Wishful Thinking (14 page)

After some effort, Dr. Sexton managed to clear a space on the counter and plopped the Van de Graaff onto it. “Julien. Jack. My name is Dr. Sexton. I am your neighbor, as you know. And this,” she said, eyes alight, “is a Van de Graaff generator. Would you like to see what it can do?”

Julien shrugged but inched closer. Jack climbed up onto a barstool.

Dr. Sexton flipped a switch. She then placed both of her hands atop the large metal ball. “
Watch
,” she commanded. A
belt beneath the ball began to turn. The ball began to buzz. And Dr. Sexton’s hair, to which she had apparently applied less product than usual that morning, as it was uncharacteristically limp, began to stand straight up on its ends.

“Is
that
how you make your hair do that?” Jack asked.

“I’ve seen one of these!” Julien cried, reaching for the ball. “Can I try it? Can I?”

Turning to Jennifer as the boys clamored for the Van de Graaff, Dr. Sexton, hair sticking out in every direction like a toilet brush, mouthed a single word.

Go.

Seeing her chance, Jennifer went.

Once outside, she headed south. She had to leave the perimeter set by the five-hundred-yard radius before her other self (her other self, or her, later? It boggled the mind) made her way home. There was only one place to go, Jennifer thought grimly, where she could be out of sight and ready for transport when the clock struck 8:00 p.m. It was time for a trip to the nearest automatic public toilet.

T
HE REST OF THE
day at the office, thankfully, went remarkably smoothly. She reentered her meeting with Bill, Alicia, and Ms. Work for Today seamlessly, almost immediately abandoning her protests about the unconven-tional way Bill was running things. This pleased Bill greatly, who took it as evidence of what he believed to be his superior powers of persuasion. It was, of course, the five hours straight she’d just spent with her boys that had reduced the fight in her. After a full afternoon of meetings, Alicia left at six thirty, saying she had to be at home for dinner with her family. Jennifer smiled sunnily and waved good-bye when she left, enjoying Alicia’s evident irk at being first to go. She was even
more delighted when Bill exited his office and saw her sitting dutifully at her own. As master of the macho pissing contest of who stayed at work last, Bill could afford to give her an approving nod. Not only that, but she got a huge amount of work done, her productivity notably increased by the feeling of well-being that came from knowing she was with her children, too, and there was no need whatsoever to rush home.

She did not meet herself on her way back to her apartment. And Dr. Sexton, it turned out, was the world’s best thirty-minute babysitter. The boys were still so busy with the Van de Graaff, in fact, that they hardly noticed when she walked through the door. It was very strange—from their perspective she’d been gone only a half hour, while from hers, she’d spent the last five hours at work.

On her way out, Dr. Sexton took her aside. “I’ve given it some thought,” she said, “and it would probably be best if you did not use the app’s default of traveling to a Wishful Thinking appointment and then traveling back to the place where you began. Better to work till the end of the day, then travel backward in time to get the boys at school. That way, you may continue your day in real time, without a return trip, and you will not encounter this difficulty.”

Jennifer nodded. Good idea.

“I can amend any upcoming appointments,” Dr. Sexton added. “Stop by tomorrow?” Jennifer nodded again. She was too tired to do much else.

“Ta-ta for now!” she called out to the boys, who enthusiastically waved their good-byes. The Shoe Lady, Julien later confided, had turned out to be pretty cool after all.

A little less than an hour later, it was all Jennifer could do not to pass out while reading Jack a story in his bed. Nine o’clock at night felt like five o’clock in the morning to her, and
when she finally crawled into her bed, she fell asleep instantly. But her dreams were bizarre, flashing from memory to image to memory in a dizzying mash-up, just as they had after her first Wishful Thinking journey. Waking up the next morning was hard. Getting through the day at work was challenging. The following night, the night she had planned to catch up on sleep, the boys took turns disrupting it (they always seemed to have a sixth sense for when Jennifer most needed an uninterrupted night’s sleep), first Jack with a bloody nose that took forty-five minutes to stanch and clean up, then Julien with a nightmare. Which meant that by the time Thursday rolled around, getting up was damn near impossible.

