Shelley, too, tried to help her daughter temporarily forget about her pregnancy issues by visiting most Thursdays, the only day in the week, what with her bridge games, tennis, walking group, her luncheon circuit, and volunteering at the library that she could block off three or four hours. She brought Karen homemade soups and retold her own pregnancy stories, thinking they might help Karen see that she was not the only one with discomfort and inconvenience. Sympathy was what Karen wanted, but her mother thought empathy was the same thing. Shelley found it uncanny that their symptoms were so similar: nausea throughout the morning and into the afternoon, loss of appetite, no interest in S-E-X, and a general resentment toward people who tried to help. It was this final symptom that eventually prompted Shelley to stop coming. Karen was tired of trying to act cheerful when she was miserable. Plus, miserable people depressed Shelley. So instead, they visited by phone a couple of times a week. “Until this unpleasantness is over,” Shelley said.
When, exactly, the unpleasantness would end was a mystery. Even though Bob understood Karen’s need for sympathy, he was losing patience with her. Women all over the world get pregnant, he told her one night after an especially long day on the road. Did their lives get turned upside down? Were no meals made? Did their homes look like national disaster areas? “What else, Bob?” Karen shouted. “What else is missing?” And even though he hadn’t planned on fighting, he was in it now and told her that yes, he did miss the sex. “God, you’re such a selfish prick!” yelled Karen. “You wanted this baby, damn you, but I’m the one paying the price!” She started throwing things at him; whatever was on the bed was suddenly moving in Bob’s direction: a tissue box, an empty mug, a yellow legal pad, a folder full of work papers that came apart in the air and floated to the floor. And then for a moment, all was quiet. “Oh God.” Karen covered her mouth with her hands.
“Is this what we’ve come to?”
“I don’t know,” she said, breaking down. “I’m so sorry.”
Bob sat down on the edge of the bed, and Karen leaned in to hug him, something she hadn’t done in weeks. Bob took her in his arms and held her, softly stroking the hair he was still enamored with. “I don’t want to fight anymore.”
“No,” she said, tears running down her face now. “And I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I hate everything about this pregnancy. It’s ruining our lives.”
“For now. But I know it will eventually enhance our lives. We just have to be patient.”
“I’ve been patient, Bob.” She was sobbing. “It’s brought me nothing but misery.”
Bob kissed Karen’s forehead and then her cheeks. “Just a little while longer.”
Karen looked at him. “Are you sure?” she asked, wanting to believe him.
“I promise.”
Bob tucked his wife back into bed and then picked up the room. He made himself a grilled cheese sandwich and read the newspaper in the living room. He watched North by Northwest, one of his favorite Hitchcock films. Bob had been watching them with his father since his teenage years, when Tucker introduced his son to the esteemed director by insisting they watch Psycho with all the lights out. After the movie, Bob ever so gently got into bed beside his wife and slept soundly. It wasn’t until Karen woke him that he opened his eyes, even though it was well past seven o’clock. She was standing over him, smiling. “What?” he asked sleepily.
“You, Bob Parsons, make good on your promises.”
Bob sat up in bed. “You feel better?”
“I feel terrific.”
CHAPTER 5
MAY 1993
Rebecca Spears Parsons was born at 3:46 p.m. on the fifth of May, just one day late, weighing seven pounds, ten ounces, and measuring twenty inches, statistics that Karen, like many mothers, would reflect on in her child’s teenage years. She would call them to mind, often when she was angry or frustrated with her daughter, as a reminder of how fragile and silent she had once been. On that unusually warm May afternoon, Rebecca looked very much like the old-fashioned doll Karen had played with as a child. Her grandmother had given it to her right after her twin brothers were born, and Karen toted it around with her for almost two years. Rachel was the name she had given the doll, and Rebecca had her brown hair and blue eyes, as well as long enough eyelashes to draw comments from the maternity nurses. And even though Karen guessed the nurses said encouraging words to every new mother, each drinking in the compliments like an overdue glass of water, she thought Rebecca was exceptionally beautiful.
