When Angels Cry
Page 7
Underneath the rose covered arbor, looking into Brad’s loving eyes, I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. The celebration was nothing but the best. People asked when we would be having children. I told them as soon as possible.
An hour into the reception, Marie took my hand and led me into the house. “I need to talk to you,” she said.
We entered the powder room on the lower level. I had a Pavlovian response whenever I saw a toilet. I was instantly nauseated. “Do we have to be in a bathroom?”
“Oh my God, fine!” Marie was annoyed.
“No. It’s alright. Don’t worry,” I responded, “I’ll just hurl into the solid gold swan fauceted sink if I have to.”
“This is serious.” Marie took my hands in hers.
“What? What is it?” I asked.
“Last week,” she began, “I got home early, and to my surprise, I saw David’s car in the driveway.” Marie’s eyes began to tear.
“Oh God, Marie . . . don’t tell me. Another woman?”
She shook her head.
“A . . . man?” I whispered.
“No, nothing like that.”
I just waited for her to tell me.
“I went into our bedroom. He was standing in front of the mirror . . . in my bra and panties!”
Okay . . . strike me dead . . . A laugh surfaced from the bottom of my stomach to my mouth. I couldn’t contain my laughter.
“It’s not funny!” Marie was offended.
“Oh God, Marie . . . I know!” I propped myself up on the sink for fear I would laugh so hard I’d hit the ground. Then something remarkable happened, maybe because of our love for one another and the deep understanding we shared. Marie began to laugh, too. The two of us hung on to one another for dear life, tears running down our cheeks as both of us tried to catch our breath. After several minutes, we just stood, totally winded, staring at one another. Finally, I asked, “What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to leave him?” I asked.
“Of course not!” She replied indignantly.
“Well, good!” I couldn’t come up with anything else to say.
Marie explained that no one knew, and even David hadn’t seen her see him. “So he has a little quirkiness,” she shrugged. “I still love him.”
“Good!” I said again. I was beginning to feel like a puppet with my head bobbing up and down. I was also wondering how much she was lying about her feelings.
“But hey, it’s your wedding day for cryin’ out loud. Let’s party!” Marie grabbed my arm and led me back outside.
It was dusk and the scent of night blooming jasmine was wafting through the warm air. A lovely string quartet was playing Bach or Mozart. I didn’t have a clue. Tiny tea lights had been placed around the property and some even floated in the Olympic sized pool. I caught Brad’s eye as I walked toward him. Everyone seemed to stop in that moment as the two of us made our way toward each other. It was all very romantic, until I found myself fighting another tsunami of nausea. He steered me to a private spot. In those days Brad thought that everything I did was adorable. Even my throwing up in his mother’s yard made him smile. I could not have loved him more.
At two in the morning March 14, 1976, I woke up thinking I had wet the bed. So I waddled into the bathroom and sat on the toilet to have a lovely pee. As I wiped myself, I realized that the fluid I had felt before was not urine.
“Brad.” I tapped him lightly. “Brad, wake up. My water broke.”
And from the deepest, darkest sleep, my husband was suddenly airborne. He shot out of bed as if I had stuck dynamite up his ass.
“Honey, I’m fine. Slow down,” I tried to reassure him.
He was on a mission. Trying to find his keys, trying to locate the suitcase I had packed. All the while he repeated, “It’s two weeks early. What does that mean?”
I just told him we needed to go quickly and safely to the hospital. It would all be fine. Until that point I hadn’t really felt anything other than slimy fluid down my legs. As soon as we got into the car, the contractions started. The enlightened love child in me was all about natural birth. I wanted to do it at home in a bathtub. Since my mother almost had a heart attack when I told her my plans, I agreed that my first child would be delivered in an antiseptic, brightly lit hospital.
