The day had not begun well. Willy wanted me to bake him blueberry muffins. Audrey, whose friend Melissa had come for a sleepover the night before, woke to discover that Melissa had left in the middle of the night with a sudden attack of homesickness. Charlie couldn’t find his bear. Steve was dead to the world.
So I crawled out of bed, put on water for coffee, started clattering pans for muffins, and (this being Saturday) turned on the cartoons. I changed Willy’s diaper, found Bear Bear, promised Audrey we’d try another sleepover soon, and removed from the kitchen counter a piece of watermelon that had been left out the night before. With about a hundred ants on it.
The telephone rang while I was sifting the flour: a collection agency, wanting to know why I hadn’t been making payments on my Mastercard. (“I’ve been so busy fighting a nuclear dump in my town,” I told the woman. She didn’t seem too interested.) On top of everything else, my whole mouth was in pain from two teeth I’d had filed down for a temporary crown, my dentist was out of town, and I had poison ivy all over my left foot.
Steve came into the kitchen and gave me a kiss. I slid the muffin pan into the oven, threw my potholder to the floor, burst into tears, and told him (for probably the five hundredth time in our nine years of marriage) that I was about to have a nervous breakdown.
Steve poured himself a cup of coffee. “I thought I’d go for a jog,” he said. “Could you just hold off falling apart until I get back?”
I was still crying. Audrey and Charlie came rushing in to see what was the matter. “I’m sorry, Mom,” said Charlie, who no longer waits to see whose fault it was this time. He threw his arms around me. Audrey threw her arms around both of us. The weight of the two of them knocked me over—I fell backward and cracked my head against the floor.
Now, I am a little hazy about the order of things after that, but I can tell you some of the things I said (in no particular order), because they are the things I nearly always say to my family in times like these:
“I’m just a servant around here. Nobody appreciates me.”
“Of course I’m mean and no fun to be around. I could have a pleasant personality too, if I got to sleep late and hang around watching cartoons every morning, and if I could take off any time I felt like it to go jogging.”
“Just once, I’d like to see one of you put your bowl in the dishwasher without being asked.”
Of course there was more: about the nuclear dump, about my dentist, who had shot me full of Novocain and then stuffed my mouth with cotton, seconds before launching into his remarks on the nuclear issue. I complained about how I never get time to hang up all the clothes on my closet floor. I moaned about not having my tomatoes planted yet.
“Please don’t get tears all over my bear,” said Charlie.
“I have three hundred unanswered letters sitting on my desk,” I said. “Vicky leaves in three weeks and we still don’t have a new babysitter. Our medical insurance expires July first. How am I supposed to plant a garden when there’s twenty feet of brush piled up on it? What teacher will Audrey get for third grade? I don’t think calamine lotion does one bit of good for poison ivy.”
Of course I burned the muffins. Steve took his run. Audrey shooed her brothers out of the kitchen, and everyone stayed out of my way for about half an hour, until Steve came home. By then I was dressed, and glumly seated at the kitchen table, contemplating all the things about my life that seemed out of control. Steve took a shower, dried himself off, and sat down next to me with a ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s make a list. We’ll write down all your problems, so we’ll know what we’re up against.”
I told him to stop making fun of me. This was serious.
“Who’s making fun?” he said. He picked up the pen and wrote “MOM’S PROBLEMS” at the top of the sheet.
I told him I didn’t know where to begin, I had so many.
“Number one,” he wrote. “Having nervous breakdown. Number two. Have to put kids’ cereal bowls into the dishwasher all the time.”
“I’m always the one who has to get out of bed to change Willy’s diaper at six o’clock,” I said.
“What about yesterday?” Steve pointed out. Then he wrote: “Number three. Have to change Willy’s morning diaper—sometimes.”
“The three hundred unanswered letters sitting on my desk,” I said. “Cleaning the closet. Getting Audrey new sneakers.” Which was followed by “toothache” and “cat using fireplace for litter box.”
