I walk through the condo and survey the magnitude of the moving job ahead—books and more books, boxes and boxes of stored papers, stacks of writings that someday might be discovered by one of my children and assembled into another book or provide material for an historian. Photographs of the children, of me with dignitaries, of me at various stages of my public life: fly fishing, signing bills, tapping the first maple tree, standing in the center of a group of women, of a group of children, of a group of men.
Boxes are everywhere. In the garage, they are stacked up to the ceiling, already sagging with the weight of time. Each box demands a decision: keep, toss, or re-box when I am too exhausted to decide. Metal shelves hold paintings and posters and framed awards that are not good enough to hang on the wall, but not bad enough to discard. It seems an unforgivable discourtesy to throw an award into the trash and lose those words of precious praise. I fill five boxes of them (tossing in glass candy dishes, vases, bowls, and small clocks, all embossed with my title and name) and label them to go to the University of Vermont. I won’t have to think about them any further. If they are relegated to the library basement, I will never know.
I ask my son and daughter-in-law to take the glass lamps and the carved ivory depiction of the signing of the Magna Carta. My other son looks through the boxes of books and I say, “Take what you want.” My stepdaughter brings home the white fleece sheep rocker that my grandchildren loved to sit on. Now it goes to her grandchildren. I have an inward battle. I am glad to see these possessions taken away; I have to free myself of space-consuming pieces. And yet, I want to weep. I had only begun to love them.
The books are the hardest to sort out. I had been thrilled to read the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, which everyone was talking about in the 1970s. I stepped into the lives of unfaithful friends described by John Updike. I was intrigued by the inner lives of Philip Roth’s male characters. I fell in love with Anita Brookner’s lonely women and wrote her a fan letter to which she replied. Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro felt like friends. If I simply perused the covers, would that give me enough nostalgic pleasure to justify keeping them on the shelf? When a few of them are resettled at Wake Robin, I enjoy looking at them. It is enough.
While packing I discover a small, thin, faded-blue paperback wedged between two pushy hardcovered books. I carefully pull it out. The pages are edged in brown. It has become old like me. The signs of wear surprise me; I had not expected stationary books to age in place. I read the title: Evangeline and Other Poems, copyright 1946. In pencil on the inside cover I have written “Madeleine May, 8A1” (eighth grade, P.S. 101). I recite the opening lines. “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.”
Do I keep it or give it away? Would the library even take it? I hold on to it, knowing I am not likely to reread it but reminded of smelly navy-blue gym uniforms, the steel jungle gyms, my old lunch box. And oh, yes, Miss Lutz, the spinster principal who towered over us. I place Evangeline where I can see her, next to my computer.
The closets are scrunched with clothes from four seasons and several lifetimes. I am not ready to give away the expensive silk suit I wore at Peter and Lisa’s wedding twenty-three years ago. I have worn it only once since the wedding, but still, it cost so much it has to stay. The same thinking prevents me from disposing of the ice blue silk suit I wore for my swearing in as ambassador to Switzerland. I was pleased that my elegant attire could equal the ornate, gold-trimmed room of the State Department. I have a photo of me and Madeleine Albright, who officiated. I take each suit out of the closet, one at a time, give them a final, tender look, and mercilessly squash them into the black plastic trash bag. I pull the red plastic ribbons tight. They may have another life, I console myself, thinking of their happy rediscovery.
The three formal gowns from each of my inaugural balls are stored in the downstairs coat closet, off to one side, safe in their hermetically sealed and zippered bags. I designed them myself and an Austrian dressmaker made them. At my first ball I wore a maroon velvet gown with large puffy sleeves, a narrow waist, and a full skirt—a medieval princess leaning out of the tower. I asked the seamstress to copy the second gown from a Lord & Taylor advertisement in the New York Times, a slim black velvet gown with a broad white satin shawl collar. For my third, a fitted navy blue velvet top and a full, shiny, taffeta skirt. Should I try them on before zipping them up again? No. It doesn’t seem right to expose myself to certain disappointment. I know the zippers won’t go all the way up, not only because I have gained weight (not too much), but also because the shape of my body has changed, particularly from the waist down. It feels like bad luck to put them on again. Each gown is like a wedding dress: to be worn only once.
I have to save them. They belong to history; this is what the first female governor of Vermont wore at her inaugural ball. I consider calling the Vermont Historical Society to ask if they will store them. The thought of the gowns displayed on mannequins, who look perpetually young, is pleasing. The gowns will continue to be who I once was. As with many such ideas, I never follow up. Instead, I ask the moving company to provide a tall cardboard clothing box that I place in storage cage number eighteen in the basement at Wake Robin for twenty dollars a month. It seems worth it.