We pulled into the emergency entrance, and Brad ran inside. A nurse soon came out wheeling a chair. I was surprised that my contractions were coming every two minutes and were so powerful I thought my insides would explode. I was trying desperately to remember all the breathing techniques I had learned at the few birthing classes we managed to attend. All I could do was moan, which prompted Brad to remind me to breathe, which prompted me to tell him to tell him to fuck off. You don’t mess with a woman in labor! The nurse began shoving paper work at me, even though I was telling her that I thought I had to push.
“Isn’t this your first child? How long have you been in labor?” she asked without much sympathy to my cries.
“My whole life!” I screamed at her.
“Well, then. We aren’t going to get very far if we have that kind of attitude are we?” She smirked.
“No, we will be a dead nurse if we don’t check me immediately,” I yelled. Brad had disappeared, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea where he had gone.
Psycho nurse wheeled me into a room and told me to get onto the bed. I tried to maneuver my body onto what seemed like the bed from The Princess and the Pea. I knew it couldn’t have been as high as
I thought it was, but I had never tried to mount anything with what felt like a bowling ball about to drop out from between my legs.
“Okay, Missy. Let’s see what all the fuss is about,” the nurse said as she pulled up my muumuu.
“Oh my God. You’re crowning!”
“Does that have anything to do with you being a royal pain in the ass?” I hissed through my teeth.
Phoebe Elizabeth was born ten minutes later with neither my doctor nor my husband present. Nurse Ratchett delivered her with a couple attendings standing by.
“It’s a girl,” Nurse said as I heard my baby cry.
“Far out!” I replied. I had never used that phrase before or since. Why I channeled John Denver I will never know. As Phoebe was placed in my arms, I knew the true meaning of love. Even nurse Ratchett and I smiled at one another.
It turned out that Brad had gone to make the perfunctory phone calls. Of course, his parents were first. They lived in the same city, I’ll give him that, and my parents were still up north expecting me not to go into labor this soon. When Brad returned, I had a newborn at my breast. Brad broke down and sobbed.
“I missed everything!” he wailed. “My first child. I can’t believe it!!”
At that moment, I thought to myself why am I not feeling sorry for him? He was making this all about him. He never asked how I was or what I had just gone through. It was all about his missing it!
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“I was making the phone calls. All the people on your list, for crying out loud!” “Maybe you could have waited until after she was born?” I was smiling. I didn’t get mad. A kind of euphoria takes place after delivery. I know that it has to do with hormones. Oxytosin. Something else kicks in, too. The meaning of life! All of a sudden, you realize how powerful it is to be a woman. You know that you would dive under a moving train for this person swaddled in your arms. Nothing else really matters.
We were home in two days. Brad went home the night after Phoebe was born and set up her crib. He complained bitterly about how badly he had thrown his back out doing so. My mother flew down to help and stayed in our bed with me, because Brad insisted on taking the couch.
“Why Phoebe?” my mother asked at the two a.m. feeding my first night home.
“Why not?” I replied.
My mother sighed. “Well, I guess I thought you might name your daughter after Rachel?”
I search
ed my mother’s face for some sort of sign that could help me with this one. “Are we Jewish and you never told me?” I asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She snorted.
“Well, our family has never named people after the dead,” I said.
My mother’s lip quivered a bit. And I wondered if this might be the second time in my life I would see her cry. But no, she bit her bottom lip and willed the tears away. “Mother.” I took her hand. “No one can replace Rachel, and Rachel had her own name. I wouldn’t want anyone to take her place, even symbolically.”
My mother sighed again and scooted down under the blankets. “I understand,” she said, turning her back on me and feigning sleep.
I looked down at my child attached to my breast. What a satisfying feeling it is to nurse your child. I swore to her in that I would always communicate with her the best way that I knew how.
