by Rachel Simon
The next morning, a Saturday, with Hal sleeping late and the workers off for the weekend, I go to the house. I can’t say why, except that when I lay awake all night, tormenting myself, I thought I might be able to blunt this feeling if I return to the scene of the crime.
Alone in the demolition, I close the door behind me. The living room floor is now talcumed with dust, the air smells of wood and plaster. It’s so quiet that I hear myself breathing. I step forward, unconcerned about nails and splinters, unclear on what I’m seeking, feeling ridiculous. Hal was right—the dining room pantry has been torn down, exposing dingy wallpaper. In the kitchen, the cabinets, sink, and stove have been carted off, their silhouettes remaining like photo negatives on the floor. I go upstairs. Nothing has changed in the hall or my old study, except that the mantle mirror is now mummified in plastic and marked with the grandiosely misspelled “FAGILE.” A large mirror, it leans against the back of the closet and reflects my entire body. With so much plastic, I can make out only a generic womanly shape staring back at me. Perhaps that is why, as I confront her, I let the house sickness finally speak.
The first voice I hear is my old belly-dancing friend Amina. She is in a memory where we are changing into our costumes for a class, and she turns and asks, “Do you want children?”
I am in my early twenties, on the verge of living with Hal, and I give her the only answer I have. “I don’t know.”
“I always wanted kids,” Amina says. Then she looks at me, and sees something—confusion, doubt, maybe fear. “Haven’t you felt that way?”
“Not really.”
“But you like kids. My kids like you. And you’ve got a great boyfriend. He’ll want kids.”
“Actually, he hasn’t said that.”
“What has he said?”
“It hasn’t really come up.”
“Maybe he’s afraid. That’s typical of men. Once you’re ready, he’ll go along.”
“What makes you so sure I’ll be ready?”
“Do your parents bug you about giving them grandchildren?”
“They don’t even expect me to be married. They have a liberal view of adulthood.”
“So wait. Someday you’ll just feel you’re ready, and then you’ll do it.”
That’s a relief, I think, as we take our places in the dance studio and fix our eyes on our veiled images in the mirror. I feel too young and unknowing even to think about children. None of my siblings has begun doing so, either. Only Hal’s sister has had a child, a gorgeous boy who is endlessly entertaining. But he’d been colicky, and Hal’s sister spent every night of his first months driving him all over town, the rumble of the car quieting him. How could I handle that? Or bullies? Puberty? College tuition? I have enough trouble believing in myself and making ends meet. Besides, there are all those Beth issues. I assume that any child of mine will have a disability, not because Beth’s condition is genetic, but because, as her sister, I know that things don’t always go as planned. Also, my parents have always expected that Beth will live with one of us, a fate that has come to feel like a prison sentence when compared with my friends’ freewheeling ways. Why, if I can possibly get a pardon, would I volunteer for lifelong duty?
My question ushers in the next memory.
This time I’m with my friend Ethan from college, and we are having lunch together. We’re nearing our mid-thirties, and he and his wife have recently had a little girl. “Having kids is great,” he says.
I guess it might be, if you’re not, as I am, on the verge of breaking up with your boyfriend. I say, “You’re lucky. You’re just a natural dad.”
“For the record, I think you’d make a wonderful mother.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not like your mother was such a good role model.”
“I don’t blame her. I don’t blame anyone. I just don’t really, really want a kid, and it seems you should really, really want a kid if you’re going to have one.”
“And for what it’s worth, I think Hal would make a wonderful father.”
“He says he doesn’t want kids.”
“He can’t be set on that. Have you pressed the issue?”
“What would be the point? I can’t even decide to stay with him.”
“Well, sometimes people just wake up one day, and they know they want to have kids.”
We go on with lunch, and I think, Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up with certainty? That’s apparently what happened to Max. He’d never even talked about parenthood, but here he is with a wife and two kids. Of course, I could go the other way, and wake up committed to not being a parent, which is what Laura’s always felt, even during the time when she was married. Though there’s also being like Beth, attracted to the idea of kids until she got serious with Jesse, then deciding against parenthood. All these options seem appealing. All of them terrify me.
Which takes me to an evening in my mid-thirties, right after I broke up with Hal. Roberto, a journalist and notorious skirt chaser, is driving me toward what I see as an interesting dinner and he sees as a date, when he asks, “Do you want kids?”
“I’ve been ambivalent a long time. Now I’m alone and I have no savings and I’m renting a room in a house and I’m working in a bookstore and I’m about to start teaching, too, so if I ever make up my mind, it sure won’t be anytime soon.”
“You know,” Roberto says in a thoughtful tone, “I keep meeting women like you. Bright, good-looking, educated women who don’t want kids. And I have to say that it’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”
I lose the ability to see for a moment. When I gather myself together, I point out that Roberto doesn’t have kids, either.
“I will.”
“You have several careers going at the same time, you travel constantly, you seem to have nothing but flings. How would you take care of kids?”
“There are always nannies, and when the kids get older, there’s boarding school.”
