THE FIRST CALL CAME around nine o’clock one night, more than a dozen years ago. I was living alone in the country—unmarried, twenty years old. Watching whatever happened to be on TV, finishing my second bowl of ice cream, when the phone rang. The man talked like a cowboy, said he lived in Oklahoma and his name was Lloyd. He’d read and liked a book I wrote. The name of my town had been mentioned somewhere, and my phone number was listed with information. He wanted, he said, to be my friend.
I thought it was a joke, someone I knew from college (I’d dropped out after my freshman year), one of my old acting friends trying out an accent for some play he was in. That’s what I figured. But there was also the odd way this call had come at a moment (not by any means a rare one, in those days) when what I needed badly was someone to call me up and say he’d be my friend. There were things he said that made me feel he really knew who I was. A Hank Williams record that I owned too was playing in the background while we talked. He’d held a lot of different kinds of jobs, worked at a Campbell’s Soup factory one time just because he wanted to see the tomato soup he loved. He talked about books he read, promising to send me about a dozen he mentioned: American history, obscure short-story collections, movie-star biographies. He was a birdwatcher, and said I had to have a copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide. Hank Williams was singing all this time: “Jambalaya,” “Your Cheating Heart,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
“Come on,” I said, as we were finally about to ring off. “Who is this really?” Your friend Lloyd, he said. From Oklahoma. I said all right then, what’s the Oklahoma state bird? “Scissortail Flycatcher.” That sounded like a joke for sure.
The next day I looked up the answer to my question in an almanac, and of course he’d been right. A week later came a package containing the only picture I ever saw of him (cut from his high-school yearbook) showing a very handsome dark-eyed boy, the center forward, plus the books he’d promised, each one elaborately inscribed with my name in oversized capital letters on the first page. “Property of … Hands OFF. KEEP OUT!!!” Now and then, reading along or flipping through the pages, I’d come across a few words that were underlined, with a comment in the margin. In a biography of Vivien Leigh, her birthday (the same as mine) circled in red, with exclamation points all around it. Something about birds, or country music, and sometimes a subject I didn’t even think I’d mentioned (a food I liked, a movie I’d seen four times). If a character in a novel wore her hair the way I did on the cover of my book, there’d be a comment. And over and over again there the words, “Don’t forget, you can always count on me.”
I know what all this sounds like (psychopath twisting the phone cord; unhappy young woman alone in the woods). My mother, hearing about Lloyd, made no comment, then called back a day later to say, “I can’t stop thinking about that man in Oklahoma. I’m scared for you.” I told her, told myself (and the many people I entertained with the story of his increasingly frequent phone calls) that I was getting into this because it was such a good story.
And though he called me, by now, twice a week (very often after the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, that he and I—hard to say we—both loved) and though I seldom cut the calls short, I never phoned him. At some point, though, I realized that if he disappeared, I’d miss him. He sent packages weekly: books, newspaper clippings, tapes—but I never (though I copied down his address) mailed him anything. Even his strange form of communication—forming an attachment based on a photograph from a book jacket, talking only by phone and exchanging precious little information about the basic facts of either person’s daily life, work, family—made an odd kind of sense to me. Never mind that he was thirty-eight and I was twenty, that his passion was the Oklahoma Sooners football team and I built dollhouse furniture. The very fact that our two lives held so little in common seemed to me, now and then, to suggest the presence of some much deeper form of kinship. Of course it seemed crazy that I was sitting in my house in the middle of a New Hampshire winter (and then another one), on a Saturday night, talking for an hour with a man I’d never met, who lived two thousand miles away, someone who had just got home from his office Christmas party, where a divorcee from the secretarial pool had stuck his cowboy hat on her head and invited him to be her date at a rodeo next weekend, a man who said no, because he wanted instead to stay home, watch Mary Tyler Moore, and call me. But every now and then I’d go to a party too or visit friends at college, where I’d find myself face to face with some young Ivy League type, and I’d ask him what his major was, and he’d tell me about applying to medical school—and all the social rites and customs we’d go through, on the way to absolutely nothing more than the cheese-and-crackers platter, seemed just as crazy to me as what was going on with Lloyd. Maybe more so.
He sent me strange, wonderful presents. A deluxe two-key harmonica (with the request that I learn how to play “Red River Valley” in time to perform it, over the telephone, for his birthday in May). A pair of blue cowboy boots and an Oklahoma football jersey. A four-record set of bird calls. A pair of apple-head dolls made by Oklahoma Indians. An antique green-velvet doll-sized chaise longue. A hand-inlaid veneer table that played “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago when you lifted the top. One of the first American Cuisinarts, with a gold plaque attached to the side inscribed with my name and the words “HANDS OFF!!!” He sent so many books that I had to buy two new sets of shelves. For my part, I sent nothing, but any time an article I’d written showed up in the Ladies’ Home Journal or Seventeen, he’d know about it. He was keeping a scrapbook about me, he said.
Once in a while he’d make some remark about paying me a visit in New Hampshire. There were one or two times, real low points in my life, when I felt I had to go away somewhere, and Oklahoma (more than some other place where old friends and family lived) came to mind. But it was easier to be brave on the telephone than in real life. In real life, I left my house in New Hampshire and got a job in New York. Had a few appropriate-seeming boyfriends who weren’t nearly as interesting or funny, as good company or as devoted to me as Lloyd, and whose names and faces I can’t now recall. Lloyd still called on Saturday nights—though sometimes I’d be out and I’d come home to find his message on my new answering machine. He never got the hang of waiting for the beep.
