Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  When I felt the flutter of life in me anew, I kept the thrill of it to myself. Something told me to be careful. I did my quota of nesting, washing Andy’s outgrown layette and making extensive lists of details to attend to, but I was careful not to burden Will with them. There was something about the way he picked up the newspaper and then put it down again, the way he kept going to the refrigerator and the window for something that wasn’t there, that told me to keep my nesting secret. He was too restless around us, as though we were keeping him from something important and elsewhere.

  I did my best to avoid sensitive topics. I hid my child-care pamphlets among my recipes as I had once hidden my beauty charts and Seventeens. I knew they were considered vacuous, like the talk of formulas and play groups that blighted cocktail party repartee—unless it issued from some doctor. But they dealt with matters too important to leave to chance. I knew I risked the worst contempt for reading them, but I had more than my own ego to consider: there were the children’s. How else was I to learn the pitfalls of sibling rivalry or the symptoms and cure of croup? I had no models, no advisers for child care. Like housework, it was something charming people didn’t discuss and rich people didn’t do.

  Once I had tried to read Will an urgent paragraph from the “Parent and Child” feature in the Sunday Times Magazine supplement. Tearing it away from me he had cried, “Why do you read that trash and let it upset you? It’s just bullshit!” as, during my earlier pregnancy, he’d forbidden me to read about the limbless thalidomide babies, saying, “You’d be a nervous wreck if you didn’t have me to protect you.

  I too was protective. Too vulnerable to rebel, I always tried to have Andy’s bath finished and her toys picked up before Will came home, to put on perfume and music at dinnertime, so things would be cozy. I could never have risked Roxanne’s guerrilla tactics. But however carefully I spared him our disorder, he still used every excuse to come home late. No matter how endearingly Andy greeted him at the door, once home, it seemed, Will couldn’t wait to get out of the house again.

  Men react to their wife’s pregnancy with various feelings: protectiveness of the wife, increased pride in the marriage, pride about their virility…. But there can also be, way underneath, a feeling of being left out … which can be expressed as grumpiness toward his wife, wanting to spend more evenings with his men friends, or flirtatiousness with other women. (Section 18.)

  Of all the experts I’d ever consulted, none—no Watson, Webber, or Spock—was unequivocally on my side. They made us do it, then blamed us for it, another case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. They found nothing more hateful than a clinging wife—except a dominating mom.

  Some fathers have been brought up to think that the care of babies and children is the mother’s job entirely. But a man can be a warm father and a real man at the same time…. Of course, I don’t mean that the father has to give just as many bottles or change just as many diapers as the mother. But it’s fine for him to do these things occasionally…. Of course, there are some fathers who get goose flesh at the very idea of helping to take care of a baby, and there’s no good to be gained trying to force them. Most of them come around to enjoying their children later “when they’re more like real people.” (Section 20.)

  From the confines of my cell I tried to thwart Willy’s wanderings. It was my duty. By turns I tried confrontation and subterfuge, and for penance I supressed my terror in the face of his driving and my gloom at his playing knight to every lady. And when I ran out of coffee or snapped at him in my regular early morning panic, I kicked myself for driving him off to Riker’s Restaurant for breakfast, the Times tucked under his arm as he walked out the door. And when I finally went to the hospital to give birth to Jenny, I could no longer hide my obsessive conviction that once Will was free of us, with me away and Andy gone to stay with his mother and nothing in the world to keep him at home, he would simply pack up his things and leave.

  “What a beautiful child! I never saw such eyes.”

  “Thank you.” With a pang for pale Jenny asleep in the carriage, I beamed at Andy. Picking the chocolate off her Good Humor, oblivious of praise, she was indeed beautiful.

  “I mean, her eyelashes. What we wouldn’t give for lashes like that, eh? Too bad they’re wasted on kids.” She smoothed her white uniform, sighing with fatigue, then peered into my face. “Where’d she get them—from her father?”

  “N-no,” I stuttered, brushing my hair back self-consciously. “I mean I don’t think so. Her father’s fair.” Should I explain? “Actually, I once had eyes like that myself.”

