It’s almost Halloween. Last night I spent three entire hours making popcorn balls and wrapping them in clear plastic and tying the plastic with orange paper bows. Saturday we are all invited to a Halloween party, and I promised I’d help decorate and bring the popcorn balls. Popcorn balls, what a job! Perhaps especially difficult here in this inefficient apartment, where I have so few pots and pans and utensils and no measuring cups or candy thermometer. It seemed to take hours for the syrup to reach the hard-ball stage and I thought: What on earth am I doing here stirring over a hot stove late at night like a cranky witch? Adam and Lucy are only four and two; they don’t know that popcorn balls are a customary Halloween treat. But after all, I know, and I like tradition, ritual, ritual food, and it eases the ache of homesickness a bit to celebrate as if we were at home. They don’t have Halloween here in Finland, but a Finnish woman who lived in the States for a few years enjoyed the custom so much that she has decided to hold Halloween in her own home, every year, for friends and their children. So I spent three hours last night making popcorn balls, and actually I enjoyed it. When I was rolling the balls together, hands coated with butter, picking up the hot candied corn, which I had spread out in the three metal baking pans, I even smiled to myself and dreamed a bit. In just a few years, I thought, Adam and Lucy will be able to help me. Last night they were tucked away safely in their beds, out of the way of the possible harm of bubbling hot syrup. But in a few years—a picture came into my mind. An October evening back home. Crisp air and golden leaves. Adam and Lucy and I in the kitchen, working and laughing together, cheating and eating the sweetened popcorn as we worked. Adam would be interested in the candy thermometer, he already likes things like that, and back home I have a candy thermometer. Lucy would be talking—even now she talks incessantly—about school, and the bats and pumpkins and witches her class would make out of orange and black construction paper. We all three would have butter on our hands, we all three would roll up the crackly balls. Perhaps we would be making them for our own party. Somewhere—in the next room, probably, in front of a fire of applewood—a big dog would be sleeping. After making the popcorn balls we would clean up the kitchen—the children would cheerfully help; it was after all my fantasy—and then go in to sit by the fire. The children would lie next to the dog, stroking his black silky coat (he would be a Newfoundland), and I would tell them a Halloween story, perhaps “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and we would all drink apple cider.
How funny that I didn’t fantasize a man around somewhere, in an easy chair by the fire, reading the newspaper, or even in the kitchen, joking with us and helping.
Perhaps I didn’t want to spoil my lovely dream by having to decide just which man would be in the chair. Charlie? I don’t know. Stephen? I don’t know. I do know I certainly didn’t imagine Stephen’s children, Carrie and Joe, in the picture.
I met the woman who is giving the Halloween party at a Finnish-American Women’s Club meeting which I went to out of desperate need to meet someone who speaks English and has small children. Rija is interesting to me for several reasons, mostly because she is so very nice, but partly because she is also a stepmother. And much more a stepmother than I ever was.
Rija married an American just one year ago. He was a handsome man, in Helsinki on some sort of business, and they fell in love and were married in Finland just four weeks after their first meeting. She is Finnish and loves Finland, but agreed to live with him in the States. He took her home with him to Chicago, and for a while they lived happily. One Sunday afternoon the doorbell of their apartment rang, and when Rija opened it, she saw two little boys standing in the hallway, crying. She called to her husband, who came to the door and said in amazement that the two boys were his sons by a former marriage. He couldn’t imagine what they were doing there, but when he saw the little suitcases full of clothes he began to guess. The children had been abandoned by their mother, and although Rija’s husband had very good connections with the government and other police agencies, no one could find out where the mother had gone. They had of course taken the boys in, and Rija, after the first shock, had gladly played mother to them. They were attractive little boys, only five and three years old. She decided that she would have a baby herself, now that she had so suddenly accumulated a little family. But before she could get pregnant, something else happened.
Her husband worked for the United States narcotics agency; she had known that when she married him. One night they were all coming home from a drive-in movie. The children were asleep in the backseat of the car. Rija was curled up in the front seat, her head on her husband’s lap. They had been married almost seven months. It was dark. Her husband stopped the car, got out to open the garage door of the apartment building. A huge figure emerged from the dark. Rija sat up just in time to see the figure raise a pipe above her husband’s head. She screamed, “Michael!” and her husband turned so that the pipe, coming down, broke his shoulder instead of his skull. Rija, insane with fear and anger, grabbed the loaded pistol which she knew her husband kept in the glove compartment of the car and jumped from the car and ran to the man. She pointed the gun at the man with the pipe and told him she would kill him if he tried to run. Apparently she sounded serious enough with her accented English; the man did not run. Her husband lay moaning at her feet and her husband’s children sat crying in the car and the man with the pipe stood staring at her while Rija stood on a Chicago sidewalk screaming, “Help! Police! Help! Murder!” Finally other apartment lights came on, finally a police car came. She told the police the story; the police checked her husband’s identification papers. They took the man with the pipe away. Later she had to go to the police station to fill out papers. She agreed to be a witness at a trial.
Three days later the police informed her that there had been some problem, some accident, the man with the pipe had escaped from jail. She had thought, Escaped from jail? How? She asked her husband, who was in the hospital with his broken shoulder, and he said that he was sorry to get her involved, but in the international narcotics world all things were possible. The next day she took her husband’s children with her to get groceries. She came back in time to see part of her apartment on fire. Firemen arrived quickly and put the blaze out, but much damage was done. The next day she went down to the locked garage to get the car, and the car had been destroyed, the fender and hood and trunk and doors hammered in, the windows and windshield completely broken, pieces of jagged glass sticking up. She had called a taxi and taken the children to the hospital to ask her husband what to do, and he was gone. Her husband, Michael, had disappeared. The police couldn’t find him. No one could find him.
Ten days after her husband disappeared, Rija and her husband’s two sons were in Helsinki. Fortunately her husband had some money in the bank and her signature was on the account card. The police had been instrumental in helping her get passports for the two boys. Now she lives in a rented apartment with the boys, and she thinks she has enough money to live on for a year. After that she doesn’t know. Supposedly people are looking throughout the States for her husband and his first wife. On her worst days, when the boys are sick and whiny, she suspects that Michael and his first wife are somewhere together on a Caribbean island, laughing because they’ve managed to get someone else to take care of their kids. She thinks they might show up to claim the boys in a few years. But the boys are nice, and handsome. Rija is sure her husband loved them; she is sure her husband loved her. She thinks he will come for all of them if he is alive. She waits. The boys like her. They are happy. She likes them, but she doesn’t love them, and she certainly isn’t doing what she meant to do. Children don’t go to school in Finland until they are seven, and she can’t afford preschool for them. She is stuck in a small apartment with someone else’s children, and it is not what she wants to do. She thinks it’s crazy. When I first heard her story, I felt nearly sick with guilt, as an American, and I thought she would hate people from the States. But she doesn’t. She says she loved the way her husband treated her, the way he gave her both respect and freedom, and if she could, she would marry another American in a minute. She holds no grudge against the United States; instead she plays Sonny and Cher records constantly, and sends money back to Chicago so that former neighbors will send the children Sesame Street books.
