The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s because you’re an artist. You need light and landscapes. But I’m just grateful to have a desk and a quiet place to think.”

  At first I was dedicated to contacting real estate agents, but then I gave up. All the empty, available places tended to be in dangerous neighborhoods, the kind with drug addicts lying in the streets. The late 1970s was not a good time for the city. President Ford had refused to bail New York out, and it looked as if everything would just go under. Jeremiah and Carly said it would be ridiculous for us to leave, when we all got on so well together.

  And we did. Carly was wonderful to me. She had a throaty, exciting voice and a way of confiding in me that made me feel as though we would someday be old friends. One day she told me that she and Jeremiah were better when they lived communally. “It makes us behave,” she said. “I can’t seem to do marriage in private. Over the years, I’d say our best years have been when we had spectators.”

  “What does she mean by that?” I asked Jeremiah, and he laughed his easy, intimate laugh and said it meant they didn’t fight as much because they didn’t want to argue in front of other people. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Carly is kind of, uh, a passionate person. She can scream and carry on, and when she’s alone with me, I seem to bring out all her fury, for reasons I can’t seem to help. So—and you’ll love this—you know what we call you and Grant when you’re not around? The ‘marriage saviors.’ If we make it to our golden anniversary, I promise you there’ll be a special plaque with your names on it.”

  I LOVED living with children, even though they were exhausting and opinionated and not toilet trained and showed no signs of ever becoming civilized humans. Still, they made me laugh a hundred times a day. They were both cherubic, with Carly’s red hair and Jeremiah’s huge blue eyes, and deliciously fat, golden bellies, and when they were sleeping or cuddling with you while you read to them, you could almost forget that they could turn into rampaging maniacs with no warning whatsoever, fighting over toys and screeching and spilling milk and flinging food and being unwilling to put on their coats or get into their pajamas or finish their dinner. Lindsay was serious-minded and managed her brother (seven minutes her junior) with a hands-on-hips imperiousness that made all the adults laugh. Brice was clownish and clumsy and would do anything for a laugh. Carly once observed that when he walked into a room, the wallpaper started automatically peeling off the walls. But they called me Anniebelle and crawled in my lap sometimes just for fun, and the day I read Goodnight Moon thirteen times in a row, Lindsay said she loved me best of anybody.

  As much as I was fascinated by the children, though, I was outright mesmerized by Jeremiah and Carly. I had never known people to be so cheerfully honest about the deficiencies and difficulties of marriage. It was so adult, the way they were always throwing up their hands in exasperation with each other and having hissing fights in front of us, fights that seemed to me both comical and ironic. But not scary, not at all scary. Their disagreements were so unlike the arguments my parents would have indulged in, which always felt sort of dark and ominous. Carly could get furious with Jeremiah over his opinions about books and films and plays, just as often as she’d get mad about the fact that he had let Brice go without a diaper, or that he was hiding dishes in the oven and then forgetting and preheating them.

  And whenever the four of us were together—at the dinner table, for instance—and they and Grant would get to talking, I felt as though I was a kid permitted to stay up late and sit at the adult table. I felt so young and incompetent around them, like I would never catch up, never understand how to live a cosmopolitan life. Jeremiah and Carly were older and they were physically beautiful, and they had furniture, wineglasses, dinner guests, daily planners, and a whole household that ran on something approaching chaos, but which still ran. It thrilled me to discover that running a family didn’t have to be an all-consuming enterprise, the way my mother and her friends did it, but could just happen in an offhanded, casual fashion. Jeremiah and Carly and their friends were sophisticated and cool, and to my shock, Grant seemed right at home with them, able to hold his own talking about authors and playwrights and artists. It made me see him in a whole new way, as somebody who knew things. He could be a New Yorker, while I was just a baby. A California child.

