Morley stared at him.
Dave said, “You wring it out first.”
What Morley was thinking was, What am I doing here? But she wasn’t about to quit.
She was so young. She believed what they were doing was important.
On Saturday mornings Dave got up first and made them scrambled eggs. Ever since he was a child, Dave had loved scrambled eggs. Sometimes, when he was a boy, he could hardly wait to get to sleep on Friday night because he knew he was going to get scrambled eggs the next morning.
One Friday night as she was washing the dishes, Morley said, “I make the best scrambled eggs you’ve ever had.”
The next morning she squeezed fresh juice and got out their matching coffee mugs. Carefully folding their one pair of linen napkins, laying them out side by side, she whisked up six eggs and brought them to the table. Dave stared at them. There were little green flecks all through his scrambled eggs. Pieces of chives Morley had snipped from the back garden. In Cape Breton you don’t add anything to scrambled eggs. Except maybe ketchup. But this was his bride, and she had made these eggs. Dave picked up his fork. When he had finished, he said, “I love your scrambled eggs.”
The next weekend the eggs came with chopped-up mushrooms. The weekend after that, it was tomatoes and onions. Then spinach. On the fifth weekend it was cheese.
Dave had begun to hate Saturday mornings. He would lie in bed listening to the sound of a knife hitting a chopping board. How did I get mixed up with this person? he wondered.
By the middle of that first winter, they were both thinking, This marriage is a big mistake. Here it was, January of all things, and Morley was gloomy. Under a year married, and she felt like she had been sentenced to life with a stranger.
One night on television there was a news story about the canals in Holland. The reporter squinted awkwardly at the camera as he interviewed an old man smoking a meerschaum pipe at an outdoor cafe. The old man said it was the first time in ten years that the canals in the Netherlands had frozen. The newscast cut from the old man to pictures of a Dutch boy lacing up his skates on a canal bank and from him to three girls in folk costume skating hand in hand through an unidentified village.
Morley watched the entire report with her chin cupped in her hand. Then she turned to Dave and said, “I’ve always dreamed of doing that.”
Dave, who had been only half paying attention, said, “Really? That was your dream?”
Morley said, “Yes.”
Dave stood up and walked into the kitchen. When he came back, he was carrying a beer. He looked at his wife and said, “We should go.”
Morley said, “To Holland? Don’t be silly.”
Dave said, “Maybe this is our only chance. Maybe the next time it happens, we’ll have kids and a mortgage and we won’t be able to go.”
Dave had never said anything about kids before.
He smiled at her. And he went back into the kitchen and picked up the telephone. When he hung up, Morley was standing beside him. Watching. Nothing like this had ever happened to her.
“We leave tomorrow. We’ll be back on Monday,” said Dave. He was looking right at her.
The next morning they bought Dave a pair of hockey skates. At lunch Morley held out a present she had wrapped in newspaper. She said, “It’s almost finished. I was going to give it to you for your birthday. I can finish it on the plane.” It was a heavy blue wool sweater.
“This is a beautiful sweater,” said Dave. “I love this sweater.”
When the plane landed in Amsterdam, Morley had her face pressed to the window. She wanted to see everything. She wanted to make sure the canals were still frozen.
They went skating right away.
But the canals in Amsterdam were wide and windy and open, and the ice was soft and bumpy and treacherous. It wasn’t like Morley had imagined it at all. It was like skating on a freeway.
The man at the hotel said, “You have to go to Friesland.”
So on Saturday they rented a car and drove into the country. They parked at the end of a road and left their boots and coats under a long row of willows that stood bare and wispy along the banks of the canal. When Morley climbed down onto the ice, it was like her dream—the canal was framed by the high protective banks. She felt like she was a little girl again and had stepped onto her ceiling. She was standing on a narrow swath of ice that kept going as far as she could see. She could start skating and go on forever.
