Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  I sighed. The greatest minds in history had grappled with this God issue, but it was not a big deal to Johnny. This was his greatness and his flaw.

  Amos and Franklin sat on the living room floor engaging in what early childhood experts call “parallel play.” Franklin was placing his extensive collection of plastic elephants in a circle, and Amos was building a flat structure out of blocks.

  “A guy came to interview me today,” I said.

  “Do tell,” said Ann, who was sitting on the floor drinking coffee.

  “About my former life as a backup singer,” I said. “It seemed so odd to be thinking about all that with Little Franklin asleep in his crib. They seem a universe apart. Is Amos interested in sleeping in a bed?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” said Ann. “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t get the feeling that what I said was very interesting to him. This guy has his big idea of what it was like and I think he’s looking for people who agree with him.”

  “What was it like?” Ann said. “Singing and all that.”

  “It was perfect heaven,” I said, yawning. “It was sort of like life is now—being very tired and singing a lot. Also being on your feet all the time. That’s what I should have told him: it’s exactly like having a small child.”

  37

  Although I had nowhere to go and nothing much to do, one afternoon a week a very nice girl from the local design college—a redhead who wore yellow and purple in combination—came to babysit Little Franklin, who also wore yellow and purple in combination. Her name was Mirandy Rubenstein, and when I came back from my outing my dining room table was covered with newspaper, and the newspaper was covered with clay, paint, crayons and glue.

  When Johnny asked me what I did on my day out, I said I did errands or went shopping, which was often true, but more often than not I found myself browsing at Huey’s O.P. Records, TCB Enterprises, Inc. (TCB stood for Take Care of Business.) It was too far to Fred Wood’s, and Huey’s was just like Fred Wood’s. In fact, every out-of-print record store I had ever been in was like every other. They smelled of cigarettes and cardboard, and the faint, plastic smell of vinyl. The proprietors were either laconic and depressed, or depressed and hyped up.

  You never knew what you might find in these places. If you were patient, you might stumble on an old Howlin’ Wolf cut, or some old sides by Bobby Blue Bland.

  One balmy afternoon I pushed my way over to the always crowded rhythm and blues section. I felt awfully low. That morning I had taken Little Franklin to his play group—a bunch of one- and two-year-olds in a pretty room in a church, where I was the lone biological caregiver in a sea of baby-sitters. All the other mothers had gotten their thing together and gone back to being lawyers or graphic designers. At lunchtime Franklin said, “I have no baby-sitter.”

  “You have Mirandy,” I said.

  “She isn’t,” Little Franklin said.

  “But she comes and baby-sits for you,” I said.

  He looked at me intently. “She isn’t brown,” he said. “She has red hair.”

  As I browsed through the records, reflecting on the fact that I had deprived my child of early independence from me by not having a fulltime Jamaican baby-sitter, I felt an arm press against me. I looked up and there was Donald “Doo-Wah” Banks.”

  “Wah!” I said. “How amazing!”

  “Well, well, well, well,” said Wah. “What brings you into this neighborhood?”

  “Huey’s,” I said.

  “Pee-Wee over at WIS says you have a baby.”

  “I have a big, huge boy,” I said.

  Doo-Wah looked remarkably fine. He was wearing a white sweatshirt and cowboy boots. His hair was short and he had done away with his sinister shades.

  “You look great, Wah,” I said.

  “I’m an ugly critter,” he said. “You have always been blinded by love.”

  He was a sort of ugly critter, blunt and big, but imposing, like a tugboat or a brick wall.

  “Let me take you for a drink,” he said. “What’s your boy’s name?”

  “Franklin Ross Miller,” I said. “I call him Little Franklin.”

  “Great name,” said Wah. “Has he cut any sides yet?”

  “He made up a song he says is called ‘Kitty Roll Over,’ but he won’t sing it for me.”

  I was so used to having Franklin with me that being without him made me feel light and anxious. To be loose around town without a cookie, a box of raisins, a copy of Curious George Rides a Bike, an extra T-shirt, a supply of juice and two tiny molded-plastic elephants, made me uneasy. I kept checking my pockets, until Wah asked me why I was wriggling so much.

  We walked a few blocks to an old saloon that had a barbecue in the back. It was two in the afternoon and there was almost no one around, except a guy at the bar and another guy fooling around with the jukebox. As we sat down, the entire place was suddenly drenched with the sound of Fats Domino singing “When My Dreamboat Comes Home.”

  How I loved that low, growly, mellow bass. At the sound of it, I put my head on Doo-Wah’s warm muscular arm.

  We were sitting in a dark corner. Wah drank a beer, and I drank a Coke. He would have fed me mine with a spoon if I had asked him.

  “Now, tell old Wah what’s up your mind,” he said.

  “I guess sometimes it makes me sad that I’ll never be a Shakette again,” I said, overcome.

  “Oh, come on,” said Wah. “Don’t be sentimental. Aren’t you glad? You’re a mama! And you don’t have to bust your butt or get on that nasty bus again.”

  “I’m not my old self anymore.”

