Domestic Affairs

by Joyce Maynard

  I was finishing this book the day I learned that the ground I was standing on might become the nuclear waste dump of the nation—and after the news sank in and changed our lives around here permanently, none of what I’d written up to then made sense anymore. Words written in the days of my innocent bliss ran through my mind like the film footage of the space-shuttle crew heading out to the launch pad the morning of the explosion. Like a bad and tasteless joke. My stories about cooking spaghetti sauce and arguing over replacing the car muffler seemed irrelevant, my old life meaningless. All I wanted to talk about was how our world is in danger, how our children might be deprived of their future.

  But it has come to me, in the months since that first rude awakening, that our concerns here—before our nuclear dump ordeal and since—aren’t different: Keeping the woodchucks out of our vegetable garden and keeping the Department of Energy off our soil. Making sure our children brush their teeth and stay a safe three feet away from the color TV and questioning the term “acceptable levels of radiation.” Packing away the best baby clothes for future grandchildren and calling up my Congressman to register my support of a nuclear weapons test ban. Looking out for our back yard and beyond it as well. Neither can go on to the exclusion of the other. I will never become one of those people prepared to fast to the death for world peace, and I’ll never make my children sit out in the rain all day with antinuclear placards, because it seems to me there’s nothing left to fight for if, in the name of the cause, you sacrifice everything you love about your life. I still bake pies and I still grow zinnias, only now I think those small pleasures seem more precious to me.

  A year ago our focus shifted radically here, from domestic affairs to global ones. (Not simply nuclear waste in my back yard, but nuclear waste in anyone’s back yard. And the power plants that produce it. And the site in Nevada where the bombs are tested that have the capacity to destroy everything. And that invisible shield up there in space that we’re supposed to believe protects us better than a total weapons ban would.) But it is not, in fact, that this new cause of mine has replaced my children. Just the reverse: Where I used to think that being a mother and taking good care of my children was reason enough not to be an actively involved citizen, I have come to see there is no dirt road so far out of town, no house so well protected by trees and woods, that the people who live there can escape whatever is going on beyond their stone walls and fences, and there is no way to be a good mother without also looking out for the world one’s children will someday inherit.

  I used to be home to tuck my children into bed and sing to them nearly every night. It wasn’t a competing set of concerns and passions that took me away from them then, to go to meetings and make phone calls. It was only more of the same fierce longing every parent feels: to protect her children.

  Charlie—who, at four, has perhaps registered the recent changes in our household more than either his older sister or his younger brother—asked me a couple of nights back, as I was tucking him into bed, “What will the future bring?” I told him how he’d grow bigger, make new friends, learn how to read and how to ride a two-wheeler. Someday he might play a musical instrument, someday he might sail across the ocean. He would find out what kind of work he liked to do, and have a job. He might fall in love, might marry, become a dad. It’s the old dream—a variation on the one (Ozzie’s and Harriet’s, and Beaver Cleaver’s) that always propelled me when I was growing up, and while the details change, it’s still the one I believe in. Even large and lofty goals need to be grounded in small, earthly matters.

  We were at an antinuclear rally a couple of months back. There stood Dr. Helen Caldicott, on a podium with the huge white dome of the nearly completed Seabrook reactor looming behind her, and a chilly April wind from the ocean blowing in her face as she spoke to the crowd on the grass (where I sat, with my sons on my lap, handing out the peanut butter sandwiches). “There is only one reason we’re put on this planet,” she said. “And that’s to save it.”

  What we are all concerned with here is the future, and our own small emissaries to it. Seeing to it that they are just as brave and strong and healthy as we can make them, for the day when we won’t be there to wipe their noses and look both ways before crossing. Seeing to it that they will someday be able to have and raise children of their own.

  I got a letter the other day from a reader of my newspaper column—a man, thirty-eight years old, married a few years. “I’ve been reading stories about your family life every week now for a few months,” he wrote. “And I wanted to tell you” (at this point I reached for my coffee, to better savor the compliment I thought I was about to receive) “it was reading about your children that made me decide, once and for all, to get a vasectomy.”

  Well, I persuaded Steve to get a haircut once. I got Charlie to try asparagus the other night. But this was a new one.

  And the thing is, these stories I’d been telling about my children and the frequent havoc they wreak on our home were mostly about times I wouldn’t trade for the world. At midnight, finally sponging off the last counter, turning out the lights, heading upstairs, and finding Willy wide awake and sitting on the steps, in total darkness, with his toy chain-saw on his lap, his face beaming. “Happy New Year,” he says brightly. (In fact, it is March.)

  Who could be angry?

  Although often, of course, I am. The other day (with Steve out of town, and the rest of us feeling a little lonely), I dressed the children up and announced we were going out to dinner. Put on socks. Tied shoes. Buckled belts. Sponged off faces. Sent the three of them outside, then raced to run a comb through my hair. Looked out the window: saw my two sons ankle deep in mud. Audrey rushing, in pink-satin Chinese slippers, to rescue her brothers, who were stuck. (Mud on dress. Boot in mud. Head in hands.) Everybody had to be cleaned up and dressed all over again, naturally.

