Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  Mother would sometimes try to console me by telling me how disappointed he’s been never to have had a son, and she must have informed me a thousand times, though never in his hearing, of how vicious and angry he’d become—inconsolably so—when I was two years old and he contracted a case of the mumps. But the mumps didn’t really explain everything, because—a strange obstinate part of him I never had access to—he had not even allowed for the possibility that his first child might be a girl. When I was born, I’d had no name. For years—even into college—whenever I had to write an essay for English class about myself, I’d begin, “I was born Robert Arthur Sutler…”

  Or was that the story Mother wanted me to believe? I never asked Father about it. Once or twice when I came down to the cellar to visit him—it was the coolest part of our house in summer—his defenses down momentarily, he would smile lovingly at me. But an instant later he’d realize he was no longer alone, and he’d snap at me or ignore me. Didn’t I have anything else I wanted to do?

  I like to watch you work, I’d offer, but my words seemed to mean nothing to him.

  How different when I’d go off with him in his car! At Christmas and Easter every year I’d get one day each school vacation to be with him, and I longed for those days, savored the memories afterward. When he was off and alone in his car, his samples and catalogs of Masonite products in the back seat, he was free too, wasn’t he? I’d sit next to him and go through the catalogs, asking him about the different kinds of woods and grains and finishes and panelling, telling him which ones I liked best, which ones I’d like in which rooms of our house—and in my own house when I would be married someday—and he’d talk with me and tease me and laugh with me.

  When I was nine he made me a dollhouse with a roof and walls that lifted off—first the roof, then the walls—from Masonite samples he brought home. The dollhouse was a replica of our own house, and he panelled the small rooms according to my wishes. It will be nice to tell Jennifer about my days with Father sometime, won’t it? She knows him only through photos. She loves the dollhouse as much as I did, and she can play with it for hours on end. It’s the quality in her that Michael encourages most, a quality he claims comes as much from me as from him.

  On the long weekends when Father was building our house, while we lived in a small apartment near Greenwood’s first shopping center, I’d have to amuse myself for twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch sometimes, without playmates. Mother would help Father—nailing and painting and measuring and bringing him things and holding things for him—and she and I would try to make our picnic lunch an elaborate affair, but he always ate as quickly as he could so that he could get back to work, and most of my day—I’d bring a little satchel of things: dolls and books and a jumprope and crayons and chalk—would be spent playing with woodcurls, scraps of Masonite, pieces of copper tubing, bent nails, asphalt shingles, and tar paper. I hated those days. I knew, of course, that Mother and Father needed to be left alone, that they were anxious to get out of the apartment at last, that they were irritated by costs they hadn’t foreseen, and afraid of errors that would delay us, but my knowledge didn’t keep me from feeling lonely, abandoned, and resentful. Later on, they would refer to those days when they’d worked so hard together as if they were wonderful ones—and they would remind me of what a good child I’d been, of how everybody had been in awe of me for my ability to amuse myself so endlessly. And for a time, in my own memory, I even came to believe that I agreed with them.

  Despite father’s irritation with me, I’d often stay in the cellar with him and watch him work. He would make me doll furniture from scraps and samples—a new piece every year especially for my birthday. From the time I was nine until I left home for college, and when he was away at work I would sometimes steal down to the cellar and touch his tools, look in all his jars and boxes, and read through the hardware catalogs. I would lift the tiny bureaus and chests of drawers he was constructing and I’d hold them in the palm of my hand, amazed-remembering his surliness—at the delicacy of his work, his patience for detail. The miniature clamps, securing the wood while the glue dried, always fascinated me most.

  After he died, Mother sold his tools, and I was furious with her for it, though—same old me—I said nothing to her at the time. And later on, when we’d moved into our house on Long Island and Mother was watching Michael drill holes on the back deck one day, for installing a barbecue, and she said something to me about wishing she’d saved Father’s tools so that Michael could have had them—that Father had loved his tools so much and cared for them so well, and had always bought the best quality even if it meant doing without until he had the money—I’d rushed into the house, too overwhelmed by anger and loss to cope with the situation.

