EVERY SPRING STEVE DEBATES whether or not to join up with the softball team again. (Two games a week, plus occasional umpire duty, take up a lot of time. Then there is the risk of injuries—something he never thought of seven summers back, when both of us were younger and felt invulnerable.) In the end, Steve always signs up again for his old spot, center field, and though time was I would have welcomed the end to his summer softball career, the truth is now I’d miss watching him from the bleachers nearly as much as he’d miss playing. It’s six years now that he’s been on the team—six years I’ve been packing up children, juice, cold chicken, diapers, nerf balls, and Goldfish and heading out to games. It has become as much a part of the rhythm of summer as tending my zinnias or picking blueberries.
We were less than two years married, new to this town and to small-town ways, the summer Steve first joined the team. Of course the softball league had been around forever, but his was a new team, just starting up—a team of men who had little in common but the fact that they had not grown up here. That, and the love of softball (although for nearly every one of them it had been more than a few years since his last time at bat). The local paper sponsored the team, which meant that its editor (also an outsider and a would-be ballplayer) bought a dozen regulation balls and black T-shirts with THE MESSENGER printed on the front. We were assured of press coverage, if nothing else.
It was a motley crew of players then (and still). It happens that Steve is a good ballplayer, with a long Little League history behind him and plenty of all-around athletic gift, but in fact he would have been urged to play even if he’d never before put his hand in a glove. I had simply gone into our local bookstore one afternoon, and the owner asked me if my husband might like to play ball. I said I thought he might. The bookstore operator said, well, that’s two people on the team, anyway. He—a (predictably) bookish fellow named Jake—had never played the game himself, but he was open to learning. He was even reading up on the sport. And of course there would be other players.
And there were. There was Mark, a young lawyer, new to town, recently separated from his wife. A smart, sophisticated, highly articulate man—gourmet cook, music lover, wine connoisseur—whose fondest childhood memories were of sandlot Little League. Fred, a big, bearded carpenter who lived in a cabin in the woods. Phil, a private-school administrator, Princeton graduate—a fellow who knew every obscure rule in the playbooks, and the batting average of every Red Sox player from 1955 on. Douglas, a friendly, easygoing local boy who worked at the lumberyard. Pete, a shy, gangly naturalist who hitchhiked fifteen miles to games (and then home again) because he didn’t own a car. Gus, who’d left a job at Procter & Gamble to live, without electricity or running water, on a piece of old family land he was farming at the farthest end of town. Ray and Jim and Marty, three bachelor brothers, house painters, who rode to games on motorcycles, with different girlfriends on the back every time. Sam, the hearty, beer-bellied manager of a local plant, an unexpectedly erudite man who quoted Camus and made his own Polish sausage. Ernie, the newspaper editor, and David, his one and only reporter-photographer, a red-bearded former high-school track star. Steve, my artist-and-house painter husband. Jake, the bookstore owner, son of a former Russian ballerina and a Harvard classics professor, who’d never swung a bat in his life. And a few others, who dropped in and out, over that first summer.
They weren’t exactly cheered into the leagues, those Messengers. Even then (seven years ago), the players were mostly older than those on any other team, and a pretty alien-looking lot, with their beards and their leftward-leaning bumper stickers, Gus’s multicolored old pickup, Mark’s Peugeot. Not everyone on the team fit the label, but the Messengers swiftly acquired the reputation for being nonconformists, a little weird. Different, mainly. That was enough.
But it turned out that those Messengers could play ball. The team had a few stars. Hot-tempered Fred, a power hitter who might strike out twice in a row, then come up with a crucial home run when the bases were loaded. David, a smooth, effortless-looking pitcher. Mark, the cool, analytical shortstop. Big Sam, in his catcher’s mask, more agile and graceful than his shape would have suggested. Six-foot-four-inch Phil, at first base, with arms and legs so long he seemed able to span the distance between first base and second. Steve, known for his speed as a runner, and for making occasional impossible catches in the field.
Behind the bench, the glory of the husbands belonged to the wives. The women—I among them—lined the single row of bleachers, sipping beer and catching up on town news, but always when it was our own particular favorite coming up to bat, each of us would focus on him. Some, like Fred’s wife Maria, liked to call out encouragement just before her man went up to bat (and later, when he made it to home). My way was always to go suddenly tense and quiet.
Of course it was only a game (I used to say, especially in the early days). I used to make fun of them all, and how seriously they took their playing: the way Fred would sometimes come close to striking the umpire on an unfair call, the gloom that would overtake the players on the bench when they lagged by half a dozen runs. Then, gradually, I saw the thrill of a good play: Ray to Marty. Marty to Mark. Mark to David. I’d feel, for myself, the euphoria that came when (to the jeers of a particularly hostile opposing team) Fred would hit a home run and the Messengers would rally. I saw the men embracing on the field, as if they were brothers, and wished I could play ball too, wondered if I could ever make a hit out there.
In fact, there was one woman on the team (the only woman in the league. Naturally she belonged to us). Doris was a mother of two, well into her thirties: a small, tight-muscled woman who showed up for every game, even though she seldom played more than an inning. She made hits, she caught the ball. She could run. She simply wasn’t as good as most of the men, and so, like Jake from the bookstore and Ernie from the newspaper, she warmed the bench a lot. She was the source of some fierce debate too. Some players felt that everyone deserved equal time on the field (the point was simply having fun out there). Some players had the killer instinct, their eye on the league pennant, and because of them, Doris sat out a lot of games.
There were plenty of bitter moments that summer and every one after it. Fights with other teams, fights among our own (brothers when they won, hotheads when they lost). Back on the bleachers, the women arbitrated battles among the children (just a couple of kids, that first summer, and then new babies every season after). We followed the progress of a dozen pregnancies over those half-dozen summers (kidded each other, every year, about whose turn it would be next June to wear the maternity tops that went the rounds). Many of us saw each other only in the summer, and so the children seemed to shoot up, mysteriously, from the September playoffs to the first practice the following May. Audrey went from diapers and eating dirt, that first year, to riding a baseball bat as if it were a hobby horse, to organizing softball games of her own on the sidelines with the children of other players. She and Fred’s daughter, Chloe, were the senior children, presiding over a growing band of babies and toddlers. Every year the two old-timers would lead the young ones off, instructing them in the peculiarities of each playing field. Poison ivy growing here. A good cemetery to play in over there. In one favorite playing field, a swingset and teeter-totter and a water fountain.
