I RODE THE RAPIDS of the Contoocook river once, on a rubber raft in early spring, when the water was at its highest and most wild. I remember thinking my heart might burst, I was so terrified, as we crashed over the rocks and swirled down the river, with the water shooting into our faces. After it was over, somebody told me those were class-four rapids we’d traveled. More than one rafter has died on that same stretch of river. And of course, if I’d known that, I never would have set out in the first place.
Well, I am not as a rule a risk taker in life. I have spent most of my thirty-two years being cautious and fearful about many things: fast toboggan rides, high diving boards. But I plunged into my marriage and parenthood almost without a second thought or a backward glance, much as I entered the Contoocook that day: at a calm spot, the waters smooth and free of boulders, with the rocks and drop-offs concealed around the next bend.
I was twenty-three years old. I had come from New Hampshire to New York City the year before. I had a great job as a newspaper reporter, and good prospects. I had a penthouse apartment overlooking the park. It was the year of the bicentennial: I could stand on my balcony at night, sipping white wine, and see the Empire State Building lit up in red, white, and blue. I’d go out on a Saturday afternoon and pick up three new outfits at Bloomingdale’s and a couple of new records. I bought myself African coffee beans and bouquets of calla lilies. I had plenty of friends; I went to lots of parties. Sometimes I went out on dates, and always, when I went out with a man, I tried to imagine myself married to him. But this was 1976; women my age—career women—weren’t supposed to be thinking about marriage.
Sometime in the fall of that year, I started getting calls from a man named Steve whom I’d met briefly, years before, back in my one and only year at college. He was an artist, raised in the Midwest, who was supporting himself as a house painter and living in a downtown loft he shared with a struggling jazz singer. He remembered me from a bike ride we took together a half dozen years earlier, and he wondered if we could get together some evening.
I always put him off with one excuse or another: I had to cover a singles’ convention for my newspaper. I was writing a story about celebrity bathrooms. I had to do my laundry. Really, though, I think I avoided Steve because—after dealing with all the men I had been meeting (who needed space, or couldn’t handle commitment, or who simply disappeared, or didn’t disappear, only I wished they would)—I had reached the point where nothing made me so suspicious of a man as to hear him say he liked me and wished he could see me again. Steve said those things, and he kept calling. (In New York, the city where, every thirty seconds, there’s a new face coming down the street. Where no one’s irreplaceable.)
I turned him down one weekend; he tried again the next. I told him, “Call me in a couple of months,” and he did. I was seeing a food photographer at the time—a man who would, on occasion, spend an entire morning looking for the perfect anjou pear, or pour mug after mug of beer in search of precisely the right combination of bubbles and foam for a beer ad. A man who would eventually end our relationship, around eleven-thirty P.M. on Christmas Eve, drive off in his Porsche, and then return five minutes later to pick up his imported German fruitcake. It was sometime after the fruitcake incident, when Steve called again, that I remember telling a friend, “This guy is probably a psychopathic killer.” He sounded so nice there had to be a trick.
He called me up one Sunday in February to ask if I’d like to go to a museum with him, and I don’t know why, but that time I said yes. We spent the afternoon walking around the city, came back to my apartment, where (as usual, in those days) there was nothing in the refrigerator but a couple of eggs and a piece of cheese. He made us an omelet. Even that first night we talked about marriage and children, I think, in a way that strikes me now as reckless and crazy, knowing what I know now about those things. (How hard it is to be married. What an enormous and irreversible thing it is to take on the responsibility of a child.)
But we were twenty-three and twenty-five then—very different types of people, but both of us in love, both driven by a pretty unfashionable longing for family and home. Later (first, when I was pregnant with Audrey, and dozens of times after that) I would accuse him of marrying me only because of those things. “You just wanted me for a wife,” I would say, as the clincher to a long list of accusations. “You just wanted to have a baby with me.”
And really, I guess, there was some truth to that, for both of us—only it no longer seems to me like a crime. We were wildly in love, but neither of us was the person the other might have run off with to Bora Bora or the coast of France. Our work, our interests, our friends, our style of life, could hardly have been more different. (I loved to talk. He fell silent swiftly. I had spent my life sitting in chairs, thinking, analyzing. He would get restless if a day went by that he hadn’t taken a run or played ball or fit in a ten-mile bike ride or a long swim. I looked at his paintings—large, abstract, undecorative—and didn’t know what to say. He didn’t ask me what I’d been writing about.) What we loved best about the other from the beginning, I think, was our dream of the family we could make together and the home we’d build.
