A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  “Uh-huh,” Zoe said pointedly.

  Mark’s smile evaporated. Alison’s stomach tightened. When tension flared between Mark and Zoe, Alison couldn’t keep from feeling as if both of them were attacking her. Being the lowest point on an unhappy triangle was all too familiar. They’re not my parents, she reminded herself. Even if they don’t quite love each other yet, they both love me.

  The good news was that Mark and Zoe were starting to treat each other like family. That was the bad news too.

  “What a great reason for you to get a promotion,” Zoe said. “Because a woman with more seniority had the nerve to get pregnant.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that I might be the better candidate?” Alison agreed with Zoe. But this was Mark’s big moment, and Zoe was ruining it. Also, if Mark got a promotion, they might be able to actually afford their life.

  “I’ve always wondered how it would feel to personally benefit from sexism,” Zoe said, pulling a bag of carrots from the fridge. “But of course, I’ll never know.” She squeezed past Alison, pulled a knife out of the drawer, and started chunking carrots into the stew.

  “That’s why God made affirmative action, right?” Alison asked, trying to derail their argument. They both frowned at her and went on arguing.

  You wanted this, Alison reminded herself. And it works so well most of the time. The problem was that when it didn’t, she felt ripped in two.

  A few nights later, Mark went out after dinner on a secret mission and came home with a six-foot-tall Christmas tree. Zoe shook her head, fringed with jet-black, two-inch-long spikes. “Excuse me, but last I heard, you guys were Jewish. We should be teaching Corey about Hanukkah.”

  Déjà vu all over again, Alison thought. Zoe had been just as indignant years before, when Alison told her she hadn’t celebrated a Jewish holiday since her father died. “If you were an Average White Girl like me,” Zoe went on, “you’d realize how lucky you are to have any culture at all.”

  Each year Zoe had given Alison eight nights of Hanukkah gifts, made a ritual of lighting the menorah, dragged Alison to liberation Shabbat services and feminist Seders. Now she glared at the tree in Mark and Alison’s living room as if it were a stealth missile poised to take out the house.

  “We always had a Christmas tree growing up,” Mark said. “I like them. They smell good. And look—” He held up a small silver peace sign. “Corey’s first politically correct ornament.”

  Breathe, Alison instructed herself. You’re not their referee.

  Zoe went out to her car and came back with a box of Hanukkah candles and a wax-splattered brass menorah—the one she and Alison used to light together every year. Zoe put the menorah on the mantel as if it were her house, her Jewish holiday, her decision about Corey’s first Christmas. Mark stared at the menorah as if it were about to explode.

  “Either the kid’s gonna grow up thinking of his Jewishness as an ethnicity to be proud of,” Zoe said without turning around, “or he’s going to experience it as an affliction, the way you guys do.”

  “Corey’s five months old.” Mark’s voice rose. “What do you want me to do? Sign him up for Daddy-and-me Yiddish lessons?”

  Alison felt the usual tug-of-war tension in her gut. She didn’t want a fight, especially now. Her parents had had their worst fights around the holidays, often about the same thing. She could still see her mother brandishing the menorah, her father shaking his head.

  “We could keep the tree and get a Hanukkah bush too,” Alison said.

  “I just want Corey to feel good about who he is,” Zoe said. “Are you guys really going to raise another self-loathing Jew?”

  “We’re not going to raise a religious Jew at all,” said Mark. Bad timing, Alison thought. Mark had spent the past week editing a piece about a riot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, between rival members of the same Orthodox Hasidic sect. The more he learned about the riot, the more anti-Zionist he became.

  Zoe shot Alison a look that meant “Jump in here and take my side,” a look that made Alison feel she was holding the four of them together with her two bare hands. Alison depended on Zoe now—for different reasons and in different ways than she had when they were lovers, but no less profoundly. Every time she told herself to let Mark and Zoe hash their arguments out themselves, she worried that this would be the fight that finally undid them; that would be the accusation that would damage their bond beyond repair.

