By the time I agreed to a date with Jonathan Stewart Mull, I was scared and alone. Rather than face a summer in New York again, I had chosen to spend it as a dorm counselor staying on campus, watching over my freshmen charges and taking a course or two I didn’t really need for credit. Lily was graduating and off to get her Master’s degree in Education, a shock to me and Maggie, since we were sure she’d try to get a newspaper job. “It’s time to get practical!” she had announced. Maggie was still at Juilliard, but playing at Aspen for the summer.
Now in a restaurant with Jonathan Stewart Mull, I was being asked if I would like a drink. He wore a jacket and tie. I wore my only silk blouse. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what I wanted to drink. “Well,” I said slowly, “why don’t you order something for both of us?”
“We’ll have two Cinzanos on the rocks, each with a twist, please,” he said easily to the waitress in his light, firm, pleasantly knowing voice. I didn’t know what a Cinzano was. His voice had slipped around me like an arm around the waist of a satin party dress. I felt as if I were wearing such a dress. It was as if we had been left there by parents supervising us from afar, parents who wanted us to have advantages. I liked the dinner very much.
I liked having the hock of his arm around me in the front seat of his used car. He was both hip and genteel in his tweed jacket. He huffed benignly at the wheel as he invited me home with him, to a house on the widest street in the upstate river town. He had asked his roommate to remove himself for the evening. His roommate had been obliging. First we sat on his couch. Then we repaired to his bedroom.
We took off our own clothes, mostly, since he was so big that I couldn’t get his shirt off after I unbuttoned it. His undershirt sported grease stripes, like jail bars. He had washed the undershirt, but it had not dried sufficiently, and so he had put it in the oven, though he had forgotten about the oven racks. The shirt had brownish prison stripes of casserole remnants on it. Jonathan made light of it. He wore his mistakes as lightly as he wore his tweed jacket and as suavely as he ordered the vermouth. I said it was fine. He took off the shirt. I was in my bra. He looked like the Buddha, with a great roll of fatty spirit around him, inset with an enormous navel. I had never felt so small. Thumbelina-like, I pirouetted in my bra. We took off my skirt. I left him to his pants. They were enormous, and black. Without them he stood naked as a bison.
We lay down together, but we did not make love. Instead we had a kind of nude pajama party under his duvet. I had never seen a duvet before. Even his bed was cosmopolitan. He was Jewish, he told me. Mull was modified from Mullinsky. Stewart from Stein. Jonathan was really Jacob. Jacob Stein Mullinsky. Jake Mullinsky. He was a completely different person than he appeared to be. He had gone to private school. He had already spent years in psychoanalysis and he was only twenty-three. Since we’d been talking more intimately than we’d been touching, I ventured the premature question, did he ever think about having children? Oh my God, that was too far off even to consider, he said. Very good, I thought. If you hadn’t even thought about it, then you couldn’t very much want them. And if sex also seemed distant and diffuse, then you really couldn’t want to produce them, could you?
Shortly after our date, Jonathan began calling every day, and one afternoon asked if I would iron his shirt. Ironing was beyond him, he said. The maid had tried to teach him, but he hadn’t gotten the hang of it. “Certainly,” I said, ignoring the disgust I felt at having to do it. “Bring it over to the dorm.” After I took out the floor’s starch-infested iron, I slid the shirt onto the ironing board. It was bigger than any of my father’s, but it wasn’t a workshirt, of course—it was a buttondown blue oxford. When I spritzed it with water, it fell off the board in a heap. I grabbed it up and repositioned it, though it skidded across the starchy board and fell again. Finally I grabbed a sleeve and let the rest of it dangle on the floor. Each swipe of the iron made another crease, and another, and another. The collar was scalloped with creases, the front placket askew, the back yoke bunched, the seams around the pockets puckered.
“I’m not very good at this,” I said, handing him the shirt, drooping off a wire hanger. “My mother made me iron my father’s shirts.” Jonathan looked down in amazement. The shirt bore the same resemblance to a freshly ironed buttondown that a plastic hamburger on a museum pedestal bore to one off the grill. “It looks like a pop sculpture,” he said in appalled wonder.
