Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  I bolstered my spirits by reassuring myself that this would just be a brief side step. I made sure the New York apartment rent was paid and had the mail forwarded so I could pay the phone and Con Ed bills. I figured I would get back to my real life as soon as Pete’s mother died.

  We had stashed money in the bank in case our jobs fell through before we’d started on our European trip. Carrying the expenses of Ada’s house and the New York apartment was depleting this money rapidly so we went into Boston and answered a small art studio’s ad for artists. We were both hired. These jobs established a recurring pattern that worked but played havoc with my ego. Pete became the designated illustrator. This made sense. He was a gifted and well trained illustrator. He said I was the better designer but he ended up doing that too. I became the hand letterer, type expert and paste-up person because “I was so much better at it than he was.”

  A month later I visited the family doctor who confirmed I was pregnant.

  That was when Pete told me he didn’t think New York City was a good place to raise children. Even if we both worked, we couldn’t afford a larger apartment and childcare.

  I understood how Alice felt when she ended up in Wonderland. Everything was right and wrong at the same time. I knew Pete had a point. Neither of us had been working long enough to make much more than minimum wage but we were both good at what we did and we always had work. Why couldn’t we manage? We wouldn’t have to move. Our apartment was large enough to section off a space for a crib and a changing table.

  Then Pete told me he didn’t want to live in New York City. He didn’t plan to go back there regardless of what happened with his mother.

  I couldn’t have been more disoriented if I had awakened in the middle of the Sahara Desert surrounded by camel-riding Arabs who didn’t speak English. The existence I had helped create in New York City represented everything I had ever wanted from life.

  Pregnancy made me feel painfully vulnerable. My mental scenario of the kind of life I would have in New York with a baby in tow and no husband gave me chills. Sometimes a vivid imagination is a curse. It was hard to decide if the major problem was lack of courage, innate pragmatism, or too much pride to openly acknowledge I had made a series of really dumb decisions. Probably all of the above.

  I went into a profound depression when we gave up our New York apartment. I still remember how my spirits plunged deeper and deeper with each box I carried down the five flights of stairs. It was one of those turning points when you knew you were on a downhill slide and had to accept the fact that you were too chicken to dig in your heels and bring yourself to a screeching halt.

  As we drove back to Melrose dragging our meager possessions behind us in a small borrowed trailer, I felt as though the world had been blanketed by a dark, bitterly cold fog. Pete didn’t notice. It’s hard to fault him for this. We were well matched. I was good at covering my feelings. He was equally good at not noticing what he didn’t want to see.

  Strong emotions upset him. He never talked about his feelings. I was never sure he even acknowledged them to himself. With no verifiable data from him, I had to do a lot of guessing and piecing together reasons for everything he did or didn’t do. And after that lengthy exercise, I had to spend an equal amount of effort concocting what I considered to be reasonable excuses for his actions so that I could live with them without getting frazzled.

  Since our brains worked differently, I often ascribed motives to him that were probably a long way from what he was really thinking. I was working from a base of Jane Austen and the Brontes, where spirited women conquered cold and distant men like Darcy and Rochester. It took me a long time to understand that emotionally remote men were not turned into considerate, tender husbands by any women other than the hopeful authors. I was sorry my mother had not been interested in history instead of nineteenth century novels. I might have had fewer illusions about the inherent capacity of love to change stone-faced characters if my young mind had been exposed to real-life tales of men like Caligula instead of Mr. Darcy.

  Pete read magazines and newspapers. He rarely read novels. His understanding of male/female relationships was formed by watching his parents wage a never-ending war for control of their small household. Nothing was ever resolved. When the skirmishes grew too vicious, his parents stopped speaking to each other, once for a full year. Far from giving Pete a respite, during these breaks he was forced to be the conduit as his feuding parents each did their best to verbally annihilate the other. Pete had learned to slip out of the house without telling either parent where he would be in order to stay sane. Yet he insisted they were normal. He may have believed it.