We met in February, nine years ago. I quit my job a month later. In early April we rented a U-Haul truck, filled it with his paintings, my two white couches, his power tools, my designer suits, and moved to the old farmhouse in New Hampshire where we are living still. We had no money and few clear prospects for earning any. We hadn’t met each other’s families, didn’t know the most basic facts of how the other spent the days. We instantly set about planning the wedding. (When Steve called his parents in Ohio to let them know, they were very happy. Then asked to speak to Karen, the girlfriend he’d been seeing the last time they’d heard from him.)
We were married early that summer, in a little church down the road from our house. Afterward we gave an outdoor party for a couple hundred friends, back at our house. (In keeping with our approach to life back then, we had made no provisions for rain. None fell.) We left the dishes piled high in our kitchen that night and took off for the Breezy Point Motel, six miles down the road. Came back the next morning to wash the dishes. Our daughter Audrey was born the following winter—a year and two days from the afternoon we first got together.
The seas we have been navigating in the years since then have been rough indeed—full of choppy waters, boulders, sudden drops—and we’ve sustained more than a few injuries along our course. We’ve laid some demons to rest. (I am less quick to argue. I’ve come to understand that days are finite. Time is precious. So is peace.) I no longer shed tears over my birthday present (I seldom get flowers, but I don’t expect them). Some problems we’ve resolved. (He gets the car inspected. I do the cooking.) Some we no longer expect to resolve. We’re more realistic, maybe. We’ve seen a lot of marriages break apart over the years we’ve held together. And what I feel when I hear the stories of those marriages, is never the lofty superiority of one who has it all sewn up herself. Only the recognition, felt, I think, by anybody who’s been married a while, of how hard it is for two people to build a life together and how much more than love is required to make it endure.
Our friend Ursula’s son A.J. blew into town the other day, and this morning he paid us a visit. We’ve known A.J. close to ten years now, though never well. Like his father, Andy, who died a few years back, A.J. is a large man with not a lot of small talk in him. Trained as a geologist, he has been working these many years as a carpenter instead. He was married around 1970 to a pretty red-haired woman named Julia with whom he lived in a little cabin out of town, without benefit of electricity or running water. A.J. grew a beard. Julia wore long dresses and long hair. Their first baby, Cassie, was born right there in the cabin, and the second one, Sara, came a year and a half later. They drove a beat-up truck and A.J. picked up odd jobs; Julia baked bread.
I didn’t know them well back then, but they seemed like one of those couples—perhaps there were more of them, in those days—who lived by the creed “We ain’t got much, but we sure have love.” Sometimes I would run into A.J. and Julia in summertime, taking a dip down the road, at Gleason Falls, in the middle of the day—A.J. with a beautiful blond-haired baby in each arm. Around the time I met Steve, A.J. and Julia moved out West. A.J. had been offered a full-time construction job in San Diego. Sometimes, when I’d stop by to visit Ursula, she’d take out pictures from A.J. and Julia’s travels cross country in the truck. They camped out in Baja California for most of that summer and part of the fall: more pictures of beautiful blond children (three of them now; there was a boy, Jesse), with golden tans, wearing bandanas on their heads.
After they moved West we mostly lost touch with A.J. and his family, except for reports from Ursula. They seemed to be doing well, though. First they had an apartment, then a house. Then a better job, in Colorado. A.J. had shaved his beard. Julia (always after A.J. to push a little harder in his construction business, be a better provider) was talking about getting a job herself. She was going on a diet. The children were growing fast—still blond and beautiful.
Every summer or two they’d come back to New Hampshire for a visit, and when they did we always had the children over to our house. I always liked those children: They were kind to each other, and kind to Audrey too. Sometimes, months after a visit, we’d get a note from Sara, asking after pets, babies, news. Her family was moving again. (Texas this time.) They were buying a bigger house. She would take riding lessons. She was getting her own horse.
The new house was in a development called Pleasant Woods; I saw it on television, one time, when we were in Ohio visiting Steve’s parents, and Steve’s father was watching a golf match televised there. The place looked green and perfect, and it turned out A.J. and Julia’s house overlooked that very golf course. I tried to picture A.J. in a luxury housing development, not only building houses there but living in one. Hard to imagine.
Then we didn’t see them for a few summers. (“Too busy, I guess,” said Ursula, a little bitterly.) Ursula’s husband, Andy, was dead by now. Julia had put the children in day care and got a job as a secretary at the Pleasant Woods resort complex, where she’d been such a success they’d made her executive secretary to the head of the whole place. She had indeed gone on a diet; the new photographs from Texas showed her in fashionable suits and a new short hairdo. A.J.—still a good-looking man, but considerably aged—had put on weight. Sara, the second daughter, was taller than me now and could’ve been a fashion model.
A couple of years ago they came back through town, in a rented Lincoln Continental. Sara came for a sleepover with Audrey, but there was a crisis when she misplaced a ring she’d just been given by her mother for her birthday. The ring was real gold. In the end we found it, but not before some tears were shed, with Sara saying, “My mom will just kill me.”
