The Love Children

by Marylin French

  “I just got my PhD, Pat!” My mother cried. “What am I supposed to do with it up there? There’s nothing there! I just signed a contract with Harvard!”

  “That’s nothing!” he countered. “Just tear it up!”

  Mom sat back. “I don’t want to.”

  “We’ll rough it,” he urged. “It’ll be fun!”

  “Fun for who?” my mother challenged.

  “Tsk, tsk, your grammar.” Dad laughed. “And you with a PhD!”

  She ignored that. “I’ll be the one roughing it. You’ll be in your studio painting, as always. Whereas I will have to do the laundry on a washboard, hang the clothes on a line, empty the chamber-pots, wash the dishes by hand, and be a general dogsbody! I won’t become a slave!”

  “Slave? Slave! It’s called being a wife! It’s what a wife is supposed to do.”

  “According to your family.” Mom’s face changed. “Let’s not fight in front of Jess,” she said. He shut up then, but both their mouths looked zipped.

  After dinner I went to my room to do homework. After I finished, I crept out and sat on the top step, listening. They argued in low, urgent voices. A few days later, as Dad packed his stuff into his car, Mom watched him in silence. When he left, he kissed me good-bye and told me he’d see me pretty soon. It would be months.

  I loved my dad and I knew he loved me. Sometimes, when he thought I was being fresh, he’d snarl at me like a dog; but other times he’d chuckle, as if he thought I was cute. Sometimes he looked at me with kind eyes, and he hugged me once in a while. When he was gone the house was quieter. After that, every once in a while he’d descend on us from Vermont. He never called ahead, he just came, annoying Mom. Her reaction bothered me. It was as if he didn’t have the right to come to his own house. I loved Mom, but I wished she was nicer to Dad. The main reason she was annoyed was that she hadn’t bought enough food for his dinner. But also she knew he was trying to catch her at something.

  The Vermont cabin was tiny, with a main room and a narrow bedroom and bath on one side and a loft over them, where I slept. The bathroom had a sink and a wonderful huge old claw-foot tub, but no toilet. Dad absolutely refused to put one in—we had to use the outhouse. The whole place was heated by a wood stove. I loved the cabin; it was beautiful. It was in deep woods, facing a lake, and had no neighbors. There was a canoe Dad’s father had built, and a rowboat and a sailboat and an outboard motor. Wood for the stove was stacked in a shed attached to the house, and wildflowers grew all around. I loved to go out at night and lie on the grass, looking at the sky. It was so dark, the stars were like diamonds, hovering over the lake. For me it had a mysterious resonance with the Little House books I had read, with a dream of an America built by good, hardworking, disciplined people living in a nature that was gorgeous, if harsh.

  One day, Dad called from the cabin. I was in my room doing homework when Mom answered the phone, and she called up to say that Dad was on the phone, and if I wanted to talk to him, I should get on the extension. I ran into her bedroom and picked up the phone; I heard him announce to my mother, “I fixed the kitchen for you!”

  “For me?” she asked, surprised.

  “Yes, of course for you. Who else?”

  A little excitement made its way into her voice. “You mean you put in a dishwasher? A washing machine? A dryer?”

  “No,” he said angrily. “I put in a gas stove and a new sink. An expensive sink, one of those stainless steel jobbies.” I could picture his set mouth. I could hear the lecture on the environment, on not polluting the lake.

  “You didn’t take out the wood stove, did you?” I asked.

  “No, Jess. It’s still there,” he assured me.

  “And did you put in a toilet?” Mom asked quickly.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “You know how I feel about that.” He hated toilets on principle.

  “And you know how I feel about that.”

  “Why do you have to be so petty?”

  “I don’t think it’s petty to care about how you spend your life. What you spend your life doing.”

  “You know damn well those things harm the environment.”

  “I’m not coming to live there, Pat.”

  “You are such a bitch!” he shouted. “You bitch, you slut, you whore!” I hung up. Dad rarely called Mom by her name; he usually called her “honey” or “sweetie.” But whenever he was angry, he called her those other names.

