I hated his wife more than I loved him: David. A history professor. I gave him, over and over, the sex that his twenty-five years of marriage had failed to provide him with. He thought he loved me and I let him think it. Mark had gotten engaged, and I needed someone to remind me that marriage was a bankrupt construct, needed to remember that men thought I was worth the trouble. I no longer trusted myself to keep a roof over my head, so I wanted protection, competence, and command. He was ten years older than me, and his hands looked indeed as if they had taken chain saws to trees, built bookcases, built treehouses, laid floors, and rewired crumbling houses. They had cradled four infant daughters and turned the pages, four times over, of Anne of Green Gables.
His girls: Elinor, Anne, Elizabeth, and Victoria. Also known as Ellie, Annie, Beth, and Vixie. Or Ells-bells, Anners, Queen E, and Vicks. Elizabeth would not be called Liz, and Victoria would not be called Victoria.
Elinor and Anne had been champion gymnasts, Elinor’s specialty being the balance beam and Anne’s being the vault, before they decided to start a band with two girls from the neighborhood. Elinor on guitar and vocals, Anne on drums and harmony. They called their band Get Off the Couch, Dude! which their father thought was brilliant. I thought it was pretty funny for a couple of teenage girls stranded in Cleveland, Ohio, too. Elinor and Anne thought about calling the band Ugh, Hipsters! but he told them it was a better song title than band name, and Elinor said that as much as she hated to admit it he was probably right. Elizabeth loved soccer, and she and her mother tried to outbake the Cake Boss on weekends. He was a little worried about Victoria, because her closest friends seemed to be Elinor and the two cats and the one dog who roamed the house. He was very worried about the way she and Elizabeth picked fights with each other, mostly having to do with getting proximity to, and attention from, Elinor. Anne, meanwhile, didn’t care that she wasn’t the one being fought over. Anne had a boyfriend. And this, said her father, made Elinor a little crazy. As the eldest, Elinor thought she should have been the first to do everything and in this way set precedents and examples for the other three—Elinor liked to say that she should serve as a constitution that could be appealed to in the event of legal debate. Anne, being the second in line to the throne, felt no compunction to do anything she didn’t want to do, let alone be perfect, so she could slip out of the house and find herself another pocket to stay warm in without feeling the guilt or betrayal Elinor would. Elinor, according to her father, had somehow developed a talent for guilt in addition to all her other talents, because her premature birth had resulted in lung damage that put her on a ventilator for the first six weeks of her life. He and his wife spent five of those weeks thinking they’d lose her, and living with this knowledge, he thought, had made Elinor perhaps too aware of disappointing them. For Elinor, disappointing her parents might be another version of almost disappearing for good again.
Their father called me his eucatastrophe. A word coined by Tolkien, he told me, that referred to the point in a fairy tale when, near the end, all hope seems lost, but then there arises, out of nowhere, what Tolkien called a sudden joyous turn.
His wife: I saw a picture of her once, taken in what appeared to be their early twenties. In his office on campus, on a weekend when she and the girls were away, in the evening, with the lights off so no one would see me, waiting for him to pick up some mail. I pulled out a book and a picture fell out. Of the two of them, standing on a promontory in what looked to be the Grand Canyon, ridged rocks and chipped clouds undulating for miles and miles out behind them. She was beautiful, in a stark and shadowed way. Her very large eyes—they looked brown—glowed intently, and with humor. They made me think very seriously about packing my bags and getting on a plane back to New York. He needed to stare hard at that picture and figure out where that girl was hiding today in his wife, and what role he might have played in making her disappear.
Mostly when I thought of her I couldn’t stand the idea of her. She’d been happy not to work; never, in the waning years of the twentieth century, did she ever want to be more or other than she was. I could not forgive her for being a woman who had no other ambition than mothering—for never even having been an elementary school teacher or an administrative drone. For being a willing receptacle, for being filled with nothing but love, for being nothing more than an embodied heart. For taking his name, for taking his money. For being so certain at age twenty-one that she had found the man she wanted to die with. For never being deviled by a horizon. For having a mind so free of intellectual prejudices that it was satisfied by books written by pastor’s wives. I could not forgive her for having an undivided heart. For having a pure one.