A.J. and Julia were celebrating their anniversary that August: I think it was their fifteenth. As we stood on the lawn at Ursula’s house, where they’d been married (Julia barefoot; the minister in an embroidered Indian shirt), they fed each other cake and Julia (in a pant suit) said something like, “Once you’ve made it together this many years, you’ve gone too far to quit. I know now we’ll always be together.” A few months later they split up.
Ursula called me one day early last spring, in tears, to say that A.J. had turned up at the housing development where Julia and the children lived, on the edge of the ninth hole, and he’d gone on a rampage—yelling, breaking things. He had just been committed to a mental institution. Julia had just called Ursula to say she feared for her life. “The man’s gone nuts,” she said. “He’s crazy.”
I told Ursula it didn’t seem so crazy, to me, for a man who’d just ended a fifteen-year marriage and had been separated from his three beloved children, to flip out a little, but as for the homicidal part, I didn’t believe it. He must be under a lot of pressure, I said. As long as he’s getting good care, and he can get out when he’s ready, it might not be such a bad idea for him to have a rest.
A few weeks later he started sending us poems. It was easy to recognize the characters: The poems were all about A.J. and Julia—the old days in the little cabin, lit by kerosene; and more recent history, in the house on the edge of the golf course that the bank had announced it was about to repossess.
The poems kept coming. It was odd, getting them: Steve and I had never really known A.J. all that well, but after reading a few batches of those typewritten sheets, with the hospital return address, he started seeming like a friend. And though they were odd poems—disjointed, angry sometimes, wistful—they were not the poems of a madman either.
He checked out of the hospital after a few weeks, when the insurance money ran out. He drove across country in his old truck, with a wooden bumper that had Sara’s name carved in it. He took a carpentry job in Connecticut and kept sending us poems all summer.
A.J. came to New Hampshire from the Adirondacks a few times that summer. He’d show up on our doorstep, always unannounced. Once we were just heading out the door for our week’s vacation in Maine, with the car packed and the children already buckled into their seats. Another time, when Steve was out of town, he knocked at the door just as I was getting the children into bed. I was so startled to see him, six feet tall and then some, looming in the doorway in the pitch-dark night, that I told him it was a bad time for a visit and closed the door before I realized he’d come over on foot from Ursula’s house, where he was camping out.
His middle child, Sara, flew out to see him in the fall. She stayed with him at Ursula’s for a week, seldom letting A.J. out of her sight. I tried to imagine our children without Steve, Steve without our children. I avoided seeing A.J. for a few days after Sara left, knowing it would be a long time before he’d see her again and knowing how torn up he’d be.
He came over this morning, just to visit. I fixed him a bowl of soup I’d been making, and he sat down and told us the story of how his marriage fell apart. Amazing, I thought to myself, that I ever took this man for the quiet type. I had been making a blueberry pie when the story started. I made a second pie so I could justify staying on to listen, and when that pie was done too, I started in on some cookies. As it turned out, I forgot to put salt in the pie crust (which has a more adverse effect on the pie than you might suppose), simply because I was so wrapped up in A.J.’s tale.
He has no home and no job and no money, and he sleeps in the back of a seventeen-year-old truck. He is back again to where he started, only now he’s forty years old, with three children he loves more than anything, living two thousand miles away. I guess his is the old story: romantic, idealistic young love (the cabin in the woods), worn down by too much domestic reality. Designer jeans, horseback-riding lessons, summer camp, wall-to-wall carpeting: “We just got so busy getting ahead,” A.J. says, climbing into the cab of the same ancient red truck he and Julia rode off in on their wedding day, back when they thought all they needed was each other. The last I see of him is his hand-carved wooden bumper, with his daughter’s name carved in big capital letters (he made it the day she was born—on their bed, into his waiting hands). And then he disappears around the corner and out of sight.
Our old car needed a new muffler. That much seemed clear. And because the last one we’d purchased came with a lifetime guarantee, we were cheered to know we’d be out nothing more than the price of a new tail pipe to go with it. That, plus the sixty-mile drive to the muffler shop and back. We thought we’d combine the trip with a night at the movies: drop off the car, walk to the theater, pick up the car after the movie, drive home.
That was the plan. Steve made an appointment a week in advance for six-thirty on a Friday night. A few days before the scheduled appointment, he brought our 1966 Valiant into the shop for an advance viewing, in case the muffler installers might need to contemplate our particular tail pipe situation. We hired a babysitter. And finally the big night came: I set out the children’s dinners, sleeper suits, a plate of brownies. We made a successful exit—no tears. We were on the open road, Steve patting the steering wheel with satisfaction, saying, “It’s good to get this taken care of.”
