Free The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

quickly stepping aside so that the next woman could have a look at all that lay ahead.

Chapter THREE
     
    S O HERE IT WAS, what lay ahead. When school let out every afternoon, the landscape was a mosaic of women and children. It didn’t matter where you lived—whether you led a vertical life in the city or a spread-out, horizontal one anywhere else across the broad surface of the country—at three o’clock, the outdoor world was at its highest pitch of manlessness. As the double doors of schools swung wide, the children were released back to you, and just for a second it felt as though the separation had been extended and arduous, instead of having been just seven hours long and involving the loose and easy peregrinations of mothers.
    Amy Lamb, waiting for Mason to appear, would have liked nothing more than to grab him hard, roughly hug him, then buy him some ice cream or roasted nuts on the street and walk home side by side. Often, when they walked together, he would first speak nearly in monosyllables, but then the snack would open him up as if it contained truth serum, and he would tell her pieces of information from his day.
    “Mr. Bregman showed us a nebula.”
    “Was it nebulous?” she asked.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. A joke.”
    She felt peaceful on these walks home from school. Back in the apartment, Mason would noodle around with his homework, then he would IM his friends, and finally he would wander into the kitchen, where Amy might be doing something at the counter, and invite her to play cards. Always she accepted, and they sat at the table with the cards making little licking sounds on the surface as they were slapped down, and he might give her more details about the awesomeness of Mr. Bregman, who had told the boys that until recently, mankind in its hubris had thought it knew everything about the universe, but it turned out that what could be seen and understood of the universe made up only four percent. “The rest they call dark matter and dark energy but they don’t even know what it is. It’s unknown. They only know about four percent. It makes you think,” Mason had said, turning over his top card.
    But today they could not walk home together and could not sit at the table playing cards and talking about school and about the mysterious deep, partly open bag that was the universe. Today, like some women all around the city and the country, Amy would perform safety duty at the school, a responsibility that fell to her once a year; she had unknowingly signed on for it the moment she had given birth. No, she thought, she had signed on for it the moment when the bliss of full-bore unprotected sex had created a tumbleweed of cells that had rolled along, gathering volume and requiring, so many years later, that she shed her vanity and put on a bright orange woven plastic vest, drape a whistle around her neck, and grab hold of a walkie-talkie. Then she and her safety partner would set off into the world.
    The bright chaos of the afternoon could be felt everywhere now. Children, giddy at being released for the day, jabbered and howled and did karate moves in the cool air. Amy Lamb, stepping out onto the sidewalk, felt that she might just as well have been wearing a clown nose and big floppy shoes, so touchingly absurd did she feel as she walked the beat. The school asked that two parents from different families show up each day to patrol the local streets. Then they would march side by side, knowing, in their hearts that beat beneath the weave, that ultimately they could not protect their children.
    “Dear parent of MASON LAMB-BUCKNER ,” a letter from the Auburn Day School had read, “you and your safety partner, parent of HOLDEN RAMSEY , should meet in front of the school at 3 PM on MONDAY .” The letter always used the word “parent,” as opposed to “mother,” and once in a while a father did come, and the other mothers tended to fuss over him, as though he needed special treatment for