In 1981, Sam and I rented a townhouse at the west end of Eugene, away from campus. Away from the memory of the rape and all that came after: the victims’ panels organized by the police to help survivors recall details that might help them catch our rapist, away from the place of his crime and of his eventual capture near our apartment a year after the rape.
Away from this: Victim.
Toward this: Grown-up. Wife. Career woman.
Our new home had two stories and a back patio with a small patch of dirt. I made my first garden: marigolds in clay pots arranged on wooden shelves on our patio. I put the Pfaltzgraff dishes and mixing bowls in the cupboard, Aunt Lena’s cut glass on display on a shelf.
After Granddad died, Mom and Dad had offered some of my grandparents’ belongings to us kids. I chose Nana’s china with its delicate rouge-colored flowers. Place settings for twelve. I also got their bedroom set. Sam and I carefully arranged the bed with its mahogany headboard and footboard, dressers with brass pulls. It made our bedroom look like the bedroom of two people serious about a long life together.
I was a wife. Each week I made a menu of dinners and a grocery list, and Sam and I went together for groceries. I clipped coupons, cooked the dinners, cleaned the house, did the laundry.
I was a career woman. I worked full-time with clients in an alcohol-treatment program, kept to-do lists and detailed records, and did what I said I would do. My boss liked me. Coworkers liked me. My boss promoted me to supervisor.
I was a future mother. When Aunt Lena died six months after my wedding, she had no children to sort through her precious things. Dad, her favored nephew, was left in charge, and we kids got to choose. I chose the wooden rocking chair, chose it even though Leanne was the one with a baby. I put it in the living room, but I rarely sat in it. It creaked when it rocked, and wasn’t so comfortable.
Leanne’s first pregnancy had happened during the year after the rape. I’d felt a distance from her joy in the same way I’d felt a distance from my own wedding plans, from Nana’s absence in our lives, from Aunt Lena’s illness, from the happenings in the world.
Even after Leanne’s baby girl was born, I didn’t go rushing home. When I did meet my new niece, Annilee, I held her and did the usual cooing that people do over a baby. She was a pretty mix of her dad’s dark hair and the shape of his eyes that turned to my sister’s eyes when she opened them. All that blue. She was a fine baby, but I didn’t mind when Mom or my sister-in-law or someone else nudged in to hold her.
One weekend when Annilee was about ten months old, I went back to Condon for a visit. I spent all Saturday afternoon at Leanne’s house. Sam hadn’t come with me, and Leanne’s husband worked all day, so Leanne and I were alone with Annilee. Already Leanne seemed comfortable being a mom, like she’d been doing it for years. I sat at the kitchen table and Annilee crawled to her and pulled at Leanne’s jeans. Leanne bent down to pick Annilee up. Leanne talked to her in a voice I’d never heard her use on anyone else. A voice that sounded like love-no-matter-what, completely there for her girl.
Leanne asked me to watch Annilee while she prepared lunch. Annilee crawled around on hands and knees and pulled herself up, and took a few hanging-on-to-things steps. She stopped at every little thing. She made her way around the edges of the room, pausing here at the spindle-back chair. She touched an envelope with a plastic window that crinkled when she pressed it. She looked at her hand and looked at me, then mashed her fingers a bunch of times on that envelope.
She dropped down and got on her hands and knees and crawled again. Stopped at a corner and sat back on the paddy diaper of her butt, legs crossed. Leaned way forward with one finger out. Reaching. She chased a floaty dust mote with her finger. Caught it. She raised her hand and looked at the dark speck on the tip of her finger. She laughed. She looked at me. Holding that tip of finger up to me.
Here! A dust mote!
For me. From this girl.
My chest expanded with love, as though my heart had grown three sizes and no longer fit. It sent out roots that took hold and ran the length of my body. I wanted to be with her all the time. And if I couldn’t do that, I wanted Sam and me to start a child of our own so I could feel this feeling all the time.
Sometimes I cried and asked Sam to hold me. He held me. He asked what was wrong.
I was at a distance, out of my body, watching the crying me, held in Sam’s lap. “I don’t know.”
The feeling had no pure identity. It was empty. It was full. It was sadness. It was hope.
I didn’t think it was from the rape. I didn’t want it to be. That would be giving the rapist a power I didn’t want him to have. And it seemed too easy, too ready a hook to hang my tangled feelings on.
Mostly it felt of time passing, and of a longing for something more.
Sometimes when the tears came, Sam pressed me for the reason. I searched. Found words that seemed maybe true. “I’m in this generation. Raised to think we should have it all. Work, marriage, family. It feels like pressure, that I should want it all.”
It was 1981. Anything was possible.
I didn’t want it all. The love I had felt that day when I watched Annilee was the strongest thing I’d felt for almost two years. And now Leanne was pregnant with her second daughter. She stayed at home and was a mom. I wanted this too.
I felt embarrassed. After all that work going to college. It was important to Mom; she and Dad were proud of me. I couldn’t waste it. I was the career woman.
What I said was, “I want to have a baby.”
Sam wanted a baby too. I’d seen him with Tawna and JD and Annilee. I’d seen him with his sister’s girls. He’d be a good father.
“But how will we afford it?” I said. I worked full-time, Sam worked part-time and was going to graduate school. I made the most money, and my job paid for our health insurance. “I’ll have to be home to take care of the baby.”
Sam said he’d keep working part-time. He would take care of the baby.
No.
But I didn’t say this out loud. Didn’t say, That’s not how it’s supposed to work. I want to be the mother with her child. I want to stay at home. The selfishness of it. The old-fashionedness of it.
Sam said we’d figure it out, somehow it would work out.
I didn’t know how. I could only hope that when I got pregnant, when the baby came, something would change.
I put the circle of birth control pills away. Quit smoking and hardly ever drank. To have a baby meant making a healthy body for it. I planned for when.
We began to make love more often, me reaching for Sam. But the rapist had left himself with me. In small ways I stepped outside myself when we made love, so far that I didn’t even know it, until years later when another man, another husband, would help me find my way back.
For now, with Sam, each time we made love, the possibility of something new hovered nearby.