In theory I look forward to these long drives alone with my husband. There’s been so little time to talk, lately, that sometimes I’m tempted to bring along a notebook with a list of subjects we need to cover. But the truth is, when I have him alone with me, captive in his seat belt, my tendency is always to raise large and troubling areas of discussion. Money comes up. Who has been sorting more laundry. Who last cleaned the car. I become icy. He grows silent. I may say, “Stop the car, let me out right now.” Having heard this line probably once a month in our nine years of marriage, Steve calmly turns on the radio. I say nothing for ten miles or so, and then forget for a second that I’m mad, tell him something Charlie said today. A song we like comes on the radio. By the time we’ve reached our destination we feel like actors who have just finished auditioning for a Bergman film. Who did not—thankfully—play their roles well enough to get a part.
So when we walked into the muffler shop, we were friends again. Steve presented our six-year-old warranty and our car keys, reminded the manager about our tail pipe. And then the trouble began.
“We don’t start repairs after six o’clock,” the man said. I—who always anticipate trouble when it comes to cars— braced myself for a fight. Steve stayed calm, his voice friendly. “I made this appointment a week ago. The woman I spoke to said six-thirty would be fine.”
“The girl was wrong. You know how they get mixed up.” The manager winked in my direction.
Steve didn’t have to look at me to know what I was about to say. He made the hand signal a policeman makes to indicate, “Slow down.” I held my tongue while he talked the fellow into making an exception.
“Now about the tail pipe …”
“We don’t have a tail pipe for that model in stock. You’ll have to come back some other time.”
I had begun pacing the floor a while back. Now I returned to the counter. “Leave this to me, please,” said Steve, who is still pained by the memory of the time I took action when a commuter airline lost our luggage even though we were the plane’s sole passengers. There is an entire airport we avoid these days, as a result.
Well, they had made a mistake. They had failed to order our tail pipe, and though they were equipped to make tail pipes at this place, the particular page in their instruction book giving the specifications for 1966 Valiant tail pipes was the one page missing from the book. No, they couldn’t call another dealership: No one else in the state was open Friday nights.
There was a long silence as I prepared the speech I was about to deliver, and Steve, hands in his pockets, thought hard. “Please,” he said to me. “Go outside now. Let me handle this.”
I sat down and picked up an old copy of Car & Driver magazine, flipping through it in about the same manner in which Jerry Fallwell might handle a double issue of Hustler.
“Well, if all the muffler shops here are closed,” said my husband, “let’s call California. It’s three hours earlier there.”
The manager looked stunned. Was Steve kidding? Did he know what it would cost to call a dealer in L.A.?
About two dollars for three minutes, said Steve levelly, even cheerfully. “I’ll pay.”
“How am I supposed to get the number? What am I supposed to say?” This fellow had never made a long-distance phone call, from the sound of things.
“I’ll make the call. I’ll get the tail-pipe specifications.”
Well, I’m going to skip over what happened after that, which was an endless debate involving telephones, mufflers, Valiants, reminders of the slogan from this muffler company’s television ads—punctuated with occasional, increasingly strained use of the word buddy on the part of my husband. I paced the office, scribbling notes, ostentatiously copying the manager’s first name off his personalized shirt. He was just reaching for the telephone—gingerly, as if the receiver were a grenade—and he had the number for the muffler shop in Los Angeles, when he made one last grumble about how much time all of this was taking, and I lost control.
What about our time, I yelled. What about the sixty miles we drove? I don’t even remember what I said, but somewhere in there a Car & Driver magazine ended up flung halfway across the floor, and a telephone receiver got slammed down. And a phone call wasn’t made. And though we caught the second half of the movie, I have no recollection of what finally happened to Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom—because all I could think about was our unrepaired car, our totaled evening. “That was a good idea about calling California,” I said quietly as we made our way home in silence, except for the sound of our tail pipe rattling. Steve paid the babysitter seven dollars and drove her home.
It isn’t that I learned, that night, that women should defer to their husbands in car repair shops. It isn’t that I learned to suffer fools gladly. There were some lessons in there about counting to ten before leveling the first threat of a call to the Better Business Bureau. But what I really learned had to do with my precious freedom of self-expression that I guard so zealously, and that I certainly preserved, that night. Except the cost was too great.
One of the hardest things to learn in a marriage—and I’m still a long way from getting this right—has to do with sometimes putting aside one’s self-interest for the good of this mysterious new unit, the couple. Who have a tendency to get all tangled up in details that never seem so important when they’re going well, and then suddenly become vital when they’re not.
