The Rise and Fall of Rocky Love

The dark evening shimmers with flurries — a surprise late-winter storm — and Cat and Teddy take their usual nightly walk. She wishes she could share his enchantment with the 3-D fog of light snow filling the air, but ever since she found out she was pregnant she’s been too preoccupied to think of anything else.

“Come on.” He takes her mittened hand into his gloved hand and tugs her into a run.

He keeps running for a few moments but she can feel the slowdown, an imminent release of their hands as if he wants to let go of her and keep on running.

They come to a stop in front of a tenement guarded by six snow-capped garbage cans. Teddy continues to look straight ahead. Then, slowly, he turns to her. His face is bright red and his lashes glitter with soft snowflakes.

She feels like laughing, she is so nervous, so scared. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you —”

“Inspected?” She has never had her diaphragm checked or replaced, but has wondered recently if the rubber didn’t look a little dried out.

“This is no place for children.” His gesture opens to the garbage cans, the quiet street, the snow-sleeping night. “I would love to have children some day. But I’m a graduate student. I won’t have my degree for another five years.”

“Teddy... it happened. It isn’t just my problem. It’s our problem. And why does it have to be a problem, anyway?”

He sighs. A car passes. And in the shifting shadows of the headlights, she sees something close down in his face. He doesn’t want this. Not now, or not with her — she can’t tell.

“We should sleep on this, at least,” Cat says, sensing him drift away from her, as if someone snipped their cord. “Shouldn’t we?”

At home, Cat goes right to bed and Teddy stays up. She can hear him moving around the living room. It is chilly in bed, even in her flannel nightgown, and she huddles under the blankets. She feels guilty for having gotten pregnant, and for suggesting an extra burden to Teddy before he’s ready. But she also feels little flickers of happiness, of hope, of wanting it. It. She reminds herself that it’s just a knot of cells in her womb. It isn’t even really a person. Yet she feels a yearning for that little cell-clump. If she does nothing, it will simply grow and one day emerge from her body, indisputable. She knows it will change her life. But Teddy... she loves him and wants him, too. The thought of having to choose between them is impossible.

In the morning, she finds him sitting on the edge of the bed. From the rumpled sheets on his side, it looks as if he came in eventually and slept next to her. That’s something, at least. She opens her eyes and for a moment feels happy, like it’s a regular morning. She stretches and smiles. Then she remembers and quickly sinks.

“I’ve been thinking.” His voice is gentle and as he speaks his forefinger moves a strand of hair across her forehead. “I’ll do what I can to help if you decide to go through with it. But I have to be honest, Cat. No guarantees.”

She says, “Fine,” but doesn’t mean it. She lies there and her feeling that it is not fine quickly escalates. He has impregnated her and in that moment they were equal. Now, because her body carries the seed, she has become dangerously unequal. Why has all the burden of risk and responsibility — and the choice — landed on her?

Teddy gets dressed and bundles himself up for the winter morning. He packs his briefcase and knapsack for long hours of studying elsewhere. “I’m going to the library,” he says. “I have some research to do.” He pecks her on the cheek. “Are you okay?”

She feels paralyzed by confusion. If she has an abortion, will she be able to forgive him — or herself? If she doesn’t have an abortion, will it drive him away? Only one thing is clear: it will be a matter of having and keeping it, or not having it at all. She would not be capable of bringing a baby to term, giving birth and then relinquishing it forever. Even now, she feels stirrings of fascination and love.

She needs to talk to a woman who would understand and immediately realizes her mistake. It was never going to be Rocky. Alone in the chilly apartment, she dials her mother.

Janet makes them herbal tea and dumps a box of shortbread cookies onto a big plate. She has put on weight and her hair is now cut short. Cat thinks her mother looks healthier and prettier than when she was a skinny drunk. Janet carries a tray to the living room and sets it on the coffee table, where, Cat notices, a copy of Freak is displayed along with the latest New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and book of Helga drawings.

“I had dinner with Eddie and Penny last week,” Janet says. “They’d love to see you.”

Janet nods, clearing the way for Cat to explain this sudden visit. But she is silent. So Janet says, “What’s new in the world of cartoons?”

Her mother is still, except for her eyes, which blink. “Well,” she says, “let’s talk.”

“I mean, I know what I want to do. But there’s a practical side, reality, and it seems to be the problem.”

“Having a baby is not a romantic thing,” Janet says. “It is a practical matter. It’s very expensive, and it’s a good idea if your relationship is stable. I suppose in a way that’s what marriage is for, to clear up issues of responsibility before they get tested. At least in theory.”

