Amanda Bright @ Home

by Danielle Crittenden

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

With a college degree from an elite university, a top-level job at the NEA, a loving and successful husband, and two adorable children, Amanda Bright is ready to conquer the world. But when she decides to leave her career to be a stay-at-home mom, Amanda finds that her college degree, her professional wardrobe, and glamorous friends and connections are no preparation for her new life.

Gone are the days of meetings and power lunches; Amanda's days are now filled with changing diapers, mopping up spills, and singing "The Itsy, Bitsy Spider" over and over.

While everyone else around her is on the fast track, it's getting harder for Amanda to even remember-or appreciate-why she left work in the first place. Mothers everywhere will laugh and cry along with Amanda as she experiences the daily trials of adjusting to this new life and discovers that success isn't always measured in the workplace.

A Blackstone Audio production.

Release date: February 28, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 346

Sample

Chapter One

IT HAPPENED every time Amanda came home: she felt asphyxiated by her small house. She stood for a moment in the front hall, her arms full of grocery bags, pushed from behind by two small children and thwarted from moving forward by a minefield of rubber boots, stuffed animals, and scattered blocks.

“Ugh! Kids! Why do you leave these things right here where Mommy can trip?” Amanda dropped the bags on the floor and turned sideways to allow the children to burst past. “Just go—go upstairs, do something, watch a video, I don’t care.”

Amanda bent down and swept aside the offending objects. She did not glance into the living room, knowing it to be in even worse condition than the hall. She would get to it later, after this—but when? And where would it all go? The children’s shelves were already full. The area beneath Sophie’s bed looked as if it had been attacked by Suicide Bomber Ken: plastic body parts, shoes, purses, and broken pieces of doll furniture were strewn everywhere. Amanda knew from experience that to sort toys consumed as many trash bags as it did hours, and still you were left with uncategorizable little piles of childhood detritus—goggly-eyed fast-food figures, tiny cars, baseball cards, rubber snakes—objects that you couldn’t throw away, but you didn’t know where to put exactly, either. Four years spent earning a bachelor’s degree had not prepared her for a career as a domestic curator.

“And don’t make any more mess!” she called up the stairs, to no reply.

It took two more trips to the car to bring in all the grocery bags. Amanda stacked them wherever she could find room in the kitchen: on the narrow counters, the stove, the breakfast table, the floor.

The kitchen, like the rest of the house, remained in what the real estate agent had described as its “original condition.”

Amanda and Bob had bought the house during the Washington real estate slump of the mid-1990s. The “three-bedroom, Old World charmer/lots of detail” turned out to be a typical Woodley Park semidetached brick job from the 1920s crammed up alongside another semidetached brick job from the 1920s. There wasn’t much to recommend it except that it was not—repeat not—a tract house in the suburbs. Never mind that if she and Bob were different sorts of people they could have afforded a spanking-new, Palladian-windowed, four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath “Manor Home” in a development named Badger Run Estates. They had looked at such a place precisely once during their transition from apartment-dwelling, one-child family to house-dwelling, two-child family, and had driven away so quickly that their car left tire tracks in the freshly planted sod.

“I don’t want to spend my life commuting,” Bob muttered as they sat waiting for the light to change at a six-lane intersection near a strip mall where you could buy, right away, with no money down, a reclining mattress.

“I don’t want to be more than two blocks away from a good cup of coffee,” Amanda replied, and that was all they said for the next forty-five minutes until the bridge that would take them back over the Potomac hoved into view.

By comparison, the Woodley Park house had seemed charming: the plaster moldings, the slanting walls, the cubbyhole kitchen, the urban backyard of flagstone, bushes, and gap-toothed fences. “Eventually you might want to push out the back here and create a sunny breakfast room overlooking the garden,” the agent said airily as Amanda wondered whether they could afford to pull up the scuffed linoleum.

That was before Amanda knew Christine Saunders and her custom-built mock Georgian on its two-acre ravine lot, with its “media room,” “chef’s kitchen,” and “in-law/au pair suite” in which Christine stored her holiday decorations. Christine lived in the suburbs—but not the suburbs that advertised in weekend supplements. Her neighbors were artfully hidden behind the glades of an adjoining golf course. Inside her house everything vanished as well: children, toys, noise, even Christine’s husband, who kept an office somewhere in the vast basement. The few times Amanda had met him were as he emerged, blinking like a ferret, to ask if anyone had seen his car keys.

Amanda no longer felt any of the defiant pride she had once taken in the clutter of her own house, the clutter that announced, I am not a homemaker. I am “at home” to care for my children—not to “make a home.” One day I will be returning to the office, where I belong. Until then we can get by with the pressboard bookshelves from college and the pullout loveseat we bought when we moved in together, and my grandmother’s lamp, and the milk crates we thought made creative record holders. As for the toys everywhere, they just show what affectionate, nonauthoritarian parents we are. It was the same pride Amanda had once taken in driving an old Volvo wagon instead of the suburbanite’s vehicle of choice, the minivan.