“Why do you even want kids if someone else would be raising them?”
“So I can have someone around to look after my papers.”
He isn’t kidding. Nor is another man I date briefly during the years away from Hal, a perennially unemployed ne’er-do-well whose idea of fatherhood consists entirely of being able to loaf around while living off his wife’s salary. Then there’s the ponytailed guy who derides his sister’s tendency to “pop out” kids. As I turn thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, and sift through this kind of chaff, I start asking myself, If I met the right man, could I be nudged into taking the leap?
Around the time I give up looking for the right, or any, man, I receive a letter from my friend Sandy in which she brings up babies. It’s a small moment in a long letter, but it imprints itself so strongly that I hear her speak the words now. “You know what I do when I’m feeling stressed out? On my way home from work, I go to the hospital nursery and I look at the babies. I still don’t know if I’ll ever want any of my own. But just looking at them makes me feel great!”
When I first receive that letter, I smile, knowing, if only vaguely, what she means. A year after Hal and I parted, I started teaching creative writing. I loved it immediately, and as one semester has spilled into the next, I’ve found myself becoming more patient, more bar-raising, more selfless, more inventive, more joyful at another’s triumph. Meaning now courses through my days because every day flows toward someone’s tomorrow. Teaching is not parenthood, and I don’t confuse the two. But I feel a kind of love toward my students—an I-will-hold-the-lantern-through-your-forest-and-never-blow-it-out kind of love. And I wonder, as my students move into their lives, becoming teachers and editors and journalists and psychologists and librarians, some still turning to me for guidance that I’m delighted to give, would I be as dedicated to them if I had children?
Then comes a dinner with Hal at a Ruby Tuesday. It’s six years after we split up, our friendship is now romance, and as we’re laughing at a joke, he says, “We should get mar
ried.”
“Is that another joke?”
“What if it weren’t?”
“I . . . I . . .”
Hal’s eyes tear up. “It would be wonderful.”
“I wasn’t expecting this at all.”
Hal collects himself, then says, “Tell me what would get in the way.”
“Well, I’ve never been someone who dreamed about being a bride.”
“So we’ll have a really simple wedding.”
“We know too many people who don’t get along.”
“We’ll go to a justice of the peace.”
“But my bookstore job’s too far away. I’ll have to keep my apartment if I keep that job, and we’d live separately half the week. That’s not what a marriage is supposed to look like.”
“Why do we need to be in anyone else’s marriage? Why can’t we create our own?”
Now I’m tearing up. “You’re giving pretty good answers.”
“Say yes.”
“One more question.” I take a breath. “What about children?”
“What about children?”
“What have you thought about having children?”
“Oh. I don’t want any.”
“Boom—no kids. That’s it?”
“I’m forty-nine. I don’t want to hit sixty-five with a teenager.”
“People do it all the time.”
“I know. But I see what my friends deal with. They don’t have time for their wives or their own interests. Some of them have to work at horrible jobs just so there’s enough money for a kid. Some of them have kids with nightmare problems. I like my quiet life.”
“But what if I decide I want kids?”
“Then I’m not the guy for you.”
“But you’re so easygoing about everything else. Why not this?”
“Why are you surprised? I never said I wanted kids. I always said I didn’t.”
“I never took that seriously.”
“Why not?”
Good question. “Maybe because we never really talked about it?”
“Which, I’ll remind you, was because you were up in the air yourself.”
“I guess I thought that if I changed my mind, you would, too.”
“Whatever made you think such a thing?”
“Everyone told me that’s how men are?”
“And every woman is absolutely certain that she wants a baby, right?”
“Are we fighting about this?”
“There’s nothing to fight about, unless you’ve made a decision about kids. Have you?”
“Uh . . .”
“You might not know if you’ve changed your mind. But I can tell you that I haven’t.”
Now I avert my gaze from this plastic-wrapped mirror. Of course, I know how I ended up making my peace with Hal’s feelings—it is a story of Beth and a hospital and a blue light. But I will not latch on to that memory now. I cannot. Because four years after I thought I’d settled the matter, four years after I opted out of ambivalence to choose the man I would marry, four years after I thought I would never feel the longing that so much of the world feels, I am suffering from a house sickness so profound it is making me dizzy.
I will never fill this house with the burble of toddlers and the chatter of schoolchildren and the giggles of teens; no one will ever dance on Hal’s feet. And when my parents and stepparents slip away from me, and, assuming I don’t go first, Hal passes into memory, these rooms will be silent.
Trembling with an unbearable sorrow, disoriented with irreversible regret, I make my way to the front door, finally understanding what has been obvious. It wasn’t just the fallen woman and the possible biopsy that made my house sickness acute. It was the falling walls, the finality of choice, the kindred spirit of an empty home whispering of barrenness to me.
The oncologist orders a biopsy. My father and Theresa decide to keep their vacation plans at the shore and return just for the morning next week when she’ll get the procedure. Then they purchase their first cell phone ever so they can return to their beach house afterward and the oncologist can call with the results. “But I have no idea how to use the thing,” Theresa tells me when she calls to announce their plans.
