The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer Page B

news of sudden death in the night. A handyman hosed down the sidewalk, the water running into the gutter and into the patches of earth by the curb with their rawboned urban trees. The air around the entrance of The Rivermere had a root-cellar funk about it. Every perfect fall day always forced you to think of that other perfect day when the city had been struck. But today Amy also thought about how this was a time in life when she was meant to be content. Her body remained slender, and her day was not yet spoken for. She had a close little family and a best friend whom she loved. The war in Iraq kept on going while really going nowhere, infusing everyone with helplessness, and there was still the real possibility of an act of terrorism, but people always said you couldn’t stay cowering inside your apartment. Instead, they insisted, you had to “live your life,” because it was all that any of us could do.
    The other women streamed through the revolving door. In various parts of the city and in surrounding towns off the highways came the rest of them. Soon they would be depositing their children at the mouths of schools and kissing their heads and watching them disappear inside, and then the women would be free. They could have all the covered malls and plazas and fields of the suburbs, and all the buildings and shops and museums of the city if they wanted, and all the open air as well. The day waited for them with its bounty and its freedom, which their husbands almost never had anymore and swore they didn’t even want. How it had ended up like this, no one really knew. This wasn’t supposed to have happened.
    But on a day as beautiful as this one, the sensations of despair and regret were mostly obscured by pleasure. All around the country, the women opened their front doors and stepped outside to take what was theirs.

Chapter TWO
     
    Montreal, 1972
     
    S OMEONE BETTER CLOSE the shades,” one of the women said with a big, loony laugh, and then everyone else laughed too, their voices rowdier than usual, because they had been drinking gin and tonics for the better part of an hour, and there were no children underfoot or husbands looming in doorways, casting long shadows as they asked when dinner was or where we keep the scissors. Even Henry Lamb had been banished for the evening, and he was one of the best ones, a mild and introverted man with wings of fair hair that floated up in static on either side of his baldish head, and who had never devoted too much thought to the idea that women had been given a raw deal in society. He was an academic, and he could have found blatant bias right there in the small pie of the Economics Department at McGill, if he had looked.
    Right now his wife Antonia had forcibly barricaded him upstairs in the Lamb house with their three small daughters, as she sometimes did, and the girls made him play a board game with them called Race to the Province! that had myriad shifting rules that even he, with his Ph.D., could not follow. These three smart little girls certainly could, though. One flight below in the plant-heavy living room, the members of the consciousness-raising group spoke with individually tended flames of intensity about the role of women in the world today. Their voices rose up in columns and flumes and spirals.
    A few straggler women rang the doorbell, and Antonia let them in. They stamped their feet on the rough mat, breathed their cold-night curlicue breaths, and then entered the house. They dropped frosted coats on the bench in the front hall, then went in to join the warm, bright, crowded female forest that had formed in the living room. By half past eight, Antonia Lamb tapped on a glass.
    “I’d like to suggest,” she said when the partly soused women were quiet, “that everybody take a quick slug of what’s left of their drinks, because the drinking portion of our evening is about to end, and the enlightenment portion is about to begin.”
    “Uh oh,” put in a