Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  She could organize anyone. Except Max. He wanted to be her friend but they might as well have come from different planets. He was hard to take anywhere. He couldn’t seem to grasp limits and had no interest in playing with the other children so I ended up repeatedly grabbing him from the edge of disaster. After a few visits with him in tow the invitations to bring the kids petered out except from my dearest friends who were willing to endure constant interruptions from Max to have my company.

  Max was a serious child. I had never heard him go off into gales of laughter until the day Pete brought home an oldfashioned Jack-in-the-Box. Max was at the hanging-onto-things-but-not-yet-walking stage. The toy was a large, brightly colored music box that played Pop Goes the Weasel. Pete set it on the coffee table in the living room and wound the crank.

  Max was no more than a foot away from the toy. Linda was a couple of feet behind him. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen. We all jumped when a large, gaudy clown figure abruptly leaped out of the box. Max was so startled he fell backward and plunked down on the rug. He stared at the box. I expected him to cry. But he broke into wild peals of laughter, pulled himself up and said, “Again.”

  So Pete pushed the clown back in the box, closed the lid and turned the crank. Max hadn’t figured out the tune yet so he was just as startled this time and again he collapsed in laughter. Pete replayed the tune a few more times. Every time the clown leaped out, Max cracked up and said, “Again.” After that, whenever I sat down in the living room, Max crawled over to the toy box, pulled out the Jack-in-the-Box, dragged it over and plunked it on the table in front of me. I cranked it over and over just to hear him laugh.

  Winters in Concord were long and harsh. The kids hated being bundled up in heavy snowsuits but the alternative was frostbite. So we stayed home a lot. Fortunately, my friend and neighbor Mary and I visited back and forth. She was a role model for the person I would have loved to be. Ten years my senior, she gave me the considerable compliment of treating me as her intellectual equal. She told me once I was “all of a piece,” an expression she had picked up in England. She had graduated from Bennington, lived in London and been on her own for years before she married a fascinating man and decided to raise a family. Witty, she had a rare gift for seeing people with all their peculiarities and putting these perceptions into succinct comments.

  One day she mentioned that Pete didn’t really like women. She wasn’t being critical. It was clear she didn’t care one way or the other. It was just an offhand observation delivered in the same impartial way she might have said he had blue eyes.

  Her comment flew around my mind pinging as it banged against stored bits of information like a well shot ball in a pinball game. I had always watched people’s faces and tried to figure out what they were thinking. Her comment made me more watchful. I started listening for the undercurrents when Pete talked about or to women. I soon realized Mary was right. Then it slowly dawned on me that he didn’t like women because he was afraid of them. This wasn’t surprising with a mother like his who made him feel inadequate no matter what he did. I never did understand why he didn’t stand up to her or assert his own rights when she was egregiously rude to him or why he became so angry and upset with me on the rare occasions when I confronted her. What was he afraid of? There was little she could do that could hurt him more than she already had.

  After a few weeks with two sick children and gale winds that kept me housebound, I knew I was on the path to brain death when a friend who was married to a furniture designer asked if I would help her pass out hors d’oeuvres at a party to celebrate the opening of a new store. I was delighted. I got a baby sitter and drove into Cambridge. I was happily carrying around platter after platter of luscious food I didn’t have to cook, smiling at all the adults and getting smiles and thanks in return. A scruffy-looking bearded man took a stuffed mushroom wrapped in bacon from my platter. He started to turn away then stopped abruptly and gaped at me with the goody poised in front of his mouth. What I had just said to the man played back like a recording in my mind, “Now say thank you,” delivered in the automatic sing-song phrasing of a mother teaching a child good manners. Realizing immediately how silly this sounded, I said, “Sorry, I don’t get out much,” and giggled. The man glared at me. He probably didn’t like his mother. He left shortly after.

  I decided I had better get out more or confine my forays into the real world to movies, where I didn’t have to speak to other adults.

  Chapter 8

  Pete had inherited his father’s reliance on moving to fix problems. A friend intimately associated with Alcoholics Anonymous called this The Geographic Cure. By the time we had been married five years, we had moved three times and I could see he was getting restless again. I loved Concord and I wanted to stay there. I had good friends and a constructive outlet for my love of reading and writing. I was close to the end of the second semester of an accredited English course offered on the Harvard campus by the University of Massachusetts Extension. The course gave me an anchor, allowing me to create scenarios based on tangible problems I could solve. A succession of A grades made me feel I was capable of something more demanding than what I was doing.

  When Pete had an unexpected shot at an art director’s job with a top advertising agency in Philadelphia, I reluctantly agreed it was too big a chance to turn down. I had done a small amount of artwork in the years after Linda was born, even less after Max’s birth and the move to Concord. Pete was now the primary wage earner and his desire to move into the world of big-time agencies made sense.

  We made a quick trip to Philadelphia and rented a garage apartment in Chestnut Hill through one of those friend of a friend of a friend referrals that seemed to rent most garage apartments.