Then I met Steve (whose family, on his father’s side, were Oklahomans), and within a month I’d quit my job, given notice on my apartment, and made plans to move with him back to New Hampshire and get married. And even though over the four years since Lloyd had started calling, not one word of love or commitment had been spoken, still, with Steve there in the room, I felt guilty and two-timing the next time Lloyd called me. I meant to tell Lloyd about Steve that night, and then the next time he called; but he was full of the story of a cheese dish that he was sending me he’d seen in a store window in Oklahoma City, and a toy bird in a cage that sang just like a real one. He’d made a tape for me of the last episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that he was sending enclosed in a five-pound can of macadamia nuts.
I wrote Lloyd a letter (easiest of all to be brave on paper) telling him that I was getting married. He wrote back to say he’d always be my friend, but that he probably shouldn’t call me anymore. If he were in Steve’s place, he wouldn’t like it.
I heard from him, after that, only on Vivien Leigh’s and my birthday every year, and at Christmas, when he’d send Audrey a red and white Oklahoma Sooners jersey in her current size and some hugely extravagant toy. (An enormous stuffed elephant. A deluxe baby doll with thirty-piece layette, packed in a wicker suitcase. That one came on a Christmas we had so little money we gave her balloons and bubble-blowing solution. Steve wrote to Lloyd after that to say please, no more presents.)
Over the years, in various periods of hard times, we’ve sold most of Lloyd’s presents to me, though I still have the bird-call records and the personalized Cuisinart. I still think of him now and then (when I’m grating carrots, and sometimes, rereading an old book, when I come upon a reference to Tammy Wynette or red-winged blackbirds, underlined in red). And sometimes, when I’m feeling fed up with my real-life, nine-year-old marriage to a man I love who gives me meat thermometers and dish towels on my birthday—a man who loves me, but is not about to keep a scrapbook documenting my life—I think about how much easier it is to carry on a romance with someone if you’ve never met him.
A few years back, over a period of several months, I used to visit a woman in the state mental hospital. Sometimes I drive past that hospital on my way to buy groceries or to take one of my children to the doctor. I feel almost like an escapee, the relief is so great, still, that I’m on the outside.
I first read about Linda in the newspaper. Years before, her father had killed her mother and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. When later he was released from the state hospital, and within the year, found dead of a gunshot wound, his death was ruled a suicide. For months Linda had waged a protest with the authorities until finally they agreed to exhume the body. Sure enough, there was a bullet wound in him that proved it was a murder, and the one who shot him was the daughter who’d insisted they investigate. They found Linda not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced her to the state hospital. Which is where I sent her the letter saying I’d like to meet her and write a book about her story. She said sure, come.
I was living, then as now, in this house in the country, with Steve and Audrey, who was just a baby. It was a couple of years since I’d lived in the city, working as a newspaper reporter—but I still liked to talk about my old days as if I were a character on Hill Street Blues. Never having quite as many stories as I would have liked.
But now I was spending my days picking strawberries and making jam, with a baby strapped to my back and no shoes on. There were, in fact, rough edges in my life: the constant eruption of little battles that mark the early days of a marriage and pass, if one survives them, into truce or much more serious warfare, greater pain or deeper intimacy, and sometimes both. And there was a difficult, often stormy father in my life then too—my own beloved, infuriating, alcoholic parent whose calls I avoided and didn’t return. That woman locked inside the state hospital was nothing like me, and the father she killed—a burly, violent, gun-loving small-time businessman—was nothing like mine, who liked, when drinking, to sit in the living room late into the night, conducting Mozart horn concertos played on a scratched record. Still, reading this other woman’s story, I drew comparisons between Linda and me, imagined her story addressed mine and held larger implications about fathers and daughters, madness and sanity. I don’t remember what else I said about her case, but it seemed to make sense at the time—enough that a publisher was going to pay me a sum out of which (there was always an uneasiness surrounding this) I would pay a percentage required by Linda.
So I used to visit her. Unlike most people in state mental hospitals, she looked good. She was about ten years older than I: mid-thirties. She’d known her share of successes in the world: achievement in sports, excellent grades, and a few semesters at a medical school. She had good teeth, good skin, a good figure.
Because she was, at the time, the only woman in the state to be committed on criminal charges, there was no women’s forensic ward to place her on. So Linda, with her books and Johnny Cash cassettes and her calligraphy pens, inhabited a world of women who never got out of their bathrobes and didn’t always make it to the toilet on time. Tapes I made with her are hard to make out, chiefly because there was always so much yelling going on around us. Some of the women on that ward had been there twenty years and just sat in chairs all day, staring straight ahead. Signs along the hallways, decorated with some staff members’ attempts at rendering Snoopy, instructed patients on subjects like “Five steps to a cheerful outlook” and listed days of the week.
Many times I was the only visitor on the floor. The first fifteen minutes of my visit were often taken up by her questions about the business aspects of our arrangement. She knew just what kind of car she wanted to buy with part of her earnings when she got out: a Pontiac Trans Am.
Then we’d settle down to her story, beginning with childhood: tap-dancing lessons and target-shooting practice, times when her father hit her mother, intimations of sexual abuse. We got along well. I never felt any particular warmth from her and I always felt she was evaluating my behavior pretty closely, but of course that’s precisely what I did with her. When you’re having a conversation with a person in a mental hospital you measure everything she says, so a remark about the orderlies having it in for her sounds paranoid, and if the person says, “I could’ve killed him,” you can’t help but think that maybe she could have.
Making the transition from inside the hospital back to Steve and Audrey was always hard. I’d break into a run when was I out the door, and often I’d cry driving home. And often, too, I’d get into a silly argument with Steve afterward. I’d make some remark about Linda’s psychiatrist, how the nurses and orderlies hated my being there. Steve said I was spending too much time at the hospital.
The big issue surrounding Linda at the time, she told me, was that everyone at the hospital suspected her of using drugs. She said she wasn’t. But her doctors gave orders that she couldn’t have any money in her possession.
