The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  Didn’t I get up in the night when I heard him crying? Didn’t I do all the shopping and the cooking and the birth announcements and the washing? Didn’t I tell you, the day I had to go back to work, that I dreaded leaving you? Didn’t I give you that bracelet, that one with the three interlocked gold bangles, and tell you it stood for our family? Didn’t I cry, later on, when we had to hock it?

  Even when I did go back to work, I was still the one who walked up and down with him at night, who sponged him when he had fevers, who looked into his face and told him, even when he was too little to understand me, about all the places you and I would take him when I had made enough money to buy us out of San Francisco. It was the nights and weekends I lived for, Laura. The happiest moment of my day was when I left work. Every evening, when I changed buses in Washington Square, I would stop and look up the hill at our building and imagine you standing at the window waiting for me with Jesse in your arms.

  The Jesse in my imagination was always the Jesse I came home to, the Jesse who had learned to crawl, who had his two bottom teeth now, and now his two top teeth, who had learned how to say ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ and called our downstairs neighbour a dog. But the woman who was holding him was always the Laura in the hospital, the tired but radiant Laura pressing her newborn baby against her breast. And that was why I dismissed Charlotte, Becky and Ophelia as diversions. The first time I came home and found them strewn all over the living-room, I was surprised. How had it happened? What on earth had you found to talk about?

  Then I found out you had actually invited them, that the four of you had organized a playgroup. What? I thought. But then I thought: She’s lonely. I’m gone for nine, ten hours at a stretch. She has to talk to someone.

  Then these words, these alien words, started seeping into your vocabulary. Words like ‘parenting’. Expressions like ‘childcare option’ and ‘ego disintegration’ and ‘setting limits’. Things we had once laughed about. Together.

  Then you started signing up for things. Because you found life at home ‘depressing’. (Depressing? With our Jesse?) It was Diaper Gym, and Little Flippers, and Child Observation Class. And twice a week now for that co-operative playgroup, so that you could take turns getting away from the children. (Away? From perfect Jesse?) You started coming home with weird ideas about food, which you insisted on calling nutrition, and you would only tell me about them when I did something wrong, for example, if I offered Jesse pear for the first time without waiting sixty hours before we could establish that he was not allergic to banana. If I suggested, after Jesse fed apple sauce to his cheeks, his chin, his ears, his hair, and his nose, but not even once to his mouth, that perhaps we should feed him with a spoon. If I brought home bread that was not made of rice flour. Then you would tell me what Becky or Charlotte and Ophelia had told you about wheat or bananas or the evils of spoon-feeding. If I complained about the price of sodium-free rice crackers, if I said that soya milk tasted like potato juice, you would go into a sulk.

  And then this obsession with equipment. Every week it was something else we couldn’t afford that you couldn’t live without. A mechanical swing. A Johnny Jump Up. A portable restaurant seat. A safer, hundred-dollar car seat. A hundred-and-fifty-dollar stroller, designed by the same people who brought us Concordes. A high chair made of real wood instead of the plastic-and-steel one my mother got for us. Half a dozen safety gates to replace the confining and repressive playpen. An indoor climbing frame. Bars for the windows so that he didn’t fall out of them when he was climbing on the indoor climbing frame. A two-hundred-dollar Cuisinart, not because it mashed up food any better than the blender, but because Charlotte swore by it, Becky already had it, and Ophelia was going to order it from a catalogue.

  Then you even started to look like them. I remember, with horror, the day I came home to find you wearing those shoes. I can’t remember what you called them. Familias? They were brown and grotesque and had thick, rippling, rubber soles, the kind that said just try and get a hard-on now you’ve seen me, just try and tell yourself that these feet belong to a woman. I remember how insulted you were when I told you this.

  But didn’t we still manage to have a good time together? Even when you wore those shoes? Remember all those trips we took, just you and me and Jesse, to Eureka and Yosemite and Yelapa and the Yucatan? All those Sundays we spent in Napa and Half Moon Bay? It was easy, when there were still only three of us, to dismiss the Stork Club as a weekday annoyance, and to believe that our real life, that one that counted, was the life we three shared on weekends. It was Maria who tipped the balance.

  I am not trying to say, now that she exists, that I regret our decision to have her. Wasn’t I there, right next to you, all through the ill-starred labour? Wasn’t I the one who saw the danger signs on the graph on the foetal monitor? Wasn’t I the one who insisted that Ophelia call Kiki in for a second opinion? Wouldn’t Maria have died or been severely brain-damaged if Kiki hadn’t done an emergency Caesarean?

  If I was closer to Maria than you were, Laura, it is because I watched her being born. I can’t tell you what it did to me to watch them slash you open, and to see your blood splatter over Kiki’s shoes. I don’t know if anyone ever told you this but she had the cord around her neck. She was blue when they put her into the incubator. But I was there, right next to her. I watched her turn red. I heard her first cry. I was the first to pick her up and hold her, right there in the operating room.

  There are still unanswered questions. I still find it strange that you and Becky and Charlotte all gave birth to your second children within seven weeks of one another.