  Sometimes, though, they’d all be talking, and I’d be left out, and when I would look up, Jeremiah’s eyes would be resting on mine. He’d have just the tiniest smile on his face, a lifted eyebrow, a smile that seemed to acknowledge that everything that was happening at the table was all just superficial bullshit, that he and I knew the real stuff.

  I’d want to look away, but I couldn’t. I’d been marked by his understanding of me. There was a little scorched place inside me where he had seen.

  We, his eyes said—we, he and I—were the ones who truly understood.

  I KNEW Grant and I shouldn’t stay and yet we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave, so we all four fell into a pattern of life that somehow worked out. Grant and Carly were the industrious, busy ones, heading out the door early in the mornings with their importance wrapped around them like cloaks. Jeremiah called them the ants and said that he and I were the grasshoppers, and they had to take care of us. I had temp jobs sometimes, typing in banks and offices that required that I put on panty hose and skirts and close-toed shoes, which Jeremiah called my pitiful attempt to show myself to be a would-be ant. But many more days I was at home, and there were those days when Jeremiah and I just hung out. One of us would take the children to day care in the morning and then we were on our own. He showed me around the city, took me on my first subway ride standing in the front car, hurtling through the underground darkness. We went to parks and museums. We’d go to the market together, plan dinner, walk around the neighborhood, then settle down at home with our books and our imagined work. I sketched things, he typed at his desk. We met in the kitchen for heated-over morning coffee, padding around in our socks, watching the late-afternoon sun slant in through the windows while we drank wine and cooked dinner.

  He told me he was supposed to be spending his sabbatical writing a book about something having to do with the history of an uprising in upstate New York, but he said he wanted to switch fields, to write a book about the philosophy of creativity instead. He was sick of the work that had once come so effortlessly to him. He wanted to find the seams of people’s stories, of the spirituality and mysticism they carried with them, and then he laughed his always self-deprecating laugh. He was tentative and almost formal around me, put-upon and beleaguered, but in a funny way, and always ready to laugh. He knew such a wide variety of things: he could play the guitar, speak three languages, cook gourmet meals, and talk to just about anybody on any topic at all. At the market, I’d go off to pick out fruit and come back to find him squatting down talking to some street person about redevelopment or the constellations or the best way to light a cigarette if you didn’t have any matches.

  I confessed to him that I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. I should do art, I supposed. Or maybe I should go back to school, get my degree. Should I be painting? Working more? Getting a full-time corporate job? Who knew? One day he said, “Why the fuck does everybody have to do something? Why can’t we just enjoy ourselves? I think that’s what you should do. Resist, resist. Do as little as possible for as long as you can.” He moved his arms in the air, like waves, when he said, “Resist, resist.” His voice was like silk and velvet.

  Grant, when pressed for an opinion, held the same one he’d always held, that I was vastly talented and should be doing art for my own self-fulfillment, for art’s sake alone. And Carly thought I should be looking for studio space and galleries to show my work, and possibly lining up mentors, if not benefactors and backers. This was what she referred to as “support.”

  “I would like to support your art,” she said to me one day, “but I notice you’re not doing any. And I want to know why. Are you depressed, do you think?”

 
; I stuttered through some explanation about not really having the time and space. The truth, which I was much too shy to ever admit, was that I was way too disorganized and confused. Art was the last thing I could think about in this new life. The most I could do was sketch pictures of the peonies in their glass bowl in the living room or portraits of the twins on the move, and I never intended to show anyone those.

  “Perfect!” she crowed. “No time or space? That we can fix! Can’t we, Jeremiah?” She and some friends had taken over some old factory space in SoHo, a giant, unused loft where once there had been machines and heavy shoe-making equipment. Other artists, too, were trying to set up studios there, and she told me that if I was truly serious about doing my art, I could maybe join in a co-op, start claiming my own space. I didn’t think I qualified as a “serious artist,” the way Carly and her friends might define it.

  “I like her, but she scares me,” I said to Jeremiah one afternoon when we were trying to wrangle the children into playing with Play-Doh, and he laughed and said, “Yeah, she’s fucking scary. Always has been. Really one of your more intense individuals.”