When Karen got pregnant again, she was sick, but not nearly as sick as when she carried Rebecca. She had just enough energy, she told Bob, to look at houses. Karen and Bob loved their apartment, but it was too small to house a family of four. The spare room, which Karen and her mother had transformed into a nursery by stenciling colorful kites on the walls, would not house a two-year-old and a baby. It took just under a month for Karen and her mother to find and fall in love with a Cape Cod expanded to twice its original size, sitting on a half-acre lot surrounded by mature maple and oak trees. Shelley proclaimed it perfect the minute Karen stopped the car at the curb out front. Bob liked the house as much as Karen did, so they bought it, putting thirty percent down. This was possible, Bob pointed out at the closing, only because they had been so frugal.
OCTOBER 1995
It took just over seventeen hours of labor on the twelfth of October to push out an eight pound, eleven ounce boy. Robert looked swollen and bruised when he finally emerged, an infant prize fighter. The nurses told Karen he would be strong and handsome, like his dad. Bob was thrilled to have a son, a namesake. His daughter was lovely and intelligent, everyone said, for a two-and-a-half-year-old, but only a son could provide another generation of Parsonses. As Bob held his son in the hospital, he fantasized about playing football with him in the backyard on cool fall days. Karen and Rebecca would watch from lawn chairs on the sideline and serve them hot chocolate with mini marshmallows at the half.
Bob bought Robert a plush football for his first birthday, which Robert stuffed in his mouth. When his son turned two, Bob bought him a Nerf football, thinking it would be easy for him to catch. But whenever Bob tossed the ball to his son, from as little as one foot away, he dropped it. And not only did he drop it, he laughed when he did so, as if dropping the ball had been the intention of the game. Karen told Bob to lower his expectations. Just let Robert hold the football in his hands and run around the house with it. Chase him. But Bob refused to give in, to baby him. The kid was supposed to be able to catch a ball without hours of training. Anyone knew that. Bob was so tired when he got home from work; it was a relief actually not to have to give another twenty-minute pep talk—this one about the old pigskin instead of paper and cardboard—in an effort to get his uncoordinated son to catch a ball. Karen urged him to continue, like she urged him to occasionally do the dishes or read bedtime stories, but he ignored many of her requests. After a twelve-hour day, he was bushed.
Increasingly, Karen cared for the children and Bob cared for himself. It made good sense to Bob, since he was traveling more and had just been made responsible for the largest sales area in the country. His hard work and devotion to the company were paying off. His name carried clout and suggested a can-do attitude. Customers expected the very best out of Bob Parsons, and they were rarely if ever disappointed. If a shipment was delayed or an order not filled, Bob had the good sense to send expensive gifts or theater tickets to sold-out performances and dinner vouchers to popular pricey restaurants in its place. He was the man everyone wanted to work with, and nobody knew that better than Bob.
Karen, with two children, had lost the short-lived professional status she gained when she officially stopped working for Clear Communication the day before Rebecca was born. She and Bob had agreed when she got pregnant that she would stay home with their children, at least for the first year. Jennifer told her to holler if she ever wanted to work again. And for a while, Jennifer kept in touch, as did Mary and Patty. They invite
d Karen to birthday lunches and other informal office gatherings, but as time passed and Jennifer hired two additional writers Karen didn’t know, the get-togethers became awkward. Minus the commonality of a shared working environment, they had little to link them together. Jennifer, who had recently married her boyfriend of eight years at her parents’ house in Naples, Florida, and Mary, and Patty, recently engaged, were all professional women without children. The two new hires were right out of college. Child-rearing stories, Karen quickly realized, were best understood and appreciated by other mothers. And because Karen was no longer in the office, and had not been in the office for more than two years, she had become an interloper, too far out of the loop to know which client was doing what.
