Her Mother's Daughter (40 page)

“Well, it could be just for a year or two, until I can get on my feet,” I said casually, trying not to sound as if I were begging.

“But it's Dad,” she went on as if I hadn't spoken, “I really can't ask Dad to accept it. You know how he feels about children, you know how he was with you. I can't ask him to live in a house with little children again.”

And that was that. I knew my father would not be happy having small kids in the house again; their noise and chaos seemed to frighten him, he became grouchy and ill at ease when my kids were around. He was anxious every minute as if they would, in the next second, unleash violence upon furniture, rugs, walls, and windows. But I also knew that my father would accept whatever my mother asked him to accept—that if she wanted to take me in and urged it, that he would accept it completely. But I knew too that if I moved in with them, Mother would end up baby-sitting part of every day. I couldn't work and take the kids with me. Her new freedom and ease would vanish. I couldn't blame her for not wanting that. I could see things from her perspective, and as in the past, seeing things from her perspective made it impossible to see them from my own. So I had no way at all to respond. I just sat there, numb. Finally, I found a voice that wouldn't squeak:

“Would you mind if we stayed overnight?”

“Of course not. Did you bring pajamas for the children?”

I had. I had brought enough clothes to stay a week, but I didn't tell her that.

I didn't need them. We had dinner together, and I put the kids to bed upstairs in my old room, and we were sitting on the porch, my parents and I, watching television when Brad showed up, late, near ten. No surprise. He knew I had nowhere else to go. He sat with us through the eleven o'clock news, after which my parents politely, almost ceremoniously, excused themselves.

When the noises of doors opening and closing had ended, and the bathroom light was turned off for the last time, Brad turned to me and spoke in a very low voice, it reminded me of how we had acted years before, before we were married.

“Are you planning to stay here?”

It came to me that he needn't know how desperate I was. “Yes.”

“Look, I'm sorry I was so high-handed this morning. I was really upset:”

“Really?” I was cold. It surprised me to hear the coldness in my voice, I hadn't known I could sound so icy. “I was thinking about the afternoon Billy hit Arden over the head with the carpenter's plane and cut her skull open and I had to get her to a doctor and didn't have a car, and I called your office and you were out showing a house. Do you consider that a flaw in your fatherhood?”

“Stahz, I couldn't help that. I didn't know about it. I was working!”

“And I was working last night. It may seem like nothing to you, but it's important to me. And what happened last night was nowhere near as serious. And you were there to take care of it, and, you shit, you left that baby lying in vomit!”

He chewed on the inside of his lower lip. He was drinking beer, and he held up the bottle and let half of it pour down his open throat. I never knew how he could do that, and I hated it. It seemed obscene to me, especially at that moment. I was cold and angry, I was even armed against comments about my cooking—or rather, my noncooking. But he didn't make any.

“That place seemed so empty tonight when I got home.”

“And when was that? At nine-thirty? It took you long enough to notice we were gone.”

“No.” Shamefaced. “I went out for dinner with Len Watkins. To talk over a deal.”

I made a face. I knew him too well. “I see. And you did that without calling, so I'd be sure to worry, right?”

He didn't answer.

“Where'd you get the money to go out for dinner anyway? We can never go out for dinner.”

He squirmed in his chair, lighted a cigarette.

I decided to pursue my advantage. “You may not like the way we live, but I'm not crazy about it either. I'm stuck in a place miles from any stores, without a car, with two babies. I have barely enough money to get by each week, yet you made a couple of hundred thousand dollars on that real-estate deal….”

“No, no, I didn't. The agency got most of it.”

“So how much did you get?” I was relentless now. I'd never questioned him about money, I had wanted him to feel free, a big man, a big deal.

“Sixty.”

“Sixty dollars?”

He made a face at my stupidity.

“Sixty thou, Stahz,” he corrected impatiently. He was torn, I could see it. On the one hand, he didn't want to tell me how much he'd made because then I might ask for some of it; on the other, he wanted to seem a big deal in my eyes.

“Sixty thousand dollars!”

He wiped his hand across his face and mouth. “Look, I know. But I spent most of it buying a parcel of land off Merrick Road. Dad says it's a sure thing, I'll triple or quadruple my money in a few years.”

