Between Husbands and Friends

by Thayer, Nancy

  Max’s reporters and ad salesmen, college graduates only three years younger than we were, burst in on Sundays or in the evenings with fresh rumors and local news flashes. When Max wasn’t working, he was attending committee meetings, serving on boards, donating free time he didn’t really have to local charitable causes. Gradually, as we came to know them, members of the civic league, directors of boards and trusteeships, lawyers for conservation foundations found their way to our house, where they sat around having informal forums. Neighbors strolled in, pretending to need to borrow sugar, really curious about all the activity, and stayed to argue against a tax increase or to flirt with one of Max’s reporters. Friends dropped their children off while they raced to the grocery store or the gynecologist to see if they were pregnant again, or arrived full of indignant energy about the latest stupid decision by the board of selectmen. Soon everyone stopped in all the time, casually, unannounced.

  We could afford to buy our house because it had been the home of an elderly couple whose children didn’t want to deal with the legacy of a house marked by benign neglect: brittle venetian blinds, worn rugs, rusty appliances, faded drapes. Their children just wanted to get rid of it and get the money; we bought it as is. With a lot of elbow grease and the help of our friends, Max and I scoured and painted all the rooms. I washed the windows and put up the fine old cream linen drapes that had been languishing in my parents’ attic. As we worked, I looked out the windows at all the beautiful flowers and thought how old Mrs. McIntyre must have hoarded her money and her energy to buy and tend the iris, tulips, daffodils, rhododendron she lavished around this backyard. She must have made it through the long winters in her dark house by anticipating spring.

  We ran out of time and money before we could replace the former owner’s old wall-to-wall carpet; it still spread over the living and dining rooms, a shaggy olive green expanse that seemed to absorb small objects as well as dirt; it gave us the illusion of being outside. This provided an odd sense of freedom. I certainly didn’t care if the thing got soiled or stained; we planned to have it ripped out as soon as we could afford it. I shampooed it thoroughly, then simply felt grateful that it never showed any sign of grime or wear, and our friends felt totally relaxed when their children spilled drinks or their infants had a moment of projectile vomiting.

  We were all so young then, and our children were young, and crawling or toddling. I had all the sharp edges of the fireplace and the coffee table cushioned with bubble wrap and tape. In the warm weather I kept a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris in the refrigerator and boxes of Popsicles in the freezer. In the winter I made Irish coffee laced heavily with liquor and topped with whipped cream with which I also embellished the hot chocolate for the children. The adults sat on the floor and sipped their drinks while their children munched animal crackers and apple slices. Friends changed their babies’ diapers while discussing whether to get up a petition, then rushed off, late for dinner, leaving their children’s soiled diapers curled like cauliflowers growing from the green carpet. Children cried when their bits of He-men or Barbies disappeared in the oceanic rug, and I handed them Life Savers to quench the tears. We discussed everything: political candidates, a runaway dog, divorces, affairs, gothic babysitters, abortions, crucial dinner parties, babies, disastrous haircuts, diets, failure to be given tenure, elation over a promotion. We complained and wept and laughed and cursed about it all.

  It’s odd, but those were amazingly sexy days. At least I thought so, felt so. Perhaps it was because of all the children I held and nurtured, passing their heavy, flushed bodies back and forth so that my arms touched the arms of other daddies as I bent close enough to breathe and smell and feel the heat of another man’s warm, ever so slightly boozy breath. Perhaps it was because being parents of young children brought out the beast in us. Our most extreme emotions boiled just beneath our skin: adoration and vigilance and fierce possessiveness. I had to be alert all the time, so all of my senses were turned up to their fullest capacity, and I couldn’t modulate my senses or censor them. One moment I’d experience a hot flash of panic when a child fell off a chair or shut her fingers in a door, and then someone’s husband would walk in the door and flash me a smile, or someone’s daddy stood just a little too close to me as I warmed a bottle for him at the stove, and lust would drench me, leave me weak.

