The Ten-Year Nap (19 page)

The income they brought in back then was modest, but so were their financial needs. Roberta’s parents, Norma and Al Sokolov, the original crafts-centered people—both small, round-bodied, deeply connected to each other, and industrious—worked as a husband-wife team themselves and loved it. They ran a small company in Chicago that created centerpieces for banquets: accordion-tailed turkeys, bicolored maize, and oversized wooden acorns for Thanksgiving; miniature crèches for Christmas; and so forth. They had made a single, excellent investment with their earnings: one year, back in the late 1960s, on a business trip to a party-supplies convention in New York City, they had met a woman who also sold real estate and who knew of a “steal,” a walk-up apartment on the Upper East Side that she said would one day be valuable.

Norma and Al believed her and bought it, renting it out right away. And though they were difficult parents over the years, more impressed by each other than they were by their daughter or her artwork (“I
realize
,” Roberta had said to them once during a terrible argument in her twenties, “that my paintings do not display the creativity and brilliance of, oh, an Easter centerpiece made of shredded-plastic grass and cheap dyed eggs”), they were shockingly generous upon her marriage to Nathaniel and gave the newlyweds the New York apartment.

If only the place were better. The rooms were shot through with light but breathtakingly small: two little square bedrooms and one old, corroded black-and-white bathroom on the fourth floor of a walk-up building in the East Seventies, near the river. Roberta and Nathaniel would never have chosen to live in this neighborhood, which seemed more static and dull than they had ever imagined for themselves. They should have been living in Brooklyn, or even up in Harlem, which despite its dangers was becoming popular—anywhere but here. Theirs was the kind of building where the mostly elderly neighbors left items they no longer wanted on the windowsills of the stairwell, so that as you descended like Alice down the rabbit hole, you might come upon a pair of singed but usable oven mitts and a softly rotting paperback copy of
All Quiet on the Western Front.
Yet the apartment was theirs free and clear, and they had no money to move somewhere more exciting and diverse, and they were in love, and so they would figure it out. Later, after the two children were born, the close quarters became more oppressive, and Roberta was reminded of the feeling she got from crouching behind a puppet theater with other puppeteers, everyone elbow to elbow.

For a long time the Sokolov-Greenacre family managed. Now, though, Grace and Harry were eight and ten, and a couple of the mothers at the Golden Horn occasionally warned Roberta that eventually the children would reach an age when their bodies would begin to develop (“Grace will
get boobs,
Roberta”) and that it would no longer be appropriate for them to share a room. For the time being, though, the children had bunk beds and remained inseparable.

Roberta pretended to her friends that she agreed that someday soon the children would need their own rooms, but she knew that from a practical standpoint it could never, ever happen. Harry and Grace would share this room long into the years when he grew constant boners and she did indeed develop breasts, and both of them staggered in and out of adolescent storms with no warning or reason. The free apartment in this age of impossible real estate would belong to Roberta and Nathaniel forever, and they would remain in it along with their children, regardless of the fact that they belonged elsewhere.

After Grace was born, Roberta had stopped doing puppetry completely, and though the enclosure of the apartment had depressed her at times, she’d also seen it as a refuge from the long, damp mornings of children’s theater. Nathaniel still valiantly dragged himself around to libraries and schools with his friend Wolf, performing Nuzzle and Peeps, but Roberta didn’t miss the work at all. When Grace started kindergarten, Roberta thought hard about rejoining Nathaniel on weekends, but when she figured out the calculus of such an arrangement she saw that it would never make sense. She would be paying a babysitter almost the same amount of money she would be earning herself. There was no reason for her to leave the children, except some indistinct one that had to do more with the generic idea of
working—
of wanting to “do something”—than with logic.

So she stayed home and tried to paint, but nothing happened at the easel. It was excruciating. She helped Harry and Grace with their crafts projects, using the same care and attention she’d given to painting. Her children loved doing crafts with their mother. They weren’t self-critical yet; instead, they just kept creating more and more
things.

How wonderful to be free of self-criticism, Roberta often thought. This lack of self-consciousness and condemnation was probably a fleeting state. Back when Grace was in preschool, and it had been her turn to select a body part during the Hokey Pokey, she had sung, “You put your nipples in, you put your nipples out, you put your nipples in, and you shake them all about….” The young teachers, poker-faced, had gone along with it but couldn’t resist telling Roberta about it at pick-up. “She was just completely comfortable with herself,” one of the teachers had said with admiration. “It was so lovely to see.”

Roberta wanted Grace to be free enough to say and do and create what she wished and not care about other people’s opinions. Unlike her mother, she would be a real artist, and she would be ambitious; she would rise.

Artistic talent, Roberta Sokolov thought, was like the soul; in the absence of an actual product, you couldn’t prove its existence. Nathaniel had no question that Roberta’s talent was slumbering but still present. He imagined it as a kind of positive entity, able to exist underground for decades, and was sure that one day, when the circumstances were right, it would emerge, intact.

In art school in Providence, she had been a serious figurative painter. How was it, she had asked Cindy Skye during portraiture class, that almost no one in the world looked exactly like anyone else? That the slightest flare of nostril or convexity of forehead could make one person entirely different in
character
from someone else? And how too did children become what they did over time?

When her own children were small, Roberta had had the idea to do a series of paintings based on famous people who had died young, showing what they would have looked like had they been given the chance to grow old. In addition to the obvious inclusion of Anne Frank, she would paint Princess Diana as an elderly, beakish dowager, and the murdered and violated child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey looking old and ridiculous and vain. The series was going to be called Old Children.

She’d tried to begin work on it during Grace and Harry’s afternoon naps. The first of the paintings, Anne Frank, came out timid and unformed, suggesting very little about the nature of innocence or loss, or the banality of evil. It suggested nothing. The woman in the portrait looked like no one who had ever lived. One eye was slightly larger than the other. Roberta’s skill for portraiture had apparently disappeared, just like brilliant, vivid Anne Frank.
Poof.

