by Nancy Thayer
“You know?” Sara snapped, emboldened by the alcohol. “How can you know? You told me you never wanted to have children!”
Fanny smiled, her eyelids lowered over her enormous blue eyes. “That’s not the only way to fail people. There are other ways.”
“How have you failed people?” Sara asked, aggressively. It was as if she were not to be denied her supremacy of self-pity.
“By not staying beautiful. By growing old.” Fanny’s voice was low now, and she looked down at her hands, where jeweled rings sparkled among the wrinkles.
“What?” Sara demanded. “What are you saying? In the first place, you are beautiful. In the second place, it’s not your fault that you’re growing older. Everyone grows older. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Yes, I can,” Fanny said. “Every bit as much as you can blame yourself for not getting pregnant.”
“But you’re wrong!” Sara cried. “Don’t you see? Growing old is natural! Not getting pregnant is not natural!”
“I’ve never thought that what was natural played a very large part in our twentieth-century society,” Fanny said.
“Oh, Fanny,” Sara said impatiently. “No one is going to blame you for getting older. No one is going to stop loving you because you’ve gotten older.”
“Aren’t they?” Fanny asked, and looked Sara directly in the eye. “Do you really think that if I went to Paris the young men would want to paint me nude now? Do you really think that when old friends see me, they don’t have pity in their faces? Can you actually look at the paintings on these walls and then look at me and tell me there isn’t an enormous change, one that causes everyone to treat me differently than they did when I was young?”
“But love isn’t based just on looks,” Sara persisted. “People will still love you even if you look older.”
“Then people will still love you even if you can’t conceive,” Fanny replied.
Sara looked at Fanny. “Yes,” she said, “but in a different way.”
“Yes,” Fanny echoed Sara. “In a different way.”
They sat in a slightly drunken silence, hearing the cars passing on Brattle Street, the cheerful repetitive chirping of birds. One of the dogs yawned and smacked its gums.
“I have not left this house for four years,” Fanny said, breaking the silence.
“Good God!”
“I can’t bear to go out. I cannot bear to be anonymous on the streets.”
“You could hardly ever be anonymous!” Sara protested.
“Do you think the young men look at me?” Fanny said. “Oh, I know that for a woman in her fifties I am attractive enough, like an old car that’s been kept clean and has no dents or chipped paint. People are always polite to me. But do you think that I receive the same kind of glances and smiles and replies that I got even ten years ago? Sara, ten years ago, I could still make a man in his twenties stammer when he spoke to me.”
“But those are strangers!” Sara said. “What about the people who know you? Who care for you, the person under all that beauty?”
“You would be surprised how very few of those people there are,” Fanny said. “And that’s my fault. I know it. I forfeited many friendships to my vanity.” She paused, looking off into some secret distance of her own. Then, laughing, gesturing with her hand, as if pushing aside a curtain, she said, “Well, can you imagine what I was like as a friend? Can you imagine that I ever let a girlfriend show up with a new handsome rich young man and didn’t try in my own very subtle way to get that man for myself? Then, of course, once I had the man enamored of me, I grew bored with him. It’s an old story, I’m not the only woman who ever spent her life that way. But it leaves one alone. You know, Sara, I’ve almost never had a woman friend who meant as much to me as you do. With whom I’ve spent so much enjoyable and intimate time.”
“There’s Eloise,” Sara offered, touched and yet saddened by Fanny’s confession.
“Eloise,” Fanny replied. “Well, she is something different. Eloise works for me, you know. She has been with me for years now. She has her duties. She has a responsibility to me. She is paid quite handsomely for what she does. Not that she doesn’t have some affection for me, as well, I suppose. I hope. Or perhaps not. Eloise sees me, you see, when I am—not in my best state. She protects me. I pay her for that. And she understands that she must be strict.”
Sara said nothing. She waited, hoping Fanny would explain more.