  The agency had given Pete a wide time frame to start. I asked him to set his beginning date so I could take my final English Literature exam and get credit for the semester’s work. He chose a date a week before my class ended. I was dismayed and protested. He said he hadn’t paid attention to what I said about the timing of my final exam because it didn’t seem all that important.

  “It’s important to me. You said they gave you a wide time frame for your move. Can’t you just tell them you need to make your start date a week later?”

  “What reason would I give them? My wife wanted to take an English exam? How the hell would I justify that? I gave them a start date and I’m not going to change it now.”

  I bugged him to the point where he finally snapped at me. He chanted a weird rhyme I had never heard before. “He who pays, says.” He made “says” rhyme with “pays.”

  “Who made up that inane saying? It sounds like something you heard in grade school. And what’s the point?”

  He assumed his disgusted ‘boy, are you immature’ expression, sighed and said, “I didn’t mind paying for English classes if frittering away your time reading and writing about old books made you happy, but I am the “only one making money in this family and the one with the job gets to make all the important decisions.”

  I felt equal measures of fury and dismay. “Why do you need to make me feel so worthless?”

  “Why do you always have to make something simple into a complicated scenario?”

  He turned away, walked into the kitchen and said, “When’s dinner going to be ready? I’m hungry.”

  Chapter 9

  Chestnut Hill was part of the city of Philadelphia but a long way from downtown. Max was nineteen months old when we moved from Concord. He watched Pete and me putting together the cribs. That evening, I found the large screwdriver we had been using under a blanket in his bed. He looked at me with wide eyes. I got the impression he thought I had some kind of magical insight into everything in the world because I found it without actually seeing it. I didn’t tell him I recognized the shape under his blanket. With Max I needed every edge I could get. After that I checked his bed for anything he could use as a screwdriver.

  At some point he noticed that the screwdriver
slots in the tops of the long bolts attaching the side rails to the crib shifted side to side each time he shook the rail. What followed appeared to be a simple physics experiment. Shaking the side, he held his finger on top of the bolt and pressed down at different points in the screw’s arc to see what would happen. He noticed a spot where pressure unscrewed the bolt in minute increments. He moved from side to side, methodically loosening both sides. In the middle of the night, a crash jolted us awake. The side of his crib was on the floor. When he offered to do the same thing to his sister’s crib we conceded defeat. Pete made two bed frames six inches off the ground for the crib mattresses. The children’s bedroom opened off ours and the hinges on their door made an ungodly screech. I didn’t know if it was the fact he no longer felt he was sleeping inside a cage or the obvious unease he felt living in what he had decided was the middle of a forest but Max stayed in his room.

  The carriage house was like a doll house on top of a four-car garage at the end of a sweeping, boxwood-lined driveway on two wooded acres in the center of Chestnut Hill. Small casement windows set in dormers looked out on a large greenhouse and the gable end and kitchen wing of a Georgian style brick mansion. The faint sounds of traffic seemed to come from another world.

  For me, the most compelling plus in the move to Philadelphia was the increased distance from my supposedly dying mother-in-law, who looked healthier each time I saw her. When I described the apartment to her I stressed the small size. I should have known this wouldn’t deter her.

  Our first apartment in New York City was a large studio yet my mother-in-law showed up regularly with no advance warning. She never called before leaving Melrose; her phone calls were usually made from a booth on the Hutchinson River Parkway.

  Death of a Salesman was a sensational play in its first New York run. Instantly a must-see, there was a long wait for tickets. We had bought balcony tickets four months earlier. The evening we were going to the play, Ada called from the Bronx River Parkway irritated that we hadn’t been home when she tried to reach us half an hour earlier. She said she would be at our apartment within the hour. She hoped we had food—she was famished. Dismayed, I had looked at the near-empty refrigerator. We had planned to get deli sandwiches. We were meeting another couple at the theater.

  I said, “What is she going to do while we’re at the play? Maybe she can go to a movie.”

  Pete had retreated into cold withdrawal mode. “I’ll give her my ticket.”

  “You know that doesn’t make sense. Why can’t you just tell her we had plans for this evening? She’s going to hate the play. I don’t think Arthur Miller is her style.”

  “I said I’ll give her my ticket to the play because she’s my mother.”

  I was careful not to say what I was thinking. I couldn’t afford to get into a pissing contest about the merits of our mothers.

  Ada accepted the play ticket without questioning that she had every right to it. Then not only did she hate Death of a Salesman, she declaimed in a loud voice during the play that she was horrified that any son would dare to talk to his father in such a nasty way. Her noisy ire was a constant since heated father-son arguments were a large part of the play’s plot. All around us people kept shushing her. I would have loved to pretend I didn’t know her but she turned her head and glared at me each time she delivered a scathing editorial comment. She complained bitterly about the terrible play all the way home. Pete never got to see the play but I couldn’t work up much sympathy for him.

