She gave them life, gave them milk from her breasts, nursed them through sickness and colds, made a throaty sound when she hadn’t seen them all day, moaning, kissing them all over. She did the days. I handed over my paychecks, any option money or royalties that hadn’t dried up; she pooled it with her money, paying the bills, taking them to kid parties, doctors, setting up playdates, hanging with other mothers, deciding on Kaya’s preschool, wondering if I could take a more active role in decisions. Sitting in a little chair by the door of Kaya’s classroom last fall for three straight weeks, her back breaking, trying to get Kaya to calm down and hang in there. She was strong, strong-willed, and shouldn’t have been surprised that her daughter was, too. She got field producers and actors to do what she wanted, took hours of incoherent B-roll and turned it into tight twelve-minute arcs, understood how the wildlife conservation movement had failed African lions.
For several years, following her time in children’s television, Robin worked for an international news agency, and went all over Latin America, and held a camera and got dengue fever and hired soldiers to take her into the mountains. She had friends who were stabbed, kidnapped, or disappeared. Later she worked at the bureau, going out on assignment once a month, and until Kaya was born she ran the desk, Central and South America and the Caribbean, sending out other people to risk their necks the way she once did. Eventually she burned out and quit.
She wound up at the Nature Channel, which was perfect for a mom with a small kid. Her co-workers sometimes arrived still wearing their morning tennis outfits. The newsroom had been exciting and desperate and prone to burnout, but the Nature Channel was ergonomic and well lit and had the congenial atmosphere of a shoe store. She didn’t make films anymore; the channel didn’t make anything. It bought the finished product, shows about water buffalo, flora and fauna, and also, increasingly, the stuff that filled prime time: a “science” show about people too fat to wear clothes, a “history” show about bombs that fit up someone’s body cavity. A show about a man with huge testicles was not yet considered a celebrity vehicle. She still got to travel, but not to the Galápagos. Twice a year her department went to Wheaton, Maryland, for an afternoon of paintball.
Then she had morning sickness, puking her guts out for eight or ten or fifteen straight weeks, it’s hard to remember now, wishing she could give me a nonlethal form of salmonella so I could know her pain. After Beanie was born she took time off again, and for the last six months had been edging back in, happy to work part-time at Connie’s small production company, whose only client was the Nature Channel, making a sweet little PSA she loved, destined for the wee hours of the night, about girls in poor countries who were victims of early marriage. A former executive producer for the channel, she was now a so-called independent producer, with no benefits, no contract, no real job, at the mercy of bland, plodding, overpaid executives on staff.
Between us we’d had terrifying gaps in employment, clients who’d gone bankrupt, work stoppages, lean times, hospital bills, economic downturns, crises of confidence, bosses who’d lied or disappeared, and projects mercy-killed.
There were moments when I too somehow failed to understand my place in the world or see what lay ahead, when I thought my own good luck would never end, when I mistook the work I did for a skill that builds on itself. I had years where money dropped from the sky, but also disappointments, broken dreams, ill-advised spending on copper saucepans and breathable raingear, troubles with the IRS, and a house we owned whose value had dropped below what we owed the bank. Six years ago, we’d borrowed from Robin’s mom to buy it. After the mortgage crisis we were underwater, and nobody would refinance the loan. A year or two later, we went back to Robin’s mom. She took out a second mortgage to bail us out. We got money from her dad to buy Robin’s car. We got a title loan against the car to pay bills. We set up a payment plan with the IRS guy, asked the worst credit card companies to cut our spending limit, begged them later to maybe raise it back up so we could eat, which, thank God, they refused to do. The magazine paid me on the twenty-eighth, like a monthly salary, although I wasn’t an employee, so a third of it needed to be set aside to pay taxes, which was completely out of the question, and would have to be dealt with down the road.
While I sat there by the flagpole, a pair of gladiator-sandaled feet appeared on the grass in front of me, and two legs, and above that, Amy. She held up a finger for me to wait. She was being polite. She pulled the phone away from her ear and said, “Somebody wants my money.” I feigned outrage. She shook her head. “I’m on a conference call.”
She was tall, with a long neck and good collarbones. She wore a gray sleeveless T-shirt and close-fitting blue-and-green plaid shorts. She had the bent posture and crimped mouth of a forty-one-year-old mom with three small kids. She didn’t look like her photos—ones she’d sent me, from a skating rink, or her bedroom, or with her oldest kid and a dog—which now seemed like one more problem to deal with.
She’d tied up her hair for painting class. It looked smooth and glossy. Her cheekbones were high and soft, her arms tanned and freckled. She went back to the phone call, nodding her head as hair spilled from the knot, her wrist bent against her waist, and turned on her toes on the grass, twirling cutely. It bugged me. Her movement said, “I’m busy. I’m needed. I have a life.”
In high school she was scouted at the local mall, and got hired to do some modeling, boat shows, department store flyers. Her parents didn’t approve. Her father stocked shelves in a grocery store and died young. Her mom was still living, and also tall. Amy had swum competitively, and set a national record in the short-course two-hundred-meter something. Then came a job in finance, to erase the deprivations of her childhood, and marriage to that jackass who made her a fortune. Then she set her sights on becoming some kind of activist, straddling the classes with money and love.
Lately she’d been infusing her artwork with one of her charity concerns. The toxic-sludge painting she’d started here last summer showed aquatic life along the Connecticut shore, deformed by PCBs—which, I guess…if you like that sort of thing. Over the winter she’d sent me pictures of another one, more sludge infecting life-giving waters, with these intestinal shapes framing her screwy self-portrait, head too long, one eyebrow raised, a kind of eco-friendly Frida Kahlo thing.
She turned to me and rolled her eyes. I shrugged like, “Oh well.” She grabbed her throat and stuck out her tongue. I pretended to gag. She motioned to throw the phone in the direction of the bay. Then she hit Mute and said, “It’s beyond partisan politics, but working together to protect our environment I want to thank you all for blah blah—”
She pressed a button on the phone again.
“Ugh. Yes honey, sorry, I’m here.”
When the call ended, she groaned. “We’re trying to get muckety-mucks to buy a table, and if you really want to know, we can’t decide whether to put a seashell in the middle of each table and decorate the seashell with the table number or put the fucking number on a stick.”
“Oh.”
“Board service.”
“You sound bored.”
“I like to serve on small boards, with a clear give-get, for a year or less.”
“Whatever that means.”