What she missed more than the work itself was interaction with other adults. She had Bob, of course, when he was in town. But their conversations were often interrupted by Rebecca and Robert, who seemed to need something at the exact moment Bob was leading up to the crescendo of another work story. He repeatedly told Karen to ignore them, that they were just vying for her attention and that whatever they wanted could certainly wait. But Karen had a hard time ignoring the children, who had perfected whining, crying, biting one another, and shrieking at an early age. What mother could ignore that?
Bob seemed content to kiss their cheeks and pat their heads when he left for work in the morning, and to do the same thing when he got home in the evening, meaning their day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-by-minute care fell to Karen. Robert awoke at six o’clock, and Rebecca went to bed at eight o’clock, and the fourteen hours that stood between those defining quotidian occurrences belonged to the three of them. Their long days together were remarkably repetitive. Robert and Karen read books and played with toys until six thirty, when Rebecca got up. Karen then made breakfast for the family. Bob left the house by six forty-five. The television went on at seven. The children watched educational shows for two hours while Karen showered, dressed, tidied the house, and made lists, fueled by coffee. On the days Rebecca didn’t have preschool, the three of them then ran errands for an hour. At ten o’clock, weather permitting, they drove to a playground, where Karen sat on a bench and watched her children play. If other kids were there, Karen shared the bench with other mothers. Oftentimes her conversations with the stay at homes, as she referred to them, were far less satisfying for Karen than flipping through a magazine.
JUNE 1998
Not ready for summer, for the end of Rebecca’s three-day a week preschool schedule, tired of their regular play areas, and desperate for stimulating conversation and company, Karen decided to try a new location. Carson Park was a twenty-minute drive from Karen’s house, twice the distance she usually drove for a swing set. It was a small park with antiquated equipment, nothing special. The only reason Karen knew it existed was because it sat across the street from where she had her hair trimmed every three months. But Karen remembered it as a nicely appointed park, with a grassy area, several picnic tables, a large sandbox (which is all Robert cared about), a climbing and sliding apparatus, and a swing set, which would satisfy Rebecca.
When Karen pulled up to the curb the following morning, the park was empty. The four U-shaped swings hung motionless, which made Rebecca squeal with delight. She ran from the car, as did Robert, who lumbered across the grass carrying an oversized red and yellow plastic dump truck with both hands. Once Karen delivered a pail and a shovel to her son and gave her daughter a starter push, she sat down on one of two wood benches with her travel mug of coffee. It was just after ten, so she would let the children play for an hour before calling them over for a snack. She had packed animal crackers and grape juice; Robert would be pleased.
Several minutes later, another car joined Karen’s at the curb. When the doors opened, Karen saw a little girl step out and run to the swings. Karen watched Rebecca’s face register casual interest. The girl chose the swing next to Rebecca’s and immediately started pumping on her own. At the car, the mother was helping the little boy choose toys from a large plastic laundry basket. Two colorful motorcycles in hand, the boy dashed to the sandbox and sat down a few feet from Robert. Like the girls, they looked very close in age. Karen took a sip of coffee as she looked back at the mother, who was now carrying the basket and a canvas bag. She smiled at Karen then sat on an adjacent bench.
“Britney,” she called out to the girl on the swings, “we’ll have a snack at eleven.” They were on the same schedule. The woman then took a travel mug and a thick novel out of her canvas bag and started reading. Perfect, thought Karen, who went back to the food magazine in her lap. She made an effort to try one new recipe a week, but had fallen behind and was hoping to find something today she could make on the weekend. Bob had been dropping hints for salmon, a miracle for a steak-lover, and Karen had just found what she thought might work. The marinade was simple, even though it called for ingredients she didn’t have at home. The pasta salad pictured with the fish looked good, too. While Bob preferred potatoes or rice with his main dish, he didn’t object to pasta, especially in the summer. Karen looked up from the glossy pages. She could also make a Caesar salad, Bob’s favorite. Karen glanced over at the other woman, who now looked familiar. She wasn’t anyone from the neighborhood, or from Rebecca’s nursery school. Perhaps Karen had seen her at the grocery store or at one of a dozen regular errand locations around town. The woman looked up from her book and met Karen’s gaze. They both smiled and suddenly Karen knew; it was Sarah Kelly from high school.