  What I resented most at the time was the way they took over the birth room. Remember how upset they were about the ‘intrusive’ foetal monitor (without which Maria’s distress would have gone undetected) – and that awful Peruvian folk music Becky brought in to soothe your nerves? (Ha!) And that acupuncturist! The toddlers in the hallway! The least they could have done was clear out when I brought Maria in to you. But they didn’t. They stayed to watch you bond. I began to see that I belonged to a much bigger family than I had bargained for.

  That night they even had the childcare angle covered. Jesse was to eat at Charlotte’s, would be moved to Ophelia’s for the night, would be driven to playschool at Becky’s in the morning. Deprived of responsibilities, I was left to my own very dangerous devices.

  That is why I went out drinking with Mitchell – because my judgement, after watching that Caesarean, after watching a long unwanted and suddenly loved baby almost die, and then recover in my very arms – my judgement, after having that same infant whipped away from me, was impaired.

  I had been keeping Mitchell at arm’s length for going on two years by then. I didn’t see why we had to be friends just because we happened to have gone to the same college. But with you in the hospital and Becky due to deliver within the month, we were back in the same boat. Or should I say stud farm? We didn’t even have to say it – we both needed to break away. And so off we went to Specs, where we forged a spurious alliance based on drink, accidental fatherhood, and parallel memories of Harvard Yard.

  I don’t remember what story I told you about what happened that night. My own memories are disjointed. The Game, if I remember correctly, was a big item in our conversation. So was Elsie’s. So was Tommy’s Lunch. But most of all, we talked about the strike. He went on and on about the scars it had left him with, and so, I’m afraid, did I. It didn’t take too many shots of tequila before we were agreeing how bad it felt when we looked at how our aspirations had dropped since graduation, and telling each other how much we wanted to opt out of the system. (We actually called it that! That’s how drunk we were!)

  I ought to have realized he was leading me up to something, but I didn’t. And so, foolishly, I told him that I was saving up for a house in Greece, so at least we could have our summers the way we wanted them. That was when he told me – in a careful, persuasive voice I have since come to know all too well – about
the great real-estate bargains to be had South of Market.

  He told me about one (as it turned out, fictitious) building that was going for nothing. He wanted to buy it, sit on it for two, three years (‘Fuck improvements, just rent it out as it is’), and then, when the neighbourhood came up, sell it and make a thousand per cent profit. All he needed was a partner with some capital. ‘So how about it?’ he said. ‘Why not make your money work for you? Think it over. Have another drink.’ Unfortunately, I did. And then, when I said it was a deal, he put me through what he claimed was the authentic Black Panther handshake.

  We ended the night by taking some women I can’t remember to the Hot Tubs on Van Ness. It was (if you exclude the final year) one of only two occasions when I was unfaithful to you. The other time was a month later, when Becky was in the hospital with Paloma. Mitchell and I did a repeat performance with yet another forgettable woman. We picked her up at one of those fern bars on Union. By then we had already begun our doomed partnership.

  It wasn’t just work that was getting me down by then. It was the way you were treating me. From the moment you brought Maria home from the hospital, you seemed to hate me. You seemed to think I had all the freedom you had lost. No matter how much I did around the house, it was never enough. If I so much as picked up a newspaper I was taking advantage of you, I was treating you like a slave. The fact that I was the only one bringing in the money was unimportant. I had no right to expect any free time unless I was willing to give you free time, too. If I went out for an evening, even if it was for business, that meant you deserved an evening out with your friends. If I questioned your logic, I was treated like a caveman. I had to put up with telephonic post mortems which would always end with your friends reminding you that I only had forty-eight chromosomes.

  The day arrived when I felt as if I had no chromosomes left at all. When I found out they had talked you into signing up for that wretched bar exam – even though it was clear you did not have the time to prepare for it – I didn’t dare say a thing, and I can’t tell you what that enforced silence did to me.

  Still, I wanted you to pass. I can’t tell you how bad I felt when I came home that day to see you crying over that stupid letter, blaming yourself when it wasn’t your fault. When I took you in my arms that night and apologized to you for giving you such a miserable life, I was not trying to reassert paternalistic authority. I was just trying to cheer you up. And later, when I told you I wanted to get out of that business, and take you back to Europe, I was trying to cheer myself up. I didn’t begin to hope it might be possible. I had long since lost hope of extracting myself from the temple of doom that was my office.

  3

  You were smiling when I brought you in your coffee the next morning. When I asked you why, you said you had been thinking of the Palatia – although now that I think about it you didn’t mention it by name. You just said you were thinking of the marble arch standing all alone on the island at the far end of Naxos harbour, and that the thing you liked most about it was that it was going nowhere.

  You said that, whenever you felt upset, all you had to do was imagine you were back there. You told me how clear the shoreline became in the late afternoon, how the sea and the sky were the same translucent blue, how the slanting sunrays cut through the blanket of dust on the mountains and made the whitewashed houses look as if they were radiating light instead of reflecting it. You said your memory of that view was so detailed that you could even see the seaweed swaying in the rockpools, and the sea urchins rocking back and forth, and the shellfish. I remember asking you which shellfish. You said you didn’t remember their name, even though you could tell me exactly how they tasted.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘they belong to the famous Thing Category, do they?’

