“Roast beef costs a dollar eighty-nine a pound in case you didn’t notice,” she says. “Your fly’s unzipped. Gross.” He is not wearing shorts. He has plenty in the drawer, of course—ironed. He just likes the way it feels, wearing none.
This isn’t what he thought it was like, being married.
He has no idea when it was, the first time they met. Mark and Sandy were born in this town, their parents belong to the same church, they have simply always known each other. They were Mary and Joseph in the Congregational Christmas pageant one time, and lab partners, years later, in chemistry. Sandy had filled out by then: she was always cute, but around freshman year she also got a figure. Mark would think about lab session all week, worry because his hand trembled while he held the Bunsen burner, that he’d light the curled-under ends of her hair, which is honey blond.
They started dating at the end of sophomore year. The first time they went all the way was a few days after Christmas, junior year. They were baby-sitting for Mark’s older sister Charlene, who has twins. She and Mark’s brother-in-law left four beers in the fridge for them. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Mark’s brother-in-law told Mark, at the door of his car just before they took off. Sandy was back in the house, waiting for one of the babies to burp.
She didn’t hear him come back into the house. He had taken off his shoes so he wouldn’t track in snow. Came up behind her very quietly, and she was singing to the baby. She was only sixteen then, but already she looked like a mother.
The truth is (Mark doesn’t like to think about this), Sandy has never turned Mark on as much as some other girls, though she’s the only one he ever loved. When he would lie in bed alone and think about fucking he would picture one of the cheap girls in school, like Candy Patenaude, who didn’t wear underpants, or Joyce Munson, who’s pretty ugly. “Mouth like a cunt,” one of the guys on the basketball team used to say.
But that time upstairs in his sister’s house, with the Christmas tree lights blinking and the smell of fried chicken still in the air, some stupid TV show droning down in the family room—Price Is Right, it sounded like—and Sandy’s off-key voice singing “Hush little baby, don’t say a word,” it was almost like they were married, and that was their bedroom across the hall with the chenille spread all smoothed out and the big jar of Vaseline next to it on the nightstand, the two pairs of slippers lined up on the floor. It was almost like that was their wedding picture, not his sister’s, on the bureau, and the twins were theirs. Mark got this tremendous hard-on, just thinking about it, and when Sandy laid the baby down and turned around, he sort of fell into her arms.
Even then he can’t say he was so anxious to go all the way exactly, he just knew he had to. It was like a responsibility, part of being a family man, and it went with those beers in the refrigerator, the eagle-design bedspread and the file box on the kitchen counter, filled with proof-of-purchase panels from cereal boxes. After it was over he was a little surprised there wasn’t more to it. Later he bought a copy of The Hite Report to find out how many times a month most people did it. And when he and Sandy have done it three times in a week he sometimes feels like he has been let off the hook, knowing he can take a few nights off if he feels like it, or not take a few nights off, and be above average.
He always knew they’d be married sometime, though he wasn’t expecting Sandy to get pregnant when she did, in spring of junior year. He didn’t like his mother thinking Sandy was fast, thinking that was the only reason they got married. He wished he could’ve taken his diploma, taken the two-year auto mechanics course at the Manchester Technical Institute. He wished they could have had a real wedding like his sister’s, with Sandy in the long white gown.
But other than that, he was happy enough about the baby. He loved doing all that stuff like putting his head against her stomach and feeling it kick and making lists of names. (He told Sandy if it’s a boy what about George, for your father, but of course he was secretly happy when she said no, Mark Junior.) He loved fixing up their apartment. (Sandy has a touch, and could be an interior decorator, in his opinion, except of course she wants to stay home with the baby.) He didn’t mind how big her stomach got, even when they couldn’t make love anymore, by the ninth month. It was worth it, to walk down the street with his hand pressed against the small of her back and have everybody know he was the reason she had this enormous belly sticking out a full foot and a half in front, those (briefly) enormous breasts.
She made felt Christmas stockings with their names stitched in sequins. (She left the baby’s blank because he wouldn’t be born for another week.) Christmas morning she gave Mark a Swiss Army knife and a box of White Owl cigars to hand out after the baby was born, and a vest she’d made from a kit, orange and green crochet. He wore it to Christmas dinner at her folks’, to please her.