  I swallowed. “But very, very committed. A good person,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Goes without saying. A terrific person. Grant, too.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You two are without a doubt the best marriage saviors going.”

  And for a moment our eyes met over the top of the children’s heads. He brushed his hair out of his eyes, and I looked away.

  ONE DAY I came home from a temp job working in a bank and there he was, pounding away on his typewriter at the kitchen table while the kids banged on pots and pans with wooden spoons. He held up one finger in the air, like somebody saying, “Wait!” and told me he’d had a flash of an idea for his book. This wasn’t a treatise on creativity and labor unions after all; it was a novel! He could barely stop typing. He looked almost feverish. He’d been writing all day and the ideas were just pouring out of him, he said. He was trembling with energy.

  Lindsay’s diaper smelled to high heaven, so I whisked away the twins and changed both of them, and then I sat on the rag rug in their room with them and blew bubbles from a plastic wand while they tried to smash them. When Jeremiah came to join us, he was smiling.

  “It’s a novel! It’s really a novel!” he said, and he grabbed Brice by the hands and started jumping up and down with him. “Oh, Bricey, your mama is going to be so mad when she finds out what Daddy is doing with his sabbatical. Who would have guessed that I’m writing a novel!”

  “But why should she be mad?” I said. “Isn’t she, like, all in favor of everybody being as creative as possible?”

  “Ha! Have you observed nothing in your time here, my dear Annabelle? That’s lip service. Girls—excuse me—women are allowed to be creative, but guys are supposed to be paying the bills. Being a Columbia professor of history and all that.”

  I had to admit he had a point. Carly had ambushed me one night early on, after the guys had gone to bed. “You can’t let these years go by, you know. It’s bad enough that you’ve displaced yourself, stopped going to college because of your husband’s career, but luckily you landed in New York City instead of in South Podunk, North Dakota, like so many college wives. So now you need to take over your own life and make sure you get exactly what you need out of the deal. Get things the way you want them.”

  But how, when I didn’t even know what I wanted? I had squirmed under her gaze. We needed money, I told her. That’s why I’d signed up with the temp agency. Already I’d worked at a bank, a talent agency, a public relations firm, and a law office. That seemed fine for now.

  Carly slammed her fist down on the counter and said all that was shit work. “You know what this is? It’s depression!” she said. “When an artist is not doing her art, she starts to lose touch with her essential self.”

  “I don’t really think it’s depression. I might just not have any ambition,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not going to give up on you even if you’re giving up on yourself,” she said. “Just remember that when you’re ready, there are plenty of opportunities. And sometimes you need to push yourself through the next door. For God’s sake, just don’t do what I did and have children.”

  I couldn’t believe she’d just said that. It seemed to me permissible to be vocal about not wanting children in advance—nameless, faceless children that you would never know—but to speak so callously of existing children was surely wrong. She saw my expression and leaned forward suddenly and spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Listen, I love my kids as much as anybody loves their children,” she said. “I bow to no one when it comes to being a good mother! But I’m talking about something else now. A career! And not getting swallowed up by all the domestic concerns. Kids are great when you’re ready for them, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say that it’s just the most wonderful thing in the world, a woman’s greatest crowning achievement, because it isn’t. I lost my body when I had those twins. Having two at once was a piece of bad luck, really.” She stared at me again, daring me to disapprove. “Annabelle. I’m talking from the standpoint of my body. That’s all I’m saying. I gained fifty-three pounds that I’ve had to sweat off every inch of. But I’m doing it. I’m flourishing again, but I’ll never make back that time. You—you have nothing constraining you, and yet you just go out to shit jobs every day. Let me tell you, because nobody else will: you need these years. I won’t ever be great because of the time I took off. You don’t know it, but the longer you just stand in place … You’re losing time. I’m older than you are. Be careful, is all I’m telling you. Stop letting people take advantage of you.”