That was a terrible blow. Linda needed to buy cigarettes, and liked, once a week or so, to order a lobster dinner delivered from a local restaurant. It got to the point where most of what we talked about when I came was the money business, and every time I’d take a dollar out of my wallet to buy groceries, I’d think of her and feel something approaching guilt. Then one day she asked me if I’d smuggle in a hundred dollars for her.
At first, and for a long time, I said no. I have always been one to obey rules. But here in the hospital, Linda used to say, resisting authority was a healthy sign of sanity. When a person stopped fighting, that was the moment you knew she’d be spending the next twenty years staring at the Snoopy posters.
What she said made sense. Also, our work together was going less and less well; we hardly ever talked now about anything besides how much money she’d get for the book and who should play her in the movie. I guess I felt that if I would just bring her the hundred dollars and be done with it, she’d trust me.
It wasn’t easy, smuggling in those two fifty-dollar bills. A female attendant searched me every time I came. The day I brought the money I was in a cold sweat, and even after I’d managed to turn it over to Linda I couldn’t calm down. When I got home that day Steve told me I was going crazy.
I’m not completely sure even now of all the reasons why everything fell apart after that. A few days later I was called into the office of a hospital administrator who said he’d been given reason to think Linda was using drugs again, and no one could figure out how she got the money. I said I didn’t know, and he believed me.
Linda’s brother called me, wanting his share of royalties from my still-unwritten book. I drove up north to the motel he ran and spent an evening dickering over figures at his kitchen table. From where I sat, the stuffed head of a huge buck deer killed by the dead father seemed to be staring me in the eye.
A couple of days later I sent Linda a letter telling her I couldn’t go through with the project. I sent back the money I’d been paid for the book, and to make up the lost income I wrote a whole lot of magazine articles about marriage and babies, sounding like an expert on both. My father, who had moved away by this time, and hardly ever called me anymore, died in his sleep, and I realized, touching his face as he lay in his casket, that of the many feelings I had for him, wanting him dead was never one.
I had told Linda, when I quit the book, that I’d still come and visit her. But I never went back.
My friend Beverly is a mother of two boys, ages three and ten. She’s a singer and songwriter, a crackerjack seamstress, a deeply religious woman. She loves her home, she loves her husband, and she believes strongly in the importance of a home-cooked dinner on the table for her family. No one, meeting her six months ago, would have said, “Here is a person with a deep void in her life. Here is someone who needs a hobby.”
But three months ago (“on a whim,” she says, and because she figured it would be fun for the children) she and her good friend Jane took their boys to a place called Funspot for an afternoon of roller skating. Everybody had a good time. And you might have thought that would be that.
Only, two days later, Beverly left her three-year-old with a babysitter and returned to Funspot at ten A.M., alone. She took a private lesson with a fellow named Russ. She goes twice every week now—as much as four hours at a time. She’s bought herself a skating outfit and good skates. She even dreams about skating. “It has changed my life,” she says, her eyes fairly burning.
We are in her car when she tells me this. We’re making the thirty-mile drive to Skate World (the new rink she’s graduated to). We have each left children at home, and husbands in charge of making dinner. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon—the hour I am usually chopping vegetables and putting on the potatoes—and I am (I can hardly believe it) headed for Skate World.
“Up and floating,” says Beverly. “That’s the essence of roller skating.” I sit a up a little straighter in the seat listening to her, and ask what it was that possessed her to make this surprising change in her life.
“Well,” she says, “it just makes me feel so—free.”
All day long, she’s taking care of children. Doing laundry, running errands, tending to all the little pieces of business that seem so unimportant by themselves but add up to a way of life.
And then she gets to the rink. Puts on her sheer-to-the-waist pantyhose and her little black skirt and her white skates, steps out on the floor, and rolls away. “It doesn’t feel like you’re exercising,” she says. “Your wheels just keep moving, and you have to follow. You’re flying.”
I ask her what she thinks about while she’s skating. “Nothing,” she says. “Not even my children. When I’m skating, all I do is skate.”
After it’s over, that’s when she does her thinking. “I’m learning all these things,” she says. Not just about skating either. “I’ve come to see you don’t have to be arrogant to hold your head up and keep your back straight. I feel so proud at the way I keep improving. I actually believe I’m good. And it carries over into all the rest of my life. When I’m singing, I close my eyes and say to myself, ‘Just pretend you’re skating.’ And then my voice just opens up.”
When she was a young girl, she competed as a gymnast, and she showed a lot of promise. In her junior year of high school she was chosen for intensive pre-Olympic training, but that was the year her family had to move to Belgium. On the day of her last meet before leaving, she was injured doing warmups and had to miss the competition. “I never knew whether I could’ve won or not,” she says twenty years later. “That always bothered me.”
In her adult life she continued to do a little gymnastics now and then, and sometimes she’d roll up the rug in her sewing room and do an interpretive dance, all by herself, to Ann Murray singing “You Needed Me.” She danced it for her son one afternoon, and, watching her, he wept. But other than that, she says, her exercise these past few years has been pretty much confined to running up and down stairs.
We get to the rink. Inside, nearly everyone seems to know Beverly. There’s an eighty-three-year-old man named Pete (he doesn’t do Mohawk turns the way he used to, but he still skates). There’s Mike, in his early thirties, and legally blind, who started skating five years ago (forty hours a week, after work) and does the Glide Waltz as if the wind were carrying him. Little girls with skinny legs and fancy skating skirts, who merely laugh when they fall. Gray-haired women—one, named Mary, with a flower in her hair. I am surprised, for a second there, to see a vastly overweight woman, well into her fifties, emerge from the dressing room in a short purple skating tunic. Then she puts on her skates, and she’s transformed. She takes off, suddenly weightless.
