Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  In the gray flavorless hospital room where she recovered for the first few days, Charles reading or dozing in the corner chair, flowers and treats left by visitors bringing color to the place, Flannery held this warm, small life, wrapped in a nurse-folded blanket or pressed nakedly against her skin and nursing, her new eyes closed and her sweet hungry mouth learning how to feed — and she toppled helplessly into love with her. Willa, Flannery murmured to their girl, in the hospital; back at home, in the small bedroom upstairs where Flannery slept for the first months, near the bassinet, so she could rise at any hour to tend to the beloved creature. Willa, Willa. The name itself was a lullaby, easy to sing.

  This tiny treasured child stirred something within Flannery that she had not known to expect. How blind, again, not to have foreseen this! What had she imagined about motherhood? Love, of course, exhaustion, responsibility — and joy, and pride. She had read of all that. Flannery had not suspected, though, that this altering passion for another person would have all the same symptoms as the other kind. Everything you saw reminded you of her; you thought about her all the time; the world’s other shades faded next to the implacable brightness of the one you loved. Her name was always on your tongue, the sound of her breath and her noises were tunes that played on a loop in your inner ear, her scents and textures were so familiar to your senses they were the fundamental atmosphere. You held her in your arms, even when you didn’t.

  Now it was Willa. Once, it had been Anne.

  19

  Flannery, siblingless, counted her friends as her family and her mother as her only actual parent. Lenny, though at least a person she knew existed, remained most vivid on the pages of Flannery’s book. She received periodic emails from him, generally with links to animal videos or occasional rambling political reflections. A week after she had sent out a brief general email about Willa’s birth, she received a one-line note back from Len: YOWZAH!!!!

  Most who could expressed their congratulations in person. People trooped through the house on Ashbury Street after Willa was born, offering their advice and admiration, their snacks and their blankets. Flannery didn’t know this ritual. Few of her friends had had children yet, she hadn’t grown up in a community with many babies in it, and she felt as though she were visiting a country whose religion she had only read of, a place more vibrant and lively than she had expected.

  Flannery’s cousin Rachel came to the door with her ringletted three-year-old Claudia, who stiff-armed a soft cotton-candy-pink bunny in Flannery’s direction though it looked from her pout as though she would rather have kept it herself. In Rachel’s cashmere arms was an aluminum dish of lasagna, and though Flannery had never been much of a lasagna eater before, she found now that she was an everything eater and accepted the dish gratefully, along with Rachel’s lengthy tips on getting the baby to sleep through the night. Charles’s nice architect and pianist friends, whose children were teenagers (an unimaginable age, and dimension), brought pumpkin scones and a soft gray cap with mouse ears; Susan Kim had bags of fragrant Korean barbecued beef and a teething ring in the design of a shark. ‘Other people can do the teddy bears,’ she announced. A colleague of Flannery’s from the art school brought wine for the parents and rusks for the baby, saying, with a little chuck under Willa’s chin, ‘This is how it goes, kid: the grown-ups get all the good stuff. You might as well know that now.’

  By the time Flannery’s college friend Nick showed up with his sleek-skinned Greek boyfriend, a felt ball that played a musical jingle, and a spread of delicious meze, Flannery was almost overwhelmed.

  ‘More swag! Thank you,’ she stage-whispered, as Willa had just gone down for a nap. Flannery ushered the men into the living room, where Charles’s Roche Bobois looked on disapprovingly at the collecting pool of pastel and polyester objects scattered on the Turkish carpet. ‘I wasn’t expecting all this. When you publish a book, people don’t bring you stuff. They congratulate you, but they don’t feed you.’

  ‘No,’ Nick said. ‘They just come to your launch party and drink.’

  ‘And nobody asks to hold the book. You don’t pass it around.’

  ‘Which is why it feels really overlooked, and has to go to therapy later, when it grows up. Where’s Charles?’

  ‘At the studio.’

  Nick tilted his ashy blond head and raised a questioning brow at her, as only an old friend can.

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ Flannery answered his wordless question. ‘I don’t mind having some time to myself with Willa. Charles has a lot of work to do.’ In response to the continued look, Flannery said more firmly: ‘He does the meet-and-greet in the morning with whoever is here. But afternoons he has to go to the studio.’

