We Never Told

by Diana Altman

  I said, “Your hair doesn’t look bad.”

  “Not now. I went back to him the next day. I said, Remio, I washed my hair and it still looks too spikey. Fix it. Meanwhile, I have to sit there and listen to him tell me all the movies he’s ever seen. Takes hours.”

  “They don’t pay you anything extra for going to Stockbridge?”

  “Yeah, they do. A little. And I don’t mind getting out of town. It’s so pretty there. Trees, birds, it’s New England.”

  “Raf doesn’t mind your going away?” Mother said.

  “Raf? I don’t know.”

  “He lets you go?”

  “Let’s me?”

  “He doesn’t object to your being away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely they could send someone who isn’t married.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? No husband likes to be alone. And certainly not one as good looking as Raf. I’ve seen the way women look at him.”

  “You mean you think Raf is going to find someone else while I’m gone for four days?”

  “I mean no husband likes to be alone. Men are men.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I butted in. In Cambridge, I was a member of Bread & Roses. I went to “cell” meetings where we talked about not getting equal pay, and whether or not to have children, and how marriage was a capitalistic institution meant to enslave women, and how we were barraged with images of infantile women with their index finger on their pouting lower lip, and how the men at work called us honey and slapped our bottoms, and how the men on the street shouted lewd things at us, and now it was time to join together, strength in numbers, let them all know we were not going to stand for it.

  “You can say what you like about equality and men being the same as women and all that feminism talk,” Mother said. “Women are not doing themselves any favors with this feminism business. They’re going to end up taking care of the children and the housework and having to bring in a paycheck.”

  “Men can do housework. Nothing says the woman has to do all the housework.”

  “Men are men,” my mother said.

  “But don’t you think if the husband and wife are friends the husband will want to help out?” I said.

  “Friends? No. Impossible.”

  “What’s impossible about it?”

  “Men and women cannot be friends. There’s always that spark.”

  I would have liked to argue that the days of the servile wife were finished but I didn’t know if ideas translated into action. I was too young to know how life really worked. Secretly, I was sometimes appalled by the women I met at the Bread & Roses meetings because they said awful things about being a mother, about how children ruin a woman’s life, keep her from her true creative self. At the same time, there were attractive women at the meetings, especially one named Ginger who lived in a basement apartment in Central Square. One evening as I sprawled on her sisal rug listening to her talk about how capitalism created the suburbs in order to isolate women and sap our confidence, I realized with a start that she was a lesbian. Here was Ginger with her abundant auburn hair and her nipples sticking out under her T-shirt and while I was not drawn to her in a sexual way, because everything below her belt did not interest me, I could certainly see her appeal. If a woman didn’t need to attract a man, then she enjoyed a kind of freedom the rest of us didn’t have. Ginger and I were in separate orbits.

  The women who were in the other feminist group in Boston, the National Organization of Women, also seemed foreign to me because they were so comfortable. I went to one of their meetings in the posh living room of a house in Newton. The women there, with big diamond engagement rings, talked about changing the status quo but I couldn’t see why. The status quo had done them good. They said daycare was the most pressing feminist issue.

  Joan licked mashed potato off her fork. “How’s your job? How’s that Franny person?” She didn’t want to argue about women’s rights with our mother. It wasn’t that long ago that we were glaring at our mother in children’s court. Now here we were eating her delicious meal.

  “Quit. She got pregnant.”

  “I thought you said she has five children.”

  “Now she’ll have six.”

  “And we’ll have to support them,” Mother said.

  I couldn’t argue with this begrudging attitude. Franny didn’t deserve any help and Franny deserved all the help she could get. Both. The only solution was for Franny to be dead and anyone who met her would never want that. “There’s a welfare mother in my daycare center,” I said. “Her daughter is four and she’s a model. The woman showed me her daughter’s head shots, all dressed up in bonnets and little outfits. I saw pictures of her walking down the catwalk carrying a little parasol.”

  “They let black children be models?” Mother wondered.

  “This one’s white. A little blond girl. So I said to the mother, how do you make her do that? How do you make her get all dressed up and walk in that stylish way down the catwalk? The mother said, How? I tell her I’ll fucking kill her if she don’t.”

  “Lovely,” Joan said. We cleared our plates then set out dessert dishes and sat down to sample the pecan pie Mother made.

  “I had to kick out one of the kids,” I said.

  My mother took a bite of pie and said to herself, “Came out all right.”

  “He was what they call anti-social. Did you ever hear of that? You know what it means? It means he pinned down other kids and smacked their heads on the concrete playground. He would have killed them if the teachers didn’t pull him away. He’s four. He’s a criminally insane four year old.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He’d wait until the teachers weren’t watching then he’d attack one of the smaller kids, sit on the kid’s chest, and take his head in his hands and smash it against the concrete. He’s big for a four-year-old.”

