by Mark Dunn
Edith Chillwater sat with her daughter-in-law, Regina, and her daughter, Amy Crew, in Pauley Pavilion on the campus of UCLA. They had obtained three hard-to-get tickets to the women’s gymnastics competition and cheered on Mary Lou Retton while intermittently discussing Guy Chillwater’s obsessive need to have a fifth child—in other words, to get himself a son.
“I think she’s going to do it,” said Edith to Amy. Both mother and daughter wore sweatshirts emblazoned with the words “red,” “white,” and “blue,” each word displayed in the appropriate color.
“But you’re wrong. I can’t. I won’t,” said Regina, in between sucks from her McDonald’s soda cup.
“I think Mama’s talking about Mary Lou Retton,” said Amy. “Isn’t she adorable?” Mary Lou was, at present, negotiating the balance beam with pint-sized éclat. “So much spunkiness in such a tiny Italian American body.” Amy looked at her McDonald’s scratch-off game ticket. “And if she wins, I get a Big Mac.”
“We all get Big Macs, honey,” said Edith. “I think this promotion is going to put Mr. Kroc out of business.”
“Mr. Kroc is dead, Mama,” said Amy. “He died a few months ago.”
“His people, then. They must have distributed all these tickets before they learned there was going to be a Soviet-led boycott. Serves them right for betting against the U.S. in gymnastics.”
Edith glanced at her daughter-in-law. Regina wasn’t even looking at Mary Lou Retton. She was staring at the corded forearms and rippling shoulders of one of the youthful male gymnasts who had taken a seat a couple of rows down. She sighed. “Guy really wants a boy.”
“Well, my son should have learned a long time ago that he can’t always get what he wants.” Edith patted Regina on the leg. “He has four beautiful daughters and he should be pleased and proud and let it go at that.”
“He never had a son to toss a baseball with.”
“He has Janie,” interjected Amy. “Or has she grown out of her tomboy stage like my Tamara?”
“I think Janie will always be part tomboy. But she isn’t a boy.” Regina sighed again. “I’m sorry to have laid all of this on you. You and Evan and your kids have been so wonderful to us. We wouldn’t have even been able to come to the Olympics if you hadn’t offered to put us all up.”
“It’s really been no trouble at all,” said Amy. “But I could have told you that bringing Guy to a place like this—surrounded by all these strapping Free-World male athletes—was going to get him feeling bad all over again about the fact that he wasn’t able to have a son.”
Edith snorted. “My son can be a real ninny.”
Several days later, Guy Chillwater had a chance to be a ninny with his sister’s husband Evan. The two were watching the women’s 3,000-meter race at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and had just a few minutes earlier witnessed Mary Decker’s dramatic collision with the barefoot South African Zola Budd, and Mary’s collective-gasp-inducing stumble and ruinous fall. All eyes were pinned on Zola now to see if she would be able to ignore the chorus of boos that instantly rained down upon her to win the race in the absence of Decker’s competitive interference. Evan, however, was taking in the pack in the aggregate. “Do you see these incredible women?” he asked his brother-in-law. And then half under his breath: “Apparently you can become a star athlete even without having a dick between your legs.”
“I wouldn’t care if my son turned out to be an athlete or not.”
“Not buying it, Guy. You have all the makings of one of those ‘my-kid-über-alles’ Little League dads who heckle umpires.”
“Then you have me all wrong, Evan. Do you mind if I watch the rest of the race? I want to see if any more of these athletes who aren’t men fall on their female asses.”
“That was low.” This response came not from Evan, but from the woman sitting on the other side of Guy. She scowled. “I feel sorry for your wife.”
Guy sank down—thoroughly emasculated—into his seat. The woman looked Japanese. Guy later told Evan that he had spoken so freely because he thought she couldn’t understand English.
Guy Chillwater had a chance to talk the whole matter over with his two oldest daughters—his teenagers Janie and Carol Ann—as the three stood in the audience line, waiting to be seated for a taping of that night’s Tonight Show. “Your mother says it bothers you two—the fact that I want to bring another kid into this family.”
