Rose. It’s the kind of name none of us has. We’re so locked into our histories, my father, husband, and son in the Old Testament, my mother, Marion Leigh Wadsworth, the girls, and I on Plymouth Rock. From what I understand, neither I nor my children could ever be considered even remotely Jewish, although at Hastings I was the resident Jew.
“You ladies enjoy,” Rose says.
Mother says, “I really think you should bring Isaac and Jane to the city. Until you get whatever it is sorted out.”
I spoon Daisy soup, then, stupidly, as I’ll only have to do it again, I wipe her mouth.
“Foop,” she beams.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what it is.”
“You won’t believe it,” I say, looking only at Daisy.
She sighs. “He’s in town, isn’t he.”
The mere mention of him brings him here, to the cafeteria in Macy’s, and he’s watching how we do things, what we say, a kind observer, at the ready should we drop something or forget any of our bags on leaving.
“Leigh,” she warns. “Don’t be a fool.”
“Mother, please,” I say softly. “He had some news.”
“Of course he did.”
Fowler is in back of me, his mouth at my ear. It’s all right to tell her. Tell the planet. We make our own rules. But you know all this.
“He’s sick. I don’t know what it is. He might not make it through the winter.”
Mother looks embattled. “At this rate, Leigh, neither will you.”
I leave it. We go ahead and eat.
• • •
While Mother is at her afternoon tennis game in the park, I begin my maniac phoning.
They’re not home. He must have picked them up from camp and taken them for a swim, over to Kirsten’s or the neighbor’s club. I can’t bring myself to leave word, after listening to our recorded message, which has all of us talking at once and then Isaac saying, “You caught us at a bad time—can we get back? Please say yes.”
Next: Kirsten.
“They’re on their way over,” she says automatically.
I beg her to have them call me the minute they get there.
“You’ve been gone for under twelve hours, Leigh,” she says with irritation. “Nothing’s happened to them.”
“I want to talk to my children,” I tell her.
“Then live with them.” She hangs up.
I call her back. “Are we really doing this?” I ask her.
“We?” she pleads.
My turn. I hang up.
I look around my old room, wishing for siblings. If I had siblings I could call them. They could come back to this apartment and make themselves comfortable with things to eat and pillows, and they could talk me out of this desperation. They could marvel at Daisy’s chewing on the spines of my college texts in the combination desk-bookshelf-cupboard that I can remember being thrilled over acquiring. It made me feel wealthy, like one of my classmates, to have such a structure to keep all my things in. I was minus the walk-in closet, the private bath, the wraparound terrace, but I felt I was ahead in terms of the uniqueness of my parents. Not one of my classmates could brag that she had a Jewish father and a mother who didn’t believe in God. (It was their one commonality, I thought, the atheism. I thought it sounded fashionable then, although it terrified me, made me feel as if I were floating in a satellite universe that was only coincidentally connected to the one everyone else was living in.)
A brother or a sister would ground me, I think.
I lie on the floor next to Daisy, who now sits over a series of inch-high plastic people, fitting them into shallow wells in a plastic school bus. I know that in minutes I’ll be asleep, so I pull her over, settle her into the V of my hips, arrange the toys so she’ll stay occupied while I nap. If I knew a prayer I’d say it now. I’d tell whoever it is their names, all three, and ask for help in getting us back under the same roof. And then I’d ask whoever it is not to let Fowler die, and to flood Simon with forgiveness.
• • •
Our theory, Gillette’s and mine, that glut begets immorality, holds water. In fact, given my research on the court of Louis XIV, it’s irrefutable. Feigning scholarliness and singleness of purpose, I have enlisted the help of one of the librarians at the 40th Street branch, a man younger than myself, trim, elegantly dressed, who gestured dramatically, palms open to the world of European social history, when I asked for books on seventeenth-century French mores.
“My dear,” he swooned. “Your chariot awaits.”
It is midmorning. I left Daisy home with Mother. I walked forty blocks to get here despite a crashing headache and terrible fatigue. I’ve had six hours of sleep, in spurts of one and two hours, since I brought us to Mother’s two mornings ago.