  Nick nodded, looked around the home, took in the shape of Flannery’s life. Possibly swallowing some other thought, the boy she once thought had a crush on her said simply: ‘I can’t believe you got to parenthood before I did, Jansen. You always were secretly competitive.’ He gave Stavros a sideways embrace after he said it, and the two men exchanged a tender moment that did not require her.

  When Willa woke up a little later with a rhythmic cry, Nick did indeed ask to hold her. Flannery cooed a moment in private over Willa, lifted her from the bassinet, then handed her baby to her old friend, who received the bundle with the appropriate solemnity — and humor. He chuckled and chatted over her.

  ‘Everyone’s a winner, Nico,’ Flannery said as she watched Nick’s gentle, fathering hands. ‘And anyway, you’ll catch up.’

  20

  Flannery’s mother came frequently, of course, driving up from her modest home on the Peninsula. Charles’s mother had died of lung cancer several years before he and Flannery met, and he was in scarce contact with his father in Ohio, so Willa was a girl with a single present grandparent.

  Now in her sixties, unmarried, a few years away from retiring from the high school, Laura Jansen’s face gently sagged but was still pretty, her weathered skin creased mostly by kindness, her undyed hair the shade of sandy driftwood, streaked off-white with the tracings of sea creatures, or years. Laura was perplexed by but tolerant of her daughter’s shifting choices, and had a formal respect for the man Flannery had married, without necessarily understanding either his work or his attraction. She had never been a baby person, Flannery recalled noticing at a family gathering after Rachel’s child was born, but Laura was interested in people and their stories, and as her granddaughter grew older, she happily read picture books to her, listened to the girl’s tales and opinions, and wandered hand in hand with her to story hour at the local library.

  For the moment, Laura nestled Willa gingerly until she started crying, then handed her back with visible relief. Charles, trying perhaps to establish his paternal standing with his mother-in-law, took Willa and walked with her, rocking her. This did not happen altogether often, Flannery quietly knew, but she saw her mother registering Charles’s thick, loving arms holding the tiny girl. A complex cloud moved over her mother’s face that had in it memory and wistfulness, both.

  ‘I’ve told you about the trip I took with you to Italy, haven’t I?’ Laura said to Flannery, though the question was really aimed at Charles.

  ‘Tell it again,’ her daughter said.

  ‘Well. You were ten months old, and a girlfriend of mine was living for a term in Florence.’ That Don Lennart, as Flannery ironically named him, had deserted Laura shortly before Flannery was born was a fact the single mother skipped over. ‘Jennifer said I had to come visit, though I’m not sure her husband was completely thrilled to have a baby wailing in their tiny apartment. You were quite a loud little thing!’ Laura watched Charles holding Willa, whose cries had turned to hiccups and were subsiding. The part of this story Flannery had always least enjoyed was how piercing her own scream had been as an infant. It was a bit late to apologize for it now.

  ‘I’ll never forget,’ her mother laughed ruefully, ‘taking the train fro
m Florence to Rome. I realized I needed to give Jennifer and David a break so I thought I could manage an overnight in Rome, alone. With you.’ Laura winced at her own naive determination. She had been brave then. In 1975. ‘But I had left the bag of diapers on the train, when I got off. So there I was in the Rome train station, your lovely yellow onesie was soiled and you were crying, and I sat on a bench trying to clean you up — to fashion a cloth diaper from one of your little sleepers, sweetie — and making a godawful mess of it.’ As she rolled her eyes up to the high living room ceiling, Laura’s face was the young mother’s again. ‘A Roman conductor came up to me, waving his hands, in more despair than I was, saying, “È un disastro! È un disastro!”’ Laura did the big Italian hand gestures, which fascinated little Willa. ‘Of course, seeing that I was without a man, he then tried to pick me up.’

  Charles laughed obligingly, though Flannery could see from her husband’s face that his thoughts were elsewhere. She could read him well by now, see from the interior focus of his eyes that his mind was traveling over a problem from his work. He disguised it well enough that Flannery’s mother felt merely flattered by the loud barked laugh of his response. She glowed.