“Really,” I warbled, “I hate ironing,” then addly lamely, “I wish I had done a better job.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me you hated it?” he asked legitimately. “I guess we’ll just have to send our laundry out.”
Our laundry? Later that night Jonathan suggested we live together for the summer, to try things out. “Oh yes!” I said to the man who would send our laundry out to be magically cleaned and pressed—and paid for. It was just like getting the sheets every week in the dorm! When I thought of our tentative, sibling-like sex, I thought to myself, You can’t have everything. Then we called Polly and Gail in their new apartment to tell them we were moving in together. My sister was actually finishing high school, and my mother had sold the store and the house. They both listened, Gail on the extension, and my mother groaned, “Well, Molly, it’s OK with me, but…” She fell silent.
“But what, Ma?”
“But just don’t get involved.” To her, it seemed possible to live with someone and stay uninvolved.
“OK,” I said.
—
A year later Jonathan and I were married in a homemade wedding in the house of graduate student friends of ours. My college advisor gave me away, and the faculty poet read Ezra Pound, and Polly drove down from Buffalo and Gail took the bus from New York where she was working at the Fillmore again. Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Gillie were too frail to come. I refused to invite my father, who had moved to Florida. “I’m not going to meet your father?” Jonathan asked.
“My father would ruin this wedding, Jonathan,” was all I said. But if Ted didn’t come, neither would Gram or Grandpa Peacock. My family had shrunk to my mother and sister. It was Lily and Maggie who helped buy the gallons of fresh shrimp and fussed over my daring crimson velvet gown.
Like creatures lost in the woods, Jonathan and I depended on and watched out for one another. How grateful I was not to be alone! Jonathan was as big as a door that fit snugly into its frame. When I dreamed that poison gas was seeping round the doorframe and woke up panicked, I saw him in bed and reminded myself how airtight he could make life be. And so his presence began to shield my fear, and I in turn gave him my attention, which he craved. We grew like hermit crabs into each other’s comfy shells. He enjoyed dispelling fear for me, and I enjoyed his ease, his humor, his confidence that things were usually all right, after all, what could go wrong? Everything in Jonathan’s manner denied any knowledge of ugly family behavior. To me he was a home, a womb, and like my mother he didn’t have a clue as to who I was, only Jonathan had more of a reason: I hardly talked about my childhood.
Why should I? I had a nice job doing student counseling at the university and a nice husband who drove me to work in our new car. I would work, and Jonathan would get his Ph.D. And then it would be my turn to write poetry, but I wasn’t writing any poetry now. I was learning to cook nice meals and watching the Watergate hearings and Mary Tyler Moore. I was falling asleep on the couch after dinner, after work, then getting up groggy and going to bed to read Agatha Christie. And Jonathan was there across the room sleeping with the TV on and there across the bed reading Dick Francis mysteries. Weekends of our first year of marriage were dreamy, full of friends’ houses and moderate dope smoking and flirting with Jonathan’s graduate student pals. If I possessed feelings I stored them with my poetry books. It was aesthetics, epistemology, ethics we talked. And at work it was students’ feelings. And at parties it was the feelings of know-it-all graduate students.
On Saturday mornings Maggie, who drove up for weekends with her music professor, someti
mes went out with me for breakfast. We ate at Perkins Pancake House, discussed our disdain for Lily’s ordinary career choice, and dissected our dreams. One night I dreamt about a strange pet, a cat with a purple plume on her head and a monkey tail. This pet had special complex caretaking instructions to insure its survival, and I’d failed to take care of it. Racked with guilt from my neglect, I found the animal dying, maybe already dead, and I woke in a panic.
“I’m probably going crazy,” I said matter-of-factly to Maggie, slurping my maple syrup.
“You should have more sex,” she said.
Jonathan and I had sex on Fridays.
“You know, I’m wrecking my hormones on birth control pills. I feel like such a cow. I’m practically mooing from bovine bloat!”
“So why not get rid of them?” she asked.