He hands me a printout of ten titles, mostly biography and collected essays, each with a long abstract.
“Tip of the iceberg, dear heart. Once I teach you the matching game, you’ll be able to make your selections more expediently.”
I’m trying to be intent, but I keep wondering about this man, where he went to college. ELIOT BERMAN, the nametag reads. He types in two commands and the computer lists more titles. He shows me the instructional card of prompts, and I thank him, clutching the printouts.
“You’ve been dear,” I say, kicking myself. Something Mother would say.
“Not really,” he says curtly. “This is my job.”
I turn back to the screen.
“Will there be anything else?”
Almost venomous he is, all of a sudden, ill-treated servant to master, misogynist to all of womankind.
“Yes,” I say, chinking.
“Be quick, would you.” He slants his head away, eyeballing me.
“I need a book on degenerative diseases of the muscular system. Just a general text that would list them and the features of each, how each first manifests itself and progresses. If you’d be so kind. I’ve left my husband for a man who’s dying of one of them, he hasn’t told me which, and I’d like to get my bearings.”
Eliot smiles to himself, a puzzling smile, not exactly amused, not uninterested.
“Back in a jif,” he says, only glancing my way. I know he won’t be, that if he’s lucky, he’ll be on his lunch break or have gone home by the time I pass by the reference desk again, but I need him to know he’s gotten the wrong end of the tiger this morning.
Oh, let’s not do need.
I search, and find.
Dull, hardcover tomes full of dull, hardcover facts, no voices. Liselotte is my best guide. Reluctantly I jot down notes, facts, none of which has any impact. Open on the desk, Liselotte’s letters drown them all out: It is a miserable thing when people may no longer follow their own common sense but have to conform to the whims of whores and self-interested priests.
I leave my carrell in search of a telephone.
Gillette, home, her voice huskier than usual, takes a tired tone with me.
“You kicked you out?”
“I suppose,” I explain, “it’s what I want. To be away. To give us room for some solution.”
“About the chapter,” she cuts me off.
I tell her about the musty old texts and that I’m inclined to go a different route with the book now, find more primary sources, letters, diaries, poetry by the women who watched as men brought home booty from war, effected royal takeovers and mergers, got rid of wives and mistresses, gained popularity.
“It’s yours,” she says lightly. “You call it.”
“Do you want to see the draft?” I ask, nervous that what I’m daring to call “my work” has now been deemed unimportant by the only person who supports it.
“I can wait,” she says, “until we meet with Barry.”
Barry is our garrulous editor, a classic WASP divorcé: too smart, too jaded, too busy.
“Okay. Thanks.” I feel like a teenager, fresh from a meeting with a displeased teacher, one who might have suspected the link with Fowler and w
ho was primed for finding fault with my work, knowing it would have reason to fall short.
I call Mother.
“Sound asleep,” she says, gratified. “All the way up Madison Avenue, after the children’s zoo, in my arms. I even figured out how to fold up that awful stroller! But don’t you think you ought to be here when she wakes up?”
“I will be,” I answer.
I race back to my desk, collect my things, leave the untrustworthy volumes, rely on Liselotte and the pounding instinct that tells me I have to get to Daisy, now, before she wakes up, lest all that is true about me appear in her tearful, frightened face.
I wait impatiently as the bag checker at the exit checks bags. Someone taps my shoulder.
Amazed, I take the manila folder Eliot hands me.
“Xeroxes,” he says, “from a medical dictionary. It’s all we had.”
I’m glad he turns on his heels, doesn’t wait for me to respond.
Before I reach the bag checker I’ve read a description of motor neuron diseases. There are a good number of them. I close the folder until I’m in the taxi, fishtailing up Madison Avenue.
“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease,” I read on the first page. In the top right-hand corner, penciled in tiny square letters, is “I’m sorry.”
