A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  “Not to worry, honey,” he said, still focusing on the calculator tape. “Everything’s going to change now.”

  Then I told him I’d invited Harriet to move in. I expected a monumental row, but all I got out of him was, “Dynamite move, Georgie. You just do whatever you have to do.”

  “Well, maybe,” I said, exasperated, “you could stop whatever you’re doing for just two minutes, and tell me what the hell is going on. And where you really were last night?”

  He looked up at me, his moon face now in a big grin, then stood, stretched, and then, picking up his bowl in one hand and his chopsticks in the other, he told me about Lawrence E. Coffey and Company.

  We now refer to it around here as “The Deal.”

  Most days we’re going to make a fortune; every so often, there’s trouble, everything stops, and we’re on the phone endlessly—with Holbrook, Joe Penzil, other people. (“We,” of course, is Larry.) Essentially The Deal, as he explained it, is that he’s becoming—I guess has already become—a kind of independent agent, selling Shaw Cross “products” on commission. And working from home until he gets his act together—a mixed blessing—although he still goes into the office most mornings and his salary, under his old “deal,” doesn’t run out till January.

  “The beauty of it, Georgie,” he declaimed that night in the den, “is that it fits Reality like a glove. When you stop to think about it, what am I if not a great seller? If the whole industry is going back to fundamentals, and that, for me, means selling—Kee-rist, when it comes to selling, I’m a fucking genius!” Grinning broadly, his glass mug raised in some kind of a toast. “The old Bear still has a few secrets up his sleeve. Believe me, baby.”

  For what it’s worth, I do believe him. Maybe other people don’t—I’m constantly asked how he is, a kind of once-removed pulse-taking—but if Larry Coffey believes, I do, too. For one thing, I’ve been there before with him. The time they took his commissions away at Shaw Cross, we had the same crisis atmosphere, the near-total self-absorption, the interminable telephone huddles with Holbrook et al. But Larry came out on top then and, to judge from what’s been happening this time, he’s going to make a success of Lawrence E. Coffey and Company too.

  Craig thinks I’m jealous.

  Maybe I am, a little. I used to think my husband makes a truly astounding amount of money. (I still do, actually.) But now that I’ve seen a little of him in action, his indefatigable enthusiasm when he’s on the “horn”—“shoring up my customer base,” he calls it—I can’t but think that’s what God, in his wisdom, made him to do.

  As for me, I quit the work force seven years ago. All it took, at the time, was Larry’s running the numbers for me and the (gruesome) discovery that what I made in a year on the magazine, after deductions, was what he pulled down in a good week.

  Exit Career Girl.

  Enter, seven years later, your classic, and very pregnant, Suburban Mommy.

  Is that why God made me?

  It’s as though I’m having the post-partum first. I wake up this morning from bad dreams I can’t remember. Drenched in sweat. And the baby kicking, the terrible taste in my mouth, the dragging, aching limbs, and, transcending the physical, a weird sense of foreboding so powerful I feel as though I have to get out of here or go mad. Out of my body would be best, but I’ll settle for out of my room, the house, St. George.

  But to go where?

  Yesterday was my last session with Craig till after the baby. I can’t take the back and forth to the city any longer, even with someone else driving. Just getting in and out of the car, I could use a derrick. I’m a hippo. I’ve gained over thirty pounds, which Dubin keeps saying is fine. I can’t even see the scale anymore below my bulge, I have to call Harriet, and it could be my scale is off, but Dubin’s doesn’t lie.

  Craig did wish me luck. But then, with his habitual and insufferable banality, he opined that my troubles lately may simply have been that I haven’t had enough to do!

  (What did he mean by that? That if I don’t have things to do, I revert to my natural state, which is one of pure hysteria?)

  It’s true, I’ve never been so pampered. I have Clotie five days a week now, and she and Harriet have taken over most of the cooking from me. I hardly see Justin anymore, he’s so devoted to his precious “’arrit.” A few weeks ago, I let him move upstairs to the room next to hers (their idea, not mine) and had the workmen in to redo his old room into a nursery. I had them paint it a neutral yellow just in case (although I’m sure it’s going to be a girl this time), but now it’s done, they’re gone, the new furniture has been ordered (because Justin’s old stuff, in the basement, turned out to be mildewed), and what am I supposed to do with myself other than focus on a body that doesn’t feel as though it’s mine anymore?