Number ten was poison ivy. Number fifteen was “Texas still being considered as a nuclear dump site.” Eighteen was our town fire marshal, who has been unwilling to give us a permit to burn our brush pile so we can rototill our garden. I was winding down—I could feel it. However, I had to admit, I was feeling better.
Number nineteen was the imminent departure of our babysitter, Vicky. Number twenty-one was nuclear war. Even that one seemed less than overwhelming, listed as it was just beneath “third grade.”
I had stopped crying by this time. I was even munching on toast, and fixing myself a third slice. The children had stopped tiptoeing around and were back to bouncing on the sofa. Steve put the list on our bulletin board with a push pin. Where it still hangs, right beside the grocery list, a pack of morning glory seeds, and a reminder about my next dental appointment.
This afternoon it rained, and we got a burning permit.
Tonight we burn the brush pile, and tomorrow we’ll rototill the garden. Check off item number eighteen. One down, twenty to go.
I often wonder about those housewives and mothers you hear about now and then, who simply, somewhere along the line, flip out. The ones who walk out the door and never come back or break every piece of their best china, some afternoon when their husband says he’s too tired to change the baby’s diaper. A woman who one day just lets the washer overflow and stops bothering to wash the dishes, a woman who simply wakes up one morning and decides to stay in bed.
And of course, at the back of it all is the image of some young, hardworking, responsible-seeming wife and mother (she cooks out of the Silver Palate, does Jane Fonda six days a week, gives perfect holiday parties) who one day sticks her head in the gas oven and signs off for good. I suspect many of us have wondered, at one moment or another, whether we could ever reach that point. And for most of us, the answer is no. Still, who doesn’t feel the urge, now and then, to just let loose?
So this is what happened last Tuesday. I had taken off work for the afternoon, deciding to spend it with my husband (also off from work) and our children. We packed a lunch and headed for the mountains. We had a wonderful afternoon. Then, on our way home (because I wanted to prolong this good time together, and everyone was in such a good mood), I suggested we stop in a nearby town for pizza.
We placed our order, careful to specify that half the pizza should have the works on top and half (the children’s portion) should be plain. The man told us to come back in half an hour, and we did—in good spirits, but starving.
But when the pizza was set before us, it was covered completely with mushrooms, anchovies, and onions, and I knew the children wouldn’t touch it. I sent it back, thinking maybe the pizza man could scrape off the extra stuff and replace it with a new topping, ready to go. He said it would take twenty minutes.
And—hungry, tired, frustrated at seeing our dinner out on the verge of being ruined—I exploded. I told the pizza man a few things about two-year-old boys (what they’re like after sitting in a high chair for twenty minutes, waiting for dinner). I told him (the way I tell my children; it’s a habit I can’t break) that he should at least say he was sorry. “I’m only human,” said the pizza man. “Everybody makes mistakes.”
Which was fair enough, but didn’t do much for the children, who were already losing their good humor. I tried taking Willy for a walk, but having once seen the pizza so close nearly within reach, he didn’t want to come. Charlie wanted to work the video games. Audrey was wrigglin
g. “Why don’t you go walk around the block by yourself and let off some steam,” said Steve, seeing my clenched fists and tight-lipped expression. So I did.
When I came back, the pizza was nearly ready again. But just as the pizza man (to whom I had apologized, by now) began to cut our pizza, Steve got up from the table and headed out the door with Willy. I couldn’t imagine why, and he didn’t stop to tell me.
The rest of us sat at the table then for a couple of minutes, waiting for Steve to come back. Three minutes. Four. I drummed my fingers on the table exaggeratedly. Charlie began sucking his thumb. Audrey wanted to know if we could just start without the others. I said no. We were going to have a happy family dinner if it killed us.
When Steve had still not returned, after precisely six and a half minutes of waiting, I ran out of the restaurant after him. He was halfway down the block with Willy, and the two of them were walking back in our direction—but slowly, taking their time, admiring cracks in the sidewalk. “Steve!” I screamed, in a voice that must have made him think the restaurant was on fire.
