Normally Pru would take one look at such a woman and dismiss her as one of those pampered, sheltered, stay-at-home types, whose only burdens were a huge diamond on her finger and a fat fashion magazine under one arm. She would have remembered her clean little apartment in the city, the comfortable arrangement she had with her attentive boyfriend, all the time she had to read books and eat at restaurants and watch movies. She would remember her friend Fiona, who complained constantly about the demands of motherhood. Or her sister, who was raising a daughter by herself on her schoolteacher’s tiny salary. And she would have felt grateful for her freedom, glad she and Rudy were waiting until the time was right to get married and have kids.
But today was different. It might have been the letch she was trying to shmooze, breathing down her shirt. Or the fact that, in four more days, it would be exactly two weeks since she’d lost the job that was supposed to advance her career and let her buy a four-bedroom fixer-upper in Cleveland Park and take a nice long maternity leave in the not too distant future. Or maybe it was because Rudy had been out of town all week, at a conference for public television executives in Chicago, where he was so busy they’d only had the briefest of conversations, at night, before she went to sleep.
Or maybe it was because, as a child, Prudence had loved family hotel vacations. All of them together, in one room, with real silver on the room service tray, and clean sheets every night. Running through the corridors with Patsy, and riding up and down in the elevators. She’d always wanted to live in a hotel, like Eloise.
Whatever the cause, suddenly all her plans seemed pathetic and narrow. Next to the golden, fructive mother-ship before her, Pru felt like both a withered old spinster and a child. She felt hard and tired out, in her severe worsted wool suit, the sad little scarf she’d tied around her neck to brighten her face announcing her desperation. The woman before her, coming toward her like her own future—there was a woman who knew her place in the universe. She would go up to her hotel room tonight, after dinner, and tuck in those little girls, whose arms would linger around her neck for a moment, when she kissed their foreheads. They would smell her perfume, and she would smell their no-more-tears shampoo, and faintly, the chlorine left over from their swim. Pru could imagine it, all of it, entirely, all of a sudden. Her fingertips could practically feel the girls’ silky hair against the pillowcase. This was a woman who had what a job would never give you. She was loved, and she would never grow old alone.
As Pru watched, transfixed and pained at the vision of herself as wife and mother, the little family moved through a ray of sunlight coming in through the hotel’s atrium, so they were lit up, like angels.
Pru felt a grip of fear in her gut. Grow old alone! She’d forgotten about that! She’d been so busy at work that she’d forgotten about growing old—possibly even dying—alone. It wasn’t so far off now. And people in their thirties got horrible diseases, all the time. What would her 401(k) do for her when she was lying in bed, immobilized by terminal cancer? She could scarcely breathe for the thought of it.
The executive director had turned around to see what had attracted Pru’s attention. The sight of the blond, angelic-looking family perhaps reminded him of his own wife and children, because he quickly straightened up and gave Pru a fatherly pat on the back. “Actually, I’m just going to grab a sandwich and eat at my desk,” he said. “Good meeting you.” And before Pru could recover her composure long enough to give him her business card or even her last name, he was gone.
Behind her, the doors to the Gerald R. Ford Room burst open, and out came the rest of the conference attendees. They streamed from the room and around Pru, heading toward another room that had been set up for lunch. A tributary to the stream headed outside for a cigarette, and another to the bathrooms, while Pru stood rooted to the spot like an old dead tree, blinking in bewilderment, wondering how she’d forgotten to have a husband and children by this point in her life.
WELL, IT WASN’T LIKE SHE’D FORGOTTEN, EXACTLY.
In the back of her Daytimer, in fact, behind a list of her boyfriend Rudy’s faults (or so he called them; she called them, more peaceably, his “pros and cons”) and a list of clothes she wanted to buy, was her five-year plan. It had been unfolded and refolded so many times that the edges were soft, and nearly came apart in her hands, like some kind of historical document.
Pru was a believer in lists and plans. She’d made her first five-year plan when she was nine. It had included becoming an astronaut, a schoolteacher, and the mother of four children (two boys and two girls) before turning twenty.
She’d come up with her current, more realistic plan in college. Married with children by 29, she read. She remembered making the list in her dorm room, cold winter light pouring in through the window by the desk where she sat writing, a pot of tea steeping nearby. The 29 had since been crossed out, and replaced with 30. Then 32, then 34. And