  “Oh, my god.”

  “Yes. Luckily no one was seriously hurt. But I had to call in the parents and expel him. The father is a deacon in the African Episcopal Church and the mother is a leader in their community and they’re from an old Cambridge family that’s been there for generations. So in they come, the father and the mother and I tell them that I’m sorry but James can’t attend the daycare center any more, and I describe his behavior and suggest that they take him to the Judge Baker clinic for evaluation. The mother tells me this will be very inconvenient for them because she works, and I say I understand but I have to consider the safety of the other twenty children at the daycare center. So next thing, the mother goes out of my office and into the play area and comes back with James and she says to him, ‘You apologize to Miss Adler and tell her you will behave yourself.’ James climbs up into my lap and says, ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘You’re sorry who?’ says the mother. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Adler.’ ‘And what else do you say,’ says the mother. He’s already forgotten what else. ‘What else did I tell you to say?’ He can’t remember. So I say, ‘James, I’m going to set you down, now. And your parents are going to take you home.’ ‘You should have given us more warning,’ the mother says. So I remind her that I’d been phoning her for several weeks and she never bothered to return my call. And the daycare social worker tried phoning and they never returned her call either. So the parents get up and James is standing there and the father grabs him by his ear and they drag him shrieking out of the daycare center.”

  “I don’t like you being around such people,” my mother said.

  “My job is such people.”

  “Delicious,” Joan said about the pie. “Did your sculptures arrive?” We knew Mother was worried because the shipment from Italy was taking so long.

  “Yes. Do you want to see?”

  “Of course!”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re ready.”

  “But aren’t they cast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they’re ready,” Joan said pushing back her chair and standing up
. “I mean you can’t fix them now, right?”

  Mother had stage fright. She had experienced the toil and delight of artistic work and now it would be judged. I was a member of the undiscerning public, but Joan’s opinion would matter. Joan’s whole life was either producing art or looking at art or thinking about art.

  We followed Mother into her studio where there were a few pedestals, some bags of clay, and a smock hanging on a hook. She was nervous. She had gone to Europe for the privacy required to turn into a different person, a person closer to her conception of herself. She was an artist, not the entitled and useless wife of a rich man. In Florence, the elderly Contessa was willing to believe whatever version of herself Violet presented but in New York she might be evaluated in a harsher light. She had hoped to escape what she had been and now she would see if she’d managed that. “You haven’t unpacked them?” Joan said. Mother went to one of the cartons and from the sawdust lifted out something encased in bubble wrap. It would be magnificent. Here was her calling, here was what she was meant to be, not a wife in the suburbs worrying about canapés. For years she’d been an artist trapped inside a conventional woman’s body. Now she was out. Now she would shed her married name and the real Violet Greenstone would emerge, an independent person able to make her own living, needing no one. She would never marry. Why should she? She pulled at the tape and bubble wrap fell to the floor. She lifted a bronze statue about a foot tall and set it on a pedestal. “There,” she said in a tremulous voice.

  It was the figure of a nude woman cradling a tiny grown man in her arms, holding him as she might a nursing infant. The tiny man had a tiny erection. Everything about the piece was repulsive, including the brown surface that had not been smoothed but looked like turds patched together. The female had sinewy biceps, calf muscles, and the chest of a body builder with little breasts stuck on. She seemed copied from an anatomy book. Her face was devoid of expression but couldn’t be mistaken for a mask because there was no one behind the face, no spark in the eyes. Here was the lifeless representation of an idea, an angry idea. Men are big babies and women are forced to take care of them. “Whoa,” Joan said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Powerful,” Joan said.

  “That’s what I was striving for.” Mother turned to me. “Sonya, you’re very quiet.”

  I was struck mute by this glimpse of the bitterness that was inside my mother. She hated men and was afraid of them. The work was furious, ugly the way an angry face is ugly. Not knowing what to say, disappointed because I wanted my mother to have success, wanted the burden of her unhappiness to be lifted from me, I said, “What’s it supposed to mean, that men are big babies?”

  “If that’s what it means to you, then that’s what it means. It’s open to interpretation.”

  “You mean it’s symbolic?”

  “I mean it has an abstract quality that can be interpreted several different ways.” This was exactly what it wasn’t. I nodded and hummed a sound that was supposed to mean I stood corrected.

  “Are there any more?” Joan said. “Let’s see some more.”

  Mother unwrapped three more, all of them variations on the theme of big women, emaciated men, except for one other that was a horse on its back as if it had been felled by a trip wire, its legs thrust out in panic, the focal point being the horse’s penis and balls that were exposed while it lay flailing on its back. All the dignity of Horse gone, it was a heap of clumsy parts. Just as disturbing as the sculptures was how few of them there were. Four. “So,” she said, obviously unnerved by our response, “there you have it.” Joan said something about a strong point of view. We stood in the room without speaking, keeping our eyes lowered, wishing things were different. After a few minutes, Mother stopped drooping, gathered herself together perhaps believing that she misunderstood our response. Maybe our silence was the result of being moved. “So do you think I should start looking for a gallery?”

