Eloise tried to chase away what ailed us with a question. We had decided against having a baby, she reminded us. We had done that together. Could we do things together for the rest of our lives? Of course we wanted to answer yes. I wanted what I promised myself, a stable relationship, no matter what. “If this doesn’t work with you, I cannot imagine being with anyone else,” Tilla said, as clearly as he had said he could not be a father. He could only be a lover, he was telling me.
—
The tiny church cozied up to the tall apartment buildings on its Upper East Side block. On our way to the Frick again, Tilla and I stopped to read a little hand-lettered sign that announced “English Tea.” “It’s like Barbara Pym!” I exclaimed. “Let’s go in.” Several ladies in periwinkle rayon stood behind the tea urns in the rectory. The Anglican church had come to Manhattan, unbeknownst to me, the church that had made my beloved George Herbert a minor saint, and the church year Barbara Pym timed her novels to. “Let’s get out of here!” Tilla groused, but I had already accepted my tea in a rose-trimmed cup and was fooling with the tongs to get the sugar cube in. With a newly cultivated patience, he remained at my side.
Occasionally Tilla himself performed at a huge church on Long Island with his family, leaving me to luxuriate alone on a Sunday morning. A month later on one of these occasions I gussied up and went alone in the pouring rain back to the cottage-like church, its tiny narthex stuffed with umbrellas. From the back row I could see the oddball congregation of humans and dogs. A large collie guarded the baptismal font, and a West Highland terrier sat a few pews ahead of me. At communion an apricot poodle headed for the rail with its mistress. The priest delivered the host to the woman and a pat to the dog. It was a divine and doggy place, reeking of incense and wet fur.
Though every morning I sat in Quaker meeting with my charges for the school year, the drab meeting house smelling of their sneakers had no mystery in it, or humor. Often when the stillness was right, I got my God feeling with the kids rustling as I would have rustled during the sermon at the La Grange Baptist Church, Ruth silencing me with a pineapple Life Saver—just as I allowed the kids to pass TicTacs in the morning. But the Eucharist with a poodle gave me a God feeling with humor and delight.
In my head I invented a liturgy. Instead of Kyrie eleison, I said, Take comfort, and instead of Christe eleison, I said, Take heart.
—
“I’m broken,” I continually chanted to Ruta. “I’m in pieces.” I explained to her that I felt like a cardboard children’s puzzle-map, the pieces all near each other, almost in the right place, but not exactly in place.
“Well, at least you have all your pieces,” she joked.
I yelped, “You’re not listening to me!” Shifting out of my prone position on the beige couch, I twisted around to look at her. “Each piece is…slightly turned. They don’t fit snugly the way puzzle pieces are supposed to.”
“So you’ve got all your parts, but something is off.”
“Yes.” It was a pleasure to have her agree with me as I thought of the mental wheelchair zooming from school to workshop to seminar to therapy to writing to school…then Tilla on weekends.
“I have to put the brake on this wheelchair,” I ventured. “I’m adding and adding and adding to what I can bear.” I sighed. “Sorry to have rhymed those sentences, it’s an occupational hazard.”
—
The mass was like a sonnet, formal and full of emotion. Because of its repetition, I found myself saying things I didn’t believe. I didn’t believe I wasn’t worthy! Years with Ruta led me away from that. In opposition, I silently insisted in the prayers that I was worthy, altering the ritual as I altered verse forms, the complex repetition a comfort of layers, just as making a complex poem was. Take heart, honeypie, I told myself, as if I were Hazel. I was trying to make a new book of poems, but this one wasn’t coming out as easily as the first two. I struggled harder to say things more directly, and the poems were getting rejected harder, too. There must he room in love for hate…I wrote in the last poem. Presume that love has room/for all other emotions, and resume, resume. I meant it. I was going to resume with Tilla, to mend. My manuscript was really making the rounds. It took months and months almost to be accepted, then many more months for it almost to be accepted again. With each rejection I changed the title. Now my beleaguered new editor who’d succeeded in her fight to take the book was threatening to make the final decision herself.
“No, no!” I squirmed. “I’ll give you a title next week!”
“Take Heart,” I said to the overworked young woman on the phone.
“Oh thanks, I really have been having a tough day. Now what did you decide for a title?”
“Take Heart, that’s the title,” I repeated.
“It’s burning, it’s burning every time we have sex,” I whispered.
“Stay still,” Sarah the gynecologist said.
Oh, God, it’s psychosomatic, I thought. The therapies hadn’t worked. I must hate Tilla, I thought, and I’m unconsciously using my burning innards to let myself know!
Nearly two years after the abortion my vagina had begun to burn painfully every time Tilla and I made love. I hotfooted it to Sarah and lay on the table, my feet in stirrups.
“This is allergy,” she pronounced. Oh God, I was allergic to Tilla! I panicked. “You’ve got a terrific allergic reaction here to the diaphragm jelly.”
“The jelly?”
“Yes, Miss Molly poet, the jelly. How long have you been using a diaphragm, anyway?”
“Fifteen, sixteen years,” I calculated.
“Well, it builds up. A lot of women get allergies to spermicidal jellies. Try the cream. Sometimes a switch will work.”
