In the fall of 1967, Charlie was a visiting professor at a university in a small town in Michigan. He was Distinguished Visiting Professor; I was wife-in-limbo. I couldn’t take courses or teach, I couldn’t get my life to work for me. And then, that fall, when I was almost twenty-five, a strange thing happened to me. A shocking, totally unwanted and unexpected thing happened to me: I began to want to have a baby, a child of my own.
It was as if I had been strolling in the woods, innocently enjoying the peaceful day, and suddenly a huge and gloriously beautiful tiger pounced upon me, and dug his claws into me, and I was engaged in a furious struggle for survival, suddenly forced to claw and bite back, to fight him off.
Of course I was bored that semester, and dejected, and unsure of my future, and that was part of my ammunition against myself. You don’t really want a child, I said to myself. You’re just bored and dejected and unsure of yourself. Boy, you’re a mess. You get away from a university routine for one semester and you go insane.
Part of it, too, I realized, was Alice, and Alice’s friends. They were all such lovely women, and some were quite talented and some had professions, and some just played lots of tennis and golf, but they all had children. And even though they all had children, none of them was boring. It was amazing.
Charlie was busy all the time with his teaching or book writing, and I valiantly and dutifully kept to my reading list, preparing for my PhD work, keeping notes, reading relevant criticism. But I couldn’t read or study all the time, and Alice lived within walking distance of the house we were renting, and I wanted to take advantage of the few months I would have to live near her. So I visited her almost daily. Her home seemed like a storybook to me. All those children, each one so beautiful, and all their animals, dogs, cats, birds, turtles, gerbils, even a snake, and all the children’s friends, and the babysitters who came sometimes just to chat—all that life was wonderful. Alice and her husband had a great huge Victorian house that twisted and rambled and had window seats and doors in the paneling of the front stairs and alcoves and lots of big wide halls. Everything was covered with hockey sticks or ballet slippers or sweaters and mittens or dog leashes or ice skates or dolls, except for the living room, which was majestically reserved for adults. Every evening from four till five-thirty Alice had a sitter come play with all six children in their big bright messy basement rec room while she and her husband read the paper and drank martinis and talked in the beautiful neat living room. Charlie and I often joined them and sometimes stayed for dinner, which was held in the big oak-paneled dining room with all the family. It seemed to me that Alice looked like a queen as she sat at the head of the huge oak table smiling down at her children. The four oldest children, who were twelve, eleven, nine and seven, had to help set the table and clear off. The two youngest ones had to sit up straight and eat as politely as they could or they were banished to a lonely meal in the kitchen. We never stayed after dinner; then Alice turned from queen into general and directed the table clearing, dish doing, floor sweeping, homework preparing, baths, storytime, and bed. She did it all so beautifully and elegantly that it never occurred to me to think that it could be hard work.
Alice was beautiful, her house was beautiful, and her children especially were beautiful. The oldest boy played the guitar and sang; the oldest girl was doing very well in ballet; the second son took piano and played as well as an adult and intended to go to conservatory; the second daughter could draw and paint. The two youngest children were simply very clever and very cute.
The youngest child, a girl named Vanessa, but called Nessie, was my favorite. She liked me because I always brought treats. She was just three, with great blue eyes and curly black hair. She wore her older sibling’s cast-off clothes and looked like a charming Raggedy Ann doll. One stormy winter day I sat snuggled in a window seat off the kitchen, reading Nessie a story. She was curled up against me with her old soft blanket clutched in her hand; she was almost falling asleep. The doorbell rang and Alice went to answer it, and brought back into the kitchen a young woman who had just moved into a house across the street. Alice had asked her over for tea.
“This is a friend of mine, Zelda Campbell,” Alice said, introducing us, “and that is Nessie.”
“She’s beautiful,” the new neighbor said, looking at me, talking to me. “And she looks just like you.”
“Why, she does, doesn’t she!” Alice laughed. “Zelda, she could be yours. You’ve got the same curly black hair! But actually,” she said, turning to the new woman, “Nessie’s mine. My youngest.”
The women laughed, and we went on talking and Nessie fell asleep. Alice came over and lifted Nessie out of my arms to take her up to nap in her bed. I wanted to cry out at the loss of the sweet warm weight of the little girl who looked like me. I thought: someone thinks I could have a child. I could have a child. I could have a little girl of my own. I want a little girl of my own! I was so agitated and excited and upset that I could scarcely keep my wits about me the rest of the afternoon. When I returned to our rented house, it seemed empty and lonely and dull.
The rest of the semester seemed like a war to me, and I was both sides and the battleground. I didn’t tell Charlie about my feelings, I told no one. I was ashamed of wanting to have a child. It seemed an enormous weakness on my part, as if I were admitting that I wasn’t enough for myself. I thought that every other woman in the world simply got pregnant by accident, that I was the only woman in the world wrestling with such a choice. I thought I was losing my mind, that my wanting to have a child was the same as admitting to be a failure as a professional person. I began to hate myself for wanting to have a child.
Christmas was the hardest time. We were invited to spend Christmas Eve with Alice and her family. The great Victorian house had been built for Christmastime, and the six children had decorated it in every corner. The Christmas tree was at least eleven feet high and almost hidden behind the sparkling lights and handmade decorations. We all sat around eating pastries and cookies and drinking laced eggnog, and the older children played Christmas carols on the guitar or piano, and then they all sang carols together in front of the fire—for Christmas Eve they were allowed in the living room. They opened the presents Charlie and I had given them, and said thank you, then were bustled off to bed.
“They’ll be up at six to see what Santa brought,” Alice grinned.
Charlie helped Alice’s husband put a little bicycle together while Alice and I kept watch to be sure no children were sneaking back downstairs.
That night Charlie and I walked home in the snow, and I began to cry, and couldn’t stop, and couldn’t tell him why.
I felt as sad and relieved to leave Michigan at the end of the semester as a weight watcher leaving a pastry shop. Each day I was there I felt tempted toward something that I thought was intrinsically wrong and bad for me. I was glad to start my PhD work back in Kansas City, and I was grateful that it was difficult and time-consuming. I told myself that I was going to be an interesting career woman, not a boring mother. I was afraid of becoming like Adelaide: dependent on children, feeling significant to the world because of them, void and helpless when they were gone. I did not want to be that way. I told myself repeatedly that I was crazy to think of it—of having a child of my own. But sometimes on spring evenings as I worked late in the library digging up my little clusters of obscure and useless facts, I wondered what I was doing with all that dusty dead stuff when what I wanted was life.
