Back Then (30 page)

Sitting beside me, Joe insisted on reading to me from a book of S. J. Perelman pieces he'd brought with him. I could understand single words but sentences were beyond me. “Isn't that funny?” Joe asked. I told him to shut up. The pain was ferocious, worse than anything I had ever experienced. It felt as if my insides were being ripped from their container. High-pitched shrieking in the hall outside didn't help. “Some women,” Dr. M. said, with eyebrows raised significantly, “seem to need to express themselves more than others.” Joe rubbed my back the way he had been taught by our instructor. That didn't help either. Did I see on Dr. M.'s face a look saying he'd told me so?

They didn't ask Joe to join me in the delivery room when Dr. M. announced that the last stage of labor had started, but sent him out to a fathers' waiting room to chew on his nails. Once on the table, my legs hoisted on steel troughs like two pieces of dead meat, I pushed so hard that I broke hundreds of tiny blood vessels in my neck and shoulders. Dr. M. announced that he was about to perform an episiotomy. “A little cut in your perineum. To make room for the baby.” I didn't protest and felt it as he sliced into the tissue. “There,” he said, like a seamstress pleased with a neat hemstitch. “The head's crowning.” Drained of every sensation but the need to get this hideous business over with, I said “Thank God.” “It's a girl,” Dr. M. announced. “She's got very large hands and feet.” “Susanna,” I said. She was just under six pounds.

I tried to nurse Susanna, but my milk was slow in coming, and she refused to suck, twisting her mouth away from my nipple while her body went rigid. I begged our pediatrician—the same man who had taken care of me from the time I was an infant until I went away to college—to let me try a little longer. But by day three he decided that Susanna needed food and had her put her on the bottle. From that moment she was hooked on the easier way and I gave up, crying for a week after I got home, and scrambling to see the bright side of things.

Two
years later to the month our second child was due to be born. On my last office visit to Dr. M., he had said, “Better not have it this weekend; I'm going sailing.”

Did he know something he wasn't telling me? My water broke over my feet after dinner—a turkey leg at the Tip Toe Inn, a delicatessen around the corner on Broadway—on Friday night. I called Dr. M.'s office and was told by his answering service that he was away for the weekend and couldn't be reached. Dr. Wilson was attending to his patients. Who was Dr. Wilson? I'd never heard of him. Choice-less, I met Dr. Wilson when he came into the labor room to see how far along I was. He was so generic, his manner so impersonal and earnest, that I could not have described him two minutes after he left the room. During labor's second stage he showed up again. Saying that he wanted to make me “more comfortable,” he asked me to turn onto my side and, without a word about what he was doing, inserted a needle into my spinal column and started injecting a painkiller that numbed everything below my waist. This dispatched the pain within minutes, for which I was properly grateful. It was only afterward that I realized that Dr. Wilson, like Dr. Munnell, was no fan of natural childbirth. If a patient had rights, they were locked away in a safe in the bowels of the hospital.

Hester was born a few hours later. On Monday, a tanned Dr. Munnell breezed into my private room and sat himself down, beaming at me. “I hope you're not going to wait too long to try for a boy,” he said.

By
the end of year five in our marriage—I had stopped working at a job shortly before Susanna was born—I was a whiz at mashed
potatoes, scrambled eggs, hot dogs, pancakes, Shake 'n Bake, and Junket. From time to time I still burned the toast. I heard about shallots on a radio cooking show, and one day as we walked up Broadway—we had by this time moved to a six-room apartment at 175 Riverside Drive—I stopped at one of those fruit and vegetable shops seductively spilling onto the sidewalk and asked the proprietor if he had any shallots. “Lady,” he said, “I got enough trouble without shallots.” Another time I asked the same man, “Are these eggs fresh?” He turned away, refusing to answer. Joe thought I'd hurt the man's feelings.

Our apartment was on the twelfth floor and if you stuck your head far out the bedroom window and looked north, you could see the George Washington Bridge spanning the Hudson River. Almost everything was done for you: Mail and newspapers were delivered to your door. Elevators took you quietly to your floor; garbage disappeared down a chute in the hall. Snow was cleared from off the sidewalk. The super arrived the same day you called him to take care of leaks and stoppages. Joe and I knew only one or two families who lived on the West Side. It was considered not quite up to snuff, somewhat seedy, giving off too strong an odor of the Old World; the opposite of the Upper East Side. On evenings and weekends, we spent a good deal of time walking, with Susanna in her English-made baby carriage, staring at the sky. The Broadway that Isaac Bashevis Singer writes about with inhuman accuracy and affection seemed to me the very center of an energetic cosmos, and the New York that made Singer skeptical—he said it had “all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk”—might have been there, lurking, but I didn't see it; my glasses were tinged with the pink of living where life's pulse and throb were on the surface, not buried under layers of rectitude and caution.

