The Road Taken (14 page)

At college Ed had decided he didn’t want to be an accountant anymore, that he wanted to go into advertising instead, because it was the new glamorous thing to be an ad man; and he had taken English composition courses, although they hardly seemed necessary in order to write a slogan. Still, it turned out he had a knack. So now he was at an ad agency that promoted air travel and cigarettes and cars—some of the things America wanted in this new era of prosperity—and making people want them more. He was earning a lot of money—ten thousand dollars a year—and paid off his family’s loan. Once a week Peggy got a baby-sitter and met him in New York, and the two of them went to a good restaurant, or to a play. They were still so in love they were perfectly happy seeing no one but each other.

In the next two years Peggy had two miscarriages. The first one consisted of sharp pains, a terrifying amount of blood, and finally a clump of blood and human tissue—the end of what she had planned to make her destiny complete. But the second time the baby was six months old, a girl, born dead. She and Ed were devastated. Her doctor told her to wait a while before trying again, in order to be as strong as possible.

She knew she wanted everything too much, too soon; that had always been her nature, and she had always gotten what she set her mind to. For the first time she had to pause and think about life. She realized how lucky she was that she’d gotten pregnant with Peter, her sweet, beautiful son, without even thinking any part of it might be difficult. She and Ed were determined to have another child. Everyone wanted at least two children, most people three or four. But two children, a boy and a girl, Peggy thought, would be perfect without being greedy or tempting fate. Then they would move to a larger house in a better suburb, perhaps in Larchmont: an oasis close to the city, with growing green things around it, an ocean of green, peaceful and fresh. She would be able to sit at her bay window and look out, and not see anybody’s house. Although she would have privacy, the other houses would be right there, of course, so she wouldn’t be afraid or feel isolated, and so that her children could play with the other children in their neighborhood. The sound of little kids playing, she thought, their high voices calling to each other in the dusk just before they came in for dinner, was one of the prettiest sounds in the world.

It was not that she was bored or unhappy here in Levittown, or that she had nothing to occupy her. Even now, living so close to the city, she hardly saw her family anymore except on the big holidays, unless she and Ed made a real effort so that Peter’s grandparents could see him. There was so much for her and Ed to do around the house on weekends. There were chores, things to be fixed, Peter’s social activities. They had bought the new Weber grill that had just been invented, so now they could cook out-of-doors, and they had barbecues, for themselves, or, if they wanted to be festive, for another couple or two with their children. On weekends there was a plume of fragrant smoke coming from everyone’s yard. The husbands were tired from commuting during the week, and this suburban life was what they were working so hard to have. She was twenty-three now, and she considered herself in the prime of her womanhood.

When Peggy became pregnant again, and gave birth to another dead baby, her doctor ran blood tests. Resentfully she thought he should have done it in the beginning, so all these tragedies wouldn’t have happened, but you never criticized your physician. There were new discoveries all the time, and the ramifications of this one, affecting infant deaths, were fairly recent. Her doctor told her that her blood was Rh negative, while Ed’s was Rh positive, which meant that if she carried an Rh-positive baby her blood made antibodies against the child, her body thinking it was not part of her but something alien to get rid of. Ed, her trusted love, whose body she shared in passion and hope, his blood was dangerous to her. She was struck by the irony, the ridiculous unfairness of it.

Peter, her first child, had been safe because her body didn’t know that the blood crossing from her to him through the placenta was different. But after his birth, it did—for ever after. Now, only if she carried an Rh-negative baby, its blood like her own, would the child be all right. Unfortunately, negative was rare. But her doctor told her she didn’t have to take the gamble. There had been a vaccine developed, to be given to the mother within seventy-two hours after a miscarriage, and he gave it to her now.

A year later Marianne was born. Completely perfect, six pounds twelve ounces, and beautiful, with the blue eyes and blond hair of both her parents and her brother, she looked like a fantasy baby in an ad. In fact, Ed wanted to take her photos to his office and get her a job doing a commercial, but Peggy wouldn’t let him. “All I want from now on is for us to be normal,” she told him.

As normal as you could be with the Cold War on, and the war in Korea, and everyone afraid of the Communists, hating the Russians, worrying about the atomic bomb. Duck and cover, the little kids in school were told, hiding under their desks, falling facedown on the playground, eyes shut, in their bomb drills. Peter started wetting his bed again after Marianne was born, and Peggy didn’t know if it was because he was afraid of the bomb or jealous of the baby. In any case, she didn’t make a fuss. Kindly Dr. Spock was the child and baby authority now, his book every sane parent’s bible, and it was official that children were to be treated with benevolence and understanding. It was the first time.