Of course. I had slathered a sperm-killing agent on a miniature rubber flying saucer for a decade and a half and had thought nothing of the damage it could do, and here I was, excoriated now each time I inserted it. I shopped for creams.
Cream worked for another half year, then the burning began again.
“Well,” my doctor clucked, her black curls bobbing between my legs, “I guess the cream bothers you, too.”
“Bothers me? It pinions me to the bed in pain!”
“Well, you can’t go on like this.”
“No, I can’t. What next?”
“Pills. IUD. How old are you?”
“Forty-one.”
“Pills, IUD, condoms or vasectomy for your partner, or tubal ligation for you. That’s it. Them’s the choices.”
“I hate these choices. I hated taking pills. IUD’s scare the hell out of me—I’m afraid of all the terrible stories I’ve heard about them. Forget condoms, he’ll never use them consistently.”
“Vasectomy?”
“I can’t imagine this guy having a vasectomy, but I’ll check it out. In the meantime, write me a prescription for pills.” When I was dressed and in her office face-to-face I added, “And tell me about tubal ligations.” SoHo lay beyond the huge loft windows of her office. I looked out at the light on the red brick buildings as she said, “Easy…
“Easy as pie. We make an incision in your belly button and go in with a thin scope and clamp a silicone clip just like a staple on each of your fallopian tubes.”
“A clip?”
“Yes, it just sort of dissolves over the years.”
“Dissolves? But then how does it work? I thought these things were supposed to be ninety-nine-percent sure.”
“They are. So don’t count on getting it reversed. The clamp dissolves long after the fallopian tube is so damaged by being shut up that it just sort of shrivels up. No egg is going to make the leap.”
“Well, I’ll think about all this. But first I’ll start on the pills.”
—
Birth control pills, at age forty-one, gave me the same sexually deadened feeling I’d had when I was in my early twenties. And now they were far more dangerous for me. Tilla was outraged at the prospect of condoms—and nervous. “Even if we use them
, Molly, they are not one-hundred-percent effective, and I cannot repeat that abortion. I cannot go through it again, darling.”
“You can’t go through it! I felt crippled by it.”
“So take the pills, Molly.”
“Take the pills, take the pills—I wish there was something you could do, Tilla.”
“Oh my God in heaven, Molly, oh Jesus the holy shepherd, Mary, and Joseph, Molly this I cannot risk. What if something slips? I will be castrated! I cannot risk this!”
“Just a try, Mr. Treasure. Just thought I’d broach the idea.”
“Oh, my lovely girl, you cannot ask this of me. It is not possible!”
“Well, it was just a try.”
Over the last twenty years, as I’d inserted the diaphragms, as I’d tensed at a calendar trying to predict when my period would come and panicked if it failed to arrive on time and smiled in deep satisfaction when it did, I had thought, Why not have it all over?
You’ll have to wait, I told myself year after year for two decades. Having your tubes tied is a radical act. And I am not a radical. I am a nice, ordinary girl, and I might change my mind. Who am I to cut off my choices? But was a tubal ligation so lamebrained? Could I make a wise refusal of motherhood?
Time after time over those two decades I had said to myself, I wish this were over. Then slowly what I had said to myself changed. For the past few years I said, I can’t wait till I can make it be over. I never said the word sterilized to myself. It made me think of kitchen counters Chloroxed to a terrible whiteness. Sterile. It was everything I was not. I flowed with the juice of my ideas and desires. Fertility meant being alive. Sterility meant the whiteness that was death. Could you have a tubal ligation and remain sensuously alive?
Things grew because of me: My fragile students became strong, my friends laughed in an orbit of empathy. My writing grew, and love grew there, love for Tilla and love for patterns, for structures and organizations. I had published three books and I’d become president of the Poetry Society of America. I hadn’t been president of anything except my sixth-grade class when my friends were the other officers, and it felt just as thrilling when the director and I schemed like schoolgirls about putting poetry everywhere. We dreamed about changing the face of New York, not with architecture, but mental structures, plastering poems all over the subways and buses. But, like Tilla, the little Poetry Society didn’t have a dime. The part-time accountant couldn’t even cash her paycheck. Then we wrote grants and took businessmen to lunch and asked them to write checks. And the checks came in, and more people, lured by the wildness of our dream, came to put in their money and time. Now Poetry in Motion was going to happen. We were in league with New York City Transit and millions of subway riders were going to be reading Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman on the way to work. The idea was bearing fruit. New York was my orchard. And I made a fertile ground for my aging mother, too—me, the one who could make Polly chuckle—and for my sister, whom I was speaking to again, the one only I could calm down.
But I did not want to bear. To bear up. To bear up under. To forbear. At earlier times in rage and terror, I refused to have children. But the refusal in fear and anger was not the same as what I came to think of now as the paradox of “the Saving No.” The Saving No is the decision to be child free, made free of panic. And now I was going to make such a decision. I asked myself, Will I be a complete human being if I do not have children? And my answer was yes. And since my answer was yes, I asked myself, Will I be a complete woman without having borne a child? And my answer had become yes.