He gave her a kitten, which got run over by a car three weeks later. He also gave her a pressure cooker, which his mother said was one of the five most important ingredients to a good marriage, and a pink lacy nightgown to take with her to the hospital, and for a joke, a copy of Playgirl magazine with a bookmarker in the page where the foldout was. She didn’t understand it was supposed to be a joke and said, “Why would I want to look at that?” And even then she wouldn’t leave it alone. “That was a waste of a dollar-fifty,” she said later in the day. “When there are so many things we need.”
He came home one time (Mark Junior was born by now) and found her sitting around with her friends. They were all laughing in this high, hysterical way girls have when they get together. The minute he walked in they stopped.
The baby looks nothing like him. “Are you sure you’re the father?” his brother-in-law said (kidding). More than one person has called Mark Junior Sandy’s clone.
“Doesn’t Sandy know it’s more expensive to buy name brands?” his mother said one time when she stopped over with something for the baby. “The store brands taste just the same.” Also, she should defrost the refrigerator.
“So how’s the new man in your wife’s life?” said his mother-in-law when he ran into her at the post office. Mark had to think for a minute before he understood what she meant.
“Has she bought you an apron yet?” said Virgil. He and Jill dropped over one night on their way to a Bob Seger concert in Boston. Sandy was already asleep in their bed, with Mark Junior in her arms. The six-week period when they weren’t supposed to make love was over, but they still hadn’t done it. Virgil kept nuzzling his head against Jill, burrowing his face in her hair. They started to arm wrestle, and then he pinned her on the floor, kneeling down between her spread legs in tight jeans. Mark was afraid his face might be turning red, and went to get a cigarette.
His sister called him an old married man. When he picked up his son the baby cried. People started asking when they were going to have another one.
Sandy must have told Jill they weren’t doing it yet, because one day Virgil stopped him, said, “Must be getting pretty horny by now, huh?”
She left him with the baby for an afternoon, when she went for her postpartum checkup and to be fitted for a diaphragm. When she came home, with her mother—her mother was in on this—the two of them started that high-pitched laughing again. Evidently Mark had put the baby’s diaper on wrong, though he couldn’t see what was so humorous about that.
She still keeps the house very clean, though there are a few things she never remembers to do, like sponge off the part of the toilet underneath the seat, the part he uses. She’s also a terrible cook.
And lately he has been thinking about sex more often, having these ideas that never occurred to him before. Things about tying her down, doing it standing up. Things that aren’t about her at all. If he told anyone they would lock him up.
He hasn’t forgotten why he wanted to get married, how good it feels to wake up in the morning curled around her, the warm safe feeling of their bed, even when Mark Junior has soaked through his diapers in the night, and there’s a moist pissy spot u
nder him. He liked buying an insurance policy and having Sandy’s name to write on the line that said Beneficiary. He likes going to Howard Johnson’s on Fish Fry Night—the three of them—and seeing the waitress come toward them with a high chair for his son. He still gets a kick out of saying “my wife,” “my family,” and tries to work them into the conversation when he can.
But instead of making him feel more like a man, Sandy sometimes makes him feel like a little boy. Twice he has called her Mom by mistake. And one time, for a couple of seconds there, he couldn’t remember what his son’s name was.
He just wishes he hadn’t been in such a rush. It’s like tearing down the highway to get to this party by seven-thirty, and then you get there and it’s really kind of boring, and you think: How am I supposed to fill the time between now and midnight? Because even though it’s not that great, you still don’t want to go home.
Chapter 2
Because the weather has finally turned nice, Reg Johnson has taken his Rototiller out of the garage, and is turning over the soil so he can get his lettuce in. He’s also glad to get out of the house: eight days of rain, stuck listening to Doris gabbing on the phone, left him ready to dig ditches just so he could escape.
