Domestic Affairs

by Joyce Maynard

  But last night, Joan Baez came to a nearby city to sing, and we got tickets. It was, I realized as I waited for her to come on stage, twenty-two years since I first saw her perform, when I was so excited I could barely catch my breath.

  She has cut her hair (that happened a while back), and there’s gray in it now. She was not particularly dressed up, but stylish. She is still a beautiful woman. And her voice, after all these years, is still marvelous.

  She sang a few of the old songs: “Stewball,” and “Farewell, Angelina”—giving us an imitation of Bob Dylan during one verse. She sang a song she wrote about her love affair with Dylan and one about her ex-husband. (Remarried now, I guess, and with another child. She herself never married again.) She also sang a song by Pink Floyd, and one by Elton John, accompanied by a grand piano. She brought up a few causes—Nicaragua, Libya—but there was a kind of detachment to the way she spoke about those things, rather like someone saying “here we go again.” She has been crusading for close to thirty years now; she’s seen plenty of causes come down the pike.

  A lot has happened since those early days when she stood barefoot, with her guitar, wearing a dress that looked like a burlap bag, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Times have changed: for her on the stage; for us in the balcony.

  I think I had been a little worried when I bought my tickets: afraid her voice would be thinner, afraid she would seem old. (Afraid that seeing those things, I would feel that way myself.) But what I felt as we filed out, heading for home and my sleeping children, was wonder—and relief—at all the stages a person passes through, and all the things a person can survive.

  There is a brand of baby stroller I’ve always wanted and never owned. I have had three babies now, and probably walked the mile from our house to the brook a little way down our road at least a thousand times with one or more small children in tow. But what I’ve been pushing all these years has been a cheap folding stroller, and though it’s hardly the most difficult part of parenthood, let me tell you, pushing those cheap bargain models down that stretch of road hasn’t been easy.

  Our road is dirt, and very bumpy. There’s a steep hill out here too, and so many rocks that sometimes I give up pushing altogether and simply lift the stroller in my arms, baby and all, and carry it over the roughest spots.

  This road is hard on strollers. In all our years of parenthood Steve and I have gone through six cheap ones, where that one Cadillac of strollers might have lasted us right through: We’ve spent about as much on twenty-dollar strollers as we would have if we’d simply bought the good one in the first place. The problem was, we never had that much money all at once. But you know, in all those years of pushing our kids down our road (or sometimes watching well-dressed young professional-type city parents push their well-dressed babies in that brand of stroller I coveted), I don’t think there was a single time I took a walk without wishing I had a good stroller and feeling a twinge of regret.

  Well, for our youngest child there remains, at the outside, probably no more than a year of being strolled before he chooses to go wherever he is going on his own steam. I offer protestation (cannot bear the finality of this), but Steve tells me, firmly, that he’s ready, with this third child of ours, to put having babies behind us. It has been hard, no question, and we both know our lives will be a lot easier once we have put away the stroller and everything that goes with it.

  Already we are beginning to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel of baby care. They’re just fleeting glimpses, mind you: one morning out of twenty, when we’re able to loll around in bed until six forty-five, without a single request for cereal, bottle, or book. The odd half hour when all three children are playing together, totally peacefully, without needing our intervention. I can sometimes duck into the bathroom unaccompanied now. I have begun wearing makeup again, and socks that match. We no longer spread newspapers on the floor under the table—to catch flying food—before every meal. And for the first time in ages, we are paying our bills on time, and going out to dinner now and then.

  Last weekend, for instance, I thought I’d take the children to Toys R Us and let them each pick out a summer beach toy. Buckets, snorkels, swim fins, that sort of thing. No special occasion—I was simply celebrating the beginning of the beach season and the general easing up of our lives.

  Then suddenly we were in the stroller aisle, and there it was: the one I always wanted and could never afford. The one our friends Tom and Diane had just bought, following the birth of their first child. (Unlike ours, a baby who was carefully planned for. For whom they waited several years, until the time was right.)

