Read Online The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Meg Wolitzer
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women
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speculum caught the light, Antonia inhaled hard, as though she herself was about to be violated. But the speculum would be used only on and by Marsha Knowles; this had all been planned in advance.
Everyone adopted a studied pose of nonchalance; all these women went for internal checkups every year, paid for in full by the National Health. But away from the small cubicles and nurses, the speculum seemed like a medieval weapon. Without saying a word, Marsha did some quick preparation, lay back on the strawberry-edged sheet, and then, smiling smartly, she waited as the women lined up in order to get a look.
They might as well have been on line at a buffet, so calm and polite and orderly were they. Antonia went first; after all, someone said, it was her house. So she approached the supine figure of Marsha Knowles, who was like a baby awaiting a diaper or a chicken awaiting basting—domestic images both—but, however you described it, certainly it was evident that she was vulnerable, splayed, totally still, a tableau vivant for the new world order. Antonia peered hesitantly in, the reading lamp angled just so, the light thrown across this woman, illuminating this entrance to her body. Antonia Lamb looked in through the parted, vivid space and saw the dark and the light, the walls and the ceilings. She almost thought she saw stalactites and stalagmites; there were no clear channels there, but instead everything in the female anatomy was apparently dense and complicated, just like life itself. No path was ever easy or smooth.
Antonia gamely continued to peer into the gleaming time tunnel. She would be a novelist; she would inspire others like her. Her husband and children would accept this change in her and would embrace it. One of the women in the group would soon realize her own lesbianism. Another woman would die of cancer within a few years. Life was difficult and strange; this was obvious to anyone who really paid attention. But mostly, as Antonia Lamb, age forty, looked into the opening between the sturdy legs of a school guidance counselor from Toronto—a woman she now hoped never to see again—she visualized the future as something vast and gleaming, not blunt and knowable.
Her daughters Naomi, Amy, and Jennifer wouldn’t need to be tough and complaining and groundbreaking, as Antonia and her friends now were. For these girls there would be no Popsicle-cold speculums slid with excruciating self-consciousness into oneself in the bright light of someone else’s living room, G&Ts and crackers and cheddar-cheese balls rolled with nuts on a nearby sideboard and the snow whirling outside the dark windows.
Instead, all the women’s daughters would become a generation of postspeculum feminists. They would grow up to be women who would live with men and children in a kind of harmony previously unseen in the world. Their marriages would be far better than Antonia and Henry’s was; there would be no department secretary on the side, with her sad jar of candy. There would be only love and equality. As sinks filled with dishes, a woman might grab a sponge or else a man might; there would be no difference between the sexes, and no one would ever be surprised by men in aprons, women slung with tool belts, or men shouldering babies and women running board meetings. Everyone would work, everyone would have power, everyone would help out at home. The daughters would recognize the enormous changes their mothers had set in motion, the no turned irrevocably and historically into yes , and they would be grateful. Antonia would start her historical novel in the morning; she would do something new with her life now, expanding its dimensions.
“Well, goodness, what’s so fascinating in there? Haven’t you seen enough already?” asked one of the other women in a nervous and jocular voice, poking Antonia lightly, for apparently she had been standing in the lamplight transfixed, unable to turn away.
“Sorry,” said Antonia Lamb,
Everyone adopted a studied pose of nonchalance; all these women went for internal checkups every year, paid for in full by the National Health. But away from the small cubicles and nurses, the speculum seemed like a medieval weapon. Without saying a word, Marsha did some quick preparation, lay back on the strawberry-edged sheet, and then, smiling smartly, she waited as the women lined up in order to get a look.
They might as well have been on line at a buffet, so calm and polite and orderly were they. Antonia went first; after all, someone said, it was her house. So she approached the supine figure of Marsha Knowles, who was like a baby awaiting a diaper or a chicken awaiting basting—domestic images both—but, however you described it, certainly it was evident that she was vulnerable, splayed, totally still, a tableau vivant for the new world order. Antonia peered hesitantly in, the reading lamp angled just so, the light thrown across this woman, illuminating this entrance to her body. Antonia Lamb looked in through the parted, vivid space and saw the dark and the light, the walls and the ceilings. She almost thought she saw stalactites and stalagmites; there were no clear channels there, but instead everything in the female anatomy was apparently dense and complicated, just like life itself. No path was ever easy or smooth.
Antonia gamely continued to peer into the gleaming time tunnel. She would be a novelist; she would inspire others like her. Her husband and children would accept this change in her and would embrace it. One of the women in the group would soon realize her own lesbianism. Another woman would die of cancer within a few years. Life was difficult and strange; this was obvious to anyone who really paid attention. But mostly, as Antonia Lamb, age forty, looked into the opening between the sturdy legs of a school guidance counselor from Toronto—a woman she now hoped never to see again—she visualized the future as something vast and gleaming, not blunt and knowable.
Her daughters Naomi, Amy, and Jennifer wouldn’t need to be tough and complaining and groundbreaking, as Antonia and her friends now were. For these girls there would be no Popsicle-cold speculums slid with excruciating self-consciousness into oneself in the bright light of someone else’s living room, G&Ts and crackers and cheddar-cheese balls rolled with nuts on a nearby sideboard and the snow whirling outside the dark windows.
Instead, all the women’s daughters would become a generation of postspeculum feminists. They would grow up to be women who would live with men and children in a kind of harmony previously unseen in the world. Their marriages would be far better than Antonia and Henry’s was; there would be no department secretary on the side, with her sad jar of candy. There would be only love and equality. As sinks filled with dishes, a woman might grab a sponge or else a man might; there would be no difference between the sexes, and no one would ever be surprised by men in aprons, women slung with tool belts, or men shouldering babies and women running board meetings. Everyone would work, everyone would have power, everyone would help out at home. The daughters would recognize the enormous changes their mothers had set in motion, the no turned irrevocably and historically into yes , and they would be grateful. Antonia would start her historical novel in the morning; she would do something new with her life now, expanding its dimensions.
“Well, goodness, what’s so fascinating in there? Haven’t you seen enough already?” asked one of the other women in a nervous and jocular voice, poking Antonia lightly, for apparently she had been standing in the lamplight transfixed, unable to turn away.
“Sorry,” said Antonia Lamb,
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