So much of what we decide to keep is built on “someday.” Someday we might need it; someday we would wish we had kept it. Someday is shorter than it used to be. The word itself has shrunk. If someday hasn’t happened by now, I have to accept that it is not likely that it will. If I haven’t looked through my library of big, beautiful art books in the last ten years, I probably won’t take them down from the shelf in the next five, or in whatever time I have left. If I haven’t sorted through the boxes of photographs, still in the envelopes they came in when I picked them up from the photography section of the drugstore, I am not about to cull them now. But someday itself is hard to discard. I still cling to the belief that someday, I will have empty hours to happily sort through my boxes of photographs. For now, I reach up and plunk the sagging boxes down on the top shelf of the garage.
Some things no one wants but I can’t give away. I have two silver tea sets. One belonged to my mother and the other to Aunt Berthe. Every middle-class European bride once was given such a set as a wedding present. My mother once confessed to me, with an unusual note of jealousy in her voice, that her older sister Berthe’s set was genuine silver, while hers was plated. I can see my Aunt Berthe slowly pouring from it, careful not to spill a drop on the crisp, white-stitched tablecloth, mixing the desired amount of tea with hot water, strong or weak. Now both sets are more black than silver, as if in mourning for their neglect. I have my excuses. For some years after I inherited my mother’s set I polished it, not as well as my mother or a housekeeper might have done, but well enough to find a place for it on the dining room buffet. Then I stopped polishing and it was kept in the dark. That is how it ended up in the laundry room hidden behind the door and on top of an old sewing machine. It deserves better. My mother would be dismayed. She had insisted on including the tea set among the few possessions she packed to come to America. It, like us, was a refugee, a reminder of comfortable middle-class life. As I place the tarnished silver lid back on the sugar bowl, I turn to my son Daniel with a question: “Will you take it?” He agrees.
My daughter-in-law Jane says she doesn’t want any of our possessions. She and Adam are regularly carting their own things off to the Goodwill. Clutter has already become their enemy. How wise. If only we had done that earlier, then I would not be faced with disposing half a lifetime of possessions, each with its own archaeological history. The right time to denude the condo would have been before we moved into Wake Robin, a year and a half ago. But I was not yet ready to let go and adhered to the illusion that we did not really live at Wake Robin. I wanted our home to continue to be where it had been for the last ten years: 9 Harbor Watch. That was where we had been young, well, and happy. At Wake Robin, we would be old.
Set
ting a date for the sale of the condo felt cruel. Tearing home apart feels like pulling off a spider’s legs, one at a time. It’s an autopsy of space—once alive, now dead. But I knew it had to be done, for John, for my stepdaughter, and, however reluctantly, for my own sake. I couldn’t continue to long for the condo while living at Wake Robin, and John had begun to obsess over the need to sell it. These worries woke him up at two in the morning and wouldn’t let him go back to sleep until the next day. He wanted things settled. He asked himself repeatedly, what would happen to the condo if he died before it was sold? Would I be able to afford the expense of keeping it? The condo became a constant irritant that rubbed him raw. Selling it would be the best ointment.
MY POSSESSIONS ARE MOVED out in separate brigades. Three cars and six Burlington library volunteers arrive on schedule one morning to take away all the boxed books. First Adam and then Daniel help me bring things to the synagogue. Peter brings things to the Goodwill. My friends Nancy and Peter distribute five filing cabinets and a set of bookcases. I arrange for a rug, art books, and a coffee table to be brought to my daughter, Julia, in Brooklyn. The owner of a secondhand furniture store, from whom we bought the dining room table for Wake Robin, comes and decides which pieces to take back on consignment. Slowly, the condo undresses itself. I call “1-800-Junk.”
“We take anything,” the man on the phone says.
“Anything?” I repeat.
“Anything.”
Two medium-sized trucks pull in and stop in front of the garage. I give them everything that is left: flower pots, rakes, old pictures, old pots and pans.
“You sure you want to give us this?” One of the men is holding up a plaster flamenco figure I made when I was taking a sculpture class as a new bride.
I am ruthless. “Yes, take it. Take it, take everything,” I repeat, feeling a sudden surge of fierce happiness.
The driver is having a great time. He finds a silver wig in the trash pile and puts it on. One Halloween I wore it for fun at a staff meeting in the Department of Education. He finds another treasure, a gold cardboard crown studded with glass diamonds, and balances it on top of the sparkling wig. He waves to me from inside the truck, one leg hooked over the wooden side panel. He looks hilarious. I laugh and wave back.
Before he leaves, he takes a wide broom and sweeps the entire garage. I feel cleansed, liberated, light. It is over.
Learning to walk at Aunt Berthe’s house in Switzerland.
My parents, Ferdinand and Renée.
Me and Edgar, four years apart.
Me, eleven years old.
College graduation photo, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
First legislative race photo.
At the governor’s desk with Edgar.
End of 3rd term photo.
Cutting a ribbon.
Greeting a little girl.
Me and Rosalind Carter.
President Reagan and First Lady Nancy.
Campaigning with Geraldine Ferraro, 1984, Burlington.