Chapter Sixteen

Joan knew that if you were to describe in one phrase what each person was in her family, she would be the black sheep. Except for knowing that disconcerting fact about herself, all of her life she had been unsure of who she was, or even of what she wanted to be. She knew about her sisters. Peggy would be a contented wife and mother, and Ginger would be a genius or a star of some kind. But what would Joan be? She felt that not only did she not know herself, but other people hadn’t a clue who she was either.

When she complained, her mother said that being the child in the middle was difficult, that she had been one and understood. Her mother also told her, too often and in a guilty way, that Joan had been subjected to great pain as an infant, the reminder of which was the scar on her forehead. Joan didn’t think her scar was as ugly as she led people to think, and making her friends pay to see it was a bit more of a joke than a way of turning around embarrassment. But she had also discovered early that if you told people something bad about yourself they were less likely to discover it and throw it up to you later.

There was plenty that was bad about herself. Although she was smart, she didn’t work hard because she had figured out she didn’t have to. She dreamed or whispered in class, but when she read the books they were given for homework she remembered everything, which annoyed her teachers even more than if she had actually been stupid. Her teachers sent notes home with her report cards, the gist of them being that she was her own worst enemy. Joan was not sure what that meant, but she knew it was scary; it implied there was a malevolent creature inside her that might jump out and destroy her some day. She would have to be prepared.

In her personal life, she hoarded money, always had. She hated to help around the house and do chores if she was told to, and often managed to get out of it, but if not asked she would do anything to be helpful. She teased her sisters and made them angry, when she really hadn’t meant to and didn’t know how it had started. She had nothing against them, she loved them; in fact, when she was young she had followed her older sister, Peggy, slavishly because she thought Peggy knew everything. Peggy had wanted tap-dancing lessons, so of course Joan had begged for them too. Then they both got bored and quit. Peggy didn’t feel guilty but Joan did, because they both knew there wasn’t much money and their parents would do anything for them.

When Peggy fell in love with her soldier and actually married him, Joan wasn’t jealous for an instant. She knew her own adventures were coming, although she had not the faintest idea what they could be. What she did know was that every girl’s ambition of being a young wife and mother as soon as possible was not for her. It seemed like a dead end and too much responsibility. She was aware this made her a kind of misfit in the world, and what was worse she didn’t keep her feelings a secret, so other people thought she was odd, selfish, flighty. Not want to get married and have children? But what would she do with her life?

Joan’s good marks got her into college; she went to Radcliffe, which was a triumph. The family gave her a going-away party and a new typewriter. Then she flunked out after the first year because she was so tired she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning to go to her classes. That was a disgrace. Back at home with her confused and disappointed parents, bored and a child again, she let her mother talk her into taking some extension courses at NYU. She went only because Peggy had not and she wanted to appear better than Peggy—in some way, any way, what way? Peggy had deserted her, and she had no inclination to follow.

At NYU Joan took art appreciation and French, in case she ever went to Paris. Everyone who could afford to was going to Paris now that the war was over; college graduates went as their graduation present, always with a friend. Joan wasn’t a college graduate celebrating, and she didn’t have a close friend to go anywhere with. Her friends from high school were away at college, or married and going on trips with their husbands. Most of the time it was just easier to sleep than to think about any of this.

In New York, people were reading Freud, and going into psychoanalysis—a sentence of five days a week for five years. Something minor, like sibling rivalry, or rage, was enough to send you off to the couch, on that lengthy, expensive journey toward normalcy. But luckily, in her family, eccentricity was accepted. You only had to look at Uncle Hugh. He was gay and no one seemed to care, except for Grandma, who was something of a perfectionist.

There were beatniks now in Greenwich Village, wild-haired young people who always dressed in black, who read strange poetry aloud in dim, smoke-filled little coffeehouses, or converged in bars like the Limelight, the Cedars, Joan’s favorite coffeehouse, Figaro, or the White Horse—where they talked for hours, made friends, found lovers, understood each other (or admitted they understood nothing, which made them feel better). There were drugs, and furious marathon writing sessions, and experimental plays, and artists who had no money.

