Autobiography of Us (20 page)

* * *

Occupation: housewife.
There it was on our tax returns that first January in New York, Paul’s cramped black print marching across the cream-colored paper. It was on the kitchen table when I woke up one morning, Paul already gone to work, the apartment empty.
Sign here,
he’d written, taping the note to the table with an arrow pointing to the appropriate box. I stood for a moment, holding my breath. It was a trick I began playing at some point that winter, finding myself stopped all too often in front of the bureau in our bedroom with one of Paul’s socks in each hand, distracted by a ray of sunlight that had escaped the curtain to run down the bed frame; or, if it was one of those days when I tried to make a go of it, to make what Paul at a certain point began to refer to as an
effort,
I might find myself frozen in front of a painting at a museum for far too long, aware that I wasn’t seeing what everyone around me saw, that I was missing some small, crucial detail, the thing that would shift what I stared at from the inscrutable to the sublime.

But the longer I stood there that morning in our apartment, the more foolish I felt, just as I did those moments when the sun finally shifted behind a cloud and the light disappeared from the bed frame, or the painting failed to surrender its secret and I came to, holding a sock or a paper brochure proclaiming the genius of Picasso. I let out my breath and took up the pen and—turning the form over—began to write.

Dear Alex,

Was it Aristotle who said that the value of life ultimately depends on awareness? Contemplation? I am, in a word, surviving. I am only twenty-four. We vowed not to become our mothers—or you did, anyway, and I took it for granted. I thought it went without saying that we would make our own way.

I want to tell you it’s nothing like we used to imagine when we were girls: New York. Life. The trees are bare here by November and everyone is cold as ice. There are too many pigeons, no sky to speak of. If there is excitement, glamour—if these gray streets are holding everything we found missing from our lives—they’ve hidden it well. None of it what we thought. I am beginning to think we went about our thinking all wrong.

I am writing because you claimed we were headed in a different direction. You trusted there was another path. You are the one person I have ever known who did not lack, as you once said of me, the strength of your own convictions. I am writing because I was always of the same mind, whether I admitted it or not. A different world, you said. I thought of it as a promise. It occurs to me now that that may have been my first mistake.

By this point, I’d covered the back of the form and moved onto the front, writing first in the narrow margins and then over the typeface itself, covering
housewife
with my determined script, the loop of my
l’
s girlish, fat. I knew even as I wrote that I would never send it, explaining to Paul that evening that I’d spilled coffee across the page, the form ruined beyond repair. At the time I must have told myself that was the end of it, that I would push that page deep into the trash and be done, wash my hands of the whole affair.

How little we know of ourselves, I should have said.

April 5, 1968

Dear Alex,

Chaos last night here—I suppose it must have been everywhere. By noon yesterday, the streets were crowded with people. They stood right there in the middle of the road like they’d never seen a car coming down Broadway. Stood and wept, holding on to each other for comfort. All the restaurants had shut down or else flung their doors open, handing out food and drinks. I’m ashamed to say how little I knew of Dr. King. I know, of course, that he was a great man, but I must admit to only having heard bits and pieces. Those speeches, I mean. Everyone seems to have memorized them but me. I’ve never had the mind for memorizing. Or I did once, but I lost it somewhere along the way. This is one of those things that happens now: I misplace keys, I lose dollar bills, I turn a corner and forget where I am. They say that’s what they do, the hormones. I’m pregnant: Did I tell you?

But last night. Is it awful to say that as I made my way toward home, I found that sadness comforting? That I found the sight of strangers crying in one another’s arms moving in a way I can hardly put words to? It seemed like such an enormous relief. To cry like that, to be held by someone, to
weep
.

I find myself at a loss these days. I’m huge now, swollen. Big as a house. A ship gone down.
A melon strolling on two tendrils
(Plath?), and meanwhile the books all saying the same thing. I’m supposed to be knitting booties or blankets or God knows what. Sleeping all day. Eating nutritious foods.
Nesting
. I’m meant to be a bird, not a boat. But I can’t sit still. I feel myself sinking. I’ve come unmoored, lost my anchor. At any moment, understand, I might drift away.

June 26, 1968

Dear Alex,

Do you understand when I say something in me wants out? Not the baby—that part over, thank God. I barely recognized my body, the sounds it made. The way it pushed and groaned, the sheets wet ten times over an hour in and me still sweating like a horse. But I’m talking now about fear. The dark kind. Fear that sneaks up on you like a cat. I lie here on our bed while Matthew sleeps, Paul still at work or out in the living room, going over his papers, and somewhere in the back of my mind, beyond the shopping lists and feeding schedules, the naptimes, the reminders about the bottles being cleaned—somewhere it occurs to me that I will never leave this place. That the walls of this apartment will circle in. I feel the closeness of everything in this life, that’s all. The way it binds.

July 2, 1968

Dear Alex,

Today I went down to the river and sat. Just half an hour or so, Gladys home with Matthew while I made up some excuse. It was the first time I’ve gone anywhere without him since he was born, and I swear to you, he knew. The way he clung to me as I put him in his crib! Those little arms reaching, the betrayal in his eyes as I drew the blanket up around his arms absolute. There was a moment as I stepped into the elevator and pressed
L
where I thought I might be ill.

But then—God, the freedom! To leave the building with only the house keys in my hand. To walk down to where the air blows clean and do nothing but sit. To be, for even a moment, just another anonymous stranger. The boats came and went, the lights along the shore of New Jersey blinking on and off. Every now and then someone passed by and I feigned a look of concentration, as though there was something out in the water I was studying—
amoeba proteus
, I let myself imagine.
Chlamydomonas.
The cells under the light of a microscope brilliant green. The colors jewellike, glowing.

