by Susan Isaacs
“They’re loud,” Barry observed, not too softly, at the Young Dems annual dinner, which took place in Wang’s Chi-Am restaurant in Kew Gardens.
They were, at least some of them. They were nineteen-year-old boys like Robert Lombardo, who boomed instead of spoke, smoked stinky cigars, and sported Carmine DeSapio dark glasses. They were girls like Susan Wolf who wore black tights because she couldn’t remember to shave her legs and who made caustic, nasal remarks about fuzzy-minded liberals. My friends were the heirs to Tammany Hall. Their grandparents had never learned English. Their parents did not seem to care that they wore garish prints and didn’t know the serving secrets of the Baroness de Rothschild. They were a noisy group, aggressive, sometimes crude, occasionally embarrassing to be seen with.
But they were content. They were enthusiastic. They were nice. Robert saved me his Times each morning, so I wouldn’t have to buy one. Susan taught me to drive. Several of them invited me for dinner on weekends when Barry was studying, informing their parents that “Marcia’s going with an Ivy League guy, from Columbia.” Their parents would smile with their too-bright dentures and offer me more pea soup or tortellini. They did not seem to care that I was seeing a prospective professional from a very fine family while their own child was dating a future civil servant. “Hey,” they would say as we would leave for the movies, “button up. It’s freezing outside.”
But my mother and Barry must have sensed a threat because they suddenly became allies. She had always been polite, almost deferential, when he came to the apartment, standing in the kitchen doorway and wiping her hands over and over on a dish towel, hardly daring to speak. He, in turn, had been almost ridiculously polite, calling her “ma’am” like he was from Ohio and telling her how nice it was to see her again. Actually, I think he was repelled by her pasty, wrinkled skin and her hunched shoulders.
But like two magnets of opposing polarities, they drew together and clicked on the issue of my political friends. “Ill-bred,” said my mother. “Tasteless,” Barry responded. “So brash.” “They belong in vocational school, not a four-year college.” They seemed afraid that I carried some genetic anomaly, some downwardly mobile chromosome that forced me to seek out the inelegant and the churlish.
I would come home, after an exhausting evening of debating how Queens College Young Dems could stop Goldwater, and find my mother waiting up, wrapped in a ratty flannel bathrobe.
“Your sweater. It’s stained.”
“We had pizza. It’ll come out.”
“I’m sure Barry and his friends from Columbia would love to see you looking like that.”
Or Barry would examine my fingers and discover purple mimeograph ink. “Making a better world, I see.” I’d pull my hand away. “Look, Marcia, do what you have to do. But I think these—uh, associations of yours are disturbing to your mother. That’s it. I’m not going to say any more.” And he would begin sucking each of my fingers, to show how the purple ink didn’t bother him.
I began mumbling to my mother I was going to a friend’s house to study. I made sure I kept my hands clean. But I continued my involvement in politics because, like sex, it was completely enthralling. It excited me, exhausted me, amused me, and linked me to other people. My course work only involved me in a remote sense. Unlike Barry, who reported he wept each time he read Lear, I would close the book, thinking that Cordelia was something of a fool, and reach for a newspaper.
On the other hand, I threw up for three days after Kennedy was assassinated. Barry said it was very sad.
Less than a year after that, Goldwater was defeated and Dave Flaherty got swept into Congress in the Johnson landslide. That fall semester of my senior year—taking courses like creative writing and modern American poetry so I would have lots of free time—I put in a full eight hours for Flaherty each day. I began by typing envelopes and making phone calls, but by early October I was bored. Flaherty was due to speak on NATO, not his best subject.
“What the hell am I supposed to say?” he demanded of an aide.
I overheard and offered to write a speech. He peered at me, a little suspiciously because I looked nothing like Ted Sorensen, but agreed, probably because he didn’t want to offend such a proficient envelope stuffer.