  We didn’t hear from him for another month. The next time he called, I didn’t pick up the extension. My mother listened and murmured something that I couldn’t hear. When she hung up, she said in an odd tone of voice, “He’s finished his studio up there.”

  “But he has such a nice one here!” I lamented. I wanted him to come back. I didn’t want to live in Vermont any more than Mom did. I loved Barnes, I loved my friends, I loved Cambridge. I didn’t want to move. If we lived in Vermont, Mom would have to drive me to and from school every day. I’d never see friends, if I even had any. But if Dad had built a studio there, he was serious.

  A few years earlier, he had bought an old barn and had it transported to a meadow near the cabin. Now he’d dug a foundation for it and put in a new floor and electric heat. He’d broken through the walls to insert huge windows, one facing the lake and another facing the meadow. I remembered how dark the cabin was, tucked in the woods, and I pictured light streaming into the barn. In history we were reading a book about ancient Athens that said that the men spent their days in the bright agora, or light, open-sided public buildings, while the women were locked away in the house, running home factories, doing all the work. It gave me some insight into how Mom felt about being in Vermont.

  About a month later, Dad came back to Cambridge again. Mom came home from work to find him and me sitting at the kitchen table. Dad had a whiskey and soda; I was drinking a cola. Mom stopped dead in the doorway and said in a flat voice that there were only leftovers for dinner and only enough for two. “What do you want to do for dinner, Pat?”

  He looked at her lazily. “I can just have eggs. You know I don’t care about food. You got any bacon?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “You can make me a cheese omelet.”

  She came in and took off her coat and poured herself a drink. She put the scotch bottle beside the bottle of Canadian Club whiskey on the counter. That was a common sight. “Would it kill you to call and let me know you’re coming?”

  “What’s the matter, you had other plans for tonight?”

  Mom rarely went out at night except to political meetings. Dad knew that. She grimaced.

  She made him an omelet and gave him the same salad we had, Boston lettuce, asparagus, and white beans. I liked all Mom’s dinners, except eggplant parmesan. I hated eggplant in those days, and because of that, Mom hardly ever made it.

  It got to be a custom: when he came home, they’d have one serious talk. They’d be in the kitchen. Mom would be cooking and Dad would sit on the kitchen counter over by the washing machine. He would have a drink in his hand, and he would say they had to have a talk. And she would say, “Ummm.” Then Dad would say a wife’s first duty was to her husband, in a pronouncement from on high. Mom would exclaim, “Whooa! Listen to the man! The ghost speaks!”

  She was referring to his ancestor. Dad was related way back to the poet Coventry Patmore, author of The Angel in the House, whose thesis was that wives were created to make little heavens on earth for men in the home. I’d never read it and I’m not sure Dad had either. Dad’s full name was Patmore Leighton. He used to tell me I had the right to join the Daughters of the American Revolution because his forebears had fought in the Revolution. When he said that, Mom would snarl that the DAR were a bunch of bigots too ignorant to let the great Marian Anderson sing. I didn’t know what that fight was about, exactly, but I knew enough never to join the Daughters, whoever they were. Mom came from a Lithuanian family that had settled in Rhode Island; she still had some cousins in Providence. Her n
ame was Andrea Paulauskas Leighton. Whenever Dad started quoting his ancestor, she would say that a woman’s first duty is to herself, that she was a free being, not a possession. I’d disappear then: I couldn’t stand those arguments. Dinner would be late that night.

  They would have one long talk, and that was it. No matter how long Dad stayed, they’d never talk again and they’d both act mad afterward, walking around barely speaking to each other until he disappeared again. As the years passed, they grew more and more hostile, more fixed in their positions. I couldn’t understand why they had stopped loving each other.

