The Red Book (9 page)

She ended up writing about the birth of the Adler technique—how it differed from Lee Strasberg’s method acting; how it was rooted in Stanislavski’s teachings; how Sanford Meisner devised his own riff on it; how it taught her important lessons about authenticity in her own life, not just on the stage—for her college essays, going against her parents’ wishes that she write about working at the soup kitchen instead. “Then what was the point of all those hours I drove you half the way to hell and back so you could ladle soup into those stupid hobos’ dishes?” her mother asked, to which Mia responded, without actually answering, “Mom, we don’t call them hobos. And a lot of them are just unlucky or chemically imbalanced, not stupid.”

When she became a mother at twenty-three, again against her parents’ advice, she had a similar—and somewhat surprising—revelation. She enjoyed what both her mother and the mothers of her own generation often referred to as the soul-crushing mundanities of the job; the cheering on from the sidelines; the waving hello to zoo creatures; the building up the blocks in order to knock them down. Mothering, to Mia, was simply a new role she assumed in front of an audience of four, and like all previous roles, she approached it with the kind of research, passion, diligence, and subtextual nuance her audience appreciated. She didn’t just act the part of a good mother. She lived it.

“You’re the best mom ever,” her boys often told her, with genuine, unbidden hyperbole and frequently enough in front of friends and strangers that these witnesses to her children’s admiration would ask for her secret. “Easy,” she’d reply. “Whatever my mother did, I just do the opposite.”

When she found out she was pregnant with Zoe, her insides did a little jig, not only because she was finally getting a little girl but also because now, instead of having to figure out what to do with this next chapter of her life, she would once again get to sniff the sweet ambrosia of fontanelle before immersing herself, at least for another decade, in the comfortable zen of her own deep-seated, maternal desire. This desire—for there was no other word to describe it—was one, she understood well within the first year of motherhood, when nearly every mother she met on the playground complained bitterly of sore nipples and sleepless nights, of careers sidelined and sex lives shattered, to which hardly anyone from her generation with her education ever admitted. Or if they did, it was always tempered by a long list of mea culpas and amorphous plans to get back out there once the youngest was in kindergarten.

Yes, every once in a while, Mia would feel a dull ache, an unnameable pang of dread, like that moment you walk out the door, and you know something’s amiss, but you can’t figure out what it is until you return home and realize you’ve locked yourself out. But she was such a good actress, she trained herself to ignore any negative undercurrents. Her life as a mother was full. It had meaning. It provided her with the same sense of purpose she’d first experienced in the soup kitchen. Everyone who knew her, who knew the children, could see this.

“I feel like Mrs. Stockman in a world full of Noras,” she once said to Jonathan, after a back-to-school parent cocktail party at their children’s school, during which the grumblings from her fellow mothers escalated with each glass of wine consumed. “Is there something wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said.

“Shouldn’t you resent me for not earning a paycheck? Shouldn’t we fight more? Shouldn’t I resent you when you’re off on location for six weeks? Should I have more ambition? Are we doing this right?”

Jonathan, who still felt lucky to wake up in bed with Mia, as if his life were one long coda to his happily-ever-after films, simply laughed. “There’s no right or wrong,” he said. “There’s just us and our kids, and if you feel good about our choices, I feel good about them, too.” He appreciated everything his wife did both for him and the family, he told her. He knew his career would not be possible were he married to someone whose work also frequently took her away from home; or rather, it would be possible, but it would be hard on the kids, and the center of gravity would be off, and their house would not be a home in the way a home, he felt, ought to be.

Jonathan loved all the little compartments for buttons and shoes and toilet paper and pot lids his wife designed; he loved that anytime he needed to find a nine-volt battery or an international stamp or a yarmulke, Mia knew exactly where to find it. He loved the dinners she prepared, and the care she brought to the celebration of holidays, and the fact that he never had to worry about where the kids were or what they were doing or whether their time was well spent. Mia loved the fact that Jonathan’s work brought in enough money to survive and then some, such that she never had to look at a bank statement to see whether or not the roof could be replaced or a vacation taken.

