Of Time and Memory (29 page)

Peggy could hear her whispering this to everyone—If she starts holding her babies, she'll start feeling better.

Now Peggy thanked God for the midget race cars that screamed their maddening sound through town each night because they drowned out the sound of everyone whispering about her, and because if she laid her head on the windowsill, the noise from the racetrack was enough to cover the sound of her babies crying.

.  .  .

It came down to one last night.

It was well after midnight and on the couch across the room, my father was tossing and turning in his exhausted sleep, his feet hanging over the edge. All those times during the months when he was courting her, he would drop her off at the front door to this house and then while he was driving home, she would lie in bed wishing in the worst way that she could sleep next to him. Since she had fallen in love with him and been certain that he was the one she was waiting for, it had seemed like such a sad waste of time to her not to sleep with him. Each night was a night they would never get back. Now she wanted all of those nights back.

Tonight, outside the front window of the living room, the branches of a young birch tree waved in the warm August wind. Since coming here from the hospital, she had been aware of the smallness of her parents' house. Like the others on the block, it was divided into many rooms in an effort to give the illusion of space and privacy, but you could stand in the center of any room and stretch out your arms and nearly touch all four walls. Tonight the house seemed too small to contain her and her husband and the two babies. The house didn't seem to hold enough oxygen for everyone.

The problem with being back here under her parents' roof was that the progression in her life—the marvelous progression from being a single teenaged girl and then an engaged teenaged girl and then a married teenaged girl and then a mother—was suddenly interrupted. Here she was back home, sleeping alone again as if nothing had happened.

She gazed across the room at her husband and wished with everything in her comprehension that she felt strong enough
to get up from the daybed and walk the five steps it would take to reach him. She wished she felt strong enough to get up and make him his lunch, the sandwiches that he would take to work at the print shop in the morning.

She thought how her love for him seemed to have begun in Atlantic City where he had driven her that Saturday during her seventh month of pregnancy. She stood looking at the ocean that day, wondering if the blue-green waves would be able to hold up even her great weight. Just beyond the boardwalk, on the way back to the parking lot, there was an outdoor shower, nothing more than a green garden hose hanging on a rusty nail inside a wooden stall, where he stopped to wash the sand off her feet so she wouldn't track it into the Chevrolet. On the way home he pulled onto the side of the road to take pictures of her and this car. It was a 1948 Chevy with grand, sweeping fenders and hubcaps that were bright disks of light. He had wanted her to stand alongside the car, a profile so he could capture her enormous belly. But she wouldn't. “A car parked next to a tank,” she said. She fell asleep before they reached home, waking once and for a few seconds forgetting it wasn't a date she was on, forgetting she was married.

How this young man changed her. Something about his love for her, his way of accepting her despite her dark moods and her stubbornness, set her free to dream and to change. No one had ever heard her say that she wanted to get married young and have a family; she was headed out of town, off to a bigger, grander life. And then she met Dick, and suddenly she was a married lady who wanted to have six sons. Boys; she loved their inexhaustible energy. The way their imaginations were just beginning to take hold—explorers, sliding their canoes into the clear, cold water. They were always moving;
even when they walked they were doing a kind of dance. She liked boys emphatically, felt she understood them. They drove their cars very fast, as if they were fleeing something. They pressed girls, like their cars, to go faster, farther. She admired the way they disdained convention, defied time, challenged even the force of gravity. Boys, not girls, because a daughter might inherit all her fears, be too much like her.

She saw the fright in children's eyes—“I didn't ask to be put here!” Like her, they were not completely of this world. She suspected that little children knew the mysteries of the universe, saw the truth in things; they cried when loved ones left the room as if they thought they might never return, because sometimes in life that was what happened.

Her mother had warned her about the sadness of raising children; when they are small and eager to draw close to you, they are too young to understand you. Then when they are finally old enough to understand you, they draw away. You never really understand each other, her mother had said. Your seasons never match.

In the hospital, between her terrifying contractions, one of the nurses had said, “Boys are easier, they're not as smart and will do pretty much whatever you tell them to do.” That was probably Sally, trying to get her to laugh, trying to distract her. But there was something on the nurse's face, some concern in her eyes.

When it was over, it was this nurse who held the babies up for Peggy to see, their anatomy so shockingly different from her own. Their beauty was stunning and she raised her hands at the moment she first saw my brother and me, reached for us to take us from the nurse. That was the moment the pain in her head returned, and now it was much worse than it had ever been. It felt like her skull was cracking.

.  .  .

The pain had frightened her because in the misery of those last weeks of pregnancy she had allowed herself to believe my father each time he told her that once she had delivered her baby, she would begin to feel better. She would begin to reclaim herself the way the other mothers in the hospital had. Tonight as my father lay sleeping across the room, she tried to count how many days she had been at home, how many days had passed since the pain grew worse. And this frightened her, because she realized that she had been sleeping away entire days at home. She had not awakened when my father got up for work in the morning, or when he came home in the late afternoon, or when he made his bed again on the couch, or when all of them sat down in the next room for dinner and breakfast and another dinner. She had slept through her babies' crying. This thought tonight paralyzed her with fear, the same fear she had felt in April, up late in the kitchen, tearing the seams out of her maternity dresses with the feeling that an animal living secretly in the basement had found its way up the stairs and was gnawing through the door into the kitchen.

The only food that she could tolerate in her last days was the ice that my father fed her from the blue glass bowl, the blue of a mailbox. Little chips of ice that he fed her from a spoon. When she looked into his eyes as he raised the cold spoon to her lips, she could feel the world was falling away beneath her feet.