  ‘That must have been tough, doing all that alone.’ Flannery was wearied by midnight feedings, but made herself smile at the familiar story.

  ‘Oh, it was!’ Laura said, almost gaily. ‘Luckily I was still young, and didn’t know any better. You can be braver, really, when you don’t know what you’re doing.’

  Flannery leaned across and hugged her mother from a mixture of impulses, among them sympathy and apology (she was sorry to have caused her such trouble, thirty plus years before); though also, given recent argumentative outbursts at the Ashbury Street house, another feeling was folded in there too.

  How hard it must have been, to do all this alone; yet on the other hand, there might have been moments when it was simpler, and purely sweet.

  21

  Flannery’s daughter had a father.

  This was a novelty.

  Flannery saw, even drained as she was by her paradigm-shifting exhaustion — when a new mother believes she has sunk so far into sleep debt that it would require a government bailout, or intervention by the World Bank, to extract her — that her daughter had a father. Daily, that small miracle nourished Flannery. Charles held Willa and he cherished her, and Flannery had not in her own childhood known a man’s holding or his cherishing. How else could A Visit to Don Lennart have moved so many, and sold so well? The ache at the heart of that story, her fatherless melancholy, gave Flannery’s otherwise wry, jaunty tale of adventure and pilgrimage its salt and its truth.

  A doer, an actor, Charles liked taking Willa places, even when she was tiny. He left the hands-on tasks — feeding, bathing, dressing — mostly to Flannery. This division was more unexpectedly lopsided than Flannery felt comfortable admitting to her friends, or sometimes even to herself, since when she did bring it up with Charles he responded to her perceptions with caustic disbelief. (‘Is that a line from the feminist playbook?’ he asked her once during a tart exchange about the unequal share of diaper changing. It proved an effective silencer.) But he did get their daughter out into the world, proudly pushing the sleek navy stroller that contained her, and enjoying the way strangers admired and smiled at a baby in a stroller, as well as the parent accompanying her. He liked taking her places not specifically separated out for children, so avoided playgrounds and toddler pools, but happily walked with Willa past the tattoo parlors and used-clothing stores of Haight Street, the exotic botanical gardens at Golden Gate Park, or art museums, galleries, art shops, hardware stores. By the time Willa was three, the hardware store was one of her favorite outings with Daddy, who indulgently let her pick up objects in the carpentry aisle, encouraging her to feel the texture of sandpaper, or even the heft of a hammer.

  Daddy: hearing her daughter speak those two syllables re-arranged something within Flannery, fixed one of her inner workings, got some fundamental emotional mechanism to run more smoothly. She was forever grateful to Charles for that, and when her husband aggravated or disappointed her, demeaned her even, she reminded herself of this shift, and how permanent it was.

  ‘You won’t have the same material as me, sweetheart,’ Flannery whispered into her daughter’s perfect mollusk ear, as she splashed and cleaned her in the evenings in the large and elegant claw-foot tub. There, too, Charles’s previously tasteful arrangement of soapstone dishes on a weathered wooden cabinet had been brought downmarket by Willa’s brightly colored frog sponge, her waterproof Dr. Seuss books, and the bubble bath that smelled of fake strawberries. ‘You already have a very different story from mine.’

  Willa might have nodded had she been older, but at that tender age she simply grew, as children do, into herself, as the particular braid of nurture and nature came together to form her.

  From her father Willa inherited an infectious laugh, an urge to build, and a knack for playing with Legos that set her apart from her princessed peers. (She was focused, careful, and inventive as she wove imaginative tales in and out of her constructions.) Her dark eyes; her dimples; her square feet. From her mother she received thick fair hair; the ability to sit still, to observe and remember; a will not to do the done thing; strong teeth, and a smile that brought abrupt light to an otherwise serious, worry-tending face.

