This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  My mother mentioned this curiosity only once, offhandedly: “He never calls me by my name,” with a very slight tinge of rue, but more in the manner of noting a mildly eccentric but insignificant habit. Then, when my father was in his seventies and sick with cancer, she told me in her colorful, dramatic way, how he had been in the bathtub and suddenly gone weak and faint, felt himself sliding downwards and couldn’t summon the strength to reach the faucet and turn the water off. “He could have slipped down and drowned,” she said theatrically, her green eyes wide, her mellow voice almost singing (she was an amateur singer, mostly of torch songs; she had the cabaret singer’s marvelous erotic knack of making every man in the room feel she was singing to him alone). “But he managed to call me. I was in the kitchen and luckily I heard him.” A meaningful, almost shy glance: “I knew it must be serious, because he called me by my name. ‘Sarah,’ I heard him calling.” She rushed in. Actually, she added, with pride in his resourcefulness, by the time she got there he’d managed to release the stopper with his foot to let some water out. So maybe he hadn’t needed to break his lifelong habit after all.

  “IF YOU DON’T FEED THEM ENOUGH . . .”

  I also knew for certain at a very young age, after reading a sex manual in my parents’ bedroom, that since there were such things as orgasms to be had, I would have them. Determination seemed needed because the author of the manual made orgasms sound dauntingly arduous for women to attain; his detailed recommendations—addressed to men—were burdened with anxiety and condescension. I already knew daily life was painful and I was intent on grabbing whatever spontaneous benefits it could offer in recompense. I might even have had an inkling that the activities the book described—however bizarre, mortifying, even disgusting—were very important, maybe even the reason why people put up so docilely with everything else.

  Shortly before I was to be married, my mother gave me a gift for my “honeymoon.” My husband-to-be and I didn’t hold with such bourgeois concepts as engagements, trousseaux and honeymoons (we didn’t see the paradox in our taking the ultimate bourgeois step of getting married) and hadn’t the money or time to go away in any case. Instead we were planning a few nights in a glamorous New York hotel. As it turned out, on the second night, most unglamorously, we found ourselves having dinner at my husband’s parents’ house; how we allowed that to happen I can’t or won’t remember, but it chills me to think of it. How rife we were with paradox. There my husband became violently ill with the flu, so we ended up staying over. My in-laws put us in separate rooms so I wouldn’t catch his flu. Married just two days, I wasn’t bold enough to insist that we sleep together—the reason we had married to begin with—and my husband was too sick to insist on anything. I have to hope so, anyway. I crept into his room in the middle of the night as if we were having an illicit affair.

  In the box my mother presented I found a pair of red harem pajamas. The pants were tulle, very full, with elastic around the ankles. The top, also tulle, was cut like a peasant blouse, with elastic at the neck, around the short puffy sleeves, and at the midriff, which was of course left bare. They struck me as ridiculous and I said so. Did she really think, I asked, that I would ever wear something like that? She did. Surprised but undeterred, she pressed them on me—“Why not?”—and I was a trifle offended, as if she thought they might be needed, as if I alone and unadorned were not enough. I accepted the pajamas with no intention of wearing them, and I never did. I can’t remember what I did with them. They were not the kind of thing you donate to the Salvation Army. Now, with years of housekeeping behind me, I realize they might have been good cleaning rags. Probably, years later, I shoved them in the dress-up basket, where my children rummaged for outlandish play-acting costumes.

  The harem pajamas made me wonder what kind of notions my mother had about sex and about me. She certainly didn’t own anything like them, unless she kept it under lock and key—I knew all her clothes, from the bras on out. Her clothes were on the flashy side, but never outrageous. It seemed she wished to fashion me into something that fit an abstract idea, an idea of the kind of sexual being I, or maybe any woman, should be. And this red-harem-pajama idea seemed paradoxical too, for there was a quality about my mother that I didn’t especially enjoy and that I can call only “wholesome.” Wholesomeness, to my mind, wiped out, like a coat of spanking white paint on a grainy old wall, most of what made life interesting, the gradual accumulation of flaws and dirt. She managed to be wholesome even when she was telling raunchy jokes. And she used humor to domesticate any unwholesome tendencies brought to her attention. When I told her something Freud had said about childhood incest, she was appalled but quickly recovered. “Sleep with my brother! I didn’t even like to eat with him.”

