Dad was always a paradox: he regularly blew up at her or me, shrieking absolutely hateful things in tantrums that lasted whole weekends, but when she would mention divorce, he would laugh. He would say how happy they were together and that he never loved anybody but her. He constantly suspected her of infidelity, but even when he was in a rage, he assumed she was utterly bound to him and would not leave him, no matter how horribly he behaved. At the meeting with the lawyer, he promised to give Mom generous child support. She and the lawyer urged Dad to get his own lawyer; he refused. He signed the papers and stormed out of the office.
Mom knew he’d never pay the child support. That was why she knew she had to get a better job before she left. I was happy I had a job, so I could buy my own clothes and not ask Mom to do that, knowing how thin she was stretched. It’s odd to think of money being love. Someone told me that Freud said money was shit, but that’s crazy. It’s love, doled out or withheld. It made me wonder how my father felt about me that he wouldn’t send Mom enough money to even feed me, as though I was the one who had divorced him.
At the end of August, my mother flew down to El Paso and crossed the border in a van to get a Mexican divorce. The night before, she called my father from Texas to tell him what she was doing. I was asleep when the phone rang, which it did a few times before I was able to pull myself out of sleep; I went to the top of the stairs, preparing to run down and pick it up. Dad must have been sleeping in his chair; he answered the phone and quickly exploded in curses, calling Mom horrible names. I ran back to my bed. He stayed awhile on the phone; I couldn’t believe Mom would remain on the line to be called those names. Then I heard loud noises. Dad was clattering and clanking around, throwing things, it sounded like. Suddenly he appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Did you know about this?”
I sat upright in bed. “What?”
“Shit!” he cried, and stomped back down the stairs.
The next morning, as I got ready to go to work, he threw some things in a bag and tore out of the house, yelling at me not to burn it down. He got in his truck and drove away, fast. When I was sure he was gone, I called Mom to see if she knew what had happened. But there was no answer. I tried to think of who else I could call, who else might know. I called Annette Fields, but she wasn’t home.
The next evening as I was sitting down at the table to eat the dinner Mrs. Thacker had left, my father burst in through the back door.
He took one look at me and shouted, “Did she tell you?”
“What?” I asked, hating the tremor in my voice.
“The divorce, bitch!” he screamed.
Bitch?
He stomped past me and went to the pantry and opened a fresh bottle of Canadian Club, poured himself a glass, and sank down at the table.
“She divorced you?” I asked timorously.
“She tried,” he muttered. “But I fixed her.”
I waited. I didn’t dare ask. But he couldn’t contain himself.
“She thinks I’m a dummy. She thinks she can use my power of attorney. But I sent a telegram to Mexico, revoking it. Hah!”
“How did you know where to send it? How did you know the address?”
“Americans get divorced in Juarez,” he said. “They stay in El Paso and cross the border in a van. That’s the cheapo way to do it. That’s what she’d do. I know your mother. Oh, yes! I called the court there.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Means she thinks she’s divorced, but she isn’t!” he grinned. “And then I met her at Logan and told her so! Fixed her wagon. That bitch!”
“You met her at Logan? How did you know what flight she’d be on?”
“There’s only one flight a day from El Paso to Logan. Had to be on it.” He smiled that sick grin again and poured whiskey down his throat.
I hadn’t realized my father was that resourceful. I always thought of him as an innocent, an artist with his head in the clouds, who just couldn’t help being inadequate in daily life. That was why he drank; everybody knew artists and writers drank because making art was so hard. Jackson Pollock and William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald—you didn’t expect them to be able to deal with daily life, fixing a faucet or mowing the lawn. But Daddy could work with his hands—he built all his studios.
“What did she do?”
“Nothing,” he shrugged, “what could she do? It’s a fait accompli!” He smiled again.
Somehow I couldn’t picture my mother standing there silent for this. Not that I wasn’t dismayed that she’d divorced my dad. Why did she have to do that? And why did she have to do it while I was living with him?
“She must have done something,” I insisted.
“Bitch,” he swore.
“Are you calling me a bitch?”
“You act just like her sometimes.”
That did it. I stood up.
“What’s the matter with you?” he cried.
I didn’t know myself. I ran up to my room and packed my stuff in my duffel bag, then counted my money. I’d been saving my wages over the summer, and with tips and no expenses for living, I’d accumulated a few hundred dollars. I’d never had that much money in my possession before, and it made me feel strong. Since my friends and I looked down on materialism, I knew I’d have to think about this, but later, not now. At least I was sure I had enough for a bus ticket to Cambridge. When I got downstairs, the kitchen was empty. My father had disappeared, along with the bottle of Canadian Club. Either he’d gone out to the studio or was in bed. I refused to look for him, refused to ask him to drive me into town, not after the way he’d spoken to me. And I was too angry to leave him a note. Let him worry. If he even noticed I was gone.
I walked to the road and hitched into town. I had to sit in the bus station for a couple of hours, but I had a paperback of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook with me. It was near midnight when I got home; Mom was sitting in the kitchen over a drink. I groaned, but she wasn’t drunk. She looked ravaged. We hugged each other. We didn’t talk at all. I wanted to yell at her for what she’d done, but she looked too wasted. It would have to wait.