  “Who’s tak—?”

  She tucked a tendril of red hair behind her ear. Her nostrils flared. “Your husband,” she said. “And mine, too, if you let him. I heard that last week you took the children to day care twice. I warn you: don’t let him do that to you. He’s the one with the free time. Men have all the cards. Don’t let them take yours.”

  ACTUALLY, THOUGH, it ended up being Carly herself who took my free time. She had a fight with the day-care lady, Marjorie, a motherly woman I had come to like on my frequent trips with Jeremiah to pick up the kids. Marjorie was in her forties, an old hippie-type with one long gray braid down her back, harried but sweet, and she genuinely seemed to like the children in her care. Often she and I and Jeremiah sat outside on the stoop, drinking a glass of wine at five o’clock while the kids played in her tiny gated yard. But Carly had problems with her. Now that Brice and Lindsay were about to turn three, she only wanted books read to them that did not have sexist references. The moms in the books should not be shown as the only ones taking care of children. They should not wear aprons or cook. The dads should be shown grocery shopping and putting children to bed. It was, I thought, an excellent point—but what were we to do about it? Stop reading books altogether?

  No. Apparently she had a plan to remedy the situation, and one night after the kids were in bed, she brought a bunch of the day-care books out of her bag, along with some Magic Markers. We were going to black out the offending passages and change some genders, she said with a big smile.

  “Wow. How did you get these?” I asked her. Behind her, out of her line of vision, Jeremiah raised his eyebrows for my benefit and pantomimed somebody shoving books into a bag and tiptoeing away. I had to stifle a laugh.

  “Well, today,” she said, “I told Marjorie I wanted to join the twins for lunch, and she said okay. And then, while we were having a picnic in their little back area, I just slipped inside and put about ten of the books in my bag. And now tomorrow I’ll give them to Jeremiah to take back. Next week I’ll see if I can’t get some more.”

  “Wow. You just took them?”

  “Yep! Don’t look at me like that. Marjorie should be happy about it. She’s one of us, you know. She and her husband are both feminists. He marched against Vietnam and she hasn’t shaved her legs in about a d
ecade. So I think she probably would have done this herself if she’d had the time. I actually see doing this as a kind of present to her.”

  Marjorie, of course, didn’t see it that way. When she caught me trying to slip the books back on the shelves the next day, she was horrified at what we’d done. I hastened to explain about women in positions of power and the importance of boys and girls growing up realizing women could be anything they wanted, but my mouth was dry while I was doing it.

  “But … isn’t this … like censorship?” she said. I explained again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It had been a terrible idea.

  “But Goldilocks was a girl!” she said, thumbing through the book and discovering that Goldilocks had become a boy named Locks, a change that Carly had thought was particularly brilliant. “She had curiosity, and stamina, and judgment, all good qualities …”

  “Carly said it was sexist,” I said, although I was suddenly sure that Goldilocks was not sexist at all.

  “You know,” said Marjorie. “I love Carly’s children, but I’m just about sick to death of Carly Ferguson-Saxon herself. She came in here yesterday and asked me a million questions about the lunch I was serving—was the macaroni made from whole-wheat pasta, where did the apples come from, and wasn’t it interesting that the little boys happened to get their food first before the little girls did? When really it was all because of where they happened to be sitting. And then she went into this whole big thing about nap times, and which songs I sing. I tell you, she’s a pain in the ass.”

  “She’s got a lot of opinions,” I said.

  “And you live with her! I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I find her … refreshing,” I said loyally.

  Marjorie stared at me. “I don’t know how you do it,” she repeated. “But I don’t need this hassle. I think I’m done with her.”

  She gave Jeremiah and me a note that evening when we went to pick up Brice and Lindsay. They had two weeks to find some other arrangement. Marjorie and her husband were cutting back, the note said. They were sad to say they could no longer offer day care.