The couple got divorced is what happened. Neither one could afford to keep the place alone.
I guess I was pretty unhappy myself that winter (I can’t now reconstruct why, but after nine years I understand that even good marriages can sometimes seem impossible). That winter I certainly spent a lot of time arguing with Steve (who had always loved where we were living) about our house. It was too isolated. Too hard to maintain. Too small. Too dark. I get up in the morning (I would say), and the first thing I do is turn on the lights. Naturally I feel discouraged. Who could be happy, in such a dark house?
Of course I see now our house wasn’t really the problem. We were simply living through some rough times. And during times like those it’s easier to think about moving than it is to think about changing—easier to believe that what stands between you and happiness is a slate-floor kitchen with built-in skylight and a dumbwaiter (even if it carries a two hundred thousand dollar price tag) than to get down to the business of working things out in a too-small house with one bathroom and a toilet that only flushes if you jiggle the handle just right.
Well, in the end, we didn’t buy a house or sell the one we had. It would probably be helpful to someone else (currently eyeing the real-estate listings) if I knew what it was that changed, but that’s as hard to pin down as what was wrong in the first place. Some things I know: The new baby started sleeping through the night. Steve took fewer trips to the city. We sold the piece of land that had been driving us rapidly into debt. Partly what saved us may have been my husband’s unwillingness to accept my vision of doom or my perception of our home as the wrong place to be. And it may sound too simple, but I think it’s true that I also began to see—walking through all those other people’s houses (houses I coveted that still hadn’t made their occupants’ lives complete or perfect)—that a good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it’s not track lighting or a sunroom that brings light into the kitchen.
We’ve finally got all three children in bed, and Steve and I are cleaning up the kitchen. I’m scraping bits of spaghetti off a chair, he’s washing dishes.
“I know you hated it when I gave you these knives,” he says, drying off the blade of the one he used tonight to carve the chicken. It’s one of a set of three he gave me one year, early in our marriage, for my birthday. And he’s right. I cried the year he gave me the knives; the truth is, I have cried over almost every gift he’s ever given me.
Not immediately, upon opening. (Then I always thank him, kiss him, tell him, “This is great.”) It comes out later: “All I am to you is a wife,” I said about the new bathtub, the stainless-steel spaghetti pot, the can opener, the knives. Eventually he got the message about practical gifts, so in recent years the presents have been perfume, silk stockings, jewelry, a skirt. But even those were never quite right. The skirt was horizontally striped and made me look thick around the waist. The stockings came from an expensive lingerie store I’d steered him to, specially, with hopes of a particular nightgown I’d seen there. I never wear perfume. Didn’t he even know that about me, after nine years?
But the birthday he gave me the knives was a particularly bad one. I was twenty-four, mother of a new baby girl. I’d gained fifty pounds with that baby, and I still had twenty-five to lose. I lived in drawstring pants and loose blouses that buttoned down the front for nursing. We had almost no money. And here Steve had gone out and spent seventy-five dollars on knives. “All I am to you,” (I said again, a few hours after the initial half-hearted expressions of pleasure when I first opened the box) “is a wife.” Then, reaching for the largest knife to cut myself another piece of birthday cake, I’d sliced my thumb instead, so badly I had needed to rush downtown to the medical center for stitches. I still have the scar.
“It’s true,” I tell him now as he dries off that same blade, eight years later. “They’re good knives. But I didn’t think they were a good present.” Meaning, there’s nothing romantic about a knife.
“You know,” he says, “I can still remember the afternoon I bought those knives.” He was in New York City, having just finished a house-painting job, and he had a couple hundred dollars cash in his pocket. He was driving home to New Hampshire that night (to make it back for my birthday). He’d seen the knives in the window of a little store downtown, and he knew right off that was what he wanted to get me. He couldn’t afford a complete set, of course. But the three knives he got me were the best made.