The passage of years showed in other ways, too. In the final game of the Messenger’s second season, Steve collided with Ernie in the outfield, both of them running to catch the ball on a crucial play. Steve broke his leg, and after that the wives always looked worried when they saw two players running for the same ball, and someone always yelled, “Call it!” The next season a carpenter named Bill broke his shin, slamming into a second baseman, and developed complications. The next summer he came back, but only to watch, not to play. When he told us he’d had to give up carpentry, and was studying for his real estate license, a kind of chill went through the group. Nearly everyone had kids by now, mortgage payments, doctor bills. The Messengers didn’t take so many chances anymore.
Somewhere around the fourth season, David, the red-bearded pitcher (sports editor for a bigger newspaper now), had to sit the summer out on account of having broken his arm in a winter basketball game. Steve broke his arm too, skiing. The wife of one star player left him (“He’s always loved ballplaying more than me,” she said before leaving town for good). Doris gave up benchwarming in favor of amateur theatricals. Douglas got married and switched to bowling and volleyball. Gus got a telephone. Ricky, the team hellion, became a cop. Phil got a job near Boston as headmaster of a large private school. Sam turned forty and turned in his catcher’s mask.
Steve still played, and so did a handful of others from that first summer’s team—most of them even improved their playing, one way or another—but none was so quick to slide into home plate anymore or to try to steal a base. The players no longer went out for beers after the game (the kids had to get to bed, and besides, they’d be up early the next morning).
Of course, the roster changed considerably over those six seasons. The team changed its name when The Messenger stopped sponsoring. For one season, the players all wore T-shirts proclaiming “This shirt not paid for by The Messenger.” Then they became Homestead Builders, with a whole group of young and unfamiliar faces on the bench. And though they have yet to win the league championship, summer after summer they come close.
One odd turn of events is the surprising alliance the old Messenger players have built up over the years with the once-hostile adversaries on other local teams. Rivals on the field, still, they meet in the streets or at a wintry town meeting and shake hands, comparing summer plans and team rosters. They call each other Stevie, Freddie, Davey, Boomer. There is something that happens to men who have played ball together. They may not have dinner at one another’s houses, may not even know where the other fellow works (certainly almost none of my husband’s teammates has ever laid eyes on his paintings). And still the bond is tight, and deep.
They haven’t gotten around to taking a team portrait these past few seasons. We keep Steve’s from that first summer framed and hanging on our bedroom wall. The familiar faces in their black T-shirts catch my eye often, through the year: sober-looking young men, with babies and toddlers on their knees who are second-graders now. Younger, slimmer, with longer hair, and more of it. They are smiling, most of them, even though they’d lost a game moments before the picture was taken. It was summer, after all. There was still beer in the cooler. There would be other games, more victories.
I remember a night (we were in the sixth inning of a game against J and J Auto Parts) when an unexpected rain began to fall, just as the sun was setting, and a rainbow stretched clear across the field, from third base to first. Even the youngest children looked up from their hot dogs and squirt guns to watch. There was another night, when a giant purple hot-air balloon landed smack in the middle of the outfield during the seventh inning of a game against Contoocook Furniture. And then there was the night we played Profile Seafoods (this goes back to that first season, the only one in which Jake, the bookstore owner, ever played). It was August, and though the team always let Jake go in for an inning or two, as long as the score wasn’t close, he had yet to make a hit or catch a ball in the field. That night someone hit a pop fly, right in his direction, and he reached up his arm (more of a wave than a catching attempt) and caught the ball. He was so dazzled and amazed that he began jumping up and down, right there in the outfield, doing a little dance, screaming, “I caught it. I actually caught it.” The other Messengers joined in, yelling and calling out his name. Everyone was so happy that not one of us even noticed the runner from the other team, sliding into home plate to score. That night, nobody even minded.
I first met my friend Ursula more than ten years ago. We had just moved to town and knew no one.
Ursula and her husband Andy were outsiders too—though they had lived here close to thirty years. In their early sixties then, their children grown and gone, they didn’t belong to the big white church on Main Street, or the Moose lodge, or the local American Legion post. Andy was a longtime leftist who still reminisced fondly about the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. He was a printer by trade, and briefly (until local sentiment forced him out) editor of the town paper, The Messenger. Ursula was a retired elementary-school teacher, the daughter of Finnish immigrants, raised on a nearby dairy farm where her sisters and various nieces and nephews still lived. From the first I could see in her a melancholy streak I always imagined as having something to do with Finland and those long sunless months among the fjords—even though she was born in Massachusetts.
A neighbor introduced us, and Ursula invited me into her kitchen for tea and a slice of pie (blueberry) that day. In all my years of visits, all the hours I’ve spent in that kitchen, sipping tea and talking to Ursula, there was seldom a time when one kind of pie or another wasn’t just coming out of the oven. I’m not sure what we spoke about then: her garden (from which she gave me cuttings), the birds she fed daily, who flitted around her garden in such numbers that it could have been an Audubon sanctuary. Sewing maybe—she did that, too. I do know she took me on a tour of her wonderful old house: the basement filled with canned goods, and Andy’s enormous, hundred-year-old printing presses; her sunny sewing room, with fabric scraps all around, and boxes containing the pieces from every pattern she’d ever sewn; the collection of rocks and minerals she and Andy had gathered on their expeditions around New England, Ursula’s blue and white china, her wallful of cookbooks, and every issue of Family Circle and Woman’s Day from the last twenty years, filed for recipes; the big old upright piano in her living room, painted salmon pink. The garden, filled not just with the usual perennials, but with wildflowers Ursula had dug up and transplanted, including a jack-in-the-pulpit whose single annual bloom she’d call me every year to announce.
