Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  I sat on the sofa arm, wearing a long white cotton dress with colorful embroidered flowers along the side. It was my compromise wedding dress, white but hippie-ish, like a dress for a Woodstock wedding. I should have been angry at the groom for being so late, but I was more scared than angry.

  The night before, the phone rang just as I was getting ready for bed. It was Janey, calling from Wisconsin, where all my friends had stayed for the summer. I hadn’t seen her since May, when I left Madison for a job in New York. I had already been accepted to NYU Film School, which I was scheduled to start in a few weeks.

  Janey was blunt. “You don’t have to do this,” she said, for the tenth or twentieth or thirtieth time. “You can just live with him. Why don’t you just live with him?”

  “I want to get married.” We had been around this for the last three weeks, ever since I announced that Lenny and I were marrying in a couple of weeks, so we could be settled in a new apartment before school started.

  “You’re nineteen, for God’s sake! You’re too young to get married.” My friends took turns calling in their objections, night after night, but they all said the same thing and none of it changed my mind: You’re too young, you hardly know him, just live together. You should wait, and think about it—what’s the rush? No one gets married at nineteen anymore. You don’t live in a trailer park!

  Sometimes they altered their objections, from You are too young to He is too old. Lenny was twenty-nine, exactly ten years older than me. He was a lawyer. He owned—and wore—suits. To my friends this was as exotic as if he wore a kilt or a dhoti. They thought he was old, and square, and very not-for-me. He read the New York Times, which doesn’t even have comics, my friends whined. He plays golf, they said, as if he disemboweled chickens. I couldn’t explain it to them because I couldn’t explain it to myself. If it doesn’t work out, I thought (but never articulated, even in my own head), I’ll just get divorced. I’m young enough. Even if we’re married five years, I’ll still be only twenty-four when I’m single again. I was getting married to Lenny, despite my friends’ pleas, despite my age, despite my mother’s blatant joy, which was the one thing that made me hesitate.

  I was certainly not getting married to escape Madison. My first two years of college had been wonderful. Freedom, friends, days at my disposal, nights to enjoy; it was bliss. Even the misery, the overwhelming, powerful, dramatic adolescent misery, was wonderful, because it was my misery, my drama. I was having—at long last—a life.

  I loved Madison, the flat, scruffy, friendly campus, the lakes that anchored the town, the old stone buildings climbing Bascom Hill. I loved ugly cinder-block Witte Hall, and Janey, my roommate, and I loved the dilapidated red house on Chandler Street, where I lived sophomore year with four other women. We pulled straws for the room choices and I won an L-shaped corner room that overlooked an overgrown patch of rhubarb that we picked and cooked for hours with massive amounts of raw sugar into a sticky pulp that hurt our teeth when we spread it on the wheat bread we bought from the food co-op. We lived on grainy, thick bread and cheese—cheese was cheap in Wisconsin—baked potatoes with cheese, pasta with cheese, and sometimes a stray vegetable or fruit.

  We ate those things. We lived on romance, and books we read and reread, and loud music and pot and dancing in the living room to Bette Midler till 2:00 a.m., and boys with guitars and Cat Stevens scruff who looked sad because they knew it made them look sexy. We convinced ourselves—through our tears, our sleepless nights, and our pain—that without the lows there would never be highs: that the pain was essential to the pleasure.

  Even though I loved the roller coaster, there was a part of me that was always watching, always judging. I decided this was because I was a writer. The theory of the one-third, I called it, the belief that part of me was always observing and recording. It was the same old emptiness, really; I’d just learned how to dress it up in fancy ideas.

  I’d met Lenny a year before in the legal department of the company my friend Linda worked for. I was a secretary for the summer, wearing dresses I borrowed from my mother, and pantyhose that itched in the heat. The job felt pretend, but I liked making money, and I liked the people there, who were older and seemed glamorous. They went to Puerto Rico for long weekends and after work gathered at a bar for drinks, instead of someone’s dorm room to pass a joint. Lenny and I didn’t go out, alone, until the very end of the summer, just a week or two before I went back to school. He invited me to a Judy Collins concert in Central Park, and dinner beforehand at a restaurant near Lincoln Center. He lived in a brownstone just off Central Park West, right where I had always wanted to live.

