Excerpt
from The Ten Year Nap
by Meg Wolitzer
Chapter One
All around the country, the women were waking up. Their alarm clocks
bleated one by one, making soothing sounds or grating sounds or the
stirrings of a favorite song. There were hums and beeps and a random
burst of radio. There were wind chimes and roaring surf, and the
electronic approximation of birdsong and other gentle animal noises.
All of it accompanied the passage of time, sliding forward in liquid
crystal. Almost everything in these women's homes required a plug.
Voltage stuttered through the curls of wire, and if you put your ear to
one of the complicated clocks in any of the bedrooms, you could hear
the burble of industry deep inside its cavity. Something was quietly
happening.
BIP BIP BIP. By a bed on this
Monday morning in fall, the first alarm went off in a house with cedar
shingles in a small, buffed suburb, and a woman sat up, the prospects
of the entire day rising before her. BOOP BOOP BOOP.
Three towns over, there went another alarm, a full octave lower, and a
woman broke the skin of consciousness in her colonial, blinking. " -- A LOOK AT THE TRAFFIC. RANDY, WHAT'S HAPPENING OUT THERE?"
Throughout the region, and in others not unlike it, in houses broader
and more spread apart or else smaller and tightly bunched, the women
awakened. Farther away, across unswimmable waters and over a nexus of
highway and bridge, in the residential towers of the city, a whole
other crop of alarms peeped and chirruped and wailed and beckoned.
They sounded in both suburb and city, on individual night tables beside
facedown, broken-spined volumes being read for book group with titles
like Bigfoot Was Here: A Father's Letters to His Newborn Son from Iraq,
and among curling school permission slips ("I, ________ , allow my
child, ___________ , to attend the field trip to the recycling plant").
The intensifying chorus of alarms urged the women to get up and go
wherever the day would take them. Some would shepherd their children
into huge, fully stocked, cornball American family vehicles,
adjusting rearview mirrors and backing out into the world, while
others would grab their children by their soft little hands and yank
them like pulltoys into the mash of urban foot traffic.
One by one the women began their separate and familiar routines. Unlike
in the past, there were no presentations to give, no fears of having to
keep vast savannahs of information in their heads all morning, and
then, at eleven A.M., having to recite it all aloud to a roomful of
colleagues. Because now there were no colleagues, just as there were no
conference calls or lunches with "a client." All of that was over, and
when the alarms sounded in the morning and the women were startled
awake, they sometimes took a momentary dip into the memory of what they
had left behind, and then, with varying degrees of relief or regret,
they let the memory go.
COO COO COO COO COOOOOO. In a
light-stippled apartment on Third Avenue in New York City, on the
eleventh floor of a newish colossus of a rental building fashioned of
glazed brown brick, an alarm called out in Amy Lamb's bedroom. She was
alone, as she always was when the alarm went off, for Leo had been
awakened by his own Timex over an hour earlier, and had staggered like
a newborn monster through the violet shadows to the bathroom and the
elevator and the gym and then finally to the office. By the time the
doves called to Amy, Leo Buckner was already at his desk in midtown,
looking into the eye of a video device that sent a slightly convex
version of him to the clients sitting around a platter of pastries in
an industrial-park conference room in Pittsburgh.
As Leo went about the start of the workday, Amy slowly woke up. Her
clock, which he had bought her as a recent birthday present from the
Domestic Edge catalogue, and which, depending on the setting, made a
noise like one of a variety of animals, today sounded like a flock of
mourning doves. Leo and their son Mason were sent into a shared frenzy
by gadgetry. The apartment, because of this, contained objects that
blinked and hummed and made animal noises and sometimes actually spoke
sentences in flattened android voices, remarking, Your-keys-are-o-ver-here,
so clearly indifferent to where your keys actually were. But husband
and son were content with the impersonal nature of electronics; they
didn't need these objects to love and embrace them, because Amy did,
and that was enough.
"Mason!" she cried in a dry, fruitless morning voice. "Time to get up!"
There was no response. It would have made much more sense if she'd
simply gone into his room right away and hung over his bed like a
jackal in a tree, the way some mothers did. "MASON!" she cried again,
rasping but loud. Still nothing, and so Amy gave it a rest, standing in
the middle of her pale bedroom and moving her head from side to side,
listening to the internal neck pops and explosions. At age forty her
physical self seemed to make much more noise and require so much more
attention than it used to. She stretched her arms over her head, her
body nicely thin but slightly battered by middle age, tight-nippled
inside one of Leo's oversized undershirts, which she wore to bed each
night out of habit, because long ago he had said it was an erotic
sight. For some reason, men often liked women in some sort of nominal
drag, though Amy couldn't remember the last time Leo had been all that
excited by her. Maybe she should have had gadgets affixed to her body,
she thought. Instead, married for thirteen years and in the middle of
their life together, they often lay in bed at night like two tired
prehistoric animals that had individually been out in the world for
many hours, fighting for survival.
