Excerpt from A Woman of Intelligence by Karin Tanabe, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

CHAPTER 1

Mother.

Only one word cut through the noise of a New York afternoon.

The rest of my neighbor Carrie's monologue was lost to me as a Packard ambulance raced past us along Fifth Avenue, siren screaming and bright red gumball light flashing. On its oversize tires, the Packard looked like a white scarab beetle, slicing a path through Manhattan's congested Upper East Side.

Our view of wide and pulsating Fifth Avenue was flanked by a parade of elms now in full leaf. When the shriek of the sirens had faded, we turned our attention back to each other, two women seated on a wooden bench at the playground near the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian wing.

Carrie, a red-headed, doe-eyed girl with a pin-up body and an alabaster face, scrunched up her pretty features. "Those ambulances are awfully loud, aren't they?" she noted.

"Indeed."

She glanced uptown, as if they might suddenly start rolling down Fifth Avenue by the dozen, like the tanks during the Victory Parade in '45, nine years back. "Is it just me or did they get louder after the war?"

"Could be," I said.

"I think they have, and it's really too much," she replied decisively, her heart-shaped chin rising a pinch. "The noise scares the children." She pulled on the large diamonds clipped to her earlobes as if to adjust her eardrums back to softer sounds. "They shouldn't let ambulances take this route to Lenox Hill, so close to the park. But I suppose, if someone dies on Fifth Avenue, someone dies on Fifth Avenue," she said with a sigh.

"Even the rich have to meet their maker," I replied.

"I suppose that's true," Carrie said, sounding doubtful. As a woman made of sunshine, never clouds, Carrie was the type of uplifted soul who always focused on life, not death. Part of her seemed quite sure that her husband could simply make a large bank transfer to the grim reaper in exchange for eternal life for the whole family—that is, the moneyed New York sort of life that they were already living. If eternity meant being a farmer's overburdened wife in one of the Dakotas or that state shaped like a mitten, then Carrie would surely take her last breath in that ambulance to Lenox Hill instead. At least she'd die in the correct postal zone.

"What were you saying before the ambulance came?" I asked. "The sirens drowned you out."

"Oh," Carrie replied, frowning as she thought back. "I was saying that our children are at a perfect age. Don't you love it? Don't you just love being a mother?'"

She looked out at her daughter, Alice, and my son Gerrit, trying to climb up the metal slide, squawking happily, their faces a mix of dirt, mucus, and joy. Next to us on the bench, my one-year-old, Peter, was tucked in a white cashmere blanket, sleeping with his head on my lap, wrapped up as tightly as the mummies in the Egyptian wing a few yards away.

"Being a mother," I echoed, thinking how the sirens had seemed to amplify the word's impact. "And yes, of course," I added quickly. "Of course I do. I love it. There's nothing I love more." I stretched as much as I could in my heavy coat. April was proving no breath of spring. "We all love being mothers."

"We do," she said firmly. "It is the greatest gift."

In her teal green dress and matching coat, a child-friendly one-inch heel on her beige shoes, Carrie was a vision of a certain kind of femininity, her whole being screaming of spryness, full of the vivacity that I lacked. At twenty-seven, she was a full decade younger than I was, and suddenly she seemed even younger.

"I remember when I was pregnant with Alice," Carrie continued, touching her flat midsection reflectively. "I was at the opera with Matthew, just a human beach ball taking in Tosca," she said, grinning, "and during intermission, a woman patted my stomach with a hand covered in diamonds—yellow diamonds, very large—and said, 'Isn't it so wonderful? To be having a baby? Just think, when it's born, you'll never be alone again.'" Carrie cocked her head and moved her pretty red hair—shampoo advertisement hair—to the other side of her neck. "For the rest of my life I'll always have someone at my side, or at least somewhere roaming the earth, who I've created. Never alone again," she repeated. "Isn't that just the most wonderful sentiment?"

Excerpted from A Woman of Intelligence by Karin Tanabe. Copyright © 2021 by Karin Tanabe. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.