  I wished that Michael could have known him. I wished that Michael could have talked to him and worked with him, making things for our house, for his grandchildren. From the time I met Michael—eight months after Father died—I’d always believed that, with his sweet ways—with his directness—he would have been able to draw Father out, to share things with him, to get around Father’s irritability.

  When Father entered the offices of his clients, I would see just how much others admired him, and it surprised me each time to have secretaries and businessmen tell me how he bragged on me—about my good grades in school, about my achievements—my 4H ribbons and medals, my Girl Scout awards, my swimming trophies, my parts in plays. It used to amaze me to discover that other people were eager to be near my father—that they wanted to please him, and until I saw the way they looked at him when he came into their offices, I’d never really thought of him, I realized, as being especially handsome.

  But he was, and when I was about fourteen I first began to have an elaborate fantasy in which I would put myself in the place of some beautiful and shy secretary with whom he was having an affair that lasted for many years and was very painful, beautiful, and tragic. I imagined them taking long drives in the countryside together. I imagined myself writing her diary. I imagined them having elegant dinners at roadside inns. I imagined her early death from a gruesome form of cancer, and the quiet reassurance he would give to her—the peace he gave her soul before she departed this world. I imagined him at her deathbed, holding her hand—and I would dote on the gentle knowing smiles they exchanged, the firm and loving pressure of their hands upon one another. I knew the secrets she took with her to the grave. I heard harps and violins. I saw them kiss and dissolve into the heavens. I saw Jesus folding them gently under his cape.

  During that period, whenever actors and actresses kissed in movies, I would lean forward and peer as intently as I could—to see if they really meant it. It was something I had to know. I was the prettiest girl in our school, everyone said, and the smartest. I could sing and dance, I could memorize long speeches and poems without difficulty—I accepted the verdict: I would go to Hollywood one day and make our town famous. But what I wondered about endlessly—the thing I feared would ultimately prohibit a film career for me—was how I would ever be able to kiss men I wasn’t truly in love with. If I were married, I asked myself, and had children, what would my husband and children think and feel when the whole world would be seeing me on enormous screens, my lips pressed against those of other men? And how would I ever be able to kiss a man I wasn’t truly in love with and make people believe that I was? How did actors and actresses manage it? Did the directors step in and put their hands on the cheeks and lips and chins of the actors and actresses to get them in the right positions for the camera?

  Sometimes, when Mother and Father were both gone to work, I’d take movie magazines down to the cellar with me and I’d sit on the braided brown and orange rug in front of Father’s workbench, and press my lips against photos of actors. I discovered that my fingers—the knuckles of my index and middle fingers pressed against my lips—felt like a boy’s lips. I’d close my eyes and dream, trying to let my mind drift off into ecstasy. I’d lick my fingers lightly, and part my
lips. I’d open my eyes to stare at photos. I’d glance down and be aware of my nailpolish, at nose level, but I wouldn’t smile. When I returned from seeing movies I’d replay the love scenes in my head in front of mirrors, fogging them as I leaned forward, eyes almost closed, for the climactic moment.

  At kissing parties, and later, on dates, when I would actually be kissing boys, I would always be trying to imagine what—if someone were filming us—I would, as an actress, have been feeling. How many hours and how many times did actors and actresses have to practice to get it right? Did they get aroused in front of cameras and cameramen and other actors? And did the men—the girls laughed about it in our school locker room—wear jockstraps to the movie sets the way the girls said boys did to dances, to keep themselves from showing? I was intensely aware of how often movie stars became divorced, and when I discovered stars who didn’t, and who, according to the magazines, led good Christian lives, and had loving marriages, I’d bring the articles to Mother. The real Christian home, Mother stated, but with a severity that chilled me, was the nearest approach to heaven this side of the grave.

