The Ten-Year Nap (18 page)

Rise, sorrow,
the women all chanted, and their sorrows obediently rose, and kept rising.

Philadelphia, 1962

I
WOULD LOVE
to see you in
The Glass Menagerie
,” Bob Benedict said to the young woman who sat in front of a smeared mirror in the open space backstage. The place was unheated, but all the actors wore shirtsleeves, for the play tonight had been
Summer and Smoke
, and the setting was moistly southern. This was the first Tennessee Williams production that Greasepaint Amateur Theatricals had attempted, and there had been some difficulty coaxing these long-held Philadelphia accents into patient southern drawls, but in the end the entire cast felt pleased with its progress and infused by a moody sexuality that floated over into the audience as well, bringing the serious young businessman Bob Benedict backstage and into the sightline in the mirror of Susan McCrory, resident ingénue. She turned around.

“I don’t think I could carry that yet,” she said softly, but she was pleased at the attention. The businessman came to see all the Greasepaint productions, attending by himself and then, after the curtain calls, appearing backstage with a bouquet of lilies for her in damp paper. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, only sort of plain in his dark suits and horn-rims, yet after a while, seeing him show after show bobbing and grinning in the mirror, Susan began to appreciate his thorough lack of artifice, especially when compared to the men of the theatrical troupe, a mix of the narcissistic, the frankly homosexual, and the “character-actor” peculiar. All the performers were deeply aware of themselves in relation to the world; everything they did seemed somehow as if it were being done onstage. Their laughter during table reads had a patent falseness about it, as though they imagined they were secretly being observed by a Broadway producer who would step out from the wings and say, “I have been quietly watching all of you, and there’s one of you whose mannerisms I have been most impressed by—not only when in character but also when simply sitting at the table, responding to the performances of others.” And then he would name a name and take that person with him to New York, where he or she would be deposited in short order upon a Broadway stage.

During the day Susan McCrory worked at her low-paying job as a nursery school teacher in downtown Philadelphia, but every evening she went to rehearsals, and for the past two nights she had been onstage in the auditorium of a church in front of a small, though not humiliatingly small, audience. She had become accustomed to praise, and knew that as long as she stayed in amateur theater, she would always do well. She was an unusual combination of shyness and self-display, a very pretty if slightly too broad-shouldered and tall, vividly blonde girl of nineteen who knew she wanted to act professionally. She didn’t have enough money yet to try to become an actress in New York City, though she planned on doing so in the next few months. Her roommate, who owned a Brownie camera, had agreed to take head shots. And then, in March, during the nursery school’s vacation, the plan was that Susan would go to New York, sleep on her aunt’s sofa, and answer ads for casting calls that she had circled in the pages of
Backstage.
If she had any luck, she would give up her life in Philadelphia, move in with her aunt, and have a go of it; if she had no luck, she would return home and try again the following season.

But until vacation, Susan McCrory would continue to perform with Greasepaint, this friendly if slightly sad-sack collection of housewives, office workers, and professionals. Community theater was always a mixed lot. Dr. Carlson, who was given most of the male leads and whom Susan was usually asked to kiss at some point during a production, was the only one in the troupe not referred to by his first name, out of respect for his medical degree. He was a married obstetrician of thirty, weak-chinned but vain. Susan had played opposite him last spring in
The Man Who Came to Dinner
, and when it came time for them to kiss, his lips had been pinched and prissy as he turned his whole body at an angle that would give the audience the most generous view of his face.

But Bob Benedict, businessman—Susan liked the alliteration—seemed, compared with this crowd, pleasingly manly and lacking in self-congratulation. He appeared unaware of the way his body moved in space as it parted the curtains and came toward her, holding out a cone of flowers. Apparently no one had ever taught him to be coy or boastful.

They began dating, and he took her out in his big green finned Cadillac to steakhouses with tasseled menus, and then they started making love every weekend in his bachelor apartment. Susan had herself fitted for a diaphragm and was moved into an adult world that, while not exactly as she’d imagined it to be, seemed at least like a decent facsimile. Bob loved her desire to be an actress, and he escorted her home each night during the brief run of a production. The other cast members all murmured, “Hi, Bob,” or “What did you think, Bob?” as he strode backstage.

