quilt
WHEN I TURNED seventeen, we were in love. Richard had nine months before he left town to attend McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, to study physical education. Until then, we would spend every weekend together. In the winter we went to house parties where I drank too many beers and got dizzy, and he drove me home, then slept on our pullout couch in the den. When the weather turned warmer, we went camping, and skinny-dipped in the icy bay, and walked the Bruce Trail, and lay out under the stars while he named the constellations.
I introduced Richard to my father, who thought he was a misdirected bohemian without a bright future. My mother asked me to tell my new boyfriend to stay out of the refrigerator (“He’s eating us out of house and home!”), and so I made Richard meaty sandwiches that he scarfed, unobserved. His thriving was essential to me, instinctual, necessary. I hadn’t known love before, but this would become my definition of it: I cared about his well-being as much as I cared about my own.
Our first summer together, my mother found my birth-control pills in my purse, and she confronted me, shocked at my audacity. We were Catholic, and she demanded abstinence (at least of us three daughters; the son, not so much). I had become a disappointment and Richard was the catalyst for my fall. After berating the doctor who had prescribed the medication, my mother asked my father to talk to me.
“You’re not aware of the consequences of your choices. You don’t know what life has in store for you!” my father said, over a steak dinner out. (We were always treated to the best restaurant meal when we needed a talking-to.)
“No one knows those things, Dad,” I said.
“You can’t keep chasing after him. When Richard goes away to college, he’s going to move on to other relationships.” My father sipped his Canadian whiskey on the rocks.
“We’re having sex. That’s not going to go away. But no man is going to get in the way of my goals,” I said, without sarcasm, as I slashed my filet mignon.
My father knew that I was serious about my studies, and for the time being, his fears were quieted. All summer my parents looked the other way, hoping that when Richard and I lived a hundred miles apart, things might settle down. Instead, that September, I told them I’d be visiting my boyfriend at college.
“If you leave to spend the weekend with him, you can’t come back to this family,” my father said.
“That’s your call,” I said.
That first weekend visiting Richard in his college apartment he shared with two roommates, I made him lasagna. He chilled dessert in the freezer while we watched Star Trek. I sprawled on a pillow next to him, reading Blake. We smoked hash. Hours later, in a desperate search for satiation, in a tear through his pathetic pantry, in a stoner’s quest for munchies, we discovered the forgotten confection. We sat on the linoleum floor and we fed each other ripe strawberries and we licked whipped cream from our fingers.
That Sunday afternoon my father, emitting a stony silence, allowed my return. I visited Richard every month. The distance didn’t shake us.
Since I was twelve, I’d kept my three siblings fed many days while my mother slept, her headaches—and the codeine she was prescribed for the pain—removing her from the world. After school, I’d come home and start dinner, usually something easy like a casserole or sloppy joes, while Mother woke from an afternoon nap, folded laundry, and chirped anecdotes at me over the antics of Graham Kerr on The Galloping Gourmet. We’d eat dinner at six when my father arrived; then I’d often study at the kitchen table until one or two in the morning.
My mother was not ambitious, stalwart, or confident in raising children. But she was funny and charming. Where she was social, I was studious. This made me outwardly responsible and inwardly rebellious.
In January of 1978, I turned eighteen and graduated from high school six months early. I waitressed at two restaurants, my bank account slowly growing. I felt as free as I’d ever imagined, because I knew I would make it out of the constriction of my family life and because I was so well loved by Richard. Inside my body I could locate a sense of fearlessness and power, an awareness beyond the punishments and rewards of my childhood.
That July, I drove to the poppy fields atop Blue Mountain and lay down in the flowers’ garnet shimmer. For a moment, the story of my life did not exist. There was no territory, no past, no mother, no father to possess. I was not relative to anyone. I did not belong nor did I desire belonging. There was only the wind lifting petals. The warbler’s call. In the distance, the murmur of a spring. When I was a teenage woman, my body knew what it loved.
After Richard returned from his first year at McMaster, we celebrated the freedom of our summer together through music. We stayed up all night with a hundred thousand fans at Canada Jam to scream along with Kansas and Triumph and one of Richard’s childhood favorites, the Commodores. We drove to Toronto to load up on vinyl at Sam the Record Man, to dance to the steel drums at the Caribbean Carnival, to see Fleetwood Mac and Cheap Trick and Rush. We danced at clubs in the city and hotel lounges in town. He knew the words to every album Motown put out and he sang them for me as we wound my used Plymouth Valiant up Blue Mountain’s back roads. We had three months until we left for different universities, and we spent much of that time playing, just playing.
