Mr. and Mrs. Richard Ashmore had a real good time, and so did the Standing Stone of Ireland. I swear we hit the mattress at least ten times a day.
Then home we went, back to real life. And, truly, our first summer wasn’t too bad. We both had jobs, and Richard had made the decision earlier to skip summer school, so we actually lived something resembling a real life for three months. We fixed up our apartment and entertained our families. We had Laurie and Francie up to stay with us, and Richard taught them to dance. I sang “Nessum Dorma” in concert for Daddy, and Richard praised me as if I had outsung Sutherland. I kept house and managed a credible dinner for his parents, Richard and Daddy refrained from killing each other, and all my sisters seemed suitably impressed with my new status as a married adult. Even that wretched brat Francie, who, of course, hung all over Richard. (Looking back, why I didn’t see it coming….)
But Richard changed. In the space of a summer, my devoted boyfriend who’d sent me flowers for no reason at all started talking about budgets and saving. He got testy when I forgot to mail the payment for the phone bill. And once, after I forgot to start dinner because I was working on a new jazz piece, he got more than a little sharp about my cooking, my housekeeping, and my general all-around sloth. I asked him rather nastily if he would like to wear his dinner, and then we ended up going at each other instead of eating. I believe we ordered in a pizza.
But the next morning he asked why I never made the bed when I got up. After all, his mother always had. I said (quite reasonably, I thought) what was the point, since we were going to be back there in no time at all, and he gave me one of those patented Ashmore I don’t believe I heard that correctly Diana looks.
Over breakfast that morning, I imagined him wearing his oatmeal.
He decided that we should start off right, be independent of our families. The Ashmores paid his tuition, and Mama’s estate paid mine, but he wanted us to be responsible for all the rest of it. Fine, I said, thinking that if Daddy didn’t pay my way through life, he couldn’t dictate it, either. The piano lessons I had been giving in my desultory fashion for fun money became a matter of financial necessity, and I found myself back in church on Sunday mornings, playing the piano and organ for a local Baptist church. Richard found a job doing freelance drafting, which paid pretty well for a college student. We didn’t live half badly, considering how unbearably poor our fellow married students were, but the downside of not starving was that we saw less and less of each other. Once school started, Richard took his usual full class load in addition to his job, and I had to scramble to make up the hours I had sloughed off the year before.
Suddenly, we had less time for each other. And when we were home, Richard studied. I’d never realized how much he studied. My studies, except for composition and theory, were all done in lab, but Richard couldn’t concentrate if I watched TV, so I ended up staring out the window. I’ve never been the reader Richard is.
One evening, he finally looked up from his calculations, and I guess I looked lonely. “What about that group you told me about?”
I had been asked to join a jazz group earlier that month. I didn’t think he had even heard me when I told him about the invitation. I hesitated, because I knew other music students who were in groups, and they all worked their asses off. But to get out of the house…!
“Sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course not.” He rose from his desk and came over to put his arms around me. “Di,” he said, “I know how dull it is for you here in the evenings. Get out some, okay? This is going to be a tough year for me. I’d feel better if I knew I wasn’t boring you to death.”
He was so sweet, and I had been so bitchy… and as I hugged him and one thing led to another (as it usually did with us – all that about the first year of marriage and sex is true), I didn’t even think my usual thought: Why is he so damned nice?
So I joined the group, and I loved the music, the forerunner of New Age, and I loved my new friends, and – after a few sessions in which I took their measure and they took mine – I enjoyed the talk and the companionship and the various other experiments that went on after the instruments were put away and the keyboard covered. I must be a natural addict, just as Richard has said for years, because I adapted to my new-found stimulants of choice very easily. I started seeing the world through a pink-colored haze, filled with dreams, that chased away the chill of Richard’s preoccupation and Daddy’s nagging and my fear that, sooner or later, Richard would find out.
Which, of course, he did. “Christ, Diana, what are you doing?” I spun him the usual excuses (I learned they were usual at Betty Ford), and he paid not one whit of attention to them.
I’m just having fun, Richard.
I can stop whenever I want to, Richard.
(Never spoken) Go to hell, Richard.
He brought home pamphlets from the university health clinic. He made a point of reading aloud every negative newspaper item he found on marijuana. He complained that my car reeked of pot. The more he talked, the madder I got. And then, oh, yes, then he picked what I’m sure he thought was the most convincing argument of them all.
“Think of the future. Who knows what effect this might have on our kids?”
Children! The very thought terrified me. Richard had never made any secret that he wanted children after we got out of school and got established, and, yes, once we laughingly picked out names… but that had been in play. I was absolutely convinced that, if anyone could ever prove why my mother went into the sea that day, the motive would turn out to be too many children in too little time with too little money. My mother, they said, had been a comet, a meteor across the opera stage, one of the great Medeas in history, brought down low by her wretched fertility and her apparent inability (and my father’s, as well) to learn anything remotely useful about birth control. Well, I wasn’t going to make that mistake.