Cat knows well that her parents’ relationship broke all the theoretical rules of marriage, and Janet’s heart, again and again.

“Your father and I got married because I was pregnant with Eddie,” Janet says.

“Not that I regretted having Eddie, but we were too young and it was difficult. Mort was not prepared to be a husband and father. But I loved him and I wanted Eddie. I was a very privileged child and didn’t understand hardship or what it meant to work or make sacrifices, so when my father cut me off I didn’t blink an eye. It seemed very romantic at the time. My father, your grandfather, is a real stiff, and I think he was wrong, but so be it. He is an ACOA, too, you know.”

Adult Child of an Alcoholic. Ever since Janet first admitted her own role in the family dysfunction, Cat has been unable to hear the acronym without feeling doomed: ACOA, MIA, DOA, RIP.

“Yes, Mom, you’ve told me all about Grandpa Phillips and his father, Avery Phillips, the fall-down-drunk.” Cat raises a finger to swipe an errant strand of hair from her eye. All this family history weighs so heavily. She needs to know what to do now.

“So, there we were, Mort and I, twenty-one years old with a baby. Oh my God, to think back on that now! Well, we lived frugally. It was not easy. It was very hard and I was lonely. He wasn’t monogamous. When I was pregnant with you, ten years later — and I was worn out by our small closed life —”

“Mom, I know the story. You kicked Daddy out for being unfaithful when you were pregnant. Then you had me.”

“That’s part of the story. I suppose this is a good time to tell you the rest.” Janet pauses to take Cat’s hand gently between hers. “I want to clear up one thing right now, Cat, before I go on. I never regretted having you, either.”

A weight seems to fall on Janet’s expression, pulling it down, adding shadows and years. She does not take her eyes off Cat as she speaks. “My darling, I tried to have an abortion. It was scheduled, but the doctor was arrested. It was illegal in those days, you know. It was a very dangerous procedure and most people didn’t do it. It was risky. But I was desperate, desperate. I already had one child and I didn’t know what to do with him. Well, Eddie was a great boy, a lot of fun. But I was scared.”

Cat sits there, taking in the bits of information her brain is able to process, the rest of it flying above her head. She always knew that she was, technically, a mistake, part of the tumult of her parents’ marriage. But never before had she considered herself to be that dark, dreaded notion: unwanted.

“I’m going to tell you everything, because you’re a woman now and you need to know.” Janet looks into her beloved daughter’s eyes, and Cat looks back, into her mother’s: sky blue, faded and tired. “When the abortion fell through, I tried to abort myself. With a hanger. Just like the stories you hear about now, about what used to happen. Well, that was the reality then. If a woman is desperate, she will try anything. And I did.”

“But what happened?” she asks, gesturing with her free hand as if to say Why am I here?

“That’s right. I didn’t abort you, and I didn’t puncture my uterus, which is amazing. I bled a lot, though, and I thought I’d aborted... you. But after some time I realized the pregnancy was continuing. So, Ben and Rose took me in and I lived with them until after you were born. They were very generous, but I could never feel quite comfortable living with Mort’s parents under the circumstances.”

“Right. That was another mistake. It added sixteen more years of pain before we finally got divorced.”

“Getting pregnant in the first place,” Janet says softly, spilling a liquid truth that doesn’t collect neatly but dissipates into a cloud that infiltrates every part of Cat like invisible poison gas. “Once you’re pregnant, if you aren’t ready, there is no perfect choice.”

Cat sits silently, her mother’s hands warm on her skin. She does not feel ready for this confession, and suspects she never really will. It’s the kind of information she wishes she didn’t possess and will never be able to forget. And she cannot begin to understand how to process it in light of her own pregnancy now.

“It’s not an easy decision, sweetheart. I can’t help you with it. But I’ll support you in whatever you decide. The trouble is....” Janet shakes her head resignedly. “Money. I just don’t have the resources to help you financially. And I’m sure your father doesn’t, either.”

“I know, Mom. I don’t expect you guys to help with money.” She hears herself sounding so rational, while inside she is pinging with anguish, wishing someone would come along and serve up the perfect solution. She can imagine how relieved her mother must have felt, twenty-five years ago, when Grandpa Mort and Grandma Rose came along with a safety net. And, later, how that net had trapped her into a life for which she was unprepared.

Janet lifts and lowers her head in an exaggerated nod. “That’s too bad. But in a way, darling, it is your decision, because you are pregnant, not him, and no matter what promises a man makes it doesn’t mean he’ll keep them.”