Earlier that spring, my father announced he was moving the family back to Kentucky for a job. He needed a challenge, he said, and he thought it would be helpful to return to where we had roots, and family. I’d been accepted to Wilfrid Laurier, which was in Waterloo, two hours by bus from Richard’s school, and I told my parents that I would not change my plans. My family and home disappeared, so that autumn, I moved myself into the dorm room a week before school started. It was the first time I’d been alone, without anyone to care for. In my aloneness, I was relieved and confused. That bafflement only made me drink more alcohol, something that went perfectly with freshman year. The daughter of a distiller, I’d become an adept bartender at my father’s parties and seen how booze made me braver, less inhibited. Being alone, without anyone to rein me in, only intensified my experimentation.
The weekend after orientation, I took a Greyhound bus to see Richard. He put Todd Rundgren on the turntable and told me that he didn’t want to be together anymore. He wanted to date other women. He needed to see what school would be like without a long-distance girlfriend. He didn’t want to take the place of my absent family.
I fought against the unknown. I went on a campaign to convince him to see our relationship as necessary for survival, as I did. I visited him the next two weekends. I made a case for giving each other more space. I said that I’d call only once a week. I promised we could take a break, if only he would keep us together. To be without his physical presence seemed unbearable. Finally he told me to stay away, that he couldn’t see me.
“Promise me that if you get serious about anyone, you’ll call,” I said.
“Promise,” he replied. “You too.”
When I gave him up, I dated a dozen men. I slept around. I met a lovely man who took me on trips and cooked for me and was exactly the opposite of Richard—small, nurturing, quiet—although they had the same name. I dated my psychology professor, who was newly divorced and aching for attention. I didn’t have the sense to realize that most of those relationships were clichés. I was sad, and drowning my sadness in beer and speed, a combination that gave me limitless energy and made me feel invulnerable. I lived on Labatt’s Blue and a salad a day, and my weight dropped below one hundred pounds, seriously skinny. But I could still go to class in the morning, read Virginia Woolf all afternoon, and, in the evenings, party. Like a patient with walking pneumonia, I looked better than my symptoms suggested. I was heartsick and masquerading as a college feminist, determined to take control over my life but finding only exhaustion.
Five months later, Richard called.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I’m seeing someone,” I said.
Silence.
“Remember we said we’d be honest?” I said, wanting to put some distance between us now.
“You could have told me!” he yelled.
“I’m telling you now!” I screamed, terrified I’d feel attached to him again. Emotions were so contained, so manageable with the other men. It was easier not to complicate things with love, I thought.
A week later, a letter arrived. Richard was angry with himself for allowing me to go. He hadn’t seen any other women. He wanted another chance. When I opened the letter, I was in the cafeteria eating sausages made by the women of the mostly German town, who each day plied us with their wunderbar Oktoberfest menu. I smashed the letter into my plate. Mustard splattered onto his tiny handwriting, his intelligent sentences. When I tossed my meal into the trash, the aproned woman who’d been trying to fatten me up looked concerned.
Still, I relented. Richard and I made plans to see each other before I left to visit my family for spring break. I’d be getting a ride with a whiskey truck driver my father knew, making an eighteen-hour haul from the distillery in Ontario to the bottling house in Kentucky. Richard and I agreed to meet at his home on Blue Mountain. The psychology professor drove me to Richard’s house and suggested we make plans to finish reading Gödel, Escher, Bach over scotch on the rocks, which he’d been teaching me to drink. I didn’t know what the hell I wanted anymore, but I did know that I wasn’t enjoying playing roles for the benefit of men, learning to amuse, faking caring. In my first year of college, what was to have been my greatest experience of freedom had turned into the kind of vacancy I saw in my mother’s tired face. I was absent. No philosophy could pierce my vacuous melancholy. I could only remember a kind of emptiness that came with loss and disappointment. I said good-bye to the professor in the ski lodge parking lot down the street and walked to the little brown cottage I’d visited so many times.
Richard answered the door and invited me in. His hair was long, past his shoulders, and his biceps bulged from the time he’d obviously put in at the gym. His muscled body handily nullified the memory of the horrible high school mixtape he’d made for me that included both Edgar Winter’s “Free Ride” and Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” He sat me on the couch and told his story.
“This breakup was the stupidest idea I ever had. I was afraid of not taking the chance to see other people.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“I don’t want anyone else.”
“You didn’t even sleep with the phys ed chicks?”
He smiled at my famous disregard for the monotonously unimaginative female gym rats who were his classmates. “I couldn’t even ask anyone on a date,” he said.
“What have you been doing?”
“Listening to music.”
“Surely someone tried to snog you.”