  Pete insisted my family was a clump of crazies so I couldn’t possibly know how ‘normal’ families functioned. I couldn’t refute this. My siblings were great but my mother was more or less acceptable at times and certifiably nutty at others. The trick was figuring out which mother was waiting behind the closed door. She disowned people for periods of time—sometimes for years. No money or real property was involved. She just pretended the shunned person didn’t exist. For example; she hadn’t wanted me to marry. This wasn’t because she thought Pete would or wouldn’t make a good husband. As far as I could see, she liked him. It was just one of her freaked-out periods. She warned my father she would leave him if he went to my wedding. He came anyway. She went to Florida and moved in with her mother. She went back to my father a few months later but she would have nothing to do with me for years. By the time she did grudgingly acknowledge me, I had two children. She was never a doting grandmother. Being the shunned one was upsetting but I didn’t understand how pathologically weird it was until I had children of my own. Anything seemed normal if it happened often enough.

  My dad was high functioning at work but volatile at home. Deep down, I knew his irritation was impersonal. He even kicked the dog out of the way once and he talked baby talk to her so he obviously loved her.

  I only deduced that Pete’s family members were as wacky as mine through observation. He never admitted it but once the initial ardor of our affair faded and I allowed myself to look at the two family members I knew with a proximity-jaded eye, it baffled me that I had ever believed anything about Pete’s family was as he had said. It’s hard to believe I didn’t acknowledge this earlier. Shortly after I met Pete, I asked if he had siblings. He said, “No” without hesitation. The first time I met his mother, she talked about someone named Maxwell. I finally asked who this person was. The poor woman burst into tears. She never believed me when I said Pete hadn’t told me he had an older brother who had died during the war. He later insisted he had given me an honest answer. Raised in the Congregational Church, he didn’t understand sins of omission.

  Chapter 3

  We stuck to the promise we gave the doctor to not tell Ada she was dying from cancer, so she assumed we were freeloaders. She equated artists with self-indulgent wastrels who sponged off their families and she continually berated Pete for not getting a ‘real’ job. The fact that we paid all the bills and bought most of the food didn’t seem to make any difference. This and the fact that Pete had gotten into the habit of slipping out of the house without telling me where he was going as soon as Ada and I started washing dishes turned life with Pete’s mother into a bad sit-com.

  Three months before our first child was born, we realized Ada wasn’t planning to die in the near future so we moved to a large apartment on the first block of Commonwealth Avenue in downtown Boston. The Public Gardens with their swan boats and serpentine, tree-shaded walks were half a block away. The main room in our apartment had been the formal dining room in one of the very large four-story townhouses lining both sides of the wide avenue. It was an impressive space, with a twelve-foot ceiling and a large fireplace with an ornate marble mantel. Three floor-to-ceiling windows formed a bay overlooking a courtyard. Our bedrooms were in the old servant’s quarters.

  Giving my first child a name she had to drag around for the rest of her life seemed
egocentric, as though I thought someone had elected me God because I’d produced a baby. Friends were visiting the night before I left the hospital with my still un-named daughter. The charge nurse came into my room and told me I had better give my baby a name before she sent in the paperwork or the child’s first and second names would legally be Infant Female until we petitioned the court to change them. One of the friends reeled off a string of names she planned to give her kids. Pete and I both liked Linda, the least flowery name the friend mentioned. We didn’t bother with a second name.

  Linda was an anxious, colicky baby who waked screaming if a bird chirped near her window. When I saw pictures of me taken during this period, I looked starry-eyed. I was actually sleepwalking most of the time.

  To my amazement, I discovered I had inherited my grandmother’s strong maternal instinct. I realized I loved this cranky little girl. She was opinionated and loved to eat—my kind of girl. By the time she was four months old, she could look sideways through her eyelashes at me in a way that said “don’t try to kid me, lady” as clearly as if she had said it. I spent a ridiculous amount of time carrying her in the crook of one arm and talking to her. She made me laugh.