It was the greatest skate of her life. They sailed past farmhouses with roofs so low that they looked to be wearing great wool hats pulled almost to their eyes; past huge creaking windmills that Morley said reminded her of herons trying to take off. For an hour they saw no one, and then they went right through a village and saw an old man leading a donkey with panniers, and a dog pulling a cart, and a family pushing a baby carriage on wooden runners. Once in the middle of nowhere, an old man passed them going the other way. He was sitting on a contraption that looked like a wagon on blades, and he was rowing it along the canal with what Dave swore were cross-country ski poles with toilet plungers fastened to the end. There were footbridges to duck under and frozen intersections, where smaller canals branched off toward villages and towns. At each of these icy intersections was a sign nailed to a tree—a white arrow pointing into the gray distance—with something like LEYDEN 50KM painted on it in neat black letters. There were no automobiles. No Ski-doos. It was like being in the nineteenth century.
They ate lunch on the ice, at a cafe on a boat that was frozen under a leafless elm. No one could speak English, so they ordered by gesturing with their red fingers at meals on other tables.
Instead of getting what they thought they were pointing at, they each got a large meatball covered in gravy, a mug of thick hot chocolate, and a huge square of gingerbread. The waiter smiled at them as they ate. It was delicious. Dave could have sat there for the rest of the afternoon.
But Morley wanted to keep moving. She was thinking, Now I understand why people like to dance. Dave, who had been having trouble keeping up with her, laced up his skates wondering how to say “cardiac arrest” in Dutch.
An hour after lunch, Morley stopped for a rest. Dave was out of breath. “My feet hurt,” he panted. He flopped on the bank.
Morley said, “Stand up.”
Dave struggled up. Morley made him cross his arms over his chest. She skated behind him. “Lean back,” she whispered. He tipped his head back.
“All of you,” she said. “Trust me. I’m here.”
Dave leaned back into her arms, and she caught him and pushed him along the canal as if he were a statue. It started to snow. It was like skating through a painting. The snow was on their hats, their mittens, their sweaters. Everything was white, above and below them, the white sky and the white ice. Dave leaning back. Morley pushing, pushing.
They had waffles and hot cheese for supper, and bought a wooden toy that would move in the wind on their balcony.
On the plane, Dave carried the toy in his lap. He was being so careful not to knock it as he stood up to leave that he snagged the sweater Morley had knitted him on the side of his seat. He had taken four or five steps before he realized what had happened. The sweater had begun to unravel behind him. There was a strand of blue wool hanging from his waist that almost reached the floor. When he caught up to Morley, he was clutching the wooden toy and the line of wool was dangling behind him like a tail. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. He thrust the toy into her arms and turned around. They both stood in the middle of the walkway staring at the sweater. The man behind them said, “Excuse me,” and people started to push past them.
Morley reached down and gathered up the line of wool. They started to walk through the airport, Dave a step ahead of Morley like a kid on a line. They walked that way to the luggage carousel and out to the taxis. And they still walk like that today—attached, drifting apart sometimes, but never so far apart that one can’t reel the other one back.
&
nbsp; Valentine’s Day
There is something,” said Dave, “about standing at the bottom of the stairs and yelling at your kids to come eat dinner that I find upsetting.”
Morley was moving around the kitchen, straining potatoes, stirring beans, moving too fast for philosophy.
“Just get them,” she said, dropping a frying pan in the sink.
Stephanie was the first down, her hair tied half-up, a horrifyingly yellow potion setting on her face. She was wearing a pair of Dave’s boxer shorts and an oversize T-shirt that matched her face. She looked at the table, which Dave was in the process of setting, and said, “Why did you call me? It’s not ready yet.” Then she disappeared back upstairs.
An hour after dinner, she was still at the table, chewing on a stick of celery and painting her nails, balancing the brush on the table, picking up the celery, holding her fingers out in front of her, waving them in the air. Sam was sitting across from her, in another universe, chewing on a pencil and frowning at the math book in front of him. When the phone rang, no one moved. They all looked at Stephanie.