At last she called out to him that night, called his name softly and tried to move toward him. It was another hot and humid night and he slept with his shirt off, his wire-rimmed glasses
folded on the mantel. Her legs were as heavy as iron to move, swollen twice their size as if they'd been blown up with a tire pump. And there he was, so thin, growing thinner every day now, seeming to get thinner right before her eyes whenever she answered the question that he kept asking her—Are you still bleeding, Peggy?

It was his fear that seemed to diminish his size.

The same fear was in her mother's eyes when she changed the sheets. The look in her eyes that cried out—For God's sake, Peggy, how can you have any blood left!

She wanted to wake her husband now, to bring him into the daybed, to tell him her terrible, terrible thoughts. But she was distracted then by a noise in the kitchen, the rattling of glass bottles in the pot of boiling water on the stove. She wondered angrily how she had slept through this sound! Then the sound of her mother's slippers on the linoleum floor. She wished that her father had gotten up for this feeding. There was something she wanted to talk with him about. Ever since her pregnancy had begun to show, he seemed to be backing away from her, keeping his distance. She thought back to the nights when she had stood outside with him as he watched the skies. The war was on, and he was always watching for enemy planes overhead. He stood in the grass, his suspenders buckling a little each time he tipped his shoulders back to look up at the sky.

But then, with her pregnancy, he began backing away. Maybe he was just stepping aside because he knew that she would be too busy to have much time for him anymore. She would leave him.

Tonight she felt guilty for taking over her father's tiny house this way. The cot in the living room, things for the babies piled on every chair. Even the familiar scent of his aftershave lotion and her mother's baking had given way to
tonics, powders, disinfectants, and diapers. She was taking over his tidy house, making a mess of it.

His radio was pushed into a corner behind a chair. She remembered the day her father brought the big radio home, setting it carefully in the living room as if he were putting a monument in place. Its resonance in this house, its lighted blue dial, its doors like the doors of the Lutheran church in town. And when he fixed up the basement and brought home their first washing machine. Once she had roller-skated off the landing and fallen down the stairs to the basement floor, landing on her wheels and rolling along as if nothing had happened. Until now she had always felt safe in her father's house.

More than anything else, she wanted to feel safe again. She wanted to get up and hold these people she loved, and make the most of this time they had together because she knew that no matter how hard these days were, these were the days they would all look back on, wanting to have them back again.

Soon her mother was standing at her side, apologizing. But Peggy began yelling at her. They're my babies, I want to feed them. They're not yours, they're mine!

Her mother's hands were open at her sides, pleading with her. You need to rest, you need to save your strength.

And then it returned—the pain like a cold spark exploding in the back of her head. Her voice woke my father. On the clock it was 1:30.

When the babies began crying to be fed, the milk ran from her nipples.

My father had brought the record player from the apartment because Peggy told him that as soon as she got out of the hospital she was going to start dancing herself back into shape. She was determined to regain her figure, and to remain a girl, always a girl. She would still go barefoot, babies or no
babies, and she would keep her hair long, the curls hanging in her face. She would resist growing up for as long as possible, and then yield an inch at a time.

She heard her mother's voice but it seemed to be coming from far, far away. She kept dreaming about the little brick apartment, she kept moving the furniture around in her mind, trying to figure out if there would be room for two cribs. Two babies! It was a wonder. Down the hallway they were stirring. The two of them in one crib, sleeping horizontally, one at each end. She pictured them: little oblongs of heat and light; hair like corn silk.

I'm only nineteen, she said to her mother. I just need a little time to get used to them.

Her mother held up two little sailor outfits—cloth coats, matching short pants, and kneesocks—as small as dolls' clothes.

Please, Peggy told her, don't let them cry. The sound of them made the blood rush to her head.

She looked past her mother, back to my father asleep on the couch. She felt his loneliness. He didn't really even know her, know who she was. The two of them hadn't had enough time, they hadn't eaten enough meals together, just the two of them across the narrow tin table in their own apartment. His gestures were still unfamiliar to her. She looked at him asleep on the couch, studying him, trying to memorize him.

It was strange, but when she turned her head and looked back at her mother, she thought for a moment that they were all on the farm in Hatfield, the farm where her mother had lived as a girl.

Outside on the clothesline, the diapers were white squares in the moonlight, like bandages.

They're good boys, aren't they? she asked her mother. She
already pictured us running. Someday she would tell us about Jim Thorpe, the American Indian boy who ran like the wind. She told her mother how she was going to move all the furniture in the apartment so there would be room to push us around in our stroller,
inside
.

Inside?
her mother asked.

I don't want to take any chances with polio, she explained. Visitors would have to stare at her babies through the glass windows of the apartment. Her idea was to protect us within a cocoon of love. During the war, when she had stood outside on the lawn watching the sky with her father, her own life had seemed far off, beyond the stars. But somehow she had found her way, everything had come to pass exactly as she'd hoped it would. Now the love for my father—her husband—and for the babies was self-contained, prepossessing. She was too sick to hold us, but she wanted us nonetheless. We were all encased within her love for us, a love that would immure us from the world's sadness, from all loss and longing.

When the cold spark of pain exploded again in her head she asked her mother to wake her father. He came down the stairs, trying to put his glasses on. Then she asked him to carry her up to their bed.

My father awoke then as she was being carried away. If only she had had the strength to explain to him why she wanted to spend the last night of her life away from him. They were young, their marriage so new, and their love for each other so strong that she knew his heart might try to follow hers into the next world. She had to do something to make him relinquish her. She had to push him away so he wouldn't follow her. So he would stay and take care of her babies. How my father's heart had been set upon going with her.