Steve and I have known our friends Tim and Margaret for close to ten years—about as long as we’ve lived in this town. They’re a bright, articulate couple, wonderful parents of two boys around the ages of our two older children, living just a couple of miles down the road from us; their paths and ours cross often. When they do, we always smile, wave, exchange news of kids and gardens, comment on how good it would be to get together. They have always seemed to me extraordinarily kind and generous, with the kind of conscience that extends not only to friends but also to strangers around the globe. I don’t know many parents who spend more time with their children or display more tenderness. They have what has always looked to me like a really good and strong marriage. And one that’s nothing like my own.
Tim is a long-distance runner who gets to work every morning by foot, not car, so we pass his tall, lean figure in a Day-Glo beanie on the road into town, no matter what the season. Margaret is a tiny, soft-spoken, very pretty woman with a lively sense of humor and one of the best gardens in town. I see her outside, tending it, when I drive by. Our children know each other less well, because while Audrey has been attending the big red-brick school in town, Tim and Margaret have chosen to school their two at home—partly because they would just as soon avoid conveying certain worldly lessons to their boys. They have no TV set, no He-Man figures in the playroom. On the Frisbee lying in their front yard are the words “He is the Lord.”
Tim is a minister of the fundamentalist church in our town; Margaret carries her well-thumbed Bible wherever she goes, in a home-sewn case with handles like a pocketbook. It is their faith that shapes every aspect of their lives. Steve and I (who belong to the Congregational church, but don’t always make it there on Sunday mornings) are less absolute in our convictions. We try to maintain, in our family, a strong sense of moral behavior (though, as a half Jew, I can never go quite so far even to identify what I am as strictly Christian). But you won’t hear us talking about having taken the Lord into our hearts. The grace we sing before dinner—a Shaker tune called “’Tis a Gift to Be Simple”—never mentions Christ.
Which has to mean that in Tim and Margaret’s terms, we remain lost souls. I asked Tim about this once. “As far as you’re concerned,” I said to him sadly, “I guess you see me headed straight to hell.” He looked at me kindly, and said he was praying for me.
We all like each other a lot. But the issue of religion keeps us from getting too close. What am I to do with the fact that one of the great achievements of Tim’s career in town has been the creation of a crisis pregnancy center that denounces abortion as murder? What is he to do with the casual, eclectic background we provide our children? (A bible story here, a piece of Greek mythology there. A little Jesus, a little Santa, a little rock and roll.)
I read to our children, from our book of Bible stories, about Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: “This man was wise and good and great, and we should live by his teachings,” I tell them. (But so was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Gandhi.) “Maybe God didn’t literally create Adam exactly the way the Bible says, or Eve from his rib,” I say (in a discussion of dinosaurs, cavemen, evolution). “The idea is simply that God made the world.” If they heard me at a moment like that, Tim and Margaret would have to view us as the most lost-seeming of fence sitters—the watered-down form of Christianity we serve our children bearing about as much connection to the kind that governs their lives as Kool-Aid bears to nectar.
When our children were much younger, we invited Tim and Margaret’s oldest boy, Ben, to come play with Audrey for the afternoon. When Tim came to pick him up, and the two fathers were animatedly discussing a ball game, Steve—who almost never swears—let slip a couple of words I’d almost never heard him utter, then turned bright red. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said afterward. “I was so focused on not saying the wrong thing that I said it.” I think episodes like that one—combined with our mutual affection, and our desire not to jeopardize it—have made us keep a certain distance in the relationship between our two families.
Tim and Margaret invited our family over for Sunday dinner the other day, and all the things that had made us like each other were present. Their boys proved to be the kind of children I would have guessed they’d have—friendly, curious, lively, compassionate. Margaret had home-baked rolls and a salad from her garden on the table. Their refrigerator door was covered with kids’ drawings, like ours at home, only they also had a Bible lesson for the day printed in big letters for the boys to read. When we sat down, we bowed our heads together for grace, and I felt truly happy to see our families together. Many of our values are so much the same.
The conversation came around to the counseling sessions Tim and Margaret offer to couples about to be married. And partly because Steve and I had celebrated our ninth anniversary just the day before, and because, even when it’s not my anniversary, I am always thinking about marriage and how to make ours better, I asked them what sorts of issues they cover in their counseling sessions. Child raising, finances, in-laws—Tim offered a list of issues anyone who’s been married a while would recognize as ones worth considering—and ones Steve and I would have done well talking about, more than we did, before our own wedding.
Then Margaret named another subject they deal with in their premarital sessions, and I felt my teeth clench. “Headship,” she said. “The principle laid out in the scriptures, that the woman serves her husband, just as her husband serves Christ.”
Well, if I had liked this couple less, if I respected their intelligence less, or knew less of Tim’s respect for and devotion to Margaret, I would simply have sat there in stony silence and beat a hasty retreat home as fast as I could. But I had to ask: How could they accept a notion like that?