She is giving the little Halloween party to make the boys happy and to bring some American gaiety into their lives. And after all, she has to do something with her intelligence and energy. She speaks seven languages fluently: Finnish, Swedish, Russian, English, French, German, and Danish. She was, before her garbled marriage, an interpreter for businesses. She is also an artist, although it’s possible that she doesn’t realize yet just how very good she is. When she finishes a canvas, a gallery in Helsinki always takes it, and it always sells quickly. But she doesn’t have much time to paint these days. She writes letters to federal agencies in the States asking for her husband or his first wife, and she stays in a small Helsinki apartment and takes care of her husband’s boys. They call her “Mother.” “Aiti.” “Mommy.” She didn’t tell them to call her that, but she doesn’t know how to ask them to stop.
Caroline and Catherine never called me “Mommy” or “Mother,” of course, and Lord knows I never wanted them to. Oh, but there was one time, the second summer they were in Kansas City with us. That summer I had managed to get them to meet some other girls in the neighborhood, and they made some good friends, and we were all a lot happier. One rainy afternoon I had taken five little girls, ages seven to eleven, shopping at a big covered mall in Kansas City. We were walking along, looking at windows full of toys or clothes or shoes or pet food, when I noticed further on down the mall a student I had had the previous year. He had been one of my favorite students; I suppose the ones you convert always are. He had begun my freshman lit class disdainfully, a big bad jock totally uninterested in anything intellectual, and he had finished the course with an A. He had started writing poetry himself, good strong stuff; he slipped the poems to me privately, for comments. When one poem was published in the college paper and he got more praise than mockery for writing it, for writing poetry, big football boy that he was, he said he thought he’d switch from a phys ed to an English major. I hadn’t seen him after that, not for a full year.
“Girls,” I said, after I spotted the young man at the other end of the mall, “I see someone I know. I want to go say hello for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
I left them looking at a window full of stuffed animals. As I walked toward the football poet, he turned and looked at me, and smiled, and stood there just looking at me. He was handsome even with, or perhaps because of, his broken nose. For the first time I realized that I was physically attracted to him. And that he was physically attracted to me. He was after all only five years younger than I, and a good foot taller. Much bigger.
When I was next to him I couldn’t think of anything to say. What I wanted really was to rise on my toes and kiss him right in the middle of the mall.
“Hello,” I finally said. “How are you?”
“Fine. And you?”
“Fine.”
We stood and looked at each other and grinned for a while.
“I’m an English major now, you know,” he said. “I even got an A from Corbin’s course.”
Corbin was the toughest prof the English department had. His course was a sort of filter to keep out the students who wouldn’t be good as English majors.
“That’s great,” I said. “But I’m not surprised.”
We grinned at each other for a few more minutes.
“Listen, are you busy right now?” he asked. “Want to come get a cup of coffee or something …?”
“Sure,” I said. What was I thinking of? I wasn’t thinking at all. I walked off next to him, breathless.
We were at the door of the mall, going out to the parking lot and his car, when suddenly five little girls of various shapes and sizes came running up to me.
“Mommy! Mommy!” they all yelled.
“Mommy, I found the neatest skirt!”
“Mommy, I want the dolly in that window back there!”
“Mommy, can I have an ice cream cone?”
“Hey, yeah, I want one, too, Mommy!”
“Hey, Mommy, I found the neatest shirt that Daddy would just love!”
The last was from Cathy, who was hanging on my arms and literally pulling me away from the football poet’s side. All the other girls, Caroline included, were giggling and snorting and acting generally half-assed because of their joke, but Cathy was deadly serious. She looked me right in the eye and kept pulling at me until I almost lost my balance. She had seen or scented something; she knew something the others didn’t know.
“Come on, Mommy,” she said, “Let’s go buy a present for Daddy.”
She was only seven years old, but her radar was working even then.
There was nothing I could do but laugh. I had absolutely forgotten Charlie’s daughters and their three friends. I had also absolutely forgotten Charlie. I felt rather foolish. I also felt rather sad, rather trapped, rather old.
Goodbye, football poet.
“Sorry,” I smiled at him. “I forgot all about the girls. I’d better get them ice cream cones.” I didn’t even think to tell him that I wasn’t the mommy of all those girls, that I wasn’t anyone’s mommy at all.
“See you around,” the boy said, and went on out the big glass door into the hot summer day.
“Pretty funny joke,” I said to the girls, and they all cracked up again, giggling hysterical giggles and holding their sides. I bought them all ice cream cones.
I think that was the first, last, and only time they called me “Mommy”; I know it was. They had a mommy already, after all; they didn’t need another. And physiologically it was only barely possible for me to be their mother. I was twelve years older than Caroline and fifteen years older than Cathy. Also, they looked nothing like me, nothing at all. They were so tall and big-boned and blond and I was so short and dark and small. I couldn’t have been their mommy. And I don’t believe I ever did the things that mommies do. I didn’t worry constantly about their health, for one thing. Dentist and doctor appointments were Adelaide’s responsibility, though Charlie paid the bills. Perhaps only three or four times during all the years they came to stay with us did I ever have to get up in the night to help them when they were sick. During the day—that was a different matter. Their mother had impressed upon them just how very delicate and precious they were, and apparently one of the favorite ritual games in their house was illness. Caroline and Cathy both described being ill with as much enthusiasm as they showed for Christmas. Being ill meant lying in bed, and being completely waited on and pampered, and having presents and medicine and solicitous remarks, and having the TV set in the bedroom all day. I never liked the game much from my vantage point; I got tired of carrying endless glasses of 7UP to the bedroom. Mainly my reaction was one of secret distaste because I knew that usually the girls were faking it. There would be no rise in temperature registered on the thermometer, no cough, no vomiting, no darkness under the eyes to signal sickness. Usually the sickness was preceded by a boring day, or the announcement that Charlie and I had a social engagement the coming night. Then one or the other would feel “feverish” and “achy” and would take to her bed. Back in Massachusetts, in their three-female household, the ritual response to such claims was immediate attention and the dismissal of all other occupations of the day. Being sick in Massachusetts meant: you are special. You are now worth noticing. You are important. Being sick in Kansas City was not so much fun. I suppose I was a wicked stepmother; I didn’t try to make being ill a special event, a wonderful thing. After a while the girls stopped getting sick at our house.
