Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [104]
She thinks about her own life. What is important to her now? Certainly, her criteria have changed. Six months ago she was a vaguely dissatisfied housewife with young children; now she is a terrified single working mother trying to remake her identity. Focus on Aftercare? Focus on Take-out Pizza?
As an editor at mainstream women’s magazines, Alison had always had an uncanny ability to pinpoint what readers wanted. A writer she worked with once turned to her in a meeting and said, “I’ve never met anyone so in touch with Middle America. Frankly, you freak me out.” It was a joke—but it wasn’t. Alison could never have passed for one of those tart-tongued New York editors weaned on sushi and cosmopolitans. At the last magazine she’d worked for, she became famous for a quote her boss had posted in the lunchroom: “We’re doing a feature on comfort food? I am comfort food!”—Alison Granville.
Focus on … She looks at her watch again. 3:13, two minutes until the meeting. Right now Annie is switching activities at summer camp—3:15, arts and crafts; Alison has the schedule posted on her bulletin board—and Noah is waking from a nap at the Sunny Side Up Child Care Center. At 5 p.m. Alison will be standing at the elevator, rushing to catch the train home. Leaving early had been her main requirement in taking this job. She didn’t quibble too much over salary or benefits; she just wanted to be home by six. A nice girl, Rayonda, a student at the local community college, picks Annie up from the bus at four-thirty and then gets Noah at day care at five. By six o’clock Rayonda has usually put fish sticks in the toaster oven and microwaved frozen peas, so that when Alison walks in the door she and the kids can sit down together.
On weekend mornings in Rockwell, Alison often goes on long walks with Robin—power walks, Robin calls them. Alison drops her kids off to watch cartoons with Robin’s kids and groggy, coffee-slurping husband, Robin clips her pedometer to her moisture-wicking T-shirt, and off they go down the street. On these excursions they pass other clusters of power-walking women who call out cheery greetings; Robin seems to know them all by name and asks specific questions such as, “How is Trevor liking St. Luke’s?” and “Did Liz come through with the Rangers tickets for the auction?” Clearly Robin has dozens, even hundreds, of friends. A whole world exists in this town, Alison is beginning to realize, that she knew nothing about. Trotting along (Robin walks so fast!), Alison feels vaguely like a wildebeest on the plain encountering other beest from the herd. Once she might have recoiled from such associations, but now she is comforted by the idea. There is a herd, and she is a part of it. Not only a part of it—she is the sidekick of an alpha female. (Alison thinks about high school, where she inhabited the same role. Does nothing ever change?)
Her life isn’t perfect. It is far from perfect. But it isn’t as awful as Alison had imagined it would be. In some ways it is not only better than she’d feared, but it is also better than it had been when Charlie was home, when she thought things were fine between them. It has been shocking to realize how absent Charlie was from their day-to-day lives; some days, now, the children barely notice his absence. Many of the things Alison thought she needed him for—taking out the trash and recycling, paying the bills, small home repairs, sex—she finds she can do just as well on her own.
Maybe not just as well. But well enough to counterbalance the wrenching loneliness she feels some nights, the tiredness in her bones, and the dull awareness that she has to summon the strength the next morning to do the whole routine all over again—waking before daylight to shower and dress and get the kids to camp and day care and herself to the train, spend a long, stressful day in the city,