Her Mother's Daughter (29 page)

Our bed—a daybed we pulled open at night—our licit, legitimate, legal bed, was never as much fun as the lumpy dusty Green Room couch. I don't know what happened. We didn't even reach for each other with the same absolute need, and we didn't seem to fit together as naturally and perfectly as we had. We didn't know if something had come between us, some shadow had fallen; or whether we had changed in the months since we'd last been together on the Green Room couch; or whether we misremembered the experience, endowed it with more radiance than it had actually had. We still loved each other then; it wasn't that. I felt it was that somehow the people we were now no longer satisfied the other's deepest dream; we had lost the enchanted realm. After a few months, after I'd been unable to reach orgasms dozens of times, after Brad had been unable to get erect a half-dozen times, we could no longer discuss it.

“It was the thrill of the forbidden,” he pronounced. “Now it's legal, prosaic. That had to happen. We had to grow up. Besides, it's hard for me to make love to you with the baby there. I keep being afraid I'll hurt it.”

I acceded to this explanation, and we postponed sex for two months. But I saw Brad's face when he came home from the real-estate office every night—for it was summer, and he worked with his father six days a week now. He was drained and grey, and his mouth was set in lines that had never been there before. I'd make jokes and act silly, but he'd look at me with a new superior look and tell me to stop acting childish. Even his voice was different now: louder, and somehow hollow, and he didn't talk so much as declaim. He was turning into his father, and if I complained, he said—naturally—that a man had to do what he had to do, that I was immature, oh, all the same things over and over, as if by diminishing in me the qualities we both possessed, he could destroy them in himself.

I was a lunatic that summer, because I was determined I would remain cheerful, happy, gay, when I had no reason at all for such feelings. I attached myself more to Jimmy Minetta, whose camera shop was the best for miles around, and attracted newspaper and magazine photographers who lived on the South Shore. They hung out there, in the back room, where Jimmy kept a bottle of bourbon and a coffeepot and plastic coffee cups, and they talked f-stops and light and wondered about all the new technology that had begun to appear on the camera market, and I listened and made coffee and helped out generally and was accepted as a servant-pal. There were no sexual innuendoes—how could there be when my belly was a foot out into space? But if Jimmy was busy in the front of the shop, the guys would launch into long laments about their relations with the women in their lives, and ask me why she was so…well, you can fill in the blank—angry, bitter, mean, helpless, weepy, unfaithful…. As if I knew, or could do more than murmur consolingly. But I liked these guys, and I felt sorry for them in their unhappy love lives, and each time I heard a new story about what Ellen or Mary or Doris or Betty had done, I'd determine, my teeth set, that I'd never do such a thing to Brad. Over the months, I determined not to do so many things that I could hardly act at all with Brad.

Not that he really noticed. He was so consumed with learning his new mature role, and with drowning his utter misery, that he no longer really saw me. His eyes were always opaque grey. It was hard for him. Selling real estate requires a certain kind of personality—a willingness to treat people as means, as walking money that you wanted to put into your pocket, and a habit of appraising everything—people's appearances, their clothes, their shoes, their cars, houses, furniture, everything—in terms of dollar value. Brad, who if he had ten dollars in his pocket when he went out drinking, and the bill was four dollars, would simply leave the whole bill, had had no sense of money at all, and learning to see in this way required his killing some other part of himself. I watched it happening. And even then, young as I was, inexperienced, ignorant, I knew what it would do and I knew more than that, I knew I would have to leave him someday. That thought made my heart squeeze up in pain like a mouth that has drunk straight vinegar; I pushed it away, stuffed it down into what I thought of as my basement, the room where I kept everything that was broken and dangerous, everything unusable, slimy, coated with dust and dirt.

How I lived in those days, it was really crazy. The thing is, I was trying to be
good,
I was doing, or not doing, things everyone said a woman should do or not do. I made Brad my center, I did everything around him, I didn't think about myself, or my “career” or my art—I couldn't bear to think about that anyway. I thought about Brad's needs, his likes and dislikes, and I arranged myself as best I could within them. My old proud sense of myself as a bad girl had vanished—except in one area.

