A Round-Heeled Woman (17 page)

However, here we are in New York and it's the year 2000, and I am trying my damnedest to be cool, not an easy task, for in between games, a little scotch adding fluency, Robert recounts his sexual history. There is Stacie, the professor—“God, I really loved her!” There is Judith, “flaky but adorable.” There is Ruthie, who with her husband swapped with Robert and his first wife on a beach on the Riviera. And there is Sharon, his second wife, once his medical student, whom he clearly still loves: “We made love every morning and often at night.” Some girls have all the luck.

I suggest he write his memoirs and I even offer a title— “Interstitial Women,” the two fulcrums his first wife and his second wife, with all those women filling in the spaces for a time, like me, though I do not have a space here, not really. He cannot see how his tales hurt me, he doesn't care to know, though it is entirely possible he does know and is punching me out of his life. Aware of me or not, he is deliciously lost in the sexual past, in the fields of women who spread their legs from desire, upon command, at his request. And he comes erect and fucks them all. Ah, youth, ah, wilderness.

But I am a grown-up, and I have my pride. I don't have to sit on Robert's couch and listen to all this. I can . . . I can . . . I have no pride whatsoever. Whoever I was is gone; whatever strength of character, sense of humor, self-regard I had is a sodden mess staining the sheets jammed against the foot of Robert's bed. “Robert, can I come visit you again?” I beg.

“We'll have to see.”

“In June?”

“I don't even know if I'll be here in June.”

“Will you let me know? Do you want me to come if you're here?”

His anger flares: “You're writing a script for me! You want me to say things I don't want to say! I have to write! I can't write if you're here!”

I go mute, though not inside where I am screaming.

At the end of the week I pack up what's left of my life force and go home. On the plane my stomach aches from holding back sobs. Tears stream down my cheeks. What will they think, the other passengers? They will think I have been to a funeral. They will think I am crying over the death of a loved one. They will be right.

Back home my college students wait. My students in San Quentin wait. And, in my chorale, Johann Sebastian Bach and his B Minor Mass wait. Somewhere over Iowa, I dry my eyes and listen to the pilot tell us that the weather in California is good and that we will be landing three hours ahead of now.

At home, I e-mail Robert:
“In the interest of regaining my equilibrium, I will not phone or write you. Please do not call or write me.”

Time and distance, the great healers. And words.

THIRTEEN

Going Backward

My house burned down
But anyway, it was after
The flower petals had already fallen.

—CHIBANA HOKUSHI (ca. 1665–1718)

Were my father alive he would be as puzzled about my current life as he claimed to be about the rest of my life once I reached high school age and then adulthood. He never understood, so he told me, the articles I wrote and got published about teaching. He never understood why I took his grandson to live twenty-five hundred miles from home. He never understood the hardship, financial and otherwise, that accompanied single parenthood. He never asked because he didn't want to know or didn't know how to ask—which it was I never knew. As for my mother, if she were speaking to me, and, of course, she would have been after her first glimpse of her grandson, she would shake her head and murmur something about sadness and how there was enough of it in the world without her daughter adding to it. It would take the freedom from parenting, from full-time teaching, from shame, from fear of failing, for me to, as they say, get a life. What would my parents say about the ad I placed in the
New York Review
? Take a guess. You get one.

“BIGGEST TURNOUT I've ever seen,” said Reuben Short, the funeral director. “Came from all over, didn't they.”

My mother died in April 1965. Here I was at the funeral home, which stood next door to my grandparents' house and across the street from my childhood home, and where, down in the basement, Mr. Short's son kept furry animals of all kinds in cages and on tethers of one sort or another. “I don't know,” said Mrs. Short, “Jimmy just seems to like live things.”

The visiting line reached out the door and down the sidewalk. The whole town and then some had come to pay their respects to the family of the woman they had admired for so long. I stood unsteadily in the receiving line, shaking hands with people who had watched me grow up, people whose children my father had brought into the world, whose gallbladders he had resected, whose hernias he had repaired, tonsils removed, spines fused, limbs set. And yes, they came from the towns, the farms, everywhere my father had ever been. Here came Rhonda, the hairdresser in town. “Did you see how I did her hair?” she wanted to know. “I think it looks real nice.” I nodded and said nothing for fear that if I did I would scream. My mother lay not far from us in an open casket. More than anything in the world, my mother dreaded being stared at. And there she was for all the world to see. On the shoulder of her suit jacket I had pinned a bunch of the violets whose hiding place she had shown us every spring and which had done the right thing by blooming early this year. My grandmother was not pleased: “Surely, we can do better than that,” she said. No, I thought, we can't.

