“Drive a Volvo, don’t you?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Gotta go,” he said, and started leaving the house. Before he reached the door, his wife emerged from the kitchen, her baby, Tom, over one shoulder.
“Where you going?” she asked Tony.
“Out,” he said, and was gone.
“He say where he was going?” she asked her mother.
“Yeah. Out,” Babs said, then turned to me and asked, “Get you a beer, hon?”
I accepted a can of Schlitz and a Tareyton cigarette. Betty had put her boy into his playpen. Babs picked up Jeffrey and placed him alongside Tom. The playpen was filled with assorted wooden toys and looked like it needed a good cleaning—but I tried not to stare at it for too long.
“Now, hon,” Babs said, “as I am lookin’ after Tom here while Betty is out, I would be delighted to add Jeffy to our happy home.”
She gave Betty a big toothless smile. Her daughter glowered back at her.
“That would be wonderful,” I said, then explained the hours I’d be working and asked her how much she wanted a week to look after Jeffrey.
“Don’t want nothin’,” she said. “’Cause, like I said, I’m already babysittin’ my grandson here . . .”
“You’ve got to accept something from me,” I said.
“Okay, five bucks.”
“A day?”
“With you on sixty bucks a week? Hell no. Five bucks a week will do me fine. Keep me in smokes.”
Later that night, when Dan walked in after work, his appearance threw me. He’d had a haircut. Not a minor trim, but a radical crop that reduced his shoulder-length hair to short back and sides.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve enlisted.”
My attempt at wit did not play well, as Dan looked tired and strained.
“So you don’t like it?” he asked, sounding testy.
I didn’t take the hint and change the subject. Instead I said, “No, I don’t like it. It makes you look like a drill sergeant.”
“I only got it cut because . . .”
“I know, I know. It’s easier to fit in here this way.”
“Something like that, yes. And you think that’s a conformist thing to do, don’t you?”
“Dan—”
“It offends your counterculture sensibilities, right?”
“Why the hell are you so angry?”
“I’m just wrecked, that’s all,” he said, kicking off his shoes and flopping down on the bed. “And it’s been a particularly bad day.”
“So that gives you the right to take it out on me?”
“I wasn’t taking anything out on you.”
“Yes, you were.”
“You’re not happy here, are you?”
“I’m not happy in this damn motel.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Hey,” I said, trying to steer us off this subject, “I took the job in the library.”
“Yeah, I heard,” he said.
“Aren’t you pleased?”
“Of course I’m pleased. And Nurse Bass told me that you agreed to let her mom look after Jeff. Politically, it’s the right call.”
“I liked Babs, although . . .”
“Yeah?”
“It’s a little grubby in there.”
“But not so grubby that . . .”
“I wouldn’t dream of leaving Jeff anywhere that wasn’t safe.”
“I know that.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said.
“Are you trying to start a fight?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “you were the one who started it.”
We moved out of the motel the next day after settling a bill for almost $200 for the two weeks we spent there. Considering that Dan was only being paid $600 a month and that we had been offered free accommodations at Bland’s house as part of the deal, it was just a little galling to have to pay for the pleasure of camping out at that “charming” motel.
“Don’t worry—we’ll get it back,” Dan said.
“You know, I’ve also just written out a check for six hundred dollars to Billy for all the repairs . . . which essentially wipes out any savings we have.”
“I’ll get on to Delores tomorrow.”
“No, I’ll get on to her. You worry about your patients, let me take care of the move-in.”
Actually, it was Billy who did the move-in. We’d been storing what little furniture we had in a local barn that he’d found for us. Now he hauled everything out, lugged it up the narrow back stairs, and reassembled it in the freshly painted apartment. Because of its relatively cramped size, we just had room for our double bed, a chest of drawers, a sofa, a large easy chair, and a simple pine table and chairs. Billy had done fantastic work. Considering the grim state of the place when we’d arrived, the transformation was astonishing. Freshly painted white walls, stripped and sealed floorboards, a renovated kitchen, and a toilet that no longer looked like a public health violation. I tried to forget the tiny size of the space. It was simply good to be somewhere clean and relatively airy, with our own simple furniture. And thanks to Billy’s amazing energy (he started moving our furniture at seven in the morning), we had the entire apartment unpacked and set up by the time Dan came home that evening.
“Coming home” for him meant mounting the back stairs from his office. When he showed up that evening, he had Nurse Bass with him. She blinked in shock when she saw the renovations, but quickly recovered and said, “Just wanted to see what you’d done here.”
“It’s Billy who did the work,” I said, nodding in his direction. He smiled shyly and continued adjusting a kitchen shelf. “Feel like a beer?”
“Got stuff to do at home,” she said.
“It’s fantastic, isn’t it?” Dan said, looking around.
“Makes a change,” she said, then turned and left.
“Well, I think it’s great,” Dan said and kissed me. “Thank you.”
Later that night, he made love to me. Try as much as I did to engage in the act, I still felt curiously detached. This was not the first time I’d been indifferent during sex—especially as we’d hardly made love since Jeffrey was born.