  Even her sexy cabaret songs, sung so that every man in the room felt she was singing to him alone in the dark, were made ambiguous by the sunny glow of wholesomeness—suggesting that she both meant and didn’t mean the words and gestures. This is how I’d seduce you if I wanted to, but of course I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s all just good clean fun. A kind of peek-a-boo, teasing quality. (Maybe the pajamas weren’t so paradoxical after all.)

  With a husband, though, the teasing would imply the opposite: I’ll pretend I won’t give in, but of course I will in the end. For she made it clear that wives were supposed to be on hand for pleasure and use. “If you don’t feed them enough at home, they’ll go out to eat,” she warned me a year or so after my marriage, when I went off to visit a close friend for a few days, leaving my husband on his own. I laughed and made a weak joke about food in the freezer. Everyone knows the salient element of sexual teasing is control. Or is it the more provocative illusion of control? If the wives dole out the food yet the husbands can easily “go out to eat,” then who’s really running the kitchen?

  I didn’t think all this at the time, naturally. I suspected the reason for the pajamas was simpler and more focused: she must still judge me intellectual and innocent, in need of something to catapult me into the realm of the erotic. I felt underestimated. My sense of the erotic back then did not include red harem pajamas—she was right about that; they were a prop I thought I could do without. It wasn’t that I didn’t grasp the purpose of sexy lingerie, but the pajamas were so overstated as to be parody, just as her sexy singing verged on parody. She had too much sense of the comic to be a true vamp.

  Later on I was sorry I hadn’t had the aplomb to accept the pajamas graciously, even to understand that in some circumstances, they might play a role. They could certainly be amusing. But even had my ideas about sex embraced all manner of accoutrements, I probably wouldn’t have worn red harem pajamas. Black, maybe. Yes, I might have welcomed a nice black silk nightie. Not peek-a-boo, just dark, smooth, lush and slinky. Obviously, my mother and I had widely diverging ideas about who I was to be in the conjugal bed.

  “SOMETIMES IT’S IN AND OUT . . .”

  When I saw my mother a few weeks after my marriage, she was curious to know how things had gone in that area. And yet from remarks she had let drop and I did not contradict, she was assuming, not unreasonably, and not with any consternation, that my husband and I had been sleeping together all those weekends I’d visited him in graduate school before our wedding. Sex before marriage was publicly taboo in the upright middle class, but as I learned later, few people were gullible enough to take that seriously. My mother wasn’t, as she’d already hinted with her plans for my hypothetical baby out of wedlock. And when her thirty-year-old niece was irked by an invitation to a Saturday-night date in a motel, my mother had strongly urged her to go. Not for pleasure’s sake, I know, since I witnessed the consultation—but because it might bring the man closer to a marriage proposal.

  “So how was it?” she asked me, more or less. I wasn’t giving any information. Fine, I said with a shrug, as if the issue were beneath consideration. My laconic mode happened to coincide with my mother’s spell of talking jags, brought on by the diet pills she was taking. She’d always bee
n a spirited talker, but the pills gave her talk a spooling, uncontrolled quality, and we would sit listening, amazed and befuddled, wondering if the skein of words would ever stop. With fifty pounds gone she seemed also to have lost some of her emphatic buoyancy, but maybe that was just age, or the dejection of eating so much less. Eventually the talk spiraled down: either she went off the pills or their effect wore off.

