The Wife by Meg Wolitzer Page A

attention, like all firstborns. She would come into the kitchen, where I’d be frying a lamb chop in a pan, and she’d announce, “Me help,” knowing that the food was for Joe, who was busy in the bedroom.
    “All right, my girl, you help,” I’d say, and Susannah would spear the chop in the hot pan and plunk it down on a plate, adorning it with crumpled pieces of paper meant to look like flowers. Then she’d carry it carefully down the hall and kick Joe’s door a few times in lieu of knocking. I’d hear murmuring between them: a father’s distracted words, a daughter’s quivering entreaties to “look at the plate, Daddy, look, ” and then a father’s quick change of gears, his voice raising up in praise and saving the day.
    Me she loved; him she adored. I never minded this, and when she and I were together I felt completely relaxed, gratified by her smell, her smooth skin, her feverish excitement at all new things. If she’d had a tail it would have been continually thumping. When I was unavailable to her—when I was otherwise engaged, which was often, and had to leave her with a baby-sitter—her face would take on a tragic cast, and it would almost kill me.
    Her sister, Alice, wound up sturdy and athletic and more independent. She wasn’t good-looking like her sister, merely healthy -looking, her body small and tight like Joe’s had once been, her hair light brown and cut close to the head in Roman-boy fashion. When Alice became a teenager, her lesbianism finally presented itself, after many telegraphic years of crushes on favorite young ingenue–type teachers and a bedroom papered over with the witchy-haired women of rock, and tennis Amazons with hard brown thighs packed incongruously into little white dresses. And when it did present itself, I was relieved to hear it said aloud, though Joe seemed startled and personally hurt.
    “I like girls,” she burst out to us one night, out of nowhere, in the kitchen.
    “What?” said Joe, who’d been at the table, deep in the newspaper.
    “I like girls,” Alice continued bravely. “ That way. You know.”
    The refrigerator suddenly stirred and clicked and began to manufacture ice cubes, as if to fill the awful silence.
    “Oh,” said Joe, staying pinned to his chair. My heart was immediately racing, but I walked over to Alice and hugged her. I told her I was glad she’d said something, and I asked her if there was someone in particular she liked. Yes, she said, but the girl had been horrible to her. We talked politely about it for a minute or two, and then she slipped off to her bedroom.
    “It’s not about you, ” I’d said to Joe that night in bed, as we furiously whispered back and forth. This would be a theme of our conversations about the children.
    “Yes, I’m aware of that,” Joe said. “That’s my point.”
    “So what are you saying, you want to be the centerpiece of your daughter’s sexuality?”
    “No,” he’d said. “Not at all. You’re a mother. You can’t understand what I might feel about this.”
    “Oh, that’s a good one,” I’d said, wanting him to believe that mothers knew everything, that we were the omniscient narrators of our families’ lives.
    David, the youngest, the troubled one, seemed incapable of finding a life for himself. Joe and I were always holding our breath and hoping everything would work out for him, but this was magical thinking. Very little would work out for David; that had become increasingly clear, and his life was up for grabs.
    But still we loved him. We loved them all, Joe and I, though not quite together. The children received two separate channels of love, one from me, a reasonably steady flow, and one from their father whenever he thought of it, whenever he could manage to turn away from himself. He was distracted so much of the time, caught up in the details of his professional life and all the accoladesthat kept accumulating like inches of snowfall. The children and I simply watched as