I guess a person could call it woman’s talk, all this discussion of pressure cookers and pie crust and flowers, crochet stitches and scarlet tanagers. But the truth is, we were always talking about more than those things, Ursula and I (or any of the dozens of mostly young people who passed through her kitchen constantly), over the years I visited there. What it came down to, really, was a way of looking at the world, a set of values, which acknowledged not just the importance of using old-fashioned cake yeast for making bread or of never cutting thread with your teeth, but also fairness and generosity and—always—a respect for the natural world.
A short woman (especially beside her tall, rangy husband), Ursula always despaired of her weight, and dressed mostly in loose homemade blouses and pants a little like pajama bottoms. My children always loved her embrace, in part, I’m sure, for the roundness and softness of her. Even for me, a grown-up, it felt good to get a hug from Ursula, and more than once, over the years, I turned up on her doorstep in need of one.
Even when I first met him, Andy wasn’t entirely well. He was an infinitely gentle, slow-moving, vague sort of man, and a few years after I met him we learned he’d been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. He must’ve had it for years, but because he’d always been a little fuzzy, a little slow-moving, nobody noticed that much. I remember a visit Andy and Ursula made (to our kitchen, this time) just after the birth of Audrey: Audrey in Ursula’s arms, wrapped in a patchwork blanket Ursula had just finished making for her, all of us eating slices of a pie Ursula had brought. Andy sat, by the woodstove, in a rocking chair, silently munching on his pie, and then, slowly, he spoke up. “Isn’t it something,” he said, “that a man actually walked on the moon.”
Partly because of his completely unhurried, quietly thoughtful ways, he was a wonderful, natural companion to young children. When Audrey was little, I used to bring her to Andy and Ursula’s house whenever I’d try to sew a dress or to do a little canning. Ursula and I would be bustling about in the kitchen and there would be Audrey and Andy, in the living room, sitting together in Andy’s La-Z-Boy rocker, watching Sesame Street. “Are you sure Andy doesn’t mind?” I’d ask—as the hours went by. “Oh no,” said Ursula. “He likes watching that show anyway, but I don’t usually let him.”
The summer Audrey was three Andy began saying, quietly, that his heart was giving him trouble. Several times Andy and Ursula’s daughter, Alison (who came to visit every summer), rushed him to the emergency room at a hospital thirty miles away. Every time, some doctor or other would take Ursula and Alison aside and tell them there was nothing really wrong and offer lectures on hypochondria. The Parkinson’s was just affecting his mind, that was all.
All that summer, though, Andy was depressed. He stopped taking his afternoon swims down the road at Gleason Falls. He was too tired to take Ursula blueberry picking and looking for rocks. He told her she should learn how to drive. He sold his old horse, Duke, who had been living in the barn for years even though nobody could ride him.
Then one morning, very early, I got a call from Ursula, who was practically screaming. Andy had collapsed on the kitchen floor. The rescue squad was on its way. Come over, come over right away.
He was dead by the time they reached the hospital. Alison came; when she had to leave, Audrey and I drove back over with our suitcase and spent the night in an upstairs bedroom so Ursula wouldn’t be alone. We woke early, but of course Ursula, who in the best of times was always up by five, had been up for hours. With breakfast ready.
Ursula lived alone in the big house four more years. We came by more often after Andy’s death, but still she complained that there was no one to cook for anymore. Pies went bad, cookies went stale. The house was cold in winter. The garden was too much to keep up with. Ursula took in boarders a few times, as much for the company as for the money, but there was always a problem. They would turn out to be vegetarians, or they’d be on a diet, or they didn’t believe in white sugar. Or they simply didn’t stop enough, at the kitchen table, for tea and conversation.
So finally, last fall, Ursula packed up and moved to an apartment in Massachusetts, near her sisters and the family farm. She put her house on the market; and all winter, driving by (explaining to Charlie, for the hundredth time, why we weren’t stopping at Ursula’s for pie), I’d fantasize about buying it.
But somebody else bought the house, and the closing is today. Hearing that Ursula planned simply to abandon Andy’s big old printing press in the basement, Steve and some friends spent all last weekend dismantling the press and hauling it to a neighbor’s barn. I noticed, as I watched them carry the last pieces out to the truck, that (though she had left her irises and lilies in the garden, and the special late-blooming lilac Andy had planted for her), Ursula had dug up and moved her jack-in-the-pulpit. As for the pink piano, it’s in our living room now, and I am working away at scales nightly. As Ursula says, no home should be without a piano, and no piano without a home.
My friend Jessica is, like me, a married woman, mother of three children, living in rural New Hampshire. She wears old clothes a lot and cleans out sheep stalls and buys groceries at Cricenti’s. She’s also a former Miss North Carolina, a fact which amuses her but isn’t central to her existence these days. But because Jessica and her husband are innkeepers, she frequently comes in contact with a pretty unlikely sort of person for these parts—the kind who flies in to New Hampshire for the weekend with his girlfriend, who brings with her three suitcases, none of which contain mud boots. Some of these visitors are kind and considerate people—friends—and some are virtual strangers who stop in for a quick dose of the country and a few sets of tennis and the novelty of a venison steak before heading back to the airport.
Now the truth is, Jessica is a beautiful woman—with the kind of natural glamour that doesn’t require klieg lights or makeup. She’s an artist by training, but for the last twenty years it’s been her children and her home to which she’s mostly turned her talent. Now her youngest son has his driver’s license and there are no more rooms left to redecorate, and she’s finally able to get back to her studio. But that twenty years’ interruption (as much as she chose it and, mostly, loved it) has had its cost. “Back in North Carolina,” she recently told one of these weekend visitors from the city, “a young woman was either talented or pretty, but never both.”
“Oh,” said the visitor (an actress, an ingénue). “And which one did you used to be?”