“Oh, my dear, look at you peering at me!” Fanny laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not a madwoman or a nymphomaniac. I don’t send Eloise out to procure young men for me, although don’t think I haven’t fantasized that now and then! No, it’s very simple that when I am depressed, when I need to be alone, to hide in my bedroom and study, Eloise is there to keep intruders out. She does the shopping, answers the door and the phone, keeps the house, and even, when I’m especially bad, opens the mail. And—and so on.”
“What do you mean—especially bad?” Sara asked.
Fanny smiled. “There are times,” she began, then paused. She began again. “We females all have times when we cry and cannot stop, or wake up and cannot find the energy or the reason to get out of bed. Or feel we must take some definite action to end our lives. Sometimes this sort of thing just lasts a little longer for me than for most people, that’s all.” She looked away. “Oh, you see,” she said, her voice suddenly serious, “there are days and days when I don’t know how I’m going to go on with my life, Sara. When I am so lonely, when I long to be with people, and I know I can’t go on living any longer in this solitude. That’s when Eloise is necessary; she sees to it that, well, that I do go on living. It’s not an easy job for her.”
“But you don’t have to be so lonely,” Sara said weakly. “Not someone like you.”
Fanny turned on Sara, angry now. “You would advise that I join a bridge club? Attend church and do good deeds? Perhaps join a center for the elderly?”
“Fanny, for heaven’s sake. I’m not thinking of anything like that. You could have lunch with Linda Oldham at Heartways House. She adores your work, she would love to take you out. And Donald James is longing to meet you. You could probably teach at one of the universities here, creative writing; the students would worship you, you could attend readings, you could give readings.”
“Don’t you understand that I can’t bear to have people see me as I’ve become?” Fanny said. She ran her hand across her forehead. “Oh, no, you don’t understand, of course you couldn’t. You have no idea of how much I had and how much I’ve lost.”
“I think you’re placing far too much emphasis on your looks,” Sara scolded. “This is crazy. Life isn’t just about how one looks.”
Fanny raised her head and smiled at Sara. It seemed her good humor had suddenly restored itself, but when she spoke her voice was cutting, “Well, we all have our obsessions, don’t we?”
Sara nodded bleakly. Was it possible that her obsession was as self-defeating and irrational as Fanny’s? She didn’t know; she couldn’t decide, not with two Bloody Marys inside her before noon. And my God, she thought, my God. How terrible that this wonderful talented woman would hate herself so much that she would try to commit suicide, that she could not go out among people. What could she do about it? How could she help?
“But we have gotten too deathly dull!” Fanny exclaimed. “You know, alcohol does have a depressing effect in the morning. We must cheer up. You must finish the story you were telling me when you had to leave last time. About the summer you and Julia spent in Europe after college.”
Sara took a deep breath. “Well,” she began, “we had Eurail passes—” At the back of her mind dark worries about Fanny clotted and surged just as the thick blood moved from her body, but she knew Fanny was right, there were times when the dark things must be ruthlessly shoved aside, the light forced in, or the spark of life would be extinguished.
In June and July, Sara and Steve had houseguests. Old college friends and their fami
lies. And Ellie and her husband, Jeff, and their two-year-old son. Secretly she hoped that being around her nephew for two weeks would trigger some hormonal release that would make her pregnant. Joey was a happy child who ran through life full-tilt. His affection for Sara and Steve was obvious, and by the end of his stay, he had established an early-morning habit of coming into their bedroom and rolling around like a puppy between them in their bed. Sara breathed in his fragrances—the sweet shampoo-smelling hair, the baby-powdered skin, and the dirty diaper. He snuggled against her and squealed with delight as she walked her fingers up his back—and she felt her body go warm and fluid with a special kind of love that was even a sort of lust.
Julia was their next guest, fortunately, because it was the end of July, and Sara’s period was starting again. Ellie had tried to persuade Sara not to be afraid of the laparoscopy. But Sara hated the thought of hospitals, needles, losing consciousness, losing control. There were too many risks, no guarantees. She was afraid she would die.
