“You know more than you think you do,” is the first line of Dr. Spock’s baby book and one reason it is an enduring bestseller. There is nothing a new parent needs to hear more.
As a parent, I did not trust my instincts, or perhaps I trusted them too much, fearful that I would treat my children the way I had my siblings, as intrusions on my valuable time and space. I read every book I could on the subject of parenting, a trendy new verb in the eighties, no less irritating for having hung in and entered the language on a permanent basis.
At night my husband and I actually had conversations that went like this:
Him: “You know, this crying at the end of the day is quite normal.”
Me: “Absolutely. They just get a little fussy. As Anna Freud says, that’s when their little egos disintegrate.”
Him: “Yes, into a fretful noisy collection …”
Me: “… of needs and reflexes.”
Him: “It’s that sense of cosmic attenuation …”
Me: “… that often presages …”
Him: “… a new developmental milestone …”
Me: “… and comes from that frustrating imbalance …”
Him: “… between his sophisticated sensory apparatus …”
Me: “… and his primitive motor impulses.”
Him: “Do you think he’ll ever stop crying?”
Me: “God, I hope so.”
When I reported this exchange to Christina, she said it was amazing: I married someone who also sounded like a book.
For me the fire of motherhood was, at the beginning, elusive; it flickered on and off. The birth and the caretaking of my firstborn activated the old buried frustrations of growing up in a house with too many babies and not enough adults to take care of them. When the baby was cranky and I was tired, I invariably slipped and called him Michael rather than Nicholas. My friends with babies seemed much more stout-hearted and pioneering as they navigated what I considered the dull shoals of nap time and regular feedings. They were explorers stumbling over new territory. I had a feeling of having been there and done that, not so successfully the first time around. It was slow going, discovering what felt new, to me, about babies, and mostly I found it in long walks, folding my son’s infant limbs into a denim Snugli, and as he curled up in the pouch, together we sought adventure and saw the world as a new coinage. He would hear an unfamiliar noise, observe a falling leaf, or notice the pattern in the sun’s shadows.
Once, he felt the rain.
Once, he saw the night.
It was our finest time.
A neighbor with three children helped put my fretfulness in perspective. She came by one evening with a meal of brisket, applesauce, and salad. (When I think of all the meals I have consumed over the course of a lifetime, why does this one menu remain so clear and concise?) The applesauce was red, and the salad had a newfangled ingredient, roasted pine nuts.
As she stood in the doorway, getting ready to leave, I said:
“Susan, I can’t sing.”
“So?”
“So? So, no lullabies.”
I looked at the wide-eyed baby in my arms. He had not taken a nap all day. Nap, I used to tell him: Not Awake Permanently.
“Oh,” she said, “this is serious.”
She stood still, backlit, lost in thought, as if carefully arranging the stems and stalks of memory in a vase.
“Ah,” she said, “I remember now.”
And then she proceeded to recite, word for word, a poem by Yeats that she had used with her children from time to time. “Put him down in his crib and say this,” she said, “over and over, and soon enough you’ll touch his back and feel the even breathing of a sound sleep.”
The angels are stopping
Above your bed
They weary of trooping
With the whimpering dead.
God’s laughing in heaven
To see you so good,
The Sailing Seven
Are gay with his mood.
I sigh that kiss you
For I must own
That I shall miss you
When you are grown.
During the children’s early years, my sisters and I had a shared investment in each other’s children and their well-being and in their growth, as peas and milk and sunshine had their merry way with them. The children were a loud phalanx of missing teeth, infected bug bites, scraped knees, and untied sneakers.
Jacqueline, known as Aunt Jay or Play Jay, got them kits that had a scientific overlay: “Why wait a billion years? Make homemade coal now!” When they tripped and fell, rather than chastise the children, she would make an elaborate show of rebuking the linoleum, culminating in the stern order, “Floor, go to your room!” She exclaimed over each and every ragtag gift of dead dandelions.
We went to their nativity pageants, expressing sympathy about how hard it was to be Joseph because then you had to put your arm around Mary.
We helped them make volcanoes for their science fairs:
one cup water
a quarter cup vinegar
a half cup dishwashing liquid
Pour into bowl with baking soda.
Watch it explode.
They made the usual childish malapropisms, though in the new era of frank talk and open discussions, their mix-ups had modern twists, as when I heard one of the boys talking about someone who liked to pull down girls’ vaginas.
They thought that the job of policemen was to wave, and they thought toll collectors got to keep the money. They called music la la. They said elemenopee as one word when they recited the alphabet. They struggled with deep mysteries, such as, were bagels ever alive? We acted encouraging when one of them said he wanted to grow up to be someone who hunts for gold. We would agree not to talk when they presided over play stoves with Tupperware pots and issued orders: “Quiet, everyone. The mustard is boiling.”
