnant sooner than she thought—Wendy was pragmatic and had planned for trying for at least a year, at her age, with her history (every woman had a history). But once the egg had implanted and she’d told Elliot, Wendy knew they weren’t leaving Clapham. He called his mother first. Wendy asked her mother to come when the baby was born, and then before too long they knew that the baby would be two babies, and she was needed all the more.

Living in Clapham was like living in a Strick museum. This was the house where her husband had lost his virginity. This was the field he and his friends used on the Fourth of July to send illegal fireworks zooming into space. This was the restaurant with the best hamburger, this was the bar with the best booths. He was the expert in their lives, and she was his tourist. When they had the twins, she became an expert in them, which was enough, for a little while. Aidan would sleep for only forty-five minutes at a time, Zachary preferred applesauce and yogurt mixed together in an equal ratio. Aidan would pee on the potty but not more, Zachary would always, always go in a diaper, until she took the diapers away and threw them into the garbage with a grand flourish, as she had previously done with the pacifiers. Elliot would come home and announce his amazement at her work. Her “work.” It was work, of course, but when he said it, she knew that he whispered those quotation marks, that he thought anything that took place inside their house’s walls was playtime. As if children’s playtime was playtime for their parents. As if it wasn’t work, to keep the house and the children from bursting into flames, to keep herself from lighting the match. Men understood so little.

When Wendy was seven months pregnant, her mother arrived from San Francisco—twins came early, and both Chan women liked to be prepared. Wendy’s father stayed at home—truthfully, was there ever a more useless figure than a grandfather? Vivian Chan chose the bedroom next to the twins’, though there was an au pair suite on the first floor, by the garage, with its own door and a small kitchenette. She would move down there when the boys were sleeping through the night, she said, and she did, when they were six months old. Wendy had always loved her mother, in her own way, the way one loves an airplane for not crashing into a mountainside, but once the boys were born, she appreciated her too. The two women spent days together without speaking, passing things back and forth without more than a nod: a diaper, a pack of wipes, a bottle, a swaddle. They were synchronized swimmers. Elliot was their absentee coach, who occasionally wandered into the room and found them each holding a sleeping child and offered an enthusiastic thumbs-up, wandering out again before he could ask if their arms had fallen asleep, if they were hungry or thirsty, if they could reach their phones. When her mother had returned to San Francisco after the boys’ first birthday, Wendy wept more than she had ever wept in her life.

Just as Wendy had turned into something else when the children were born, so had Elliot, only she had taken a step toward the rest of human experience, and he had taken a step back, shaken as he was by the visceral fluids, the menial tasks, and the tedium. He had no training—he’d said that to Wendy, incredulous at her request that he help her change Aidan one morning, when her mother and Zachary were already downstairs, and Aidan had produced an incredible, bright yellow dal of a bowel movement, which covered his lower half, his back, the changing table pad, and Wendy’s two hands. He’d said this to her as if her classes at Princeton had included Home Ec and Childcare 101. As if there were a manual, and she’d read it. (There were manuals, of course, hundreds of contradictory books, and she’d read dozens of them, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she always left the books, underlined and dog-eared, on his side of the bed, and he’d never opened them.)