“It’s just that lousy halftime stuff I can’t stand anyway.”
“Good, I’ll give you some halftime entertainment you’ll like better.”
“Yeah?” she said.
“I’m getting married!” I screamed. “To Mike!”
“Well, well, well, isn’t that nice,” she said. “After all this time, you finally have each other. Isn’t that nice.”
“Yes, it really is, it really is nice.”
“Well, when are you going to do it?”
“We’re not sure. We haven’t decided anything. Don’t worry, we’re not having a big wedding. I’m really not sure what we’re going to do.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re getting married, and I’m really glad you’re not having a big wedding. You wouldn’t do it here in Buffalo, would you?”
“No, I don’t think so, Ma.”
“Good, then I won’t have to buy a dress because I won’t have to go.”
I heard this with as much relief as there was in her voice.
“Gee whiz,” my mother was saying, “you’re both forty-four, that’s still…that’s still young enough….” she trailed off, “…that’s still young enough for kids,” she finally said. She had brought it up. Her sliver of hope pierced the afternoon like a sliver in my palm.
“I don’t think so, Ma, I don’t think we’re planning on that. We’re both going to be forty-five.” I still hadn’t told her I had had a tubal ligation. And I hadn’t told her that I’d be marrying a man for whom my choice was OK.
“Plenty of women have kids now at your age,” she continued.
“Polly, I don’t think we’re planning on it.”
“Well, I couldn’t help thinking…”
“Did I hear the game go on again?”
“Yeah, it’s on, but nothing’s happening,” she said.
“Don’t you want to watch?”
“I’ll watch in a minute. It isn’t every day you call up and say you’re getting married.”
“Isn’t it nice? We’re thrilled, Pol, it feels just right.”
“Mike’s a nice boy. I’m glad you’re back with Mike.” Then she suddenly fired, “Even though he probably isn’t very good-looking. He was a dopey-looking teenager.”
“Polly! He looks great! What is the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me.”
The subject, dew-like with possibility, was there with Mike’s mother, too. “I don’t suppose you’re planning on any children,” she chortled on the phone.
“No,” I said neutrally, “I don’t guess we are.” I didn’t offer her any explanations, either. I couldn’t really. There wasn’t a catch phrase I could use. Oh no, I don’t have the calling for it, I might have said, using Lily’s standard line, but how could I pass my future mother-in-law off so lightly? I was neutral as cardboard, and as stiff.
—
But our happiness sported a flexible, almost otherworldly personality, equipped with the capacity of keeping us in its protective cloud. And that benign cloud moved. It swept us completely across the continent.
The following August Mike bought a glamorous suit, and I made my wedding dress and my hat, too, dolling it up with a band and a rose I made from silks the colors of the dress. Every texture delighted us, and felicitously, all the colors seemed complementary. We were making a play all for ourselves.
As we approached the little town in Washington State where we got married, I remembered I’d forgotten about a bouquet—and there on the mountainside ahead of us were drifts of wild sweet peas, and because I’d brought ribbon (in case my hat fell apart), I tromped in my brand new shoes into the sweet peas with some toenail scissors and harvested a big bouquet, a lucky thing, since the flowers wouldn’t last. They had appeared at the only moment they were needed and desired. It was like writing a poem where all the rhymes fell into place, with no reaching, except across a field of peas.
We’d found a married couple in legal practice together who’d marry us. We’d found the state with the fewest license restrictions. We’d found a town and a charming place to stay. We’d even found a photographer. But the best shots came from my own camera, lent to a woman I didn’t even know and whose name neither of us can remember, someone in the legal office of the lawyer couple who were marrying us on the steps of County Courthouse, who suddenly volunteered to come take pictures. Our faces are radiant in the breezy light of the Straits of San Juan de Fuca. Happiness presided over our union in a whimsical wholeness, wagging its planetary tail.