Of course, this wasn’t the first time someone had challenged them on the headship question; it’s an idea that goes so totally against current thinking about men and women and their roles. And they both had some reasonable-sounding things to say: That nearly every decision they made was in fact made together, a product of both of them. And that, on the rare occasions when they were at an impasse, and his word overruled hers, nothing so humbled him, or earned her greater respect in his eyes, than to see the strength she possessed that allowed her to yield. Margaret added that Tim’s position, as ultimate head of the household, protected her, made her feel safe. “I wouldn’t want all the responsibility Tim has,” she said.
Well, I am not buying it, and I am not buying it even though I know my pride, my willfullness, my headstrong need for control and equal responsibility in our marriage is the reason for at least seventy-five percent of the fights that take place in our household. Even though I know there would be a lot more peace and happiness in our house if we could accept a method of relating to each other like the one Tim and Margaret subscribe to. I can even see the reasoning behind a scriptural law that gives one sex ultimate power to overrule the other; the alternative (that exists in our household, for instance) makes for a lot of fights, a lot of impasses. Listening to Tim and Margaret describe their own system of living by the scripture, and the scripture only, I felt a kind of envy and sorrow. Because all around me—in their neat, bright, welcoming home, on their bountiful table, their blooming garden, and in the faces of their two fine boys—was evidence of how well it worked. And still, theirs is not the path for me. Steve and I will take the rocky road, with no one book offering all the answers, and I know from past experience that road will be filled with brambles and potholes, and even dead ends. I don’t feel either of these two couples is wiser or better than the other (though I have a guess at who has the greater shot at pure happiness). We are simply different. Passing each other on the road, I know we’ll always smile and wave, and wish the other well. And then, go our own, our separate ways.
There was a winter, a few years back, when I spent my days looking at real estate. As things turned out, we never bought any of those houses I tromped through, opening closets, inspecting basements. But every now and then Steve and I will be in some nearby town and we’ll drive by a familiar-looking place, and it comes to me: I went there with a realtor. “$75,000,” I tell him. “But it could probably have been gotten for less.” “$160,000. There’s a dumbwaiter in the kitchen.” “$225,000. The walls were paneled in mahogany. And there’s a bowling alley in the carriage house.”
“You got a realtor to take you through a house that cost $225,000?” Steve says, not really surprised (we have been married for nine years), but faintly curious.
“I drove our good car to the appointment that day,” I explain. Meaning our two-year-old Ford, and not our eighteen-year-old Plymouth.
“And what did you tell the salesman, after he’d taken you through this mansion?” he asks me.
“I was concerned about how we’d heat that third-floor tower room. Also, there wasn’t enough land.”
I remember well the winter when I went shopping for houses. Not just the prices of the houses I looked at, and which sellers would consider owner financing, and where interest rates stood. Charlie was not quite one year old then. Audrey was four. I wasn’t working. Money was tight. One week our water heater gave out, and two weeks later it was the furnace. We were using our front hall as a closet, and even so, I had clothes boxed up in corners all over the house. The paint was peeling. Melting snow had leaked through the roof and onto the walls of the one room I’d papered. Every day a new layer of dust seemed to rise up through the cracks between our floorboards. The woodstove made my skin dry, and there were ashes everywhere. Our house is five miles out of town, at the end of a dead-end road. Looking out the window, all I could see was snow. Steve worked long days, and sometimes he was gone for a week at a time, house painting in the city. Days would go by that the only conversations I had were with children and real-estate agents.
So that winter I sat in their offices and told them about my dream house. It should have at least four bedrooms, I explained (there would be more babies. I knew that.) And bathrooms, lots of bathrooms (our own house having only one).
The house I was looking for was sunny. Had a big kitchen, with lots of counter space, everything built in, and room for a little desk in one corner and a comfortable chair to sit in and read to a child. I figured room for a refrigerator went without saying. In our house we have to keep the refrigerator in the pantry. And since the doorway to the pantry crosses paths with the front door and the doorway to upstairs, it’s a frequent occurrence for a cook (me) to find herself clutching five eggs and half gallon of milk while she stands poised on the threshold, waiting for a couple of children and a dog to take off their boots, shake off a pile of snow, and finish arguing over whether they want miniature marshmallows or whipped cream in their hot chocolate.
Of course, when these real-estate agents heard that I also wanted land, and privacy, and a screened-in porch and plenty of closet space and a barn (for the horse we would someday own) and water nearby (if not on the property) and a first-rate public school district—they all told me you have to expect to pay a good price for such a place. Naturally, I concurred. And I didn’t even blink when the realtor quoted me a price of two and a quarter (I, who had been putting off a trip to the dentist because I didn’t know how we’d pay for my root canal).