The women have such hard faces here, said David, the first time he came to visit me.
The women here are beautiful, he said the last time he came to visit.
You’ve made them up, I would say of his daughters. Thinking of Laura and Mary, and of Betsy and Julia and Margaret. And of Ella and Henny and Sarah and Charlotte and Gertie. And Maria and Josephine. Of Josephine’s obsession with The Nutcracker, and Maria’s obsession with Michael Jackson. Of Rose’s own childhood obsession with Elvis and his jungle room, which had come to pass because her grandmother also had a little bit of an obsession with Elvis. Of my own grandmother, whom I once overheard saying—of Johnny Mathis—that he could put his shoes under her bed anytime. Mom! said my aunt Carolyn. Charlotte is right here! Of Nicole from long ago telling me that she once glued a series of shoeboxes together in order to make her own dollhouse version of Anne Frank’s secret annex. And not, she used to stress, for school. Of my crush, and Rose’s crush, on Peter van Daan. Of Tracy from long ago telling me that she insisted on being Amelia Earhart for Halloween three years in a row. Of my childhood habit of reading stories about illustrious women of history, any kind of illustrious woman from history, taking books out of our town’s dinky, damp-from-the-sea, fluorescent-light-flickering library the size of a postage stamp, sitting on the olive green carpet in my red snow parka with my hood up for what I told my mother when she came to take me home was extra mind insulation—books on Maria Tallchief, Cleopatra, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Dolley Madison, Rosa Parks, Clara Barton, Marian Anderson, Louisa May Alcott, Pocahontas, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells, Anna Pavlova. The three sisters all under five, flanking their father on the bench seat in the very back of the B63 bus one Sunday, legs dangling, faces roving and rapt, while they listened to their father read to them from The Wizard of Oz. Of a friend’s daughter, Helen, asking me why wasn’t I married and then telling me that when I found another husband she was going to be the maid of honor and she was going to wear a dress that had a rainbow skirt, and the cake would be rainbow, too, made of white icing with rainbow sprinkles on top and layers of red, yellow, green, purple, orange, and blue cake inside. Of Ivy, another friend’s daughter, on another morning, telling me that she never, ever wanted me to get married again but that she did want me to get a dog. And Moira, a former student of mine, who, one day in class, and I sadly forget why, said Don’t get me started on my obsession with Mary, Queen of Scots.
Are you in love with him or his daughters? said Rose, when I told her about him. I didn’t mention him again.
When Elinor, his oldest, was thirteen, he picked her up from a dance and asked if she’d danced with anyone. I’m not falling in love until I meet someone who makes me want to break a slate over his head, she said. She was referring, he knew, to Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. Her idealism—or, rather, her ability to turn a piece of text into an article of faith—made him proud. As did her total dismissal of the boys at this event as cretinous. Cretinous! he’d said in the car, laughing, delighted, pleased at his daughter’s choice of words, at her definite sense of where the pitiful world ended and she began. Then he asked her what book she’d gotten that word from. The one I’m writing right now, she told him, and when he realized she was serious, that it wasn’t ironic, he knew she would be safe no matter what happened, because he could see that she had become a discriminating, imaginative, opinionated, and strong-willed human, and those qualities meant that she would never be hurt by the world, or for very long. Or so he hoped.
You never know what life will bring, he said.
Elinor, who typed this sentence at nine on the electric typewriter that got him through college, a sentence she knew he would find because he still wrote first drafts with it: It is quite unbearable to hear one’s parents fighting when all one wants to do is listen to the rain.
She sent a letter to me at school. It arrived in a pale blue envelope. No return address. A former student, I thought, and saved it to read later that night.
Ms. Snowe, it began. Matching blue paper. The handwriting neat and balancing itself on evenly spaced invisible lines, a large baroque embossed capital letter E, colored navy blue, unfurling quite splendidly at the top. E, for Elinor.