  “Are you mad, Mom?” asked Charlie, cautiously, after five minutes’ drive in total silence on our way to the restaurant. And to my surprise (having been furious for a second there), I burst out laughing.

  Our house has suddenly become overrun with mice, and after weeks of gentler (and unsuccessful) forms of mouse-deterrent efforts, Steve decides to set out traps. Audrey finds one, complete with dead mouse, and carries it outside, using corn tongs. Three days after the mouse burial (and the funeral, and the memorial service, and the construction of grave markers and funeral wreaths), Willy wanders into the kitchen, tightly clasping a mysterious muddy object in his fist. It’s our mouse, raised from the dead (trap and all). “Look, Mom,” he announces, triumphant. “He came back.”

  There is a day when Charlie, demonstrating a sudden leap in manual dexterity development, removes every lace from five different pairs of boots. Willy, who has been suspiciously silent for half an hour, turns out to have pulled every one of approximately three hundred children’s books off the shelves. “Bookland!” he cries, as he brings me to come see.

  Charlie and Audrey have applied what was supposed to be a press-on decal, featuring a life-sized image of Michael Jackson’s head, not to Charlie’s shirt but directly onto his belly (where it remains, resisting all my best efforts at scrubbing, through the next five baths and two trips to the YMCA pool). Willy pours Rice Krispies into the bathtub. Audrey loses her fifth hairbrush this year. Willy sets a new record: spilling four glasses of milk at a single sitting.

  If I went on at this, maybe they’d be forming lines at the vasectomy clinics tomorrow.

  Or not.

  No question, there’s disruption and disorder that comes with raising children: physical commotion in early years, followed, I guess, by turmoil of a more emotional nature. But truthfully (though you will never hear me admit to it the morning I’m down on my hands and knees sorting through the pieces of seventeen different jigsaw puzzles Willy has seen fit to dump on the playroom floor—“puzzle land,” he called it), frustration, disruption, exasperation—despair, even—are surely necessary parts of the whole process of raising ch
ildren. If one can say of hiking the Appalachian Trail that it’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters, the same is surely true of child raising. The point is not getting it done and over with, but doing it. And if there were no spilt milk—no need, ever, to peel off the snowpants, untie the double-knotted boot laces, pull off the boots (all so the seams of the socks underneath can be lined up, just so, along my son’s five toes)—well, life would be easier going, and less tiring, but less mysterious and rich.

  It’s ten o’clock at night. I am standing over Willy’s crib, which contains not only Willy but a stack of about twenty Little Golden Books, a pile of stuffed animals, his chainsaw, his football, his skis, an avocado seed, a fireman’s hat, a plunger, and his riding motorcycle. I am singing to him, for the third time tonight, his current favorite song—a made-up number we call “’Willy’s Riding in a Truck.” I am so dead tired I start to fall asleep, standing up, in the middle of the verse about the windshield wipers, but it doesn’t matter—Willy finishes the song for me. “Night, Mom,” he says, signing off. (We’ll hear from him again around six A.M.) “Happy New Year.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WANT TO RECOGNIZE and thank all the women who have loved and cared for my children over the past eight and a half years: Mary Walker, Joanne Marziano, Minerva Roque, Irma, Beverly Dumais, Cathy Cartagena, Denise Blanchette, Shari Sudsbury, Victoria Whitten, Dulce Donovan, Joanie Laidley.

  Because so much of this book first appeared as newspaper columns, a number of editors have contributed their guidance and sound judgment to the work that appears here. Dona Guimares and Nancy Newhouse of The New York Times; Max Horowitz of the New York Times Syndicate; and especially Ann Harnagel, also of the Times Syndicate, who has made the weekly escapades of my family a part of her life for a long time now.

  Thanks also to Amy Gash, who read and reread, and helped to organize this book. To my friend and editor, Elisabeth Scharlatt, goes gratitude and deep affection, for her patience and faith, and her wonderful editorial eye. To my agent and friend, Bob Cornfield, love and thanks go always. And to my husband, Steve, who would so much have preferred having a wife who wrote historical novels, or science fiction—or anything that didn’t mention him, my heart.

  A Biography of Joyce Maynard

  Joyce Maynard is the bestselling author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction. She is best known for her memoir At Home in the World and her novel Labor Day, both bestsellers. Since launching her writing career as a teenager, Maynard has been a commentator on CBS radio, a contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and a reporter for the New York Times, as well as a speaker on parenthood, family, and writing. She has published hundreds of essays and columns for publications such as Vogue; More; O, The Oprah Magazine; and the New York Times; in addition to many essay collections.

  Born in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1953, Maynard began publishing her stories, essays, and poems when she was fourteen years old. She won numerous awards for her work before entering college at Yale University in 1971. During her freshman year, Maynard sent examples of her work to the New York Times, prompting an assignment: She was to write an article for them about growing up in the sixties. In April 1972 that article, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” graced the cover of the magazine, earning her widespread acclaim and instant fame.