There’s Oliver, a sort of oddball character. “Oliver wishes he had a partner for the Mirror Waltz, and he hates being short,” Beverly had told me. Sure enough, the first thing he does is ask me how tall I am. It is the first time in my life I’ve lied about my height. (I shave off an inch, but I’m still too tall. Plus, I can’t skate.)
But watching Beverly out there working on her figures (tracing and retracing a pair of circles, trying to keep her outside wheels on the black lines, while Pete and I look on and nobody breathes), I long to try. I rent a pair of boots and stagger out onto the floor. The organ plays “Melancholy Baby.” And Beverly was right: I am not thinking about fertilizing my rose bush or what to make for dinner tomorrow, or reminding myself to get the winter clothes into mothballs. I am not worrying about how on earth I’d manage at home if I broke my arm here tonight. I’m not even thinking about how much Audrey would love it here. I suppose anyone watching me would see a thirty-two-year-old woman in a pair of old jeans, hobbling around the floor. But in my head, I’m thinking, “Up and floating. Up and floating. Up. Floating.”
As for Beverly, she’s in her own world here. There are more accomplished skaters, of course (a young girl in purple, who jumps and spins; a white-haired woman in a black skating outfit, who dances the Society Blues as if she were born on skates; Mike, cutting across the rink in what looks like a single move), but few float better than my friend. She’s unfastened her long hair, so it trails behind her, and she moves her arms as if she were conducting a hundred-piece orchestra. It happens we’re in a prefab warehouse with cinder-block walls, called Skate World, listening to a little old man play the electric organ, but this might be the stage of the Kirov Ballet, or Lincoln Center, or Paradise itself, to look at her. “It’s hard to believe she just started skating this spring,” says one old-timer, standing on the sidelines with me, watching.
Her husband has never seen her skate. One of these days, he’ll come along with her. What she’d really love would be for him to learn also; there can’t be many feelings better than doing the Mirror Waltz across the rink with someone you love. There are a half dozen really accomplished married couples out on the floor tonight, and though most are in their forties or beyond, and some are gray, it’s easy, watching them, to imagine how they would have looked as teenagers.
But it’s also true, Beverly sort of likes it this way: coming here all by herself, doing something that is all hers. Coming to Skate World, where, as she says, “I’m not Mrs. So-and-So. I’m just myself.” She knows nothing of Oliver’s life, or Mike’s, or Mary’s, outside the rink, and they know nothing of hers. “I think of them all as friends, but I never picture them away from the rink,” she says. “I just imagine them going round and round forever. All the rest of the time, I’m so many things: a singer, a wife, a mother. But what I love is that here all I am is a skater.”
I was in New York—a city where I once lived in a Gramercy Park penthouse, carried on a career, maintained charge accounts—for the first time in over a year. These days I give little thought to my old life in the city. Nearly all the clothes I bought and wore when I lived there have gone out of style, and the rest I have little occasion to wear. But I came back to New York to celebrate the marriage of our two good old friends Greg and Kate, a painter and a writer, like Steve and me, who met at the same time we did but chose a very different course—of freedom, work, travel, each other.
We were in our friends’ downtown loft—exquisitely remodeled, white and spare—for the post-wedding party. My first thought, entering the room—and finding it filled with men in good suits and women in three-inch heels, wearing real pearls and carrying mixed drinks—was surprise at what a lot of older people had come. Then I realized they were just my age, these lawyers and psychiatrists and television executives. We went to the same schools; I even knew some of them, nearly a decade ago, when we had all just come to this city, had just gotten our first apartments and grown-up clothes.
An elegant-looking woman came over to me. We were both due to turn thirty in a matter of weeks, we discovered. Not surprising, really, that the information emerged so swiftly; the knowledge of my upcoming birthday had been much on my mind and clearly much on hers.
But she was a vice president with a large advertising agency handling the Johnson & Johnson account, a woman who flies all over the country looking at cute babies, while I at that point dealt mostly with my own, and the one on the way. (There were, at this gathering that included surely fifty women of prime childbearing age, just two—me and one other—who were pregnant, and only one child present.)
She pulled me aside, sat me down, leaned in close. “How do you do it?” she asked. “What’s it like?” She might have been talking about conquering Everest or kicking heroin, but in fact what she meant was having children, being a mother.
And she wasn’t talking about the elaborate balancing act pulled off by so many successful New York professional women who manage to have children and a high-powered career too. She was talking about my having made the choice of motherhood at the expense of career. Though she didn’t say it quite this way, what she was also talking about were my five-dollar Chinese shoes and my self-cut hair, and how invisible—not unwelcome so much as incongruous—a “nonproductive” pregnant woman was at a gathering like this one, where every conversation begins with “What do you do?” I identified myself as a mother of two young children. It’s a real conversation stopper, that one.
No question, the thousands of hours Steve and I have spent reading Goodnight Moon and Babar to our children, zipping and unzipping their snowsuits, singing them “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and the Love Boat theme song, have taken us away from work. But there’s a drain on us greater even than the physical one, the hours of child care and dollars gone to ear infections and Barbies. It’s the way the focus gets blurred, the concentration lost, the way every day begins (not even close to unpleasantly) in a bed faintly dampened by our son, rescued in the early morning hours from his crib and asleep now between us with his Sesame Street pillowcase wrapped around his thumb. The ritual daily listing of breakfast possibilities: Cheerios, Rice Krispies, toast, egg (white only). The question, always asked though the answer is always no: “Can I have a doughnut?” Packing the lunchbox. Braiding the hair. Pinning Charlie down to wash his face, retrieving the boot he throws, comforting his sister, on whose head it has landed. Racing out the door at ten past eight to a seventeen-year-old car whose ability to start is always up for grabs.