Well, one day when I was over at Jessica’s I asked her for a phone number I needed, and she handed me her address book to copy it down. And there on the same page with bug sprayer and bike repairs was the phone number of Marlon Brando.
Naturally I had to get to the bottom of this. It turned out that Jessica didn’t really know Marlon Brando. But one of these weekend visitors had the number in her book, which she kept leaving around open, next to Jessica’s kitchen phone (from which this weekend visitor was making frequent long-distance phone calls to “the coast”). And somewhere near the end of the weekend, after about the fourteenth of these phone calls—emptying out this woman’s ashtray again—Jessica found herself copying down Marlon Brando’s number. Also Jackie Onassis’s number, and Ryan O’Neal’s and Warren Beatty’s, and a few others besides. Not that she ever intended to call these people up. She just liked flipping through her address book and seeing their names now and then.
It was her own private joke, having Omar Sharif in there with her veterinarian. Then, too, every now and then someone like me would spot one of those names, and sometimes, like me, they would comment; but frequently they would simply be silent, and forever after they’d be wondering, every time they called Jessica and got a busy signal, whether maybe she was on the phone with Marlon.
I was getting so much enjoyment out of the idea that Jessica asked me if I’d like to put a few of those numbers in my address book. What woman couldn’t use the odd movie star in her life? So I said sure, and for the last couple of years now I’ve had Marlon Brando in there, right above “bus station,” and below “barbershop.” I never flaunt it, but every six months or so someone will notice the name there, at which point I either explain or (depending on the circumstances) simply act mysterious. The whole thing has worked so well I have come to feel that everyone ought to put a famous name or two into his or her address book, beside whatever number she chooses to make up. (The area code for Los Angeles, incidentally, is 213.) Not to put the neighbors in their place, or so the babysitter will see. Just as a reminder: There are all kinds of beautiful people.
Because this is such a small town, the newspaper comes out only once a week here, and when it does the news is likely to be who won a milking contest and whose aunt has been visiting from Maine. For controversy we consider questions like whether or not to rename Dump Road after a beloved and recently deceased town fireman. Photographs on the front page feature unusually large trout, high-school athletes, and good-looking woodpiles. Then a month or so back, on the top of page one, came the headline “Two in Family Have Cancer,” accompanied by a large photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Norton and their three children, all of them stiffly facing the camera and looking understandably grim.
The story below the picture went on to tell the Nortons’ story, based on the reporter’s visit to their home and the afternoon he spent there. Eighteen months ago, the family’s middle son, Billy, was diagnosed as suffering from leukemia and put on a program of chemotherapy. Then, a couple of months back, on the very day Billy was found to be in remission, his father was discovered to be suffering from another form of cancer. The paper didn’t say it outright, but for the father, especially, things don’t sound too hopeful.
He can’t work now, of course, the paper informed us, and neither can his wife, because she’s so busy driving back and forth to the city, bringing her husband and son for treatments. The family has no medical insurance, no relatives in the area, no savings. Already they have had to give away their beloved family dogs. They don’t know what they’ll have to do next.
Reading news like this, of course, leaves a person reeling. (Also, filled with the knowledge of his own relative good fortune: Thank God it’s not me.) I kept looking back at the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Norton (just a few years older than Steve and I, I figured). Mr. Norton very gaunt now, of course, but bearing the look of a man who used to be well built and muscular. Mrs. Norton, a good-looking woman, with dark circles under her eyes, her mouth forming a perfectly straight line. The little boy with cancer, his hair just beginning to grow back in tufts, like a baby’s. Almost saddest of all were the older brother and younger sister, who don’t have cancer. I wonder if they ever feel guilty about their good health.
At the end of the story about the Nortons there was a plea for contributions. “We’re proud people,” said Mrs. Norton. “We hate asking for help. We just don’t know where else to turn.”
Well, this is, as I said, a small town, and people here believe in taking care of their own. Even though the Nortons hadn’t lived here all that long—didn’t work in town, or belong to a church, or appear to have a lot of friends here—people began organizing the minute that story came out. Audrey came home from school a day or so later to report that every classroom was decorating a coffee can for local businesses to put out for contributions to the Norton Fund. Then the third grade announced a car wash. The school nurse approached me about donating the proceeds from a school play I was directing. There were posters for a dance on behalf of the fund, and then a concert.
It’s come to the point where now you can’t buy a cup of coffee or pick up a newspaper in this town without seeing one of those Norton Fund coffee cans and that photograph of the family taped to the cash register. A couple of days ago Audrey came home from school with a letter from the principal, informing us that the elementary school would be putting together a bunch of food baskets for the Nortons, to be delivered on the last day of school, and asking that every child in the school (about five hundred) bring a canned food item for the Norton family. When I forgot to send in a can, that first day, Audrey delivered an impassioned retelling of the Nortons’ plight for me, and then marched off to survey our pantry shelves for good items. “I think one is enough,” I said, as she reached for a whole stack of tuna cans. “Mom,” she said sternly, “they’re desperate. Everybody has to give as much as they possibly can.”
Well, I have become increasingly uneasy about all of this and about why I haven’t opened my heart to the Nortons. All the more so because the family’s situation is so unequivocally terrible. (Cancer. It’s the nightmare that haunts us all. Multiplied by two.) Why don’t I feel better about the way our community has rallied for these people—by doing precisely what my husband and I try to teach our kids? Namely, to always lend a hand.
It’s just that I’m picking up these troubling undercurrents—hidden strings attached to all of our community’s love and charity. It is almost as if, with the contents of our coffee cans, we have purchased the right to scrutinize every aspect of the Nortons’ lives, and not surprisingly, they come up short in a few departments. There’s the story told me by a friend about a mutual acquaintance of ours who lives near the Nortons. One of the gentlest, most sweet-natured women I know, she showed up on my friend’s doorstep in tears, a couple of years back. Mrs. Norton had just chased after her, screaming, because—backing her car out of her own driveway—she had almost hit one of the Nortons’ fifteen tied-up dogs.
