The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  “Honey, it’s the way I felt about your father when I first met him. I knew instantly that he was the man I would marry.”

  Anna wanted to tell her mother that she was nothing like her and Jason was nothing like her father. Her situation resembled nothing of her parents’ life. Anyway, things like this weren’t supposed to happen, not to her, not now. But Anna couldn’t figure out who or what she was protesting. Was it the chance for happiness with a loving husband and family? The fact of the matter was she wanted it very much; she just didn’t believe it was possible before she met Jason.

  ANNA HELD GREAT affection for her father, Nick Ducci, and their relationship had always been strong, both in spite of—and possibly in part because of—his Old World Italian patriarchal attitudes. He was strong and affectionate and believed in always doing the right thing. On the surface of things, he ruled the house. Protective of his family, they always came first, second, and third. Nick could be loud and intimidating; he didn’t hide his emotions. When angry, he shouted; when happy, he’d laugh long and loud. He cried when something made him sad or unbearably happy. Nick Ducci filled the house with his big heart and even bigger opinions.

  Anna’s young boyfriends had always been terrified of her father. Anna silently loved him for it even as she outwardly chided him for being so intimidating. In her heart she knew she could never love a man who was afraid of her father. She wanted someone to stand up to him the way she always had. She’d admired his fierceness most and tried to imitate it even as a young girl.

  Still, growing up in a predominantly Italian enclave of family and friends, Anna was most affected by the ways in which women were subordinated to men. As an adult she could never get the picture out of her head of large family dinners where this was played out. At the table, the women’s chairs were often pushed slightly farther back, so that they were seated behind their husbands who dominated the food and conversation. While the men leaned forward, elbows on the table, presiding over the scene, the women kept their hands on their laps or by their sides. The positions spoke of generations of dominance.

  She had first become aware of it during a Christmas Eve dinner, when she was just a girl of eleven or twelve. The traditional multicourse Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes took days of preparation and lasted hours. It began with an antipasto of marinated baby artichokes, olives, roasted peppers, sliced raw fennel, and provolone. Then came the pasta course, always served three ways: linguini with lobster tails, linguini with crab claws, and aglio e olio with anchovies. Next came the main course: fried smelt, flounder, scallops, and baccalà salad.

  After dinner, the men would sit over espresso and wine, cracking walnuts and smoking cigars, as the women cleared the table and spent those same hours hand-washing all the dishes, scrubbing the kitchen, and preparing dessert. The men never lifted a finger during those dinners.

  But that Christmas Eve, when her mother had called her into the kitchen to help with the dishes, Anna had put up a fight. Her brother and male cousins were not asked to help and she was damned if she was going to.

  “But, Mama,” she had objected, “I want to stay at the dinner table and eat walnuts with Papa and Grandpa.”

  “You belong in here with the women, not with those noisy, stinky men!” Anna’s mother disapproved of the cigars the men lit after dinner. “Come here!” she insisted.

  “No, I’m staying here with Papa!”

  Anna sidled up to her father in the chair next to him and reached for the walnut cracker and the basket of nuts.

  “Anna, do you want a little wine? You can have a bit with some seltzer,” he offered as he poured her some red wine into a juice glass and topped it off with some seltzer.

  “Thank you, Papa.” Anna nodded, making sure that she didn’t seem too eager.

  “Drink it in sips. Don’t gulp it down.”

  Anna took a sip of the diluted wine. She liked its grapelike bitterness and the bubbles that tingled her tongue. She picked a walnut from the basket and worked to place the round walnut shell between the two arms of the nutcracker, but it kept slipping out. The walnut shot across the table and hit her grandfather’s belly. The men chuckled, and her father said, “Anna, give it to me, let me help you.”

  “No, I can do it myself,” she said with some annoyance.

  She finally got the walnut properly firm in the vise and squeezed with all her might. Nothing happened. Her small hands ached but she squeezed even harder until the entire apparatus flipped out of her hands and knocked over the juice glass of wine all over her dress. The men around the table laughed at the effort—though not with menace. Anna fought back angry tears until her mother, hearing the commotion, came to the doorway of the dining room and scolded them all. Anna burst into tears and her mother grabbed Anna by the arm and dragged her into the kitchen.

