by Mary Gordon
Shore up and guard yourself. As I have. Do not fall once more into those arms that seem strong but will leave you. Do not fall.
The daughter leaves the young man now to dance with the best friend of her mother. This woman has no husband and a child of two. The mother with no husband and a child of two dreams of her lover as she dances with the daughter of the hostess. She thinks: I have known this girl since she was five. How can it be? I have a child of two; my best friend has a daughter who lifts her angry shoulder and will drive away on Sunday to the working world. Do not be angry at your mother, the mother with no husband wants to say. She is young, she is beautiful, she needs a man in her bed. The mother with no husband thinks of her own lover, who is someone else's husband and the father of the two-year-old child. Someday, she thinks, it is just possible that we will live together, raise together this boy of ours, now only mine. She longs for her lover; she spends, she thinks in anger, too much life on longing. But she chose that. Now she thinks about his hair, his rib cage, the feel of his bones when she runs her fingers up his back, the shape of his ear when she can see him in the distance. She thinks: He is torn, always. When the child was conceived she said, being nearly forty: I will have it. There is nothing you need do. He said: I will stand with you. He came on the first day of their son's life and visits weekly— uncle? friend?— and puts, each month, three hundred dollars in a small account and in a trust fund for college. Says: I cannot leave my wife. The mother with no husband longs sometimes to be with her lover in a public place, dancing, simply, like the married couple, without fear among the others of their kind.
The scientist has come without her lover. He has said: Oh, go alone. You know I hate to dance. She phoned her friend, a man in love with other men. Come dancing with me. Yes, of course, he says. He is glad to be with her; he too is a scientist. They work together; they study the habits of night birds. They are great friends. The lover of the scientist is brilliant, difficult. In ten years she has left him twice. She thinks now she will never leave him.
The daughter of the hostess puts on music that the angry wife, the mother with no husband, and the scientist don't like. So they sit down. Three friends, they sit together on the bench that rests against the wall. They look out the large window; they can see the moon and a newly lit square white patch of sea. They like each other; they are fortyish; they are successful. For a month each summer they live here by the ocean, a mile apart. The angry wife is a bassoonist of renown. The mother with no husband writes studies of women in the ancient world. These women, all of them, have said to each other: What a pleasure we are, good at what we do. And people know it. The angry wife has said: You know you are successful when you realize how many people hope that you will fail.
And how are you? they ask each other. Tired, say the two, the angry wife, the mother with no husband, who have young children. I would like to have a child, the scientist says. Of course you must, say the two who are mothers. Now they think with pleasure of the soft flesh of their children, of their faces when they sleep. Oh, have a child, they tell the scientist. Nothing is better in the world.
Yes, have a child, the hostess says. Look at my daughter. See how wonderful. The daughter of the hostess has forgotten, for a time, her anger and is laughing with the young man. Asks him: Are you going back on Sunday? Would you like a ride? The hostess thinks: Good, good. My daughter will not drive alone. And maybe he will love her.
I am afraid of being tired, says the scientist to her three friends.
You will be tired if you have a child, they say to her. There is no getting around it. You will be tired all the time.
And what about my work?
You will do far less work. We must tell you the truth.
I am afraid, then, says the scientist.
The widow sits beside them. And they say to her, for she is old now: What do you think our friend should do?
The widow says: Two things in the world you never regret: a swim in the ocean, the birth of a child.
She says things like this; it is why they come to her, these four women near the age of forty. She has Russian blood; it makes her feel free to be aphoristic. She can say: To cross a field is not to live a life. To drink tea is not to hew wood. Often she is wrong. They know that, and it doesn't matter. She sits before them, shining, like a bowl of water colored, just for pleasure, blue. They would sit at her feet forever; they would listen to her all night long. She says: I think that I have made mistakes.
But they do not believe her.