On a bitterly cold Sunday in November 1957, with the wind whipping around us as at the top of Mount Washington, Joe and I, with Susanna in her carriage, were walking in Riverside Park when a girl about six or seven emerged from the bushes waving a large pistol. Not pausing to figure out whether or not it was a smart thing to do, I went over to her and said, “Little girl, let me have that gun please.” She obviously didn't want to, but my tone persuaded her. Having handed it over, she disappeared back into the shrubbery. What followed was a typical urban tale: we called the police from the nearest call box. Two cops showed up in a squad car and whisked Joe off to the local station where they made him sit for two hours in a kind of cage before releasing him with the neat send-off: “I guess you're legitimate,” and as a coda, “Next time you find a gun, mister, toss it in the river.”

“It apparently never occurred to them,” Joe said later, “that only a lunatic would commit a crime and then call the police to announce he'd found a gun. All I need is to be seen throwing a gun in the river.”

At
a party soon after we were married I was asked by a woman devoutly and unhumorously feminist which one of us, I or Joe, made the family's “administrative decisions.” Unprepared for this challenge, I couldn't answer. “Who,” she wanted to know, “stops working when one of your children is sick?” “I do,” I said. “I have softer breasts.” She didn't like this answer and got up from where we both had been sitting and walked off to find someone more compatible to talk to.

Administrative decisions within a family struck me as a pretentious notion. Nevertheless, I was discovering that completing domestic tasks was a complicated business. In 1955 my mother published a book called
A Wife Is Many Women
in which she nailed it: we will play as many roles as we let society thrust upon us. It was assumed—even by my husband—a statistical freak by virtue of his doing any of the housework at all—that I would be in charge of the laundry, both clothes and linens; I became known as the laundry fairy. If the rug or floor needed vacuuming, I did it. Strict division: Joe became the garbage fairy. Decisions about the children's health and well-being were largely mine, although we were equally ignorant about caring for infants and toddlers.

Someone responsible should probably have overseen our child care. Within two years Susanna was hit above the eye by a swing, fell off a slide in the playground, giving herself a severe concussion, sucked on a camphor ball she found in a drawer of sweaters, and bit into a tiny flashlight bulb from God knows where. She also opened a floor-level cabinet door, found a bottle of vodka there, took off the top, and lifted it to her mouth just as I came 'round the bend. Any one of these “accidents,” had they been upped one notch, could have killed her. I was so ignorant I thought they were normal mishaps of childhood, that every baby experienced something similar, and I emerged after each one shaken but inculpable, convinced that small children were less fragile than I could have imagined. One of my friends assured me that Susanna was accident-prone. Maybe she was, but by the time Hester arrived two years later, we no longer left camphor balls around to be mistaken for candy.

Every afternoon if it wasn't raining or snowing I wheeled Susanna in her carriage across Riverside Drive and down several blocks to the playground, where I sat on a bench talking to Maggie, a woman I had struck up a friendship with after seeing her every day for over a month without exchanging more than a cool smile. Maggie was a midwesterner whose principal trait was openness and sweetness, two qualities I wasn't all that used to. We talked only about babies and food and about how living in New York was so exciting and so hard at the same time; I heard from her that she and her husband were having a tough time adjusting to the city after Des Moines, a place so exotic to me that it might have been Des Moon. Maggie and I had almost no way of calibrating each other except as wife and mother; the only thing we had in common was two children approximately the same age who lived in the same neighborhood. As a basis for genuine affection it seemed as tenuous and unexpected as the fact that I had begun, more or less out of the blue, to write.

I was eight years old before I could extract any meaning from the marks on a page which, when combined, form words. Before this, my mother, alarmed because she seemed to have produced a dummy, took me to be tested for some physical explanation of my slowness. These tests came up negative except they did indicate that I was not only left-handed (surprise!) but severely left-eyed as well; they made me wear a black eye patch over my left eye for nearly a year. My mother, hoping to make me feel less miserable, told me I looked like a pirate, but I knew I looked like a cripple. When I was no closer to reading, she had me tested for mental capacity, the results of which reassured her but not me. I knew I was a dummy.