  One very cold winter day when Linda was six-months old, Pete walked into the apartment and said that I should stop nursing her. It was time to start the second child. I had no idea what triggered this. It was too soon. Linda was a great kid but she still hadn’t figured out the sleeping-at-night part.

  By then I had grasped the fact that I would never dissuade Pete from doing exactly what he wanted to do. I was too tired to fight with him. He had a game plan and he had cast me as the person who supported his dreams no matter what this cost me.

  Unfortunately, this was the classic male/female ideal of the time so he had a lot of support. Our friends at the time were people he had known all of his life. The men and most of their wives were at least five years older than I was and had between two and five children. None of the women worked or had any desire to work outside of the home. I was good at faking cheerfulness but I felt as though I went through my days with an elephant sitting on my chest.

  My mother had been fond of saying her family members were so proud and well-mannered they could serve tea to a stranger in the front room with aplomb even if they knew a relative was committing a murder in the back of the house. They were four generations removed from Germany but the need to keep up appearances was part of their DNA.

  I sometimes wondered if the rest of my life would have been easier and more honest if I had been able to have a noisy, obvious nervous breakdown. Maybe not.

  I would have had to do something really out of character, like wheel Linda down the middle of Commonwealth Avenue with both of us stark naked. Even then, if Pete were the first one to see me, he would probably have draped his coat over my shoulders and asked me if I had baked the lemon meringue pie he’d told me he wanted for dinner.

  Chapter 4

  I anticipated going through the problem with names when the second child was born. When Pete was told he had a son, he said, “He will be named Maxwell.” His voice was flat and ponderous like those fake God voices issuing from roiling clouds in B movies. He’s given to sarcastic statements. I was about to laugh but the look on his face stopped me. He was serious.

  The name was okay with me but I was surprised. My motherin-law talked about her Maxwell non-stop. She said he was a saint. I was looking at her face when Pete told her our son would be called Maxwell. She flinched and looked jolted. Not happy. More like, “How dare you?” When I mentioned that his mother didn’t seem pleased at the idea of a second Maxwell, Pete shrugged and said, “Nothing I do pleases her.”

  He still insisted we name our son Maxwell but called him Ralph. This infuriated his mother. I sometimes wondered if that was the point of the whole naming fiasco. I felt sad that an innocent little boy was secondary to the ongoing mother-son love-hate fest. Pete’s mother was programmed to consider the baby a usurper from the start. I probably added to her grief when I started calling him Max.

  My mother-in-law was a disaster as a parent and in-law but a very good businesswoman. She ran a successful hooked rug-making enterprise out of her house. Her most important source of income came from packets of wool dyed in each of the myriad colors used for the rugs. She dyed fine wool flannel into values ranging from almost white to the full color of the dye, tore the fabric into precise four-by-eight inch pieces and stapled these together with a hand-written label. In her copper-plate script, the exotic color names looked elegant and expensive.

  They were. She had a gift for marketing.

  The packets were displayed in a custom-made floor to ceiling, window to window case in the back bedroom she used as her classroom. The display shelves looked like a hotel mail rack on steroids. This dyed wool required numerous bolts of fine wool flannel and frequent trips to the woolen mill north of Concord where Pete and I had moved when Max was a month old. These forays were taken some time between five and six in the morning so she could be at the mill when it opened and back home in time for her students.

  She frequently stopped at our house in those very early morning hours, barged into the kitchen and then into Pete’s and my bedroom without knocking. This unhinged me. I told her I would appreciate it if she knocked. She didn’t even acknowledge I had said anything. I complained to Pete. “Can’t you tell her to knock?”

  He looked defeated. “What makes you think she’ll pay any attention to what I say?”

  “What will we do if we’re having sex when she barges in? Can’t we at least lock the bedroom door?”

