The Ten-Year Nap (26 page)

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 accomplished 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.

“It’s like looking at the world through a urine sample,” Amy said, when she tried them on. Every bush and tree had become individuated.

“Can I try?” Nadia asked tentatively, holding out her hands, and Karen strapped the second pair of goggles to the little girl’s head. “Oh!” Nadia cried as the yellow light was turned on and the world lit up just for her. “Wow!”

There seemed to be two different entrances into the campgrounds, and the women arbitrarily chose one. They walked and walked, but after about five minutes the trail ended and they found themselves wading into the cold woods. They shuffled through drifts of leaves and twigs, using the flashlights and the goggles to guide the way. Instinct drew them in a particular direction, and they went from tree to tree and bush to bush, finding another trail and then choosing which fork in the path to take next, all of this done in a darkness that was punctuated by flashlights and urine-vision and lights from the cabins in the distance.

“If we were all to be eaten by a bear in a moment of ursine barbarism,” said Roberta, “nobody would ever know what we had been doing here. It would be this huge mystery: why we were all in the woods at the father-son weekend. It would become a legend, and every year our husbands would tell the kids another version of what they thought had happened to us.”

“They’d tell it to their second wives too,” said Jill.

“What second wives?” Karen asked, confused.

“Karen. It’s a
joke
,” said Roberta.

“Oh.”

“And then our husbands would say, ‘Well, son, I’ve begun to believe that the reason that your
original
mom and her friends drove all the way up to the campgrounds was to say “I love you.”’”

“‘But unfortunately, son,’” Jill said, “‘one of Mommy’s friends had her menses at the time, and that attracted a bear.’”

“I actually do have my period,” said Karen. “Fairly heavy too.”

“Oh Karen,” Amy said, “your idea of fairly heavy is probably a thimbleful of blood, am I right? Like a pinprick on a sewing hoop in a fairy tale.”

“No, as a matter of fact, it’s not,” Karen said, but the others seemed to suspect, accurately, that her neat little body was rarely overcome by torrents, the way their bodies apparently were.

“I see a light up ahead,” Jill said.

“‘I see a ring,’” said Amy.

“A ring? Where?” Karen asked.

“It’s the opening of
The Waves
,” explained Amy. “Virginia Woolf. My senior thesis at Penn. I still know exactly how the novel begins.” She began to recite:

 

“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.”

“I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.”

“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.”

 

When she finished, the women were silent for a moment. “That’s interesting writing,” said Karen. “Kind of strange.” She was thinking:
Too strange. Much too strange for me.
Words, to Karen, were what numbers were to almost everyone else; they confounded her and always seemed as elusive as a quivering ring hanging in the distance just past fingertip reach.

“It’s not my favorite of her novels,” said Amy, “but it’s mesmerizing. I once read the entire thing out loud to Leo.”

“And he let you?” Karen asked.

“Oh, he loved it.”

“I can’t imagine Wilson letting anyone read to him that much, even when he was a baby, unless it was the NASDAQ.”

As the women drew nearer to the center of the camp, a bonfire scented the air, and the sky became slightly lighter from the flames. The smell reached them first, then the light, and soon they heard the singing. It was this that stopped them, finally—the surprising sound of a hundred male voices, all joining together in some kind of idealized, testosterone-drunk vocal perfection. It was a world without women, Amy said later, as though they had stumbled upon an encampment of Civil War soldiers stopping for the night.

“Whoa, listen to that,” said Karen.

The men’s voices were lifting up in a song that Wilson would never have sung on his own, so dismissive would he have been of its sentimentality. He still liked the ’80s punk music he’d listened to in college and had played when he was in the band Fermat. Over time, though, that punk streak had made fewer appearances in him. He rarely played the expensive electric bass he’d treated himself to on his thirtieth birthday, after he’d received his first big bonus from the bank. Karen knew enough to realize that here, out among the logs and stones, and the bits of cinder that flew into the eye, and the marshmallows pierced dully by crooked twigs, it was very unusual for Wilson and all the others to be singing that old Joan Baez folk song “Donna Donna.” But that was what they were doing, and they sang with improbable beauty:

 

On a wagon, bound for market,

there’s a calf with a mournful eye.

High above him, there’s a swallow,

winging swiftly through the sky.

How the winds are laughing,

they laugh with all their might, laugh and

laugh the whole day through and

half the summer’s night…

 

“They sound
great
,” said Jill. “I’m floored.”

The men were singing angelically, and without obvious irony inflecting their often-ironic voices. The women closed in on the campfire, and through the night-vision goggles and with their flashlights, they watched the scene. One or two fathers stalked the periphery on illegal cell phones, whispering into them with agitation. But they were a small minority; the other men had agreeably left their business behind overnight. There were Wilson and the twins, all three of them wearing parkas with reflector strips on the side. There, a few feet away, was Leo Buckner with Mason beside him, the big uncomfortable man and his intelligent son, their eyes glittering in the night. They were all singing openly, willingly, without rolling their eyes or demonstrating any overt sarcasm.

How, Karen wondered, did Wilson even know the lyrics to this song? The men and boys sang all the verses, and then, when the singing ended, the women watched from their place behind the trees as Alec Giffen, the father of Jake, the boy with the peanut allergy, suddenly stood up in the center of the circle. He was dressed, like all the fathers, in lumberjack clothes. It was established that he had been a designated “team leader” during the games today, and so tonight he had been given the task of addressing the group at large. “Guys,” Alec Giffen said. “Listen up!” He raised a hand, and the talking soon subsided. “You all sang great,” he said. “Give yourselves a big hand.”

There was a round of clapping and fist-pumping. It had been a long day in the woods, Alec Giffen said. They had hiked and climbed, and had had a “most excellent” cold-weather color war, and even if the red team had crushed the heart and soul of the blue team, it had been all in fun, and everyone had performed admirably. There was more applause, and then he said, “And now I’d like to invite one father-son team up here to recite the Auburn Day School Pledge. One team in particular, whose spirit of cooperation and skill today has been outstanding.”

He looked around the group, going one by one, as though he was mulling this choice among the various firelit faces when instead the choice had likely been sealed from the beginning. Karen longed for Wilson and Caleb and Jonno to be the chosen team, but she knew this wouldn’t happen; her sons’ twinness served somehow to cancel them out and probably always would, in various ways. Yet the twins needed each other. They were so much smaller than the other children. Just the fact of their prematurity and how much they had endured back in the NICU, Karen thought now, should be reason enough for Alec Giffen to choose them.