This Side of Married

by Rachel Pastan

  “The yard looks great,” Isabel said. “Marco’s working out? The azaleas have never bloomed like this.” A gardener herself, she had regarded the dull, weedy expanse of her parents’ yard with a sense of waste for years until, quite recently, she had persuaded her mother to hire someone to take care of it. Now she looked around in satisfaction at the rich suburban ground, no longer fallow.

  “Oh, yes,” Dr. Rubin said. “He’s a nice young man. And his English is so good, too. The Stanleys have someone working for them now, and he tries, but you can’t understand a word he says.” Her eyes were on the little dog crouching and growling by the hedge. “Prince!” she called, snapping her fingers for the dog, who turned and looked at her, his fluffy stub of a tail waving.

  “If he’s a gardener, I’ll bet he has great muscles,” Tina said.

  “Don’t tease me, Tina,” Dr. Rubin said. “You’re as bad as your father. Come, Prince!”

  The dog bounded across the grass and leapt into his mistress’s lap.

  “Dirty paws,” Dr. Rubin scolded affectionately, kissing him on the nose. “You showed that squirrel, didn’t you, you noble beast.”

  “He’s getting dog hair all over you,” Tina said.

  “Oh, Prince doesn’t shed,” Dr. Rubin said complacently. She was never happier than when sitting with the dog in her lap or lying on her bed with her shoes off and Prince stretched out at her feet.

  “I think Izzy should get another dog,” Theo said, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms comfortably behind his head.

  “I don’t want another dog,” said Isabel, whose beloved Daisy had died the year before.

  “She says she doesn’t want another dog,” Theo said. “But I think she could be persuaded. Alice? Doc? A wolfhound, maybe. Or a malamute. Something big to guard the house and sleep in front of the fire.”

  “Oh, yes!” Dr. Rubin said. “It’s just what she needs to keep her company. I wasn’t going to say anything, but now that Theo has brought it up—”

  “A malamute wouldn’t sleep in front of the fire,” Isabel interrupted. “It would be too hot.”

  “What about me?” Tina asked her brother-in-law. “Don’t you want my opinion?”

  “You’re not much of a dog person,” Theo said.

  “Of course I am!” Tina said. “I’m warmhearted.”

  “I don’t want a dog,” Isabel repeated. “Maybe someday, but not yet.” She had had Daisy even before she met Theo, had walked with her by the river nearly every day, been comforted by the soft muzzle on her knee. The joke about pets looking like their owners had been true of them. The Portuguese water dog was slender and lanky, with messy brown curls, a long snout, and bright brown, lively eyes. Isabel missed her more than she wanted to admit.

  “Obviously, it’s Theo who wants a dog,” Alice said. “Have you checked with Hollis and Stoltz? Maybe they’ll let you bring it to work with you if you get it a tie instead of a collar.”

  “It’s just that they don’t allow pets in my apartment building,” Tina said.

  “I suggest a snake,” Judge Rubin said. “A boa constrictor. Or an iguana. Isabel is a herpetologist.”

  “No, I’m not,” Isabel said affectionately. She had completed a master’s in herpetology before going to vet school but had not pursued the Ph.D. her father had hoped she would earn. “We used to have those water dragons. But Theo didn’t like them.”

  “They smelled,” Theo said. “And they were so—cold-blooded.”

  Isabel laughed. “We don’t say ‘cold-blooded,’” she said. “We say ‘exothermic.’”

  “Just so no one can understand you,” Theo said.

  “I’m thinking about going back to school,” Tina said.

  “Really, Tina, what a good idea!” Dr. Rubin said.

  “There’s a program at Manalapan in massage therapy. What do you think of that, Theo? You can be my first client. You could stand to relax a little.”

  Theo smiled but said nothing.

  “Did you say a program at Hahnemann?” Judge Rubin said, referring to the prestigious medical school.

  “Oh, look!” Isabel cried, her eyes wandering down the fence. “Marco’s planted hellebores.”

  “And he cuts the grass every week,” her mother said. “He doesn’t let it grow up into a meadow.”

