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Authors: Elizabeth Crane

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BOOK: The History of Great Things
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Brava

Y
ou and Dad come back from Germany and move to Binghamton, where he has a teaching job.

—You forgot about Minnesota, Betsy.

—I'm just conflating. Nothing happens in Minnesota that's all that different from what happens in Binghamton.

—That's probably true.

You move into a little Cape Cod, excited to set up your first house. Your budget is still laid out down to the penny, so you sew more curtains, shop sales, make a braided rug out of wool flannel remnants for the living room, take it apart about four times until it lays flat. You fix supper for Fred most every night, broiled, buttered chicken breasts with frozen lima beans, pork chops with frozen green beans, Jell-O or vanilla ice cream for dessert, Mother's three-bean salad in the summer, nothing fancy. Sundays are his turn to cook but he would just as soon have TV dinners, which are fairly newly popular, and which Dad considers to be one of the brilliant innovations of their time, so when his turn comes it's either Salisbury steak with
peas, mashed potatoes, and apple pie, or he'll fix up some braunschweiger sandwiches on Hillbilly bread. For a while you're pleased with yourself for being such a good homemaker, write letters to your mother thanking her for all the ways she taught you to save pennies, but once the place is all decorated, you're not altogether sure what to do with your time. You're thought of as a good faculty wife, whatever that might mean, showing up with a smile to cocktail parties in a smart wool sheath, pearls, and circle pin, and you know Dad never so much minded that you wanted a career as much as he just hadn't fully understood what that might mean, and that he hadn't thought about it at all before you got married. You're not even sure how much you did, honestly. You knew you wanted more than what Muscatine had for you; that was about it at the time.

There's a small opera company in Binghamton, and you and Fred have attended a few performances there, though you secretly think most of the singers are positively dreadful, that you would be better than any of them. But you and Fred have been trying to have a baby, and soon after this you get pregnant; you're only twenty-two, and this is what people do, though you have some lingering uncertainties about whether it's what you really want, or at least this soon. Still, when you eventually miscarry, you find yourself unexpectedly sad. You imagine a boy (though you'll never know), standing over his changing table, tickling his tummy, observing the utter perfection of every part of him, his long eyelashes, his chubby fingers, thinking how lucky he is to be a boy. The image vanishes though, and your mind takes you somewhere else: you've failed. This is not something you have much experience with—none, to be precise. You have never known anything but triumph, no matter how small; you got straight As throughout school, you
behaved like a proper young lady, always, never once got in trouble, although you haven't forgotten that time you brought your friend Ginny over to play, how even though you weren't punished, you had failed to see that your judgment was utterly wrong. This new but gripping sense of failure settles in as though it had been there the whole time waiting for the best opportunity to come forward, like a creature with a mind, as though you are fully made up of whatever the chemical components of failure might be; you now clearly see where you've been made of failure all this time, that you will simply have to work your absolute hardest against this from here on. Shortly after this, you consider trying again, wonder what it would be like to have a little girl to dress up, to pass down all the things your mother taught you.

Your friend Audrey is about your age, already has two kids, a boy and a girl just over a year apart. Audrey is the perfect mother; she was in nursing school when she got pregnant the first time, decided to finish later. You spend a great deal of time at Audrey's with your friend Inge, observing Audrey's endless patience with her toddlers (she laughs when you tell her this, but it's more or less true, she's a gentle soul); mostly, though, you are making notes in your head, as you are fairly sure that your patience is a finite resource.
Fred is ready
, you tell them,
but I might want to wait a while
. You love having Audrey's baby in your lap, his tiny fingers gripping your thumb, but he is crying soon enough, so you hand him over to Inge, who has no plans for children herself, but who also has a good way with a baby. You fall a bit silent, realizing that if you have a crying baby, your handoff is likely to be at work. In her soft German accent, Inge says
Not efryone has to haf babies, Low-is. Dan and I aren't going to.
You've known this about Inge, but it's an idea in your
head that people who don't have babies
can't
have babies, that if you choose not to have babies, there's some extreme reason, like a family history of leprosy or hysteria or who knows what, not that you might simply prefer not to be a parent. At the same time, there's a speck of a thought that this doesn't seem quite right: Who decided this? It seems like something that was decided. Inge is one of the most rational, even-tempered people on the planet, capable of making a decision on the basis of her own research or perhaps even her own instincts about what's right for her, but why doesn't that seem to apply on this issue, or at least not to you? You don't feel like you have a choice. A part of you loves the idea of having a child. Another part feels like having kids will be a terrible, terrible idea.

