The Ten-Year Nap (11 page)

“MASON, COME BACK!” she cried, and in a sense she had been crying it ever since. Frantic, naked, damp, Amy had reached for one of the towels that the Y provided. It was a small, niggling square, big enough either to cover her breasts or her pubic hair, but not both. In that moment, she had to choose: Which was worse for the world to see? Her
breasts
, she decided, and she ran skidding out into the lobby, frantically calling her son’s name and displaying her pubic hair to the elderly. A few people looked up from their drowsy conversations. One old man with pickety teeth smiled and waved when he saw her. She grabbed Mason by the arm; he was unperturbed as she yanked him back, but Amy was suddenly sobbing in relief and unable to stop.

“Why Mommy crying?” he had asked over and over on the bus going home. “Why Mommy crying?” Which had only made her cry a little more.

Years later, stripped of all its fear and desperation, the scene would become a funny anecdote at the Golden Horn. The women went around the table and each of them declared which body part, in that same situation, she would have chosen to cover with the towel. Roberta had shrugged, coming up with the only good answer: “I would have covered my face.”

So boys, in their wildness, were simple, and girls, static and contemplative, were complex. Boys ran and ran, and then, when they were eventually tired, they sat and took things apart and put other things together, while girls quietly braided friendship bracelets out of little snippets of colored thread and gave each other the chills and promised lifelong fidelity.

Amy, who had grown up among girls, had wanted a daughter and had been shocked when she had given birth to a boy. Her parents had sent a baby gift of a handmade doll, a definitively male blob with its own tiny penis, the whole doll stuffed with all-natural-fiber filler and encased in a stocking over its flesh-colored cloth, giving it a disturbingly realistic, soft-sculpture quality. The doll had never been a favorite of Mason’s, and once, when Amy was cleaning his room, she had screamed when she saw a line of ants crawling out of one of the doll’s nostrils. The filler, it seemed, was infested. She had flung the doll down the chute in the incinerator room, and Mason had never missed it, and had never wanted another doll in his life.

He craved things that moved, though, and in the early years he ran cars and trucks along the floor, although once in a while, if a friend were over, he might lift one and casually smash it down on the other boy’s head. Amy would force him to apologize, the way other children had been forced to apologize to Mason at other moments. “Sorry,” intoned the insincere apologist. “Sorry for taking your Burning Engine Monster Truck. Sorry for breaking your skull.” Sorry, sorry, sorry, for everything I have done and will likely do over my lifetime.

Amy and Leo had tried to instill in Mason some kind of spiritual consciousness from an early age. Leo, who presided over an informal, condensed seder for them and his parents every year, with the Jews skipping fast across the parted sea as if on a moving sidewalk at an airport, had casually dropped God’s name now and then when Mason was small. But Mason had shown so little interest that it was as if his father were talking about some distant, elderly relative who was a pharmacist in Indiana. Mason was a literalist, interested not in God but in nebulas. He was scientific, list-oriented, not at all spiritual, yet just when Amy decided he was one thing and not another, he invariably said something that changed her perception of him.

When he was seven, he had confided in her before bed one night, “Mom, I am frightened of the escalator. Also, the yellow part in eggs. They look up at you like
eyes
.” The fears had been so strange but also human and understandable. The following day, walking home after a birthday party that had featured an overstimulating magician, they stayed silent for a while, slowly separating themselves from the images of flapping scarves and squealing, spontaneously exploding balloon dachshunds. The sky was a beautiful pale color, and she had suddenly asked him, “Mason, does time pass slowly for you, or fast?”

She had been thinking of his vulnerability, and of herself as a vulnerable girl growing up in Montreal during the long lead time before adolescence. Life had been so slow back then. Summers were spent in a hammock with a succession of realistic teen novels from the library, eating the crumbling crust of an ice cream bar and standing in the driveway with the garden hose, washing her father’s car. Her sisters, Naomi and Jennifer, could be found inside at the kitchen table, pushing new subject labels into the slots of the dividers in their notebooks. Their mother was often locked in her study writing or off at a women’s meeting, and their father was teaching summer classes.