By nine-thirty, when I’m home again and putting groceries away, washing juice glasses and loading the dryer, the house is empty and quiet. But haunted too, by the children who inhabit it—the concrete evidence (in the form of Matchbox cars and Fisher-Price people, barrettes and an experiment Audrey has set up involving celery sticks, water balloons, dirt, and cups of water with various shades of food coloring in them), and more than that, the energy field that lingers, nearly crackles, even when they’re gone.
A few years ago, when my father was slowly dying of pneumonia, I flew out west to see him for what I knew would be the last time. I was pregnant then too, with Charlie. And what I remember best about that trip was the feeling I had, greater even than my grief at saying good-bye, of something close to embarrassment at my condition. My father was a man of enormous promise and ambition who saw himself as waylaid by domestic life, detoured from what had looked like a brilliant trajectory into thirty years as an assistant professor of English at a small New Hampshire university. “Children are hostages to fortune,” he said regularly, not unkindly, to me, his too-well-loved younger child.
Of course there are parents who want only for their offspring to lay grandchildren at their feet, but what my father wanted from me, on his deathbed, were timeless novels and glorious reviews, and what came instead (though he didn’t live to see this) was a baby boy, fair-haired and blue-eyed like him, from his own dark daughter. Another irresistible hostage, come to wreak pleasurable havoc on his parents’ lives. In a half year’s time, the little inheritance my father had socked away, with enormous advance pride and pleasure in the freedom it would bring me, was mostly gone to pay bills unwritten novels had left unmet. What would he have thought if he could have seen me, two years later, pregnant again, in 1978’s maternity dress (my chief extravagances are babies), sipping champagne and answering the advertising executive’s question: Doesn’t it bother you that your children have, well, sort of messed up your career?
Of course I know well the answers one gives here—all of them well constructed by the countless numbers before me who’ve taken this exit off the expressway’s faster lanes. All about how comparatively brief the period of total responsibility for one’s children comes to seem in the “broad overview” of a life, how the experience of parenthood transforms all the rest of one’s days, increases a person’s humanity. That what one does is not (the old notion) to martyr one’s self for the next generation, but to enrich one’s own existence through parenthood. (I remember reading a comment made by Meryl Streep, a while after she’d given birth to her first child, that the experience of being a mother would make her a better actress.)
My own view is somewhat less totally assured. I joked to our just-married friends (Kate, the bride, slim and beautiful in a strapless Norma Kamali gown with five layers of organdy flounces that I will draw for Audrey later, back home, and that she will color in, pink): I told them that in ten years I’d be spending my days at my typewriter while they were walking the floor with babies. But the truth is, maybe not. One’s art can also be one’s only child, and one’s child can be one’s only true art. It may well be that I never again do anything else as wholeheartedly as I am currently engaged in being my children’s mother.
The day after Greg and Kate’s wedding, I stood on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 22nd Street, holding Audrey’s hand. I pointed out to her the lights in the windows of the apartment that used to be mine, overlooking the park. I told her how I hung the terrace with flowers. I told her how I served dinner on the roof one night and the meal blew away while I was bringing out the candles. There were statues of knights in armor holding up the awning at my front door, I told her, and a doorman and a shiny brass elevator. You could stand on the balcony and see the Empire State Building, lit in red, white, and blue that year, for the bicentennial. I was relieved to discover how nearly painless it felt to get into our old car and head for home.
Back when I was eight months pregnant with our third child, broke, snowed in, with Steve out of town for two weeks, my children sick, our pipes frozen, and the engine of our eighteen-year-old car refusing to turn over, Audrey and I got into the Love Boat habit. At four o’clock every afternoon—the hour that used to be reserved for Sesame Street—we’d fix ourselves a big plate of peanut butter on crackers and (the diet version) peanut butter on celery sticks, and tune in to the daily Love Boat rerun. Even Charlie got into the routine.
“Love—exciting and new. Come aboard, we’re expecting you. …” That was the theme song. Then, one by one, and sometimes two by two, the guest stars would come on board, each one presenting his or her own terrible or comic problem. By the end of the hour, they had all managed to solve their problems, or at least to live with them, and acquired a good base tan while they were at it.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” Audrey would murmur, with one hand on my belly and one hand on the crackers, “if we could go on the Love Boat.” But of course, we were dry-docked. The idea of lounging in a bikini, alongside a kidney-shaped pool, sipping a drink out of a coconut shell while someone like Bert Convy rubbed suntan oil on my back—well, it couldn’t have seemed more remote to me, as I folded laundry and chopped onions for soup.
But I could dream. I could do more than that, in fact. I wrote a note to the Cunard Lines, entertainment division, offering my services aboard ship as a lecturer on writing. A few weeks later I got a form letter acknowledging receipt of my note, and then nothing. The next month our second son was born. Then came postpartum depression, mud season, blackfly season. And then one day in late May came a phone call from the entertainment coordinator of the Queen Elizabeth II. Could my husband and I be ready to set sail for England, first class, all expenses paid, in ten days?
We didn’t agree right away. Steve is the type who feels no day is complete if he hasn’t chopped some wood or hammered a few nails. A reluctant vacationer. A man who tries to keep his shaving down to once a week, and his three ties as dusty as possible. When he heard dinners on the QE2 would be black tie, he groaned.
As for me, I was still nursing Willy and hadn’t spent a night without him. I was dropping into bed at eight-thirty every night. I wasn’t sure I could muster the energy for a vacation, even if we could think of a way to leave the children.
But it was also, we decided, a chance we couldn’t pass up. In our seven years of married life, we’d never had a vacation like that, with no children, no work (the lectures didn’t really count)—and we had never needed one more. We found a good friend who was willing to take care of our boys, and another friend who agreed to see us off at the ship and then put Audrey on a plane to her grandmother’s. We leaned against the rail as the ship pulled out of port, throwing streamers and watching our daughter growing smaller and smaller on shore. It was terrible to see Audrey crying and not be able to put my arms around her.
