by Mary F. Pols
He slumped back in his chair.
“So, how do you feel about babies?” I asked him. I’d run out of things to say.
“Well,” he said quietly. “Everyone wants a child.”
No, I thought, no they don’t. But how wonderful that you think that way. Your apartment is disgusting, you don’t have a job, and you appear to have no obvious assets except for a beautiful smile. Yet you apparently believe that everyone wants a child, from which I’m going to extrapolate that you want one.
That afternoon, there was nothing sexual between us. We lay on the bed together, his arm behind my head, but it was purely about comfort. He wanted to know how I felt about baptism. We talked about last names. My estimation of him shot upward when he told me he’d always assumed he’d marry a feminist, and that she’d keep her last name and that maybe they’d let the girls have her last name and the boys his. Telling him had gone as well as I could possibly have expected it to go. The conversation seemed in some ways bizarrely couple-like, practically cozy.
“Did you realize that we both have green eyes?” he asked.
I’d thought until then that his eyes were light brown. This was the kind of basic information I ought to have known about him before we conceived a child together. This self-rebuke—How could I? What was I thinking? Why wasn’t I thinking?—was a constant refrain of mine that whole first year. But at the same time, his question about our eye color indicated that he was speculating about our child, less than an hour after having had his world rocked. That had to be a good sign. And as he’d said, “Everyone wants a child.”
For the next eight months, I would clutch that remarkably simple but potent statement to me like a talisman. “This was his first reaction,” I’d tell people. “It’s going to be okay.”
CHAPTER 4
Chasing High Tides
BECAUSE OF HOW FAR NORTH MAINE IS, and some complicated science involving the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy, the tides are extreme. Depending on the cycle of the moon, there could easily be a ten-foot difference between low and high tides. If you’re out on a boat, you wouldn’t notice it, but if you’re in a small cove, the difference can be shocking. The landscapes laid bare by the departing tides were whole new worlds, raw and messy worlds. I always had an aversion to these naked demarcations of land and sea.
None of this matters on a sandy beach, but Maine has only thirty miles of those—the rest is rockbound. When we planned our family outings, we always consulted the tide chart before leaving the house. But there were plenty of times when a hot afternoon in town and a high tide at the shore did not correspond, and then we’d navigate punishingly sharp-edged rocks and pebbly beaches that bruised our feet. There were fields of sea grass and clutching tendrils of black and yellow seaweed to face. You might have to walk the length of a football field before getting to water deep enough to plunge into. Dozens of hermit crabs scuttled in the shallows, indignant at your very presence, ready to nip at your toes. Worse still were the mudflats that sucked balefully at your feet, leaving clots of gray muck on your ankles.
At high tide, none of that mattered. It was all under there, but when you were floating above the sea grass and the rocks, they were harmless. The mudflats held warmth from the last low tide, and so swimming over them was pleasant. “I’m in a warm patch,” I’d shout to Benet when we swam together as kids. “I’m making a warm patch,” he’d say, treading water, his bony shoulders sticking out, his mop of brown hair still dry. We never put our heads under.
The sea greeted you at high tide, came right to you, offered itself. If I could have, I’d have built a wall around my favorite swimming places, to trap the water forever. High tides were just better. They were what we showed the tourists; try finding a pictorial calendar of Maine that revels in the muck of our seaweed-shrouded shores. A low tide might illustrate the gloomy months when we were all waiting for the weather to change, March or November, but you’d never flip to July’s photograph and see mudflats.
As I grew up, I thought that the right relationship would be like a high tide that would never ebb. Each time things didn’t work out with a boyfriend, I felt myself like a low tide: exposed, messy, vulnerable. When you put a boat in the water at low tide, the trailer wheels leave ugly scars in the mud. High tide will whisk that ugliness away. A soul mate would do the same for me, curing all past ills, smoothing over my rough edges. Or so I believed.
