by Amy Boesky
One group, sci-fi determinists, claimed to have the answer. If you went back in time and met your own grandmother, they reasoned, you could only act in predetermined ways. You wouldn’t be able to kill her—something would stop you at the last minute.
I had a different question: What if you could actually help your grandmother? What if you could keep her from dying young? Say, for instance, you could go back to the 1940s, take a train to Chicago, over to the near North Side, and let’s say it was a nice day, maybe in May, and you could go to the hat shop where Sylvia was learning to curl ribbon with a knife, and you just strolled to the counter with a beautiful hat you were thinking about buying, one of those hats you just can’t find in the late twentieth century, not even on eBay, and right before she reached over to wrap it up for you, you grabbed her hand—small, warm—and you pressed it, hard, and got her to look up at you. The two of you staring at each other, gazes locked. And you said, “Sylvia, I know this sounds insane, but listen. Listen! I know you’re feeling great right now, I know you’re a single mother, you’ve got a beautiful daughter, you’ve got other things on your mind, you’re not thinking about your ovaries, you love to go dancing, you have a closet full of dresses, but Sylvia, listen—”
What if you could save your own grandmother? What then?
It wouldn’t wreck the future. Your mother could still have her life. And you could have yours. Only better, in hundreds of ways.
Rewind, play backward. The ground opens up, the coffin lifts upward, the lid opens, Sylvia sits up, brushes her hair back, drowsy, a little stiff, starts to climb out, looking around her, confused. “Where am I?” Now you can play the tape again. Forward, but repaired. My mother turns nineteen, Sylvia is healthy, ruddy, they have dinner, Sylvia bakes the cake herself, they sing together at the table. My mother, able to be nineteen the way most girls are nineteen, rolls her eyes when Sylvia gets sentimental about how grown-up she’s getting. Afterward the two of them curl up on the couch together and make plans. They have nothing but time, sometimes they quarrel over insignificant things, make up, laugh, quarrel again. The pictures in our upstairs hallway change in a blink. Look: There Sylvia is, arm linked through my mother’s, and my mother has her mouth open wide, laughing. Forward, forward. Sylvia fussing over Sara’s bassinette. Lifting me from a swing. Oh, and there’s Pody with her. She looks older, my mother says fondly, with that isn’t-it-amazing-how-old-we’re-all-getting warmth in her voice. It’s wonderful how much older everyone looks. There’s a third act to the play, and a fourth. Gail is there, too. She and my mother say how glad they are to have each other, since neither of them has a sister. They all come to Michigan for Thanksgiving. We have to get more chairs, the table is so crowded! The cups fill to the brim, winking a little under the chandelier.
We don’t worry much, as a family. Not in this version: Family 2.0. Why sweat the small stuff, when you have your whole life in front of you?
In the real version—1.0—we worried all the time. About our bodies. About bad weather, terrorists, freak accidents. We called each other, asked how things were going. It was like we were always waiting. “For the other shoe to drop,” my mother said, and even though I didn’t know exactly what that phrase meant, I got the implication. We were waiting for the next worry—as if we’d know it when it came.
THREE DAYS AFTER I GOT back from Boston, I got a call from the department chair offering me the job. Between appointments with the pediatrician, and Sacha’s first and second set of shots, and long phone calls with Annie and my sisters and my mother, and long nights up with Jacques, making lists of pros and cons and tearing them up and insisting we should just go with our gut, we decided I should take the job. Sad as I was about leaving Georgetown, it seemed like the best choice for us now as a family, and suddenly it was like we were rewinding the tape, taking things off shelves and putting them in boxes, emptying the fridge, recorking the champagne. We put our town house on the market, and soon there were always people over we didn’t know, opening up cupboards, inspecting the surfaces of things. With each visit, I’d put Sacha in her Snugli and walk up and down the steps in front of or behind the Realtors, defending the narrow stair-well, the distant nursery, the burn mark on our exposed brick wall.
