The only way she knows she’s happy is when other people tell her. It always comes as a surprise. “I look happy? I’m glad,” followed by a startled smile.
Claire is scared of getting older and of dying young. She’s scared that she’s not enough for Peter and that she’s too much for him. She’s scared that infidelity wipes out fidelity the way bad currency wipes out the good, fast-flooding the carefully cultivated marketplace of their home and of their lives.
She tries to content herself with the pleasures of a piece of cake, an interesting article from The New Yorker (which her husband no longer reads) and clean, creatively designed rooms, but she can’t do it anymore. When her sons and her husband are out for the evening she feels like she’s babysitting herself and wishes somebody would pay her for it, the way she used to get paid at 15, when sitting in a quiet house and keeping it that way was considered a job.
She suspects that her husband resents her all-embracing and unconditional affection as much as she resents his apparent inattention. Claire’s preoccupation with detail and the boredom of her evenly distributed and excessive reassurance and comforts is not enough to hold Peter’s imagination. She despises herself for not being able to make her husband lost in her and she despises herself for trying. She longs for independence, but what, exactly, would it be independence from?
She hated their first house. A one-level ranch, a brick and clapboard construction on a small irregular patch of land, not even a quarter acre but this was way before they thought of property in such terms. They were happy to play house anywhere, to be relieved of the anxiety caused by the baby crying, or Peter returning home at dawn or her own weeping at midnight. His early writing years, like all pre-tenure lives, was tough and relentless. He loved it. He thrived on the sharp, metallic taste of impending doom. She counted the days and sometimes, towards the end, the hours until it would be over: the dissertation, the job search, the reappointments, book contracts, tenure, more book contracts, hints at better jobs, more important books, important promotions.
Nobody told her it would be easy, but that didn’t mean she was prepared for how hard it was. It was during those years she became hooked on the snooze button. Peter would work until dawn and she’d hit the snooze button to get ten more minutes — but she’d keep hitting it for an hour, like it was the handle of a slot machine and she might win back in a lump sum all the time she’d lost. He’d come to be bed on early nights at two or three and she’d wait up for him at first, but after the first baby this didn’t work anymore and she’d stay asleep.
Or pretend to sleep. How many nights has she made herself rigid and unmoving in order to fake sleep?
Even though they were born exactly two months apart, Claire knows she and Peter are wildly different ages now, that she is a middle-aged woman and he’s a relatively young man, that graduate students 25 years his junior would date him if they ever split up. Whereas her only suitors, she tells herself, would be widowers or weirdos, men who for some reason were left on their own, men looking for a nurse with a purse to keep them comfortable up until the day they died.
Life with Peter wasn’t so bad — not if she looked at it that way.
She thought and still mostly thinks of her life as an extended happy ending, except it keeps going on and she has to prevent the plot from ever changing.
Each year that goes by is another award ribbon in her glass case, another notch in her belt, or another nail in her coffin, depending on how you look at it. How could anything change after this long?
Does she want it to change?
