TEN
Tell me everything!” Rachel commanded, stirring a cube of brown sugar into her chamomile tea.
Rachel and her little daughter, Isabel, were in the city running weekend errands.
We were having brunch at our favorite Upper West Side café—a bright, bustling place where delicious crepes and quiches were served on large communal tables.
Rach and I used to come here a lot back when we lived together in Morningside Heights.
The preppy Saturday morning brunch crowd here was equal parts earnest new couples on the Morning After and their counterparts five years later, now parents with kids in tow.
“I mean, why now? After eight years?” Rachel pressed. “What finally happened?”
“I’m not really sure why now,” I tried to explain to Rachel—and to myself. “It just finally felt right, I guess.”
Rachel raised one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “And even more importantly,” she smirked with barely restrained glee, darting a look over at four-year-old Isabel, who sat coloring quietly at the table, “how was it?”
Ah. The Question. I’d been wondering how long it would take Rachel to get around to asking it.
My married friends were much more interested in hearing about their single friends’ sexual exploits now that they themselves had, in front of God and everyone, committed to a single penis forever after.
These happily married women thought it downright rude not to ask after my love life, when of course the opposite was true.
Single career women did not like to feel that we were out here getting our hearts trampled on for our married friends’ entertainment.
Revealing our romantic humiliations and our most vulnerable selves for the sake of a funny anecdote or two at someone’s next book club.
Rachel often liked to say that she lived vicariously through me—still single in the city, still keeping crazy hours, still chasing the brass ring after she’d given it up for a wedding ring. To which I often apologized that she wasn’t having more vicarious fun.
But this time felt different. This time, it was Murph we were talking about.
“Well, it was—kind of great,” I murmured vaguely.
“Elaborate.”
“It was really nice, actually,” I said, noticing a pleasant pull in my stomach as I thought again about Murph, the gentle way he’d kissed me good-bye at the door, the message he’d texted me during my short cab ride home: You were worth the wait.
I thought once again about our sweet, half-remembered conversation in the Oak Hollow clubhouse.
And I realized with a slight stab of guilt and surprise that some moments were too perfect, too private to share, even with Rachel.
“Isn’t he the one you said was a huge player?” she shrieked. An older couple at a neighboring table glanced over at us.
I felt a ping of annoyance. I took a big swallow of coffee and decided to change the subject.
“I just don’t know how we’re supposed to act around each other at the office.
I mean, is he going to act like my boyfriend now?
Does he think he’s my boyfriend? Do we tell people at work we’re together? What?”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think you should just play it close to the vest for a while,” Rachel said.
“Mommy?” piped up Isabel, next to me. “What does ‘play close to the vest’ mean?”
Rachel leaned across and bent down, speaking softly into her daughter’s hair. “It means to keep some things to yourself. Now, Isabel, remember you promised you would let Mommy and Auntie Ingrid have our grown-up time this morning. Okay?”
Isabel nodded, turning back to her coloring book. I looked down at the page. She was studiously giving a fairy princess a pretty fringe of curly brown hair like her own. Like Rachel’s. My heart melted.
No one would ever describe me as oozing maternal instinct, but Isabel completely disarmed me.
I remembered babysitting her when she was still very tiny, and sitting there by her side in the semidarkness for a long while after she fell asleep, just staring, marveling at her ten perfect little fingers and ten perfect toes and the gorgeously long eyelashes she already had.
A few months ago, when Rachel and Josh had a black-tie benefit to attend, I’d gone up to Westchester to stay with Isabel and her baby brother, Jacob.
While eleven-month-old Jacob slumbered upstairs, Isabel and I had entertained ourselves by drawing movie posters and designing jewelry for each other.
I showed Isabel how to make a chain-link construction-paper bracelet with the letters of her name drawn onto each link in bright rainbow colors, and she’d insisted on making one for me.
Isabel had been delighted to discover that our names not only both started with the letter I but were also each six letters long.
She’d worn her I-S-A-B-E-L bracelet and I’d worn my I-N-G-R-I-D one the whole evening.
When Josh and Rachel came home and she woke briefly, Isabel murmured sleepily, “Auntie Ingrid, don’t take off your bracelet until you get home, okay?
” “Oh, I won’t, honey.” And I didn’t. I’d kept it on all that weekend and only took it off, reluctantly, when it was time to go back to the office.
I still had it, in a cloisonné jewelry tray on top of my bedroom dresser.
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t exactly planning to broadcast our hookup in the firm newsletter, Rach.”
“No, I know. I just mean, okay, so you guys have hooked up once. It’s exciting and everything, but that could be it. You don’t know if this is actually going to go anywhere, right? There are all kinds of issues with dating someone at work, obviously. Especially for you, this year.”
“Rach, I know. Dating a colleague in my own department. It’s in the bad-idea handbook, right?”
“It’s not just in the book, sweetie,” Rachel said gently. “It’s on the cover.”
I sighed.
I knew she meant well. But sometimes I felt that Rachel—beautiful, happily married, stay-at-home Rachel, who had never been without a man for longer than a month (and that was during finals)—had married dependable Josh and left the corporate world so long ago that she’d simply forgotten what it was like for us single professional women still flailing around out here, trying to make it on our own.
When in the world would I ever have time to meet someone outside of Parsons Valentine?
Even if I did, I had been on enough blind dates and setups in my lifetime to know that whenever a man starts off a conversation with Yeah, so I’m already practically heading up my group over at Weil, and I’m up for partner next year—trust me, they did not want to hear you say, Me, too.