Down the line my brothers, tall and stoic, their faces the color of chalk, smiled at the visitors. My sister looked the way she felt, exhausted and terribly sad, and stood next to Aunt Cara, who was holding her up on one side, me on the other. “Oh god,” said my sister, “here come the Fergusons; they've come all the way from Fort Wayne.” Her mouth was contorted, tears threatened to spill onto her cheeks, and I felt my own lips tremble. My aunt, a funeral veteran, tightened her hold on our arms and said, “Don't you dare cry.”

My best friend in high school was there all the way from Cleveland. She reached for my hand, held it tightly in hers, and said, “Jessica Mitford was right.” I smiled. At least, one other person recognized the absolute banality of this occasion. At least, Harriet knew none of this was right. When, later, I expressed my disgust to my uncle, he said, “In small towns, funerals have got to be open casket. A closed casket causes too much talk that never goes away.” Harriet would have turned up her nose at this explanation, but I sort of understood; I just didn't like my mother being the center of a tradition that honored no one but gossips.

I turned to my father, put my hand through his arm, and said, “That's not Mom in there. That has nothing to do with her.” My father said nothing. He knew better.

SETTING UP HOUSEKEEPING in your mother's house is not a good way to begin a marriage. But doing that was my last chance to win my father. All I had to do was become my mother. A window of opportunity, you might say, not to be ignored. At that point in my thirty-two-year-old life Oedipus was still only a character in a Greek play. Of course, I knew of the Oedipus complex and applied it to other people all the time: Sarah and her lifelong battles with her mother; Dick and his struggles with his father. Me? I was smug. I believed myself to have had a trouble-free childhood in a trouble-free family in a trouble-free town. Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell: that was my life.

Even in graduate school, way past the age of smugness, or so one would have thought, I looked on my fellow students with a superior eye. How was it, I wondered, that these people studying for advanced degrees in literature, in touch with the wisdom of the ages, were so screwed up? I felt sorry for them; obviously, they had not had the advantages bestowed on them by parents who loved them in towns that sheltered them.

No, the reason I gave myself for my return to that sheltering town (and to that family and that childhood) was that my father was alone, he needed someone to look after him. Add to that, my youngest brother, who was moving back to live in our childhood house and begin his teaching career in the local, trouble-free high school; he would need taking care of, too. Men did not do well on their own; they would probably not iron their sheets and would drink milk straight from the carton. Then, too, my husband's parents lived in Cleveland. They had not been able to attend the wedding, had never seen their grandson, and wished daily for us to move closer. At least, Cleveland and my town of Archbold were in the same state. Finally, Tom wasn't doing much at Berkeley, had decided to change his field from math to psychology, and why not start in the Midwest? So I quit my perfect job, supervising English teachers for the credential program at Cal, withdrew all my money from my teachers' retirement fund, and off we went. I would do it right this time. What a mess.

My father, as you know, was a mighty handsome man. He was also, in today's parlance, emotionally unavailable and, more than likely, alcoholic. I know my father loved us, but it would take me most of my life to understand that he did not know how to show that he did. In a rare display of intimacy, he said to me while I was doing my Mom II number, “After all these years in practice, I still can't get used to a woman sitting on the other side of my desk and crying. It just embarrasses the heck out of me.”

During my growing-up years, once I got to Ann Arbor and got sophisticated, I decided I really did not love my father. His conservative Republican values, his attention to appearance, his drinking, his golf, his wife my mother, were far cries from what I was coming to believe was important. And he was always, always busy. In my twenties, I asked my mother, “Did Dad spend time with me when I was a baby?” “Oh, my, yes,” she answered. “He was so proud of you; he wheeled you up and down the sidewalk in your buggy; he thought you were the most wonderful baby on earth.” Too bad I had no memory of that fine event.

The best times with my father were when I was a child, no older than nine, and got to go with him to make house calls. Each night, after dinner, my dad and I would climb into his Buick, the latest model in an endless series of Buicks, and drive off into the country, where his housebound patients lived on their farms. Sometimes, when the patient inside was in peril, I was ordered to stay in the car, but at most of his stops I was allowed to climb out of the car and go with him into the farm-house. There he examined the patient and then turned to me. “Ten Seconal, please.” I would zip open his medicine case, take out the glass tube containing the red capsules, and count ten of them into a white envelope. “Thank you,” my father would say, and write the instructions on the front of the envelope. I was his partner then. I was on his team; I was the only one on his team.

I'm not sure when or why I got sent down to the minor leagues. I suspect that, when I became a girl—and I did so at an embarrassingly early age—I made him uncomfortable. I suspect that he did not know what to do with girls, especially a girl who didn't seem able to play a decent game of tennis or golf or even the piano. “Play for us,” he commanded too many times. “What should I play?” “Just play something you can play all the way through without making a mistake.” I would sit dutifully at the piano and play one of Bach's Two-Part Inventions for the very short time it took before I made a mistake. Then I was excused to the tune of my father's huge sigh. I was a disappointment to him, no doubt about it. And once my brothers were born, any attention left over from his long days at the hospital and the office went to them. They didn't get very much either.