“Just last month,” she said, “there was a story in the news about a man who went to the dentist for oral surgery. He was terrified, but the dentist assured him he’d be all right. Well, the man was allergic to the anesthesia and died in the dentist’s chair! He lost consciousness, he didn’t have a chance.”
“But that’s a freak accident,” Ellie insisted. “That’s a one-in-a-million event.”
Still, Sara protested, still, and she kept protesting. What about air bubbles in needles? She had seen people killed that way, sadistically, in movies. What about unclean instruments? What about all those incompetent doctors who were being sued for malpractice?
Julia agreed with Sara. A feminist, she believed that it was because most of the doctors were male that all the tests and operations for sterility were done on the females. Just as the contraceptive burden lay on women.
“What are the statistics on this operation?” Julia asked. “Only about twenty percent of the women who have it get pregnant right afterward; they might have anyway. These quacks don’t have any proof that the operation really helps. It’s absolutely the old doctor-as-God routine, Sara; the old laying-on-of-hands bit.”
“Oh, Julia,” Sara said, sighing, “I suppose you’re right. Or maybe you’re not. Damn, how I wish I knew what to do!”
Whenever Sara sat talking about blood and risk to Ellie or Julia, she went quiet if Steve came in. She changed the subject. There was never a time that summer when she and Steve sat together, husband and wife, a couple united, and discussed their problem and Sara’s fear. Sara knew she had discussed her desire for pregnancy and her fears and sorrows a hundred times more deeply with Ellie and Julia than she had with Steve. And this worried her, but she did not know how to change it. Steve was an easy man to be around, but he grew solemn and stiff when certain subjects were mentioned, even embarrassed. She did not want to seem to be ganging up on him with another woman.
And it was a busy time for Steve; in the summer carpenters worked long hours, trying to finish their work before bad weather set in. When he came home, he was tired and sweaty and wanted to relax. And Sara was aware that for her at least making love when she was ovulating had become tinged with an almost dreary sense of duty, and the times after she ovulated, when she thought intercourse might damage a possible pregnancy, were times when she felt more anxious than anything else.
On their bedroom dresser in a silver frame was an eight-by-ten photograph that Julia had taken at midnight, after a Christmas party three years before. Steve was sitting at one end of the sofa, Sara lay with her head in his lap. One of Steve’s hands rested in her hair, the other on her rib cage, just under her breast. Thinking they were alone, Sara had reached up to stroke her husband’s face. There was such concord between them. Such lust and depths and needs and generosity.
All that was in the snapshot. It made Sara’s heart ache now to look at it, to remember that. For while they could not feel such abiding joy in each other every second—no one could—still, that had been the basis of their life together. Content, lust, love, harmony.
Now, was it gone? Now she remembered it, as if remembering a strain of music she had not recently heard. It was her fault, partly, even mostly; she had gotten into a state about her infertility and spent much of her time in grief or anger or bitterness or some sort of obsessional fit. But it was Steve’s fault, too, a little. If Sara’s anxieties and sorrows had swelled outward, filling the emotional atmosphere of their home with its tensions and glooms, just so had Steve withdrawn. It was all so subtle. He seemed just the same. But he had closed down from Sara, she could tell. She could not get him to admit that he ever, once, felt any sorrow or anger or anxiety about having or not having children. Now, all too often, when she tried to discuss it with him, he grew impatient, aloof. Sometimes it seemed to Sara that with every word she spoke, she shrank smaller and smaller, became a foolish child, while Steve grew taller and taller, quieter and quieter, until he towered above her, white and judgmental and bored, and she cowered beneath him, a quivering dwarf. She could not climb or squeeze into or even touch such a massive mountain of impassivity.
She knew that she had to do something, or better, something had to happen, or they would lose what they had together. They did not laugh so often in bed now. During the time she was ovulating, she insisted now that they make love with the lights off, to hide the fact that she could feel almost nothing, that her body was beginning to go numb. Other times, during her period and just afterward, when there was no chance she could get pregnant, she would be ravenous for him, she would pace the house, desiring him, needing him to come home, she would attack him when he came in the door, she would seduce him on the living room floor, and afterward, exhausted and replete, she would lie secretly thinking, Thank God, thank God, it still works for me, I haven’t lost all sexual desire.
