Children change your life irrevocably. I’d spent countless hours planning birthday parties, the themes never duplicated—constructing cakes in the shape of whales, witches, princesses. There had been nights when I’d nursed one of the kids, frightened by a flushed face or a loud, croupy cough coming from deep within a tiny chest. There were frantic afternoons trying to get the endless paperwork done at my office, knowing I had to be at a sports field for a game at four, worried I might miss the pivotal play of the season. The twins and Joseph were the heart of my life. Motherhood, though often a burden, was more a joy, but why bother to say any of those things to you, Elliot? You couldn’t have related to them.
I began to see a preciousness to the way you spent your days—beholden to no one, having almost no responsibilities. Without kids, people can do completely as they please. I must confess, I saw a sort of shallowness to it. You needed to have had a child, children. In moments of melancholy, as my youngest, Joseph, was leaving for college, I thought sadly how you’d not experienced having a baby, had not taken care of a child, watched this child develop into unique personhood. Your time with Meredith’s son had been brief. You even admitted that you had lost contact with Matthew. I was shocked. Imagine, you didn’t know where the boy was. Children are the most satisfying experience a human being can have. Walt knew this. It was what made him saddest about dying young—leaving us behind. In his last months, he’d agonized about not being there for the children.
At one point, I said what was on my mind, honestly spoke about what I felt you were missing by not having kids. Isn’t truthfulness what good friends give each other? Unfortunately, I learned this is not always the case, for it did not go well and resulted in an almost irreparable rent in our relationship. After you and Lilly came back from Southeast Asia, you rhapsodized about the beautiful children you’d seen in Viet Nam. It had been great being silly with the kids, you said, telling me how you blew soap bubbles from containers you’d brought as cheap gifts. “Language was no barrier,” you said. “We just played and played.”
“Oh, Elliot, you should have a child, of your own,” I responded. It came out without thinking. “You’re missing out on the greatest adventure of life.”
“What?” you practically shouted into the phone. “Again? Are you out of your mind, Judith? That’s the last thing I needed. You’re like an old bubbe from a shtetl in Europe. Always asking when I’m going to have kids. Since when does a person have to have kids to be satisfied? When will you let up on the subject of kids?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.” But then, because I often don’t know when to stop, I added, “It’s because I’ve always felt you’d have been a wonderful father.”
“Ha,” you snorted. “After Meredith died, her family couldn’t wait to pry Matthew out of my house. Her sister, Renata, swooped down and whisked him away just days after the funeral. They didn’t think I’d make such a wonderful father.”
“Oh, Elliot,” I said, remembering how this had hurt him. “That was completely different. You were working so hard—how could you have been a single father? You’d only known Matthew a short time and he was so needy, so devastated by his mother’s death. But a baby of your own. That’s what I always wished for you.”
“Matthew was better off without me,” you said. “Everyone saw that. And a baby?” I heard a short, bitter laugh on the other end of the line. “Have you thought about my wonderful genes? Are you forgetting that my mother had a mental illness that killed her? A baby? Why would I want to pass on my genes? Shit, Judith, listen to what you’re saying.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But your mom, when she could, was a wonderful mother.”
“Why are we having this conversation again? How many times do we have to talk about this?”
“I know, I know,” I said, again going too far and knowing it. My heart was pounding. “But I’ve always wished you were with someone younger. Someone who you could have a family with.”
What I really wished, of course, was that we’d had children together. That had been my dream. When we were in San Francisco, you yourself had said as much. Hadn’t you whispered in my ear how we would make beautiful children together? Why had you said those things to me? I’d actually listened and believed every word.
“It’s Lilly I’m with!” you were shouting. “Not someone younger. Not anyone else. Lilly. Do you think I don’t notice how you keep putting her down, ignoring her? Why don’t you accept that I have the life I want? I don’t want anything else.”
I was chastened and apologized. I vowed never to bring up kids again. I promised I’d try to be more positive about Lilly. And I meant it. I really tried. I swore to myself that I would bury my decades-long disappointment that you’d chosen other women, especially Lilly, and not me. But you had had enough of my scolding and meddling. After that argument in our sixties, sadly you and I were estranged for years.
Perhaps this was a good thing. With you, Elliot, not occupying center stage, I realized something important. Who I really wished for was Walt. Poor, dead Walt. He was who I wanted to see and who I wanted to see me. Walt had been interested in everything about me, especially the children—all three of them. It took more than a decade after he died for me to begin the real process of grieving for him. Busy raising the kids, fantasizing over Elliot, and whatever else I filled my life with, I had deferred the pain for so long, I thought I could avoid it. Finally, I ran from it no longer. All the grief books say that this is the way it happens—unexpectedly and piercingly. Sometimes there was a dream in which Walt was suddenly alive. He’d look at me with his warm brown eyes and say with a kind smile, “You thought I was dead? Ha, don’t be silly, I was just away for a while. Why did you think I was dead?” That dream was so real, I’d wake happy. But the dream was evanescent, Walt’s lanky form fading before the relieved smile left my face. Awake fully, I felt the loss anew.
