by Tad Friend
“Do I seem happier to you than when I started?” I said to Mom now.
“Oh, yes, much.”
“So why would you want me to stop before I’m done?” I was trying to take charge of the discussion, but we were in her living room, and I was slumped in her custom-designed armchair, upholstered in blue-and-white batik, with my feet on her ottoman. It’s hard to hold court when you can’t plant your feet on the floor.
“You know, I was in analysis for two years, a long time ago, and it was what made me feel I could be married,” she said.
“I didn’t know that.”
“But you do have to get on with your life at a certain point.”
I frowned but stopped myself from saying, “Two more years and you might even have felt you could have children.” She continued, “I like about ninety-five percent of your character very much. There’s five percent I don’t like, and I know that five percent is important to you, and I know you blame me for it, but I don’t understand it.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” I said, not wanting to know what, exactly, that five percent was. I suspect it was the part that had not forgiven her.
She went on to lament that Timmie and Pier were elsewhere that weekend, and that I came down so infrequently from New York. “We have this beautiful lawn here, perfect for two soccer teams of grandchildren,” she said. “And there aren’t any grandchildren. I’d always thought my children would live nearby, just down the road, and would be over all the time. But everyone lives so far away.”
“And why do you think that is?” I said.
She began to cry. I felt sorry, and guilty, and started crying, too. Sam trotted into the room and looked worriedly back and forth. She gathered him up and wept into his fur.
FOURTEEN
Lawns
BY MY MIDTHIRTIES my career, at least, was angling toward contenderdom. In 1998, I became a staff writer at The New Yorker, adapting easily to its understated tone and with more difficulty to writing long pieces that fit together like jigsaw puzzles. But the late nineties had been a turnstiling period of married women and bored women in skimpy sweaters, and, dismayingly, I was now on my agent’s “extra man” list for dinners. A few months into 2000, my friend Jennifer Steinhauer called me in my Los Angeles hotel room at five a.m. local time to say that her New York Times colleague and good friend Amanda Hesser, a graceful food writer with a darting sense of humor, had just broken up with someone and I should call her. Right this minute, in fact. When I groggily said, “Okay, but what time is it, right this minute?” Jenn scoffed, “Oh, wake up! It’s your lucky day.”
When Amanda walked into the bar where I’d suggested we meet, I thought, Yes, yes, exactly! I loved her face — a mix of Audrey Hepburn and Modigliani — and her warm brown eyes, her shy yet purposeful walk, her demure yellow shoes. I loved how she weighed any number of factors with a tiny frown before deciding what to order as an appetizer. She was, in her deliberation and determination, not my traditional type. Nor was I hers. Gun-shy, we both took our time doing due diligence. During that period, she didn’t call me by name, or by a nickname, leaving a telltale gap in “Hey … want to get something to eat?” It was the way I’d behave with a Wasp friend’s father before he invited me to call him Wink. Sometimes, she would pat my head with a meditative look, and I’d say, “Old Pokey, he was a good horse.”
Two little moments began to convince me. The first was when Amanda dropped by my apartment one night with a bright-eyed look, carrying an apple tart that tasted like apple nectar. She was putting it out there, leading with her strength, making me raise my own game. “Come right in,” I said. “May I offer you, um, a vodka? Some scallions?”
The second was when we were sitting on my bed a good half hour after we’d agreed to go out for dinner and a movie, and Amanda was still running her fine-point marker through items on her pages-long to-do list and writing little reminders to herself, making the list longer than when she began. “Oh, come on!” I said.
“I just need a minute.”
“Nobody, on her deathbed, wishes she’d spent more time on her to-do list,” I said.
She sprang onto her haunches and declared, “I’ll take you down!” then tried to wrestle me to the quilt. I started laughing, which increased her advantage of surprise, and she almost had me pinned before it occurred to both of us that I outweigh her by seventy-five pounds. From then on, whenever I was being too much me, she would cry, “I’ll take you down!” and launch a sneak attack, like Cato bushwhacking Inspector Clouseau.