At one brief point, they each thought my sisters and I were all goddesses and every house in America should have our statue in it.
If you wore a dress with flowers, they would try to pick them.
Chapter Twelve
A Grudge X-Ray
WE BEQUEATHED RAYMOND THE VALLEY. HE STAYED IN WESTERN Massachusetts, while the rest of us headed south. Because I lived the farthest away, I was his designated correspondent.
There would be long stretches when the communication from Raymond would be resigned, logical, slightly despairing, a not unreasonable response to his circumstances. His letters were sometimes an odd mix of formal diction and inane detail, the bright but blighted mind caught in a limited deadening existence. “I’m so tired of being stuck in Chicopee. For example, Springfield is having a tasting sample from good restaurants and I saw a dish of ziti, broccoli, cheese (three kinds) with sausage and marinara sauce, as an example, all at very reasonable prices, but alas I can’t go.”
Then, not much later, after Jacqueline passed down her old car so his access to other towns increased:
I hope this turns out to be a long letter. Halloween is over. I didn’t buy candy and I was worried about 200 kids showing up. No one came. The front door has a security lock and they probably couldn’t get in. Maybe Halloween is passé. You could write a story: razors and poison may be a turnoff.
I met a girl (Jean) at a coffee shop and we see a little of each other. We had Spaghetti at Mel’s in Holyoke last night but she is married. It’s rocky (the marriage) but I guess our friendship is okay.
Can’t wait till x-mas.
Here’s my list: shirt large or extra large, underpants forty inch waist, shoes size 12, socks either 11–13 or stretch one size, pants 44 inch waist, 30 inch length.
I’m going to take your suggestion and play it cool with the flowers.
Every time I see anyone in the family, there is some mention of the old house. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could rent it for some kind of reunion?
Jay’s old car runs good. It gets great mileage and it takes me wherever I need to go. What a
pleasure compared to rotten buses and bus drivers.
It’s starting to get cooler here. It’s been way warm this fall. Tonight is supposed to be the first cold night.
I’m very bored. That’s why you are getting such a long letter. I do, however, expect you to respond in kind.
Another time he reported that he and a friend (unnamed) went to the Paramount Theatre in Springfield to see a movie: “The place was magnificent, very large, holds perhaps (ball park guess) six thousand people. It has two balconies and several, if I’m using the correct term, opera or box seats. It’s been completely refurbished by the city, with federal aid, I think, but kept authentic with its old architectural charm fully intact.”
He continued with his lists, even when it wasn’t Christmas. We supplied groceries and the usual stuff people need to maintain their personal infrastructure:
sweet and lo
canned stew
boneless sirloin (freezes well and doesn’t take up much space)
sugar free strawberry jelly
canned ham (small size)
A-I sauce
canned mushrooms lots
canned corn beef hash
new broom
Good News razor blades
Resolve carpet cleaner
horseradish
paper plates
olive oil.
He also needed objects for his home:
Mattress (I have foundation)
pots and pans
two nice medium height lamps, not a matched pair.
Sometimes, he would shoot for the extras:
A Pentax camera
stereo and tape equipment.
And, sometimes, he would shoot for the stars:
A trust fund.
When our mother attended her fiftieth reunion, in the early eighties, at Chicopee High School, she filed this account:
One man said he and his wife had just taken their eleven grandchildren on a cruise. I would have been out the nearest porthole. The food was awful: canned fruit salad, green salad with gunky dressing (the waitress spilled some on the sleeve of my green dress), frozen beans, mashed potatoes and capon smeared with pallid gravy, accompanied by a thin slab of ice cream. I sat with three classmates who went to the Alvord School with me. One of them said she’d never forget when our club (six little girls in the fourth grade) put on a show in Kay Mannix’s backyard and I did a “Powder Puff Dance.” Apparently, I swooped around with exaggerated gestures, powdering my nose. Original, anyhow. She also remembered the boy who sat across from me and was always giving me boxes of jewelry, which he had acquired by selling things. I was always so embarrassed by the gifts, poor kid.
It took awhile, but eventually she sold the second little house in Granby and moved to Mystic:
Finally, I am going to be all in one place. I have a b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l place in Mystic, a unit in a landmark building. It has four large rooms with corner windows (charming). I have the use of a large attic for storage. Floors are hardwood. The house is old (1869) so my furniture will look great. I am on the second floor, hence the attic. I am just down from the library and can walk to church and stores (A&P) as well as have the occasional cup of chowder at BeeBee’s. And, it has a fireplace!
Holidays came and went:
I find Memorial Day depressing and Ray’s plight does not make it any better. In spite of the dogwood, pink and white, the air is heavy for me and lonely. Maybe what I want is to be a Girl Scout again, back in 1925, and marching in the parade where we ended up at the American Legion where we were served the forbidden fruit of coffee with doughnuts. I really hated coffee, and we had Lizzie’s own doughnuts, much better.