But then she changed it, she shifted the rhythms, she almost
ruined everything
, as her mother had feared she would. Susan insisted on going to New York, as she’d planned to do, and it was there, at an open call for a black-box production of something forgettable, that she was discovered. Her lines at the audition included “I am Mary, the mistress of the loom. I sit and weave and weep and keen. I am Mary, the mistress of the loom.” Though she was not cast, one of the producers said he had a friend who was currently casting the chorus for the new Broadway play
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, and he told Susan to give the friend a call. She sang and pranced for that man, and when he asked her if she’d ever worn a toga—technically a s
tola
, he told her, for that was the female version of the toga, though most people didn’t call it that—she’d said, “In an earlier life,” and he’d seemed amused by this and gave her a part.

“
GOOD LUCK ON THE GREAT WHITE WAY
,” the other members of Greasepaint Amateur Theatricals had written on a banner they taped across the doorway of the rehearsal room in the basement of the church in Philadelphia. Dr. Carlson gave her a kiss as dry and obscure as a piece of scrimshaw and shook her hand and told her to stay in touch, but really this was it. She wouldn’t return to these southern sets where she was always being stage-directed to fan herself or “drink a sweating cold glass of lemonade,” or wipe the back of her hand across her brow. She wouldn’t return even to see their productions, because then she would be made to observe herself from the outside: how much like high school plays these plays had been and how embarrassing, in retrospect. She didn’t want to see herself accurately; she couldn’t bear the idea of such clarity.

In the beginning, after she moved to New York, Bob Benedict telephoned her every day, and at the end of the conversation he told her he loved her. But soon, when Susan was off singing around someone’s scuffed, upright piano in a walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village and drinking in a bar with all the other chorus kids after a rehearsal, it became clear that Bob might soon lose her to this new life, and so he became anxious, calling frequently, laughing too much, nervously asking her if she loved him.

Her mother Margaret said to her, “You know that Bob Benedict is a very good man and that the Benedicts have lots of money—Benecraft Shellac—and we don’t, and I don’t know how you will survive unless you have someone like him to provide for you.” Margaret McCrory had always worried intensely about money, so much so that she sometimes wore herself out from her despair, and had to lie down in bed for a couple of days in order to recover. All the women on Susan’s mother’s side of the family had always been a little sensitive this way. Once, Susan’s father, who had come to New York to visit his daughter, sat with her in the kitchen of her aunt’s apartment and showed her what kind of a budget she would need to keep if she continued working as a chorus girl. “There won’t be any leeway for extravagance,” he said to her, as if she’d ever known extravagance before.

The Broadway play opened, and was of course a hit, and every night Susan sang and danced, and changed back into her street clothes in a room with a half-dozen other overheated girls, and then stayed out very late. After two months of this she was wound down and underslept, and caught viral pneumonia. She lay on the daybed in her aunt’s apartment, where Bob, who had driven up from Philadelphia, sat beside her all afternoon in the slatted light from the Venetian blinds. Susan was weak and sick, and for reasons she never really understood, Bob took that opportunity to propose to her. “You can’t go on like this forever, can you?” he asked gently. “You’ve had the experience of being on Broadway, and it was what you said you always wanted. Now you’ve done it; it’ll be in your scrapbook. But you want other things too, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I definitely do.”

He enumerated them. “Marriage,” he said. “Taking care of a home. Motherhood, certainly. We both said we want a family on the soon side.”

She conceded, through the codeine, that she did want these other things and that she didn’t want to lose him.

The night before the wedding, Susan briefly thought about killing herself. There was no reason for this thought, but still she imagined jumping off the roof of their hotel and landing in an alley with her long white legs scrambled and her pretty blonde head caved in. It would be the last moment of attention she ever received, she thought with some dark, vicious satisfaction.

But she couldn’t do it. She married him, and the wedding went well, even if none of her friends from the chorus could attend, because it was a Saturday afternoon and they all had to be in the matinee. That night, after vigorous sex in the suite at the hotel with her very pleased husband, the newly minted Susan Benedict slept for twenty hours straight. When she woke up, Bob promised her that she would love her life with him, and that she would “want for nothing.” He actually spoke those words, as though he were reading them from the script of a bad play.