  My mother was smart and my father was talented. He painted large, energetic squares of color, two or three to a canvas, cerise and gray and yellow, or blue and that same cerise, sometimes with a squiggle or two connecting them. For many years he didn’t make any money from his artwork, and we lived on their Harvard salaries. Dad was an adjunct, and Mom just a teaching fellow, and the two combined made hardly any money. At the time I didn’t know how hard up we were for money; we had the house Daddy had inherited from his great-uncle, and Mom could turn a cheap cut of meat into a feast.

  But when I was eight or nine, Daddy was “discovered.” An important art critic wrote about him, and after that galleries called and then articles and reviews proliferated. Museums and collectors bought his work. I was proud that he was famous.

  One thing we never talked about, Sandy and me, that was sort of a secret bond between us, was our pride in our parents. It separated us from the others in our gang. Nobody talked about their parents—that would have been tacky. But Sandy often quoted things her father had said and I quoted my mother all the time. Bishop’s father was famous too; he was a politico in Cambridge, he was deputy police commissioner or something and he knew the governor and Tip O’Neill. Bishop never quoted him though. Still, we knew he used to adore his father, who was a friendly, laughing man full of good humor even at home. Only these days, Bishop barely spoke to him because they disagreed about the war. His parents supported it: well, two of his brothers were in the service.

  We knew little about the other kids’ parents, and most of what we did know was bad. Like we knew that there was something weird about our friend Dolores’s father and maybe her mother too. I had also met a guy named Steve Jackson, who went to Cambridge High and Latin. Once we met, Steve and I were together all the time: he would hang around Barnes waiting for me after school, or he’d call and tell me to wait for him after school at Cambridge High. Steve didn’t like to talk about the fact that he didn’t live with his parents. He only told me after a long time that his mother was dead, and he lived with an old woman he called his grandmother, who wasn’t any relation at all. She kept him for money from the welfare people, he told my mother at dinner one night. She had three boys living in her apartment, sleeping in bunk beds in one room. Once a week she cooked a huge pot of spaghetti, leaving it on the stove for them to help themselves, all week long. After hearing that, my mother invited Steve for dinner every time she laid eyes on him.

  Actually Steve’s father was alive, but living with a new wife and a couple of new kids. When Steve was a freshman in high school, he used to spy on his dad. He’d stand in a doorway across the street from his apartment on Mass Ave and just watch. He loved to see his dad come breezing out, brilliant white shirt tucked into tight black jeans, hair in a huge Afro, jingling change in his pocket. He always headed for the T. Finally, Steve got up the nerve to approach him. He crossed the street, walked right up to the man, and said, “I’m your son, Steven.”

  The man stopped, surveyed him with cold eyes. “So what,” he said, and walked on.

  Steve was even more terrified of him after that. Sandy and Bishop were one center of our group. It was a big group, thirty or more kids, and we didn’t always all hang out together. It was a huge, shape-changing cell with several nuclei. Sandy and Bishop were one nucleus—the intellectuals I guess. Before I met them, I was best friends with Phoebe.

  Phoebe Marx’s father, like Sandy’s, was a professor at Harvard. My mother was a professor at Harvard too—or so I thought. I suspect that Phoebe knew even then that Mom was merely a lowly teaching fellow—there was always an edge of scorn on her face when I talked about my mother. Her father probably knew my mother’s job title and told Phoebe. Throughout my sophomore year, I spent many of my afternoons with Phoebe in Cambridge.

  Phoebe liked to shop—whether window-shopping or shoplifting, it was her favorite thing to do. My mother disapproved of magazines like Vogue and Mademoiselle and wouldn’t give me money to buy them. So I stole them. I stole lipsticks and nail polish, although I never wore either, and stockings in their cellophane packages; ditto. We stole cigarettes, which we did use, constantly.