Why not? It was 1973. The consciousness-raising group I’d joined was reading Our Bodies, Ourselves. In a cold conference room one weekend some women had demonstrated the use of a plastic speculum so that we all could learn to look inside ourselves and see what was there. One of them, whose name I never learned, got up on a freezing conference table, slipped off her slacks and underpants, and inserted the speculum into her vagina. “This isn’t easy for me to do,” she hissed at us, “so come up here quickly and take a look.” All the women in the room, maybe forty of us, lined up and gawked.
Fascinated, I bought a disposable plastic speculum from one of the women in my consciousness-raising group who had volunteered to go to the local medical supply house and get them.
“You’re buying one of those?” Maggie was disgusted.
“Why not? I want to look!” And Jonathan did, too. We got a flashlight and looked inside me, after the trial of getting the stiff plastic speculum in. Neither of us had ever looked at me like this, straight on. I had never seen a porn magazine or a split beaver photo, never read a description of a woman in that position. There I was. We saw where the hair stopped and the folds began. We started laughing we were so nervous and then I was embarrassed and wanted the speculum out. Jonathan still held the hand mirror and the flashlight in one hand, so he began to unhinge the speculum with the other. But it was stuck completely open, like a dislocated crocodile jaw.
“Maybe I should get out a wheelbarrow and wheel you to the emergency room!” He laughed.
“It’s not funny!”
“Stop crying, Molly, crying isn’t going to do anything.”
“This thing isn’t stuck up you, it’s stuck up me!”
“Try not to wail. I’m getting it, I’m trying not to break it or I’ll scratch you.”
“This was a terrible idea! Maggie was right!”
When I relaxed, he slipped the thing out, no harm done.
In fact, it amazed me that simply seeing my sex made it possible to take charge of myself. In a newfound spirit of feminism, I was off to see the gynecologist, requesting a fitting for a diaphragm. Soon I had my shell-pink half globe to fit inside my magenta insides, a cap to don, a physical barrier against the sperm, so specific and unmysterious. Sex with these diaphragms was planned, intentional, and sexier because of the acknowledgment. I liked the silkiness of the creams, the wetness of the jellies, the pure practical physicality of the act of inserting the springy pink circle and checking my cervix, like a nose pressed against the diaphragm’s screen. I was in charge of protection, of reproduction; it was my responsibility, my joy.
The diaphragm became a kind of pet: to be fed and cared for, to be kept clean and refitted and replaced. The lavender plastic case bobbed along in the company of my wallet, my checkbook, address book, calendar, Kleenexes, makeup, pens, and the balled-up bits of tissue that littered the inside of my purse. I cleaned out my handbag countless times, devising pitiful new ways to organize it, but always there was the plastic diaphragm case and in a separate pink plastic bag, the spermicidal jelly. Why didn’t I leave it at home in the bathroom or by the bed? As if it were alive, I gave it my constant attention.
And now by our third anniversary Mrs. Molly Mull—young wife with an interesting job, flair for conversation, moderate sex life, and great fear of feeling—had put an end to the eccentric, emotional, poetry-writing Molly Peacock. She was not going to be like Anne Sexton whom she had met at a drunken party before Sexton committed suicide. Or like John Berryman, whose tobacco-stained vampire fingers jittered at a podium in a lecture hall where she had gone to hear him before he committed suicide. Molly Mull, intent on leading a normal life, had calmly chloroformed the poet she was. Now, instead of writing two poems a month, she came down with something. Two years’ worth of illness equaled eleven sore throats, seven hacking coughs, fifteen head colds, two flus, three bouts each of tracheitis and bronchitis, nine allergy alerts, and four sinus infections. When Mr. Mull finally asked to be released from nursing duty, she had to let him go visit the friends they’d been supposed to visit together….
—
Alone I sniffled in my ratty nightgown. I ate my soup alone. I let the dirty tissues pile up on the couch where I dozed in front of the TV, feeling I’d entered a blessed state of empty-all-around-me that I hadn’t felt since the poetry room. Like a cat in blankets I slept all Saturday night on the couch and on Sunday woke up with a poem in my head. It swam there like a goldfish. Without thinking I grabbed Jonathan’s yellow legal pad and wrote it down. Happiness spread through me like water or light, elemental. That night, showered and dressed, I read it to the relaxed, returned Jonathan, who was so delighted I was actually alarmed.