  Alison knew some things about Zoe that she hadn’t known before. She understood that Zoe drew her strength from being other people’s strength, from slaying other people’s dragons, making them feel safe and known and loved. Zoe needed to be needed. Alison and her family needed her. The meshing gears of their needs and neuroses were their equilibrium.

  Although he complained about Zoe’s stubbornness and self-righteousness and her radical politics, even if he felt threatened by Zoe, as Alison suspected he did, Mark had the home court advantage. He was Alison’s man. He was the father of her child.

  “You guys work it out,” Alison said and went to check on Corey. She expected the shouting to follow her up the stairs. But when she came back down with a wrinkle-faced, freshly diapered baby in her arms, Mark and Zoe were chatting companionably, threading paper clips through the blue and silver Star of David and dreidel ornaments Mark had bought, hanging them among the tinsel and candy canes. The candles in the menorah were burning, their reflections dancing in the shiny red and green balls.

  “We came up with the perfect compromise,” Zoe announced. “From now on, we’re going to celebrate Hanuchris. The best of both worlds.”

  “Ba ba ba ba,” Corey gurgled, batting his hands at the twinkling lights.

  Alison kissed Corey’s head. Everything she needed to be happy, red and green and blue and silver, was right there in that room.

  At seven months Corey started teething, and he went back to waking them several times a night. When she heard him crying at two in the morning, Alison stumbled into his room and brought him back to bed with her. Without thinking about what she was doing, she nursed him back to sleep. Four hours later, she woke up with leaking breasts, a crying baby, and the sinking realization that she’d have to wean him all over again.

  “Maybe I’ll call in sick,” she groaned, rocking Corey in her arms.

  Mark rolled away from her, muttering.

  “What?” Alison asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m getting tired of you ignoring me whenever I ask what’s going on with you,” Alison said over Corey’s cries.

  Mark sat up, glaring at her. “And I’m getting tired of you complaining about having to work. You got to stay home with him a lot longer than I did.”

  “We made that decision together. If you didn’t want me to take the extra month off, you shouldn’t have agreed.”

  Alison slid out of bed, holding Corey against her shoulder, walking him around the room. Corey wailed, wanting her breast. Alison felt like wailing, too, wanting to give it to him. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay,” she hummed into his ear. Finally he slumped against her, asleep.

  “You know how bad I feel about not making enough money for you to stay home,” Mark said in a stage whisper. “You don’t have to keep rubbing it in.”

  “So when I say how I feel, I’m rubbing it in?” Alison hissed.

  Mark got up, scooped Corey out of her arms, and laid him in the middle of the bed. Then he walked over to Alison and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “We’re both exhausted and stressed out,” he said. “But let’s not take it out on each other, okay?” He lifted her chin with his fingers, looked her in the eye.

  Alison’s anger didn’t dissipate that fast. “I guess.”

  “If I get that promotion,” Mark said, “maybe you can go part-time.”

  Side with me against Zoe, Alison heard him say. “Fingers crossed. Eyes crossed. Wires crossed. Every fucking thing crossed.” She dragged her weary bones into the bathroom, where she made the mistake o
f looking in the mirror. She looked like she was fifty years old. She looked like her mother.

  Being away from Corey was getting harder, not easier. Week after week, Alison sat at her desk missing deadlines, missing Corey, thinking, this is so wrong. She didn’t care if this happened to every working mother. She couldn’t stand it happening to her.

  Her job seemed meaningless now. In the middle of writing an ad for Berkeley’s new curbside recycling program, Alison found herself wondering, If people still don’t know how to separate a bottle from a newspaper, is an ad really going to teach them? Assigned to write a “triumphant” fund-raising letter about the FDA’s approval of a long-acting contraceptive implant for Planned Parenthood’s newsletter, she could barely restrain herself from mentioning that this “triumph” was already in use in sixteen “less developed” countries.

  What am I doing here, she asked herself again and again. Nearby, her son was sitting up and gumming a Zwieback and doing things he’d only do once for the very first time.

