For the second time that Tuesday, all three of them were crying, and it wasn’t even noon. The current fiasco had begun with two-year-old Anne marching up and down the hallway, her red-wheeled corn popper thudding relentlessly over the wood floor until the contraption woke baby Karen, who promptly began wailing in her crib. The situation disintegrated from there.
It had taken Ruth forty-five minutes to get Karen down, nursing her all the while as she read aloud to Anne on the sofa: Teddy the Terrier (twice), Winky Dink, Whistle for the Train, and Harry the Dirty Dog, among others, hoping that by some miracle she might be able to get the girls to nap simultaneously. That rare occasion, if achieved, might allow Ruth time to wash the breakfast dishes, start a load of laundry, get out of her bathrobe, check the mailbox, and, heaven permitting, decompress for five, or seven, or ten minutes.
Anne was not having it, however, and remained acutely awake after Ruth eased Karen into her crib and closed the bedroom door but for a one-inch crack. Shepherding Anne to the living room, Ruth stationed her like a mushroom in front of the black-and-white Zenith in hopes that The Price Is Right could hold the toddler’s attention long enough for Ruth to get dressed. Alas, neither the corny repartee of Bill Cullen nor the relative charms of the contestants, a plumber from Parma, Ohio, a housewife from Sacramento, a schoolteacher from Boise, and an optometrist from Baltimore, offered any incentive for the child to stay put.
That’s when the corn popping began. Ruth was still buttoning her dress when the baby awoke and began screeching like a teakettle. Nerve-worn and exhausted, Ruth lost her head, charging out into the hallway, where she let loose a verbal lashing that instantly reduced Anne to a puddle of tears.
Overcome by remorse at once, Ruth tried to right the ship.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” pleaded Ruth, squatting down to Anne’s level and pulling the child close. “Mommy shouldn’t have yelled at you. Mommy was being a bad mommy.”
But aggrieved and bewildered, Anne could no more be consoled than the baby, now purple in the face as she choked and sputtered on her own frantic wails, rebuffing Ruth’s calming strokes, even refusing the nipple. It was at that point that Ruth, overwhelmed by a hopelessness now familiar, began to sob, too.
What had become of the possibilities of the wide world? Where was the poetry or the song? Where was the leisure time to explore or the impetus to create? With Abe working long hours and her hormones in a frequent uproar, with no time for herself or her interests, nobody to talk to beyond the grocery clerk or the bank teller, hardly time to go to the bathroom, it was hard for Ruth to see past her immediate obligations to that wondrous place she had once aspired to. After two years of convincing herself that she was merely on hiatus from UW, Ruth had finally given up on ever resuming classes once Karen was born, consigning herself to a life of shopping, and nursing, and cleaning, and yes, crying, almost daily, on this occasion so much that Ruth was unable to assuage her grief and frustration until after the baby had ceased howling of her own volition, and little Anne, bless her heart, began to comfort Ruth.
“It’s okay, Mommy,” she said. “Don’t be sad.”
Another wave of guilt washed over Ruth as she looked down into Anne’s face, registering the child’s genuine concern.
“After Mommy feeds Karen, let’s go to the playground, how does that sound?” said Ruth.
Once Karen was sated, Ruth dressed the children and conducted them out the front door, where the stroller awaited them on the landing. The fresh air was a welcome diversion from the cloistered house. Ruth was ready to greet the day with renewed optimism. With Anne clinging to the hem of Ruth’s coat, they set out on foot, Ruth pushing the stroller south down the rutty sidewalk toward the playground, hoping the six-block stroll would lull Karen back to sleep and an hour at the park might wear out Anne. Much to Ruth’s relief, the former objective was achieved within three blocks.
The playground was uncharacteristically quiet at midday, owing perhaps to the promise of rain. Ruth had a bench to herself, Karen asleep in the carriage beside her, as Anne tentatively approached another toddler, a towheaded boy of perhaps three, his mother stationed on the opposite side of the jungle gym. Starving for companionship, Ruth might have engaged the young woman and struck up a conversation but opted instead for the solace of verse. Though she always packed a volume of poetry in her handbag, Blake, or Wordsworth, or Frost, the books served mostly as reminders to Ruth that she still existed somewhere beneath the burden of domestic toil. On this occasion, she’d brought a thin volume of Browning—Elizabeth, not Robert—which she spread open in her lap. But ever watchful of Anne on the merry-go-round, or the Buck-a-Bout, Ruth managed but a single stanza before she was called into service, assisting Anne on the monkey bars.