The agents were unimpressed. The market was in a slump, and people with children—the bull’s-eye of home seekers—wanted detached houses. With garages. And yards.
Nobody had a nice thing to say about our third-floor nursery.
Then, just as suddenly, a couple in their fifties (children grown) came to look at the house, came back twice with an architect, and within days had made an offer. Not a stunning offer, but acceptable. They had all kinds of plans to “open things up” and knock out walls, and the agents thought it was a miracle. We signed the purchase and sales agreement and before we knew it, our house was on its way to belonging to someone else.
One Saturday Jacques helped me cut the royal blue carpet out of Sacha’s room with an X-Acto knife and roll it up to take with us. We also took some leftover blue-and-yellow border. I would’ve taken the exposed brick wall if we could.
March was a month of good-byes. We said good-bye to neighbors. To Dave and Lori. I said good-bye to the people in my department, to former students, to Dr. Weiss, to Dr. Lennox. We packed boxes. I started out with a great attitude and a neat outlay of supplies—fresh cardboard cartons, sharp scissors, boxing tape, permanent markers. This move, I told myself, was a chance for revision. In our new life I’d pare things down to mere essentials, everything would have its place. I stacked books neatly in boxes by author and subject. Shakespeare. Seventeenth-Century Biography. I still had no idea where any of these things would end up. Every Tuesday and Thursday when Jacques flew up to Boston, he looked at places for us to rent. All I could picture was my old apartment in Eliot House, with its green door opening onto the parking bay. Or Jacques’s little house with the pear tree.
“Back,” I said to Sacha, who pursed her lips in what I thought was an approximation of the letter B. “We’re going back.”
Through all of this, we packed, and then one Tuesday Jacques called, excited, and told me he’d found a place to rent. Admittedly, it was in the suburbs and not in Cambridge, but it was an actual house—detached, not even a town house—with three bedrooms, a fenced yard for Bacchus, and most importantly, no lead paint. That was a big deal. In Boston, landlords weren’t allowed to rent to anyone with children under the age of five if there was lead paint on the walls or trim. That law had knocked almost every place Jacques had looked at so far out of the running.
“Which suburb?” I asked. I knew Arlington a little.
“Newton,” he said, after a pause.
We’d made a pact, Jacques and I. Not Newton. Not that there was anything wrong with Newton—it’s pretty, full of trees, safe—but it seemed to both of us to epitomize suburban living, a leap forward into middle age. We weren’t there yet.
“Don’t worry,” Jacques said. “It’s just for a few months.” The plan was we’d settle in, using the rental as base camp. We’d find something permanent soon enough.
He brought a picture home, which I taped up on our fridge, like a focal point.
“Well,” I said judiciously, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s not that bad.”
“It has shag carpet on the first floor,” Jacques mentioned, as I centered the picture between the ice maker and the door handle. He frowned, inspecting the picture. “Kind of mint green shag, if you can picture that.”
FROM THE OUTSIDE, THE HOUSE with the Green Shag Carpet looked like a child’s drawing of a house, a white box with shutters. We arrived late-week, late-March, during an early spring snow squall. Moving north, we seemed to have set ourselves back almost two months in terms of weather—it was like leaving the world of color and going back to black and white.
The house stood behind a neat front lawn in a row of other houses, closed up and immaculate, each with its own plastic can marked YARD WASTE. No people out
side anywhere. Inside, each room was a perfect square. Every room on the first floor except the kitchen was carpeted in thick green shag—not a color I’d ever seen before, but one that my mother later nicknamed Donnagel Green, after the kind of medicine she made us take when we had diarrhea as children.
We only unpacked what we needed right away, stacking the rest of our boxes (Shakespeare, Comedies; Ski Hats, Long Underwear) in a side porch. Annie sent us an oven mitt in the shape of the Liberty Bell, which I hung up in the kitchen. This, Jacques reminded me as we trailed from room to mint green room, was just a place to park ourselves while we looked for something permanent. We wouldn’t be here long.