It all got even more confusing that summer, the fourth summer the girls came. Caroline was thirteen, and had braces, and Cathy was ten, and gawky and trying to act like her older sister, who had wondrously become a teenager. Both girls were interested in horror movies and clothes and rock music and competitive sports, and I was glad to drop my studies for a while in order to take them to horror movies and shopping and swimming and riding. Charlie was finishing up his book; that summer the girls spent more time with me than with him. The girls seemed to relax with me that summer, and we began to enjoy each other.
We began to share jokes.
CAROLINE: Do you know why the Dairy Queen got pregnant?
ZELDA: No. Why?
CAROLINE: Because the Burger King couldn’t handle his Whopper.
ZELDA: Caroline! You’re only thirteen!
Mad hysterical fits of laughter.
We began to share likes and dislikes.
CATHY: Which movie did you like best?
ZELDA: The Claw of the Cat.
CATHY: Me, too. It was scariest of all. I loved the part where they found the hand.
And we began to share memories. That was very nice, sharing memories.
CAROLINE: Is Liza getting old?
ZELDA: No, not really, she’s only ten.
CAROLINE: Well, she seems old. It seems like I’ve been riding her forever. It’s just like sitting on a big ol’ comfortable grandmother’s lap. I can really trust her. And I can remember that first summer, how scared I was of her, how afraid I was to ride.
ZELDA: Yes, I always felt bad about making you ride, because I knew you were afraid. But I wanted you to learn. I knew you’d like it when you had learned.
CAROLINE: Yeah, it was funny. I hated you when you made me get on the horse, but once I was up there I was glad you had made me. Sometimes I liked you for it while I hated you for it, you know?
ZELDA: Yeah, I know.
And we began to share hopes for the future.
CATHY: Zelda, we all aren’t driving back to Maine this summer again, are we?
ZELDA: No, darn it, we’re not. I wish we could, but Charlie’s got to teach this summer, and he’s got to get that damned book finished.
CATHY: Well, maybe we can go next summer. I’d love to go to the beach again. And we could all go eat at that neat lobster place!
It had happened. By the fourth summer I had been accepted, or assimilated, or something. I was part of their lives. We could share things. We could talk.
They were turning from children into pretty girls. They were clever and bright and imaginative. Caroline showed me how to do simple macramé. Cathy, who was good at sports, began to beat me at swimming races. They were beginning to add things to my life. And when they left at the end of that fourth summer, I missed them. I missed them very much. They had told me about their friends, their projects, their fears, their desires. I found myself wanting to know how it all worked out: did Caroline get the good grade-seven teacher or the bad one? Was Cathy invited to rich Jennifer’s birthday party? Suddenly the world was filled with things I wanted to share with the girls—movies, music, clothes, puzzles, jokes, games. I thought of them every day after they left. I remembered what rich pleasure it had been that summer, giving them things, how it had been as if I were giving myself presents because I enjoyed their pleasure so much. More and more my PhD studies and professors seemed dry and dull and insignificant. I had to force myself to leave the summer, to enter the fall.
Charlie, on the other hand, was plunging deeper and deeper into his work. He had finished all his little projects, and the book he had co-authored with the other historian was now at the publishers’. Charlie was starting another book—his book—which he had been collecting information and notes on for years. Everything other than The Book became a distraction for him. He taught and attended committees dutifully, then rushed back to his study at home. We had books and note cards all over the house, we read constantly, and spent less and less time at the farm, or eating out, or seeing friends. We worked. Charlie was past happiness; he was absorbed in his work. But I was lonely, and grew lonelier every day. I missed teaching very much. I often walked slowly by the classrooms, listening to other instructors explain metaphor or syllogisms, and I yearned to be there, in a classroom full of scratching, yawning, gum-chewing, note-taking kids. Instead I had the library, with its silent heavy books, or my house, decorated with piles of white note cards.
Adelaide had called several times that summer, but not so frantically, and once Charlie agreed to pay the bill for both Caroline’s and Cathy’s orthodontic work she stopped calling him completely. For once a fall passed without letters from her threatening to go to court. The girls had said very little about her that fourth summer, just that Adelaide was taking a vacation in Maine with a woman friend, and that she was taking a few craft classes, and that she wasn’t dating at all. The girls were very happy that she wasn’t dating. The three of them had moved into a small colonial house, and little by little were making it their home, and that made them all very happy, planning curtains and carpets and wallpaper and mirrors and such.
The first week in September that the girls were gone, I wrote them a letter. I almost couldn’t help myself; I missed them. Still, I didn’t say that; I didn’t want anyone to get sad or mad. Two weeks later I was shocked to find a letter for me from Caroline. It was a long, newsy, silly, sweet letter; Caroline was warmer in correspondence than in person. I noticed that Adelaide had put the return address on and I smiled: so Adelaide had accepted me, too. To “Mrs. Zelda Campbell,” from “Mrs. Adelaide Campbell.” How funny. After that I wrote Caroline and Cathy about once a week, sending clippings from cartoons, jokes, and sometimes a tiny present, a dollar, or a little ring. I looked forward to Caroline’s letters. She was a sensitive girl, I thought, always asking questions of herself or of me.
Whenever I listen to music, I’m happy. It’s like being in a hot bathtub after a rainy day, I feel so warm and content. I love the Beatles, and I think I would die for them. I would give up all my possessions just to talk to John Lennon for one hour. Why do I feel this way? I think sometimes I love the Beatles more than I love Cathy or Mother or anybody. Isn’t that strange? And I’m supposed to love God, but I think church is so boring. I feel closer to God listening to the Beatles than in church. I wonder why this is. Do you know? It’s really embarrassing in a way, how warm and happy the Beatles make me feel. I think I must feel like adults do when they’re drinking wine.
I always answered Caroline as well as I could, and I sent Cathy little letters each time I wrote Caroline. I didn’t want to seem to like Caroline more, even though secretly of course I did. I kept reminding myself that Cathy was younger and not interested in writing letters yet, that she was a different person.