Barely three years had passed, and already it seemed like another lifetime since that afternoon in July of 1954 at Magnuson Park beach, Abe, the recent graduate, lying beside her in sunglasses, his nose daubed white with zinc oxide, his bare, curly-haired chest already beginning to pinken from the sun, Lake Washington lapping at the shoreline, two dozen kids shouting and splashing in the near distance, when Ruth set aside her dog-eared volume of Keats and spoke in the most matter-of-fact tone she could summon.
“I’m late,” she said.
“For what?” said Abe.
Ruth offered only silence in response. After a short interval, Abe shot upright on his beach towel. Turning to Ruth, he lowered his sunglasses and looked her in the eye.
“You mean…?”
“Yes,” she said.
Two days later, as they strolled through Volunteer Park, Abe stopped midpath and got down on one knee, fishing a black felt coffer from his pants pocket.
“I know it’s not much,” said Abe of the half-carat diamond. “But I promise, once we—”
“You’re only doing this because of the—”
“No,” said Abe. “That’s not true. I would have asked you to marry me the first night I met you if I thought I’d had a prayer.”
“Oh, Abe,” said Ruth. “What will become of us?”
The reply was a soft yes, but it served its purpose. Two weeks later, they were married by the justice of the peace at the courthouse downtown, Fred and Mandy their only witnesses. They deferred a honeymoon until such time as they could afford one. Oh, how quickly the trajectory of Ruth’s future had been altered. Down the tubes went the adventuresome path she’d planned for herself, gone the glamour of college life. Indeed, Ruth did not resume her studies in the fall. Instead, she counted the days until motherhood with equal parts dread and hopefulness, the hope being that her new vocation might offer her joy and satisfaction hitherto unknown.
Abe, meanwhile, took a job with the Safeco insurance company. The salary was far from extravagant, but it would do for a family of three. They rented a little green two-bedroom on Roanoke, where nesting helped ease a difficult transition for Ruth as the baby’s arrival drew nearer. Despite her frequent physical discomfort, the swelling feet and the constipation, pregnancy allowed Ruth whole days of rest and contemplation. Ruth had been free in those days to wander and wonder, to sate her appetite for newness. But all that changed the minute Anne was born.
Make no mistake, Ruth loved baby Anne every minute of the day, loved her achingly, every inch of her, from her swirl of wispy hair to her placid gray eyes, from her drooly little heart-shaped mouth to her chubby wrists; Ruth adored every tiny finger and toe of her. But all the love in the world could not change the fact that the child all but meant the death of her lifelong ambitions.
The arrival of Karen two years later sealed Ruth’s fate as a full-time homemaker. Though Karen was preternaturally composed and mellow for an infant, her appearance doubled Ruth’s workload. Now a mother of two, overburdened, listless most of the day, any hint of intellectual stimulation beyond the horizon, Ruth passed her days wavering between anxiety and despair. While she understood that Abe did not account for her malaise, Ruth could not help but resent him, if only because Abe enjoyed a thousand tiny freedoms beyond her purview as a housewife. He lunched at Clark’s Top Notch, engaged in substantive conversations with fellow adults, walked down city streets at his own pace, unencumbered by children. Perhaps her biggest misgiving was that in starting a family, Abe had sacrificed so little. In pursuing the career he’d planned for himself all along, he had compromised nothing. In siring his brood without having to contend with the messy consequences of daily life, the dirty diapers, the aching nipples, the constant orchestration required to execute the simplest of household tasks, Abe was unburdened by the perpetual neediness of others, free of the domestic bondage that marked her every waking moment.
It was true that Abe provided for the household without fail, just as he verbally and emotionally supported Ruth and the children in his way, all according to the presumptions, expectations, and customs delineated by the course of human history and biology, as agreed upon by roughly half of the population, the male half. It was plain to see that Abe adored his girls. But bouncing children upon one’s knee was not the same as nourishing them at the cost of one’s own vitality, just as subsidizing them was not equal to bearing and tending to them.
These thoughts occupied Ruth’s mind for twenty minutes at the playground before Anne tripped on a sprinkler head and skinned her palm on the concrete, effectively ending the outing. After much coddling and many assurances, Ruth finally managed to console the child, and they began the journey home, the baby still sleeping, while Anne complained incessantly of hunger all the way to the doorstep.