  He seemed as different from the boys I knew at school as a Manhattan skyscraper is from a clothing-optional commune. He was confident and strong. He made me feel safe. He made me feel grown-up. He made me feel real.

  In my parents’ living room nearly an hour had passed, and the judge was tipsy. I had asked him two things: to please say “love and honor” instead of “love and obey” and to say “husband and wife” instead of “man and wife.” I was pretty sure he had forgotten, and made a mental note to remind him—if the groom ever arrived.

  My mother refilled glasses and put out more cheese and crackers. She was so nervous she spilled a few drops of champagne onto the beige shag rug. My wedding, clearly, was more important to her than it was to me. Linda’s father had come to take pictures of the ceremony, and my mother sent him away. “Lenny’s been delayed,” she said, as if we’d heard some news of him.

  Lenny’s brother and “little sister,” as he called her, even though she was a year older than me, talked quietly on the couch. They were weighing the odds, I thought—was he backing out? Had he changed his mind? His mother was wearing a long dress, even though we were in someone’s living room, not a church, and going out to dinner at a local restaurant afterward, not to a hotel ballroom.

  My mother wanted the hotel ballroom and the long dress. She wanted two hundred people and a rabbi and a cantor and piles of presents from everyone whose children she had given presents to over the years. But she tossed it all away with hardly a whimper, because the fact that I was getting married—to a nice guy, to a grown-up, to a lawyer—made up for all of it.

  Three weeks earlier when we made our announcement, my mother had gone into overdrive. She pulled out a guest list that she’d been working on for years, maybe since I was adopted. She booked the temple and started calling hotels to see which function rooms were free. She spent a day at Kleinfeld in Brooklyn, scouting wedding gowns.

  A few days later, we held the first meeting of the parents at the Jaeger House, an old-fashioned German restaurant my father liked in Manhattan’s Yorkville, then a German neighborhood. Lenny’s parents were early. Mine were earlier. Everyone was nervous. His parents were Italian Catholics, and mine were Russian/ Austrian Jews. But that was the only difference. They were both comfortably middle-class, striving, self-conscious immigrant families. By the time Lenny and I arrived, his father and mine had discovered they had served in the same regiment in Europe. Everyone was old friends, until the subject of who would perform the wedding ceremony came up.

  “A rabbi,” my mother said, as if there could not be other options.

  “A priest,” Lenny’s father said. “The men in my family have been married by Catholic priests for a thousand years.” Lenny’s father was nearly as proud of his Italian heritage as my mother was of her Jewish one, although she couldn’t claim roots that went back to the Roman Empire, as he often did.

  My mother, to whom a priest was one step removed from a shaman with a bleeding sheep’s entrails in his hands, looked at him as if he had suggested a moon man.

  “My daughter should be married by a rabbi,” she said.

  “My son will be married by a priest,” Lenny’s father said.

  Lenny and I looked at each other. “Actually,” he said into the silence. “We want to be married by a judge.”

  No one was pleased by this idea.<
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  “We could have a priest and a rabbi,” Lenny’s father said, “if we could find a priest who’s willing.”

  My mother bristled. Willing? A priest should be honored!

  Before she could speak, I opened my mouth. “We were thinking about eloping,” I said. “This seems like too big a deal. Eloping will be much easier.”

  Suddenly everyone was in agreement.

  “Eloping? No, no, that’s not a good idea,” my mother said.

  “A judge isn’t so bad,” his father said. “My brother can do it, he’s a judge.”

  “I know a judge in White Plains,” my mother said. She gave up her rabbi, but she wasn’t allowing in more of his family.

  “Fine, fine,” his father said, and everyone drank happily. We would be married by my mother’s judge from White Plains in her living room, in front of just the immediate family, and Lenny’s two roommates.