  If Dubin tells me to listen to Mozart one more time, I think I’ll scream!

  On an impulse—a weird one, admittedly—I’ve just gotten my mother on the phone. I find myself asking if I can come over.

  “In the city?” she says, a little surprised.

  “Yes.” (Where else?)

  “Well, of course you can, when do you want to come? And how will you get here?”

  “Today, actually. This afternoon. I thought I’d stay for dinner, maybe spend the night in my old room, stay tomorrow, maybe even Sunday.”

  “But what’s wrong?” my mother says. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, of course not,” I answer, knowing how her mind works. What I’m really thinking, I suddenly realize, is: Friday night dinner. Throughout my childhood, my father, who is Jewish—my mother isn’t—but who never set foot in a synagogue (at least he hasn’t in my lifetime), nevertheless insisted on saying the blessing over the Friday night bread. (In Hebrew, no less.) “I’m just feeling a little antsy, is all. The pregnancy blues. I guess it’s the endless waiting.” I add, “I’d like to see you too.”

  “You mean you’d like to see your father,” she says tartly.

  “I mean I’d like to see both of you,” I correct.

  “But if you’re here, who’s going to be taking care of Justin and Larry?”

  “Well, Harriet’s here for Justin. And—”

  “Oh, is she? Since when is she working weekends too?”

  And—of course—she isn’t. Well, I decide, she’ll have to this once. If necessary, I’ll pay her double whatever it works out to be. Just this once, she can just do it. Do it for me.

  But she won’t.

  After I hang up from my mother, I call her in, and she says, “Georgia! I know I’ve committed to staying all the time once you go into the hospital, but that’s not for a couple of weeks. And you know I’m always gone weekends. Whatever could you have been thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I admit. “But it’s important to me. Damned important. If I don’t get out of this house, I’m going to go absolutely nuts.”

  But, to my amazement, I can’t budge her, not even to staying over tonight if I come home tomorrow.

  “I’m sorry, Georgia,” she says quietly, “I just can’t. I’ve other plans.”

  “Other plans? What other plans?” Then suddenly—I can’t help it—I fly off the handle. “How can you do this to me—I thought we were friends? Don’t you realize how important it is to me?”

  And how (to my simultaneous shame) she is, without a doubt, the best paid nanny I’ve ever heard of? And what about all the little gifts I’ve bought her—the sweaters, the silver earrings with her birthstone, the framed Redoutés for her room?—yet have I ever asked her to do anything outside the confines of her job before now? And how (worst of all), if she’s ever going to amount to anything in this world, doesn’t she think she’d better learn to accommodate herself a little to other people’s needs?

  I stop, shocked by everything I’ve just said. It’s horrible! For God’s sake, this is Harriet!

  I burst into tears.

  “Oh, God …,” I stammer, unable to look at her. And, lamely, something abo
ut the pregnancy, hormones, claustrophobia. I can’t bear to look up.

  Finally I do. She’s smiling at me.

  “Let me see what I can do,” she says calmly.

  Now, no matter what I say, I can’t dissuade her. She leaves. She’s gone a good fifteen minutes. While she’s gone—other horrible confession—I pick up the receiver to see if she’s talking to him (her stepfather, I mean), but I get the dial tone instead. I must have missed them. She comes back shortly afterwards, her face uncommonly pale but her chin jutting with resolve. What she’s going to do, she says, is stay through Justin’s supper, then go home, have dinner with her stepfather, then come back and spend the night here. She’ll stay as long as I need her tomorrow during the day, but she’ll have to be gone tomorrow night. Will that help?

  “Oh, Harriet,” I say, “it’s all so stupid, so unnecessary. For God’s sake, why can’t Larry and Justin fend for themselves for just one night and one day? Or I won’t go. What’s gotten into me? What do I think’s going to happen to them, that they’ll starve?”