  So I pulled over my shopping cart and just looked at it for a moment: the stroller of my dreams. I looked at the price-tag: $149.00. A lot of money, but still I knew I could write a check for that much. I was spending half that on plastic beach equipment and a backyard water slide that would probably be wrecked by Labor Day.

  I lifted the stroller off the display stand and gave it a little push. (Smooth ride. Good suspension.) I tried folding it up. (That took about two seconds.) I ran my hand over the upholstery. I pictured Willy in the seat, waving a stalk of grass the way he likes to do on stroller rides, or a daisy with all the petals pulled off. And I pictured myself behind him, pushing up the hill so effortlessly I could manage one-handed.

  I guess I’d been standing in the stroller aisle for several minutes, because Charlie began to get impatient. He could see the tricycles ahead, and pedal cars shaped like fire engines and police cars and rocketships. That’s where he wanted to be.

  Not Audrey. Audrey understood. Often these days (usually when I’m trying to get dinner on and the boys are pulling on my legs), I’ll ask her to take her little brothers for a walk, with Willy in the stroller and Charlie holding onto the side. I pay Audrey a quarter to take the boys down our long driveway and back, and it’s a job she likes—only partly because of the income she derives from it. The one problem is our stroller, which is so flimsy and beat up that even pushing it on level ground is hard for her.

  “Look at that stroller,” she said dreamily, as only a first child—a stroller pusher herself—could do. “If we had one like that, I wouldn’t mind pushing Willy a hundred miles.”

  In the end, of course, I didn’t buy the stroller. I bought our beach stuff and a Barbie doll for Audrey, for which she will pay me back over the summer by taking Willy for more walks.

  About a week later Steve and I were driving down our dirt road without the children, to dinner and a movie. I was wearing the first new dress I’d bought in a while. Steve was talking about maybe getting away to the beach this summer, just the two of us. Making plans to put in raspberry bushes this year. Paint the house. Maybe we might begin looking into how much a used tractor would cost.

  “I almost bought a stroller the other day,” I told him, naming the brand I’d always wanted. I thought he’d laugh, or simply look horrified, but he didn’t. He just nodded and patted my hand. Then we drove on to the restaurant, where dinner probably came to forty dollars. Not that anyone was counting.

  I was taking a walk one day. This was a long time back—more than ten years ago, before I was married. I was on a dirt road near where we live now. No houses in sight, just woods. Through the trees was a path that looked as if it hadn’t been explored in a while, and I took it. Where it led was a clearing filled with wildflowers. And beyond that, a roaring brook with watercress growing in the shallow parts, and beaver dams along the edges that made a pool deep and long enough to jump into. Which is just what I did that day.

  Half a dozen years later—married and, very briefly, in possession of a little extra cash (I’d published a book that looked as if it might become a bestseller. It didn’t.)—Steve and I heard that piece of land along the brook was on the market. Not just a few acres, mind you, but more than a hundred. More than we could comfortably afford—we knew that. “But we can always sell some off,” we told ourselves. “It’s a good investment.”

  Tru
th is, we are neither of us cagey investor types. We just loved that land. We’d spent a perfect afternoon tromping the woods along the banks. Rolled up our pants and waded across to the other side. Inspected the tree stumps the beavers had left, like well-sharpened pencils. Tried to identify mushrooms. Picked wildflowers.

  We talked, that afternoon, about where we might build a house someday. How we’d keep a little boat on the beaver pond, and maybe build a sauna beside it. We had only one child then, but I pictured the others who would follow, and what a wonderful place this would be to grow up. Catching fish for dinner. Building tree houses. Inspecting frogs.

  We bought the land, using our small lump of cash for a down payment and signing a ten-year mortgage for the rest. We had another baby, and I began to realize that writing another book would be harder than I’d imagined. Steve started taking on more and more house-painting jobs, to come up with that monthly payment money. I stopped buying myself new clothes, started cutting my own hair. Steve ran out of more and more colors of paints and didn’t replace them. “I think I’ll just use black and white for a while,” he said.