I’m sorry to intrude, but—
I stopped reading and called Rose, against my better judgment. She did not waste any time pretending to sympathize.
I’ve never thought this one was a great idea, she said. The girls screaming and laughing in the background.
Now you tell me, I said.
You’re an adult, she said. What am I going to do, rain on your parade? The older we got, the more we sounded like our mothers. Or no: we sounded most like our mothers when we were angry. Those girls need him more than you do.
Tell me what to do, I said. Helpless, frustrated, hating myself.
Tell you what to do? she said. Impatient, frustrated. The girls now crying in the background. You’re an adult, she said, and hung up.
I left the apartment to walk away the shame and rage. When I came home I wrote David and told him I could no longer see him. He called ten minutes after I sent the email, twenty minutes after that, then an hour, and two hours after that, but I didn’t pick up or listen to the messages. His calls told me what I wanted to hear. Don’t go, they said. Don’t go.
Because you never knew what life would bring, I went online to see who was available, and slept with anyone who’d sleep with me, until one morning, Easter morning, I thought, when I’d gotten up to use somebody’s bathroom before sneaking out, and I stood staring in the mirror of the bathroom of an East Village apartment that was not substantially different than all the other East Village apartments I’d spent nights in when I was twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-eight, thirty-three, thirty-five. Al Green on an iPhone instead of the Magnetic Fields on vinyl, but it was all the same, my breasts the same, because I had not given birth, my face dented and creased a little around the mouth and eyes, but really, mostly the same, still getting me called Miss at forty-two, my bag still full of dog-eared, scrawled-up books, several lipsticks, although in Hollywood starlet reds rather than the burgundies of the nineties, the front page of the Times still wadded in between my wallet and a day book, my dresses still black, my shoes still black, my tights still black, my head still given hassles by free champagne. The bodegas of the East Village nicer, but still cold at six in the morning and smelling of years of dust and Mistolin pressed into linoleum the color of pigeon breasts. But the ability to hold on to the pleasures of the night before lessening, and the value of holding on to those pleasures lessening, the desire for those pleasures the same, even greater, but daughters of mothers who never knew more than one man may order a coffee as they have done many mornings before and feel that their young self and their old self, being so unchanged, cancel each other out and make a ghost. Make her something as flickering and liminal as the cats who watched her fumble for her wallet to pay for her coffee.
That morning put an end to those nights. In May the house sold. For $1.6 million, the Internet told me when I finally mustered the courage to look. The resentment I felt against the two couples who bought the house, and for their matching brand-new Jeep Cherokees, one gleaming in slate gray, one gleaming in midnight blue, and for their architects, who repeatedly stood in my doorway with matching clipboards and matching linen dresses the color of cloud, and their politeness that smelled a little officious, asking if they could measure the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom—I had the usual fantasies of defacing the walls with lipstick and defecating in unexpected places, of dumping chicken carcasses and eggshells all over the hardwood floors.
I don’t understand why they wouldn’t want to keep a tenant as lovely as you, said my landlady.
Oh I do, I wanted to say, but didn’t. When my landlady and her husband bought the house in 1984, they filled the three floors with painters, activists, professors, and psychoanalysts who on the weekends sat around her dining room table for potlucks. After she and her husband had children, they began renting the top floor to artists, and artists only—my landlady’s rule. Before me there had been actors, poets, and pianists—one of whom left her piano on the windowed porch and occasionally still came by to play it. I thought of all this and then of the couples who came to the open houses, all of them wearing crisp polo shirts and thin-lipped smiles. People like that wanted privacy—I did!—and could afford to not have to collect rent from the crazy girl-slash-lady moldering away upstairs.
The broker came to my door the day after the house sold to give me two bouquets, one made of peonies and one made of goldenrod, to thank me for keeping the place so clean and bright, so bright, said the broker, that everyone who came through the house always remarked on how cute, her word, the rooms looked, and then at the end of our conversation said that the only way to have any real security in this world is to buy a place.
