Diana looked at her expectantly, eyebrows raised.
“That I wasn’t going to get to go anywhere,” she explained. “That the years I probably should’ve spent living on my own, or seeing Europe on a Eurail Pass, or living with three girlfriends in New York, I was already married with a kid, and a husband who’s not crazy about travel.”
“Couldn’t you travel on your own? Or with friends?”
“I could go with friends. I did, sometimes.” She and Beatrice had made a few trips to the Poconos with Hannah and Zoe; they’d done overnight trips in New York. But they’d never gone very far, or stayed very long. “It’s not that Hal wouldn’t let me go. It’s just that he needs me.” If she hadn’t had the better part of that Bloody Mary inside of her, she wouldn’t have said it; and if she’d said it, she would have surely stopped there, but the combination of spices and horseradish and vodka and being in a room full of adults with a new friend who was listening with interest kept her talking.
“Needs you for what?” Diana was asking. If there was judgment in her tone, Daisy couldn’t hear it. “To take care of your daughter?”
“Well, definitely that, at first.” Daisy could still picture Hal, shirtless, with the baby in his arms, because the nurses at the hospital had encouraged skin-to-skin contact; Hal pacing back and forth along the upstairs hallway, insistently chanting, “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep,” and with Beatrice’s small pink body pressed against his chest for all of ten minutes, before handing the baby back to Daisy. He’d needed her to manage the baby, and their house, and, eventually, Beatrice’s schooling and her schedule, needed her to remember his father’s birthday and the anniversary of his mother’s death, and set up doctor’s and dentist’s visits and buy groceries and gifts, to drop his suits at the dry cleaners and pick them up again. “Just everything. All of it. Our life. He needed me to run our life.”
Daisy tried to smile, to shake off the memories of those bad years, the exhaustion born of sleepless nights and busy days, and how it felt when Hal would just hand off the baby, mid-meltdown, so he could go shower and shave. “You’re lucky you never had to deal with any of this.”
“Oh, sure,” said Diana, rolling her eyes. “Because the world is just so delightful to women who don’t get married or have kids. Nobody ever thinks there’s anything wrong with me, and nobody ever asks if I’ve frozen my eggs, or when I’m going to meet Mr. Right.” Diana raised her glass. “To the grass always being greener.”
Daisy looked down and discovered a fresh drink in front of her. “To green grass,” she said, and hoped she hadn’t allowed the conversation to dwell too heavily on herself, and her own disappointments. “Did you fire anyone today?”
Diana touched a lock of her expensive-looking hair, and tucked it behind her ear. “I should have. There’s this one manager. He deserves to be fired, but I think the most I can hope for is getting him reassigned to a place where he won’t do as much damage.” She shook her head. “White guys—especially white guys who are part of a family business—they fail upward, or they move sideways. And they always come out fine in the end.”
“Ugh, right?” Daisy said. “My husband went to prep school. This place called Emlen, in New Hampshire. I swear to God, those guys…” She stifled a hiccup against the back of her hand. “They hire each other, or each other’s businesses; they give each other’s children internships and jobs. Like, one of my husband’s classmates was down on his luck for a while—he’d had a couple of business ventures that hadn’t worked out, and then he’d had a really horrible divorce. So first, he goes to one classmate’s summer house in Maine for a few months, to lick his wounds. Then he moves to New York City, into an apartment in a building that another classmate owns, where he decided that what he really wants to be is an artist. So he goes back to school for an MFA in painting, while he’s spending the year in the one guy’s New York City apartment, and his summers at the other guy’s place in Maine, and then…” Daisy paused for another sip. “… when he graduates, and has his student show, half the class shows up, and they buy every single painting.”
Diana was staring at her, eyes wide. “That cannot possibly be true.”
“Swear to God!” said Daisy. “We’ve got one of his watercolors hanging in our living room.” She lowered her voice. “It’s really awful,” she said, and hiccupped again. She hadn’t realized, until she started speaking, how irritating she found it. If she screwed up her job or her marriage, there wouldn’t be an Old Girls’ Network waiting to catch her and buoy her, with beach houses and New York City apartments and a whole new career when she was ready. “I don’t know, maybe things are changing. Maybe they’ll be better when my daughter’s all grown up.”