“What’s it like?” Annie asked, when I called to thank her for the oven mitt. In six years of grad school, she’d never been to Newton.
I tried to describe it.
The House with the Green Shag Carpet—eight miles from Cambridge, walking distance to no more than an Exxon station and a Star Market—was a distinctly middle-age house, with its wall-to-wall shag, attached garage, and swirly stucco ceilings. This was a house that smacked of trips to the hardware store, of Lysol and wind chimes, of mildew and old socks. The house had more space than we needed or wanted, and most of it we left closed up and unexplored: cedar closets for storing winter woolens, a mudroom, and the garage, where we found coils of rubber hoses and a pyramid of Ice Melt pellets. Mostly we huddled in two or three rooms, like campers avoiding the fringes of an unfriendly forest.
Unattractive as we were as potential tenants, given the lead laws and Bacchus, I knew the house was a windfall. It was for sale, which meant Realtors might intrude on us “once in a while” to show it, but—Jacques loved this part—it was a tenancy-at-will, which meant all we had to do was give a month’s notice when we wanted to leave. Of course, as I pointed out, that worked both ways. The owners (relocated to the edge of a golf course in the Carolinas) only had to give us a month’s notice if the house sold, lending a certain urgency to our house hunting.
Jacques didn’t mind. He liked the pressure. It made the whole thing a kind of race!
Except, he reminded me, that didn’t mean we should relax our standards. Jacques was still smarting from the hit we’d taken selling our house in DC, and he kept emphasizing this was a time for patience. For comparison shopping. In his mind, there was no rush. We were planning to settle here permanently, and Jacques wanted what he called the “Forever House”—a place we’d settle down in until the distant day someone came to roll us off to assisted living. Personally, I was hoping a house might show up a little closer to this end of our lives than that one. March gave way to April, and I could feel the months left for nesting and decorating dwindling at an alarming rate. I wanted time over the summer to plan my courses for the fall, time to line up a babysitter. I wanted to find the Forever House now.
I tried to throw myself into the hunt. A house would come on the market, we’d pack ourselves up, get Sacha ready, look over the listing sheet or replay the message from Sandi, our broker, and convince ourselves this one would be it. In the abstract, each house sounded perfect. But inevitably, there’d be a problem. The house would be on a main road, or in ruins, or the size of a shoebox, or way too expensive, or all of these things at once, and we’d come back, glum and irritable, and the green shag would be waiting for us, scratchy, ugly, not even ours to change.
Maybe it was moving back to Boston with so little warning, finding myself in a place both known and unfamiliar. All I know is that the House with the Green Shag saddened me. Each room felt lonely in a different way. The basement was the worst, with its old remnants of family fun: a box of dented Ping-Pong balls, a banner from someone else’s high school days.
I had no interest in playing in the playroom or dining in the dining room or living in the living room. I wasn’t myself. I didn’t feel like driving up to Maine to see Julie, or joining playgroups, or getting myself a new library card and taking Sacha to Story Time. One of my new colleagues called, wanting to meet for lunch, but I didn’t have a babysitter and didn’t feel like bringing Sacha, who’d been irritable and off-schedule since we moved, so I just declined. Instead, I called my mother from the phone in the kitchen, our borrowed table cluttered with baby cereal and real estate listings. I made fun of the house and when my mother laughed, I felt better.
I was annoyed with myself for missing DC. When I was in DC, hadn’t I sometimes wished we were back in Boston?
“The carpet,” my mother reminded me, “is always greener on the other side of the house.”
