Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  “Honey? I’m in a meeting now that I just can’t leave. Better eat without me.”

  His work and ego prospered—for us, he said. But how could he possibly learn on Sundays the intricate rhythm we had established during the week? How could he relieve me if he left us in the morning and returned late at night, or if he were away, as the omniscient Spock had divined, on a business trip?

  “Hold it—” said Will, opening his lens on us.

  I tried to hold it.

  “Okay. Relax now.”

  Us at the fountain in Washington Square, us lying naked on the bed, us playing pat-a-cake, us arty under the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “You have no idea how breathtakingly beautiful you are with that child,” he said, holding the negatives up to the light for scrutiny. “You’re going to love some of these.”

  He kept us like a credit card in a window of his wallet and blown up splat on his office wall. As I sat in the doctor’s office waiting Andy’s turn or stood in line at the checkout counter, I liked to think of us on Will’s office wall silently watching him work, decorating his life. Our sepia eyes followed the viewer all over the room. Hector had a penchant for pretty clericals from good colleges, and I wanted our presence felt in that place. Not that I mistrusted Will, but I remembered how far I could have been trusted as an unattached clerical. Overnight, it seemed, I had switched allegiances: suddenly I found myself siding with wives and parents against insurgents. Marxists were right: we follow our class interests.

  Once every two weeks I hired a daytime sitter and tore myself from Andy as Spock advised. I planned to slip off to the library and read a book or arrange to meet a friend at the Museum of Modern Art. But somehow the hours were too precious to use up on personal frivolities, and instead I took to dropping in on Will for lunch (as in the old days), doing everything I could to live up to my photographs. Flat-stomached supermother uptown between feedings. “Please tell him Mrs. Burke is here,” I said with authority to the current receptionist. Not for nothing had I insisted on living in Manhattan.

  I took more care dressing for those office calls than when Will wrenched me away from Andy at bedtime to accompany him to the movies or a party at Hector’s, where I watched the world go spinning on as though babies were a recent invention. Couples stood in line at movie theaters holding hands, oblivious of the consequences; old friends gathered at Hector’s with new girlfriends to exchange news of charter flights and recent books, as though Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care had not been written for them. “How’s that baby?” asked informed singles. And when Will proudly displayed the latest photos of me and Andy he had carefully enlarged on weekends in the darkened kitchen, they saw no prophecies, heard no warnings. “I told you; I thought you knew,” Roxanne had said, yet not even I had caught the message. Then how could these party girls be expected to understand what was in store for them? I was not about to admit exhaustion or plead anxiety to them, waiting like harpies for just such a signal that Will was carrion. Nothing provokes attack like the smell of defeat. Instead, I joined the general snicker at the profession of housewife and kept a careful eye on Willy. And determined to do stomach-muscle exercises if I could steal the time.

  That first summer I took Andy to the crowded playground every day, carrying her up the slide and sliding her down on my lap.

  “Wheee! Andy,” I said; and she after me, “ee.”

  I strapped her into the baby swings, swinging her, singing to her, anything to hear her delicious laughter.

  I had a silver nut tree, nothing would it bear

  But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear.

  The King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me

  And all for the sake of my little nut tree.

  From the tilt of her head, her sounds, the way she held out her hands to me, I knew which songs she loved, which games she wanted. We spoke in a secret code. Her laugh and cry was the pitch pipe by which I tuned my days.

  I skipped over water, I danced over sea,

  And all the birds in the air could not catch me.

  From a park bench I watched her at my feet intently tearing up a leaf, her mouth open and brows knit in concentration, her pudgy fingers moving with careful grace. Though I always took a book to the park I didn’t dare read for the dangers; couldn’t read for the distractions. Anyway, most books were now irrelevant. Instead, I searched around to see which of the other mothers, multiparous and knowing, could tell me things about my daughter I ought to know. Some of them were limber and accomplished, some foul-mouthed and acne-scarred, no doubt with mean lives and husbands to match, and I wondered as I watched them fitfully sunning themselves on the benches—their skirts or dungarees pulled above their knees to reveal legs laced with varicose veins and stubble, their hair in rollers on Fridays, their hips spreading, their ankles puffed with edema—I wondered that some of them had ever managed to land and hold husbands at all. I listened to them entranced. Their complaints were auguries, their advice oracular. I hung on every casual comparison they made of Andy with their own like revelations. My daughter’s life was on my hands.

  “Slow down, Willy!” I screamed as we rode the bumper of the car ahead. I yelled for Andy, and all the others Willy was bound to kill, it was only a matter of time. He was surely the most reckless driver in New York City. Always rushing to make the turn, pass the car ahead, get into the tunnel first, make it through the light on yellow, as though restraint were defeat. I half wished he’d crash and get it over with. (“There, you see? Now you’ve killed our baby!”)

  With a certain acumen he labeled my criticism “disloyal,” and forbade it. “I’ve told you: this is the way I drive. If you don’t like it, then don’t drive with me!”

  I couldn’t fault his position. But aware of Andy asleep in her carcrib in the back seat, I couldn’t control myself either. Her enemy was my enemy.