After that, though, we had an idyllic twelve days, during which I thought about my children surprisingly little. I had brought along a state-of-the-art breast pump, in the hope of being able to continue nursing my son when we got home, but otherwise we behaved like carefree, footloose types who wouldn’t know Luvs from Huggies. We drank a lot of champagne. We danced every night, sometimes so late that we watched the sun come up over the ocean. We started every morning with a jog around the deck and ate caviar with every dinner—the new rituals that replaced pouring Cheerios and emptying the diaper pail. Our new shipboard friends included an opera singer, a golf pro, and an avocado grower, and on the return trip, a retired couple who had just purchased thirty-five pairs of shoes for themselves in Portugal and invited us to come visit them sometime in Boca Raton. There was a French nobleman (who, when jokingly I asked how many ancestors of his had been beheaded in the French Revolution and whether he had a castle, answered nine and then took out photographs of two castles—his, and his cousin’s). Then there was a young man with five Rolls Royces in the ship’s hold and a lady friend sporting $100,000 worth of jewelry, a fellow who confessed to Steve (while the two of them sweated side by side in the sauna) that his underworld connections had been making things dicey lately. We thought he was kidding until we got our pictures back and discovered that in every one where he appeared, he had succeeded in obscuring his face behind a beach umbrella or a piece of rigging.
By the second half of our trip we knew all the ship’s comedian’s jokes, but it didn’t matter: We were cruising. Steve—who spends his life back home in jeans and a paint-spattered shirt—found that he loved putting on his tuxedo every night. I wished I’d managed to scrounge up more gowns than the four I’d brought, to avoid repeating my outfits. I began to look a little enviously at other women’s pearls and diamonds.
After twelve nights aboard ship (plus one night in Southampton, England) we were home again, stepping a little unsteadily onto land. And though during that week and a half I hadn’t missed the children as dreadfully as I’d feared, suddenly I was frantic to see them. All I wanted was to rub my cheek against my baby’s bottom and make a pot of soup.
Sometimes, now, we still watch the Love Boat, and it always makes me think of that brief, unreal interlude when we inhabited neither one continent nor the other, but a world apart from everything else. Eating, drinking, dancing, drifting in the Atlantic. Every now and then at parties (my children’s) I still tell one of Mickey Marvin’s jokes, featuring a dollar bill folded up in the shape of a telephone receiver and a punch line that leaves the five-year-olds doubled up with laughter. And sometimes, when I tell friends about our cruise, I take out the shipboard portrait taken of us, greeting the captain: I in my borrowed silk gown, Steve in his borrowed tux. That one also gets a laugh. The truth is, we are better suited to pumpkins around here than to coaches.
Thursday afternoons I pick Audrey up at school and drive her to a city twenty-five miles away for gymnastics lessons. It’s a wonderful school we go to—wall-to-wall mats and equipment, uneven parallel bars, balance beams, enormous bags filled with foam rubber, and a professional-size trampoline. There’s a bench at one end of the gym for the parents to sit on while they wait for their children, and a toy bin that keeps Charlie and Willy reasonably well occupied during the hour and a quarter of Audrey’s lesson. I could bring a book, but I love watching, not only my child but also all the other little girls in brightly colored leotards and gym shorts, dreaming of becoming ballerinas and acrobats. For them, anything appears possible.
We’ve been coming here for a year now; I know the routine pretty well. I bring a stack of books for my sons to look at when they get bored, and a couple of snacks to tide us over until dinner, which we eat at McDonald’s, just down the road from gymnastics class. This is our night for the big city.
Audrey loves these classes, adores her teacher and our Thursday routine. The waiting around part is hard for my boys, but the thought of the Happy Meal they’ll get afterward keeps them going. As for me, I take my pleasure vicariously—relishing the thought that I am giving my child something I would have loved, and never had, myself. All through my own school days, I remained a miserable failure at sports—the last one chosen for every team, the first one replaced by a substitute. To this day, I am unable to perform a cartwheel. For Audrey, I vowed (almost the day she was born), it will be different.
The truth is, she’s not a natural gymnast either. There are girls in her class who slide effortlessly into splits and flip across the room in one cartwheel after another, girls who spin round and round on the uneven bars and do somersaults in midair off the trampoline. For Audrey, every new skill they teach her is a struggle. But she’s getting them—and if I have to put a thousand miles on the car to make it happen, well, that’s one of the things mothers do.
Yesterday at her first class of the new school year, I found myself sitting on the bench beside the mother of a new student, a girl just Audrey’s age, whose family has recently moved to our area. So I was the veteran, the one who knew the ropes—naming the pieces of apparatus, explaining dismounts and trampoline rules and the policy concerning absences. “I signed Rebecca up because she’s just so gawky and awkward these days,” the woman sighed to me. And then, observing my child in one of her better headstands, the woman nodded appreciatively. “Was your little girl always that graceful,” she asked, “or did she pick it up here?”
Of course I beamed, and (secure in my own child’s accomplishment) I assured her that her daughter’s headstands looked just fine and would get even better. Audrey looked up just then, to be sure I had been watching, and waved, and I mouthed the words “Great job!” I recognized the look of pleasure that crossed her face before she turned back to the little group of girls, ready to attempt the next exercise. She was giggling about something. Her ponytail was bobbing, and she was hiking up the tights under her red leotard—making me realize she must have grown over the summer. They’re too short for her now. I reminded myself to pick up new ones for her. Maybe a new leotard too.
When the class was over, she ran up to me, still bouncing. Did I see her backward somersaults? her vault over the horse? her flip on the uneven bars? I hugged her, told her how well she’d done. “You know,” I said, “I was always too scared to get up on the uneven bars, even when I was a lot bigger than you. One time, when the teacher made me do a flip, I burst into tears.”
