Nolan and I had had grudging sex at first when I returned, usually following some bank party when he was tanked up and so could pretend that none of that other business had ever happened. When he could coax his wife—that being his version of the problem—to put out. “Come on, hon,” he’d say, “give me a little.” As if I were the one reluctant, as if I were the one not interested in sex, not more eager than he for satisfaction. Later on, he would come into my room if he wanted to do it, and go through the motions of touching my nipples and slipping his hand between my legs—a couple of pinches, a couple of rubs, as if he’d learned all the sexual moves of the depraved and enlightened—and then he’d lumber up on top of me and saw away until he came.
I’d seen it as a choice: I could be bitter or I could be agreeable. I could tend my own body in the shower and be glad for whatever additional warmth in bed his body offered, or I could rage and stew, throw my towel across the room, take all the bedding off my narrow single bed and drag it downstairs to the sofa. I’d tried both. In the end, going along had won out; if you were going to cohabit you had to coexist.
By that time, anyway, I’d already got Nolan to agree to separate tax returns, separate checking accounts, separate names; to agree not to list me as his life insurance beneficiary (“That’s sick,” I’d said, “for a man to think he should support a wife from the grave”); to leave me no inheritance (“I will not, I am not, going to benefit from your death”), or so I thought. I had already made clear that I had no love of and a lot of dislike for the institution of marriage. I wasn’t going to relinquish what little intercourse we had.
What made the break so stupid and so sad, and brought my anger back whenever I thought of it, was that sex was how Nolan and I had got together in the first place. I’d been seventeen, he’d been twenty-one, finishing up at Chapel Hill. His family had come to visit mine in Mineral Springs over Easter; our sisters were school friends with a mutual interest in horses.
I’d been alone in the house with him. Where had the rest of them gone? The lakes? The state parks? I had said I wanted to stay behind and wash my hair, so I must have planned it out. As soon as the front door slammed, before the rest of them could even have got in the car—they might have returned for something, have called out to me—I’d gone into the back room where Nolan was staying and closed the door. He’d been on the bed in blue-jean shorts and no shirt, studying. He was that sort of big North Carolina boy with black hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders and clean looks I couldn’t resist. And old enough to know the score.
“Do it to me,” I said, peeling off my baggy blue shorts and chambray shirt.
“You’re crazy,” he said, bolting upright. “They’d kill me. All of them. My folks, your mom.”
But he had. Right then and there, on the lumpy guest bed. It hadn’t taken two minutes before I realized I had more experience than he did, but I didn’t say so. And, later, when he found out, he seemed shocked but excited by it. Him getting a girl who’d been around, he didn’t mind that. Except that maybe, on some level, he did. Maybe that was the reason he never loosened up with me later, after we married, the reason he was afraid to find out what it was I really liked, because maybe I’d learned to like it before him. Or perhaps that wasn’t it; perhaps he just thought it was always going to be the way it had been the first time. Me stripping and him climbing on and going wild with how willing I was and how exciting that was, with how fast he came.
You would think, with a start like that, long before anybody said anything about love or marriage or making a family, when we were taking it whenever we could, and, later, when our families knew we were “dating” and we spent weekends together, rushing to get into bed when he came to see me at Duke, when I went to see him at Chapel Hill, where he was finishing his M.B.A., you’d think nothing could mess that up. I had thought we were made for each other.
How could it not have worked out? How could I have grown so angry at him? How could Nolan have become so rejecting and rebuffing toward me? If I had been outside it looking in, could I have said, Stop, wait, this moment you are taking a wrong turn, taking a dangerous step, here’s where you’re going to make trouble? I had never suggested we see a counselor, fearing that one would only tell me to be a better wife, and knowing that there was no chance Nolan would have hauled his ego into some therapist’s office and said, My wife and I are having trouble in bed. He’d have died first. He had.
I was never with another man after Nolan. The only institution I was less fond of than marriage was adultery. Adultery being a diversion created by marriage to maintain itself, a distraction to keep a woman or man from ever questioning the basic contract.
