An Intimate Life

by Cheryl T. Cohen Greene

  My father’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of their sockets. He lunged for Michael and I screamed, “Dad, no!” I tried to grab his arm, but he was moving so fast I clenched my fingers into an empty fist. “Robair,” my grandmother yelled, reverting to the French pronunciation of his name. He and Michael stood barely an inch apart. Besides being half his age, Michael towered over my diminutive father. He could have clobbered him without breaking a sweat.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Michael said, never raising his voice.

  “C’mon on, Daddy,” I said, and grabbed his elbow.

  My father stepped back and I only let go when he had cleared striking distance from Michael.

  “Let’s go,” my mother huffed, glaring at me.

  If my parents thought they would intimidate me into leaving Michael, they were proven wrong, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shaken. My heart raced and my body felt paralyzed and ready to sprint at the same time.

  I was mostly angry at my parents, but Michael’s remark had stung too. Likening me to a pair of shoes wasn’t exactly flattering. In fact, it was downright insulting. And to be so crass in front of my parents, even if they were treating him poorly. I loved the freedom—sexual and otherwise—that life with Michael offered, but I also wanted him to think of me as special, and when I thought of metaphors for that, a pair of shoes didn’t come to mind. I let it go, though, because to me Michael represented a one-way ticket out of the provincial life. He was everything my family, the Church, and my teachers were not. My thinking was very black and white back then. If he was their opposite, it could only mean that he was all good because they were all bad. It would be a while before shades of grey became visible to me.

  Later that night Michael and I made love and he seemed even more attentive than normal. He was a dream lover and sex could go on for hours. He was slow, sensual, and made me feel like I was the most desirable woman in the world. We mused about what we wanted for our future and for the first time we discussed leaving Boston. We talked as though my parents were done meddling, but they would make a final attempt to separate us, and this time my mother would take the lead.

  I never really thought of my parents as bigoted. Salem was a fairly diverse city and both my mother and father seemed to mingle easily with people of other creeds and ethnicities. Rose and Arthur Solomon were good friends of theirs. They went to the movies together, ate at each other’s homes, and took weekend getaways as a foursome. It didn’t matter that the Solomons were Jewish. Yet neither of my parents was happy that Michael was. Friendship was one thing, but when it came to dating and marriage, only Catholics were welcome. When I was older I acknowledged this for what it was—a kind of gentile bigotry. My parents would never have been overtly hostile to someone because of his or her race or religion, but when it came to marriage the lines were drawn.

  Mom and Dad assumed that Michael’s mother and father, Sadie and Julius, would be equally dismayed to learn that their son was shacking up with a religious interloper. If my parents couldn’t sever us, perhaps Michael’s could. A few weeks after their mortifying visit to my apartment, my mother put in a call to Michael’s mother. She banked on her news being a bombshell, so she must have been pretty disappointed to find Sadie nonplussed by it.

  Michael’s parents grew very dear to me and they always treated me with warmth and kindness, but it turned out they had prejudices of their own. “We were just relieved you were white,” Sadie later told me. Michael had dated Latino and African-American women in the past and their fear was that he would cross racial, not religious, lines.

  Michael would turn out to be one of the most charismatic people I’d ever meet. He was always at the center of his social circle and everyone from frat boys to hipsters to ordinary Joes were drawn to him. He had an uncanny knack for divining psychological motivations and subtleties. He made nearly everyone feel that finally they had met someone who understood them. Often, he played the role of the philosopher of the group, the one who had the insights, who could detect subterranean truth and hold you spellbound as he eloquently unearthed it for you.

  Michael had a regular table at Jack and Marion’s Deli in Brookline, just outside of Boston, where he held court with his entourage, myself included. We drank soda, ate massive corned beef sandwiches, and talked, talked, talked. This was 1964. Society was in flux and young people like us were questioning everything. Michael spoke with a certainty and confidence that eluded the rest of us. We had questions; he had answers.