“But isn’t it better to start off with good intentions? I mean, if he was happy about it, I wouldn’t be so confused.”

“Maybe, maybe not. If, if, if. Unfortunately, you have got to look at what your situation is.”

“I hate to say it, Cat honey, but he’s right, in a brutal kind of way. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is. The decision you have to make is terrible. Impossible. But not making one would be a decision by default, wouldn’t it?” Janet smiles sadly, her eyes growing wet. She leans over to hold her daughter, patting the young back that now heaves with sobs. After a while, during a pause in the crying, she adds a final bit of advice: “It might help not to lump them together, Teddy and this pregnancy. Think of them as two separate things and figure out, one at a time, what feels right and what makes sense. Heart and head. Listen to both. And then project forward to imagine your life in every possible scenario. Being a single mother, Cat, will change everything about your life, if that’s what it comes to.”

Every day, the embryo develops, forms into something closer to a baby. And now, every day, Cat feels sicker and sicker, edging to the moment when she will start vomiting as part of her daily routine. There isn’t time to decide. She wishes she could suspend herself and take a year. Wait. Be reasonable. But her body won’t let her.

At home one evening, she stands by Teddy’s desk and delivers the only decision she has been able to make so far.

“I don’t want to go away with you,” she says. “I want to spend my week off alone, thinking.”

Okay. No argument. Not even a discussion about the hard-earned deposits to all those inns and the rental car, all that money they’ll lose. But why — why should she have expected more at this point?

“I’d like to take the week off from work and spend it here by myself. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

All the lights in Teddy’s study are off except the blue backscreen of his computer. She can hear an echo of the energetic voice of John Paglia talking and talking about getting to the heart of the truth of the real story, like a sales pitch to the inner mind. What heart? What truth? What real story? Who am I and why am I here and what should I do now? Cat poises her fingers on the keyboard and begins to type.

The Legend of My Transformation

Once I was a cartoonist, an artist, living happily inside my mind. Then I fell in love. Got a job. Got pregnant. And now I spend all my time figuring out how to survive.

I used to walk around just looking for ideas. I would wait until I heard that click-click inside my mind, then I would stop and begin to pay attention. It could be anything — an old Chinese man handing a flyer for a tanning center to a black woman — and that became a cartoon. Ideas came from everywhere.

Sometimes I would buy a stack of newspapers, all of them, including the trashiest ones, and go to the park and read. The Star and The Enquirer were full of fascinating and hilarious true stories: shoe size determines life span, Elvis seen panhandling on Dallas street, extraterrestrial mows neighbor’s lawn, man who ‘can’t’ impregnates wife with thought waves. All these stories became cartoons. From The Post, I got one of my favorite ideas: the story of a young actor who lived a double life, as gigolo to a rich older man, and boyfriend to a sweet Midwestern girl. I turned it into a comic strip: Man in Tights: Adventures of a Bisexual in the Age of AIDS. I sat at the kitchen counter, drawing doodling and plotting each frame. As the strip grew, I started spending whole days and nights inside. After a while I would force myself to take long walks just to keep my sanity.

It was a wonderful time.

As a child I studied, collected, consumed Marvel comics. Now, an adult, I dug deeper. I spent hours in bookstores and comics specialty stores looking for the work of the masters — Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, the Hernandez brothers — until I started to wonder where all the women were. So I looked, and I found them: Trina Robbins, Cat Yronwode, M.C. Lord, Mary Wilshire, Wendy Pini, and there were more. There were so many cartoonists and so many magazines: Zap, MAD, Spirit, Love & Rockets, RAW, Weirdo, Elfquest, Pork Roast. And there were publishers just for comics: Rip Off Press, Last Gasp, Kitchen Sink, New Wave Comics. But I wasn’t ready for them yet. First I needed to polish my work.

To survive, I worked part-time for a woman who made and sold jewelry out of her home. I would sit with her, stringing beads and listening to music, or take the work home with me. The pay was miserable but the flexibility was ideal. I never told her about what I thought of as my secret ambitions and I never showed anyone my cartoons. I thought of them as forming, half-baked, unready. Plus there was the problem of me not taking myself seriously. Always waiting for the day to make my move — to submit work — and never doing it. I loved my work but feared it had no value, and worse, I worried that, as soon as I showed it, the experts would confirm my fears. And then what would I be left with? Without cartoons, I would have, think, feel, dream, desire nothing.