Sometimes, it even happened when I was awake. I’d be returning home from visiting one of the children and walk through the door with my suitcase, replaying in my head, for example, the latest interesting thing Joseph had told me. I’d start to formulate the words of how I’d ask Walt what he thought, knowing how interested he’d be in the conversation. But instead there was the quiet house, cold because the thermostat was set low and Walt is forever in the ground, never again to offer his seasoned, sage opinions. Never again to see me.
11
Moving
As the moving crew unloaded the last of my drastically reduced possessions, there was a knock at the partially opened front door. I finished writing the check, tore it from the checkbook, and handed it over to one of the heavily tattooed fellows who had carted and grunted my stuff up from the street into the elevator and down the hall to my apartment. “Thanks, guys,” I said, before turning to the woman waiting in my doorway.
“Dolores Levine, MSW, Loma Alta Social Director,” her badge read. Curly hair, harried, no makeup, but with good eye contact, why, she looked like … me. More accurately, she looked like the former me, the social worker who’d only recently retired. I was probably just five or six years older than this woman, but as we faced one another in the doorway of the two-bedroom apartment I’d now call home, Dolores and I stood at opposite sides of the professional divide. She was a staff member at Loma Alta, while I was a resident. This made me one of Dolores’s clients, someone to be ministered to. Shockingly, it also made me officially an old person. I had retired from my job at Child Protective Services and sold my comfortable three-thousand-square-foot home in the Oakland Hills. In doing this, I’d created a new Judith—one who was not a social worker, but had a social worker.
I was not in the habit of needing or asking for anything, had certainly never before had a social worker, so I was curious to see what Dolores would be offering. She looked confident in her role as Judith Sherman’s social director. Dolores provided services, but she served those at the other end of the life cycle from my own previ
ous caseload of foster children. In that life, Dolores might have been one of my girlfriends. If she wasn’t now standing in my doorway in a professional capacity, wearing an employee badge, we could have been going off to dinner somewhere.
“Come in,” I said. “Sorry I can’t offer you a seat.”
“Not a problem,” Dolores said, surveying the mountain of boxes and bubble-wrapped furniture that filled the living room. “I don’t envy you, putting all this away, but you’ll have plenty of time to deal with it later. Now, you need sustenance. They serve dinner from five until six in the dining room and, trust me, you don’t want to be late. The dieticians take no pity on latecomers and they won’t give you a morsel after six. Come, I’ll show you downstairs and introduce you around.”
Yes, I was weary. Moving had been exhausting. The huge house in the Oakland Hills had sold so quickly that the past month was a blur of packing, trying to persuade my children to take belongings it turned out that only I thought were special, carting boxes to Goodwill, and then, finally, hauling the remainder to the dump. Those three children of mine should be on their knees with gratitude that I’d saved them the trouble of sorting through a lifetime of possessions after I kicked the bucket. But they weren’t. They were furious with me and wanted no part of this move.
I’d promised myself that this new apartment would contain little nostalgia. Previously, I had been a woman who favored colorful chaos in home decorating—collections of art glass, vintage clothing, tapestries and textiles, unmatched crockery from around the world. “Hippie shit,” I overheard my son Evan describe my collections to Ira, his once boyfriend, and now husband, who was an interior decorator. In the new place, I vowed I’d go for a whole different look: sparse, clean, and clutter-free. I’d visited Evan and Ira’s immaculate loft in Soho. They’d undoubtedly approve of the new place—even though they, along with everyone else, were aghast that I’d chosen to move into a retirement community at the relatively young age of seventy-one.
I obediently followed Dolores downstairs and into the dining room.
“We’ve assigned you to Mrs. Rosen’s table,” she said.
That said a lot, didn’t it? Mrs. Rosen’s table. It told you immediately who was the alpha old lady.
“I think you’ll like it there,” Dolores continued. “At least I hope you will. The table needs a fourth. They aren’t always an easy bunch, that group, but they’re interesting. I suspect you’re up to the task. Not everyone has been.” She turned to eye me. “But once a social worker, always a social worker, right?”
“I appreciate your honesty,” I said to Dolores, pleased she, at least, recognized my former professional self. “And you’re right, after forty years, I’m sure the old habits will still be there.”
“Anyway, give it a try,” said Dolores. “If it doesn’t work out, we’ll find other options.”
I had been informed that at dinner we were always to sit at the same table—like on a cruise ship. Moving around provided too many complications, and besides, the staff needed to know who had not come out of their apartments that day. That way, they could check on the residents—see if they were still breathing, I suppose. Breakfast, for those who made it downstairs before noon, was open seating. Lunch was a buffet (with waiters assigned to carry residents’ trays to any available table). But now it was dinner and as I walked behind Dolores toward my table, I looked around at the people already seated. Old, sad, proud. You didn’t need to be a social worker to see that. The dining room was a formal space resembling not quite a hospital cafeteria and not quite a hotel restaurant, but a magazine ad for either. The décor was created to neither offend nor please.
