Mother

I DISCOVERED, TAPED TO the side of Alan’s desk that faces the closet, a picture postcard of some white stone structures in the Mesa Verde, in Colorado. The card showed a tall ladder connecting two levels of the Indian settlement nestled in an enormous cliff against an azure sky. Alan had drawn a circle around the ladder in red Magic Marker, then drawn an arrow going across the card and the light maple of the desk to another circle, where he wrote, “7/13/76.” More than once I had told him that he could write on his desk in pencil, but please not with Magic Markers, which is why he did it on the hidden side.

Millennia ago, perhaps while Thales across the sea was pondering how to measure the pyramids, the Mesa Verde was the site of a thriving, self-sufficient Pueblo Indian community, eventually conquered and abandoned. Early in this century, two men on horseback happened upon its remains. Imagine their surprise, to round a bend and find extant, in those vast copper-and-ochre-colored cliffs, white buildings tucked in the cavernous hollows dug by wind and rain. The cliffs themselves are separated by deep ravines, creating a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle split apart. The stone dwellings, in their linear, geometrical groupings, foreshadowing Euclid, are lucid and harsh, with rock for floor and rock for ceiling. Above on the mesa, their roof, the Indians cultivated crops, scaling the cliff by an obscure path of carefully bored finger- and toeholds, a path indecipherable to outside marauders.

We climbed that perilous ladder, 7/13/76—Victor and I and the little ones, off on a three-week jaunt while Althea and Phil were back East in camp. Below us was a bottomless chasm. “Don’t look down,” the forest ranger warned. “Keep looking straight ahead, at the person directly in front of you.” Directly in front of Vivian was a retarded boy of about fourteen who moved clumsily, and I feared he would make a false move and topple us all. I saw us hurtling through the cubist landscape like falling rocks. Earlier, the boy had tossed a rock down and we never heard it come to earth. He lumbered up one step at a time like a young child, unwilling or unable to go on till he felt each rung of the ladder firm beneath both feet. With every step the ladder trembled. But he didn’t make a false move. He managed as well as anyone else, and up on the grassy mesa at last, I felt like falling to my knees and thanking him, as you might thank an indifferent god who has spared your loved ones out of pure caprice.

In the pottery and artifacts of the Pueblo Indians recurs the motif of a serrated line. After much study, said the forest ranger, archaeologists have concluded that the motif represents teeth. Because of their particular diet (and with no dentists, she added coyly), the Pueblo Indians must have suffered greatly from decaying teeth. So the image for their intractable pain finds its way repeatedly into their art.

I suppose the Magic Marker could be scrubbed off as in the past, but really, what would be the point? What is the point of so many minor restrictions? Most of them are concerned with the setting of precedent and habit, presupposing long life. I should have let him draw all over his room, if he chose. Drink milk straight from the half-gallon container. Live on pizza. Crawl into our bed in the middle of the night way past the age of four. For his whole life, if he liked. I also should have let him do things related not to setting precedents but to my own discomforts: keep a pet mouse, ride his bike alone through Central Park, see Star Wars for the fourth time. Refine his tastes? For what? And I should have gotten him the Adidas sneakers he craved, immediately, not put it off till the snow melted because I was busy, not said they were vastly overpriced and wouldn’t Keds do as well.

One wall of his small room is painted midnight blue and dotted with all the stars in the heavens, each constellation clearly labeled in his slender, neat letters. He writes like a draftsman, Victor used to say. Several weeks have passed and the Beatles records still lie scattered on the bed like huge coins. I select one at random to play while I limp around. When he first played Abbey Road for me, he pointed out how the songs ran into each other; despite their different moods, they were connected musically, thematically, like a suite. He didn’t use those words, naturally, but that was what he meant. I was impressed and pretended I hadn’t noticed. Vivian remarked that the songs on one side of the White Album were connected too: they were about animals. “Animals?” said Alan. “Sure. ‘Blackbird.’ ‘Piggies.’ ‘Rocky Raccoon.’” Alan looked closely at the record label. “Three out of nine.” “Well, still,” said Vivie. I stuck up for her. I thought she had a point. Tenuous, but a point. “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” was certainly animal-like, though I didn’t suggest that aloud. “Blackbird” is playing right now—it has a feathery, airy grace. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting ...”

The spy story is on his desk, the spies in their three-piece suits scribbling notes on the Magic Slate in the bushes of Central Park oblivious, forever now, to the danger they risk. But so is the danger, forever now, forestalled. Also on his desk is the report he was writing about Egypt. “Religious Beliefs” is the heading. “The ancient Egyptians believed that when a person dies and goes to their Day of Judgment, their life is put in a balance scale and in the other side is a feather called The Feather of Truth, and if the person’s life tips the scale even a little bit then he does not go to heaven.” A winsome notion of truth, compressed into a feather, far from the Truth we were led to envision: solid, unbudgeable, forbidding, and quite lacking in charm. Evidently for the Egyptians it was the lies that were heavy.

The old Ranger Ricks can go to the school library. The baseball cards should really be given to his friends—they are valuable, I understand—but since I don’t want to see his friends I drop them in the metal wastebasket, where they make a hollow, accusing thud.

There on a shelf is that stupid wooden pig. Flat, barely an inch in depth, only the vaguest outline of a pig, it is a small bank designed by one of New York’s less prescient shop teachers. Its legs—front two and back two merged—can hardly support it. If you move the shelf the slightest bit, it tips over. I move the shelf. The slit on top is too narrow for nickels and pennies: a dimes-only bank. But there is no provision for getting the dimes out, no secret cloacal exit, only that one thin slit on top. And being so flat, the bank fills quickly. Like doing penance, you need to turn the pig over and shake out the dimes one by one, which requires a certain strength of character. I would occasionally shake out a few for bus fare. Alan could empty the whole bank. Every child in the seventh-grade woodworking shop made the same pig and brought it home this past Thanksgiving, which means that in thirty-three families dispersed through District 3, someone shakes out the dimes, humming or cursing, depending on temperament.

Through my years of experience as a mother, it has in fact come to my attention, as the funeral director would say, that the New York City schools are obsessed with turning out small household articles. For girls it begins with potholders, which Althea wove out of colored loops on an eight-by-eight metal loom that she brought home at the end of the year. One potholder even had my initial woven into it; a week later, so as not to appear sexist in outlook, Althea made one with a V, much more tricky. The potholders were useful and pretty but deteriorated rapidly, while Althea moved on to woodworking. Luckily Vivian took over and kept me well supplied; I have not bought a potholder in years, but soon I shall have to. I cannot ask Althea, at seventeen, to weave potholders on a baby loom. Besides potholders, we have half a dozen clay bowls, a dull-tipped letter opener, sand sculptures in applesauce jars, and a lamp made out of a Chianti bottle. We have a bulbous green vase that came home wrapped in newspaper like the Maltese falcon. We have ceramic ashtrays and ashtrays of mosaic tiles, although till lately only I smoked, and not very much. Now, unfortunately, Althea smokes an occasional cigarette. We have boxes made out of popsticks and boxes made out of toothpicks, boxes that hold seashells, playing cards, matchbooks, painted pine cones, stubby candles. All these things we welcomed with fulsome praise.