  “I told you to stay in here with us women,” her mother admonished. Then she added more kindly, “Oh, dear, look at your dress! It’s okay. We can clean it later. Here, take this”—she handed Anna a sifter filled with confectioners’ sugar—“and sprinkle it on all of those cookies on the tray.”

  Anna refused to take hold of the sifter, but her mother pushed it into her hands and positioned them above the cookie tray. “Just shake it back and forth like this,” her mother instructed. Anna stood motionless for a moment, and as soon as her mother let go of her hands, she turned the sifter over, dumping all the sugar on top of the cookie tray, and threw it on the floor. She ran out of the house ignoring her mother’s shouts.

  “Anna, you get back here this instant. Isabel, go get your sister!”

  Anna ran down the street, past the neighbors’ houses lit up in blinking multicolored Christmas lights. She ran in the cold late-night air until her lungs hurt and snot ran from her nose. She heard Isabel’s calls from down the street, which somehow penetrated her mortification. Anna turned around and slowly walked home, choking back sobs and shivering from the cold.

  She thought her mother would punish her when she reentered the house, but instead she put a blanket around her daughter and asked, “What, Anna? Why are you so upset?”

  “I wanted to sit with Papa” was all she managed, her body stiff with refusal to submit to her mother’s affection. Her mother was weak, she thought, enslaved by her husband like most women. One thing she was sure of, she would never be like them.

  TWO AND A half decades and two children later, Anna and Jason had created a loving bond in the life they had built together and nurtured over the past five years. On some level she had been relieved when Jason intuited the fact of her pregnancy on his own. It was less of a burden now that she didn’t have to carry it alone.

  Jason tried to distract her and cheer her up by planning family day trips on the weekends. They drove to Coney Island and had dinner in Sheepshead Bay. They took the subway to the Bronx Zoo, where Henry laughed at the wallabies and a blind llama spit on Oscar much to his disgusted delight. When she grew tired, Jason took the boys on the giant slide and climbed with them up the jungle gym. Anna watched them, all the while praying for the health of the new baby.

  Now they were all together for an end-of-summer bit of family time before the demands of the fall season began. At the nanny’s request, Anna gave her a well-deserved two-week vacation, though Anna regretted it immediately.

  It rained the first two days they were in Montauk, which would have been a welcome relief from having to do anything at all but for the pent-up energy of the boys. They had their mama all to themselves now and they weren’t going to miss one moment.

  In between downpours, Anna suggested Jason take them out of the house. “Henry, Oscar, Papa is going to take you to the farmers’ market and you can climb on the hay bales! Mama is going to stay home to rest a little. Then we can play when you get back, okay?” Anna did her best to sell them on an outing without her.

  “I want you to come too, Mama!” Oscar asked.

  “No, baby, I am going to stay home and take a nap.”

 
; “Okay, I will stay home and take a nap with you,” Oscar suggested, clearly believing he would do that, nap with her, which of course he wouldn’t.

  “You have to help Papa with Henry, okay?”

  “I don’t want to go with Papa and Henry! I want to be with you!” Oscar was now close to wailing, which got Henry riled up as well.

  “I stay too,” he managed, but it sounded like “Ay-yay do,” which made Oscar laugh through his tears.

  Anna looked to Jason for help, but he just shrugged. “Come on, boys, let’s leave Mama alone for a few minutes at least. I need your help in the backyard.” Oscar and Henry dutifully followed their father to the yard, but only five minutes later Anna could hear Oscar’s footsteps running through the house looking for her.

  “Mama, where are you?!” He sounded close to panic.

  “I’m in my room, Oscar . . . What’s the matter?”

  He said nothing, but found her in bed and crawled in with her. There was nothing she would rather do than curl up around her little boy and sleep. But just a moment later, Henry waddled in, face and hair covered in dirt, which he planted all over the duvet.

  “Where’s Papa?” Anna asked them, trying not to show her annoyance.

