Free Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner Page A

and Pilates in the new millennium. She did Atkins, and South Beach, and Weight Watchers, and Weight Watchers online. She kept those twenty pounds off, and made other improvements. Any woman would have if she’d seen herself in the Times , in a picture snapped at a press conference, hair flying around her head, mouth hanging open and double chins on full display. Now Sylvie’s hair was chemically straightened every three months and dyed every two. She’d had a breast reduction and a tummy tuck when she was thirty-five, and liposuction done on her chin and cheeks ten years after that. She wasn’t thin—at least, not the bone-thinness of some of the other ladies-who-lunched and politicians’ wives she’d met, women who looked, in real life, barely more substantial than the cardboard cutouts of the president that people posed with while waiting in line for the Washington Monument—but she was thin enough so that she didn’t cringe every time she saw a picture of herself.
    Of course, not everyone approved of her choices. “You look so ordinary,” Ceil once cried, years ago, after they’d split a bottle of wine at lunch. Ceil had apologized, thinking that she’d insulted her friend, but secretly, Sylvie had been pleased. Ordinary was good. Ordinary meant that no one would notice you, or post your picture, or make fun. Ordinary meant that they’d leave her alone, her and her daughters, and that was all the blessing Sylvie could wish.
    Sylvie’s mother was even less impressed with her daughter’s efforts. “What happened to you?” she’d ask, staring at her, perplexed, as if she could no longer recognize her own daughter. Sylvie remembered her mother’s reaction the first time she’d brought Richard home, three months after Leonard King’s funeral. Her mother had studied Sylvie’s husband-to-be from across the table, watching as he struggled to eat her brisket, which had been roasted until each slice had the consistency of a scab. “He’s going places,” Selma had said, tapping one knobby finger against her red lips, while Sylvie washed the dishes and Richard and Dave watched football in the living room. “But I think he’s the kind of man who just needs a woman along for the ride.” Sylvie hadn’t answered. She knew the truth was that Richard didn’t just need her along for the ride, he needed her help, her advice, her behind-the-scenes counsel … and, unlike her mother, she’d never craved the spotlight. She didn’t mind invisibility or a permanent spot in the passenger’s seat.
    She also hated being a lawyer. She’d survived law school, where you could read about the great cases and argue about procedure and precedent and justice, but being a lawyer, especially in trusts and estates, wasn’t about justice; it was about moving mountains of paper from one side of the desk to the other. When Diana was born Sylvie had left her firm and grabbed hold of new motherhood like a drowning woman clutching a piece of driftwood. Twelve weeks had stretched into six months, then a year, then three, then four, and when Diana was five she’d gotten pregnant again, not entirely accidentally, although Richard thought otherwise.
    Diana had been a handful—headstrong and bossy, walking at nine months and uttering her first word—“more!”—at ten. Then, when Lizzie came along, after a difficult pregnancy and an emergency C-section, she was underweight and wrinkled, like a tiny and miserable old man in the pink dresses Selma brought to the hospital. Lizzie was also illness-prone, allergic to everything but the air and sometimes, Sylvie suspected, that, too. Between the two girls—Diana with her demands and her schedule and her Gifted and Talented enrichment classes, Lizzie with her acid reflux and her asthma—not even Selma expected Sylvie to go back to work. There were doctors’ appointments to make and keep, games and practice to organize and witness, play groups to attend and homework to check and at least