She made a face of exaggerated disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding, Mom. Flips are cinchy. Everybody does those.”
Nope, I said. Not your mother.
In the car on the way to McDonald’s, she was still flying. Maybe next session she could sign up for two classes a week instead of one? Maybe in a year or two she could be on the team? Maybe we could get a mat, so she could work on her routines at home? “We’ve got that old mattress up in the playroom,” I said. “That would never work,” she said. “It’s got to be a certain kind. You never did gymnastics, so you don’t understand.” In her voice was a tone—not exasperation so much as mild amusement, and the very faintest, most affectionate form of condescension. But because she is basically a kind and considerate person, she also gave me a hug, and said, charitably, “That’s okay, Mom. Nobody can be good at everything.”
My eight-year-old can do some things I can’t. She has begun a process that will be repeated with increasing frequency by all three of my children, for as many years as I live, in which the child surpasses the parent. It’s what I want for all of them. It’s why I drive all these miles on Thursdays, why I sit on that hard bench, why I write out all those checks I can’t always afford for gymnastics classes (also piano lessons and skiing lessons and art supplies), and why there will very likely be a regulation-style gymnastics mat under the tree this Christmas.
I remember the first time the thought came to me, that part of what being a parent meant was moving one step closer to the grave. Shifting: from protected child to child protector, from the one who walks on the inside to the one who walks closest to the road. When the thought first hit me, I was pregnant with my first child—the one who is now my eight-and-a-half-year-old gymnast—and (in the style of a nine-months-pregnant woman, who is seldom very far from tears) I was in tears. My body was no longer simply my own, I wept, but totally at the service now of a small person I hadn’t even met yet. I had longed for this moment. I wanted to become a mother. Still, it was a shock to realize that if I did my job right, I would have a child who was smarter, wiser, nicer, more secure, more accomplished than I. A child who could turn cartwheels and do flips. Who would someday say to me, “You mean, you can’t even do a backward somersault? Here, let me teach you.” And see, it has happened.
I was in New York City the other day—without my children or my husband, or any of the paraphernalia I usually carry (bags of groceries, a baby bottle sticking out of my purse) that give me away, instantly, as a married woman, a mother. Sitting on the bus, I felt a man looking at me in a way that hasn’t happened often in the eight years since Audrey was born. No way he could tell I was unavailable.
I guess, truthfully, I miss being looked at not as somebody’s mother, but as my own self. One pleasure I remember from my single days was the way every day dawned with possibilities looming. You never knew if this might be the train you’d board and meet the man of your dreams. There was always the chance that tomorrow you might fall in love. Given the choice, I’ll opt for loving someone, being loved, to the mysteries behind door number two. But no question, one element that’s absent from even blissful domestic life is mystery. Courtship. Suspense. (It’s no wonder so many mothers of young children watch soap operas and read romance novels.) A husband can be many things, but one thing’s for sure: he will never be a stranger in the night.
Early last winter (it was just before Christmas) Audrey flew by herself to visit her grandmother in Canada. It’s a trip she’s made often, ever since she reached the age at which airlines permit children to fly alone (and, in truth, a little before then too). It’s a direct flight: my mother puts her on the plane, and of course either Steve or I always pick her up at the other end.
This time she’d been gone about five days, and I was missing her badly—couldn’t wait to see her coming off that plane. I guess I was in a pretty keyed-up state: a combination of excitement at seeing Aud, and Christmas, which is a holiday that (I keep reminding myself) I love, even though I’m generally in tears at least once a day throughout the month of December.
This particular December day, I’d had a fight with Steve a few hours earlier. I can’t even remember anymore what it was about, but I know my themes well enough that I can guess. He wasn’t talking to me enough. He had fallen asleep on the couch again. He had slept through all three times Willy woke up in the night. The only compliment he’d given me in two days was for taking the trash to the dump. He was showing all the signs of being a man who’s planning to give his wife a knife sharpener for Christmas. Somewhere in there I had doubtless told him (my old refrain) that he was treating me like an old shoe.
When I set out in mid-afternoon for the hundred-mile drive to the airport, we hadn’t made up. I didn’t really mind the drive: I had brought with me a bunch of obscure bluegrass music tapes full of tragic love stories. Playing bluegrass banjo is a long-deferred dream of mine, but for the time being, I just sing along. That’s what I did that day all the way to Boston. Then, because I had a couple of hours to spare before Audrey’s plane got in, I stopped at a mall a few minutes from the airport to do some Christmas shopping.
I bought a few toys for the children and three dozen bagels for the freezer. When I looked at my watch I realized I had cut things a little closer than usual, but still, I knew, there was enough time to pick up our car, drive to the airport, and retrieve Audrey. As I walked to the parking lot, I said out loud—superstitiously—how much I loved her, and how lucky I was to have a daughter.
But when I got to the car, put down the packages, and reached into my purse for the car keys, they weren’t there. I checked again, and then I checked my pockets. I checked again, checked the ground around the car. I raced back to the toy store I’d been shopping in: no keys. No keys at the bagel stand. And now Audrey’s plane was just a half hour from landing. I knew the keys might be in the car (it was too dark to see) and they might be in the snow somewhere between the parking lot and the shops. But there was no more time to look. So, frantic now, I hailed a taxi and told the driver to take me to Logan Airport fast. I had only ten dollars left in my wallet. The fare came to five.
I got to Audrey’s gate with just five minutes to spare. I made a call to the Boston police, who told me they couldn’t get a car like mine open and started without seriously damaging the ignition, and in any case it might be a few hours before they could get around to me. I called Steve—told him what was happening, and explained that I’d be home late.
Then I caught a glimpse of Audrey, who was carrying an enormous box holding a Barbie Dream Carriage (her early Christmas present from her grandmother) and a couple of shopping bags besides. Of course I threw my arms around her first, and burst into tears. Then I explained about the car.