When I decided to move into Loma Alta, every single one of my friends thought I was crazy, and told me so. You would not believe the anxiety it stirred up in people. If I was old, then they were old. My action worried not only my friends, but also my three grown children. There wasn’t one person who supported the idea—not even my younger son, Joseph, who was almost finished with his training to be an emergency medicine doctor and usually on the same page as me. You’d have thought I suggested they put me on an ice floe and shove me out to sea.
“These days, seventy isn’t so old.” Over and over, I heard that one.
My daughter, Miriam, in her mid-forties, seemed the most appalled. As soon as she heard my plans, she phoned each and every day from Los Angeles, trying to talk me out of it.
“Why, for God’s sake,” she asked furiously, “are you treating yourself like an old lady? It’s ridiculous. You just finished a bicycle trip through Vermont. You’re not ready for an old people’s home.”
“It’s not an old people’s home,” I said. “Not like in the old days. It’s an active adults’ community.”
I didn’t feel as if I needed to explain myself to Miriam, or to anyone. For starters, the house in the Oakland Hills was getting me down. I ate too many dinners alone. Hadn’t I counseled people not to wait to move until they were too old to create a new life for themselves? I’d seen plenty of elderly neighbors and relatives delay moving into senior living facilities, or whatever euphemism was currently in vogue, only to end up on the tail end of some debilitating decline. They’d moved too late, when they were already feeble and could no longer take care of their homes or even themselves. Often someone else made the decision for them. And then what happened? Their supposed golden years immediately became empty and bleak. They could barely leave their rooms or apartments. They never made new friends and sunk deeper and deeper into isolation and depression. Then, senility set in. When that happened, what good was the pristine swimming pool or the billiard table in the lobby? Once senile, did it matter that there was a bulletin board full of announcements of activities and concerts and bus trips to the outlet mall?
I had my own reasons for moving. But for now, I’d keep them to myself. It was no one else’s business—including my family’s. The story I put out and stuck to was that I planned to take every trip to every damned opera, concert, or ballet offered by the old folks’/active adults’ community. I wouldn’t have to pay a cent for parking or gas. I’d lean back on the plush seat in the souped-up bus from Loma Alta. At Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, or at the War Memorial Opera House across the street, I’d listen to all the Wagner and Mozart I wanted—from prime seats, even. Then I’d get back on the bus and close my eyes for the thirty-five-minute drive back to Belmont, replaying the glorious music in my head, undisturbed by traffic.
I’d made a bundle from selling the house in the hills. Of late, there always seemed to be high-tech millionaires who wanted to enroll their children in the fantastic Piedmont school district and to live in my family-friendly Oakland neighborhood only a half hour from all that was available in San Francisco. The community even offered “diversity,” and so these young masters of the universe could tell themselves that although they might be obscenely rich, they still exposed their precious kids to real life: to black or brown or Asian families. When these young millionaires arrived to look at my house, realtors and spouses in tow, I tried looking as feeble as possible. I’d slowly lead them upstairs and then direct their gaze toward the magnificent view from the bank of windows in the bedroom. Then I’d hang back, pretending to straighten towels in the bathroom. When those thirtysomethings looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge and at the skyline of the city, I could hear a collective intake of breaths. It was, indeed, a splendid view, and, admittedly, the single thing I’d miss most about the house when I sold it.
The realtor would shush her clients, whispering a warning, “Don’t act so excited. We’ll talk back at the office. Do you want the owner to get you into a bidding war?”
Which is precisely what I did. I waited until there were four people who’d fallen in love with the place, swooning about the tree house (built for my own three kids and still left standing), and the original stained-glass windows. Then I slowed down, pretending that I was having second thoughts about selling and giving up all those memories.
You know, “I raised three kids in this house. I have such fond memories. Honestly, I don’t know if I can go through with it.” This got the buyers really nervous, and they coveted the house even more than they had originally. They’d already been imagining their first Thanksgiving, sitting in the charming dining room with its four-inch crown moldings and now, damn it, they wanted this house. They were prepared to fight for it. Finally, my realtor and I set a date by which we said we’d consider all offers. Bids could be submitted on that date only, not before. As I sat back and waited for the envelopes to arrive, I thought about how much I hated scrambling to find someone to clean the gutters every year, what a fortune it had been to heat the huge, poorly insulated place. I thought with relief about getting rid of the shelves of books and collections I’d once loved, but now felt anchored down by. As those buyers submitted their bids, one by one, it was obvious they had gotten into precisely the feeding frenzy we’d hoped for. Eventually, I accepted an offer which was half a million more than my realtor and I had previously agreed would be acceptable. And, believe me, this original amount was criminal.
“Ladies, look who I’ve brought you,” Dolores said with great good cheer, as if she was delivering an extravagant present to the three women sitting before us. “A fourth. Now your table has a fourth.” She was the only person smiling. The group did not appear to feel the need for a fourth.
Love Is a Rebellious Bird Page 25