After four months, she began to write about our relationship for a column called “Food Diary” for the New York Times Magazine. I scowled when she told me her plan, hating the prospect of being publicly embarrassed. Whenever I said something unorthodox about food — how a roast chicken tasted like “pork chop seasoning,” say — I could see her making a gleeful mental note, which further reduced my already-thin stream of culinary opinions. Then, at Christmas, Amanda showed me her first few planned columns, and I relaxed. While there were sly riffs on my dining foibles, she not only addressed what I thought of as my good qualities — capturing what I cared about and how it felt to be me — but she also exaggerated my virtues, describing me as “witty, impossibly smart, and very, very funny,” as well as “thoughtful and generous.” Plus, the watercolor illustrations made me look like a Gallic Gregory Peck. Nobody had overvalued me so since Melanie, but with Amanda I wanted to live up to her idea of me. And I felt ready to try.
We didn’t fight much, at first, arguing mostly about temperature: she likes to shower and sleep in equatorial warmth, and I dislike sweating while doing either. As we relaxed into our natural selves, issues came up. I left my office messy; she was always late. I withdrew and she nagged — who started it? I was behaving like my father, she like her mother. (Being in therapy, as we both were, is like taking a commando course: you learn where the pressure points are, and how to kill with a single blow.) But when she wasn’t driving me berserk, I found her fierceness on these fronts endearing; our disagreements usually felt not dire but merely puzzling or hilarious. One night after we’d sparred about how I wash dishes — I had not soaked them for forty-eight hours in a sinkful of caustic potash — I thought, I could fight with Amanda for the rest of my life.
There were so many moments, really, a continual gathering of texture and ease, and of the fizzy feeling that I wanted my friends and family to meet Amanda so they could begin thinking better of me. It turned out that she cackled when amused. And that, unlike anyone else I’d been interested in, she couldn’t tell a lie without blushing. I came to delight in how her slow, curtain-raising smile disclosed the stage of her inmost self. For the first time, I felt little of that frustration and blowing up the air mattress that I’d assumed relationships required. When I worried, in Sylvia’s office, that it seemed too easy, she cocked her head and said, “Why be loyal to all that?” Perversely, still, I sometimes felt the sadness of happiness, of no longer having to fight to prove I was worthwhile.
A year in, as I was beginning to think of proposing, in a middle-distance sort of way, Amanda and I went to a wedding on the South Fork. When we arrived at the reception at a restaurant called East Hampton Point, surrounded by a dozen close friends, milling in our finery on a soggy fall afternoon, I knew, suddenly, that it was time. I led Amanda down an empty hallway behind the bar. The passage was damp and chilly, her two least favorite qualities, but she followed calmly, thinking I was positioning us by the kitchen for hot hors d’oeuvres (one of my moves). She looked astonished when I swung her around with my hand on the small of her back, as if to music, and said, “I’ve been thinking….” — which wasn’t true. My thinking cap was off. When she said, “Yes!” the future compacted to her ear, pink with excitement, and her sheltering lock of hair.
IN 2000, Mom launched her culminating campaign. She had always wanted Day to have a proper study, but she also needed to remove his desk and filing cabinets from the front hall,
where they gave visitors a hodgepodgy first impression rather than the desired Japanesey effect. With him gone, that space would become a new entrance hall, a tiny powder room, and a playroom for the future grandchildren. Having redesigned the garage as his office, she attached it to the house with a passageway she called “the Link.” Day didn’t think the Link necessary, in part because of the expense — which she ended up paying for out of the money from Maplewood, house begetting house — and in part because he declared himself happy to walk outside to get to his study. “Oh, now, Dorie,” she said. “You won’t be happy trudging through snow up to your knees.” She understood that his stoicism was reflexive, a fear of self-indulgence. But it was also vital to her that the new wing be connected, that the house encompass us all.