It’s hot, and the traffic is horrendous. And Eliot Berman, who thought I was someone worth hating, has taken pity on me.
chapter five
I don’t sleep. Fearful, unable to concentrate, I put reading aside and haul out two yellowing photo albums from Mother’s slovenly bookshelf. I look at baby pictures of Isaac. In them, I never fully face the camera. I focus down on the baby, or away, at some off-site distraction. There are several of Fowler and Isaac sitting in the chair I sit in now, and there is one of the three of us, a momentary family, with the rock and castle background of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. We’re warmly dressed, but the ground is free of snow. It must have been March, a week or two before Fowler left me in the lurch. I show no signs of suspicion that this is about to occur.
Even in the best moments, since before the births of my children, there has been fear. I don’t remember, even in the whirlwind of finding Simon, a minute without it. Mother and Daddy are edgy people, so I’m sure I became afraid at a young age. I’m not sure I knew the safety others may have known, the ones with parents glued together throughout the years, in all the Christmas photos, at the school plays and Saturday birthday parties. My parents made a career out of being different from those other parents, and they enjoyed it.
Isaac came in a flash. The labor, anything but gradual, hit me in sleep, and when Fowler and I reached St. Vincent’s Hospital, I had to stay in the cab on my back until he got someone with a gurney to come to me. My water had broken in bed. I thought I’d peed, sneezed in my sleep and let loose, and then I felt the wave of pain in my lower back circle to my pelvis and down, down, through to the outside of my thighs where it got caught and I screamed. Fowler rushed, wordless, about the one large room, gathering clothes and the small bag I’d just packed with Kotex, a nightgown, and the obligatory but useless tennis ball everyone said would help to ease pain if you rolled it around on your back. I couldn’t stand without feeling that the baby would come out, so we crouched, both of us, and took the stairs like thieves afraid to make the boards creak.
Twenty minutes after we got to the hospital I had Isaac in my arms in a white receiving blanket with aqua balloons chasing across it. I was trying to see through what had just happened, to understand that I hadn’t gone into two pieces, despite all that pressure through me and out to my thighs, my trembling feet, no end to the pain, just disbelief over it.
“You have a boy, Mrs. Fowler,” the doctor, not mine but someone who was on call, said, and he shook my feeble hand and left forever.
“Seven nine,” one assistant said.
“APGAR ten,” someone else said.
I moved the blanket off his tiny, ruddy face, clamped shut except for the mouth, which was wailing the way I wanted to. Fowler was above me, at my shoulder, staring, speechless, holding his fingers out now and then to graze his son’s cheek.
He’d seen me pass through, go from what I was, pregnant, eighteen, a girl who’d floated into his life, to this. I couldn’t be his again. He wasn’t prepared for this sort of damage, I guess, and I wasn’t interested in damage control. If he couldn’t join the party, he could hang. I finally had the most precious thing. I was leaving off with the sort of fear his world offered me and finding my own, more gripping one. It’s this fear that has moved me through all these years of babies, work, and men. It keeps me wired, on my guard, while other people sleep, my mother out cold, unaware of her radio’s blaring talk show, Daisy bottom up in her enviable baby slumber.
I close the album and go back to the folder. There are several articles, some personal histories, some flat, horrifying descriptions of dystrophy and sclerosis. I picture Eliot at his monitor, commanding information for me, the harridan.
I read: causes, symptoms, treatments. I wonder, which one is it? All fatal: MD, ALS, MS, and the ones named after people. I recall Fowler’s fluttering arm, his difficulty getting up from his chair. I read about motor neurons, voluntary muscle control, limb weakness, exaggerated reflexes, damage that affects speech, chewing, swallowing. ALS, the first thing I read coming home, is more prevalent among men, ages thirty-five to sixty-five. There is no known cause. It isn’t hereditary. It leaves the brain, heart, bowel, and sexual functions unaffected.
I am sure this is what he has. Amyotrophic: muscle atrophy; lateral: “side”—nerve tracks run down both sides of the spinal cord; sclerosis: hardening—scars that remain after nerves have disintegrated. Suffocation is likely to be the cause of death, “when muscles that control breathing cease functioning.”
