In an instant motion, she sprang up and stretched out full length on top of him. “Let’s make a baby,” she whispered.
Ivan clasped his arms around her. The bones of his wrists dug low into her back, and her insides pounced in response. “Are you serious, Caroline?”
“Why not? We did so well with the first. I bet we could do it easily this time.”
He raised his eyebrows in a parody of shock. “Darling, this is so sudden. I mean…Maybe we ought to think about it for a while.”
She shifted her weight and reached down to caress him so he would forget the practical objections sprouting in his mind. Raising her head, she could see out the window Isabel at the pool, beautifully poised on the higher of the two diving boards but hesitating, peering with some trepidation down into the blue water. She had only recently learned to swim and had never dived from so high a place. Caroline stiffened with fear, then a sense of immense distance overcame her fright. Let her learn to take risks too. Jump, she thought. Go ahead and jump! As she sent her message she assumed the burden of responsibility for the dive, and accepted the outcome, whatever it might be. With her hand still on Ivan she watched, holding her breath, till Isabel finally jumped on the board, leaped in the air, made of her body a curling arc and plummeted into the water. After a long moment she reappeared yards from the board, shaking water from her face. When she waved at her companions and swam over to join them, Caroline breathed again, heavily, in relief, and turned back to Ivan. She did not tell him about the triumphant dive.
Ivan’s face softened, his mouth curved into a smile. She brought her hand up to run a finger over the rim of his lower lip. He rolled her off him gently and began to unbutton his shirt, his fingers fumbling. “Why not?” he said in a low voice. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” he added after a moment. “This is no way to decide. You must have cast a spell.”
“Yes,” she whispered in his ear. “I cast a spell.” She kissed his lips and reached out to snap the lock on the door. I have him, she thought. Then tears rose in her eyes; she had never intended to be this way with him.
Ivan put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not crying, are you? What is there to cry about?” He had all his clothes off and began on hers. “Come here,” he said in a soft urgent tone. “Come on.” He stroked her hair. “I’m going to make you very happy.”
THE SECOND BABY WAS Greta, born when Isabel was nearly eight. There was nothing crooked about Greta’s eyes, but in every other respect she was as troublesome a baby as Isabel had been angelic. Caroline and Ivan took turns pacing the floor with her the first year of sleepless nights, and once during what Ivan called the changing of the guard he muttered, “You wanted this. Take her.” She took her. She was too numb with exhaustion even to be hurt, and besides, she knew he didn’t mean it, he was worn out. Still. They were too old for this. Soon she would be forty. Isabel, who had developed sympathetic insomnia but who read pacifically, curled in a chair with a finger in her mouth, looked up from her book and commented in the offhand manner of her father, “‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace—Christopher Robin went down with Alice.’”
“Another great wit. Why don’t you just go to bed?” When Isabel ignored her, and Ivan, relieved of his duty, went to the refrigerator to swig ginger ale from the bottle, she cried out over the crying of the baby, “It’s two-thirty in the morning and everyone in this household is wide awake! What kind of a crazy place is this? I have to teach a class at nine o’clock. I can’t stand it any more!”
“I told you what to do,” said Ivan. “Drug her.”
She gave in and got a prescription for a sedative. “Now for your sleeping potion, sweetie-pie,” she would murmur to Greta each evening, shoving the spoon at her, scraping up any stray drops on her chin and guiding them firmly to her mouth. That took care of the nights, but the days grew worse as Greta grew more mobile. She whipped through the house like a lashing hurricane, not bad-natured, nor frustrated like Koh Ma, but propelled rather by the impersonal fury of the elements. She had physical strength beyond her years, and an appetite for adventure. I didn’t need this, Caroline thought. I had my baby already. This was her punishment for trying to deflect Ivan’s infatuation. She had interfered with the course of nature and the gods themselves were humbling her.
Indeed her strategy had worked, but in ways she never intended. Ivan doted on them both. He was tired, though, of night feedings and diapers, tired of playing with mashed food and plastic beads, tired of being enlightened and fair-minded. But he was picking the worst possible moment to slacken, for all about them sounded ancestral voices prophesying war. Women, arming unobtrusively for a decade, loosed their primal and most potent of weapons, words. The words sprang from the newspapers, lurked in the mailbox, invaded the bookstores and tumbled from the lips of Caroline’s students and friends. She absorbed them avidly. They were a delight to hear, saying things she had known quietly all her life. Once she heard them, she knew she knew them. And even though through circumstance she was raising a family in the conventional way, she still felt herself an anarchist at heart. This rising, at its verbal peak, had gloriously anarchic possibilities.