Mostly, as Amy recalled, back then she thought that she would be a girl forever, breastless and unencumbered, and that she could loll around and read books as long as she liked. She thought that adulthood, when it came, would naturally pass as slowly as childhood had. The insult had been that none of that was true and that now, at age forty, Amy felt she barely had time to read books, even though she had no job. Girlhood had evaporated, with only a few photographs and report cards and friendship bracelets as primary-source evidence that it had ever existed.

But Mason, when she asked him that question on the street, simply looked at her and said gently, “Mom, that question is really queer.” He meant it in the way that boys meant it:
Mom, no offense, but please don’t ever ask me about this kind of thing. It will do neither of us any good.
So back and forth she went over time, giving him distance, then pressing in close.

When Amy turned and looked at Mason now in the bed, she saw that he was asleep. His hair had that slightly smoky, rotting smell to it, but his face was almost transparently innocent in this first stage of sleep. Mason was so
big;
his head smelled, and his feet did too, sweaty inside his ribbed athletic socks and those heelie shoes with the wheels embedded in the soles, as though boys needed extra propulsion, when in fact they could run and run on their own steam for long distances. He was sometimes so ardent and tender, but increasingly she glimpsed bits of what she considered a kind of male remove, as Penny had mentioned. Maybe this was the thing that would make it possible for him to go out into the world eventually. For months now he had been in the process of building an elaborate catapult, and he was independently developing a studious interest in warplanes. Once, in his sleep, she had heard Mason fitfully mutter, “Heinkel He51B…” and “Vought Corsair F4U…”

Amy left her son’s small bed and went off into the other, big bed, where she belonged. Leo was already there, with a glass of milk and a plate of big, commercially soft-baked cookies and with pages of legal briefs spread all around him. Though he was a solid, tall, somewhat homely man with slightly crushed features, she had always loved the way he looked.

“Hi,” she said, climbing onto the bed and then moving across the papers and sitting down lightly on his chest. “Need a break?”

“Whoa, nelly,” Leo said, holding up his hands, and at first she thought he was being playful too, but when she kissed him, his breath scented with generic cookie ingredients, she could tell from how tentatively he formed his mouth to hers that nothing was going to happen.

“I can’t now,” he said. “There’s the Pittsburgh thing.”

“Which one is that?”

“The lunch meat people. The salmonella defense.”

“Well, maybe if you actually were Vishnu,” she said, “that would be better.”

“What?”

“The joke you made last night. What you said to Stutzman at work, and then he didn’t know who Vishnu was? He thought he was a new associate?”

Leo seemed to marvel that Amy had retained this slight and trivial anecdote, for of course there was no parallel; when she told him stories about her day, he often did not remember them. He was not interested enough to remember them and refer to them again, and they both knew that, but at least he could be interested in her now sexually. A husband was supposed to want sex more frequently than a wife; word had it that a wife was the one who was allowed to be grudging about it. And sometimes Amy was grudging, for by the end of the day she was so tired, which Leo could never understand. “What are
you
so tired about?” he’d ask.

Women who worked were exhausted; women who didn’t work were exhausted. There was no cure for the oceanic exhaustion that overwhelmed them. If you were a working mother you would always lose in some way, and if you were a full-time mother you would lose too. Everyone wanted something from you; you were hit up the minute you rose from your bed. Everyone hung on you, asking for something, reminding you of what you owed them, and though the middle of each school day or workday seemed to be open and available, this wasn’t the way it felt. Meanwhile, husbands often crashed ahead as if they, like their sons, had wheels in their shoes. Husbands sometimes wanted sex, and always wanted money, and stock tips, and wines, and good components for their audio systems. They seemed to want everything they could get their hands on.

But now, in bed at night, Leo didn’t really want her.