The next day, she looked okay. We were both home, neither of us had work to go to. So we dawdled in the way we both liked to in the morning. I liked to drink coffee and sprawl on the old armchair we kept in the kitchen and read. I was loving The Golden Notebook. Mom liked to make coffee and read her newspapers—the New York Times and the Boston Globe.It took her hours to get going in the morning.
So we were lolling there in the kitchen, reading, and I decided to plunge in.
“Dad was very upset yesterday.”
She looked up. “I hope he didn’t take it out on you.”
“Of course he did. You knew he would!”
She put her newspaper down and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Jess.”
“Yeah. He said he met you at Logan.”
She grimaced. “Yes.”
“What did you do?”
She shrugged. “It was so stupid. He said . . .” She sighed and stopped. “I don’t know how to explain . . .”
“I know what he said. He told me.”
“Oh. Well, it was so stupid. The chances are his telegram didn’t go to the right place, and in Mexico . . . Things are so confused there anyway . . . There’s little chance that he did actually cancel the power of attorney. Anyway, I think I am really divorced. I have papers. . . . But even if I’m not, it doesn’t matter. I mean, he understands that we’re not together anymore, not husband and wife anymore. That’s all that matters to me. That we are legally divorced matters only if one of us wanted to marry again, and I won’t, I wouldn’t put myself in that situation again, ever. For me, marriage was too horrible. But not for him; he’ll marry again. So if he did mess things up, it’s himself he messed up, not me. I told him that. He’ll be the bigamist, not me.”
She lit a cigarette and breathed in deeply, then glanced at my mug. “More coffee?” She stood and went to
the stove and poured a mug for herself. I held mine out and she filled it.
“What makes you think Dad will marry again?”
“He was happy being married; he wasn’t unhappy being married to me.”
“But you were?” I couldn’t help sounding a little accusing.
“Of course. You know what his tantrums were like. He went into such rages . . . even before he started drinking so much. I was thinking about divorce long before he went to Vermont. His living up there probably kept the marriage alive for a few more years.”
“How can you be sure you won’t marry again?”
She smiled. “I’m sure, honey. Very sure.”
She was right, Dad did marry again, twice. A few years after he married for the third time, he died, at fifty-nine, from lung cancer. And Mom was right about herself, too. She never married again. She had a recurring dream, she told me—long afterward, when I was in my forties—that she had somehow married Daddy again. She would discover this and cry out in grief and rage, “How could I do that? I was free of him, how could I let myself marry him again?” In the dream, she was frustrated to tears that she had blown her chance at freedom. I like to think that if she had lived long enough, she would have got over her fear of marriage and let herself have a companion again, but she died at sixty-two, also of cancer.
The whole event—Mom sending me up to Vermont and then secretly getting a divorce, my father’s dreary way of life and the way he acted toward me at the end—all of it did something to me. It didn’t turn me against my parents, exactly, but it changed where I stood in regard to them, as if a giant hand had picked me up and set me down again at a different place on the globe, farther away from my family, my friends, my country. I began to see them as if they were not my parents, but just people. It felt disloyal. But it also gave me a sense of freedom.They weren’t me, I wasn’t bound by them, I wasn’t like them and didn’t want to be.
Mostly, it made me decide that no matter what, I wouldn’t live like them. I would be careful whom I married and I would do whatever I had to do to have a happy marriage. I would never drink too much. I would live right.
5
Over that summer, my friends seemed to change, too. They were more distant. Or maybe I was the distant one. But it shook me up that when I told them that my parents had divorced, they just murmured sympathetically, as if it wasn’t a disaster. I’ll bet they’d think it was if it happened to them, I thought. They probably just didn’t know what to say, but it felt as though they didn’t care. The truth is, I was not unique. All of a sudden, everybody was getting divorced. It was a tidal wave. I’d never heard of anyone getting divorced before, except my mother’s friend Alyssa, who acted as if her divorce was a major tragedy and whispered about it.
Nobody was really interested in my problems. Just after the term started, there were massive demonstrations across the country against the war; everybody was up in arms about it. Nixon had made a peace offer, but those of us who were against the war thought he wasn’t serious. People seemed to be getting more and more angry and were blaming us for all the problems. It seemed like the four of us—Sandy, Dolores, Bishop and I—symbolized everything the conservatives hated. We all had long hair. Almost everybody in our school had long hair. And wherever we went, into the little stores that lined Mass Ave or the shops on the side streets, storekeepers and cops and shoppers practically hissed at us, especially Bishop. They railed at him as if his hair was their business. Even the portly ladies in hats and gloves who never raised their voices would make nasty cracks about our dirty jeans, our dirty hair. It was as though the country was at war, not with the North Vietnamese, but with long-haired kids.
One day we were sitting together on a bench facing the Charles River, just smoking and watching people crossing the bridge and talking about the war. It was warm out, even though it was December, and I was wearing sandals, and when I wiggled my feet, my shoes fell off. A huge cop came storming over—luckily we weren’t smoking pot—and commanded me to put my shoes on immediately. Sandy glared at him, asking, “Is it against the law not to have shoes on?” But he didn’t even let her finish. He boomed, “It’s a law that you be covered up, yes, smart-ass, now shut your mouth or I’ll arrest you!” She was so shocked, she shut up. The four of us looked at each other and just got up and walked to my house. We didn’t feel safe outside.