  Joan, the champion feeling hider, said without hesitation, “Sure! Why not?”

  “What’s the protocol? Do you send photographs? How’s it done?”

  “Slides.”

  “Could you do it for me, Joanie?”

  “Me? No. You need a large format camera. You have to hire a photographer. They have to be professional photographs.”

  “Won’t that be expensive?”

  “I’ll ask around at work. Has to be someone who’s good at lighting.”

  We returned to the kitchen, cleared the table, wrapped up the remaining pie, put it in the refrigerator, scraped mashed potatoes into a Tupperware bowl, snapped down the lid, rinsed the dishes, fitted them into the dishwasher, stuffed the cork back into the wine, dumped the wilted salad into the garbage pail, lugged the trash out to the incinerator down the hall, shoved the heavy green plastic bag into the shoot, heard it whoosh on its way down to becoming someone else’s concern.

  Under a cloud of chagrin, we re-assembled in the living room amid the furniture from Scarsdale now in its third home. Bought at the beginning of the dream, sunlight once glinted off the glass coffee table. Here, twelve stories above the traffic, it looked tired. I could see my mother’s heart aching. It was on her face and the way she sat on the sofa, with her chin lifted, as she twisted the wedding band she still wore on her finger, a symbol perhaps of how she was unavailable to suitors or perhaps an announcement to the world that someone had once loved her.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  One of the men at work said that he had to get home to talk to his wife about something, and I asked him what he meant. He meant he wanted to discuss a work problem with her. I was still perplexed. Why would he talk to his wife about something that was troubling him? It was his surprise that gave me pause. “Don’t you think married people talk to each other?” he said. “Who do you think they talk to if not each other?” He looked at me with such intense concern that I felt all my attitudes wobbling.

  Age twenty-six marked a turning point. Married men began to pursue me. I’d rounded some unsavory corner. Too vulnerable before, now I was fair game. It was as if my front door got a new smell and a different breed of dog was scratching there. At first, I was full of sympathy for the lonely husband so misunderstood by his wife but when I’d heard the same story three or four times and realized none of the men intended to get divorced, that they were bored at home, I made an appointment with Dr. Goldfarb and lay down on his couch.

  His office was on the first floor of a brick building in Brookline. I sat on the edge of a chair in his waiting room. When his office door opened, it was always the same young man who came out, the one with the appointment before mine, the one who, as etiquette required, did not glance at me. Seeing a psychiatrist was a private matter. No one was supposed to know. Dr. Goldfarb stood in his doorway and nodded at me as I entered. In his late forties, old to me, compact and formal, wearing a dark suit, tie, and dark shoes, our eye contact was a quick tap. I knew nothing about him except that he was obviously shy. Perhaps at school he was the smartest boy in the class but nobody asked him to the prom.

  His office seemed to be intentionally unrevealing. Nothing coordinated with anything else. Behind a nondescript narrow couch was a black leather Charles Eames chair, a modern chair that contrasted with his curlicue carved Victorian desk. The Van Gogh print of Sunflowers, available at the Harvard Coop for students furnishing their dorm room, was too commonplace to mean Dr. Goldfarb preferred the impressionists or even cared about art. Maybe he liked modern furniture or maybe the Eames chair was just the most comfortable for sitting all day. Maybe he liked Victorian desks or maybe the person who had the office before him left it there. Yet he was not a shadowy person. By the end of our very first fifty minutes together, I understood that he was not my friend and had no intention of being my friend. He was impervious to the charms I used on others. He did not laugh at my turn of phrase or my humorous observations. On the rare occasion when he did laugh, a sound came out devoid of merriment, a snuffle. He was the most serious per
son I’d ever met.

  I visited him four times a week and lay on the couch and said whatever came into my head, narrated my dreams, described incidents from my childhood, and learned that when I was boring myself to death it was because there was something I didn’t want to talk about. He seldom spoke, but when he did it meant I was supposed to pause and examine what I’d just said. His silences were just as forceful as his few words. “You were fifteen,” he said repeating what I’d just said.

  “Yes. She went to Louisville.”

  “Louisville?”

  “That’s where the best tumor hospital was.” Silence. Then more silence. “Isn’t it?” Silence. “Isn’t that where the best tumor hospital is?”

  Dr. Goldfarb said nothing.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve always wondered about that. I mean to go to Louisville when you live in New York. I always wondered how Louisville could have better hospitals than New York.” Silence. “Did you ever hear of a famous cancer hospital in Louisville?”