I never worried about Caroline’s and Cathy’s schoolwork, either, although I read to them and gave them books and introduced them to ballet music and took them to concerts, and so on. I never worried about whether or not they had friends, or the right kind of friends, or any of the zillion little worries a mother has about her child’s social life. Actually, when the girls were not with us, for more or less ten months of the year, I didn’t worry about them much at all. Now it seems that I worry almost constantly about Adam and Lucy. Will it ruin Adam’s life if he goes for these nine months without having any friends? Why won’t he try to get himself dressed in the morning when Lucy, who is two years younger than he, zips right through it all, even puts on her snowsuit and boots? Will Lucy be pretty? I can’t tell, little funny girl with chicken feather hair sticking up all over. I think I’m liberated, but I still want Lucy to be pretty. Pretty people are so pleasant to look at. Will both children survive all the screaming and stomping and crying I do here? It has become terrible. I scream and stomp every day, and tears shoot out from my eyes like bullets from a gun, they are propelled by such an angry force …
Today a letter arrived from the States from Ellen, Stephen’s wife. All the news fit to print; gossip, Joe’s teeth, Carrie’s colds; how were we liking Finland?; she and Stephen had left the children with grandparents and spent a glorious few days swimming, horseback riding, and hiking in the New Hampshire woods; and Stephen had hired two new full-time people. Both women. One, an older woman with a PhD, who would teach Shakespeare and Renaissance lit; the other, a younger woman still working on her PhD thesis, to join the freshman comp and lit staff. Fall was beautiful in New Hampshire, etc. They were carving lots of pumpkins; did they have Halloween in Finland?
I felt so sad at heart after I finished Ellen’s letter that I wanted to weep. It was as if the leaden skies of Finland had finally dropped their heaviness down onto my shoulders. I couldn’t bear the burden.
“I don’t want to go to the Park Auntie’s today,” Adam whined. “I don’t like it there. Just babies go there. I don’t have anything to do there or anyone to talk to.”
I had just finished reading Ellen’s letter. But if Adam doesn’t go to the Park Auntie’s today, I thought, I will not have a minute alone to think.
“Oh, sweetie”—first I tried the soft sell—“you always have fun once you’re there. There are dump trucks, shovels, the sand—” It didn’t work. “Adam, you have to go!”
“But I HATE it!” Adam wailed. “I never get to be alone with you. Lucy gets to be alone with you every afternoon while I’m at school.”
“But Lucy naps usually, Adam, or has quiet time by herself in her room.” So that I can sit at the kitchen table soaking in the silence, sorting out my thoughts, thinking through things. “I need the mornings to go get groceries. It’s hard to get groceries with you around, honey, and it’s boring for you. I want you to go to the Park Auntie’s.”
“Yaaaaaah! I don’t want to go!” Adam swept his Legos onto the floor, and they scattered about like plastic fireworks, red, yellow, black, white, and blue pieces skittering across the floor.
Slap! I slapped his bottom and yelled, “Go to your room, you spoiled little monster!” Then I burst into tears. Lucy, watching it all, ran to Adam and threw her arms around him, trying to kiss and soothe him, but he pushed her away so hard she fell. And of course she cried, then, too.
I ran to my room and fell on my bed, on the ugly, grimy quilt that came with the bed in this rented apartment, and I cried. I hate myself when I spank Adam; I think it is an unnecessary thing to do. Yet I do it more and more, and right then, instead of remorse, I still felt anger. I had so many emotions colliding inside me that I couldn’t sort them out. Was I so upset because Stephen had had a few romantic days and nights with Ellen? Did I miss pumpkins and crackling fires and football games and pumpkin pies so much? Or was it really that I felt my job had been taken from me at the university; Stephen had given it to another woman. Whatever it was, I needed time and space to think it all out. I felt pressured to the bursting point. Yet I realized that Adam’s complaints were valid. Poor little boy: for two months he hadn’t had one child to play with who spoke his own language and who would openly smile and relate to him. He sees children at his school, but they speak only Finnish and live far away. There are no children his age in the forty-eight apartments in our apartment house here. I know he is lonely. And he is so bright; I should read to him, help him write, paint, create, draw. His preschool is more pre than school, and because of the language problem he is not taught his words or letters. I should spend more time with him, hold him on my lap, gently say, “This is the way you write your last name,” and so on. That would make him happy, I know. But what will make me happy? How do I get rid of this rage? I am overflowing with it, and I’m not sure why. Do I hate Finland so much? Do I love Stephen? Do I hate motherhood? Am I tired of following Charlie around everywhere?
Last night I dreamed a beautiful and erotic dream. I went into a house, and there was Count Dracula, very aristocratic and handsome and mysterious. I fell in love with him and embraced him: merely embraced him, we did not kiss. I yearned to be with him, he was so tempting, and yet I knew everything about him was dangerous and wrong, and yet that only made him more attractive. I finally left his house, to walk in a garden, to think, to try to decide whether I would choose to live with him, really live with him, or not. There were heavy moral and religious questions involved, I knew. I had to do serious thinking, but underneath it all I was sexually stirred and excited as never before. And I was so happy, so exquisitely happy.
I wonder who Dracula is for me. Help, Freud.
I wonder if I can get through this gray day without screaming again or spanking one of my children.
* * *
I have never hit or screamed at Caroline and Cathy. It would almost undoubtedly have been better if I had; the noise and motion might have broken down some of the barrier that stood between us. In the later years, during the times I felt most bitter and angry, it would have made things much clearer if I had been able to scream at them, but by then the pattern had been too firmly set. And in the early years I felt resentful of them, or angry with them now and then, but I never felt the pure passionate wrath that my own children can call forth from my depths almost daily. A queer thing, this. A queer thing that I should feel so powerfully angry with my own children that I sometimes have to restrain myself from throwing them across the room. I never much yelled at Charlie, though once in a quarrel I threw my Betty Crocker cookbook at him and broke the book’s spine. Yet it was only four days after Adam’s birth that I wailed, “Oh, Adam, will you please shut up!” (Then in horror and remorse I grabbed him up and nursed him again.)
But in the first year of both my children’s lives anger was rare. It was the second year, and the third, and the fourth, that it really flourished. I was so sure that I would feel nothing but love for them that for a while, when I first felt the anger boiling up inside me, I thought I was going mad. What I didn’t know was that mothers of small children need lobotomies. They need to be able to say, “Dear, would you please get your elbow out of your plate?” and, “Darling, no, you may not play with Mommy’s lipstick, it is not a toy!” and, “Oh no, you wrote all over the wall with Mommy’s new lipstick!” and, “Please don’t climb up my leg and screech right now; this is a long-distance phone call,” and other such phrases at least six thousand times a day. They must be able to say them sometimes simultaneously. They must be able to refrain from making love in the daytime and be prepared to interrupt lovemaking at any moment in the night if a sick child cries or coughs. They must be able to jump quickly at any given second. They must bend and stoop and lift and rock and wrestle, and sit with little feet pressing against their legs. Little feet pressing against Mommy’s legs; how endearing it sounds. And they don’t mean to hurt, they simply can’t keep from moving, and they like to keep in contact with Mommy. But bruises build up anyway, especially on the side of the thighs, where little feet press and push while little hands are sticking little forks up little noses during the process called mealtime. All that is endurable. One doesn’t get really angry over having to say, “Adam, this is the fourth time I’ve asked you to wipe your hands on your napkin instead of your clothes.” One gets really angry on the rainy days, when one’s husband is out of town for three days, lecturing in Copenhagen, and civilization and its beauties seem unimaginably distant to the mother stuck home with small children. Then one gets angry when both children want the star cookie cutter for their play dough, and they won’t share and the phone rings, and when you come back they have mashed play dough into each other’s hair. But mostly one gets angry, really angry, when the children get the parent trapped, so that there is no time in the day to think or read or even pee without a child crying or needing something. And as they get older, they become so disagreeable, they argue and fuss and demand and whine and say, “You’re not my friend.” And they don’t care who you are or what you’ve done in life; they really don’t care at all. They just want more, more of everything, pudding, toys, swinging, more of you. And these are good children, children you love, children who worry when you cry and who say from an airplane, “Oh, look at that big beautiful cloud, that must be God’s cloud!” or when seeing a huge silver moon in a play, “Mommy, how close that moon is. I could run up and put my arms around it and give it to you.” Adam is, after all, the only one in my life who has literally offered to bring me the moon.