By Thursday morning, in fact, she thought she would have to snort the contents of her coffee grinder directly into her nose if she wanted to arise. At seven twenty, when she should have been showered, dressed, and pouring milk into waiting bowls of Cheerios, she remained immobile on the couch, and her sons had begun to poke her in the tummy with plastic swords.

Jennifer could not imagine how she was going to rouse herself. “Desist, good sirs!” she mumbled weakly, but the poking continued. Then, from somewhere in the murky depths of her consciousness, inspiration surfaced. “Remember when we went swimming in that freezing lake?” she said, partially unburying her face from the pillow. “And you guys counted to ten and I jumped in?” They nodded. “Okay. On ten, jump on me … and tickle.”

Julien assumed a serious expression and spread his legs in a warrior stance. Jennifer steeled herself and began to count. “One, two … ten!”

With cries of “cowabunga!” and “charge!” they pinned Jennifer to the bed, two little balls of muscle, each sprouting what seemed like a thousand tiny fingers scribbling at her skin
—under her chin, in her armpits, on the bottoms of her feet. It was a frenzied, sloppy kid-tickle, and it did the trick.

Up and at ’em, Jennifer quickly got herself into shape, relying on her old dry-shampoo-and-ponytail trick. Then she fed the boys breakfast, aka buttered toast, made Jack’s lunch, and got the three of them out the door only five minutes later than usual.

Work was murder, but she made it through with the help of roughly eight cups of coffee. Alicia left at six thirty for her family dinner. Bill left soon after, again giving her a chummy thumbs-up for working late. By seven Tim was gone, too, and Jennifer was alone. The silent office was like a tomb. She wanted to sleep in it.

But at 7:55 p.m. she trudged down the stairs to the secret bathroom to start her afternoon all over again, heading back to 2:00 p.m. for the appointment Dr. Sexton had revised for her.

Blue spinning tunnel of light. Contraction and expansion. Annual benefit committee meeting.

Superwoman, indeed.

T
HERE ARE WORSE PLACES
to pass out cold than in a group of full-time moms. Mothers of young children may be the only audience, in fact, in front of whom you can go narcoleptic smack in the middle of a meeting—ending up facedown on a conference table, no less— and be immediately met with sympathy, ice packs, and arnica.

At some point during a rather heated debate about the “coolest” theme for that year’s fundraiser (should it be an eighties night or Roaring Twenties?), Jennifer had begun to fade. Under the soporific buzz of the fluorescent lights in the school’s conference room, with the soothing melodies of rest time floating in from the classroom next door and the aching absence of coffee in her system giving her a wicked headache (she just couldn’t justify another cup), her eyes had begun to droop as heavily as they had in her business school statistics class, where she had been a notorious classroom sleeper. Her head had then begun to bob. She had wrenched herself wildly awake at least six times, snapping her neck backward every time her chin hit her chest à la Jack, who, when he was determined not to sleep, seemed to have a string attached directly to
his eyelids that he could jerk violently upward whenever unconsciousness threatened. Ultimately, however, she’d lost the fight. She’d keeled right over onto the conference table, face-first, spilling somebody’s Pellegrino Limonata in the process.

At least it wasn’t coffee. She might have started licking it.

Upon impact with the wooden surface, Jennifer had awoken with a jolt and sat upright, though with a bit of drool still clinging to the corner of her mouth. The other five women at the table looked shocked and alarmed, but this quickly gave way to comfort and the aforementioned offers of ice packs and arnica.

“I am so sorry,” Jennifer said, painfully embarrassed and in pain to boot. A knot was forming where her forehead had hit the table.
What a way to kick off my new career as a mom who does volunteer stuff!
she thought. They had all been so happy to see her there, though it had soon dawned on her that it was because these women, whom, she was ashamed to admit, she had looked down upon somewhat for the endless amounts of time they devoted to volunteering at the school, were desperate for help, and Jennifer was the first fresh face they’d seen at a meeting like this one in some time.

“When Charlie was a baby,” said Caroline, who Jennifer had been glad to see was on the benefit committee, too, “I fell asleep once while I was standing up. While steaming vegetables. While he was strapped to me in the baby carrier.” She laughed. “Luckily, I fell backward.”

