We Are Gathered

by Jamie Weisman

  Elizabeth’s generation will be different. Isn’t this what all those girls burned their bras for? A purpose beyond the care and comfort of husbands and children. They will give things up for this. We, born before 1950, the last generation of women to be bound to home and hearth, know that, even with help, a home empty of its occupants saddens, springs leaks that left unattended for minutes or hours grow from trickles to rivers, same for the sprouting cobwebs and the thin layer of dust; unattended, the cobwebs turn to rope, the dust to an unbreakable shell. We were there all day, beating back this entropy, stacking the papers of math problems and vocabulary into neat piles, collecting the half-empty glasses before the skin of the milk could harden, before the water marks formed on the table. We were there for the children, for the whimpers, the first words, the steps and the falls, for the husbands, for the double bogeys and the missed promotions and the poorly packed suitcases left on the bed after business trips. We didn’t imagine that these things needed doing; they needed doing, and left unwatched, the garden will change; tamed things will become wild again. For husbands, maybe this is not a bad thing, but for the children, I wonder. It isn’t just the milestones, the first words and steps, the first day of kindergarten, the birthdays, the holidays, it’s the sound of a small throat swallowing, the sweat on the neck after an afternoon nap, the discarded blanket picked up and folded, these are the things that make a life, that add up to love and complete a child.

  Every generation has a rule or two that it thinks it will break and change the world. Showing ankles, smoking cigarettes, baring arms, wearing pants, getting divorced. Then we realize the rules had advantages, and breaking them didn’t change the world the way we thought it would. Now that there are veins on my legs and my stomach will never be flat again, I think it would be nice to cover myself in layers and wear a dress that sweeps the floor. More than a few of our friends from college had affairs, got divorced. The happy ones remarried, usually to someone just like the person they’d left, for the men, maybe a few years younger. Elizabeth has married a boy from another world, raised Episcopalian though apparently his mother’s mother is Jewish, a fact that came out after they announced their engagement. The grandmother willingly shed her Judaism for the safety of the last name of Burke—not Berkowitz—and children who could claim descent from English farmers and maybe a famous philosopher. Christmas trees and Easter bunnies filled her house, she said, but at the ceremony, I saw her mouth moving through all the prayers. Elizabeth doesn’t think it will matter that Hank’s not Jewish. It’s all the same God, she told me, as if the deaths of tens of millions of people throughout history isn’t proof enough to her that kings and armies, false prophets and phar-aohs, do not agree with her. She says they’ll celebrate all the holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Good Friday and Easter, and when the kids are older, they can make a choice between jelly beans and matzo, she said, laughing. A choice between the prayers I said—that my mother said, my grandmother, her mother, going back five thousand years—and some candy. I wasn’t going to argue with her. There’s no arguing with Elizabeth. She’ll find out later how difficult you can make your life. Or how you can keep it simple.

  When my mother died, Jeanine and I, the oldest and the youngest, cleaned out her house, and I found a notebook of poems I wrote. The ones about love were pretty awful, but there were a few that were not terrible. I also found several letters I had written to Jack Chandler when he was in Vietnam and after he came back. They weren’t love letters. I had no intention of having an affair with him, and I never mentioned the kiss. I told myself that I was writing to him because he needed to receive letters. Josh said that Jack was estranged from his family: his mother was dead; he had had the world’s shortest marriage, had no children. His brothers were farmers, and something he had done had angered them or vice versa. Either way, they did not speak. Jack had been living in New York, but after the war, there were many holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas—which we do not celebrate—when he would show up on our doorstep unannounced, hungry but exalted, as if he had been sentenced to exile on a deserted island and miraculously made his way back to us, crossing the vast ocean in a raft. By the time of the letters, I had Ben, then Katie, and there was no question of passion. When I became a mother, Jack looked at me differently. He admired me, honored me, but when he called me lovely, it was in the way someone calls the very young or the very old lovely, with no imagination of their naked body.

