Domestic Affairs

by Joyce Maynard

  As for me, I’m an old veteran. I have to resist the impulse to offer my friends advice (on the use of a pacifier, on the inadvisability of playing with one’s newborn when she awakes at three A.M.). I love and admire these two friends, as I know I will love their new daughter, but maybe (having got there first) I feel a certain need, at a moment like this, to stake out the territory (babies) as mine. (Just as, if we ever made it to Morocco, they might want to show us around.) But of course, when it comes to having children, we all have to learn the lessons, all over again, on our own. Steve and I are the world authorities on our children only, as Greg and Kate will be about theirs.

  So Kate handed me the small package of Lily, and I held her close, walked her around the room, stroked her cheek, whispered in her ear, hummed for her the little tuneless series of notes I always hummed to my babies. I left my favorite new-baby activity for last: the sniffing of the top of her head—expecting to find there the faintly remembered smell my children had when they were new. And found, to my surprise, I could smell nothing. And then I realized: Lily’s scent is for Kate and Greg alone, as Audrey’s and Charlie’s and Willy’s were for Steve and me. I handed her back, with a combination of regret and relief. (I loved having new babies. But I also love seeing them grow up.) Then we said our good-byes, my eight-year-old and I, and took a subway uptown, to a Broadway theater where there were a couple of seats waiting for us for a musical I knew Audrey would love. And I found myself thinking that there are many ways to be a romantic adventurer: in a sports car, or a station wagon. And that there is no way to move forward without leaving certain things behind.

  MARRIAGE—MINE AND OTHERS

  How I Married Steve

  A.J.’s Divorce

  Argument at the Muffler Shop

  Christian Marriage

  House Hunting

  The Knives

  I RODE THE RAPIDS of the Contoocook river once, on a rubber raft in early spring, when the water was at its highest and most wild. I remember thinking my heart might burst, I was so terrified, as we crashed over the rocks and swirled down the river, with the water shooting into our faces. After it was over, somebody told me those were class-four rapids we’d traveled. More than one rafter has died on that same stretch of river. And of course, if I’d known that, I never would have set out in the first place.

  Well, I am not as a rule a risk taker in life. I have spent most of my thirty-two years being cautious and fearful about many things: fast toboggan rides, high diving boards. But I plunged into my marriage and parenthood almost without a second thought or a backward glance, much as I entered the Contoocook that day: at a calm spot, the waters smooth and free of boulders, with the rocks and drop-offs concealed around the next bend.

  I was twenty-three years old. I had come from New Hampshire to New York City the year before. I had a great job as a newspaper reporter, and good prospects. I had a penthouse apartment overlooking the park. It was the year of the bicentennial: I could stand on my balcony at night, sipping white wine, and see the Empire State Building lit up in red, white, and blue. I’d go out on a Saturday afternoon and pick up three new outfits at Bloomingdale’s and a couple of new records. I bought myself African coffee beans and bouquets of calla lilies. I had plenty of friends; I went to lots of parties. Sometimes I went out on dates, and always, when I went out with a man, I tried to imagine myself married to him. But this was 1976; women my age—career women—weren’t supposed to be thinking about marriage.

  Sometime in the fall of that year, I started getting calls from a man named Steve whom I’d met briefly, years before, back in my one and only year at college. He was an artist, raised in the Midwest, who was supporting himself as a house painter and living in a downtown loft he shared with a struggling jazz singer. He remembered me from a bike ride we took together a half dozen years earlier, and he wondered if we could get together some evening.

  I always put him off with one excuse or another: I had to cover a singles’ convention for my newspaper. I was writing a story about celebrity bathrooms. I had to do my laundry. Really, though, I think I avoided Steve because—after dealing with all the men I had been meeting (who needed space, or couldn’t handle commitment, or who simply disappeared, or didn’t disappear, only I wished they would)—I had reached the point where nothing made me so suspicious of a man as to hear him say he liked me and wished he could see me again. Steve said those things, and he kept calling. (In New York, the city where, every thirty seconds, there’s a new face coming down the street. Where no one’s irreplaceable.)

