Domestic Affairs

by Joyce Maynard

  After about a half hour of cooking I lifted the pan out of the oven and the cake tester came out clean. The cake, turned upside down on a gold plate, slid out of its pan perfectly star-shaped. Audrey ran to get two candles (not little birthday candles, but a pair of half-burned tapers) and stuck them in the center. “Charlie,” she said. “It’s your birthday now.”

  For presents all we had was a dollar-twenty-nine cowboy hat we’d picked up a couple of days before, still in its brown paper bag, tied with a ribbon. I lit the candles, and we all gathered around. We sang “Happy Birthday,” Charlie extinguished the flames, and Audrey served up the cake—which probably wouldn’t win a bake off, but tasted okay. One might even say tasty.

  Then Charlie opened his present, put it on his head, and began to gallop around the living room, whooping, “Cowboy, cowboy.” Audrey, without a moment’s hesitation, stuck her fingers in the remains of her cake, smearing brown crumbs on her cheeks. “I’m an Indian,” she said. She tied the ribbon around her head for a headband, handed Charlie his hobby horse, and the two of them ran around and around chasing each other until bedtime.

  There is a lesson in all of this. I hope I have learned it.

  YEARNINGS

  Oklahoma Friend

  Visitor at the Mental Hospital

  The Lure of the Roller Rink

  Greg and Kate’s Wedding

  The Love Boat

  On the Sidelines

  Stranger in the Night

  THE FIRST CALL CAME around nine o’clock one night, more than a dozen years ago. I was living alone in the country—unmarried, twenty years old. Watching whatever happened to be on TV, finishing my second bowl of ice cream, when the phone rang. The man talked like a cowboy, said he lived in Oklahoma and his name was Lloyd. He’d read and liked a book I wrote. The name of my town had been mentioned somewhere, and my phone number was listed with information. He wanted, he said, to be my friend.

  I thought it was a joke, someone I knew from college (I’d dropped out after my freshman year), one of my old acting friends trying out an accent for some play he was in. That’s what I figured. But there was also the odd way this call had come at a moment (not by any means a rare one, in those days) when what I needed badly was someone to call me up and say he’d be my friend. There were things he said that made me feel he really knew who I was. A Hank Williams record that I owned too was playing in the background while we talked. He’d held a lot of different kinds of jobs, worked at a Campbell’s Soup factory one time just because he wanted to see the tomato soup he loved. He talked about books he read, promising to send me about a dozen he mentioned: American history, obscure short-story collections, movie-star biographies. He was a birdwatcher, and said I had to have a copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide. Hank Williams was singing all this time: “Jambalaya,” “Your Cheating Heart,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

  “Come on,” I said, as we were finally about to ring off. “Who is this really?” Your friend Lloyd, he said. From Oklahoma. I said all right then, what’s the Oklahoma state bird? “Scissortail Flycatcher.” That sounded like a joke for sure.

  The next day I looked up the answer to my question in an almanac, and of course he’d been right. A week later came a package containing the only picture I ever saw of him (cut from his high-school yearbook) showing a very handsome dark-eyed boy, the center forward, plus the books he’d promised, each one elaborately inscribed with my name in oversized capital letters on the first page. “Property of … Hands OFF. KEEP OUT!!!” Now and then, reading along or flipping through the pages, I’d come across a few words that were underlined, with a comment in the margin. In a biography of Vivien Leigh, her birthday (the same as mine) circled in red, with exclamation points all around it. Something about birds, or country music, and sometimes a subject I didn’t even think I’d mentioned (a food I liked, a movie I’d seen four times). If a character in a novel wore her hair the way I did on the cover of my book, there’d be a comment. And over and over again there the words, “Don’t forget, you can always count on me.”

  I know what all this sounds like (psychopath twisting the phone cord; unhappy young woman alone in the woods). My mother, hearing about Lloyd, made no comment, then called back a day later to say, “I can’t stop thinking about that man in Oklahoma. I’m scared for you.” I told her, told myself (and the many people I entertained with the story of his increasingly frequent phone calls) that I was getting into this because it was such a good story.