She says: In my day we served men. We did not divorce. I do not think then we knew how to be good to our children and love men at the same time. We had wonderful affairs. Affairs are fine, but you must never fall in love. You must be in love only with your husband.
But only one of them has a husband. He is sitting, drinking, talking to another man. His wife would like to say: Look at the moon, don't turn your back to it. But she is tired of her voice tonight, the voice that speaks to him so cruelly, more cruelly than he deserves. She would like to say: Let's dance now. But she doesn't want to dance with him. Will I get over being angry, she wonders, before the party ends? She hopes she will and fears that she will not.
The widow greets her friend across the room. They have both understood the history of clothes. And so they watched, in the late 1960s, the sensitive and decorative march of vivid-colored trousers and light, large-sleeved printed shirts, of dresses made of Indian material, of flat, bright, cotton shoes. So, in their seventies, they greet each other wearing purple and magenta. As they kiss, the gauzy full sleeves of their blouses touch. Tonight to be absurd, the widow's friend has worn a feather boa. Her husband, her fifth husband, stands beside her, gallant and solicitous for her and for her friend.
The widow says to her old friend, pointing to the four women sitting on the bench: I think they've got it right. Their lovely work.
The friend says: But look, they are so tired, and so angry.
The widow says: But we are tired at that age, and angry. They will have something to show.
Who knows, the widow's friend says, turning to her husband. Dance with me, she says, I think this one's a waltz.
He kisses her, for she has made him laugh. They dance, they are the only ones now dancing with the hostess's daughter and her friends. The music has gone angular and mean, it seems to the four women on the bench. The hostess's daughter thinks: Perhaps, then, I should marry a rich man. I am not ambitious, but I like nice things.
The mother without a husband thinks about her lover. Of his mouth, his forearms, his way of standing with his knees always a little bent, the black hairs on the backs of his small hands.
The hostess thinks: Perhaps I will ask this new man to stay.
The scientist thinks: I will live forever with a man who hates to dance.
The daughter of the hostess thinks: I love my mother, but I will not live like her.
The widow thinks: How wonderful their lives are. I must tell them so that they will know.
Her friend thinks: If this man dies I will be once more alone.
The angry wife wishes she were not angry.
Suddenly a funny song comes on. It has a name that makes them laugh, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” The daughter of the hostess claps her hands and says: No men. The women, all of them: the hostess and her daughter, the scientist, the mother with no husband, the angry wife, the widow and her friend, stand in a circle, kick their legs in unison, and laugh. And they can see outside the circle all the men, ironical or bored-looking, the kindly ones amused. They all look shiftless there, and unreliable, like vagabonds. The two old women cannot bear it, that the men should be unhappy as the women dance. The widow's friend is first to break the circle. She takes her husband's hand and leads him to the center of the room. The widow dances with the handsomest young man. The daughter of the hostess walks away. But the four women near to forty sit down on the bench. The angry wife can see her husband's back. His back is turned against her; he is looking at the moon
.
Violation
I suppose that in a forty-five-year life, I should feel grateful to have experienced only two instances of sexual violation. Neither of them left me physically damaged and I cannot in truth say they have destroyed my joy of men. I have been happily married for fifteen years before which I had several blissful and some ordinary disappointing times with lovers. In addition, I am the mother of two sons, my passion for whom causes me to draw inward, away, when I hear the indiscriminate castigation of all males, so common and so understandable within the circles I frequent. I rarely think of my two experiences, and I'm grateful for that, for I don't like what they suggest to me about a world which I must, after all, go on inhabiting. And I don't like it when I start to feel in danger in my house, the Federalist house we've been so careful in restoring, in the town not far from Hartford where we've lived now for ten years, and when I wonder if, perhaps, safety is a feeling open to men alone. It is then, especially, that I am glad to be the mother only of sons.
