An Intimate Life

by Cheryl T. Cohen Greene

  “I just checked Michael’s grades,” she said.

  Because of her position at the school Sadie had early access to final grades. Her voice sounded strained, but I couldn’t imagine why.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “He dropped out of all of his classes. He got incompletes in every one.”

  I felt dizzy. I grabbed the back of one of the kitchen chairs and then lowered myself into it.

  “What?” I stammered and then realized I did not want her to repeat herself. “How . . . how could that be?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Cheryl. I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

  Well, I couldn’t, and any explanation I could conjure up hurt too much for me to think about it for very long.

  I was hurt, scared, and angry, and when Michael came home I lashed out.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I know, Michael. I know you didn’t take your exams. Your mother told me. What were you doing those two weeks when you told me you were taking finals?”

  Michael looked down at his shoes.

  “Were you with another woman while Jessica and I were out of the picture for two weeks?”

  “No. I was hanging out in the school cafeteria. I couldn’t tell you, but I just didn’t want to be in school anymore.”

  “So why did I need to leave?”

  Michael said nothing.

  I grabbed a lava lamp off an end table and slammed it down on the floor. The glass broke and the red-veined liquid expanded out on our hardwood floor like an amoeba.

  Jessica started to cry.

  “Mommy broke lamp,” she said.

  I picked her up and cuddled her.

  “I’m sorry, Sweetheart. Mommy’s sorry.”

  Jessica’s tears were the only thing that could have stemmed my anger.

  We ate dinner that night in total silence. I could now add guilt and humiliation to the list of toxic emotions coursing through me. I was stuck, and I knew it. What was I going to do? Return to my parents with my toddler and another one on the way? I could just hear the chorus of “I told you so.”

  And then there was the undeniable fact that I still loved Michael too much to walk away. Even if I had a warm, welcoming home waiting for my children and me in Salem, I would never go back to it. I loved Michael not just for who he was, but for how he made me see myself. I became the person I wanted to be with him. Around Michael, I was smart, funny, adventurous, and sexy—or at least that’s how he made me feel. Michael listened to me. He wanted to hear what I had to say. He understood me. I had revealed myself to him and he had embraced me when many others had reproached me. I could no more leave Michael than go to the moon.

  When early July came around, Michael announced that he wouldn’t return to Boston State in the fall. I could feel the blood draining from my face as he explained that he was bored with the education program and that he needed more of a challenge. I would have been angry if I wasn’t so scared—scared of losing Michael, scared that I wasn’t enough for him, scared that he regretted marrying me. So, I simply said “okay.”

  A month later, in August 1968, our son, Eric, was born. Within four years I had left home, gotten married, and had two children. My life had radically changed, and soon it would take another major turn.

  Michael and I had occasionally talked about leaving Boston for California. It was the heady days of the late 1960s and we both believed the world our kids were destined to inherit would scarcely resemble the one we knew. We were building a more just, freer, more tolerant society and it was just a matter of time before the transformation was complete. From our perspective, the epicenter of this new world was the San Francisco Bay Area. In the last few years some of our friends had headed there and we wondered what it would be like to join them. Sometimes they would call us from their apartment and hold the phone out the window so that we could hear the bustle of the street. “You’ve got to come to San Francisco. People smoke grass in the street here!” they would cry into the phone. In October 1968, we called our friends and asked if we could stay with them for a few weeks until we found our own place.

  I so wished that moving to California would motivate Michael to do something more with his life. I hoped that he would hit his stride out there and discover what it was that would make him happy. I was excited about our new life. So many possibilities waited for us, I was sure. I was also scared as hell.

  Michael earned some cash by taking an exam for a friend who wanted to get into a doctoral program and we emptied our savings account. After buying a Volkswagen camper we had a $1,000 left to start our new life, no small sum at that time. We lined the back of the camper with sleeping bags and crammed in Jessica’s menagerie of stuffed animals, plenty of drawing paper and crayons, and enough books and toys to keep her occupied for the cross-country trip.

  On the morning we left we stopped by some friends’ houses to say goodbye and then drove to my parents’ house. My mother was furious. She took our leaving as a personal affront, and when I hugged her she stiffened her body and kept her hands at her sides. My father had tears in his eyes, and when I turned to him he said, “Go ahead and leave. The next time you see me I’ll be in my coffin.” My father was a healthy forty-six-year-old, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about how unrealistic and melodramatic this was. Peter, my fourteen-year-old brother, was crestfallen. He looked as though he was at a funeral. “I’ll come back and you’ll come visit me,” I said to him, fighting back tears. Nanna was sad, but she said she wanted me to be happy. I promised I would call or write every week. I didn’t stop sniffling until we were hours down the road and my sadness started to give way to excitement about the life that awaited us on the other coast.

  Most of the trip was a lot of fun. We camped in KOA campgrounds. We stopped off at the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest and drove through cities like Oklahoma City and Santa Fe, which were so different from where I came from that they seemed nothing short of exotic. I nursed Eric, who started the trip just as he turned ten weeks, and three-year-old Jessica delighted in seeing the new sights that flashed before her every day. Everything was going smoothly, until about two weeks into our journey, when we were less than a 150 miles south of San Francisco.