With Murph, I didn’t need to worry about any of that.
He was someone who understood and empathized with my crazy hours and erratic work schedule, who never took it personally when I had to cancel plans at the last second because a deal was heating up, who wasn’t the least bit threatened by my job or how much money I made because he did it, too, and who understood exactly what I was talking about when I described the headlong adrenaline rush of closing a billion-dollar acquisition and seeing the headline the next day in the paper.
Murph and I had sort of grown up together, side by side, at the firm. We trusted each other.
Still, I knew that Rachel cared about me. She was only trying to help.
“I’ll be careful, Rach. I’ll play it close to the vest, okay?”
“There are some things you should keep to yourself,” said Isabel sagely.
“You are absolutely right, honey.” I leaned over and tousled her hair, then gave her a big kiss on the top of her head.
Rachel looked a little sheepish. “Look, I don’t mean to be a downer.
It’s just—God, you’re so close, Ingrid. Why do anything that could jeopardize your chances now?
All you have to do is stick it out a few more months.
Think of all the women who’d kill to have made it this far.
You’re this close to being the first ever, Ingrid! You have a responsibility!”
A responsibility to whom? To me, or to Rachel?
I thought of Dr. Rossi, and the fight I’d just had with Tyler over speaking out. You have a responsibility.
Once again, I wondered why so many people felt entitled to project their own particular choices onto everyone else. It ended up making things much more confusing for us all.
Back in law school, I’d had a professor named George Tanaka.
He was an extremely good, extremely popular professor, and his classes were always full.
I’d taken his Civil Rights Law survey course and seminar on Critical Race Theory and gotten A’s in both.
My third year, after the school published an alphabetized list naming each 3L student’s employer after graduation, I received a scrawled note from Professor Tanaka, saying he’d like to speak with me at my earliest convenience.
I assumed he wanted to wish me luck in my future endeavors.
But when I dropped by his office, Professor Tanaka gave me a tight-lipped smile before saying, “I’ll be frank.
I was surprised to learn that you’ll be heading to Parsons Valentine this fall. ”
I was stunned. And he could see it, because he smiled hastily and shook his head.
“Don’t misunderstand me. Parsons Valentine is one of the best firms in the country.
It’s just that I was curious whether you’d considered other avenues.
Like public interest law. A federal clerkship, or the Justice Department. Perhaps, eventually, academia.”
He looked at me hopefully.
“Well, I—I’m . . .” I was speechless. He was being presumptuous.
He was putting me on the defensive, and he had no right.
“I appreciate your thinking of me, Professor Tanaka, and of course I was aware of the clerkship process and the Justice Department, but I—I really enjoyed my summer at Parsons Valentine, and for now I think I want to try the law firm route.”
“I see.” He sighed a drawn-out, world-weary sigh that seemed to signal the end of our conversation.
As I was turning to go, Professor Tanaka murmured, “Sometimes, Ingrid, in the grander scheme, it behooves us to do certain things not because we want to, but because we are among the very few who can.”
Rachel’s fervent wish—that I make partner on behalf of all the women lawyers who’d gotten mommy-tracked over the years—was Professor Tanaka’s grave disappointment that I was selling out. There really was no pleasing everybody. Maybe there was no pleasing anybody.
I looked at Rachel now, sitting across from me, trying to interest Isabel in her oatmeal and strawberries.
Rachel, who professed to live vicariously through me, who claimed to be jealous of everything I was about to achieve at Parsons Valentine, the very things she had once dreamed of achieving herself, back when we were both bright-eyed, idealistic young law students.
We’d been so brash, so full of ambition.
We had not come to law school to get our MRS degrees. No, we were there to kick some ass.
Rachel and I had both grown up in that fortunate class of American women who had been taught that, at last, we could truly have It All.
For years, a cheerful chorus of Ivy League professors had insistently painted us glowing pictures of our futures as one great big, fat, glistening, juicy oyster.
But, one by one, as all the women I knew dropped out of their high-powered careers, or let their last few childbearing years slip away with resignation, or married men they didn’t love simply because they felt they were running out of time—I was realizing that we had not quite been told the truth.
It wasn’t that we had been lied to, exactly.
Rachel and I were extremely privileged women in many ways.
We could definitely have A Lot. Many of us even managed to have Quite A Good Deal of It.
But we were all finding out that, no, actually, regrettably, painfully, we had not quite figured out how to have It All. At least not All at the Same Time.
For the moment, at least, you still really did have to choose.
I thought about the handful of precious Saturdays I’d taken Metro-North up to Westchester to babysit at Rachel and Josh’s house.
These were evenings I enjoyed, not just for the sheer pleasure of seeing those two beautiful, tousle-headed kids, but for the chance to get away from the hustle and relentlessly expectant pulse of Manhattan, the modern starkness of my immaculate, brand-new condo, to sit in somebody’s real live living room, with a deep, fluffy sectional couch and a wood-burning fireplace and stuff scattered everywhere and family pictures cluttering the mantel and actual sconces on the walls.
This felt like a place where lives actually happened.
After I tucked Isabel and Jacob into their beds, I would creep quietly about the warm, comfortable family room, feeling a little like an intruder, carefully examining each framed photograph in turn—a laughing Rachel and Josh feeding each other pieces of wedding cake; Josh relaxing on a porch swing with Jacob sleeping on his chest; Isabel and Rachel hugging each other and beaming in front of a Cinderella castle—and I would wonder to myself about which one of us was luckier.