  We only lived in Chestnut Hill for five months but Ada managed to drop in on us without warning twice then complained because we didn’t have a comfortable bed for her. She hinted that she expected Pete and me to give her our bed. I ignored her hints and stressed that the children got up all night long with nightmares ever since we had moved and would cry if I wasn’t immediately available. I only felt a little bit guilty.

  I resisted having a third child but Pete was relentless. The women I counted as close friends all lived too far away to offer me a sounding board. We wrote back and forth but discussing my strong reservations about having another child was something that still went against accepted norms in the fifties. I needed to discuss it face to face so I could read their expressions.

  Once again, I was caught in a situation where I was dependent on Pete. He stayed reasonable, pointing out that the two children we had didn’t get along at all. He said this was too much like his own childhood. He was certain a third child would improve the dynamics and make us into a better family.

  Having been the middle child of three for most of my childhood, I knew this position was no guarantee of all-around bliss for any of the siblings. What if a third child acted like Max? Then there would be two kids competing with Linda for my attention.

  I finally agreed anything was better than the bad feeling between the two we had. There was no hope of a third child in the tiny garage apartment so I set out to find a house. Ever hopeful, I looked in Chestnut Hill and also checked out the towns on the Paoli train line. I wanted a place with frequent and accessible trains. So did everyone else and they had more money than we did so the price of houses close to the city was too high.

  Half of the men in the art department in Pete’s advertising agency came from California. Most of these former West Coasters lived in Levittown. They thought a tedious hour and a quarter car commute was normal. To them trains were weird.

  After months of trying to house-hunt with two small kids in tow, I agreed to move to Levittown. The house was great. Four bedrooms and two full baths felt pretty luxurious after a carriage house.

  The other art directors and their families were used to the casual entertainment style they had enjoyed in California. They instigated impromptu parties to celebrate the smallest event or non-event. I loved this. Coming from a home where no one was ever invited to share a meal with the family, I realized I’d somehow ended up with a genetic mix much different from my parents. I loved having people underfoot and thoroughly enjoyed feeding crowds. An added plus, there was always someone at the parties who thought Max was delightful.

  At a party with a bunch of these art directors and their wives, one of the men went off on a long-winded gripe about an account executive who thought he was an art director and insisted on changing every layout before he would show it to the client. I was listening, trying to figure out who they were discussing. I was probably frowning, something I inadvertently do when I think. My hostess, a nice woman I had seen at parties before but didn’t know well, assumed I had no idea what the man was talking about. She had been an art buyer at a small agency. She started explaining what happened each time something in the layout of a print ad was changed even if it was just the size of the type.

  It took me a few minutes to grasp why she felt the need to explain this to me. When the import of her words sunk in, sweat gathered on my brow and under my arms. She thought I was baffled by what the men were saying. Feeling sick, I wondered when and why I had allowed a large part of myself to be erased and had become only someone’s wife and the mother of his children.

  What was I doing? When had I become the reflection of other people’s perception of my role? The men were animated and involved, the women the same way. Both were talking about what mattered most in their lives. I was interested in both conversations but there was no cross-over.

  My hostess looked puzzled. Her voice trailed off. “Are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water?”

  “I worked in advertising. I used to do what they’re talking about. Pete and I met at art school.” My voice was too abrupt. The buzz of women’s voices halted.

  My hostess looked embarrassed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “There’s no reason why you would know. We never talk about anything except children and food. I was just jolted to realize all I am now is Pete’s wife and the mother of two kids with another one on the way.”

  My hostess looked around at the other women. I could see her assessing how much damag
e control she needed to cover up my unflattering comment about the women’s roles. Hoping for some vote of assent, I turned to the woman next to me. “What did you do before you married?”

  “Went to college.” She was mumbling. She looked trapped. Some part of me tried to tell myself to shut up but I blundered on. “What was your major?”

  She looked chagrined. “I didn’t finish my first year so I never declared a major. Jamie wanted to get married so…” She shrugged with a what could I do expression on her face.

  I asked the rest of the women the same questions. Even the women who had finished college seemed to accept their lives as their husband’s helpmate.

  One woman finally asked me, “What did you want to do that’s better than bringing up a happy family?” I looked around and realized the women were looking at me with pity.

  “Establish a career. Find out who I am before I spread myself so thin I don’t have the time or energy to explore what I’m capable of doing on my own.”

  This statement was as popular as a fart.

  The artists in Pete’s circle liked to party. And drink. Fortunately, most of them also loved to eat so this usually worked out. At the next party, our host had been fighting with his wife since he got out of bed so he skipped dinner and was drunk by the time dessert was served. Like many of the art directors, he freelanced on the side. Revisions to a full-page newspaper ad were marked in red on a comprehensive drawing tacked on his drawing board next to a pad of layout bond paper. I was looking at this as I polished off the last of my dessert. My host floated by muttering about how hard it was going to be to finish the revision with a hangover.

  Swallowing my last bite of key lime pie, I said, “When’s it due?”