Jane said, “Whenever I dream I’m driving someplace, it’s always in a station wagon that has two baby car seats in the back. I forget that all of that’s over when I’m dreaming.” Kay continues to hook stray rubber bands around the knobs of her under-sink cabinets as if she still had a toddler at home in danger of swallowing a lethal dose of ammonia. Anne says she can’t believe she’ll never again chauffeur a bundle of soiled white shirts around town in the passenger seat of her car, and claims she can still sometimes smell the odor of her long-gone husband in the front seat when all the windows are closed. Sometimes she buys No-More-Tears shampoo or Lucky Charms at the supermarket just to offset the cans of Soup for One in her shopping cart.
The endless tunnel of work, obligations and dependencies that we experienced during our twenties and thirties turned out to be the best years of our lives. The light, for which we kept watching, finally appeared at the other end of the tunnel only to be identified as a fast-moving express train bearing down upon us and our loved ones. And now that we’ve finally realized the value of the past, we feel doubly gypped because we didn’t discover its worth until long after it was lost.
For those of us who married in the late fifties or early sixties, marriage became the center stage of our lives. It was here we introduced and played various versions of ourselves. Indeed, we also designed and cleaned the sets, cast the characters, wrote the scripts, directed the actors, and selected intimate audiences to watch our impromptu productions. When our first marriages ended, we felt as if we’d been flung off Broadway in the midst of a long-running play.
In retrospect, there were so many years of such great happiness that often late at night now we wonder how what has happened to us could have happened.
We are the first generation to learn that the equitable distribution principle in no-fault divorce does not mean the equal division of property. For that lesson we paid dearly, even though we felt we’d already paid enough dues. As Nancy wrote in one of her self-published poems, we will never again agree to accept the charges on any collect calls until we know precisely what they are and whether or not we have the right to defend ourselves against them. Nevertheless, most of us kept our slave names after we were divorced.
Despite all the reality sandwiches we’ve eaten, we’re still hung up on the idea of marriage. Way back in the fifties, we learned that we “needed” a husband just as we “needed” a little basic black dress that could take us anyplace. It never occurred to us that two distinct human races—one of which dressed right or left, the other of which dressed up or down—might turn out to be fundamentally incompatible. Yet despite all our disappointments over the defections and deficiencies of our men, we still prefer them to freedom. We still expect some man will come along to light up our lives like a little asterisk twinkling above the prose sentence of our days. For us, six months without a man feels like a house without books—a situation that inevitably leaves us clinically depressed.
Some of us have already remarried. Informed as we are, we know that sixty percent of all second marriages end in divorce. That doesn’t deter us from repeating ourselves since we’ve developed a certain equanimity in the departures department. After all, we have been rehearsing separations for almost half a century now and, during our original stints as single parents, we learned the necessary technique for folding a flat king-sized bedsheet alone.
None of us really feels old yet. In many ways we are living contradictions unable to age, gracefully or otherwise. We would never dream of adding a blue rinse to our hair, getting a perm, choosing sensible shoes for a social occasion, or going to the supermarket without wearing either eye makeup or sunglasses. We still curl our lashes, rub Preparation H on our faces before a cocktail party to shrink enlarged pores, and encourage friends who haven’t yet done so to have their ears pierced.
We continue to believe our futures are full of possibilities and that we still might go to law school. We do not want to end up in Miami Beach sharing Happy Hour drinks and Early Bird Special dinners with ladies who play bingo twice a week and steal lipsticks from the Collins Avenue Woolworth’s on Saturday afternoons. Having clung to rocks that crumbled into sand in our hands, we are now attempting to take charge of ourselves and to go forward in a dignified and orderly fashion.
I weep for a while before I fall asleep, but I sleep deeply until nine o’clock the next morning. Since I can hear Joanne in the shower, I simply put on yesterday’s clothes and go downstairs in search of coffee.
CHAPTER 5
And there—in Sukie’s dear, sweet, familiar kitchen—sitting at the table beside Elaine is Max.
He looks exhausted—dangerously, explosively exhausted.
Heartbreak, jet lag, and time warp have spoiled the Hollywood handsomeness of his face. Messy emotions have erased his sophisticated smile and dimmed his dramatic denim-blue eyes. Pain has shorted out his previously wired personality. The buttons of his rumpled shirt march diagonally, rather than perpendicularly, down his chest toward an off-center belt buckle that ropes in tired jeans.
He is externally disheveled and internally damaged.
His suffering summons me and, when he stands up and opens his arms, I trot obediently toward him. Like an abused child who turns for comfort to the guilty parent, I reach out in my grief to the man who hurt my friend.
Then a flash of shame, with a hot flash chaser, roars through me.
Above my head, Max groans, “The only thing harder than losing someone you love is losing someone you’ve stopped loving.”
He is crying, his mouth pressed against my hair so I can feel the heat of his breath on my scalp.
“Too much,” he moans. “This is too much.…”
“Why? Why? Why?” I complain rhetorically, thudding against him like a crib-banger.
Without quite seeing it, I feel Elaine avert her eyes until Max releases me and steps away.