“Go back to the store and have them explain it.”
“We did, but it didn’t do any good. And the manual’s impossible.”
There’s no point discussing the phone with my father—he lets Theresa handle all feats of engineering, like fixing the chain in the back of the toilet. But I speak with him anyway.
“How can I reach you while you’re away?”
“If we can get this damn phone to work—”
“Will you just call me collect if anything happens?”
“Nothing’s going to happen until the test.”
I pause. “And how are you doing?”
“I’ll know after the test how I’m doing.”
I try to imagine scenarios, but decide to stop thinking.
So it’s a good thing that Hal tells me that we need to start shopping. Needless to say, I balk at first, since selecting things like doorknobs and wall sconces, which Hal properly calls “fittings,” is even further from my mind than usual. “Why now?” I say, as Hal removes eco-friendly linoleum samples from his bag the next night. “I thought we were in the demolition phase.”
“We are. But there’s a lead time for obtaining materials, and you also have to account for the time to select them. You just have to work backward from when they’re going to be needed on the site and then you know when you have to start thinking about them. Which is now.”
That night we easily agree on the color of the floors for the bathroom and kitchen. The next day, at a specialty hardware store, we both like the crystal doorknobs. There’s a great deal to recommend shopping right now, I think, as we start paging through catalogs. By reminding me that Hal and I have always been good at give-and-take, it’s affirming why, after that night at Ruby Tuesday, I made the choice that I did.
Then we go to a tile store. Hal makes a beeline to tiles with marine motifs, but my eye is caught by a display of glass tiles, emerald and azure and teal, and he is quickly won over. Since they’re too costly for the whole bathroom, he pulls out some paper and sketches a pattern that will combine these glass tiles and a more traditional white. Then we take the sketch to the owner for pricing, and as he and Hal discuss measurements, I notice another employee showing customers around. Wouldn’t you know. She’s pregnant.
I look away, but wonder what kind of conversations she and her husband had before now. A few nights ago I asked Hal—“just out of curiosity”—to tell me how he came to feel the way he does about having children. He reminded me that he’d told me long ago: after the demise of a brief, childless first marriage to a high school sweetheart, he watched friends who were starting families, and quietly, without inner strife, concluded that parenthood would prevent him from having the freedom to pursue his creative passions and structure his time. I then remembered him saying this on the rare occasions when the topic arose during our first thirteen years. But I’d assumed that since he’s generally so agreeable, he could be persuaded to change his mind, if I ever felt determined to do so. Only I never did.
When we get in the car at the tile store, I say, “Do you ever wonder if we should have had kids?”
He looks at me. “Why are you thinking about this?”
“The pregnant woman. Just, you know, it made me think.”
He pauses. “No. I don’t.”
“Would you ever, well, reconsider?”
He takes a deep breath, then lets it out. “No. I’m sorry.” His tone is both sensitive to the distress he must see on my face, and resolved that, whatever I am contending with, it is my battle to fight on my own. I fold his sketch on my lap over and over, and silently we drive home.
Hal has started holding weekly job meetings on mornings before work, then calling me from the office to tell me what happened. A few days after Theresa has the biopsy, Hal has
his next meeting. “You just have to see it,” he says when he calls. “Let’s meet at the house tonight.”
I won’t let it get to me any further, I tell myself as I drive to Teacher’s Lane. I need to suck in my emotions. I need to pretend I’m a regular person who feels regular things.
When he meets me at the front door, he’s grinning broadly. He walks me into the living room, which is fleeced with dust. “Keep your eyes on your feet,” he says, flicking on the overhead lightbulb, taking my hand. I follow Sherpa style, stepping in clearings left by his shoes. We pass out of the living room into the dining room. Then he says, “Look.”
I lift my eyes and gasp. The wall between the dining room and kitchen is gone. We are standing in one astonishingly spacious room. “It’ll be even bigger when we finish,” he says.
“Because they’ll be demoing that back wall, too?”
“That’s right.”
It’s really something, though I’m dismayed to feel no less morose than I have for weeks. I just continue after him, now up the stairs. On the landing I spy one yellow rubber glove—from a pair, I remember, that I lazily left in the bathroom cabinet. Why is it on the floor?
At the top of the stairs, I see. The bathroom’s been gutted—toilet, sink, tub, cabinet, tile, and ceiling are gone, wood exposed to the roof. This room of bright light is dark as a cave. But that’s not the only change. The two bedrooms beyond the bathroom are now one, the demo team having torn down the separating wall as well as the corridor wall. My study-to-be has appeared.
“Won’t this be great?” Hal says, pointing to where I’ll put my desk, how the southern light will gild my books’ spines.
I wish excitement would replace this lump in my throat. I wish I could meet the emotional specifications. “So,” I say, just to say something, “is the demo almost done?”
“There’s still the back wall in the kitchen, but before it gets removed they have to hand-dig the new foundation in the backyard so we can extend the first floor by five feet. Then they have to get a new back beam in place—and then they can take down the wall.”