Amanda Bright @ Home Read online

  “We could go next door for Mexican,” Bob shouted through cupped hands, above the laughter of a boisterous party of six that had joined them at the bar.

  Amanda recalled the sight of her stomach in a bathing suit. “No, let’s wait. I feel like having one of their salad platters.”

  Bob nodded as if he had heard her. By the time they were finally led to a table, they had worked their way through two glasses each of the house’s sour Chianti. The buzz saws and hammers that had set to work on Amanda’s brain after leaving Christine’s returned to punch through her skull.

  “You okay?” Bob asked as they sat down.

  “Just tired.”

  He grasped her hand across the table. “Well, this should cheer you up.”

  Amanda was eager to hear his news, of course, but five years of constant interruption from small children had taught them both to wait for the right moment to talk. It was not exactly the right moment now. The back of the restaurant was not much quieter than the bar. The small tables were jammed up against each other like domino tiles and shook unnervingly whenever the Connecticut Avenue subway rumbled below. It had been a long time, Amanda realized, since they could afford to eat somewhere quiet.

  “I just got word from Frank …” Bob began. He was cut off by the arrival of a waiter, who thrust between them two vinyl-bound menus the size of phone directories.

  “Vould you like to ’ear our speshools thiz ev’ning?”

  Bob glowered at the waiter, an affable if overworked-looking man wearing the red vest, black bow tie, and green trousers of a lawn jockey.

  “I think we know what we’re going to have,” Bob said, taking both menus in hand. “My wife will have the large Mediterranean salad, and I’ll have the mixed shish kabob platter, thank you.”

  Bob turned to Amanda. “Would you like anything more to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” she said curtly. “Water is fine.”

  “In that case I’ll have a beer.”

  The waiter took back the menus and left. Bob shot Amanda a quizzical look. Her eyes, which had awaited his news with such interest, were averted and annoyed.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? You seem—”

  “I’m not.” Amanda rubbed her temples. “It’s just, well, you didn’t have to be so rude to him. He was only doing his job.” What she was really trying to suppress was her irritation with Bob for ordering for her.

  “Rude? I wasn’t rude! He was rude, cutting me dead in the middle of a sentence and dropping a ten-pound menu in my face. Why don’t they ever teach these guys to wait for a break in the conversation? Why do they always have to barge in?”

  “That’s really—really—oh.” Amanda stared at him, offended. “I can’t believe you’d criticize someone who obviously works hard for a living, for, like, sub-minimum wage. Maybe if the job paid better … maybe if he didn’t come from a different culture …”

  “Amanda, please,” Bob said, taking her hand again. “Let’s not turn this into a lecture on the evils of Western privilege. You know me better than that, and I have very important news I want to tell you. Please?”

  Amanda removed her hand from his grasp. “All right.”

  Bob carried on, stammering a little before regaining his earlier enthusiasm. “It’s finally going to happen,” he said. “Frank”—Frank was Frank Sussman, Bob’s boss at the Justice department—“is ready to launch a serious investigation into Megabyte. Finally! It took some pressure from the Judiciary committee, but Frank now agrees that what Megabyte has been doing warrants DOJ action, maybe even an antitrust suit. But—wait for it—here’s the best part. Guess who’s going to be leading the investigation?”

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very serious.”

  This time they barely noticed when the waiter arrived with Bob’s beer and their plates of food, which he dealt to them like playing cards. Bob looked as happy as Amanda had ever seen him. No, that wasn’t quite it: he looked as if he had just received a hundred volts of electricity to his entire being, and there was so much energy coursing through him that he had to struggle to restrain even his smallest physical gestures, like raising his glass to his lips, lest he inadvertently knock out his teeth.

  “When does it start?”

  “Right away.”

  “Well—cheers, hon. You certainly deserve it.” She held up her water.

  “Cheers.”

  Amanda pushed some hummus onto a triangle of pita and ate in thoughtful silence. She was happy for him, thrilled in fact, really, but she felt a tugging inside her chest that compromised her sense of joy.