I remember that November too. We had just one car then, and Steve had taken it to New York, so I’d been home, alone with six-month-old Audrey, for five days. One afternoon I’d taken out all my old clothes from before we were married—back in the days when I was living in New York City myself, and working as a newspaper reporter, the days when I belonged to a health club and got my clothes in little designer boutiques. My silk blouses didn’t even button. I left them in piles on the closet floor and fixed a large bowl of buttered popcorn for Audrey and me. I was about to turn twenty-five years old, and all I was was a wife and mother. (Which I now understand to be quite a lot indeed. But I was younger then.) What I needed, that year, was a new dress and a bottle of bubble bath.
“The man in the knife store could tell the situation,” Steve says. “Young husband, not much cash, just starting out and wanting to give his wife a present that would last. He must have taken out three dozen knives, telling me about the uses for each one, helping me choose which ones would be best for us.”
They chose well, Steve and the knife seller. I have used those three knives nearly every day for nine years now. Paring potatoes. Peeling broccoli spears. Slicing muffins. Carving turkeys. Making radish roses. Trimming pie crust. And because (a couple of birthdays later) Steve gave me a knife sharpener, the blades still cut as well as they ever did.
“I knew these knives would last forever,” Steve says, hanging one up on the magnetic knife rack he gave me one Christmas.
“Durability,” I say sharply. “That’s your idea of romance.”
“And to you nothing’s so romantic as heartbreak,” says Steve, not unkindly.
He has a point there. The truth is, I am a domestic type. I like nothing so well as making a home and raising children in it. But I guess I’ve always thought less of myself for being that way. I have looked curiously and enviously at those mysterious women who’ve resisted the impulse to follow my particular path. Wondering (I always will) whether they are remaining truer to their essential selves, while I’ve been compromising mine. I eye them from my kitchen—those passionate, reckless, footloose, undomesticated women who have been following their hearts all these years that I’ve been driving the car pool. The only time a woman like those ever sees a knife like mine is between some lover’s teeth, as he threatens to slit his throat if she leaves him. There’s romance for you. There’s passion.
And maybe because I’ve always seen myself as a little too domesticated, because I’ve believed that unhappiness (or tumult anyway) was a more interesting condition than security or comfort, I’ve always done what was necessary to keep this domestic life of mine from ever coming close to running on an even keel. I don’t just cry on my birthdays: There were whole years, for a while, when I cried almost daily. I have started nearly every argument that ever took place under this roof of ours. I have thrown dishes, dumped entire meals into the sink, stalked out the door, jumped in the car and driven away. I have asked myself, at least once a week, whether it’s a good idea to stay married, and frequently I have concluded that it isn’t. I have never stopped loving my husband or my children. But loving them has sometimes been about all I’ve been sure of. I have lived in the same house with the same man for nine years now. But there were plenty of times, there, when I didn’t make plans more than a couple of days in advance, in case I wouldn’t be around by then.
I shouldn’t put absolutely all of this in the past tense either. I’ll always have my flare-ups. But lately it has been occurring to me that I am in fact leading the life I want to be living, an
d that it’s a good and lucky one.
“I think it’s about time you realized you’re happy,” my friend Laurie said to me the other day (Laurie being the friend of mine who, more than any other, I would describe as having lived a nearly uninterruptedly happy life, a woman who tells me she has never allowed herself to consider, for an instant, the possibility that her marriage wouldn’t last; the one who tells me, when I’m miserable, that I should start running again, or take up Dancercise). As for what she told me: I realized with shock that she was right.
I won’t ever possess Laurie’s kind of optimism and wholehearted self-assurance. It’s also true, I will always mourn all the other lives I couldn’t lead, places I can’t go, all the other babies I won’t have. (With every child I’ve had, I’ve grieved for the other sex that wasn’t born, even as I was rejoicing over the one I got.) I live in the country and miss the city. I love the husband I’ve got, but sometimes I imagine other kinds of marriages, other kinds of men I might have chosen. I have done the same one thing to earn my living since I was eighteen years old, and still, every week, I read the help-wanted ads in the paper. I will probably always feel ambivalent. I will want to change my life until the day I die. And all this time, through all my wavering and anxiety, all my husband has wanted was for our marriage to last as long as our carving knife.
