Kramer vs. Kramer (3 page)

“You think you like?”

“The relationship is young. What I do is ask them to go to Montauk for the weekend with me.”

“Don’t you think it’s too soon for that?”

“It could be a fantastic autumn weekend and we could find out we don’t have anything to say to each other.”

“Or it could rain and we could find that out.”

“But think of all the time we’d save. And all the money I’d save.”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

After a few more evenings together, he asked again, she agreed, he rented a car and they took a motel room in Montauk. The weather was clear, they did have some things to say to each other, and without banter, lying wrapped up in a blanket on the beach, they confided that they were getting weary of the singles’ scene. They went to bed on this shared confidence.

The decision, then, was never that Ted Kramer had been selected by Joanna Stern out of all the others as the man she had to marry. What was significant with Ted was that she chose him at that time out of a somewhat interchangeable group of men she had been seeing as a person she might see more often than the rest. By the general standards of the world in which they moved, this meant she would sleep with him eventually, and by her own personal standards, she would not sleep with others at the same time. So Ted was simply one man like others who preceded him who became the key person at the time. It just happened to turn out, given Joanna’s growing malaise with single life, that no one followed him.

They began spending extended periods in each other’s apartments, halfway houses, less than actually living with—more than just dating. He felt that he had won the gold ring on the carrousel: this person—in his field, aware of his work, sophisticated about the singles’ scene, exceptionally pretty, star of beach-house decks and Sunday cocktail parties—was his lady.

The summer was coming, a critical time. Joanna could sense the stirring in the loins of the married executives who were thinking about getting into position with the office girls, even as these men were packing up the station wagons with their weekend underwear, their wives and their children. At his office, Ted had been asked to fill in his vacation schedule.

“We have a momentous decision to make in our relationship,” he said, and for an instant Joanna was worried that he was alluding to a much more permanent arrangement. She was not up to that part yet.

“I’ve got two weeks vacation coming. Want to spend it together?”

“Okay. Why not?”

“Larry is putting together a group house. We could get a room. We could have two weeks by ourselves plus every weekend.”

She had never been to Fire Island or any of the usual summer spots attached, and neither had he.

“It might be all right.”

“Four hundred a person, full share.”

“You’re a real wheeler-dealer.”

“I think it would be nice.”

“Sure. It’s a bargain. I mean, now that I know you don’t snore.”

When Mel, the account executive, wife in Vermont, stood at her desk and asked, “What are you doing this summer and who are you doing it with?” Joanna replied, “I’ve got a place on Fire Island with my boyfriend.” This was the first time she had used “boyfriend” in a sentence referring to Ted, and it gave her pleasure to do it, especially when Mel quickly withdrew with an “Oh,” and took his loins elsewhere.

Being together in a place where so many other people were on the prowl, where they themselves had once been hunting, made them feel unique. When they heard that a porch had collapsed at a singles’ cocktail party practically from the sheer weight of all that social aggression, they were happy not to have been there, to have been at the house eating Sara Lee brownies instead. The singles wandering with drunk or lonely faces along the walks, looking for a party, a conversation, a phone number, the Sunday night ferry rides back, last chance before the highway, people trying to salvage in five minutes what was not found all weekend—made them feel grateful for each other.

The sex was gamy, salty, the delicious quality of always being on the sneak, angling to find the house empty. Most delicious of all was the knowledge that when the summer was over, they could still be together if they wanted to be.

“Joanna, I’d like you to marry me. Please. I never said that to anyone in my life. Will you?”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

They embraced with real affection, with feeling, but beneath it all, with gratitude for being able to prove that they were healthy, after all, and whole, and for not having to pace along the walks any more with drinks in their hands, looking.

T
HE BABY HAD BEEN
crying for what seemed like two hours. “Only forty-eight minutes on the clock,” Ted said. “Only.”

They were drained. They had rocked, patted, bounced, walked, put down, picked up, ignored, strolled with, and sang to the baby, and still he cried.