“Sarah?”
“Karen,” Sarah replied, closing her book and setting it down next to her. “I thought I knew you.” Karen stood and approached Sarah’s bench. “Have a seat and tell me what you do to keep your sanity.”
“From the looks of it,” said Karen, sitting, “about the same thing as you do.”
Both women, relieved to find someone in a situation similar, talked easily. Karen had no nearby girlfriends, now that she no longer saw Jennifer, Mary, and Patty. Her college roommate, Allison, had married a rancher and moved to Montana, and her good friends from high school were scattered, many of them single and working in big cities. The few that were still in Karen’s hometown were too busy with their own lives to make the fifty-minute commute to visit. Karen was inundated, too. Using exhaustion as an excuse, Karen didn’t try hard enough to keep in touch. She sent Christmas cards and occasionally called, but mostly she did nothing but care for her family.
Sarah’s friends, some of whom Karen remembered, were also busy or elsewhere. Since Sarah had ventured out to the East Coast for college, many of those friends had settled in New England. She, too, would have stayed, in Boston, if she hadn’t met Vincent Keyworth, her husband of nine years. They met when she was a sophomore in college and he was a junior. Like an idiot, Sarah said, she dropped out at the end of her junior year to get married. Vincent was going to spend a year studying in London, and he wanted Sarah to go with him. And Sarah’s parents wouldn’t allow her to do so unless she was Mrs. Vincent Keyworth. “Can you believe that? They wouldn’t let me go without a ring on my finger, but they had no trouble with my dropping out of college.”
“I was right there with you. Bob graduated a year ahead of me and at times we both thought it was silly to wait.”
“Yeah, but you did, didn’t you? I honestly don’t know what I was thinking. I could have gone to school in London and graduated with my class in the spring.”
“But at the time you were in love.”
“Oh yes. Plus, my mom thought I should put all my energies into being a good wife.”
“Ah, there’s nothing like maternal advice.”
“Especially when it’s misguided and unwelcome.”
Karen laughed. “Do you ever think about going back to school?”
“All the time,” said Sarah. “I have just two things in my way.”
“Time and energy?”
“Britney and Jeremy.”
As it turned out, Britney was eight months older than Rebecc
a, and Jeremy was just two months older than Robert. It was easy to tell they were contemporaries because they played nicely together. Rebecca and Britney had stopped swinging and were lying in the grass pointing up at the clouds. And Robert and Jeremy were pushing trucks around in the sand. Moments like this one, when her children were serenely occupied and Karen could simply sit and watch them, made motherhood enjoyable.
“Mom!” called Rebecca. “I’m starving!”
“Me too,” said Britney, getting up from the ground. “Let’s get a snack.”
The girls raced to their mothers. “And I’m thirsty,” Rebecca said. “I want some juice.”
“Please,” said Karen.
“Please,” parroted Rebecca.
Karen poured Rebecca’s juice into a plastic cup. She gave her a plastic bag with animal crackers and told her to sit back down on the grass with her new friend. Britney, holding a juice box and cheese crackers, said, “Let’s go!” The women then readied the snacks for their sons. Robert needed a lid on his cup so he wouldn’t spill it all over himself and just a few crackers at a time, or they would end up in the sand.
“Spills everything?” asked Sarah.
“Absolutely everything.”
“Don’t worry; there’s hope. Jeremy was like that six weeks ago, and now he’s much better. He can actually drink a cup of juice without spilling a drop.”
A Changing Marriage Page 7