  Oh, Mariandaughter, Alison thought, how I have failed you. The exciting, self-realized, self-fulfilling existence that feminism had promised her had morphed into a replica of every working mother’s treadmill life. Her son was growing up without her, spending most of his waking hours with someone else. Her sex life was nonexistent. She never had time to enjoy the house she worked her ass off to pay for; it was just a pit stop between races around the track.

  One February morning, Alison pulled herself out of bed in her usual state of weekday panic and then realized it was Lincoln’s birthday. Mark had already left for the office, hoping for a quiet catch-up day while no one was around. Miraculously, Corey was still asleep.

  A whole day, just Corey and me, Alison thought, diving back into the big warm bed. She was planning the fun day they’d have when she heard the front door open. She jumped up and struggled into her robe.

  Zoe stood in the hallway. “You’re running late,” she said.

  Alison racked her sleepy brain for a reasonable way to get Zoe to go home. “Today’s a holiday, remember?”

  “Shit.” Zoe shook her head. “I totally forgot.”

  Corey’s morning babbling wafted from his room. Alison went to get him, Zoe right behind her. Corey was sitting up in his crib, gumming a red plastic bagel.

  “Hey, Pickle,” Alison greeted him from the doorway.

  “Morning, sunshine,” Zoe trilled.

  Corey beamed as Alison walked toward him.

  “Mama,” Corey said, reaching for Zoe.

  Whom could Alison tell about the heartbreak of that moment? Not Zoe. Not Mark. Whom could she blame for the heartbreak of that moment? Not Zoe. Not Mark.

  Clinging to a cold metal pole on a packed BART car the next morning, Alison realized whom—what—she could blame. Fucking feminism.

  Like her fellow feminist devotees, Alison had come of age determined to have a bigger life, a better life than her mother’s. She’d swallowed the sisterhood Kool-Aid, believing that being just a mother was personally degrading and politically incorrect. In her desperation to avoid her mother’s empty dependency, Alison had become a caricature of the postfeminist superwoman, turning herself inside out to be the world’s best copywriter and the world’s best girlfriend and friend and mother. Now she knew it in her bones. Nothing was more important than mothering her son.

  The train squealed to a stop. Alison pushed through the crowded car and across the swarming subway platform and rode the densely packed escalator up to Market Street. It was drizzling on this side of the bay. That morning, more wrenched than usual to leave Corey, she’d stolen a few extra minutes with him, then rushed out without her umbrella. And her lunch, she realized. And the folder she needed for today’s marketing meeting.

  On the corner of Columbus and Montgomery, Alison closed herself into a phone booth and called Mark at work. “He’s not answering,” the receptionist said.

  “Page him,” Alison said.

  “Is Corey okay?” Mark picked up the phone, sounding terrified.

  “He’s fine.”

  Mark exhaled loudly. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I needed to talk to you before I got to work. I’m going to quit my job today.”

  “What the hell—”

  “I’ll freelance. I’ll waitress if I have to.” Alison started to cry. “I can’t be away from Corey for fifty hours a week anymore. I just can’t.”

  She heard Mark close his office door and then pick up the phone again. “We’ve gone over and over this. Which part of ‘we can’t afford it’ do you not understand?”

  “He’s going to take his first steps any day now. I want to be there when he does.”

  “Guess what, Alison. So do I. So why don’t you keep your job and I’ll quit mine? You make more money than I do anyway.”

  “You don’t need to be with him as much as I do.”

  “Why? Because you’re his mother?”

  “Yes. Because I’m his mother.”

  “What the hell kind of 1950s bullshit are you spouting?”

  If I don’t quit my job today, Alison thought, I’ll resent you for the rest of my life. “If I don’t quit my job today,” she said, “I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

  Mark sighed. Alison’s heart soared. He was going to say yes. She could feel it. “Can you at least take a leave of absence instead of quitting?” he asked.

  “I’ll try. Thank you, honey. So much.”

  “I’m not a total asshole, you know. I do want you to be happy.”

  “I know you do.”

  When Alison got home that night, Zoe was in the kitchen washing dishes. “How was your day, dear?” Zoe said, filling the kettle, setting it on the Wedgewood stove, a bigger and slightly newer version of the stove in her cottage.