One day last fall, Reg’s neighbor Pete Murphy stopped by on his way back from the mailbox when Reg was boarding up his dormer windows. He said, “I see you’re shutting the dormers for the winter,” and Reg had stopped in his tracks for a minute there, just looking at Pete. Reg thought he’d heard Pete say he was shutting Doris up for the winter. He figured Dr. Joyce Brothers would say that’s what he must really have had on his mind.
What he’s thinking about now is another neighbor, the girl down the road. He sees her driving past his house every day around noon, coming back a half hour or so later. She has a red car—foreign. He doesn’t know her name. He can tell she’s very young, and wonders what she’s doing living by herself in the old Richards place. Doris says she’s probably got some drug headquarters going. How else would you figure she’d get the money to buy a piece of property like that? (Reg and Doris had to take out a second mortgage on their own place, after Reg hurt his back and had to quit his job. Now most of Doris’s conversation centers on how much everything costs.)
Reg wonders why the girl doesn’t have a boyfriend. He never sees any cars heading down the road except hers. “She must get pretty lonely down there,” he says to Doris, who answers that it takes all kinds. This is her response to most things he says to her, and to every night’s Walter Cronkite broadcast. “Live and learn.” “What can you expect?” “It takes all kinds.”
This afternoon, he thinks, he will walk down the road and say hello. Neighbors should introduce themselves. She might want him to Rototill a garden patch. The Richardses used to have a beautiful garden.
He turns off the motor and reaches for his jacket, with “Ashford Bowling League” in maroon script on the back. No—no need of a jacket. Just a hat. He runs a comb through what is left of his hair and heads toward the girl’s house.
If Sandy is ever reincarnated as a man, she will know just how to act. What it takes to make a woman happy is so simple it’s hard to understand why so many men mess things up. It doesn’t even cost money. Sandy knows there are those other kinds of women, who want jewels and fur coats and things, but she believes they’re the minority. Flowers might be nice, but they don’t even have to be roses. A bunch of violets and daisies would work just as well. Better.
Here is all Sandy needs, all most women need, she thinks. (And someday she’s going to tell this to Mark Junior, and he will have a very happy marriage.)
A kiss on the cheek first thing in the morning, his hand brushing the hair away from her face. Good morning, darling.
Not just when he wants to make love. When she is cooking the eggs sometimes he might come up behind her and press his lips against the back of her neck. He might put his hands on the sides of her waist. When she comes out of the shower he tells her, “You sure look pretty.”
He should be a little interested. When she mentions that she saw this hair clip at Felsen’s that would go just right with her blue dress, he remembers, and that night at dinner there it is, all wrapped up in her napkin.
“What did you put in the chicken?” he asks her. “It’s so good.”
What does a candle cost? A card on their anniversary and occasionally on no particular day: “Just Thinking of You.” He could take her dancing, or just some night in their living room he could say let’s waltz.
Tell her what a wonderful job she’s doing with the baby. Ask her if she’s had any interesting dreams lately. They could buy a bottle of wine some night, take out her old English books and read each other poetry.
He could want to see what she looks like when she was little, say—when her mother visits—“Tell me about Sandy’s first day of school.”
But the main thing is if he would just talk to her. If—instead of stretching out on the sofa after dinner, watching TV—he would tell her his hopes and fears, describe his day. I’m alone in the house all day long for goodness’ sake, with a baby that only says four syllables. I need to hear about your life.
It wouldn’t have to be just the good things. Why does he think he has to be a hero all the time? She could comfort him.
He comes home one night with a bag of fresh strawberries—remembering how she likes them—and a box of whipping cream. He says come outside for a second, I want to show you this fantastic sunset. He hugs his son close to his chest. Why do fathers think all they can do with their sons is wrestle them, tickle them, throw them in the air, make jokes about them having the hots for some ten-month-old girl who’s having her diaper changed: “like father like son”?
“You know,” he says, “the baby has your chin.”
He takes her hand. He tells her his dream, that someday he can get a little piece of land a few miles outside town, build them an A-frame with his own two hands.
“I know you can do it, honey,” she says. At this moment there is nothing she wouldn’t do for him, absolutely nothing.