Within a few weeks, the overly generous, unselfish, un- egotistical man for whom I had recited my wedding vow regressed into the equivalent of a two-year-old. He wanted all of my attention as though I was his mother, not Phoebe’s. At first it was subtle, but it soon became more obvious. He stared at my breasts as I would open my shirt to nurse. Granted, my breasts were the size of silos and my nipples looked like Oscar Meyer Bologna. I understood the fascination. When he began to drill me about the breastfeeding, I realized there was more going on with him. “Can’t she take a bottle yet? When will your boobs be normal again? How much milk does one baby need, for Christ’s sake?”
Phoebe was three months old when I stopped nursing. I really didn’t want to stop. In fact, I think I might still be nursing my kids if it wasn’t taboo. And knock me down if it didn’t seem like a conspiracy. My mother jumped on the bandwagon and told me how pleased she was that I would be able to concentrate more on Brad now that I had stopped breast-feeding!
“A man needs to know that he is still number one, sweetie,” she pointed out.
Of course, my mother never even attempted to breast feed her children. I even saw a photo of her around eight months pregnant with me with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Talk about a generation gap.
Motherhood was all-consuming at that point. All I wanted to do was look at this gorgeous being, whom I helped create, and let the world go by. Once the decision was made to let my milk dry up, no one tells you how painful that is. I had to find other stimuli. Now that Brad was a junior partner in a law firm and barely home, I kept up a dialogue with Marie. In a weirdly symbiotic way, she had a baby too. Born three months after Phoebe. He weighed in at eight pounds and was a C-section. Marie’s stomach looked great. My baby was six pounds, and I was sure my vagina and my stomach would never be the same.
Marie suggested I pick up my writing again. “Even if you never do anything with it, you are a good writer Sarah, and it will give you an outlet,” she preached. Were we really this smart at the age of twenty?
We talked at least once a week. Mostly about our babies and sometimes about our spouses and how uninvolved with us they seemed, now that we were mothers. We never spoke about what she had revealed to me on my wedding day.
I launched myself into the career I still have to this day. I’m not really sure why or how I fell into the erotic romance genre, seeing as I hadn’t really experienced any of that myself. I had been considered a fairly good poet, so why wasn’t I channeling Emily Dickenson instead of Harold Robbins? Beats me.
I completed my first novel Love and Lust at Midnight within a year, and I was damn proud. Brad was as supportive as he could be. I don’t think he actually believed anything would come of this newfound hobby of mine. Brad referred to it as sexy fluff. One day after reading the cover of a paperback romance novel, I wrote down the publishing company’s name. What the hell? Why not submit my manuscript to them? Months went by, and I suspected Brad was secretly pleased that I hadn’t heard anything.
We celebrated Phoebe’s first birthday. She took her first steps . . . they were toward the vodka-laced punch bowl. Maybe I should’ve known then and there she would be in and out of rehab. Brad was made partner at Korsen, Korsen, Korsen and Hertz. One day, I received a certified letter.
“Dear Miss O’Malley,
“We are pleased to inform you that we would like to publish your debut novel Love and Lust at Midnight.
Please contact us at your earliest convenience . . .
I don’t think I actually finished the letter. I just screamed. I received a $5000 advance, and they wanted an option on my next novel.
The first thing I did was get a new typewriter. I wasn’t very fast at typing, so I enrolled in a night class in order to perfect my much-needed skill. Brad took rolls of photographs of me in our back yard for the author photo. The publishers picked a shot in which I was looking off to the left and slightly upwards. It wasn’t one I particularly liked. It looked as though I was wishing on a star, or something to that effect. Maybe I was?
The actual cover of the book, I learned, was typical, in those days. It was a painting, but looked very realistic. A hunky, shirtless man in polo pants and boots, holding a young raven haired girl in his arms. Her flowy dress was falling off of her shoulders. A huge horse rearing up in the background.
Over the years my book covers remained somewhat alike. Most were actual photographs of the hunk and damsel scenario. And my author photos got better and better.
It took about nine months before Love and Lust was published. With all the editorial notes, proofreading the galleys, sending back all the corrections, the time flew by. I was interviewed for Publishers Weekly as a hot, new, genre writer. Brad was still skeptical about the whole thing and concerned about how legitimate the publisher was. I felt he was just jealous that attention was being paid to me.