The fall semester passed slowly. The spring semester came. Nothing changed. The year clicked over; it was 1969. I wrote letters to Charlie’s girls and waited for their letters, and wrote Alice and waited for her letters, and read books and wrote papers and waited for my professors’ remarks. Charlie buried himself in his study, and when he came out it was to ask me to read and criticize the latest chapter of his book. The few friends I made at the university were graduate students, too, fighting the same battles I was fighting: when we talked, we talked about literature. My world seemed made of words. Printed words. All life seemed like chapters from books, overheard conversation seemed like dialogue. I couldn’t look at a person without finding his twin in some literary work; I couldn’t look at the countryside without trying to find the perfect words to describe it. When I slept at night I dreamed of my papers, of footnotes, bibliographies, indented quotes, words in rows. Sentences rearranged themselves in my head. I cooked absentmindedly, reading a book with one hand while stirring with the other, and it didn’t matter, for we ate absentmindedly, uninterested in our food. Our Christmas vacation was spent on the farm, and our one escape from words was to ride the horses. But as soon as we entered the house, we saw the books and papers we had brought down with us, and we made a big fire and weak drinks and settled down to work again.
I was doing well. I was getting the best grades, the best remarks from my professors. I was doing what I had dreamed of doing all my life, and I was doing it well, and I was miserable beyond the reach of all those words at my command. A year had passed since I had seen Alice and her children, yet I thought of them every day. Alice and I wrote to each other often, and occasionally she included in her letters photos or a splashy bright painting made by one of her children for me. I would tape it to a mirror or the refrigerator door, and it would bring back to me vividly the laughter, the noise, the caressing and cuddling, the sheer good busyness of life which was a part of Alice’s world and not a part of mine. I began to apply images of barrenness and sterility to myself. I would read Eliot’s words, “ridiculous the waste sad time,” and think of myself as a pale sad half-moon, curving emptily around nothing, drained instead of filled. When I saw pregnant women on the street I stared with envy and amazement: how could they have done it? Did they choose it? How did it feel to be so full, to carry another life? I would look away, ashamed. When I saw little babies in their mothers’ baskets at the grocery store I would stare, dumbfounded at the size, wondering how it would feel to hold something so very small in my arms. When I visited Linda and saw little Dina, who walked and talked now, and cooed and babbled when she saw me, who was all soft pink flesh and immediacy, I felt nearly sick with longing. Sometimes, when I was very sad or tired, I would let myself indulge in the ultimate forbidden delight: I would imagine a child, a real child of mine and Charlie’s, a child who would cuddle against me, a child who would hold my hand.
I did not understand what was going on. Had instinctual desire to reproduce suddenly risen within me like a yeast bread? If so, how base, how animalistic. I had to fight it off. I told myself that my feelings were temporary. I told myself that I would absolutely not give in to them. I took my birth control pill with fanatical regularity. I told no one, not even Charlie, of my feelings. I knew that what I wanted was ridiculous, unnecessary, senseless; I could not think of one good logical reason for having a child. Yet I wanted one with all my heart, every day.
I had my pride and the Pill as weapons against myself; I decided they weren’t enough. I got a cat. A beautiful Siamese chocolate point. I named him Jami, after a Persian poet, and Charlie enjoyed Jami, too. He was an intelligent and a playful animal, and he entertained us and gave us a break from our work, and gave me something to love and to buy little treats for. I bought him a basket and wove blue ribbons in and around the wicker and tied a blue bow on top; he soon tore the bow to shreds. He slept on my lap when I read, he greeted me at the door when I came home. He rubbed against my ankles or arms when I cried, and when I looked into his face I only cried the more because he was a sweet cuddly creature but an animal, with whiskers and crossed eyes.
Finally the spring semester ended and the summer began. I was amazed at the joy I felt when the semester ended and at the relief I felt when I said, “No, I won’t be taking courses this summer. Charlie’s girls are coming again for two months. I’ve got to play stepmother. Charlie’s almost through with The Book—he’s got to work on it this summer.”
I spent hours planning special events for the summer, hours looking at children’s clothes which I eventually didn’t buy, not knowing Caroline’s and Cathy’s sizes after a year’s growth, hours looking at card games and toys. The night before Charlie’s daughters arrived it finally hit me: boom. I was putting a huge stuffed teddy bear on each bed, a surprise for the girls. How happy they would be, I thought, when they saw the bright cuddly bears. I grinned in anticipation. I looked at the big stuffed bears. And knew—boom—what I was doing. I was acting as if Charlie’s daughters were mine. I was making myself happy through them.
Jami wandered in and rubbed against my leg. I sat down on the bed and picked him up and stroked him.
“Is it a crime?” I asked him. “Is it, Jami? Whom am I hurting? What am I doing wrong?”
Sitting there, I remembered that whenever people used to ask me, “Do you have any children?” I had laughed and said, “Heavens, no, and I don’t want any! I’ve got too many other things I want to do!” But now when someone asked I always said, “Not yet, though I do have two stepdaughters.”
“This is terrible, Jami, terrible,” I said. “I think I’m going nuts. I’ll take those damned bears back to the store and use the money to buy that set of critical essays I’ve been wanting.” But I didn’t.