  Everybody smoked in those days. My father always had a cigarette dangling from his lips when he painted and when he drank—his two favorite things to do. My mother had a cigarette going when she washed dishes; she smoked even in the bathtub. Phoebe’s mother, who was a doctor, smoked constantly. She was Chinese and was pretty, dark-haired, and intense. She was a terrible cook. She said cooking wasn’t built into the X chromosome. When she did cook, Phoebe said, she’d make things like lima bean casserole, or a tian, a tasteless pie of rice and eggs and zucchini. Usually they had TV dinners in little tin trays. I loved these—they were a treat for me: my mother wouldn’t buy TV dinners; she disapproved of them. So I was thrilled when Phoebe’s father asked me to stay for dinner with Phoebe when the Marxes were going out. Phoebe was adopted, which made her special. She said her parents had told her that most children are just had, but she was chosen, which meant they really loved her.

  Phoebe’s father was a doctor too, but not the medical kind. He took us out for dinner sometimes. He loved Chinese food, although he wasn’t Chinese. There was a great Chinese restaurant in Cambridge in those days, Joyce Chen; we all loved the moo shu pork there, shredded pork and vegetables in a pancake. Mom and I couldn’t afford to eat out. I didn’t understand that either because people said my father sold his paintings for lots of money.

  I didn’t care about money in those days. I never wore anything but jeans and stole the few expensive things I wanted. But Phoebe loved money. She never had enough, despite her ten-dollar weekly allowance. Phoebe’s and Sandy’s fathers loved them, and I always felt a little pull of something I didn’t want to feel when I saw the way their dads looked at them. My father was hardly ever around, and when he was, he and my mother squabbled. He was nice to me when he remembered I was there. When he hugged me, though, tears would come to his eyes.

  Phoebe never showed interest in the boys in our gang, though she was very interested in sex. A couple of times, we went to the Friday night dances at the YMCA and picked up boys and went outside and made out. We did this a few times and it was fun, but once I stayed out later than usual, and my mother came looking for me in her car and couldn’t find me; when I got home at four in the morning, she was wild with rage. When I told her where I’d been and what I was doing, she shrieked. She yelled that it was dangerous, that terrible things could happen to me. After that, I lied about where we were going and made sure to get home by one.

  Phoebe was much more sophisticated than I was. I usually followed her lead; we did things I’d never think of and wouldn’t have done without her. Phoebe and I were never caught in the act of shoplifting, but my mother did find out one day. I had just got home and was in my room emptying my big shoulder bag when there was a light knock on the door and it opened. Mom stood there, about to say something, when she faltered, having processed what she was looking at: me emptying my bag of stockings and bras I’d stolen a half hour before. Caught holding the bag, I thought ironically. Mom was speechless for a minute, then she strode over and took the packages I was holding in my hands and studied them: two sets of queen-size nylon stockings and a bra, 36D, all still wrapped in plastic. I wore a size 4 dress and a 32C bra. She surmised the rest.

  She sank down on the bed. “Why, Jessamin?” />
  I stood there. I stared back at her, as hard as I could. I made my expression defiant. I concentrated on the fact that it was all her fault for not giving me more spending money.

  “I wanted them!” I said loudly.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said sadly. “That’s the thing. That’s really the thing. You’re risking—do you know what could happen to you if you got caught? Cops grab you, pull you into the office. You know, cops treat kids like dirt. They might drag you down to the police station. You might even be prosecuted if the owners knew you, had spotted you before. You could be sent away to a juvenile detention center. You would hate the way the cops treated you; you’d hate the way the storekeeper spoke to you. You would really hate detention. You would hate your life. And you would have courted this, asked for it, your own self! For what? Queen-size hose and a huge bra? Things you can’t wear, don’t need? Why?”

  I just stared at her. I tried to keep up the defiant look.

  “Think about it,” she urged, then got up and started out of the room. She turned back. “It would be good if you saw less of Phoebe.”

  “How did you know it was Phoebe?”

  She moved her head, as if indicating something invisible at the windows. “It’s obvious,” she said.

  I was amazed, but then I’d been amazed at my mother before. Little kids think their mothers have eyes in the back of their head, and I used to think my mother could see me wherever I was. I needed to get away from her.