“It’s not the country, Ma. It’s only the suburbs.”
“But there’s nature there. Who knows?—maybe you’ll start writing poetry again like you used to, with the flowers and all that nature around you.”
Why did she only acknowledge my poems when it was impossible for me to talk about them? And why did she think I’d write about flowers?
41
THE BUYING OF THE house was a strange experience. I couldn’t help, thinking that all legal procedures were the same in a way: marriage, divorce, even real estate transactions. The language was so formal and humorless and seemed to have nothing to do with what was really taking place. Deeds. Lots. Escrow. But how were we going to feel in those new rooms, in that suburban stillness? What was going to happen?
The lawyer for the other people, the sellers, chewed gum and ruffled papers for effect.
“I feel nervous,” I told him. “Like a bride.”
He stared at me. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“Oh, as if one of you should say, ‘Do you take this house on Lot fifty-three, Block one twenty-five, and promise to love and honor it, to keep a high wax shine on its floors till death do you part?” Something like that.”
“That’s a funny way to look at it,” he said, and he went back to his papers.
But I could see that Howard felt the same way I did, despite all his enthusiasm on the way to the bank. In the car he could hardly wait to get there, leaning on the horn the instant lights changed, taking his rampant happiness out on me with urgent kisses and radiant smiles. But later, seated around the desk in the mortgage office he looked the way he had at our wedding; pale and confined. He took a cigarette from the deeds clerk and his face disappeared in a screen of smoke.
All that signing, all those pages of printed gibberish. I reached under the table for Howard’s hand, but it was cold and damp like my own, and we quickly let go.
Right after we took title to the house, the former owners moved out. We drove there the next day to look the place over and to supervise the painters. Jason was worried and confused for a while. He shadowed me through all the rooms and once, after using the upstairs bathroom, he came rocketing down the stairs. “Hey!” he shouted, his eyes blazing with fear and anger. “I almost couldn’t find you!”
“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about, kiddo,” I told him. “I’ll be here. I’ll probably always be here.” I was talking to myself as much as to him, but Jason plastered himself to my hip and wept in relief.
I thought I understood his confusion and his alarm. During those weeks of transition, I often had bad dreams. I’d wake suddenly, wondering where I was. If I cried out, Howard, that heavy city-sleeper, would hardly rouse, but he’d say “shhh” anyway and lay his arm across me in that mute gesture of comfort. And I would gladly take his comfort and lie close to the dark warm bear of his chest. In moonlight, I could just make out the small crescent scar below his nipple where the apple corer had gone in. I did that, I thought in wonder. I did that. And no one knew about it but Howard and me. If I ever told Judy, she would probably make something Freudian out of it, tell me how sexual it was, how it was a true reversal of roles, with me penetrating Howard for a change. Sherry would have said that my hand was guided by Mars or by an outraged Venus.
But I had no accomplices, celestial or otherwise. It was an inside job.
42
THE PAINTERS ERASED OLD colors and fingerprints, those signs of the house’s former life, while we wandered through it. The kitchen and laundry room came equipped with wonderful modern appliances: a stove that shuts itself off when dinner is cooked, and a washing machine with twelve finely tuned cycles. The refrigerator manufactures a steady supply of ice, and it has a blue light on the door like a soda machine in a movie lobby. With all this equipment, I thought, it will probably be a breeze to diet. I could fill the refrigerator with cottage cheese and with the fruits and vegetables we would grow in our own little garden. Maybe I could even just live on ice cubes for a while.
I went outside and saw that it wasn’t really that bad. There were Eliot’s lilacs right on cue. And Howard was certainly right about the clean air and the feeling of space. The children would have their own jungle gym in the backyard, and they could slide and roll on the soft summer grass. The important thing was that we were a unit again, that terrible but enduring eight-legged beast, a family.
Jason noticed that there were letters in the mailbox. I opened the first one and saw that it was for the woman who used to live there.
Dear Eleanor,
Bill and I are so happy to hear that you’re finally getting out of that house where you’ve had so much rotten luck.
I didn’t read any more, but folded the letter back into its envelope and wrote, moved, please forward. There were several advertising flyers in the mailbox too. People offered to mow our lawn and to baby-sit, to teach us belly-dancing and pottery and easy classical guitar.
I’ll sign up for a poetry workshop at the New School, I decided. I’ll commute to the city one night a week, just to keep a claim on that territory. The poems were starting to come anyway, just as I knew they would.
I took a walk with the children in that profound absence of traffic and other walkers. The lawn sprinklers moved back and forth with the precision of Rockettes. Women on their lawns and porches were friendly. When they saw me with Jason and Ann, who fit nicely into the mean age of all the children in the neighborhood, they waved and invited us to visit.
It was spring in the suburbs, as it was in the city, but out there it announced itself in full orchestra. During my walk I felt that I would probably be able to forgive Howard, that we could clean the whole slate and start all over again. It might take a while, I knew, but I believed we could do it. What I would have trouble dealing with was the heartbreaking leafiness of all those trees and the earth-sprung shoots of grass underfoot. What I probably couldn’t ever forgive was that joyous riot of birdsong wherever I went.
