I met the man I married at a wedding held in upstate New York. Late at night, after the bride and groom had gone to bed, the best man gathered the guests in the bar of the inn where most of us were staying and ordered up an hour of Stax and Motown from the jukebox. The floor was full from the first song, and as the room grew hot and close, Mark and I, left behind by our conversation partners, stood next to each other, leaning back against the bar, talking and watching the dancing. Mark: a professor who talked like a farmhand and swore like a racetrack owner because he knew the ladies loved it. Or so I told Rose. Tall and from East Texas, with a thick pile of dark gold hair thatching this way and that. A fine long sturdy face and quiet hazel eyes. Dress shirt untucked, sleeves rolled up. Courtly and direct. At ease with me in a way that suggested he’d be at ease anywhere.
You’re funny, he said after we’d been talking for a while. Looking down at me, taking my measure. Witty, I mean.
Usually when people say that, it’s a sign that they’re not that funny themselves.
Oh, I’m not, he said, smiling.
Let’s dance, I said, to see if he would thaw.
To “Proud Mary”? he said. Hell no. I’m not desecrating Ike and Tina like that.
Oh, so you are funny, I said.
He smiled, and I dragged him out to the floor, where I promptly turned my back to him, and danced away from him, so that he could get going without me watching. When I turned back to face him the song had reached its crescendo and the crowd, exploding into shouts, stomping, singing, crushed us together. The floorboards bounced. Someone’s whiskey spilled out of a glass held high. It ran down my neck, over my collarbone, down under my dress. I looked up to see where it had come from, and then back at Mark.
You’re beautiful, he said, and kissed me. His kiss: green like a weeded lot grown lush out of hope that someone would find the wildness alluring. Blue-black like a night in January, which, with its chill clarity, was another form of green. Don’t stop, I told him, when he pulled away. I thought I could marry him.
You should be more famous than you are, he said, coming into my bedroom one morning, holding my second book in his right hand. He’d spent a few hours on the couch drinking coffee and reading it while I slept off a party. I thought I should marry him.
He needed me, and did not try to hide it. Don’t go home, he’d say on Sunday nights, and then hold me to him so he could fall asleep. I liked the idea of being needed—perhaps because it lessened my responsibility toward him. I didn’t have to work very hard to love him. I just had to stay put.
With Mark, doing nothing together was like singing together. Over and over we went to the same restaurants, restaurants that were never more than five blocks away, and walked in their doors every time with the same excited relief to be home. Cooked side by side on Saturday nights, and he’d tell me about the boys he went to high school with, the football goons who tried to hold up a Whataburger and the preacher’s kid who was a serial impregnator, doing a perfect impression of each instance of headlong, wobbly manhood, conjured them with his voice out of the halls of Longview High School and into my kitchen. Drove nowhere together with Dylan or Springsteen turned up loud. The distance between the Jersey Shore and East Texas is shorter than you’d think, he liked to say, and he was right. Reading on Sunday afternoons under the same maple in Prospect Park, the two of us spread out on an old pale blue sheet, my grandmother’s, covered with daisies, at the top of a slope that poured into a pool of lawn. The books he read were often just that much more serious than mine, and I was much more inclined to pick up the books he’d just finished with than he was to pick up the ones I’d just finished, and I tried not to let this bother me, especially because he’d told me that I was the best editor he’d ever had. He himself was often more serious than I was. Moodier than I was. More changeable than I was. My difficult artist.
You should put your legs down, he said, one afternoon as we lay reading in the park.
Nobody’s looking, I said. Lying on my back, knees tented, dress making what I thought was enough of a curtain over my shins. Besides, it’s all yours.
I know you think that’s funny, he said. He didn’t think it was funny at all.
I took his hand and set it on the place he would never call my cunt. He took it away and put it on the top of my knees, and pressed down, gently, while still reading his book, until I lowered them.
Run, I told myself. But Sundays in Park Slope were full of couples pushing strollers, couples loaded down with grocery bags, couples holding hands and drinking coffees, couples behind their sunglasses sleepy with self-enchantment, couples who seemed to be relieved to have exchanged animal passion for animal contentment, and on the walk home from the park, they formed a chorus that said Stay. I’d never once felt an overwhelming need to have a child, but I was beginning to feel an acute and overwhelming need to be paired up. I did not stop to think that perhaps it was a shared abundance of cash, and not shared companionship, that made the faces of these couples appear free of bitterness and impervious to sorrow.