I am thinking of all that now as I stand at the wooden counter cutting celery, carrots, water chestnuts, so unvegetative in their texture, radishes that willingly compose themselves in slices decorative as shells. Courageously, we've kept the kitchen faithful to its period: We have not replaced the small windows by large sheets of glass that would allow a brightness our ancestors would have shunned. Leaves make a border at the windows; farther out— beech, locust— they become a net that breaks up the white sky. I arrange the vegetables, green, orange white, white circled by a ring of red on the dark wood of the chopping board, as if I had to make decisions like a painter, purely on the basis of looks. As I handle the slices of vegetable, cool and admirably dry, I think about myself as a young woman, traveling abroad or “overseas” as my parents then called it, truly away from home for the first time.
At twenty-two, I must have thought myself poetical. This is the only thing I can surmise when I look at the itinerary of that trip— my parents’ present to me after college graduation— that I took with my college roommate and best friend. Lydia had majored in economics like me, although like me she had adopted it as a practical measure, rejecting a first love (for her it had been art history, for me English). But we both prided ourselves on being tough-minded and realistic; we knew the value of a comfortable life, and we didn't want to feel we had to be dependent on a lucky marriage to achieve it. We'd both got jobs, through our fathers’ connections, at large Manhattan banks; we'd take them up in the fall, and the knowledge of this gave us a sense of safety. We could be daring and adventurous all summer, have experiences, talk to people (men) we never would have talked to at home, reap the rewards of our secret devotion to the art and poetry we hadn't quite the confidence to give our lives to. We considered ourselves in the great line of student pilgrims admiring ourselves for our self-denial, traveling as we did with backpacks and hostel cards and a few volumes of poetry. Not for a moment did we understand the luxury of a journey made on money we had never had to earn, and that the line we followed was that of young people on the grand tour: a look at the best pictures, the best buildings, some introduction to Continental manners, the collision of which with our young natures would rub off the rough edges but leave our idealism smooth. We would return then to the place that had been held for us in the real life that had been going on without us, not forgetting us, but not requiring us yet.
Our plane landed in Amsterdam. We saw the Rembrandts and Vermeers, and the Van Goghs my friend thought, by comparison, jejune, and then we took an all-night train to Florence. We stayed in a cheap pensione with marble floors and huge mirrors and painted ceilings above the iron cots that were our beds. And in Piazzole Michelangelo, I met Giovanni, who sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners. Poor Italian, he was overmastered by the consonants of his employer's name and pronounced his product E-LAY-TRO-LOO. Luckily, he worked all day so my friend and I could see the Ufizzi, the Palazzo Pitti, the Duomo, the Museo San Marco, and I need leave her alone only at night when Giovanni drove me around Florence at breakneck speed and snuck me into his pensione until midnight, then miraculously got me back into mine. (Now I see he must have bribed the concierge.) He agreed to drive us to Ravenna, where I could do homage to Dante and my friend to the mosaics, but even after he'd done this nice thing for the both of us and paid for both our lunches, my friend was put out with me. She felt that I'd abandoned her for a man. She hadn't met anybody possible, the friends that Giovanni had introduced her to were coarse, she said, and she was afraid to go out alone at night, she was always being followed by soldiers. It wasn't her idea of a vacation, she said, sitting in her room reading Kenneth Clark. Punitively, she suggested that when we got to England, where we both could speak the language, we should split up and travel alone. It would open us up to experiences, she said. Clearly she felt she hadn't had hers yet, and I'd had more than my share.
I left Giovanni tearfully, vowing to write. He bought us chocolates and bottles of acqua minerale for the train. Then we were off, heartlessly, to our next adventure. We were both sick crossing the Channel; it made us tenderer to each other as we parted at Dover and hugged each other earnestly, awkward in our backpacks. She would go to Scotland, I to Ireland; in two weeks we would meet in London, stay there for a week, then travel home.
I decided to cross the Irish Sea from Wales, the home of poets. I would spend the day in Swansea and cross over at Fishguard to Rosslare. From Dylan Thomas's home, I would proceed on a pilgrimage to Yeats's. I felt ennobled but a bit lonely. It might be a long time, I knew, before I found someone to talk to.