Come upstate! said Rose. When are you going to come upstate? As if I had never begged for her help and she had never hung up on me.
Memorial Day weekend. Everyone at the house that weekend attractive and coupled, everyone gracious and good-humored. Their children, even when shrieking and crying, delightful. Everything in the house an expression of discriminating taste and the limitless budget required to express it across two floors and ten rooms. I’d brought a huge bouquet of blue hydrangeas for Rose only to find that they were all over the place—in the kitchen, in the bathrooms, on both sides of the couch, blooming purple, blue, and white—but Rose was still delighted.
As you can see, she said, putting the ones I’d brought into a glass pitcher, once is definitely not enough.
Before dinner that night I had a conversation on the porch with a twelve-year-old boy about World War II and whether there could ever again be armed conflict that inspired idealism and not rank cynicism. Rank cynicism: his words. Owen. Bangs, as lanky as his limbs, that he flipped into his face while talking, with a frequency increasing proportionate to his enthusiasm, which reached a peak as he described, in great detail, Churchill’s bunker at the Imperial War Museum in London. When his mother came to shepherd him to dinner, she apologized, as if her big hairy dog had been too friendly. I told her I hadn’t minded in the least, which was true.
I’m convinced he’d talk like that even if he had no audience, she said.
Boys tend to do that, I said.
She rolled her eyes in commiseration and said, Do you have any?
No, I’ve just fucked a lot of them.
Luckily she laughed. She thought I was being funny but I knew I was being—hostile? Passive aggressive? Defensive? Inappropriate? At dinner I made sure to drink enough to slow my tongue’s reflexes. Enough turned into too much and on the porch after dinner, as the women surrounding me laughed harder and harder and I grew quieter and quieter, I noticed Rose looking over at me from time to time as she refilled her own glass and the glasses of others.
That night I heard: About a guy who’d bankrolled the graduate degree of his wife—East Asian studies—to the tune of $80,000 but at the end of it she told him what she’d learned after those two years was that she wanted to teach yoga. A woman who’d become obsessed with having a child even though when she’d married she’d assured her husband it was the last thing on her mind, and borrowed money from her parents and his parents to fund several rounds of IVF, and then, seven years after her son was born, told her husband she didn’t know she could hate a thing the way she hated her child, and in the middle of the night one night got on a plane to Alaska, where her sister lived, and never came home again. The woman who threw a bunch of her own money at IVF and then on every Mother’s Day after the divorce dumped her daughter with her husband to go day drink with a bunch of other mothers who’d dumped their kids with their husbands. Another woman—no, three other women—who started cheating on their husbands once the husbands suggested, and suggested gently, hesitantly, even anxiously, according to the hearsay transmitted on that porch, that maybe they could go back to work now that the kids were a little older because it would be good to have the additional money. The women, who had all gotten used to doing fuck all, according to this hearsay, and liking it, took offense and balked and the cheating turned into divorces that made one guy attempt suicide in a hotel in Midtown after paying for sex.
After a while I didn’t feel like sitting there listening to stories about women without jobs who blew through their husbands’ money and women who insisted on children and then abandoned them. And even though I knew the women telling these stories were not the enemy—that they had been reporting on the enemy, and even knew that I had been the enemy myself, when I took not the money of a man for granted but his love, or robbed a woman of her husband not for his money but his lust—I felt more alienated from the world and everything in it than when I was sixteen and had the Smiths on an IV drip. But I’d never really been that alienated back then—you can’t be when you’re absolutely sure the people you love hate what you hate and want what you want.
I stood up to leave the porch, half out of protest, half out of boredom, thinking I couldn’t just keep walking out of places whenever they bored me or bothered me and was going to have to figure out what to do about that, but not tonight, when the woman to my left, who must have assumed I was headed toward the kitchen or the bathroom, asked if I could bring a pitcher of water and glasses back out with me.
Sure, I said, perhaps too brightly.
If it’s not a problem, said the woman to my left.