“Why are you looking at me?” she said.
Before Morley went to bed, she knocked on Stephanie’s bedroom door.
Stephanie was lying on her unmade bed, books spread around her and spilling off the bed, where they merged with a pile of dirty clothes that stretched to the empty laundry hamper in the corner. Stephanie was talking on the phone, listening to music, and apparently, working on homework.
“It’s time to say goodbye,” said Morley.
Five minutes later, she knocked again.
“Hang up,” she said, sticking her head in the room. And then, spotting her hairbrush on the bedside table, Morley walked in and picked it up.
“I’ve got to go,” said Stephanie into the phone. She lunged for the brush but was too late. “I need that,” she said to her mother.
Her hand was out, and they were both looking at the hairbrush, which Morley was holding close to her chest. Morley said, “It belongs in the bathroom.”
As she turned to go, Stephanie said, “There’s a Valentine’s dance on Saturday. I’m going with Paul Chalmers.”
“On a date?” said Morley, stopping at the door.
Stephanie was sixteen. Ever since she became a teenager, she had moved around the city—to movies, to parties, on shopping trips, even to the library, with a pack of friends. As far as Morley knew, she had never been on a date.
Morley looked at her daughter and smiled. “That’s wonderful, darling,” she said.
Morley had begun dating when she was twelve. She was pleased when Stephanie hadn’t shown any interest in boys during her early teenage years. But lately, she had begun to wonder when it was going to start. It was, she had thought, time.
Stephanie said, “It’s no big deal.”
Morley said, “Is he a nice boy? Do you like him?” What a stupid thing to say, she thought. She put the hairbrush down where she had found it, and she smiled. “Put it back when you’re finished, okay?” Then she said, “Well, it’s nice. That he’d ask you.”
Stephanie shrugged. “He didn’t ask me. I asked him.”
“Oh,” said Morley, her fingers fiddling absentmindedly with her lips. “Great.”
Morley was a child of the sixties. She believes in equality of the sexes. She thinks of herself as a feminist. Part of her was delighted her daughter was living in a world where she could do this. This powerful thing. Yet somewhere Morley felt an uneasy rumble of anxiety. The boys ask the girls. That was the rule she’d grown up with. Did her daughter have any idea how much the rules had changed? And had they? Was everybody else doing this? What would the boys think? Morley knew she shouldn’t feel this way. She knew this could make her a traitor to her generation, to her feminism, to her very sex. But she couldn’t help it. She didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about her daughter.
“Why am I feeling like this?” she asked Dave.
“Because it makes her vulnerable,” said Dave. “You don’t want her to be hurt.”
It was not as if the boys ask the girls rule had served Morley particularly well. As a girl, she had been subjected to an astounding number of doleful dates. Evenings she had spent with boys for whom the strongest emotion she felt was pity.
There was Colin, who, for weeks before he screwed up the courage to ask her out, rode his bicycle endlessly up and down the sidewalk in front of her house. This was when they were sixteen years old. When so many of them had their driver’s licenses that it wasn’t cool to ride a bike any more. What made it worse was that Colin used to pretend he was driving a bus: When he thought no one was looking, he would ring his bell and slam on his brakes, opening the bus doors to pick up passengers. He could make all the bus sounds with his mouth. And once the passengers were on, he would hiss and ride down the street. Until the bell rang and he had to let someone off again.
When Colin asked Morley out, she said yes. She was tired of being the only one who didn’t go out on weekends. She thought, Surely Colin will be better than no one. She was wrong.
They went to a movie—Carry On Doctor. The feature had hardly begun when Morley became aware of Colin’s hand inching toward her, creeping across the armrest in the darkness.
Colin was looking straight ahead as if he had no idea what his hand was doing, so Morley was able to watch its approach. She watched in dumbfounded fascination as his hand left the armrest and headed out into space—it was inching toward her hand, which was gripping her knee.
