Alternate Side(37)

“You sound like Charlie,” Nora said.

“That’s just mean,” Elena said, and they all laughed.

“The really good news,” Nora said, “is that my assistant quit.”

“That’s the good news?” Jenny asked.

“Oh, I hear you,” said Elena, who ran a PR firm. “I had one kid, when he aced his LSATs and decided to go to law school, I was happier than his parents. I was so glad to see the back of him.”

Jean-Ann said, “One of my partners, I swear it’s his favorite part of the job, calling some young associate in, saying, ‘You may want to consider employment elsewhere.’ I’ve just never developed the knack. I’m always so relieved when they decide to quit and I don’t have to fire them. You’re so lucky, Nora.”

“This is a depressing conversation,” Jenny said.

Nora’s assistant now was a temp named Richard. He was so thin that his clothes all looked as though they were still on hangers. When she had gotten in that morning, picking up the folder for a meeting with a vodka company that wanted to sponsor an exhibit of the Danish crown jewels, he held up a hand. “Your daughter is on the phone. She says it’s urgent,” he said, and then, seeing the look on Nora’s face, added, “in a girl way.”

“Do you have a sister?” Nora asked him as she went into her own office.

“I have six sisters,” Richard said.

It seemed to Nora that it was always when she was late for a meeting that the phone rang and Rachel was on the other end with a crisis at once so profound and yet so fleeting that if Nora ignored it it would be added to the grievance bank, and if she took it seriously Rachel would say when she brought it up again that her mother exaggerated everything. “In a girl way,” she thought to herself. Richard had been working for her for only three weeks and she already liked him infinitely more than she ever had Madison.

“I’m in so much pain,” Rachel wailed, as though Nora could do something about it, with Rachel four hours away in Williamstown.

“Oh, buggy-boo,” Nora said, a relatively safe reply.

“I was in this rugby scrimmage yesterday—”

“A rugby scrimmage? Why were you in a rugby scrimmage? Aside from everything else, it’s not even rugby season.” Not a safe reply.

“Mom, why do you always ask questions instead of just listening to me? I want you to listen to what I’m saying and instead you just grill me, like I’m a criminal or something. I don’t know why I bothered to call.”

Nora was not sure, either. She supposed she should be glad that Rachel still called her when she was overwrought, when she got a B on a paper in her major, when she and the current boyfriend had quarreled, when she’d strained something—it sounded like a hamstring, although Rachel was bound to think it was a compound fracture—in a rugby game. Sometimes Rachel called Christine about these things, which hurt Nora’s feelings, although she would never say this to either one. Oliver seldom called, and only with emergencies that he refused to characterize as emergencies. In a boy way, Nora supposed. “Mom, do you know where my passport is?” he’d asked the week before he was due to go to Oslo for a semester abroad. Luckily Nora was well acquainted with a place that could, for a price, provide a new passport in forty-eight hours, having used it twice before for Oliver, once for Rachel, and even once for Charlie, when he had to fly to Tokyo on an emergent business matter and discovered that he had somehow let his passport expire. In New York City you could find anything. There were women who would pick nits from a child’s hair if there was an outbreak of lice at school, as there so often was. Christine had thought she was kidding when she first told her. Nitpickers. Now they had them in Seattle, too.

The last time Rachel had called Nora at work, Bebe had stood in the doorway of her office tapping a foot in a black slingback stiletto. There were people who were careful not to let judgment register on their faces, particularly where motherhood was concerned; Bebe was not one of them. Her whole body was a semaphore: get off the phone this is ridiculous what am I paying you for.

“Kids,” Nora said, putting down the receiver and shrugging.

“There were so many reasons I never had them,” Bebe said. “Or had any interest in doing so. Husbands don’t really care for them.”

“And yet so many of them become fathers,” Nora said coldly.

Bebe waved a hand. She was wearing a square-cut emerald so big no one would bother to steal it because it shouted “fake!” It had once belonged to some Indian royalty and had been Bebe’s engagement ring, and so “for sentimental reasons”—“the woman is as sentimental as a crocodile,” Nora had told her sister—she had decided not to give it to the museum. “Until I’m dead,” she’d added, unsentimentally.

“They become fathers because their wives insist on becoming mothers. Although most of the ones I know had only one, just so they could say they had, you know: little Lindsay has changed my life, blah blah blah, night nurse, nanny.”

Thank God Bebe was away now and couldn’t hear Nora talking to Rachel nor see Phil sitting in a spot cleared by their facilities guy with the snowblower. The last time Bebe had noticed him was just before the holidays, as she stopped in to the museum before she flew south.

“Go away!” she’d yelled.