I realize, telling all this, how thoughtless it sounds. I was taking up realtors’ time, walking through people’s houses—people’s lives, actually. There was an old man, selling a huge old colonial he’d lived in forty years (the house he’d raised his children in). He showed me where his children built their tree house, where to find wild blackberries, where the good trees for Christmas cutting were. There was a big Dutch oven in the kitchen fireplace. He spent twenty minutes telling me how to cook a turkey in it. “You’ve never tasted a better bird than the ones my wife cooked in that oven,” he said, with his eyes moist. His wife had died the summer before, which was why he’d put the house on the market.
There was a big modern solar house with one whole glassed-in side and a gourmet kitchen with a professional cookstove and a marble pastry board and a grill for indoor barbecuing and a stereo system built into the walls of every room. Dimmers on the bedroom lights, a balcony overlooking woods and a brook. Children’s bedrooms (two of them), with custom-made bunk beds and a secret passageway. A greenhouse. A soundproof music room. So why was this family selling a place like that?
The couple got divorced is what happened. Neither one could afford to keep the place alone.
I guess I was pretty unhappy myself that winter (I can’t now reconstruct why, but after nine years I understand that even good marriages can sometimes seem impossible). That winter I certainly spent a lot of time arguing with Steve (who had always loved where we were living) about our house. It was too isolated. Too hard to maintain. Too small. Too dark. I get up in the morning (I would say), and the first thing I do is turn on the lights. Naturally I feel discouraged. Who could be happy, in such a dark house?
Of course I see now our house wasn’t really the problem. We were simply living through some rough times. And during times like those it’s easier to think about moving than it is to think about changing—easier to believe that what stands between you and happiness is a slate-floor kitchen with built-in skylight and a dumbwaiter (even if it carries a two hundred thousand dollar price tag) than to get down to the business of working things out in a too-small house with one bathroom and a toilet that only flushes if you jiggle the handle just right.
Well, in the end, we didn’t buy a house or sell the one we had. It would probably be helpful to someone else (currently eyeing the real-estate listings) if I knew what it was that changed, but that’s as hard to pin down as what was wrong in the first place. Some things I know: The new baby started sleeping through the night. Steve took fewer trips to the city. We sold the piece of land that had been driving us rapidly into debt. Partly what saved us may have been my husband’s unwillingness to accept my vision of doom or my perception of our home as the wrong place to be. And it may sound too simple, but I think it’s true that I also began to see—walking through all those other people’s houses (houses I coveted that still hadn’t made their occupants’ lives complete or perfect)—that a good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it’s not track lighting or a sunroom that brings light into the kitchen.
We’ve finally got all three children in bed, and Steve and I are cleaning up the kitchen. I’m scraping bits of spaghetti off a chair, he’s washing dishes.
“I know you hated it when I gave you these knives,” he says, drying off the blade of the one he used tonight to carve the chicken. It’s one of a set of three he gave me one year, early in our marriage, for my birthday. And he’s right. I cried the year he gave me the knives; the truth is, I have cried over almost every gift he’s ever given me.
Not immediately, upon opening. (Then I always thank him, kiss him, tell him, “This is great.”) It comes out later: “All I am to you is a wife,” I said about the new bathtub, the stainless-steel spaghetti pot, the can opener, the knives. Eventually he got the message about practical gifts, so in recent years the presents have been perfume, silk stockings, jewelry, a skirt. But even those were never quite right. The skirt was horizontally striped and made me look thick around the waist. The stockings came from an expensive lingerie store I’d steered him to, specially, with hopes of a particular nightgown I’d seen there. I never wear perfume. Didn’t he even know that about me, after nine years?
But the birthday he gave me the knives was a particularly bad one. I was twenty-four, mother of a new baby girl. I’d gained fifty pounds with that baby, and I still had twenty-five to lose. I lived in drawstring pants and loose blouses that buttoned down the front for nursing. We had almost no money. And here Steve had gone out and spent seventy-five dollars on knives. “All I am to you,” (I said again, a few hours after the initial half-hearted expressions of pleasure when I first opened the box) “is a wife.” Then, reaching for the largest knife to cut myself another piece of birthday cake, I’d sliced my thumb instead, so badly I had needed to rush downtown to the medical center for stitches. I still have the scar.
“It’s true,” I tell him now as he dries off that same blade, eight years later. “They’re good knives. But I didn’t think they were a good present.” Meaning, there’s nothing romantic about a knife.
“You know,” he says, “I can still remember the afternoon I bought those knives.” He was in New York City, having just finished a house-painting job, and he had a couple hundred dollars cash in his pocket. He was driving home to New Hampshire that night (to make it back for my birthday). He’d seen the knives in the window of a little store downtown, and he knew right off that was what he wanted to get me. He couldn’t afford a complete set, of course. But the three knives he got me were the best made.