Of course the daily sweetness outweighs the daily nastiness. That is the other side of the story. Children are sweet and real and very, very beautiful. After baths, when Adam and Lucy run around naked, I love watching the way their plump legs and bums move, I love their perfect flesh. Sometimes I think I won’t know how to endure it when I don’t have all this voluptuous, creamy, smooth, silky, perfect flesh to wash and clothe and hold and kiss and smell and see. I think when my children are gone I’ll have to raise horses, dogs, cats, flowers; I’ll have to have beautiful fabrics to wear and sleep and sit on; I’ll have to surround myself with cold beautiful artifacts to endure the sensual deprivation of my warm living babies.
Because I have friends with young children, I survive. My friends share their feelings, their angers and frustrations, and we dissolve much of our wrath in mutual helpless laughter. Because I have older friends, I know I will also survive the time when Adam and Lucy are grown and gone. In fact, if I can be like my older friends, then I will really flourish. I wanted my children, I want them now, even on the darkest days, but I want to teach, too, and so I watch my older friends like a teenager watching a movie star, and I store hints for the future in the back of my mind.
Part of my rage here, I suddenly realize, is because I am here, in Finland. It seems impolite and unsporting to criticize one’s host country, but then I must say I don’t feel that Finland is a host country. It wants my husband here, but it doesn’t want me here. It is doing nothing to make my stay here pleasant. Part of it is of course due to what the Finnish travel books call “the Finn’s innate shyness,” which may be shyness to them but comes off as rudeness toward me. When I walk our children to the Park Auntie’s, I feel more and more like a leper; no one smiles at me or says “Paiva.” And the harder thing is that no one speaks to my children, except to tell them to go away. The other part of my difficulty in this country has to do with being a woman and a mother. Today, for example, professors are taking my husband to see Turku, an interesting Finnish town with an ancient castle and cathedral. I am left here in the apartment, alone with my children. My children and I are valueless here; we have no value; and no one will help us. When we arrived here in Helsinki, there was one orientation by the Fulbright people which I was unable to attend because I couldn’t sit through the all-day lectures with my two small children, and since I had just arrived I had not yet been able to locate a babysitter. No one here helped me to find a babysitter. No one told me about the Park Auntie or helped me to find a school for Adam. It was as if I were set down in a cold foreign world and forced to fend for myself, to discover everything for myself, without help, without anyone caring, without anyone even saying hello. They said hello to my husband, of course, formally, at the official Fulbright functions. My husband did not have to stay home with small children. He is a professor. His happiness matters. He matters. The children and I do not. The prejudice here is not against Americans or women as such, but against women with small children. And it is such a subtle prejudice: we are simply ignored, left frightened and alone to fight our trivial daily battles.
Only because I was lucky enough to have the washing machine in the bathroom break the first time I used it was I able to stay here at all. The machine broke the third day we were here. I called the talonmies—custodian—and a pleasant woman in her thirties came to the apartment. She smiled, she was warm, she spoke perfect English. I nearly wept simply to have her speak to me. She said it was a matter of a bad electric connection, and that her husband would fix it that night. During the few minutes she was in my apartment, she told me about the Park Auntie, and later called the Park Auntie to ask her to accept my children even though she officially had room for no more. She told me about babysitters and suggested preschools. She told me about the grocery store, the parks nearby, the library. And I have called her about once a week to ask where to get vitamin C tablets, or what a police form means, or which way to go to find the zoo. Thank God for this woman, whose name is Gunnel; she has truly saved my life. Without this accidental, completely chance acquaintance I don’t know how I could have survived here.
And yet it’s more than all that, and different: it’s me. If I were not so crazily ambitious, if I did not have this itch to teach, to work with words and people, I could be happy here. I could relax, enjoy myself, enjoy my husband, enjoy my children, enjoy the experience of a foreign country. It is not simply that I am a spoiled American woman who feels seriously deprived without all my electrical luxuries, although that is part of it; heaven knows how I miss Sesame Street. It is that I have managed to become competent in a certain field. It is that I want to work. That is part of who I am, who I have become. I cannot imagine Charlie without his work; the thought is absolutely impossible, a contradiction in terms, Charlie is his work, and without it, without his books and working papers and felt-tip pens and lecture invitations and phone calls and students, without his work he simply would not be Charlie. He would not recognize his face in the mirror; I would not recognize his body in my bed. Charlie is a historian; that is as much a part of the man as his muscles or his breath. I am not so complete—and perhaps, because of the children, I can’t be, for a while—but I still feel that my work is a part of me, an essential part, and without it I am weakened, disabled, blunted. I’ve lost my sense of humor, my sense of delight. Even if Finland were heaven, I would still be grousing because I could not work. It is unfair of me to be here, grumbling and unappreciative; it is doing no one any good. I don’t see why I should stay here. I don’t want to stay here—I won’t.
I won’t.
I will write the mathematician who is renting our farm to tell him that he must be out by January first. I’ll tell him that for emergency health reasons (my mental health) I have to come home. I’ll tell Charlie to stay or to come with us, but I won’t be dissuaded from leaving here. Today I will begin to write letters to the universities and colleges within driving distance of the farm to see if they will hire me—but I know the chances are slim. If I don’t get hired, if that particular miracle does not happen, I’ll go home anyway, and put Adam and Lucy in a preschool and spend every afternoon working in a library on the research papers I’ve been longing to do, and perhaps they will get published and pave my way into a university position. I don’t need to stay here sniveling, feeling sorry for myself and my children, hating Charlie for his success. I need to go home; I need to go to work. And I will.
I will.
* * *
Hooray! Hooray! Everyone was happy! It was July 1966, and Caroline and Cathy were coming to spend their second summer with us in Kansas City. They were so happy to be coming because this time their mother said she wanted them to come. And of course she did; why not? We were providing free babysitting service while she got married again. Not that we thought of it in that way—well, perhaps I did, since I did the cooking and laundry and other dirty work, but Charlie didn’t. He was simply overjoyed to be having his daughters with him again. He was glad the psychological counseling had paid off; Adelaide was okay, Adelaide had found someone else to love her; Adelaide was getting married. He was sure that she wouldn’t call crying that summer.