Don’t worry. Charlotte never does anything she doesn’t want to do, said Rose, as she poured wine into someone’s glass. It was the kind of thing a mother, amused and not quite having reached annoyance, might say out of long intimacy—out of a desire to assert that long intimacy. Or she’d had it with me and couldn’t be bothered to tell me to my face. The way she’d hurt me, just now, and I would probably not be bothered to tell her to her face.
That’s right, I said, as I stepped over sandals. Playing along seemed the best defense.
Could she teach me that trick? another woman said as the door shut behind me and the porch filled with laughter.
I want to go home, I thought, while the faucet ran and the night stood still outside the kitchen window, but the thought made no sense because I did not mean I wanted to see my parents or to sleep that night in my apartment. The next morning I got up early and left without saying goodbye.
Was it Rose who had disappointed me, or New York?
Back in the city she asked if we could meet for a drink, and I wondered if she was finally calling me into the principal’s office, and cursed myself for not being the one to air my grievances first. When I showed up at the bar and saw Rose, wearing leggings, a massive gray sweatshirt, and the pink bejeweled flip-flops she’d accidentally walked out of a nail salon with but had never worn out of the house, Rose, who put on lipstick to get milk, her face drained from what I knew must have been frequent crying, an already empty wine glass sitting next to the full one waiting for me, it became clear that I was not the one in trouble. But I felt nothing as I took an inventory of the signs of her distress, and that worried me more than her being in distress did. I did not know what kind of help I could give her—or wanted to give her. She had not been much help to me lately.
The trouble had a name—one I thought I recognized. I’d heard its voice on NPR. Younger than us, seven years younger, and the brother of one of the mothers she knew. Born and raised in East L.A. and graduated from Harvard. Nominated for some Pulitzers, plus he went down on her like a deep-sea diver who—but I stopped her. Okay, I said. I get it. She pulled out her phone and showed me a picture of a man standing in front of a mosque while a crowd moved around him in hazy sun. He was beautiful—the way all foreign correspondents are beautiful, given that constant exposure to death keeps the dullness out of a person’s eyes. His skin tanned, but lightly, hair thick and black, as black as Peter’s had been, but not a trace of gray, not a trace of fat on his body, not one extraneous object weighing down his person, not a watch or sunglasses or a wedding ring sitting on his left hand like a big fat blinking frog that would not budge. Just jeans and a T-shirt and an expression on his face that said Hello! but also Don’t fuck with me! and I could see wanting to hang around watching that expression change from receptivity to ferocity and back again, hang around wanting to see if my hand could ever be the one to flip that switch, and how often. He’d told her he didn’t care that she was married, she said as I looked at the photo and stared at the tilework blazing up and down the mosque. He’d told her he’d wait forever, she said, or take as much of her as it was possible for her to give.
Forever? I said, struggling not to give in to the jealousy those clichés had kicked up in me.
She took the phone out of my hand and kept talking. He’d just met someone who wanted to give him everything, and although this person was free, she wasn’t Rose, and now he did mind that Rose was married, because he wanted Rose, not this other woman, and he was making demands, he was making promises he couldn’t keep, but Rose wanted him to keep making them, and her jealousy of this other woman was so intense it was making her sick, she couldn’t see straight, it was like a fucking migraine, and she couldn’t sleep, and the girls were constantly crying because she was constantly crying, and Peter had checked into a hotel because he was fed up with watching her grieve someone in front of him, and though he didn’t say that’s why he was clearing out, she knew he knew what was going on.
I hope he leaves you, I said.
It was clear by the look on her face that she had not expected me to say a thing like that. I didn’t think I’d ever say a thing like that to her, and couldn’t believe I’d said it. The words that had flown out of my mouth—so quickly, and from some wound that didn’t think it needed to seek my consent before making itself known—were stinging me as much as they seemed to be stinging her. She stared at me. When she spoke, she said:
You always did think you were better than me.
Yes, I said. I probably did.
She took her wallet out of her bag, opened it, set two twenties down on the table, and left, no hurry, no hurt, her composure revealing my insult for the tantrum it was.