Before motherhood, Sarah had worked in advertising, and after Jenny was in preschool she’d flirted with the idea of going back to it, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of a nanny raising her daughter while she was at work. So though she felt like she was giving up a piece of her soul, she’d stayed home and made lunch and changed diapers and waited for her husband to come home and do his share.
Her mother had encouraged her to do it, becoming—as her mother described it—a lady of leisure. But Sarah didn’t do well with unstructured time, possibly because her mind was so unstructured. And so she’d become a woman of lists, a woman with multiple calendars who left sticky notes on the inside of their front door. She was the kind of person who needed reminding, who would forget a phone number the second after someone recited it to her. She’d known it was bad when her three-year-old daughter started reminding her of things, even went to see a neurologist, who’d found nothing physically wrong with her brain and suggested Ritalin, suggesting she had ADHD, but Sarah hated pills and worried they would turn her into a different person, so she’d gone back to her lists, to her calendars and alarms.
On nights that Ben had worked late—which became increasingly frequent—she couldn’t help but think of her mother in the kitchen when Sarah was young, washing up after dinner, supervising the end-of-day arts and crafts while packing lunches for the next day. Was this the cycle of motherhood? The constant return. Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.
Fathers, on the other hand, were there to toughen children up, to say Walk it off when mothers would hold them if they fell. Mothers were the carrot. Fathers were the stick.
And so Sarah had found herself in her own kitchen on East 63rd Street, packing preschool lunches and reading picture books during warm baths, her body and her daughter’s body one and the same. On those nights when she’d fall asleep alone, Sarah would bring Jenny into bed with her, reading books and talking until they both nodded off, intertwined. This would be how Ben found them when he came home, smelling of booze, his tie askew, kicking his shoes off noisily.
“How are my girls?” he’d say. His girls, as if they were both his daughter. But he said the words with love, his face brightening, as if this was his reward for a long day, the faces of the women he loved looking up at him with sleepy eyes from the comfort of the family bed.
“I like this one,” said Jenny, now a woman in her twenties, five years from children of her own. They’d managed to stay close through her divisive teen years, despite all odds. Jenny never was one for drama. The worst you could say now was that she didn’t respect her mom the way she used to, the curse of the modern woman. You stay home and raise daughters, who grow up and get jobs and then feel pity for you, their stay-at-home mothers.
Beside her, Jenny was going on about Shane’s parents—Dad fixed up old cars. Mom liked to do charity work for their church—and Sarah tried to focus, listening for red flags, things Ben would need to know, but her mind wandered. It struck her that she could buy any of the art in this room. What was the most these pieces by young artists could cost? A few hundred thousand? A million?
On the Upper West Side, they’d lived on the third floor. The condo on East 63rd was on the ninth. Now they owned a penthouse loft in Tribeca, fifty-three stories up. And though the house in Connecticut was only two floors, the zip code itself made it a space station of sorts. The “farmers” at the Saturday farmers market were the new breed of hipster artisans, championing the return of heirloom apples and the lost art of basket weaving. The things Sarah called problems now were wholly elective—There are no first-class seats left on our flight, the sailboat is leaking, et cetera. Actual struggle—they’d come to turn off the gas, your kid was knifed at school, the car’s been repossessed—had become a thing of the past.
And all of this left Sarah to wonder, now that Jenny was grown, now that their wealth had exceeded their needs by a factor of six hundred, what was the point? Her parents had money, sure, but not this much. Enough to join the nicest country club, to buy a six-bedroom home and drive the latest cars, enough to retire with a few million in the bank. But this—hundreds of millions in clean currency stashed in the Caymans—it was beyond the boundaries of old money, beyond even the boundaries of what was once considered new. Modern wealth was something else entirely.
And these days—in the unstructured hours of her life—Sarah wondered, was she staying alive now just to move money around?
I shop therefore I am.
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