“Maybe this is a good note to end on,” said Elizabeth, annual benefit committee chair, Harvard law school graduate turned professional supermom (for real), with plank-straight blond hair, ripped triceps, and no stories of falling asleep on the job. It was Elizabeth whom Vinita and Jennifer often had in mind when penning their “somewhere there’s a woman” emails to each other, but this was partly because Elizabeth’s very
existence made them feel guilty—everyone knew that the woefully underfunded and overcrowded public school couldn’t function without Elizabeth and women like her. “Let’s all give some thought to what the different themes might take to execute, and come up with suggestions for venues, decor, et cetera. We’ll make the final decision next week.”

They all nodded, rising from their chairs, gathering bags and violin cases and tennis rackets, preparing for pickup and afternoons full of activities ahead. Jennifer attempted to rouse herself with the rest, but the temporary shot of adrenaline her face-plant had provided was already fading, and she was feeling wobbly. It seemed prudent to remain seated for another minute or two.

“Can I help you with anything?” Caroline asked. “Do you still want to do the playdate with Charlie and Jack today?” Jennifer grimaced. She had forgotten all about it. “I could pick Jack up,” Caroline said. “Sasha is going to a friend’s. You could come get him from my house later. We live right around the corner.”

“Could you?” Jennifer said. She willed herself to stand up. She was already fantasizing about sneaking into Jack’s bottom bunk for a nap when she and Julien got home—so much for helping Julien with his homework. Caroline assured her it was absolutely fine, though Jennifer worried it would be a black mark, or maybe just a question mark, against her.

At three o’clock sharp, Jennifer was in the schoolyard at PS 41, searching for Julien. In the afternoon scrum she did not even realize, until they were inches away from each other, that she was standing right next to Vinita.

“What are you doing here?” Vinita asked, as they each turned toward the other in the same instant. “And what happened to your head?” Vinita put a thumb to the tender spot and leaned in for a closer look. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Did you pass out again?”

“You could say that,” Jennifer said.

Vinita frowned. “Did you get those tests I ordered?” Jennifer couldn’t muster much more than a weary nod. Turning to face her squarely, Vinita put a hand on each of Jennifer’s shoulders and searched her eyes. “What’s going on, Jay?” she said. “You don’t look right.”

“The app,” Jennifer said, unable to stop herself.
“It’s real.”

W
ITHIN MOMENTS OF
J
ENNIFER
’
S
proclamation, Vinita, never one to dither when immediate action was required, had arranged for her babysitter, Sandra to take Julien to her place with her three girls. (Sandra was at pickup, too, as a backup, because Vinita had been afraid she was going to be late.) Julien protested until Vinita told him he could play with her oldest daughter, Rani, on their 3-D Xbox—property of Vinita’s man-child investment-banker husband, Sean—as soon as they finished their homework. Even then, however, he was reluctant. “I thought the point of you picking us up was for us to spend time with
you
,” Julien said reproachfully. “Not for you to have coffee with Vinita.”

“I know, sweetheart,” she said, “but I really need to talk to her about something, okay?” She thought about giving him her stock “mommies are people too” speech, but she wasn’t sure she could even remember it.

A few minutes later, over a cup of herbal tea at Le Pain Quotidien, Jennifer told Vinita the second half of her Wishful Thinking story.

When she was finished, Vinita sat back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and pursed her lips. “So, you’re at work right now too?” she asked, picking up her phone. “Why don’t I just call you and find out?”

“Don’t!” Jennifer cried, grabbing her wrist across the table.
“You can’t do that. It would result in a … causality violation. Dr. Sexton told me. It would be very bad.” Jennifer considered adding that Vinita couldn’t call her at work because Vinita
hadn’t
called her at work, but the implications of that were too much for her to wrap her head around at the moment.

“How convenient,” Vinita said, putting her phone down and leaning toward Jennifer, “that the only way we could possibly prove the app is real is not permitted by the very person who has trapped you in the delusion that it is.”

“It’s not a delusion!” Jennifer said desperately. She had already shown Vinita the app, but Vinita’s reaction had been similar to Jennifer’s the first time she’d seen it. Yes, it looked like every overscheduled woman’s fantasy, but that didn’t mean it was real.