Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“Which means,” Sadie carried on, quelling uneasiness at her own hypocrisy, though it was apparently Caitlin’s hypocrisy, too, “that all these women with Ph.D.’s are standing around the playground talking about diapers.”

“Right,” said Caitlin, rubbing Ismael’s back in wide circles. “Like your friend Beth.”

Sadie laughed. “Beth is a staff writer for Slate . And teaches at NYU.”

“Whatever.” Caitlin shrugged. “The mommy group culture. It’s a waste. And a formula for unhappiness. Not that what our mothers did made them—or us—happy.”

“So, what do you think we should do?” Sadie asked. What she meant, she knew, was, What do you think I should do? It was a question she had been afraid to ask herself in recent months—a question she had been afraid to raise with any of her friends. “If we shouldn’t stay home and we shouldn’t go back to work—”

“See, I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it,” Caitlin responded, shaking her head. In her arms, Ismael had fallen back asleep, his head turned toward Sadie, snoring lightly through his tiny, elegant nostrils. “ Nurse, nurse, nurse ,” Jack moaned softly as she stroked his curls, so much softer than her own. He was exhausted, poor boy. “It’s not about going back to work or staying home. It’s about cultural concepts of what constitutes a woman’s identity. It’s about whether a woman, when she becomes a mother, has to give up every other part of her identity. That’s really what all the second-wave feminists wanted.”

“I thought they wanted help washing dirty diapers and control of the family finances.” She grinned. “What does Marilyn French say? ‘Shit and string beans.’”

Caitlin waved her hands dismissively. “That was just window dressing. What they wanted was to not just be”—she affected a child’s high whine—“‘mommy, mommy, mommy.’” In her arms, Ismael shuddered, deep and contented, and turned his face into Caitlin’s chest. “Hey,” Caitlin said in a soft voice. “Hey, little man.”

“And now?” Sadie contemplated transferring Jack to his stroller. He would be reluctant. There would be tears. But he was too heavy to carry all the way home. Ed could do it, but not she.

“Now it’s like the Eisenhower era all over again. They all want to be ‘mommies.’” Her mouth slack with disgust, she gestured toward Vicky and her clan. “And, of course, big business likes it that way, ’cause they can sell them more stuff. There’s, like, the whole mommy industry. You’re not a real mom unless you have a four-hundred-dollar diaper bag and you go to Mommy and Me yoga at Jivamukti and you read ‘mommy lit’ and nurse your kid in a two-thousand-dollar ersatz midcentury modern rocking chair. You’ve seen all this, right?” Caitlin gave her a challenging look.

“Hmmm,” said Sadie, rising and depositing Jack in the stroller. He immediately began to wail. “You know,” she called to Caitlin, before she could think better of it, as she handed Jack his favorite toy, a wooden figurine of a Victorian policeman, found in the basement of their building and washed in hot water. “You should write a book.”

“I should,” said Caitlin, with such an air of entitlement— Of course I should write a book, seeing as my thoughts are so profoundly original and penetrating —that Sadie immediately regretted giving her mouth over to the still-active editorial section of her brain.

“Read book,” Jack called now, calmer. “Take nap.”

“I’ve really got to get him home,” said Sadie, turning to Caitlin, who sat, still, on the bench. “He’s exhausted.”

“We’ll walk with you. Where do you guys live?”

“In Hillman,” Sadie told her. “On Columbia Street.”

“You’re kidding.” Caitlin stood and fell in step beside Sadie. “I’m right across the street. In the Amalgamated.”

“ Really? How funny that we’ve never seen each other before!”

“I usually walk up to Tompkins Square Park,” Caitlin explained.

Ahead of Sadie and Caitlin, on the winding concrete path, the Orthodox mothers streamed out through the gate, their kids skipping alongside them, and turned east on Grand.

“How long have you lived here?” Caitlin asked as the gate clanged shut behind them. From the corner of her eye, Sadie could see Vicky waving. She was nice, really. Sadie waved back.

“Two years. A little less.”

“We just got here in January. It’s cheaper than Brooklyn now.” Sadie was not sure that this was true, but she said nothing. “Do you have a two-bedroom? Or a three?” The layouts of the apartments in the area’s buildings were all roughly the same—having been built by the same cooperative organization immediately before and after the war.

“Two,” Sadie told her, again having the feeling that Caitlin already possessed this information, through Lil, and that these banal questions were leading somewhere, somewhere Sadie might not want to go. “What about you?”

“Our place is, like, a combined space. It’s four one-bedrooms.”

“That sounds great,” said Sadie, fighting a discomfiting wave of jealousy.

“Yeah, it’s a lot of space. And, you know, the apartments in the Amalgamated are so much nicer than in the other buildings—”

“ Really ,” said Sadie. No, Caitlin had not changed.

“Yeah, I mean, because it’s prewar. So the ceilings are higher and the windows are larger and we have great moldings. The other buildings, the apartments are so boxy. We looked at some when we were trying to buy.”

“We like to think of it as Modernist,” said Sadie, with a smile. She, of course, lived in one of those boxy apartments.

“But the guy who combined the places had the worst taste. It was like Boca, circa 1983. White leather couches. Pink tile floor. Mirrored doors on the closets.”

“Bleh.” Such decor was common in their buildings.

“ Yeah ,” said Caitlin. “ Really bad. We’re ripping everything out. Knocking down all the walls. It’s been going on for ever .”

Their apartment, Sadie realized, must be the one she’d heard everyone talking about: it was the first in the neighborhood to sell for more than a million dollars. The real estate section had done a story on it.

“Do you miss Williamsburg?” she asked suddenly. She herself still missed Brooklyn even after two years, though her old neighborhood was rapidly being invaded by hedge fund managers and suchlike, exactly the sort of people she’d moved there to avoid. Still, Dave and Emily and Beth were all there, and it would be nice to be around the corner from them again, especially now that Beth had Emma. But they couldn’t afford it, not now, not yet. Everything that came in seemed to flow right back out again. They were still making huge payments each month on the credit cards Ed had used, in part, to finance his film. The money from the distribution deal—which had not been insubstantial—had gone right into his company, into the new film. The thing was: it didn’t have to be this way. After Sundance, he’d been offered development deals with Fox and Paramount, but he’d—to Sadie’s shock—turned them down. He didn’t want, he explained, another Boom Time scenario. “That was a bad, bad time,” he told her. “I woke up feeling like shit and it just got worse as the day went on.” I know , she told him. I understand . And she did. He wanted control over his work. “I don’t care about the money,” he said. “If you do things right, the money will come.” Thinking of this—his earnestness, the sound of his voice—she felt, suddenly, the weight of his absence. Maybe , she thought suddenly, I should just pack us up and meet him in Sarajevo .