Neither of us had eaten dinner, but I figured we’d better use our last five dollars to get back to the car and try again to find the keys, or someone who could get the car open. It was around seven-thirty by this time, and below freezing, with a stiff wind.
To save money, I thought we’d try and share a cab. There was a friendly, kind-looking man in the taxi line, so I asked him if he might like to split a fare. The man—Ned was his name—said sure.
In the taxi, Audrey told him our story, leaving out nothing (not the bagels, or the Barbie coach, either). And it turned out that this fellow (a nice-looking man, about thirty-five) was an engineer who’d just flown in to set up a machine he’d invented at MIT. His briefcase was full of tools. “I’ll come with you to the parking lot,” he said. “I’ll get your car open.”
Well, I said, okay; and Audrey jumped up and down on the seat, announcing, “This is great! This is just great!” I suggested she could wait inside the parking-lot attendant’s booth, where it was warm and there was a television set, but she didn’t want to miss anything. So she sat on the hood of the car, bundled up in extra clothes she’d pulled out of her suitcase, and leaned over Ned’s shoulder while he laid out his tools on the roof and analyzed the situation.
With his special miniature flashlight beamed in through the windshield, Ned found out the keys were in the ignition. Then he took a coat hanger out of his garment bag, twisted it, and attached a screwdriver to one end. Then he attached some wire so he could maneuver the screwdriver, sort of like a fishing line, from outside the window. The whole thing became pretty elaborate.
And it didn’t work. An hour had passed now, and my fingers were numb. Maybe I should just leave the car and call a friend in Cambridge to pick us up, I said. Audrey and Ned protested. “I’m going to get this thing open,” Ned said.
He built a second invention. Audrey told him her longtime ambition—to be an inventor. He told her about things he used to build when he was a little boy.
We talked about all sorts of things while he worked on our car. He told funny stories about taking apart people’s stereos all the time, and Audrey told him about her trip to Canada. She mentioned what a good pie baker I am. He mentioned how much he loved pies.
I was aware, though, through all of this, of the fact that Steve’s name hadn’t come up. I had a child, and obviously she had a father, but after a couple of hours, when the fact still hadn’t emerged that I had a husband back home (and two little boys), it occurred to me that maybe Ned thought I was divorced, and available.
He was a really nice man. Just the sort of person with whom—if I’d met him at the airport, before I met Steve—I would’ve been happy to have dinner. It was very easy and natural, talking with him. He gave me his scarf and hat when he noticed I was cold. He really paid attention to Audrey.
Now comes the part that’s hard to admit: that there came a point, somewhere along the line, when I began consciously avoiding mention of Steve and my two little boys back home. Not that I planned to head off into the night with Ned (and Audrey, and the Barbie Dream Carriage). Not that I planned anything more than a handshake, and maybe a gift, in the mail, of some home-baked Christmas cookies. But the fact is, I guess I liked holding on to the image—for a few minutes anyway—of a young single mother, being cared for, and, I supposed, courted by a kind and attractive inventor who knew how to talk to children and told me I could make standing in a parking lot for two hours on a night with a windchill factor of negative ten degrees feel like fun.
Twice, while Ned worked on our car, a couple of men came up to see if they could help. One of them even appeared, for a second there, to be making some progress with the lock for a second there. And I saw, when that happened, how much Ned wanted to be the one to get our car door open.
Which he did, finally, by taking off a window, using the coathanger to lower in a towel to remove four separate interior screws, in a procedure that was (as I told him) nothing less than brilliant.
“Now,” Audrey said brightly (always up for a party), “we have to take you out to dinner. To celebrate.”
It was ten o’clock by now. I explained, with embarrassment, that we were out of money. “Don’t be silly,” Ned told us. “This is my treat.” And though I protested that we really had to get home, Audrey was starved and so was I. And I needed to warm up before the long drive home in a car with one window missing.
So we went to a restaurant that served enormous hamburgers, and Audrey had a sundae, and we all talked a lot more (I was surprised at how much there was to say that had nothing to do with my marriage and my family). Ned told us this was the best evening he’d had in months. And then, just after our second cup of coffee, I got up and said I’d better call Steve and tell him why we were so late.
I think back on this today and wince, because I saw the look on Ned’s face when I said that. Now it seems just about unavoidable to conclude that I was somehow leading him on—toying with his affections, giving him reason to hope that things might turn out the way they would have in certain highly romantic movies, where the man, the woman (a widow, probably), and the child (Shirley Temple) walk off hand in hand and become, instantly, a family. I do know that I wasn’t just using him to get my car open. For a moment there I probably allowed myself a romantic fantasy or two as well. None of which is to say that I don’t love my husband, and want to stay married.
Well, it was late. Ned had been very kind. There was no danger, anymore, of my being misunderstood. So I told him I’d drive him to his hotel before we set out for the long drive home. When we got into the car and I turned on the ignition, my obscure folk music tape clicked on and he shook his head. “I didn’t know anybody besides me listens to this,” he said. And it turned out he played the banjo.
By the time I pulled up beside Ned’s hotel, Audrey was asleep. “Be sure and say good-bye for me,” he said. I shook his hand and said, “If you’re ever in New Hampshire …” He picked up his briefcase and then closed the door very carefully, so as not as not to wake Aud.
The next morning I told Steve what had happened. Later that day (setting out for the grocery store with Charlie and Willy) I found, on the floor of the car, a package belonging to Ned, and called the hotel where he was staying. It turned out to be a crucial piece for the machine he was installing at MIT. I said I’d send it Express Mail that day. He wrote to me once, after that, saying it would be nice to get together in Boston, sometime when he came into town again. He had some records he’d like to tape for me.
I didn’t write back.