“They delivered muffins to my house.”
“I bet they did.”
“Can we start again?” he asked.
“I don’t know . . .” Suddenly I wanted to run away from everything he represented: intensity, desire, a kind of devotion my recent independence had freed me from.
His hands reached for me. “Sonya, I love you.”
We held each other until I could breathe again, and then I pushed him away.
“I need to go,” I said.
His head went into my lap, and he sobbed, wracks and gasps that ran through his giant body. My hands unclenched, and I touched his beautiful hair. He raised his eyes and words seemed to unlock from his chest.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d made a terrible mistake and said this thing out of a need to keep me close. Was that a suggestion that we marry? Or a desperate attempt to make his pain go away? And how would I, in my aching confusion, know what the difference was, anyway?
“Oh, God,” I said. I made a prayer that I might walk away from there, and at the same time, something inside me was watching as I settled into his love. “I’ll call you at the end of break,” I said. I got out of there, before he could take me to bed.
Two days and seven hundred miles later my father asked me why the hangdog face.
“He proposed.”
“Who?” my mother asked from the laundry room.
“The ne’er-do-well,” I said.
“What did you tell him?” my father asked.
“I need time to think.”
“Well, don’t leave him hanging out there.”
I surveyed my father for signs of derision but he’d clearly started to like the bohemian mountain boy, at least in his absence. Dad had grown to admire Richard’s persistence and his stellar grades. They’d shared conversations about organic chemistry, basketball, and growing up poor. Before we’d broken up, my father had hired Richard to work for him, loaned him his luxe car, and tested him on American history. They were bonded in a way that I couldn’t be with my father, for Richard shared none of my bitterness.
The phone rang, and my father answered and talked for a moment before handing it to me.
“Your dad says I can catch a truck and be there by tomorrow,” Richard said.
“Don’t you have class?” I asked. His spring break had already come and gone. And he’d never skipped a day in his life, a fact I found freakish.
“I want to be with you,” he said.
Three years later, we were married at the Toronto Ski Club near his home. Our honeymoon was in a cottage in the Muskokas, loaned to us by a family friend. We took a boat to a remote island, lay naked on the sand, told each other our wildest dreams. Mine: to write, and start a camp where children could live free. His: to live with me forever. And play a little tennis in the summer.
We moved back to Waterloo, where I finished my degree in literature and Richard began a graduate degree in exercise physiology.
Five months later, near their home on the mountain, his mother was run over by a drunk driver while helping someone on the road. His family came to tell him the news, and because I was unreachable in another city, they waited for me to come home from a journalism conference in a snowstorm. The Toronto Star ran a headline on page two about his mother’s death: GOOD SAMARITAN DIES, it said. I held the paper folded in my lap in the dim car, unable to read it because of the perilous road conditions. I wouldn’t learn of his mother’s death until I got to our apartment door.
We grieved. In him, this looked like working long hours at school and sleeping a lot. I worked as the news editor for the university paper and went out drinking at the pubs after press time. Richard and I never argued until after we married, but that first year of marriage was full of conflict. During a weekend retreat called Engaged Encounter, a marriage preparation program courtesy of the Catholic Church, we discovered that we agreed on everything except for how we might raise children (him, laissez-faire; me, with vigor). After his mother’s death, he was distant in his sadness, and I didn’t know how to help him. And so I stayed out late, partying. My absence drove him further into his private thoughts.
Two weeks after his mother died, I discovered I was pregnant with our first child. I’d skipped a period, and went into the university health clinic to be examined. The test was positive. The doctor looked at my wedding ring and counseled me on all my options.
“You can get substantial grants for married students, if you want to stay in school,” she said. “This office has fine prenatal care. But if you need to terminate the pregnancy, I can make some recommendations.”
“I’m good,” I said, jumping off the table. I wanted to get outside, to someplace I could be alone with this information.
“There are counselors here, any time you want to talk,” the doctor said.
“Thanks,” I said, grabbing my coat and getting out of there.
Richard and I had made a risky decision. After several years on the pill, we had decided to alter our birth-control method. We’d discussed birth planning with our families, and both our mothers warned us that early marriage wasn’t the best timing to make a change. I wasn’t sure which night of pleasure had created this embryo. I walked the quad of the university—students rushing to class, young men throwing snowballs—and I pulled my winter coat close in the February chill and shivered past the brick buildings.