  Late one frosty December night during our first year in Sussex, when Max was asleep, I slipped from our bed, pulled on a robe, and went quietly through the dark house to the kitchen. I made a mug of herbal tea and carried it with me for the companionship and warmth.

  I didn’t want to sit in the living room where the Christmas tree would incline my thoughts toward duties. I checked on Margaret, who was sleeping soundly, and went whisper-footed up into the attic.

  Does every woman at some point in her life wander through the sleeping house, looking in at her husband and children, and wonder what she’s doing here, in this particular life?

  I think so. I think we all carry the girl we once were within us, and from time to time we need to commune with her, our early self. We need to find a quiet spot where no one can see or intrude, and just as we used to giggle with our best friend behind a closed bedroom door, we sit down with the girl we once were and laugh and exclaim: Can you believe all this? A house, a husband, a child, a microwave, and you’re not even thirty! I thought you’d be in Afghanistan, teaching English and having a hot affair with a Mongol.

  Perhaps I’m more restless than others. The best way I can account for this is the zodiac. I’m a Gemini. The Twins. I have two equal sides, in my case, the domestic and the wild. And in my life I had two equal role models, my mother, the consummate homemaker, and my mother’s sister, Aunt Grace, who left me her Nantucket house. The two sisters came in the middle of a family of five children with not enough money or space; they hated the rush and tussle of their home and longed for life with subtlety, fluency, and silence.

  Hope, my mother, married my father, several years older and already established as a statistician in a large insurance company. Mother ran her home like a top, keeping every faucet clean, each fuse reliable. She became a capable, much-sought-after committeewoman, sitting on boards for charities, libraries, and hospitals, and she gave cocktail parties and birthday parties and elaborate dinners with a zest and flair that came from genuine pleasure. My mother loved her life, adored my father and me, and found the quotidian tasks of daily life absolutely delightful. She was a rare woman, and I’ve often regretted that I wasn’t blessed with more of her qualities. When my father retired in his early sixties, my parents moved to Arizona, where they play golf and tennis and hike; my mother is on the board of the local opera, library, and historical museum.

  Aunt Grace looked like my mother (and I look like both of them), with flyaway blond hair and green eyes. Like my mother, Grace had a rare gift for appreciating life, but she took a completely different route than my mother. Grace got a Ph.D. and became a professor of English literature at a small women’s college. She never married. She traveled every summer, usually to England, sometimes with a man, sometimes with a woman, sometimes alone. She was a raving feminist, and her greatest desire was to write a book about Dorothy Wordsworth. Perhaps not surprisingly, Grace and my mother were closer to each other than to their brothers, my uncles, who spread to all the corners of the map and seldom appeared in our Connecticut home. Grace and my mother wrote each other often, and then phoned each other weekly, and I loved it when Grace came to visit. Mother and Grace would sequester themselves on the screened porch with glasses of tea and cigarettes, and laughter would curl through the afternoon like their cigarette smoke.

  Mother didn’t like to leave Daddy, so it was Aunt Grace who took me on trips, every summer from the age I was nine. Two weeks: first, to national parks in the United States. Later, when I entered my teens, to France and Italy and England and British Columbia. Aunt Grace supplied me with the novels and poetry of each region and gave me minilectures about them ev
ery night over dinner. She was an enthralling speaker, partly because she had no qualms about discussing the sexual episodes in the books which my mother would have ignored.

  When my aunt was in her fifties, she bought the large old Victorian house on Nantucket, planning to retire there and write. Every August my parents and I stayed with her for two weeks. My mother did all the cooking and cleaning—she wanted to, she enjoyed it, and she made no secret of her opinion of what Grace considered a decent meal. Grace spent most of the day in her study, working on her books. My father taught me to sail, and on Sundays all four of us would get into Grace’s old Jeep and bounce out to Great Point for a picnic.