Then there is another woman in our town, who tells my friend she drove past the Nortons’ house the other day (drove out there specifically to check things out, actually), and what she saw were half a dozen dogs, still tied to trees, three ten-speed bikes, a new addition, and a moped.
“Why doesn’t Mrs. Norton get a job?” I have begun hearing some people ask. Someone else will point out, then, that she has to drive her husband and son to treatments. “What about nights?” they ask then. “And what about the sixteen-year-old son? He could get work after school. He could help out.”
We have all of us become experts on the Norton case. Our quarters and our canned tuna entitle us to speculate, debate, and finally, to judge. It’s possible that Mrs. Norton isn’t a very nice woman, I think to myself. But is her trouble any less real, for the way she screams at her neighbor? Do we only help people who don’t tie up their dogs? Is what we want to see—driving past the houses of people we help out—signs of unabated misery? Does a person holding his hand out forfeit the right to a ten-speed bicycle? How about a five-speed, then? How about a one-speed?
Last night as we were clearing the table after dinner, I made a few remarks to Steve about some things I’d been hearing around town concerning the Nortons, and Audrey overheard. “How would you feel if you were them?” she pointed out. “You wouldn’t act so nice either.” And of course she’s right.
So I sent a can of tuna in to school today, along with a can of baked beans, and some cream of mushroom soup that nobody in our family ever seems to want. I pictured what dinners at the Nortons’ will be like this summer, as they make their way through five hundred cans of baked beans, sardines, and maybe the odd Spam. I thought again of the haunted face of that father—who is suffering (all of us here now know) from cancer of the left testicle. And the boy, reading in the paper that his chances for survival are “pretty good.” And the healthy brother and sister—maybe stopping in Weber’s News now and then for a pack of gum. Standing at the cash register, studying that construction-paper-covered coffee can with their family’s name on it and knowing it’s headed their way.
In September of the year Audrey turned six, a meeting of concerned parents who might like to raise money for an elementary-school field trip was called at her school. That seemed like a good idea. I had been a parent of a child in this school system exactly two weeks at this point, and hadn’t burnt out yet. Audrey’s new purple sneakers were still purple and not, as they would be come November, gray. She still had the top to her thermos. Life seemed filled with possibilities. So I went to this meeting, along with seven other mothers, six of them, like me, the parents of first graders.
We started talking about ways to earn money, and all the usual suggestions came up. A bake sale, a yard sale, a raffle. Then I said, “Why don’t we put on a play?”
Even then I knew there were easier ways to earn money. (I think Steve, for one, would have written out a check to the school, on the spot, exceeding by a dollar whatever profits this play might conceivably bring in, if he’d known what this play would do to our life.)
But money isn’t everything. I acted in plays all through my own school years (though never in elementary school. Nobody ever wanted to put elementary-school children in a play, and I had always wondered why. Stay tuned.)
Anyway, those old plays represent my happiest school memories. I wanted that for my daughter, and for the many children in this town who have never seen a play, never been applauded for anything they’ve ever done. I knew a few like that, back when I was growing up—kids who could barely read, kids who wore the same clothes every day and devoured their hot lunch as if they hadn’t seen food for twenty-four hours, which they probably hadn’t. Goofy kids with hardly any friends, oddballs who got on stage and suddenly were stars. Children so shy they could hardly open their mouths—but oh, could they ever dance. For them, especially, being in plays was a lifeline.
Everybody at the meeting agreed that a play sounded great. Before I knew it, I was given the job of director, and it was decided that we’d put the show on near the end of May.
End of May, I said. That’s blackfly season around here. So we made it a play about a little town like this one that’s overtaken by blackflies. Of course the blackflies would be first graders (typecasting). I would write the play. And every child who wanted to could have a part.
Ninety-seven children wanted a part. “Don’t worry,” said the teachers. “A lot of them will drop out.” And before I knew it the cast was down to ninety-four.
Every one of those children got a line. Every character got a name. “Mrs. Apple, Mrs. Yogurt, Mr. Telephone, Mr. Paperclip, …” I would call out, at the beginning of Townspeople Scene Number 16. For the last dozen or so parts, I started naming characters after whatever I saw on my desk.
They did get to know their lines, most of them—which is not to say they knew when to recite them. There were times, during rehearsals, when I thought I might have to stand onstage throughout the performance, holding a yardstick and tapping heads, like the player of an enormous human xylophone. At every rehearsal, about thirty children lost their script pages. About forty children would ask if they could go to the bathroom. Ten needed change for the soda machine. Five wanted to know when they’d be getting their costume.
We found a choreographer, but because she gave birth by Caesarean section just six weeks before rehearsals began, there were a few problems. First, we needed a babysitter. Then, because she was nursing, we needed a breast pump. Then, when the breast pump didn’t work, we needed formula. “Whatever you do, don’t give Patrick formula with iron,” were my last words to my choreographer, the day Patrick started taking formula. (Iron constipates.)
Wednesday the choreographer called me up to tell me Patrick was constipated. I told her how to carve miniature infant suppositories out of Ivory soap chips.
Thursday we were still waiting for the soap chips to take effect, and meanwhile, I was tap dancing.
I haven’t told you yet about my friend Erica—another first-grade mother—whose job it was at rehearsals to keep certain fifth-grade boys from beating up or kissing certain first-grade blackflies. She called one morning to tell me she thinks she’s getting ulcers. “I’m tired of being the heavy,” she said—understandably. So that day her job was passing out Oreos.
I have not told you about Scott, who decided, after six rehearsals, that he didn’t want his leading role anymore and dropped out. Or my closet, which by the last week of rehearsals was piled waist high with every item of clothing I had worn, but had not had time to hang up, in the last four weeks. Or the fact that I was spending about three hours on the phone every day, rounding up breast pumps and top hats.