I’d tried in vain to convey this to Nolan: my faithfulness. My dislike of, distaste for, adultery as something which adulterated and therefore made marriage palatable. I had tried to no avail to reassure him he would never have cause to worry on that score. But he did not believe me. He was jealous of impossible, implausible, boring and gross men of all sorts who were chummy with me at bank affairs. Jealous even of the gay architect (what Katie and I called “a real man’s man”) with whom I sometimes had lunch to talk about the houses we’d both worked on. He was jealous even of Harriet, Harriet, my oldest friend, to whom, he was convinced, I confided everything. Despite my assurances, and despite the fact that he could have observed that I was not the sort who confided everything to anybody or anything much to anybody.
Jealous men, I had come in time to believe, had once been jealous boys. It became a part of their personality. It seemed to me that Nolan must have been jealous of something as a child. Some kid who had the best shooter, or Marvel comic, or trick of holding a basketball in one hand. Something. (Perhaps that was the personality that went into banking. Bankers were always guarding their assets and coveting yours, weren’t they? Wasn’t that the job description?)
Oh, Nolan, I said aloud, burying my head in my arms on the rough wooden table, I’m sorry. I truly am sorry.
MY FIRST EXPERIENCE of sex had been so generous, so freeing, I had assumed that was the way males and females were made.
I’d been sixteen; it was the start of my junior year at Miss Pritchard’s. I’d fallen head over heels in heat with my history teacher. His name was Ned, Ned Brown. He was ten years older, all of twenty-six. Just a boy, but a grown man to me then. I’d hung around him after class, gone by to talk to him—which was not at all encouraged—whenever I had a free moment. Finally, one day I’d made him a proposition.
I’d closed the door to his office—Mr. Brown he was to me then—and suggested we become lovers. I knew that he would never tell anyone, I said; he’d be dismissed if he did. And he knew that I would never tell because I’d be expelled at once and my mother would feed me to the spiders. It would be our secret. I had never been with anybody; he could teach me everything.
He’d replied, panicked, “You’re trying to get me fired, Cooper. You’re tired of school and wish to go home.” He’d stood and pressed his palms on an open book.
“You know you want to do it with me,” I said boldly.
“I may know that. I also know I wasn’t born without a brain. Girls tell everything. They’re conduits. That blond who’s your next of kin will know by nightfall.”
I was offended and said so. “I don’t tell anybody everything; I don’t tell anybody anything.”
Ned had walked around the other side of his desk and stood close to me, still looking ready to bolt. “Where do you propose we carry on this way, and when? This is not only crowded as a zoo, it’s also public as one.”
“I’ve thought it all out,” I told him. I was in a skirt and sweater set, pretending to be heading for study hall. “We’ll meet in the practice room, the back one on the third floor. You can go up there from the faculty office wing here and I can go up there by the back classroom stairs. We’ll do it in the afternoon the days that everybody goes to the military institute to have their pretend dates in the parlors. Or when everybody goes to the movie
matinee in groups of four to meet boys in the theatre. They’ll all be busy. The girls trying to get off where the chaperones can’t see; the chaperones trying to watch what the girls are doing. There are always two or three of us who don’t go on these trips. Oddballs. Loners. Nobody pays much attention. They know we aren’t pyromaniacs, just misfits. We play the piano, or we read books that aren’t assigned, or we write long letters home telling our mothers about the wonderful time we’re having.”
“You’ve got it all worked out.”
“I have.” I took a step toward him so we were almost touching. “We have to open the door now; you’ll get in trouble. Do men always want to kiss with their tongues?”
“Here,” Ned said, “I’ll demonstrate.”
He taught me so much about my body, made me so comfortable with its wishes. Told me: “You have to do some of the work, too,” and showed me how to do my share. Told me: “Take your time; sex is in the brain and the brain doesn’t like to be rushed.” “But we have to hurry,” I’d said the first time, when we were huddled together on a pile of overcoats on the floor of the second piano practice room.