“That's nice,” I said in a dead voice.

We sat in silence. He got up to get himself another beer and asked if I wanted another drink. I did, but I wouldn't let him get it for me. I waited until he came back and sat down, then I got up and got one for myself. I felt stupid and childish, but I couldn't help myself. Letting him get me a drink would somehow be giving in; it would be accepting his gift of a service, and I wanted him to think I wanted nothing from him.

“Stahz, come back,” he urged, finally.

“To what? A man who's never home, who refuses to have anything to do with his own children, who even suggests they're not his….”

“I'm sorry. Really. I was crazy, I didn't mean it. I love you.”

“Well, I don't love you very much anymore.” I'd said it in pique, but was astonished, as I did, to realize it was true.

“Stahz, I'll make things better. I'll get you a car, and I'll give you more money. We'll go out for dinner. I promise.”

“You don't love me.” I was mortified to hear my voice sound thick the way it does when your nose clogs up with tears. I didn't want to betray the least degree of feeling. “You hate that I can't cook.”

“Ah, Stahz.” He'd heard the nasal thickness, he knew he was safe. Damn it. He reached out his arms to me, and when I didn't move, he came and sat on the floor beside me and put his arms around my waist. “I didn't marry a cook, I married a skinny long-legged kook, an artist, a bohemian, a crazy photographer.”

Now I was really crying. “You didn't marry a photographer. I was a painter in those days, and would be one still if…”

Just as well I didn't finish that statement, lying through my teeth as I was. He kissed me, and I found myself kissing him back.

That was the way it went. I stayed overnight that night because I didn't want to waken the kids, but Brad came early the next morning to fetch us. I went back, or he bought me back: that was the truth of it. We never talked about what we felt, about our bad feelings for each other, our bad feelings about our lives. He offered me a bigger allowance, a car, and dinner out every two weeks, and he delivered all but the car: I had to wait for that. My allowance was raised by ten dollars. In return, I got out the cookbook my mother had given me when I got married, and tried to prepare real food. Dinnertime became tense, as everyone came to the table warily, examining what monstrosity I had managed to produce that night, and the kids said, often enough, that they wished I'd go back to hot dogs and hamburgers. The lima bean casserole was incredibly dry, and Brad had to go out and buy us a pizza; and the chicken orientale was swimming in pineapple juice. Arden suggested we drink it instead of eat it. In time, I was given permission by the entire family to abstain from an occupation I clearly had no talent for. But by that time I was determined to continue to try.

Nothing else changed in our marriage. I went on developing film at night, and when one night Billy woke up again, and Brad again pounded on the bathroom door, I told him to have Billy pee in the kitchen sink.

His response to that was a silence whose shock I could sense clear through the door. But somehow, Billy did pee that night, and was sleeping soundly in a dry crib when I checked him later.

I went on as before, taking pictures, charging a little more for them. I was able to buy developing equipment, a used Rollei, and a telephoto lens. My next goal was a Leica, for close-up portrait work. Photography consumed me, and if I never said anything like “I am a photographer,” I knew myself to be one.

But something bad happened to me through this quarrel and its seeming resolution. I felt it happening at the time, but I didn't then think of it as bad. I thought it was natural, mature, that I was finally putting away childish things and becoming a man, I mean a woman, well, a grown-up. It had to do with the way I saw love and the relations between husbands and wives. I recognized that in our quarrel, I had essentially made a power play, had pretended strength I didn't have, had accepted material things as an emblem of victory. Something hardened in me. I began to see Brad the way he saw himself, as our breadwinner. Or to put it crassly, our meal ticket, our necessary evil. Only now—god knows it's more than twenty-five years later—do I really understand what happened that night. I lost my virginity.

M
ONDAY WAS WASHDAY, WHETHER
it shone or rained. When it rained, Belle hung the laundry in the basement, thanking heaven for the basement, remembering having to hang it in the apartment. It was harder to hang it in the basement than in the yard because she had only three lines there, and the basement was damp except near the furnace, and things dried more slowly and she had to keep running up-and downstairs. But at least it wasn't in the house itself. (She wasn't fanatic about the laundry, like some women—like Adeline Carpenter—who had to have their wash on the line before nine in the morning. Adeline considered women who didn't get their wash out that early sluts; she viewed them with the horrified contempt most people reserve for prostitutes. They were scandalous. So were women who served dinner in the kitchen. “Shanty Irish,” Brad's father would pronounce when he looked across their dining room windows to the family next door sitting around the kitchen table at dinner hour. Adeline simply went “Tsk, tsk,” but her judgment of such people was harsher than his.)