  “Papa?” Henry asked.

  She crawled out from the covers, picked up Henry, and went in search of her husband, who was picking tomatoes.

  “Jason! I thought you were going to take them.”

  “They wanted their beautiful mother. I can’t say I blame them.” He smiled and kissed her. “Here . . . let me take Henry. Go back to bed—take Oscar and maybe you can get him to nap with you.”

  THIS DANCE WENT on for days. While Anna craved the love and attention of the boys, she desperately needed time to herself that she wasn’t getting. She made it to the fourth day before breaking down.

  Jason found Anna silently sobbing in front of the television. She had an arm wrapped around each son while they watched a Bob the Builder video. Tears streamed down her face, her eyes swollen into slits. She made no sound and the boys were so rapt that they hadn’t noticed. They’d spent hours on the beach earlier, had had their baths, and were blissed out watching their favorite show.

  “Anna, what’s wrong?” Jason had been fixing the grill all afternoon and was covered in grease. He was wearing a tool belt and work clothes. Henry looked away from the screen and pointed to his father and said, “Bob!” clapping with pride at having made the joke. Oscar fell off the couch laughing, which made Anna laugh through her misery.

  She squeezed her boys tight to her and kissed them on the backs of their necks—Anna loved the soft hollows just below their hairlines, loved to bury her face there. It tickled Henry and made him squeal with delight.

  “Anna, what’s the matter?” Jason sat down on the couch with them.

  Anna couldn’t bear to try to explain to Jason how she was feeling since she didn’t understand it herself. Exhaustion didn’t quite cover it, because what she felt was more terrifying. It was the same feeling she’d felt before, the feeling that she would just stop. Stop. She was the Energizer Bunny and her batteries had finally died. Now what?

  Anna wiped away the tears and straightened up. “Can you watch the boys while I go take a bath? They’ve already had theirs and they’ve had their snack. I haven’t planned anything for dinner—maybe we can just go to the Lobster Roll.”

  The Lobster Roll was a favorite seafood shack just a few miles west on Montauk Highway. It was one of the first places Anna took Jason when they’d gotten together. Since they didn’t know each other when they married, they’d dated postnuptially. Each place they’d visited in those early days held a special discovery for them.

  “Of course, take your time,” Jason said as he picked up Henry and leaned in to kiss Anna.

  “Don’t let them fall asleep. If we can get them to dinner and back here before they pass out, maybe we can get them to bed early.”

  Anna retreated to the bathroom, where she closed and locked the door behind her. She wished she could use the aromatic bath salts she kept for those rare moments she had alone in the bath but wouldn’t dare take the risk. She let the room fill with steam, then cooled the temperature of the water using the cold tap, making the water tepid, not hot.

  Anna slipped into the bath and closed her eyes. She took a long, slow breath in through her nose, and on the exhale through her mouth she was distracted by Oscar’s wails downstairs. “I want to see Mama! I want to watch her take a bath . . .”

  Jason tried to console him. It didn’t work. Next, she heard her three-year-old’s footsteps on the stairs.

  “Mama,” Oscar called, “I want to stay in the bathroom with you.”

  “Oscar, honey, please go help Papa take care of Henry. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  “But, Mama, I want to be with you!”

  “Oscar, please,” Anna begged. There was silence on the other side of the bathroom door and Anna thought for a moment that Oscar had gone back downstairs.

  “I’m not Oscar,” he said quietly, but loud enough for Anna to hear him through the door.

  Oscar loved to pretend he was one of the many characters he encountered over the course of the day. Whenever he did this, it changed his mood immediately.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Bob.”

  “Oh, okay, Bob. Can you help out with Henry?”

  “He’s Pilchard,” he said, referring to Bob the Builder’s cat.

  “Right, Bob. Papa needs help taking care of Pilchard. Mama will be finished with her bath soon.”

  “Mama?” Oscar’s voice was tiny now, barely audible from behind the door. He often made his voice smaller when he was pretending, as if assertion would make it less real. “Are you Wendy?”