“Thank you,” she said, speaking her own awkward line.

Once in a while, in their Tudor house down a private road outside Philadelphia in the middle of the day, with the air smelling of rain and the maid vacuuming discreetly in the living room, she would think about how the joke she had made to that casting director had turned out to be true: In a previous life, she had worn a toga.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a time in the world when art was art and craft was craft, and everyone knew the difference. Art could be spotted right away, because the real thing was rare and gave off a particular sheen—and also because the artist could usually be found lurking nearby, anxious to know what you thought about “the work.” But craft was all over the place, splayed out on folding tables at country fairs, or on drop-sheeted floors of houses and apartments where children were in residence. With art, you might be said to have a good eye; with craft, mostly what you needed were
hands.

Roberta Sokolov had both. She’d long known about the art part; had known it when she was a standard-issue, politically active, bohemian girl in a magnet high school in the Chicago suburb of Naperville; and had still known it throughout art school and even afterward, when she was trying to make it as a painter in New York City during the early 1990s—the era of the white male painter, her friend Cindy Skye called it. “Every era is the era of the white male painter,” Roberta had said. Back in the ’90s, art dealers went trolling for young men who rubbed steel wool and glued doll heads onto their huge canvases and then stood belligerently in front of them with folded arms. The dealers were often seduced, if only by the physical magnitude of the work.

But when Roberta tried her version of this, the dealers weren’t drawn to her the same way they were drawn to the men with their huge, frenetic canvases. Sometimes she was invited to participate in group shows, or in women’s group shows, which inevitably took place in a gallery no one had heard of—Ovum, or the Marilyn Heinberg Artspace. She tried to show off her good, capable, figurative paintings, but few people paid attention. It was better, Roberta eventually thought, to paint quietly, discreetly, expecting nothing and asking for nothing. Maybe, if you were lucky, something good would happen to your career; for the first few years after art school, Roberta Sokolov had believed this. But still almost no one came to the quiet corners where she painted.

For a long time, whenever people asked her about what she did for a living, she always said, “Artist,” though that implied that she was compensated on a regular basis, which wasn’t true. Then, during the period when she began to support herself by becoming a puppeteer, she would tell them, “Puppeteer and artist.” In recent years, she’d say, “I used to be an artist and a puppeteer, but then I had kids. I still try to do some art when I can.” But her voice was stiff, for she knew that the financial necessity of puppetry had eclipsed art, and then, finally, motherhood had eclipsed both, bringing with it the thing called craft, which was ubiquitous in both childhood and motherhood.

Now, no one in her daily life had even known Roberta back when she had been an artist; they just had to take her word for it that she had been one and that she was good. Because of Nathaniel, though, people still thought about her in terms of puppetry. Just yesterday morning, the annual call had come from the woman in the special-programs office at Auburn Day, hitting Roberta up for a one-day puppetry workshop. Each fall this same woman phoned with the same request, and each fall Roberta said yes, as they both knew she would. Because her son, Harry, was on financial aid there, she felt slightly guilty and grateful, besides which she genuinely liked doing things for the school. It really wasn’t a big deal to come in and perform her little puppet demo. So this time, when the woman from Auburn Day telephoned, Roberta said to her, “You know, you could probably just save yourself the call each year by putting me down as a permanent yes.”

There was a pause, and then the woman said in an uncomfortable, formal voice, “Actually, we’re never sure what our plans are year to year.” As though Roberta shouldn’t feel
too cocksure
that she’d be invited. She was the one volunteering her time and her expertise, and the school “wasn’t sure” what its plans would be next year!

Now, over breakfast at the Golden Horn, she told her friends about the call. “So call them back and tell them you realized you can’t do it this year after all,” Amy Lamb said. “Tell them you’re too busy.”

“That’s the thing. They know I’m basically available. I am at their mercy. We all are.”