We had spent those weeks after his mother died turning to each other in the night, our limbs aching to prove our existence. We were in sex-grief, that complicated twining of longing, acceptance, relief. Richard found solace in lovemaking. One of those nights, we hadn’t paid attention to prevention. Now, we were with the sway of a force that could change the direction of our lives. As if that hadn’t happened enough lately, I thought. I was worried that I’d fucked things up, a thought I had nearly constantly even when there wasn’t a baby involved. My heart beat loud. I made myself breathe in the winter air, cool clean breezes filling my body. Tears froze on my face. If nothing else, I thought, I could make a righteous dinner.
I walked the slush-filled roads to the cheapest market in town and I found the ingredients, confusion winding me up and down the same aisles a dozen times. For two miles, I carried the plastic bags through the darkening city, hoping that I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew on the street. I also carried home a card I’d bought for Richard, my music aficionado, a valentine with a picture of a stereo receiver on the front. Inside our apartment, I began to make boeuf bourguignon, a recipe of Julia Child’s I’d wanted to try since we married. We didn’t have much money for beef; if I made this dish we’d have to eat peanut butter sandwiches for several meals, but suddenly I wanted the elegance that I’d always imagined married life might afford, the kind of grace and calm my own chaotic family never seemed to achieve. The stew simmered. I put the Clash on the turntable, the apocalyptic, angry, post-punk “London Calling,” with its warning of the coming ice age, starvation, and war.
The song, inspired by the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island, wasn’t exactly inspiration for bringing another life to the planet, but it wasn’t a thoughtful consideration that I wanted. I danced the kind of dancing one does in the house alone to analog recordings roaring full bore. I screamed. I tossed my hair. I thrust my pelvis and struck a pose. At the end of the album, I stretched out across the floor and put my hands on my belly. I listened. There was nothing in me that could take away this life. I hadn’t known I was so resolute, but here was certainty. Whether I could mother well was another question. I’d been mothering my siblings, cooking, and cleaning since I was twelve, but I hadn’t had many models for the kind of mother I wished to be. I did have a fierce imagination.
I looked around our two-room apartment. Richard and I shared a mattress, two lamps, cooking supplies, dishes, an old couch, and a kitchen table. We were intelligent and tenacious with a tendency toward adventure. We’d have to give up traveling in the ways we’d imagined when we lay on the beach on our honeymoon. I was twenty-one and he was twenty-three. We’d have loads of time for travel when this kid left home. I laid a blanket and pillows on the living room floor and lit candles everywhere. I wrote inside his valentine’s card with the picture of a stereo on the front: “We’re not going to be able to afford one of these for a while.”
Richard came home from a long day at the research lab. He saw the candles, smelled dinner, and melted into me. We laughed through the meal, making plans for where we’d go on spring break, a road trip to visit friends. After dessert, he opened the card and looked at the sentences, and then at my face.
“Pregnant,” I said.
“Do you want to have the baby?” he asked.
“I want to know what you want,” I answered.
I nearly always deferred to his greater confidence. He tried to read my desires in my eyes. This was precisely how we were dishonest with each other.
“This would be a change,” he said.
We sat in silence. I cleared the dishes. He came to the kitchen, put his arms around me.
“Come back,” he said.
We lay across the pillows, and he curled his long body around my back, cupped his hand across my breast.
“I can’t tell you whether to have this baby or not, sweetheart. You’d be the one to do the greater share of parenting.”
“At least for the first bit,” I said.
“But whatever you want, we can figure it out.” He kissed my neck, turned my face to his.
“I’m sorry it happened so close to your mum going,” I said.
“You’d be a good mother,” he said.
“We’d be great parents together,” I answered. “We don’t have to know right now. Let’s see how this feels.”
My grandmother Frances sent a quilt she’d stitched for our wedding, and I placed it over our simple mattress. Its ivory butterflies, made from scraps of old clothing, somehow lent ancestral ballast to a time when I walked around in a trance.
A few weeks after that night, Richard’s instructors purposefully killed a dog during an experiment in the kinesiology laboratory. He told me how it happened, how the dog’s death hurt him, how he knew he could not be responsible for taking the lives of research animals. We sat with our books open at our tiny kitchen table and cried, knowing that we would not ever be the same. He would not finish his final year of graduate school, he would not become a researcher or a teacher, we would return the scholarship money, I would graduate from university four months pregnant—we would not be young and careless again.
That night, we held hands as we lay on the bed in the college apartment, blue moon mottling the wedding quilt, quiet. In the days that followed we’d sometimes wander across to the corner store for potato chips and bread and cans of spaghetti, piling food and books and blue-ruled paper on the bed, surrounding our prone bodies. We didn’t know where we would live or how we would support a child. But we did know that we were rootless, and gutsy, and that we didn’t need wealth or possessions to be a family. This seemed to us a beginning.