Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

  Down again with my help to sitting, then up on her own. For an hour and more we did our joyful dance while the tide waited.

  “William Burke, please.”

  “Just a minute, please.” A new voice at the switchboard.

  “Willy? She can stand up!”

  “What?”

  “Andy! She can stand up!”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. She holds on, of course, but she can get up by herself.”

  “Hey! That’s great, Sash! Great! It’s about time, isn’t it?”

  “No, Willy. She’s only nine and a half months old. Spock says it happens any time in the last quarter of the first year. But she’s so happy, Will,” I went on, imploring him to rejoice. “Like she knows. She stands up and laughs that way she has, as though she’s the wonder of the world. And you know what? She is! The minute I sit her down, up she goes again. I thought you’d want to know about it.”

  “Sure do, honey. Thanks a lot for calling me.”

  When I hung up I chastised myself for having phoned him with the news. I ought not to have told him at all. I should have let it happen for him as a surprise, as it had happened for me. And when he finally did come home, I overdid it, searching his face for a joy that could not possibly appear. And filled up like a Hoover bag with resentments.

  October 10: First step unassisted.

  October 28: First word: pity (pretty).

  The experts would have agreed I expected too much of Will: infants’ progress is fit news only for ladies’ magazines. Andy’s triumphs were everything to me—elating, exonerating—and only bonuses to him, which somehow diminished them. They were like the figure skates I had wanted for my ninth Christmas because my best friend had asked for skates and I imagined us learning together. We each got our skates, but Jackie got skis as well. She skated occasionally, but spent most of her Sundays on the Baybury slopes with other friends, while I settled for the school pond, alone. I acquired considerable skill, but what I had wanted was my friend.

  Willy tried. He brought home quince in the spring and roses often. But even with the living room a garden, he sat at the window and looked out. I could see he felt trapped inside with us, whereas I, trapped too, could barely be induced to leave.

  On Sundays he was gallant, taking us to Central Park, first to the zoo cafeteria for pancakes, then to the carrousel, where he waved to us from a bench each time Andy and I rode by. But in between, though I never actually caught him, I knew he looked at the carefree New York girls.

  Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross

  To see a fine lady upon a white horse.

  With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes

  She shall have music wherever she goes.

  Everyone but me was on best behavior, sitting still and enraptured in the darkened Hunter Auditorium as the Budapest String Quartet (with an extra cellist) unfolded Schubert’s Quintet in C Major. To me, it was the most exquisite music in their repertoire; of the five concerts in the series, this was the one I’d been most eager to hear. Yet already the opening movement had gone by while I sneaked nervous glances at my wristwatch, and now, with the adagio approaching, I feared it would all be over before I could begin to listen. Another waste.

  “Give me a dime, Willy,” I whispered between movements, unable to contain myself.

  “What for?”

  “I’m going to call home.”

  He glared incendiary darts into my heart. “No!”

  “Give me a dime!”

  “Shhh,” said people around us as the music commenced again.

  Trapped mid-row. If only he’d thought to buy aisle seats! I glanced at my watch. Time stopped. The exquisite slow movement was interminable!

  For my twenty-ninth birthday Willy had bought tickets to the entire Budapest series. Once, I noted bitterly, it would have been the perfect gift, the music stopping time for us in a different way. But now, the tickets were a burden, the music a snare. For two concerts in a row Andy had refused to be left with a sitter, and when I threatened to stay home with her again tonight, Willy was enraged.

  “Are you a wife or a fucking nanny? Why do you allow that child to tyrannize us?”

  Talk of tyranny! As though it were my fault that child care precluded entertainment! As though I should share his mad priorities! I had been working for weeks on getting her to sleep without having to sit with her in her darkened room for an hour, and I knew leaving her at bedtime with a strange sitter would set me back days.

  The cure is simple: put the baby to bed at a reasonable hour, say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don’t go back. Most babies who have developed this pattern cry furiously for 20 to 30 minutes the first night, and then when they see that nothing happens, they suddenly fall asleep! The second night the crying is apt to last only 10 minutes. The third night there usually isn’t any at all. (Section 284.)

  With Andy, it had been a half hour the first night and an hour the second, and I wasn’t going to try any third.

  It’s hard on the kind-hearted parents while the crying lasts. They imagine the worst: that his head is caught in the slats of the crib, or that he has vomited and is lying in a mess, that he is at least in a panic about being deserted.

  By then Will bristled at the mere suggestion that he get someone else to go with him to a concert. “Now tonight you do as I say! You put her down in that crib and close that door and leave, do you hear? Or else I’ll do it!”

  Though I trembled with hate (her enemy was my enemy), I couldn’t fight him. He forbade me to overrule him as he forbade me to go for the mail in my night clothes or tell secrets to Roxanne. He was too strong. I couldn’t handle Andy and him both; things were difficult enough. If he threatened to leave us, if he left us, we couldn’t survive. (“Don’t be so fatalistic,” said Roxanne. “I could probably get you a job. I know a few angles by now.”) I gave in as often as I could; when it came to a fight I always ended in tears and apologizing, like someone without resources. (“The best thing about a divorce is, afterwards you get to say and think anything you want,” said Roxanne.)

  Finally, the applause. “Excuse me, excuse me, please,” I said, pushing past the others in my row all applauding ecstatically.

  At last the aisle, only seconds ahead of the intermission crush. Now for the lobby and the phone booths. If I couldn’t complete my call or couldn’t stand the message, Willy or no, I would leap into a taxi and break for home!

  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, “Yo
u’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 Andy 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.