But in the other column was a boy named Ben who’s stayed back twice and still can’t read much, who knew every one of his four lines perfectly. A boy named Jimmy who practically lives in the principal’s office, who turned out to be one of the best actors in the school. A girl named Susan who was always the first one to arrive at every rehearsal, so she’d be sure not to miss anything. A couple of townspeople who danced their hearts out, and some who knew not only their own line but everybody else’s too, which they would recite softly, under their breath.
When I told Jimmy’s mother how good her son was in the play, she looked at me incredulously. “Jimmy?” she said. “Jimmy?”
The thing about a play is that when he’s onstage Jimmy doesn’t have to be Jimmy. He gets a fresh start. He’s Mr. Paperclip. And people will clap for him.
We grow five kinds of tomato plants in our garden, and lots of basil. In August, when everything comes ripe, I cook batch after batch of tomato sauce from scratch. I can my sauce in quart jars—rows and rows of them, enough so our family can have spaghetti once a week for a year. I make an extremely thick, rich-smelling sauce, and I’m very proud of it. Every few months I go down the steps to the cellar, where I store my jars of sauce, and count how many containers are left, to make sure the supply will last us through to next year’s tomato harvest. And while it’s true that I love the taste of this sauce of mine, served up on a plateful of pasta, what I love even more is the sight of those jars, still unopened on my shelves.
Last year a happy miscalculation left us with more sauce than we needed. So one night, just days before I was due to can my new batch, we decided to give a spaghetti party and serve up what was left from the season before. I made a big salad, baked a couple of pies, rented a couple of Charlie Chaplin movies, and called up some friends. This being a small town, with not a whole lot else happening on a Tuesday night, most of them said they’d come, and one friend asked if she and her husband could bring along a pair of travelers they’d just met. We had plenty of food, so of course I said yes.
Here in New Hampshire, where new diversions are few and our social circle small enough that most of us run into each other at least half a dozen times in any given week, the kitchen is as good a place as any to create a little drama. Some of my methods could seem a little corny to sophisticates. (Piña colada, served in a coconut shell. Homemade potato chips. Tempura, served by a cook—me—in a kimono and accompanied by a scratchy record of koto music.) I stick sparklers in my cakes and fortunes in my cookies. I guess my theory has been, if you can’t go to Peking, you might at least try Peking duck. And so our palates know a good deal of variety. Even if the rest of our lives does seem a little mundane.
On the night of the spaghetti party Steve and I fell into a routine of preparations so familiar we don’t need to discuss them anymore. He scrubbed the bathroom. I waded through the grass to pick a bouquet of flowers. This being the first cool night of the season, he laid a fire, while I spread a tablecloth and chose my twelve favorite unmatched flea-market dishes. I stuck the garlic bread in the oven, he rinsed wine glasses. I fed the children early, Steve lit the fire. I put on a record and my best apron. And then we waited for the guests to arrive.
I love this moment: after the preparations are done, sitting by the fire, admiring my clean house, smelling dinner on the stove, listening for the sound of cars in the drive. On this particular evening, our guests were all old friends who come here a lot. All except for the travelers passing through: a couple named Jo and Martin, probably in their early thirties like Steve and me.
Before she even got out of the car, I knew Jo was going to be beautiful, with the kind of looks I most envy, because they have nothing to do with makeup or rollers, or days of trying on clothes in Bloomingdale’s. She was tall and slim, but not skinny, tanned, with long straight hair held back by a tortoise-shell clip. She wore jeans that fit perfectly and a belt she had probably owned for fifteen years, and a white cotton blouse with mother of pearl buttons, and she carried an ancient-looking leather backpack, which, I later learned, contained all her worldly goods. Reaching out my hand to shake hers, I realized my other went—automatically—to stroke Willy’s blond head. Because who I become, at a moment like that, is my children’s mother. Who Jo was, was simply Jo.
She turned out to have an accent: exotic, implacable. I asked where she was from and she thought for a second. “New Zealand, sort of. But nowhere anymore, really.” She and Martin, a lean, dark, remote-seeming man, were on the road—had been for over three years. They had spent last winter in Nepal, last week in London. Tomorrow they would set out for the west coast of Canada. But tonight they were in this little town of ours in New Hampshire, where spaghetti sauce was bubbling on the stove and an applewood fire was burning.
I’ve never been much of a traveler myself. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in one small New Hampshire town. When—during a brief stint in New York—I met Steve, we thought we’d get a van and just travel around for a year or so, picking up odd jobs on the road. Our friends took us at our word and showered us with sleeping bags, outdoor cooking sets, and road atlases for wedding presents. And they kept asking (a sore point) just when it was that we were planning to leave.
Our scheduled departure date was always being put off. I would find myself poring over seed catalogues. Steve began talking about how nice it would be, after our trip was over, to build a studio here. Intellectually, we knew that this was the time in our lives to be footloose and free. But we acquired a dog. And I kept thinking about what to name a baby.
We never precisely canceled our travel plans; they just got less and less ambitious. In the end, we spent a long-delayed honeymoon weekend at a beach a hundred miles from home, remarking frequently to each other on how good it was to have a change of scenery. Then we came back to this place in New Hampshire and had Audrey. Followed four years later by her brother Charlie. And two years after that by Willy. Now here he was in my arms, resting one sauce-orange hand in a proprietary manner on my shoulder, while Steve got Martin a beer and Jo examined my flowerbeds. Our dog Ron was licking her foot. Charlie was demonstrating his breakdancing.
Jo and Martin had no children. Neither did they own pets, a garden in need of weeding, a mortgage, a mailbox to which bills are delivered daily, or a pantry full of spaghetti sauce and preserves. Sitting by the fire, seeming instantly at home the way perpetual travelers often do, they told us the story of how they’d met. Jo had just come from India, Martin from France, when they ran into each other in a Moroccan cafe. From there they went to Scandinavia, working on a fishing boat, and then to Poland. “Never go to Poland in January,” said Jo.