I saw no beauty in low tide. Nor in being alone. I knew life thrived in tide pools, but it didn’t interest me much. It didn’t look the way I wanted it to look. In my adult life, I went about my business, waiting for a change in gravitational pull that would somehow make me whole.
TO THAT END, or perhaps simply by nature, I have always been romantically tenacious. Only once has a man said, “I love you” first to me; I have volunteered it every other time. I could offer at least a half-dozen mortifying examples of how this tenacity has not necessarily served me well, but those are stories I am, thankfully, no longer interested in. Peter will suffice as an example of my dogged persistence in the face of incontrovertible evidence that my true love was an asshole.
I’d met him in Washington, D.C., where I’d moved a few months after college. I was sharing a house in Mt. Pleasant with a group of young journalists. He was a teacher, handsome, well-educated, convinced of his own worth. He lived in a shared house too, filled with guys that were just as handsome and just as smart, as if their individual magnetic properties had pulled them into friendship. Peter’s half brother was a well-known actor, and some of that glamour hung about his own chiseled features and long, lean frame. When I watched him ice-skate, I was practically paralyzed by his grace.
I was smitten. He seemed smitten, at least with the sex. When the cherry blossoms were in bloom, we drove to the Jefferson Memorial after midnight, determined to do it under the cherry trees. Our plan was foiled by someone with similar, solo plans, but we ended the night outside, on the lawn of the National Cathedral. I’d slept with only a few people before him, but he was the first I’d fallen for without reservation.
He had reservations about me, though. Maybe because he was testing his students during the day, he seemed determined to test me as well. If I liked T. C. Boyle’s World’s End, which I’d picked up at the bookstore because it had won some national award, then I was a fool. If I didn’t like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, I was another kind of fool. I left both books unopened, fearful I’d fail and be cast aside. But I didn’t find the giving of these tests as appalling as I ought to; I thought it indicated he could teach me something. Until then, I was the best-read twenty-three-year-old I knew.
He once told me that I didn’t challenge him. I can still see his narrow blue eyes as he delivered that line, waiting to see how I’d react to the condemnation. I should have gotten out of his bed, put my clothes on, and fled for good. Instead I stuck around. He broke up with me, not long after, the beginning of a long pattern of push me, pull me. Our status was so unclear that when he told me his final acceptance to the Peace Corps was contingent on his passing the “significant other” interview process, I had no idea what he was talking about. “They want to know if I’m going to be traumatized about leaving you,” he said, his lips in my hair, his hand up my shirt. “Oh,” I said. “Really?” So I was significant? “What did you tell them?” I asked.
“That I’ll miss you, but that it wouldn’t stop me from going,” he said.
I believed that, eventually, he’d own up to feeling the same way about our relationship as I did. This misconception lasted all through the years he spent in the Peace Corps. I moved to San Francisco, a place I wanted to be, but that I secretly hoped would be cool enough to suit his standards when he came back. I pored over every letter he sent, looking for hints of his love in his accounts of latrine building. Meanwhile, I was interning at one of the city’s alternative weeklies. I’d stood in front of a newspaper box on the street and known the thrill of seeing my name on a cover story for the first ti
me. I decided to go to graduate school to study journalism. I felt as if I were on the right road, my road.
At the end of his assignment he’d called to ask me to come ride across the Sahara with him, on the back of his motorcycle. I had no money to get there, and the semester at Berkeley would be starting soon. Moreover, the mode of transport—me holding on for dear life, him making all the decisions—seemed too representative of our relationship, so I said no. But the invitation itself was enough to fuel my fantasy life. He was done with all this Peace Corps stuff, and whom did he want to see? Me. I was ready to clean out a drawer in my bureau for the Great White Adventurer upon his return.
He’d been home less than twenty-four hours when he called to ask if he could visit me the next day. I was at my parents’ house in Maine at the time and he was at his mother’s, a day’s drive away.