  Meanwhile, perhaps to loosen my tongue, she said offhandedly, “Sometimes it’s in and out so fast you hardly know it was there.” This I received in gaping fascination, less for its graphicness than for what it might be revealing about her. Them. Was that how it was? After so long? Sometimes? Always? Rarely? Like her single mention of my father’s not calling her by name, the words were uttered with no distress, a bald statement of fact. Did it pain her, make her resentful? Didn’t she want or feel entitled to more than that? Or was it pleasure enough to be an object of desire? (As in, “He’s always bothering me,” which racier married women used to mutter, the pretended annoyance a sheer drapery for their pride, as transparent as the red harem pajamas.) If the desire she aroused erupted in such haste, maybe her vanity was all the more titillated. But hadn’t she read the book, I wondered, the book I found hidden in my father’s night table and which exhorted haste-prone men to recite baseball scores or whatever, indefinitely? (My father was not a baseball fan, but he was an accountant, so surely he could have found some series of figures to occupy him.) The book rated men by endurance, but maybe my mother thought speed was flattering. Things seemed at cross-purposes.

  I might have pushed on for the answers to those questions, and she might have been forthcoming, particularly with the diet drugs coursing through her. But I couldn’t. I felt shy. It seemed perilous: I might learn things I would regret knowing. I might have to offer some intimacies in return.

  “SO WHAT’S THE TROUBLE?”

  Though not as unthinkable as incest, divorce was something my mother’s circle and generation almost never indulged in—only under the most egregious pressures: crime, blatant or incessant adultery, rampant alcoholism. Otherwise my mother saw little need for it. When I told her of friends who were wretched enough to get divorced, she refused to understand why. “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t gamble, he doesn’t run around. So what’s the trouble?” That sort of throwaway aphorism might suggest she was oblivious to the infinite nuances of human relationships. She was exquisitely sensitive to those nuances. (More so than my father, one of whose favorite proverbs was “Familiarity breeds contempt.”) She was articulate about them too. She just didn’t consider them, however blighted, grounds for divorce.

  But as with everything else on this subject, I find contradictions. Long after my parents’ deaths, my sister would occasionally fill me in on events from before I was born or before I reached the age of observation, and possibly later as well, since she was my mother’s confidant. They had an intimacy I could never hope to penetrate, in fact didn’t want to penetrate—I could sense the price was too high. My mother would sometimes tell her she wanted to pack up and leave because she couldn’t bear my father’s abuse: verbal, never physical, except for the equivocal arm-twisting. For despite boasting that he loved every inch of her, he was capable of atrocious insults (familiarity indeed breeding contempt): no foul language but scathingly elegant aspersions of her intelligence, opinions and “bleeding-heart” leanings. Even at the stage when I found his cruel wit so dashing, I hated it and wondered how my mother could bear it. Since she did, I concluded she must not mind it as much as I. But of course she minded. How could she not? And of course she knew there were grounds for divorce other than drinking, gambling and running around. If she didn’t claim them, it was out of fear. Love, also, or the love of being loved. All the unknowns of the intimate life. Maybe there, in the intimate life, he apologized, although that is hard to imagine. Nor can I imagine any analytical pillow talk of the contemporary “What’s really bothering you?” variety. But perhaps that is my failure of imagination.

  Surely out of fear, too, she didn’t pursue a singing career. Fear of leaving the cozy, though wide, circle of family and friends where she was the luminescent, admired center; fear of displeasing him, for while he enjoyed her being the life of the party, he had to pretend to disdain it; fear of losing whatever hold she had on him, for though there was much in her to love and appreciate, it puzzles me that he, of all people, was able to appreciate it. I would have expected that rage, bravado and relentless acuity would seek their like, not their opposite. But then I would be overlooking the unfathomables of chemistry, the trite but true attraction of opposites. Also that the bedrock goodness and generosity he strove so hard to conceal could find free expression by proxy, as it were, through her own. Still the puzzle remains: not that they were both lovable in their endless contradictions, but that two such sets of contradictions could be driven to love each other.