But before Ruth could finish warming a can of pea soup for the child, Anne fell asleep on the sofa to the theme of Tic Tac Dough. And no sooner had Anne succumbed to slumber than baby Karen woke up again and began to fuss.
This was not exactly what Abe had had in mind when he chose insurance as his calling. As one of two dozen junior underwriters at the Safeco insurance company, all of them men, all dressed uniformly in white shirts and black pencil ties (Abe having abandoned the bow tie in the name of conformity), hair short and well-kept, heads down as they annotated an endless stream of incoming applications under the vigilant eyes of multiple supervisors, it was difficult to feel as if a body was distinguishing itself in the insurance field.
In they came on the left, and out they went on the right, one file after another, Abe fastidiously processing every application, scouring them for any viable reason not to insure a soul: medical history, obesity, criminal record, pilot’s license, any propensity for risk-taking. Abe made notes in the margins, circling hazards and flagging uncertainties, before sending the memo files off to the typing pool, where two dozen women, dressed uniformly in gray skirts, modest blouses, and black pumps, their hair short and curly, updated files like automatons, promptly dispatching them to the agents.
The Safeco insurance company was a well-oiled machine, and it was not Abe’s ambition to be a cog in a machine, but an individual, a man in control of his own concerns and regulations, without having to answer or adhere to the governance of a larger interest. Abe wanted to be an agent, to make a better living for his family, to be his own boss. The financial benefits were not lost on him. He saw the agents with their chronograph watches, driving luxury cars, Cadillacs and Continentals, while Abe and his brethren did the heavy lifting to the tune of twenty-five bucks a week.
While each new day at the Safeco insurance company was roughly the same as the last, some days were worse than others, as was the case with a particular Tuesday in March, when Abe had been taken to task by his supervisor, a thin-lipped, bloodless personage named Scanlon, tall and straight as a lamppost, narrow of shoulder, and stingy of nature, who might have walked straight off the pages of a Dickens novel.
“Mr. Winter,” said Mr. Scanlon, looming above Abe’s workstation, “were you unaware that Mr. Schwert was a military reservist?”
“No, sir. I was aware.”
“I see, yes,” said Scanlon unpleasantly. “Then, might I ask why you saw fit to omit this information from your audit?”
“I forgot to note it, sir.”
“You forgot?”
“Yessir.”
“It just…slipped your mind?” suggested Scanlon.
“Yessir.”
“I see,” Scanlon said, his mouth curling distastefully at the corners. “If I might pose a question, Mr. Winter?”
“Of course, sir.”
“How am I to trust your judgment on matters of…let us say, incontestability, when something as significant as a man’s military status slips your mind?”
“It was an oversight, sir,” said Abe.
“And a glaring one,” Scanlon observed.
“Also a rare one, sir,” said Abe.
“I hope so, Winter. Because I can assure you there are at least ten fresh graduates who would be more than happy to relieve you of your station here at Safeco.”
“I don’t doubt it, sir,” said Abe. “Rest assured, it won’t happen again.”
Watching Scanlon retreat, the heat of shame and indignation rushed to Abe’s face.
His day only got worse from there. At lunch, a solo affair in the murkiest corner of the College Inn, Abe spilled hot coffee in his lap and lost his favorite pen. In the afternoon, he developed a splitting headache poring over the application of a certain James Robert Molinaro, thirty-seven years old, a roofer by trade with two misdemeanor charges (public drunkenness on both counts), both issued ten years prior, shortly after his honorable discharge from the marines. This Molinaro happened to belong to Alcoholics Anonymous and had recently embarked on several mountaineering expeditions, red flags, both. The man was an underwriter’s nightmare. But who was Abe to judge? Everyone ought to be insured, as far as he was concerned. In fact, he’d already run the numbers. He could insure every applicant that crossed his desk and the margins would allow for a small profit. There were pecuniary limits, of course, certain financial and moral probabilities to consider, but if Abe was to believe in the American dream, he had to view the playing field as level. To this end, he omitted Molinaro’s mountaineering from his memo, an omission that might well cost him his job tomorrow if Scanlon were to catch it. But after four months on the job, Abe was beginning to wonder if that wasn’t exactly what he wanted.