This summer when Charlie wrote to ask about flying the girls out, he had received a pleasant letter telling him exactly what days to book both arriving and returning flights. “By the way,” Adelaide had written, “as the girls will tell you, I am going to be married this summer, July 3, to a wonderful, wonderful man. He doesn’t have much money and he is also divorced. And as he is good and moral enough to pay his wife alimony as well as child support, we won’t have much money, so don’t think you’ll be able to get out of sending the child-support checks. Still we are buying a nice house and I’m hoping we’ll be able to have another baby or two; I know Cathy and Caroline would like that. Please take good care of my little girls this summer.”
“Everyone will be happy this summer!” Charlie said.
And that summer, everyone was. I had the brilliant idea of having a party at the house for the girls, and invited children from all over the neighborhood, and eventually Caroline and Cathy made friends. They were happier because they spent time with girls their own age, and I was happier because I had more time to myself. Of course things were not perfect: once again I couldn’t kiss or touch Charlie when they were around, and Cathy still occasionally sent little eye spits of hatred my way, but on the whole, it was a much better summer than the first had been. Charlie was busy completing a book in time for a contract deadline, so I took the summer off from my studies to play with and take care of the girls. With friends their own age around they were braver, and we went down to the farm and rode the horses and swam in the pond and took nature walks on the farm, and the girls slept out on the screened porch in sleeping bags. We made fires by the pond late at night and cooked hot dogs and marshmallows. When I had time during the day I read literary criticism and T. S. Eliot and e e cummings. In Kansas City we went to movies and swimming pools and parks and zoos again, and if I was slightly bored it was all right; everyone was happy. Adelaide called several times that summer, and cried a little bit, missing her daughters, but not quite so desperately. We even spent a few pleasant afternoons with June and Anthony Leyden. I thought we had all entered a season of peace and content. When Caroline and Cathy left at the end of August, they cried, and I felt genuinely, if minutely, sorry to see them go, and they both came to me and held their pretty faces up to be kissed goodbye.
It had been a good summer. It went by fast. In September what I considered “our” season—Charlie’s-and-mine—began again. The blissful freedom of being alone to make love in the daylight in any room of the house, the uninterrupted moments spent reading together or discussing our separate days, the burden of extra cooking and laundry and cleaning and driving and organizing and caring and pleasing so completely removed—the girls had come and gone. Now there were fires in the fireplace and late pizza dinners and long hours in the library or with a pile of books and note cards at home. On weekends the farm and the horses, and kisses in the crisp fall air. And then it was Thanksgiving, and time to start buying Christmas gifts for Caroline and Cathy.
Christmas Day, 1966, Charlie called his daughters to wish them Merry Christmas and to see if they liked their presents.
Caroline answered the phone.
“Daddy?” she cried. “Oh, Daddy, I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call. Daddy, please, I want to come live with you!”
I was upstairs on the extension phone, where Charlie had told me to be, my mouth open in readiness to yell, “Merry Christmas!” Instead, on hearing Caroline’s words, I went speechless.
“Why, Caroline,” said Charlie, “what’s wrong?”
“Daddy, please, please, just let me come live with you. Cathy wants to, too. Please—” she cried, and then there were scuffling sounds and the next voice was Adelaide’s.
“Charlie?” she snapped. “Is that you? What do you want?”
“I wanted to wish everyone Merry Christmas,” Charlie said. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong!” Adelaide shrieked, and the sound made my ears ring. “Stop prying into my private life!”
“Caroline said she wants to come live with me,” Charlie said.
“Nonsense. She’s just had a bad day.”
“She’s had a bad day on Christmas Day?”
“Oh, you always were the most sarcastic goddamned bastard!” Adelaide said. “Why don’t you leave me alone!”
“Adelaide, I just want to say Merry Christmas to the girls. That’s all. Okay?”
“NO! NO, it’s NOT okay! Now STOP IT and LEAVE ME ALONE!”
There was a harsh click; she had hung up the phone.
“Merry Christmas,” I said to Charlie over the hum of the disconnected line.
“Wow,” said Charlie.
So that Christmas Day was spent with Charlie in his study, talking to the Ascrofts. It seemed that Adelaide’s new marriage was having problems. The Ascrofts were vague, and they wanted to protect Adelaide as much as possible. They said they thought she was fine psychologically, just having a difficult time at a rocky spot in her marriage. The Ascrofts thought the reason Caroline and Cathy were upset was that they didn’t get along with their new stepbrother when he came to visit. They thought there was some kind of rivalry, jealousy, there, but nothing to get excited about. They promised to keep an eye on things and to let Charlie know if there was anything he could or should do.
At the moment, there was nothing Charlie could do but worry. And he worried. That Caroline, quiet, restrained Caroline, had cried and asked to come live with him amazed him. He worried that if he called her back Adelaide would be furious with Caroline, but that if he didn’t call her back Caroline would feel he had deserted her, that he didn’t care.
I tried to reassure Charlie because that was what he needed, but secretly I felt sorry for the girls, too, and perhaps understood their problem more than he did. I had found stepping to be difficult and painful at best, and yet I was an adult: I had the power to change things, at least the freedom to leave the situation forever or to simply walk out of the house and down the street and away from an angry situation. But Caroline and Cathy were children, minors; they were trapped in the way that all children are trapped. Then, too, when they came to stay with us in the summer, we all knew it was a temporary arrangement, and there was a solace in that that made it all much more tolerable. We could temper our anger and secret resentments with the knowledge that it was not going to last forever, we would be free from each other soon. But Adelaide had remarried. That meant that Caroline and Cathy had to deal with a stepfather on a permanent, daily, and apparently eternal basis. They could not live for the end, or even rush off in a huff for one day. They must have felt panicked, as any helpless creature does when imprisoned in an unpleasant home.
Yet there was no way I could help them. I had no proof that they would be any happier living with their father and me than with their mother and a stepfather. The thought of the four of us living together on a permanent basis was something past the scope of my imagination. It seemed to me that the only likely result of such an arrangement would be that they would come to hate and resent me. I did not know what to say or do, what advice to offer Charlie. And selfishly, I worried about myself, about my work. I had only one semester left to finish my master’s degree, defend my thesis, and take my orals. The coming spring would be the busiest time for me, with teaching and my studies. I really didn’t want the girls to come then, with their problems and their mother’s phone calls; I needed silence and peace around me; I knew I could not offer the care and attention that such a new situation would deserve. But I said nothing about all this to Charlie. They were his daughters; if they wanted to come, then this would be their home.
We spent a restless spring. Charlie wrote the girls and called them several times a month, but his letters were never answered and the phone conversations were unrevealing. Apparently the girls were happier, apparently some sort of peace had been achieved; at least that was all we could think given the information we had. Still, we worried; and felt helpless, because any attempt to help or understand would be seen only as an attempt to interfere and agitate.
In May, two nights before I was to have my oral examination to defend my thesis, Adelaide called. It was perhaps ten minutes till midnight. Charlie and I were in bed, asleep. I answered the phone.
“I want to talk to Charlie,” Adelaide said. Her voice was clear, strong, calm, and grim.
I handed the phone to Charlie and sat in frightened silence as he talked.