  And though he called me, by now, twice a week (very often after the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, that he and I—hard to say we—both loved) and though I seldom cut the calls short, I never phoned him. At some point, though, I realized that if he disappeared, I’d miss him. He sent packages weekly: books, newspaper clippings, tapes—but I never (though I copied down his address) mailed him anything. Even his strange form of communication—forming an attachment based on a photograph from a book jacket, talking only by phone and exchanging precious little information about the basic facts of either person’s daily life, work, family—made an odd kind of sense to me. Never mind that he was thirty-eight and I was twenty, that his passion was the Oklahoma Sooners football team and I built dollhouse furniture. The very fact that our two lives held so little in common seemed to me, now and then, to suggest the presence of some much deeper form of kinship. Of course it seemed crazy that I was sitting in my house in the middle of a New Hampshire winter (and then another one), on a Saturday night, talking for an hour with a man I’d never met, who lived two thousand miles away, someone who had just got home from his office Christmas party, where a divorcee from the secretarial pool had stuck his cowboy hat on her head and invited him to be her date at a rodeo next weekend, a man who said no, because he wanted instead to stay home, watch Mary Tyler Moore, and call me. But every now and then I’d go to a party too or visit friends at college, where I’d find myself face to face with some young Ivy League type, and I’d ask him what his major was, and he’d tell me about applying to medical school—and all the social rites and customs we’d go through, on the way to absolutely nothing more than the cheese-and-crackers platter, seemed just as crazy to me as what was going on with Lloyd. Maybe more so.

  He sent me strange, wonderful presents. A deluxe two-key harmonica (with the request that I learn how to play “Red River Valley” in time to perform it, over the telephone, for his birthday in May). A pair of blue cowboy boots and an Oklahoma football jersey. A four-record set of bird calls. A pair of apple-head dolls made by Oklahoma Indians. An antique green-velvet doll-sized chaise longue. A hand-inlaid veneer table that played “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago when you lifted the top. One of the first American Cuisinarts, with a gold plaque attached to the side inscribed with my name and the words “HANDS OFF!!!” He sent so many books that I had to buy two new sets of shelves. For my part, I sent nothing, but any time an article I’d written showed up in the Ladies’ Home Journal or Seventeen, he’d know about it. He was keeping a scrapbook about me, he said.

  Once in a while he’d make some remark about paying me a visit in New Hampshire. There were one or two times, real low points in my life, when I felt I had to go away somewhere, and Oklahoma (more than some other place where old friends and family lived) came to mind. But it was easier to be brave on the telephone than in real life. In real life, I left my house in New Hampshire and got a job in New York. Had a few appropriate-seeming boyfriends who weren’t nearly as interesting or funny, as good company or as devoted to me as Lloyd, and whose names and faces I can’t now recall. Lloyd still called on Saturday nights—though sometimes I’d be out and I’d come home to find his message on my new answering machine. He never got the hang of waiting for the beep.

  Then I met Steve (whose family, on his father’s side, were Oklahomans), and within a month I’d quit my job, given notice on my apartment, and made plans to move with him back to New Hampshire and get married. And even though over the four years since Lloyd had
started calling, not one word of love or commitment had been spoken, still, with Steve there in the room, I felt guilty and two-timing the next time Lloyd called me. I meant to tell Lloyd about Steve that night, and then the next time he called; but he was full of the story of a cheese dish that he was sending me he’d seen in a store window in Oklahoma City, and a toy bird in a cage that sang just like a real one. He’d made a tape for me of the last episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that he was sending enclosed in a five-pound can of macadamia nuts.

  I wrote Lloyd a letter (easiest of all to be brave on paper) telling him that I was getting married. He wrote back to say he’d always be my friend, but that he probably shouldn’t call me anymore. If he were in Steve’s place, he wouldn’t like it.