I wrote another poem the next weekend, and the next, and the next, until I was doing it all the time. I sniffled and wrote, I hacked and wrote. At pencil length Ted got drunk, Polly abandoned us, Gail took drugs. Reality crafted into artifice made it all safe. Poetry had become a fetus in the womb of recall. Jonathan was very impressed by my cautious attempts to publish them.
I could give birth to a poem, but I did not want to give birth to a child. Babies were real. All that was monstrous and unpredictable and demanding would be released with the birth of real children. But that was OK, because even by the time we’d been married three whole years, we didn’t want them.
“You’ll change your minds.” Gram announced.
“Well, you have lots of time,” Polly said.
“You can have them later, Molly!” Flo declared. “Now get more education!”
Jonathan tired of graduate school and thought of doing something “real.” “I want a regular life,” he said. Did this secretly mean children? I secretly knew I wanted an irregular life, the life of an explorer, far away from the motherhood and the family I was terrified to replicate. Polly, Ted, and Gail already bulged inside me, leaving me without my own outline because their very being had stretched me into something lumpy and misshapen. And with every poem I wrote, I grew more afraid that I was going crazy. Jonathan, meanwhile, was growing more and more frighteningly normal, now bringing home a paycheck from his new job. Just short of his Ph.D., he’d fled his department for a job at a foundation. Now he gave away money during the day, and at night we shopped for another new car.
But slowly my ambition, amphibian-like, climbed out of the muck of my fear. I began to want to be a writer more than anything, to want to be who I would be. When I had published five poems—and when we had been married five years—I was listed as a poet in a national directory, and this put me on a mailing list for art colonies. But the minute I got the idea to apply to one, I began to feel pains in my ear, the very place my gills would have been, had I actually been a creature who could live in two elements. No doctor could find anything wrong with me, yet by the time I tore open my acceptance letter, one whole side of my face had paralyzed from Bell’s palsy.
From my paralysis I watched Jonathan, intent on changing. He began a diet, and grew as ambitious about how he wanted to look as I’d grown about being a writer. Daily he transformed, becoming less and less of himself, the man I married. With palsy medication, I went to the art colony, and Jonathan continued a
t Weight Watchers. The private tailor he’d found to make his outsize pants was about to lose his best customer. By the time I got home, Jonathan’s metamorphosis was shocking—my big Hansel had become small, and was getting smaller, just as my Gretel’s need for him was diminishing, and probably his need for me. Where had he gone?
Our need to wrap ourselves in the cocoon of our sibling marriage had peeled away with each poem I wrote and each pound he lost. We really were going to be butterflies, if we could just make our way out. Jonathan already had his wings.
“I can’t seem to fix the way I feel,” I whined to him.
“So get somebody to help you, Mol. See a therapist.” There was Jonathan, fixing himself by losing weight. Why did I need help? Didn’t I do everything by myself?
In a kind of dream state I called the office of the campus psychotherapist, Ruta Arbeiter, a woman I’d often observed in campus meetings. She had short black hair curved to her head and a tiny waist that made her hips look ampler than they were. In her office I saw again that she possessed a reactive face: her eyes brightened, her mouth widened, her eyebrows rose in response to my words—an ideal reader. She was the soft-lipped mother I needed, though I would have disclaimed that I needed one, since I already had a mother, and my mother and I were completely alike, and I didn’t have a father, oh well, I mean I had one, but I wasn’t anything like him, and he didn’t matter, I didn’t take after him in any way, my sister, now she was just like my father, and I was just like my mother, that’s the way it was in our family, no there isn’t anything about me that’s from my father, I’m completely my mother’s girl, I’m good, I’m responsible, I’m wondering if it’s bad enough yet to leave Jonathan, because, really, my marriage isn’t bad, not the way my mother had to leave my father, I mean, he was going to kill her, and Jonathan wasn’t killing me, it was just that I’d tried to kill something in me that had woken up instead….It was a complete shock to me when I looked up and announced, “I want to leave my husband.”
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 10