  But she won’t hear it, won’t hear my apologies either, and when I mention money again, she cuts me off. She has to leave to pick Justin up from Group, but after lunch, the two of them drive me all the way in to Riverside Drive, and when I emerge from the car, I can’t help thinking: Why on earth am I doing this?

  Maybe to be with my father?

  He isn’t imposing physically—he’s rather short in fact, and slightly built, and bald-pated though with a long and silver-gray fringe—and, unlike most psychoanalysts I’ve met, he’s quiet socially. Self-contained. Maybe that accounts for his appeal to women, that and his eyes. They’re dark, piercing, impenetrable at the same time. Even when he’s simply listening, observing, they seem to shine.

  But he doesn’t get home till almost eight.

  My mother, meanwhile, works me over about my weight gain—how will I ever get my figure back? how could I have let it happen?—and then starts grilling me about Larry. What exactly is he doing now? Forming his own business, I explain. But isn’t that something of a comedown for him? Wasn’t he an officer of the company, and a very prestigious company? And for most people who go out on their own, it takes a long time, do we have enough money put aside?

  “Well,” my mother says, “at least now he won’t have any excuses, nights.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She looks at me, surprised. Haven’t I, myself, complained about how often he comes home late? And what about the night the alarm system went off?

  I end up defending Larry, how a big part of what he does involves wining and dining his customers and that’s unlikely to change.

  “Well, Georgia,” she goes on, “I don’t see how you stand it. I’ve told you for a long time that you’d better put your foot down. What right does he have to leave you all alone, particularly when you’re pregnant? And how do you know where he is, all those nights?”

  “Are you accusing him of having affairs on the side?”

  “I’m not accusing him of anything. That’s your business, not mine. You’ve got to live with it. All I’m saying is that if I’d put my foot down years ago with your father, maybe things would be different now.”

  And there we are. I realize, too late, that I’ve let myself be sucked in. I’ll be damned if I’ll ask her how things are between them, but once launched, she needs no help. He treats her like garbage, she says. He’s always hiding behind his precious patients, or trying to, and her whole life is nothing but a misery of well-founded suspicions and his ducking. The saddest part, I think as I listen, isn’t that there’s no basis for her rancor—my father, I’m aware, has been less than faithful over the years—but that she feels compelled to involve me in it.

  I manage to escape finally by pleading fatigue. In my old room, I lie down on the bed. Not to sleep, however. The few old familiars—the bed, the dresser, my old desk with the flip-down front, the same rose-patterned wallpaper—no longer say me, and the room has taken on a strangely anonymous character. Occupant gone, destination unknown. A little later, I steal down the back hall and into my father’s study.

  It was always, for me, the magical center of our apartment. A small room, then as now. Its one window gives out on a shaft, and the only furniture, apart from the bookshelves that line the walls, is his writing desk and chair, an electric typewriter on its own rolling table, and his old easy chair with the overhanging floor lamp. When I was little, the shelves contained a virtual library of psychoanalysis. Since then, I realize with amusement, it has become a library, mainly, of Herbert Alan Levy. His own published works are there, in all their editions and translations, the relevant manuscripts in neatly labeled boxes, and row upon row of his “casebooks.” These are cloth-bound blank books, ordered through his publisher. Each of his patients gets one or more volumes, a kind of diary of his or her treatment, and they constitute the source, or raw material, of his published writings.

  Virtually every important conversation I’ve ever had with him has taken place in this room. I can almost hear the echo of the little girl who sat in his lap or, later, the teenager who straddled the desk chair back to front, her arms draped. I can (do) mark the crises of my young life in terms of my visits to that room.

  But that was then, now is now.

  I leave, wait, help my mother with dinner, call home.

  He comes at last.

  All during the meal, I find myself wondering: How can I get him alone? No answer. But over coffee in the living room, he says, “Georgie, is everything all right with you? Aside from the fact that, any day now, you’re going to have a baby?”

  “I’m okay, more or less.”

  “Really?” he says. “You look troubled to me somehow.”

  “I’ve been telling her that all day,” my mother interjects.

  “Is there anything you want to talk about? Just to me?” His eyes still focused on me.