  The reference to sex elicited a “so what” shrug but the comment about locking a door grabbed his attention. His voice flat and cold, he looked at me through narrowed eyes as he said, “I better never find one of my doors locked.”

  This was an old issue but it seemed so ridiculous, I kept testing his parameters. I wasn’t sure what he would do if he were confronted by a locked door but his tone of voice and cranky expression convinced me I probably would be better off if I didn’t have to find out.

  He let me lock our apartment door when we lived in New York City and occasionally in downtown Boston but never in Melrose or Concord. This kept me on edge. I was raised by a fanatical door-locker. My father not only locked every door, he went back and made sure they were still locked by checking and rechecking every window twice. It was a large house so this took a while. I assumed this obsessive concern was needed to set his mind at ease but it had the opposite effect on me. I was sure he was the most formidable man in the world. If he were so afraid of whatever lurked out there, it must be pretty bad. With my child’s imagination I decided bears, lions and witches must live in the dark woods my bedroom windows faced. Afraid to go to sleep and jerking awake at any unusual night sound, I practiced breathing so I didn’t move the covers and arranged my pillows so anyone really bad wouldn’t realize there was a live body in my bed.

  Explaining to Pete why I preferred locked doors at night didn’t get me anywhere. He just laughed at my father’s compulsive nature. I don’t think he realized he was just as obsessive. Asking him why he hated locked doors just made him grit his teeth and glare at me with the irritated expression he usually saved for his mother’s yapping Pomeranian when it had the temerity to lunge at him and try to nip his leg. I couldn’t decide if he had no introspection at all or didn’t want to acknowledge something dark inside his mind. I suspected it was a little of both.

  Each time something came out of left field like his aversion to locks, I was amazed at how little I understood what went on in Pete’s mind. Even with the locks, I was never able to figure out if he hated the idea of being locked in or locked out. How could I have dated him for two years, theoretically talked intelligently with him and been married to him for four years and still be so startled at what he expected? I still thought he was the most physically attractive and certainly the wittiest person I had ever known, but more and more frequently wished I
had never met him.

  Pete’s mother continued to be one of those vexing problems common with people who were thrown together but never meshed. Although I admired her in many ways I didn’t like her from the first time we met and the dislike was mutual. To her, I was the woman who “stole her son,” turned a religious boy into an agnostic, didn’t discipline her only grandchildren, or bathe them, or dress them in starched and ironed clothes, or keep the house white-glove spotless. And I read too much.

  To me, my mother-in-law was the rude, overbearing woman who could turn anything she was given into a negative. Giving her a gift was an exercise in frustration. It was either wrong and she took it back then insisted we had spent too much for shoddy goods or when I resorted to potted plants she couldn’t take back, she denied she got them even when they were blooming on a glass shelf for anyone to see.

  We were expected to appear at her home or host large gatherings in our own house at every holiday. She waited until there was a crowd gathered around then sniped at us. Pete never replied to her attacks on him directly. He waited until one of her friends inevitably asked him where he worked now. Looking innocent, he’d say, “I’m unemployed.”

  His mother’s face predictably reddened with shame then seemed to swell with fury. No one in her rigid middle-class world had ever heard the term “freelance.” Real men had nine-to-five jobs they held for life. Anyone else was lower-class and probably sweaty.

  Chapter 5

  A thud sounding like a cat jumping off a high place came from Linda and Max’s bedroom. Jolted from deep sleep, I leaped out of bed and ran, cracking my right elbow as I skidded around the corner through the children’s open door. We didn’t have a cat.

  Within seconds I was crouched over my keening sevenmonth-old son, my sleep-dulled brain trying to process the sight in front of me. Max was on the floor next to his crib. I stifled my instinct to pick him up. His spine could have been broken. I felt his small body. No sickening divots in his downy head. His joints moved only where they should. Doing my best to keep his spine straight, I slid my shaking hands under him, lifted his small body and tucked him against my shoulder. My heart lurched with relief when he clung to me.