  Wendy was Bob’s helper . . . or something.

  “Yes, baby, I’m Wendy. Pilchard needs you downstairs. Wendy will be down soon.”

  “Okay, Wendy. I’m Bob.”

  “I know, Bob. See you soon, Bob.”

  It worked. Anna could hear Oscar run down the stairs, bursting with newly found resolve, his voice now big with excitement. “Papa! Where’s Pilchard?”

  Anna smiled. Oscar’s demands came from some sweet place that dissolved her frustration. The very fact of his existence made her heart break every day. She worried about him—he somehow felt too fragile for this world. Henry, on the other hand, possessed an innate fierceness, attributable, perhaps, to his status as second son. Still, Anna thought the genesis of their differences occurred at a genetic level. Henry was a Ducci; Oscar was a Schwartz.

  Anna thought about the new baby. She fantasized about a third son, a houseful of boys. She closed her eyes in silent reflection.

  The bath had already gone from warm to almost cool when Anna opened her eyes to search for the submerged washcloth. The water was cloudy and she had to feel around for it. It took a few minutes for her to realize that the bath was tinted pink. In the center of the tub a cloudy suspension of crimson held her attention for a moment. Another second brought the realization that she was bleeding. She stood up quickly, losing her balance. She slipped back down, falling hard on her backside. Anna screamed, then heard Jason running up the stairs a moment later.

  “Anna! Anna, are you all right?” Jason yelled as he flung open the door, breaking the meager lock.

  Anna, too stunned to answer right away, doubled over from cramping as the water grew to a brighter red. She looked up at Jason, eyes wide and mouth clenched tight. She felt a regret she’d never known before this moment.

  “Take the boys downstairs,” Anna managed between sobs. “And call the doctor. Ask him what I should do. I started hemorrhaging before I slipped, but the fall made it worse.”

  Anna pulled herself from the tub and started trembling uncontrollably. She managed to pull a big bath towel around her shaking body and sat down on the toilet, where she watched as the life literally drained out of her.

  Jason came back to tell her he’d left a messag
e with her doctor’s answering service, who said they would find the doctor right away. “Let me help you get to bed,” he offered.

  “No, Jason. Just leave me alone. Please. Get out.”

  Lying in the darkening bedroom an hour later, Anna was filled with anger. She played over in her mind the demands of her daily life, this vacation that wasn’t a vacation, and her frustrations solidified around Jason for not picking up the slack. Just as she feared, her body had been pressed to the limit and her premonitions of losing the baby had come true. Her mind raced with the quotidian scenarios of her daily life: pushing her way through the crowded subway; jumping into taxis uptown, downtown, and back again; meetings and lunches; racing home from work. Every evening she inhaled her dinner as the boys climbed all over her, followed by the ritual of bathing them and getting them into bed. This rigorous routine began at five thirty every morning and ended after nonstop activity at 10:00 P.M. if she was lucky. Awakened three or four times during the night to minister to the needs of her boys, she didn’t rest even in sleep.

  How had this happened?

  ANNA COULDN’T LOOK at Jason for an entire week following the miscarriage.

  “Anna, please talk to me,” Jason pleaded. “Don’t shut me out. I’m sad too.”

  “You’re sad? I’m sorry you’re sad. I’m sad too, and also furious and in pain and hormonal and everything else I don’t have a name for . . . I’m sorry you’re sad, but you can’t possibly know what this feels like.”

  “Help me understand,” he said.

  “You can’t.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Isabel

  SAM WAS HOME more than usual for the six weeks following Isabel’s outing with Christopher. With her husband around, Christopher’s pull lost much of its strength, until Isabel wasn’t sure if she had dreamed that Christopher had called and spoken with Sam that night or if it had really happened.

  Life fell into their couple-rhythm of work, dinner, movies, and baseball games, sometimes even venturing to Yankee Stadium. They had the occasional evening out with friends. Isabel was feeling better; the nausea had mostly abated except for when brushing her teeth, which had turned into a race to finish before she threw up. Once she was done, she didn’t feel sick for the rest of the day.