I signed with my first literary agent. He had seen my article in Publishers Weekly and had offered to represent me. My publisher made sure the book was in all the special promotions. I’m sure the exotic cover was appealing to most women. Also, it didn’t hurt that several top selling authors, Tina Mason, Walter O’Rielly, Samantha Davis, had given us blurbs, on the back cover.
Brad and I bought our first home in the San Fernando Valley. Van Nuys to be exact. We found an affordable home on a quiet street. Yes, the house had a white picket fence. That is what sold it for me. I didn’t really care about anything other than that fence. It signified so much.
My mother hated the house. Mainly, she hated the valley. “It’s so hot here!” Yet still she was determined to line every single drawer with sweet smelling liners and color coordinated anything that was to be hung.
Not long after our move, Brad’s father became ill, and Brad retreated into himself and his work, big time. It’s not as if Steve and Brad were ever that close. In fact, Brad could hardly remember his dad being around when he was young. Nevertheless, Brad was devastated by the news. I decided that it would be a good time to take a trip with Phoebe, and see Marie on Nantucket. Neither of us had seen each other’s children, other than photographs, and we felt it was time.
I couldn’t get over the size of Marie’s home; it was a beautiful colonial on an acre of lush land, five bedrooms, three baths and wrap around porches on each floor. The kitchen was decorated in provincial blues and whites. The granite counter tops, flecked with gold, sparkled in the afternoon light that poured through the large bay window above the stainless steel sinks. All the important rooms had views of the water where a small sail boat was bobbing.
“Did you order the cute boat for me?” I asked Marie on our tour of the house.
“Of course I did,” she giggled. “Only the best for my best friend!”
It was great to spend time with Marie even though we knew the visit would be short. Her cross-dressing husband wasn’t around much, which was probably a good thing since I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to keep my mouth shut for long. Marie had hired an au pair from Sweden. We actually could leave our children and go out to lunch or just sit with a bottle of wine
in her garden looking out at the surf.
We were different now. When I tried to broach the subject of our “teen experience” and what we had done the night before her wedding, Marie behaved as though she didn’t recall. Without going any deeper, I understood that she had decided it wasn’t anything she wanted to stir up now that she was married and a parent. I have always wondered if maybe we hadn’t short changed ourselves.
Marie’s phone rang at two a.m. I figured it was for David. When Marie slipped into my room, I could read the expression on her face. Brad had told me he didn’t think his father had more than twenty-four hours left. Phoebe and I took the first plane off Nantucket that morning. We would have one stop before getting into LAX. Phoebe and I would’ve only stayed another day anyway. Marie cried as she waved good-bye, and we swore to call once a month without fail. I didn’t see Marie again for ten years.
Brad’s father, having suffered a major heart attack was not expected to make it through the night that Phoebe and I returned home. Our neighbor, Susan, a twenty-four-year-old nursing student, said she’d be happy to watch Phoebe while I went to the hospital where Brad had been sitting vigil.
The look on my mother-in-law’s face as I walked into the hospital room was not welcoming. Brad’s mother had a way of making people who weren’t immediate family feel as if they had not bathed in a while. She would scrunch up her face, purse her lips, and look as if she was smelling rotten air. Even with her husband in critical condition she was dressed in a Chanel suit with a strand of good pearls around her neck. God forbid she walk out of her house looking less than perfect. I felt as though I was invading a family sanctuary. I was definitely the outsider. Brad, who was sitting in a chair close to his father looked up and smiled. Steve was lying so still in the bed, his mouth wide open and his breathing labored. I had never seen anyone close to death before.
“Hi, Honey,” Brad whispered as he walked over to me, “I’m glad you came.” He kissed me tenderly on the cheek, and I saw Marjorie’s expression soften at that point.