“We don’t,” he said. “If they come in here at any stage in the proceedings, then we’ll be drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, shipped out. If they don’t—then we have world enough and time. Or, at least, we have the afternoon.”
I’d said, “Teach me everything. I don’t know anything.”
“We’ll start by naming,” he said. “I’m Ned, not Mr. Brown, you’re Sarah, not Cooper.” He’d put his hand on me, on my panties. “What do you call this?”
“My ‘down there.’ ” I’d tried to make it a joke, but that was the truth. I was jumpy on our piled-up coats, electrified at having his hand on me.
“But what if your ‘down there’ ends up ‘up here’?” He’d let it be a joke.
I tried to remember what other girls called between their legs. Mostly they didn’t, or they didn’t tell anyway. I thought of Harriet, who was always telling me about how some boyfriend, some Stewart or Stuart, wanted to get his hands on her treasure, wanted to feel her treasure, sure wished he could get in her treasure. “My treasure,” I said to Ned, thinking that sounded terribly worldly.
He’d acted as if he wanted to laugh, but he hadn’t. He was one of those dark, soulful-looking men in white shirts that girls eat their hearts out for, just this side of tubercular, but kind, his pale lips able to make the gentlest possible smile at my inexperience. “You hoard treasure; you want to give this away.”
I’d reached up, then, and yanked his head down by his black hair, bringing his ear to my lips. “Pussy,” I’d whispered.
“Very good. Now we can begin the education of Henry Adams,” and he’d put my hand on him, already hard.
We’d only got together a dozen times. It hadn’t been as easy to beg out of every outing as I had anticipated, and I didn’t want to raise suspicions. Then, at the end of the year, Ned told me he wasn’t coming back.
“Time I got that Ph.D.,” he said. “That way, the next time I’m seduced by a student, I can at least be sure she’s in graduate school.”
He’d dropped me a couple of cards my senior year, telling me to take care of myself, wishing me happy graduation, signing them Henry A. I told Harriet at the time they were from some cadet, that I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. Harriet, who believed me, thought that thrilling.
Later, I told Nolan there had been someone first, but not who. I had to tell; he knew I was using birth control. I didn’t share with him my early terror when Ned had tried rubbers, nor my boldness in going to Mother’s old doctor and obtaining a diaphragm through a mixture of coaxing and coercion. Counting on his desire to keep me from getting pregnant to combine with his wish not to upset Edith H. Cooper. At first Nolan seemed flattered that someone with experience had sought him out. And that he had a girlfriend who wasn’t a virgin. But after we married, his attitude changed. Every word I said, everything I confided I liked, everything I already knew how to do, he used to bank the fire which had flared so swiftly between us.
Living with someone that jealous, I’d learned to keep my mind blank, to keep even my thoughts clean. I’d learned to think of my mother, of my father as I remembered him, of my grandmother, of Bess, my sister, young, rocking herself back and forth after our daddy died, papering her walls with pictures of horses. I’d learned not even to dream of that year with Ned Brown, lest some of the remembered coupling creep into my stirring, my voice, my response.
I poured out the cold coffee and rose, still smelling a heavy waxy smell under the resinous pines. There was no use in dealing with regrets. Today was enough for today. Not that that was true; you never really lived only in the present. I wouldn’t be out there among the peach trees weeding and feeding but for the memory of last year’s harvest of fruit. You were always thinking about what you’d done before and what you were going to do again. Unless, with Alzheimer’s, you’d come to the end of your past; unless, dying like Nolan, you’d come to the end of your future.
DESCENDING THROUGH THE red clay hills with their blanket of pine, I felt back in my skin again—if not at peace with myself, at least not at war.