During his last weeks, Alan gave us periodic reports on a certain crumb pan he was making in the seventh-grade metal shop, successor to woodworking. He first mentioned it in his tongue-in-cheek way, like his father but more pronounced, with a toss of the head so his longish, tawny hair rippled then settled like a sleek cap. I was stumped. Was it something to put underneath a toaster, or maybe under a pie plate? “A crumb pan,” he explained soberly, “is like a dustpan, only smaller. You use it to sweep up crumbs.” “Oh, I see.” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh. “Do you make a little brush also?” “No, Mom, I’m afraid you’ll have to supply your own little brush.” Ah, so it was all right. “Well, good. It’s what I’ve always wanted, actually.” “I thought so,” said Alan. “I sensed there was something vital missing from your life.” “Yes, an unfulfilled need, as George would put it,” I said. Phil said, “We’ll have to leave more crumbs around, though. I think we may be too neat for a crumb pan.” “Yes, all you kids better start leaving crumbs.” We asked him at odd moments about his crumb pan—its dimensions (four by six) and its progress. “So, how’s the crumb pan coming?” It was taking what seemed an inordinate time. It was not the process that took time, Alan explained, but waiting to use the machine that bent the metal, of which there was only one, because of city budget cuts. He was unfailingly good-humored and deadpan, even when Althea said she could think of nothing in the cosmos with less raison d’etre. He explained carefully how it was made. First you do a stretch-out on cardboard, then you scratch the outline on a sheet of metal, then you cut it out of the metal with tin snips. ... Victor was the only one who saw some merit in this project; he had nostalgic memories of metal shop. “Did you make a crumb pan for your mother too?” I asked him. “No, I can’t remember what I made. Oh, a belt buckle, I think. Maybe a napkin holder.” “Well, we already have a napkin holder,” said Alan. “That’s why you’re getting a crumb pan.” “Yes, I know. Phil made the napkin holder.” “No I didn’t,” said Phil. “Alan made that too.” “Oh, really? I could have sworn you made it.” “I made a napkin holder,” said Althea resentfully, “but you never use it.” “Is that true? I’m sorry.” “Your napkin holder only held seven napkins,” Phil reminded her. “So what? It’s the principle. It’s not my fault they make napkins so thick.” “I use your little blue ceramic pot for thumbtacks,” I said to Althea consolingly. “That’s not hers, that’s mine,” said Phil. “Is it? I’m sorry. I’m sorry, children.” It was true, there were so many of them and so many artifacts, as though our apartment would someday be studied by archaeologists for clues to our joys and pains, like the Pueblo Indians’ dwellings, that I couldn’t keep things straight. But I would have remembered that the crumb pan was Alan’s. None of them but Alan could have described with such aplomb in the face of the ridiculous how it was cut and bent into shape. I can hear his voice lingering over the words “tin snips,” with a soft merriment at the sound. Now that I can never have my crumb pan I feel an absurd longing simply to see it. I could call the metal-shop teacher and ask if I might pick it up, in whatever its stage of development. Or I might just go in to look at it, after which the teacher could throw it out or, given the state of the budget, unbend the metal and reuse it, if feasible.

Of course there is not the remotest chance that I will pursue the crumb pan. I would never go mad in quite that way. My curiosity will have to remain unslaked, that’s all, along with my curiosity about how tall they would grow, how their features would sharpen, what surprises their talents would lead them to, what kinds of lovers they would choose, how they would take the world and its vicissitudes—would he really become a Quaker? would she always prefer sleep to spiritual communion?—and what they would be and mean to us, grown. “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” Last night, lying alongside of Victor in the dark—guarded, stiff, tense as stretched wires yet for all that companionable, an impossible, agonizing mix—I said, “Oh Victor! That crumb pan.” “Jesus, I forgot all about it. The crumb pan.” And for a teetering instant we didn’t know whether we would cry or laugh. But nothing happened. The moment settled in balance between us and we lay silent, breathing slowly.

I’m shaking and shaking this damned bank, but it’s too full for any dimes to escape. What a waste, to lose so many dimes. How often, in the early years of our marriage, fifty or sixty dimes would have made a difference. They would not have kept Con Edison from turning off the gas and electricity in the bleak old apartment so that I had to warm Phil’s bottles under the tap, raging, till Edith came, took a look around, and for the one time in her life, maybe, lost her temper and told Victor his pride was insane, and drawing in a deep breath for courage, turned to me and said I was no better, then snatched the bill from the kitchen table, slamming the door on her way out. But the dimes would have reheeled shoes, bought a steak or two tickets to a movie. Our pride was insane. But no longer.

I fetch a hammer and screwdriver, and sitting on the floor of Alan’s room, assault the piggy bank. The screwdriver is less violent but also less effective; I have to use the hammer, and mercilessly. The wood cracks and splinters, soft wood that, once split, I can even rip with my bare hands. I take care not to hurt them—I am not planning retirement again, oh no. Never that again. Dimes spill out on the floor, a small fortune in dimes. A legacy.

Finally I sit down on the wide windowsill, rubbing my ankle. I have come to savor that other, duller pain and would miss it if it left. On a nearby roof across the back alley is a young black woman with an Afro, a bright golden dress, and Frye boots, hanging baby clothes on a line. Even though it is warmish for early March, the sky is overcast, portending snow or rain. An optimist. I shake my head at her innocence, slowly, like an old lady.

Why did I lose my children? That’s what I want to know. But the question is loaded, no good because it’s not phrased right. It embodies some fallacy or other I learned about in school, an egotistical warp. As warped as asking why did Victor lose his children. A better question would be, Why did these particular children die? To that there are reasonable answers having to do with chance and the law of averages. Also, cosmically: everyone dies. Locally: whatever that official doctor said was the cause of death. I forget the Latinate phrase.

Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic and prig we used to mock, counsels that we be content with whatever happens to us: “Because it was done for you and prescribed for you, and in a manner had reference to you, originally from the most ancient causes spun with your destiny.”

But why did I lose my children? Precisely that loaded question is what I want to ask, whose obvious, built-in answer is that I didn’t deserve to have them. That’s crazy, be quiet, I scolded Victor for thinking that way. Do you think the whole world revolves around where you put your prick? No matter. Why didn’t I deserve to have them?

For the answer, months, years of my life that I repressed for my own ease come flooding back, now that I neither have nor seek any ease. They were not truly repressed, in the sense that psychiatrists use the term, but suppressed, as truth is suppressed but not forgotten under authoritarian rule and floods back with an upheaval. The dam breaks in one crucial place, we might as well let go the others. I need no longer pretend that I have always been this cheery, competent creature, my life a rational passage from sturdy rung to rung. Under interrogation, stripped and spotlighted, my body becomes an open book.

There is an essential and profound strangeness about being a mother that is rarely spoken of, and yet religion does make much of loving others better than one’s self, which suggests it does not come naturally. Maternity, though, is considered in the nature of things: that mothers gladly endure pain so that their children may thrive is a useful, sustaining myth. Also something of a cultural joke: the mother as sucker. And between saint and sucker, two sides of one thin coin, is little room to maneuver.

In childbirth we tunnel through a dark passage to the new and strange place, to find there that the myth about mothers is true and so is the joke, the corrosive humor. At one in the morning in a room barely lit, two nurses from Trinidad sat at either side of the bed where I sweated in panic my first time, and in between discussing young men they had known in Port of Spain—Desmond, a big spender, Hugo, a terrific dancer, and Patrice, out for what he could get—they peered up my legs. There was going to be a party on Saturday night. “And do you think William be there?” the plump one asked. The thinner one sounded irritated. “I don’t know if William be there, but if he be there he better not be looking for nothing from me. Or that brother of his either. No, mon, I finish with William and William whole family.” The plumper one giggled. “Not if he treat you right I bet. Offer you with sugar coating.” I groaned in pain, and she took another look. “Nothing doing yet, lady. You got a long time yet.” Panic locked like a shackle. This was another country entirely; I had no preparation, no passport. “I wept and mourned when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land,” Gaby had read aloud in the dorm. She had a baby now, yet neither she nor any book had ever told me it meant this. I asked for the doctor. I only wanted a familiar voice and face. “Don’t put me to sleep. I told you I want to be ...” But he jabbed me, stopped the world. I went out with the luscious West Indian rhythms vibrating in my ears—their voices were lilting and trilling and hard, like a xylophone.