  “You did? When you were a kid? See what I mean?” she said, shaking at once her head and the carriage in her charge. “What a waste.”

  The ice cream was dripping down Andy’s fat arms onto her overalls. I reached down with a diaper to catch it, but, too fast for me, she squirmed free. “Come back here, monkey,” I shouted, taking off after her. “Take that stick out of your mouth when you run!”

  Too late. Jenny was awake and crying. I caught my screaming Andy and tucked her under my arm. She replaced the stick I snatched from her mouth with her thumb.

  “I’ve got to go now,” I said to my companion, hooking Andy into the baby seat atop the carriage.

  “You mustn’t let her suck her thumb, dear. Her teeth will come in all crooked and ruin her face. She’ll need braces.”

  “I don’t believe in that,” I said.

  Whether thumb-sucking displaces the teeth or not, you naturally prefer to have your child give it up as soon as possible. (Section 324.)

  “See that? Your little girl’s eyes are even brighter now she’s been crying. What we wouldn’t give.”

  I gathered our plastic belongings and Andy’s strayed sneakers, then pushed the carriage toward the ramp leading out of the playground. Jenny quieted as soon as we were rolling, but there was still no time to waste.

  “See you tomorrow,” I called back. My milk was already letting down.

  “The man I work for,” the woman called after me, “is a professor at the university!” She could have been his wife for the pride in her voice. “He won’t let Charlotte suck her thumb!”

  We rolled down the ramp and out of the park.

  “Pedestrians have the right of way!” I yelled.

  “Pedestrians have to right away,” mimicked Andy.

  What would the park nurse have thought if she knew that as soon as I put Jenny to my breast, Andy took hold of her sister’s tiny foot, rubbed it on her cheek, and watching me with her great green eyes, sucked her thumb inconsolably?

  “Don’t you think that’s a creepy scene, Sasha? Don’t you think it’s bad for her?” asked Will. But whatever I did about it was bound to be wrong, damned either way. And who but a stranger would have the heart to stop her?

  I had just walked in with the groceries when the phone rang.

  “Surprise,” said Roxanne.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Guess.”

  We hadn’t spoken in ages. We still confided in each other, loved each other, but since I had become a mother I’d seen and spoken to almost no one.

  “Let’s see,” I tried.

  “You’re getting married?”

  “Married! Don’t be crazy! Once was enough. Guess again.”

  “You got a new job?”

  “Getting closer. But it’s better than that. Guess again.”

  “You sold a poem.”

  “Yes! Four poems, to be exact. To Intersection. They’re going to feature me. Their Lady Poet. But I don’t care—it’s a start.”

  “Roxanne! How wonderful!”

  “All it takes, ladies and gentlemen, is freedom, determination, and very hard work. And to think,” she added, “I was once foiled by zygotes.”

  “Wait till old Franklin Raybel sees one of us in his Intersection,” I said. And though it was probably mean, I couldn’t wait.

  Will came leisurely into the kitchen, distributing kisses. He gave An
dy a large, plush, multicolored ball from FAO Schwarz, peered at Jenny in her Infanseat, presented me with a bakery box, set a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, and got down the long-stemmed goblets he had courted me with.

  Andy’s second birthday and I hated him. He’d said he’d be home at six thirty, and as usual he arrived at an entirely unrelated time, pretending nothing was wrong. As usual he came swathed in gifts when what I needed was love.

  I couldn’t let it pass. Crippled by vanity and two babies I had only two choices: to care or not to care.

  “Where have you been?”

  He stiffened, setting his jaw for the defense like a bull lowering his horns. “At the office. And then picking up these things.”

  Presents and a lie. No one had answered his office phone for hours.

  It was the way we always started. Not with a difference to be resolved or an unkindness to be forgiven, but with some absolute and crushing betrayal. To be obliterated by a new total commitment—or divorce.

  “I’ve been calling your office for hours. No one was there.”

  “I was in the back room. Or maybe I’d already left to get the stuff.”