“You okay?” he asked afterward.
“Yeah, fine.”
“It didn’t sound like . . .”
“I didn’t want to wake Jeff,” I said.
“Right,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“Can I go to sleep now?” I asked.
Happily, Dan didn’t push this point—or demand why exactly this part of our marriage had hit a bad patch. I couldn’t explain it myself. I realized this was crappy behavior. And I knew that I wasn’t treating Dan fairly. But right now, all I could see was an endless, empty horizon of broken nights and dirty diapers. And every time I turned on the television and saw news coverage of an antiwar demonstration, or watched footage of the Allman Brothers concert at Watkins Glen, or read in Time about Vonnegut’s new novel—I felt as if I had been physically removed from everything interesting in 1973. I woke up every morning with this terrible sinking feeling that I had landed myself in Permanent Dullsville and there was nothing I could do except tough things out. I was trapped. And I hated it, especially the fact that I myself had constructed the dead end in which I now found myself.
But when my mother showed up a week later she knew immediately that things weren’t exactly stable between us.
“So when did you stop having sex?” she asked me.
“I’m still having sex with Dan,” I said.
“You mean you’re duty-fucking him.”
“That’s a little blunt, Mom.”
“But accurate. And who can blame you, living in this dump?”
I didn’t know if she was referring to the apartment or Pelham—and didn’t push to find out. Instead I said, “Don’t all new marriages go through their teething pains?”
“Stop smoothing over the cracks, Hannah. You’re not g
etting on—and it shows.”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Liar.”
Much to my surprise, Mom didn’t press me further about the state of my marriage. Nor did she make many scathing comments about Pelham, except to say that she liked Estelle and thought Nurse Bass (whom she met outside Dan’s office) was “a quintessential example of Grumpy White Trash.” Maybe her lack of nonstop acerbity had something to do with the fact that her flying visit was just a quick layover en route to a talk she was giving at Bowdoin College about her work. A few days before she arrived, she called to explain that she was passing through Maine, and didn’t have a lot of time, but wanted to drop by and see me and her grandson.
“How much time is ‘a little time’?” I asked.
“About six hours.”
True to her word, she arrived in Pelham at eleven, and left at five. I showed her around the library and introduced her to Estelle. Then Dan took us all out to lunch at the local diner. He was preoccupied throughout, dashing off after forty-five minutes when Nurse Bass called to tell him that some pregnant farmer’s wife had just burst her waters. That’s when she asked me when I stopped having sex with Dan. And though she’d been briefed about the disaster that was our apartment, her only comment when she saw it was, “Where do you run to after you and Dan have had a fight?”
“We don’t have fights,” I said, wondering if my nose was about to enlarge, Pinocchio-style. My mom just rolled her eyes and changed the subject, asking me what I did for fun around here.
“Well, there’s Sebago Lake and some great hikes . . .”
“So where have you hiked?”
“Nowhere.”
“And how many times have you been to the lake?”
“We’re planning to go next weekend. Anyway, with all the problems we’ve been having with somewhere to live . . .”
“So I guess you watch a lot of TV.”
“Well, that old black-and-white set of ours only pulls in two channels. Anyway, I’m not much of a television type. And between my job in the library and looking after Jeff . . .”
“I know: a rich and fulfilling life.”
Long pause—during which I fought back tears and the desire to scream, rage, and tell my mother exactly what I thought of her. She saw this—and reacted out of character, coming over to me and squeezing my arm and saying, “If this gets too much, if you really feel like you’re heading for the edge, you can always come home.”
I looked at her, stupefied.
“You mean that?” I asked.
“Of course I do. And I mean you and Jeff.”
“You wouldn’t want us.”
She gave me a tough, no-bullshit look.
“How do you know what I want?”
Again she changed the subject, mentioning that Dad had just written an “extended jeremiad” for Harper’s about appearing on the White House “enemies list,” and pushing for a congressional judicial inquiry, especially in the wake of the firing of the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.
“You did hear about the Saturday Night Massacre, didn’t you?” Mom asked, mentioning the recent evening when Nixon dismissed the entire judicial team that was investigating the Watergate break-in.
“I read about it in Time.”
“Time is the American Pravda.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme, Mom?”
“Sure it is . . . and so what? Anyway, you should subscribe to Harper’s because then you can read your father coming across all Jeffersonian and pretending that he has some influence on affairs of state . . . whereas the truth of the matter is that he is just some minor-league academic at some minor-league—”
I didn’t want to hear this, so I cut her off, asking, “And where is Dad right now?”
“Off at an American Historical Conference in Seattle, then heading across the border to Vancouver Island, allegedly to hole up in some hotel for ten days and work on his new book. But what he doesn’t know is that I know he’s traveling with his new girlfriend, who—”
“Mom, I’d rather not know.”
“What would you rather not know? The identity of your father’s newest twenty-four-year-old conquest, or the fact that, yet again, your father is fucking around?”
“Both.”
“But why? It’s all just part of life’s rich cavalcade. And like the dumb schmuck that I am, I’ve accepted that we now have an ‘open’ marriage, and all I have to do is turn the other cheek, pretend that nothing is going on . . .”