I was content, believe it or not, with my secret work, my paltry job, my tiny apartment, my band of like-minded aspiring-artist friends.

Then one scorching day in July, after a long morning sketching at the kitchen counter, I went out to take a walk and get some pizza for lunch. I walked and walked until I reached Famous Ray’s on 11th Street.

I bought a slice and a root beer and carried them to a corner table and sat down. I was still thinking about cartoons, that the thing about cartooning was that it looked easy but it was hard, you had to get the whole wide world in there just to make your point, for it to click, and if it wasn’t exact, perfect, on the mark, then it was nothing at all.

That’s what I was thinking when in walked Teddy.

I noticed him right away. He seemed arrogant yet unselfconscious, swinging open the door and lurching in as if pushed by the heat. He had this cocky look on his face like he wanted to go back out and give the weather a piece of his mind. He was wearing baggy white shorts — half-pants, really, that reached all the way to his knees — and brown leather shoes with no socks. His calves were long and muscular, sexy, I thought. He wore a gray T-shirt that said RED on the front and SOX on the back.

He got his pizza — two slices flopping over the sides of the paper plate — and carried it to a table near mine. I took a first bite of my slice and the cheese stretched into a long string which I had to struggle to get under control. But my mouth was full of too-hot pizza and the cheese wouldn’t break, it was like putty.

He looked at me. “Some weather, huh? Have you ever seen such a hot day?” He pretended to wait for an answer. Of course I was annoyed. Then he said, “Uh, cat got your tongue?” For a moment I thought he was referring to me by name and it confused me enough to look at him squarely — cheese still dangling between my mouth and the slice of pizza in my hand. He puckered the sides of his mouth, making a kind of chipmunk face, and said, “You look like some kind of pizza-producing silkworm. Sorry to say.”

I finally managed to break the tenacious string of cheese, draw in what dangled from my mouth (I did feel like a silkworm, in a way) and coil the rest onto the slice. He continued to watch me.

“Sorry,” he said again. But this time it really sounded like an apology.

“Let’s see you eat that,” I said.

He tucked a napkin into the neck of his T-shirt, cleared his throat, picked up a plastic fork and knife, cut the tip off one slice and placed it carefully into his mouth. He chewed slowly, then swallowed. “A new invention, the fork and knife.”

I sunk my teeth into my slice.

He said, “I noticed you’re not wearing a wedding ring.”

I glanced at my left hand, as if to confirm his observation, and said, “So?”

“So, what if I wanted to ask you out, and seeing that you don’t have the social grace to use utensils, decided I’d be better off not taking the risk? Appearances count, you know.”

I half-grinned, shook my head, bit my pizza again. He was a jerk but I kind of liked him.

He continued: “It’s a theoretical argument. I’m posing a simple question based on a premise that a man and a woman, out for pizza, separately, might just possibly look across a string of cheese and skip right into that fourth dimension they call love.” He was laughing by now, trying to suppress it but it leaked like fumes from behind his face.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Theodore Morton Foster the third. And you?”

“Catharine Rose Gold the first.”

He didn’t ask for my number but gave me his card. I thought it was pretty strange that a graduate student had a formal business card. I waited a week before calling him. His machine answered with the message: “Teddy Foster’s Deconstruction Hot line. Please inlay your voice pattern on the magnetic tape following the tonal moment.”

I said, “This is Cat Gold calling you, I think,” and left my number. He returned the call within minutes, and invited me over for dinner that very night.

He picked me up at my apartment on Barrow Street and walked me east to his place on Sixth Street. He lived in a third floor walkup. You entered right into the kitchen, which was small and cluttered, and a series of doorless doorways led you through the living/dining room, to the tiny study crammed with books and piles of papers, and then the bedroom.

He had prepared what he called “the dining nook” by setting the small round table with his mismatched thrift store china, silverware and cloth napkins. A candelabrum with five long white candles was too big for the table but gave it a romantic look.

Teddy made pasta that first night, angel hair primavera, stringbeans sautéed in olive oil with garlic and shallots, and salad with vinaigrette. I was amazed at his cooking skills. I myself had not mastered food as an art. I was hungry and he fed me. How could I not fall in love?

He was funny and charming through dinner, took care of the whole meal, even washed the dishes. It turned out he was a first year doctoral student at NYU, studying deconstructionism in postmodern American painting. In another year, he would begin his thesis. He supported himself with a combination of loans and freelance articles for art magazines, which paid well enough that if he pressed himself and wrote more of them, he could be “almost solvent,” he said, and clinked my wine glass which he’d filled with white wine.