I hadn’t met anyone like him in New York. He was purer than I was, than anyone I knew—more frugal, more diligent. Much less bothered by the noise coming from the culture. Although he had a decadent streak that could manifest itself in cashmere winter coats and long dinners at bustling, glittering restaurants—if he didn’t, we wouldn’t have lasted. He hadn’t wasted his twenties and thirties the way Rose and I had wasted them, the way all the people I knew and loved had wasted them: drinking and talking, seeing bands, seeing movies, seeing art, buying clothes, buying shoes, buying music, buying books, traveling, writing things whose importance evaporated within a week even though we were trying hard to engineer posterity. Mark had been busy reading the ageless thoughts of the very dead, studying at Oxford, hiking through Italy like Nietzsche, teaching heavy course loads, turning his dissertation into a book and then beginning another. His purity of soul and purpose amplified his already ample confidence: he did not doubt himself, at all. He liked what he liked, rejected what he found wanting, and didn’t need anyone else to affirm these tastes. That might have been why, even though this very fixed compass could create a rigidity that made me fear idly for the us of thirty years from now, I felt safe lying next to him in bed: he knew what he was about. And it was why his students loved him more than mine loved me.
You shouldn’t care what those kids think about you, he always said. But mothers always do.
His own mother loved me. Barbara. She’d always longed for a daughter, and neither of Mark’s two younger brothers had given her the next best thing, which was a daughter-in-law, because neither of them had stayed romantically involved with the various mothers of their various children, and there I was, asking her to show me how to make biscuits and gravy and listening to the stories that bored her granddaughters and burdened her sons. Did I love her, as I thought I did as we stood next to each other frying links of Jimmy Dean sausage in cast-iron pans, or was I just hanging around for material?
The sixties ranch house in which she raised her sons contained only one bookcase: a glass-paneled Chippendale, a wedding present from Barbara’s grandfather, which stood full of Silhouette romances, cookbooks, diet books, and eighties-era guides to living the Christian life. But Barbara drove to the Books-A-Million near the Walmart Supercenter in Longview, Texas, to order my books, and after she read them, called me up in Brooklyn so we could talk about the women I’d written about. They just didn’t give a damn! she said, laughing in delight as she gossiped with me about their triumphs and tragedies. Not a one of them! Agnes, Rebecca, Georgia, Agnes. Ida, Dorothy, Mabel, Louise. Referring to them by their first names, which is how she referred to the hosts of the Today show and the judges on American Idol. Barbara, who said my mother must be so proud. My mother had never read either of my books, but I did not mention this to Barbara. Some days I think the highest honor those books ever received was the delight they provoked in Barbara Gillespie, née McKinley, and some days I think it’s their truest condemnation.
Why, don’t you just have the skin of a girl in a Pond’s ad! she said, the first time we met. At a carpeted, climate-controlled Cracker Barrel that had all the charm of a midsize Midwestern airport, Christmas Eve, off I-20, at a long noisy table full of his brothers and their children and his brother’s current girlfriends. Reddish-brown hair, dyed redder, I could tell, from the roots framing her forehead, and pulled back in a gold monogram barrette—a gift from the boys, she said, Christmas 1987. Hot-rollered curls spilling out of the barrette and onto the shoulders of her green cable-knit turtleneck sweater. Barbara didn’t need makeup either—her face was smooth and shining and laced with freckles at its edges—and when she told me she’d been using Pond’s herself every night since she turned sixteen, I began slathering it on every night, too, until Mark said please stop, it was freaking him out. Her hazel eyes merry and her laugh frequent until she started to cry, elbows on the table and face in her hands, when his youngest brother said his girls couldn’t spend the night at her place, and everyone at the table ignored her while she cried, went on talking and reordering because if it wasn’t one minor disappointment bringing on the waterworks it was another, and they no longer had the energy or will to distinguish which tears merited attention and which did not.
