Suzanne is left standing alone, glass of clotted sangria in hand. The women are dispersing, the room is quieting. She waits, dumbly, for Madeleine to return. Through the side window, she can see a segment of her own house showing pale between the pines.
The process is a long and slow one, the specialist reminds them. Therapies that work for some children do nothing for others. There are no shortcuts, only trial and error, love and patience. Suzanne takes a day off work to bring Elliot to a treatment center an hour’s drive away. There, she chats with a few of the other mothers—they are all mothers—who share a saintly aura. It seems to Suzanne that they have moved through the stages of denial and sorrow into a ferocious embrace of their children’s conditions. They use foreign terminology—stimming, perseveration—that bespeaks years of reading, research, preoccupation. She thinks she detects a condescending sympathy in their eyes when they listen to her speak about Elliot, when she tells them she is optimistic about his recovery. They smile kindly, creases of valiant exhaustion in their faces. Their hair is cropped or pulled back, and their clothing is utilitarian: cargo shorts and rubberized sport sandals. None of these women, she comes to understand, works outside the home. They do not have to announce this fact; it is evident by their casual camaraderie, their practiced stances and ritualized movements, that they come here every day. When she mentions having taken a personal day from work, they give her that same frustrating, patient smile. The work they do with their children—the grinding hours of floortime, of tantrum taming, of endless mopping and toileting—is bigger than any office job, the smile seems to say.
The next day, Suzanne returns to work, and Carlota brings Elliot to the center. At night, Brian is quiet in bed. It is as if Suzanne can read his mind, but she waits for him to speak, makes him work at shaping his words and finding a careful way of delivering them. He asks whether she would consider leaving her job, working with Elliot herself. When she does not respond, he gathers himself, as if to continue the discussion on a greater scale. No. She stops him. She does not want to hear about life’s unpredictability, the necessity to reassess, reprioritize, to choose what must be sacrificed and what preserved. No, she tells him. Not now.
It is maddening that the question will never be whether he should leave his job. His salary is double hers, and without it they couldn’t keep the house. But still: work, for him, is just work. It isn’t oxygen. It took years to realize that she was unusual, that for most people work is a discrete and ill-fitting role, incompatible with their true pleasures and purposes. Few are fortunate to have been born, as she was, to a clear-cut ambition. As a girl, she’d brought a notebook and flashlight under the covers at night and drew women in dresses. By the time she reached high school, she’d completed a dozen such notebooks and developed what she thought was a recognizable style. Now, at thirty-five, she is a design director at a major fashion house, just one notch beneath the name on the label.
She never stops designing. On the train, she sketches. When her eyes close, patterns erupt before her. Her current obsession is chinoiserie. She is not alone in this, she knows, and fears that the classic motifs—birds on flowering vines, sleepy pagodas—won’t be fresh much longer. Still, she is pushing it as a unifying theme for the spring line. The novelty will come from the colors and details she proposes: silken dresses in cream and ivory, printed with shades of citron, magenta, turquoise. Romantic pieces slashed by exposed zippers. And suede footwear in risky pastels and unwise whites, sexy in their vulnerability. Here is a woman above such concerns as mud and scuffing. Buff-colored boots, brushed to rabbit softness. Suzanne feels a sensuous rush through her body as she draws a figure in these boots, the neck customarily long, with short marks for the mouth and nose: disdainful, defiant.
The fall line, now in stores, is dark and billowy, unstructured. She has grown to hate it with the acid repulsion reserved for things most recently loved. She can’t get away from it fast enough, can’t draw pale, slim things quickly enough to obscure the fall collection from her mind, the wide navy capes and black duster coats, the models like dour crows.
Coming home from work, she pours a glass of Syrah and helps Carlota with dinner. Elliot sits in front of the television, his hair greased with its daily buildup. Suzanne asks about their visit to the center, and Carlota itemizes Elliot’s activities: squeezing a ball, looking at pictures of faces, toeing a painted line.
“What did the therapists say? Did they mention how soon we might see progress?” Suzanne takes a breath and revises the question for Carlota. “Did the teachers say when he’ll get better?”
Carlota shrugs, makes a sour face. “I don’t know. The teachers, they don’t really talk to me.”