  I don’t know why I used my parents’ home address rather than ours. There was nothing shameful in the letters. I just told him the details of my daily life. How Katie slept curled up, like a fuzzy insect, hand under her chin, lips pressed together. Ben turned four years old. We put a pointy hat on his head and he blew out four candles, and I wondered why no one questioned this ritual, blowing away the years, extinguishing the fire. It seemed all wrong. I watched my children sleep and felt in the stillness the movement of time, the stretching of their bones, the expansion of their hearts, the knitting together of thoughts that would one day form words and sentences and the memories that would define them. Sometimes I felt so sad, watching my babies rush forward through time to adolescence. Ben would grow a dark fuzz on his lip, his voice would change from a squeak to a growl, Katie would sprout breasts and hide her secret loves from me, my parents would die and be forgotten, the children would marry and move away, Josh and I would die one day and also be forgotten. While nothing happened, while they breathed in the quiet way that babies and young children breathe, with small sighs and twitches, everything happened. And then I apologized, because Jack was in a place where everything was happening, where people were dying and bombs were exploding, and here I was, obsessing over the fact that I was already putting away the newborn clothes and taking out the next size up and that the last three months were just a blur. That letter didn’t get to Jack. It was returned to sender. Others got through, musings on the magnolia tree in the front yard, whose tender white leaves I crushed for their too-sweet smell; on an ice storm that coated the bare branches of the trees as if they had been outlined with a thick black pen; on a burned pot roast that looked like the remains of some extinct animal; on the protests in Washington and the women who invited me to lunch and didn’t want to talk about the protests in Washington; and then on another pregnancy, turning my body over to the unending universe for the perpetuation of the species, the movement inside me, the creation.

  I kept writing even after Jack got home from the war. I wrote to him in New York and San Francisco, New Hampshire and Indiana, college towns where he got teaching jobs, artists’ colonies. As the children got bigger, I wrote things I would never say out loud. I confessed that I hated going to Ben’s interminable baseball games even though he was the star pitcher. I found the adulation of a boy throwing a ball ridiculous. Externally, I was a perfect baseball mom. Pitchers of lemonade, homemade cookies, and PB&J sandwiches packed and wrapped in wax paper for away games. I cheered. I drove around town in my station wagon, sweaty boys laughing and farting in the backseat, kicking one another, coarse and stupid, and just when I was about to give up, just when the sky was darkening in the late afternoon and I was wondering how far I could get on a tank of gas and the loose change in my purse, a boy, my boy, in a mud-stained baseball uniform, would bow his head, concentrating, I am sure, on a spitball or a double play or what he wanted for dinner, but he would look in that moment like a supplicant bowing to the oracle, accepting his fate and the fate of all boys everywhere, to only get so far, to lose in the quarterfinals, to grow too old for playing games, and when he looked up with his pale face and dark eyes, I would want to run to him, and say, It’s fine. It’s fine. Whatever you need, I will give you. I have no needs or desires beyond your happiness. I would not say that, of course. I would pour lemonade into Styrofoam cups and give them to the boys waiting their turn to bat, pick up the dropped wax paper and cupcake wrappers, smooth them flat and throw them away, giving order to the universe. That’s what I did. That’s what I
wrote to Jack Chandler.

  I confessed to him that I loved Katie the most. First she lisped and couldn’t pronounce her r’s. Thilly wabbit. Thee how she wuns. Then she started to stutter. Th-th-thee h-h-h-how she w-w-w-wuns. No one called her for playdates. The few kids that came over did so out of the kindness of their mothers, bribed with offers of ice cream and new toys. I bribed them myself—come with us to the zoo! Ice-skating! To McDonald’s! We’re the house with Little Debbies and ice cream sandwiches and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Katie wasn’t fooled. When the kids came over, she sulked and then cried when they left. She sat in a corner at birthday parties. She didn’t have any friends until high school, and then I knew she had cast her lot with the losers, the pot smokers and the nerds. She didn’t get asked to dances; she spent prom night at The Rocky Horror Picture Show dressed in torn stockings and a purple wig. The more the world rejected her, the more I favored her. What could I do? Each child is entitled to an equal amount of love. Ben got his from us, from his teammates, from girls, an order that reversed itself in high school and has stayed reversed. Elizabeth from us, from strangers, from teachers, from other children, from boys, from men, and now I assume from her husband. So little love was given to Katie by the world that it was incumbent on me to make up for it.