So the pleasure in my father's company came unexpected and unbidden. One night I rode with him in his Buick convertible, top down, summertime. We were driving home from our cottage at the lake, where we spent every summer, where my father had spent every summer as a boy, some forty miles from our town; no one else—not my sister or my brothers or my mother—was along for the ride. I sat in the front seat, the seat belonging to my mother, and looked up at the stars. On the radio Sammy Kaye or Tommy Dorsey or Glenn Miller (who had died in the war but his spirit lived on) played “Stella by Starlight” or “Stardust” or “As Time Goes By” or maybe all in succession or at once; no matter, the strings and the saxophones soared into the summer night that, despite the stars above, was so dark that nobody, not even I, could see that my breasts were too big and my legs were too short and that pimples, some closer than others to popping, decorated my chin and forehead. At fourteen, I was utterly unconscious of what might cause the pleasant warmth in my upper chest, lower tummy, and inner thighs. All I knew was that this was what happiness felt like. That's a nice kind of sex, when it just comes at you and you let it.

Not all the sex between me and my father was so pleasant. One summer day, I crewed for my father in his Comet. He of course was the skipper, and our destination was the cottage of friends of his across the lake, where he would have a drink or two and then another. “Well,” he would say, raising his scotch and soda on high, “it must be five o'clock somewhere.” I was afraid to sail with him. “There can only be one skipper,” he said time and again. “Crew members have to take orders, not ask questions, and be quick about it.” I was terrified I would fail to pull the sheet in quickly enough, afraid I wouldn't shift to the other side quickly enough, afraid I would tangle myself in the jib, afraid I would be in the wrong place when my father, the skipper, decided to come about, afraid he would be disgusted by my ineptness, my awkwardness, my ignorance. No wonder he preferred to sail with my brother.

My mother told me more than once how lucky she was that my father had married her. She also stood up to him. To my father, the whole world was his operating room and he expected those of us in it to behave like his nurses, quick, efficient, alert to his every command. Every so often, my mother exploded. “Ed, I am not your nurse!” Then he would calm down and start over.

On the day of our sail, we sailed as close to the friends' shore as possible. My dad turned the boat into the wind, I loosed the sheets right on time, pulled up the centerboard, and we climbed out to walk the rest of the way in the water. At the water's edge, the friends, martinis held aloft in one hand, the other shading their eyes from the sun, stood watching. “Well, Ed!” they called as we came up the dock. “We wondered who you had with you! We thought maybe you had gotten yourself a girlfriend!” Laughs all around except from my dad and me. My bathing suit was horrid, all stretched out from my fat breasts and belly and a summer of daily wear. My hair was a tangled mess from swimming and being ignored. And why hadn't my dad told me before we set sail that we would end up at the Morrises ' cottage? I would have worn the old shirt my uncle had given me (my father had no old shirts) to cover myself when I wasn't swimming. I had no shirt, no cover-up, no camouflage, and these dreadful people on shore were accusing my dad and me of being a couple. I was embarrassed for him. My father saw nothing funny either, but it had nothing to do with his new girlfriend. He was simply embarrassed. As for me, secretly, way down deep beneath the humiliation, I was happy. Anything was possible; maybe, I could turn out a girl after all.

Once in a while, I saw the man, the doctor his patients saw. Another summer, on vacation from my secretarial job in San Francisco, a vacation I should have taken in Mexico or Tahoe or Mt. Shasta or anywhere but with my family—I was twenty-five years old, for god's sake—I stood on the porch of our cottage watching the moths beat their wings uselessly against the screen and listening to the waves, whose sound would soothe us all into a sleep usually available only to the very young. My youngest brother was in his teens and, according to my mother, spent far too much time in his bedroom. The middle room was the worst room in the cottage: small, hot, the penalty for being the youngest of four. It was directly above the living room. On this night, my mother had had enough. “He's up there again! Ed, do something!” My brother was masturbating; at fifteen he did it a lot; he oughtn't to have done it at all, my mother believed. I spoke out: “Would you rather have him impregnate some girl down at the City Drug?” My mother rushed out of the room and returned with the broom. “I'm going to put a stop to this!” She held the broom by its bristles and slammed the tip of the broom handle against the ceiling again and again. “Ed,” she screamed, “do something.” My father very gently took the broom from her and led her out onto the porch. He didn't say anything, he rarely did, but the way he drew my mother away from her own humiliation made me understand why she believed herself the luckiest person in the world. Eventually, my mother reconciled herself to my brother's style of premarital lovemaking, though, on those now rare occasions we made the beds together, she would murmur, when we got to my brother's room, “At least he could put the Vaseline away.” A few years later, she got downright jolly: “I found Chaucer in the bathroom; that's a step up.”