“Hey, this is really good,” he said later, thwacking me on the back. “You’re a really smart kid, kid. Wanna do more?” I did. I began to travel around the district, cutting classes, listening to Flaherty mouth my words. I learned to write in his voice, essentially monosyllabic and direct. “Kid,” he remarked, rejecting my third or fourth effort, “I’m no Kennedy. Take out this Yeats stuff.”
We got on fine. I liked Flaherty because he was friendly, hard-working, and funny. He liked me because I was quiet. A few weeks after the election he suggested I work for him in Washington.
“I can’t, Dave. I’m getting married in June.”
“Too bad, kid. All right, let me know if you have a change of heart.”
It was not my heart that changed, but Barry’s plans. He failed to get into Harvard Medical School. He also was rejected by Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell. Sheri said they were letting too many colored in and had re-established their Jewish quota. Barry claimed, a little ex post facto, that he had had a stomach virus when he took the medical boards and had spent the morning fighting off spasms and griping pains.
“But you got accepted at Georgetown,” I protested. “If you went there, I’d have a ready-made job on Capitol Hill.”
“I’ve also been accepted at University of Cincinnati and Penn State. I mean, I’m building the basis for a career …”
I finally convinced him by handing him over to Flaherty at a Heart Fund dinner dance I had dragged him to. “Kid,” Flaherty said to him, “I’ll be paying her a big ten. Can she make that in Cleveland?”
“Cincinnati,” Barry said, trying to pull his biceps out of Flaherty’s hand.
“Wherever. She’ll wind up with six thou a year and you’ll have a pile of debts when you graduate. And,” he continued, noticing Barry preparing to speak again, “think of the connections you’ll make down in the District. I mean, all those N.I.H. doctors, those fancy professors hanging around for federal grants. I requested Health Care as one of my committee assignments….”
That night, Barry said he’d go to Georgetown. We’d live in Washington. He understood that marriage meant compromises. If I wanted to work for Flaherty, that was my decision.
“Barry, when you get to know him, you’ll really like him. He’s honest and very sincere about—”
“Marcia, he is no philosopher-king.”
We married in an elaborate ceremony at the Forest Hills Jewish Center, which Barry’s parents paid for. They allowed my mother to invite twenty people. They invited a hundred fifty-five of their closest relatives and dearest friends. The chuppa—the bridal canopy—was decorated in Plotnick peach, covered with hundreds of peach-dyed carnations and peach roses. In the banquet hall, the cloths and napkins were peach, as were centerpieces of some unrecognizable but clearly peach flowers combined with peach-dyed feathers. The mother of the groom wore peach chiffon. The rabbi, somehow, escaped color coordination and wore a black robe.
My Uncle Julius walked me down the aisle and parted with a “Love ya, sweetheart.” My Aunt Estelle told everyone at her table how she had paid over two hundred dollars for my wedding dress. It was one hundred sixty-seven fifty, including tax. Sheri Plotnick put a manicured hand on at least ninety arms and explained that they felt for me because I was a poor girl so that they had paid for the wedding. “Even the monogrammed fingertip towels in the bathroom,” she confided. Dr. Plotnick, whom even Barry called the invisible man, actually stayed through the entire affair, having arranged with a colleague to cover for him. We danced and he squeezed me against his hard, mountainous stomach and told me he knew I would make Barry very happy—although if there were any problems I could give him a call and he would keep it strictly entre nous. My mother’s Cousin Ne
ttie from New Jersey announced in an easily audible screech that she had broken a cap on the gristle in the prime ribs. Barry’s Aunt Gussie sat for four hours with a see-through plastic raincoat protecting her dress because she was afraid of gravy stains. My mother took me aside as the waiters began serving coffee.
“You’re going to have to be a wife to Barry tonight.” Naturally, she did not look at me as she imparted this embarrassing information.
“I know,” I said, perhaps snapping a bit.
“Well, mazel tov,” she said. “Aunt Estelle said don’t forget to give her back the pearls before you leave.”
We had a grand wedding night at a motel near the airport, a rather sleazy place that smelled of disinfectant. “Hardly the Georges Cinq,” Barry remarked, although he had never been to Paris. I had been anticipating that night because I was certain that Barry would tell me he loved me. I had imagined him saying something like, “I’ve been so horribly negligent. I’ve never told you how much I love you.” He said, “Try pulling your legs up higher and spreading them more.”