  You said you guessed they did.

  And I said, ‘God, that mother of yours really knocked herself out educating you.’

  You said there was no reason for your mother to have known the names for everything in the Mediterranean when she herself had grown up on the North Atlantic.

  And I said, ‘That still doesn’t account for the rest of the Thing Category. When I met you the only kitchen utensil you knew by name was a corkscrew.’

  You wrinkled your nose the way you always did when you mistook a joke for a criticism, and then told me that in the end you thanked her for not telling you the name of every single thing you set your eyes on.

  You said that was what you enjoyed most about the rockpool – seeing things instead of names. It was not as important to know which sea urchins were poisonous – the black ones or the blue ones – as it was to watch them sway in the waves, as it was to be able to remember them, and to remember them perfectly.

  You were interrupted here by Charlotte, who was calling to remind you that it was your floater day for the car-pool. So we never had a chance to finish our conversation. But I would like to think that you were about to say you wanted to take the children to Greece for the summer, so that you could show them the Palatia and the marble archway going nowhere.

  Do you remember how I dressed the children in their sleep while you made their lunches? Do you remember how they were still asleep when we strapped them into their carseats? Do you remember how they looked up at us with their eyes still fogged as they sipped their box drinks?

  In your mind’s eye, can you still see yourself rolling the window down and reaching out to stroke the side of my face?

  I would like to think you meant it when you said you didn’t know what you would do without me.

  And I would like to think that the picture I am about to paint of your friends as I imagine them that morning (lying in wait for you as you proceed, unsuspecting, on your circuitous route) is, if not accurate in every detail, at least reasonably familiar to you.

  4

  I’ll begin, then, with Charlotte’s house, Charlotte’s narrow, yellow-shingled Victorian modestly clinging to its neighbours on its steep incline. At half past eight on the 28th of May I imagine … that its light-blue shutters are closed (except, perhaps, for the one in the rafters) while its front door – its dark-blue front door with the street number hand-painted off-centre in bold, calligraphic black – is inexplicably ajar.

  Inside, the hallway leading to the back of the house is dark and cluttered. Along one wall are the coat-hooks for adults. Along the other are lower ones for children. Each hook holds more than it was designed for: piled on top of one another, the jackets and robes and sweaters fan out like petticoats over the shoes and the boots, the kites, umbrellas, tennis rackets, golf clubs, beach balls, flippers and snorkelling masks stacked beneath them.

  The kitchen is bright, almost too bright. The shafts of sunlight coming in through the bay window enclose the dining-table like a tent. At one end sits Charlotte, looking solid and fit in her UC Berkeley track suit. Her large blue eyes are clear, almost luminous; her long, honey-coloured hair is still damp from her early-morning swim. Her broad, handsome face looks composed but tense. This may have something to do with the cartoon soundtrack that is wafting in from the den next door and blending infelicitously with the muted Mozart concerto on the kitchen stereo.

  Look at how she clutches the handle of her coffee mug. Look at the ‘To Do’ list beneath it – at how the carefully curved handwriting of the top items: ‘Discuss P. with L. 2.45 – Toothpaste – Nectarines,’ turns into the frantically large additions at the bottom: ‘READ BOOKS! MAIL LETTERS! REARRANGE OFFICE HOURS! REMEMBER HAMLET!’ Notice how some items are underlined while others are starred, and how she has crossed out each completed chore at least three times.

  How can you tell she’s a teacher? From the loud, professionally affable way she calls her children in from the den for breakfast. How can you tell she teaches at the college level as opposed to primary or secondary? The words she uses have too many syllables. She is trying a new kind of ‘initiative’, she tells Patten and Dottie as they climb into their chairs. This is because she is entering a ‘bottleneck’ and
so finds herself ‘hugely overextended’. She is due to give a paper at a symposium – in fact, this paper (she waves the draft at them). She needs some peace and quiet right now, in exchange for which she is offering them what would normally be ‘forbidden substances’. She points at a selection-pack of generic brand cereals, but already the children are tugging at it, tearing away at the cellophane and fighting over the Cocoa Puffs. With a patient and excessively intent smile, Charlotte sets out to talk them both into ‘experimenting with other products’. It is clear, from the careful way she discusses their options with them, and from her adamant refusal to favour one child over the other, that she is not just talking about cereal boxes, but about the larger (and largely gender-related) issues lurking inside them. This is a woman who could find a gender-related issue in a nail clipper.

  Finally she talks her daughter into Frosted Flakes and her son into Rice Crispies. They rip open the boxes, play tug-of-war with the milk carton, watch jealously as Charlotte takes possession of it, and protest, each of them, that she has given more milk to the other. There is an edge to her voice as she threatens to make them eat muesli instead. But they don’t even listen. When she sits down at her place again, it is clear, from the blank way she stares at her lists, that she has lost her train of thought. From the way she jumps up and pulls the Mozart cassette out of the stereo and rifles through the piles of cassettes on the table behind it for a replacement, it is clear that the metaphor ‘train of thought’ has reminded her of something. Clear also, from the first strains of ‘Blue Train’, that she has managed to preserve her sanity – yet again! – by escaping into the past.