IT wasn’t going to happen again.
I was only nineteen, for God’s sake, and Richard was only twenty. Why we even had to think about kids at that stage was beyond me. Maybe in ten years, when he had his career established and I had lived – maybe then I would think about it, but not till then.
I thought about it long and hard and told Richard that I was taking over the birth control.
Not that I had to worry about it that much! The boy who could barely keep his hands off me in high school had metamorphosed into a young man who, half the time, merely kissed me good night and fell into bed. Our sex life slid into a frightful routine – not totally unexpected, I guess now (who could sustain that level of activity?), but it certainly was a disappointment the first time I tried to interest him and he begged off from exhaustion.
I tried the pill, but it made me sick and depressed, and Richard told me to stop taking it before my mood deteriorated. He even had the nerve to suggest that the pill and certain illegal substances were not a good chemical mix. I told him to stop nagging me, since after all I had joined the group at his suggestion, and he said – well, who remembers what he said? It escalated until we were smack in the middle of our first major married fight, which ended when he took his books and went to the library to study. I started imagining him with his face smashed in, but by that time he had left, so I calmed myself down by crying, eating a pint of ice cream, and smoking a joint.
When he came home, I pretended to be asleep, and I sprawled across our bed so that there was no room for him. He slept on the sofa, and that weekend he went down to see his parents, alone.
I had the weekend to think through my sins. I decided I was being a bad wife – but then I realized, for the first time, how thoroughly I hated that word. I hated being Richard’s wife. I hated that I had to account to him. I hated that he expected me to live up to whatever Peggy Ashmore fantasy wife standards he had in his mind.
And mostly, I hated being by myself. I missed him. So, when he returned, I was properly penitent. I cooked him a nice dinner. I put on his favorite music. And, since he readily admitted
that he had missed me terribly, we made up beautifully.
That took care of that week, at least.
Then there was Daddy.
With the jazz group activities, both during and after rehearsals, I had – cardinal sin of sins! – neglected my voice, and when Daddy found out, he was merciless in his criticism. I got so I was afraid to hear the phone ring. After a few weeks of making Richard answer the phone, I wasn’t surprised when Daddy drove up to find out just what I was hiding.
Oh, my God, I will never forget the humiliation when he made me sing for him! Of course, every skipped day of practice showed; it always did with me. He demanded that I give the group up, and for once, Richard, that treacherous bastard, instead of standing up for me and telling Daddy where to go, agreed with him. I remember standing there, listening to them, and imagining them both with their faces shoved into concrete.
Well, I resisted. I had fun in the group, I was accepted; there I was just Diana. I wasn’t a wife or a daughter or a potential star, I just was. And we had a gig coming up at a jazz festival, and I wasn’t about to miss that.
So Daddy left, muttering dark imprecations about withdrawing my tuition. But he didn’t know when to quit, and he kept after me long distance, to the point where I not only avoided the telephone, I smoked dope in the apartment to calm myself down. Richard, in self-defense, took up cigarettes and studied more and more at the library. We fought about the dope, we fought about his smoking, we fought about the brand of cereal I bought. We fought about everything, and less and less did we make up with the Standing Stone of Ireland.
By the time our first anniversary rolled around, my grades were down, my voice was shot, he was smoking a pack a day, and sex happened once a week, in good weeks.
And Daddy continued to breathe down my neck.
I was so nervous and on edge that the inevitable happened. I lost track of three weeks on, one week off, and forgot my pills for two whole weeks, and that damned fertility kicked in, right on schedule.
I knew, right away. I woke up feeling very strange and knew, with the most sinking feeling in the world, that I had felt this way before.
Okay, I’m going to talk about this calmly and rationally.
I’ve read a lot about abortion, trying to come to terms with IT. Well, I have news for any man who excoriates a woman for exercising her right to choose. No man on earth, and that includes Mr. Bloody Perfect Richard Ashmore, can possibly understand what it is like to look at the blue tip of a pregnancy test wand and know that your entire world has crashed.
And mine had just crashed for the second time in two years.
Even smoking a joint didn’t calm me down.
It was too much! I’d lost my right to my own space, my right to determine how I wanted to live my life (and, I faced the truth now, the only reason I got married), and now I had completely lost control over even my own body. I was well and truly trapped, trapped by the role marriage had thrust upon me, trapped between Richard’s expectations and Daddy’s demands, and now trapped by this growing thing inside that was going to expect me to grow up and get my act together and be a mother.
Mother? How could I be a mother? My two role models, Peggy and Mama, were polar opposites. Supermom and Medea. Great.
I looked into the future, as I stared at that wretched blue stick. I saw myself in ten years, standing in the doorway waving my rising young professional husband off to work, with two or three perfect little Ashmores waiting for their bloody little breakfasts and another perfect little Ashmore undoubtedly ruining whatever figure I had managed to preserve to that point. I thought about the wine bars of Paris and how they did not come equipped with kiddie menus and crayons. I thought of Richard, able to determine his own life as he saw fit, and I thought of me, trapped by biology and a family history of untimely fertility and the title of Mrs. Richard Ashmore.