I played with the girls all that summer of ’69. They were suddenly perfect ages; fourteen and eleven; old enough to take care of themselves, dress themselves, enjoy the same museums and concerts and movies and jokes, yet young enough not to worry about being seen in public with adults. Charlie finished his book that summer and took us all to Colorado for two weeks. We rode horses and swam and hiked mountain trails and laughed in the exhilarating mountain air. Somehow, subtly, without announcing it, we had become two pairs: Charlie and Cathy; Caroline and me. Cathy at eleven was still gawky in the way a prizewinning show horse is gawky as a filly. Her lines and instincts were good. She adored Charlie and held his hand almost constantly. If he went to the garage to see about tires, she went. If he went to the post office to pick up a package, she went. She stayed up late at night, sitting by his side on the sofa, sitting in my former spot, curled against him, reading. Twice every half hour she would say, “Can I get you anything, Dad? Tea? A glass of water? Some cake? A brandy?” When the mail came, Cathy ran to get it from the box and brought it all to Charlie eagerly; if she’d been a dog, she would have wagged her tail and drooled. When the four of us played Parcheesi, she never captured or blockaded Charlie, she tried to help him win. She was forever praising him, complimenting his clothes or hair or laughing at his slightest joke. Watching her, I felt both amused and saddened: she was acting just as I had acted when I first met and married Charlie, and I didn’t act that way anymore. I couldn’t—I had changed. I was so torn, so almost maddened, by my desire to have a child and my desire not to want one that I lived in a state of fury every day. Yet Charlie never guessed this; worse, he never did what I longed and longed for him to do: he never said, “Zelda, I can’t stand it anymore. I want to have a baby with you. I want you to have my child.” The fact that Charlie didn’t long for the same thing I longed for, the fact that he didn’t even guess at my raging subterranean desire, made me feel a real and sudden separation. We were not one person after all; we were two. We were separated from each other deeply. We were alone. It was frightening. I did not know then how in the course of a marriage, over a stretch of years and years, two people can ebb and flow together, ebb and flow in closeness and then in isolation, yet never really part. I knew I loved Charlie; I knew he loved me. We were still happy with each other in our daily lives. Yet I was lonely. There was something I wanted him to know, something he did not guess and I could not bring myself to say.
So I played elaborate card games with Caroline, and Caroline and I read biographies of famous people and discussed them. We sat reading in silence while Cathy chattered to Charlie. On the farm Charlie drove the tractor with Cathy standing on next to him; Caroline took Charlie’s horse and went off riding with me.
That summer I knew I loved Caroline. With her braces and her skinny angular height—she was now as tall as I—and her philosophical curiosities, she seemed marvelously dear and precious to me. It was already obvious that when boys flirted, they flirted with Cathy, not with Caroline; Caroline did not have that winsome instinctive way of charming boys that Cathy had. She tripped when she was near boys her age, or dove into four feet of water and hit her head on the pool bottom, or spilled her Coke, or if she did nothing wrong she still didn’t manage to look up at the boys the way Cathy did, like an ingénue vamp, raising the eyelashes so slowly, letting a slight smile slip out so tantalizingly. Even when Cathy was eleven, boys gave her things; they always would. They couldn’t help themselves. But they barely looked at Caroline back then, and Caroline seemed to shrink inside her clothes when she came near a boy. I wanted to protect her. She was so bright, so sensitive—and in a few years, I knew, and she could not believe, she would be beautiful.
The night before the girls left that summer, Caroline and I sat up late, talking. Or rather, Caroline talked. She told me about her friends in Massachusetts, and her clothes, and all the items in her room, and her records, and the plots of all the books she’d read, and all the movies she’d ever seen. She didn’t want to go to bed because then she would wake up and leave, but she couldn’t say that to me, and I doubt that she could say it even to herself.
There was a tension in the air between us, a feeling of longing and need, of things left unsaid. Caroline was not the kind of girl who could say the simple basic phrases; she was saying everything else that came into her head.
“Caroline”—I finally interrupted her—“I’m going to miss you so much. Do you think you would ever want to come live with me and Charlie?”
“Me and Charlie,” instead of “your father and me.” It was an impulsive question.
“Oh, gosh, oh, uh,” Caroline said. “Yeah, of course, but you know—my mother—”
“How’s your mother doing? She hasn’t called much this summer.”
“Well, she’s good, you know, really good. She’s taking a course in sailing this summer at the Cape with Irene; that’s her best friend. And she’s really happy with her job. She’s the assistant to the Registrar now; good job, good money, big deal, you know. I mean she’s pretty happy usually. She’s calmer. But I don’t know about leaving her. I mean are you serious you’d want me to come live here? And Dad wants me, too? This is a real invitation?”
“Oh, Caroline, you know you and Cathy have always been welcome to live here with us, always, at any time.” As I spoke, I remembered the early years, when I would have been absolutely dismayed at the idea of the girls living with us. No, they had not always been welcome, not by me. Perhaps they had known that, had sensed that, as children do sense the unsaid things. But things were different now, had been different for some time, and I wanted to announce the change, to make things clear. I wanted to say the words aloud. “We love you, Caroline. You don’t need an invitation to live here. We want you to be with us. But we don’t want to upset—things—or to interfere or cause trouble. I feel bad even now asking you because I know your mother wouldn’t be overjoyed, and I don’t want to cause your mother problems. But I love you so much and enjoy you so much and miss you so much when you’re gone, and I know Charlie does, too— Caroline, don’t cry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I wish I hadn’t said anything—”
“I wish I could live here. I’d like that a lot, I think. But it would kill Mom. And I’d miss Cathy too much. She would love to live with Dad, you know. But we can’t leave Mom. I mean we want to live with her, too. She’s our mother.”
“Caroline, don’t cry. Really. I’m so sorry I mentioned it. Listen, let’s go make some popcorn and watch the late movie and then go to bed.”
We made popcorn and ate it as we watched some old black-and-white movies and we went to bed about two-thirty in the morning. At four, Cathy came into our room.
“Daddy? Can you wake up? Caroline’s got those stomach pains.”
Caroline was lying in her bed, twisting and moaning, her hands pressed over her stomach just below her chest. Tiny lumps of breasts stuck up under her summer pajamas. Tears were running down her face. Her pillow was wet.
“It’s those goddamned stomach pains again,” she said.
“We’ll get you a doctor,” Charlie said.
“A doctor won’t help. Nothing helps these bastards. You guys go on. I didn’t mean to wake you up. They’ll stop pretty soon, they always do stop after a while. Go back to sleep.”
“We ate popcorn about midnight—” I said to Charlie. I wasn’t brave enough to tell him I’d asked Caroline to live with us.
“It’s not popcorn,” Charlie said. “Cathy, you go get in bed with Zelda. I’ll sit here and hold Caroline. Come on, honey, I haven’t held you for a long time. I’ll rub your back; maybe that will help.”
So we ended the summer strangely. Charlie sat up into the morning, holding poor big Caroline, who finally slept, and Cathy sprawled peacefully in the double bed beside me. And I lay awake on my half of the double bed, feeling guilty and bad and sick at heart. I vowed never to ask Caroline to live with us again, never to put her in such an emotional bind.
