“Me, too.”
She lit another cigarette, poured herself a cup of coffee and took it outside with her. Robin was still giving the sandbox her full attention, but she turned from it at Andrea’s approach and got to her feet. She stood with her feet well apart and placed her hands very deliberately on her hips.
“Happy birthday,” she said. “Another goddam telephone call.”
Andrea tried to object to the “goddam” but couldn’t bring it off. “You’re impossible,” she said.
Robin beamed.
Andrea went to her and picked her up. “Impossible,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter. Other people get to have children. But what I get stuck with is—”
“A forty-year-old midget smartass!” Robin sang out.
“Smartie,” Andrea said. “A forty-year-old midget smartie.”
“Smartass.”
“I give up,” she said. She brought the child’s face very close to her own, and for an instant it was as if she was staring into her mirror again. Then she said, “I’ll tell you what.”
“Goddam smartass.”
“Yeah, that’s you, all right. Goddam smartass. I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal.” Was it proper to make deals with a child? “Here’s the deal. You can say things like goddam and smartass when it’s just me.”
“And Daddy?”
“And Daddy, yes, but not—”
“And Poppa David?”
“And Poppa David.”
“And Nana Sylvy?”
“And Nana Sylvia, yes, but—”
“Not Poppa Harry,” Robin said emphatically. “Not Nana Dele.”
“Jesus.”
“Christ,” Robin echoed.
Andrea put her down and stared at her. “You know everything, don’t you? Not Poppa Harry and Nana Adele, that’s right. And not any other people. And Jesus Christ is another of those words.”
“Oh, I know that,” Robin said.
It wasn’t that children grew up so quickly. It wasn’t merely that. She’d heard that line all her life, it was what the old always said of the young, and she was beginning to see what they meant. Time passed subjectively faster the older you got, as each year in turn became a smaller proportion of your overall experience of life. Thus the years of your child’s childhood rushed by more rapidly than your own childhood had ever done.
But there was something else, too. It was that the changes in your child were so abrupt, so spontaneous, so impossible to anticipate. Someone who has for months existed as The Kid one otherwise unremarkable morning emerges as a completely defined individual. There is suddenly a personality present in what had heretofore been not much more than a warm and entertaining animal.
And all at once the attendant awe of parenthood is immeasurably extended, from My God, I made a living being! to My God, I made a person, I made this person!
Two summers ago, when Robin was a year and a half old, they had attempted to conceive another child. It was hard now to remember the degree of urgency that had accompanied that decision. It had become somehow imperative that they have another baby, and that they do so immediately so that the two children would not be too far apart in age.
But it hadn’t worked. For four months in a row they had made love faithfully on all of the appropriate nights, and each time she had remained for a minute or two with her legs high in the air, so that gravity might give the sperm a little extra assistance. And each month she was certain she was pregnant, and each time her period was almost a full week late.
Eileen had suggested that it might be breakthrough bleeding but that was impossible. She wasn’t just spotting. She was having a full period, and if anything it was a heavier flow than usual.
After four months like that she went to her doctor. When she came home she took a couple of aspirin and lay down on the couch but couldn’t sleep.
Later that night she told Mark, “I saw Lerner today. He put me back on the pill.”
“That’s going to help you get pregnant?”
“He thinks it’ll regulate my cycle.”
“Oh. How long does he want you on it?”
“He doesn’t know. He has a theory.”
“About the pill?”
“No.” She took her time forming phrases in her mind. She said, “He thinks I’ve been getting pregnant each month for the past four months. He thinks possibly I’ve aborted each time.”
“Could you do that and not know it?”
“Evidently. At that stage it would just seem like a heavier flow than usual. Which is what I’ve been having. And it’s late each time.”
“Have you ever—”
“Had anything like this before? No, I haven’t. He said it’s just an idea he has and that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s the case or not.”
“What does necessarily mean?”
“Oh, don’t be worried, darling. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me physically.”
“Now tell me what physically means.”
“You really have to watch yourself around lawyers, don’t you?” She forced a grin, then took a few seconds to light a cigarette. She said, “According to kindly old Dr. Lerner, this can happen when a woman thinks she wants to be pregnant, but deep down inside she doesn’t want to be pregnant. So she gets herself knocked up in the first place, you should please pardon the expression, and then her body takes over and, uh—”
“I thought Lerner was a gynecologist. Obstetrics and gynecology.”
“So?”
“I never knew he was a psychiatrist.”
“He said it wasn’t exactly common but that it happens more than people realize it. Having what’s technically a miscarriage and not even knowing it.”
“For that reason that you just mentioned.”
“God damn it.”
“Look, honey—”
“I want to have another baby,” she said. She was on her feet now, pacing. “At least I think I do. How is a person supposed to know what she thinks unconsciously? Mark? I don’t know what to do.”
But it was easy enough to decide, because when you didn’t know what to do you did nothing, and it was very easy to do nothing. Lerner had put her on the pill and so she remained on the pill and they both knew that eventually she would stop taking the pill and they would have another child.