  It was a fortunate childhood, I know. And it was a gesture beyond benevolence when Grace left her Nantucket house to me. In a way it made sense: Her brothers and their children, her other nieces and nephews, had seldom visited her there. But she could have left the house as part of her estate; it could have been sold and the profits equally divided. No, Aunt Grace meant something by leaving me the house, and I wanted to honor that, not simply by taking my own family to summer on Nantucket, but by paying attention to the part of my soul that had been nurtured by my aunt, and to the yearnings and questionings and dissatisfactions and hungers in my soul that came, that had to have come, from genes I shared with Grace.

  In the middle of that December night as I sat in the attic, it seemed I was accompanied by the spirits of the young girl I once was, and by my Aunt Grace. What would they think of my life? Would they be disappointed in how domestic it was, how ordinary? Was I disappointed? By twenty-six I had gone through labor and through a terrifying spell when my husband was so depressed he hadn’t talked to me for eight days. If I had not become heroic, at least I had become brave.

  The unfamiliar crossings of the shadows in the attic pleased me. It was a safe landscape, demanding nothing, yet somehow mysteriously electric, alive. I thought about the Mclntyres who had lived in the house before us. I imagined the ancient, secret routines of mice or sparrows in the eaves, making nests, making babies, feeling in their feathers, fur, and pin-narrow veins the dawn or an approaching storm long before we humans heard about it on The Weather Channel. For a moment I was not Lucy West, mother and wife, part-time journalist for the local newspaper, concerned citizen. For a moment I was a young woman, still capable of doing anything at all.

  In the silence of the attic I realized what I needed: a friend to talk this over with, a real friend, who wouldn’t be shocked or censorious, who would laugh with me, who would make me laugh. I’d met plenty of nice women and smart women, interesting ones, but with none of them had there been that click that happens when you meet someone who thinks the way you do.

  “That’s what I want for Christmas, Aunt Grace,” I said aloud into the night. I saluted her with my mug, then went back down the stairs to my bed.

  In May the Little Red Schoolhouse held an open house for all prospective parents and children. Max and I had decided that we wanted Margaret to start preschool that fall. She was three, and she was an active, sociable, curious child who loved to be with people. If she attended preschool every morning, that would free me up to write more articles for the newspaper, which would help Max, provide me with a bit of pocket money, and give me a chance to write.

  Twenty mothers and four fathers arrived for the open house, all with their three-year-olds, some also carrying infants and toddlers in packs on their backs. We listened to the introductory spiel from the head, Anita Walton, and to the brief but glowing testimonials from preschool parents, which were not really necessary, since through the casual town grapevine we knew that this was the best preschool in the area.

  The exterior of the Little Red Schoolhouse was a cheery barny kind of color, but it had never been a schoolhouse; it was just a normal ranch house with a large fenced backyard full of playground equipment and its living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedrooms turned into the Main Room, the Quiet Room where children napped, the Table Room where they had snacks and engaged in finger-painting or modeling with clay, and the Storytelling Room.

  Several assistant teachers supervised the children as they explored the Main Room and its toys while the parents talked with the head teacher and with one another as they sipped a punch that tasted suspiciously like Kool-Aid and nibbled on homemade cookies. I’d lived in the town for almost a year, and I knew many of the parents, so it was a comfortable morning for me. I was having a good time, and gregarious Margaret was with her friend Amy Granger, near the doll cradles. I wore twill slacks and a blue cotton sweater. Most of the parents wore similar clothes, comfortable, washable garb.

  But one woman stood out, and I surreptitiously studied her. Tall, thin, blond, she lounged against the wall in a pale violet linen sheath, looking as if without the wall she’d fall right on over with boredom.

  “Who is that?” I whispered to Sandy Granger.

  “Kate Cunningham. Isn’t she gorgeous?”

  “She looks like a model.”

  “She is a model. For Smith and Smith. You must have seen her in their catalogs.”