Of course then he came fast, scooping Willy up in his arms and running, while I returned to our table and sat stonily across from our children and the still-untouched pizza, while the pizza man stared at me curiously.
Steve came in a minute later and sat down very calmly, explaining that he had taken Willy out to give the pizza time to cool. What was the matter with that?
Now comes the part that’s hard to tell: About how I stalked out of the restaurant with my beer, all appetite for pizza gone, and then sat, alone, for twenty minutes in the car (which was parked directly in front of the pizza parlor, in perfect view of my friend the pizza man), staring at a woman’s magazine that had been lying on the seat. How my family came out of the restaurant at last and Steve (not really angry) said quietly, “Ready to apologize?” And how I said nothing, and just kept staring at a recipe for Coffee Macadamia Nut Torte.
Neither one of us said anything, then, for a pretty miserable ten minutes. I was sorry, by that time, but I was also in so deep I didn’t know how to turn things around. I was tired, I was hungry, I was mad at myself for ruining our lovely day. I didn’t talk, then, about how I’d felt abandoned, back in the restaurant, with the pizza man giving me the evil eye and Steve gone and all the rest of us just sitting there, waiting. I didn’t talk about how badly I had wanted us all to have a good time. I didn’t, as I should have, close my eyes and think back to that morning and the happy whoop our children had let out when they heard that I was coming along with them. I just looked at my beer and a terrible urge came over me to throw it, and because nobody else had done anything wrong (except maybe the pizza man), I raised my cup and poured its contents all over myself.
I’m here to tell you, it didn’t work. Didn’t make me feel better, didn’t make my children happy again, didn’t result in a big hug from my husband. And if what one gets from throwing crockery, pouring the Rice Krispies out the window, snipping the clothesline in two, is more of the feeling I got from having beer drip down my hair into my eyes, then I think I’ll pass on future outbursts.
It’s a week now since the episode my children speak of as the night Mom threw her beer, and things are back to normal. For more days than I like to remember, though, every time I’d turn around, Charlie and Willy were dumping something (cereal, orange juice, bristle blocks) over their heads, and shrieking wildly. Of course I told them again and again that what I’d done was wrong, that it only made me feel terrible. Keeping things under control is a strain, all right. But losing control is worse.
This morning I baked a blueberry pie for my friend Barbara, who just gave birth to a baby boy. Then I ran in a five-mile road race, finishing 248th out of about 260 runners. I picked up my free T-shirt, stood under an open fire hydrant to cool off. And then I came back home, peeled off my sweaty running clothes, pulled on a dress, and drove with Audrey to a hillside a few miles outside of town to attend a memorial service for the daughter of friends of ours who died, three days ago, at the age of twenty months.
There is more, of course, that can be said about all of these events, beginning with Lindsay Turner, who was born with a serious congenital heart defect and died on the operating table during the sixth major heart surgery of her life—a very beautiful baby girl you might have seen, in her stroller, without realizing anything was wrong, unless you went to change her diaper and saw the scars that went from the front of her chest clear around to the back.
We barely knew the Turners when we offered to take care of their older daughter, Hannah, one time when Lindsay went into the hospital last fall. After the parents came back to town Joan told me what their year had been like: Lindsay’s birth was smooth and uncomplicated, but a few hours later she suddenly turned blue. An ambulance rushed her to Boston, where Joan and Donald learned that without a brand-new surgical procedure—the first of a whole series, whose oldest survivor was not yet four—their baby would be dead within hours. Of course they chose the surgery, although, describing it later, Joan told me softly that sometimes she wished they’d simply let Lindsay die. Terrible as it would have been to lose her then, it would get worse later.
By last spring, Lindsay had survived all but the final and most life-threatening stage of heart repair, and her parents dared to be optimistic—Donald boundlessly so, Joan cautiously. They’d go to her crib every morning wondering if she’d still be breathing. And still they carried her everywhere, too weak to walk, while Willy, three months younger, raced through our house and up the stairs, tumbling down them more than once, leaving me near tears from trying to keep up with him.