The drug was sodium pentothal, also called a truth drug, also used on criminals. You wake as though from heavy blank sleep, but in truth you have been awake all the time (telling the truth), living in scenes that live only once, never to be retrieved by memory and granted their proper place in your life. Sensations and all their possible harvest vanish without the supreme gift of the echo that graces them with humanity. For everything that promises our lives the resonance of a third dimension must recur. Even hearing music for the first time is not truly hearing it, only the prerequisite for hearing. The next time, and the next, we hear with the fullness of anticipation and foreknowledge, having had the pertinent nerve paths cleared for the feelings that will travel them, strewn like seeds. Everything destined to be real and permanent happens to us over again, in the act of remembering. What abides, along with Empedocles’ elements, fire and earth, water and air, is the past. We possess nothing securely but the past and that simple gift of turning and turning, to recreate it, to come round right. Nina was wise when she took those early morning solitary walks in college, trying to reconstruct the events of the previous day in their proper order, after the edict of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, “that there is nothing more important for science, and for experience and wisdom, than the ability to remember.” And for salvation, they might have added. This I know from my own life.

So that what happens only once, like Althea’s birth, never to recur in the life of the spirit, didn’t happen at all in any subjective sense. It happened like the tree falling in the forest: I not there to hear it, and yet all the while there for strangers, telling them the truth. What truths? Universal? Hardly. The most secret and incriminating, probably, the ones I would never have told a soul. That after Victor and I decided to marry I called George, one last fling for old times’ sake? And did I say what a good fling it was? Exactly how, and how many climaxes? That while in college I shoplifted a bra from Macy’s by wearing two out of the store, to see what it felt like? I had been reading Gide; I wanted to perform an acte gratuit. Or that earlier, much much earlier, against my mother’s express injunction I opened the locked drawer in my father’s bureau and found pulp magazines with stories set in Paris and pictures of girls in black stockings and garter belts kneeling with men’s penises in their mouths? What a peculiar thing to be doing. It didn’t seem quite sanitary. I was sure my mother wouldn’t approve. The doctor who heard my true confessions, the sloppy stitcher, is dead now, which gives me satisfaction. The nurses wouldn’t remember: they must hear volumes of it; they must watch that feather of truth rise on the balance scale every day, mortifying even us milder liars. But I, I remember all about Patrice and Hugo and Desmond and William!

When I awoke, alone in a bare room, my stomach was flat. Hours later they brought me a creature swaddled in a pink and white checked blanket, and I was expected to assume that she and the lump absent from my stomach were the same. I did as commanded: civilly, I offered her a breast. Not till the next day did I undo the blanket, count her fingers and toes, look at her eyes, her ears, up her nose and in her mouth, and at the rotting black knot of flesh at her navel. Mark of Eve. In sorrow, meaning travail and pain, shall you bring forth children, but I had had little travail or pain. I had fallen in the forest; all unfelt. I had plenty of pain now—the stitches stung and ached—but even I knew that infected stitches from an episiotomy were not the pain God was referring to.

Lying idle, I was able to sort out the pervasive din of the hospital into distinct sounds, like sorting out sections of the orchestra: wheels large and small, voices, footsteps (rubber-soled staff and clicking visitors), ringing telephones, buzzers, pagings of doctors for God knows what calamities, moans, baby cries, and an occasional shriek from the labor rooms across the courtyard. Time jerked by in green and white flurries—aides depositing trays or snatching them away, nurses with orders: get up, walk, urinate (“or else we’ll catheterize you!”), take a shower, attend a meeting. A meeting? I looked up, puzzled, from my Trollope novel of parliamentary intrigue. Yes, dear. Meetings for breast-feeders. Meetings on bathing the baby. The nurses reported to Victor that I was uncooperative. I refused to go to meetings and I refused to urinate. “Do them a favor,” he said to me, “and piss at least.”

I woke from a nightmare to find a large man at my bedside; in the dim he resembled a Samurai warrior. “Give me your arm, please.” I didn’t remember the dream but knew it had been violent—it still wrapped me round in its terror. “Your arm.” He had come to chop it off—I looked for the sword and cringed in the bed. He reached for my arm. “Blood pressure,” he said. I have always thought the dreams I cannot remember are dreams of Althea’s birth, those buried few hours fighting to take their rightful place in my life, so I might understand where I had been. I gave him my arm. “What time is it?” “Early. You can go back to sleep.” “Goddammit, can’t anyone give a straight answer around here?” “Five-thirty.” I came to anticipate his footsteps and thrust out my arm at the sound. The fourth and last morning I raised my head and spoke. “Tell me something. Isn’t there any other time of day you could do this?” He smiled and said, “Sorry.”

There was one moment of peace. Althea lay asleep in my arms after nursing. No one came to fetch her and since I didn’t know what else to do with her, I held her. I lay back and placed her in the crook of my arm with her head on my shoulder, as you hold a lover after love. It was startlingly quiet—a lull in the usual din—and gradually, in the quiet, my terrors fell away like ugly old rags, leaving a brand-new skin, a layer of peace exposed to light for the first time. “We won’t let them get us, will we?” I heard myself whisper. “You and me, we’ll take care of each other, like now. Just quiet.” We were not in a hospital but on some blessed island, and I heard Debussy’s L Isle joyeuse. There was nothing I needed to do for her that would not come instinctively; tears of relief streamed down my cheeks. We had escaped into a state of grace, out of this world, isolated and safe, one flesh.

After they took her away—“Anything wrong, dear?” the nurse asked keenly. “Anything wrong with Baby?”—I dried my tears and feared I was mad to be so frightened, living in madness like a place, a last resort.

I felt the tug of the weird twilight sleep for many months. I wished I could sleep all the time, that same terrible Lethean sleep, being there and not there, and wake years later to find her ready for school. I couldn’t move fast. My legs dragged as if they pulled weights. I couldn’t read anything serious. I could barely think—my mind was milky fog. When I listened to music I heard only the surfaces of the sounds. While I nursed Althea I played endless rock and roll on the radio. The Four Seasons sang “Walk Like a Man”; I could barely stand straight. When she sucked at my breasts she was drawing the life out of me, and when she was done I swayed on my feet; sap gone, I was a brittle tree, liable to blow over in a breeze. I was cut off from the subtleties of common language, and like a non-native speaker, stopped short by idioms, arbitrary usages. My breasts ached with more milk than she wanted; when I asked the doctor how to give up nursing and he said, “Cold turkey,” I held the phone, dumb. What magic in chilled turkey could dry up my milk?