We said so long to the painters and drove back to our carton-packed apartment, which had begun to look like a poor man’s supermarket. At three o’clock in the morning, Raymond showed up at our door. Things hadn’t worked out, he said, by way of explanation. Renee was staying in Chicago for a while to seek new horizons, but she had promised to keep in touch.
Raymond’s feet hung over the arm of the sofa when I tucked him in. He snored like a diesel train approaching a crossing, and the sofa groaned in rhythm with his dreams. He looked through the want ads every day. He took our garbage to the incinerator and ran little errands. My night talks with Howard were expanded into small but amiable group sessions for a while. Raymond’s stories were interesting, as I’d suspected they’d be, from his tattoos and all. He never even knew his real parents or his true history. We sent him to N.Y.U. for a battery of aptitude tests, and it was predicted he’d do well in social research or merchandising. In the meantime, we helped him find a place of his own in Sherry’s current building, and we staked him to a small loan until his luck changed. We were still worried about Renee though, and a few days later there was an airmail letter. She was lonely and her body absorbed only the harmful additives in food. After all, Chicago was not her hometown.
43
This is the last stage of happiness;
the lamp still keeps one filament of light.
And your sleeping arm, remembering an embrace,
still circles a portion of the night.
April 30, 1962
THEN IT WAS OUR final night in the complex. We put the children to bed, promising them good dreams, kissing them jointly to guarantee our reunion.
“Come here,” Howard said, beckoning from our bedroom door. He was unbuttoning his shirt, smiling.
“No,” I said. “You come in here.” I gestured at the living room, that new miniature city with its cardboard skyline.
“Hey, there’s no room in there.”
“We’ll make room.” I moved some things from the sofa and
set them onto the floor and the coffee table.
“It’s a special occasion, you know. This is going to be our last session here, in this place.”
Howard hesitated. “We don’t need that stuff anymore.” His smile was flickering, ready to go out.
“Don’t be afraid, Howie,” I said. “We’re not going to go over the recent past. It’s too awful for me, anyway.”
He came in then, and we lay down side by side once again, hips touching, fingers joined. The sofa springs plunked a small, familiar complaint.
“I want to do the future instead,” I said.
“Howard was relaxed, amused. “Are you a fortune-teller?” he asked. “Can you really see the future?”
But I didn’t have to be a seer to do that. It was a cinch. On certain Sundays, we’ll no longer look at model homes. Instead, we’ll probably go to places like Plant World and Puppy Palladium. In the back of a station wagon, we’ll trundle home azalea and begonia, rhododendron and spirea. One day, when Jason has outgrown his allergies, we might even bring back a puppy in a carton.
Howard will have to work longer hours to keep up the mortgage payments and all the other expenses. He’ll have to spend a couple of hours every day just commuting.
As for me, at super shopping malls, I’ll be a consumer, dazzled by the bounty. In bed, I’ll always be a passenger ready for cosmic flight.
“Well, can you?” Howard asked.
“What? Oh, the future. Sure,” I said. “Let me read your palm.” I opened his fingers. “A lot of intersecting lines here. God, it looks like Bruckner Boulevard.” I sighed. “I wish I really knew what it all means.”
Howard closed his hand over mine. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “Don’t look for mystical answers, love. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“We’re going to be happy,” Howard continued.
“Reasonably happy,” he emended. “Peaceful. That’s not so bad, is it?”
Happiness. It seemed like the most senseless and tenuous of states. “Are you happy right now?” I asked.
He paused for just an instant. “Yes,” he said. “Sure. Yes, I am.”
“But what’s going to happen when you’re not again?”
“Paulie, that’s not fair. I thought we weren’t going to go over the recent past.”
“We’re not. We’re talking about the. future, kiddo. Remember? But women aren’t the only ones who live in cycles. I mean, what’s going to happen when you start to feel sad again, displaced, melancholy?”
“Who says I’m going to?”
“Who says you’re not?”
“I say,” Howard said. I’m happy, damn it!” He banged his fist on the floor, and china in a nearby barrel made an answering sound. “Can’t you tell? I’ve got everything I truly want in this world, and I know that now. You and the kids. A decent life. Nothing can affect that. Don’t worry, nothing’s going to change.”
I smiled in the growing darkness. “Everything changes,” I said.
“What are you trying to say, Paulie?”
“I’m trying to say that it wouldn’t be any good if it happens again, Howard. I’m trying to say that I’ve changed.”
“Yes,” he said, and his hand moved cautiously to his chest. “But you’d never get away with murder in this state, baby,” he said.
I let him have his little joke, thinking he’s the one, he’s the one who got away with murder.
In bed later, after we made love, Howard whispered, “Do you forgive me, Paulie? Do you forgive me?” But I didn’t choose to answer; I pretended to be asleep.
It was difficult to really fall asleep, for the last time in that room. I knew that things were no longer the same between Howard and me, and we would take that burden of knowledge with us wherever we went.
Maybe it was just as well, though. Obsessions never actually pay off, even in Bette Davis movies. It was more balanced now; equal passion, equal terror.