And then I looked into the past.
The thought of another procedure – I thought back two years, I remembered lying there on that table, looking at the ceiling, while the clock tried to run backward in time. I remembered that sound. I remembered how empty I felt. And mostly I remembered how much I cried afterwards.
I thought of the voice I still heard in the night.
Past and future. Both just as unbearable as the present.
So I decided to run away.
I needed time to think, I decided feverishly as I threw clothes into a suitcase. I needed time to plan. I needed time to – and I never really got the chance to figure out what I needed. Richard came home from class, tired, stressed out from carrying twenty-one hours, and, unfortunately for the rest of our lives together, he did not read my mind. Instead, he nearly fell over the suitcase by the door as I sat at his desk, trying to pen a note to him.
If he was upset when I announced that I had to get away for a few days, he masked it well. I look back, and I realize that, as things had disintegrated between us, he had learned to shutter his emotions. He wasn’t the boy I had married.
And, somehow, that strange calmness of his provoked everything that followed.
I thought that he had no idea that I was pregnant, but he proved me wrong.
“Is running away going to help the baby?” he asked quietly, so quietly that at first I thought I had imagined it.
“What baby?” But I’ve always been a terrible liar, and I knew the shock of his words showed on my face.
“The baby you bought the pregnancy test for yesterday,” he said, and I cursed myself for not hiding that stupid box any better than I had. I should have dumped it at school. “The baby that has you acting like a terrified rabbit. That baby, Diana.”
And then I panicked, and I said it. I don’t know why I said it. “There isn’t a baby, Richard,” I said, “not anymore.”
He moved so quickly that I didn’t see it coming to get out of the way. Not that he hit me, oh, heavens, no, not Richard Ashmore. But within a second, he had me pinned up against the wall, and not because we couldn’t make it to the bed fast enough. “What did you do?” he said, and I think he shouted, and I do remember that his hands bit into my shoulders. “God, Diana, what did you do?”
I tried to twist away, but he held me there. And then I exploded.
I don’t remember everything I said. The only thing that sticks in my mind is that I said that the whole idea of having a child sickened me, that I couldn’t take a child as smug and self-righteous and bloody perfect as he was, and that I would never, ever let him get me pregnant again. I truly don’t remember anything else. I know I said more, because, more than anything in the world, I wanted to smash that exquisite coolness of his before I completely smashed his face in.
I shocked him. His face went white, whiter than I’d ever seen it, and in his shock, he let me go. I scooped up my suitcase and flew out the door.
And the next morning, after spending the night on the sofa at the clarinetist’s, safe from the telephone, I drove myself to the clinic.
I sat in the parking lot for a long time. I don’t know how long. Then, finally, I got out of the car, and I went in—
No. Time to hit that button. I can’t talk about it.
~•~
It took a disaster for me to go back to him.
I blew off school. I drifted for several months into the fall semester, crashing on spare sofas, experimenting with drugs even some of my group members hadn’t discovered yet. I managed to make it down to see Daddy once, when the twins were away on a class trip (I made sure of that, because no way was I going to let on to that brat Francie that anything was wrong). I partied, I met men with time and money to spend on me, and I broke my marriage vows, not once but several times, and not twice with the same man. One, I believe, was a professor of mine, but I’d had a lot to drink at that particular party, and I don’t really remember.
Peggy tracked me down one day, probably through Lucy, since I hadn’t laid eyes on Richard, and, to my admittedly hazy knowledge, he hadn’t seen me either. She expressed concern about ou
r separation, and I managed to fob her off. From what she said, Richard hadn’t told her about the baby, and that relieved me. I wasn’t in a mood to listen to condemnation or get dragged off to confession or have the priest summoned to give me the Last Rites before she burned me at the stake. I said not to worry, Richard and I were just having a few problems, we’d work things out.
Peggy must have called Daddy, because within a few hours he knocked on the door of the sax player’s apartment.
He wanted to know the truth. I parried. He opened a bottle of wine, and then another, and then another. We drank. I told him how miserable I was with Richard. He told me about a woman he had been seeing (which surprised the hell out of me). I admitted to him that I had slept around on Richard.
He reminded me that he’d predicted Richard wouldn’t satisfy me for long.
I told him how I wanted to go to Paris and live a musician’s life.
He said over his dead body.
We opened another bottle of wine.
We talked about Ireland and the old days of vagabonding around Europe, before Mama died.
He told me what he had done that day long ago.
I told him I remembered.
We drank some more.
He confessed the truth about Mama’s death.
I confessed that Francie and I had witnessed the whole thing.
He said I must never tell anyone.
I said I’d only told Richard and he would be silent as the grave.
He said he didn’t trust Richard an inch.
I said I trusted Richard implicitly, and that surprised me, because I realized I really did.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 36