  “History,” said Wah, sipping his beer. “We are constantly living the history of our own lives, you dig? You used to be your old self, now you’re a new self, and someday you’ll be some other self and what’s now will be your old self. Honey, my kids are almost in college. When I started with Ruby, I was paying off my college loans. Look at your own kid—what’s he, almost two? Where’d the baby go? Vanished! History! Don’t sweat it.”

  There was no question but that I was in the state of mind that allows people either to lecture or to hector you. This was the same rap I got from Johnny: even Wah came on like a guidance counselor in high school. I told Wah about the Race Music Foundation and how I had run into Grace.

  “She’s doing great,” Wah said. “Catering a lot of music gigs these days. Got nine people working for her. She doesn’t look back.”

  This pep talk did not cheer me up. I wanted Wah to say to me, “Girl, my crib is around the corner from here. You come with me and we’ll finish some unfinished business, and Wah’ll make you feel real good.”

  But it was not to be, since I was now a respectable wife and mother. That night Johnny noticed that something was up. He knew what it was and he gave me a variant form of the Doo-Wah lecture.

  “Oh, leave me alone,” I said. “I have enough trouble trying to pass for normal with all those other mothers in the park.”

  “I thought you liked those women.”

  I was silent.

  “You like Ann Potts,” Johnny said.

  “Well, look at Ann Potts,” I said. “She wears leopard-skin clothes, and remember when she put that green streak in her hair? That’s the kind of mother I like.”

  “I don’t know what to do with you,” said Johnny. “First you just want to be Little Franklin’s mother, then you see Doo-Wah and get all upset because you can’t be a Shakette. You say you blew it with Spider Joe Washburn. What do you want?”

  “‘We don’t understand it better by and by,’” I said, quoting a hymn from my album of Bahamian spirituals.

  Johnny looked disturbed. “Are you unhappy being married to me?”

  I told him that he was the only person I could have stood being married to, even if he was like a Boy Scout. When he sat transfixed listening to John Lee Hooker and singing along in a strange voice, I knew I had married the right person. Besides, he had known me when I was a Shakett
e.

  “Look,” he said. “You know what I found? Look at this.”

  He took the wrapping off an oversized book entitled The Golden Years: A Rock and Roll History.

  “Look in the index,” Johnny said.

  I did, and there I was on page 413.

  “It’s finished,” I said.

  “But it’s never over,” said my husband.

  38

  In what seemed like half a second, Little Franklin turned two, and that fall he entered a program for two-year-olds at the Malcolm Sprague School, an old, venerable progressive school in our neighborhood. Three mornings a week, along with his close personal friend, Amos Potts, Little Franklin and eight children played with clay, blocks, little squares of cloth and water, or they painted with one color on a flat surface so as not to have to cope with drips. These materials, I came to learn, were called “open ended” since they had no fixed purpose and could be used in any number of ways at the child’s discretion. I often stood in the doorway wishing that I could go to the Malcolm Sprague School, too.

  The second month there, as I was waiting to pick up Little Franklin, I noticed a woman giving me what used to be called “the hairy eyeball.” She stared and stared. Finally she came over.

  She had a quantity of fuzzy yellow hair, freckles and a diamond ring on her finger that probably made it hard for her to lift a fork or spoon.

  “You don’t know me,” she said.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “But I know you.”

  “You do?”

  “I used to be Pixie Lehar,” she said. “I’m Paulette Goldberg.”

  “Oh, right!” I said. “Spider Joe Washburn told me you lived in this neighborhood.”

  “That sleaze,” she said.

  “I thought you were probably dead from being a hairoyne addict,” I said.

  “Vernon,” she said. “What an old lady. I only snorted a few brown flakes once or twice, but you know what that does to a girl’s eyes. Vernon thought he could spot a junkie a mile away. What a nance! But you were a good girl. That was the buzz. What are you doing here?”

  “My little boy just started the twos program,” I said.

  “My daughter, Cilia, is in the nines, and my son, Otis, is in the sevens.” She took a lipstick out of her bag and painted her lips bright red. “I’m on the parents’ committee,” she said.

  “Do you keep up with anyone from old times?” I said.

  “Keep up!” she said. “Are you kidding? It’s bad enough to be hit on by a jive-hummer like Washburn. It was a phase, you know. Sort of fun at the time, but I’m glad it’s over. I mean, look what washed up on the shore! All those dumb girls in their little dresses drugging their brains out and thinking that they had a million years till adulthood set in. I mean.”

  I sighed. Probably I was just like one of those girls, except I hadn’t drugged my brains out.

  “How did you get,” I asked, “from there to here?”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Well, let’s see. I was a very bad girl at college. I mean, a girls’ school, can you believe it? I dropped out and, you know. One thing. Another, then another. I used to dance at the old Bombsite, remember? Then I backed up this group called Big Thing and Little Ed. Remember them? They were sort of nowhere but I was with Little Ed at the time so it seemed like a good idea, and then we opened for Ruby one night, God knows why. We were pretty terrible, but loud. I still think I have partial hearing loss in my right ear from jumping around in front of those speakers. Then Vernon fired me. It was your very friend Spider Joe Washburn that I used to get smacked up with. He hung around the scene, that scunge. What a jerk! Then I worked for that guy Lenny Decatur, he repped all these acts. You probably don’t remember him. Another sleaze in the music business. Like my father used to say, a real American Indian: a Schmohawk. Just when I thought the light at the end of the tunnel had just about gone out, I met Bob Goldberg, who had nothing to do with the music business really, except that he happened to be Lenny Decatur’s cousin and when they were in college they had collaborated on that song ‘You Make Me Go on Fire.’ Remember? ‘Ooh woo, smoke! Smoke!’ It was kind of a novelty song and made a million dollars. So we got married and eventually I had Cilia and Otis and now I work at Kids Magazine. And yourself?”