Just read a new life of Oliver Goldsmith. Terrific. What gaps I have in my education.
“Ray’s plight,” as she called it, had been compounded by an incident in 1983 when he tried to get off Social Security and get a job. He was spurred to do so by a wholesale governmental review of the cases of people like him, who were suspected of playing the system in order to avoid taking responsibility for themselves. The frenzy that this review set off in Raymond was enormous. He did try to get work, as a grave digger, but the stamina required for that kind of work went far beyond his store of energy. The second day on the job he went to a bar in the evening and fell off a bar stool not because he was drunk—he hadn’t had time for that—but because he was so exhausted. With his leg in a cast and his financial safety net in jeopardy, he became so despairing that he attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge in Springfield. We have been told that this incident was documented on local TV, a kind of bad news/good news/bad news joke. Bad news: someone tried to kill himself. Good news: he was saved thanks to the buoyancy provided by the cast on his broken leg, coming to rest on a small island in the river. Bad news: he was taken by ambulance to Northampton State Hospital, a place that by now filled him with fear and loathing in equal doses.
By then, we knew that there would be no miracles for Raymond. He had deteriorated beyond repair, and healing him would be like trying to restore a wilted flower to its original form or paste dead leaves back on a tree. A line had been crossed. Instead, we would have to temper our hopes for him, whittling away our dreams for his improvement to something much more realistic. We would try to keep him from hurting himself or someone else. We hoped he wouldn’t thrust us into an unwelcome limelight like those stunned families you see on television.
Sometimes the tone of resignation in his communications shifted to something more dire.
The writing would be scrawled and legible only to trained eyes, eyes used to an onslaught of words, the letters crushed together: “Often I feel with Reagan wanting to save money to finance ‘Star Wars’ that my suicide was unfortunate only in that I missed. He (Reagan) would prefer me begging on the streets. Please help. Ray.” He never forgave the Reagan administration for putting him through hoops, making him get the job that almost killed him. “That man has an absolutely borderline moron vocabulary.”
The tone of his letters went back and forth, reflecting his moods.
Threatening: “Some people are harassing me and ruining my life. Some family members are getting involved. If any family member chooses to help these sleazes over Xmas I will depart for home and no longer consider them part of my family.”
Angry: “Have you slept on the streets, have you begged for food, have you depended on soup kitchens, your fool loser brother has. Even cheese has an address. It comes from Vermont or Wisconsin. Where were you, bragging your help? I have a life of F-U-C-K-I-N-G poverty. You are no or little help. Reagan loves to hurt poor people. He wants me begging on the streets.” And, then, even bigger letters with more underlining and more capitalizations:
“THE THING IS HE NEVER EVEN MADE A GOOD MOVIE.”
Even more angry: “Don’t ever brag about what you do. Don’t feed your nervous ego over me. You do very little. Fuck you. You landed me at Northampton. I don’t trust you and I don’t need you.”
One More Winter: my husband and I found ourselves going back and forth about whether to stay in Miami or move back up north. The years had piled up, eleven in all. We were boggled and shocked at the amount of time, gamblers amazed at their debts. Yet it was unsettling living in a community strewn with bodies of people who lacked their upright glands. Everything that made Miami exciting for a reporter made it dubious for a parent. I remember asking my husband over some roast pork and pounded-out steak at the Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana, “Do you realize, except for the alligators, everyone here is a refugee?”
“So what?”
“They’re all running away from something. Bad affairs, of business, of the heart. Dictatorships.” I didn’t want to get involved in politics, especially at a Cuban restaurant, but I did whisper, “Some of them were the dictators.”
I cut a plantain in half. “What about us? Why are we here? Are we exiles too?”
At its worst, Miami was a series of huge shopping centers connected by streets ghoulishly em
pty of people. Our son’s first words: dada, mama, dog, bus, bye-bye. Not much later, he said Burdines, the name of a popular department store. He said Dade-land, air conditioning, South Dixie Highway. Who was he? Who were we?
All over town, you heard racist fears voiced of home invasions by hordes of Haitians. The new Cubans from Mariel were called escoria and gusanos, scum and worms. The elderly Jews on Miami Beach were being kicked out of their condos, forced to move inland, by developers who didn’t see the charm in shtetls next to prime oceanfront property.
Guns were common as mangoes. Our closest neighbors, all-American family men with the all-American names of Skip and Bud, both had weapons in their homes. Our son played with Skip’s kids.
My job at the Miami Herald often meant taking phone calls from the subjects of stories in the evening. I’d be bathing the baby, and there would be someone on the phone who needed to talk, right now, having been led to believe, by me naturally, that the coverage of their story was the most important event in the cosmos.
Uphill Walkers Page 18