He came to the front door. No one ever used the front door except for the mailman and people collecting for the American Cancer Society. The hug hello was awkward, off-kilter. I felt instantly aware of my body, the body he knew so well, and desperate to get him out of the house and into some environment that had possibilities.
“I was thinking we’d go to the beach,” I said.
“Sounds great,” he said, shrugging with studied nonchalance. “Are we going to have lobster?”
“Definitely,” I said, picking up my bag.
We flirted at the beach. We flirted through our lobster dinner. Then we walked down to a dock and stood looking at the moon on the water, and maybe I shivered, and that made him reach out for me. “I missed you so much,” he said, between kisses. “There hasn’t been anyone else.” I pulled back and looked at him quizzically. We’d been honest with each other, and I knew he hadn’t been celibate in Africa. Nor had I in D.C. or California. “No one like you,” he corrected himself.
Even if my father had caught us in the spare room that night, I don’t think I would have cared—that’s how happy I was. The next day Peter and I walked downtown, hand in hand, had lunch, and stopped at the Bowdoin campus on the way back. My father had been teaching there since 1949. I knew every corner of the campus; this was my territory and this was who I was, a philosophy professor’s daughter from Maine. We sprawled on the grass together. I put my head on his thigh. I had never been happier in my adult life. The tide was in, the waters lapping around my shoulders. This gave meaning to all those hopes I’d been holding on to for four years.
He didn’t touch me.
“I get the feeling this means a lot to you,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said, craning my neck to look up at him.
“This reunion,” he said. “Or whatever it is.”
I sat up. He was digging acorns out of the ground with a stick.
“Whatever it is?” I said. I wanted his cards on the table.
“You seem to believe that we belong together,” he said, looking at me now. “Or something like that.”
I was angry. Finally. I stared at him. I felt fierce, but very sure of myself.
“You asked me to come to the Sahara with you,” I said levelly. “Then when you come back, I am the very first person you want to see. I am the person you can’t keep your hands off of. You tell me there’s been no one else like me in the last three years. I’m sorry, Peter, but I’m not pretending all of this doesn’t mean something anymore.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “Nothing? I don’t believe you. I think you love me.”
He looked away. “I feel something for you,” he said. “It’s deep, but I don’t understand it. I just know I don’t want to end up with you.”
All I had wanted since the first time he’d kissed me was to end up with him. That was the life I wanted. I had let him torture me. I had tortured myself. I had tried to make myself into someone he’d want.
I was standing up now and my hands were in tight balls at my side. I turned and walked away. Walked home across the browning grass of late summer, feeling the tide I thought I’d captured rush away, wondering, even now, as I peeked over my shoulder, if it could come back. All he had to do was get up and follow me. Which he did not do.
ELEVEN YEARS LATER, I was thirty-eight and less of an idiot, but no less romantically challenged. Moreover, the bad things that happened with men had become less significant for the kind of quivering mess they left me in than for the amount of my valuable reproductive time they had consumed. I no longer had four years to waste moping after anyone, not even Apollo himself. If you believed Sylvia Ann Hewlett, I did not have four months to waste. She was the author of Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, a book that came out in the spring of 2002 to much fanfare. Her premise was that women who had put career first, women who cared about success, women like me, tended to find themselves childless and unhappy in their late thirties, with little chance of saving themselves from this self-inflicted tragedy. Here’s how the book opens: “There is a secret out there, a painful, well kept secret: At mid-life, between a third and half of all high-achieving women in America do not have children. A nationwide survey of high-earning career women conducted in January 2001 shows that 33 percent of them are childless at ages 40–55, a figure that rises to 42 percent in corporate America. By and large, these high-achieving women have not chosen to be childless. The vast majority yearns for children.”
Except for the high-earning part, her accusatory finger seemed pointed directly at me. True, I didn’t work in a “corporate” job (I owned one suit), and if the definition of high-achieving meant high-income, that wasn’t me. But my career had always been of utmost importance to me. I didn’t imagine ever quitting my job to stay home full-time with the children. So I felt a kinship with the ambitious women who worked as lawyers, investment bankers, stockbrokers, and such.