In recent years he and Amy had taken turns being equally uninterested. The death of the married libido had been widely reported; it had happened to them too, as it had happened to many others. Now you were supposed to make an effort about such matters. Sex was meant to be a project, just like an assignment at work or a child’s diorama. In order to keep yourselves from falling into indifference, you were meant to go on a “date” once a week. Shelly Harbison, a woman Amy knew from the school, said that she and her husband Alan got dressed up and went to dinner and a movie every Thursday. “And,” Shelly had said, “we have a rule that we’re
not allowed
to talk about the kids.”

“That must be hard,” one of the other women remarked.

“Yes,” Shelly admitted. “It is. It’s actually harder than you think.” She paused, considering this. “You run out of things to say when you take the kids out of the picture,” she said forlornly. “You start to realize just how much they dominate your thoughts and all your conversation. There are these
silences
.” She paused again. “Once, I looked around the restaurant, and the whole place was silent. They had all forbidden each other to talk about their kids. You could hear everyone’s silverware and glasses.”

But Amy and Leo did not go out on date night, did not force themselves upon each other in a formal way, and still there was silence between them. He looked so unhappy now. “Sorry, Amy,” he said, extricating himself from beneath her.

“The old reverse
Lysistrata
trick,” she said softly, embarrassed, and he smiled and apologized again. She was wearing the undershirt he supposedly liked to see her in, and she smelled nearly edible from her pomegranate body wash, yet it didn’t matter. She wondered if he sensed that she had climbed on him because she was anxious and overwhelmed and couldn’t stop thinking about all that had happened today.

“I’m just too crazed,” said Leo. “It wouldn’t be fun.” He grabbed another cookie and put it into his mouth, then picked up a file. He ate to calm himself, she knew, and to entertain himself. The cookies were a tiny treat, a coda at the end of something long and strenuous.

“It’s okay,” Amy said lightly, and she turned over on her side, with a book opened before her like a prop. “No big deal.” She and Leo lay there like pieces of dry kindling in a tinderbox.

Penny Ramsey, she thought, had found a solution to the waning of love. Penny climbed the stairs of the kind of building that she would otherwise never enter, and undressed in a strange room. The British framer palmed and rubbed her breasts and held her to him, length to length, and his penis rose against her in happiness. How could someone like Greg Ramsey expect his wife
not
to take a lover? How could he ignore her longings for gentleness and empathy and aestheticism and humility, and instead strut around with his little Hong Kong–tailored suits and his squash racquet and the dull sheen of his unsavory money, and actually think it would be acceptable to her? Really, what was he thinking?

The story of anyone’s love affair was exciting and easy to listen to; it cost you nothing to hear about, or think about. You weren’t at risk of exposure yourself but could luxuriate in the simple, distant idea of it, which Amy did now as she lay on her side, facing away from her uninterested husband. She was soothed and engaged by the image of Penny and Ian. Still, she wished that Leo, good Leo—so much better than the apparently piggish Greg Ramsey—would put a hand on her shoulder and pull her back as if rescuing her, but he couldn’t know that this was being asked of him.

Without turning and looking now, she knew that Leo bore the expression of a faraway husband. But even so, she willed him to reach around her—not Vishnu but just a two-armed, desiring man—and neatly peel away the thin skin of her undershirt and do one of the things to her that he had been doing for so long that the pattern had been thoroughly established. He did nothing; his hands didn’t try to touch her, and she stayed facing away from him.

Deep into the soup of their long marriage it seemed to her that she was entitled to use Leo sexually once in a while. Married sex was strangely shape-shifting, and they gratified each other as circumstances required. At times it was the equivalent of parallel play. There were sudden, unexpected bursts of excitement punctuating long, fallow weeks during which she and Leo were like chaste roommates at a Benedictine college. Amy could pepper her face with benzoyl peroxide during sudden hailstorms of middle-aged, hormone-triggered acne, and Leo could feast on Thai take-out noodle dishes in a slick of hot red oil that fired and furred his breath, and neither of them cared all that much. Any moment together just represented one small and possibly poignant or ordinary moment in the long and varied story line of their marriage.