Her face tightened—and for a moment or two, I thought she was going to cry. But when I tried to put my arm around her to console her, she took a step back from me.
“I’m fine,” she said, regaining control of her voice. “Just fine.”
We spent what remained of the afternoon visiting the work site that was the Bland house (“You shouldn’t simply screw them for the renovations on the apartment,” Mom said, “but for all the marital crap they caused you”), then we drove over to Sebago Lake. This was Mom’s idea. She’d spent several summers there at summer camp and hadn’t been back for years.
“It’s about time you looked at your neighboring natural wonder,” she said. “It’s only fifteen minutes away.”
Mom was right about the wondrousness of Sebago Lake—a vast expanse of becalmed water, set amid dense woodlands and minor hills. As it was a weekday, the lake was all but empty—one sole canoeist rippling its mirrored surface. We went down to the water. Jeffrey was asleep in his stroller, so we left him on the bank while we walked the few yards to the edge of the lake. Mom kicked her shoes off and tucked her toes into the mud, shivering as the chill of the water hit.
“I’d forgotten how damn cold it was,” she said.
“Well, count me out,” I said.
“Coward.”
We fell silent, staring out at all that water. Out of nowhere, my mom reached out, took my hand, and held it. I looked over at her. She didn’t make eye contact. She just kept staring out in the direction of that soft autumn sun, which was just beginning to recede and bathe the lake in a bourbon glow. For a moment or two, she seemed to be smiling. For a moment or two, she seemed to be content—something I could never remember her being before. I wanted to say . . . what? That I so loved and feared her? That I always so wanted her approval and never seemed able to earn it? That I knew her own life was full of deceptions and disappointments, but that, shit, we were here together now and had the chance to . . . ?
I didn’t complete that thought, because almost as if she were reading my mind, Mom disengaged her hand from mine and clutched her arms around her.
“Cold . . .” she said.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. The moment had come and gone.
“Thirty-four years,” she said.
“What?”
“I was at this lake thirty-four years ago. Summer camp. Christ, how I hated the great outdoors, especially since, just to really torture me, my mother had chosen this camp full of shiksas from Westchester County. I was the only Jewish girl there, which meant that all those vicious little Waspy bitches thought I put the id in Yid . . . not that anyone had any idea what an id was back in 1940. Still, I did do one big id thing that summer: I lost my virginity on the far side of the lake. And since one of the camp counselors found me and the guy in mid-act . . .”
“Do I really want to know this, Mom?”
“Sure you do. And you know, the guy in question, Morris Pinsker—can you imagine losing your cherry to someone named Morris?—is now a very respected orthodontist in New Jersey.”
“How do you know that?”
“Saw a wedding announcement for his daughter, Essie, in The New York Times around six months ago. Morris, Essie, and his wife’s named Mildred. You’d never guess they were Jews.”
“I thought you said you went to a Waspy camp?”
“There was a neighboring camp of circumcised boys—and occasionally, we had a social or a dance . . . although I know some of the Waspy mothers obj
ected to all their Greenwich, Connecticut, daughters mixing with the Hasidim . . .”
“And that’s how you met the future orthodontist and ended up with him in the woods?”
“Yeah, it was as prosaic as that. And the thing was, it just . . . happened. I met the guy at this campfire dance, he asked if I wanted to take a walk by the lake, the next thing I knew we were doing it under a tree.”
“But you hardly knew . . . what was his name again?”
“Morris. That’s right. I’d only known him for around ten minutes before I let him get into my pants.”
“Why do you feel it necessary to tell me this?”
“Because it’s another example of just how idiotic life really is. And because it’s the first time I’ve been back here since.”
“So that’s why you really wanted to visit me?”
“You got it,” she said, giving me a sardonic smile. “A romantic déjà vu by the lake.”
“That incident was romantic?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Especially since Morris had spots all over his ass.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“And when the counselor found you with Mr. Spotty Ass . . . ?”
“I was expelled from the camp, sent back to Brooklyn in disgrace. Your grandfather refused to talk to me for two months, and my mom kept telling me I was a whore.”
“That must have been fun.”
“Hey, it’s always complicated between parents and kids . . . as you’ll find out.”
“I’m sure I will.”
We fell silent for a moment. Then, “How can thirty-four years go so fast?” she asked.
“A year still seems pretty long to me.”
“Wait until you’re fifty—and time just seems to evaporate around you. Blink once it’s Christmas, blink again it’s summer. And you realize you’ve got—what?—twenty, twenty-five of these blinks left, and you start to wonder what the sum total of everything really is, and you make dumb, stupid pilgrimages to some backwoods lake where you humped some guy with pimples on his tokhes.”
Jeffrey began to stir. Mom said, “I guess that’s my cue to shut the fuck up.”
She drove us back to Pelham, dropping us off in front of the apartment. She turned down my offer of a cup of tea, telling me she’d better start heading off to Brunswick and her talk at Bowdoin. But she did get out of the car to kiss Jeffrey good-bye.
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