Part of the pleasure I found in these excursions into the Blue Ridge was the echo of a summer long ago. I was four. It was before Bess was born, when just the three of us, my mother and daddy and I—Mother laden with the baby but still agile in walking boots—spent three months in a log cabin in north Georgia. While my daddy, MacDonald Cooper, gathered data on the WPA in the four-state area—Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas—my mother and I spent our days eating peanut butter sandwiches by the creek, which ran by our cabin and tasted of iron, and gathering fresh needles of short-leafed pine for a sachet to put under my pillow at night. She young, slim, tanned from the wind and sun, I in my shorts and canvas shoes, covered in insect repellant, a smell I can still sense beneath the odor of pine.
I remember the thrill of hearing my daddy come back in the early evening, hearing him call out to me, “Where’s my Sarah?” and turning my head to see him, amazed to find I could tell direction by sound.
I remember touching a tree, trying to make sense of all its parts. The rough trunk big around as a cider barrel, the sharp-petalled cones, the needled branches, some hanging as low as my head. Tree, once a shape in a coloring book, now a reality containing many parts. I remember at night, when the resin-filled logs were fed into the stove and burst into flame like torches, thinking that the very tree itself contained fire.
I kept that summer deep inside me, even after baby Bess was born and we settled in Mineral Springs, after my daddy’s heart was torn apart, and after I watched Edith Cooper go back to the pine forests and begin her work there with silken webs glistening with dew, spun on a pile of pine needles. Intricate patterns that I, a schoolgirl by that time, was forbidden to disturb.
I had that summer still, and could recapture its wonder and contentment each time I drove high into the aroma of these woods. Even when I tended my gardens and fed my fruit trees, it stayed with me. Even when I covered the walls of forlorn and abandoned rooms with countless paper forests of lilies, peonies, roses, climbing vines, it was there as well.
TWO
I HAD TAKEN Mother’s advice, and now woke at a different time and breakfasted in a different place. I’d begun to move through the mornings with some ease, no longer going in and out the back door without a sound so as not to disturb someone resting upstairs. No longer stirring and baking in the kitchen in fear that the smell of the food would be painful to someone who couldn’t eat.
This morning in the first light, before heading for the Greenville airport and Texas, I carried my plate of scrambled eggs, toast, peach preserves and my coffee out the front door and sat in a rocker on the porch. This was new, eating here in the mornings. Just in sight to my right were the peach trees, just in sight to my left was the county road and, across it, my neighbor’s apple orchards. Before me, the winding
gravel drive circled a large oak. Dogs Past ran beneath its branches, darting after scents under the shrubs. (Will Rogers, Thomas Hardy, Gentle Ben’s forerunners.) When I had time to linger for a spell, I could watch the mail carrier make her rounds and workers in their ties and scarves head for the highway and city desks.
Fannin, my daughter, had called just before midnight with the news that she was expecting a fifth child. I hadn’t slept much after that. I’d packed in a rush, throwing in a linen dress for supper at the Stagecoach Inn, my dog-walking shoes for the back roads of East Texas, and, my mind only half on the matter, had laid out a long, gored blue skirt for today, an embroidered white blouse that Mother had given me after an earlier trip to South America, a wide-brimmed straw hat with streamers, and sandals with heels. Harriet liked me to look presentable.
I was still trying to deal with the news. I didn’t know—and perhaps Fannin didn’t either—how much of her decision had to do with losing her father. If I calculated right, she was six weeks along, and he, six weeks gone. She hadn’t wanted to wake me, she said, and she hoped she hadn’t. But she’d just realized I was going off for my “Texas slumber party” and she wanted to tell me before I left. “Don’t be mad, Mother,” she said, which filled me with guilt.
“I’m not mad,” I told her, though I was, of course, as she knew, not heartened by the news. I worried for her health and her stamina, understanding better than she what was involved in raising a child to adulthood. What was she doing, my dark, slender daughter, having baby after baby? What was she thinking of?
I knew what she was thinking, because she’d said it to me and to her Aunt Bess, her confidante. She thought that Bess and I had had lonely childhoods, with our father dead and our mother gone, that she and George had had lonely childhoods, with just the two of them at home. I knew that she wanted to provide for her young a clan of siblings, a pack, the safety of numbers, the warmth of a crowd.
Life Estates Page 4