Reading and listening, she could feel a certain coziness. She had little to complain of, personally. She had always had her work; no one could have stopped her. In two universities she had been the first woman in the mathematics department without thinking much of it, politically, at any rate. She had seen it more as a private feat: sleight of hand, slipping through the eye of the needle. The militant women students in her classes even looked to her as some kind of exemplar, though she felt unworthy. And Ivan did not abuse her for her sex. Ivan, she was gradually discovering, adored, no, esteemed women and girls: the way they thought and spoke and moved and acted and felt. Divorced friends envied her. He was not afraid to wash dishes and he was not afraid to be tender. He was not afraid of hidden teeth in her private passageways. Like Leopold Bloom and unlike most men, he understood or felt what a woman is.
So Caroline went about her business, which was Greta and devastating. Hurricane Greta, a record-breaker. Her life had become incessant labor. Labor at school and labor at home. Somehow there was forever some wretched but consuming task to do, despite the baby-sitters. She had always disliked domestic work, but she dragged herself doggedly from one task to the other without question: they were assigned to her, apparently, by circumstance. When through the death and illness of elderly men, the chairmanship of the department dropped in her lap like a ripe fruit, she felt not honored as she would have years ago, but oppressed. She accepted, certainly; a woman in her position could not refuse. She gave up resting; she would rest in the grave. She lost weight and looked haggard, and cultivated the useful habit of not thinking ahead, or back, or beyond the task at hand, whether laundry or ever-higher-dimensional non-trivial knots.
The family thrived. Isabel was president of the fifth grade, and Greta’s powerful arm knocked objects off surfaces, shattered glass. Ivan worked longer hours, writing articles and hustling money for artists. His advice was widely sought; he consulted, he plotted strategies. He was in the prime of life and his energy was boundless. His long hair was in fashion now, and no one wore a tie any more. He marched and rallied, protesting the winding-down war with Greta on his shoulders and Isabel by his side. But she was the anarchist, Caroline thought with some bitterness, and she had no time to protest. Exhilarated by dissent, he came home ready for love. That she hardly minded. That was by far the easiest of her assigned tasks. The thriving literature of sexual discontent gave her guilt pangs, for she felt like those churlish men they complained of: she liked it quick and uncomplicated and with a minimum of talk, playful or soulful. Ivan amorous was like a chef with a gourmet feast in store, whose guests have an appetite only for hamburgers.
He cooked fancy dinners too, once in a while, but he burned the pots. One wintry evening Caroline was attacking the charred grains of rice sticking to the bottom of a pot. Like the anti-war demo
nstrators, like Ivan himself, they would not be moved. She scrubbed absently, dreaming of a toddlers’ play group for Greta, till it struck her that her hand had been oscillating across the bottom of the pot for at least five minutes. Odd, was it not? The motion of the hand, pointless and mechanical, detached from the world of purposeful action, took on an aura of the absurd. Its oscillation, fulfilling some obscure metaphysical arrangement, became sinister. All at once the seeming infinity of her futile motion, of all the tasks she assaulted each day only to see them spring up the next with unremitting life, magnified into the labors of Sisyphus, except Sisyphus, as she remembered Camus pointing out, at least relished his instant of success. And she became, in her own mind, no longer a woman but a symbol, gathering into herself the futile labors of thousands like her. Her head vibrated. Everything she had read and heard seethed and bubbled inside as in a cauldron, and then a crack in the cauldron released a torrent of spewing, accumulated brew, and she ran with dripping hands into the living room, where Ivan sat reading the newspaper and the children played with blocks on the floor.
“Why?” she screamed. “Why am I standing at the sink scrubbing a filthy pot while you’re reading the paper? Will you tell me that?”
“But I cooked it. I thought we took turns.” He lowered the paper with reluctance.
“What is the use of your cooking,” she screamed, “if you burn the pots? Do you know how hard it is to clean a burned pot? You don’t, because when I cook I don’t burn them. I have never left you a burned pot to clean.”
“Throw the pot away. Buy a new pot.”