  Once she started kindergarten, Elizabeth was the belle of the ball. Her teacher told me that children fought to lay their nap mats next to hers. The teacher, Mrs. Mallory, had to assign seats at snack time or a melee broke out with children pushing to be at the same table as Elizabeth. I asked if she was cruel, but she was not. Children recognize beauty, the teacher said, and Elizabeth was an astonishingly beautiful child. Other mothers, I am sure, would bask in that reflected glory. Instead, I felt for the little girls who just wanted to be near her. They would have to fight for their place in the world, whereas Josh and I had miraculously made a child whose path was laid in stardust and jewels. I felt like the goose that lays a golden egg and stands up on her webbed feet, looks at her nest, and thinks, What in the world is that?

  All of these thoughts I poured into letters to Jack Chandler, most of which apparently never reached him since I found them tied with string in a shoe box in my mother’s pantry. Looking at the envelopes, I could track the many times he picked up and moved, the letters coming back stamped RETURN TO SENDER until a new address emerged. That would explain why Jack so seldom responded, and when he did, it was usually with a short “Thank you for your letter. It’s awfully nice to receive mail.” But then it really wasn’t about Jack.

  In retrospect, I was lonely. Josh was working long hours, trying to become a partner. He asked me about my day, but there was nothing specific to say about my day, so we talked about his, about the cases he was working on and his coworkers. His secretary was pregnant and due around the same time as I was due with Katie. He dreaded her leaving; he relied on her so much, but he knew she would leave and not come back. “That’s what we do,” I wrote to Jack. “When the children come, we leave whatever we are doing, and we do not go back.”

  Not this generation. They intend to have it all, careers, families, creativity, at least for the lucky few who can afford it. They intend to travel the world, children in tow, and write books, shoot off into space, leaving their tidy houses and the dog and the cat behind, return and find it all just so, the dog well fed, the grass trimmed, the cat purring, the windows clean and clear with a view of the pond and the wildflowers. I have my doubts that it will work, and I worry that this generation has torn an unwitting hole in the order of the universe. Katie would call me reactionary. I want them to be happy, but when you attend to one thing, you have to neglect another. To say that everything we did was worthless and that this new way of life promises infinite happiness, I know that to be false. There were good things about the choices we made, and although it was limiting, it evolved that way for a reason.

  I have tried to make this family something that will endure even after we are no longer under the same roof, but Katie and Elizabeth have so little in common, and Ben will no doubt find a woman to love and follow. There isn’t a law that sisters have to love each other, but there is a law about mothers and children. Josh and I will be gone someday; I hope before our children go. At that point, only the three of them will be able to bear witness to the people that Ben, Katie, and Elizabeth Gottlieb were before they learned how to control their image, before they tore up the pictures of themselves they didn’t like and retold the stories of their childhood to exclude the parts where they were less than kind. Maybe that’s the reason to have children. To know someone before they have really learned to lie. Children are expert liars about the little things, who ate the cookie, who spilled the water; but they are completely transparent about the big things, how openly you love, how big you dream, your moral compass. I know these things about my children. As we grow up, that honesty fades. The mother is the last person a child learns to lie to, but eventually they start to hide their failings and lie even to us. Despite our reassurances that we will love them, warts and all, despite the mothers visiting murderers on death row and weeping at the graves of serial killers, they start to lie to us. It may be true that it is not possible to both fully know and truly love another human being, and that none of us, not in America, not in China, not anywhere on this planet, can bear to believe this truth, and that it is this lack of belief that turns us all into liars. I suppose it is more important to be loved than to be known, though for a short time early in life, a child can have both.