Swansea was one of the least prepossessing cities I had ever seen: it might, despite the hints left by the poets, have been someplace in Indiana or worse, Ohio, where I was from. I decided to look for a pub where Thomas must have got his inspiration. I found one that looked appropriate, ordered bread and sausages and beer, and read my Yeats.
So I was not entirely surprised to hear an Irish voice ask if it could join me, and was pleased to look up and see a red-haired sailor standing with a pint of beer. I was abroad, after all, for experience, to do things I wouldn't do at home. I would never have spoken to a sailor in Cleveland, but then he wouldn't have been Irish. I thought he'd noticed me because he saw that I was reading Yeats.
“Yer American, then,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Great place, America. What yer doin’ in this part of the world?”
“I'm traveling,” I said.
“On yer own?”
“Yes.”
“Brave, aren't ye?”
“No, not especially,” I said. “I just don't see that much to be afraid of. And an awful lot that's fun and exciting. I'd hate to think I'd let fear hold me back.”
“It's a great attitude. Great. Ye have people over here in Swansea?”
“No.”
“What brings ye here?”
“Dylan Thomas, the poet. You've heard of him?”
“I have, of course. You're a great poetry lover, aren't ye? I seen ye with the Yeats. I'm from the Yeats country myself.”
“That's where I'm going,” I said, excitedly. “To Sligo.”
“Yer takin’ the ferry?”
“Nine o'clock.”
“What a shame. I won't have much time to show ye Swansea. But we could have a drink or two.”
“Okay,” I said, anxious for talk. “You must have traveled a lot of places.”
“Oh, all over,” he said. “It's a great life, the sailor's.”
He brought us drinks and I tried to encourage him to talk about himself, his home, his travels. I don't remember what he said, only that I was disappointed that he wasn't describing his life more colorfully, so I was glad when he suggested going for a walk to show me what he could of the town.
There really wasn't much to see in Swansea; he took me to the Catholic Church, the post office, the city hall. Then he suggested another pub. I said I had to be going, I didn't want to be late for the boat. He told me not to worry, he knew
a shortcut; we could go there now.
I don't know when I realized I was in danger, but at some point I knew the path we were on was leading nowhere near other people. When he understood that I was not deceived, he felt no more need to hesitate. He must have known I would not resist, he didn't have to threaten. He merely spoke authoritatively, as if he wanted to get on with things.
“Sit down,” he said. “And take that thing off your back.”
I unbuckled my backpack and sat among the stalky weeds.
“Now take yer things off on the bottom.”
I did what he said, closing my eyes. I didn't want to look at him. I could hear the clank of his belt as it hit the ground.
“What's this,” he said. “One of yer American tricks?”
I had forgotten I was wearing a Tampax. Roughly, he pulled it out. I was more embarrassed by the imagination of it lying on the grass, so visible, than I was by my literal exposure.
“Yer not a virgin?” he said worriedly.
I told him I was not.
“All right then,” he said, “then you know what's what.”
In a few seconds, everything was finished, and he was on his feet. He turned his back to me to dress.
“I want ye to know one thing,” he said. “I've just been checked out by the ship's doctor. Ye won't get no diseases from me, that's for sure. If ye come down with something, it's not my fault.”
I thanked him.
“Yer all right?” he said.
“Yes,” I told him.
He looked at his watch.
“Ye missed yer ferry.”
“It's all right,” I said, trying to sound polite. “There's another one in the morning.” I was afraid that if I showed any trace of fear, any sense that what had happened was out of the ordinary, he might kill me to shut my mouth.
“I'll walk ye to the town.”
I thanked him again.
“I'm awful sorry about yer missing the boat. It's too bad ye'll have to spend the night in this godforsaken town.” He said this with genuine unhappiness, as though he had just described what was the genuine offense.