All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [17]
As the evening wears on, it strikes me that while most of the men are as clever and confident as they were in college, full of ironic observations and witty word play, several of the women seem to have sipped some of the same punch I did that gives you a sneaking suspicion that you’re a disappointment at forty, that things haven’t turned out the way you might have hoped.
I run into Kate, with her mesmerizing blue eyes, who was a brilliant actress in college, talking with Chloe, who manages to run an environmental nonprofit while raising three children. Chloe asks Kate if she’s still acting, and Kate shrugs it off. “Not with the kids.” She seems content, but as she moves on to greet someone else, I ask Chloe if she thinks that deep down, Kate is genuinely happy exploring other talents—or whether she’s acting.
“Hard to say,” says Chloe, as we watch Kate sparkling in the center of another little group. Chloe shakes her head. “Everyone was in love with her in college.”
“And with you,” I say.
Chloe laughs and Ellen comes up, someone I envied for her effortless beauty and long-term boyfriend, whom she married after college. She was fun: we traipsed around a carnival doing interviews with the hard-living carnies to make a documentary for film class and once secretly drank bottles from our birth year from her parents’ stash (since she’s a few months older than me, we had to pop open both the ’60 and ’61 Bordeaux, a first experience with French wine that definitely beat my first experience with sex). She and her boyfriend were both talented writers. Now she tells me she’s read my book and marvels that I have done so well in my career, getting so much published. “You have such a great life,” she says, almost wistfully, “traveling all over the world and writing about it.”
“It’s true,” says Chloe. “The farthest we ever travel is to Long Island.”
This makes me uncomfortable, because while I’m grateful that I’ve had adventures, I’m also thinking that they have such great lives, with their smart husbands and adorable kids and ability to work part-time. It’s not that the grass is greener, it’s that you can never be on both sides of the lawn at the same time. Ellen tells us an idea for an article and asks if I think she could get it published in a women’s magazine. Of course, I say, that’s a piece of cake for someone like you. I can’t fathom why she sounds so uncertain. She sighs. “It’s been hard for me to get back into that world, I’ve been so busy with the kids,” she says. “I don’t know where to start.”
Ellen waves at a friend across the room, kisses us good-bye, and Chloe whispers that Ellen’s husband is at the top of the media food chain—almost as if, by some necessity of gender physics, their careers had to go in opposite directions.
Susan taps me on the shoulder and pulls me away from Chloe. Like me, she’s working on her second or third gin and tonic. I used to marvel at Susan for being able to discuss Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism during the day and then go off and capably flirt with guys at frat parties. She had been fiercely optimistic that we could have it all, sure that we would be free and creative and sexy and self-actualized, all while raising kids, sharing the chores, and making a lot of money. Now she’s a lawyer with a big corporation, single, and not dating anyone. “It sucks,” she says, taking a long sip of her drink. “I work too hard. I never have time to meet anyone.” I nod along as she tells me how she stays late at the office, later even than the men who go home to their families, since she has no excuse to go home early at all. She finishes her drink, turns her head for a moment, then flashes a smile as big and bright as the diamond on her right hand. “But I’ve made partner.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “I’ll have to put that in the class notes.”
As we leave the cocktail party, I picture these extraordinary women from my class, loading up their minivans or catching planes, scattering across the country. Most have made uneasy choices