She came closer. She wanted to hit him, he was so calm. The muscles in her right arm tensed to strike, but she was afraid to, in front of Isabel and Greta, who had put down their blocks to watch. “Don’t you dare tell me to buy a pot!” She stamped her foot. “I’m sick of your burned pots, and of the whole damned thing.”
Ivan got up wearily. “Why don’t you go lie down, then? I’ll finish the dishes.”
“I don’t want you to finish the dishes! I want you to explain to me how it came about that I am oppressed by your burned pots, how come I am standing at the sink and you are reading the paper. Is it because you’re paid more money for what you do? Is it because you’ve got a—Is that what gives you the right to burn pots?”
“Now look,” said Ivan very loudly. “Now look. I am not oppressing you. I said I’d do the dishes if you’re tired.”
“I am not tired!” she shrieked. “It’s not because I’m tired. Don’t you see, this is an oppressive situation.”
Ivan threw the newspaper to the floor and lunged forward. “I am not your oppressor!” he yelled.
Together, the children stood up. Isabel turned her head from one to the other, back and forth like a mechanical doll. She had two fingers in her mouth. Greta put her thumb in her mouth and started to wail. Both of them had a demented, mesmerized look.
“I am not your oppressor!” he yelled again, so loud that Caroline stepped back and gasped. She heard Isabel gasp too, above Greta’s wails. “Don’t call me that! I have never oppressed you or anyone else and I don’t intend to. I’ll do your fucking dishes but I will not be called an oppressor. You think life is oppressive? I’m just as oppressed as you are. People all over the world are a lot more oppressed than either of us. That’s real oppression—you want to try it? It’s a political thing. Not burned pots. Did I ever once stop you from doing what you want?” He moved brusquely to pick up Greta but she cowered away from him, howling.
“The political is personal! I mean, the personal is political.” She had read that in a magazine the other day. It had seemed profound but now it sounded stupid, with Greta crying and Isabel staring and sucking her finger.
“Don’t give me that cant!” Ivan thundered. The hanging asparagus plant in the path of his voice swayed perilously. “I’ll do the dishes for the rest of my life if you want, I don’t care, but don’t give me that nonsense! The personal is just that, personal!” He grabbed up the shrieking baby. For a second Caroline thought he would attack Greta, but he tried awkwardly to soothe her. The touch of her quieted him. “Look here, Caroline, I’ll do the dishes. We’ll eat out. We’ll eat pizza. Whatever. I know it’s hard. But this is our life. Our life is not happening in the pages of some pop magazine. Where are your brains? You’re no better than Jerome when you talk like that.” He stalked off to the kitchen, carrying Greta.
“Hard!” she yelled after him. “Hard! You don’t know what hard is!” She stretched out on the floor. The blood in her head pounded so fiercely she thought it would burst. Isabel knelt beside her. “Are you okay, Mommy?”
“You’re old enough to think now. Think, before you ever get married.”
From the kitchen, Greta’s sobs were subsiding. In a few moments she appeared, her face red and streaked, with a lollipop in her mouth. Caroline heard running water, the clink of metal against porcelain. Ivan was doing the dishes.
The local nursery school took children at three years old. The day after Greta’s birthday party—six toddlers, sugary cake, Scotch neat—Caroline enrolled her. She had a bit of spare time now, and intended to use it for rest. The hangover from the party was prolonged. But on the second day of nursery school she met her old friend the French professor in the university parking lot. She looked beautifully ascetic, he said; she could use some of his brioches. Two days later, still persuasive, he stopped her after class and suggested a drink at his apartment. Caroline was so light-headed knowing Greta would be in school all afternoon and for the next eighteen years that she would have consented to anything.
There was a divorced father who dropped off his child at nursery school the same time she did. He was giddy with relief too. They joked together on the way out like truants. Coffee. Drinks. It seemed inevitable. Ivan had said long ago to use her imagination. Her imagination told her to speed. In dreams reappearing from adolescence she drove convertibles at top speed down endless flights of stairs and woke an instant before the crash. She could do it all if she did it fast. She formed a committee of women in math and the physical sciences, graduate students and younger teachers. A small group. They did not know yet just what their mission would be—there were so many possibilities—but for the moment it was good simply to sit in a room and feel bitter together. She had always wanted to play the flute. Life was brief. She went to the music department for lessons. She raced with the velocity of a whirling dervish from the university to the nursery school, from Isabel’s dentist to her ballet classes to student conferences. She could almost be in two places at once. Her comings and goings were a study in complex variables. Mark was teaching that now, as a matter of fact, at Columbia, on her recommendation. He still sent her everything he published and asked for her comments. Touching and unnecessary deference, since, unhindered by any family, his researches had surpassed hers.