“I feel good about our choices, too,” said Mia, who really didn’t mind when Jonathan was off shooting, for it gave her time apart from him, which was part of the glue, she was certain, that held their union together. Plus—and this surprised her—as the kids entered their teenage years, they seemed to require the physical presence of a parent
more
than they did as babies. Not in the visceral way Zoe does, with her ravenous, minute-to-minute needs, but more like the overstuffed armchair in their attic, left over from the shabby chic era and placed inadvertently in the sole beam of garret light, such that on those rare occasions when one of her boys suddenly, without warning, needed a little sun and comfort in a secluded, soft place, she’d be there, threadbare, steadfast, and glowing.

Zoe begins to fuss again, loudly. “Look, I’m so sorry, Luba, really. I gotta run,” she says. “The baby’s hungry, I have to catch a taxi, I wish I could stay and chat, but I can’t.” Just as she turns to head toward the taxi stand in Harvard Square, however, a black Escalade appears on Dunster Street, stopping on the sidewalk near enough to Mia and Luba that they’re able to spy, as the back passenger seat door is opened, the profile of Vivica Snow, neck bent over her BlackBerry. Another woman—younger, anxious—steps out onto the sidewalk, clipboard in hand.

Vivica, who’d had to don a gray wig and a fat suit in order to hide her lambent tresses and sleek concavity when she played the Nurse to Mia’s Juliet and Luba’s Lady Capulet, won an Oscar several years back for her portrayal of Christopher Walken’s dutiful daughter, who turns to a life of drug dealing, hard-core porn, and petty crime in order to pay her cancer-riddled father’s medical bills. Jonathan had once considered casting Vivica in one of his films, until a director friend of his told him the actress was a bit of a diva on his last set, demanding this kind of bottled water and that kind of hydroponic kale, a bendy straw for her green tea and a separate trailer for her bichon frise. This surprised Mia, who’d viewed gawky Vivica back in college as adorably insecure beneath her Breck-girl exterior, with a nice, even mousy personality, horned-rim glasses, and a tall girl’s don’t-look-at-me slouch.

It’s such a shame when the fame goes to their heads, Mia thinks. But she also knows, from having seen the girls Jonathan chooses for his films go from obscurity to household name overnight, how hard it is to stay grounded when your feet never touch the earth save to strut down a red carpet; when every latte you purchase, every pound you gain or lose, every person you fuck gets instantly chronicled by the Celebrity-Industrial Complex, the most recent rumor being that Vivica’s baby had been fathered in a petri dish by Vivica’s gay agent’s sperm.

WHO NEEDS A HUSBAND?
a recent
US
magazine caption had asked, over a photo of a smiling Vivica and her new baby, Madeleine Marcel, emerging from a trendy children’s boutique on Melrose. The little girl, the rest of the text box explained, arrived in the world armed with an $895 receiving blanket, a $90,000 custom-built nursery, and a stroller equipped with both an iPod dock and a built-in cooler that was so new only those with inside connections were allowed to give them a test-drive. This though Vivica would be practicing attachment parenting with little Madeleine Marcel (named in honor of Proust, the French novelist, the article said, whom Vivica had admired ever since having majored in French literature and language at Harvard), using a $645 Peapod Pollywog organic cotton sling made exclusively for her and manufactured by fair trade weavers in Guatemala to cart her around the set of her new HBO miniseries, about a band of foreign correspondents working and sleeping together during the Vietnam War.

Vivica’s assistant and/or nanny—it was unclear what role the woman with the clipboard was playing, apart from indispensable—leans into the backseat, after a quick glance at her paperwork. “Registration’s just inside,” she says, pointing behind her into Kirkland House. “I’ll be right back with your name tag, and then we can head over to the hotel to get you dressed for the luau. You need to decide whether to wear the Marc Jacobs or the Derek Lam. I hand carried them so they should be fine. I’ll have the rest of your clothes pressed as soon as we check into the hotel. Tomorrow’s picnic is casual— I brought that ruffly green Stella McCartney plus a bunch of other shirts and capris, and your ballet flats—and the evening dinner dance is semiformal, which gives us a bit of leeway.”

“Okay,” says Vivica, lost in her texting.

“And then we fly back to Vancouver early Sunday morning, so we really have to go over your lines for Monday before then.”

“Okay.”

“Jake was adamant—”

“O-
KAY
,” says Vivica, finally looking up before returning her attention to her tiny screen, marauding thumbs poised for the plunder.

