would do if she really lay down and fell asleep right here, her coat balled up under her head. It might be worth it to find out, and less humiliating than crashing in on her daughter again.
She took another sip, staring out the window into the night. It seemed right to lament her decisions, to blame all her wrong choices. She’d worried they were wrong even as she was making them. Most of her sorority sisters had not gotten married right out of school. They went on to graduate school, or law school, or medical school. Or they went traveling. Or they joined the Peace Corps. She remembered the way some of them had looked at her when she told them she was engaged. Yes, she said, she would take his name. Yes, she was moving to Kansas City. They all smiled and said congratulations and admired her ring, but she saw the judgment, even dismissal, in some of their eyes. Or maybe she was just paranoid and feeling unsure of herself.
“I’ll get a job there right away,” she told them, though no one had been rude enough to ask. “You can get a teaching job anywhere.”
For a recent graduate with good grades, that turned out to be true. Natalie didn’t have any trouble finding a job, even after she moved to Kansas City, or, as the editor of her sorority newsletter had put it: even after she followed her new husband to Kansas City. In 1981! One of her “sisters” wrote that! And made her sound like a puppy, just because she wasn’t going to law school, just because she didn’t hyphenate her name, just because she didn’t submit a picture of herself wearing a blazer with huge shoulder pads and one of those blouses with those stupid bow ties. She hadn’t followed Dan. Was she not supposed to marry the person she loved because he was moving? Kansas City was where the law firm was. Someone had to give. Someone had to be flexible. And because the person she happened to love would be making approximately five times as much money as she would be making, it seemed reasonable and right that the flexibility might be required of her.
Natalie’s mother didn’t see the problem. “Please,” she said. “Your cousins were in day care from day one, and they all turned out to be decent people. And I know plenty of kids who stayed home with moms who turned out to be wingnuts you’d never want in your house. And no, honey, I am not talking about you.”
Dan’s mother, however, wasn’t as convinced that putting the beautiful baby Elise in day care so early was a good idea. She flew in from New York for the birth, and she stayed for several weeks. When she first saw the breast pump lying in wait in the nursery, she eyed it with suspicion.
“You’re going to so much trouble?” she said, or maybe asked. Leni Von Holten was a short, apple-shaped woman who inflected her voice at the end of every sentence, question or not, so Natalie was never certain if she needed to respond. “You’re pumping the milk? It can’t be comfortable? So you can go to a job that you don’t need, that you don’t even like so much? Dan makes enough money to support you both? You really want to spend your days taking care of other people’s children while someone else takes care of yours? This beautiful girl? This perfect little breadloaf who will only be a baby once?”
Natalie had careful, practiced responses to all her mother-in-law’s questions: she explained that she did enjoy teaching; she shouldn’t have complained so much the previous year, which had been particularly difficult, with more emotionally disturbed children than usual and a few particularly abrasive parents. Next year would be better. Really, she was looking forward to getting back to work. She’d found the best child care available, and she was sure that Elise would be fine.
But even as she said these words, her voice full of conviction, she felt herself wavering inside. Dan did make enough money for her not to have to work. Her paltry teaching salary hardly mattered—and next year, much of it would go toward covering child care so she could work. Her life would be a snake, swallowing its own tail. She would make herself miserable out of principle.
Still, in the fall, she went back to work, just as planned. The first time she dropped a wailing