  “I never let it get that bad,” Judge Rubin said.

  “You did. Prince positively disappeared under there.”

  “You’re a short little guy, aren’t you, Prince?” Isabel said, scratching the terrier behind the ears. He was a one-woman dog, but he tolerated Isabel’s attentions politely.

  “I liked cutting the grass,” Judge Rubin said. “A man should cut his own grass.”

  “Well, darling,” Dr. Rubin said, “in that case just ask Marco to leave it. But really, at our age, I think we’ve earned the right to have someone else do some of the work.”

  “Of course you have,” Alice said soothingly, adjusting her straw hat to shield her face from the sun. With pale reddish hair, she was the fairest of the sisters, her skin dusted with freckles.

  “Like they never had anyone to help them before!” Isabel said. “Only Cicily to take care of us while they were working, and Gladys to clean. And before her, Betty.”

  “And what would I have done without them?” her mother demanded. “It wasn’t easy raising the three of you, you know, and working full-time, and your father busy fighting injustice every minute of the day and night. At least I had a day off every now and then! Remember how I used to take you horseback riding on Saturday mornings? Alice was a natural, of course. And Tina looked so cute on her own little pony! And Isabel was always whispering in the horses’ ears. You swore they understood everything you said, Isabel.”

  “I used to tell them to take me away to live in the land of the horses,” Isabel said. “But they never would.”

  “I remember how impatient we were on those Saturdays,” Alice said. “Waiting for you to get home from the hospital. Cicily would give us breakfast and you’d come in and tell us how many babies you’d delivered that night.”

  “Oh, so many babies!” their mother cried. “It must be thousands by now. Tens of thousands. And thousands of abortions, too. You’re always swamped in this business. You’d think it really worked the way my mother used to say, that a man could get you pregnant just by looking at you. Oh, Isabel, honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t,” Isabel said.

  But Dr. Rubin would not be reassured. “I am an OB/GYN, and even if infertility isn’t my specialty, you’d think I’d be able to do something!”

  “Dr. Abramowitz says nothing’s wrong,” Isabel said, as she had said a dozen times before.

  “Ed Abramowitz is a good doctor, of course,” Dr. Rubin said. “He’s very smart, and he knows everything. He’s helped hundreds of women, but sometimes I think he could do a better job of sitting down and talking to his patients. Explaining things to them, going over what they should be doing.”

  She would have continued, but Isabel, who couldn’t bear having her most intimate failures discussed out loud, interrupted, “Doc, Theo and I are perfectly clear on the proper procedure.”

  Across the table, Theo’s face had closed up tight. He had mostly learned to let his mother-in-law’s effusions roll over him like waves and break harmlessly elsewhere, but he liked having his personal affairs discussed in public even less than Isabel.

  Dr. Rubin flushed. “I don’t know why you have to turn every innocent comment inside out, Isabel,” she said. “I just want you to be happy. I don’t care whether you have children or not!”

  Isabel wondered whether Dr. Rubin believed this. Maybe she did. She had always tried to be a good mother in her own slap-dash, tireless way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When she got home, Isabel changed her clothes and went out into her small garden. Dandelions stuck their heads through the cracks in the pavement, and tendrils of creeping Charlie colonized th
e ground under the azalea. Once Isabel would have pulled them out, but now she let them stay, a touch of wildness among the nursery plants.

  She loved the resilience of the garden. Green and red shoots appeared in the ground after the icy winter. She didn’t know how the tender plant tissue pierced the hard surface of the Philadelphia clay, but she didn’t wonder about it very much anymore. She loved the natural world, but she no longer cared how it worked. In graduate school, working on her master’s thesis (“Microhabitats of the Terrestrial Amphibian Bufo americanus”), it had occurred to her that she had lost interest in the size of convex polygon areas fitted to toad locations. Her college zoology professor had encouraged her to get a Ph.D., but it wasn’t the right life for her.