Toward morning I woke to find Howard’s face, a dimly illuminated planet, suspended above mine. “But do you still love me?” he asked, and his breathing was anxious.
I looked at his shadowy features, rediscovering their dear planes. I inhaled that known odor, the heavenly stink of a well-used bed. Love, I thought sadly. But I felt committed to the truth. “Yes,” I said. “I still love you.”
“And I still love you!” he cried joyfully, letting himself down again, crushing me under the weight of his relief. “And we’re going to start all over, a new life in a brand-new place. So everything’s going to be fine! Isn’t it?”
44
ON MOVING DAY SEVERAL neighbors came in to say goodbye. I was surprised because we had never spoken to some of them. “I always meant to come in,” a woman from down the hall said. “But you know how these things are. Something always came up.” She wished us the best anyway, while she looked around at the packed cartons and the naked beds with an ecstatic gleam. I imagined it was the same curiosity one might feel at the funeral of a stranger; a perverse longing to see the body without any desire to have known the person.
The superintendent of our building came up too, and he said we had been very desirable tenants. We had never destroyed property that didn’t belong to us, and we had been good sports about power failures and failure of water pressure. He was usually such a dour and inarticulate man. In almost five years he had hardly said anything to me. He had changed washers and knocked furiously on pipes and had always seemed to look just past me with his terrible eyes. For a moment I thought he might be trying to say something else, that I had perceived the desperate look of a man in love. But when I thanked him and offered my hand, he turned quickly away and left the apartment.
Jason and Ann ran wildly about, excited by all the activity, and for a while I sat them in front of the television set just to keep them quiet and out of the way. Cartoons flickered and squealed. They sat as close as they could, as if they drew nourishment from its milky light, until they were abruptly weaned by a mover who pulled the plug and carried the set away. They both screamed in protest and Howard took them downstairs for a final ride on the playground swings. I wondered if Mrs. X would happen to look through her window and catch her last sight of him, fixed forever in this world as a family man.
The moving men were like Chinese acrobats I had once seen in a circus; squat and powerful and communicating in wordless grunts. They worked perfectly in teams, our furniture on their backs, until the rooms were completely bare.
I went on a brief tour of inspection. A rusted steel wool pad on the kitchen counter, a collapsed pacifier in the dust where the baby’s crib had been, and, in the shower stall, delicate curls of pubic hair, gender unknown.
Howard, always mindful of ceremony, came upstairs again with the children in his arms, and we all took one last look together. The baby, because she was hungry or tired, or from some deep, intuitive knowledge, began to cry, and we left quickly, leaving the door open, and we didn’t look back.
A Biography of Hilma Wolitzer
Hilma Wolitzer (b. 1930) is a critically hailed author of literary fiction. Her work has been described by the New York Times as “often hilarious and always compassionate.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, she began writing as a child. She was first published at age nine, when a poem she wrote about winter appeared in a local journal. She was voted the poet laureate of her junior high school, but after graduating from high school at sixteen she worked at various jobs, from renting beach chairs under the boardwalk in Coney Island to pasting feathers on hats in a factory and holding a position as an office clerk.
Wolitzer married at twenty-two, and though her family consumed most of her time, she began writing again. Her first published short story, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket,” appeared in print when she was thirty-six. Eight years (and several short stories) later, she published Ending (1974), a novel about a young man with a terminal illness. The New York Times called it “as moving in it
s ideas as it is in its emotions.” Ending was released when Wolitzer was forty-four years old and she was dubbed the “Great Middle-Aged Hope.”
She followed this success with In the Flesh (1977), a well-received novel of a conventional marriage threatened by an affair. Since then, her novels have dealt mostly with domestic themes, and she has drawn praise for illuminating the dark interiors of the American home. In the late seventies and mid-eighties, Wolitzer also published a quartet of young adult novels: Introducing Shirley Braverman (1975), Out of Love (1976), Toby Lived Here (1978), and Wish You Were Here (1984).
Following her novels Hearts (1980), In the Palomar Arms (1983), Silver (1988), and Tunnel of Love (1994), Wolitzer confronted a paralyzing writer’s block. Unable to write more than a page or two a day—none of which ever congealed into a story—she did not publish a book for more than a decade.
After working with a therapist to try to understand the block, she completed the first draft of a new novel—about a woman who consults a therapist to solve a psychic mystery—in just a few months. Upon its release, The Doctor’s Daughter (2006) was touted as a “triumphant comeback” by the New York Times Book Review. Since then, Wolitzer has published two more books—Summer Reading (2007) and An Available Man (2012).
In addition to her novels, Wolitzer has published nonfiction as well, including a book on writing called The Company of Writers (2001). She has also taught writing at colleges and workshops around the country. She has two daughters—an editor and a novelist—and lives with her husband in New York City, where she continues to write.
A three-year-old Wolitzer poses for a portrait, taken in 1933.
Wolitzer with her mother, Rose Liebman, and sisters, Anita and Eleanor, circa 1943.
Wolitzer drew this picture of FDR in 1945.
In the Flesh Page 21