Wild with excitement about “the playhouse,” as she called it, for two years she talked of little else. She filled its shelves with books from Grandma Tim’s childhood (Howard Pyle) and hers (Beatrix Potter) and ours (Maurice Sendak). There was a sunlit reading nook by a bay window, a little drawing table that slid out from beneath it, a corkboard, and a peekaboo TV. Yet the room seemed intended not only for toddlers but also for Mom herself. Its furnishings included one of her mother’s Sheraton love seats that she had upholstered in easy-to-ruin gray trapunto, two large bolsters in even-easier-to-ruin blue-and-white Marimekko, and two enormous ginger jars steadied on wooden disks. The sliding door that would keep the children in had a porthole to allow for adult observation (there they are, still not playing with the enormous ginger jars). The ceiling was a Prussian blue, covered with stenciled stars and comets and a single crescent moon.
The first potential playhouse user, Pier’s son Wilson, came along at last in late 2000. The following February, Mom sent around an e-mail asking us to help her decide her grandmother name. Such nicknames usually emerge from the grandchildren, but she wasn’t taking any chances:
Every time I come up with a name for Wil to call me, Pier has a (no doubt sensible) reason why it wouldn’t work. For example, I thought “Puff” sounded nice, but he pointed out that that has connections to marijuana…. “Grandma Elizabeth” is too much of a mouthful, “Grandma E.” becomes Grammy. Here are some other thoughts: “Pom” (after Babar’s third child, who, I know, was a boy) or “Pom Pom.” “Mouse” (from Day’s new name for me, “Mousehead”) — actually, Goggy Robinson had a cook called Mouse, which is fine by me. Tad and Tim, you will someday presumably have little ones who will have to latch onto whatever name we choose now, so please,GIVE IT SOME SERIOUS THOUGHT.
She eventually settled on “Foffia” — as a young girl, that was how she had pronounced “flower” — and put it on her license plate to cement the granny-branding. “Foffia,” impossible for any small child to say, or at least for any small child except my mother, inevitably became “Foffie,” a tweak she tolerated with a slight frown.
That April, Grandpa John celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday by holding Wilson in his arms. Trembling in his wheelchair, he murmured to his great-grandson, “Be the best at what you do, and be kind to those who are not.” He died that fall, three days after 9/11 — for a UN stalwart, a killing blow.
I thought of Grandpa John one warm evening last spring, as Amanda and I came home by taxi with Walker and Addie, then twenty months old and utterly adorable in their blue pajamas with fleecy clouds. We’d spent the afternoon with Adam Platt and his family in their Manhattan apartment, where Addie, mistaking a sculptural assemblage of clay spheres for the foam balls we played with at home, grabbed one and flung me a no-look pass. When the ball exploded just short of my lunge, Addie was outraged, and her storm of accusatory tears nearly drowned out my offers of restitution and Adam’s affable refusals. Addie takes misadventure personally: when she runs laps around our dinner table with her right arm pumping, her tenacity, her merry refusal to be diverted from these vital private errands, reminds me extraordinarily of Mom.
Tuckered now, Addie was asleep in Amanda’s arms. The sudden, mortal fatigue of small children. When we check on the twins before we go to bed, tiptoeing into the hay smell of their night sweat, she often half-wakes to laugh at us — Of course you want to see me! — before diving back to sleep, squatting with her head just touching the pillow, as if at prayer. Walker, for his part, clicks and wheezes, sprawled on his back with a strip of belly gleaming like a wino’s. This 11:30 p.m. visit, night watchmen keying our clocks, has become Amanda’s and my new favorite ritual, replacing the seigneurial morning life of coffee and the Times.
Walker was in my lap. Fighting sleep, his blond hair wet with sweat, he reveled in lower Broadway’s rain of light, pointing and insisting, “Thass! Thass!” I returned his sweet, beseeching smile without having any idea what he was talking about, as his roaming finger targeted stoplights, lampposts, and sky. The few words he possessed were necessarily protean because they stood in for so many others — for everything, really. When I bent over his crib to tuck his blanket or ease Goodnight Moon from under his cheek, he sometimes cried out in his sleep, “Milk!” or “Shoes!” or “Daddy!” which moved me enormously. Now he placed his hands atop my forearms, drowsily settled into me, and murmured, “Bish!” There was indeed a large Atlantic City–bound bish beside us. “Our son is a genius,” I told Amanda. Not that that always turned out well….