  My mother was the local Avon lady and in truth, I’d liked the idea—what could have been funny or wrong about it to a girl born and raised in a small Indiana town?—for it enabled me to know the insides of the houses of all her friends. I liked going with her on her rounds, and sitting on couches next to her, and being proud of how much she knew about the products in her sample case. Nor did I ever question the gentle and discreet way she would, when she delivered completed orders, give the women gifts of Bible pamphlets, for which she’d paid herself. And though I came to realize later on that most of her clients probably did not share her views, all of them seemed to admire her for what she did. Whenever I’m out doing my work, she’d joke, I always try to do a little of His work too.

  I used to wonder what Michael could want with stories from my childhood, with such ordinary memories—there seemed so little that was strange about them, so little in them that could be called real secrets. But the truth, I came to see, was that I liked to think of myself as having had the impossible: a childhood without terror. I lived the way everybody lived in my home town. In my dollhouse the rooms contained only those dramas that were derived from the most ordinary and normal of books and TV shows—from Ozzie and Harriet and Sue Barton and Loretta Young and Anne of Green Gables and Jane Wyman and Father Knows Best. In my dollhouse the mother cooked and shopped and drank coffee with the neighbors and tried out new Avon products. The father came home from work and fixed the car and mowed the lawn. The children rode on yellow schoolbuses and played house and had slumber parties. Everybody admired everyone else’s new clothes and new cars and new washing machines and green lawns. In my mother’s house there were many mansions, I used to tell Michael, and they were all decorated by Montgomery Ward.

  Michael tried often to answer the question I was always asking. Where did I come from? I came from me, he told me. He tried to teach me to value the fact that however banal I may have found my childhood, it was mine, and nobody else’s. And to him, of course, born and raised in Brooklyn, my life was, in fact, exotic—a real American girlhood, one in which mother and daughter cooked together for the church bake sale, and in which the daughter was never permitted to see the father nude. Incredible yes, I’d say to him—but extraordinary, no. How I wondered about the little bundles the boys in school carried between their legs! When I was eleven and a half, I went to the local library, took an anatomy book off the shelf, brought it with me to the girls’ room, and locked the toilet door. But the only drawing of a man’s parts was a cut-away medical diagram, in profile, showing all the major internal organs and arteries and veins, and it made no sense to me.

  Often I’d go off my myself, biking, and stop in quiet places and take out my notebooks and my books of poems and the plays I was memorizing parts from and storing up—as I’d stored up the verses Mother taught me when I was younger—and those were the times I felt most beautifully cool and desirable and at peace. Those were the times when I did believe that I had a soul that made me special. It was as if, I’d imagine then, I were seeing myself from the point of view of the mysterious man, who, happening by, would see me there, would understand me, and would desire me.

  I see myself sitting on the grass, my old Schwinn bike next to me. My knees are up, my hands locked around them. I’m home from college for the first time—Father is still alive, I haven’t met Michael yet—and my hair is tied back in a pink ribbon, my plaid shirt is open at the chest, my cut-off dungarees are tight around my hips, and what I’m realizing, with a miraculous suddenness, is that it isn’t so much that I’m waiting there to be discovered by some older man—as I’d imagined before—or that what I want in life is to be able to please some older man the way I felt my mother had never pleased my father. What I’m feeling in that moment is not so much that I want to have a man like my father—which thought had begun, during the previous year or two, to disturb me—but that I want to be a man like him. And curiously, the connection, instead of frightening me, soothes me.

  By then I’d seen photos and statues and paintings, and I knew what the mysterious little bundles looked like, and so I was able to incorporate them into my fantasies. I’d let boys do forbidden things to me now and then—heavy petting—and I’d touched them where they wanted me to touch them and held them there—wanting to please them, and hoping to become excited the way books and other girls said you were supposed to be excited. Sometimes I would feel something like what other girls told me they felt—but neither my fantasies nor my experiences ever seemed to be enough to arouse me as I felt I should be aroused. I was forever outside myself while things were happening, it seemed, wondering if I were feeling and doing the right thing.