  Another lie. Schwarz’s closed at five thirty.

  “Did you stop at Schwarz’s on the way home?” I asked, laying a trap.

  I could catch him, or he could answer skillfully and escape; either way I lost. I prayed he would have some half-believable explanation to prove that despite all his treachery he might still love me.

  “No. I got the ball on my lunch hour. I had a drink with Hector and picked up the champagne. Are we going to have an inquisition over the birthday cake?”

  A drink with Hector! Me here, waiting, and he has a drink with Hector! If it was with Hector.

  But as always, it was too risky for me to follow through. Mothers of very young children are not in the best position to press their hunches. Anyway, Andy was already watching us. And we were dealing only in words, which didn’t matter.

  I opened the cake box. Frosting flowers: sweet deceptions.

  What did matter were facts. The fact of me here alone with the girls, always alone, waiting for him, going crazy. Of his being ever poised to flee. The incessant subterranean battle. Whatever time t he said he’d show, he showed at t + x.

  His defense: “Can’t you be flexible? Must I know in advance and report to you every step I’m going to take?”

  No way for me to calculate x without being small-minded. No possibility of retribution. For every x, the salad would be wilted, the entree spoiled, the children ready for bed or asleep. Complaints too mean to voice. My complaints deemed trivial, while his:

  “Can’t we do anything spontaneously any more?” My back a trampoline for his spontaneity.

  Small-minded? On the contrary, my mind soared, exploded, with resentments! (A disaster-enjoying woman of thirty will be, unless a miracle happens, the same at 40 and at 60: Dr. Watson.) My mind, my faculties, universally disregarded since I had become a housewife, were tuned to detect the minutest discrepancies. They never worked better! No sooner did the key turn in the door than the smile I summoned turned to snarl or sob, as in he walked, a torment to his wife, a stranger to his children, bringing gifts and excuses and romantic pretense to make it worse.

  Happy birthday to you,

  Happy birthday to you,

  Happy birthday dear Andrea,

  Happy birthday to you.

  The flashbulbs and the champagne cork made Jenny cry during the ceremony, but at least Andy didn’t cry—even though I had to help her blow out her candles and it was long past her bedtime. With her endearing unpredictability she was the model celebrant, chasing the ball gleefully around the room, perfectly nesting the set of nesting boxes I gave her for a challenge, my precocious pumpkin.

  There we were, except for the absence of a little boy, the perfect family (flash! snap!). Lacking only an audience to make us real.

  “Sit still, darling. I’ll put the birthday girl to bed myself tonight,” said Will, elevating Andy to his shoulder. He whinnied like a stallion and cantered her off to bed.

  “Don’t forget her poem—she can’t sleep without it,” I called. “And two diapers for night time.” (The sleep crises of Section 284, long since resolved by ritual poems, had been superseded by other crises, other Sections.)

  “This whole family needs jollying,” said Will, returning to the living room to lift dozing Jenny from my arms. By the look in his eye and something in his voice, I knew he planned a bedtime treat for me as well.

  All forgiven. For once I would leave the dishes on the table till morning and go to bed unclothed. We would take it slow and all over, calmed by champagne, kissing and rolling, forgetting the formula and the new receptionist. Though I was no less exhausted than other nights, no less tense with the children in the next room ready to waken before we’d finished, still tonight I would try to relax.

  “Relax, will you? Where’s the fire?” Will had often urged, popping in and out of me in the early mornings as I lay poised to answer the baby’s first cry. It was as it had always been. If I wanted to kiss and snuggle and embrace, I had to be prepared to screw. One thing had to lead to another, whether there was only a little time or a lot. Touching and holding, for which I yearned, were only prelude for men. As Baybury girls learned at twelve, boys always go as far as they can and never backwards.

  “Kids are God’s contraceptives,” Willy quipped to his friends, “always waking up just when you feel horny.” Tonight, though, I would back Willy in letting them cry if they woke too soon. For once I would not fake orgasm in the interests of my offspring, but with the abandon of former days that made sex into love, I would try to scale with Willy those treacherous peaks we had once managed to climb so perfectly together.