Then I feel delivered, expelled from a warm womb into worldly danger. Max solders his hands onto my shoulders so as to steady and study me. We have not seen each other for five years. Foolishly I feel ashamed of how I may appear to him and, suddenly self-conscious, I step back and sink into a chair.
Immediately Max moves a chair next to mine.
“My God,” he breathes. “You look fabulous, Diana.”
I stare at him.
He seems somehow more soulful than ever before. His dark hair and light eyes, his grainy skin and dune-colored stubble, remain handsome, but he seems softer and more accessible now. Wounded, he is no longer as intimidating as when he was totally self-assured and sexually judgmental. Hurt, he is less commanding and less challenging.
Now he looks expectantly back and forth between Elaine and me. Although neither of us has seen Max since he left Sukie, we know he knows we know everything. That is why he has now become our supplicant. He wants us to grant him some dignified part in this tragedy despite the ignominious role into which he’s been cast. Clearly, after the bitterness of divorce, there can be no pretense of love. The best role for Max is as a supporting character who helps his children bury their mother.
But Elaine is hanging tough. She is sitting sullenly on the other side of Max, totally immune to his neediness. She is not about to forgive him and her toughness is displayed by a total lack of self-consciousness about her appearance. Addicted to loose, shapeless housecoats that she believes flattering, but which actually make her appear larger than she is, Elaine is now swaddled in a huge Arab caftan. She hasn’t combed her hair and clearly couldn’t care less. There is a certain integrity in Elaine’s contempt for Max that encourages me to resist his subtle solicitation of sexual deference in exchange for his social approval.
“It was great of you to come right away,” he says.
Max always opens affirmatively, playing the highest card in his partner’s strongest suit.
“How are the kids doing?” I ask.
“Not good. Neither one of them. Carol’s all busted up. Terrible.” Max shakes his head.
“And David … he’s angry because Sukie died all alone with everyone gone. It’s not good.” For a moment he covers his face with his hands. “They’ll get into New York tonight and my folks will pick them up and take them home to their apartment. Then they’ll drive down here with Carol’s boyfriend; she wants him to come. My parents will fly in for the funeral.”
The kitchen door swings open and Joanne appears. Shocked at seeing Max, she freezes in the doorway and unconsciously begins resealing the flap of her beige silk wrapper by nervously tightening the belt.
Max stands up and moves toward her.
Despite an initial effort to restrain herself, Joanne also rushes to him, weeping helplessly.
“Oh God, Max,” she moans, collapsing in his arms. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he says, stroking her hair. “I don’t know.”
Eventually she extricates herself from his arms and stands, slightly bewildered, in the center of the kitchen. Embarrassed by her emotional capitulation, she begins tightening and retightening her belt again. Then, seeing the cellophane-wrapped Washington Post on the table, she hurries forward to unwrap and open it.
“Elena is still hovering off the Florida panhandle,” she reports, staring at the front-page headline. “Elena.” She lights a cigarette, nervously whips her creamy hair back from her face with the rake of her fingers, and continues studying the paper. But again the long chains of hair spill forward over her shoulders, reaching down to touch the beginnings of her breasts in the easy V-neckline of her pale wrapper.
“I thought they were going to start naming half the hurricanes after men,” she complains, repeating the name several more times to herself in a whisper. “Elena. Elena was hovering over the Florida panhandle the weekend Sukie died.”
In a flash we all taste our future memories of the present.
Suddenly Joanne starts leafing through the pages. When she reaches the obituary section she spreads the paper open and we gather around her. There at the top of the first column is Sukie’s obit and picture. The photograph is the same one Sukie used for the book jacket of Disorderly Conduct. It is a serious picture that somehow makes her look like a thin Liz Taylor; she would have loved the Post for choosing it.
SUZANNA AMRAM, 50, DIES
IN SENATE PRESS GALLERY.
Suzanna Amram, 50, died yesterday in the U.S. Senate Press Gallery of a cerebral hemorrhage. A longtime resident of the District, Ms. Amram, a free-lance journalist, was working on an article related to Friday’s extraordinary Senate session.
Ms. Amram was also a novelist and the author of Laugh Lines, Fine Print, and Disorderly Conduct.
Born in Chicago in 1935 and a graduate of the University of Chicago, Ms. Amram held a doctorate in English literature from Catholic University. Active in the writers’ rights movement, she was a member of Washington Independent Writers, PEN, the Author’s Guild, and the National Writers Union. She was one of the original members of Mothers Against the War in Vietnam.
Formerly married to Max Amram, professor of sociology at American University, she is survived by her two children, David, 18, and Carol, 20, of Washington, and her father, Martin Smilow, of Chicago, Illinois.
Funeral arrangements are to be announced.
“Oh God,” Elaine moans, staring at the newspaper. “Sukie never finished her doctorate. She only said that on one of her resumés when she was trying to get a teaching job at some girls’ academy around here. That school where Jean Harris worked.”
“Goddammit,” Max curses as exasperation chases weariness across his face. “Why the hell did she do things like that? Why did she have to lie and ruin her own obituary?”
Silence.
“Oh, who’s gonna know?” Joanne finally asks. “You think Catholic University is going to check through all their records and demand a retraction?”