  I turned him down one weekend; he tried again the next. I told him, “Call me in a couple of months,” and he did. I was seeing a food photographer at the time—a man who would, on occasion, spend an entire morning looking for the perfect anjou pear, or pour mug after mug of beer in search of precisely the right combination of bubbles and foam for a beer ad. A man who would eventually end our relationship, around eleven-thirty P.M. on Christmas Eve, drive off in his Porsche, and then return five minutes later to pick up his imported German fruitcake. It was sometime after the fruitcake incident, when Steve called again, that I remember telling a friend, “This guy is probably a psychopathic killer.” He sounded so nice there had to be a trick.

  He called me up one Sunday in February to ask if I’d like to go to a museum with him, and I don’t know why, but that time I said yes. We spent the afternoon walking around the city, came back to my apartment, where (as usual, in those days) there was nothing in the refrigerator but a couple of eggs and a piece of cheese. He made us an omelet. Even that first night we talked about marriage and children, I think, in a way that strikes me now as reckless and crazy, knowing what I know now about those things. (How hard it is to be married. What an enormous and irreversible thing it is to take on the responsibility of a child.)

  But we were twenty-three and twenty-five then—very different types of people, but both of us in love, both driven by a pretty unfashionable longing for family and home. Later (first, when I was pregnant with Audrey, and dozens of times after that) I would accuse him of marrying me only because of those things. “You just wanted me for a wife,” I would say, as the clincher to a long list of accusations. “You just wanted to have a baby with me.”

  And really, I guess, there was some truth to that, for both of us—only it no longer seems to me like a crime. We were wildly in love, but neither of us was the person the other might have run off with to Bora Bora or the coast of France. Our work, our interests, our friends, our style of life, could hardly have been more different. (I loved to talk. He fell silent swiftly. I had spent my life sitting in chairs, thinking, analyzing. He would get restless if a day went by that he hadn’t taken a run or played ball or fit in a ten-mile bike ride or a long swim. I looked at his paintings—large, abstract, undecorative—and didn’t know what to say. He didn’t ask me what I’d been writing about.) What we loved best about the other from the beginning, I think, was our dream of the family we could make together and the home we’d build.

  We met in February, nine years ago. I quit my job a month later. In early April we rented a U-Haul truck, filled it with his paintings, my two white couches, his power tools, my designer suits, and moved to the old farmhouse in New Hampshire where we are living still. We had no money and few clear prospects for earning any. We hadn’t met each other’s families, didn’t know the most basic facts of how the other spent the days. We instantly set about planning the wedding. (When Steve called his parents in Ohio to let them know, they were very happy. Then asked to speak to Karen, the girlfriend he’d been seeing the last time they’d heard from him.)

  We were married early that summer, in a little church down the road from our house. Afterward we gave an outdoor party for a couple hundred friends, back at our house. (In keeping with our approach to life back then, we had made no provisions for rain. None fell.) We left the dishes piled high in our kitchen that night and took off for the Breezy Point Motel, six miles down the road. Came back
the next morning to wash the dishes. Our daughter Audrey was born the following winter—a year and two days from the afternoon we first got together.

  The seas we have been navigating in the years since then have been rough indeed—full of choppy waters, boulders, sudden drops—and we’ve sustained more than a few injuries along our course. We’ve laid some demons to rest. (I am less quick to argue. I’ve come to understand that days are finite. Time is precious. So is peace.) I no longer shed tears over my birthday present (I seldom get flowers, but I don’t expect them). Some problems we’ve resolved. (He gets the car inspected. I do the cooking.) Some we no longer expect to resolve. We’re more realistic, maybe. We’ve seen a lot of marriages break apart over the years we’ve held together. And what I feel when I hear the stories of those marriages, is never the lofty superiority of one who has it all sewn up herself. Only the recognition, felt, I think, by anybody who’s been married a while, of how hard it is for two people to build a life together and how much more than love is required to make it endure.

