before Danielle had even sat down again, produced pictures of April and Jonas. Danielle told the story of her own broken engagement. They recalled some of the people they had worked with back in the day. Cynthia had no idea what had happened to any of them; Danielle knew what had happened to all of them. It was possible to connect the overbearing power chick she was now to the emotionally manipulable peon she had been back then, but just barely. Finally they came with mutual reluctance to the subject at hand.
“Come on,” Cynthia found herself saying. “I’m smart and I work hard and I can tell a good idea from a shitty one. If that was true three years ago it can’t be untrue now. Children don’t actually make you stupid—you do know that, right? Or maybe that would make a good investigative piece for you.”
What kept her there past the point of good sense was her imagination of the dismayed, relieved, pitying expression into which Danielle’s face would resolve the moment her office door closed between them. She postponed that moment as long as she could, even when doing so came off as begging. “You don’t want what I can offer you,” Danielle kept saying, and she was right, Cynthia didn’t want it, but even less did she want to be spoken to like a child by someone who used to be her peer and now presumed to tell her what she did or did not want. In the end, in a thoroughly bridge-burningmood, she wrote “eat me” across the top of the résumé she’d brought, slid it across Danielle’s desk, and walked out.
On the street she had a sudden memory, useless now, of a night out after work six or seven years ago when Danielle had gotten so drunk—Cynthia, pregnant by then, was stone sober—that she’d started hitting on the troll of a bartender and Cynthia was deputed to take her home in a cab. The bed in her York Avenue studio, which Cynthia had never visited before, was covered with stuffed dogs. But it wasn’t surprising that Danielle should have changed. There was a fast-moving mainstream in life, and once you’d dropped out of it, as Cynthia had, you weren’t going to be hailed by everybody when you tried to step into it again.
That was what had happened to her: she had fallen into the underworld of women with nothing special to do. Like those moms she despised, the ones you made small talk with while you waited for your kid to find his shoes after a playdate at their Versailles-like apartments, who had live-in help and no real responsibilities and yet all they did was complain about how they never had a moment to themselves. But what filled Cynthia’s days? She was at the gym five mornings a week now; Adam kept telling her she looked hotter than she ever had in her life, which was probably true, but maybe the whole routine there wasn’t even about that, maybe it was about something else entirely. She had volunteered, again, to head the silent-auction committee for April’s grade and for Jonas’s too, even though she took no pleasure in it because of the proximity it forced her into with women whom she imagined were nothing like her. She had a rule about not drinking before five. She never broke it, but why was it there at all?
She and Adam joked all the time about the social purgatory to which they’d condemned themselves by having kids so young: some of their old friends were still hooking up in bars and setting up Hamptons shares, while the people who actually lived the same sort of domesticated life the Moreys lived tended to be a dozen years older, boring as hell, and too covetous of their youth to befriend them in any case. They’d go to some school function and after acouple of drinks all the middle-aged Wall Street husbands would be macking on her; she thought it was hilarious, and Adam did too, and then the next day their fat-ass wives would make a point of not talking to her, as if that was supposed to be some sort of punishment. Still, her own charisma had become latent in her;
“Come on,” Cynthia found herself saying. “I’m smart and I work hard and I can tell a good idea from a shitty one. If that was true three years ago it can’t be untrue now. Children don’t actually make you stupid—you do know that, right? Or maybe that would make a good investigative piece for you.”
What kept her there past the point of good sense was her imagination of the dismayed, relieved, pitying expression into which Danielle’s face would resolve the moment her office door closed between them. She postponed that moment as long as she could, even when doing so came off as begging. “You don’t want what I can offer you,” Danielle kept saying, and she was right, Cynthia didn’t want it, but even less did she want to be spoken to like a child by someone who used to be her peer and now presumed to tell her what she did or did not want. In the end, in a thoroughly bridge-burningmood, she wrote “eat me” across the top of the résumé she’d brought, slid it across Danielle’s desk, and walked out.
On the street she had a sudden memory, useless now, of a night out after work six or seven years ago when Danielle had gotten so drunk—Cynthia, pregnant by then, was stone sober—that she’d started hitting on the troll of a bartender and Cynthia was deputed to take her home in a cab. The bed in her York Avenue studio, which Cynthia had never visited before, was covered with stuffed dogs. But it wasn’t surprising that Danielle should have changed. There was a fast-moving mainstream in life, and once you’d dropped out of it, as Cynthia had, you weren’t going to be hailed by everybody when you tried to step into it again.
That was what had happened to her: she had fallen into the underworld of women with nothing special to do. Like those moms she despised, the ones you made small talk with while you waited for your kid to find his shoes after a playdate at their Versailles-like apartments, who had live-in help and no real responsibilities and yet all they did was complain about how they never had a moment to themselves. But what filled Cynthia’s days? She was at the gym five mornings a week now; Adam kept telling her she looked hotter than she ever had in her life, which was probably true, but maybe the whole routine there wasn’t even about that, maybe it was about something else entirely. She had volunteered, again, to head the silent-auction committee for April’s grade and for Jonas’s too, even though she took no pleasure in it because of the proximity it forced her into with women whom she imagined were nothing like her. She had a rule about not drinking before five. She never broke it, but why was it there at all?
She and Adam joked all the time about the social purgatory to which they’d condemned themselves by having kids so young: some of their old friends were still hooking up in bars and setting up Hamptons shares, while the people who actually lived the same sort of domesticated life the Moreys lived tended to be a dozen years older, boring as hell, and too covetous of their youth to befriend them in any case. They’d go to some school function and after acouple of drinks all the middle-aged Wall Street husbands would be macking on her; she thought it was hilarious, and Adam did too, and then the next day their fat-ass wives would make a point of not talking to her, as if that was supposed to be some sort of punishment. Still, her own charisma had become latent in her;
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