Uptown, in real life, theirs was the generation that would soon be called the Silent Generation because they didn’t object to anything and wanted to conform, but downtown they were the Beat Generation. Uptown, people watched
I Love Lucy
and
The Honeymooners
on television, where it was made clear that husbands had the control and wives had to connive. The heroic working women of the war years had disappeared. Every girl had to be a virgin, although you couldn’t say the word
virgin
in the movies because it was too sexual. Everyone was having babies, although you couldn’t say the word
pregnant
on TV, because it, apparently, was too sexual too. Hollywood’s and TV’s married couples slept in separate beds with a night table between them. Downtown unmarried couples slept in the same bed, often a mattress on the floor, and if they had a night table at all it was an orange crate. In suburbia, Peggy and Ed were collecting Danish Modern; that life was light-years away from Joan’s.

Did “Beat” mean beaten down? Joan didn’t know, but she started hanging around in the Village too, started dressing all in black like the others, let her hair grow: blond, long and straight, with bangs. She met people. She felt that finally she had friends who were just like her, who believed in individuality and freedom, who questioned the establishment, who understood that anger was an acceptable emotion. Although she had not thought of herself as having any literary talent, eventually she started writing her own free-form poems, and reading them aloud from time to time. She drank red wine and smoked pot. She discovered pills that people took for a marathon evening of fun, though for herself they merely helped her stay awake. She went to parties in people’s apartments—pads, they were called—where the bathtub was in the kitchen and the toilet in the hall, and where people who weren’t married to each other lived together anyway and sometimes even had a child.

Paris could wait for a while, Joan thought. She was actually having a good time here. However, she still lived at home.

Her parents didn’t like the way she looked, the way she dressed, or that she stayed out late and came home smelling of cigarettes. If they had known the rest of it they would have liked it even less; perhaps, despite their tolerant nature, they would have made her stay in the house or sent her to the dreaded Freudian psychoanalyst. But they didn’t know, and there was not even anyone for her to tell, although sometimes she thought of confiding in Uncle Hugh because his life was unconventional too, and he might understand.

What Joan wanted to tell him was that she had a lover now, her first, Henry Collins—at the same time her sister Peggy, the good one, had a new house in Levittown with her successful husband and their adorable little son—and that her secret lover was black and he was an aspiring painter. Of course, she could never bring him home.

Joan and Henry even had to be careful in the street. It was one thing downtown, but ten blocks uptown, where her family lived, people would stare at the interracial couple. She and Henry could never hold hands or look as if they were interested in one another. There were restaurants they could not go to, even if he had the money to take her. They never went further uptown, although sometimes she splurged and bought them standing room tickets for a Broadway play. Joan thought how ironic it was that Peggy and Ed sometimes went to see Broadway shows too, but that the four of them could never double-date.

The place she felt safe was in Henry’s tiny apartment, with his unframed paintings stacked up against the brick wall and one in progress always on the easel surrounded by a spattered drop cloth. He was beautiful, with skin the color of milk chocolate and as soft as that of a girl. His lean and muscular body was so admirable that he often worked as an artist’s model when his paintings didn’t sell and he needed money to eat. Joan found sex—with him, and in general—fascinating. If anything, she thought her friends didn’t appreciate sex enough because it was too easy to have, too accessible. They got drunk, they got stoned, they just did it. But not her, she took it seriously.

Love, of course, was a different matter. No matter how much you made fun of the transient and hypocritical nature of love, it could still wound you more than anything. She and Henry were fascinated with each other, with each other’s bodies, with each other’s looks, with each other’s differentness and the few things they had in common; but they weren’t in love with each other, although they told each other they were because that was part of an affair. She knew that, and so did he, but they would never admit it. They were very fond of each other, they had fun together, they were well suited physically. So they said they loved one another, and later, Joan knew, when they grew bored with each other or the relationship, one of them would say that the love was over, and the one who was told would be hurt. That was the way it was; she knew it already, just starting out on her road of life. She had seen it with her friends. Even if you thought you really weren’t in love, when the love was taken away you would feel hurt. The sex, of course, could be replaced.

She had started keeping a diary, hiding it in her dresser drawer. It was more like a manuscript than a diary per se, since she thought she should make some use of her college typewriter for something besides the occasional poem. In this sheaf of papers she noted her discoveries about human nature. For example, there were so many young women downtown who had run away from their traditional, conformist, middle-class families, and who were now living with abusive men who pushed them around, put them down, and expected to be waited on—allowing themselves to be turned into just the kind of wives they had sworn they would never become. And they were not even married! They considered themselves muses. Was that what love did to you? Why didn’t these women even notice what they had done to their lives?

I will always control my destiny, Joan thought. No matter what happens, there is always free will. Later she would look back and wonder how she could have been so arrogant.