The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer Page B

conversation, you would have noticed the way the two women inched their asses closer across the booth and leaned their heads forward, as if they themselves were having a love affair. Oh, female intimacy! Amy thought with longing. She had missed it so much since Jill had left the city. She recalled lying across Jill and Donald’s bed on a weekday afternoon last year, before it was time for school pick-up, trying on clothes that Jill was thinking of giving away to a thrift shop. They’d talked about how their bodies had changed over time and how you had to accept this and not dwell upon it; each of them insisted to the other that she looked as good as she had looked back in college, and it wasn’t really untrue. “The thing about clothes,” Amy remembered Jill saying, “is that you never know which one will end up being your favorite and which one you’ll never wear—and will be just like throwing your money down the toilet.”
    “Yeah. You should be able to say to your new clothes,” said Amy, “‘One of you shall betray me.’” They had laughed and lain back together on the wide bed as though they were in college again. Amy had let her head drop down over the side, seeing the room upside-down, feeling a disorienting, teenaged blood rush.
    But their time together seemed stolen, pitched against the grain of family life. Marriage and children sometimes divided friends; the one or two women Amy knew well who had remained single and childless seemed almost unaware of the astonishing differences between their life and hers. They would call her on a weeknight, when anyone with kids would be in the prime of high-homework and arguments and general noise and distraction and preparation for tomorrow.
    “Hey there, Amy girl,” Lisa Silvestri would say on the telephone at eight o’clock on a Tuesday. “What’s going on? Is this a good time to talk?”
    Amy had once crammed with Lisa Silvestri in law school, sitting together on the chunky, modular furniture of the library lounge, and then later on, by coincidence, they’d had offices down the hall from each other at Kenley Shuber, where Lisa still worked along with Leo; she had been made partner, while he was forever to be a salaried associate. But Lisa Silvestri seemed to have little awareness of the rhythms of family life that often carried you away from your friends.
    Some mothers felt secretly pious about motherhood; they were sure their childless friends could never reach anything approximating the gorgeousness of family bedlam: the intensity of teaching a child to read, the drama contained in a tantrum, the on-call mother love that was more concentrated and ecstatic even than sexual love. Life with children was bigger than life without them, these mothers were convinced, and so the childless women could seem austere and prissy, though this could never, ever be said aloud, for it was judgmental and certainly unfair.
    When Lisa Silvestri called in the middle of the chaos of an evening, Amy had to casually say, “Listen, Lisa, I’ve got to call you back, okay? It won’t be tonight, I’m afraid.” In the background of Amy’s apartment, there might be a crash and shouting and the roar of bathwater running unchecked from a tap. Over at Lisa’s loft, the sound of light jazz noodled along softly.
    But even when you made time for your friends, Amy thought, and they made time for you, at intervals the center of your attention reflexively moved back to your family. You sat with the other women in the morning here at the Golden Horn, but you thought, Pick up shin guards for Mason. Or else, you even used your precious time with your friends to ask them, “Do you know where I could get shin guards?” One of the other women might name a new sporting-goods store called Outdoorland, and you would pull out your BlackBerry, which, unlike your husband’s—which was stocked with notes on depositions and meetings with clients—was stocked with names of shops and doctors and