Spoiled Read online

  They’d told her to take it easy, so rather than walk to the subway, Alice put her hand up for a taxi and gave her home address. She wasn’t going back to work today.

  And yet, curiously, it seemed like any other procedure—like getting a cavity filled or, more accurately, having a Pap smear, and she couldn’t help but feel she was pulling the wool over their eyes. It was like when you stayed home for a second sick day because you really did think you needed it, but by early afternoon it was clear that you could have made it through the day at the office—could have run a mile if you had to, or driven through the night on some altruistic exploit—except that you never had to.

  On the floor of the taxi there was, of all things, a condom wrapper. Alice looked away at once but it was too late. She had already thought of the hour of conception. Could most couples pinpoint their children’s like that? She didn’t know. Perhaps it was something you mused on once and then never again, telling yourself the one had nothing, really, to do with the other—trying, for the children’s sake, not to be tacky about it. (A toddler in their building called “Venice” came to mind as a counterexample.) In their case, it had been obvious because Mark had, atypically—he rarely traveled for work—been in London for a rational choice conference at the LSE the week before. Fourth of July weekend. They had walked to the Healys’ from the station. (Kevin found the habit wacky and would greet them with an expression of disbelief—“What, you walked again? I told you to call!”)

  An oversized kiddie pool that had been filled up in the backyard was proving more popular with the grown-ups than the kids. Alice went upstairs to change into her suit. “Use the boys’ room,” Brenda told her. “Bathroom’s a pit.” She was thinking how ugly these boys’ things were, the endless shoddy plastic electronica in place of books, the flanks of armed action figures and the guns, when there was a light rap on the door—almost a greeting. It opened, over her protest. “A-ha!” Mark murmured. “The return of the red suit.”

  “Please,” Alice said haughtily, pulling the straps of the tank suit up over her shoulders. She turned her back to him but she couldn’t keep a straight face. The door clicked shut. He was beside her, behind her. His two hands slid in underneath the suit and ran the length of her body. One wide-open hand for her nipples, two fingers for her pussy—that it was all happening underneath the suit was like a hot little secret she wanted to hoard. Then he was looking around sheepishly for a place to sit—settling, with a little grin, on the edge of the bottom bunk; the boys’ wheeled desk chair deemed too flimsy. “Just hurry, okay?” she begged as she stepped out of her suit and straddled him, some childish notion of fair play preventing her from telling him he’d just have to wait till tonight to get his. “Please, please hurry.” Her whole body was sickeningly tensed for the footstep in the hall, the creak of a floorboard or turn of a knob.

  “Don’t come in!”

  For the split second before she heard the reply she thought maybe she was talking to the air, paranoid.

  “What?” The confusion—no, the irritation, in Brenda’s voice, of being told what to do in one’s own house.

  “Don’t come in, Brenda!” Alice cried, begging, and somehow she said it in time. Such was her cousin’s surprise—her hand stayed perhaps on the very knob—that Brenda obeyed Alice’s plea. The door was shut—more firmly now. The hallway, even to Alice’s straining ears, was quiet. So that Alice, instead of springing off him and ducking behind the door (poking her head around and laughing, maybe, as if she weren’t “decent”), stayed where she was. She stayed where she was, and, in that strange, intransitive use of the verb that always struck her as so vulgar, she let Mark finish.

  At the turn onto Alice’s block, a police barrier had been erected, preventing access to the street. The taxi had to go the long way around, so it took her an extra ten minutes and, she reckoned, $2.50 to get home. When they finally stopped around the corner from her building, Alice noticed a line of people waiting in front of the elementary school across the street. She paid the driver and got out. “Is it some kind of protest?” she asked a woman walking a tiny black-and-tan dog.

  The woman stared at her and said, “It’s election day!” sounding appalled yet at the same time thrilled to have found someone ignorant to rage against.

  The woman’s tone would have irked Alice except that she was glad to have been reminded. She would have forgotten to vote, and now she could accomplish some little thing today.