Caroline was in the hospital. For several days she had been having severe stomach pains, and the physicians could provide neither diagnosis nor cure. Adelaide wanted Charlie to fly out the next day to see Caroline. She was worried, and she thought, quite rightly, that by God, Charlie ought to worry, too. Adelaide said that perhaps Caroline was having some kind of psychological problem because of the conflict of having two fathers. Charlie said that he would come as soon as he could. The conversation was short and quiet.
After he hung up the phone we sat up in bed among our wrinkled sheets, talking. We turned on the bedside lamp, as if seeing would help us hear each other better, and the warm circle of light seemed to create a magic small world that held only the two of us and our cozy bed, but the illusion was false. Other people were with us; too many others.
“I’ll have Anthony take my class and I’ll fly up tomorrow,” Charlie said.
“Charlie, could you wait two days? Till after my orals? I’d sort of like your support—”
“Oh, Zelda, Jesus, I’m so sorry. God, what timing! Listen, what can I do? What would you do in my place? My daughter’s in the hospital, having severe stomach pains. If Adelaide thinks I can help—”
“I know. I know. You have to go. There’s nothing else you can do. I hope she’ll be okay, Charlie. I’m sure she will.”
“Zelda, I’m really sorry about having to leave right now.”
“I know. It’s all right. Let’s go to sleep; tomorrow will be busy.”
We turned off the light and the warm enclosing circle disappeared in the darkness. We turned away from each other, Charlie to worry about Caroline, me to worry about my orals, and the great deep canyon suddenly there between us.
Charlie left the next day for Massachusetts, and the day after that I took my orals. They were held at three in the afternoon and went on until five-thirty. Afterward I was so weak-kneed and exhausted that I could scarcely walk. The head of the department, the notorious Catholic, woman-as-mother-lover, woman-as-intellectual-hater, had been unexpectedly nasty and petty and picky. He had led me astray, interrupted me, laughed at me, and in general looked down his nose at me until I wanted to rise from my chair and punch him in his nose. But I had kept my cool—he was the head of the department—and riding on the energy and sharpness that fear and anger provide, had done my best. I even had room in the back of my mind to wonder as I spoke if male master degree candidates worried about the way their legs were crossed while they discussed Eliot’s Four Quartets. And I wondered how much different the whole scene would have been if there had been just one woman professor on the committee instead of the five males. Would I have felt less threatened, one female facing a mixed group rather than one female facing five stern men?
When it was over, they asked me to wait in the outer office. I did. The secretary had gone home; everything was quiet. I stood next to a window, looking down at the grassy square and praying, “Please God, please God,” over and over again.
Finally the door opened and my favorite professor came out and said, “Congratulations, Mrs. Campbell.” My first thought was that I wanted to burst into tears from sheer exhaustion and relief, and then that I absolutely must not. The other men, including the department head, came out and shook my hand and offered their dry congratulations. We talked a bit of small talk, simply to prove that we were now all friends instead of adversaries, and then we all went home.
They went home and I went home, all by myself. It was spring, a warm May evening, a soft sexy evening, and I walked home alone. Everyone seemed to be outdoors, playing and laughing and being with everyone else, and when I saw my tiny pretty house I finally did begin to cry because it was so empty, because no one was in it to share my triumph. The windows reflected the sun and green trees and passing cars as if everything important were happening outside, as if there were nothing inside waiting for me. I didn’t want to go in the house. But I couldn’t simply stand outside and cry. I went in. The first thing I did was to take the phone off the hook. I didn’t want Charlie to call and ask how it had gone and to hear my news, and then for it—my triumph, my success, my achievement—to be diluted by my having to ask, “And how is Caroline?” And he would say she was fine—he had called me the night before, and she was fine—and then we would have to discuss Caroline and Cathy and Adelaide, and my one bright golden moment would be muddied.
But, after all, things worked out, and perhaps in the long run worked out better than if Charlie had been there. For without him I had to take the first real, small steps from dependence on him to dependence on myself—and it is harder to be elated without the one you love than it is to be depressed; one can easily indulge in depression alone. I made myself a vodka tonic and sat down at the kitchen table, preparing to drink myself into a state of maudlin self-pity, accompanied only by the empty buzz of the telephone receiver as it hung by its cord to the floor. But my drink did not taste good; I did not want a vodka tonic, I wanted champagne. I had achieved something—I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to celebrate even if I had to do it without Charlie. I put the phone back on the hook, then picked it up again and dialed my mother and father, and then Alice, and then all the other friends I had, to tell them that I had finally, at last, done it: I had defended my thesis, I had won my master’s degree. Finally, unsure of what reception I would get, I called Linda. She had dropped out of the MA program the past semester to have her baby, and I had sent her flowers and bought a small pink knit bunting for her new daughter, but she had been so wrapped up in the baby, and I had been so wrapped up in my books, that our conversation had kept sliding off into mutual uninterest. This night when I called her, however, she responded with the beautiful manic enthusiasm I had been so used to and invited me over to her house to celebrate. Her husband was out of town; her daughter was asleep. I stopped at the liquor store and bought a magnum of champagne. The two of us drank it all. What a wonderful evening it was: we left the doors and windows open and let the sounds of the spring night drift in, and we sat in her messily luxurious living room eating cold roast, cheese, crackers, olives, nuts, anything we could find from her pantry, and drinking the champagne, and telling each other secrets, and laughing at the secrets until we both ended up rolling on the floor with laughter. We didn’t get tired until three in the morning, and because it was so late and her husband was not home, I spent the night there. Before we staggered into our beds to sleep, we crept into the nursery, where little Dina, Linda’s daughter, lay sleeping amid white and pink quilts in a small white cradle. How warm, how moist, how sweetly aromatic that sleeping child was. I can remember it even now. The sight and scent of the little girl moved something inside me, like a small, pure, crystal chime just beginning to stir in a breeze. I hung above the baby, seeing her tiny white hand plump and relaxed among soft quilts, and felt a most delicate, exquisite, puzzling desire.
The next morning I had a hangover, but only a slight one. I drank black coffee and watched Linda give Dina first a bottle and then various globs of warm smooth food, and finally left for my own house. I brushed my furry teeth, took a long bubble bath, put on fresh clothes, and then fell asleep on the sofa. When I woke up, it was late afternoon and Charlie was home.
We kissed, and Charlie sat down next to me, and we talked about Caroline. She was out of the hospital and doing well. The physicians thought she had been chronically constipated, but they agreed something psychological was going on. Caroline had said only that she was perfectly happy and felt fine except for the stomach pains. Adelaide had admitted that she had never given the girls the letters Charlie had written—she thought they were too upsetting for Caroline and Cathy—but had agreed in the light of Caroline’s strange illness to let them have the letters from now on as long as Charlie wrote only light happy things and never said he missed the girls or asked them to live with him. Adelaide had said that her marriage was fine, just fine. Cathy seemed content. Charlie was as satisfied as he could be in the situation.
