Of course I would never, never express such opinions in front of Jeff or Shannon. That’s not my style. Nor is it Dan’s style. Then again, Dan rarely expresses an extreme opinion about anything that doesn’t have to do with orthopedic surgery or the American Medical Association or his beloved Lexus or the tennis that he plays and watches with ferocious avidity. Even when I pointed out—after her first visit to us as Jeff’s “steady”—that Shannon would embrace the “little woman” role with a vengeance, Dan just shrugged and said, “They seem well suited.”
“The thing I can’t get over,” I said, “is just how damn conservative she is.”
“Jeff isn’t exactly a flaming radical himself.”
“My point exactly. He’s going to get himself hitched to that girl and tie himself into the most old-fashioned marriage imaginable.”
“But it’s what he wants,” Dan said, reaching for the sports section of The Boston Globe and coverage of the previous day’s action at Wimbledon.
“I know it’s what he wants. That’s what worries me: our son has turned into an Eisenhower Republican.”
“I think Eisenhower was a little more liberal than Jeff,” Dan said. I smiled. My husband may not be the most naturally humorous man, but he has a quiet wit that still catches me off guard, and reminds me that there is a subtle subversive streak to this otherwise very conventional (and successful) doctor.
I pulled off the highway and drove the mile or so down the narrow two-lane road that led home to Chamberlain Drive. When Dan first landed the job as orthopedic resident at Maine Medical back in 1981, we bought a little three-bedroom Cape Codder on a half acre of land in Freeport . . . back when Freeport was just a small town that happened to have L.L. Bean on its doorstep and wasn’t the big shopping destination that it has become today. We were on a road in the woods. The house—though small, with low-ish ceilings—was totally cozy. Anyway, after that nasty little apartment in Pelham all those years ago, anything larger than three shoe boxes struck me as palatial. And I loved the fact that, though we were only half a mile from the main road, there were no other houses within sight of our own. It seemed like we were in the middle of nowhere . . . especially on one of those sublime January mornings when you’d wake to hard sunshine and a freshly fallen shroud of snow, and the view from the kitchen was of fantastic frosted woodlands, cut off from all hints of modern life.
Back then, it wasn’t hard to find a teaching job—and I landed a full-time one in Freeport High School within four months of moving there. Looking back on it now, it was a relatively uncomplicated time. Jeff and Lizzie were still both under ten, Dan was busy (but not fanatically so). We weren’t rolling in money, but we certainly had enough to live well, and I approached my thirties with a certain . . . no, I really don’t want to use the word equanimity here, even though it’s apt. Put it this way: whatever desperate dissatisfaction I felt during those early years of our marriage—that sense of having shortchanged myself—had been replaced by a calm acceptance that, in the great scheme of things, mine was hardly a bad life. I liked my job. I liked being a mom. Most of all, I liked my kids and got such pleasure watching their personalities and worldviews taking shape. From the outset, Jeff was self-directed, very focused—and something of a perfectionist (“He’s a real achiever,” his fifth-grade teacher told me, “but boy, does he beat himself up when he gets something wrong”). Lizzie, on the other hand, had a true creative streak (she designed her very own puppet theater when she was five and informed me that she was writing a novel when she was eight). But she also seemed intensely vulnerable whenever a girl at school was mean to her, or if she wasn’t chosen for a school play. God, the memories that brought back. I did my best to reassure her that these disappointments weren’t a reflection on her; that you couldn’t always be chosen for everything; that, frequently, life was simply unfair. “You’re my pal,” Lizzie told me after one such conversation. It was about the nicest thing she could have said to me—and I took pride in the fact that my kids looked upon me both as their mother and a friend.