  There were fights too, and usually what they were about (directly or indirectly) was money. We talked less about building a new place down by the brook and more about how to find more room in our existing house. By this time, there was another baby on the way. We decided, finally, that we’d put some pieces of that land on the market, and save the largest, best one for ourselves.

  Hard as it was coming up with the money every month to make those payments, I loved owning that land. We didn’t get down there all that often, because it was pretty thickly overgrown with brush, and hard for the children to manage. But now and then we’d take them down for an afternoon of fishing and a cookout by the water. A few times we set up our tent and spent the night. (Waking, once, to the sound of a beaver hitting the water and our dog Ron splashing in after him.)

  There had been an old sawmill on the site of the clearing where we camped, and what remained of it was a enormous pile of sawdust, perfect for children to climb on and jump in. Audrey liked building little shelters out of twigs and moss for dolls made out of acorns, with twig bodies and leaf dresses. Charlie liked throwing stones into the water and chasing frogs. Steve and I would sit by the campfire, sharing a beer, looking out over the children and beyond them, to the water, feeling no need to say a word. It was that place, those moments, I’d seize upon and hold onto any time I wanted to calm or comfort myself: during Willy’s birth and at the funeral of my father, after a bad argument with Steve or on some February morning when it seemed as if winter would never end. Our land—that’s what I’d think of then.

  We also headed down to our land every December to cut our Christmas tree, and though those trips were usually complicated some by my dissatisfaction with the spindly trees we found there, I always loved our tromps through the woods to find one. Last Christmas, a year after putting our land on the market (with no takers still) we found ourselves eyeing other smaller trees, for future Christmases, as we hauled in our spindly pine. Maybe we won’t sell the land, I was thinking. Maybe we’ll manage to keep it after all.

  And then six weeks ago came the call. A young man and his wife, newly married, had spent the day walking our land (as Steve and I had, a few years back), and now they wanted to make an offer. Not on the smaller pieces we’d planned to sell, though. They wanted to buy the big piece—where we’d dreamed of building a house someday. The piece with the beaver pond and the watercress and our campsite and Audrey’s twig villages and the sawdust pile.

  Steve and I argued again. He pointed out—rationally, unsentimentally—how much easier our lives would be without that big payment to come up with every month. “You and I wouldn’t have to work so hard,” he said. “We’d have more time with each other and the children. More time for camping trips and swimming. Less worry and strain.” Of course he was right, and of course I denied it.

  It wasn’t easy for either of us to think of parting with that land, and because of that we drove a hard bargain (I secretly hoping our prospective buyer would lose interest and go away). When he didn’t (like us, he and his wife had already begun building a house in their heads, right there beside the brook), I cried. Knowing I was spoiled. Knowing we still have our house and our small piece of not-quite-so-breathtaking, but still pretty land on that brook. Knowing that in the scale of things, letting go of a beautiful piece of brookfront land is nothing, compared to all the sorts of things people have to give up all the time.

  The day of the closing, as we drove down to the realtor’s office to sign the final papers, we were both pretty quiet. “I feel as if a chapter of our lives is about to end,” I said. “The most romantic, most hopeful part. It makes me feel old.”

  “You know,” said Steve, “that piece of land was too big for us to get a handle on. We never could get around to thinning the trees or clearing a path along the brook for the kids. The land that’s left is small enough to be manageable. We can make that parcel a real gem.”

  Which cheered me up. Better a few well-shaped Christmas trees you have time to look at than a forest full of spindly ones you never get to, after all. We’re not old yet, I decided. Just mature enough to know what we can handle, what we can’t. And what matters most.