Then we talked about me, about my small success. Charlie said he had not worried about me a bit, he had known I would do fine in my orals, but he still felt bad that he had not been there to support me or celebrate with me. I said what I had to say: nonsense, nonsense; he was not to feel bad that he had not been there; I had not minded; it hadn’t mattered at all. Because of course I knew that he had done only what he had to do, being the good man that he was. And then I did not want him to know how really petty and selfish I was, that I had resented him and for a while even hated him, and his daughters, because I had childishly wanted for one day, one evening, to shine, to be the star, and had not been able to. It had been no one’s fault; there was no one to blame. There was nothing to be done about it but to go on with goodwill. And Charlie did take me out to dinner at a marvelous restaurant that night, and he ordered a wonderful French champagne, and later he made love to me so beautifully that I would have eagerly forgiven him anything.
After I finished my master’s I fell into a deep, deep slump. Part of it was because Charlie had agreed to be a visiting professor at a university in western Michigan the coming fall semester. A historian who taught there had arranged it; he and Charlie were working together on a book. In one way I was glad, because Alice, the woman I had fallen in love with at the symposium, lived there. And after the crush of work finishing my master’s I wanted a break from my studies. But I was also eager to start work on my PhD, for I realized that that was the only way I’d be able to continue what I liked best (outside of making love and riding my horse): teaching English comp and lit to college kids.
That was the other part of the reason for my slump. I could no longer teach. I had somehow always blithely assumed that they would want me to teach part-time at the university. I was so good, and I was so cheap. During the loose final days after I took my oral exam, I kept drifting back to campus even on the days I wasn’t teaching. I wanted someone to ask me my plans; I wanted someone to say offhandedly as he passed me in the halls, “By the way, Zelda, we’re planning on you for two introductory comp courses next year.” But no one said it. No one really spoke to me at all. It was only by having coffee with some of the male graduate students that I found out who had and hadn’t been chosen as part-time instructors for the following year. How damned mad I was as I sat there hearing the news from the other students. I got even madder because when I realized I hadn’t been asked to teach tears came into my eyes and I wanted to blubber and wail. Instead I dug my fingernails into my fist, and smiled and acted nonchalant, and after a while we all got up to go our separate ways. I went to the office of my favorite prof, the one who had advised me on my thesis. He was in and not surprised to see me. Our session was short and not sweet: “Zelda, the way things are set up here we were able to give you a teaching assistantship while you were working on your master’s. But we make PhD students part-time instructors, and the pay scale goes up. It’s handled differently. You’ve got a husband on the faculty. You’re a woman. We’ve got to give these plusher jobs to the men who have families to support.”
“But Crawford? You know I’m a better teacher than Crawford!”
“Yes, but he’s a brilliant scholar and his wife is pregnant. We have to support him. Good Lord, we all know you’re a great teacher; this is no reflection on your teaching abilities; don’t take it personally.”
“I’ll work without pay. Just let me teach.”
“Oh, Zelda. You can’t. We couldn’t even let you; it would blow all the fuses in the payroll computer. Come on. Be reasonable.”
There was absolutely nothing I could do. Perhaps, back in 1967, if I had realized that women all across the country were reeling from the same shock from the same sort of words, I might have been able to do something—anything else. As it was, I just went home and cried. I felt defeated, I felt rejected. I felt that I had failed, that if I had only been better they would have had to hire me in spite of my being married to a faculty member, in spite of the English department head, who disliked women.
I began the summer of 1967 feeling dejected and defeated. For the first time in my life I was formally through with my studies; really through. I would go to Michigan with Charlie the next September instead of plunging into a new course of work, instead of setting out for a new goal. The freedom and looseness and lack of responsibility were the most awesomely depressing things I had ever experienced. Of course I still had to play wife and housewife, still had to do the cooking and dishwashing and housecleaning each day, but all that did not really matter, did not really count. I did not take it seriously; it was of no importance to me. It did not even take up very much of my time. There were only the two of us, and we ate out many nights, or ate large lunches together at the university, then merely snacked at night at home, and the house did not get terribly dirty with both of us gone so much, and Charlie always helped me with the laundry, the dishes, the cleaning; there was not enough there to occupy my time or my mind. I could not think of it—being the keeper of Charlie’s house and meals—as what I was about. What I was about was loving Charlie—but he was involved in teaching or working on his papers and books most of the day—and books and students and teaching, but I had been cut off from all that and could find no way back in. I felt lonesome, wasted, adrift.
I was accepted into the PhD program, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to attend classes until the second semester. Charlie suggested that I spend the summer and fall reading and relaxing. He thought I deserved a vacation. I didn’t want a vacation. I was twenty-four, I had a master’s degree and teaching experience. I wanted a job. But when I tried to explain it to Charlie, I succeeded only in making him feel bad. “I know you want to get started on your PhD work,” he said, “but this semester in Michigan is crucial to the new book. I’ve got to go. You could stay here, of course—”
But of course I couldn’t stay. I had to be with Charlie. He would have his fortieth birthday that fall, and I wanted to make it a great big smashing occasion. Even without the birthday I never once thought seriously of staying apart from him that semester. It would have been like agreeing not to breathe for a few months.
And I must be honest: I didn’t want him to stay home, either. The royalties from his first book were not large, but they were all the difference between scraping along on what was left from his salary after child support and doctor bills went out and living an enjoyable life. I liked having a little bit of money. I wanted him to write another book. I wanted him to go to Michigan, to write the book he and the other historian were planning. I wanted to be with him, always. I simply had to put my own life off track for a while. I knew I was making my own decisions. I had no one to blame for the direction I led my life.
Caroline and Cathy arrived in July for their third summer with us. Now they were nine and twelve; big girls. Each could make her own toast. The first few days they were abnormally quiet and jumpy and tense and nervous, but I was too wrapped up in my own gloom to care. I went about taking care of them with an automatic dutiful friendliness, and read Gothic romances when I had free time. Luckily they had friends in the neighborhood to play with, and to spend the night with, and to generally fill their time with. I read lots of romances and mysteries and ate ice cream sundaes with the girls and gained weight and didn’t care. It was a sloppy, superficial, easy sort of summer. It went by very fast. We were not friends yet, but we were no longer enemies. Caroline’s stomach problems had disappeared, at least for a while.
One August evening the four of us went to see some idiotic horror show at a drive-in and had to leave early because of a sudden violent summer thunder- and rainstorm. We felt somehow cheated as we pulled away from the drive-in, and somehow saddened by the rain sweeping down over the cars and streets. The movie hadn’t been good, but we felt grumpy being deprived of its ending. Charlie decided to stop at a pizza parlor on the way home, and we were all immediately cheered up. The pizza restaurant was as warm and cheery as a fireplace in autumn, with its padded booths and bright lights and spicy smells.
“Caroline,” Charlie said, “I guess you are really all well. That’s your fourth piece of pizza, and on top of popcorn, too.”
Caroline grinned, her mouth full of pizza.
“It wasn’t her stomach at all,” Cathy volunteered. “It was her mind making her stomach sick; the doctors told us so. She didn’t like calling Mommy’s new husband Daddy, and it made her sick.”