  “I’m sorry, Will. I mean, please slow down. As a favor. I don’t know what I’ll do if she wakes up now.”

  He threw me an exasperated look and dropped a few feet behind the car in front before pulling out fast to change lanes. I clenched the armrest and closed my eyes. “Oh please, Willy,” I pleaded.

  He stopped the car short in the parking lane.

  “You’re impossible! If I’m going to creep, I have to be in the slow lane. Why don’t you drive?”

  But I had long since given up driving except in emergencies.

  “I’m sorry, Willy. Go on. I’ll keep quiet.”

  I dreaded angering him. My stomach had knots enough. If we continued to break faith with each other we would turn sour like any other couple, and then—The mere thought of Andy fatherless could make me panic.

  Will started the car again, his mouth set against me. There was never time any more to talk things out as we once had done. Misunderstandings lingered. I always seemed, he said, to be pushing him away, when what I needed was to bind him close.

  I was more helpless than ever in the passenger seat. Yielding to nature’s temptations had put me in Willy’s power as surely at it had once put me in Joey Ross’s. Only this time I couldn’t escape by moving out of town.

  I began each day solemnly with resolutions:

  Today I will make myself lunch; I’ll brew myself a cup of tea between breakfast feeding and diaper delivery.

  I will not pick her up whenever she cries today.

  I will be calm when she spits out her food.

  The horror of my predicament was: everything counts. Each tiny mistake I made was destined to reverberate through all eternity.

  The first time I yelled at Andy she looked at me unbelieving; betrayed. Her chin puckered, her lip trembled, then tears gushed from those green eyes all over her hands. I sank into a week-long depression. (Only a week and I had damaged her forever! More than a week and who would have fed her?) The weeks became records of my guilt, the months stages to weather and survive. No wonder my poor mother blamed herself for all my foolishness: I felt responsible for all of Andy’s. Willy was pi
ssed at my state of mind; I wasn’t the carefree woman he had married. I lived by the tick of a clock not the beat of a pulse.

  It’s possible that you will find yourself feeling discouraged for a while when you first begin taking care of your baby. It’s a fairly common feeling, especially with the first. You may not be able to put your finger on anything that is definitely wrong. You just weep easily. Or you may feel very bad about certain things. One woman whose baby cries quite a bit feels sure that he has a real disease, another that her husband has become strange and distant, another that she has lost all her looks. (Section 16.)

  Exactly as I had once imagined but forgotten, when my child was born my fate slipped through my fingers into the bay. I was hers now.

  If you begin to feel at all depressed, … go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get yourself a new hat or dress…. (Section 16.)

  A new locale, a new hair style, could solve nothing any more. We swam around sifting plankton, hoping for some huge uplifting wave to come along and carry us high and wide; but there were only the usual ripples and currents and erratic seismographic disturbances to be recorded on the precision instruments of oceanographers. It all went down somewhere in a book; caprice was a memory. Even Roxanne had been stuck until Sasha began school. At least until Andy reached puberty, I noted, I was no freer to kill myself than a barnacle.

  Notes in a Baby Book:

  December 14: First smile. More delicious than the sneeze.

  January 2: She discovers her thumb.

  April 5: I laid her down on her stomach and picked her up on her back. Ergo: she has learned to turn over.

  June 21: First tooth through. Though not yet visible, I can hear it clink against her spoon. At last an explanation for her fretfulness as good as Will’s hypothesis that I am overprotective.

  August 17: She learns to stand.

  Thinking her still asleep in her crib at naptime I had gone next door to borrow some diapers from a neighbor. When I returned, I heard her screaming in her room. (Was it my fault? “Look, honey,” Willy had warned, “this is the third time you’ve run out of diapers. What happened to the emergency supply I got you? You need better planning. If you won’t increase the regular order, you’ll just have to use the ones you have more sparingly.”)

  An accident? Had I forgotten to raise the side of the crib?

  A baby, by the age he first tries to roll over, shouldn’t be left unguarded on a table for as long as it takes the mother to turn her back. (Section 349.)

  I rushed to her room to find her standing in her crib clutching the bars terror-stricken, her fat knees buckling.

  “Standing! Look at you!” I cried. She sobbed with exhaustion and victory. A star!

  I unhooked her fingers one by one from the bars and scooped her up into my arms, my bumblebee, pressing kisses all over her shining face. “You can stand. You can do anything.” I rejoiced. When she kicked to be put back again, I sat her down in the crib; then up she climbed on her little legs once more, crowing with pride.

  She had learned to stand not for a moment or a day, but for all time. I knelt before her crib. She looked so much tinier upright than sprawled across her mattress. She was one of us now, though she didn’t come up to my knees. As I knelt adoringly before her, trying to kiss her nose through the bars, she began to shake her little body furiously, rattling the bars, laughing until her chin puckered, her lower lip protruded toward me, and once again, the deluge.

  Down again with my help to sitting, then up on her own. For an hour and more we did our joyful dance while the tide waited.

  “William Burke, please.”

  “Just a minute, please.” A new voice at the switchboard.

  “Willy? She can stand up!”

  “What?”

  “Andy! She can stand up!”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, She holds on, of course, but she can get up by herself.”