A pamphlet suggested I would feel better if I expressed the milk. “Express the milk” sounded like something to do with a train. Oh. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More, baby? But I figured it out, picking apart the syllables like a foreigner. I opened my old red terry-cloth robe, bent forward so my breasts hung over the bathroom sink, and squeezed out the milk. I was a machine or an animal, one side or the other of human. Dark blood oozed below, milk dripped above, my body was beyond control, churning out its liquids. Like a machine or an animal, I felt no modesty or desire for privacy. I didn’t bother to close the bathroom door. Edith, come to help, civilized Edith with her lightly sprayed fair hair and her sweet manners, passed by. Curiosity conquering discretion for once, she paused. “Lydia, what are you doing?” Edith had never nursed. “Getting rid of the milk,” I said ferociously. My face was contorted with concentration like a scowling animal’s. Edith drifted away. If she thought I was offended at her intrusion she was mistaken. I was bitter at being no longer human while she still was. See, Edith, I’ve become an animal! Grrr ... grrr! The milk spurted out like semen, only thinner and not sticky, and swirled down the drain. Guilt! Think of the starving children in Europe! I didn’t care to taste it. Victor did. I imagine lots of men do, though at the time we thought it a highly original and slightly perverted thing to do. He tasted it in bed, in a boyishly salacious way, and we laughed. I could still laugh. Laughter was on the surface; my panic was deep, deep.

“Well, how is it?” “Not bad. Try it. I’ll give you some on my finger.” “No, thanks.” He sucked some more. “Sweet. Aren’t you even curious?” “Not particularly. I’ll suck you, if you want, though. Do you want me to?” He looked up, startled. “Well ...” “I thought maybe you could use something. I mean, those stitches, and all.” “You make it sound like ... you’d be, you know, doing a service. It doesn’t feel right.” So scrupulous, so evenhanded, ah, he always was. Only it never occurred to either of us, back then, that I too might work in a bar and bring home the money and thus feel justified spending my mornings practicing. “Well, I’m offering. Take it or leave it.” “Lydia.” “What?” “Don’t ... don’t talk that way. You never used to.” “I can’t help it. I’ve become an animal.” He laughed. He thought I was joking. “All right, let me see what it feels like with an animal.” I did it not with any particular allure, but in a serviceable way, just as I would willingly have spoon-fed him had he broken both arms. He didn’t seem to enjoy it very much—men with broken arms must not enjoy being spoon-fed either—and I didn’t offer again.

There was another moment of peace, when the ugly rags of terror fell away. Althea was about two and a half weeks old. Amid the debris of jars and brushes and half-finished paintings, we sat side by side on the couch on a snowy afternoon, she in her infant seat, I with my legs cautiously crossed (the stitches refused to heal, itched and stung). Out the window was the small concrete park where in fine weather the Italian men played bocce; now it was patched with graying snow, deserted except for a lone boy in a plaid jacket, throwing snowballs at the iron fence posts. My mind was quiet and empty. I watched the boy scoop the snow in both hands, cup it, and pat it into balls. The time since she was born felt like time not marked by passages of darkness and light but one long span of wetness—diapers, laundry, nursing, bleeding. Life is a fountain, all right, and I smiled in spite of myself. It struck me that this was the first time in Althea’s life that she had been awake for twenty minutes neither hungry nor crying, neither being fed nor being changed, not needing anything, merely sitting on the couch and gazing at her surroundings, like any other person. I had a vision of such grandeur and beauty that I wept. It was only a vision of Althea growing into a real person, with longer and longer periods of just such commonplace peace, and myself someday not needing to devote every moment to her survival but sitting calmly beside her, living.

The season began to change. The sun climbed higher each day. I didn’t need a hat and scarf and gloves any more when I took Althea out; she didn’t need sweaters under her snowsuit. Mornings, I scanned the sky like a farmer with his mind on crops. Beyond that I ignored the offerings of weather. I carried around my own weather, graceless January. I awoke from the twilight sleep: I could move quickly, I could read. But I did not pick up my life. A spiteful element in my nature took over, like an extremist political party that seizes power when moderate ones default. Compromise demands subtlety and inventiveness. All or nothing was my spiteful slogan. I had a baby? Then I would damn well be a mother. I took good care of Althea, much better care than anyone would have expected, those first foggy weeks.

My mother helped, but she could not take my bitterness very seriously. And why should she? This was no crisis—this was the life of an ordinary woman. Everyone had to learn it sometime. She was not unkind; she had a certain perspective. “You’ll see. Right now you can’t wait to get a little time alone, but later on you’ll wish for company. Children get to be thirteen, fourteen, they come home from school and shut themselves up in their rooms—you’ll wish someone would come and pester you.”

Did Evelyn and I, Ma? Sorry about that. Anyway, you were more correct than you ever dreamed. I wish for their company. Any of them, the living, the dead. The stillness of the house, and its neatness, are oppressive. No music is ample enough for its abandoned spaces. Things stay where they are put. The closet swells with clean towels, while the refrigerator is impoverished. Althea, who once trailed after me, seeking my company, my conversation, ferreting out our likenesses so that she could proceed to deny them, is occupied elsewhere these days; she returns with a flock of friends to cram the void in her twin-bedded bedroom. Their hellos are enthusiastic. They like me. I wear jeans and can speak their language, and they sense I like them too. I have always liked teen-agers, their amorphous, spurting, ribald personalities. But chatty greetings soon subside, and the bedroom door clinches their withdrawal. Six months more and she will be away somewhere at college. Phil does not have so many friends. He comes home alone late in the day and is too big for me to demand an accounting, too sealed for a friendly inquiry. I twitch at the sound of the key in the lock, step forward gingerly to say hello. The emptied apartment is suddenly warmer, habitable. My son, home. Snare him with offerings—brownies, an egg cream with George’s seltzer? No, thanks, he had something on the way. Stopped off for a beer? Or is he stoned? What are the signs again? Do his eyelids droop, his words sound remotely mumbled? Yes, but not from drugs. School okay? He humors me with a few scraps of unclassified data, goes into his room, and shuts the door. All those years I trained them not to disturb me while I was working! Too well-trained! It’s all right, I implore the closed door. Disturb me! Please!

After the first birth many women swear they will never go through that again, but they do, soon enough. When Althea was ten months old we decided we might as well have the other one, the boy, while we were still awash in infancy and had nine hundred dollars in the bank. For Victor had been in his first group show and sold two paintings, miraculous in the age of op, pop. Representational was generally too multisyllabic a word, its visions too multifaceted, for the ruling simplemindedness. Paintings depicting the real world were called derivative, which was true enough. The thrill of the show was keen but brief, just enough to make his return to obscurity a letdown. Pregnant and dull, I would wander over to where he stood working in the living room and make encouraging remarks, wifely, ignorant, and I don’t think very helpful.

Phil was born. I was no longer undone by the liquidities of the body, but when I found a roach in my hair I wailed and ranted, thrust my head into the kitchen sink and turned on the hot water full force. Anywhere else, I could slaughter them in cold blood. But my hair! And what if it had laid its eggs? I was a nesting place for vermin! In the midst of my wails I remembered that the effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself, from Spinoza, and I was disgusted. The person I had planned to become did not wail but was resourceful and stoical in the face of adversity. With a huge scissors I chopped at my hair in front of the bathroom mirror till I looked as ugly as I felt, and I vowed to be bitter in silence: I had some pride left.

The hair grew back, in time. I was not very successful at silence. Victor came home from the bar one evening as I was shouting at Althea, “Why do you have to be so selfish about it? Can’t you share things?” Phil sat on the floor banging a spoon on a pot.

“It’s my book!” Althea yelled back. “My book!”

“I was trying to help you!”

He came into the kitchen where I loomed over her, a tiny three-year-old blond thing stamping her foot and waving a coloring book. When he sat down heavily, a screw fell out of the chair. He picked it up and spun it on the table like a dreydl. “What is all this screeching about?”

“She—” Althea stabbed a menacing finger at me. “She colored in my book!”

