Exclusive extract from Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman.
In the Olivia books, it still doesn’t matter if the little white pig is not at all sleepy. She still has to take a nap. William, however, is under no such compulsion. His mother has decreed that since William’s imagination is so “activated,” since he is so bright, so creative, so highly intelligent, he is in need of constant stimulation and thus cannot be compelled to sleep during the day. I cannot help but believe that Carolyn could have issued such an edict only because it is never she who has to simulate William’s activated little self. Whenever William is not in Jack’s or my care, he is with his nanny, Sonia. Sonia’s days off are identical to the custody arrangement – every Wednesday and every other weekend. Only then does she retreat to the bowels of Queens and drink slivovitz or play the single-stringed Gusle or is a Russian gangster’s gun moll or does whatever it is that recent immigrants from Dalmatia do on their off days from catering to the needs and whims of over-privileged five year olds on the Upper East Side. Actually, I know virtually nothing about Sonia other than the name of the region in Croatia where she is from, and the fact that she once told Jack that her one of the grandfathers was Jewish before the war. I don’t know what that means, ‘Jewish before the war.’ I don’t know how long Sonia has been in America. I don’t know where she lives when she is not in the little room off the kitchen that I once glimpsed, when I was looking for the bathroom during the firm dinner in the days before Carolyn threw Jack out, before I fucked Jack in the black Aeron chair behind the desk in the office at Friedman Taft, the desk Carolyn chose for him when he became partner and was given a corner office and the money to decorate it.
Sonia decided to take care of William every day after school, except Wednesday, and I take care of William in Wednesdays, and thus Carolyn has no idea how hard it is to entertain her child for an entire afternoon. I understand from looking her up on UrbanBaby.com that Dr. Carolyn Soule is one of the few obstetricians in New York, perhaps the only one, who always performs her own deliveries, be they in the middle of the night, on weekends, or on Christmas morning, or any day of the year, in fact, except during the three weeks every August she spends at her family’s house on Nantucket. This makes her a very desirable and comforting wife. Though I didn’t get that last judgement off UrbanBaby.com. Presumably on the occasional weekends that she is not working, when she is not called to the hospital to deliver a baby or monitor a high-risk patient, Carolyn is faced with hour after hour of William’s company. Perhaps she is as excited as her son by the project of reading the dictionary cover-to-cover and debating the merits of each individual definition. Perhaps she finds it perplexing as he does that we have come to use the word “morning” for the period of time between sunrise and noon rather the more aptly-named “forenoon.” Perhaps mother and son keep matching magnifying glasses in the kitchen drawer to read the contents of every food packet, searching for the dreaded molecules of wheat, lactose, and, God forbid, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Carolyn must love it, or else she endures no more than half an hour of it at a stretch before calling in Sonia, because otherwise she would never have banned the reliable salvation of the television.
I rarely complain about these afternoons, because after all, isn’t the weakness on my own? Wouldn’t a better step-mother have figured out a series of fascinating ways to pass the time, perhaps constructing a mathematically accurate replica of the Hoover dam from sugar cubes or starting a breeding program for genetically modified fruit flies with an eye both to finding a cure for colour-blindness and teaching them how to ride teeny weeny bicycles. I occasionally whine to my mother, who makes me swear that I will never breathe a word of dissatisfaction to Jack. I grumble, but I trust her. My mother was herself a stepmother, in fact, not because of her success in the endeavour, but rather because of her catastrophic, her epic, her operatic failure. My older sisters hated my mother from the moment they met her, years after their own mother had abandoned them to my father’s incompetent and grudging care. My mother was a young wife bursting with devotion for the forsaken, motherless waifs, the neglected daughters of the much older man who had swept her off her feet and convinced her to drop out of college and marry him. Despite the fact that my mother proceeded to devote her life to taking care of Lucy and Allison, aged eight and ten, driving them to band practice, making their dentist appointments, packing their lunches, washing their dishes, affixing their perfect spelling tests and SAT results to the door of the fridge, they never changed their minds about her. They never stopped despising her, and they never stopped telling her so.
They were, in fact, so relieved when my parents divorced almost thirty bitter years later that they were even willing to acknowledge their role on the disaster that was my parents’ marriage. Lucy said to me, “It can’t have been easy for your mom, taking care of two kids who never wanted her around.” Then she asked if my mother had gained a lot of weight since the divorce and wondered if I’d met our father’s new girlfriend yet, who was, Lucy said, “Just fabulous. And beautiful. Really thin.” And then she laughed.
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