  Unless Jenny switched to her panic cry, or Andy asked to be taken to the potty.

  The main cue for the mother is to remain friendly, encouraging, and optimistic about tomorrow. She can talk about how she, Daddy, brothers, sisters, friends, use the toilet, how the child is growing bigger every day, how nice it feels to be clean and dry. I don’t mean a whole sermon every day, just a reminder.

  All this takes a lot of patience. Some days the mother will be irritated and angry that no progress is apparent. If you see you are making no progress, drop the effort for a few days or weeks. It’s better not to punish. If encouragement doesn’t work, stronger methods will only set you back further. (Section 379.)

  Nine

  Leave it to the philosophers to have a weighty German name for the question of whether or not to procreate. Zeugungsproblem. An aspect of axiology, a branch of ethics. Hear the learned professors contemplate the consequences of birth for the race of Man, the metaphysical implications of existence, and not one word about the effects of procreation on a woman’s body.

  Schopenhauer, the profoundest of pessimists, meets the gloomy Byron on a holiday stroll through Venice. The two giants greet each other, remark the shimmer of the air, the futility of life, while their inamoratas, each leaning on her lover’s arm and shifting her weight from foot to foot, looks the other over, smiles sweetly, twirls her parasol, straightens her skirts. Ah, sighs Lord Byron, how painful this life. Aye, nods Schopenhauer, we must put a stop to it. They part, the one to suicide, the other to misogyny.

  But see what the tiniest baby will do to the woman. Stretching her belly and waist into the ghastliest shapes before it even emerges from the womb, ruining her breasts, turning her pink nipples brown. Producing spots at the hairline, dark hairs down her midline, bleeding gums, stretch marks, varicosities, blues, alterations of the hormones and perhaps the DNA—and that’s only the beginning. In time comes the ugly crease in the brow between the eyes hewn by incessant anxiety and sporadic rage, the rasp in the voice, the knot in the gut, the regret. Fear alters the features, and in time the sweetest child will make a shrew of her.

  Schopenhauer, the misogynist, resolves his Zeugungsproblem by remaining a bachelor and sometime celi
bate. He rises punctually each morning to write his books, blames his mother, takes his meals in his favorite restaurant, in a temper shoves an old woman down a flight of stairs, and discourses at length on the futility of life and the deception in women.

  It was partly because of the way Willy noted the girls on the street that summer, partly because of the new fashions, that I finally decided to cut my hair. The sixties had started while I was having my babies, and I felt I had to do something about it. The threat of abandonment or another woman had crept into the nursery, and I was going out of my mind.

  I did not act on impulse. I spent a long time thinking it over, studying the ads and my old photos, before I finally made an appointment with a hairdresser and hired a sitter. And even then, I would never have had the nerve to go through with it if Willy, who had declared himself against the haircut, hadn’t left town for a week to supervise a computer installation in Waterbury, Connecticut. He said.

  At first I tried to reach Andrew, the man who had regularly cut my hair when I was at Columbia before I had married and let it grow long. He would have known exactly the look I wanted. But I was told on the phone he had long since left to open a shop in Queens, and I accepted an appointment with a Mr. John instead.

  Standing on an Eighth Street crosstown bus edging through traffic, I was fairly optimistic about the results. My reflection in the bus window was not unattractive. It skipped the details and gave no hint of texture. Depending on how I chose to focus, I could see at a single spot on the windowpane my nose or a building across the street.

  I had never been one to dwell on my failings: Rather, since the miraculous removal of my braces back in 1945, I, raised on Emerson, had always believed that whatever faults surfaced, there was always some cure, some program or remedy to apply, to reverse the symptoms. A diet, a haircut, sun, sleep, exercise, a change of scene, a new lover, a husband, determination, suicide if all else failed. Through the years I had found my own standards more exacting than others’; and examining my reflection as we stopped to take on passengers, I was reasonably confident of the expedition’s outcome.