  She understood the magnitude of his triumph: Bob had spent the past two years tracking the unsavory business tactics of Megabyte, the largest computer software company on earth. His efforts had been received with almost total indifference by his superiors, many of them holdovers from the last Republican administration. Amanda herself had begun to doubt that Bob would ever turn up solid evidence. She certainly believed in the cause, at least, to the degree that she could comprehend it. Bob had once tried to explain the case to Amanda by sketching it on a paper napkin in this very restaurant. He used terms like bundling browsers and licensing source codes and application programming interfaces (“Those are called APIs,” Bob said helpfully), and drew ballpoint arrows shooting this way and that. None of it made much sense, except for Bob’s analogy that Megabyte was “the Standard Oil of our time,” with its owner, a former hippie named Mike Frith, standing in for the top-hat-and-striped-pants-wearing John D. Rockefeller. That Amanda got. What troubled her was that Bob’s sole witness and lone ally was an eccentric attorney from Silicon Valley named Sherwood J. Pressman.

  Sherwood J. Pressman (and he insisted on using the whole ridiculous name, right down to the middle initial) was a five-foot-three package of paranoia who represented a group of small computer companies, all of which blamed their failures to expand on Megabyte’s chokehold on the market. Pressman had written up his clients’ complaints in a document that read more like a potboiler novel than a legal brief. Somehow a copy had found its way to Bob’s desk. Bob was intrigued, if skeptical (“I find it hard to believe that even a guy like Mike Frith would say something as hokey as, ‘If you don’t do what we say, we’ll cut off your air supply,’” Bob had remarked as he read through the manuscript one evening in bed). Still, Bob contacted the companies involved and gradually became convinced that they had a case, although he told Amanda he would have come to the conclusion more quickly if it hadn’t been for the annoying Pressman. Pressman was obsessed with Megabyte and frequently called Bob in the middle of the night to describe the company’s latest wrongdoing. Amanda had learned to hand over the phone when it flashed Pressman’s number, too tired to express her exasperation that he had woken the baby—and her—for the fourth time in a week. That all of this had at last come to something—well, that was a surprise.

  Yet so was her reaction—here, now, watching him. Bob was waiting expectantly for her enthusiasm to catch up to his, but it couldn’t. She felt—what? What? She tried to fashion a smile.

  “What turned them?” Amanda asked suddenly. “Why now?”

  Bob finished chewing a mouthful of meat and took a sip of his beer. “A few things, I think,” he said, swallowing. “First, as you know, we’ve now got Frank. He’s a lot more interested in these issues than Chuck Mendelson ever was.” Chuck Mendelson was Bob’s last boss. “Second, Frank’s pissed that Megabyte just announced it’s going to launch its new software, MB-98, with all these bells and whistles that violate pretty much every promise the company has ever made to us. Third, we’ve got the attorney general from Texas on our side. There are a couple of big high-tech companies in his state, and they’re furious with Megabyte. They’re willing to go on the record, which has been a problem because everyone is so frightened of standing up to Mike Frith. And if the big guys go on the re
cord, we can get the little guys to go along, too. They’re already organizing themselves.”

  He shook his head at the wonder of it all. “Basically, we’ve got live bodies now instead of just weird Sherwood J. Pressman. And Frank’s really pumped. He’s going to hold a press conference tomorrow.”

  “That is amazing.”

  Amanda watched Bob spear his last bit of meat. He seemed so alive and crackling with purpose that she felt … envious. Yes. Envious. When was the last time she had felt so alive and crackling herself? Amanda tried to banish her envy—she thought it unworthy—but she could not banish the feeling that Bob’s advancement reflected some failure on her part to advance in equal measure. He was not just pulling ahead of his colleagues but soaring past her, and Amanda found herself unconsciously gripping the edge of the table, bracing herself against being buffeted by the force of his slipstream.