She watched Colin’s hand get closer and closer, and then, as it closed in, she held out her drink, watching as Colin’s hand sank into her Coke—up to the wrist—as if it were thirsty. Colin didn’t even flinch. Just as slowly as he had sunk his hand into her cup, he pulled it out, easing it inch by inch back into his lap, his gaze never leaving the screen. A few minutes later, Morley watched him wiping his fingers carefully between his knees.
Colin wasn’t even close to being the worst date in her life. There was the night she found herself sharing the sofa in Miriam Decker’s basement with Michael Casabon. To be that close to a face with that look is something that you never forget. She was sitting on the couch talking to Michael when she noticed his glasses had begun to fog up—for no apparent reason—and he seemed to be out of breath. Which struck her as peculiar, because he wasn’t moving. He was just sitting there with his arm around her shoulders. She wasn’t sure how it got there. Then she realized his face, with that faraway look, was moving closer and closer, and she knew what was happening and she knew that it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. It could have been any girl sitting there beside Michael. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—it was like a traffic accident. She didn’t dare move, not a muscle, even though the arm of the couch was digging uncomfortably into her back. She was afraid if she even shifted, Michael might take it as a sign of passion. And things could get worse.
Maybe the worst date in Morley’s life was with a boy called Bucky who moved in next door in the summer of 1968. Bucky was two years younger than Morley. He was fourteen years old when he asked if she wanted to go roller-skating. He said a whole gang was going. Morley had never roller-skated in her life, but Bucky said it didn’t matter. Everyone she knew was out of town, and Morley thought, Why not? I can ice-skate. I’ll be fine.
She didn’t understand that she was Bucky’s date until she was squeezed beside him in the front seat of his family’s Buick. The “whole gang” turned out to be Bucky’s tenyear old brother and his two friends. Bucky’s older brother, Chucky, eighteen, the boy Morley should have been dating, was dropping them off at the roller rink.
It was one of those hot summer nights. Morley was wearing shorts, and she could feel the backs of her legs sticking to the vinyl of the front seat. Everyone was teasing Bucky because he had a date, cracking jokes as if Morley weren’t in the car. All the way there, she kept lifting one leg and then the other, trying to keep them free of the seat. By the time t
hey got to the rink, she was feeling sick.
When they had their skates on, Bucky said they should hold hands, and Morley, who was surprised to find how unsteady she was, had no choice. So around and around they went—Morley, against all her instincts, clutching on to this boy who was four inches shorter than she was—praying that no one she knew would see her. The music stopped, and the man on the PA announced a couples-only contest. Bucky wanted to enter.
There were only four other couples standing on the concrete oval waiting for the music to begin. The girls were all wearing short skating skirts. The boys all looked as if they could toss their dates between their legs.
This didn’t seem to faze Bucky, but Morley drew the line and said she wasn’t going out. When Bucky couldn’t change her mind—and Lord knows, he tried—he disappeared, abandoning Morley, who had never been downtown in her life, in the noisy roller rink.
After trying valiantly to skate around a few times alone, Morley fell, and another girl landed on her and winded her. When she got her breath back, she started to cry. She couldn’t phone her father—he’d have a heart attack. Instead, she glommed on to Bucky’s baby brother and spent the rest of the evening with the ten-year-olds. She didn’t see Bucky again until eleven o’clock, when he mysteriously reappeared, just as his father arrived to drive them home.
Stephanie had heard all these stories before. More than once. It infuriated her that her mother seemed to believe that she was destined for a similar string of disasters. Stephanie didn’t intend to have the same experiences as her mother. Stephanie’s goal in life was to end-run all the disasters.
But you don’t learn about love from someone else. Love is experiential. You have to make your own mistakes.
If Morley knew some of the mistakes that her daughter had already made, some of the lessons she had learned, if she had any inkling of what a great act of courage it had been for Stephanie to ask Paul Chalmers to the Valentine’s dance, and then to suggest that he actually pick her up at home, it would have broken her heart. And she wouldn’t have felt so uptight about it.
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