Free The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer Page A

actually leaving the floor of the stock market before the end of the day. Or else the one father in the grade who didn’t work might show up. His name was Len Goodling, and he could sometimes be seen standing thoughtfully for a moment during the day in front of the window at Camarata & Bello, looking in at the prepared salads as if they were porn. His wife worked in advertising, and she almost never came to the school; she was as invisible as many of the fathers.
    “If we were a decade younger,” Roberta Sokolov had said recently, “we’d have husbands who did safety walk.”
    It was true that their husbands, while mostly decent sweetheart-men who had changed many diapers, were not equal partners in child-raising or homemaking. It wasn’t just that they held down full-time jobs; they had given so little thought to this world that they would be stumped. They could not “buy curtain rings,” Karen Yip had once said. They could also not, someone else had also insisted, purchase a class present for their child’s teacher. If given that task, they would only bring her something inadequate: a Whitman’s sampler from a drugstore, with all the different types of chocolate delineated on the inside of the cover of the box. When they were left in charge of a child for the day, they invariably did something wrong. How many times, someone remarked, had you seen a man pushing a stroller, and then you looked down and noticed that the baby was wearing only one sock. “Wait up! Wait up!” a female passerby would call from farther back down the street, running toward the man and child with the teeny rogue sock in hand.
    But such characterizations weren’t accurate, someone else said. And even if they were, the deficits weren’t fatal. It wasn’t as if these men would take their children out naked in winter and drop them in the woods. It wasn’t as if they would starve them. But the husbands they lived with were part past, part future. They were not the future itself. They were not, apparently, the fruits of feminism, offered up to the daughters of its founders as a perfect gift.
    Change always required slightly longer than a generation. Amy and her friends took note of the occasional younger men, the ones around age thirty, who stayed home while their wives worked. God, they looked so different from the forty-year-old husbands. Those younger men had more youthful, narrow bodies, or was it just that, by virtue of not working, they had been freed of the monkey-wear that corporations required? The younger husbands wore T-shirts advertising the rock bands and lobster shacks of their youth. They had goatees and stylish geometric spectacles. They held their babies against themselves in fabric slings. Their wives, slightly shaky but calm, eased back to work, knowing that the babies would be at home with someone who loved them as much as they did.
    Men and women were still both evolving; the younger men proved it because they could handle all of this, and the younger women proved it because they were comfortable letting the men handle it. Once in a while you would find a forty-year-old husband like Len Goodling, but his appearance at the school in the afternoon was confusing; it threw off theories about how the world worked. You were initially pleased by him, but then after a short while you felt slightly annoyed. He seemed like a loiterer here in the world that the women had formed for themselves.
    Today Amy had made arrangements for Mason to go home with Karen Yip’s twins, Caleb and Jonno, and so here she was now in the orange vest. Penny Ramsey, who had arrived at the school a few minutes late, appeared beside her, looking flushed. Snapping shut the clasps of her own vest, she said, “Sorry. Back-to-back meetings.”
    “No problem,” Amy replied benignly.
    Together, now, the two women walked in synchrony, observing a kind of silence that had less to do with a seriousness of purpose than a low-level social awkwardness. Penny