While Brad was trying to learn to be his father, his mother, Adeline, was trying to train me to be like her. Adeline stopped in regularly. She cleaned her house mornings, and made dinner for Brad Senior nights, but she went out every afternoon. I worked in the afternoons, and hung around the shop until around seven, when Brad would be getting home, and I'd throw something in a pan for dinner—hamburgers or hot dogs, usually, I didn't cook anything else except eggs. Adeline had wormed a key to our apartment from Brad, and she had no compunctions about crossing the Charleses' living room, so every few weeks or so, she would stop by to show one of her friends our “darling little nest.”

Usually, Brad and I hung around the apartment in the mornings. We slept until nine or ten, had coffee leisurely and read the paper. Then Brad would go down to the agency in the car his father had lent him, and I'd make up the daybed and wash our coffee mugs and the pot, dress and walk down to Jimmy's. But after Adeline told me about her surprise visits, I began to leave everything as it was. The first time Adeline came in and found the daybed unmade and soiled mugs in the sink, she told me in horrified tones:

“Anastasia, I took Mrs. Whitney by to see your darling little nest on Wednesday and my dear! The bed wasn't made and there were dishes in the sink! Were you ill, my dear?” she asked with mock concern across the Sunday dinner table. Brad—Junior and Senior—looked at me.

“Wednesday? Ill?” I thought about it. “No, I can't recall feeling ill.” I answered innocently.

Brad Junior's mouth twitched: he was still on my side. But there was a ghastly silence from the elders, and it was some time before conversation could resume.

But even that didn't stop Adeline. She continued to take her friends in, and I, thinking I'd stopped her, had returned to cleaning the place up in the mornings. But now Adeline didn't tell me about her visits. I discovered them one evening when Brad and I drove over to his parents' house to drop off their vacuum cleaner—which I'd borrowed for my once-a-month sweep of the floor—and found a visitor, Adeline's friend Mrs. Andretti. She was a warm little woman with bright red hair, and she engulfed me with affection, hugging and announcing in an enthusiastic voice, “And your place is so darling! Adeline took me around to see it last week, Anastasia, and you've just done wonders with it!”

I didn't look at Adeline. I smiled wanly. I couldn't imagine what wonders I'd done: what can you do with a daybed, a dresser, a night table and lamp, and a tottery kitchen table and chairs in one room?

“That easel looks so charming!” Mrs. Andretti continued. “And your painting! You really paint wonderful, Anastasia!”

I tried to be gracious, but I was plotting.

After that, I never cleaned up in the mornings—or evenings, either, for that matter. I did dishes once in a while, when there were no more clean ones. When in later years Brad reproached me for my lousy housekeeping, I'd tell him to blame it on his mother. And if we made love—when we still did that—I'd leave the stained sheet open on the bed. I did one more thing. Every morning before I left for the camera shop, I'd sprinkle a little talcum powder on the floor near the door. I'd watch, when I came home in the evening, being careful not to step in it, to see if it had been disturbed. Then I'd sponge it up before Brad came home. And one night when I came home, there was no talcum powder. Adeline had spotted it, attributed it to my sluttish housekeeping, and wiped it up herself. On that day, the sheet had been displayed in all its splendor. I continued to sprinkle powder, but Adeline never came again, nor did she ever mention my housekeeping again. I kept on sprinkling powder until the baby was born. After that, there was no need: I was always home.

The business of thwarting Adeline gave spice to my days. I loved being a bad girl, loved using insidious methods to fight back against Them, whoever they were. But it was a sad little affair, after ail. It was a sign of my poverty of spirit that spiting Adeline gave me the most pleasure of anything in those months. Brad returned to school in September, taking classes in the mornings and afternoons, and working at the agency in the late afternoons and weekends. Nights he studied. His grades improved and his parents began to act as if maybe marriage had been exactly what their boy needed. But by now, Brad and I hardly spoke. It wasn't that we didn't care for each other, we still did. It was as if we had both been struck mute by what had happened to our lives. When I wasn't at Minetta's, I read. I read all of Proust, finished the works of Henry James, and read all of Faulkner. Time passed in a haze, I never knew what day it was, I thought about nothing, I was suspended, waiting for November, that sad month when my baby too would be born.