When I’m introduced to a stranger and we begin one of those conversations where the getting-to-know-you questions fly—What do you do, Where are you from—I try to sneak in “Do you have children?” and wait to see what happens. If the person says “Yes, I do!” I inquire into the kids’ various states of being, and chances are, the parent will be so engrossed in answering that it will take another meeting on another occasion—or perhaps another meeting many occasions hence—for the person to find out I have no children, let alone to discover it was by choice.
Although I do say I am childfree by choice, anticipating their reactions makes me anxious, and I hasten, always, to reassure them that I like children, and in fact devoted years of my life to working with kids. Somehow I feel this will shoehorn us out of their discomfort, for they are likely to be embarrassed. They’ve misjudged me. I ask myself why I feel a need to comfort them—I haven’t hurt them after all—and know it is because I’m determined to be accepted, not controversial. And so I behave like a coward.
I had my Cowardice Alert in the on position as I set out with Arcadia Scott, a near stranger, to share a 100-odd-block-long cab ride in the rain in the dark in slow traffic, but I shut it off immediately when my companion said quietly and comfortably that no, she had no children. A friend of Maggie’s, she’d helped organize the Harlem Euro-African Poetry and Visual Art program that I’d just helped introduce, and though we’d spoken on the phone, this was the first time we’d met in person, settling back on the lumpy seats for the ride downtown after the program. I knew I was in treacherous territory: She could have lost a baby, lost many babies, could have tried unsuccessfully, could have waited too long, could have decided no, but be so shut down about it we couldn’t have a conversation….
And so I rushed to tell her that I, too, had no children, and for me, in fact, it really was a choice, even though I was married, and that, in fact, it was a happy choice for both of us—I even used the word liberating—until, in the rainy streetlights of nighttime Broadway on the Upper West Side, I watched her face open and saw her turn toward me and smile one of those smiles that can take up nearly half of a tiny face. She was a gamine of a woman with alternating jet-black and bleached-red pixie braids, dressed in a bright coat with tiny shoulders and a flared skirt, like an urban columbine. I learned in a jumble from her reedy voice that she’d been married for twenty years—she didn’t look as though she could have been married for two decades—and was in business with her husband, and though they’d tried, in a lackadaisical way, to have children, they’d had to admit they didn’t really want them.
“We could have,” she said, “we could have spent thousands of dollars on fertility measures, but”—she hesitated before she said this, looking me over, maybe trying to decide how much censure she’d provoke—“but, I’d honestly rather take a big trip to Africa collecting!” She and her husband had a business dealing in African art. “Now why, why, well it’s very hard to give a single reason why you don’t have children,” she mused. “What reason do you give?”
I give two categories of reasons, I explained to her: “One’s from environment, and the other’s from my soul.”
“The environment one can’t matter,” she stated with sudden assurance. “It’s what’s inside you.”
“But I’ll give you both, just so you’ll have the full picture. First the environment: I had a family I didn’t want to replicate, the kind of family that actually said to me when I was a little g
irl, ‘Don’t ever have children!’ ”
“Really?”
“Well, they didn’t always say that, but sometimes they did, my father did, and my grandmother, and my mother said, ‘Only if you really want to.’ ” In the cab I realized again the gift, manufactured by frustration and inability to cope, that my parents had given me: They told me that I had a choice about what to do with my womanhood. Drunk as my father was, depressed as my mother was, conventional as Gram acted, they agreed it was terrible to be a mother if you did not want to be. “Of course the problem was,” I continued, “that I thought they didn’t want me. At least they didn’t want me as a child. They needed me to be a parent. I did a lot of unnaturally early caretaking of my father and little sister.”
“Sister! My little sister is completely consumed by motherhood. It is all she thinks about! She has two kids, one girl and one boy, and a concerned husband and no life, I mean no life of her own. Or a thought in her head except if it’s about those kids—and they’re adorable kids, they really are. But I don’t want them, and my husband doesn’t want them. We want to be striking bargains with Masai tribeswomen for stuff like this!” She pulled out a small drum-like object made, I guessed from the feel, from skins. Then she removed a leather thong, and pulled the top off. “Smell this!” she said.