Our honeymoon—seven days and six nights on a small Caribbean island named for an obscure saint—was a predictably enjoyable sexual marathon. By the end of a week, our own throbbing soreness and sensitivity was itself a stimulus.
For the rest of the summer, we furnished our Washington apartment, using our wedding gift money to buy what was probably the year 1846’s entire output of oak furniture, and visiting the museums and historical sites we wouldn’t have time for once medical school began. We dashed about, as if trying to fill some arbitrary aesthetic quota. And naturally we had sex, making the national weekly average our daily minimum; by August, though, my pleasure was so inevitable that I looked forward to our joinings with only mild fervor. Barry’s passion was unflagging, however, although he seemed to have to construct more and more elaborate precoital scenarios. I did not mind this, except when he insisted I play a character with a different name.
And then September came, with great promise. Flaherty was delighted to have me in the office; my coworkers were nice; I got an electric typewriter and a phone number at the Library of Congress where my most arcane question would be answered in minutes. Barry would come home from school about nine thirty, and over a late dinner of blanquettes de veau or carbonnade à la flambande, we’d chat about how best to lift the skin off the face of a cadaver or how Flaherty was being pressured by the left-wingers to vote against military expenditures in Vietnam. Our sexual activity slowed to a staid once a night, which ended in intercourse only about half the time. When I asked Barry about this, he said, “Do you want to have children now?”
“Of course not. We discussed it and—”
“And,” he said laconically, “that means there’s no reason to limit ourselves. Anyway, you have better orgasms the other way.”
I guess I did, but by late December, when we visited New York, my orgasmic activity was largely self-induced. Barry would return from the lab or library after eleven at night, too exhausted to even speak, so tired that he couldn’t even undress until the next morning. “It’s very competitive,” he once managed to whisper. On weekends, he aroused himself by having me recount the sexual fantasies I had as I masturbated.
“How is everything?” my mother-in-law asked, as we three Plotnicks sat around the dinner table on Christmas Eve, eating Sheri’s ecumenically colored salad greens with cherry tomatoes. Dr. Plotnick had been called away during the tomato soup to do something fast to someone’s Fallopian tubes.
“Fine,” I answered.
Sheri, looking elegant and almost seductive in a garnet velvet hostess gown, her tight features eased by the candlelight, said, “Good. I was worried about you. You look tired.”
“Barry and I have been working very hard.”
“I’m not tired,” Barry said, summoning the energy to utter his first complete sentence in two months.
And that was it. It never got any better. Periodically, we’d have bouts of intense sex, but it was a hot body need, as though we had to flush our systems of excess fluid. But we never talked as though anything was wrong. We often talked of the future.
Barry was told that he had fantastic fingers and that he was destined for surgery. He decided to become an otorhinolaryngologist, dedicating his genius of a right hand to salvaging teeny ear bones. His appreciably talented left would be saved for tonsillectomies and diddling me, easier work requiring a certain aptitude, but not brilliance.
“We haven’t had intercourse in two months,” I said one Sunday in May 1967.
“Oh, all right.” Most times, we did not speak as much as whine at each other: “Hurry up. Get undressed.”
“Barry!” I called, about three months later. “I’m bleeding. Barry!”
“Stop getting hysterical,” he called from the bedroom. “A little spotting is normal during the first trimester.” I looked at the toilet paper in my hand, soaked with blood. “You’ll call Dr. Susskind in the morning,” he added.
“It’s not just spotting, Barry. Please.” He called Dr. Susskind.
We drove from our apartment on the outskirts of Georgetown to the hospital. I kept wanting him to tell me that it would be fine, that they’d put in a few stitches or a wad of cotton and stop the bleeding. Or at least reassure me that such quantities of blood did not necessarily mean a miscarriage. But all he did was turn off the car’s air conditioner when I began shaking. And when we pulled up to the entrance of the hospital, he said, “Go straight to the admitting office.”