After dinner was done and cleaned up and put away, we sat next to each other on his gunmetal-blue couch, which had a slash in one of the cushions. We talked and I lay a hand on his bluejeaned knee and he wove an arm around my back and I pressed a shoulder into his blue cotton shirt and he reached his face down and the words stopped. Our first kisses were long and gentle. Not much later, he moved over me in his bed, kissing me sweetly, making love to me with perfect cocoon-like warmth. In the morning, the feeling was still there for both of us. We didn’t want to leave each other, even for a minute. He was nothing like past boyfriends who couldn’t wait to carve out their space. Teddy enjoyed our blossoming love as much as I did. We stayed together minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, as the feeling deepened. After a while it seemed stupid paying two rents and I moved in all my things.

“I’m ready for my second act!” Rocky laughs and tosses back her head. Oprah claps her hands and the audience joins her. “If not my third!”

“Who’s counting?” Oprah asks, and the audience erupts in cheers. “We women need to think transformation!”

“Absolutely!” Smiling, Rocky pumps her famous fist in the air and the audience goes wild.

Cat sits on the floor of Annie’s bedroom with Parker in her lap. Annie perches on the end of her bed, lips tight. When the television screen goes to commercial, the women glance at each other but neither speaks. Cat is stuck on Oprah’s you go girl, or more specifically Rocky’s embrace of it. When did these influential people stop being women and start being girls? Don’t Call Me Girl had been one of Cat’s favorite childhood slogans, particularly when she was a girl, and she had enjoyed the expectation that she would grow into a strong and able woman. It made her feel powerful and forward-moving. Now, this — you go girl — sounds so silly and misguided. It’s okay coming from Oprah. But a proto-feminist like Rocky Love? And as the title for her memoir? No way.

“Mommy looks different on TV.” Parker shifts in Cat’s lap and she wraps her arms around him for balance. She has grown to love this little boy.

“They put extra makeup on her and gave her a hairdo,” Annie says, as if that explains the phoniness of Rocky’s TV performance.

“And on TV,” Cat adds, “everyone acts extra happy, especially on a talk show.” When he grows up, Cat thinks, Parker will figure out his mother on his own, poor thing. She runs a hand up and down his soft arm and then, without warning, tickles him to the floor. He curls into a ball, laughing. Cat kneels over him, trying to find his hidden underarms. And then Oprah and Rocky are back on screen and Parker jumps into Cat’s lap.

“So, Rocky, you’re writing your memoirs. Very exciting! Any plans for a new radio or TV show?”

“Yes! As a matter of fact, I’ve got a television show in production right now.”

“Who could compete with you?” Rocky says. “Don’t worry, we’re sisters. I’ve got your back!”

Cat shakes her head, not wanting to speak for fear of letting Parker hear the sarcasm that will certainly leak through her tone.

“We’ll be in production by the fall,” Rocky flat-out lies to the legions of viewers. “As soon as the book is finished. I plan to produce it myself to make sure it’s done right.”

“You know what they say,” Oprah says. “If you want a job done well, do it yourself.”

“That’s right. Sometimes I think it’s pointless having anyone on staff. I end up handling so much myself.”

Oprah looks directly at the screen and speaks, seemingly to Cat and Annie: “Ooh, watch out! This girl’s on a roll!”

“Women have trouble asking for help,” Rocky says. “And when we do, we’re too competent to be satisfied with the help we get. It’s a catch-22.”

To stop herself from barking out a comment to Annie — that woman is so full of shit is what comes to mind — Cat presses her nose into Parker’s velvety hair. His shampoo smells sweet, like bubblegum. The smell prompts a wave of nausea. Morning sickness has been coming all day long, every day, and getting consistently stronger, though she has not yet thrown up. She breathes deeply and closes her eyes, trying to will away the sensation. But this time it doesn’t work. She doesn’t want Annie to know about her pregnancy because it will break her heart to hear of Cat’s conflict. Annie has five children of her own and lost one young, a blow from which she has never really recovered.

Cat gently nudges Parker off her lap, saying, “I have to go to the bathroom.” He springs up and goes to Annie, who shifts back onto the bed and settles him into her own lap. Cat crosses the room to the door as casually as possible while her insides threaten a volcanic explosion. This is the worst she has felt. If only it could be for something, she thinks, as she rushes down the hall to the bathroom. She shuts and locks the door. Hinges over the toilet. And her insides unfurl without mercy.

Chapter 7

Freak