  I heard from him, after that, only on Vivien Leigh’s and my birthday every year, and at Christmas, when he’d send Audrey a red and white Oklahoma Sooners jersey in her current size and some hugely extravagant toy. (An enormous stuffed elephant. A deluxe baby doll with thirty-piece layette, packed in a wicker suitcase. That one came on a Christmas we had so little money we gave her balloons and bubble-blowing solution. Steve wrote to Lloyd after that to say please, no more presents.)

  Over the years, in various periods of hard times, we’ve sold most of Lloyd’s presents to me, though I still have the bird-call records and the personalized Cuisinart. I still think of him now and then (when I’m grating carrots, and sometimes, rereading an old book, when I come upon a reference to Tammy Wynette or red-winged blackbirds, underlined in red). And sometimes, when I’m feeling fed up with my real-life, nine-year-old marriage to a man I love who gives me meat thermometers and dish towels on my birthday—a man who loves me, but is not about to keep a scrapbook documenting my life—I think about how much easier it is to carry on a romance with someone if you’ve never met him.

  A few years back, over a period of several months, I used to visit a woman in the state mental hospital. Sometimes I drive past that hospital on my way to buy groceries or to take one of my children to the doctor. I feel almost like an escapee, the relief is so great, still, that I’m on the outside.

  I first read about Linda in the newspaper. Years before, her father had killed her mother and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. When later he was released from the state hospital, and within the year, found dead of a gunshot wound, his death was ruled a suicide. For months Linda had waged a protest with the authorities until finally they agreed to exhume the body. Sure enough, there was a bullet wound in him that proved it was a murder, and the one who shot him was the daughter who’d insisted they investigate. They found Linda not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced her to the state hospital. Which is where I sent her the letter saying I’d like to meet her and write a book about her story. She said sure, come.

  I was living, then as now, in this house in the country, with Steve and Audrey, who was just a baby. It was a couple of years since I’d lived in the city, working as a newspaper reporter—but I still liked to talk about my old days as if I were a character on Hill Street Blues. Never having quite as many stories as I would have liked.

  But now I was spending my days picking strawberries and making jam, with a baby strapped to my back and no shoes on. There were, in fact, rough edges in my life: the constant eruption of little battles that mark the early days of a marriage and pass, if one survives them, into truce or much more serious warfare, greater pain or deeper intimacy, and sometimes both. And there was a difficult, often stormy father in my life then too—my own beloved, infuriating, alcoholic parent whose calls I avoided and didn’t return. That woman locked inside the state hospital was nothing like me, and the father she killed—a burly, violent, gun-loving small-time businessman—was nothing like mine, who liked, when drinking, to sit in the living room late into the night, conducting Mozart horn concertos played on a scratched record. Still, reading this other woman’s story, I drew comparisons between Linda and me, imagined her story addressed mine and held larger implications about fathers and daughters, madness and sanity. I don’t remember what else I said about her case, but it seemed to make sense at the time—enough that a publisher was going to pay me a sum out of which (there was always an uneasiness surrounding this) I would pay a percentage required by Linda.

  So I used to visit her. Unlike most people in state mental hospitals, she looked good. She was about ten years older than I: mid-thirties. She’d known her share of successes in the world: achievement in sports, excellent grades, and a few semesters at a medical school. She had good teeth, good skin, a good figure.

  Because she was, at the time, the only woman in the state to be committed on criminal charges, there was no women’s forensic ward to place her on. So Linda, with her books and Johnny Cash cassettes and her calligraphy pens, inhabited a world of women who never got out of their bathrobes and didn’t always make it to the toilet on time. Tapes I made with her are hard to make out, chiefly because there was always so much yelling going on around us. Some of the women on that ward had been there twenty years and just sat in chairs all day, staring straight ahead. Signs along the hallways, decorated with some staff members’ attempts at rendering Snoopy, instructed patients on subjects like “Five steps to a cheerful outlook” and listed days of the week.

