“Are you all right, ma’am?” her driver asked.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, then smoothed down her daughter’s tufty hair. “Right, Reagan?”
Of course she knew that Regan was the name of the ambitious sister in King Lear. She’d been an English major at Dartmouth.
The Hudson River sparkled outside her window as they sped up the West Side Highway. Gwen allowed herself to exhale, then flipped open a compact mirror to examine her makeup. She hadn’t been surprised last month—doing her customary check of Christopher’s phone while he was in the shower—to find out that he’d been sleeping with Whitney. Like Christopher, Whitney was a radiant force of charisma, one of the shining ones, and the shining ones always wanted more.
While they were stopped at a stoplight, Gwen put in some eye drops, blinked, and then carefully reapplied her mascara. She cleared her throat and did a lip trill or two to get rid of all the gunk clogging up her vocal cords. The taxi pulled up at a brownstone, one of those idyllic West Village town houses that retailed for at least ten million dollars. Gwen paid her driver, unbuckled Reagan, carried her stroller up the six stone steps, and rang the doorbell.
“Julie!” said the lithe, buoyant woman who answered the door, stepping forward to kiss Gwen on both cheeks, even though Gwen knew from extensive online research that she had been born in Kentucky, not Paris. “We’re so glad you could make it today!”
“Oh, I know I’m late,” Gwen said, carrying Reagan over the threshold. “This one was being difficult this morning, but we finally got out the door.” She followed the hostess into the living room, where a playgroup of twelve women waved and smiled at her. “Hey, ladies! What did I miss?”
* * *
—
It had all begun when Gwen was pregnant with Reagan, when the two most important men in Gwen’s life decided to screw up at the exact same time.
First, it had been Teddy, Gwen’s brother. Brilliant, difficult Teddy had gotten it into his head that he was going to invent a better cure for ADHD, using the resources afforded to him by his faculty position at Boston University. He was having trouble coming up with the funding for it all, and he’d asked Gwen to invest, so she’d given him a hundred thousand dollars. She was used to coming to his rescue. When their parents died, he’d become her responsibility. She’d bailed him out of jail when he’d gotten caught driving so drunk he could barely stand up. She’d paid for him to go to therapy when he’d called her in the middle of the night to tell her that he’d been stockpiling pills and was staring at hundreds of them all spread out in front of him on his bed at that very moment, beckoning. This time, at least, giving him the money would help him build toward something he felt passionate about.
Then, when she’d called him for an update, midway through her pregnancy, he’d told her the truth: that he’d gotten fired because of a harassment charge levied against him by a research assistant who he swore had been making eyes at him. Nobody wanted to work with him, he said, or give him the institutional support he needed. And worse, he’d already spent her hundred thousand dollars buying supplies and materials through dubiously legal channels, but he now didn’t think he’d be able to use what he’d stockpiled, and so he wouldn’t be able to pay her back.
Only a few weeks later, it had been Christopher. She’d innocently walked into the den to ask him a question about signing up for a Lamaze class, and he’d sprung up from his seat at the computer as if she’d stuck him with a flaming-hot iron, clicking out of something on the screen.
She’d offered up a quick prayer that it was porn—even something really dirty: nubile cheerleaders servicing old grandpas or some obscure fetish like Furries, but when she’d pulled up the browser history he hadn’t had time to wipe clean, she’d found that it was online poker and that he’d lost a significant chunk of their joint money. He only reminded her of her father more and more as they got older.
“No more gambling ever again,” she’d said, and he had promised her, had wept and prostrated himself at her feet. But that man had a self-destructive force inside of him, and it was only a matter of time before it found some other outlet.
For weeks, she felt hopeless. At night, she thought of the Connecticut house, over and over, as she lulled herself to sleep. Instead of counting sheep, she counted its gabled windows, the magnolia blossoms in its backyard. She dreamed about it, the kind of dreams she had trouble shaking herself out of in the morning. If she could only get back there, she could regain something that she’d lost in the years since her parents had died—something that she couldn’t find in this brownstone that Christopher had contaminated with his golden lies. She could give her daughters the childhood that she’d had.
One day, eight months pregnant with Reagan, she’d dropped Rosie off at her nursery school. And then, on a whim, she’d bought a Metro-North ticket to Westport, called a taxi from the station, and waddled boldly up to the door of the Connecticut house, her heart ricocheting inside her chest as she waited to see if anyone would answer her knock. The property looked the same as it did in her dreams or maybe even lovelier. The flowers in the garden were budding, lilting in the spring breeze. The salt of the ocean perfumed the air.
An older, shorter man answered the door, frowning up at Gwen, his glasses low on his nose, a half-finished sudoku in his hand. “I grew up here,” Gwen said. “And I was wondering if you’d be willing to sell.”
She charmed him with her childhood memories of the place and with her enormous belly. He’d been toying with the idea of retiring to Florida anyway. The price he listed wasn’t unreasonable. About a million more than she’d have after divorcing Christopher and selling the brownstone, if her rough estimates were correct. (Idiotic of her not to get a prenup, to put Christopher’s name on the deed of the house right alongside hers in that rose-colored certitude she’d had when they’d gotten married. Christopher had taken so much from her already, and when she tried to get free of him, he would only end up taking more.) She’d told the man that she would be in touch and started thinking.
The answer came to her, of all places, in the hospital delivery room, when Reagan started pushing her way out into the world. As Gwen grunted and gritted her teeth against the pain, she thought of the sleepless nights she’d had with Rosie, the sleepless nights she’d soon have again, the other exhausted new mothers she’d met in Rosie’s infant music class and playgroup who, like Gwen, were barely making it through the day. There seemed to be endless, beleaguered women who were simultaneously overcome with love and dazed by the impossible work of caring for a ravenous little despot. Every one of them was living through a moment of radical personal change when they were no longer the stars of their own lives, when they were shaken by a depth of worry they’d never before experienced. They knew they were supposed to shoulder their transformation uncomplainingly and selflessly, like “good” mothers, while also maintaining the body weight and grooming habits of a Disney Channel ingenue. It made a lot of them a little crazy, and it made some of them a lot crazy. Sometimes, a mother couldn’t hack it. She gave up and scared the shit out of everyone else. (Because her failure didn’t just affect her! When she left, her children were cast out too, denied access to their glittering birthright.) But what if there was a way to give all these overwhelmed women a tiny boost, a bit of the calm and competence they craved?