“Can’t you take me?”
“I have to park. You’ll be all right. I wouldn’t take unnecessary chances.”
I opened the door of the car gingerly, afraid that any unsettling movement would prove the coup de grace for the fetus, that tiny humanoid sea horse floating inside me. “Marcia,” he called, as I began to shuffle to the entrance, “you forgot your suitcase.” So I came back and bent down, taking the overnight bag from the floor of the car near the passenger’s seat. Slowly, I straightened up, but not so slowly as to avoid a stab of agony that knifed through my lower back down to my vagina. “See you,” he said. Later, after listening to Dr. Susskind explain to me that I would lose the baby, that it was probably already dead, Barry said softly and compassionately, “Look, you didn’t really want it anyway.”
When I got back to the office, Flaherty, who had never done more than thump my back with glee, kissed my forehead and held my hands between his. “You don’t know how sorry I am, kid. It’s a real loss. You deserve a hell of a lot better.” I hadn’t written those lines.
Eight o’clock on an ugly, slushy February night in 1968. “Barry? I have to work tonight.” No sound, but the telephone seemed to tremble with his unexhaled sigh. “Look, I’m really sorry, but Flaherty wants me to go over the language on the aid-to-digestive-diseases bill. I wish I could get out of it, but it has to be on the Speaker’s desk tomorrow and—”
“Couldn’t you have called earlier?”
“I wasn’t sure whether I’d have to stay late.”
“Okay. I’ll go out for a bite.”
“There’s some chicken left over from last night.” It wasn’t much, just half a poitrine from a somewhat desiccated coq au vin rouge, but perhaps enough to satisfy him, although it was the first night in our almost three-year marriage that I had not prepared at least four courses for him. “Or I can stop on my way home….”
“That’s all right. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. I’ll run downstairs, see if the deli has any decent canned pâté.” He added, “When will you be home?”
“I’m not sure. It depends if Flaherty wants any revisions. Ten thirty, eleven. Midnight at the latest.”
“I’ll try to wait up.”
And that night, when I knew Barry was agonizing over the semi-circular canals, I had my first postnuptial proposition. The administrative assistant of the Honorable Quincy Dade of Little Rock, Arkansas, came into our office, which was next to his, to use our electric pencil sh
arpener. He leaned over my desk, blinked a pair of green eyes at me, and asked me out. “Wan’ go out?”
“I’m married,” I explained.
“Me too!” he said, sounding pleased that we had something in common.
I was not even tempted. With a hearty “No thank you” I arose and strode into Flaherty’s office, proclaiming that the bill’s language was both literate and precise.
“Good. Thanks for staying, kid,” he muttered, not looking up from the Knights of Columbus newsletter he was reading.
It had begun to sleet, but I drove as fast as I could, stopping first at the French market for Genoa salami and Swiss cheese for two, and made it home by nine o’clock. My hair was soaked, hanging in strings, dripping icily down the back of my neck. Through the door I heard Don Giovanni blasting. I think I smiled. If Barry was playing Mozart, he was in a good mood. In any case he liked Genoa salami.
He was not in the living room, stretched out in his usual place on the rug between the two stereo speakers. I marched into the bedroom, paper bag in hand. And there, of course, was Barry.
The future Dr. Plotnick was lying on the bed, naked, fully and awesomely tumescent. And not inches away, chin resting on the mattress, probably catching a quick breath between slurps, was Noreen Ostermann.
“Remember Noreen Ostermann?” he had asked a few weeks before. “That nice little speech therapist? Let’s invite her over for dinner.”
“Okay.” She had brought a bottle of Beaujolais.
Noreen saw me first. Perhaps she hadn’t been as excited as Barry. Perhaps she was not as much a music lover. She let out an off-pitch scream, capturing Barry’s attention. Following her stare to me, his mouth went slack, rapidly followed by his member. I dropped the bag and ran out of the apartment and spent the night driving over the icy, twisted roads of the Virginia hunt country.