Primates of Park Avenue (19 page)

The more I looked, the more I saw the asymmetries of power played out, not just interpersonally between women, but institutionally, socially, and culturally. Financially successful men in Manhattan sit on major boards—of hospitals, universities, and high-profile diseases, boards with yearly give/gets (the combined amount you agree to donate and procure from others) of $150,000 and more. Their wives are frequently on lesser boards, women’s committees, and museums in the outer boroughs with annual give/gets of $5,000 to $20,000. Wealthy and powerful husbands are trustees of prestigious private schools; their wives are “class moms,” tasked with being an official and unremunerated social and communications hub for all the other mothers. While their husbands make millions, privileged women with kids capitulate, with little choice (“I need to be a good volunteer, so my kid gets into a good school,” these moms were always saying), to the “Mommynomics” of the Upper East Side. They give away the skills they honed in college and in graduate school and in their vaunted professions to their children’s schools for free—organizing the galas, editing the newsletters, running the library, staging bake sales. Schools would go under without this caste of privileged mommy volunteers, who provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of free work per year. In a way, a woman’s participation in Mommynomics is a way to feel and be busy and useful. It is also an act of extravagance, a brag—“I used to work, I
can
, but I don’t need to.” But compare it to what some of their husbands have done and aspire to do—amass enough money not to merely quit work, but to take the “Giving Pledge,” a public avowal billionaires swear to give away half their wealth.

Wives lunch with other women with children at Fred’s and Bergdorf Goodman while their silverback husbands move with ease among
their
watering holes—a few years ago, at the 21 Club, one could see Henry Kissinger, Roger Ailes, and William Safire, all seated within feet of each other, table hopping and reinforcing their world dominance. The Grill Room might as well be a men’s club, my husband observed one day when the ratio of women to men there was one-to-four (other men told me the ratio was usually one-to-two). These are places business is done and among the tribe I studied, business is mostly done by men.

As I stood in front of Rebecca’s building that night hailing a cab, I recalled the view from her massive windows twenty-six stories above. In the most elite sector of the world’s most elite economy, in a tiny corner of a specific neighborhood, a proliferation of women have left work or have never had to work. From an anthropological perspective, these wealthy women who seem and are so fortunate are also marooned in their sex-segregated world, at their charity breakfasts and luncheons and in their playgroups and on their lesser boards and in their Hamptons homes all summer long. With sex ratios in their favor, with resources under their control, with wives who are dependent on them caring for their even more dependent offspring, privileged men of the Upper East Side can do as they please. Men may speak the language of partnership in the absence of true economic parity in a marriage, and they may act like true partners. But this arrangement is fragile and contingent and women are still dependent, in this instance, on their men—a husband may simply ignore his commitment at any time. Access to your husband’s money might feel good. But the comparative study of human society and our primate relatives shows that such access can’t buy you the power you get by being the one who earns it. And knowing this, or even having an inkling of it, just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separated your version of power from your man’s, could keep a thinking woman up at night.

CHAPTER SIX

A Xanax and a Bloody Mary: Manhattan Moms on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

I
AM WEARING
an army-green vest with ample
pockets and a practical rubber-soled shoe, stealthily making my way
across the second floor of Bergdorf Goodman. Laden with lavender
shopping bags for camouflage, I am on the hunt for
The One amid the Prada and Lanvin. No luck. Adjusting
my blowgun, the type biologists use in the field, I
ascend the elevator to the jungle of “young and fun!
” designers on 5. It is hard to choose from
the specimens around me, since so many fit the criteria:
remarkably thin, highly stressed, sleep-deprived, economically privileged reproductive Upper East
Side females in midlife. But they tend to travel in
packs, and are partial to leather leggings and jeans, so
my task is complicated, all about finding not just the
right animal, but also the right moment. I can wait.
This is important. Thus far, I have mostly studied the
troop’s group behaviors. Now I need to understand them individually,
from the inside out. A blood sample could reveal so
much about their physiology and emotions.

