Free The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer Page B

Ramsey, the director of the Museum of Urban Vision, was likely still thinking about her back-to-back meetings, Amy thought. The museum, which occupied a townhouse down in Chelsea, was small and underfunded, and while most of the mothers in the grade agreed it was a very worthy place, whenever they went to a museum it was usually the Met or the Modern or the chalk-white helix of the Guggenheim instead of the small Museum of Urban Vision, with its modest, tender reminders of lost New York.
    Sometimes the museum displayed photographs, other times artifacts from the tenements of the Lower East Side or even menus from turn-of-the-century restaurants that featured prices that seemed to have been made up by children. Ninety-five cents for a steak dinner! Twenty cents for a side of parsley potatoes! What world was that? Vanished, snuffed out, gone. The boys from Auburn Day had been invited to the museum last spring in order to trudge through the galleries, shepherded by Penny Ramsey herself. During their visit, they had looked at old, preserved photos of poor children playing stickball on the streets of the city, circa 1900. Dead, all dead, thought Amy, who had been a class parent that day, as she peered at images of those hungry, scuffed little mortal boys banging their sticks together. The Auburn Day boys, well-fed and clean and forced to gorge on undiluted history, had let their eyes roll up into their heads as they clomped along the groaning floorboards, but the director hadn’t seemed to mind their indifference. She was gracious and good-natured and unflagging, both in her own museum and out in the world. Her picture and her husband’s appeared on the social-events pages of the newspaper once in a while: Penny Ramsey shining with emollient and sequin, Greg Ramsey thick and bland in tuxedo.
    Now, on safety walk, Penny, perfectly formed and small, wore her golden hair upswept and pulled into a vortex in the back; it was as though, Amy thought, all her secrets could be located somewhere deep inside that vortex, including what it was that allowed her to run a museum and be a patient, hands-on mother to three children and a wife to her demanding, entitled husband and yet still show up here nearly on time for safety walk. She was lovely without being a narcissist. She held an important job that she valued and that she hadn’t traded in for full-time motherhood or even for a less-challenging, diminished version of itself. She hadn’t been entirely swayed either by domesticity or by ambition but had managed to calibrate and temper both desires.
    Where most of the mothers in the grade felt they had had to give up so much, Penny Ramsey seemed to have given up nothing. As the story went, she had briefly gone on leave from her job when her children were young, but had always held fast to her place in the world. She was said to be an exceptionally loving mother too, appearing at her children’s concerts and soccer games and throwing her arms around them afterward, crying “Yay!” Penny hadn’t gradually let go of the museum or, like the other women, the law firm or the film production company or the statistical analysis job or the puppet theater or even, in the case of Laurie Livers, a mother in the grade whom they knew slightly, the major publishing house where she had once been editor in chief.
    How did you manage to figure everything out? Amy wanted to ask Penny as they walked along the street. This was the first time over all these years that they had ever been alone together. Now was the chance to say: I think you are some kind of unusual creature; I think you are magic. Something was supposed to give, Amy thought. It almost always did.
    The fall afternoon was beautiful and chilled like a bottle that had been put in the freezer briefly, then removed. With this day as a surface, they might even have enjoyed safety walk, but Amy was too self-conscious. She cast sidelong looks at Penny, whose face was delicate, indisputably