“They just might,” Max says grimly.
“In this town? Where half the resumés in circulation qualify as fiction?” Joanne is hanging in with a heated, irrational defense of Sukie. “Are you kidding?”
“Look, we could call the Post and let them know there’s an error,” I say uneasily, feeling ambivalent about the seriousness of this crime.
“Oh sure,” Joanne agrees sarcastically. “Sure. They had a one-hundred-percent accuracy rating before this, huh? Did you ever see their daily correction column? Look, it’s not that great an obit anyway. Only four graphs. She deserved more than that. If we do something about the Ph.D. mistake, we should at least try to have some real input into a new version.”
“But it wasn’t a mistake,” Max insists. “Sukie lied.”
“Oh, Max,” I protest, suddenly adopting the opposite position. “Sukie did enough good work that someplace should have given her a damned honorary doctorate.”
Max looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
Actually I am quite upset about this error in Sukie’s obituary since I have long feared a similar fate. One of my most frequent nightmares is that after I’m dead, someone will discover how my theoretical generalizations about the Mundurucu were based on insufficient ethnographic evidence and then publish a critique of my dissertation that will discredit all my efforts, including later work that I researched most scrupulously.
“Look, we’ve got a lot of funeral business to take care of,” Elaine says briskly. “We’ve got to take charge of things before everything gets out of control.”
“Everything is out of control already,” Max editorializes.
“We should have written the obit ourselves,” Joanne insists. “I thought of going over to the Post yesterday afternoon to see what they were planning to use, but I just couldn’t mobilize myself.”
We all sit silent for a few moments listening to the air conditioner churlishly recycling some modestly cooled air.
“Here’s the deal,” Elaine finally says firmly. “We’re going to eat a decent breakfast, so we can think straight, and then we’ll decide what has to be done. Joanne, why don’t you make coffee while I fry us some eggs?”
Joanne gets up and starts fussing with Sukie’s coffeepot. Within a few minutes she is confronting a variety of parts, scattered across the counter, that she can’t reassemble.
“This is making me crazy,” she complains plaintively. “How could Sukie use such a fucked-up coffee pot?”
“She didn’t actually brew it in there,” Max says. “She boiled the water in a teapot and then poured it through a filter into that electric thing. I had to buy her a whistling teapot because she always forgot she had water boiling.”
A silence explodes and resounds around the kitchen.
“The whistle on that teapot broke,” Elaine reports, “and the pot melted all over the stove. It could have started a fire.”
Max looks at Elaine as if she’s a witch.
Immediately I hear the chorus from our past start chanting:
Even though our husbands pretended not to know practical things such as where we kept the Band-Aids, the kids’ rectal thermometer, or our stash of safety pins and postage stamps, they clearly knew more than they let on. Even though they evinced eternal surprise that children needed appropriate age-and-gender gifts to take along to birthday parties or that nursery schoolers needed an interesting item for show-and-tell on Fridays, our husbands were hardly idiots and must have noticed some things. Max’s memory of Sukie’s complicated coffeemaking procedure validates her longtime contention that Max simply feigned ignorance in line with some strategy whereby a man couldn’t be asked to do what he didn’t know how to do.
I light a cigarette and listen to Sukie whispering in my head: “It’s like not learning the language of a country where you’re living so you don’t have to participate. It’s like I’ve got to translate everything for him. His dumbness doubles my burden. And he doesn’t even know I have a burden.” She had paused to think for a while. “The nature of my burden is such that I can no longer define it. I cannot think. I hate him. I mean I love him, but I hate hi
m.”
I know I should help make breakfast, but I feel too weak to stand up. My breath is caught within my chest, snagged like a pair of pantyhose on some sharp object. I know if I move I will irreparably rip a lung or some other interior organ—most likely my heart.
All I can do is watch Joanne holding Sukie’s antique brass teapot under the sink faucet until it’s full enough to set atop a crooked burner on the old gas stove. Previously, Sukie’s brass teapot was for show-and-tell, not for use. All of us have similar personality accents in our kitchens because each of us independently decided, way back in the fifties, exactly what kinds of kitchens we wanted. What we wanted was anything that didn’t resemble our mothers’ Formica fortresses of the postwar years. Our trademark of independence was usually an antique, such as Sukie’s teapot, that signified we had rejected Revere Ware and revered authentic Americana. It was our way of showing how different we were from our mothers’ generation.
Our mothers were primarily housewives who belonged to ladies’ auxiliaries, mah-jongg groups, PTAs, and canasta, book review, or country clubs. In the prosperous 1950s, our fathers bought them split-level homes with huge picture windows, country station wagons trimmed with wood, and airplane tickets to Florida every winter. Happily our mothers made tuna fish casseroles with crumbled potato chip toppings, desserts out of graham crackers, fancy hand towels for the guest bathroom, pot holders for Christmas gifts, needlepoint seatcovers for little footstools, and contributions to the March of Dimes because Sister Kenny was one of their heroines. Nowadays our daughters joke about making us happy by calling home to say, “Hi, Mom. This morning I lost ten pounds, passed the New York State bar, cleaned my apartment, and got engaged.” We could make our mothers happy simply by calling home.
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