In my social circle, very few of my friends who were moms were also high achievers in the working world. Conversely, the high achievers I knew were mostly single, childless, and depressed about it. Hewlett’s book, with its ominous, shaming tone, only reinforced that: “It behooves the next generation to pay attention. By doing so, twenty-something women might be able to avoid the cruel choices that dogged the footsteps of their older sisters.”
I was indignant. Hadn’t Susan Faludi debunked all this with Backlash? Weren’t we beyond accusing career women of screwing up their chances of snaring a man and a family life? I found plenty of backlash against Hewlett on the Internet. But I still couldn’t get those “cruel choices” out of my head. Had I made them, even unconsciously? Would I pay for them? Whenever a friend struggled with getting pregnant, I’d listen to the sad saga and worry for her. I’d hope that the ovulation kits would help or the Clomid would work or the in vitro fertilization would take. And always, I’d imagine myself in her shoes someday. It was no wonder Hewlett’s book sent me into a cold sweat.
I didn’t have to look far to find anecdotal evidence either. I had one forty-one-year-old friend who had just been told her eggs were shot and if she was going to have a second child, she’d have to hire an egg donor. “You better get on it, Mary,” she warned me in her kitchen, pointing a serving spoon in the general direction of my empty womb. “I had no problem getting pregnant three years ago, and now look at me.” Another friend had decided, after years of waiting for a good man, to try motherhood on her own. But going to a sperm bank hadn’t worked, and she had given up artificial insemination for the expensive, invasive, full-court press of IVF. Her insurance would pay for three tries, and then she was on her own. I hated the thought of her need, unmet.
There was no doubt my clock was ticking. I thought maybe the batteries had even run out. I did math in my head all the time. “So, Mum was forty-three when she had you. You’ve got five years before you have to start feeling hopeless.” Except that I needed to meet the guy, and get to know him a little, and pick out the invitations and the dress. Also, science tells us that it gets harder the later you start. My mother had been
a baby-making machine. After five children, what was a sixth to her? “Just like a BM,” she’d said to me once, cheerily describing the process of giving birth to her last child.
When I was thirty-six, my gynecologist had taken a look around during a pelvic and then casually mentioned that if I wanted to have children, I should do it sooner rather than later. “I’m not really in the right financial position,” I told her. “That doesn’t matter as much,” she said. “If I were you and I was in a good relationship, I’d go ahead and worry about the financial stuff later. That tends to work itself out anyway.” With each month that passed after that unhelpful nudge, I assumed I was compounding a bad situation. I felt like a company that had been already operating in the red for a couple of years, headed toward bankruptcy.
BUT I WAS NOT DESPERATE. I had standards for what I wanted and I had learned a few lessons about holding out for someone I could really count on. My last serious boyfriend had been an earnest young man I’d met at a Lucinda Williams concert. All our interests seemed to run parallel. He worked for a local politician I admired. He was trustworthy and kind. The only catch was that I was five years older than he was. That bothered him a lot and me a little, but nonetheless, within a year he’d bought Mortgages for Dummies and taken me home to meet his parents. There were a few bad signs, though, mostly over issues of power. “You’ve got to let me be the man,” he complained one night after I’d insisted on driving home from a party because he had been drinking. “Who or what is this man you are speaking of?” I wanted to say. Because he looked very much like the boy to me, with his belligerent, semi-intoxicated expression, swaying forlornly at the end of the bed.
Then one night, when we were watching ER, I glanced over and Owen was sucking his thumb. “You’re sucking your thumb,” I said, incredulous. “Right here, in front of me.” He took it out of his mouth and looked straight ahead, a strange, secretive smile on his face. He simply did not respond. Someone on the television screen was getting intubated by a new intern. Owen appeared rapt.