“I never felt more romantic then I did the day I bought you those knives,” says Steve, who has also been telling me, for years, that this is what life is like, this is how marriage is. “I loved giving you something that wouldn’t wear out,” he says.
And so far, anyway, he’s been right. They’ve all lasted. The knives. The scar from the cut they gave me. The family we’re forging here.
POSTSCRIPT
WE WERE SITTING AT breakfast, all of us, watching Willy pour Cheerios down the front of his diaper, when Audrey piped up, “Imagine, some day Willy will be a dad! I wonder what kind of a dad he’ll be.”
There was a lot of laughter then as we imagined scenes: Willy playing baseball with his children—bonking them on the head with the bat, the way he hits Charlie now when the two of them play wiffle ball. Willy—the same size he is now, but sporting a moustache and wearing a miniature business suit—driving away in his car, standing up on the seat to reach the steering wheel. Willy reading his children a book—upside down. Serving them dinner by throwing the spaghetti noodles onto their plates from halfway across the room.
It was a good game, this future projection. Imagining myself as a grandmother, Steve as a grandfather. The children our children might have. Our children as parents themselves—that most of all. The scenes Audrey hypothesized were comical, but I could almost weep at the thought of my beloved offspring suddenly transplanted from the comfortable shade of childhood to the hot, unprotected sun of parenthood. Thinking of all the things we try to spare them, and what sparing them costs us. Thinking of our children, to whom we have given over so much of ourselves, someday giving themselves over to a set of little strangers whose faces I can’t begin to imagine.
But of course, if they didn’t—if my children chose not to become parents, if they chose to remain always (even into adulthood) our children, rather than somebody else’s parents—I’m sure that would sadden me. Which is just one more example of the conflicts that dog me, always, in this life I love, and choose to lead, that drives me nearly crazy. I love having children. I want my children to have children. I also wonder, sometimes, whether there will be anything left of me, once my children are through growing up. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m not so different, really, from one of those animal species for whom reproduction is the final act before death.
Audrey’s joke about Willy as a father got me thinking. The truth is, the image of our daughter someday being a mother, and our sons someday becoming fathers, is never totally out of our minds as Steve and I go about raising our children. When I teach Charlie how to break an egg, or put a dish in the dishwasher, or mop the floor, I’m thinking, “Someday they’ll teach their children these things.”
We are fathering and mothering our children, that’s for sure. But what we’re also doing is teaching our kids how to be a father, how to be a mother. The songs I teach our children, the tricks I use to get them into their pajamas or stop their tears, may be the songs and tricks they’ll use with their children. More than that, how we view them and our role as their parents will determine how they will someday view the idea of parenthood and the children who may someday be theirs. I go about my days as a mother filled with the sense of the continuum I’m part of. Knowing there must be things in me that come from great-great-grandparents I’ve never heard of. Knowing there will be things from me in great-great-grandchildren I’ll probably never meet. Ambivalence and frustration—they’ll be there, for sure. But I hope what we pass on to our children about being parents—above all else—is how much we love our job. What a joy it is to have children. What I want to teach my spaghetti-throwing son, in preparation for the day when he may be sitting across the table from a spaghetti-thrower of his own, is that despite the enormous mess they can make of our lives, we would never choose anything different.
Sometimes, smack in the middle of things, it has seemed to me that all I’m here for is to make peanut-butter sandwiches and clean up the crumbs. So much of the job of parenthood is taken up by mundane concerns, it’s easy to lose track of what the whole thing’s for, easy to forget there is a meaning and importance to the sum of those tasks that goes way beyond what any one of them appears to possess, viewed all by itself.