The next day Caroline was all right and the girls left on schedule. When they left I didn’t cry, not at the airport. But later that night, in the privacy of the bathroom, running bathwater to hide my noise, I sat in the tub and bawled. Caroline wasn’t my child, she could never be my child. She was Charlie’s child, and Adelaide’s child, and she belonged to them. My position was less intimate, less important; I would forever be something perhaps a bit more valuable than a favorite aunt. Caroline had a mother and a home, and it had been cruel and selfish of me to suggest she leave it. I had been confused and wrong to think she could live with us. And, in a way, I had been immoral and opportunistic. I had wanted to use Caroline to fill a need in me. It was true that I loved her, true that I would have loved having her live with us. But I had let that clean, clear love become entwined with my own physiological greed. I will never know if having a stepchild live with me would have stopped my raving desire for a child of my own, but I think I still would not have been satisfied. I think that seeing Caroline every day would have made me long even more for a daughter of my own.
I wanted a daughter of my own. I wanted to watch my own child grow and develop, to become pretty, sensitive, interesting. I wanted to guide my own child, to be indispensable. I wanted someone to say of me, with that total unfathomable security and significance, “She’s my mother.”
I didn’t want to be only a stepmother.
I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to have a child.
Instead I had my PhD work. It was fall again, I had courses to take again, and it all meant nothing to me. I hated it. I hated my books, my papers, my schedule. Charlie had finally finished his book and was feeling gay and light. He wanted to go dancing and drinking and driving in the autumn to see the colors of the leaves. He couldn’t understand why I was acting so dull, so leaden, so confused.
One day he said to me over breakfast, “Zelda. You’ve changed.”
I said, “I know. I feel so—heavy. Boring. Bored. I want—” I was afraid to say it outright. “I want some life in my life.” I thought that at last Charlie would miraculously understand and say, “Oh yes, Zelda, I know what you mean. We should have a child.”
Instead he said, “You’re tired of the work, I know. All PhD students go through this. I remember—”
“Charlie”—I interrupted him, I could hold back no longer, I nearly yelled it—“I want to have a baby.”
Charlie could only stare at me, his knife and fork raised in the air beside him in surprise. Then, “What in the world?” he said. “Where did you ever get that idea?”
“It’s not an idea that I got!” I said. “It’s a feeling inside me that I can’t push away. It’s—it’s like a passion, like falling in love.”
“Oh, Zelda darling; oh, Zelda. You don’t know what you’re saying. A baby—I’m forty-one. I can’t spend the rest of my life raising children. Honey, you don’t know. Babies aren’t just sweet cuddly things. They ruin your body and screw up your sex life and change your whole life forever. Nothing is ever the same again. You’re bright, Zelda, you’ve got a future. You don’t want to waste it. If you drop out after all this work—”
“I won’t have to stop. I can do it all. One little baby wouldn’t be much work. Babies sleep a lot. I could have babysitters. I—”
“Zelda, you just don’t know. You’d have one baby, and then you’d decide that an only child would be too lonely and you’d have another. And little babies do not sleep all the time. They would be sick the night before an exam. They would get hurt the day you have to turn in a paper. Babies demand everything of you, everything. There would be nothing left for your work; nothing left for you and me.”
“I would make space for you and my work. I’d have a babysitter.”
“Babysitters cost money.”
“Well, then, I’d work.”
“You’d work and take courses for your PhD and write your thesis and take care of a baby and run this house and be with me?”
“You weren’t with me very much this past year. You were always with your book.”
“But that’s over now. I’m with you now. It took just one year. A baby would take up the rest of our lives. Years without any letup. Zelda, I don’t want any children. I just want you.”
“But you can say that only because you already have children. I don’t.”
“Caroline and Cathy spend as much time with you as they do with me.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean the same. You are their father. You are connected to them. I’m not. You matter. I don’t. They look like you. They’re a part of you. I want a child to look like me, to be a part of me. I want to nurse a baby and guide a child and teach her about flowers and horses and poetry. I want to sew mother-daughter dresses, God dammit. I want to have someone special in this world. I want to do the normal, traditional, conventional thing. I want to be a mother.”
“I never thought I’d hear you talk like this, Zelda.”
“I never thought I’d feel like this. It’s worse than wanting to fall madly in love when you’re only twelve. I’m really longing for a child of my own.”
“Look, let’s do this, just finish your PhD and try teaching one year. You are so close. You’ve wanted it so much. When we were first married, that was all you wanted—your PhD, your teaching, and me. It will take you just a while longer to finish it. Finish it. Then see how you feel about having a baby. You’re young, after all. You’ve already come so far. And you know how you love teaching, how you miss it now. Think of how you would miss it if you had to give it up entirely.”
I knew rationally that Charlie was right, although underneath it all I was sobbing and tearing my hair. I agreed to finish my PhD first. I continued to faithfully, furiously take my Pill, but I prayed every night that it wouldn’t work.
For nine more months I worked on my PhD; I wished I were using those nine months to grow a baby. All that long fall and winter and spring I wandered about the university feeling lonely and bored, calculating just how many semesters, days, hours, it would be before I could get my PhD and then get pregnant. Suddenly, insanely, my PhD seemed only an obstacle in the way of what I really wanted. I appreciated the ridiculous irony of it all, but I couldn’t help myself. My body had taken over with its deep, fierce craving, and it seemed that I spent my days wrestling myself through the world. I became nervous and jumpy and absentminded and sensitive. I longed for magic.
I finished my fifth semester of PhD work and most of the sixth year of my marriage in the spring of 1970. I was twenty-seven. I felt old. I felt stale. I felt bored. I felt like a princess who wanted to become a frog. By the end of May, I had managed to totally bind my ability to make decisions in irrational ribbons of desire and despair. I should have known it was a classic intellectual disease: too much thinking, not enough sheer pure acts. I wanted a baby, but I was unable to make the choice to have one. One late spring night I approached Charlie about it again. I was timid, irritable. I wanted him to read my mind, to make the decision for me.