  Our friend Ursula’s son A.J. blew into town the other day, and this morning he paid us a visit. We’ve known A.J. close to ten years now, though never well. Like his father, Andy, who died a few years back, A.J. is a large man with not a lot of small talk in him. Trained as a geologist, he has been working these many years as a carpenter instead. He was married around 1970 to a pretty red-haired woman named Julia with whom he lived in a little cabin out of town, without benefit of electricity or running water. A.J. grew a beard. Julia wore long dresses and long hair. Their first baby, Cassie, was born right there in the cabin, and the second one, Sara, came a year and a half later. They drove a beat-up truck and A.J. picked up odd jobs; Julia baked bread.

  I didn’t know them well back then, but they seemed like one of those couples—perhaps there were more of them, in those days—who lived by the creed “We ain’t got much, but we sure have love.” Sometimes I would run into A.J. and Julia in summertime, taking a dip down the road, at Gleason Falls, in the middle of the day—A.J. with a beautiful blond-haired baby in each arm. Around the time I met Steve, A.J. and Julia moved out West. A.J. had been offered a full-time construction job in San Diego. Sometimes, when I’d stop by to visit Ursula, she’d take out pictures from A.J. and Julia’s travels cross country in the truck. They camped out in Baja California for most of that summer and part of the fall: more pictures of beautiful blond children (three of them now; there was a boy, Jesse), with golden tans, wearing bandanas on their heads.

  After they moved West we mostly lost touch with A.J. and his family, except for reports from Ursula. They seemed to be doing well, though. First they had an apartment, then a house. Then a better job, in Colorado. A.J. had shaved his beard. Julia (always after A.J. to push a little harder in his construction business, be a better provider) was talking about getting a job herself. She was going on a diet. The children were growing fast—still blond and beautiful.

  Every summer or two they’d come back to New Hampshire for a visit, and when they did we always had the children over to our house. I always liked those children: They were kind to each other, and kind to Audrey too. Sometimes, months after a visit, we’d get a note from Sara, asking after pets, babies, news. Her family was moving again. (Texas this time.) They were buying a bigger house. She would take riding lessons. She was getting her own horse.

  The new house was in a development called Pleasant Woods; I saw it on television, one time, when we were in Ohio visiting Steve’s parents, and Steve’s father was watching a golf match televised there. The place looked green and perfect, and it turned out A.J. and Julia’s house overlooked that very golf course. I tried to picture A.J. in a luxury housing development, not only building houses there but living in one. Hard to imagine.

  Then we didn’t see them for a few summers. (“Too busy, I guess,” said Ursula, a little bitterly.) Ursula’s husband, Andy, was dead by now. Julia had put the children in day care and got a job as a secretary at the Pleasant Woods resort complex, where she’d been such a success they’d made her executive secretary to the head of the whole place. She had indeed gone on a diet; the new photographs from Texas showed her in fashionable suits and a new short hairdo. A.J.—still a good-looking man, but considerably aged—had put on weight. Sara, the second daughter, was taller than me now and could’ve been a fashion model.

  A couple of years ago they came back through town, in a rented Lincoln Continental. Sara came for a sleepover with Audrey, but there was a crisis when she misplaced a ring she’d just been given by her mother for her birthday. The ring was real gold. In the end we found it, but not before some tears were shed, with Sara saying, “My mom will just kill me.”

  A.J. and Julia were celebrating their anniversary that August: I think it was their fifteenth. As we stood on the lawn at Ursula’s house, where they’d been married (Julia barefoot; the minister in an embroidered Indian shirt), they fed each other cake and Julia (in a pant suit) said something like, “Once you’ve made it together this many years, you’ve gone too far to quit. I know now we’ll always be together.” A few months later they split up.

  Ursula called me one day early last spring, in tears, to say that A.J. had turned up at the housing development where Julia and the children lived, on the edge of the ninth hole, and he’d gone on a rampage—yelling, breaking things. He had just been committed to a mental institution. Julia had just called Ursula to say she feared for her life. “The man’s gone nuts,” she said. “He’s crazy.”