  “WHEN I’M IN YOUR ARMS . . .”

  Her pride in her desirability never wavered. He fed it. After his death she confided a tribute offered when he was home from the hospital between futile operations. By then I was in my midthirties and she talked to me openly about sex, though I never reciprocated. “Here I am in bed with a beautiful woman,” he said wistfully, “and I can’t do a thing about it.” She loved that; it made his dying easier on her. Unlike him, she didn’t dwell on the pleasure she was missing, but on the desire she was inciting.

  He was soon back in the unforgiving hospital bed. She sat at the bedside. I watched her lift his hand and kiss it. I felt speared by a shaft of light. I had never seen anything like this before, between them. What speared me was not her doing it, but his accepting it. He hated shows of sentiment. They embarrassed him. Maybe he would have protested—because I was there watching, I mean—had he been strong enough. Or maybe he conceded that I was finally grown-up enough to see him—and he helpless enough to be seen—in this guise, being loved, accepting love.

  Not long ago, I was leafing through the books in the Little Leather Library I took when my mother died. She once told me they were a wedding gift, but she didn’t say from whom. They are tiny forest-green books, dozens of them, with brown, crumbling pages, containing the classics of their time, 1925. I’d read them avidly all through my childhood, but not avidly enough, it appeared. On the title page of one, a dreadfully sentimental allegory about ardent love ripening through shared suffering into mature “Sympathy . . . the Perfect Love,” I came upon an inscription: “To Baby, With Love from Jack.”

  So he did call her something.

  Knowing him, I know he could never have said it in front of the children. Did he say it only when they were alone? Only in bed? Only when they were young, or forever? She must have liked it. Baby. His baby. A baby doll kind of woman, round, soft, compliant, fun to play with. A trope of the time, and perhaps she shaped herself to fit it by a mental equivalent of those tight girdles and long-line bras. Or else it was a shape she grew into naturally. From this vantage point, it’s hard to distinguish any difference.

  Yet she wasn’t a simpleminded kind of baby doll. After his death, she reported—again, proudly—another of his tributes: “When I’m in your arms,” he used to tell her, “I feel like nothing in the world can harm me.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” she answered back. Or so she said.

  Stone Reader

  What is it about stones? Their presence in a title seems to herald a good book: witness José Saramago’s The Stone Raft; Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries; Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River; even Harold Robbins’s A Stone for Danny Fisher, not quite in the same league but a classic of its kind. Now, as befits the shift from books to movies as the common coin of imagination’s realm, there’s Mark Moskowitz’s 2003 documentary film, Stone Reader. Apart from the producer’s ambitious claim that it’s about “the reading culture,” Stone Reader shows just how far a book lover will go in pursuit of his fantasy.

  Moskowitz produced TV political campaign ads as well as pu
blicity spots for CEOs, athletes and other notables. In private life, he loves to read. Ever since he was entranced by Harold and the Purple Crayon, his reading habit has run rampant. He wonders, in a New York Times promotional piece, “What have I done with my whole life? I’ve spent a huge amount of time sitting around doing nothing.”

  Of course he knows it’s not “nothing.” He knows we read to generate our inner lives, and that this lifelong task becomes its own end. He harbors the secret yearnings of all dedicated readers: beyond seeking diversion or data, beyond confirmation of who we are or challenges to what we think, we long to inhabit the mind of a congenial other. When we find this rare intimacy, this affinity with a stranger’s voice draped in the sheerness of language, we enjoy what James Joyce called enchantment of the heart.

  Moskowitz found that enchantment in a novel called The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman. The director was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 when the book appeared to a handful of rave reviews. Moskowitz gave up after a few pages, but twenty-five years later tried reading it again and loved it. (“Unbelievably great . . . Amazing.”) He couldn’t fathom why no other books by Mossman exist. What gives? What happened to the young writer who was hailed as the voice of a new generation? To find out, he embarks on a year-long quest for the forgotten author of the forgotten novel.