  The day started out like most days on the trip. We got up early, brushed our teeth with water from a canteen, and ate dry cereal for breakfast. I lay Eric in his car bed and Jessica lay on a sleeping bag in the back of the camper. Just as the sun started to rise we drove onto Highway 101. We traveled north for a few hours, the roadside scenery quickly unrolling alongside us. By 11:00 AM we were hungry and by noon we were famished, so just before we entered the town of Hollister we pulled into a diner. Including us there were probably ten people in the place, so we were served fast. We ordered club sandwiches for Michael and me and silver-dollar pancakes and a hot chocolate for Jessica. Michael and I each drained two cups of coffee and then asked the waitress to fill our thermos with more. Before 1:00 PM, we were back on the road. We all had full stomachs and Michael and I were caffeinated and ready to drive straight through the remaining two and a half hours to San Francisco. We would arrive at our new home before dinner.

  As we pulled out of the diner parking lot, I took off my seat belt so I could nurse Eric on my right side. He stopped sucking for a moment and I look down. I wiped away a froth of milk bubbles that had collected around his mouth. I looked out the window and I saw a pickup truck with a camper built onto the bed barreling toward the interstate from a dirt road that led into it like a tributary. A brick-colored plume of dust kicked up behind it. They’re going fast, I thought. Then we were close enough for me to see the rust on the fender. I saw the woman who was driving turn to the woman in the passenger seat, most of her profile obscured by her hair that hung loose. Isn’t she going to stop?

  Then an ear-shattering crash. Metal assaulting metal. Glass shattering into jagged shards and cascading to the pavement. The smel
l of rubber and the screech of tires moving with a new, uncontrollable momentum. I shouted, “Oh God!” All of us, in both vehicles, were trapped in the collision, slammed around by a force that gathered impossible strength in only seconds. We were upside down and Eric was on top of me, his mouth open and my chest covered in milk. The horn wailed. Then we were right side up again. Smoke wandered out of the truck’s hood like a ghost. Michael leapt out of the driver’s seat, leaving his door open, and ran around to the passenger side. He helped Eric and me out of the camper. I screamed, “Jess . . . Get Jess.” He ran to the back of the camper, ripped open the door, and extracted Jessica. Eric’s face was blue. This isn’t right. That’s not how he should look. “No, no, no,” I cried to Eric. Then he gasped and took a breath and the blue dissolved into pink as he screamed. I limped to the back of the camper and saw Jessica rubbing her sleepy eyes. “What happened?” she muttered.

  Intense pain radiated from the top of my neck to below my shoulder blades. It kept me from standing up straight. The pickup truck had crashed into us, making our van summersault across the median, into the southbound lane. All four tires were blown and the rubber splayed out in black, jagged tongues. I heard sirens getting louder. Did this mean they were getting closer?

  At the hospital they took X-rays of my back and found that I had three compression fractures between my shoulder blades and damage to the base of my neck. I realized later that Jessica had been protected by the truckload of stuffed animals we had packed for her. The impact tossed her around like a rag doll, but, fortunately, she careened from stuffed giraffe, to stuffed pig, to stuffed elephant. I was told that Eric was okay, but when he was around four he was treated for a neck problem that I attributed to the car wreck. Michael wore his seat belt and escaped with only a bruise on his foot. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Darvon and told me to take the next appointment I could find with an orthopedist.

  Since our camper was totaled, Bobby, one of our friends in San Francisco, drove down to Hollister to pick us up. The five of us climbed into his van. Jessica sat on Michael’s lap and Eric was in my arms for the two-and-a-half-hour trip north. Even the slightest bump or start made my neck scream, so I popped another Darvon. In retrospect, it seems like I should have asked the doctors if it was safe to keep nursing Eric while I took pain medication. Luckily it turned out that it was, but I didn’t ask because at the time I assumed doctors were all-knowing and infallible.

  We arrived at Bobby and Peggy’s around 7:00 PM and I hobbled to bed. As I lay there staring up, the back of my head pressed flat against the mattress and the pillow flung to the floor, I worried about the toll my injuries might take on my sex life. What if I was hurt so badly that sex would be too painful, or what if I was no longer able to move enough to have it? I shook Michael awake.

  “Huh . . . what . . . are you okay?” he said.

  “I’m scared. I’m scared I won’t be able to have sex again. So, let’s try. Let’s please try.”

  “Now? I thought you could barely move.”

  I turned over onto my side. A bolt of pain shot down my neck and into my back. I bit my cheek to keep from screaming.

  “Okay, get behind me and, please, let’s do it,” I gasped.

  Michael wedged himself up against me.

  “Ow, oooh, ow,” I whispered and my eyes misted.

  “Are you okay?” Michael asked.

  “Yes. Okay.”

  I turned my hips and lifted my leg a little so he could slide his penis into me.

  “I’m afraid this will be the last time,” I said.

  “This isn’t going to be the last time, Cheryl.”

  “I know, but if it is . . . ”

  “Cheryl, it’s not the last time.”