  Many times I was the only visitor on the floor. The first fifteen minutes of my visit were often taken up by her questions about the business aspects of our arrangement. She knew just what kind of car she wanted to buy with part of her earnings when she got out: a Pontiac Trans Am.

  Then we’d settle down to her story, beginning with childhood: tap-dancing lessons and target-shooting practice, times when her father hit her mother, intimations of sexual abuse. We got along well. I never felt any particular warmth from her and I always felt she was evaluating my behavior pretty closely, but of course that’s precisely what I did with her. When you’re having a conversation with a person in a mental hospital you measure everything she says, so a remark about the orderlies having it in for her sounds paranoid, and if the person says, “I could’ve killed him,” you can’t help but think that maybe she could have.

  Making the transition from inside the hospital back to Steve and Audrey was always hard. I’d break into a run when was I out the door, and often I’d cry driving home. And often, too, I’d get into a silly argument with Steve afterward. I’d make some remark about Linda’s psychiatrist, how the nurses and orderlies hated my being there. Steve said I was spending too much time at the hospital.

  The big issue surrounding Linda at the time, she told me, was that everyone at the hospital suspected her of using drugs. She said she wasn’t. But her doctors gave orders that she couldn’t have any money in her possession.

  That was a terrible blow. Linda needed to buy cigarettes, and liked, once a week or so, to order a lobster dinner delivered from a local restaurant. It got to the point where most of what we talked about when I came was the money business, and every time I’d take a dollar out of my wallet to buy groceries, I’d think of her and feel something approaching guilt. Then one day she asked me if I’d smuggle in a hundred dollars for her.

  At first, and for a long time, I said no. I have always been one to obey rules. But here in the hospital, Linda used to say, resisting authority was a healthy sign of sanity. When a person stopped fighting, that was the moment you knew she’d be spending the next twenty years staring at the Snoopy posters.

  What she said made sense. Also, our work together was going less and less well; we hardly ever talked now about anything besides how much money she’d get for the book and who should play her in the movie. I guess I felt that if I would just bring her the hundred dollars and be done with it, she’d trust me.

  It wasn’t easy, smuggling in those two fifty-dollar bills. A female attendant searched me every time I came. The day I brought the money I was in a cold sweat, and even after I’d managed to turn it over to Linda I couldn’t calm down. When I got home that day Steve told me I was going crazy.<
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  I’m not completely sure even now of all the reasons why everything fell apart after that. A few days later I was called into the office of a hospital administrator who said he’d been given reason to think Linda was using drugs again, and no one could figure out how she got the money. I said I didn’t know, and he believed me.

  Linda’s brother called me, wanting his share of royalties from my still-unwritten book. I drove up north to the motel he ran and spent an evening dickering over figures at his kitchen table. From where I sat, the stuffed head of a huge buck deer killed by the dead father seemed to be staring me in the eye.

  A couple of days later I sent Linda a letter telling her I couldn’t go through with the project. I sent back the money I’d been paid for the book, and to make up the lost income I wrote a whole lot of magazine articles about marriage and babies, sounding like an expert on both. My father, who had moved away by this time, and hardly ever called me anymore, died in his sleep, and I realized, touching his face as he lay in his casket, that of the many feelings I had for him, wanting him dead was never one.

  I had told Linda, when I quit the book, that I’d still come and visit her. But I never went back.

  My friend Beverly is a mother of two boys, ages three and ten. She’s a singer and songwriter, a crackerjack seamstress, a deeply religious woman. She loves her home, she loves her husband, and she believes strongly in the importance of a home-cooked dinner on the table for her family. No one, meeting her six months ago, would have said, “Here is a person with a deep void in her life. Here is someone who needs a hobby.”

  But three months ago (“on a whim,” she says, and because she figured it would be fun for the children) she and her good friend Jane took their boys to a place called Funspot for an afternoon of roller skating. Everybody had a good time. And you might have thought that would be that.