Those first three years in Freeport were happy, low-key ones. But then, Dan’s boss at the hospital retired, my husband was named head of orthopedics, and life suddenly began to accelerate. Not only was Dan back to working fifteen-hour days, he was also flying everywhere to attend assorted surgical conferences, pressing the flesh, making contacts, gaining expertise. Because Dan was a man with a plan: he had decided to turn the Orthopedic Unit at Maine Medical into the best in New England. Within six years he had achieved his aim. We hardly saw him for much of that time. Fifteen-hour days became seventeen-hour days. A two-day business trip turned into a series of two-week trawls around the country. Weekends with his kids became once-a-month events—and even then, they were frequently interrupted by emergency surgery at the hospital or the arrival of out-of-town medical bigwigs, all of whom (Dan assured me) would advance his cause.
Somehow I put up with all this frantic activity. When Dan started raking in the big bucks—and hinted that the head of orthopedics at Maine Medical and his family should be living in a grander house than our modest Cape Codder—I found a really delightful modern place. It was a five-bed A-frame, with cathedral ceilings, hardwood floors, and lots of natural light—just three minutes down a back road in Freeport, with views of Casco Bay. But Dan felt that a Very Important Doctor needed to live in a Very Important House in The Best Suburb of Portland. Which is how we ended up in the Very Big Colonial House on a Very Big Three-Acre Lot in the Very Exclusive District of Falmouth Foreside.
Ours isn’t a big house—maybe 4,000 square feet, including the floor-through basement. But it makes a statement for Portland: The People Who Live Here Have Money. Or perhaps: The People Who Live Here Have Money But In True Maine Fashion They’re Not Flashy About It. So the house is a straightforward white clapboard structure—well maintained, large, but unostentatious. There’s no swimming pool or tennis court, no ornamental ponds or statues on the front lawn. And inside, well, I’ve never hired an interior decorator, but since the kids moved out, I have had the place redone in a style that is pretty much Shaker, but with an emphasis on comfort. Dan has remodeled the basement as his study-cum-playground—complete with a billiard table, a large array of computer equipment, and a massive stereo system that is so high-tech and refined that I think you could probably hear the left ventricle of Pavarotti’s heart through it. There’s also one of those big plasma televisions that I refuse to have upstairs . . . as (a) I think they’re ugly, and (b) if I watch five hours of TV a week, it’s an event. I also have an office on the first floor, but it’s a little simpler: a nice Shaker-style desk, a comfortable chair, a small radio/CD player, a laptop computer, crammed bookshelves, a small sofa with a reading light, and little else. There have been days when I have sat at my desk, grading yet another eleventh-grade essay on The Scarlet Letter or Franny and Zooey, and have asked myself: Is this the sum total of a working life? But those are just the bad days—when I find myself fighting to remain interested in what I do. Thankfully, they are infrequent ones. I still like teaching. I like the challenge of standing up in front of a group of complex adolescents, many of whom have little interest in anything that isn’t material or instantly visceral, and trying to get them animated about Hawthorne’s take on Puritan America or Hemingway’s reinvention of narrative prose, in the hope that it might hold their attention or even interest them. That’s about all a teacher can ever wish for—the idea that something you talk about might just sink in, and get a student to rethink the way he sees things . . . for a moment or two, anyway.
I turned into our driveway, parked the Jeep, got out, and spent a good minute staring up into the swirling snow, willing myself to calm down. Then, when I had collected myself again, I went inside.
The house was dark, but I could hear television sounds from the basement. I went downstairs. Dan was sitting with his feet up, his evening glass of red wine on the side table, watching the Discovery Channel, which has become his latest fi
xation over the past few months. I came over and kissed him on the forehead.
“You’re early,” he said.
“Wasn’t in the mood for a drink with Alice this evening,” I said, walking over to the little bar in the corner of the room. I reached for a wineglass and the open bottle of Washington State pinot noir. “But I sure as hell feel like a drink now.”
“Something happen?” he said, looking away momentarily from the nasty predators on the television.
“Yeah, Sheila Platt opened her mouth.”
“You really have a problem with that woman.”
“This is true. Maybe it has something to do with me having a low tolerance for idiots who mouth off and think they’re intelligent.”
“If you really had a low tolerance for idiots who mouth off, you’d never teach high school. How was the reading group? What are you doing again?”