I once thought our life here was about nothing more than getting through the days on a basically upward curve. We’d have a baby, build a few bookshelves, put in raspberry bushes, have another baby, reshingle the roof. Have another baby, modernize the bathroom and clear land for a pond. Someday we’d have time and money enough to raise sheep, get a pony, take trips, concentrate on our work in a way that’s just not possible while one’s children are young. Meanwhile we’d go swimming every chance we got, Steve would make paintings and play ball, and I’d grow zinnias and bake lots of pies. And that was pretty much how it went. We had plenty of hard times and plenty of good ones. There were times when I wondered if we’d still be married in six months, and times when I wondered how I could ever have questioned that we’d be together always.
We’ve learned some things along the way. We seldom had, in our ninth year of marriage, the kind of arguments we used to have (about who changes the diapers, who clears away the dinner dishes) in our first. By our tenth year—this one—we still argued some, but we had become more conscious of what every battle cost us, and the value of peace, of compromise. I no longer had to buy diapers; we were getting a regular eight hours unbroken sleep nightly. We had a family van that had never gotten stuck in snow, and full medical insurance coverage. When our old black-and-white TV set finally gave out, we even bought a color model and a VCR. Steve and I were still working hard, but I began to picture a life for us, within reach, in which we’d take vacations, put in a second bathroom. We had both scaled down our nearly infinite expectations some. And that might have been that. I might have lived out my life at the end of this dirt road, taking pleasure in watching our children grow up, tending my own back yard.
Then last January we were listening to the news (half listening only: Steve was reading to Charlie, I was chopping vegetables for a salad) and got the word that our town—the very piece of land on which our house sits, in fact—had been named by the federal government’s Department of Energy as one of twelve proposed sites for a high-level nuclear waste dump, the single largest public works project in our nation’s history. Over the weeks and months that followed we learned that there was no dump of the kind proposed for our town anywhere on the face of the earth. We learned that the waste they were thinking of burying in this back yard we’d been so busy tending included the most dangerous, most highly radioactive substances known. We heard a man from the Department of Energy explain that these radioa
ctive wastes would probably not leak into our water systems “for thousands of years”—although, he added, there were no guarantees. We learned that our town could be subjected to as many as twelve years of testing before we’d know for sure whether the government would be buying us out. It was explained that the Department of Energy was not concerned with our grief and sense of violation at the prospect of having to give up our property to make possible the disposal of a private industry’s waste, and the even larger outrage that our whole region could be contaminated for tens of thousands of years to come. Our home, a safe future for our children, everything we’d been working for, and everything that mattered most to us, were suddenly threatened. “If you don’t vacate your house voluntarily,” said the man from the Department of Energy, “then we’ll call in the Army Corps of Engineers.” At first all I could do, hearing that, was cry.
Then our little town got organized. We wrote letters by the hundreds and had meetings, mapped our historic sites and wetlands, made speeches, sought out television cameras, organized a truck convoy to the state capitol. I stopped cooking meals, I let the laundry pile up, I lost ten pounds from sheer worry. I was on the phone for hours, while Willy wound himself in my long telephone cord. Charlie woke in the night with dreams of dumps, bombs, explosions. (This was also the winter of the Challenger tragedy, and the spring that brought the Chernobyl disaster.) On the morning of her birthday Audrey woke to say, “Could I please not hear the word nuclear all day?” And though I tried, I couldn’t even get through the day without breaking my promise. It was a draining, exhausting time.
But some good things came out of our dump crisis too. I loved seeing our community pull together, laying all our differences aside. I felt very sure of what we were doing—not a trace of ambivalence, for once. I realized, when I had to face the prospect of losing the life we have here, how dear it is to me. And though I had never before been conscious of having been a voiceless member of society, once I had become an active participant in the workings of my government I could no longer imagine functioning any other way. So even when the announcement was made, last May, that the search for a nuclear waste dump in our area had been “postponed indefinitely,” Steve and I were incapable of going back to the old life of tending our garden and our garden only.
Domestic Affairs Page 29