As an analog to this delay in reading, I was late to start writing. I had been an editor for years, but it never occurred to me that I could do it; writing seemed to me as remote, risky, and difficult an enterprise as taking Victoria Falls inside a barrel.

Writing was an activity that only writers engaged in. You couldn't expect just anyone to sit down at a typewriter and turn out a readable, let alone a publishable, piece of work. Like glassblowing or conducting an orchestra, writing involved an arcane initiation as well as exquisite, possibly painful, training. How did you make the turn from scribbling fragments in a notebook to having your words set in type for other people to read? What did you have to do to make it happen?

One day, shortly before our first child, was born, I ran into Ellinor, a Brearley School friend, whom I hadn't seen in several years. Asking her the obligatory—where did she live, what was she doing these days, how were her children—I soon found out that she was taking a fiction writing class at Columbia. As I walked home in a mood now turned sour, I was uneasily aware that Ellinor had triggered a spasm of envy. If she was writing, why couldn't I, who had been circling words for years? And so, shamelessly prompted by envy, I began the very next day to write a short story on a Royal portable typewriter set up on the dining room table. This was the first time since Barnard, where I had taken a one-semester writing class more or less as a lark, that I was trying to create something out of nothing, but bits and pieces of life, memory, radio programs, books, and movies stored somewhere far below the surface of my daily existence. Up until the day I ran into Ellinor, I had never dared to predict for myself anything as difficult or exhilarating as writing fiction. I had worked at a so-called literary job; now I thought that all I wanted was to be a wife and mother, like most of my Brearley, Wellesley, and Barnard classmates. Justin, tuned into my moods and shifting attitudes, let me know that he wanted for me what I did. That there might be something other than envy, that there might actually be a writer under the mother/wife skin, didn't occur to me at the time. I just had these stories in my head I had to write down.

The cover that Dr. Kronold, my therapist, had clamped down tight over the container flew off, spewing sensations, connections, and words that I quickly captured like butterflies in a net, and pinned on the page before they could escape. Words poured out of me. They came faster than I could type, faster even than I could think. Starting from scratch, my fiction was light on plot and imagination, heavy on feelings, sensations, nuances; overly dependent on metaphor, I was hesitant about leaving my own house for material—what did I know about anything but a soft life cut off from 99 percent of the world's population and its concerns? I was a hothouse flower, never having faced hunger, an empty purse, or genuine danger. So I stuck to my own life, as I suppose most beginning writers do, feeling their way, barefoot, across a lawn studded with broken glass. I was terrified and aroused at the same time, almost forgetting to eat. I managed to plow clumsily through to the end of a first story, then began a second.

Susanna's birth, in May 1957, wiped out any interest I had in producing another story, but after six weeks the pressure to write returned. My heroines—Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, Mavis Gallant, Katherine Mansfield—all were either unmarried, childless, or unconventionally domesticated. The underlying message of this self-denial was not lost on me: it was unwise to try to be wife, mother, and writer simultaneously. The pressure, building daily until it became a distraction, proved irresistible. Each day I waited until Susanna fell asleep for her morning nap, shoved the telephone inside a drawer, and stuffing a couple of pillows on top of it, began to write. I turned out ten stories in one year, none of them any good, although one was sold by an altruistic agent, John Schaffner, whom I knew from my days on
discovery.
He sold it to a magazine called
Audience
. The story, “A Better Place,” was about a young woman visibly pregnant with her first child. One day an old boyfriend whom she stopped going out with—high on pretension, low on sense of humor—sees her on the street and pauses to talk. After a few minutes of banal chitchat, he says, “What are you doing to make the world a better place?” This ticks off our heroine, whose defenses are galvanized—because she isn't doing anything at all except having this baby. She applies to her husband for comfort. He dismisses the man and his challenge as not worth thinking about, and then what's really worrying her erupts: she's terrified of childbirth. Knowing how small the cervix is, she wonders aloud how a baby can possibly squeeze through such a tiny opening. As I was writing this story I wasn't aware of how frightened I had been of giving birth and, subsequently, of being responsible for an infant. Only when I finished it did I realize how close I'd come to my own anxieties. The fiction writer is lucky if she's in touch with what's simmering inside her. My first published story was too long for its slender plot and clotted with meandering, self-consciously “literary” prose. Still, it was a start, my first published fiction. Once someone has bought something you have written you can call yourself a writer—but not before. This is the reality: a writer writes not for himself or herself but to be read by others—the more the better.