  The next day I could barely move and Michael had to help me stand. Peggy found an orthopedist at a nearby hospital who could see me that day. Michael slipped a muumuu-style dress over my head and helped me to the car.

  The orthopedist informed me that I had fractures in three of my vertebrae and a break at the base of my neck where it met my shoulders. Luckily, my spinal cord wasn’t damaged. I felt so fortunate at that moment even though I would need to be in a brace for six months. The doctor disappeared for a few minutes and when he came back he held something that looked like a cross between a corset and a straightjacket. It was made of canvas and had rods that held it straight in the back. It closed in the front with Velcro-covered straps and was crisscrossed in the back with strings to tighten it. Normally, it would have covered my breasts and gone down to the base of my spine, but because I was still nursing Eric I couldn’t have my breasts covered. The doctor fitted it just below them. I gasped in pain as he pulled the strings to tighten it to my body.

  Despite our inauspicious start, we did our best to get settled in the Bay Area. Michael began house-hunting and soon rented a bungalow across the bay in Berkeley. Julius sent us money, again. We still had several hundred dollars left from our original thousand and we used it to buy a 1954 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Because it was yellow on the bottom and black on top, we dubbed it “the yellow submarine.” After the accident, I wasn’t taking any chances. The car may have been out of style, but it was safe. I felt like I was driving a moveable bunker and that’s exactly what I wanted.

  Michael was floundering and I was in no shape to hold a job, so we went on welfare. Between it and an occasional cash infusion from Julius and Sadie, we scraped by month to month. Our new home was across the street from an elementary school and I enrolled Jessica in kindergarten. I furnished our house mostly with Goodwill buys, reconnected with some other friends who had also gone west, and did my best to keep my spirits up.

  The accident was terrifying and traumatic, but it eventually led me in one positive direction. As 1970 rolled around, I started to slowly recover my strength and mobility. I took yoga classes and did other exercises, but I was still inactive compared to my pre-accident days. I put on weight. Since my teenage years I’d always thought I was too fat, and it only got worse after the accident. This was the Twiggy era and curves had gone the way of car fins. I had never been clinically overweight, but as I was forced into a more sedentary lifestyle I felt out of shape. My new, fuller figure aggravated my body image issues and sometimes sent me into bouts of panic.

  Every afternoon I waited on our front steps for Jessica to come home from school. She would come out in mid-afternoon, wave to me from across the street, and look both ways with her teacher and classmates. When it was clear to cross, she ran toward me with her arms flung out. It was the best time of my day, and it wasn’t unusual for me to go out earlier than necessary to wait for her.

  My schedule coincided with a neighbor’s. She was a thickset woman with a heavy blonde braid that hung down to her waist. She’d always come by on her bike as I settled down on the steps with a book. As she cycled, her wide thighs pumped up and down and her large breasts jiggled, seemingly unrestrained by a bra. The rack on her bike was crammed with paintbrushes, colored pencils, and other art supplies, so I figured she was a student at the nearby art college. She looked to be around my age and we often smiled at each other.

  One day as she pedaled slowly down the street I waved and said hello. She stopped and we started to chat.

  “Are you an artist?” I asked.

  “I’m taking classes at the art school and I also do some modeling,” she said.

  Modeling? The only models I’d seen were the wispy creatures who wore haute couture and haunted the pages of fashion magazines, the ones I wanted to look like.

  This savvy, self-confident woman must have sensed my doubt. I hoped I hadn’t offended her.

  “I do nude modeling for the painting and sculpture students, and I’m more in demand than skinny women. They love all my curves and creases,” she answered.

  Suddenly I saw an opportunity. If she could model, so could I. I could earn some extra money and maybe even start to feel better about my body.

  “How’d you get involved in that?
” I asked.

  “Oh, the school always needs models. It’s a great way to earn some money, especially if you don’t want a straight job.”

  I summoned up my courage and asked, “Do you think I could do it?”

  “Sure. They’d be happy to have you.” With a cobalt blue pencil she scrawled a phone number on the corner of a piece of drawing paper, tore it off, and handed it to me.

  Within a year I was modeling regularly for students at local art schools and for a few full-fledged artists. I began to develop first an acceptance and then an appreciation of my body. Occasionally I saw flashes of excitement on the artists’ faces, which surprised and delighted me. My body hadn’t changed, but my perception of it sure was shifting. When I looked at their paintings and sketches of me, I saw them through the artists’ eyes. The bulges that I thought were so awful actually began to look appealing.

  Holding poses for lengthy periods also gave me plenty of time to think, and I started to reflect on the fluid nature of beauty. It was hard not to. I was coming to peace with a body that I had thought of as a misfortune for a long time.

  For the first time in my young life, I started to think about how the notion of beauty isn’t fixed, and how impossibly slippery the idea of the perfect body is. In those days, the waif was the ideal. A couple of decades earlier Marilyn Monroe could lay claim to the perfect figure. I did a little research and discovered Lillian Russell, a sex symbol in the late 1800s, who, at times, tipped the scale at two hundred pounds.