  She stood in line inside the school’s gymnasium. Folding tables had been set up along the walls opposite a row of New York’s shower-stall-like voting booths. Famously ignorant, among her and Mark’s friends, about the local races, Alice hadn’t voted since the last presidential election; she wondered pessimistically whether her registration was up to date. Presently she was directed to a corner table, where she gave her name and address to two women of about her age. A left-wing-looking guy emerged, in cargo shorts, with a bike chain looped around his chest; Alice was ushered in, the curtains drawn.

  The truth was, it didn’t matter that she didn’t recognize the candidates for city council or comptroller, or even really know what the offices were. She had never pretended to be sufficiently informed about the issues, as Mark was, to make up her own mind. She voted the way her grandparents had—one blessed given in a life that had been nursed on the late-twentieth-century ambivalence of the dispossessed. Mark could debunk it all he wanted, could go into lecture mode trying to convince her: “By today’s standards, Nixon was a Democrat!” She didn’t care. She voted the way she did because it made her feel connected with something. She would imagine her forebears, Maureen’s parents, Margaret and William, looking down on her from above, chuckling with approbation, could even hear William repeating, ghostlike, from the grave, “Always vote the straight Democratic ticket, Alice!” She was working herself down the slate when suddenly her hand slowed. She couldn’t go on—she couldn’t see. She was crying, nakedly crying, her eyes awash, nose running.

  “You okay in there? You all right?”

  A few minutes might have passed while she was doubled over, hugging her arms around her middle, trembling and whimpering, her teeth clamped shut to keep a cry from escaping. What finally allowed her to get control of herself was the realization that nothing was final; nothing was set in stone. It was all reversible. It was one of the things she’d always liked about voting, in fact: the mechanical satisfaction of it, the weighty pull of the lever from right to left that cast your vote.

  Until then, she could change her mind.

  SHE EMERGED FROM the booth sniffing, swallowing, even—Maureen’s old trick—putting on her sunglasses, as if that had ever fooled anyone. The two women at the registration table looked frightened, and to reassure them, Alice made up an excuse: “I just kept thinking of all the people out there who are probably canceling my vote.”

  “It’s tough, isn’t it?” The ladies were quick to empathize. “It’s really tough. But you know, we’re looking good. The papers, they’re all saying we’re looking good.”

  There had been a time, Alice recalled, as she pushed through the school’s double doors and stood blinking on the steps, overwhelmed by the crowd, grown massive now at lunch hour, when Brenda O’Halleran, newly engaged, had joked at family get-togethers about her and Kevin’s votes canceling each other’s out. Then abruptly, Alice recalled, the jokes had stopped. It was just like someone discovering religion: Brenda had joined something bigger now—the vows, scarily pronounced in public; the house with the mortgage; the getting dinner on the table night after night; the kids right away, one almost obscenely on top of the other. It was the boys, finally, that had changed Brenda unrecognizably from the party girl who used to sneak cigarettes and drive around Great Neck in her mother’s Buick—scary she had been, back in the eighties, to Alice; Maureen a bit surprised, perhaps, without saying so, when after deciding to stay in the city for law school, Alice had started to make pilgrimages out to the Healys’ on the weekends.


  The line had doubled back on itself and Alice had to push her way through two rows of lusty New York voters. It came to her, as she emerged on the other side and looked around, with nowhere in particular she had to go, what it was about Brenda’s expression the other day that had gotten to her, when her cousin was sitting there on the deck, listening to Tyler cry but not moving—not moving just yet. Take another handful of nuts. Another sip of wine. Never on his watch. I’m coming already! I swear to God he plans it.

  It was the resignation. That was why she had wanted to get pregnant—Alice knew that now, too, she thought, starting up the block to her building, though at the time it had seemed just the natural progression for a couple in their mid-thirties who had been married a couple of years. She, too, had wanted to look used up and resigned. She, too, had wanted to look like she no longer had to justify her presence on earth.