I had no one to talk to. I couldn't talk personally to Jimmy or the guys at the shop, and all my friends were in school, busy, and had different concerns. I couldn't talk to my mother. We saw my parents every other Sunday for dinner, and the chat was polite and social during dinner. We talked about the weather, food, and their upcoming/past vacation; we talked about Joy the cheerleader, Joy's friends, Joy's new sweater, and I'd be silent with envious rage. And then we all trooped out to the porch and watched television, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. I felt dead.

Even after Arden was born, I couldn't tell my mother how I felt. I should have been able to—after all, she'd told me how
she
felt, giving birth. But I knew if I told her, I'd get a look that said, Didn't I tell you, didn't I warn you? But you, headstrong, willful, you had to go ahead and do it and now you have to make the best of it as I did, as I still do, your life a daily misery. I couldn't say anything about Brad since she'd disapproved of him from the first—not serious, not stable—and how could I complain that he was becoming serious and stable and I didn't like it? How could I complain to her about being poor and crowded and cramped and sitting there with him in silent misery?

How could I tell her that every morning I had to look at this grey-faced guy in a suit and bow tie, an aged boy who hardly ever laughed anymore, and whose sax was now neatly packed away at the top of his closet with his other childish things? And that every morning he had to look at me with my belly out to there, looking at him? What in my life had she not long ago warned me against?

Nevertheless, Arden's birth disturbed me. We'd decided on that name long before, talking about it lying in bed, playing with our fingers, twining and untwining them, and laughing lightly, a shadow of our former joy in each other, but the best times we had that summer and fall. Because
As You Like It
was being played that spring, and I was painting the backdrops and Brad was playing Jaques, and most of all because we felt we'd been living in an enchanted green place, we chose Arden as the name for our baby, whether girl or boy. Brad's parents were horrified to think we'd call a boy by that name, but my boy stood with me on that one. In any case, Arden turned out to be a girl.

In all those months of pregnancy, though, one major thing I never let myself think about was the moment itself, giving birth, and when it happened, I was shocked, incredibly shocked at myself, at the utter abject humiliation I felt with this thing coming out of my vagina, with my legs in those stirrups, with the nurses and aides and doctors milling around. Oh, I had determined not to act like my mother, and I didn't cry, I didn't utter a sound, and one nurse even patted my head and told me I was a good girl, and I was doubly humiliated at my craven cringing pleasure in her pinch of praise. And then she came, Arden, and I felt eradicated, I felt like an animal doing what nature decrees all female animals must do, I felt caught in a world scheme huger and more encompassing than anything I could comprehend, and helpless within it, squirming in my fate, but subject to it nevertheless.

I tried not to let any of this show, and I think I didn't, except that as I joked with the nurses afterward, and laughed with my friends at the ridiculous presents they brought me in the hospital—a bag of marbles, a bunch of bananas, a tiny slate with some chalk for drawing (“Just about my speed these days!” I laughed)—I could hear my voice starting to sound like Brad's, that hollow echo in it, as if it were a noise being made in a great cave, by a thin tinny string. I looked down at the baby in my arms and wondered what I was supposed to do with it, and looked up and made jokes: “I never played with dolls, how do you get it to say
MAMA?”
“Does it pee all by itself? What a miracle!” I compared the baby's face to the aspects of various animals, and generally mocked myself and it and entertained my friends. Later Erma told me I was the first new mother she knew who hadn't turned into a bore, but all the while I was making jokes I felt sick inside, as hollow as my voice sounded, as if I were a Henry Moore sculpture, all limbs with a hole in the center, knowing that somehow I was sinning, but not knowing against what.

What I wanted, I guess, was to be babied myself, but since I never had been, I didn't know how to ask, or even what exactly it was I'd wanted. Maybe if I had been able to, things would have been different with Brad….One day the nurse was cleaning the stitches in my episiotomy, and she smiled at me, commenting that I was “pretty down there,” and I was so pleased, I wanted her to come and hold my head against her full stiffly bra'd breast, but of course she didn't. And I lay there wondering if there were differences “down there,” and what made one cunt “pretty” and another not. I even asked Brad, but he didn't know either, not having had experience with women other than me.