  Our friends Greg and Kate got together around the same time as Steve and I. But where we were married within months, and celebrated our first anniversary with Audrey in a high chair beside us, the two of them got around to making it legal only a couple of years back. And while, in the years we’ve been together, Steve and I have been largely occupied with having and raising children and keeping the home fires burning, Greg and Kate have always been the adventurers. They’ve swum in Morocco and off a remote Greek island and rented a cottage in a little Italian village. For a month every summer, Kate always took off on her own for an island in northern Maine, to write. They drive an old sportscar, with just two seats—a convertible. They don’t have a lot of money, but every New Year’s Eve they put on evening dress and hire a caterer to come to their New York City loft, where a waiter in tails serves them and around ten of their friends a midnight dinner that costs each guest a hundred dollars.

  They invited us once to drive down to the city and join them for the big annual dinner, and I longed to say yes (only partly to know what a hundred-dollar dinner tasted like, and partly to prove to myself that three children had not totally robbed us of the spirit of adventure and romance we’d known in our younger, less domesticated days). But common sense and practicality got the best of us (as they usually do, these days) when we reminded ourselves of all the other things we could do with that money. In the end we used the two hundred dollars to buy a pair of new steel-belted radials for our van, and toasted the new year at ten because we were too tired to stay up until midnight. “Just wait,” I laughed, a little sorrowfully, when we called Greg and Kate with our regrets. “Wait till you have kids.”

  Two weeks ago (with our youngest out of diapers now, and our oldest informing me that she’s now reached the stage where she and I can begin trading clothes and accessories), Greg and Kate had their first child (a daughter they call Lily). And last weekend I took my own firstborn (now eight and a half) to New York City for a weekend—the first time we’ve had for just the two of us since her littlest brother was born. So, naturally, we paid a call on Greg and Kate and Lily. And where, so often, it had been Kate who blew in, in the red convertible, to see me (when I had one child or another in arms, or crying, or keeping me up all night), this time I was the footloose one—with my black sequined evening jacket on and my arms full of shopping bags, heading to the theater—and she was the one who sat at the kitchen table in an old T-shirt, nursing the baby. And where once, (when it was me with the baby) I remember feeling wistful, seeing my friend so unencumbered and so free, (also so slim and rested looking), this time I felt a little wistful that the stage Greg and Kate are just entering may be permanently behind Steve and me. It felt like
a hundred years since I was the one in the rocking chair, crooning to an infant Audrey. We may or may not have another baby someday. But one thing is certain: We will never again have a first baby.

  Everything about having a baby in the house is new for these friends: the little toes, the smooth pink soles of her feet. The way she startles every time they take her clothes off to bathe her. The brow, that wrinkles clear up to the hairline, and the belly button, so newly formed you can still see the last vestiges of her umbilical cord. Here is a person they will know and love for the rest of their lives. And they have yet to see her first smile. They don’t know about Fisher-Price people or Esprit clothes yet, can’t recite the words to Goodnight Moon, haven’t been to Chuck E. Cheese, don’t buy a new jar of peanut butter weekly. When I think of all the things we’ve already done that lie ahead of them, I feel weary and nostalgic, both at once.

  Every couple I’ve ever been with, after the arrival of a brand-new baby, wants to tell about the birth. (Even years later, that impulse remains; I still savor the familiar stories of my three children’s entrances into the world.) And so, because I love hearing friends’ stories too, we spent a happy half hour or so going over the contractions, the trip to the hospital, the stages of dilation, the familiar feelings: “I can’t go through with this.” “There really is a baby in there after all.” … And then the moment when the baby finally emerged. At which point in the story, these two good old friends just looked at Audrey and me—overcome—and shook their heads in wonder. “It was just—” they began, and then stopped, at a loss for words. And it doesn’t matter that every day, every second, everywhere in the world, babies are born. The moment when the baby being born is yours feels like the first, the only, time something this extraordinary has ever taken place. And you’re like those fifteenth-century explorers, charting new courses on never-before-traveled oceans. You have discovered the land of parenthood, and it’s that strange and mysterious.