  More than once someone in his throng of admirers reminded me of how lucky I was to be his girlfriend. I was lucky. I never fully understood what Michael, who could have had any woman, saw in me. I knew that my success in landing two popular high school boys had to do with my personality and social intelligence, but this was Michael. He was a bon vivant who oozed sophistication and charisma. I knew I was out of his league, intellectually and physically. We were in Boston, surrounded by pretty college coeds. Of course, Michael had a reason for picking me, and one night as we lay in bed he revealed it. “You would be a great mother. I know you love fiercely. You’re like a lioness and you’ll protect the ones you love.”

  So, Michael wanted to have kids with me? Maybe this meant I was special.

  My mother, meanwhile, was relentless about breaking up Michael and me. Having exhausted all of her other options, she kicked off a campaign of near constant cajoling and nagging. She called me several times a day and wrote me letters besieging me to come home and get back on the right track—as if I had ever been on it. Finally, to get some relief from her, I agreed to return home for a year. She knew I would still see Michael—I made that clear—but she desperately hoped that not living with him would cool the relationship and make me realize that what I really wanted was a nice Catholic boy and a suburban future. I still went into Boston to work and for the first week I managed to come home every night. But as week number two began, I pushed back and spent the night at Michael’s. Then I stayed another night. Soon Michael and I decided it was time to jettison my parents for good and put an end to my exile to Salem. We would make it official and get married, and we would do it soon.

  When I told my parents about the engagement they were, not surprisingly, livid. My mother squawked about boycotting the wedding; my father sulked. For my part, I started going home a few nights a week. Why not give them that since in less than a month I would be Michael’s wife and they would lose all authority over me?

  Cantor Hammerman, a neighbor of Michael’s parents, agreed to perform the ceremony on one condition: that I was not pregnant. Despite some close calls, I wasn’t, so we decided to get married on August 22, 1964, nine months after we met, in a small ceremony in Cantor Hammerman’s living room. In those days, especially for women, marriage made you an adult. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t yet out of my teens. In a short time I would officially be grown up and beyond my parents’ control.

  I was thrilled and scared at the same time. On the night before the wedding, sitting in my bedroom at my parents’ house, it really hit me that my life was about to change drastically. I looked around the room that had never really been mine. The crocheted ecru bedspread, the curtains with bluebonnets embroidered on them, the dressing table with the big oval mirror, the gilded brush and comb set that lay on it—all had been my mother’s choices. She created the bedroom that she had wished for as a little girl and that even in my late teens I wasn’t allowed to change. Nearly every day my mother made my bed and straightened up my room. If she needed to open my dresser drawers to put away laundry or rifle through my desk to find a roll of Scotch tape or a pair of scissors, she did it with no thought to my privacy. Worse, I was never allowed to close my door, and although Mom never explained why, I’m pretty sure this was a precaution against that evil of evils: masturbation. We may have called it my room, but it never was in any meaningful sense. Really, it belonged to my mother. I wanted out. I was desperate to get out, so why did I feel so much grief when I looke
d around at the frilly room my mother had made?

  “Don’t cry. Don’t cry. You’ll smudge your mascara,” said my friend Lisa, who was my maid of honor, as we drove to Michael’s parents the morning of the wedding. I was crying because I was sad and because I was ecstatic. My emotions danced about, ricocheting from high to low, a discordant combination of melancholy and elation.

  When we arrived at Michael’s parents’ house, Michael was out running a few last-minute errands. Lisa carried in the simple white frock my grandmother had helped me pick out and I held my veil and satin pumps. When Sadie and Julius came to the door, they looked more serious than I had ever seen them. Sadie pressed a cookie into Lisa’s hand and asked if she wouldn’t mind ironing a table cloth they planned to use for the buffet. Then they led me into the living room and we sat on the couch.

  “Cheryl, you know how much we like you . . . ” Sadie began.

  “That’s why we have to have this talk,” Julius continued.

  “Michael will not provide for you. He’s just not capable of building a stable life for a family. And if you have children, Sadie and I won’t help you financially,” Julius said.