  When we first met and were falling in love, Michael loved to have me tell him about this part of my life. We could talk for hour after hour about all the years before we’d known one another—about what we’d felt and what we’d wished for and what we’d done and why it was that we now thought we’d felt and hoped and acted in the ways we had. Inevitably, we’d wind up talking mostly, and with great pleasure, about how good we were for each other, about how lucky we were to have found each other: the man inside me, the woman inside him. Having been only children was part of it, we’d tell each other—I the sister/ brother he’d always desired and never had; he the brother/sister I’d never had—the sibling we’d each desired, not only for the giving and receiving of love, but, without even having known it then, to help us survive—to give our mothers other objects for their love, and to have been able, thereby, to have eased our invisible burdens.

  Whenever we talked about these things, Michael would please me most by claiming that he’d never met anybody as direct as I was, anybody as natural, anybody who was in direct touch with her true self in the way I was. It was as if I came to him—with his wary city ways—from a foreign land. It was why he loved me.

  I remembered that and used it against him later on, during a fight once—telling him that studies by Army psychologists and psychiatrists showed that men who chose foreign women for wives, as he had obviously chosen me, wanted, quite simply, that their wives be foreign to them. They tended to desire to live with women from whom they would, in a fundamental way, always be separate, because they perceived that separation—symbolized by the obstacle of language—as their protection.

  When I listened to the children who came to me at school—to their stories and problems and feelings—I’d remember that scene and I’d suddenly hear Michael’s voice inside my head and I’d find myself thinking of the accusations he’d come, more and more with the years, to charge me with: that I was the one who’d put distance between us, that I was the one who’d been afraid to face real feelings and fears, that I was the one who used my work and my training—my knowledge of how and why our feelings work the way they do, of how our emotional history, our early years especially, can be caught up in any and every act and gestur
e of our later life—to cut myself off from my own feelings and self—from the sweet young girl he had once loved—and from him.

  I’d go on listening to the child who was with me, and I’d be able to respond usefully; yet all the while I’d also be hearing my conversations with Michael and I’d be analyzing the effects his words had on me and I’d be figuring out that what I was doing, most simply, was substituting his judgmental voice for my mother’s. I’d remember Michael telling me about my supposed directness, my ability to feel things and to act on these feelings spontaneously—without filters and without dissembling—and I’d think that it was because of this supposed talent—because of his words confirming this talent in me—that I’d first decided to study psychology and to go into counseling. And then—inevitably—I’d wonder why it was that the more I understood and the more I actually used the gifts Michael told me I had, and that I believed I had, to help other people, to have the kind of influence on their lives that I’d had on Michael’s—the more I seemed to lose those gifts for my own life.

  Then, as now, I became frightened of those parts of my childhood that I feared I would never have access to—those parts I couldn’t recall, or that I felt Mother kept from me somehow—and that was when Michael’s voice would leave me and pictures of you would enter my head, Mother. I would see you, dressed in your Sears Best, as if you were a statue in bronze—arms extended, eyes radiant—an Avon kit in one hand and a Bible tract in the other. And I’d see you as you were after your stroke, in the nursing home—your senses gone, unable to feed yourself or void yourself, unable to recognize me. I’d see the aides try to take your covers off and lift your nightgown, so they could bathe you, and I’d see you come alive suddenly and battle them with an astonishing fury. They were in awe of you—of the modesty that seemed to have survived all else. They gave me a demonstration several times, and watching your anger—your fists gripping the sheet to keep it pulled to your chin, your head whipping back and forth against the pillow, I remember feeling, to my surprise, that I was proud of you. I remember feeling that I wanted you to win. I remember wondering, from the doorway, as I’ve wondered since, whether or not I would ever find, before my life ended, that I’d been fortunate enough to have inherited a measure of your passion.