  In the living room, Lenny’s roommates had not yet arrived; they were driving up with the groom. Lenny’s father began to pace. He disguised it as best as he could, picking up a handful of nuts from one table, then checking out the fireplace at the other end of the room. After an hour, my future brother-in-law and sister-in-law fell silent, and even my mother’s Herculean efforts to keep the conversation aloft started to fail her.

  Sitting in my corner of the brown sofa, my stomach ached with fear. I had worked so hard, but he’d figured it out. I’d held my breath for months. I had asked him— asked him—to marry me. (“I think we should get married,” I’d said to him three weeks earlier, in his parents’ living room. “It’ll be good to be settled before school starts.” “Okay,” he answered. Okay.) I had convinced him, somehow, to love me. I had made him believe that I was sane and normal and real—just like everyone else.

  People, I realized much later, marry for right reasons as well as wrong ones. The right reasons are simple: You love him, he loves you; he supports your goals and dreams. You share the same values. He makes you happy. He makes you feel whole.

  I knew my right reasons. I loved Lenny: I loved the way he made me feel. I loved his generosity, his dependability, his decency. I loved that he understood movies better than I did, even though I was the film student; that he swam like a fish; that he loved good food and travel and was always willing to give someone a second chance. I loved his remarkable confidence, I loved that he loved me.

  But the wrong reasons often remain subterranean, sometimes for a lifetime. Maybe your wrong reason was a repetition of the past. Your father drank; you marry a druggie. Your mother’s a narcissist; your wife is unloving. Your father was distant; your husband cheats.

  I knew, without really knowing, that I was in search of a replacement for my often absent father. But I had no idea why else I was marrying, what my wrong reasons were.

  “Do you have anything in common? Do you want the same things?” Janey asked me. “Of course we do!” I huffed. But I had no idea what my values were, what I wanted, or who I was. My wrong reasons were so far beneath the surface that it took me years to even recognize their existence.

  The judge’s eyes were starting to close. My brother had gone off to watch television; my mother stood nervously at the window. She started to turn away, probably to finally say what we were all thinking, when a little green Fiat pulled into the driveway.

  Lenny got out of the backseat, where he’d been lying down. His two roommates helped him to the front door. Apparently, the bachelor party had gotten a little out of hand, and all three had been sick for hours. No one said anything about how late they were. Though Lenny was drawn and looked exhausted, he managed to stand through the short ceremony. The judge slurred our names and forgot the two things I asked him to say. I could barely look at Lenny, who was greenish-gray and swaying.

  The judge pronounced us “man and wife” and we kissed, barely. My new sister-in-law and brother-in-law hugged us, but my mother pushed them aside. She threw her arms around Lenny, tears in her eyes for the first time I could remember.

  “Thank God!” she said to him. “She’s your problem now!”

  I was too stunned by everything to react. Doesn’t matter, I thought to myself. I’m married now, I’m an adult. I’ve drawn the line between my mother and me. This is the end of something and the beginning of something else.

  What’s the rush? my friends asked. Live with him a while, see how it works out. But I had to marry him now, fast, before he changed his mind, before he found out the truth, before he got past the surface that I spiffed and polished just for him— before he saw underneath and discovered the real me. Though I wasn’t sure who she was, I knew she definitely was not someone anyone would ever want to marry.

  13. BUNNY

  WITH CHILD

  [Menstruation] has been called the weeping of a disappointed uterus.

  When the uterus is not disappointed, menstruation is suppressed

  through a change in the maternal hormone balance,

  and the spongy lining continues to build up throughout pregnancy

  to maintain a hospitable environment for the baby.

  GERALDINE LUX FLANAGAN

  THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF LIFE

  Back in New York, I made an appointment for Jake and me to see Dr. Ennis together. In his office, at his behest, we did the math: The baby had been conceived in February or March. This was July. An abortion was out of the question; it was too late. He reminded us that abortion was legal in various countries in Europe. Why hadn’t we done that? Now it was too late: We were here.

