Four years

This is what it feels like right now, tonight. The dishes are still on the table – empty wineglasses, half a challah torn to pieces, honey dripped on my younger son’s chair. 

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Nearly four years ago my mother called me laughing. “Can you believe this? ‘Grab them by the pussy’? Thank God, he’ll never get elected now.” I was giving the two-year-old a bath, I remember so clearly. The phone kept slipping off my shoulder. 

Two months later I walked into a conference – how ridiculous, a conference in Japanese history! Were we really doing this? How could we be in a seminar room? The Americans seemed more jet-lagged than the Japanese scholars. My friend and I were both wearing black, as if someone had died. “I thought of you,” he said. “With the Cubs winning, and then . . . I know you would have had it the other way.” 

Those were the years when I traveled everywhere, leaving late at night and early in the morning. I was constantly sick, constantly exhausted. A kind older man pulled me aside and said, “Amy, you don’t actually need to travel so much.” But I did, because I was running.

I fell asleep in my friend’s office, wrapped in my coat, my blown-out curls crushed against the armrest.

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Two years later – was it two years? – I sat in a coffee shop staring at my phone, watching a woman from my hometown. She had my accent, but she was softer spoken and more polite. I heard her tell us about all those familiar places. The Potomac Village Safeway. We used to shop at the Giant in Cabin John Mall.

She told us what happened to her, and I cried. 

So I worked. I wrote an essay. I finished the book. I must have given a hundred talks. No more diapers, just math homework and lunchboxes and band-aids. I made dinner almost every night. Every Rosh Hashanah we said, “This year.” 

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A year and a half later we were “safer at home.” I went grocery shopping in a cold panic. 

My son and I tried to fill out a worksheet about the “Signs of Spring,” a last-minute activity sent home from kindergarten. Find a butterfly. Find a daffodil. Find a bee. There weren’t any signs of spring – it was March in Chicago. He cried. I cried.

I taught a graduate seminar online. The students were exhausted. I was barely present. My children had tantrums. I couldn’t sleep. I thought, “Next year.”

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We wrote to the dean. We wrote to the provost. We wrote to the president of the university. He referred us to the VP of Risk Management. “I understand,” he wrote back. “I have kids, too (though luckily my wife is bearing most of the burden of childcare so I can do my work for the university!)”

Later, I watched a meeting and stared at the VPs in their boxes. Scrubbed faces and purple ties, every piece of them so obviously the product of some woman’s labor. Like golems conjured from sandwiches and shopping trips, sex and kind words, everything it takes to create a man like that. 

“My wife and I,” one of them said, and smirked.

I thought about what they get paid. I thought about what I get paid. I thought about my book about to come out, my promotion about to go through. “Hold on,” I thought. “Next year.”

******

Fall 2020 and none of the kids are in school. They are “remote.” I am remote.

We go to the playground, even though the kids have forgotten how to play. The mothers still have their pale winter faces. They are wearing sweatpants. They are covered in lint. They look five years older. 

We all work, but none of us can work. “But I’m lucky,” they say. “My boss is understanding. My husband helps.” 

I think, “This is not my life.” But the mothers are looking at the ground. Their shoes are falling apart. They’re talking about cutting their husbands’ hair.

I write that I want my six-year-old to go back to school and a stranger surfaces from the depths of the internet to call me a whiny, entitled Karen. 

*****

RBG meant that you didn’t have to choose. Your babies or your life. Your career or your husband. Your body or your mind. She seemed like the last person who understood what that meant, who didn’t apologize, who had the clarity to say, “No, this is not enough.”

All my life – all these things I depended on – unraveled in four years. I would have had it the other way. I would have moved the earth backward. Unmade the sandwiches and unknotted the ties. Let the men in their boxes feel what it’s like to be dragged back in time.

Yes, I believed that I didn’t have to choose, but I would have undone everything, made any bargain. Take my book, take my career. I would’ve given it all back if it meant I could still lift a glass and think, “This year.”