Carla and Greg’s last stop, before getting onto the FDR Drive, was West Eighth Street for bagels. Dan and Sally have told them you can’t find a decent bagel in the entire state of New Hampshire, and there will be plenty of room in the freezer for a couple dozen. Enough to last for a month anyway, and by that time someone is bound to pay them a visit from civilization.
Dan and Sally keep their place in Ashford for summers mostly, and vacations, but when Sally got a grant to teach a three-month photography workshop in Morocco, they offered the place to Carla and Greg. So now the Volkswagen’s packed with three boxes of new paperbacks (a fresh copy of Walden, lots of poetry); Carla’s cast-iron pots and the Cuisinart, with Marimekko floor pillows around it for protection; the stereo and Greg’s jazz collection, his New Wave stuff, Carla’s sixties folk and her complete ten-record set of Buddy Holly, the original first-release Patsy Cline album with “I Fall to Pieces.” Carla’s unsure what kind of clothes people wear in New Hampshire. She has bought a pair of purple overalls and some bright-green high-top Converse sneakers, a half-dozen new hundred-percent-cotton T-shirts and a patchwork skirt she pictures herself square dancing in. Greg has ordered hiking boots from L. L. Bean, a fishing pole and hip boots and a pound of the new sugar snap pea seeds he read about in Organic Gardening. Mostly, though, he’s planning on making a lot of art this summer. Earlier this morning they stopped by Jaimie Canvas and bought ten gallons of Mars Black and twenty gallons of Titanium White and thirty yards of canvas. Color is too seductive, he told Carla last night, over their linguine. It seems appropriate that at the same time they are giving up their place on Duane Street, their membership in the Y, their 250-gallon saltwater aquarium and Szechuan cooking, Greg should also simplify his work.
Greg teaches art to eleventh- and twelfth-graders at the Walker School. He does his real work on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and occasionally he shows his paintings at a cooperative
gallery in SoHo, where members pay a quarterly fee and take turns waxing the floor in exchange for exhibition rights. What he would like, of course, is to live by his painting, to have a commercial gallery sign him on. Taking his slides around is very depressing though. The last time he made the rounds he was told “We aren’t taking on new artists” (four times), “We’re only into superrealists,” “minimalists,” “younger women painters,” “superminimalists.”
There’s a collector he met through his friend Nick at the Whitney, who has bought three of his paintings—two for his place in the Hamptons and one that hangs in his office at the Chemical Bank building. (Carla is annoyingly proud of this, as if that proves he must know what he’s doing.) Greg visits this collector two or three times a year, and always gets his shoes shined on the man’s electric shoeshine machine when he does. The collector always says, “You should have a show.” When he buys a picture he pays in cash from a wall safe behind an original Stella. Greg puts the money—a thousand dollars last time—into his wallet. After he leaves the collector’s office he takes the elevator down one floor, goes to the men’s room there and transfers the bills to his shoe. Then he takes the bus home instead of the subway.
Greg has a friend, Turner, who has had a gallery on Fifty-seventh Street representing him for three years. Turner has never had to explain to a sixteen-year-old girl how Jackson Pollock’s Number One is different from the linoleum floor in her aunt’s summer place. Turner has a twenty-three-year-old art student working for him in his loft on Broome Street, stretching canvases—he’s turning them out that fast. Greg, on the other hand, has gone through periods when he stopped using red in his work simply because he ran out of red paint and couldn’t afford more.
Now, of course, with their two jobs, he and Carla don’t have to worry much about money. What hasn’t changed is the moment (usually at a party, meeting new people) when someone asks what he does and he says he paints, and then the question comes, “Are you represented by a gallery?” When it’s Carla they ask, she’ll give a long explanation about the directionlessness of the New York art scene, how gallery owners no longer take risks, how everyone is selling out, and that by paying for his own shows an artist remains pure. Greg tells them flat out, “No gallery.” And for a long time he felt so confident about his work, his promise, that it wasn’t even so bad when people—hearing that—stopped taking him seriously. But lately he has begun to wonder what the point is of making art almost nobody sees, and fewer understand. He has stopped assuming that someday soon something great will happen in his career. All the openings he attends, of friends’ shows, have begun wearing him down.
Baby Love Page 2