  “The downside,” Bob continued, “is that this is all going to fall heavily upon you. You’re not going to see much of me over the next few weeks—except on television. I’ll be the shadowy guy standing behind Frank Sussman.”

  “That’s okay.” Amanda hoped she sounded like she meant it.

  He took her hand again and squeezed it. “How was your day, by the way?”

  Amanda flushed. What would Bob say about the pool, the club, the wine?

  “Oh, you know,” she murmured. “The usual.”

  Chapter Three

  AMANDA STOOD IN the entry hall of her children’s school, awaiting noon dismissal. She had been coming to this same spot twice a day for two years, to pick up Sophie at twelve and then again to get Ben at three. Amanda had a lot of errands to run this afternoon and would have liked to fetch Ben early to spare herself a second trip, but the school was as strict about dismissal as it was about everything else. Amanda had already been issued one warning about pulling Ben from his nursery class “unnecessarily.”

  The Center for Early Childhood, as the school was called, was housed in a converted mansion along one of the oldest streets in Cleveland Park, the fashionable neighborhood to the north of Amanda’s. Built at the turn of the twentieth century by a sugar tycoon with political aspirations, little remained of the mansion’s historical grandeur except for the white-columned veranda and elaborately worked lunette above the main entrance. Whatever elegant paths and gardens might once have constituted the front yard had been pulled up to accommodate a cement driveway and ramps for the handicapped; its brick facade was stained by the generations of pigeons that had congregated on an ugly fire escape tacked to one side. All the wood trim had been poorly patched and painted over the years, lending the whole house a shabby, institutional air. This shabby, institutional air, however, was what contributed to the school’s chic among the Washington elite. As the center reminded parents in its annual fund-raising letter, it ranked among the top preschools in the nation. It prided itself on accepting only the most academically gifted students. That these students were chosen almost without exception from Washington’s most gilded and prominent families was presumably a coincidence.

  Amanda and Bob were neither gilded nor prominent, but they had something nearly as good: a connection. The director of the center, a woman named Sheila Phelps, was an old friend of Amanda’s mother from their feminist marching days. Phelps agreed to enroll Ben and Sophie as financial-assistance students because, as she put it bluntly to Amanda, “If it hadn’t been for your mother, I’d still be a housewife.”

  The few other financial-assistance students came from the city’s poorest neighborhoods and were accepted, Amanda suspected, to lessen the incongruity between the school’s racially sensitive curriculum and its otherwise all-white classrooms. Yet as generous as Phelps’s aid to Ben and Sophie was, it caused Amanda great discomfort. None of the other parents was aware of the financial arrangement—Phelps naturally wanted it kept quiet—but it was glaringly obvious that Sophie and Ben had not been admitted because of their parents’ money or reputation. That left only one possibility, one that even Amanda herself would admit was unlikely: that her children were exceptionally bright.

  Phelps had been blunt on this point, too, at least as it related to Ben (school policy allowed Sophie, as the younger sibling, to be enrolled automatically, regardless of her abilities). “Under normal circumstances, you understand,” Phelps had said, “we could not accept a student like Ben.”

  Bob and Amanda had been sitting nervously in Phelps’s office, staring into a wall of certificates and awards, as Phelps went over the terms of Ben’s admission. She indicated a manila file at her elbow, labeled with Ben’s name. “Here,” she said, shoving the file across the desk. “Why don’t you just take a look.”

  Inside was the seven-page application form Amanda had filled out the previous winter. It had asked her to list, among other things, “references” for her then three-year-old, as well as to describe his “academic strengths.” Amanda prided herself on being an easygoing mother and had always refused to rise to the bait whenever other mothers boasted that their toddlers were swimming or reading or speaking fluent French. But then, she had never before had to confront the Private School Application. What was she to write? “Can peel own bananas. Makes choo-choo noises. Barks at passing dogs.”

  “You’ll see the results of Ben’s interview just below that,” Phelps directed.