  “Hey! That’s great, Sash! Great! It’s about time, isn’t it?”

  “No, Willy. She’s only nine and a half months old. Spock says it happens any time in the last quarter of the first year. But she’s so happy, Will,” I went on, imploring him to rejoice. “Like she knows. She stands up and laughs that way she has, as though she’s the wonder of the world. And you know what? She is! The minute I sit her down, up she goes again. I thought you’d want to know about it.”

  “Sure do, honey. Thanks a lot for calling me.”

  When I hung up I chastised myself for having phoned him with the news. I ought not to have told him at all. I should have let it happen for him as a surprise, as it had happened for me. And when he finally did come home, I overdid it, searching his face for a joy that could not possibly appear. And filled up like a Hoover bag with resentments.

  October 10: First step unassisted.

  October 28: First word: pity (pretty).

  The experts would have agreed I expected too much of Will: infants’ progress is fit news only for ladies’ magazines. Andy’s triumphs were everything to me—elating, exonerating—and only bonuses to him, which somehow diminished them. They were like the figure skates I had wanted for my ninth Christmas because my best friend had asked for skates and I imagined us learning together. We each got our skates, but Jackie got skis as well. She skated occasionally, but spent most of her Sundays on the Baybury slopes with other friends, while I settled for the school pond, alone. I acquired considerable skill, but what I had wanted was my friend.

  Willy tried. He brought home quince in the spring and roses often. But even with the living room a garden, he sat at the window and looked out. I could see he felt trapped inside with us, whereas I, trapped to, could barely be induced to leave.

  On Sundays he was gallant, taking us to Central Park, first to the zoo cafeteria for pancakes, then to the carrousel, where he waved to us from a bench each time Andy and I rode by. But in between, though I never actually caught him, I knew he looked at the carefree New York girls.

  Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross

  To see a fine lady upon a white horse.

  With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes

  She shall have music wherever she goes.

  Everyone but me was on best behavior, sitting still and enraptured in the darkened Hunter Auditorium as the Budapest String Quartet (with an extra cellist) unfolded Schubert’s Quintet in C Major. To me, it was the most exquisite music in their repertoire; of the five concerts in the series, this was the one I’d been most eager to hear. Yet already the opening movement had gone by while I sneaked nervous glances at my wristwatch, and now, with the adagio approaching, I feared it would all be over before I could begin to listen. Another waste.

  “Give me a dime, Willy,” I whispered between movements, unable to contain myself.

  “What for?”

  “I’m going to call home.”

  He glared incendiary darts into my heart. “No!”

  “Give me a dime!”

  “Shhh,” said people around us as the music commenced again.

  Trapped mid-row. If only he’d thought to buy aisle seats! I glanced at my watch. Time stopped. The exquisite slow movement was interminable!

  For my twenty-ninth birthday Willy had bought tickets to the entire Budapest series. Once, I noted bitterly, it would have been the perfect gift, the music stopping time for us in a different way. But now, the tickets were a burden, the music a snare. For two concerts in a row Andy had refused to be left with a sitter, and when I threatened to stay home with her again tonight, Willy was enraged.

  “Are you a wife or a fucking nanny? Why do you allow that child to tyrannize us?”

  Talk of tyranny! As though it were my fault that child care precluded entertainment! As though I should share his mad priorities! I had been working for weeks on getting her to sleep without having to sit with her in her darkened room for an hour, and I knew leaving her at bedtime with a strange sitter would set me back days.

  The cure is simple: put the baby to be
d at a reasonable hour, say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don’t go back. Most babies who have developed this pattern cry furiously for 2o to 3o minutes the first night, and then when they see that nothing happens, they suddenly fall asleep! The second night the crying is apt to last only 10 minutes. The third night there usually isn’t any at all. (Section 284.)

  With Andy, it had been a half hour the first night and an hour the second, and I wasn’t going to try any third.

  It’s hard on the kind-hearted parents while the crying lasts. They imagine the worst: that his head is caught in the slats of the crib, or that he has vomited and is lying in a mess, that he is at least in a panic about being deserted.

  By then Will bristled at the mere suggestion that he get someone else to go with him to a concert. “Now tonight you do as I say! You put her down in that crib and close that door and leave, do you hear? Or else I’ll do it!”

  Though I trembled with hate (her enemy was my enemy), I couldn’t fight him. He forbade me to overrule him as he forbade me to go for the mail in my night clothes or tell secrets to Roxanne. He was too strong. I couldn’t handle Andy and him both; things were difficult enough. If he threatened to leave us, if he left us, we couldn’t survive. (“Don’t be so fatalistic,” said Roxanne. “I could probably get you a job. I know a few angles by now.”) I gave in as often as I could; when it came to a fight I always ended in tears and apologizing, like someone without resources. (“The best thing about a divorce is, afterwards you get to say and think anything you want,” said Roxanne.)

  Finally, the applause. “Excuse me, excuse me, please,” I said, pushing past the others in my row all applauding ecstatically.

  At last the aisle, only seconds ahead of the intermission crush. Now for the lobby and the phone booths. If I couldn’t complete my call or couldn’t stand the message, Willy or no, I would leap into a taxi and break for home!