I told him, then took a sip of wine.
“That certainly works,” I said.
“It’s a new winery on the British Columbia border. Raban Estates. Absolutely first-class stuff, and a rave review for this 2002 pinot in Wine Gourmet this month.”
“With a price to match?”
“Thirty-five a bottle.”
I took another sip.
“At that price, I’ve decided it’s wonderful. Busy day?”
“Two hip replacements, one cartilage restructuring, and some high school hockey player whose tibia and pelvis were virtually crushed when he was driving himself to school in his Mazda Miata.”
“What parent gives his high school kid a Mazda Miata?”
“A rich parent.”
“How did you know what kind of car it was?”
“I asked the kid before the anesthetist put him under.”
“The personal touch. I like it.”
Dan smiled.
“If you’re drinking,” I said, “you’re obviously not operating tomorrow.”
“No, it’s just back-to-back appointments from seven-thirty onward. What time are you heading to Burlington?”
“Around nine. But I have to grade papers tonight, so I’ll leave you with the marauding . . . what are those nasty-looking animals?” I asked, pointing to the screen.
“Cougars. It’s a documentary about the Canadian Rockies.”
“Looks magnificent,” I said.
“Yeah, we should think again about a vacation up around Banff.”
“And get eaten by a cougar? Forget it.”
“The chances of that are about as high as being hit by a meteorite. Anyway, we’ve been talking about doing Banff for a while.”
“No, you’ve been talking about doing Banff for a while. Just like you’ve been talking about the Leeward Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Belize, and everywhere else you’ve recently seen on the Discovery Channel. And, as usual, we’ll end up doing a week in Bermuda, because (a) it’s close, and (b) you can’t afford any more time off.”
“Am I that predictable?”
“Yes,” I said, standing up and giving him another kiss on the head. “And now, I’m going to recharge my glass and deal with two dozen badly written term papers on Longfellow’s Evangeline.”
“That sounds like a task worthy of a drink.”
“I shouldn’t be too late.”
“Well, I’ll be turning in as soon as the cougars attack the herd of deer. Oh, there was a message for you from Lizzie on the answering machine. Nothing urgent, but she didn’t sound her best again. Ongoing boyfriend trouble?”
“I won’t know until I speak with her. But it could be.”
“She should do the smart thing and marry herself a nice doctor.”
I did a double take, then noticed that my husband was favoring me with a very mischievous smile.
“Yeah, I’ll pass on your advice straightaway,” I said with a laugh.
As I mounted the stairs to my office, I felt my anxiety level beginning to rise. Ever since this most recent breakup—her third in about two years—Lizzie had been sounding dejected, but with a slightly manic edge that I was beginning to find worrying. She should do the smart thing and marry herself a nice doctor. Dan was just being his usual dry self, but what he didn’t know was that he had spoken the truth. Up until a week ago, Lizzie had been dating a doctor—a dermatologist, of all things (well, I guess it’s better than a proctologist). She had kept this six-month relationship from Dan because the doctor in question was married—and a minor television celebrity. And though I assured Lizzie that her father wouldn’t be prudish about her relationship with a married guy, she was adamant that I guard her secret.
It wasn’t the first time that my daughter had confided in me. Nor was it the first time that she seemed reluctant to share details of her private life with her father. It’s not as if Lizzie had a bad relationship with him, or that he had ever been a stern, dogmatic, do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do dad. On the contrary, Dan had been fairly relaxed with the kids—that is, when he happened to be around. In private, I’ve often wondered if Lizzie’s endless search for a guy and Jeff’s fervent embrace of Family Values Conservatism are somehow directly linked to Dan’s absences during their childhood and adolescence. Then again, another part of me thinks: hell, the kids were both raised in a stable household, they had plenty of attention, they were always loved unconditionally, and they wanted for nothing. And if twenty-five years of teaching have taught me anything, it’s that most children arrive in the world with a certain amount of their own baggage, which no amount of good or bad rearing is going to change. Having said that, I still worry constantly about them—especially Lizzie, who seems so terribly vulnerable and dissatisfied with things.