“Oh for Chrissake.” I took the spoon from Phil’s hand and gave him a cracker instead. “I only did one page, Althea. I did a very good job, too.”

Althea thrust the coloring book at Victor. “See! She did it! She did a whole page. It’s all done.”

Victor accepted the book and glanced at me in a tired way, his head cocked to one side, his eyes squinting. He sucked his lower lip warily. There were artists we knew who had vehement objections to coloring books on all sorts of grounds—aesthetic, philosophical, even political—but Victor was not one of them. “You don’t have to color in her book, Lydia. If you need to color why don’t you get a book of your own?” He smiled ever so slightly, timorously, as if a wrong move might tilt the room off balance. But it was a sly smile too, the smile of an adder. I grabbed the book from his hands and threw it on the floor.

“Great! Great! If that’s how you feel you can buy me one.” Phil snatched up the book and prepared to rip it. I snatched it back. “If that’s how you feel you can at least admire my work.” I opened it to my page and tossed it onto the table, in front of Victor. Phil whined and scrambled to get it back, but Victor held it out of reach. Althea was astonished into silence.

It was a coloring book of nursery rhyme characters, and the picture I had done was the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. The profile of an enormous shoe dominated the page, a worn shoe with a firm square heel and high ankle, like a work boot. I had colored it black. The laces, which I had colored pink, were half-undone and the tongue hung out limply. The shoe had a little door and window with curtains I had colored pink to match the laces. Out of the top of the shoe tumbled children of all sizes. Some scampered down the front; a few rolled on the ground nearby. They were chubby and frolicsome, not like children whose mother habitually whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed. I had colored their play clothes in bright hues, carefully adding contemporary touches—patches, peace symbols, tie-dyed effects. Also, by coloring their skins I had made them interracial—there were black children in various shades, a few I hoped looked Oriental, and one I had attempted, without much luck, to give the brick-like tone of an American Indian. The old woman was not in the picture.

Victor studied it. “This is pretty good for a first effort, Lydia. You definitely have possibilities. You need to work on your skin tones, though.” He let the book drop and leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. “God, I am so exhausted. There was a bunch celebrating something this afternoon. I thought we’d have to float them out on a raft.”

Althea, made pensive by Victor’s comments, looked at the picture again. “It’s nice. But it’s my book.”

“I’m sorry. I should have asked first. I had an uncontrollable urge.”

Victor pounded his fist three times on the table. “Okay! Enough of this! Where’s my dinner? I want a groaning board! Someone go and unsaddle my horse!”

The children burst out laughing. Phil, sitting at Victor’s feet, pounded his fist three times on the linoleum. “My dinner!”

I laughed too, though I didn’t want to. To my surprise, Victor’s face relaxed; his eyes lightened with relief. I hadn’t grasped how I had unnerved him. It was a kind of power.

“Did you children do your spinning today? Did you churn the butter? Shear the sheep?”

“Oh yes, sire,” said Althea. “We did everything you commanded.”

“And you, milady? Have you had the plumber to fix the moat?”

“Oh, I don’t want to play,” I said sullenly. “You’re such a good bartender, why don’t you fix me a drink.”

“Are you really going to buy Mommy a coloring book?” asked Althea.

“Why, do you think I should?”

“Yes!”

The next day Victor brought home a coloring book. He placed it on the kitchen table along with a small brown paper bag. He came to the stove where I was sauteeing onions for a stew, and bent to kiss me; I tilted my head so he could reach my cheek. From the living room came the voice of Mister Rogers, demystifying for a rapt audience the parts and uses of a toilet. The TV was turned up loud so I could hear it in the kitchen. I liked Mister Rogers; I liked his flat lulling tones, his enchanting dullness. From his supernatural calm I suspected he was strung out on some very high-quality grass, even better than Nina’s, and I fantasized writing to him: Dear Mister Rogers, I wonder if you could put me in touch with the person who supplies you ... The seat can go up and down,” he was saying. “We try not to drop it because it makes a very loud noise. Would you like to hear the noise, just once?” Not especially; I heard it every day. “Now that didn’t sound very pleasant, did it?” “Not pleasant at all,” murmured Victor, his arm around my waist, stroking my hip. “Give me some of that onion, Lyd. Oh, it’s good. How are things?” Grease popped and spattered our foreheads.

I opened his gift at the kitchen table several hours later, after we had cleaned up the remains of dinner, gotten the kids bathed and in bed, mopped up the bathroom floor, picked up the scattered toys, and folded a batch of diapers. I had declined Victor’s invitation to make love. “Too tired to move.” You don’t have to move—I could feel it on the tip of his tongue. I was asking for it. I wanted to hear him say it. But he refrained. No animal, but forever well-bred—Edith’s doing. Score a point.

The theme of this coloring book was fairy tale characters. I chose the Little Mermaid, sitting on a rock combing the tresses that concealed her breasts, while a few fish gamboled at the surface of the water. In the brown paper bag I found a box of sixty-four Crayolas. How thoughtful. I did the entire Little Mermaid page, including her hair, in marine colors, shades of green and blue; except that in the fish tail beginning below her navel, exempting her from carnal knowledge, I added flecks of yellow for an iridescent cast. I admired the results and turned to Puss in Boots. Gold and maroon would do nicely for the boots. Victor came in from painting, took a beer out of the refrigerator, and peered over my shoulder.

“I didn’t think you’d really do it, you know. It was just a joke.”

I kept silent. He said in his calm way, but not as thoroughly calm as Mister Rogers, “You don’t have to stay in the lines.”

“I know, but I prefer to.”

He sat down opposite me at the kitchen table and drank from the can. “Do you want anything? Coffee?” I shook my head. “So, are you happy with that, Lydia?”

I looked up to see him grin. Exquisite, that grin, and at this moment enraging, a blend of dismay, irony, and acceptance. His whole appeal was locked into that grin: as dense and seductive as the very first time I talked to him, in the Lion’s Den with a gang of kids from the Chaucer class, when he perceived me, he later revealed, as similar to him. I thought then that he would be supercilious, shrinking from anything common or distasteful, but I was wrong. He was altogether too tolerant if he could tolerate me and my coloring.

“Quite happy, yes, thank you. It was very thoughtful of you. Crayons, too.”

“It doesn’t take much to make you happy.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Look, you could practice in the evening,” he said.

“I’m too tired.”

“You could at least look at the scores or listen to some records. You used to do that.”

“I said I’m tired.”

“Too tired to listen to a record? I don’t understand.”

“For the way I would have to listen, I’m too tired.” I bent over my coloring.

“You’re not too tired to go meet your friends over at Nina’s place. Is listening to a record any more demanding?”

“That’s different. It’s not work, it’s relaxation.”

“You’re doing this for spite. Whenever I try to talk about it you clam up. You know you could find some women with babies to change off with, and have a few hours to yourself during the day. What about Gabrielle?”

“I do use her. When I have to take one of them to the doctor, or shop, things like that.”

“You could do it on a regular basis.”

“Victor, I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t understand anything about it. What’s the use of working on something three hours a week? That’s a hobby. Would you like to paint three hours a week?”

“I would if I had to.”

But he didn’t have to. “Well, this is different. It’s a technique. I mean, there’s a physical skill involved.” I looked at my hands, smudged with crayon. For an instant they ached, the way the body can ache to touch and be touched. “Go paint, and leave me to my coloring.”

“How many hours a day would you need?”

“What is this, Let’s Pretend?”

“How many hours?”

I shrugged. “Six.”

