Rockville Pike by Susan Coll

Author:Susan Coll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

11

THE FACT that I had no one to call when my husband and son were AWOL and my basement had begun to flood seemed like one more sign of personal failure. What had happened to my friends over the years? What had become of the life, or at least the fragments of a life, that I once had outside of family and furniture?

I could barely recall the last time I went out to lunch, or did something fun with a person who was not a member of my family. The most recent non-work-related social outing I could recollect was lunch with Gina. We had known each other since high school, when we both lived in Panama. We’d never had much in common apart from circumstance and language, but that was enough for us to bond in a classroom full of local kids who spoke only rapid-fire Spanish.

Gina had never married, had no children, and worked as a receptionist at a tanning salon in D.C. After dinner at our house once she’d quipped that she was now certain she did not want a family. She quickly apologized, and claimed that she’d meant something else entirely. But I think she meant what she said: her taste of my life that evening scared her off domesticity even though we had all been on our best behavior.

The lunch date was about a year ago. I remembered staring at each other over sushi in a dimly lit, half-empty Japanese restaurant. Gina had gone on at length about her guru and the spiritual retreat she was about to attend while I picked apart a California roll, wondering if it was too soon to ask for the check. She kept peering deep into my eyes as if there was something there, something more to Jane Kramer than met the eye. But there wasn’t. Not anymore. Or at least not along the lines of what she wanted to find. We kept in touch because it was more awkward not to, but we never scheduled another lunch.

Anyway, the hole I felt in my emotional life did not seem the sort that would be filled by having a best girlfriend—someone to chat on the phone with, someone who dropped in unannounced and sometimes borrowed clothes, someone I might trek to Bed Bath and Beyond with when she needed new cutlery. Yet I did envy women I observed in the neighborhood who seemed to have bonded as in the old 1950s sitcoms, their front doors always open, their kids and dogs running between the yards. I imagined the young mothers sipping coffee in one another’s kitchens, discussing teachers and pediatricians and what to cook for dinner. They were probably lawyers—my admittedly unscientific survey had established that all the young women in our neighborhood were lawyers—but that certainly didn’t mean they were discussing penal code reform or what cases were pending on the Supreme Court docket, because in my experience some toxic combination of suburbia, motherhood, and too many trips to the dry cleaner numbed the minds of even the most intelligent stay-at-home mothers.

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