Soon enough it happens, and when you're about three months pregnant, barely showing, you attend another faculty gathering where the director of the local opera company learns that you're an aspiring singer and invites you to audition for an upcoming oratorio. You haven't been practicing recently, an hour here or there, having gotten caught up in making house and babies, and you tell him so, but he insists that it can be casual. You ask for a couple of weeks, during which you practice “Caro Nome” several hours each day, and when it comes time to audition you wear an A-line maternity dress you made just for the occasion (though you still don't really need maternity clothes yet) from a light gray wool that was on sale (you are especially pleased with the sleeves, which are not always easy to line up right with the armholes, sometimes it's necessary to rip them out several times before you get the seams to match up in a perfect line underneath the arms). The maestro greets you with kisses on both cheeks, even though he's from Albany. When you're done, he jumps to his feet, claps, yells
Brava!
—
laughs with joy—and he is not humoring you because you're Dr. Crane's wife, he's genuinely moved. This is all you. The maestro says he can't wait to introduce you to the world and this is the absolute greatest thing that's ever happened in all your twenty-three years.

Who Has No One

N
ina is getting married. You are not at all fond of her fiancé, the two main reasons being that he's not that into getting to know you, and that he takes up most of her available time. Nina hasn't abandoned your plan to be famous authors, marry best friends, live next door to each other, and have kids (who would either be best friends or marry each other); she's just followed through, while you've been held up in a bunch of saloons along the way. She's asked you to be her maid of honor, which as far as you know means walking down the aisle and standing next to her, possibly in a horrible dress. That seems manageable enough, though you're not looking forward to it. It's maybe not so surprising that she's getting married before you; Nina's an always-has-a-boyfriend type and you're a wait-for-some-movie-star. Still, a part of you, a big part, feels like this is something she's doing to you, or at least something that is happening to you with some sort of cosmic intention. Frankly, this seems emblematic of your life in general. Your worldview is perilously close to being fixed on Life Is a Series of Events Specifically Designed to Fuck with Your Head. That's a worldview, right? You're from New York. What else would it be?

—I think this might be true, but I might be conflating your worldview with mine.

—There's some overlap, Mom. Or there is at this time, anyway.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to have this conversation with the person you most want to have it with. It's obviously not reasonable to suggest to Nina that she's doing this to hurt you, getting married, but what you can't quite work out for yourself is how she can't anticipate your needs about the whole thing. It doesn't help right now that Nina's worldview is, in essence, the opposite of yours. She believes deeply in prevailing goodness. So when you propose to her that these events are being designed with nefarious, Betsy-sabotaging purposes, and she asks who it is that might be designing them, your response is a simple one.
God
, you tell her.
I didn't know you believed in god
, she says.
I don't, really
, you say. You both can't help but giggle, but you're going to stick with it.
That makes no sense
, Nina says.
It makes perfect sense! How does that make any sense?
I don't know exactly, it's just what I think. Maybe something happened in a past life where I did believe in god, and then something shitty happened and I stopped believing in god, and even though I don't remember any of this now, the god I once believed in is punishing me now.
Nina laughs.
Don't laugh!
You both laugh.
Don't laugh, I'm not kidding! Okay, I believe you, I believe you, but it still doesn't make sense. Don't tell me what makes sense! God isn't about what makes sense, everyone knows that. Betsy, come on. Listen to what you're saying. It's what I think.
It is what you think. It is really what you think, and you're going to stick with it for a while.

At this point, you've been to a whole lot of weddings. You've been to weddings at the Plaza and the Pierre, outdoor weddings overlooking the Hudson, backyard weddings on Long Island,
church weddings in the Bronx and temple weddings in Queens, Buddhist weddings in Vermont, interfaith weddings in people's living rooms, and weddings at City Hall. The obvious and logical conclusion is that it's not all that hard to find a partner, for everyone in the world besides you, and the sub-conclusion is that there is something deeply and irreversibly wrong with you. This is further evidenced by the fact that you are almost never invited with a date. It doesn't occur to you that this is largely because you almost never have a boyfriend. What does occur to you is that everyone who knows you probably thinks you can't even get a date. This is on the growing list of Things Being Done to You. You believe that you should be invited with a date either way, whether you can get one or have one or don't want one at all. You have no idea who you would even bring, but every single time a fat white envelope arrives in the mailbox (and it's hard not to notice that they're getting bigger and fatter and more in-your-face than ever; undoubtedly the wedding industry is on the board of the Betsy-sabotaging conspiracy) without “and Guest” after “Betsy Crane,” you can read the invisible calligraphy that reads instead “Who Has No One.” What's crazy is that you like weddings, in theory, but lately the main thing on your mind, as one bride after another walks down the aisle, is that it isn't you.