“One of us should go to sleep,” Ted said.

“I
am
asleep.”

Billy was four months old. Long gone was the baby nurse who handed over a child who never cried during the night, who never cried at all, it seemed. The day she left, this other baby emerged, with needs, who cried—often.

After the baby was born, the family had descended, Joanna’s parents from Massachusetts, Ted’s parents from Florida—they had finally retired. Ted’s brother and sister-in-law arrived from Chicago, the family came and they sat, waiting to be fed endless snacks and drinks.

“It’s a good thing I come out of the luncheonette business,” Ted said.

“But I don’t. If I have to feed one more person, I’m going to hand them a check.”

What they had been left with after the nurse had gone and the family had scattered was fatigue. They were not prepared for the endless output of labor and the exhaustion that comes with a new baby.

“It’s been so long since we made love, I think I forgot where to put it.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“I know.”

At first, Ted was concerned with the proper behavior in his new role. This meant he would get up with Joanna and keep her company while she breast-fed Billy, so at times there were three people nodding off in the middle of the night. After nearly falling asleep in the office on several afternoons, he began to limit his middle-of-the-night assistance to mumbling as Joanna got up to do it.

By eight months, the baby was sleeping longer hours. The daytime labor for Joanna was still constant, though—washes, shopping, feedings. She knew she was supposed to look forward to seeing Ted come home at night because he was her husband. Mostly, she wanted him home to get some help—maybe he could sort the laundry, wash the kitchen floor.

“Joanna, I am so horny—”

“Honey, I don’t want to make love. What I want is a room of my own.”

They laughed, barely, and fell asleep soon after.

They kept hearing from people that “It gets better,” and eventually it did. Billy was sleeping through the night, a cheerful child and beautiful looking. Ted’s anxieties, right or wrong, that the baby might look like him appeared to be unfounded, since virtually no one was ever of the opinion that the baby looked like him. Billy had a small nose, large brown eyes, straight black hair, beautiful.

As their life changed, their friends shifted. Single people belonged to another solar system. When they were first married Ted had moved into Joanna’s apartment in the East Seventies, which was in a building populated largely by singles and a few stray hookers. They moved a few blocks away to a family building, and their closest friends became Thelma and Charlie Spiegel, their neighbors from 3-G downstairs, who had a little girl Kim, three months older than Billy. Charlie was a dentist. A space salesman from
Newsweek
, Marv, with his wife Linda became part of their circle. They had a Jeremy, two months older. First-time parents of small children, they would sit over boeuf bourguignon and discuss bowel movements and toilet training, obsessed discussions of the comparative progress of their children—who was standing, walking, talking, pissing in a potty, shitting on the floor, and they stayed with it and it involved them all. Even at those moments when somebody might say, “Hey, can’t we talk about something else?” the transition was only slight and the something else was related—bringing up children in New York City, public schools or private schools, and occasionally, not all that often, movies seen or books read, assuming anyone in the room had the time to read.

Billy Kramer at eighteen months was a child people stopped to look at on the street with his beautiful mother.

At work, Ted had received a raise simply because he was a father now, he surmised, a member of a club. He went to Giants football games with an old college friend, Dan, a lawyer. He read news magazines and
The Wall Street Journal
for his work. He
had
work. Joanna’s club consisted of a few park-bench friends, some of the less controlling nannies, and Thelma, nothing quite as colorful in her mind as Ted going off to an office where he was with people over thirty inches high who spoke in complete sentences. And in her world there was no one, not the park-bench club, nor her old friends, nor Ted, no one with whom she could share the dirty little secret.

She did bring it up, but they did not want to hear it.

“I love my baby,” she said one day to Thelma. “But basically, it’s boring.”

“Sure it is,” Thelma said, and Joanna thought she had an ally. “It’s exciting, too.”

