Difficulties arose with their dark-haired Alexandra, an observant, somber child who seemed somehow older than her five years. From the first, these difficulties were defined as a “Nina-Alexandra” problem. Peter had routed his own feelings for Alexandra through Nina. Alexandra glumly explained to me one day, “Pm driven to school by Annies mom, Sarahs mom, Jills mom. My mom doesn’t drive.” Alexandra distinguished between school friends (friends she played with at school) and home friends (friends invited home). She had school friends but no home friends. She explained that in order to invite friends home, you needed a mother at home. By all three—Nina, Peter, and Alexandra—it was considered a truth that a girl cant make home friends without a mother at home.
If Peter had an urge to plunge more fully into the childrens routines, he controlled that desire. If he had a different urge, to leave it to Nina, he acted on it. He helped Alexandra “unreverse” her printed 5 s and Ds. He read Dr. Seuss books to her, and buttoned her dress in the mornings. But the rest of “quality time,” he said with anxious reverence, was up to Nina. In this way he again shaped his inclinations so as to separate himself from the ultimate responsibility for the second shift but to identify lovingly with each family episode through the medium of his wife.
Sensing her father’s gender strategy, which placed domestic responsibilities on her mother, Alexandra turned to Nina. When Alexandra began to compare her lot to that of school friends with mothers who stayed home, it was to her mother that she addressed a silent protest, and it was Nina who felt guilty.
If Mommy wasn’t going to be home, it seemed, Alexandra wasn’t going to “be home” either—not in conversation, not in weekend play. One day, Alexandra came home with a note in her lunchbox addressed to Nina from Alexandra’s teacher. As Nina recalled: “The teacher said that even though this was Alexandra’s second year at school, she still had no friends.”
This was disturbing news. On the following Saturday, a week before Valentine’s Day, something worse happened. Nina had taken Alexandra to a stationery store to buy valentine cards for her classmates. Alexandra picked the prettiest card for herself because, as she explained to her mother in a low voice, “I don’t think anyone at school is going to give me one.”
Sometimes a way of life collapses because of a very tiny but stunning episode. So it was with the valentine card. That night, Nina told Peter, “We have a crisis.” Peter empathized with Nina’s anguish. The incident had been tiny, but they agreed it wasn’t minor. “Handle it the best way you can, honey,” he said, “I’m a hundred percent behind you.”