“Well, then why did she call him Daddy?” Charlie asked.
“Cause Mommy told us to,” Cathy said. “She said he was our real father from now on, not you. She said we were finally one big happy family again, and he was our real father. We had to call him Daddy. She spanked us and took our allowance away if we didn’t.”
“Wow,” Charlie said.
“It wasn’t like that,” Caroline said in a sudden desperate tone. “Mommy wasn’t trying to be bad, she just wanted us all to be close together and to love each other a lot and to be happy. She wanted us to be happy a lot—”
“I made a calendar for you for Christmas in Brownies,” Cathy said. “It said, ‘To My Father,’ and it had my picture on it and I had decorated it, and Mommy made me give it to her new husband. His name was John, but Caroline and I called him Toilet secretly. You know—John—Toilet—”
The girls looked at each other and went into fits of guilty laughter.
“Mommy didn’t make me sick,” Caroline said when she stopped laughing. “She didn’t, really. She was trying to make us all feel good. She wanted us to be a family.”
“Yeah, but ol’ Toilet was a real stinker,” Cathy said, and again both girls cracked up. “He had hair in his ears! And he burped at the table!” Both girls began to giggle and fidget as if they were drunk.
“And he spanked Cathy once when she wouldn’t eat her liver!” Caroline laughed.
“And he had these old cigars he smoked all the time and left lying in the ashtray like a dog poop!” Cathy yelled, her giggling almost uncontrollable.
“Yeah,” Caroline agreed, “we always said, ‘Why, why is old Toilet leaving this poop around? He’s a Toilet; why doesn’t he just eat the poop?’ ”
The girls were laughing so hard that even Charlie and I had begun to laugh, helplessly, aware of our silliness. In the back of my mind a sudden thought occurred: What nickname do they have for me? What jokes do they tell about me?
“And Toilet had a little boy, and you know what his name was? PETER! Ha-ha-ha, and you know what we secretly called him? Pee! Hee-hee-hee-hee.… ”
“He was awful. He came only on weekends, but he got to have his own room in our house and Cathy and I had to share a room. And he always got more presents, Mommy said to make up for not being able to live with us.”
“I never liked Pee; he stunk as much as Toilet!” Cathy said.
“Yeah, I’m glad they’ll be gone when we get back,” Caroline said.
“Gone?” Charlie asked.
“Yep, gone,” Caroline said. “Really gone. Mom and Toilet are getting divorced this summer. Whoops, we weren’t supposed to tell you that.”
* * *
At the beginning of September that year Charlie had a conference in New York with his publisher. Since we were going to be up in Michigan anyway, we decided to drive to the East Coast. With what we saved on plane fares we spent a week in Kennebunkport with Caroline and Cathy. It was a good time, the best time the four of us had had together. We lay on the beach or swam all day and ate like crazy at night, then took long walks all over the little town. One night we walked along the beach in the moonlight and I was humming a song, and the girls were humming it, too, more softly, and then Charlie began a sort of rhythmical clopping counterpoint noise. No one else was near us on the beach, and somehow we all began doing a silly dance-march to the music there on the sand, the cold water racing down toward our toes.
“La plume de ma tante, BOOM BOOM!” I sang, and
“BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!” Cathy yelled, and
“La plume de ma tante est sur le bureau de mon oncle!” Caroline sang, and
“Clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop-clop!” Charlie went, and we all marched, knees silly and high, funny gestures, loud singing, along the beach. It was the moonlight, and the hot sun still burning on our skins and the cool sand under our bare feet and the gay white line of surf chasing after our toes, it was a magic end of a summer night: the four of us all happy together. We were all slaphappily in love with one another, and wrapped arms around each other for warmth as we walked back toward the hotel.
We drove the girls to Massachusetts on Saturday. We had spent the morning swimming, then cleaned up and checked out of the hotel at noon, and driven three or four hours back into the continent. We arrived in Hadley drowsy from the ride, stunned suddenly by the end of the summer.
Charlie found Adelaide’s new house, the house she and her second husband had bought. It was a lovely old white frame colonial. It had a Realtor’s “For Sale” sign in front of it, stuck into the grass.
I said goodbye to the girls and gave them quick pecks on their cheeks, then got out of the car to help them get all their luggage. Charlie took the two biggest suitcases and walked with the girls up to the door. The three of them went inside.
I got back in the car and sat and waited. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the clothes come flying out of the front door of the house.
“WET!” Adelaide seemed to be screaming, and then she appeared on the front porch of her house. She had a suitcase in her hand and was apparently trying to tell me something about it.
I got out of the car, puzzled and slightly curious.
“Wet!” Adelaide screamed, and flung more clothes from the suitcase to the grass. “You stupid little girl, don’t you know any better than to put wet swimming suits in a suitcase? Now ALL THE CLOTHES ARE WET AND WRINKLED AND I HAVE ALL THIS IRONING TO DO!”
Those were the first direct words Adelaide had ever said to me. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe she was standing on the front porch of her house on a glorious sunny day with people bicycling and walking by, that she was standing there in shorts and halter top throwing clothes all over the grass. It seemed unreal.
Behind her I saw Charlie coming out the door, and I saw Cathy’s and Caroline’s anxious little faces.
“I’m sorry,” I said, since it was obvious that I had to say something. “I wrapped the suits in towels—”
“Yes, and what do towels do, you ninny? They absorb!” More clothes flew about.
Well, you’re right about that, I thought, it’s just that I never thought about it before. I haven’t thought about towels, absorption, wet suits; it never interested me before—“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Yes, you send home two suitcases full of wet dirty clothes—”
“I always wash and iron their clothes just before they come home,” I said. “I’ve never sent home dirty clothes—” I couldn’t believe our conversation. I was afraid people were staring. I was embarrassed. I also wanted to break out laughing, but knew it would be entirely the wrong thing to do.
“Yes, but this time you spent the last week at a beach. You can’t wash and iron at a beach!”
“They wore only a few shorts and tops. Everything else is—”
“WET! Everything else is wet! Because of those damned swimming suits!”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I didn’t know what else to say. I felt terribly bad about the whole thing. I felt I had ruined our whole summer by getting the clothes wet. And yet the comic aspect still made my mouth twitch.
Charlie came out of the house then and took Adelaide by the shoulders and pulled her into the house. Later he told me that he gave her twenty-five dollars to pay for a woman to wash and iron the clothes. Caroline and Cathy came outside and began to pick their clothes up off the grass. They didn’t look my way or at each other, and they didn’t talk. Then Charlie came out and kissed each girl and held them against him for a long moment. He came out to the car and we both waved and got in and drove off. We were on our way to Michigan.
That evening Charlie made a phone call from our motel room to the Ascrofts. He wanted to be assured that Adelaide and the girls were okay. The Ascrofts told him not to worry. They said that now that she had her girls back Adelaide would be fine. She had probably been in a bad mood that day—she had had such a terrible summer, the Ascrofts said. As if her second marriage breaking up hadn’t been enough, the month her second husband had moved out Adelaide had found out that she was pregnant by him, and she had had an abortion in August.