“Okay, let me talk to my parents. They’ll loan us the money. Get someone to take care of the kids six hours a day. You can go back to Juilliard.”

“I don’t want your parents to support my studies. Aren’t I a little old for that? And anyway, they’re your parents. We’ve been through this before.”

“I know. But this time we’ll do it. Because before you said you’d manage on your own, and you’re not.”

“No! I know you hate the idea. So do I. Just forget the whole thing.”

“So I hate the idea. So what? If it’s a matter of your survival we’ll do it and we’ll hate it. People do a lot of things they don’t like, to survive.”

“Oh, survival. Don’t exaggerate. I’ll survive. And if not, well, what’s the big deal?”

He stood up and yelled, “I can’t stand when you talk like that! Stop it!”

“All right, all right. I’m sorry. You’ll wake them.”

He quieted down. “Listen, I love you. Maybe it slipped your mind. I care about what’s happening to you.”

“You care more than I do. I’m hardly worth it.”

“You make me sick.” He squashed the empty beer can in his hand, held it tight for a second as if preparing to hurl it, and then tossed it gracefully into the bag of garbage under the sink.

“You love me, I make you sick. I can’t, uh, assimilate all that at once. Please leave me alone. It’s been a long day.”

I did “assimilate” every word he said, though, even if I pretended not to. Two nights later I sat down at the piano. Victor said, “Mommy has to work now,” as he carried the children off for baths. I played a simple sonata by Haydn, who has charms to soothe the savage breast. Like me, he prefers to stay within the lines, and like my coloring, within the lines his music vaults through broad arcs of possibility: rich, ornamental, exalting, and safe, like a cathedral. A pianist can get lost in Haydn, not in any grand emotion but lured into the cunning recesses of the music, and into the trimmings, the trills, the turns, the cadenzas, the sheer gratuitous delight of it. A delight similar to what Victor finds in Matisse, where what begins as decoration pervades and becomes the essential, altering our notions of necessary and contingent. It is possible to be faintly dismissive about Haydn, with all due respect. Program opener, I have heard a few musicians say. Gets the audience in the mood. Formalist. But programs do have to be opened, and forms set, and those who perfect them, decorate them and gild them, are scarcely less original than those who break them, only more serene perhaps.

I was afraid of what I might hear, but the sound was not too bad. There was a remnant of me. More than a remnant. My fingers still knew what they knew; it was the control I would have to work on, the isolating concentration. At the start of the Andante, Althea appeared, naked.

“Can I play too?”

“No, not now.”

“Play ‘Skip to My Lou.’”

“Not now.”

“‘I’ve Got Sixpence’?”

“Althea, please, just be quiet. This is a different kind of song.”

She sat down on the floor, sending up potent waves of injury. A moment later she decided to accompany me on her toy xylophone.

“Althea, please!”

Her eyes brimmed with tears.

“Althea, your turn. Come on,” Victor called from the bathroom. She ran off. I was halfway through the third movement when Phil darted in. Soaking wet and naked, he banged a soppy fist on the bass notes. I screamed at him and he fled, howling. I wiped the keys with my shirt and began again, but I could hear him howling, and Victor quieting him, and then the howling once more. I dashed to the bathroom ready to kill; he stood shivering and crying amid wet towels and rubber toys strewn on the floor, while the bathwater, filmed with pinkish bubbles, slowly gurgled its way down. As I threw a dry towel over him, Victor appeared in the hall, holding Althea, one half of her hair combed, the other half a wet tangle.

“What happened? ... I’m sorry, he got away while I was doing her. I told you both,” he said sternly, “Mommy was working and not to bother her.”

“She wasn’t working, she was playing,” said Althea.

I sat on the edge of the tub and cried.

“Look, Lydia, everything is hard at the beginning. You have to persist. We’ll set up a routine and they’ll get used to—”

“Get out! Get out! It’s not worth it! Just leave me alone!” I slammed the door on them all and locked it. It was a simple hook and eye lock I had screwed in myself, to keep the children out. “I’ve had enough!” I shouted. “Let me get it all over with!”

Victor pounded on the door. I wouldn’t open, but I opened the medicine cabinet. He would hear the click and the squeak. The bathroom door began to shake. He was heaving his body against it. I watched my hook and eye lock quiver. It rattled. Both parts started to give. All at once I was seized with curiosity, to see which part would surrender first. I bet on the hook, but it was the smaller, eye part that sprang from the frame with a groaning of the wood as Victor burst in, flushed and sweating, and grabbed me by the arm. I was humiliated.

I had done nothing, no aspirins, no razor blade: I had made a fool of him, and I felt cheap.

“Let me go!”

“Get the hell out of here!” He shook me hard. “Go to bed! Go put your head under the covers. I’ll take care of everything.”

Later he muttered that he was going out for a walk, and left. I didn’t hear him return but he was there, asleep, when I woke in the morning. The dishes were washed, the toys and the towels picked up, the children dressed in pajamas suitable for the season, which was early spring. Except that tucked in a corner of the armchair was a half-drunk bottle of Phil’s. I felt a vicious glee when I found it and scrubbed away the white ring circling the inside. He had not taken care of absolutely everything. I was a mother; I would have found the bottle. It was that minute lapse of attention that left his will the freedom to live and to paint. I had no will left over, and I was wretchedly victorious, as though we were competitors in martyrdom. We were not competitors, though. He had never entered the race. I was running against myself.

All but the most tenacious depressions can yield to circumstance, and to instinct. Mine was not truly rooted; I knew I didn’t really want to die at all, even figuratively. I looked at my hands and recalled how the Haydn had sounded those fifteen minutes, and how Victor had heaved against the bathroom door. Out of shame as much as desire, I tried. I set up a routine, the children got used to it. It took an incalculable expense of will, but only at the beginning; after that, life carried me. Esther sent me her portentous notes from Ecclesiastes about the work of the hands, and I practiced till I could get my job back at the Golden Age Club. I used the money to study at Juilliard. Eros wins over Thanatos, as George, another optimist, likes to say. Self-destruction yields to instincts, and I had good instincts, he remarked years and years later.

“Good instincts! I have horrible instincts. You don’t know the half of it, George. I couldn’t even cope with a baby. How’s that for instinct?” I paused, suppressing. Couldn’t even enjoy nursing a baby. Nursed fantasies of ancient infanticides: exposure, suffocation in a crowded bed. “I’m only grateful Victor didn’t strangle me. He had sufficient provocation. For him, it must have been Eros over Thanatos, though God knows I was hardly erotic.” And I laughed. I was working, and happy, full of banter.

“No, you don’t understand. You were waiting to die in a more fitting way. That kind of downer just wasn’t ... significant enough to destroy you. After all, you’re not just a little trout in the stream who’s too dumb to put up a fight. Remember that? We know you have character, don’t we? Uh, do you mind if I make myself an egg cream?”

We went to the kitchen, where Vivian sat poring over the illustrations in Now We Are Six. “Do you mean to say I’m waiting for something more worthy?”

“Do you want an egg cream too, Vivian? Yes? Ah, that’s my girl.” He busied himself with the milk and chocolate syrup. “Didn’t I tell you once before what Freud said about the instinct of self-preservation? Its function might be not so much to keep you alive as to see that you return to an inanimate state in some natural way, a natural death suited to your organism, that is—that you’re not stopped midstream by some extraneous force, a brick falling on your head and such. ‘The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.’“ He squirted his beloved seltzer into the two glasses and gave one to Vivian. “Here you go, sweetheart. That was simply not your fashion, Lyd.”

“And what is?”