“You’re only forty-one years old!” Mariah exclaimed to me over our broiled fish dinner. She was on another diet. She had just come from her Overeaters Anonymous meeting to this quiet, unchic little seafood place. Scorning Tilla, who was not at all turning out as she predicted, she said in disgust, “He’s lying down and taking it, he’s lying down and taking life, something I never thought I’d see.”
“Nonsense!” I said to the woman who had taught me to say nonsense! “He’s struggling just like everybody else.”
“Yes, but he’s lost a little bit of his shine, dear, you have to admit that.” Mariah had stopped wearing her black muumuus and enormous necklaces. Now she was wearing an ivory silk shirt and pale pants and enormous earrings. She had lost a considerable amount of weight. She had dumped—been dumped by? (I’d never know because certainly she’d never tell me)—the last husband and replaced him with Derek Sjovall, her prize-winning biochemical engineer. He was building her a house in Stonington, Connecticut. Together they would have seven children and three grandchildren. The house would easily sleep twenty. Tilla and I had spent a disastrous weekend with them in the Brobdingnagian rental next to the contemporary blond castle they were building. We’d missed the return train and had to spend an additional uncomfortable day with them, pretending to love cooking our whole flounder according to Derek’s step-by-step instructions. Mariah had more or less stopped writing novels, becoming obsessed with architecture.
“After all, five novels are enough, don’t you think?” she asked me as she tore at her rusty salad. It seemed to be a serious question.
“No,” I said. She looked horrified. I could see how vulnerable she was in her ivory silk. “Well, I mean, how many novels are ever enough? You’re not actually stopping writing, are you?”
“At the moment, at the moment, my dear, I am writing life, not a book.”
“Speaking of life, I have a real life problem,” I began.
“Advice! Oh, goody, I’m going to get to give advice—my favorite!” Mariah burbled. The crow’s feet around her eyes had deepened. The laugh lines from her nose to her lips were as deeply indented as before she had the celebrated collagen treatments she wrote about in several women’s magazines. Thrown over the back of her chair was a sheared beaver coat, softer than a baby blanket, compliments of international biochemical engineering. Who was she? Who had she ever been to me? Why were we friends? And why was I going to ask her advice about something I could barely speak about to myself?
“I’m thinking about getting a tubal ligation,” I said abruptly. Mariah was about to send back her fish: too much butter! She motioned to the waitress with a wristful of bracelets banging.
“You’re not!” she said to me, then turned to the waitress and gave detailed cooking instructions to be relayed to a chef who, I speculated, looking around the restaurant that needed a paint job and all the plants replaced, was just a tired cook wanting to go home.
I wanted to go home, too. Why was I telling her this?
“Oh, Molly,” she said, genuinely concerned, “what if you break up with Tilla? What if you meet someone else and want to have a baby? You’re only forty-one years old, darling.”
“I know this is hard to understand, but, Mariah, in a way I’ve been waiting to do this for years and years.”
The look of incomprehension on her face was such an obstacle to me I couldn’t go further in explaining. The waitress returned with Mariah’s plate; the now-overbroiled fish lay curled on its side like a black banana.
“Thank you.” Mariah sighed sarcastically. “Thank you so, so, so very much for my dinner.” The waitress lowered her eyes and moved to the next table. Mariah started dissecting the fish.
“Why do you think I would break up with Tilla?” I asked her. “I’m making this decision because I’m not breaking up with him. We’ve got to do something. I can’t take these pills and I’m allergic to every spermicidal product on the market.”
“Every one, you’ve tried every single one?”
“It’s not like there are a hundred brands out there. There’s four for the diaphragm, two kinds in two brands. And now there’s none.”
“And I don’t suppose Mr. Virility is going to get a vasectomy, he also being absolutely sure as you are that you two are going to be together forever?”
“What do you think?” I asked in response to her. I took another scoop of warm butter and slathered it on a piece of
bread. Mariah’s diets affected me this way.
I watched her eyes watch me eat the thickly buttered bread.
“Don’t make this decision so hastily, Molly. There’s a lot of regret built into this. What does your doctor say?”
“She says she’ll be giving me another ten years of great sex.”
“It’s your life—and your life could change.”
“I’m going to do this, Mariah, I’m going to make this decision finally. I’m completely committed to Tilla.”
“Just keep talking about it, talk the whole thing out. You can’t take this back, you know.”
“I know,” I said softly. She was making me hesitate.
“You’re only forty-one. People have babies till they’re forty-five, forty-seven, don’t cut yourself off.”
“I hear you,” I finally said.
Why had I insisted on asking her? For support I talked to Maggie and Lily, neither of whom had had to make my decision.
“I’d do it if I were you,” they’d said at exactly the same time in Cafe Loup the night we were slurping mussels.
“Would you?” I’d said eagerly. “Really?”
“Damn right I would,” Lily had declared. “Between my tipped uterus and Tom’s low sperm count, we’re a naturally sterilized couple, but I would do it, doll, I’m sure.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t want kids, or you’d be spending the Allisman fortune on in vitro fertilization,” Maggie conjectured. “Great mussels,” she added, wiping her mouth.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 22