The Ten-Year Nap Read Online Free PDF Page B

practical or adventurous people did, and you could live there decently. Early on, Amy knew couples who had nosed deep into neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The middle class extended its reach, reconfigured its range of territories. Narrow art galleries and cybercafés grew on patches of street beside check-cashing stores and rundown walk-in dentistry centers. Strollers abounded on craggy sidewalks in the steep shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Those neighborhoods were overrun with families now, and if the new residents were incidentally knocking out the low-income dwellers, they couldn’t really think too much about it; they would surely become squeamish, and then the whole plan would fall apart. The less game couples Amy knew went to nearby suburbs or to quaint and faraway towns with a single, narrow main street and one not-great restaurant that closed at eight, forcing everyone into their homes for the night, as though desperadoes roamed freely and there were townwide curfews.
    You had to love the companionship of your family unambivalently in order to live up there, Amy thought. You had to be willing to stay put in those dark-wood-trimmed old-house rooms as night fell. But Amy and Leo would neither go to Brooklyn nor buy a house in an outlying town. Though it wasn’t prudent for them to stay in their apartment, they stayed anyway.
    “We’re like the Jews in Berlin before the war,” Leo had said, and Amy told him the analogy was obnoxious, and that his great-aunt Talia, who had been in Dachau, would have been offended if she’d heard him. “I only mean that we refuse to see what’s happening,” he added. “We are demented and irrational.” But still they did not leave.
    Over the years the steep increases in rent at The Rivermere were frightening. You had to live for the moment, Amy Lamb understood, treating even real estate as if it had an existential dimension. The rent battered and shook them; it sucked the money away from them each month as if it were stored in the wind tunnel of the lobby. Mason’s school tuition drained them too, and Amy still thought uneasily that he should have gone to public school, like the rest of the country’s children did. They had tried to get him into a public gifted program. (“It’s like winning the lottery, and we won, we won!” the father of an accepted child had cried, actually jumping up and down as he spoke.) But Mason had only scored in the ninety-seventh percentile, not the ninety-eighth, and so he had been knocked out of the running.
    When Amy and Leo went to look at the local public elementary school, they and a hundred other parents had stood in the low-ceilinged cafeteria/gymnasium with its exposed pipes and boilers and flickering lights. There was no money for the arts. Their son would not paint or throw pots on a wheel or play an instrument. He would be artless—literally and figuratively. There were no sports to speak of, either, and the student-teacher ratio was discouraging.
    “So, do you think we can do the private-school thing?” she had hesitantly asked Leo as they walked outside after the tour.
    “I don’t know.” He sounded pinched and sour.
    She wished they had liked the school more; it was integrated and democratic. Over the doorways you could read the quaint words that a hundred years ago had been cut into stone: “Girls’ Entrance,” and “Boys’ Entrance,” though now girls and boys poured in through either door, watched over by a tough-looking female guard with a nightstick. In theory the school was an enclosed utopia. But this was New York City, where life was impossible and dear and the schools were a splintered mess, except for the ones where the parents banded together and served as substitute teachers and librarians and held one long, perpetual bake sale to rescue a school from a slide into indigence.
    “Can we at least figure it out?” Amy asked Leo.
    “Now? Right now?”
    “No, I don’t mean now, obviously. What are you so angry with