  He suggested adoption, and gave us the name of a lawyer who could arrange it for us. We could be paid for the baby. We went to see the lawyer, and after a long conversation, he turned us down because, he said, I would never go through with it. He could tell by my face.

  In retrospect, what happened seems inevitable. When you travel without a map, your path may seem accidental; but sometimes when you arrive at your destination and look back, you can see that every turning brought you closer to where you wanted to be. When you don’t know where you’re going, my professor at Antioch had said, in a different way, any road will take you there.

  It was in that way that I found the Louise Wise Planning Service for Jewish Young Women, in the Yellow Pages under “Adoption.”

  Jake and I each saw a counselor at the agency once a week. We explored the issues of adoption, and the procedures we would be going through. The baby would spend the first few months with a foster mother, to be sure it was healthy and doing well before it was adopted. The foster mother would be as carefully chosen as the adoptive parents. We could name the baby; the adopting parents would change its name, but they would keep the initial. We would be given some broad, general information about the couple who adopted the baby.

  Neither Jake nor I believed the baby to be his. “You need to explore this,” the counselor told each of us separately. “If you’re going to stay together, you should examine this question. Why are you both so unwilling to think the baby might be Jake’s?”

  We didn’t have an answer, and we didn’t want to explore the question and find one. It was not something either of us felt safe enough to talk about. It had never been mentioned between us at any point—in Paris, or now. We both assumed the baby was Quint’s, and we never talked about it. I still find it hard to talk about. For Jake, it must have been even harder.

  Why did he stay with me through all this if he believed the baby wasn’t his? He has said he stayed because that made him—finally—the good guy in our story.

  I think it was more complicated than that. There’s always a payoff, and there’s always a price. I’m certain the price was high, but I don’t know what the payoff was for Jake. His own answer must be part of the reason, but there must also be more. Perhaps he simply wanted to help me; perhaps he wanted to act as if—or even, in a way, to believe—the baby were the child of his own conceiving. Perhaps there was a bit of adventure for him in what we were going through. Perhaps it was more comfortable than leav
ing and starting over; perhaps he really did love me or need me; or perhaps he thought that he did. I think there’s more that I didn’t understand then and can’t know now, because whoever Jake is or may have been, he is almost as far beyond my understanding and knowledge now, when I no longer know him or need him, as he was then, when I thought I knew him so well and believed that I needed him so much.

  It seemed to me then that he was not much interested in the baby, and that he was only slightly interested in me. Maybe he was staying because it was convenient. In that case, we were together because we were together. My hope was that things would get better. Hope, Emily Dickinson said, is a thing with feathers, and it hadn’t flown away yet.

  Four months before the baby was due, Jake found an apartment with four rooms, parquet floors, a skylight in the bathroom, a working fireplace, in a walk-up on the fourth and top floor of a small building on Second Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets. The rent was $69 a month.

  Jake bought a flush door for a desk, another for a table, a wrought-iron frame with a foam rubber slab for a couch, a bed, and two wicker chairs. He found a cat, a beautiful gray kitten we named Hollis, because her mother’s owner was the daughter of Admiral Holly, whose statue stands in Washington Square Park. I registered with a temporary work agency. Jake started looking for a job.

  For prenatal care, I went to an outpatient clinic at New York Hospital. The expectant mothers learned exercises and relaxation techniques, and were told about the stages of labor. We waddled through the halls, looking at the labor rooms and the delivery rooms. I liked being with all these women who were not hiding their pregnancies, who were happy about their babies, whose husbands were proud.

  I remember taking the bus up First Avenue to the hospital. I sat in the waiting room at the clinic, listening for my name to be called, and, when it was, I undressed in a little cubicle like the bathhouse lockers at Jones Beach, or a fitting room in an old department store: a square space with a bench across the back, hooks on the wall, and a curtain for privacy. I remember having my pelvis measured—ample!—and a series of young doctors leaning over me, a different one at each visit, to listen to my baby’s heartbeat.