“It does a little, Dad,” said Carol Ann, who was seventeen and wise. “Because of how much you want to give us a little brother. We don’t need a little brother. Really. It’s okay.”
“How do you feel, Janie? Wouldn’t you like to have a little brother?”
Fifteen-year-old Janie contorted her lips and nose into a look of mild annoyance. “Whatever floats your boat, Dad.”
“Don’t you want someone to carry on the family name? It’s not a very common name. It deserves wider distribution.”
“It’s a strange name, Dad,” said Carol Ann. “Sometimes people think I made it up.”
“I think it sounds Indian,” said Janie.
“You act like that’s a bad thing,” said Guy.
Janie shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
Carol Ann said, “I just think you need to respect women a little bit more, Dad. Men may have had all the power in this country since, like, forever, and look at where that’s gotten us. I think you need to give the women of the world some credit for trying to change things for the better.”
Guy thought about this while he was watching all the women chattering away in front of him on The Tonight Show soundstage. Johnny Carson had the week off; the substitute host for that afternoon’s taping was Joan Rivers. Her guests were Mary Lou Retton and Dame Judith Anderson, who was appearing on screens across America that summer as the Vulcan High Priestess T’Lar in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Dame Judith Anderson, as Guy’s mother Edith would tell everyone that night as the two families and their matriarch gathered in Evan and Amy’s TV room to eat pizza and watch delayed broadcasts of the Olympic competitions they’d missed that day, was eighty-seven years old. She’d had a long and imminently rewarding career as an actress. Dame Judith had probably never thrown a baseball in her life, but no doubt made her mother and, yes, her father very, very proud. Edith pictured Dame Judith’s father watching her sinister portrayal of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, mentally tormenting poor Joan Fontaine to the brink of suicide, then clapping his hands together and crying, “A capital performance, my dear girl! You nearly scared the wee out of me!”
Two days later, as two of Guy and Regina’s daughters and Evan and Amy’s two daughters, accompanied by Regina and Amy themselves, stalked shopping-minded celebrities up and down Rodeo Drive, Guy and his mother sat on a bench in the floral wonderland that was the gussied-up campus of the University of Southern California (and site of the McDonald’s Swim Stadium), digging into a single Wendy’s Frosty with separate plastic spoons.
“So what’s this all about, Guy? You know you can tell me. You’ve told me everything since you were a boy. Remember when you were twelve and you had that inflammation on your rectum? Other boys your age would have suffered in manful silence, but you came right out with it.”
Guy winced. His mother was only sixty-eight, but she had the habit, common among those a few years older than her, of turning the self-censorship switch to the off position when it seemed convenient.
Mother and son could hear, not too far away, the voice of the diving announcer giving the results of the previous hour’s finals. Nearby, a large group of Olympics spectators had gathered to trade pins. Guy’s youngest daughters, Jackie and Belinda, were among them. Belinda, at the young age of nine, Guy had earlier noted to his mother, was a skilled trader. She had even acquired pins from a couple of the boycotting countries—a commendable feat.
“I just remember Dad telling me once that the proudest moment of his life was the day I was born. Not Amy, I’m sorry to say, but me—his only son. He
said it made him prouder than helping to defeat the Nazis. Even prouder than the month he was named top salesman at Holiday Motors.”
Edith leaned in and said in a mock confidential whisper: “I’ve got news for you, scout. It’s not such an accomplishment. Ask one of the biologists in that science building over there. Sometimes a man gives the woman he impregnates an X and sometimes it’s a Y. It’s all chance. There’s no skill to it at all.”