  I said I had quit the tour and worked at the Race Music Foundation, got married and had Little Frankln. It sounded totally reasonable, a straight line. “I don’t know what next,” I said.

  “Next,” said Paulette, “I have to go pick Cilia up for her dentist appointment. Catch you later.”

  I looked at my watch. It was time to pick my baby up.

  Oh, Little Franklin! The look of happiness on his face when he saw me waiting made my heart open and close like a sea anemone. I had never imagined I could love anyone so much, and when people asked, as they did incessantly, when was I going to have another, I was always struck dumb. I had one husband, one mother and one father. Why was I supposed to have two children? The idea of sharing myself with some other child and Little Franklin seemed to me totally out of the question.

  At night I tossed and turned and wished that in the welter of books about child development there was one about stages in parent development. What about separation anxiety among parents? What about stages of independence from your child? At night I held my darling Franklin in my arms and realized that I would never know him as an old man. Johnny said, “In a couple of years you won’t know anything about his bowel movements. Think of that!”

  I did think of that. I thought and thought about that. Franklin on a bus by himself. Franklin and his buddies going off to play hockey. In my imaginings I myself grew smaller and smaller, like a person seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Pretty soon the whole idea of having a mother would be a joke, from Franklin’s point of view. “Aw, Ma,” he would doubtless say. “Lemme alone. Don’t kiss me goodbye in front of school, okay? It looks queer. Nobody else’s mother kisses them.” And sooner than later I would hear, “Aw, Ma. I can get home by myself. It’s no big deal. Stop treating me like a baby.” Stop treating me like a baby—the same words I and millions of other developing children had uttered time after time, and soon my little baby boy would utter them to me. Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child who is at school at the moment.

  When I smiled at mothers with their children in the supermarket, they stared at me as if I were insane, and perhaps I was. There was no book to tell me what I was supposed to feel, but one thing was perfectly clear: eventually, I was going to have to get a job.

  39

  How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.

  I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. I had once been something. Now it was time to become something else. Being someone’s mother was not enough.

  Ann Potts (whom Mary referred to as “the Smoking Poet”) and I discussed these issues endlessly as we sat at “Carole and Peter” Café, a little joint in our neighborhood that sold sandwiches, cookies, coffee and groceries. We had taken Franklin and Amos there as babies and as toddlers, and now we brought them in after school for ice cream. In the mornings we sat by ourselves drinking coffee, reading the paper and conversing in a meandering sort of way. I found these mornings lazy and beautiful.

  “I think I have to look for a job,” I said.

  “Here,” said Ann, handing me the paper. “You can have the want ads.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “At least you know what you want to do.”
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br />   “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ann said. “You don’t think I’m sitting at home writing sonnets in my five minutes of spare time, do you? Eventually I’ll have to see if I can get my job back at the Poetry Society, if they haven’t given it to some beautiful young thing. Of course, I used to be the beautiful young thing. What a tragedy! I keep thinking I’ll call them but I keep doing the laundry instead. It’s kind of a tic.”

  “Laundry,” I said, yawning. “I never really understood about laundry before. It’s a kind of Möbius strip—no end and no beginning.”

  “Men never understand about laundry,” Ann said. “I mean, Winnie doesn’t. I guess he doesn’t get much call for clean laundry at Squirrel Productions.” This was the name of Winnie’s design company.

  “I’m sure at Johnny’s firm they do the laundry for them,” I said. “They seem to do everything else.”

  Ann spun the magazine racks. Among the fashion and news magazines were those for women, the very magazines that said we must be totally available but make our children independent.

  As the mother of a young child, I was supposed to be totally related to my child but not so much as to cripple his emerging sense of self. By being completely available, I would also be able to know when to let go. All this, and laundry too!

  “‘Fun dads,’” Ann read. “‘More fun, more time.’ These fun dads give me hives. Carole, do you mind if we buzz through Vogue if we promise not to get any smudge marks on it?”

  “‘Care-giver for small child,’” I read from the want ads. “‘Academic family.’ Hey! Here’s my job!”

  “I’ll give you a reference,” Ann said. “Amos thinks you’re a very nice mother.”

  “I’m a lovely little mother,” I said. “Turn that page around, will you? We have to go out this weekend and I have no clothes.”

  “Endless laundry and nothing to wear,” Ann said. “Isn’t it a bite? How ’bout one of your little fringe dresses, or is it a formal affair?”

  “Even my formal clothes have child smearings on them,” I said. “Of course, that’s only a manner of speaking. I have no formal clothes.”