Before the Fall(43)
“Shane’s nervous about tonight,” Jenny said after they exited the elevator. “It’s so cute.”
“The first time I met your father’s parents, I threw up,” Sarah told her.
“Really?”
“Yes, but I think it might have been the clam chowder I had at lunch.”
“Oh, Mom,” said Jenny, smiling, “you’re so funny.” Jenny always told her friends that her mother was “slightly batty.” Sarah knew it, or sensed it on some level. And she was—what’s the word?—a little absentminded, a little, well—sometimes she made unique connections in her head. And didn’t Robin Williams have the same quality? Or other, you know, innovative thinkers.
So now you’re Robin Williams? Ben would say.
“Well, he doesn’t have to be nervous,” said Sarah. “We don’t bite.”
“Class is a real thing,” Jenny told her. “I mean again. The divide, you know. Rich people and—I mean, Shane’s parents aren’t poor, but—”
“It’s dinner at Bali, not class warfare. And besides, we’re not that rich.”
“When was the last time you flew commercial?”
“Last winter to Aspen.”
Her daughter made a sound as if to say, Do you hear yourself?
“We’re not billionaires, dear. This is Manhattan, you know. Some of the parties we go to, I feel like the help.”
“You own a yacht.”
“It’s not a—it’s a sailboat, and I told your father not to buy it. Is that who we are now, I said, boat people? But you know him when he gets an idea.”
“Whatever. The point is, he’s nervous, so will you please—I don’t know—keep it light.”
“You’re talking to the woman who charmed a Swedish prince, and boy was he a sourpuss.”
With this they entered the main gallery space. Oversize canvases lined the walls, each a gesture of will. Thoughts and ideas reduced to lines and color. Sarah tried to let her daily brain go, to quiet the constant natter of thoughts, the chronic to-do list of modern life, but it was hard. The more you had, the more you worried. That was what she’d decided.
When Jenny was born, they’d lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. Ben earned eighty thousand a year as a runner at the exchange. But he was handsome and good at making people laugh, and he knew how to seize an opportunity, so two years later he had graduated to trader and was pulling in four times that amount. They’d moved east to a co-op in the sixties and started buying groceries at Citarella.
Before motherhood, Sarah had worked in advertising, and after Jenny was in preschool she’d flirted with the idea of going back to it, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of a nanny raising her daughter while she was at work. So though she felt like she was giving up a piece of her soul, she’d stayed home and made lunch and changed diapers and waited for her husband to come home and do his share.
Her mother had encouraged her to do it, becoming—as her mother described it—a lady of leisure. But Sarah didn’t do well with unstructured time, possibly because her mind was so unstructured. And so she’d become a woman of lists, a woman with multiple calendars who left sticky notes on the inside of their front door. She was the kind of person who needed reminding, who would forget a phone number the second after someone recited it to her. She’d known it was bad when her three-year-old daughter started reminding her of things, even went to see a neurologist, who’d found nothing physically wrong with her brain and suggested Ritalin, suggesting she had ADHD, but Sarah hated pills and worried they would turn her into a different person, so she’d gone back to her lists, to her calendars and alarms.
On nights that Ben had worked late—which became increasingly frequent—she couldn’t help but think of her mother in the kitchen when Sarah was young, washing up after dinner, supervising the end-of-day arts and crafts while packing lunches for the next day. Was this the cycle of motherhood? The constant return. Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.
Fathers, on the other hand, were there to toughen children up, to say Walk it off when mothers would hold them if they fell. Mothers were the carrot. Fathers were the stick.
And so Sarah had found herself in her own kitchen on East 63rd Street, packing preschool lunches and reading picture books during warm baths, her body and her daughter’s body one and the same. On those nights when she’d fall asleep alone, Sarah would bring Jenny into bed with her, reading books and talking until they both nodded off, intertwined. This would be how Ben found them when he came home, smelling of booze, his tie askew, kicking his shoes off noisily.
“How are my girls?” he’d say. His girls, as if they were both his daughter. But he said the words with love, his face brightening, as if this was his reward for a long day, the faces of the women he loved looking up at him with sleepy eyes from the comfort of the family bed.
“I like this one,” said Jenny, now a woman in her twenties, five years from children of her own. They’d managed to stay close through her divisive teen years, despite all odds. Jenny never was one for drama. The worst you could say now was that she didn’t respect her mom the way she used to, the curse of the modern woman. You stay home and raise daughters, who grow up and get jobs and then feel pity for you, their stay-at-home mothers.