“Well, how would I know?” He drank his egg cream. “Ah! You don’t know what you’re missing. Purist.”

“I don’t like a lot of bubbles. It’s a pretty grim hypothesis. It doesn’t sound like Eros struggling against Thanatos at all. Just between the right kind of death and the wrong. Or maybe between premature death and timely death.”

“Aha!”

“Come on, George. You don’t really think that’s what the whole struggle is all about?”

“I think maybe it’s a case of semantics. The will to live, the will not to die ... So how is that, Vivian?”

She nodded beatifically, immersed in her book.

“Did you like your trip out West?” he persisted.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m reading.”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. By the way, Lydia, I must tell you about this terrific woman I just met. She’s into child abuse. You know what I mean ... she doesn’t do it, she works with people who do.”

Perhaps I had good instincts, but I had good circumstances too. It would have taken someone more perverse than I to resist them. A few months after that terrible night, Victor found a teaching job; we moved uptown, overlooking trees and river, and closer to Juilliard. To our devoutly middle-class parents it was still a slum, with its flamboyant street life, its shabby and chic patches side by side like a homemade quilt, but to us the place was Eden. It had an elevator. Space. Light. Air. The best things in life were rent-controlled. The mothers in our new neighborhood were tireless activists; we found an array of cooperative nursery schools and play groups. I stepped out into the world to see what was happening. Everything! Amid assassinations and bouts of public grieving, city people were fleeing to fantasy communes in the hinterlands, suburban children abandoning home for the city streets. Everyone was getting high and everyone was in wondrous costume. The world was a rough carnival, where cops and kids exchanged rocks instead of flowers, while in the wings, in the jungle beyond, war raged. And all the time this had been fermenting I had been ... I didn’t know what to call it. Was I too old to put on a costume and join the parade? When I saw women my age marching with babies slung on their backs I was ashamed of how I had spent nearly four years. “You’ve no cause for shame,” said Gabrielle. “You were ... sick. It comes from the situation.” She spelled out the ideology for me. “Weak,” I corrected. “All right, weak. Weak is a kind of sick.” Is it? But I would never be weak again. “That’s absurd,” Gaby said. “It’s like vowing never to be sick again. You’d be better off vowing to resist the dynamics of the nuclear family.” “Words, words.” I laughed at her. “I will never be sick again.” She shook her head and laughed back at me.

I rejoined the trio when Henrietta Frye moved to California. Rosalie introduced me to musicians; the phone began to ring. I flitted from group to group—like our President, I would go anywhere and do anything, only he didn’t. Humble second beginnings, and late, but this time I felt I was constructing something. “Your career,” my mother called it, and she stayed with the children, cooked a week’s worth of dinners and froze them, while I was out rehearsing. As the war ground on, we flourished. Victor was happy. I no longer made him sick, nor was I too tired to move. Quite the contrary.

The preceding years, with their wretchedness, became a blur, as though they had passed in some drugged twilight sleep; I suppressed the details. But I knew their texture and color, stony and dun, and I puzzled over how I could have managed motherhood so badly, been so strangely helpless. Why on earth hadn’t I practiced in the evenings, or at least studied scores or listened to records? Too tired to listen to a record? I didn’t understand. Why hadn’t I found some women to exchange babies with a few afternoons a week, in order to work? Crazy! Ah, if only I had it to do over again! How much better I could do now! My permanent record card need not show an abject failure. I would repeat the course and pass with flying colors, have that shameful F blotted out.

“Have you lost your mind completely?” Victor’s tone made other diners turn and stare. Out to dinner! Something unthinkable a year and a half ago. It was Simon’s, the local pub near the university with the suit of armor in the entryway, where we used to meet before we were married, for those orgies of food and mutual evasion. He gave his wily, amorous smile of then, but confident now. He had me. “You’re a most irrational woman. You actually like to court disaster. We finally have a fairly normal life and you want to start that whole mess all over again?” Not a statement, nota bene, but a question, open-ended. In his rising inflection was a quaver of interest. Victor was a child-lover, and a lover of happenings.

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be that way again. I’m different now. You weren’t so terrific yourself either. Buying coloring books! Anyway, now we could really enjoy it. All those things that passed me by. I can’t even remember. You know, first word, first step, like in those baby books.”

“You do have a short memory! Have you forgotten the time you locked yourself in the bathroom to slit your wrists? I don’t want to see you do—”

The waitress arrived, in her rimless glasses, leather miniskirt, and beads made out of dried lentils.

“The steak, please,” said Victor.

“And how would you like it?”

“Dripping blood.”

“Dripping blood. Very good.” She made a note on her pad and turned to me.

“I’ll have the same.”

“Also dripping blood?” Her suave, narrow mouth began to curve, unwillingly. A student, no doubt, maybe at Barnard.

“Dripping blood, yes.”

“Would you like anything with it?”

“All the perfumes of Arabia,” said Victor, and the girl began to giggle. Like Nina in college. So proper, so ripe to lay aside propriety.

“I was not going to slit my wrists,” I said as soon as she left. “I just wanted to be alone. It was the only room in that apartment that had a lock on the door.”

“You were so. I remember your words distinctly. You said you’d had enough. You wanted to get it all over with.”

The couple at the next table had ceased their conversation and were frankly hanging on our words. I felt like turning aside to them with an explanation, as in a Brecht play. “Talk is cheap. I didn’t mean that. I’m not the type. I wanted to scare you.”

“Well, you did. It was unforgettable.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t do it any more.”

“Oh Lydia.” He put his hand over mine and tapped several times. “This is pretty dumb, you know.”

Althea and Phil were cranky babies (small wonder), but Alan was the jolly kind a father could bounce around in the air or sit on the back of a bicycle and display to friends in the park. A showpiece. He took lengthy naps, during which I practiced. Our dovetailed schedules, Victor’s and mine, were masterpieces of cooperation, whether from fear or feminism or some mingling of the two hardly mattered. Victor worked on with his calm persistence though the public rewards were typically meager: a few weeks in a gallery, a few reviews, a few sold, then back to solitary labor. But I saw his paintings forever ramifying, complex and convoluted now, like his life. They showed city crowds, the trees and river and ships seen from our windows, skaters and ballplayers in the park, and the children and me, over and over, all with the early respect for the inner signs, and the sinuosity. He was growing in vision, I in proficiency. Way in the distance I spied the limits beyond which I would not pass. I would be excellent, not great. Not entirely because it was too late, or because half my mind was on children. Because my gift itself was not infinitely expandable, as a precious few are. I accepted it. I was happy and the limits still far off. I was willing to keep getting better, knowing I would never get best. What I could do was play with delicacy and make fine discriminations of tone and texture, and with so much practice those skills seeped through me. It would have been indelicate indeed to pine for genius, while simple gifts abounded; I understood why people loved babies—first word, first step. Only domestically did I learn to be lax and inefficient. So lax that under the cold stars Vivian was conceived. Get rid of it? Ah, we couldn’t. We gloried in it. Four! Piquant, original. We could handle anything now.

Just as the carnival cavorted with war in the wings, our sprightly family comedy, too, was performed in the shadow of death. First my father, shocking us by keeling over at his desk in 1969, he who could never be rushed into anything, who had to be the last man on the beach at the close of day, and then Edith. But she was going slowly, slowly. Bone cancer was her license to relax, maybe what she had waited for all her life: finally she said what she thought. Her mannerly evasiveness, her patina of refinement, were cauterized away by the searing pain, exposing unsuspected qualities, strata of rock beneath the surface vegetation: fortitude, penetration, a pragmatism of the emotions. Long-secreted nuggets of her self—her Jewish upbringing, for one thing—wound their way up to split the surface and greet the light. Her face was transformed, hollowed to the bone. The charming, pampered, obedient face gave way to a stark, shrewd old Russian Jew, incarnation of her forebears. So that watching Edith die, her bones settle into sand, was not only wrenching but inspiriting, like watching a birth or a resurrection.