And then, on
the edge of the floor, one strays from her peers
to look at a rack of Balenciaga. Even better, she
is wearing lightweight trousers. I get her in my sigh
ts and, with a puff to my blowgun, quickly dart
her in the buttock. She wanders, dazed, toward the fitting
rooms, falling to the soft pile carpet in less than
twenty seconds. As I drag her through the heavy curtain
into the largest of the mirrored rooms, Robert Sapolsky, a
neuroendocrinologist and primatologist, who has made a career of studying
the lives and blood work of olive baboons in Kenya’s
Masai-Mara reserve, ushers me in and concedes, “You’re getting pretty
good at this.”

We take her vital signs and draw
her blood quickly, efficiently, knowing there is not much time.
Our petite, well-dressed great ape will come to on the
plush carpeting, see the half glass of champagne we have
left on the table in the fitting room, and,
blaming herself, be too ashamed to tell anyone what has
happened. Meanwhile, we hit the street and head to Quest
Diagnostics—the one on East Fifty-Seventh between Park and Lex. There
is a skip in my step and I have the
urge to whistle. I am eager to hear the story
that her blood, still warm in its vials in
my pockets, will tell us.

As I wrote this book, I had this daydream over and over, riding the M86 bus across the park, or jammed into the plastic depression that counts as a seat on the subway, or sitting on a bench on the edge of the playground, chatting with other moms and half keeping track of my kids. But the morphology of many of the Upper East Side mothers I knew from my older son’s school and my younger one’s playgroups—their bodies and faces—told a story of its own. Their gaunt visages and taut torsos and limbs that seemed always ready to spring put me in mind, as I passed them in the school hallways and ladies’ luncheons and galas we all went to, of an animal primed for fight or flight. Their fingers and thumbs flew across their iPhones and BlackBerries. Their jaws were clenched. Their brows were furrowed, unless they had had Botox injections there, in which case the story found expression in their mouths, which were frequently pursed or arranged in a tight smile, the kind that did
not
telegraph pleasure or happiness or relaxation but rather the very opposite: “Hi, I see you, but I’m in a rush.” Mostly, though, the tale was in their eyes—wide, alert, hypervigilant eyes that took in everything, like a gazelle endlessly scanning its surroundings, as if its life depended on it.

By now, I knew about the rites of passage and initiation ceremonies a privileged Upper East Side mommy went through. I knew her identity was forged, in part, through certain rituals that were all but explicitly agreed upon: making what narrators of eighteenth-century English novels called “an advantageous match”; passing a co-op board interview and undertaking an apartment renovation; applying to prestigious private schools for her children; attending grueling exercise classes daily; and participating in “Mommynomics,” the circle of charity luncheons and social and school events that allowed her to work on strategic alliances, solidifying or raising her social rank. But I often wondered what it
felt
like to be the wife of an alpha (or close-second beta) and the mother of young children on the Upper East Side. In spite of my having gone native, I would always be a late transfer to the troop , with less money than many of the women around me. I was low-ranking, and still a relative newcomer. So I couldn’t be sure my own feelings of stress and unease when I was at drop off or a school event or a playgroup were an accurate indicator of
theirs
. Over coffee, and after school meetings, some forthcoming Upper East Side mommies put words to what their faces were saying.

They said: “When the radiator bangs, I jump out of my skin.”

And: “Our daughter’s teacher told us she was having a hard time finding a group of kids to play with at recess and I burst into tears.”

And: “My husband tapped me on the shoulder to ask me something and it startled me so badly I screamed and fell off my chair.
In my own home
.”

“I know
exactly
what you should be writing about,” Candace told me breathlessly over lunch one day. She quickly retrieved something from her purse and popped it into her mouth. She had arrived late—“Brutal traffic,” she apologized—having learned just twenty-four hours before that her son had a concussion from a soccer game. Her husband was looking for a new job. Candace hadn’t slept well, I gathered; there were dark circles under her eyes. She had lost weight, too, and looked so thin she might break. I wanted to comfort her, but I also wanted to hear what she had to say, because Candace really understood the über-competitive, ultrasuccessful men and women whose lives I studied. She was married to one, after all, and as a high-end event planner, she had organized the baby showers and over-the-top kiddie birthday parties and charity soirees of some of Manhattan’s richest and most powerful players for years. She had seen them all at their worst, and with their guards down.