She didn’t know what had made her lose it, but she was relieved that motherhood, with all its projects, absorbed her the way it had. She needed something to concentrate on, and there were times when she admitted to herself that it was a relief not to have to try to make it as an artist anymore. It was also a relief not to have to work at a nine-to-five job that wasn’t creative and couldn’t make her happy. She felt sorry for her workhorse husband Nathaniel, who still performed in the same old puppet shows on weekends and who, several years earlier, had uncomplainingly taken a day job as a news cameraman at CBS.

They had sat down together and figured out exactly what it would take to raise their kids in the city; with ambivalence they’d applied to private schools for both kids after someone had suggested that they would have a decent shot at receiving financial aid. This was exactly what happened. Because of Nathaniel’s salary and the free apartment and the slashed-price schools, Roberta was able to stay home and continue to try to paint. They were among the least financially flush families in the grade, but their needs were far more modest than those of most families. It felt almost petty to sit here in the Golden Horn on this fall morning, complaining about the woman from Auburn Day who had called to hit Roberta up for a puppetry workshop and yet did not value her enough. It seemed, finally, spoiled.

She didn’t want to be spoiled. She wanted to be someone who had a political consciousness and who didn’t simply live without thinking in an all-white patch of land in the most privileged city in the world. The field of whiteness bothered her tremendously. “How did we get so white?” she once asked Nathaniel.

Roberta made a point of taking the kids all around Brooklyn to visit old friends who had moved there and also up to Harlem, where her friend Cindy Skye now lived in a renovated floor-through. There was a new charter school there, Cindy said, which was supposed to be decent. “You guys should move here,” said Cindy. “It takes some adjusting—the supermarkets are bad, and you have to go really far to get anything decent—but I love the neighborhood.” Roberta wanted her children to feel comfortable among nonwhite people and in an environment where money did not flow. She wanted them to learn that the world did not revolve around them—even though, quite often, it did.

But mostly she wanted to be reassured that she herself had not closed up and changed and lost the vigor of her own political drive—along with her art. It was perfectly okay to be a stay-at-home mom (though she loathed that expression) with a real political consciousness that extended beyond the act of packing organic sunflower cookies and pesticide-free-juice boxes into her children’s lunch bags. It was perfectly okay to be one of the passionate, caring mothers who thought about the horrors of the larger world, and did what she could, in her small way, then picked up her kids at the end of the day and brought them home. There would be scales of laughter there, shouting, crafts projects—until one day, when the children grew up and left, there wouldn’t.

And then what will you do?
she often asked herself.
How will you bear the rest of life?

On Sunday morning, as if in answer to her own unhappy questions, Roberta would be flying to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as a volunteer with her reproductive-rights group. She would spend most of the next week driving a few South Dakotan women to and from the one clinic in the state where you could still get an abortion.

Briefly, she and her friends had all gone through a short “political” phase, but then each of them had fallen out of it except Roberta. It had started after 9/11. On that day, all the parents—mothers and fathers, working or nonworking—had run to pull their children out of class. One of the few children who remained for a couple of extra hours at Auburn Day was a little dimpled boy who was in third grade at the time, Jackson Pershing, and whose similarly dimpled bond-trader father worked on the 102nd floor of the North Tower. Jackson’s mother had spent the day searching downtown for any signs of her lost husband. By breakfast two days later, with the ruins still smoking, the women sat in their usual booth and talked starkly about the end of the world and cried a little with their heads in their hands and wondered aloud what they could do and how they could manage to be “involved,” that floating and noncommittal word.

Later, when the war in Iraq had begun, several of the parents supported it. Roberta had been appalled. Karen said at the time that Wilson thought the invasion was “horrible but necessary,” though he changed his position soon enough. Nathaniel and Roberta had watched the early war coverage on their small TV after the children were asleep. “Those dicks in Washington,” Nathaniel had kept saying. At one point during that newscast, he had gone into his dresser drawer and brought out his little drawstring bag of pot, as if to say that there was nothing to do about the problems of a bullying administration and a frightened country except, somehow, to forget them. Eventually the war was often no more than background din, not unlike the sound of plates and silver that could be heard all around the Golden Horn shortly after the start of the breakfast rush.

Here the women sat now on this late fall morning in their usual booth, no longer marching or really political or consistently involved, except for Roberta. Being political wasn’t like being an artist; everyone was “welcome.” No one told you to stay away. No one said that you weren’t male enough or phallic enough and that your canvases weren’t big enough or didn’t have enough broken doll heads attached to them. Her involvement in the reproductive-rights outreach group was participatory and immediate.

But Roberta was not yet willing to give her news over to the maw of breakfast conversation, where it would join all the other percolating remarks. “Oh,” Joanne Klinger might say, “that’s really admirable, Roberta. I think it’s so great that you’re doing this. You’re both creative and political.” They would reflect upon the slippery and melancholy nature of time and what kind of debt an individual owed the world. The environment might be mentioned next, for they could all imagine their children wandering lost through a poisoned planet, in which fish lay with flapping gills on the shores of half-gelatinous rivers, and the polar ice caps had been reduced to a broth, and there was no such thing as winter, and
this
was their children’s inheritance, and yes, it had been the parents’ fault, for they hadn’t done enough to stop it in time. The group of women at the table might soon become depressed and quiet.

Finally, in the haziest of transitions, someone might ask, “Did you read the op-ed piece about that aid worker who was killed in Darfur? I knew her sister at Wesleyan.” Or else, “Have you seen Geralynn Freund lately? She looks worse.” Or, “Is everybody getting excited about the father-son weekend?”