Then finally she did stop taking the pill, and they talked about it, and they went to bed and he was unable to manage an erection. She tried everything she could to help him and nothing worked, and this had never happened before.
“It’s supposed to happen to everybody,” they told each other. “Too much to drink,” they told each other. “A lot of pressure at the office,” they told each other.
But the incident kept repeating itself and the explanations kept sounding hollower until both of them were careful not to voice them at all. There were nights when they tried and failed, and nights when they assiduously avoided trying, and one night, finally, when he achieved an erection but lost it seconds after entering her. He threw himself off of her and rushed out of the room.
For a few moments she lay still, waiting for tears to come. But no tears came. She got up and put on a robe and went into the living room. He was sitting in his chair with a drink in his hand and a bottle on the table beside him. He had not put any clothes on.
The sight of the drink in his hand was enormously upsetting to her. This was not like him. His drinking was purely social—the ritual cocktail before dinner, drinks with friends to augment the pleasure of their company. She would sometimes take drinks at night when he was asleep and she was not. She had always done a certain amount of that kind of drinking. But he had never done it and it frightened her.
He looked up at her. For an instant his expression was somehow defiant, but then his eyes went dull. He lowered them to his glass and drained it. He coughed harshly, caught his breath, and reached for the bottle to fill his glass.
“Well, fuck it,” she said. “Don’t hog all
of it yourself.” And she took the bottle from him, raised it to her lips, put her head back and poured a few ounces of whiskey down her throat.
He said, “Jesus.”
“I want to say something.”
“Anything you want.”
“I want to say something. We are driving ourselves crazy and we are driving each other crazy and it is ridiculous. We’re making nervous wrecks out of ourselves and our sex life is going down the drain and it’s crazy, and maybe I’m getting short-tempered with the kid and God knows what effect that’ll have on her and it’s crazy, it’s a hundred percent crazy.”
He looked at her but said nothing.
“I’m going back on the pill tomorrow.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“You know what’s happening? We’re getting so we can’t even talk about it.” She seized the bottle again and drank straight from it again. His eyes widened but he didn’t comment. “I don’t want to have a baby. I had four fucking miscarriages in a row to prove I don’t want to have another baby. And you don’t want to have a baby, and that’s why we’re having this trouble now, and we won’t even face up to it, we won’t even say it out loud, as though there’s something goddam immoral about not wanting to have another baby. For God’s sake, we’re lucky, we’ve got a wonderful child, and why do we have to kill ourselves and ruin everything trying to have another one? What makes us think we’re letting the world down if we don’t have any more?”
“Not so loud.”
“It’s my own house, for God’s sake. I’ll shout if I want.”
“Robin’ll hear you.”
“She sleeps through everything.” But she did lower her voice. “It’s as if we can’t say it because it would mean something else. As if not wanting another baby means we don’t love each other any more. As if we have to keep having kids in order to prove that our marriage is all right. Who are we proving it to, for God’s sake?”
“We love each other.”
“Of course we do. And we love Robin. Not wanting a second one doesn’t mean we’re not happy with the first.”
“Don’t even say—”
“No! That’s the whole point, you have to be able to say things, to say any kind of thing. It doesn’t mean we don’t love her. It means we love her so much that we don’t need another kid, that’s what it means!”
“You’re right,” he said.
“I am, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are.”
“Are you going to drink any more? Then let’s go to bed, darling. I just want to be held. Okay? I just want you to hold me.”
The next day she went back on the pill. They made love that night and it was good again. Attempting to conceive a child may or may not have caused his problems, but abandoning the attempt certainly solved them. They clung to each other afterward and told each other that this proved they were right not to have another baby. And they could always change their minds sometime in the future. If they ever decided that they definitely wanted a second child, they could always do something about it when the time came. It was not as though she were getting her tubes tied, or he a vasectomy.
This past spring, just after her father’s heart attack, she had begun to think of getting pregnant again. She had never given voice to the thought, recognizing it even then as being largely a response to her father’s attack. The idea stayed with her but she remained on the pill, and before much time had passed she was glad she had not acted on that impulse. Because Robin had emerged as an individual to such an extent that she could only imagine another baby as being an intruder into the family circle which the three of them constituted. There had been a time when a second baby would have been acceptable, but the time had passed.
By then, too, there was another more practical reason for her to be on the pill. Because by then she had begun sleeping with Cass Drozdowski.
It seems to her afterward that she should have been able to recognize her restlessness, to identify it for what it was. There were symptoms, certainly, though how was one to know what they were symptoms of? Nights when sleep wouldn’t come, nights when it wouldn’t stay until dawn. Days when she felt her mind going hundreds of yards up in the air, looking down at the suburb in which she lived and seeing a checkerboard, a patchwork quilt, a close-knit network of unrelated lives. She would feel a black heat spreading in her brain. Everything was too close and too busy and there was too much of it.