  Maynard’s story also caught the eye of reclusive author J. D. Salinger, then fifty-three years old, who wrote her a letter praising her work—launching a correspondence that ultimately led Maynard to drop out of college and move to New Hampshire to live with the author. Their relationship lasted ten months.

  Maynard never returned to college. In 1973 she published her first memoir, Looking Back, a follow-up to her New York Times Magazine article published the year before. Having lived alone in New Hampshire in her early twenties, in 1976 she was offered a job as a reporter for the New York Times and moved to New York City. She left the newspaper in 1977 when she married Steve Bethel and returned to New Hampshire. The couple went on to have three children: Audrey, Charlie, and Wilson.

  Maynard’s first novel, Baby Love, published in 1981, earned the praise of several renowned fiction writers including Anne Tyler, Joseph Heller, and Raymond Carver. Her next book, Domestic Affairs (1987)—a collection of her syndicated columns, which had run in newspapers across the country—reflected on her experiences as a wife and mother and further cemented Maynard’s status as one of the best-loved modern American memoirists.

  In 1986, an area in Maynard’s home state of New Hampshire was selected by the US Department of Energy as a finalist to become the first-in-the-nation high-level nuclear waste dump. Maynard was one of the organizers of the resistance to that project, and she wrote a cover story about it that was published in April of that year and was widely believed to have contributed to the government’s decision to suspend the nuclear waste dump plan.

  Maynard’s marriage ended in 1989—an experience she wrote about in her “Domestic Affairs” columns. Many major newspapers discontinued the column abruptly at this point, citing Maynard’s impending divorce as indication that she was no longer equipped to write about family life. Maynard continued writing—though for a much smaller audience—in the Domestic Affairs Newsletter.

  In keeping with her practice of communicating actively with her readers, Maynard established a website in 1996; she was one of the first writers to do so, and she was a regular and visible presence through the brand-new technology of her site’s discussion forum.

  Forbidden by Salinger to speak of him, Maynard chose to remain silent about their relationship for twenty-five years, until her daughter turned eighteen. Her decision to write about the experience in her 1998 memoir At Home in the World resulted in an avalanche of criticism, but eventually led to further disclosures by other women who had been in his life. Salinger died in 2010.

  Maynard has also written two children’s books and two young-adult novels; of these, The Usual Rules was named by the American Library Association as one of the ten best young-adult novels of 2003. Her literary fiction includes To Die For (1991), Where Love Goes (1994), Labor Day (2009), and The Good Daughters (2010). To Die For was adapted into a film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman. Labor Day is currently being adapted for the screen by director Jason Reitman, and is set to star Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin.

  The mother of three grown children, Maynard now lives in Northern California where, in addition to continuing her career as a writer and speaker, she performs regularly as a storyteller with the Moth and Porchlight. She also runs the annual Lake Atitlán Writing Workshop in a small Mayan village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala.

  Maynard in 1955.

  Maynard and her sister Rona with their mother in Durham, New Hampshire.

  Maynard at age eight with her sister Rona in 1961. The two stand before a window painted by their father, artist Max Maynard.

  At age fifteen, Maynard won the Scholastic Magazine Writing Competition for one of her short stories. She continues to support the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, which over the years have recognized such young artists as Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvia Plath, Robert Redford, and Andy Warhol.

  Maynard with (left to right) her father Max, husband Steve, and daughter Audrey in 1980 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

  Maynard with her two older children, Audrey and Charlie, in New Hampshire in 1982.

  In 1986, a large portion of the state of New Hampshire was nominated by the Department of Energy to become the first-in-the-nation nuclear waste dump. An active organizer and vocal opponent of the project, Maynard published a cover story on the issue for the New York Times Magazine. Shown testifying at hearings in spring of 1986, Maynard names the defeat of this project as among the proudest moments of her life.

  Maynard with her mother, Fredelle, at Fredelle’s wedding to her longtime partner shortly before her death. In 1989 Maynard’s mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Maynard do
cumented the story of her last months in her syndicated newspaper column, “Domestic Affairs.” That same year, Maynard’s marriage ended and she moved with her children from her rural home to the town of Keene, New Hampshire.

  A 1991 photo of (left to right) Audrey, Charlie, Willy, and Joyce in the kitchen of their Keene, New Hampshire, home. During this period Maynard was a frequent speaker on family and parenting, and continued to write her “Domestic Affairs” column.

  Maynard’s novel To Die For was adapted for film in 1994. In the film, she played the lawyer of Nicole Kidman’s character. To fulfill her mother’s childhood ambition to be in the movies, Maynard carried her mother’s ashes in her briefcase.

  Maynard at home in Mill Valley, California, in 1997, at one of more than one hundred gatherings she has hosted to teach people how to make pie. “I do it to honor my mother, to encourage the idea of making good food from scratch, with more love than fuss, and to raise money for causes I believe in,” she explains. The family dog Opie is held by one of the bakers; the group stands in front of a painting by Max Maynard.