Phenomenal, but it was also taking forever. “Why so long?” Edith griped. “Can’t you ... uh ... She flicked her head sharply towards her husband and made a swift, beckoning, peasant’s gesture with her fingers. “Grease the doctor’s palm a little, eh?” Paul gasped. He had never heard her talk that way. “Do everyone a favor, Paulie?” He couldn’t. “How long can this drag on?” Victor whispered in bed. “It’ll be over soon, dear.” “Oh sure, soon. And then what? Two more to go?” He was so bitter and angry. “No, no,” I whispered, “they can’t all be as bad.” Still, we knew it was in the course of things, the grief we were born for, unlike ...

“Be good,” this new, toughened, skin-and-bone Edith said to Victor from her hospital bed. His mouth fell open, he was so startled. “Stay good, I mean.” Later, close to the end, drugged and barely awake, she said something to him in Yiddish. This too was very simple. “Zeit gezunt, mein kind,” I repeated for him at home, when he asked. “Be well, my child. No, more like stay well.” The most common phrase, I told him. People said it every day—they didn’t have to be dying. I must have heard it a thousand times from my grandparents. But for Victor, in that language, and from her, it was the first time. He wept, and Vivian, who was almost two, climbed up onto his knees.

Edith had always liked to soothe, to smooth. She left us money to soothe her leaving, money we might have had earlier but for our insane pride. We moved into a bigger apartment in the same patchwork neighborhood. Victor rented a studio in SoHo and his paintings grew larger. I hired men to do the housework, young actors and singers, mostly, who whistled as they worked and were charming to the kids. I felt a barbaric, utterly shameless thrill watching men scrubbing bathroom tiles or prancing around with a feather duster. Oh, there was no denying now that we were in the cozy middle class. No more playing poor. Hadn’t we earned the comfort, though? Not only by labor but by suffering? And suffering right. Everyone suffers; the important thing, the experts say, is knowing how to “handle” suffering. (“... two handles, one by which it may be borne ...”) Except in their unnaturally hushed offices they call it pain. Suffering is too tactile a word for them to bandy about—you can feel what it means when you say it. Eventually you might learn to handle it so well that there would be no pain too devastating for you to overcome. So it seemed.

I did do better the second time around, with the second pair, as I promised. And even now, God almighty, after everything, I still feel a twinge of childish pride. I told you so. Okay, Lydie, clutching your exemplary report card to your milked-out breasts, you did do better, you did fine, no one can dispute it. But you lost them.

I lost my children because I was unworthy of them.

Oh Jesus, Lydia, what kind of primitive horseshit are you throwing around?

No, no, just listen! You don’t understand. I don’t mean because I was working day and night; that part is okay. Acquitted. And not because I let them go on the bus. Acquitted. But with those first two ... I was a sadistic, self-pitying bitch.

But you know all about—

No, no, never mind the reasons or the justifications. I’ve heard it all from my friends; their logic is unassailable; I bow down to it; I stand explained. Nevertheless, that is what I was.

Okay, smartass, then why weren’t the first two taken?

Aha! God moves in mysterious ways. His wonders to perform. “Because it was done for you and prescribed for you, and in a manner had reference to you, originally from the most ancient causes spun with your destiny.”

I also hear the dying voice of Edith croaking to me, an Edith not as she was or even became, but beyond herself, pushed still further back into her ancestral past; an old Jewish lady with a heavy accent and Yiddish intonation, but she still retains a certain Upper East Side savvy. Croaks: So this, Lydia, after all your hemming and hawing, this is the conclusion you come to? What are you, meshugah? This is your life, all your nice accomplishments and you’re drowning in guilt? Vey is mir! Plus with up there someone spinning threads like a fairy tale! You, on purpose, they picked out? What’s the matter, you don’t believe in accidents? You think you can be the boss of this life? All right, so maybe once in a while you thought it would be nice to be free. Since when is that a sin? Even your smart friend, what’s his name, you know, the psychiatrist, psychologist, what’s the difference, the one who I never liked the way he looked at you, a married woman and to my son, even him and his modern ideas didn’t teach you anything?

No, Edith. I think I was not meant to be a mother. I trespassed into the wrong myth.

Oh dear, she says, resuming her usual voice and diction. Oh dear, oh dear.

Zeit gezunt, mein kind, she whispers, and sinks back into her grave.

I lost my children because ... Ah, at last it comes! Because I did not want them in the first place. Not for themselves. For me. To prove a point. Because they, those two, were an experiment in pride. And you mustn’t experiment with human lives! Everyone knows that! Mustn’t, mustn’t! Stand up against the wall so I can smack your face. Back and forth and back and forth with a flick of the hand, the gifted, experienced hand. Mustn’t play games, Lydia!

Still, the experiment was a success. The operation was a success, but the patients ...

One of the most beloved and talented girls in our class in college died eight years after graduation, trying to save her child. I read about it in The New York Times. I lay on a blanket at Jones Beach reading the paper while Victor splashed around in the surf with Althea and Phil. It happened in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts: the four-year-old boy had found a cigarette lighter upstairs. Before the firemen arrived she had run up the flaming staircase to roll him in a bedspread and toss him out a window. The child was saved, but she died of burns and asphyxiation. Steffie had done well after college. Done good, that is. She was a lawyer of some repute. Deep in the South, Birmingham, Selma, she accompanied voters to the polls, talked protesters out of jail, defended activists. Even in college, we had known she would serve good causes and serve them well.

“Look at this,” I said to Victor when he came back to the blanket. As he read, I dried the children, squealing and jumping (alive!) under the towels.

“How awful. But which one was she? I don’t remember any Stephanie Rosenberg.”

“Of course you do. Steffie Baum, then. She was the small, very pretty one who wore her hair a different way every day and had a lot of boyfriends? She used to sneak out at night. We thought she was very daring. She sang in Gilbert and Sullivan—Patience, in a blue gingham dress, don’t you remember?” I was starting to cry, rubbing my eyes with sandy hands.

“Oh! Of course. She was almost the valedictorian but someone else got it in the end.”

“Yes, that’s right. That’s her. She went out with your friend Ray Fielding for a while. She wrote an article about the slums around the college and that we should pay attention, and she got the Service Award. She also loved Mallomars. And she never slept with George, either. She had to really like them.”

“This is terrible,” said Victor, and he sat down on the blanket. “Wasn’t she the one who got all those Patient Griselda poems printed in the paper?”

“Yes ...” I looked around. “Where are they? Oh Lord, they’re in the water again.” We leaped up.

When we got home I called Nina and Gabrielle, and George, who had sung but not slept with her. They had seen the article too, two and a half inches on the obituary page. I talked on the phone all evening, about Steffie Baum, now Steffie Rosenberg that was. And about that awful child. Careless, disobedient wretch, to kill his mother.

Steffie, how I envy your fate. Why wasn’t I given a chance to be a hero and save them? I would have, just like you. Even though I wasn’t as useful or as large-spirited as you, still, I swear I would have done it too. And not for pride, either. For real. For it was real. It became real. I became it. I too would have gone through the fire to pull them out, dammit. But then, you were always a step ahead.