During dinner Jo told us about climbing the Himalayas, about an ashram she visited in India, how she’d sold liquor and cassette players on the black market and how much better it was to get dollars than rupees. She told us about a meal of hallucinogenic mushrooms they’d been served in Nepal. A fabulous dinner, she said. Adding that my spaghetti sauce was also very good.
But on this particular evening being a good cook seemed not to matter very much, and my stocked pantry seemed more like an anchor than a treasure chest. I asked Jo if she didn’t find it hard, in her travels, to avoid the temptation of picking up possessions. (Knowing that, for me, part of the pleasure of a trip would be the acquisition of things to fill our house with when I got back.) No, she said. Things only tie you down.
After we had our pie and got the kids into bed, I asked Martin whether they saw many people with young children on the road.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “They have a great time. Who wants to see their children get stuck in a rut?” But domestically minded as I am, I was wondering what those babies’ parents did about naps and diapers, and thinking that our children have known too much of rootedness already to move easily into a nomad’s life. Like me, our children are attached to familiar objects and rituals: Audrey lines up her dolls and animals in a particular order on her bed every night. Charlie maintains a corner of his room he calls his Keeping Area, where he arranges his two favorite Astrosniks, a postcard of Pinocchio he got two years ago, a cardboard teepee we made, and a plastic Happy Meal bucket from McDonald’s. Even Willy likes to drink out of a particular cup, while sitting in a certain chair and watching his beloved Pokey Little Puppy video. I guess Martin would say my children are stuck in a rut.
This particular evening, what we were watching was Charlie Chaplin, in The Gold Rush, playing a lone vagabond who strikes it rich. When the movie was over, one of our friends took out his guitar and we sang a few songs. Sometime around midnight, the party broke up.
The next morning, eating breakfast, Steve and I talked about the travelers. What struck him about Jo and Martin, Steve said, was how you couldn’t quite place them. Sort of like television characters who inhabit one of those towns with no climate or dialect, that could be anywhere. “They seemed weightless,” he said—not really critically, just bemused. “I kept on thinking Martin was walking on air.” Feeling, myself, weighed down by about three thousand pounds of excess baggage, I said walking on air sounded fine to me. I looked at the sinkful of plates waiting to be washed, and the cat, licking scrambled eggs off Audrey’s plate, and my two sons, fighting over a water gun, and said there were days when I wouldn’t mind locking the door and walking away, standing on a highway, and sticking out my thumb.
Where I went that morning, instead, was into town on our weekly excursion to the dump, with a carload of trash. We ran into Jo and Martin on the way, just as they were setting out on their travels again.
“You know,” I told Martin. “I dreamed last night that I was traveling. I woke up envying you.”
He said that was funny; he’d dreamed he had a house like ours. I asked him if he thought of how he and Jo lived as just a stage in their lives, or if this was how their lives would always be.
“I don’t believe anything lasts forever,” said Martin. I thought at first he meant the traveling. But, studying the unsentimental face of this man who has got used to saying good-byes daily, I guessed that might apply to Jo, too, and wondered if she felt the same.
We are differently constructed, all right, those travelers and I. When I hear a song I love, I want to buy the record; when I spend a really pleasant evening somewhere, I want to spend another; when I met a man I loved, I wanted to set up housekeeping with him. When I encounter people who interest me, I write down their address and telephone number.
Martin and Jo, on the other hand, moved on that day, writing down nothing. I don’t think they got our last name, or that in a month or two Martin, at least, will remember in which New England state they spent a night, eating spaghetti and blueberry pie. I got the sense, that night, looking across our living room, that Steve and I, and our children and our guests, were a few more characters in the epic drama of his travels. People he might tell about, in passing, some night in Nepal.
For a couple of days it depressed me, thinking of the adventures that they were having and we were missing. Wincing over what Jo must have thought about my stacks of women’s magazine back issues, with recipes cut out, and the sentimental songs we sang that night. “Country Roads.” “Red River Valley.”
But I also thought of Charlie Chaplin, walking down that dirt road as the thatch-roofed farmhouse faded from view, twirling his cane with that brave jauntiness. And I know that though I may take some trips and wander down some roads in my time, it’s life under the thatched roof for me.
Sometimes I find myself thinking of the night the travelers passed through, as we lie in our bed under our patchwork quilt, listening to the slow, sighing respiration of our dog, or our children murmuring in their sleep; sometimes an image of them flashes before me, just as I’m reaching for a jar of this year’s batch of spaghetti sauce on my pantry shelves. Like Martin, I am never sure that anything can last forever. Still, I like having a few tomatoes growing in my garden and knowing I’ll be here to harvest them.
Our babysitter Vicky, who’d been living with us for a year and a half and to whom our children were devoted, had moved on. Unable to face the prospect of replacing her with a stranger right away, I took the summer off, but by late August I knew I’d better get to work, so I started running my ad. I had been interviewing job candidates for several days when Lydia called, and we had a number of pretty good prospects lined up. But I could see, with many of them, that like all the babysitters who have come and gone before, they would move on sooner or later (probably sooner) to children of their own, or better jobs, new places. And where other applicants needed to be sure they’d be home by four, or specified (wisely enough) that their evenings and weekends were always reserved for their own families, Lydia burst into our lives to say that she would always be there for us. She had almost no family of her own anymore, and no home. (She’d been a live-in housekeeper, for the last year or so, for a man who owned a weekend place in the next town but almost never used the place, who paid her no salary, just kept the refrigerator stocked and attended to her bills. She was starved for companionship and activity. And I knew we could provide it.) “Whatever you can manage to pay me, that’ll be fine,” she said when I apologized for not being able to offer a handsomer wage. “I just want to work for you.”