  From both her parents, or more precisely how they were together, Willa acquired an innate uneasiness, borne of the unarticulated reality that neither father nor mother, given their own angled histories, knew properly what it was to be a family. They were attempting roles for themselves and the others in their triangle, as if posing constantly for hidden cameras. Husband and wife, father and mother — parts that Charles and Flannery had, after a few months of sex and camaraderie, pledged to play, in the presence of a dutiful bureaucrat one Valentine’s Day at City Hall. Scriptless, they were improvising, with mixed results.

  22

  È un disastro.

  Of a different kind. In the spring, when Willa was six months old, this small family traveled to New York for a dinner in Charles’s honor ahead of a new show of his preparatory drawings and maquettes at his Upper East Side gallery. They stayed in a chic hotel in midtown that had nothing to do with children. Charles’s choice. Arriving early in the morning after a difficult night flight, during which the pain in Willa’s ears caused her five hours of distress, a predicament about which she alerted the entire airplane with her piercing cries (though Charles was able to sleep through the racket, as the misleading phrase had it, like a baby), Flannery was unable to shake off her intense, nerve-frayed irritation at the throbbing music playing in the hotel lobby and the sinister nightclub red of the front desk lighting. How were these appropriate notes of welcome for her and her infant? She was uncharacteristically short-tempered and fussy about the room not being ready and their lack of a cot for Willa, while the gel-haired hipster at the reception desk fielded her complaints with a restrained voice that had within it, Flannery couldn’t help feeling, the chilly implication that such problems were her own fault for getting pregnant in the first place. She stood holding a sleepy, disgruntled Willa against her, and felt awkward and ignorable, like the help that had been brought along to carry the bags and child, while Charles, large and benevolent, stood for ten enthusiastic minutes with some suited professional he’d met leaving the hotel who had to ask if he was Charles Marshall, whose pieces at the Whitney a few years earlier he had much admired. ‘Oh, you saw those?’ Charles boomed to the man warmly. ‘Well, thank you. Yeah, I was pleased with how they hung that show. And tell me, what did you think of . . . ?’

  So the visit continued. Midtown was a foreign world to Flannery, who knew only the Village, Tribeca, carvings of Brooklyn — certainly not these broad avenues with people who were older, richer and straighter than any Flannery used to brush up against in that city. Flannery was a wife in this Manhattan, and when
she met other wives at the gallery she was unpracticed in how to talk to them. She was not yet fluent in Wifese. Flannery decided that when she returned to San Francisco, she had better join a moms’ group, so she could learn at least one of these new tongues. She knew she could pick it up; she was a quick study.

  Certainly up here on Madison or Fifth, near horse-drawn carriages driving tourists around the park and manicured men and women carrying shopping bags, Flannery felt a more than geographic distance away from the streets of Soho, and any ghosts of hers who might still walk there. In her old life and a previous self, Flannery once chance-encountered on Prince Street a charismatic woman with auburn hair and a dry, delicious intelligence whom she had never stopped adoring. Flannery had tried in those few affectionate but awkward minutes to show off that she knew New York now, worked and lived there (while Anne’s partner, a silvered professor named Jasper, stood beside her, waiting patiently); but now Flannery saw that the New York she had known then was not the same as the one where she was staying now. Her single effort to meet an old work friend for dinner one evening in Chelsea was thrown off by a last-minute cancellation by the babysitter about whom Flannery had anyway been dubious, seeing as the recommendation came from a hotel which clearly wished children harm. At that point Flannery wrote off this trip as a visit to Charles’s New York, not her own, and made peace with how strange it all was to her.

  In the end, non è stato un disastro totale. With Willa alongside her, Flannery did manage the one crucial dinner with Charles’s Manhattan coterie, where he was celebrated and toasted. Charles swelled handsomely in such light. His size suited him then; in fact, it seemed the only appropriate shape for someone of his accomplishments. Even through the miasma of jet-lagged exhaustion, Flannery admired her husband’s ease and success in these different arenas — social, artistic, sartorial (Charles wore an elegant Italian charcoal suit, that made you realize that he was a man of Venice, Rome, New York, not only provincial San Francisco). Flannery laughed along with the rest at Charles’s jokes, smiled and nodded at Jeffrey’s praise of him, then retired early to the minimalist gray hotel room where she and Willa could shelter far from the fame and the fashion.