IS IT POSSIBLE TO GET delayed postpartum depression? I missed everyone that spring. I missed Jacques, who—back to a regular schedule—had traded in his bicycle and telecommuting for regular hours, five days a week, except in his world, regular meant long, intense hours, six days a week. I missed our DC neighbors, and the zoo, and my colleagues at Georgetown. I missed Julie, who sounded manic and slightly out of focus when we talked, working extra hours to put money away before the baby came, interviewing pediatricians, making a million plans. She and Jon loved their rental house—it was a Victorian with a view of the bay, and she was fixing up the baby’s room on weekends, dying for us to come up, and instead of being helpful and sisterly, I felt exhausted and even (despicably enough) a little jealous. Why couldn’t we find an adorable cottage we both loved? Why were Jacques and I getting crankier and crankier with each other, erupting into predictable arguments about whose turn it was to bathe Sacha or walk Bacchus or who got to sleep ten minutes later or sneak off to run an errand?
This wasn’t us. It wasn’t the us I wanted, anyway.
I called Annie. I tried explaining all of this to her, but she didn’t really want to hear about it. She’d just renewed a lease on a walk-up in a bad part of West Philly, had fallen behind on her car payments, and didn’t particularly care what color our carpet was. “Remember what it was like before you married a captain of industry?” she asked me.
“He’s not a captain of industry,” I said, irritated. It was clear Annie wasn’t in the mood to lend a sympathetic ear. As far as she was concerned, I had a semester off and was squandering it. “What do you do all day?” she asked me once, sounding mystified.
Remembering that, I felt doubly slighted now. What I really wanted to tell Annie was how lonely I felt, how baffling it was spending so much time alone with a baby. But I couldn’t seem to find the right words. It sounded like I was complaining, and I didn’t mean to complain. I loved being home with Sacha, it was just—
I tried telling her about our next-door neighbor, a pert woman with a knowing eye. She had three basketball-playing sons, and I thought I could make Annie laugh, complaining about the sound of heavy panting outside the window every evening.
I could tell she was tuning out.
When I took Sacha to Harvard Square in her Snugli, we walked past places where Annie and I used to hang out and I felt like I was on Mars. Same places, different people. In some instances, different places. They kept closing the old cafés and putting in banks and office supply stores.
“It’s like I’m dealing with ghosts,” I told Annie.
“I found a dead man on my front stoop this morning,” Annie told me. “At least your ghosts are only metaphors.”
“ MAYBE,”MY MOTHER SAID EXPERIMENTALLY, one afternoon on the phone, “you need to get out a little more. Meet people.”
This, from a woman who only opened the door for the exterminator. My mother loved it when we showed up. Everyone else was an intrusion.
ACTUALLY, I’VE NEVER MINDED BEING alone. Academics are bred for it: You work alone in the library, reading things written hundreds of years ago. You write alone. You grade papers alone. There are brief interludes of too-much-togetherness—department meetings; students bunched up outside of your office, waiting for help with papers or letters of recommendation. Sometimes when you’re teaching, you dream about the chance to be alone again.
But this was different.
For one thing, I w
asn’t exactly alone. I was with Sacha, and Sacha made it hard to do any of the things I liked doing when I was alone. Reading in general was out, since Sacha saw paper, like most things, as something to be torn up or sucked on. Writing was also out: She was an inveterate grabber of pens, a smasher of keyboards. When it came to housework or organizing, especially folding laundry, Sacha was herself an unfolder, a puller-outer, a creator of domestic disruption. Not to mention that she generated laundry and waste by the bushel.
I usually waited to call my mother till the hardest part of the day, the hour after the nap, the hour when Sacha was at her crankiest, smelling of sour milk, her cheek creased from the wrinkle in the flannel crib sheet, smacking crossly at my ear.
I was coming to depend on these talks.
My mother was like the authors of What to Expect, upbeat, sure of herself, only ironic, and the advice was tailored just for me. She was funny, honest, optimistic. She remembered things I’d done when I was a baby and things she’d done wrong and offered subtle and unspoken encouragement that one day, Sacha would be grown, solvent, able to talk on the phone and hold a spoon without dropping it. She admitted to making mistakes and reminded me I’d survived them. Best of all, she admitted she’d been bored and lonely half the time when we were little.
“It’ll get better,” she promised. “You’ll see. You’ll meet some nice people with babies, and it will get better.”