It was morning, and the women were sitting in the back of the Golden Horn in the booth by the swinging doors through which the agile flamencan waiters pushed in and out in a continuous swiveling dance of eggs and coffee, eggs and coffee. The room was crowded, as it often was, and the friendly, ubiquitous owner brought them their water glasses and took their orders. Today, below a lit-up niche in the wall that featured a vase of acrylic flowers salted with dust and a small painting of Greek fishermen hauling in their catch, there were five of them. In addition to Roberta, Amy, and Karen Yip, there was Joanne Klinger, whose seven-month-old baby, Zachary, drowsed in a huge, fully loaded Magnetti Supremo stroller, its handlebar dangling with its own nets. The waiters had to dart around the stroller each time the doors swung wide, but they never complained. Also in the booth was Shelly Harbison, whom no one liked very much, but it was all right, because Shelly wasn’t around a great deal. She had her own infant at home at the moment with a babysitter, and she could often be seen heading off to various motherhood lectures and all-day workshops.

“The school never asks me to do anything except give money,” Karen said.

“You were a statistical analyst,” said Amy. “They can’t bring you in and have you demonstrate that for the boys. It’s not visual.”

“They could give her an abacus,” said Joanne Klinger.

“That’s a wee bit racist, isn’t it?” Roberta said.

“I’ve actually used an abacus,” said Karen, unfazed. “They’re amazing.” Then she added, “Actually, I’m thinking of going back to work. That headhunter called me again.”

“The headhunter always calls you,” said Amy.

Karen Yip seemed to go for a job interview every few weeks, dressing up beautifully in the kind of suit with little buttons like lozenges that she used to wear when she worked. Though she never accepted any of the jobs she was offered, she liked to talk about her interviews, as though they themselves were the point.

“The school never asks the fathers to come in,” Amy said. “To take a day off and do a workshop. It would never occur to them to ask.”

“And the thing is,” said Roberta, “most of the fathers would like it.” She paused, thinking about this. “
I
actually like it,” she said with a little surprise. “Talking to the boys about puppetry, even though it’s not the way I identify myself anymore. So really,” she added, “I can’t complain when the school calls. They know that I’ll do it and that I would be sorry not to. Just so long as I don’t actually have to become a puppeteer again.”

“I would have liked to know you then,” said Amy. “Hearing you use those little voices.”

“You didn’t know me as an artist, either,” Roberta said.

“We sort of do now,” said Karen. “All the projects you do with your kids. I love how creative you are.”

Roberta’s apartment had long been loaded up with plastic boxes of beads and sequins and containers labeled
MARKERS
and
COLORED PENCILS
. Her friends didn’t make the distinction between craft and art, the way Roberta did. It wasn’t that she didn’t love craft; actually she did, and some of her happiest times had been spent with her children, Harry and Grace, making a project that would engage them for a long while, until eventually it was relegated to a closet, where it would quietly decompose.

But craft also made Roberta think of the shadow of art in which it inevitably sat, and the loss that remained. In her other life, as she often thought of it, back before motherhood and puppetry, Roberta had been a figurative painter who lived downtown, where she had gradually become involved with the “puppet-making community,” a phrase that even now embarrassed her slightly to say aloud.

The puppeteers tended to all find one another eventually, and so it was not surprising that she had met her husband, Nathaniel Greenacre, twelve years earlier at a puppet show. It was one of those Saturday morning multiact shows that cater to children’s temperaments and attention spans; you would get a compressed and accelerated
Hansel and Gretel
, followed by a wordless wrestling match between two hands in white gloves, and then an incomprehensible Hungarian folktale with painted wooden marionettes that were long and menacing and lax-jawed. Roberta was part of the fourth act of the morning, a three-woman show with a barnyard theme.

She was pacing backstage with a pig puppet on her hand when she saw Nathaniel Greenacre rooting through a trunk for an errant puppet. “He can’t have run out on me,” he said.

“You never know. They have their ways.”

He smiled approvingly, and one half of his mouth lifted in a way that was sexually suggestive. Roberta was not someone to whom men were often instantaneously attracted. It usually took them an extra beat to warm to her, and she would have to make sure they saw her personality right away—her independence and nerve—and then they would become interested, if they were going to be interested at all. But Nathaniel Greenacre did not know how men usually perceived Roberta; he was much older than she was, and the pool of women he’d been drawing from in recent years tended to be in his own age range and wary from more than a few relationships—and in many cases a marriage or two—that had come undone.

“You in the next act?” he asked her, and she told him about the barnyard routine.