  It was like a populist rally or a riot. People seemed to be running from all directions to line up and vote. Alice sidestepped a baby carriage; a businessman with his nose in a PDA. In his distraction the man jostled her and she froze—the banker. The gay banker from the IPO dinner—“We’re going out to meet our surrogate.” Is that how he had put it? But it wasn’t him—it wasn’t him, after all. Some superficial resemblance she saw, with a darting glance behind her—the blond forelock, the pleased, wry smile on his face as he pecked out words on the device. Her heart was pounding, though, and with the flash of indignation that follows a scare or a humiliation, Alice reminded herself angrily that it wasn’t as if the man would know. It wasn’t as if anyone would know, or would have to know. People had secrets—well, now she would have one.

  Her cell phone rang and she stopped to fish it out of her bag. Mark. She stared at the caller ID then dropped the phone, still ringing, back into her bag. She couldn’t speak to him just now. Not yet. It wasn’t that Mark hadn’t supported her decision. He had been all support, of course. And that was the problem. If it had been up to Mark, no “procedure” would have been necessary. He simply would have rationalized it out of existence.

  “Excuse me? Excuse me?”

  Observing her hesitation, perhaps, a jolly pollster had thrust herself forward, the lapels of her wide-wale corduroy jacket dorkily resplendent with buttons for the senator; an environmental group; various obscurely numbered propositions. “I have nothing to say,” Alice said bitterly. Undeterred, in that tediously impervious manner of the political functionary—no slight too great—the woman poked her clipboard in front of her all the same.

  She gave Alice a canned smile of complicity. “I’m just wondering,” she said. “Did you do the right thing?”

  Annabel’s Mother

  ANNABEL CAME TO the park every day at three with her nanny, Marva. She was a reserved child, with a long, sober face, and the color hair I was taught in French class to call chatain clair. She did not seem sad, exactly, and even “forlorn” was putting it strongly, but her eyes were devoid of the usual spark of entitlement one found in well-off New York City children who had been stimulated with educational toys, and taken to music and swimming classes, and shown how important they were in every way from three months of age. Annabel looked rather as if she had been told to be quiet and behave. Though not, one assumed, by Marva, who had the kind of upbeat tranquility one looked for in the best of nannies. When she was in nursery school, Annabel had always been beautifully dressed, and now that she went to girls’ school uptown, the shoes and headbands and coats she wore with her uniform were always of the highest quality. You could tell that her mother, unlike some of us, did not shop for her daughter by running into Old Navy at odd hours and grabbing quasi-presentable things off the rack. You couldn’t picture Annabel’s mother—though in fact none of us had ever met her—saying triumphantly, “Can you believe I got it for twelve bucks?”

  The park in the afternoons when school got out was a lively, robust mix of mothers and children, and nannies, and the picture it painted, under the tall, graceful gingko and chestnut trees, the squares of manicured lawn bounded by long gravel walks, was an idyllic one, although a wistfulness was likely to cross the face of a certain type of passerby who stopped to peer through the iron pickets of the park’s fence for the kind of prewar ideals that had been possible in a simpler, more class-based society. It was, in what was a rarity for New York, a private park, open only to keyholders who lived in the buildings on the square around it. Some, often those who had done time across the pond on corporate packages, said they loved it because it reminded them of London; detractors said we looked like animals in a zoo. The latter were mainly folks who did not live on the park, and I’ll admit, slamming the heavy ornamental gate in some benighted nonkeyholder’s face (as the bylaws of the park required one to do) when he or she tried to follow one inside, I could certainly understand the bitterness. I always tried to soften my personal gate-slam with a grimace and a mumble of “So sorry,” though this could sometimes backfire, as on the occasion when a glowering mother, dragging a small child in each hand, thrust herself between me and the gate to stop it from closing and demanded, “What do you mean, ‘Sorry’? Can’t I come in?”