  He asks it a little cruelly, as though she’s not there. I glance at her—reflex of guilt?—but she stands, saying in an ironic tone, “You don’t have to ask my permission,” and abruptly we’re alone.

  “I’d like that very much,” I say.

  “I thought so. Well, come along. Let’s go in the back. It’ll be quieter there. I’ll give you an hour on the house.”

  Old joke between us.

  In his study, he puts me in the easy chair and sits at his desk backward, straddling the chair as I used to. His chin resting on his fists.

  “You really don’t look so hot, Georgie,” he says. “Is there something wrong?”

  I’m tempted to answer: Nothing and everything. Now that I’m alone with him, I’m tempted to say a lot of things, my whole Daddy’s Little Girl megillah. Instead I burble something about it having been a difficult pregnancy, the last couple of months.

  But he doesn’t let it go.

  “What does your gynecologist say?” he asks.

  “Dubin?” I shrug. “Dubin calls me the very model of a baby factory. Says we’re both fine, mother and baby, all the vital signs. My cervix is holding nicely; the baby is growing; etc., etc. Says I should relax, let people wait on me, drink my milk, and listen to Mozart.”

  “Is that so terrible?” he asks, smiling.

  No, of course it isn’t. And as for the symptoms I’ve suffered this past month—the sharp contractions that convince me I’m about to deliver early, the shortness of breath and the queasiness, assorted aches and pains, even this morning’s rampant rebellion—what will he make of them if Dubin makes nothing? Or the sensation that my body has been taken over for another purpose, when in fact it has?

  The pregnant woman’s syndrome, I think. But this is my second time around, not my first, and I don’t remember any of it with Justin. (Was I too excited with Justin? Too enthralled by the grandeur of motherhood?)

  My father asks about Justin. Wittily, I think, I describe how his grandson has fallen in love, at three and a half, and how I’ve lost him not only to Harriet bu
t to the Age of Chivalry—knights, castles, and the Holy Grail. He asks about Larry (never having been a fan), and I find myself defending my husband all over again, The Deal and Lawrence E. Coffey and Company. He asks about my therapist. I tell him I think Craig is something of a dunce. He laughs, says there’s no law he knows of that says an analyst has to be a genius in order to be effective—but is it my imagination or is he secretly pleased that I find Craig lacking what, face it, only Daddy can provide?

  “Then what is it, Georgie?” he asks in a sympathetic tone. “What’s really bothering you? It can’t just be the pregnancy. You’ve done that before.”

  Sympathetic or not, the question irritates me momentarily. Who was it who said that if men had to bear babies, the race would long since have been extinct?

  But he’s right, of course. He almost always is.

  And then, just as I’m thinking that, I suddenly, unaccountably, start to cry! Second time today. Oh God, I’m so ashamed! But I can’t stop, and knowing I can’t only makes it worse. I’m aware, sniveling and sobbing, that he’s on his feet and next to me, one hand on my hair, and offering a white handkerchief. I take it.

  “Oh God,” I manage. “Talk about hormone swings!”

  But I can’t stop. It’s like a storm that has to run its course. Or some weird chemical rush inside my body. I sob, and get the hiccups, and blow hard into the handkerchief, but the honking, snorting sound—hippos, elephants, whales—sets me off again. I hate it, hate myself for blubbering like a two-year-old. And in front of him!

  But if I can’t cry in front of my own father, who then?

  “And you’re right, Daddy,” I protest tearfully, “this isn’t my first time, it’s my second! But you don’t know what it’s like in here!”

  I try to describe it, but I can’t. I gather myself while he watches sympathetically. I start over again with today, how I woke up feeling trapped inside my own skin, and the dreams I couldn’t remember but that set off the panic in me, the overwhelming urge to get out, the baby kicking as though it too had to get out, and then the awful scene with Harriet.

  “What it is,” I say finally, “is that I’m frightened in here almost all the time. It’s been going on for a month, more. Nameless fears, jumping at shadows. Maybe it is just the pregnancy—I feel like shit, physically—but I wake up convinced something bad is about to happen, or maybe already has but I don’t know about it, and I know that sounds stupid if I don’t know what it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there, does it?”