Daniela spent her days in a downtown library working on a novel, and since we still weren’t back to being friends, I didn’t tell her I was writing one, too, this novel of my memories. She had an expert nanny watching the boys now, a Spanish woman who up till then had worked for people of a higher social class than ours, the kind of household where it would be considered a good thing for twins to be with the nanny as much as possible for their first year so the mother could “live.” Faced with that old-fashioned, classist vision, I wondered if my not wanting children might be based on this contradiction warring inside me: that my being born bourgeois allowed for someone else to raise my children in the same way I took it for granted that my college degree gave me the right not to clean my own floors. Maybe raising children isn’t so different from cleaning floors or cleaning the bathroom: I loved our home, but I didn’t feel compelled to concern myself with it firsthand. Maybe, deep in my bourgeois heart, it was the same with children, and I refused to even conceive of becoming a wet nurse for any future offspring; this, from the moment that I’d been programmed, by way of Tolstoy and ancient Greek classes, to feel deep down that I wasn’t “proletarian.”

I was texting with Irene so often that I found myself beginning to resemble her, in a way. For instance, I wasn’t really concerned if Luca’s period of unemployment was turning into something serious or not. When Luca talked with me about his relationship with Daniela, I tried to be like Irene was with me, listening for minutes on end without giving advice.

At night we’d watch the game. When she came back at dinnertime, Daniela wouldn’t comment on the state we were in—it had been quite the effort for her to impose her will for the first time, to begin writing, and she had to ignore what she perceived to be the direct consequences of this show of strength. More than likely, Luca was using me as the objective correlative of the neglected husband. As for Daniela, I felt certain Barbara was hiding behind her newfound tenacity. It was just a hunch—but later I found out I’d guessed right. Daniela was more independent, more methodically unemotional, and I could just see the two of them, on the phone or over coffee, and Barbara giving her advice on how to stand up to others and their demands and not let them tread all over hers. Two women from southern Lazio forced to deal with two brothers from Rome born into privilege and lacking a certain emotional resilience.