The night doorman now takes my sacks from me—the sacks I’m completely capable of hauling into the elevator on my own. He puts them on the floor of the elevator and pushes the button for floor fourteen. I still can’t even remember his name, a fact that fills me with guilt. My own father was a doorman.
When the elevator door opens, the scene in front of me screams, “Fun!” The slide is perched on the sofa, adding a foot to the drop to the floor, and it appears that mini golf was played because I step on a few rogue balls. I pass by the boys’ room, saving my day’s highlight of seeing their faces like some sweet dessert, before going to the master bedroom, where I pray I can get to sleep without waking Bruce. He’ll sense my distress and want to talk, or worse—get busy. But our bed is empty, the house silent, and the crib is empty too. I don’t think too much about this, as Bruce and I fall asleep all over the apartment with whichever kid we were trying to get to bed. I jump into the shower to visualize and dress-rehearse my entry to work in the morning.
I’m drying myself off when I hear the phone ring. The phone? It’s almost 11 p.m. I dash to it with my heart pounding, certain of disaster on the other end. It must be Bruce; maybe one of the kids is in the emergency room. I can’t believe I didn’t scour the place looking for the bodies.
I grab. “Hello?”
“Uh, is this Isabelle?” says a woman whose voice seems familiar—can’t place her but I’m thinking preschool mom?
“Yes it is.”
“Belle, it’s Amy.”
Amy. Amy with whom I was just washing hands at a party. Amy who sits next to me, to whom I rarely speak, and have never once spoken to at home, is calling me now?
“Come meet with us. We’re at a bar on the Lower East Side. It’s a lot of women from work. Izzy, we can’t keep working like this.”
Did she really just call me “Izzy,” like we’re close friends?
“I mean, you heard those women in the bathroom tonight. They’re basically prostituting themselves to move their careers. It’s got to stop.”
Silence.
I don’t confide in anyone I work with. This conversation catches me off guard. I try to think. What is she really up to?
“Yeah, well, I’m kind of busy?” I say weakly. I want to hear more. The women I know at work only say positive things about the place. It’s not some morale-sucking post office. You don’t get ahead with disparaging remarks, so we never say what we really think, we say what our bosses want to hear and accomplish big, capitalistic things at great human cost. Countless young MBAs are brought in, given little direction and ample verbal abuse, and most disappear within five years. The survivors—me included—are people who learn to look the other way. I’m not proud of my ability to do this, but I do it and beat myself up about it. I don’t need a support group for this.
“Look, the way we all run around, it’ll never happen—us getting together. Come. Really, you’ll be surprised at who’s here,” Amy says.
“Who is there?”
“Just come. The Ear Inn. In the south Village. I’m hanging up,” and with that, she does.
I’m drying my hair. I’m going to bed. What could they be meeting about? Please, I think, now I’m even lying to myself. I have to go. I can’t go. I shouldn’t go. My family needs me. They need you? They don’t even know you’re home. I could leave the apartment again and Bruce would never know.
I slip on low-riding jeans I’ve just recently starved myself back into, and some boots with a killer three-inch heel. This brings my five-foot-eleven frame up significantly, and I feel slightly charged and something bordering excitement. I keep telling myself I’m not going and yet I keep getting dressed to go, as if I’ve surrendered to some powerful force. I crack the boys’ bedroom door to see Bruce snoring on a chair with a Nate the Great detective story splayed across his chest. Three angelic-looking children breathe in and out simultaneously. Owen, my two-year-old, is facedown on the floor and not even in a bed, but everyone is safe and alive. I should wake Bruce and send him to bed. I should put Owen in his crib but the odds of waking him up are too high, and the idea of having to explain to Bruce where I’m going too complicated.
I tiptoe out of the room, down the hall, ring for the elevator, and reverse my route back into the cold, much to the interest of the late-night doorman.
CHAPTER 4
Herd on the Street