Janet nodded, sipped her wine, and said, “Maybe I could rent your mother. My three need to get the memo that they’re responsible for more than just wiping themselves.” She made a face, flashing her crooked teeth. “And one of the boys isn’t even doing that so well. I don’t know which one—I buy them identical undies, and it’s not really the kind of thing you want to, you know, investigate thoroughly . . .”
I smiled, imagining my friend with a pair of lab tweezers and a fingerprinting kit, gingerly tugging a pair of skidmarked Transformers underpants out of an inside-out pair of little boy’s jeans.
“And did I tell you that Maya is now a vegan? And the boys won’t eat vegan food—which I can’t really blame them for—so I’m now cooking two meals a night? What happened?” she asked. Her cheeks were flushed, eyes narrowed, ponytail askew. “I mean, really. I was Phi Beta Kappa. I was most likely to succeed. I billed more hours than any other associate my first three years out of law school. And now I spend my days driving my kids to hockey practice and swim club and choir rehearsal, and my afternoons making lasagna with tofu cheese, and my nights folding their underwear and checking their homework and spraying the insides of hockey skates with Lysol. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
She poured wine almost to the top of her glass and took a healthy swallow. “Do you know what I think when I wake up in the morning?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “I count how many hours there are until I can have a glass of wine. There’s something wrong with me, if that’s all I’m looking forward to. If I have this . . .”—she gestured, hands spread to indicate the room, the house, the neighborhood—“this life, these kids, this house, this husband, and I love him, I swear I do, but most days the only thing that’s giving me any pleasure, the only thing I’m looking forward to at all is my goddamn glass of wine. That’s a problem, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and started reflexively straightening the stack of catalogs on the counter. Pottery Barn. J.Crew. L.L.Bean. Lands’ End. Ballard Designs. Garnet Hill. Saks. Nordstrom. Restoration Hardware. Sundance. All the same ones I got and kept in a basket in the powder room, to leaf through late at night. If Janet was counting the hours until her five o’clock drink, I was in way worse shape than she was. I wasn’t waiting until five anymore. Or even noon. My days began with pills—I would wake up sad and shaky and overwhelmed and I’d need a little pop of something just to get out of bed—and I kept a steady dose of opiates in my bloodstream all day long. More and more, my mind returned to that quiz in the doctor’s office, and I found myself wondering: What would happen if I tried to cut back and I couldn’t?
You can stop, my mind said soothingly. But you don’t have to. Not right now. Which sounded good . . . except what if I couldn’t? What if I was really and truly addicted, just like the actresses in the tabloids, or the homeless people I avoided while they begged at the intersections and on the sidewalks of Center City? What if that was me? Late at night, with Dave snoring away and Ellie and my mother asleep down the hall, I’d lie awake, the bitterness of the pills still on my tongue and my laptop making the tops of my thighs sweat, Googling rehabs, reading articles about drugs and alcohol, taking quizzes and reading blogs and newspaper stories about mommies who drank and celebrities who’d ended up addicted to painkillers or Xanax. With my Oxy or Percocet still pulsing in my head, I would point and click my way down the tunnel as midnight slipped into the small hours of the morning.
“I think you’re a great mother,” I told Janet. “You’re doing an amazing job. And you know this isn’t going to last. You’ll blink and they’ll be in college.”
“College,” she repeated. She lifted her glass and seemed surprised to find it almost empty. “I was going to have this big life. Barry and I were supposed to have adventures. I was going to be a prosecutor, then a judge, and then maybe I’d teach law. I used to dream about that. And now . . .” Her lips curled, her face twisting into an expression of deep disgust. “Allison, I’m a housewife. When I go online, I’m researching cereal coupons, or trying to figure out if my kid’s ADHD medicine is going to interact with his asthma stuff. The last thing I read for pleasure was Wonder, which was great but was written for ten-year-olds, and the only reason I even read that was because it was lying around the living room because Maya had to read it for school. I have all these clothes . . .”
As discreetly as I could, I snuck a look at the clock on my phone, wondering if my mail had been delivered yet and if the pills I’d ordered from Penny Lane had arrived. They came in regular Express Mail envelopes, but I couldn’t risk Dave’s intercepting one of them. I didn’t want the first real conversation we had in forever to be about why I was illegally purchasing prescription medication on the Internet.