Pennie wanted more, just as her mother had so long ago. Eileen hoped Pennie wouldn’t want to marry too young, and would give herself a chance for a real career and an exciting job before she settled down. Paul felt the same, and regularly told his daughter not to think about getting married until she was at least thirty, and to put off marriage and children for as long as she could. He always made marriage sound like a trap to be avoided. Pennie had gotten the message loud and clear. The underlying advice from both her parents was that trading career for family was not a good thing, a very bad idea, and an unwanted pregnancy would end her dreams forever. She hated the way they thought about it, and it was hard knowing that she was the cause of their disappointment, but she understood why. She had fully realized that their attitude, and their regret about the way their own marriage had started, was an antidote to love. Their relationship was solid but never tender, loving, or warm. She had seen some of her friends’ parents look at each other with love and deep appreciation, a kind of affection that had never existed in her home. She was sure her parents loved each other, but they weren’t in love, and she wondered if they ever had been. If so, it had not been in a long time. She couldn’t remember her parents ever seeming passionate about each other, or really happy. They had long since accepted the limitations of their relationship and didn’t expect more. They had settled for what they had. She wanted a great deal more than that from the man she loved.
Pennie thought that if she and Tim had been older, they might have had a solid basis for marriage one day. But that wouldn’t happen now. It was over, after three happy, loving years with him. She knew she had to give up that dream, but it was so hard to do. Breaking up with Tim was the first big loss of her life. The pain was almost physical. She felt sick for the first few days after they broke up. And even sicker the week after.
“Did he dump you?” her brother Mark asked her, with his usual eleven-year-old lack of tact, when he noticed that Tim wasn’t around. Normally he saw Tim with Pennie every day.
“Of course not, stupid. They’re going to get married after college, like Mom and Dad,” Seth answered for her. Pennie left the breakfast table, feeling violently sick. She didn’t have the heart to tell her brothers they had broken up, or even her friends just yet. It was too painful to explain, even if it was the right thing to do and made sense for both of them, and they had planned it for months. But that didn’t make it any easier.
She couldn’t wait to leave for her summer job at camp, just to get away from all of them. The twins were going to be at the same camp in Vermont, but in the boys’ division where she wouldn’t see them very often, and she’d be busy with the girls she was assigned. She’d be sleeping in a cabin with six or eight of them, and would be too busy to think. She couldn’t stand the look of sympathy in her mother’s eyes now. Eileen hated to see her daughter’s sadness, but there was nothing she could do about it. She knew it was part of growing up. Losing her first love was a rite of passage she would have to go through, just like Eileen had had to grow up at twenty-two, when she married Paul, and they had a baby five months later. She had told Pennie hundreds of times that she had been a colicky baby, and cried all the time, and Eileen did too. The early years of their marriage had been difficult, with too little money and responsibilities neither of them was ready for. She wanted Pennie to hear it so she wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Pennie had heard it all a thousand times from both of her parents.
* * *
—
Eileen had been wrestling with the idea of her fortieth birthday for months. It depressed her profoundly. Forty had always sounded old to her and now she was almost there. It was middle-aged. She was halfway through her life, and what had she accomplished? Nothing much. Raising kids seemed so insignificant compared to what she could have done. She might have been a senior editor by now, working with important authors in the literary world, contributing to their work. She enjoyed cooking and the casual dinners they gave for friends occasionally. But what was that? Being able to cook a decent meal? Friends often called for her recipes, but in her mind cooking didn’t take much skill. Paul loved what she cooked for them, although he was rarely home for dinner during the week. Part of his job was taking the important clients out for dinner, and wooing new ones. He regularly ate at some of the best restaurants in New York, and would get back to Greenwich on one of the last trains, or stay in a hotel in the city if it got too late. When their kids were busy, they went out for dinner on weekends, frequently with friends, which they both preferred. Alone, they often ran out of things to talk about halfway through the meal. After he’d told her about his latest accounts, and she’d filled him in on the kids’ activities or problems, there wasn’t much to say.
Eileen was already sad thinking about Pennie leaving for college in a year. Fortunately, the twins had another seven years at home. The time after that stretched ahead of her like a wasteland, with nothing to do. She’d been out of the workforce for too long to get a job now, and she had too little experience. She’d only worked briefly at twenty-two, and never since. She was practical, extremely well organized, and ran a smooth home, but none of that translated into a career at forty. She felt like a boring person, and when Paul had her join him for dinner with clients in the city, she felt over-the-hill, unattractive, and out of the loop. She tried to keep well informed, and read as much as she could when she had time, which wasn’t often with twin eleven-year-old boys. When she picked up a book to read the current bestselling novel at night in bed, she was usually sound asleep by the second page.
She had tried to explain how she felt to Jane Ridley, her closest friend, who told her she should have an affair. It would make her feel young again. Jane had had several, and insisted it had kept her marriage alive. She was two years older than Eileen and had no children. She played bridge a lot, and shopped. They had met on a charity committee and had known each other for years. Their lives were different so they didn’t see each other often, but they spoke on the phone. Jane was married to an older man who had children her age. He was generous with her.
“That’s a little radical, don’t you think?” Eileen answered with a rueful smile, about having an affair.
“Lots of women do it,” Jane said breezily, and Eileen laughed.
“What? The tennis instructor at the club, or the golf pro? That seems like such a cliché, it’s pathetic. It’s not for me.”
“Maybe, but it might be fun. Or you could get your eyes done, or your boobs lifted. If you’re feeling old, there are remedies for that.” Eileen didn’t want to ask her which options Jane had employed to feel younger. But she felt like a drudge compared to Jane and some of the other women they knew. Most of the women in Greenwich seemed to fall into two categories, either the boring, domestic women like Eileen, or the jazzier ones, getting plastic surgery and having affairs, which seemed depressing to her, and anything but satisfying.