  If this declaration had been delivered differently I might have felt hurt, but Julius spoke with such genuine concern that I couldn’t take it as anything other than a sincere attempt to protect me.

  “I would never expect you to,” I answered, perhaps too breezily.

  “How old are you?” Julius asked.

  “Nineteen. Old enough to know what I want,” I answered.

  “We hope so,” Sadie said.

  Despite my mother’s threats, she attended the ceremony with my father, brothers, grandmother, and a few other family members. If my parents weren’t joyous, they weren’t disruptive either. All in all, the wedding was a simple and pleasant affair. Cantor Hammerman performed a civil ceremony that was free of any religious rituals. After we said our “I do’s,” the guests, who numbered around twenty, retreated to Michael’s parents’ house next door and mingled over corned beef, pastrami, coleslaw, rye bread, and other sumptuous deli food. We sipped champagne and Michael’s best man, Jerome, made a toast wishing us a lifetime of happiness together. Even my parents raised their glasses.

  Michael and I settled in Beacon Hill, a tony neighborhood in Boston. We rented a little one bedroom in an old brick building that had been sectioned into apartments. It had a small balcony with French doors leading onto it, and on warm nights we left them open. We turned our apartment into the go-to place for our social circle.

  I soon left my job at Kressler because I got pregnant. A month into our marriage I missed a period. I went to the doctor, took a urine test, and learned I was expecting. Michael took a decent-paying job at the post office, which came with health benefits so that the cost of prenatal care and delivery would be covered.

  If our financial status didn’t worry me, what did was my ability to be a good mother. After all, I didn’t have much of a role model. From the time I was very young, I believed my mother didn’t like me. At first it hurt and I pined for her love and affection. Anger came later, but now I felt almost completely alienated from her. Would my child feel the same about me? Would I give her or him reason to? What if I was unable to love this child? I was terrified that I would repeat my mother’s mistakes.

  At Michael’s suggestion, I started seeing a therapist once a week. It turned out to be the best thing I could have done for myself and my family. In therapy I was able to start the process of working through a lot of the anger, resentment, and guilt that lingered from my childhood. I gained the insight and confidence to be the kind of mother I wanted to be. As my child grew inside me, I knew I would love him or her, and that I would be the sensitive, caring mother I longed for, even then.

  When I gave birth to our beautiful little Jessica in June of 1965, I knew that I would prove Michael’s instincts about me to be true. I also knew that the relationship I had with her would be nothing like the one I struggled through with my mother.

  Michael was everything I could have wanted in a father for my child. He was tender, caring, and sensitive to Jessica. Unlike so many other men of his generation, he eagerly became a full partner in parenting. He changed her diapers, scooped her up when she cried, and played with her. At night he turned on slow music, took her in his arms, and rocked her until she fell asleep. Before she could walk, Jessica had heard The Beatles, Donovan, The Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, and others in the pantheon of sixties rock and folk music. The Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” was her favorite song and when Michael played it she would coo and smile and within minutes her eyelids would droop.

  When Jessica was two-and-a-half and I was pregnant for the second time, Michael decided to return to college to get his bachelor’s degree in education. Maybe having a child to nurture reminded him of what he had set out to become when he started at Boston University. Michael wanted to be a teacher and for him that meant something very particular. It meant being a mentor, someone who would teach kids not just facts, but how to think critically. He would inspire them to be their most thoughtful, creative selves and show them they could achieve anything they set their minds to.

  In 1966, Michael enrolled in Boston State College. His mother was the secretary to the Dean of Admissions and she filed his paperwork for him and helped him get his credits transferred from Boston University. He left the post office job and took part-time work at the deli we frequented before we were married. He appealed to his parents for help and, despite their pre-wedding admonition, they agreed to assist us financially.

  Michael also started working a night job in the cafeteria at Beth Israel Hospital. He left at 5:00 PM and returned home at around one in the morning. The job consisted of washing dishes and making breakfast porridge by the ton for the inpatients. He was instantly bored with it so, in typical Michael fashion, he found other outlets for his intelligence. He spent hours playing poker with the doctors and amassed a tidy sum from his winnings. He also returned to taking tests for college students whose ambition outstripped their integrity.