  Someone has rung the doorbell. Maybe Katie or Ben forgot their key. Everyone else is staying in a hotel. This house with its five bedrooms has felt too big for us for a long time, but when either Josh or I suggest moving, we say we will wait for grandchildren. Grandchildren will fill the house again, and Elizabeth doesn’t want us to change her room. We made Ben’s room into a library. I took down the posters in Katie’s room, all the unpleasant pictures of rock bands and fallen guerrilla leaders, and underneath I found the wallpaper of clouds and rainbows that she picked out when she was seven years old and we first moved to this house. One day she and Elizabeth had colored along the edges in a corner where they thought I wouldn’t notice. I should have congratulated myself on not being angry when I found it, though the wallpaper was discontinued and the pictures of dogs and hearts and unicorns (I think they are unicorns, my children are not artists) could not be erased. They are still there, and there they will remain until the house is sold and another family will come and leave their mark, and then the house will be sold again or torn down, which is happening to so many houses in this neighborhood. The persistence of memory. I think that is a title of a painting Jack Chandler showed me once when he took Elizabeth and me on a tour of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I can’t remember the painting, but I know now, looking at Elizabeth’s wedding dress—what am I supposed to do with this wedding dress?—that the title was wrong. It’s the persistence of things, of wedding dresses that will never be worn again, of forks and spoons trampled into the dirt, of this planet once all the people and their dogs have died, things maybe, but not memory. Memories die with us.

  I go to open the door, but there is no one there, just the dark night, the white tent, the wind, and the stars.

  True love

  It was so hot. There was so much noise. I couldn’t remember whose wedding this was, and I couldn’t find Julius to tell me. Why I always had to go with him to these weddings I will never know. He loved his patients, his other family he used to call them, and brought home the postcards they sent from summer camp, the pictures of them in cap and gown, graduating from high school, from college, even from medical school. Sometimes I secretly thought he gave himself too much credit. Their parents were proud; they wanted to brag, and Dr. Rosenblatt would listen, but if we really needed them, if we were down to our last crumb and they were down to their last loaf of bread, would they break us off a piece? No. No, they would not. I never said it to Julius, but I knew they weren’t family,
and I knew he knew it too. In the Bronx, in New York City, in America, we were all alone, he and I and our two children we were so unprepared to defend. He could imagine that the wife of a city councilman was telling the truth when she said, If there’s anything you need, you call me. My husband knows people who can help you. That was after her baby had meningitis, and Julius knew what it was and saved him, even called the emergency room when they wanted to send him home, and said, That baby is sick. Don’t you dare send that baby home. My Julius went there and did whatever a doctor has to do to save a baby’s life, and the city councilman owed us, but Julius and I both know that gratitude has its limits; gratitude is not as strong as fear.

  I underestimated these woods. While I sat there in the heat wondering what had become of Julius, watching the young girls laugh and the boys pretend to be men, I studied these woods. They are young and thin, unsuitable for hiding anything bigger than a mouse. I doubted anything lived there; they seemed too shallow and dry for mushrooms or wild boar or deer. Pheasants? Certainly not. Stags, peacocks, wolves, bears—impossible. No one could weave a fairy tale out of these sticks and dried leaves. Still, it looked cooler there than here, quieter, safer. So I left just for a moment. Julius must have been congratulating the parents, kissing the bride. He felt one should never miss a chance to kiss a bride. He would never admit to superstition. He was a scientist, he would say. There is no evil eye; there is no bad luck, no good luck, no charms or curses. For better or for worse, we make the world, he would say. But then he would also say that you should never miss a chance to kiss a bride; he touched the children’s foreheads before he put the thermometer in their mouths; he forbade me to even speak their names before they were born; old beliefs die hard because they are old beliefs.