“I’m just saying that it made him proud to have a son.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“Why did it make him proud, Guy—except that this is the crack-brained way the world got set up, and your father was always one to follow the crowd. If there was one thing that I would have changed about him, it was the fact that he let too many other people—men—influence how he saw the world. You’re different from your father in that way. At least I’ve always thought you were different, because I’ve always believed that you had a little of your mother’s independent streak running through you. So let me ask you: have I spent my whole life moping around because I wasn’t born with a pud in the place of a Lady Slit? The world is what we make it, scout, and you have four wonderful daughters and a wife who makes me a proud mother-in-law every day of the week, and it breaks my heart that you and she and those lovely girls have to live all the way back in Connecticut and not here in Southern California, where I can dispense grandma-hugs whenever I get the notion. And here’s the other thing: Regina’s womb is tired. She’s almost forty-one. She doesn’t need to be having any more babies, just so you can roll the dice again in hopes of getting a boy. You need to give this up, honey, and be proud of what you have.”
Guy bowed his head. Without raising it, he said, “Regina and I made love last night.”
“Was that what you were doing? I heard moaning; I thought you’d eaten something that didn’t agree with you.”
“We didn’t use protection.”
Edith’s face fell. “Oh, honey, no.” Then Edith thought for a moment. “Let’s be realistic. What are the odds?”
The odds, as it turned out, were very good. Regina, still fertile into her forties, got pregnant. Regina said that she didn’t think she would—that she was throwing a bone to her husband, whose obsession with having a son was ruining the first really good vacation the family had had in years. Not to mention their enjoyment of the Olympic games.
There was no question that they would have the baby. Regina believed in reproductive rights for every woman; she also believed in her own right to give birth to whatever baby took it to mind to start growing inside of her—be it boy or girl.
Guy Chillwater didn’t want to know the sex of the child beforehand, so he didn’t look at the sonogram. Regina promised that she wouldn’t look at the sonogram either.
The obstetrician looked at it, but kept a very good poker face.
A little less than nine months after the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics—in which Guy and Regina, and Guy’s mother, Edith, and Guy’s sister, Amy, and her husband, Evan, and Guy and Regina’s four daughters, and Amy and Evan’s two daughters and one son sat in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and watched a nearly interminable sequence of fireworks to the tuneful accompaniment of multiple verses of “All Night Long (All Night)” sung by the talented Mr. Lionel Richie—Regina delivered unto Guy a precious little five-and-a-half-pound girl.
Which Guy named Rory, after her maternal grandfather.
1985
SMITTEN IN WISCONSIN AND MINNESOTA
Byron and I met in Madison—at the university—and we never left. We lived in sin for a couple of years, and then, finally bowing to pressure from our parents, we married. Byron got a job with the campus radio station and was recently hired by Wisconsin Public Radio in the programming department. I’ve worked more jobs than I can remember. This past summer I sold homemade glycerin soaps at the farmer’s market at Capitol Square. You would know me if you saw me: I have long, straight hair (like Cher used to have before she entered her lioness phase) and I’m either wearing a patterned t-shirt and hip-huggers or an overly ruffled Mother Hubbard in my periodic attempts to be fashion-subversive (though in this town of subversion-by-default—I think our current nickname is “The People’s Republic of Madison”—people tend to wear whatever the hell they want).
But this isn’t about me. It’s about Byron. It’s about the reason that Byron and I aren’t together anymore, though he calls me every day to beg me to come back. Our official status: separated, but not yet divorced. Because I’m not sure yet if I want to divorce him.
Is being incredibly pissed and really, really weirded out proper grounds for divorce?
It all started with the death of my great-aunt Rue, who departed unmarried and childless but in possession of a house filled with scrapbooks, photo albums, and family keepsakes. Aunt Rue never threw anything out because she felt that she was the keeper of the family flame—the official archivist for her branch of my family, never perhaps considering the fact that once she died, people would have to come together and somehow divide up (or discard) the tons of family memorabilia (mostly crap) she had accumulated over her eighty long, very acquisitive years on earth.