“Charlie,” I said, rolling a pebble from our patio in my hands, “I have to talk to you. I think I’m going crazy. I can’t continue my PhD work. It means nothing to me anymore. Surely you’ve noticed how I’ve changed; this last semester was awful for me. My mind is tired—”
“Zelda,” Charlie said, “I know. Listen, I have some news. I didn’t want to tell you until I had it all arranged and confirmed. I didn’t want to raise your hopes and then disappoint you. But the official letter came today. Did you see the champagne I bought? We’ll celebrate tonight. Zelda, you can take a year off and rest your poor sweet tired mind. My love, we’re going to France. I’ve been asked to be visiting professor next year at the Sorbonne.”
The Sorbonne. Paris. France. Europe. Magic words. I had longed to live in Paris, and now Charlie was giving me the opportunity. I squashed my desires into as small a package as I could make and carried them to France with me, like an invisible, unwieldy, extra set of luggage, like a pair of kittens pushing at the sides of a soft basket, mewing to get out, always there, bouncing and bumping at my side. But I went. We spent a blurred, scurried summer entertaining Charlie’s girls, interviewing people to rent our house, talking with travel bureaus and other friends who had lived in Europe and wanted to give us necessary advice, buying clothes and prescription drugs, practicing our French.
For once the girls were not the stars of our summertime, and this bothered them; when we told them we needed to send them back to Massachusetts early so that we could pack and get the house cleaned, they seemed relieved. We had asked them if they wanted to come to France, for any length of time at all, and they said that they very much did want to come. But Adelaide quickly ruled out any possibility of that: she said that if Charlie had enough money to buy them plane fares to and from Europe, he certainly had enough money to pay off their orthodontist bill immediately, or to give her some extra money for improvements on their house, which after all would do the girls more long-lasting good than a short trip.… We let the idea drop. We packed our bags, our boxes of books and note cards, and went with all our luggage, real and psychological, to France.
Many things might make one forget the desire for babies, but a year in France is not one of them. Charlie and I found a small cheap apartment on rue de la Rochefoucauld, and we bought a small white Fiat 850, and when Charlie wasn’t teaching we were in the Fiat, driving to Switzerland or Germany or different parts of France. When he was teaching, I made trips to museums and cathedrals and learned how to cook rabbit and sat in cafés, drinking and talking with friends. I drank an awful lot of wine, and read Balzac and Stendhal in French, thinking I was improving my mind, and memorized unnecessary facts about de Gaulle and Fouquet, and sat in le Jardin du Luxembourg, feeding pigeons, and wrote lots of letters and sent lots of presents back to Caroline and Cathy. I bought Christian Dior underwear for myself, and all sorts of expensive perfume, and several thousand postcards. And every day when Charlie was teaching, I lay on my bed sobbing and digging my fingernails into my arms. I hated myself for it, but France in all its beauty was not what I wanted; it was not sufficient. While walking through the great gardens of Versailles, I would think, Yes, yes, it’s beautiful, but all these statues are dead and I’m alive. I can create something beautiful, and alive, too. I began to resent Charlie for denying me what I wanted most—his child.
Paris became a blur. I was either drunk or crying. All the beauty and excess of the place stirred me up, but perhaps anything would have then. In March a graduate student sent me a list of critical books he thought I should be reading so that I could keep up with my work. I went to the William Smith bookstore, near the Place de la Concorde, and found a few of the books and went back to my apartment to settle down to work. For some reason bells were ringing that day, and their sounds moved through me as though I were made of air. Charlie was teaching and I was alone in our troisième étage flat. Something was simmering in wine on the stove, and I had a glass of wine at the little table I used for a desk. I felt lonely and incompetent and useless and drunkenly morose. The essays I was trying to read were stuffy and petty, and I suddenly knew with the wisdom that wine drunk in the afternoon brings that I couldn’t stand to read another essay. I felt I had to do something drastic and dramatic to clench my decision, so I went out on our tiny balcony and began tearing out the pages from the book of essays. I let them float and fly, one by one, down to the street below. After a while people began to look up at me, after a while the pages were badly littering the street, but I didn’t care. I didn’t stop until all the nice new pages of the books were torn out and set free. Then I went back into the apartment and fell onto the bed and slept. When I woke up I remembered that I had been drunk and wasted money and acted foolishly, but I also remembered my decision, and I knew I would not change my mind. When Charlie came home that night, I told him that I had to have a baby or I would leave him and find a new husband/father. Charlie said all right, since those were his choices, we would have a baby, although he was afraid it would ruin everything between us.
* * *
And after all, perhaps it has. After all. Now, early in November, here in Helsinki, Charlie’s been gone almost a week to lecture at various universities in Germany. Before Adam and Lucy, I would have gone with him. We would have enjoyed seeing a new town together, tasting new food, making love in new rooms and beds. But now, with four of us, it is too expensive and I really couldn’t enjoy it anyway, dragging my two little ones from railway station to small hotel in the cold November rain. I wouldn’t be able to go dining and drinking with Charlie and his friends; the children are too young to be left with a strange babysitter every night, and they don’t go to sleep before nine, so I wouldn’t be able to slip off down to the bar or restaurant, as I did when Adam was just a baby. They are too young to appreciate Germany, and the hotel rooms would have nothing to occupy them. And there would be all the paraphernalia, diapers and diaper liners, bottles and nipples and caps, clothes and love blankets and toys. No. I could not go this time.
My babysitter has just called to say she cannot come to babysit tomorrow, after all, so I will not be able to go out to meet Charlie’s plane when he returns. Before the children I met every plane that Charlie returned on. I would laugh and cry with joy to see him so big and real again, and we would come home and throw off our clothes and make love, and then eat and drink and discuss his trip and my week, and then we would make love again. Now I won’t be able to meet his plane—and we won’t be able to make love when he gets here. We won’t be able to eat and drink and relax and talk. Adam and Lucy will be mad with delight to see him again, and they’ll climb all over him and insist on sitting on his lap and climbing up his leg and having pony rides and showing him all seven million pictures they painted and drew this gloomy wet week. If Charlie and I try to talk for a long time, they’ll become jealous and feel ignored and go crazy. I don’t hate them for this, my children. I understand how they feel. They are in a strange country, away from friends and toys and Sesame Street and the comfort of their cozy rooms. They can’t remember the past or dream of the future to help them make it through the present. Now to them is a cold gray linoleum floor and a big window full of cold gray sky and electrical power lines and construction cranes hanging deadly in the air. Now is a season of harsh weather and frozen sand and the swings removed from the playground so that their hands won’t stick to the icy metal rungs. Now is having no little friends to giggle with and no safe secret place to hide and no granola bars. They need the comfort of my smile and touch and lap. I cannot bear for them to be unhappy for long. For a few minutes, yes, but not for hours, not for days.
