Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

I’m thirty-six years old, she thought; in four years I’ll be forty. I am closer to death than I have come from birth. My life has hardened in the mold. I am riding an express to the glassy-eyed, hearing-impaired, bladder-weary terminus. I am thirty-six years old and my growing is over.

“Diane?” Peter said, looking at his arm.

Diane followed his glance: she had a desperate grip on his sleeve. All Diane could see, for the moment, was the tweed fabric bunched up in her fingers.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked.

“I feel a little faint,” she managed to answer. “I’d better—” She stumbled out of the noisy room, back to the foyer. Paula was still there with her children, surrounded by a half dozen new arrivals. Peter and Betty followed Diane, Peter taking her arm, Betty appearing in front, peering at her.

“You look green,” Betty said.

“Hey!” said Patty Lane, the celebrity author, tapping Betty on the shoulder. “No hello?”

Betty glanced back at Patty. “Oh. Hi. My friend — have you met? — she’s not feeling well—”

Diane looked at Patty’s beautiful body, displayed by tight black stretch pants and a loose pink blouse unbuttoned to reveal the tops of her black bra, and she thought: all these women are more famous and more beautiful than I am.

Patty’s pleasant party smile evaporated, her big green eyes widening. “We’re fainting,” Patty announced, and pushed Peter away, taking Diane’s other arm. “There’s a bedroom this way,” Patty said.

The two women half carried Diane to a huge sedate bedroom, all the fabric beige and the furniture made of light, glistening wood. Patty shut the door in Peter’s startled face, as if he were a molester.

“That’s her husband,” Betty explained.

“Who cares?” Patty answered.

“Diane, this is Patty Lane—”

“I know,” Diane said. Diane had read and enjoyed Lane’s two novels of distressed young womanhood in New York, pitying and envying the main characters’ woes.

“This is your friend Diane!” Patty said with recognition. “Didn’t you just have a baby? Should you be out in a mob scene like this?”

Betty laughed. “She had the baby six months ago.”

“Oh,” said Patty. “So? I’d still be in bed.” There was a knock on the door. “If it’s your husband, do you want him?” Patty asked.

Diane nodded, although she felt much better alone with the two women. Younger, at ease, free from the world’s intense demands.

Patty opened the door. But it wasn’t Peter. Paula Kramer bustled in, asking questions, suggesting remedies, mentioning Stoppard’s concern that Diane rejoin the party to talk with the Gedhorn people. At the mention of the clients, Diane stiffened. Her anxiety at the chaos of the universe focused into tension at the demands of the present. Diane declined Patty’s and Betty’s suggestion that she rest for a while and instead returned to the party, ignoring Tony, Peter, and the group that she had embarrassed herself in front of, joining, instead, Stoppard and the Gedhorn people.

Diane felt sure of herself the moment she was back in her element, making fun of the way opposing counsel had deposed the vice-presidents, bolstering Stoppard’s ego as he became expansive and predicted victory.

Once they all went to the buffet, she was split from the Gedhorn people and found herself beside Delilah. The star winked at her and said, “You feeling better?”

“Yeah,” Diane answered. “I’m not getting enough sleep.”

“Does your husband help with the baby?” Delilah asked, but in a tone that implied she already knew the answer.

“Of course not,” Diane answered, relieved the secret was out. Yes, I am a failure as a feminist.

Betty, Patty, and Paula waved her over to a corner of the dining room and Diane ate ravenously while they talked. Paula continued to praise Hunter, perversely egged on by Betty, and in the cab ride home, the words of the mothers about getting their children into a good school stayed in Diane’s mind. Betty had said to Diane, “You don’t have to worry — Peter’s mom can get you into any of the good private schools.”

The baby-sitter reported that Byron had been an angel, playing happily on the rug until nine, and falling asleep without any fuss the moment he was rocked. While Peter paid her, Diane went into Byron’s quiet room and stood over his crib.

Paula’s prideful remarks—“They get into Hunter on merit”— Tony’s envious ones—“They all have IQs over one fifty”—Paula’s advice—“If you just read to your boy a lot, he’ll score high on the test”—and Peter’s infuriating “He’s not a genius” were replayed over and over in her mind.

Diane was smart. She had gotten into Yale from a mediocre public school and from there gone to Harvard Law. Her brain was ferocious, alive, calculating. Her mind could concentrate absolutely on a subject, relentless to the finish, immaculate at arranging the details. More than anyone she knew, certainly more than Peter, she was here, in New York’s fast lane, on merit.

Diane put her hand down on Byron’s back and stroked gently. Then she let her fingers stray on his warm skull.

“He’s not a genius,” his father had said.

Byron could make do with Peter’s connections and become one of those mediocre children of the successful, lazy intellectually and spoiled by physical comfort.

Diane felt her mind pulse with energy. She imagined her tough, active brain could flow down through her arm, into her fingertips, and into Byron, into the soft, impressionable dough of Byron’s mind.

Peter made a living because his mother knew the right people. He got into Harvard because two generations had gone before him.

I made it because of my brain.

Diane closed her eyes and released the force of her intellect into Byron’s baby brain. She felt her body glow with the transfer.

Get there on merit like me, she ordered.

WHEN ERIC exited off the Maine turnpike and got on the two-lane country highway, Nina rolled her window down all the way and tilted her head out, her face to the wind. The cool country air splashed her cheeks and filled her nostrils with the perfume of nature’s maturity. Her eyes rested, gazing at the soft greens, the still white houses, the glimpses of shimmering bays and lakes, the winding stretches of placid road. With every mile, there were fewer and fewer things and people — less and less of lifeless cement, more and more of the breathing earth.

Nina glanced back at Luke. He had been peaceful in the car, soothed by the steady hum of the motor and the regular bumps of the highway’s seams. He slumped bonelessly in the hollow of the car seat, his veined eyelids were closed, and his long eyelashes rested, like discarded fans, on the white fabric of his face. His black hair was crazy from repeated perspirations and dryings, some locks curling up against gravity, others collapsed on his brow, stuck to his skin.

Eric’s thick thighs, naked in his blue shorts, glowed in the late-afternoon sun. Nina put her hand on the muscled mass of Eric’s leg, ironing the curled hairs between her fingers, and tried to imagine Luke-the-tadpole growing up to become like his bear of a father. Eric’s arms were so long that even with his seat retracted to the maximum, they looked cramped by the short distance from his shoulders to the steering wheel. Eric had to angle his knee to one side when lifting off the accelerator or else he’d bang it. His head almost touched the roof. Some of his kinky hair actually did. Maybe Luke cried at the prospect of all that stretching in store for his body.

They reached her parents’ summer cottage by eight. While Eric unloaded the car, Nina stood at the top of the bleached wooden stairs that declined from the lawn to the rocky shore. Luke was awake in her arms, his eyes wincing at the chilly sea breeze. The orange and pink light of the sunset glowed over the curved sky from the west, colors parachuting from the air to die in the water, tinting the cold blue of the bay red and gold. The dark approached them from the horizon, erasing the bright world. At the edges of the night, stars appeared.