  Ah yes, the “play interview.” Amanda already knew it had not gone well. For twenty minutes, Ben had hunched shyly in his chair opposite the school’s psychologist and resisted instructions to stack plastic cubes and draw shapes in crayon. His poor performance was minutely recorded in two columns on a pink sheet, with a number scale that graded him on everything from eye contact to “motor patterns.” Amanda skimmed to the end, where the psychologist’s felt-tipped scrawl concluded that Ben suffered from “acute social anxiety” and possessed “poor scissor skills.” Before he could be admitted to the center, Phelps informed them, Ben would have to seek occupational therapy for his scissoring. The social anxiety, Phelps said, was something the school could take care of itself.

  Amanda did not end up enrolling Ben in occupational therapy—occupational therapy for scissoring cost eighty dollars per hour. Instead she spent a few minutes with him each day over the summer cutting pictures from magazines. Ben mangled every bit of paper handed to him and, what was worse, seemed to delight in mangling the paper. “Look,” he would say proudly, holding up a face he had cut in half. Amanda would lose her patience, and Ben would burst into tears. She left off the exercises a few weeks into Ben’s first term and did not hear anything more from the school about his scissoring. By then there were other problems. The teacher called to say that Ben had pushed a child during recess. Next he was rolling balls of plasticine into missiles and launching them at the blackboard. He barged into lines. He would not join in singing during “circle time.”

  Ben’s behavior inflamed the suspicion with which the other parents viewed Amanda. Except for Christine, whose son formed a fierce and immediate friendship with Ben, most parents resisted having their children play with him. Amanda launched a lobbying effort on Ben’s behalf. She volunteered at every school event and gamely manned a face-painting booth at the PTA winter carnival. The mothers she met were unfailingly friendly. They would exchange anecdotes about child rearing. But they would not take the further step of arranging a play date or suggesting a get-together for coffee. Amanda had attempted that step many times, only to be deftly rebuffed. (“I’d love to but with the kids’ soccer schedule everything is crazy right now. Maybe in a month or so …”) Amanda would wish, yet again, to pull her children from the school and send them somewhere else. But as Bob would patiently remind her, they could not actually afford a cheaper education for their children.

  “He’s too young for public school, and we’re not eligible for aid at another school, so we’re stuck,” Bob would say. “Look, I don’t like our kids knowing only a bunch of Austens and Courtneys and Olivias, either. But what else are we going to d
o?”

  And Ben had to go somewhere: Amanda did not need a professional to point out that her son was developing “issues.” Bob scoffed at the psychologist’s assessment of Ben and took his teacher’s reports lightly. “I was always getting into trouble at his age, and I turned out okay. We’ll speak to him about it, but don’t worry. He’ll be fine. Really.” And yet Amanda didn’t know if Ben would be fine, really. Those were the same words Bob and others had used to comfort her through the first two years of Ben’s life, back when she was working full time. Amanda did not like to recall those days when she used to sit in her cubicle at the National Endowment for the Arts, crafting press releases for events that would not get covered, while her toddler molded clay into dinosaur families and wondered where his mommy had gone.

  She and Bob would drop off Ben every morning at seven-thirty, at a day-care center in a local church basement. She chose this center because of the women who worked there, silvery-haired church matrons whose voices never lost their soothing lilt as they pried Ben’s fingernails from her calves. Come let’s see what’s in the dress-up box. Look at the beautiful pictures Josh is making with finger paint. Amanda could hear Ben’s cries from the parking lot. Bob, guiding her by the elbow, implored her not to go back. “It will just make it worse—he’ll be okay in a few minutes.” But when the scenes didn’t improve, Amanda, at the church ladies’ insistence, ceased to accompany Ben inside. Bob took him in while she waited in the car with the windows rolled up and the radio switched on. Bob would come sprinting back, leap into the driver’s seat, and pull away before fastening his seat belt. “He’s getting much better,” he would say, without looking at her.