  That was when she decided to become a veterinarian: not a dog-and-cat vet, but a specialist in exotic animals—a profession even harder to get a job in than academic zoology. But she was young and confident, and for a while her luck had held. After vet school she got an internship at Baltimore’s National Aquarium, commuting two hours each way, and after that a coveted three-year residency at the Philadelphia Zoo.

  At first she had loved the zoo work: the daily rounds of the animals, the consultations on parasites and nutrition, the pathology lab, the wonderful animal smell of the place. She loved working outside in big rubber boots while lions roared in the carnivore house and peacocks wandered down the paths, gobbling up spilled popcorn. It wasn’t much money, but Theo was at Hollis and Stoltz by then, their West Philadelphia student days behind them. The permanent veterinary staff at the zoo was set to expand in a couple of years. Why shouldn’t she be the one they hired?

  The screen door slid open. Theo stepped out onto the bricks and sat down, squinting in the light. He seemed to take up an inordinate amount of space on the terrace, his long legs reaching almost into the peonies.

  “It looks great out here, Izzy,” Theo said. “You’ve done amazing things. Probably increased the property value ten grand.”

  “But we can’t sell it now,” she said, smiling. “I’ve put too much work into it.”

  “You’re out of room. Don’t you want something bigger?”

  “Bigger’s not always better,” Isabel said.

  There was a pause.

  “What’s up with the rosebush?” Theo asked. Its leaves were yellow, and its flowers, once red, had shriveled to a washed-out beige.

  “Something’s eating it. Aphids, I think.”

  “Can’t you spray it?”

  Isabel shrugged. Watching the rosebush die was oddly interesting. She liked seeing the way the leaves turned slowly to lace. “The Victorians thought death had a place in the garden,” she said. “They grew black flowers and left trunks of dead trees standing.”

  “That’s pretty morbid.”

  Isabel laughed. “Maybe. I think it’s just realistic.”

  “Listen,” Theo said. His voice went slack, like fishing line drifting down through water. “I want to talk to you about something.”

  She looked up at him, at his green eyes and his firm jaw, at his cropped hair, black as a panther’s coat. “What?”

  “I think it’s time to consider the possibility that we’re not going to have children.”

  She stared and could not speak at first. “I don’t agree,” she said at last in the small, flat voice that was all she could manage. There suddenly seemed to be very little air.

  “How long has it been?” Theo said. “Theoretically nothing’s wrong, but obviously something is. We’ve tried Clomid. We’ve tried Pergonal. You hated them. We agreed we didn’t want to do in vitro. We’ve waited, but waiting hardly seems to have helped.”

  “I saw Dahlia the other day,” Isabel said. “You know they adopted a baby from Korea. A beautiful little boy, they got him when he was four months old! Samuel. He’s three now. I saw him riding his tricycle in the park—”

  “We’re not going to adopt a child!” Theo interrupted. “We’ve been through this. There are all kinds of health risks. Things they don’t tell you. Things they cover up.”

  Isabel noticed Theo didn’t even blink. He didn’t consider the possibility that he might not be in the right. “But if we’re careful,” she said. “If we do our homework and choose a reliable agency—”

  Again he cut her off. “Do you think it’s that simple? Did I tell you that Victor is suing an adoption agency right now for concealing evidence of maternal drug use? I know about these things!”

  It seemed to Isabel that when she was working, Theo never would have spoken to her in that tone of voice.

  “Are you listening?” Theo said. He got up from his chair and sat beside her on the bricks. “Don’t just disappear inside your head. Talk to me!”

  Under the lime fragrance of his shaving cream Isabel could just smell the Theo she had first known, a faint, musty, human odor. She didn’t know what to do. Talk to me, he said, but she didn’t know how to begin to talk about all the things that were wrong between them. That what they cared about in life was increasingly divergent. That they lived in the same house side by side, but not together. That they could not conceive a child. She was afraid to say any of this out loud; to be responsible—or held responsible—for the destruction of the walled city that was their marriage. “Theo,” she said softly, “I know it’s hard. But I want to have a baby.”

  He waited. After a minute he said, “That’s all you can say?”

