Chapter 1 #2
Her problem, when she thought about it, was that she had never quite been satisfied with the results.
The perfectionist in her had always overtaken the process, and she had yielded too completely to that inner voice that made her throw away anything that wasn’t a Platonic ideal.
Back in New York, in their former small town in the Hamptons, it had been easier to discard any true notion of perfectionism.
The women there were impossibly rich, for one thing.
Unattainably rich. Billionaire rich. You could freely show up in sweatpants in public and know that it didn’t matter; one of them might own a major sports team, for all you knew.
But here in Hamilton, the playing field was actually level.
These women, much as Anna hated to admit it, were her peers.
They looked nothing like her, lived nothing like her, spent their money on things she didn’t really relate to.
But they were all around the same age, probably from the same wide circle of communities north of Boston, had eaten at the same Dunkin’ Donuts growing up.
Christ, they probably all knew that chocolate glazed was the best donut in existence, when it came down to it.
So, yes, you did have to perform, all in a way she hadn’t been expecting when she proposed they move back up north.
She had to strive for the fucking Gerhard Richter, and all that striving was exhausting.
She had always believed that people should be allowed to be whoever they wanted, even if what they wanted was kind of ordinary, something she wouldn’t often admit about herself, except when she was alone.
When she and Denny planned this big escape, she had been thinking about Patagonia fleece vests and L.L.Bean flannel and the kind of down-home life that removed the pretense from wealth, but okay, that was unrealistic, because to live the kind of unflappable East Coast life that you see in Instagram reels—even the kind that she herself grew up with—you had to be kind of upper-crust. Fighting any of it was just an uphill battle.
Now here she was, fighting some other battle to fit in.
No one wore flannel shirts, it turned out.
You just couldn’t get away with being the kind of person that Anna Plummer had aspired to be.
Her son, Ben, who was only five, stood in the entry to the kitchen, a halo of light surrounding him.
Everyone talked about freezing time, and during the first years of his life she had only wanted to speed it up, to catapult through the messiness of diapers and strollers and naps that commandeered the day.
But now, all these years into parenting, she could see her children needing her less, the softness from them evaporating.
And she wished that she could go back to that place that she had been so desperate to escape.
This was the central conflict of motherhood: the inability to enjoy the moment you’re in because you’re always looking backward, constantly searching for a moment that has already receded into the rearview.
Ben, dressed in dinosaur pajamas that said snore don’t roar—tiny T.rex prints all over top and bottom—clambered toward her, in a nearly kneecapping embrace.
Little kids have no boundaries: They run in when you’re in the bathroom, knock the door down while you shower, will move mountains just to tell you that they had found a purple Lego and that it was a different shade of purple from the other purple Lego they found last week.
All this can be annoying or special, depending on which day of the week they catch you—the way they need to include you in all of it, the way they can’t stop talking about the world, the way you’re the most important person in their lives.
“I’m hungry,” he said, burying his blond head in her legs. She leaned down and tousled his hair.
Aggravation. Obligation. Privilege. Parenting never ceased to be all three. “What moves you today?” she said, knowing the question would mostly elude him.
“What, Mama?”
“What are you hungry for? What do you want for breakfast?”
“Toast,” he said. “Cinnamon toast.”
She didn’t know why she asked when the answer was always the same.
He was her less adventurous child, prone always to eating the same few things, to less experimentation.
In the ’80s, when she was a kid, parents didn’t give in to the whims and wants of children, but these days, it was different.
If Ben wanted to eat toast and bagels every day of his life, well, it was food, wasn’t it?
Throw a bunch of grapes in there and you’ve got half the nutritional bases covered (she pictured the triangle she learned in grade school, but then again, they used to drink cans of juice with dinner, so what did they know about nutrition, anyway).
Louisa, seven and always late, showed up in the kitchen with Barbie dolls in each hand.
She had the Malibu Dream House that she would have murdered to own forty years ago, but the whole point in having kids, Anna thought, was to give them a better shot.
Malibu Dream Houses for everyone. Cinnamon toast and grapes.
Live large, kids. You only get one chance.
A sherbet-pink sky outside, even on what had promised to be a gray morning, both her children, noiseless, at the kitchen counter, and maybe January was just a word, maybe January didn’t have to be thematic, maybe January was not as restless as it felt when you woke up in the dark.