She lacked a forum. The women she knew were either not admitting it to themselves or were more accepting than she. During a phone call with her mother, she broached it.

“Did you ever get bored?”

“No, not with you. You were never any trouble.”

Was there something wrong with her, then? One night, after listening to Ted and a long account of something that was troubling him, an argument with a colleague at work, she said what she was expected to, he should not let it bother him, and then she told him what was upsetting her—it wasn’t that she didn’t love Billy, he was so cheerful and beautiful, but all of her days were the same. “Being a mother is boring, Ted. Nobody admits it.”

“Well, that’s just the way it is. These early years, anyway. He is beautiful, though, isn’t he?”

He just did not want to hear it. It was he who turned over and went to sleep.

S
HE LIVED WITH THE
secret. It did not get better for her. The highlight of one summer was when Billy made a doody in the potty. “Yeah, Billy!” she applauded and Ted applauded and Billy applauded. You were supposed to reinforce the child. “Make a doody,” he said a few days later all by himself and he went and made a doody, and when Ted phoned the house to say he had closed a deal, a monthly schedule, full-page ads, Joanna had good news, too. “He said, ‘Make a doody,’ and he did it all by himself.” It was not even her triumph or her doody.

Billy was two. Joanna’s mother would have said he wasn’t any trouble. He was sometimes stubborn or slow, but he was emerging as a person, moving from the primitive state of sticking cottage cheese into his ears into a semi-civilized being you could take to a Chinese restaurant on a Sunday.

She let him watch television,
Sesame Street
, and he sat, blinking, not totally comprehending. It bought her an hour.

Ted was in full stride. Tentative when he was younger, unaggressive and searching, at thirty-nine he had evolved into a knowledgeable advertising man. The previous year he had earned $24,000, not a killing in New York, but more money than he had ever known—and he was on the upswing. He worked hard at being informed in his work, and his immediate supervisor, the advertising manager, called him “My main man.” He did not stop for drinks at any of the advertising-business watering holes. He did not trade sexual banter with the girls in his office. He was a family man. He had a beautiful wife at home and a beautiful child.

Weekends were easier for her when they did city things together or when Ted took Billy for part of the day and she could go shopping for herself or just get away. What was it like to bring up a kid in the city, people at work might ask him, and he would tell them it was an exciting place to be, which he might have been proclaiming at the very time Joanna was at home, trying to stay engaged while Billy was building blocks into a garage, “No, play with me, Mommy!” fighting to keep her eyes open at four in the afternoon and not pour herself a glass of wine before five.

The pattern of their social lives was to have dinner-party trade-offs with friends fairly regularly. The Women’s Movement filtered through to them, there were some discussions about roles, and for a while all the men were getting up together to clear the dishes. Ted sometimes saw his old friends over lunch; Joanna did not see her old friends. She added Amy, a former schoolteacher she had met at the playground. They discussed children.

“T
ED, I WANT TO
get a job.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going bananas. I can’t spend my days with a two-year-old.”

“Maybe you should hire some sitters.”

“I’m not interested in a couple of free afternoons.”

“Joanna, darling, young children need their mothers.”

“Linda has a job. She gets up, she goes out, she’s a person. And I’m standing there with Billy and Jeremy and their Cleo, who can’t wait for me to leave so she can watch
As the World Turns
.”

“Do you watch it?”

“Don’t make fun of this.”

“All right, have you thought about what you’d do?”

“What I did, I guess.”

“And it would have to pay for the housekeeper or the sitter or whoever. I mean, we don’t have enough to take a loss on your working.”

“We’re already taking a loss. In what this is doing to me.”

“What are you talking about? You’re an incredible mommy. Billy is terrific.”

“I’m losing interest in Billy. I’m bored with his dumb two-year-old games and his dumb blocks. You’re talking to grownups and I’m on the floor building garages.”

“You know, you forget so fast. At the end, you were getting tired of what you were doing, remember?”

“So I’ll do something else.”