  “I can’t give up on it yet.”

  Theo sighed and got up, brushing off his pants. “Fine,” he said, and went back into the house. Isabel put her face in her hands, feeling the cool garden dirt against her skin. She could hear Theo moving around inside the house, hear the rush of water in the sink and the clatter of the kettle on the stove. He would make tea and bring it up to his office and work. Next to his office was the room that would be the baby’s room, if there was a baby. It was painted pale green with yellow trim and currently held nothing but a couple of chairs, an extra bookcase, and the ironing board. Isabel, whose clothes were mostly wash-and-wear, did some ironing in there from time to time, just to make it feel as though the room had a reason for existing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When Isabel had met Theo, at a house party on 43rd Street the summer after college, his hair had been shaggy and his ragged jeans had hung low on his hips. He wore a dull silver stud in his ear and sat at the kitchen table drinking beer and talking about the intrigues at City Council (he had been a junior staffer for a councilman at the time).

  Isabel had gone to the party with a couple of friends, young women who, like her, were just out of school, floating in and out of jobs in coffee shops and clothing boutiques while they waited for their lives to begin. When she walked into the kitchen and Theo turned his appraising green gaze toward her, it felt as though hers just had. All through her teens she had rolled her eyes whenever her mother said “love at first sight,” but on that hot summer night in the dim room with the stereo blasting and the smell of burned rice hanging in the air, all her worldly-wise sophistication seemed to melt away.

  Their first apartment had been a tiny place on West Spruce, a bedroom and a kitchen in an old, partitioned house. The grout in the shower was crumbling, and none of the windows closed properly. The place was freezing in winter and the roof leaked, but the bedroom had a big bay window with a window seat, and Isabel painted the walls hyacinth blue. They ate pizza or Ethiopian food, and their friends came over and they listened to music and stayed up late, as though they were still in college. They were married and earning a little money and working on their graduate school and law school applications. Their friends all slept on futons, but Theo insisted they buy a queen-size bed. “Why shouldn’t we be comfortable?” he said, and spent the money his uncle from Cleveland had sent as a wedding gift.

  Alice was in law school by then, and she used to drop by sometimes with her friends. Alice always had lots of friends, a gang that traveled together and didn’t pair off much. This law school group was ju
st the latest incarnation, practically indistinguishable, Isabel thought, from the senior choir or the Spanish club from high school: smart, boisterous girls and quiet, serious-looking boys.

  “You really should get the locks fixed on these windows,” Alice had said the first time she saw the apartment. “Anyone could break in here. This is not exactly the best neighborhood.”

  “The landlady must have lied to us,” Theo said with a sigh.

  “She seemed so nice,” Isabel said. “I liked her skull-and-crossbones tattoo.”

  “And you shouldn’t plug so many things into one extension cord,” Alice went on. “The wiring in these old houses is appalling.” Her braid had swung back and forth severely as she looked around, inventorying hazards.

  “My brother used to live on the next block,” said Anne, a plump, cheerful law school friend of Alice’s who was sitting cross-legged on the bed. “He said he would hear gunshots at two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Not here,” Theo said firmly, putting his arm around Isabel and slipping his fingers up the sleeve of her T-shirt. “No gunshots after midnight. That’s the rule.”

  “Isabel,” Alice said, ignoring Theo, “you should take these things seriously. I don’t want to have to worry about you!”

  Isabel had felt so happy, her feet bare and dusty from the floor, her side pressed against Theo, whose sharpness and determination were a match for her family any day. “You know what Doc said when she saw the place?” Isabel asked her sister. “She said, ‘And I thought Alice lived in a slum!’”

  It was almost impossible to see the Theo of the Spruce Street apartment in the man she was married to now. His hair was always neatly trimmed, and his jeans, when he wore them, were cleaner and fit him better. Only something in his expression was the same—a certain alertness, like a wild animal looking for a meal. Once he had looked at Isabel in a way that made her believe that she herself—her own lean, hungry body—could be enough to satisfy him. But that had been a long time ago.