  “I say,” I murmured, affecting a British accent. Smith and Smith was a revered women’s New England clothing store specializing in a certain kind of just slightly dowdy old-money look. Their models wore pearls with their simple white shirts and plaid golf slacks. Their heels were never over two inches high, their hems never above the knee. They were always posed against the brick walls of Ivy League colleges or the masts of sailboats with a yacht club launch in the background.

  “Her husband’s a lawyer with Masterbrook, Gillet, and Stearns.”

  “Perfect.” Masterbrook, Gillet, and Stearns was the oldest, stuffiest, most elite group of lawyers in Boston.

  “They just bought the Seldon farm,” Sandy continued, naming the most expensive property in Sussex County, one hundred acres with pond, horse barn, hills covered with maple sugar trees, and a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse that it was rumored Paul Revere had slept in.

  “Wow. Is she nice?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never met her. Whoops.” Sandy was off like a shot to referee in a tussle of little boys.

  All around us women were exchanging inventive recipes to make vegetables palatable to their children or comparing pediatricians. Out of the corner of my eye I saw elephantine, competitive, hyperactive Jiffer Curtis barreling toward me, no doubt to tell me that her daughter had just learned to recite the alphabet in four different languages. I turned and made my way through the miniature chairs, tables, and people to the window supporting Kate Cunningham.

  “Hi. I’m Lucy West. My daughter, Margaret, is over there.” I pointed to the spot where Margaret was gathered with a gaggle of little girls.

  “Kate Cunningham. My son, Matthew, is over in the corner, trying to decide whether to eat the modeling clay or stick it in his ears.”

  Sure enough, there was a boy with white-blond hair and his mother’s fair skin, standing all by himself, facing the wall, intensely scrutinizing the wads of clay he held tightly in each fist.

  “My husband and I try to tell ourselves that Matthew has a scientific nature,” Kate Cunningham continued. “We reassure ourselves that he really is capable of socialization, that he’ll learn at some point to talk to other children, that someday he’ll have friends and get married and not grow up to be some misanthropic insectologist living in an apartment with twelve thousand jars of bugs.”

  I looked over at my daughter, who had Lulu, her own doll, in one arm while with the other she sorted through a pile of baby dolls, discussing their prospective merits with several other little girls. “Max and I worry that Margaret will get pregnant at twelve and have a baby every year.”

  “I’d rather have the bugs,” Kate said in a low, husky, conspiratorial voice, and we both laughed. “Do you have any other children?”

  “No.”

  “Just no? Not ‘not yet’?”

  I leaned closer to Kate, drawn to her intensity, to her lack of pretense.


  “I don’t know. We weren’t quite ready when we had Margaret. I mean, we’d just gotten married, we had no money, we hadn’t gotten our marriage established, really. I’m sure we’ll want other children, but not yet. In the meantime, I spend too much time feeling guilty for turning Margaret into the dreaded Spoiled Only Child, but I don’t want to have another child just because of guilt.”

  “Oh, guilt.” Kate sighed. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Jesus, when Matthew was two weeks old, I had to cut his fingernails. Well, I accidentally sliced into his fingertip! He turned purple screaming! I felt so guilty I nearly went down and stuck my own hand down the garbage disposal in penance.”

  “Oh, God. I know.” A kind of demented laughter swept through me. Emotions welled up inside me, surprising me; I hadn’t realized how much I had been tamping down.

  Kate went on. “Now we’ve bought this farm so he can have a puppy and fresh air and I’m sick with guilt because he doesn’t have any neighbor children to play with. It doesn’t fucking end.”

  I nodded. “I know. They never told us this before we got pregnant, did they?”

  Other mothers were collecting their broods now; it was time to leave. Children whined and resisted as their mothers attempted to lead them out the door. One woman tried to detach her son from a toy race car; he squirmed and fussed then burst into a full-scale rage. Anita Walton and her assistants were gathering up paper cups and napkins.

  I said, “I wonder, since you mentioned the farm … my husband is the editor of The Sussex Gazette. I’d love to do an article on your farm. What it was like before, what you’re planning to do with it now.”