I go into the drugs and apparatuses—wheelchair, computer with wand attached to the head when all other muscle control fails, this for communication with nonsufferers. Then the personal narratives by the doomed, narratives infused with the sort of heroism unimaginable for Fowler. What like test has he ever faced? To what outrageous misfortune has he ever been enslaved?
My troubles shrivel. Until now I haven’t believed in his going, in his ultimate desertion. Like my intermittent awareness of stars, a priori, I have counted on Fowler’s being alive somewhere on the planet, bewitching women and adding to his body of remote films, out doing his Fowler thing, my first love, the father of my son. Now I am treated to preparations for his exit. How much easier my world would have been without him, and how stupid a thought that is, for, I’m quite sure, an easy world is not one I’d be comfortable in, my penchant always having been for the opposite, the sphere of dangers and surprises and absolute passion.
Ultimately I won’t be put off by endlessly ringing telephones, fury, or refusals. I will do as I see fit, despite the unpopularity it earns me.
By five-thirty, when Mother rises, I am cheerful, prepared for coffee and conversation, for the mornings of my girlhood, busy with food and phoning and the details of home.
“Goodness, you’re up early,” she says, gathering her summer robe around her. How fat she’s gotten! How much more the portrait of love!
“I am my mother’s daughter,” I say brightly.
• • •
Daisy whines for Raggedy (Ann), for her crocadonna (dile), her ridey toy (kiddie car).
We are starting to miss the company of our things. I tell Mother I can’t believe they haven’t called.
She says, “They’re not going to behave as you want them to right now. They owe you that.”
Read: don’t expect unconditional backing. You are at fault here.
We walk several long blocks west to the farmer’s market. Mother buys lettuce, peaches, tomatoes, and a loaf of dark raisin bread.
“It’s hot as Hades out here,” she complains. “Let’s take Daisy to the sprinkler.”
Again I miss home, the little wading pool in the
back, trips to Kirsten’s when the heat is at its most beastly.
“I’ll take her, Ma. You go home and rest.”
“I suppose I might do that,” Mother says. She squeezes Daisy. All in good fun, Daisy smacks her in the face.
“She’s her own person!” Mother says. “Not surprising!”
I stop in a deli and buy Daisy a cold box of juice with a straw and a travel pack of Fig Newtons. I turn the stroller north on Fifth Avenue. A screen above a bank entrance tells me it’s 91 degrees, but I don’t feel it. I’ve lost weight these arduous days. I move fast, planing, creating a breeze. Daisy wants faster, so I go faster, weaving in and out of sluggish pedestrians. I’m taking us to the library, not the sprinkler, to thank Eliot. It’s good to know where I’m going, to be on this errand.
• • •
I ask him about lunch, if he’s eaten it, if he usually eats it, and if he’d like to join us for it. Daisy wants to nosedive onto the desk, pilfer pencils and Post-its.
“You read what was in the folder, then?” He exits a file and locks his center drawer.
“Every word. I know a lot now.”
“Here.” He gives me three colored pencils and an eraser. “These are for herself.”
He pinches Daisy’s sweaty thigh. “Let’s go somewhere arctic. I refuse to sweat in public. There’s a horrible burger place a block away that’s bound to be cold.”
I haven’t known relief like this in a long time. I believe that lunch with Eliot will not prove harmful in any way. And this belief, relieving as it is, hurts. It informs me, as does so much right now—the heat, Daisy’s small, unfulfilled requests to be home among her things and siblings, my mother’s amazed weariness—that I’ve been on a furious ride for years, that I’ve had three children in a hurry, that I’ve paid no heed to the smallish voice at the back of my heart, the one with the complaint that points to all the ignored wisdom of my life: Please, Leigh, a moment of your time.
We land in a dark, tight corner of a Burger-on-Flame. I fold up the stroller and sit Daisy on my lap.
“Infernal, isn’t it,” he states, then levels his gaze at me, a woman with her life in pieces, sharing that misery with youngsters. Through the tortoiseshells, I see that his eyes are pale blue, not even blue really, and inscrutable, defiant. But somehow they take me in, they want to know.
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