Sometimes, as they sat eating dinner together, or watching TV, or reading, Sara looked at Steve and thought how she loved him. She loved him without any reservation, past any hope of change, completely and irrevocably. She loved him with a passion that life might test but never destroy. She was deeply afraid that his silences, his independence, his gradual withdrawing from her, meant that he did not feel the same.
She was terrified that he was changing. She did not know what to do.
Mick drove the group crazy in the summer. He showed up at every get-together with a different girl, some rich college girl with a tan and a trust fund who was there for the summer to have fun and get laid. When Mick and one of his girls came around, everyone else felt suddenly shriveled with age and responsibility; they saw themselves trapped and dull and fat. And they were, compared to those gorgeous girls, who sometimes drove him to their parties in their Porsches, who came from the south and said that “Daddy” was, oh, off in Italy now, or Daddy had taken Mummy on a cruise. On their own ship.
In August one of Mick’s girls invited the gang to a party on her parents’ yacht, which was anchored in Nantucket Harbor. It was as long as a battleship, with its own captain and butler and maids. Music of one’s choice was piped into the bedrooms below, which were larger and more luxurious than the ones the group had in their houses. There were almonds coated in silver leaf for guests to munch on. Mick’s girl had a thick braid of silver-and-gold hair that swung down to her waist. She wore a gold chain around her tanned, sleek ankle. She smiled with white teeth that would have dazzled any dentist. Her stomach was flat and she couldn’t keep her hands off Mick. When the group went swimming together one Sunday afternoon, taking coolers of beers and sodas, she swam far out into the ocean, unafraid, and lost the top to her bikini, and didn’t mind, but came casually, unaffectedly, out of the ocean, water dripping and glittering from her full, upward-pointing breasts. Men and women alike groaned aloud, with different kinds of envy.
Later, when Mick had gone off somewhere else with his Venus, the men played volleyball and the women sat in a cluster, watching their children make sand castles or wade in the surf. Here and t
here the youngest babies lay on beach blankets under umbrellas, naked, sucking bottles, their eyes closed, drowsy from the heat and bright light.
“I remember the days when my stomach was as flat as Mick’s girlfriends’s,” Jamie said, sighing. “Never again.”
“Maybe Mick will knock her up,” Carole said with a nasty grin. “Let’s sneak into his house some night and poke holes in his condoms.”
“Nice talk,” Annie Danforth said, laughing. “Listen, my stomach isn’t that flat and I haven’t had any babies. Lord, my stomach wasn’t that flat when I was eight!”
“We’re the pizza generation,” Carole said. “My parents told me that when they were growing up no one ate pizza. No one knew about it. I’m convinced that’s the reason I’m chronically overweight.”
Mary had just covered her two-year-old daughter’s bare skin with a light cotton blanket, shielding her from the sun’s rays. Mary was wearing a bikini, her breasts swelling, so that the top looked several sizes too small. “Well,” she said, smiling, “I’m going to get to forget about dieting for a while. For the next few months I can get away with looking fat—I’m pregnant again.” She grinned at the group, triumphant.
There were squeals of surprise and pleasure.
“Mary! How great! When is the baby due?” Jamie asked.
“March,” Mary said. “A nice little spring baby. It’s about time, my other two have been early-winter ones. But I’m going to need some winter maternity clothes.”
Everyone talked at once, offering clothes, asking questions, everyone but Sara, who sat falsely smiling, shocked, caught in a rage of envy that made her feel wild. She had to use every bit of energy to control herself, to control her face, her voice, to hide her trembling.
Not fair! Not fair! Not fair! Not fair! something inside her was screaming. Why does she get three babies and I get none?
“Did you plan this baby?” Jamie asked Mary.
Mary laughed. “Jamie, come on. Are you kidding me? I’ve never planned any baby. In fact they’ve all been accidents. I just think about sex and get pregnant.”