Tuesday, Belle ironed. She had a system for this too. First, she sprinkled all the starched clothes and rolled them tightly together and wrapped them in a dampened sheet. She felt she was liberal, modern, about ironing. Unlike her mother, she did not iron socks, or the girls' underpants, Or undershirts, although she ran a warm iron over her own rayon step-ins, and her brassiere, and starched
and
pressed Ed's undershorts.

First, she ironed things that required only a warm iron: her underwear and nightgown. As the iron got hotter she did Ed's shorts and pajamas; then blouses, dresses and handkerchiefs; then the kitchen towels, the sheets and pillowcases; and finally Ed's white shirts and tablecloths. It took many hours, because she ironed carefully, every surface smoothed down, ironed inside and out. Her work was beautiful, and seeing it stacked on the kitchen table gave her pleasure.

Wednesday was relatively free. She did some mending, or if she were making clothes for the children, she did the bulk of it on Wednesday. On Thursday, and again on Saturday, she went to the market. This was the high point of her week. She would dress neatly, not in her good clothes, but in a neat housedress and heels and her old coat, but no hat. She would powder her face, fill in her eyebrows with the eyebrow pencil, and apply lipstick. Then she would walk the three long blocks to Sutphin Boulevard, and four more long windy blocks to the A&P, six to Big Ben.

These marketing expeditions were always efficiently planned. Belle always carefully examined the circulars sent out Wednesdays by the supermarkets, and knew in advance which sale items she would buy at which store. Her second consideration was weight: she tried to buy heavy items last, so she would not have to carry them as far. And because she had to carry the packages home those long blocks, she could never buy more than would fill three or at most four paper sacks. The third consideration was need and what is now called cash flow. She would walk the extra two blocks to Big Ben to get lima beans if they were two cents a pound cheaper there than in the A&P. The entire affair required painstaking management.

On Thursdays, they were often out of food, but she had to be extremely careful because she was at the end of her housekeeping money. Ed got paid on Fridays. Thursdays, she bought only food for that night and Friday. Things like toilet paper, soap, paper napkins and paper towels (used sparingly), and staples she would buy on Saturdays, along with roasts for the weekend, which she hoped would last until Wednesday. In bad weeks, when there was some unexpected expense (Joy was ill and she had to pay the doctor, the weather was extremely cold and they ran out of coal) she had only a few cents left on Thursday and would just send Anastasia up to the local butcher for 15 cents' worth of chop meat or baloney.

Although she felt a certain anxiety about how much she was spending, she enjoyed marketing. It gave her pleasure to stretch her tiny store of money, and to produce the wonderful meals she gave her family. Friday-night dinner was the worst problem, because she had really run out of money by then. But since it was Friday, she had a good excuse for not serving meat, and that helped. Every other night, they had meat for dinner. Their portions were often small, and Belle adamantly shared what there was equally among the four of them: in her house, the poppa did not get the lion's share with the children watching hungrily, the way she'd seen meals in other families. No. They each got one meatball, or one lamb chop or pork chop. Only when there was a roast could they each have as much as they really wanted, but Ed was so mean, he tried to deny the children a second helping of meat. “Have more vegetables!” he'd bark at them. And she would always have to say, “Oh, Ed, give them another slice.” And he'd reluctantly carve another, so thin you could almost see through it, and she'd have to watch, and often to say, “Give her a decent piece, Ed.” Then he'd be annoyed, and would not have seconds of meat himself, but would pile his plate with all the vegetables and potatoes that were left in the serving bowls. So she'd have to say, “Oh, Ed, why don't you have some more meat?” before he would take another slice for himself, and he wouldn't take it even then unless he said first, in a loving voice, “But how about you, Belle? A little of the outside?” If she wanted it, he'd heap her plate.