If you looked at her life you’d think: She has nothing to complain about. Her résumé seems enviable: A BA cum laude from Dartmouth. A junior year abroad in Aix-en-Provence (how I envied her that time in France). A constant boyfriend throughout those years (they broke up when he went to Stanford Law and she decided not to follow him because, as she later confided in me, she didn’t want to repeat the parental pattern of marrying the person she met her freshman year in college). A year as a teacher in the Peace Corps in Indonesia (during which I fretted all the time that she’d be kidnapped by some mad militants). Then, when she returned to the U.S., she surprised me and all her friends by not entering teaching—as she always swore she would do—but instead enrolling for a one-year MBA back at Dartmouth.
“I don’t want to be dependent on some guy to give me a good life,” she explained at the time. “And nowadays, teachers just end up struggling—which, though noble, strikes me as a ticket to despair. So I might as well get the Big Money Degree, start earning the Big Bucks, build up a nice block of equity, and then have the freedom to pick and choose my next move in my mid-thirties.”
It sounded like a straightforward objective—and though I did warn her that life never, ever, went according to plan, she was very focused on her goal. And as Dartmouth has one of the best business schools in the country, she was snapped up immediately on graduation by a big mutual fund company in Boston. Her starting salary was a jaw-dropping $150,000 per year—though she assured me this was “chump change” in the world of mutual funds. With her Christmas bonus the first year, she made a down payment on a loft apartment in the Leather District of Boston and sparingly outfitted it with designer furniture. Last year, she bought herself one of those spiffy new MINI Coopers, and the few weeks off she had each year (two was the most she was allowed) were spent in expensive resorts in Nevis or in Baja California.
On paper, it seemed like a pretty nifty existence. There was only one rub: Lizzie hated her work. She found it boring and one-dimensional to be managing other people’s money, but whenever I gently reminded her that she didn’t have to stay in the job if she didn’t want to, she made the point that she had dug herself into something of a financial hole with the loft and the high-flying lifestyle, and that she just needed six or seven more years of bonuses to get her loft paid off, after which “I’ll do whatever I damn
well please.”
My fear, however, was that she would have a very hard professional time over the next six or seven years, as every phone call (and we talked at least three times a week) brought with it a tale of some slight she had suffered at the office, some dispute with an obnoxious colleague, or the admission that she hadn’t been sleeping well over the past few weeks.
And then there was her romantic life. First a jazz saxophonist and music teacher named Dennis with whom she fell madly in love, even though (as she admitted to me later) he did warn her from the outset that he wasn’t the settling-down type and always fought shy of commitment. When she got clingy, he dropped her—and she went into a tailspin for a while, calling him up late at night, begging for another chance, phoning me at all hours in tears, telling me she’d never meet another man like Dennis, that she’d totally blown it, and if only he’d take her back . . .
After a week of these calls, I jumped into my car after school one afternoon, drove straight down to Boston, and (my luck was with me) made it to her office just as Lizzie was getting out of work. She looked drained, depleted, running on empty—and didn’t even seem particularly surprised to see me. Her office was in the Prudential Center, and I suggested we walk over to the Ritz and treat ourselves to a medicinal martini. Just before we reached its front door—right in front of that lovely old Unitarian church near Arlington Street—she reached for me, put her head against my shoulder, and began to bawl her eyes out. I put my arms around her and, with passersby looking on with shock at such a public outburst of emotion, negotiated her across the street and onto a park bench in the Public Garden. I held her for a good ten minutes, thinking, This is way out of proportion for a six-month romance gone wrong. When she finally calmed down, I got her into the Ritz for that martini. I didn’t have a hard time convincing her to down a second, and then tried to suggest that we all sometimes had excessive reactions to disappointments and rejections—and that they usually hinted at other underlying worries and pressures. But—and this was a really big but—it was important to remember that life was painfully short, that everything was fleeting, and that the heart was a most resilient muscle.
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