To walk in the woods. To be alone in an infinity of sand, to kneel down and rear back on your haunches and scream. To just scream and scream and scream—
Silent screaming, while she drove to the market with Robin in her car seat. Shrill screams that stayed echoing in the brain and never passed the lips, screams unuttered while she cooked a meal or visited her parents or sat across the room from her husband.
Not that often. Not constant, not even frequent. But enough so that, had she thought about it, she might have seen it for what it was. Might have recognized that she was ready.
As he had recognized.
She had never thought of Cass in those terms. When she had fantasies (and she had them often enough, alone or in company, peeling potatoes or making love) they never involved someone she knew. Her partners were always strangers and they generally remained wholly faceless in her fantasies. Perhaps the anonymity of her phantom partners made fantasy more acceptable, especially as a muted accompaniment of marital coupling. When you lay in your husband’s arms and thought of another man, surely it was less a matter of emotional adultery if the other man was only vaguely defined, only hazily imagined.
There were men whom she had recognized as attractive, either in the abstract or specifically attractive to her. Colleagues of Mark’s, husbands of friends, But she had recognized their attractiveness in a purely hypothetical way, with no intention of embracing them in fact or in fantasy. And even so Cass had not entered into that picture. She had never bothered to think of him as attractive.
She had thought of him—how? As someone with far more of a role to play in Mark’s life than in hers, certainly. Mark’s partner, Mark’s friend. Tall, rangy, with streaky light brown hair that he slicked straight back, hair beginning to recede now, hair allowed to pile up in curls on the nape of his longish neck. High cheekbones, deep-set gray eyes, a long narrow nose. A political anomaly, proclaiming that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to vote for George Wallace or Dick Gregory. A pole. A Catholic too lazy for out-and-out apostasy. A man with a wife, with three sons and a daughter, with two brothers and three sisters (all older than himself), with a tract house in Cheektowaga, with an ear for Chopin (“That Jewboy Rubinstein plays him better than anybody”) and country music. (“If I had anything else on the car radio it’d take me fifteen minutes longer to get where I’m going.”)
There was a particular Saturday night. It was in early May, with Martin Luther King a month in his grave and Bobby Kennedy a month away from his. David Kleinman, ten weeks after a slight coronary occlusion, was well enough to resume his dental practice on a limited scale. And that night the Benstocks had had some guests for dinner and drinks. Lawyers and their wives. Cass and Ellie Drozdowski. Jeff and Pauline Kaiser. Alan and Debbie Gersten. Not the Santoras—they were out of town.
An ordinary evening. She had spent so many evenings like this one, with these people, with other people similar to them, at her own house, at their houses. The conversation that had taken place one night at one house could have taken place as easily another night at another house with a different collection of people. It was as easy to differentiate the menus, to remember what had been served and who had had what to drink, easier to recall what clothes she had worn.
She remembered what she wore. She wore pants and a sweater. The sweater was a wedgwood blue and underneath it she wore a no-bra bra, and the pants were gray flannel and would probably not be fit to wear in company another season because they were beginning to wear slightly at the knees and beginning to pill at the crotch.
And around midnight she’d been in the kitchen, assembling a speed-the-parting-guests platter of cheese and crackers, when she sensed another’s presence and half-turned to see Cass approaching. And he looked at her, and she supposed she looked back at him because she recalled he put his left arm around her waist, his hand settled confidently on her hip, and his right hand went between her legs and fastened upon the crotch of her pants where the flannel material was starting to pill.
Just like that.
And for how long had he touched her? She with her eyes closed, blocking off one sense to enlarge another, one hand holding onto the formica countertop for balance, the other still clutching a round of Dutch cheese coated with red wax. His hand holding on her hip, holding her, and his hand between her legs, playing with her. Either he knew just where to touch her or it didn’t really matter where he touched her, just that he touched her.
For how long?
It couldn’t have been very long. It didn’t have to be very long. Her body responded without consulting her brain at all as if she were being stroked while asleep. There was not even any pleasure in it, really. It was too mechanical for pleasure to be a part of it. She responded, urgently and automatically, and his fingers worked, and she shuddered and sighed.
If he had not been holding her she would have fallen.
He continued to hold her for another few seconds until she had her balance. Then his hands disengaged themselves and he returned to the living room. He was out of the kitchen before she had her eyes open.
A little while later, while the eight of them sat with cheese and crackers and cups of coffee and final drinks, it was hard for her not to believe that she had imagined all of this. They sat, all of them, just as they would have sat if the incident in the kitchen had never taken place. The same conversation went on in quite the same way. And if she had imagined the incident, imagined it so vividly as to believe it to be true, it was a likely indication that she was losing her grip on things.
But was she any less likely to be losing her grip if it had really happened?
Then Cass’s eye caught hers, just for a second. And then, while he knew she was looking at him, he put a cheese-covered Triscuit in his mouth. And chewed and swallowed. And deliberately put the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth and sucked appreciatively on them.
A Week as Andrea Benstock Page 15