Aunt Rue lived in Mankato, Minnesota. We all—her four surviving siblings, all the nieces and nephews, and a few of us great-nieces and nephews—gathered and grieved for about ten minutes and then rolled up our sleeves and got down to the real reason for our visit to this warehouse-with-a-bed-and-toilet: excavation. I inherited all of her photo albums. Nobody else wanted them. Aunt Rue wasn’t a bad photographer, but she didn’t edit. I thought Byron was going to kill me when I drove up in the Excel with twenty photo albums on board, all containing pictures of people Byron has never met, with the exception of my seventy-eight-year-old grandmother, whom he had met only once, at our wedding.
But he was pretty cool with it. More than cool, actually. Byron was fascinated with this voluminous photographic record of multiple generations of one Minnesota family. We spent a whole Saturday night getting stoned while he asked me the names of nearly everyone in the pictures, eventually becoming quite proficient at identifying the subjects himself.
He was especially taken with my grandmother.
Let’s just give that statement a little breathing room.
Let’s just circle around that statement and poke it a little and see if it’s as dangerous, as potentially marriage-shatteringly cataclysmic here at the outset as it would later prove to be.
Lingering over her photograph—one of those eight-by-ten studio portraits (I forget the occasion, the college cotillion or something)—he said, and I would not make this up: “She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Excuse me. Maybe you haven’t noticed that your reportedly beautiful wife is still in the room.”
“And now I know where you got every little thing about that face of yours that’s always turned me on. That gently sloping nose. Those smoldering eyes.”
“You can’t say hair, Byron,” I said, pointing at the picture. “Nobody’s done their hair like that since Gloria Swanson.”
“I’m having a transcendent moment. Don’t ruin it. Look at her. How many boyfriends did she have in school?”
“I don’t know. I just know that she met my grandfather at the university. That’s who she wound up with”
“How did he get so lucky?”
“I’m not sure that I’m enjoying this conversation, Byron.”
“I’m just saying—look, all I’m saying—”
“Is that you have the hots for my grandmother. Although you didn’t even hint at this possibility when you met her at our wedding.”
“I don’t remember meeting her at the wedding. Did you introduce me before the ceremony, when I was hung over from the bachelor party, or after the ceremony, when I was brain-fucked on champagne and weed?”
“Help me find a place for all these photo albums. They’re dusty, and I don’t
want to have to take another Allerest.”
“I want this picture.” Byron removed the glamour studio portrait of my twenty-year-old grandmother from the album.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Can I hang it on the wall? Don’t people have pictures of their grandmothers up on their wall?”
I eyed Byron suspiciously, but didn’t say anything.
A couple of weeks later I had to drive to Milwaukee to attend a bridal shower for one of my college suite-mates. Because I would be gone the weekend, I left some healthy food choices in the fridge. In my absence, my husband will usually eat only Whoppers and multiple Happy Meals, or fill up on crap at one of the many Madtown brewpubs where he likes to hang out with his friends from the radio station. Byron is such a typical “Madison man” it’s frightening: he’ll spend an hour Bonzo’ing President Reagan with his equally Republican-loathing, liberal NPR cronies, and then, masculated by beer, he’ll shift gears and devote the rest of the evening to trying to out-macho his he-men companions by talking Packers and venison Brats and memorable moments in the annals of female conquest.
But not this weekend. This weekend Byron stayed home and entertained my grandmother.
How do I tell this without throwing up a little in my mouth?
I left Milwaukee early. One of my ex-boyfriends showed up. Not at the shower, but later that night at the motel, not only to see me but to visit with all of the women he had balled during that scorched-earth period of my sophomore year when he must have been keeping tally on some wall somewhere. Reliving it all creeped me out and I split a few hours earlier than I’d planned to. I was supposed to be home by Sunday afternoon; instead, I got home early Sunday morning—a little after two in the morning to be exact.
There were lights on.
Good, I thought; Byron’s still up. I can score some points by telling him that, faced with the prospect of spending time with a man who now makes my skin crawl, I came home to my husband instead. I opened the front door of the apartment. There were candles on the dining room table that had burned themselves down to the point of gutter-glow. I checked my impulse to call out his name. There were two plates on the table, two wine glasses with a little puddle of wine in each. It looked like someone had used our apartment for a romantic evening out of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day playbook.