“We’re not great,” she said. “It’s just a way to pick up a little cash. Please don’t listen.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said. “Not to worry.”

Many puppeteers spoke in a dismissive, arch manner about their own and one another’s acts, preferring to think of themselves as performance artists who had been forced by necessity to work before child audiences but who were really meant to be wearing ectoplasmic structures on their hands made of neoprene and bubble wrap as they performed for other performance artists in somebody’s loft.

Yet here were Roberta and Nathaniel backstage at the cheerless auditorium of an urban YMCA. Several homeless Paul Bunyan types drowsed in the rows, waiting for the soup kitchen to open upstairs. Percussive children’s coughing emanated from the audience along with waves of audible restlessness. During the Hungarian act, after the strange marionettes teetered on tiptoe and clacked their jaws, and one of them cried out to another, “Count Szilagyi, I demand you pay me back my ten gold pieces!” a small boy in the second row shouted, “OH MOMMY, WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER?”

Several parents tittered in solidarity, and one even clapped. They were all held hostage to children’s demands and limited interests—parents and puppeteers alike. Sometimes now, over a decade later, whenever a movie or a play or even just a quarrel between Roberta and Nathaniel felt particularly unbearable, one of them would turn to the other and say, “OH MOMMY, WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER?”

When they first met backstage on that snowy day, she, at twenty-eight, was decidedly still young and he, at thirty-nine, was not. Roberta’s body was slightly squat, and her nose clearly too bluntly large for her face, though more than one sympathetic female friend had told her that she possessed a sort of soulful, Semitic look. One had even said she looked like Anne Frank, and then reassuringly added, “but in a really good way.” Roberta wore her wavy black hair with a few odd ceramic clips in it, as she’d done since college, and she had about her a certain recognizable artistic look that you either responded to or did not.

Nathaniel was older than anyone else Roberta knew and possessed a slightly bitter manner that was appealing to her, because she did not yet know many older people and did not understand that this was a fairly common feature of them. Nathaniel Greenacre’s face was tired even then, at thirty-nine, and he kept his already gray hair swept off his face, long in back. He was a handsome and quiet pothead who had a trunkful of complex, ingenious felt puppets in his apartment in Brooklyn, which he shared with another puppeteer named Wolf Purdy.

When Nathaniel and Roberta first went to bed together a week later, he showed her every one of his puppets, trying them on for her in the swirled bed after sex, a gesture that seemed at the time like a pleasurably perverse, nearly sexual act in itself. His best puppets were a duo named Nuzzle and Peeps.

“You know, these could be a big hit,” Roberta recalled saying to him in that bed. “You should really do something with them.”

“I try,” said Nathaniel. “But you know how corrupt the puppetry world is.”

She didn’t, though. It was only a job to her, not a life, and she had thought of it as somewhat incestuous and low-level mean-spirited, in the way that any small and self-contained world often is. The smaller the world, the more territorial people behaved around it. But Roberta, a former figurative-painting student who had entered this field almost accidentally, thought that Nathaniel Greenacre understood hierarchies and social systems in a way that she did not. She gave him credit because of his age and the years he had clocked in puppetry and his demonstrable devotion to it. His puppet Nuzzle was a glossy-furred, golden brown creature that seemed part bear, part newborn baby, part wise guy, while the sidekick, Peeps, was a dazed and self-important chick, newly hatched.

Roberta thought right away that Nathaniel Greenacre had brilliance, though it was clearly underexploited and undersung. Sometime soon, she knew, he would become famous, a sardonic, fringy hero to the children who constituted what people were now calling “the juice-box generation.” It wasn’t as though Nathaniel’s puppets were matted with blood or saying obscenities, but they were a little
off,
in some original and essential way.

At first, after they married, Roberta and Nathaniel became a professional team, performing Nuzzle and Peeps shows at preschools and in the basement rooms of libraries around the city and in nearby suburbs. She was Peeps, giving the puppet a stringy little voice and the barest of stammers. They needed no one else, which was just as well, because no one else seemed to need them, either. Children’s puppet theater was not a very gratifying milieu. Once, as they set up their small stage in an all-purpose room, they were warned by a librarian, “Please don’t disturb the arrangement of chairs. As soon as you’re done, Narcotics Anonymous is coming in.”