When I gave birth to Adam and Lucy, I changed. It was as if when they were inside my body they had reached up and literally torn off a piece of my heart and my stomach and swallowed them, so that they now carry a part of me everywhere with them. I am linked to them by something more physically real and less scientifically observable than laser beams or remote control. They are small creatures, but I love them hugely, more than I love the earth or myself. More than I love Charlie. There it is. My children have become my lovers. I am finally unfaithful to my husband. Their smooth, fresh, rounded plump limbs are juicier and more delicious than Charlie’s. I fondle them more. Their eyes are brighter, their breath sweeter. They gave me an understanding of life at their birth that Charlie had never been able to reveal to me; they connected me up to something deep and wide and wild and good in this world. Their births gave me the shocking great knowledge that I could eat grass, dance in trees, fall from roofs, and dissolve into shimmering molecules of sparkling snow. Their births made me know that I was grabbing death and tearing it in half and washing it away with my warm proud blood. When I took their naked perfect bodies in my arms, I felt ecstasy and content. Now, four and two years later, that hot exhausted joy is over, but the strength of feeling remains. I press their bodies against mine and kiss them and stroke them more than I do Charlie. They surprise me more than Charlie does; they are more extravagant and lustful and ferocious in their love. After we have known each other for thirteen years, I am sure my children and I will be less hot and vivid in our relations with each other. Undoubtedly I will be more rational. But until then, at least for a few more years, I will continue to wade through this life with my little children as if I were wading through a vat of hot, sticky, sweet chocolate: the chocolate impedes me, slows me down, often irritates me, but I still stay here, happy in the hot thick gooey mess, licking sweetness off my fingers and arms and belly.
Charlie needs only what he has always needed: me as a companion and lover and live-in friend. I need more. I need my children, and I need a lover and live-in friend, and now I know I need to teach. Charlie wants only one thing, or perhaps two, counting his work; he does always want his work. But I want three things: him, my children, and my work. I want three things. Suppose I can have only two? I realize more and more, as I live out my time here in Helsinki, that as a woman, an American woman, I am spoiled. I have many luxuries, many electrical conveniences and psychological freedoms. And yes, when I think of it, I feel guilty, and yes, I would change it if I could. I would like for the whole world to be in a better balance. I know I do want everything—husband, children, work, harmonious complications. I seem to myself a bit greedy. Or is that old-fashioned thinking; am I trying to protect myself from the responsibility of a decision? After all, I must go home sometime, and I really don’t see how my not teaching can help anyone else. How tangled my thinking is, yet certain lights are beginning to shine through.
* * *
But after all, I didn’t make the decision in Paris. That day in the spring of 1971 when I got drunk and threw the essays out of the window and told Charlie I would leave him if I couldn’t have a child passed. The next day I received a letter in the mail and ran to Charlie, crying, “Cancel yesterday! Forget everything I said!”
A former professor of mine had just become the new head of the English department at a small junior college. He was writing to ask if I would be interested in teaching freshman English and literature full-time the coming year. He had always been impressed with my teaching, he wrote, and hoped I could join his department. He didn’t care whether or not I had finished my PhD.
I went mad with joy. Charlie was pleased. I accepted.
That summer when we returned from France was a totally happy one. Charlie and I scarcely had time to unpack before his daughters arrived. Caroline was sixteen now and a serious reader; Cathy was thirteen and a teenager. Cathy had braces now, too, and both girls glittered and flashed when they smiled, if they didn’t remember to hide their mouths with their hands like timid Japanese. Charlie was working on a paper, but it didn’t consume all his time. I was busy getting together my stuff for the fall. I was so excited by the prospect of teaching again after three years away from it that I prepared more lesson plans, diagrams, exercises, jokes, quizzes, and reading material than I could possibly have used. I read and reread the grammar book and the anthology of literature. While driving to the grocery store or dentist I would imagine my first day in class, and my second and my third. What would I say? How could I inspire them? How could I make them love the language?
I asked Caroline a thousand times for her opinion. She was very bright and helpful. She read some of the short stories and discussed them with me. We spent a lot of time in the backyard in our shorts and halter tops, with our bare feet in the water of the little lily pond and books in our hands and a pad of paper next to me and a pencil behind my ear. How beautiful Caroline was then, even with her braces and the short chopped hair she had appeared with that summer. She was slender to the point of skinniness, all ribs and elbows, but her hair was the thick silver-lighted gold that Charlie had; it gleamed when she turned her head. She looked, in fact, as Charlie would have if he had been a girl. She was still shy, still reserved, she still could not easily touch anyone. She always kept a space between herself and others, as if contact might cause pain. Except for that one characteristic she was a normal, happy girl, and to me, a friend.
Cathy still adored her father, still followed him everywhere. When he was working and Caroline and I were reading, she did elaborate jigsaw puzzles or macramé, or she sewed. Usually, if we weren’t at the farm, or swimming, she was off with her girlfriend Nicole. Caroline had let her neighborhood friendships lapse and seemed to prefer staying with me, but Cathy flew out of the house every morning after breakfast to go to Nicole’s house. They preferred Nicole’s house to ours because Nicole had older brothers and their house was full of current rock records going full blast and fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys. Charlie thought Nicole was rather dumb and dippy, too silly and boy-crazy for thirteen, but he didn’t interfere with Cathy. Instead he spent more time with her, trying to get her interested in other things: art, classical music, history, watercolor painting. Still, that summer Cathy seemed to be nothing more than a giggler, flashing out the door, letting it slam behind her.