Now, as Amanda stared into the overcrowded racks of her twenty-year-old refrigerator, wondering where the new gallon of milk would fit, she felt a nasty pressure building inside her head. She had spent most of the day by the swimming pool at Christine’s club. It was the first Tuesday after Memorial Day, and the children had been given one of those mysterious holidays from school (“Teacher Resource/Development—no classes” according to the soggy flyer retrieved from Ben’s knapsack). She had stood all morning, knee deep in the kiddie pool, trying to look dignified as Ben spat arcs of water and Sophie screamed in terror at the tiny ripples lapping at her shins. As usual, Amanda and her children were the only ones creating a spectacle. The other mothers rested upon their chaise longues as still and majestic as the gilded figures on Egyptian sarcophagi.

At lunchtime Christine commanded her nanny to take the children to the clubhouse. Amanda joined Christine by the adult pool, where she eagerly accepted a glass of white wine. (Christine was a firm believer in “maternal restoratives,” and Amanda was pleased to find that the wine worked upon her like a mild sedative.)

“They can bring us a sandwich here if you like,” Christine said, shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Thanks—I’m not hungry yet.”

“Me neither.”

Christine resumed her talmudic studying of the latest issue of W; Amanda closed her eyes, lulled by the distant hum of a lawn mower perfecting the tenth green in the valley below.

“Aren’t you loving this weather?” a voice called out.

Amanda turned and squinted. A tall woman in a black string bikini was passing by their little encampment of bags and towels. The bikini set off, like jeweler’s velvet, the glistening facets of the woman’s figure. Amanda sucked in her stomach. Her own practical one-piece was faded and stretched after many summers of propelling toddlers through the shallow end of her public pool.

“Fabulous,” Christine replied.

The woman drifted away.

“She looks too good for fifty,” Christine commented.

“Her?” Amanda sat up to take a second look at the disappearing form of the woman.

“No—her.” Christine pointed to a photograph of an aging starlet in the magazine, hunched catlike on a bed and dressed in a plunging leopard-print bodysuit. “It’s either surgery or air-brushing. What do you think?”

“I can’t tell.”

“I’d say both.”

Amanda took another gulp of wine and settled back into the cushion but it was no use; she still felt self-conscious. She picked up the novel she had brought along, an experimental work by an expatriate Chinese woman—highly praised by the Times—but she could not concentrate. She could only think about how the white dimpled skin of her thighs resembled raw chicken.

“You want a swim?” Christine asked, rising. “I’m burning up.”

“You go. I’m fine.”

Amanda watched Christine weave her way through the prone bodies, marveling at her sense of ease. Christine had been a lawyer in an earlier life, specializing in intellectual property, “before it was fashionable,” as she put it. Bob told Amanda that his colleagues at the Department of Justice still cited an article Christine had written for the Chicago Law Review. Yet in the year since the two women had met, at a play date demanded by their sons, Amanda had never once heard Christine express doubt about the surrender of her career. The only time Christine ever made reference to it was to remark how poorly her job had prepared her for motherhood: “It’s not like knowing the doctrine of contributory infringement helps me get Vaseline out of Victoria’s hair.”

It was not an ease Amanda could share. All her life Amanda had felt herself on a steady trajectory toward some professional goal. The goal wasn’t always visible, but she knew it was there. It was why she had studied calculus and biology. It was why she had made herself ill with worry after a poor exam. It was why she and Bob had spent the past ten years paying off her student loans rather than saving for a bigger house. (Her mother had been so proud: a daughter at Brown!) And it was why, at age thirty-five, Amanda could not lie beside a pool on a weekday afternoon without feeling restless.

What of these other women? Amanda cast her eyes over their gleaming haunches. They reminded her of prized thorough-breds, retired from the track, content in their new vocation as broodmares. When they were not grazing by the pool, they were wandering serenely over the landscaped grounds, hair glinting in the sunlight, a genetically perfect clone or two trotting along at their heels. Personal trainers kept their bodies buffed and sculpted purely for aesthetic pleasure, not because the women had any need to exert themselves physically. Where would they exert themselves if they could? Out here in the suburb of Potomac there were not even sidewalks. When a woman was not at the club, she was chauffeuring her kids, flexing, at most, her right foot upon a gas pedal.

Christine reappeared, dipped and glistening.

Amanda attempted the first page of her book. In the tiny village in Szechwan province where I was born, there were no dreams. My childhood was dreamless. This is the first thing you must understand about me.

A burst of howls announced the return of her children.

Good God, it was nearly six. She had to get dinner started. The broiler chicken she had scooped up on the way home suddenly seemed ambitious. Maybe they should just order takeout—although it would be the second time this week. How would she justify it to Bob? Sorry, but I spent all day drinking at the club and didn’t have time to make dinner.

Her head pounding, Amanda looked through the cupboards for something that would be easy to prepare. Pasta. Canned tomatoes. They had been eating a lot of that lately. She opened the fridge again. Despite the fresh infusion from the supermarket, there was still little that would constitute dinner for two adults: peanut butter, bread, yogurt, juice boxes, eggs, the congealed remains of last night’s cheese pizza. Amanda searched through the fridge drawers but came up with only a head of Boston lettuce, some apples, a bag of carrots, and an unripe avocado. Her elbow knocked over a full container of grated Parmesan, coating everything in the fridge with white powder, like a snow globe.