  This reinforced something I had always thought about Michael. I knew he would never be a “straight” guy with a corporate job and a typical middle-class life, but I believed he would still be successful. Success for him—and, by default, me—would just look different from what our parents and mainstream society imagined.

  Michael had no interest in being Ward Cleaver, and June made me want to wretch. Our future would be bright and it would be ours. We would make it what we wanted, not what we were supposed to want. That’s why I brushed off Sadie and Julius’s warnings. They were kind to be concerned, but they just didn’t understand Michael.

  Becoming parents didn’t slow Michael and me down in the bedroom, but his new schedule did mean we had to carve out other times for sex. Even when it was only Jessica, I timed naps to coincide with Michael’s arrival home from school and, with the vigor of two healthy twenty-somethings, our sex life continued unabated.

  Our easy domestic routine held up until around June. That’s when Michael suggested that I take Jessica out of town to my friends Marshasue’s and her husband Ron’s farm in New Hampshire for a couple of weeks. Finals were just around the corner and he claimed he wanted some time to study without distraction. By this time I was almost seven months pregnant with our son. I really didn’t feel like traveling—and I was suspicious.

  Women were always fawning over Michael. Because of his unconventional attitude toward just about everything, I wasn’t sure that he would consider having a wife a reason to resist them. He certainly was never jealous when other men came on to me, and no matter how happy I was about him, about us, I pretty much always had this gnawing feeling that I was not at all special to him, that I was just one of many who swirled around him vying for his attention. I wanted Michael to keep his free-spirited, alternative lifestyle and outlook, but I also wanted him to be so enamored of me that other women would appear unattractive by contrast. This wasn’t about
rules. It was about desire, and I wanted his desire to match mine. He wouldn’t deny himself anything by being faithful to me because he wouldn’t want anyone but me. I yearned for a comfy mix of bohemia and conventionality, one that would ensure my image as a rebel without inflaming my insecurities. Even at twenty-three I suspected real life was rarely so obliging.

  But when Michael pressed for two weeks alone, I acquiesced. On a humid June morning I packed a suitcase for myself and Jessica, loaded our Volkswagen bug with a small zoo of stuffed animals, and headed north on I-93.

  Michael and I talked every night. He told me how much he missed us and promised me he was preparing to ace his finals. I wasn’t happy about being banished, but if it meant Michael’s success at college then I would just have to suffer through a couple of weeks away from him.

  Finally, Michael was done with his last exam and Jessica and I made the two-hour trip back to Boston.

  “Daddy home?” Jessica asked as we turned onto our street.

  “That’s right, Sweetheart,” I answered.

  I parked the car, quickly freed Jessica from her car seat, and scooped her up. She giggled all the way to the front door.

  Michael’s grin lit up his face when he saw us. Jessica stretched out her arms and he pressed her to his chest and kissed her forehead. Then he planted a big smooch on me.

  “I missed you two so much,” he said.

  “Not as much as we missed you. How did your last final go?”

  “Nailed it. I’m expecting straight A’s”

  “Great!” I said and gave Michael another big kiss.

  He went out to pick up burgers and fries for dinner. I unpacked and got reacquainted with my tiny home. It may not have been much, but it was all I needed. Besides, even the Taj Mahal wouldn’t have been big enough to contain my love for my sweet little family.

  Since Michael was now out of school, he went to work full-time at the deli. That his grades would be stellar was simply a given, and as the summer drew on it never occurred to me to ask about them. A few weeks later, I stood in my kitchen chopping carrots for the stew I was making for dinner. My belly was now so big that I had to fully extend my arms to reach the cutting board on the kitchen counter. My mind wandered as I mechanically chopped the carrots into rounds and then half-moons. Just as I was about to toss them into the pot on the stove the phone rang. It was Sadie.