Barely eating, she ran on nervous energy and anger, an anger secretive and firmly implanted, like her IUD. Badges of merit, both. She was angry most of all at Ivan: he had no pity for her lot in life. His pity was for starving peasants in far parts of the world, political prisoners in distant cells—he was an avid follower of the news. Caroline too, but what she read in the newspapers abetted her. For the first time she was reading them from cover to cover, compulsively, like a man. Everything fitted in, everything was part of a malevolent ancient scheme. When the courts handed down decisions against abortions and pregnancy benefits, when Bella Abzug was defeated and state legislatures rejected the ERA, she stared at Ivan, reading great classics to his daughters on the floor, with a venomous cold gleam. A natural enemy. Thus did the political become personal.
Taking a shortcut one afternoon down an unfamiliar street, she stopped to admire a huge hairy sheep dog who sniffed at her with curiosity. The youngish owner spoke with animation about how intelligent his dog was: he remembered people he hadn’t seen in years. Maybe he had seen Caroline around before. Maybe she had a dog too? No? Well, anyway, maybe she would like to come
up to his place, just across the street, for a glass of wine. It surprised her; she had assumed he was homosexual, because of the leather jacket, the tight jeans and boots, the earring and the dog—that was why she talked to him so freely on the street. She glanced at him, at the dog, and at her watch. “I have only thirty-five minutes.”
“Let’s go, then,” he said. He was a photographer: there was equipment everywhere—tripods, black boxes, cameras, rolls of film. Photographs hung all over the walls, mostly group portraits of solemn Mexican and South American Indians. They had a glass of wine. He copulated the way he took pictures, decently enough, with seeming concern for his object but overriding self-absorption. The dog was called Stieglitz. When she hit the street she was horrified at the risk she had taken and dashed home as if pursued. Never again. Still, in a few days she could look back on it detached, and remember the piquant aspects. The world was certainly an amazing place. There was a world beneath the ordinary one, perceptible only to the initiated, where strangers met, signaled, coupled and parted. Was Ivan initiated? They could compare notes. What a pity, indeed, that she could not tell this story to Ivan, for the dog Stieglitz sniffing around the bed, the severe faces of the Indians looking down on them, the tripods like slender dark spectators, possessed just the quality of outlandishness that would entertain him. It came to seem, after a while, that she had done it almost for the satisfaction of telling him, whether to entertain or torment was immaterial. Still, she did not dream of taking such vicious satisfaction. Had she any tears left she would have wept.
Ivan led his own busy life without her, courteous and remote. She felt overlooked. As she whirled from place to place she clung savagely to the notion that it was he who avoided her. She wanted him to give up everything to succor her. He could cajole her and make her stop her running, but he refused. He refused to interfere with the course of her life; he would let her destroy herself, if that was her choice. His obstinate silence was an outrage. Like a starving child clutching an empty bowl, she clutched her resentment to her heart. She dreamed of more obscure ways of tormenting him, but knew in advance that he would not be tormented, or would refuse to show it. She dreamed of poisoning his plants, but when she envisioned herself approaching them, powder in hand, she knew it was beneath her. She dreamed of withholding his mail. She had no wish to read it, only to keep it from him, to deprive him of the world and make him turn to her alone for sustenance. Once she did keep from him an urgent message from work, but when she relented two days later he said it didn’t matter, it had been taken care of. Nothing she could do would matter. She seethed. When he went up to bed she drove out alone to midnight movies, and came home to the silent house to sit downstairs in darkness and smoke. She gave him no news of herself, only, scrupulously, of the children, the household. She tested, with a thrill of fear, how far she could go before he would break and try to break her. Before he would leave. She could go vast distances, she found; he was not keeping her, nor was he moving. Long ago, in a different discontent, she had felt like the still point in the whirlpool, and now she was the whirlpool itself, whirling around him. How he liked her in her new guise he did not say. He did not oppress her, that was true. For what he did to her there was no word yet invented; it was something more than ignore, but not quite obliterate. It was patrician, a skillful, unique defense. There were ready labels for what she did to him, though, nothing unique about it, and this too, her own base and limited means, enraged her.
Rough Strife Page 17