The Turners had money problems, but that was the least of it. There were problems with Hannah, who had to be left with friends and neighbors every time Lindsay went to the hospital again. There were days when Joan felt so bleak she simply couldn’t get out of bed. There were people who would stop her in the supermarket and, seeing Lindsay’s blue lips and fingers, tell her that she should dress her child more warmly. No one wanted the responsibility of babysitting Lindsay, so Joan and Donald never went anywhere, except to the hospital. And there was also the knowledge that they would never have another baby. The risk was too great that another child would be born with the same heart defect.
I called Joan and Donald sometimes, to see how they were doing, and now and then we’d bring Hannah over to our house to play But the truth is, I didn’t ever call as much as I should have. The demands of our own three children often seemed all I could handle—more than I could handle, sometimes.
And then too, people like helping out with small, manageable problems, and this one—about which nothing cheering and hopeful could be said, for which there were no real solutions—was just so overwhelming. Sometimes I just wanted to forget about Lindsay, and of course, for me, that was possible.
So I hadn’t talked to the Turners all summer, and didn’t even know that Lindsay had gone into the hospital for surgery at the beginning of July and had fallen into a coma. She remained there for weeks, until finally the doctors decided they had to operate on her heart immediately, even though the prospects looked grim.
But two days ago, driving into town with Steve and the children, heading out for an afternoon at the circus, we passed Joan and Donald and Hannah, driving in the opposite direction, and saw their car turn in to the funeral home.
No questions were necessary. We went to the circus anyway; we even laughed at one particularly funny clown. We got home very late, and I called a friend who told me that yes, Lindsay had died. The memorial service would be today. She was also the one who told me that our mutual friend Barbara had had her baby. We moved on to that other happy subject with relief.
When I first heard the news that Lindsay was dead and the service was today, the day of the five-mile race, I figured I wouldn’t run. But running this race was a deferred goal of mine, and I’d been determined all summer that this was the year I’d do it. This summer—the first in four years that I was neither
pregnant nor nursing a baby, recovering from one pregnancy or contemplating another. For a few years there it had felt as though I’d given up my body to my children. I had just now begun feeling I’d got it back. Running the race was a sort of milestone.
So this morning I woke before my children did and took out my biggest mixing bowl and my pastry blender. I made two pies: one for the family that gained a child, one for the family that lost theirs. Sometimes I take shortcuts with the crust: neglect to put ice cubes in the water, prick holes in the top crust randomly instead of in a flower pattern. Today I took my time. And I could tell, just by looking at them, that these were good pies.
Then I put on my shorts and chose a T-shirt, tied my hair back and laced my sneakers tight. “I hope you win,” Charlie called out as I took off for the race, but (never having run five miles in my life) all I wanted was to finish.
The temperature had already reached around eighty when the race began this morning, and the course—even for experienced runners—was what they call a killer, with a mile-and-a-half-long uphill stretch halfway through the race. Around the two-mile point I felt ready to drop. Even children were passing me.
I guess all runners use little tricks to get them through the hardest parts of a race. The owner of the supermarket sponsoring this particular event, knowing how hot and tired we’d be, had posted a sign halfway up the big hill, with a picture of an overflowing beer mug on it. But as for me—feeling more pain, by then, than I had during childbirth—what I thought about were my children, and other people’s children. How much children put one through, and how much their presence in one’s life enlarges one’s capacity to withstand it. The way children take it out of you (all those mothers, jogging a little ahead of me, who like me were getting back in shape after childbearing). And what they give you back, too, that you didn’t have before.
Before I had my children, when I was in my early twenties, I was stronger, faster, with a firmer stomach and more time to exercise. But when I was younger, I would have quit in the middle of that hill, when the pain got bad, or sooner. As it was, I thought of going home and telling Audrey (who sometimes tells me she’s afraid she’ll never learn to ride a two-wheeler or execute a cartwheel) that I finished the race, and because of that, I think, I finished.
Domestic Affairs Page 20