  Corey was on the floor, chewing on his rubber alphabet rug. Alison dropped her briefcase and scooped him up. Soon I’ll be home with you every day, she told him silently, nuzzling his velvet neck.

  “Actually, I need to talk to you about my day.”

  Corey wiggled in her arms. He reached for the blue Nerf football on the floor and clearly said “ball.”

  “Oh, my God!” Alison and Zoe exclaimed at the same moment. They stood stock still, staring at Corey, who was now trying to eat his football.

  “Do you think if we stand here long enough,” Zoe asked into the silence, “he’ll recite the Gettysburg Address?”

  “I would hope for nothing less than ‘I Have a Dream.’

  Zoe laughed. “You gotta love our boy. He saved his first word for his mom.”

  The kettle whistled. “Chamomile?” Zoe asked. Alison shook her head and took a bottle of Chardonnay out of the fridge. “Much better idea,” Zoe said.

  They took their glasses to the kitchen table. “So,” Zoe prompted Alison. “Your day.”

  Alison took a sip of wine. “Things have been working out so well with you and Corey,” she began. “It means so much to me, Zoe.”

  “Me too.” Zoe smiled down at Corey. “Him too. Right, sunshine?”

  On cue, Corey grinned at Zoe.

  “But you know I’ve been unhappy since I went back to work,” Alison said. “So Mark and I are going to make some changes.”

  Zoe’s smile faded. “Like what?”

  “I’m taking a one-year leave of absence from PMC.”

  “I thought you had to work.”

  “I do. I’m going to try and make money with my freelance writing.”

  “You think you can write and watch Corey at the same time?”

  “God, no,” Alison said. “I’m hoping you can still be with Corey two or three days a week.”

  “So you’re downsizing the nanny.”

  It’s a good thing I’m doing this now, Alison thought. Another year and Zoe would have forgotten whose baby Corey was. And Corey might have forgotten who his mother was.

  “If two days a week doesn’t work for you . . .” Alison said.

  “Yo
u said two or three,” Zoe said.

  Mark offered to turn their unused attic guest room into an office for Alison. While he was painting and earthquake-proofing the bookshelves, Alison went to Pier 1 and bought curtains made of tangerine gauze, dense enough to keep the glare off her computer screen, filmy enough to let in the light.

  As she hung them, Alison realized that they were exactly the orange of Zoe’s hair the day they’d had brunch at Bette’s—the day she’d promised Zoe she’d never take Corey away from her.

  Alison woke up on her first day of freedom with her heart singing and her nipples on fire. When Mark left for work, he put Corey in bed with her. She held him close. His lips nuzzled at her breast.

  Alison hadn’t nursed him in monhts. Weaning him had been hell. She told herself she shouldn’t put them through that again. She told herself it wouldn’t work anyway. And then she lifted her T-shirt and cradled Corey to her breast. He’s my baby, she thought. If I want to start nursing him again, that’s up to me.

  Corey began to suck. Alison closed her eyes, suffused with pleasure.

  And then he stopped. Her nipple fell out of his mouth and lay against his puffy cheek, red and swollen and glistening wet.

  Alison shifted him to her other breast. He smiled at her, giggled, swatted at her nose. She took her breast in her hand, guided her nipple into his mouth. He sucked on it once and spat it out.

  Corey tugged on her earlobe, laughing.

  Alison kissed his tiny fist and wept.

  Alison sold a story to Ms. about feminists who want both motherhood and careers.

  She sat at her new desk in her new attic office, struggling to stay focused on her writing as Corey’s voice drifted up the stairs, crying, then quieting as Zoe soothed him, then cooing along as Zoe sang to him. They both sounded so happy. Alison felt great joy and only a bit of envy.

  Mark edited her first draft and brought her a bouquet of irises when her editor accepted it. Zoe brought a bottle of Möet to dinner to celebrate. Corey gummed Cheerios and banged his spoon against his high-chair tray as the three of them toasted her success.