July 16, 1968

Dear Alex,

I’d like to tell you that I tried. I did. I tried the way I tried with the wives and their afternoon teas, our wineglasses refreshed by Maria or Gabriella or whoever—the help is the point. Everyone has help.
We
have help. Gladys, for God’s sake, and I don’t know what I’d do without her. Point being, we are just like everyone else.

But, the
wives
! The wives are hell-bent on improving—what? Their minds, their skills in flower-arranging. Their sense of civic duty. They take French or Spanish and practice their conjugations diligently; they sign up for pastry classes, and our teas those weeks are filled with doughy pies,
mille-feuilles
, butter cookies with the jam thumbprint glowing at the center like stained glass. Then they find something new, the kitchen too hot come July. Butter everywhere, they complain, the children everywhere, butter in the children’s hair, on their clothes. They find something else to stick themselves to. They get
involved
—orphans in Africa, illiteracy in China. Elderly racehorses.

One afternoon a week or so after Matthew was born and I was still delirious with fatigue, I called up and ordered the course catalog from NYU. I was half giddy when it arrived, the pages glossy and smelling of ink. Between feedings, I considered a class on French literature. I read about a course on the history of Washington Square while I gave Matthew his bottle. I went so far as to leave him with Gladys just the other day and ride up to Barnard in the first set of clean clothes I’d put on in weeks, trembling with the strangeness of being away from him for that long. At one point I almost turned around and came straight back home. But one of the wives had mentioned a landscaping class. The properties of ferns, she said, fascinating. So I sat in the taxi and tried to concentrate—picturing something along the lines of botany, leaves mounted on a slide and examined under a microscope. But the class had very little to do with plants, in the end, concerned mostly with the colors of the flowers that bloomed on certain bushes come spring, the arrangement of tulips in a particular sort of garden. Did I prefer the British, the instructor asked that first day, or the French style of hedges?

Long after I knew I would never send a single one, I kept writing my letters. While Matthew napped or late at night, after Paul was asleep, I sat at my little desk in the bedroom and wrote until my hand cramped up and I was forced to put the pen down. Isn’t it strange? I hadn’t spoken to her in years. And yet when I sat down to write, it was always to her: my audience of one. From time to time I promised myself I’d throw the letters away. Better I should take up knitting, I told myself. Macramé. Something
useful
. But each time the urge to write her struck, it rose in me like something elemental, an uncontrollable itch. I took the pen in my hand and watched her appear on the other end, twisting her mouth in that way she had when she found something amusing, the smoke from her cigarette closing around her head.

You understand: I had no one else to tell.

BUT all of this must sound horribly naïve. I should remind you that I was brought up to consider all questions concerning sex of an indelicate nature, that even as a married woman I undressed in the bathroom and blushed when movie stars embraced on-screen. At Windridge, we were given a single half hour’s class as part of our “Home and Family Living” course, in which Nurse Salter took each of us by the hand in turn and told us she prayed for our souls. Remember that I was all of twenty-three when I married, that besides that one night with Bertrand Lowell, I had never done more than kiss a boy before Paul. There was, in those days, still so much that went unspoken. If weeks went by without more than a hurried peck on the cheek on the way out the door—well, that summer after we moved, Matthew was born, and then Lucas less than two years after that, and in the whirl of new motherhood I lost track, or I pretended I had. Remember that at that time a man who preferred men would have been labeled a pervert or worse. I believe at that time it remained a crime in every state across America, that he could technically have been arrested, Paul. Disbarred. Never mind the disgrace to the family name.

We believe what we choose. I don’t expect that will come as much of a surprise to you by now.

* * *

We’d been married a little over three years when he came into the bedroom to tell me the truth. Or: He tried. I have never given him credit for that, for having had the courage to try. Perhaps I am wrong, but I have always believed that was what he came to say when he appeared in the doorway that night with his briefcase in one hand, a drink in the other.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Shh.” I put a finger to my lips and nodded at Matthew, who sat nestled in my lap with a book, his head growing heavy.

Paul cleared his throat. “There’s something I’ve been thinking we ought to—” he began in a quieter voice.

“Your mother called,” I interrupted; I don’t know why. I felt a wave of something pass through me where I sat, a touch of that vertigo I sometimes experience when standing under a tall tree—an elm or one of the old white pines that grows around the house here in Marblehead—the length of it a thing I all at once picture tipping to the side, crashing to the ground. “They’re on their way to London,” I said quickly. “They said they’re sorry they didn’t make it in this weekend but that they’ll stop by when they’re back next week. Sounds as though they’re looking forward to it.”

“London,” he repeated. “Well.” A quick grin. “Bully for them.”

“Devon too, I think. Bitsy said something about an old Saxon church? She sounded very excited. She said they thought they might take a tour.”

“Leave it to Bits to start frothing at the mouth over a pile of stones.”

“It’s nice they’re taking a vacation.”

“It is.” He gave me a curious glance. “They’ve been talking about it for a while now.”

“We should have them over when they get back, don’t you think? They’ve hardly gotten the chance to spend any time with Matthew since Luc was born. I don’t think we’ve had them over in forever now.”

“No? I’d lost track. Everything’s been so busy.” He gazed at Matthew and I bent my head to your brother’s forehead, breathing in the animal smell of his skin. I heard Paul take in a breath. “You know—”

“Lunch?” I was speaking in a voice pitched too high, too loud; Matthew stirred in my arms. “We could have them over next Sunday,” I went on, quieter. “On the earlier side, before Lucas goes down for his nap. Gladys could run to the bakery on Eighty-Third, the one your mother likes.”