He left the office at 5:40, mentally spent, spirits flagging, climbing into his 1947 Nash, its blue paint faded and oxidized, its front fender stove-in, while watching one of the agents pull out of the lot in an Imperial Crown.
The instant he walked through the door, without so much as a hello, Ruth foisted baby Karen on him before he could even take his coat off. The baby immediately began to fuss as Ruth strode down the hallway to the bedroom.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m taking a shower.”
“Well, why didn’t you take it while—”
Abe stopped himself.
“Wait, I think her diaper is—”
He cut himself short again.
“What should I do with—”
“You’ll figure it out,” said Ruth.
“But—”
“You can handle it, Abe,” she said. “You’re a big boy.”
For the next five minutes, Abe endeavored to settle baby Karen down.
“You’re supposed to be the easy one,” he told her.
Abe stroked her head and patted her back, talking to her in funny voices, all the while vexed by his wife’s hostility. He understood what Ruth was up against, caring for the girls all day, cooking and cleaning and shopping while he was at work. He knew it had to be difficult. But was it any more difficult than working at the office for eight, sometimes ten hours at a turn, under the constant scrutiny of Scanlon, who appraised Abe’s every gesture, scolding him for honest mistakes? Could Ruth’s lot possibly be more taxing or humiliating than a bruised ego, a thin wallet, and an uncertain future? How bad could it be? Surely, the baby must sleep a lot of the day, and Abe knew firsthand that Anne could entertain herself for hours on end with a twenty-piece puzzle or a mason jar full of buttons. It couldn’t be that hard for Ruth, could it? She had funds, she had peace of mind, she had all the modern conveniences, she had the adoration of her chosen man, yet none of it seemed to be enough for her. There always seemed to be something missing. What happened to the free spirit Abe first met at the Hub, the one who was game for a challenge, the one who surprised him at every turn? And why did Ruth seem to begrudge Abe for his role as breadwinner, as if his vocation were a luxury, as if his office life were something to covet, as if the whole ordeal gave him some pleasure or satisfaction that she had no access to? It wasn’t as if Abe were out playing golf or drinking martinis. The fact was, when his nose wasn’t buried in a file, when his mind wasn’t occupied in analyzing risk, those rare moments at work when Abe managed to elude the ubiquitous eye of his supervisors were spent wishing he were back at home with Ruth and the kids, or better yet, that they were all together on some much-needed sabbatical to the Oregon coast or Snoqualmie Falls. These were the sort of daydreams that got Abe through a day of underwriting.
But every evening when he arrived home, such daydreams wilted under the glare of domestic reality. Ruth was often cranky and short with him, the kids fussy, the house in disarray, and dinner was never waiting.
“There’s some pea soup on the range, if you want me to warm it,” Ruth said, emerging from her shower in a bathrobe. “I forgot to thaw the hamburger. But there’s canned ham.”
“Why don’t we just go out for dinner?”
“It’s too late,” she said. “The girls need to eat soon, or they’ll start unraveling. And I’d have to change into something nice, and besides, we can’t really afford to go—”
“We could drive up to Dick’s and eat in the car,” said Abe. “Or Burgermaster. Or I could run out for some Chinese.”
“It’s nearly seven o’clock,” she said. “We need to get the girls down by eight or they’ll be impossible in the morning.”
Thus, it was pea soup and canned ham for dinner, followed by twenty minutes of Andy Williams on NBC. Hardly the Oregon coast. When baby Karen fell asleep in Ruth’s arms, bottle in mouth, Ruth retreated to the bedroom and transferred her to the crib, returning shortly thereafter to retrieve Anne.
“Time for night night,” she said.
“I want Daddy to tuck me in,” said Anne.
A small triumph, perhaps, but enough that Abe was smiling as he scooped Anne up off the sofa and carried her to the bed.
“Shhh,” he said as they entered the darkened room. “Don’t wake your sister.”
“I won’t,” she said.
Abe pulled back the covers and laid her down in the bed, planting a kiss on her forehead.
“Good night,” he said.
“Night, Daddy.”
Abe was satisfied with himself when he took his place in bed beside Ruth. For all the disappointments and small indignities he was forced to endure, all the Scanlons, and dented fenders, and unsure futures, his life was not a complete failure, for Abe had the love and adoration of his girls to sustain him.
But when he reached out to touch Ruth, she rolled over on her shoulder, turning her back on him.
“What is it?” he said.
“I’m just tired,” she said.