  Yes, those face-to-face moments were awkward. Vegetarians will tell you of the time they visited the slaughterhouse and, having discovered firsthand where the Sunday bacon comes from, enjoy it no more.

  Inside, though, the park was a true haven because frankly, since it was locked, it afforded all of us a break from the constant vigilance that constituted child care in New York. Everyone had her spot. The nannies with newborns in Bugaboos would walk the gravel perimeter; the toddlers would step out and wobble in the center of the park (in springtime fatally attracted to the beds of tulips), where their mothers or babysitters could sit on one of two facing semicircles of benches and talk to one another while keeping an eye on their unsteady progress. The older children would play freeze tag and capture-the-flag along the southern end, where there was an exposed patch of dirt that the trustees of the park had finally given up trying to cultivate.

  Everyone who came to the park regularly recognized everyone else. We all called one another by name, and it was not at all unusual for mothers to socialize with and know intimate details about nannies (and vice versa) or to speak with children who were not their own, especially in cases like Annabel’s, whose mother never came to the park because she had, evidently, a high-level job at one of the big midtown banks. That was why Annabel was always with Marva. They were a nanny and charge who seemed to genuinely like each other’s company. They seemed suited to each other temperamentally, and had evidently arrived at a point where they didn’t need to talk much, for they often sat together silently but apparently perfectly happily, taking in the scene. That was the other reason the two were so linked in everyone’s mind: Annabel was an only child, and when she came to the park she was not particularly gregarious with the other children, contentedly eating her snack and watching the park activity without participating in it, even when one of Marva’s nanny friends would join them and the two middle-aged women would make their desultory conversation.

  She—Annabel—was always polite, particularly for a six-year-old. Occasionally I had a conversation with her, because she always asked about Sally when she saw her—how old she was now, whether she had said anything yet, whether she could eat real food or still drank only milk from a bottle. This was pleasant for me because it had the effect, like someone’s asking one for directions, of conveying authority on me, which as a new mother I didn’t often feel I possessed. Marva told me one day when Annabel was playing with my Sally, “This child have a warm heart for little babies. Her mommy buy her a hundred dolls but she like the real ones better.” She chuckled. “Does her mother buy her lots of dolls?” I said. “Oh, yes,” Marva said. “She have a huge collection of expensive dolls—Madame Alexander, you know the brand? Her mommy feel guilty she work so hard.” “Is that right?” I said. “Oh, yes. Since the day she born. She buy her all kinds of sweets, too, but I tell her,
chocolate and gummi bears are not the same as time, you know?”

  Now, if Annabel’s mother had been the one confessing all this to me, I probably would have said something noncommittal or even gone so far as to imply a measure of opprobrium toward these highly questionable parenting decisions—“Hey, everyone needs a sweet now and then, right?” or “If you’re happier working, you should work! A happy mother makes a happy child!”—but since I was talking to Marva, I said, “Gosh, we try to avoid sugar in our house,” and Marva nodded approvingly. Then I said, “I personally just can’t imagine missing the baby years.” “Is better that way,” Annabel’s nanny said. “That’s what I tell her mommy.”

  After that exchange it was as if she and I had really bonded. Win and I were new to the neighborhood at this time—we had bought on the park just before I got pregnant—and I didn’t know many people, and I was always relieved to catch sight of Annabel and Marva from the sidewalk when I brought Sally out after her nap. That day I remember I said to Marva, “Annabel can play with Sally any time she likes.” Marva conveyed the offer to Annabel, who looked up, shy and pleased, from where she was squatting down in front of my daughter. That day Sally, as all of the park babies did, had started picking up gravel and trying to put it into her mouth. Embarrassed I’d been distracted, I knelt down and opened up her palms and brushed the little stones out of them. “Sally! That’s not your food!” I said and I must have said it a little too severely, because Sally burst into tears. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t choke on them, Mrs. Kimball,” Annabel promised solemnly.