With the First Lady and President Bush.
Me and Hillary at Davos, Switzerland.
Department of Education visiting kindergarten.
With the Clinton team.
Throwing out the first ball on Vermont Day at Fenway, Boston.
With President Obama.
The Family: Peter, Adam, Daniel, Arthur, and Julia.
At the Women’s March in Montpelier.
With the Emerge Vermont class of 2018.
Me and John.
I AM MULTIPLES
The dancer’s
elastic poses
stretch my legs
high and wide
air up, I fall
on his raised hand
as if nothing
had happened.
The opera singer sways
my sucking ribs.
Her high octaves
tremble my bones
and wrinkle my throat
as I spill
gallons of sound
all over myself.
I’m on the tennis court
with someone else’s arm,
Venus or Serena?
My body obeys
every quick command
from head to foot.
Look.
Just inside the line
by half an inch,
the camera assents.
The cello is settled between
bent legs, and curved arms
leaving fingers free to run
up and down, in
pursuit of fleeing notes
that I gulp down
into a thick, low sound
that feels good inside.
I abscond with the poet’s words
and claim them for my own.
Or were they mine,
in the beginning?
I mouth them
with tongue and teeth,
and spit them in your face.
The writer says what I
wish to say,
leading me from
room to room in her house,
which seems eerily familiar.
She lived there once.
Chisel, brush, pen
bare faced, fully awake
ready for action.
Move, they say, like
we did, and make a mark.
I do, asking Monet, Manet
and ninety-year-old Picasso
to leave me a space.
I am multiples
and I am none.
It is late,
it is done.
9
Finding a Seat
I LOOK FOR THE RESTROOM before I sit down in a restaurant or take my seat in a theatre. I try to leave quickly at intermission to get at the head of the line in order to make it back before the second act begins. Bathrooms have become familiar places.
I appreciate a clean one, abhor a dirty one. When I use a public toilet, I sometimes forget to wipe the seat before I sit down. My mother always did. She thought that a swipe of toilet paper eliminated germs. I know better, and do it not for the germs, but for the urine. I feel sullied and offended when I feel someone else’s droplets on my buttocks. There is a silent agreement that we women make: you leave the seat dry for me, and I leave it the same for you.
At the Flynn theatre in Burlington, I sometimes see a line in front of the men’s room. The men look awkward, embarrassed. We women are used to lines. The public portrayal of an urgent physical need does not bother us. When a stall door opens up, I walk quickly to it before anyone else does. I feel triumphant. It’s my space.
The line in front of the ladies’ room can be a good place to have a conversation, usually centered on complaining about the long lines for the ladies’ room. I have, once or twice, when I thought no one was looking and the concert was about to begin, darted into the men’s room. Once it was accidental and a startled man turned around. “I never thought I’d meet the governor here.” Another time it was on purpose. I was in a hurry. The men’s room is a different world. It smells of men.
When I close the toilet door, I am in my private space, if only for three minutes. That is one advantage women have over men: we can close the door every time. American toilets leave open space above and below the door, possibly to enable us to climb over or under the door in an emergency, though I have never seen anyone do this. European toilets are like small rooms, totally enclosed. I like the feeling of being alone in a bathroom stall. It provides respite from the chaotic world beyond. I recapture my equilibrium there. I relax. The ladies’ room is a safe space. It can be a place to go to cry.
I WAS AT MY FIRST MEETING of the powerful Joint Fiscal Committee, the money committees of the House and Senate. It was 1978. No sooner had I taken my seat at the table than nominations for officers were made and accepted in rapid order: click, click. My delight caught in my throat. What had I missed? There must have been a meeting before the meeting, possibly in the men’s room.
; “I nominate Mrs. Kunin for secretary,” Representative Peter Giuliani announced.
“I decline,” I responded. I was certain that I did not want to slip into that “female” slot.
Representative Giuliani decided to be funny. “I say, let’s make Mrs. Kunin chair of the Entertainment Committee.”
They laughed.
I seethed.
My blood rose to my cheeks like mercury in a thermometer. They are mocking me. I am not being taken seriously. I’m here to entertain the men, like a plaything, or worse. It’s my fault. The pressure behind my eyes became stronger. Please, don’t let me cry.
And so I sat grim-faced through the end of the meeting. When it was over I got up and rushed down the hall, turning neither left or right, and ran into the ladies’ room, into a stall, and cried. When I felt ready to face the world, I washed my hands and told my story to the woman at the next sink. I didn’t know her. She listened. I felt better.
This past year I saw a newspaper photo of the newly appointed Joint Fiscal Committee. All four members were women.
TEETH
I spit them out like olive pits,
tainted yellow and hard,
uprooted from the cave
of my cheek, where my
tongue fingers empty rooms.
I contort my smile
to hide the hag
I have become.
My tongue takes
measurements
Coming of Age Page 5