“Damn!”

“Uh-oh, Mommy use bad word.” Sophie wandered into the kitchen stark naked, trailing one of Amanda’s scarves.

“Sophie,” Amanda said tensely, “why did you take off your clothes?”

“I’m playing Indians with Ben.” The little girl shook her long brown curls. “I’m an Indian princeth. Will you tie this on me, Mommy?” She held up the scarf.

“No, Mommy will not tie this on you. It is Mommy’s good scarf,” said Amanda, snatching the scarf away. “And you are not Indians,” she added irritably. “You are Native Americans.”

Sophie burst into tears. Amanda sighed and wrapped the child in her arms.

“B-b-but I want to be an Ind-d-d … a-a-a Natif Merkan princeth.”

Amanda dabbed at her daughter’s tears with her sleeve and draped the scarf around the thin, shivering body, arranging it, as artfully as she could, to resemble a three-year-old’s conception of what Natif Merkan princesses would wear if Natif Merkan princesses shopped at Nordstrom’s.

“Just this once, Sophie. Next time use a towel.”

“Natif Merkans don’t wear towelth.”

“Well they don’t wear Mommy’s good scarves either, sweetie. Off you go.”

“I’m hungry,” Sophie replied.

The telephone rang. Upstairs, Ben began shrieking for his lost princess. Sophie did not budge.

“Go!” Amanda pleaded.

“I’m hungry!”

Amanda answered the phone. It was Bob.

“Hi, hon. What’s going on there? It sounds like you’re surrounded by Apaches.”

“Actually, I am.” Amanda pushed Sophie out the kitchen door and closed it, keeping it firmly shut with her foot. A second set of shrieks joined the first.

“Can you talk for a minute?”

“Uh, yeah—sure.”

“Do you think we could go out for dinner tonight? Alone? I’ve got some great news.”

Amanda brightened. “I’ll have to find a sitter—”

“Maybe Hannah could come over from down the block. We won’t stay out late.”

“Okay, I’ll call you back. But what’s the news?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

Amanda hung up and fetched the vacuum cleaner from the hall cupboard. She stepped over Sophie, who lay theatrically on the floor weeping, and ignored Ben’s howls. The only upside of vacuuming, she realized, was that it drowned out the screams.

Chapter Two

THE SHEIK KABOB was the restaurant they went to on the rare occasions they could afford to go out to dinner. It was only a few blocks away from their house, in a grotty stretch of old storefronts that had been converted into a grotty stretch of eateries, each one offering a fast-food version of some foreign specialty. Depending on your mood, you could sear your tongue on oily lamb vindaloo or order soggy pad thai while staring into murky aquariums of condemned fish. When Bob and Amanda had first moved into the neighborhood, they’d sampled every restaurant before deciding that the Sheik Kabob was the place in which they were least likely to contract food poisoning. A proud array of yellowed reviews taped to the front window declared it one of Washington’s top 100 cheap eats of 1988.

On a warm spring evening like this one, tables were set outside under a torn awning festooned with Christmas lights. By the time Amanda arrived, those tables were all taken, and the restaurant’s tiny front entry was jammed with customers waiting to be seated. Amanda politely elbowed her way through and found Bob standing at the bar among a line of young men assessing their nightly vodkas.

“How long is the wait?” she called out, by way of greeting.

“Fifteen minutes,” he called back. “It may be longer,” he added, as she drew near. “I just got here.”

Amanda squeezed in beside him and felt, as always, the immediate relief of his presence. She loved meeting him this way, in a restaurant after work, as she had done when they were dating. Bob complained about having to wear a suit and tie to the office, but she liked seeing him in these clothes. He looked so grown-up, so civilized, and yet still youthful. His dark hair curled over the back of his collar. His face, open and gentle, rested upon enough muscle to save it from appearing soft. Good-natured, but no pushover—that was Bob. Amanda only half jokingly likened his arrival home in the evening to the landing of the marines. Almost instantly, order and discipline would be restored among the rebellious natives, and she would greet him like a besieged and grateful villager. As for Amanda, she felt it was an achievement simply to have changed into something clean. Tonight, between feeding and bathing the children, she had managed to pull on a pair of batik drawstring trousers, a black T-shirt, and sandals. She clipped up her unruly brown hair in a messy bun, and, just before running out the door, smeared her lips lightly with gloss. She had long since ceased trying to compete with the stockinged-and-moussed working women. Amanda possessed a whole closet full of business suits that grew more hopelessly outdated every year—padded shoulders, short skirts, zippered blazers, all very eighties. Every fall she vowed to give them away to charity, and every fall she changed her mind. One of these days she would return to work. These suits might come back into fashion. They could be altered. And so the suits remained, hanging in their plastic dry-cleaning bags like bodies in cryogenic suspension.

“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 eve. . .