In any case, we were getting older and had to start thinking seriously about ourselves. For years, we’d discussed questions like infinity versus finity and what was outside the universe, if anything, and the existence of god and the nature of evil, but we’d never thought about what we’d do day to day for the rest of our lives. We assumed that would take care of itself, and suddenly it came to us that it would not.
Most of the boys I knew were scared. They were nervous even talking about their alternatives, because they weren’t sure what was legal and what wasn’t. They thought they could get arrested just for talking about getting out of the draft, and they were unsure about the rights and wrongs of doing that. Was it morally acceptable to go to college to escape the draft, or to Canada? Was it unpatriotic? Was it all right to drop out, or cut off a finger or a toe, or claim to be a conscientious objector? Did you have to enlist and kill Vietnamese to be a good American? Because, of course, however defiant people sounded, everybody really wanted to do the right thing, to be patriotic. But how could it be right to kill people for no reason at all? People felt they would be cowardly if they tried to escape the draft, and they didn’t want to be cowardly, but they also didn’t want to go to a place they had no reason to go to, to kill people who hadn’t done anything to them—innocent people, babies, grandmas, hardworking farmers. And a lot of the boys knew they’d be killed there. Had they been born and loved by their parents and fed and taught and grown up healthy and strong just to be killed in a war over nothing?
Going to Canada seemed almost as bad as going to war. They’d have to leave their families, their friends, their neighborhoods behind, they might never see them again. They’d have to live in a place where they knew no one, getting whatever low-paid job they could find without training or legitimacy, and without being sure they’d ever be able to come home again.
Dropping out was the worst. They’d have to run away, like criminals, and live furtively until the war was over, and maybe they wouldn’t be able to come home even then but have to live marginal lives, on the streets. These were middle-class boys, they slept in comfortable beds with clean sheets and ate three good meals every day and had no useful knowledge of how to survive in the great big dark world outside.
A few boys bragged that they were going to enlist, maybe hoping we’d admire their courage. But when they announced this, their voices sounded hollow. They weren’t sure whether enlisting made them heroes or villains in the eyes of other kids. In my crowd, it made them villains. We hated war, and we turned away from them. Looking back now, I see that for us it was a matter of class. Those boys who thought they were doing the right thing by enlisting were the ones who were sacrificed. They went, and they hated what they did and learned to hate themselves. An awful lot of them got hooked on dope; some couldn’t live with the terrible things they’d been taught to do. They came back ruined people with ruined lives. And for what? To bolster the egos of a few people in Washington who were sorry later on anyway.
People edged into wildness. Everybody was ready to explode. In New York, the great writer Grace Paley spent six days in jail for sitting down in front of a police horse. Middle-class people were sent to jail for counseling young men about the draft; young men were jailed for burning draft cards.
At Barnes, kids protested the curriculum, saying it was irrelevant. They wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that a couple of years earlier, not even in advanced junior English, when we spent the whole damn term working through a long list of works, from Beowulf to The Waste Land. Talk about irrelevance. Kids showed up for class high or stoned. I was not the only one who cut classes.
&n
bsp; I experimented with alternate states more rarely. I had decided that my mother had smelled the marijuana on me and that was why she had sent me to Vermont. I was afraid to ask her about it, but one day I finally did: “Mom, why did you send me to Dad’s last summer?” I asked.
And she, who always said she was honest with me, mumbled that she thought I’d enjoy it, I always loved Vermont in the summer, and she wanted me to be closer to Dad.
So I didn’t know any more than I knew before, and I was afraid she’d send me up there again. And after the way Daddy had acted toward me, I didn’t want to go there now. I felt like he hated me. So I began to be careful; whenever I smoked weed, I made sure to eat something or suck on a mint afterward, and I took uppers only when I knew I’d be out for the whole night. I still hung out with Sandy and Bishop—I still loved them—but everything that was going on, especially the divorce, put me into a different stance toward what I’d known and done before. It was as if a shadow now intervened between the old and the new me, saying, Wait! You don’t have to be this, or do that. It isn’t what you want to be, it’s only one alternative. Not that I knew what I did want to be.
Mom was now working full time. She taught three courses, had three independent studies, was on committees, and held office hours. But she was home by six most nights, and she always cooked dinner, and afterward she’d say, “Finish your homework, honey, before you watch TV,” and I would, or at least I fiddled with my books, so there was some kind of order in our lives.
I’d quit my job at the dress shop when I went to Vermont. When I came back, I got a job at Sonny’s, a restaurant on Mass Ave. I now had experience waitressing. I worked weekday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:30 and eight to two on Saturdays. Sonny paid me practically nothing—fifty cents per hour—but I still made more money waiting tables than at the dress shop, because of the tips. Waiting tables is hard work and demeaning, but I always felt avenged when I took home a hundred dollars or more at the end of the week.
The Love Children Page 6