One week it rained, and Nicole and her family were away on a trip, and Charlie had meetings and the week seemed stuck in mud. It was a dirty, dull week, it wouldn’t move. After three boring days we came up with the deliciously foolish idea of writing and presenting a play. The girls—and I—were still enamored of monsters and werewolves and ghouls, and that week the setting seemed perfect for horror, what with the windows darkened by the perpetual rain and clouds and the sky dramatically shaking with thunder. I popped popcorn and the three of us sat around cross-legged on the floor, writing a play for three parts: the heroine, the vampire, and the hero. I was certain the girls would cast me as the villain, but they didn’t. It was after all the best part. They had to toss a coin to see who got the villain’s role—Cathy—and Caroline became the heroine. I had to be the hero. It was awful, being the hero, I only got to run in during the last two minutes of the play to stab the vampire through the heart. The vampire got to die a writhing and melodramatic death. Caroline swooned and said, “My hero!” and I got to say my lines: “There! He’ll never bother you or anyone else again! Once more goodness triumphs!”
Since I had such a short part, I was also made into general stagehand, director, and wardrobe maker. Caroline had to wear something appropriately heroinical and flowing, so I took her to my room to try on my long dresses. She was now at sixteen a good inch taller than I, and when she put on one of my dresses tears jumped into my eyes. Suddenly she seemed grown-up. Mature. After that summer I thought of her as a grown-up, and that was a mistake. She was still a child, needing what children need. Cathy wore her best slacks and a white shirt of mine and a bow tie of her father’s, but we had to buy black material for a cape. It was cheap shiny material and it made a great cape: in the dim rainy light it glistened elegantly, voluptuously, sleekly. I wore some slacks and a tailored shirt and Charlie’s suede jacket and cowboy hat, both of which were far too big for me. Still, without a hat I didn’t look male enough to be a proper hero.
Our play seemed so good that we invited all the neighborhood children. About fifteen of them came and squashed themselves into our dining room; our stage was the living room, and we entered from the hall closet. We had draped the furniture with dark quilts and turned down the lights and hung construction paper bats and spiders all about. No one forgot her lines. We were a splendid success. I sat in the coat closet waiting for the end of the play and my three lines, and smiled as I watched Caroline and Cathy through a crack in the closet door, and thought that we were now really all friends—comrades. I thought we would always be close and good friends.
I was sad when they left that summer, but not too sad: I was eager for the fall, and for my teaching.
That fall Anthony Leyden came to our house to tell us that June was divorcing him. She had been having an affair with her children’s piano teacher, and she wanted to marry him. I laughed out loud and couldn’t stop for several minutes when Anthony told us the news. June, proper, prissy June! Had fallen in love with her children’s piano teacher! And wanted to leave her children’s father! I loved it; it was wonderful. I hoped that someone somewhere would righteously snub her as much as she had snubbed me, but I also wished her well. I thought she was doing a splendid and valiant thing, giving up her respectable home and its superficial tidiness for the messy depths of sexual love.
Part of the problem, Anthony said, was that she didn’t want the children. She was fixed on the idea that she and her pianist would go to the Caribbean for a year of sun and love. He would support them by playing at a piano bar in a tourist hotel. She would wait tables at night, if necessary. This set me off into laughter again, the thought of June Leyden in a little cocktail waitress uniform, with black lace stockings and flounces around her prim little butt. Anthony said he thought it was humorous, too, and that didn’t really bother him, June leaving him that way. What bothered him was that she wanted him to keep the children. Dickie and Dierdre were now sixteen and thirteen, not babies but not old enough to be on their own. And Anthony, handsome Anthony, didn’t want them around. He had a lover himself, a young girl who had been a student of his. He didn’t plan to marry the girl, but he did want to live with her awhile. He wanted some romance and freedom, too, and he couldn’t have that with two teenagers in the house. He thought that June should keep them without question; she was after all their mother. He would give them lots of money to live on, he said; he just wanted his own apartment and his own life, without two hulking teenagers trailing through it, dropping clothes and knocking on closed bedroom doors.
Charlie gave Anthony the name and address of his lawyer. I sat and laughed. I felt glad for them all, even the children. Dickie and Dierdre had become spoiled, coddled, snotty teenage kids, and I didn’t like them. Caroline and Cathy didn’t like them, either, and always tried to see as little of them as possible. I thought that perhaps this change would be good for the Leyden children, would toss them out of their complacency, would reveal to them the turmoil of emotions hiding beneath ironed sheets and behind polished windows.
I would have given a lot to read the letters that passed between Adelaide and June. I wondered: If Adelaide condoned June’s mad amorous actions, could she still hate Charlie for his? Would she think it acceptable for a woman to leave a man because she loved another man but still not acceptable for a man to leave a woman he had stopped loving?
We hadn’t heard much from Adelaide that summer. When the girls were asked about her, they said that she was happy, more or less, and settled. She didn’t date, they said, she was bitter toward all men. She thought men were a rather shabby lot compared to the noble species of women.
“And how do you feel about men?” Charlie asked Caroline that summer.
Caroline went pale, as she always did when the talk got serious.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I don’t hate them, like Mother does, but I know I’ll never be able to trust them.”
“Not even me?” Charlie asked.
“Most of all, not you,” Caroline said. “You left us. I mean I don’t hate you; I love you. But you left us. I guess you thought you were taking just yourself away, but you took everything, it seems, everything. You took yourself, and our home. And in a way you took our mother. She changed. She couldn’t be just for us. She wasn’t home when we came home from school; she was at the university, working. She didn’t spend lots of time with us, she had to see her friends and boyfriends and psychiatrists and such. I know you think you did the best thing for us. But still you left us, so how could I trust you completely?”
“That’s too bad,” Charlie said. “I’m really sorry, Caroline. Please don’t hold my faults against all men. I—I did do it the only way I thought best for all of us.” He was quiet a moment, thinking.
“I like men!” Cathy volunteered. “I have lots of boyfriends. And even though Mother hates you, Dad, don’t worry, cause I love you anyway. I can see why Mother hates you, but I love you, and I always will.”
I sat silently through the conversation. It was a rare one, for the girls seldom discussed love and hate face-to-face. I kept hoping that Caroline or Cathy might say, “And we’re glad you married Zelda. It’s been neat knowing her.” But no one mentioned me at all. I felt like what I was: an interchangeable part.
I still longed for a child of my own. I was still determined to have one. But that summer the desire was subdued. I was excited about teaching again. And I told myself that I was only twenty-eight; I still had a lot of time left, I could really establish myself at the junior college, become a part of it, and then have a baby. For once it seemed that I had my life in control, that I was doing what I wanted to do, that I was going where I wanted to go. I was happy.