“
Anxiety
,” Candace whispered urgently across the table now. “Your tribe of mommies and anxiety.”

“Right,” I said. I nodded, thinking. Then I ventured, “Um, what was that pill, Candace?”

“Ativan,” she replied matter-of-factly. She exhaled with a smile and fell back into the leather chair, her shoulders and face finally relaxed. She looked beautiful and radiant, just like herself again, and she said, “Shall we order some wine?”

Anxiety and stress are diseases of the West, afflictions of the WEIRD—anthropologist Jared Diamond’s acronym for western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic peoples. A look at the cross-cultural data regarding one reliable measure of out-of-whack anxiety, social anxiety disorder, makes the case nicely. While rates of social anxiety disorder in China, Korea, Nigeria, and Taiwan are all well under 1 percent, the US rate is nearly ten times greater. One in four Americans will experience severe and sustained anxiety at some point in their lives.

And city people are especially, extraordinarily stressed and anxious, researchers tell us. Packed streets and buses and costly clothing and food and shelter and the din of jackhammers, it seems, produce feelings of threat and diminish our sense of control, leading to high anxiety, high stress, and escalating rates of stress-related disease. Indeed, such city-niche-specific conditions have changed the human brain, altering our cingulate cortexes and amygdalae so they are, in a vicious circle if there ever was one, less able to deal with stress than those of our country cousins.

Stanford biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, my partner in crime in the Bergdorf daydream, has mapped out how stress, once an indispensable adaptation, got twisted around, creating the uniquely contemporary conundrum of chronic stress and its affective handmaiden, chronic anxiety. “For the average mammal,” he explains, “stress is three minutes of terror on the savannah. After which the stress is over. Or you are.” Stress evolved as a useful, extremely short-term, lifesaving physiological state: your heart races to pump oxygen; your lungs work harder; and your body turns off anything nonessential in the interest of immediate survival (being chased by a lion is no time to ovulate, grow, or put energy into tissue repair—that’s for later). With these brief bursts of terror come surges in stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Once the lion has been outwitted or escaped, the blood levels of these stress hormones go down.

Today, though, “we turn on our stress response for purely psychological states, and that’s not what it evolved for,” Sapolsky observes. Our blood pressure surges to 180/120 not in order to save our lives, but as we sit in traffic or worry about terrorism. And we can’t find the Off button. So, momentarily, adaptive stress becomes chronic stress and perpetual anxiety. These days, “the hormones that we used to secrete to save our lives are being secreted . . . continually, when we worry about the ozone layer or have to speak in public.” One of Sapolsky’s most important discoveries was that among hierarchical mammals, like baboons or humans on the Upper East Side, social rank can cause massive stress, changing up one’s blood, mind, and body, especially where rankings are unstable and individuals are jockeying for position. Now we were getting somewhere.

There is so much we could learn from a drop of blood, which looks like a drop of wine, I thought as we sat at the table in the Upper East Side home of my brother-in-law and his wife on Passover. My older son loved this holiday, with all its ritualized food and hand washing and prayers. My little one adored the doting attentions of his older cousins and the songs, if not the sitting still. I had come to this tradition, and to Judaism, as I had to Upper East Side motherhood: through marriage. So, while my nieces and nephews and in-laws and husband went through the motions, it was all newish and fascinating to me, as it was to my children. At the point in the Haggadah when we list the ten plagues of Egypt, the punishments God rained down upon Pharaoh for refusing to release the Israelites from slavery, we dipped our fingers into our glasses, leaving a drop of wine on the edge of our plates, one for each plague. Frogs. Lice. Flies. Diseased livestock. Boils. Hail. Locusts. Darkness. As I listened, I listed in my mind another version of the plagues, the afflictions of the tribe of women I now knew so well: head lice. School applications. Capital campaigns. Traveling husbands. Intrasexual competition. SEC investigations. Divorce. I knew there were more. Lots more.