“He takes after me.”
Six months after her father died, Mom sent me a photo of a baby polar bear curled up on its mother’s back on an ice floe. Both bears were asleep and seemed contented in their landscape of blue and white. “Dearest Taddio,” she wrote. “Since I was a tiny child, Daddy and I sent pictures of animals to each other. When I saw the enclosed I wanted to send it to him. But since that is no longer possible I’m sending it to you instead. With much love, Mom.”
______
AFTER INITIALLY seeing my family as hothouse flowers, Amanda came to appreciate our courtesy and humor. Or so she says now, when it’s too late. She enjoyed baking a peach-and-almond tart with Mom and getting tips from her, requested or not, on how to paint with watercolors. She also took to Century House, and we had the world’s shortest wedding venue conversation, agreeing to get married there in mid-September 2002, and to have a clambake rehearsal dinner on the beach.
Almost everyone was there for the wedding except Baba, who was far into the mists, and Mom’s spaniel, Sam, who was lame, deaf, and almost blind. His existence had been reduced to indiscriminate licking, hopeful expressions of love for whatever open palm or chair leg came near. He always loved to sprint down the lawn in Georgica, his belly whistling through the grass like a hydrofoil, but he was now too infirm to travel.
The evening of the rehearsal dinner proved cool and quite breezy, so after scarfing lobster rolls, we all huddled around a bonfire as my best man, Rich Appel, introduced Mom’s toast. I could feel Amanda’s heart rabbiting as she shivered through three sweaters; she really does hate the cold. Looking stylish in a puffy red coat, Mom unfolded her reading glasses and her typed-out remarks, and began. But she had trouble holding everything steady in the wind, which gusted through the microphone in stormy shrieks. Rich trained a flashlight on her notes and Timmie held the mike, and Mom began again: “Wainscott has been a charmed part of our family since 1914, and has been cherished by five generations: starting with my grandparents, Charles and Elizabeth Pierson. Our house, which you will see tomorrow, is over a century old. In the hurricane of September 1938, ocean waves crossed the bar and Georgica Pond, and broke on our front porch.”
Just when I was wondering if she had mixed up her notes, and we were getting “Tribulations of Ye Pierson Clan,” she pivoted: “Tad was my firstborn. He showed early promise of a literary imagination. Not long after learning speech, he invented a companion to play with called Foogin. Foogin became a part of our family life, referred to whenever anything interesting was happening, and especially present at bedtime.” She went on to discuss my other imaginary friends, and then to observe that once I was grown, she wondered if I’d ev
er find the right flesh-and-blood companion. “And then one day, miraculously, there was Amanda. When I first asked Tad to tell me about her, he gave me only one adjective: shy. Well, I thought, that sounds like his old friend Lelvin. And when I actually got to meet Amanda — right here, in Wainscott, getting off the jitney in the middle of the night — and found how easily and generously she laughs, I was reminded of no one so much as Geeshee. As our friendship — hers and mine — deepened, I discovered her quick mind, a mind as bright and clever and full of color as Dato’s. Mrs. Bawsbaw had been a competent but ordinary cook; Amanda’s crème fraîche, on the other hand, is sublime. To top it off, Amanda is beautiful, as Lunar had been. And finally, like Foogin, Tad’s first, best beloved friend, she is brave.”
There were many other toasts, including affecting remarks from Timmie and Pier. It was our family at our best. Several friends told me that seeing that current of private feeling undammed in public, that mix of love and wit, filled them with envy. Then Jenn Steinhauer stood to mention her role in bringing us together and to recount our first date. After I had walked Amanda to her building — or near it, anyway; she gave me the Heisman fifty yards from the door — I’d asked to see her again, but she just stared at me until I said, “Or, not …” and turned away. She maintains that she was nervous and thought she’d said yes. Only when Jenn phoned each of us the next morning did she sort it out and demand that I call Amanda again. Recounting this circumspect confusion, Jenn said, “I would like someone to explain to me: how do Wasps mate, unaided?”