"What a stupid day," Leo had said last night in the dark, and his hand
halfheartedly, almost accidentally, bumped against her breast and
stayed there. "Stutzman wanted to know when we're going to be ready to
go to court. I told him I can only do so much. That I'm not Vishnu. So
he said, 'Who's that, a new associate?'"
"Oh God," she said. "I remember that kind of thing."
"It's worse now. You always have to stop and explain what you mean. And
you have to appease everyone. It's an onslaught. Corinna and I
basically just roll our eyes."
Corinna Berry was his closest friend at the office. Once, long ago, Amy
had been Leo's primary work confidante, the one he had rolled his eyes
with, but she had lost that tender role. "I'm sorry," she told him.
"Everyone else manages," said Leo. "It's like they're being thrown some
bone that no one's throwing me." He added, dolefully, "I keep waiting
for the bone."
Whenever Leo expressed unhappiness about his job, Amy tried to find
something to say that might be a comfort, even an anecdote about
herself that could create a marital symmetry between them. "My day was
bad too," she'd said. "The pediatrician's waiting room. Like typhoid
central! And we sat there for a full hour."
It was as though they performed small reenactments for each other in
bed, depicting the different ways the day had been spent. When he
described and acted out scenes from his life at Kenley Shuber, the law
firm where she had once worked too and where they had first met, she
easily pictured the toast-colored corridors, the conference room with
its oak table and recessed lights. But as she began to tell him about
her own day, he made polite, generic sounds of sympathy in his throat.
She knew he could barely picture Dr. Andrea Wish stein's waiting room
with its streppy, fractious children on the floor pushing wooden beads
along wire, and its pastels of clowns on unicycles lining the walls,
and that he wouldn't really want to picture it even if'he could.
The paradox was that Leo adored her but wasn't always interested in how
she spent her time. Jill Hamlin, Amy's closest friend since college,
who had moved from the city last spring to the suburb of Holly Hills,
had recently told her about a woman she'd met there whose husband had
admitted that he swallowed their hyperactive son's Ritalin every
evening on the commuter train going home so he could actually pay attention
at night when his wife told him about her day. "He couldn't bear to
listen to her without it," Jill had told Amy. "He said he loved her so
much, but that whenever she started to speak, he would automatically
think about other things. He was so ashamed."
"Are men's stories inherently more interesting?" "Yes."
"Yes? You're serious?"
"During my two-second career in film," said Jill, "or at least right at the end, they kept emphasizing the idea of the four quadrants,
like it was an Aristotelian concept. The four quadrants are:
older male, younger male, older female, younger female. The fact is
that both older and younger men and older and younger women -- all four
quadrants -- will go see movies about men, but that only two
quadrants -- women, young and old, will go see movies about women. So
right away there's a huge discrepancy. But it's the way it is."
Amy saw herself on a screen, in afternoon light, walking down a city
street to the dry cleaner, then sitting on a small chair at her son's
school, attending a meeting about the evacuation policies in case of
terrorism. There was very little dramatic tension to these scenes; out
in the audience, the men would start to rustle, and one by one they
would leave the theater.
Mason, in bed, didn't stir yet; the apartment remained still.
Amy always left a few minutes' leeway in their morning schedule, so now
she picked up her laptop and sat with it on the edge of her bed in the
dim morning room, checking e-mail. There were a couple of messages from
friends in the city and elsewhere, and one from her son's school with
the subject line REMINDER:
SAFETY PATROL TODAY, but the only message she opened now was from her
mother. Up in the house in Montreal, Antonia Lamb wrote her daughter
free-form e-mails roughly once a week. She was an historical novelist
who only recently had made the change from typewriter to computer, and
e-mail was still a novelty to her, the way once, decades past,
answering machines had been a novelty too, and Antonia had recorded her
own voice solemnly reciting the last stanza of Sylvia Plath's poem
"Lady Lazarus" as her outgoing message: "' . . . Out of the ash / I
rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.' Please leave a brief
message, and remember to wait for the recorded beep tone. Thank you."
The above is an excerpt from the book The Ten Year Nap: A Novel
by Meg Wolitzer. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
Copyright © 2009 Meg Wolitzer, author of The Ten Year Nap: A Novel