  I told Ursula it didn’t seem so crazy, to me, for a man who’d just ended a fifteen-year marriage and had been separated from his three beloved children, to flip out a little, but as for the homicidal part, I didn’t believe it. He must be under a lot of pressure, I said. As long as he’s getting good care, and he can get out when he’s ready, it might not be such a bad idea for him to have a rest.

  A few weeks later he started sending us poems. It was easy to recognize the characters: The poems were all about A.J. and Julia—the old days in the little cabin, lit by kerosene; and more recent history, in the house on the edge of the golf course that the bank had announced it was about to repossess.

  The poems kept coming. It was odd, getting them: Steve and I had never really known A.J. all that well, but after reading a few batches of those typewritten sheets, with the hospital return address, he started seeming like a friend. And though they were odd poems—disjointed, angry sometimes, wistful—they were not the poems of a madman either.

  He checked out of the hospital after a few weeks, when the insurance money ran out. He drove across country in his old truck, with a wooden bumper that had Sara’s name carved in it. He took a carpentry job in Connecticut and kept sending us poems all summer.

  A.J. came to New Hampshire from the Adirondacks a few times that summer. He’d show up on our doorstep, always unannounced. Once we were just heading out the door for our week’s vacation in Maine, with the car packed and the children already buckled into their seats. Another time, when Steve was out of town, he knocked at the door just as I was getting the children into bed. I was so startled to see him, six feet tall and then some, looming in the doorway in the pitch-dark night, that I told him it was a bad time for a visit and closed the door before I realized he’d come over on foot from Ursula’s house, where he was camping out.

  His middle child, Sara, flew out to see him in the fall. She stayed with him at Ursula’s for a week, seldom letting A.J. out of her sight. I tried to imagine our children without Steve, Steve without our children. I avoided seeing A.J. for a few days after Sara left, knowing it would be a long time before he’d see her again and knowing how torn up he’d be.

  He came over this morning, just to visit. I fixed him a bowl of soup I’d been making, and he sat down and told us the story of how his marriage fell apart. Amazing, I thought to myself, that I ever took this man for the quiet type. I had been making a blueberry pie when the story started. I made a second pie so I could justify st
aying on to listen, and when that pie was done too, I started in on some cookies. As it turned out, I forgot to put salt in the pie crust (which has a more adverse effect on the pie than you might suppose), simply because I was so wrapped up in A.J.’s tale.

  He has no home and no job and no money, and he sleeps in the back of a seventeen-year-old truck. He is back again to where he started, only now he’s forty years old, with three children he loves more than anything, living two thousand miles away. I guess his is the old story: romantic, idealistic young love (the cabin in the woods), worn down by too much domestic reality. Designer jeans, horseback-riding lessons, summer camp, wall-to-wall carpeting: “We just got so busy getting ahead,” A.J. says, climbing into the cab of the same ancient red truck he and Julia rode off in on their wedding day, back when they thought all they needed was each other. The last I see of him is his hand-carved wooden bumper, with his daughter’s name carved in big capital letters (he made it the day she was born—on their bed, into his waiting hands). And then he disappears around the corner and out of sight.

  Our old car needed a new muffler. That much seemed clear. And because the last one we’d purchased came with a lifetime guarantee, we were cheered to know we’d be out nothing more than the price of a new tail pipe to go with it. That, plus the sixty-mile drive to the muffler shop and back. We thought we’d combine the trip with a night at the movies: drop off the car, walk to the theater, pick up the car after the movie, drive home.

  That was the plan. Steve made an appointment a week in advance for six-thirty on a Friday night. A few days before the scheduled appointment, he brought our 1966 Valiant into the shop for an advance viewing, in case the muffler installers might need to contemplate our particular tail pipe situation. We hired a babysitter. And finally the big night came: I set out the children’s dinners, sleeper suits, a plate of brownies. We made a successful exit—no tears. We were on the open road, Steve patting the steering wheel with satisfaction, saying, “It’s good to get this taken care of.”