Mark got up out of his chair and looked down at the carpet for a second or two without expression, as if vacating his own premises in order to play the role of the rescuer she’d trained him to be. As if gathering himself before giving a sermon like the preacher he’d thought he should be. He walked over to Barbara, put his hand on her shoulder, and told her they should go outside and get some fresh air. She nodded, wiped her eyes with her right wrist, and did not move.
Come on, Mom, said Mark. His voice shaded with a tenderness I’d never heard. He sounded about ten years younger than the Mark I knew, and I worried while watching him that this tenderness would never be extended to me. She might have taken all of it. But she needed it more than I did, I thought, as I watched her grab the hand on her shoulder and kiss it once, quickly, warmly, with a gust of grateful affection.
She rose to her feet, and once they were through the restaurant doors his youngest brother, Paul, wide and tired with a faint streak of white in his red-gold beard, turned to me and said, with a sardonic smile, So now you’ve met Scarlett O’Hara.
Paul could joke about his mother’s wounded heart going off like a too-sensitive smoke alarm because he had not been Mark. Paul had been the four-year-old throwing yet another tantrum in the supermarket, crying in the seat of a shopping cart because he didn’t understand why they couldn’t have hot dogs, whereas Mark was the thirteen-year-old sitting on the linoleum next to their mother while she cried almost as loudly as her four-year-old son over not being able to afford to feed three boys on her secretary’s salary, and their father, who’d left her to marry a younger woman who let him be the hippie he was trying a decade too late to be, couldn’t give them any money because he made no money as an itinerant landscaper. Mark was the fifteen-year-old who made dinner when their mother was too depressed to come out of her bedroom to do it; the sixteen-year-old who watched his mother almost lose her job for absenteeism after being broken up with by his middle brother’s wrestling coach; the seventeen-year-old whose father put copies of Playboy and Hustler in the drawers of his nightstand because he thought his son was too studious. The nineteen-year-old who fell so hard for Greek at UT Austin that he went on to get a PhD in classics at Yale.
That boy, I thought, should not be left alone in the world without company. It was a very strong feeling, and I thought it meant I loved him, when in fact I might have just admired him. It never occurred to me that I also might have been looking to mother someone without having to give birth.
Mark had very strong feelings, too. He wrote me emails, left me notes on the backs of brown paper bags, on pages from notepads I’d taken from hotels, subscription cards from The New Yorker, wrote more to and about me than any man had ever done.
In the morning I took his notes on the subway and read them on the way to school. They made me forget I was hungrier for his body than he seemed to be for mine.
Said Rose when I brought this up to her: My aunt once said that you should marry a friend because you could always find a lover.
I’m not buying that at all. Isn’t it much harder to find a lover?
Yeah, so maybe it was the other way around. It’s possible I remembered it the wrong way—
Because you needed to?
Yes.
Are you trying to convince me of something?
I hope not, she said. I see the way he looks at you.
All those words, and I’m still not sure what he saw when he looked at me and called me beautiful. What it was specifically, about me, Charlotte Snowe, daughter of Frank and Peggy, that he loved.
I married him because he was the smartest man I’d come across in New York, and he wasn’t going to leave me to find a woman who wanted to get pregnant, like two other men before him had. Whenever I felt that my efforts to create what I imagined I could create were faltering, I could look over at Mark, on the couch, in bed, or across a table, and affirm myself by remembering that this kid would not get himself romantically involved with an idiot. And Mark didn’t care that I didn’t want a family, because family to him had been a torture. I might have questioned Rose’s supremely logical decision to marry for money, but marrying for psychological security was no better: each was a futile bid for insurance against pain.
You chose wisely, said Rose, as we stood in a ladies’ room at City Hall on my wedding day, and she watched me adjust a cream-colored dress from the 1920s that she’d bought for me off the Internet. It was her wedding gift. Not just the man but the venue, she said. I laughed. Rose didn’t.
I wish I’d had something much simpler, she said. And then, as I reapplied a coat of lipstick: You are a beautiful woman, Charlotte Snowe. As if she were disinterestedly but expertly appraising a horse.
I think I’d rather be a spirited filly, I said. Someone had called Rose that once during our waitressing nights at the cocktail lounge. Now she laughed.
Let’s stay in here forever, she said. I did not want to leave the ladies’ room either, because a worry was taking hold as the two of us stood there in front of the mirror: I am going to make him sad.