You come in with no idea of what being a maid of honor entails. Nina's not really sure either. The wedding is mostly being planned by her future mother-in-law, who gives you a list: wedding-day duties include keeping track of Nina's wedding-related appointments, helping Nina get dressed the day of, and making sure she's calm and happy. But your primary task is to arrange and host the bridal shower. All of this turns out to cost about infinity more money than you have. You've been wait
ing tables on the Upper West Side since your summer on Fire Island. The dress Nina has picked out for you (from among the choices her mother-in-law has presented from Bloomingdale's) is absolutely gorgeous, a full-skirted Ralph Lauren, which Nina insists on paying for, which seems like it might be a good thing, because you have a few thousand dollars of credit card debt as it is. But this kind of generosity, where you are concerned, anyway, only leads to weirdness and misunderstanding. You are relieved for about a minute not to have to generate more debt, only to move directly into resentment. She has more money than you. She didn't even do anything to get that money, and now she's marrying more of it. She has no idea how hard it is for you,
it
being everything. You've been waiting tables for a couple of years now. She doesn't understand that gifts like this make you feel uneven, like she doesn't really know you, or worse, that she feels sorry for you. (You have no issue with feeling sorry for yourself, but the idea that others might pity you is an unbearable conundrum.) You don't want to understand that maybe she does understand and just doesn't have any better ideas about how to make you happy. So you try to pick a fight, which you regret almost immediately, because you can hear, as it comes out of your mouth, what it sounds like when you say
I appreciate it, I really do, but I don't think you get how shitty this makes me feel.
Nina, bless her heart, is inclined to try to understand, where it might serve you both better if she just told you to fuck off.

You insist on hosting the shower at your apartment, asking Nina to politely relay to her mother-in-law that she'd prefer a more intimate setting than the River Café. You still live in, and owe back rent on, your brownstone duplex, but it's always been a good place for a party. (That one time that guy almost fell backward off the front of the building trying to catch the
beer he knocked off the roof, the one that accelerated like a missile and just missed hitting a pedestrian who turned out to be your downstairs neighbor:
Classic
.) Unfortunately, the mother-in-law insists on coming by to scope it out before the big event and gives you a list of things for the party that you didn't know you needed, like outdoor rugs for the roof garden and phone numbers for a desirable caterer and chair-and-table rental company.
You should probably carpet these stairs, too
, she says. Your indignation is growing, and as soon as she leaves, these numbers go right into the trash. You decorate the roof with your own Christmas lights and flowers from the deli and enlist me to help cook. I'll make a pasta salad and a salmon mousse and you'll bake cupcakes. But the whole shebang still costs about four hundred dollars that you don't have. Nina has boots that cost more than that.

All things considered, the shower is ostensibly a success. Nina's guests compliment you on the party, and the only one grumbling is the mother-in-law, who does not care one bit for the spiral staircase that leads to the roof (
Weren't you going to do something about this?
), nor the tattered AstroTurf she'd been hoping to cover with her fancy rugs (
What
is
this?
), nor the rusty folding chairs that were up there when you moved in (
Someone could cut themselves on this and get tetanus!
). Fortunately, one displeased person in a room is more than enough to confirm your inadequacy as a human, and even if the mother-in-law's face weren't betraying her at every turn, you have a sonar for that person, and a memory for nothing else.

That said, it turns out that sitting next to a bride-to-be, making a stupid-ass hat out of bows, and writing down a list of the thousand-dollar vases she's received and who gave them is the worst imaginable torture, an opportunity to review all the
things you don't have, will probably never have. Right now you'd be happy with a toaster oven that doesn't give off sparks when you plug it in. If you could register for a list of things like that, you would. A Walkman that doesn't merely play but also rewinds. A typewriter that doesn't turn commas into apostrophes. Any one, single, properly functioning household item. In this moment, though, you would be satisfied with no less than the lifelong misery of everyone at this party. You would totally register for that.

—Uch.

—What?

—I'm not sure this draft is going any better than the one where I was frigid and had issues with my father.

—Why not?

—Well, now I'm self-pitying and resentful and totally unlikable, Mom.

—Is that not believable?

—No, it's believable.

—So what's the problem?

—I think you're still more interesting. Self-pity and resentment just aren't as interesting as excited, ambitious, and possibly insane.

—I'll overlook that for now, Betsy.

BOOK: The History of Great Things
10.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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