I remember that November too. We had just one car then, and Steve had taken it to New York, so I’d been home, alone with six-month-old Audrey, for five days. One afternoon I’d taken out all my old clothes from before we were married—back in the days when I was living in New York City myself, and working as a newspaper reporter, the days when I belonged to a health club and got my clothes in little designer boutiques. My silk blouses didn’t even button. I left them in piles on the closet floor and fixed a large bowl of buttered popcorn for Audrey and me. I was about to turn twenty-five years old, and all I was was a wife and mother. (Which I now understand to be quite a lot indeed. But I was younger then.) What I needed, that year, was a new dress and a bottle of bubble bath.
“The man in the knife store could tell the situation,” Steve says. “Young husband, not much cash, just starting out and wanting to give his wife a present that would last. He must have taken out three dozen knives, telling me about the uses for each one, helping me choose which ones would be best for us.”
They chose well, Steve and the knife seller. I have used those three knives nearly every day for nine years now. Paring potatoes. Peeling broccoli spears. Slicing muffins. Carving turkeys. Making radish roses. Trimming pie crust. And because (a couple of birthdays later) Steve gave me a knife sharpener, the blades still cut as well as they ever did.
“I knew these knives would last forever,” Steve says, hanging one up on the magnetic knife rack he gave me one Christmas.
“Durability,” I say sharply. “That’s your idea of romance.”
“And to you nothing’s so romantic as heartbreak,” says Steve, not unkindly.
He has a point there. The truth is, I am a domestic type. I like nothing so well as making a home and raising children in it. But I guess I’ve always thought less of myself for being that way. I have looked curiously and enviously at those mysterious women who’ve resisted the impulse to follow my particular path. Wondering (I always will) whether they are remaining truer to their essential selves, while I’ve been compromising mine. I eye them from my kitchen—those passionate, reckless, footloose, undomesticated women who have been following their hearts all these years that I’ve been driving the car pool. The only time a woman like those ever sees a knife like mine is between some lover’s teeth, as he threatens to slit his throat if she leaves him. There’s romance for you. There’s passion.
And maybe because I’ve always seen myself as a little too domesticated, because I’ve believed that unhappiness (or tumult anyway) was a more interesting condition than security or comfort, I’ve always done what was necessary to keep this domestic life of mine from ever coming close to running on an even keel. I don’t just cry on my birthdays: There were whole years, for a while, when I cried almost daily. I have started nearly every argument that ever took place under this roof of ours. I have thrown dishes, dumped entire meals into the sink, stalked out the door, jumped in the car and driven away. I have asked myself, at least once a week, whether it’s a good idea to stay married, and frequently I have concluded that it isn’t. I have never stopped loving my husband or my children. But loving them has sometimes been about all I’ve been sure of. I have lived in the same house with the same man for nine years now. But there were plenty of times, there, when I didn’t make plans more than a couple of days in advance, in case I wouldn’t be around by then.
I shouldn’t put absolutely all of this in the past tense either. I’ll always have my flare-ups. But lately it has been occurring to me that I am in fact leading the life I want to be living, and that it’s a good and lucky one.
“I think it’s about time you realized you’re happy,” my friend Laurie said to me the other day (Laurie being the friend of mine who, more than any other, I would describe as having lived a nearly uninterruptedly happy life, a woman who tells me she has never allowed herself to consider, for an instant, the possibility that her marriage wouldn’t last; the one who tells me, when I’m miserable, that I should start running again, or take up Dancercise). As for what she told me: I realized with shock that she was right.
I won’t ever possess Laurie’s kind of optimism and wholehearted self-assurance. It’s also true, I will always mourn all the other lives I couldn’t lead, places I can’t go, all the other babies I won’t have. (With every child I’ve had, I’ve grieved for the other sex that wasn’t born, even as I was rejoicing over the one I got.) I live in the country and miss the city. I love the husband I’ve got, but sometimes I imagine other kinds of marriages, other kinds of men I might have chosen. I have done the same one thing to earn my living since I was eighteen years old, and still, every week, I read the help-wanted ads in the paper. I will probably always feel ambivalent. I will want to change my life until the day I die. And all this time, through all my wavering and anxiety, all my husband has wanted was for our marriage to last as long as our carving knife.
“I never felt more romantic then I did the day I bought you those knives,” says Steve, who has also been telling me, for years, that this is what life is like, this is how marriage is. “I loved giving you something that wouldn’t wear out,” he says.
And so far, anyway, he’s been right. They’ve all lasted. The knives. The scar from the cut they gave me. The family we’re forging here.