“It’s wild, isn’t it?” Luba whispers to Mia. “Who would have thunk it would have been Vivica up there, thanking the Academy?”

“I know,” says Mia, trying to sound as sincere as possible, for she felt that Vivica had overacted the part and that Oscar should have gone to Fran McDormand. “It’s an incredible accomplishment.”

Then again, Mia thinks, her graduating class is full of incredible, quantifiable accomplishments: There’s that woman who used to live in Dunster House who was just appointed to the Obama cabinet; two Pulitzer Prize winners (one of them being her roommate, Jane); a Pritzker Award finalist; two MacArthur geniuses; a U.S. congressman; a guy who made a fortune patenting a new device used to treat diabetes; a gynecologist who fought hard to maintain an abortion clinic in Memphis where her work garnered praise from women’s groups, daily death threats from the intolerant, and an eight-thousand-word homage in the
New Yorker
.

In fact, this particular edition of the red book seems to be bursting at the binding with the fruits of two decades’ worth of dedicated labor by some of the keenest minds in the country: tenured professors, partners in law, brain surgeons, tech entrepreneurs, famous journalists, award-winning filmmakers, TV writers, rocket scientists, philanthropists, you name it, they not only do it, many of them have been doing it well enough to have become publicly known for doing it, which was always the implicit underlying promise held out to the 1,600 high school seniors a year the college tapped with its magic wand: You will shower, eat, study, and cavort with the future leaders and thinkers of America. Or so the theory went.

In practice, of course, just as a percentage of the high school fuck-ups, like Mia’s brother, went on to conquer the world, a substantial percentage of the Harvard class of 1989 went on to live completely normal, ordinary lives. Others have had not-so-successful lives or, in some instances, tragic ones. Many, like Luba, got tired of reaching for the golden ring, or maybe they reached, like Mia, but fell, or maybe after having graduated from Harvard with a middling C average, their self-confidence was shot, and they aimed lower, or maybe their brain chemistry turned against them, or maybe once they finally nabbed that shiny ring with their outstretched hand, they realized it was just a piece of metal. One of her classmates owned a Subaru dealership in Pawtucket. Another was an organic farmer in Vermont. Both, in their red book essays, professed caveated contentment with the paths they’d chosen. “Do I love my job?” the Subaru dealer wrote. “You know what? Some days I do, and some days I don’t, but what I do love, always, is that it allows me immense freedom to attend the kids’ soccer games and parent teacher conferences, and it pays the bills, and for now and maybe forever, that seems to be enough.”

And then there were those, also like Mia—and so many more than she would have assumed twenty years ago—who heard the siren call of motherhood (or, in only one essay she could find, fatherhood) and never looked back. Unstated but understood was the fact that you weren’t supposed to become a Subaru dealer or an organic farmer or a stay-at-home parent if you graduated from Harvard. And nearly every woman in the class of 1989 who’d chosen the latter path and had a scintilla of self-awareness had either left their entries blank but for their address and children’s names and birthdays, or had written some sort of mea culpa—a few witty, others more serious—acknowledging the paradox, understanding all-too-intimately that there would always be those out there in the world who would accuse them of having stolen their spots in the class of ’89 from worthier candidates.

“I always thought you’d be the one holding one of those statues in your hand,” says Luba. “Really, I did.”

Thanks for that passive-aggressive vote of confidence, thinks Mia, raising her lips up in a faux smile she hope looks sincere while allowing Zoe to grasp her chubby little hands onto her forefingers, a private prize, she thinks to herself, as gratifying as any public one. Or so she has told herself often enough that it has oxidized into its own form of truth.

Mia is anxious to join Clover and Addison at the police station, but now that Vivica has arrived, her feet suddenly feel glued to the pavement. Silly, really, as she spends so many of her hours at home entertaining boldfaced names without ever getting starstruck. Then again, she never knew any of those stars when she outshone them.

A nanny-type now emerges from Vivica’s Escalade, comforting Vivica’s screaming baby, followed by a billboard-ready young buck, all sinew and sangfroid, holding Vivica’s bichon on a leash as it promptly takes a dump on the Kirkland House lawn. “I guess it really does take a village,” says Luba. The dog walker heads back to the car, leaving the pile of excrement behind.