She was fifty-seven years old, but looked younger. She wore a T-shirt that said “I gave my soul to rock and roll” and big purple earrings, and she promised to show Audrey her entire costume-jewelry collection (a quick route to an eight-year-old girl’s heart). She happened to have a spare pair of earrings on her, in fact. She put those on Charlie’s bear—filling him with awe as well. Also in her purse: a harmonica (“you never know when you might need one of these”), a couple of coupons she thought I could use, and some interesting shells. She was full of cleaning tips, plans, recipes, good ideas of adventures to go on with the children. “Your kids will never be bored with Lydia around,” one of her references told me, when I called the next day. Or as Lydia put it (hearing of our struggle to get Charlie to stop sucking his thumb), “he won’t have time for that, I’ll keep him so busy.”
None of Lydia’s references was a former employer, precisely, but they all knew her from way back and attested to her boundless energy and enthusiasm, her wonderful cooking, her efficiency around a house, and above all, her love of children. Ours were fascinated with her: She told them about meeting an Indian chief in Nova Scotia who made her a feather headdress. She told them about the meteor that landed on her cousins’ Indiana farm, where they grew corn for corncob pipes, and how that meteor burned right through one side of the farmhouse and came out the other. She told me I should throw cucumber peels into our wood-stove, to guard against chimney fires, and (hearing me start up the engine on our old Plymouth Valiant) warned me that the starter motor was about to give out. “Nonsense,” laughed Steve. “I just gave the car a tune-up.”
I hadn’t officially hired her yet, but in the week or so while I was tracking down her references, Lydia called daily, sometimes twice a day. “I’ve been thinking about your kitchen floor,” she would begin (cutting right through the small talk). “I know just the kind of oil to put on it. I’ll get that floor so shiny you’ll see yourself.” One time she called to say she wanted to let me know she’d be out for a few hours. Just in case I called.
The truth was, I felt as eager to have her working here as she felt to work for us. Our lives (in the absence of Vicky) had already become so frazzled and hectic that I couldn’t wait for her to start. Steve—always the cautious, moderate one—suggested we take some time before making a decision. But he was so busy, too, that it was usually ten o’clock before I’d get around to raising the babysitter issue, and by then we were both too tired to discuss it.
So finally I called Lydia and told her she had the job. She came right over, in a borrowed car (having none of her own), and began moving boxes in: Her crown of thorns plant. Her record collection: Jim Nabors. The Grateful Dead. Beethoven. Shoeboxes full of jewelry, stuffed animals, more plants, a Mr. Coffee she’d found at a yard sale, hardly broken at all. A wine carafe in the shape of a geisha girl. Her Indian headdress.
She spent the next few days moving in. Sometimes, when she’d come with another carload, I’d be working at my desk in the downstairs of the little house where she’d be living, and once I was under such a tight deadline I had to tell her, as she bustled in and out, that this wasn’t a very good time for me. “I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” she said, hauling her spider plant up the stairs. But she wanted to show me a recipe she’d been saving, and a painting someone had given her, and a necklace, and a stained-glass plant hanger. One time she just wanted to come over to the desk and give me a hug. “I love your family,” she said. “You know, you’ll never get rid of me.”
She came over one night around dinnertime, a few days before she was due to start working for us, and mentioned how much she loved hamburgers, so naturally we asked her to join us. She began telling us stories about her former employer—how he cursed at her, that he knew jujitsu and could kill you with his little finger. She told about a woman whose children she cared for once, out in Ohio, who drank too much, and (when the children were out of earshot) a man she knew who sexually abused his stepdaughter. During dinner, I noticed, Charlie kept trying to say something, but he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Same with Willy. There was something about Lydia that simply filled up every inch of space in the room. After she left, no one said anything except Audrey, who remarked, “Boy, it’s really going to be different around here.”
Later, once we had the children asleep and the kitchen cleaned up, Steve and I lay silent in bed for a long time: both of us staring at the ceiling, both (I knew) thinking the same thing. “We’ve made a mistake,” I told Steve. “Let’s not do anything hasty,” he said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
But in the morning, he had to go off to work early, and then Lydia was on the phone to me again. She’d seen an ad in the paper for a jungle gym someone in a town just forty miles south of us was giving away to the first person who’d claim it. Maybe we should drive over there and get it? Meanwhile, she had another carload of stuff to bring over. Her former employer’s girlfriend was moving into her old room, at her present house, and it was really uncomfortable being there. The employer was cursing at Lydia. The girlfriend didn’t like Lydia’s corned beef and cabbage. “She’s not a very nice woman,” Lydia whispered into the phone. “And I think the two of them are in trouble with the IRS.”
A friend of mine had been over, visiting, when Lydia called. After I hung up, I told her what was going on. How I had begun to feel as though Lydia was not simply moving into our house, she was taking over our lives. That instead of freeing up my energy and concentration for my family, Lydia had me more frazzled and preoccupied than before. My privacy was gone. My home no longer felt entirely my own.
“I’ll watch the children for you,” said my friend. “Drive over and tell her it won’t work, before you weaken.”
So that’s what I did. And Lydia, to her credit, was neither angry nor hostile. Only very very sad—and so, of course, was I. By the time I got home again, the phone was already ringing: Lydia again, holding the receiver up, so I could hear her former employer’s girlfriend yelling in the background: “Don’t you bring your damn junk back here. You’re not sleeping here tonight.”
We spent the next three days moving Lydia’s funny, lovable, sad accumulation of possessions out, to the home of a friend who said he’d take her in until she found another job. And while, a week and a half before, it had been all I could do to manage my own household and my problems, now I lay awake, trying to think of where Lydia might go, how we might help her find another job. In the end she called to say she’d found one, housekeeping again, for an old lady in another state. She came by yesterday to pick up the last of her stuff. We hired a new babysitter—a lovely young woman named Joanie, who will not live here with us and can’t start for a few weeks because she’s getting married. And will probably leave us before very long, as good babysitters nearly always do, to start a family of her own.
One other thing: The day after I told Lydia she didn’t have the job after all, the starter motor on our Plymouth Valiant died, just as she’d predicted it would. Of course, she’d also predicted—joking—that we’d never get rid of her. And I guess it was the fear that she might be right about that one too that led us both (two women, almost equally needy, in very different ways) to where we both are now.