“Whew!” I backed myself right into the door handle to avoid the stench.
“Face paint! That’s what you’re smelling, special-occasion face paint. This is a makeup drum! An actual Masai makeup drum. Hey, the Lancôme counter never smelled like this!”
I took the skin case from her again and opened the lid again, feeling like Pandora: Inside was a pungent smell of mashed herbs and a deep smell of animal grease, and earth and cow and bark and leaf and berry and maybe dung. It was a profound smell, and that container was empty. It had no face paint in it. It was only the empty drum, the place for possibility, and it reeked of the possible.
“This,” she said, “is the smell of my decision not to have children. The smell of something so deep inside—I mean, this smell is deep inside. It is positively vaginal! So who cares about your environmental answer? Everybody has family environments. It’s your insides, your gut that matters when you decide what to do with your life. Here is the gut!”
“Well, the gut of my decision is that I didn’t want to, it wasn’t in my nature. Strangely,” I said, “even though I’m an energetic person, I didn’t have the energy for kids.”
“I know what you mean! Here I have the energy to get on and off airplanes and learn Swahili and camp out on the dirt” (it was very hard to imagine this artfully eye-shadowed woman camping on the dirt) “and follow Billy, that’s my husband, into the preserves, and sometimes I think, Girl, you don’t even have the leftover energy to take your clothes to a dry cleaner, what would you be doing as a mother? I can’t do it all.”
“What about your mother? Does she mind?”
“My mother has the energy of eight women! All she is is energy. She is a full-time painter—and always was—and she raised four of us, two girls and two boys, and she sometimes had an extra job when my father wasn’t doing so well, and she is going strong! My mother is my best friend. She understands me.” She stopped. “She mostly understands me. We all have different energy levels.”
“My relationship with my mother is more complicated.” And I hadn’t been married for twenty years, either. The cab crawled even more slowly because the rain had turned to snow, but finally we were at Union Square.
“I’ve got to give you a card,” she said. We both fished in our bags for our cards, and our money, and we paid the driver and each went to her corner of Union Square. “Remember this smell,” she called to me. “Choice from the gut!”
Fourteenth Street was nearly empty of pedestrians, and no one was at the bus stop, but the bus loomed up and I decided to take it because the suddenly squalling snow made the very short walk home seem impossible. The bus itself took three times the normal amount of time to get to my stop. I thought of my mother, whom I loved so hard, even though she did not turn out to be my best friend.
—
In the November just after we were married, I got into the Pigmobile, Mike’s ancient car, and drove from London, Ontario, through the first snowstorm of the season to Buffalo to get to my dying mother. Polly was home from the hospital. She hadn’t had to be put in the nursing home as my sister predicted. The horrible papers I had filled out for Medicare hadn’t turned out to be necessary since she was stabilized at home. I found a clause in the insurance that said they would pay for a visiting nurse, then took more money from the little cache from the sale of La Grange and paid the nurse extra to come more often. My cousin Howie came. And her two friends for more than fifty years, Flo and Ann Louise, were there all the time. And I did duty for my sister, too, since Gail herself was in no shape to help. She’d been hospitalized, beaten up by the boyfriend who bought her the toaster oven.
I stopped eight times in the blizzard, first at the usual doughnut place, then at a second doughnut place, a tearoom, two gas stations, the toll plaza before the American border, and a highway exit, just to rest for a moment each time before going into the storm again. It squalled and stopped and squalled; the windshield wipers never moved fast enough. Three hours turned into six. The terrible heater miraculously stayed on. I would have thanked my lucky stars for that, if I could have seen any lucky stars. At the highway exit, I wept for the fourth time. I had broken down in sobs eating a peanut doughnut—Polly’s favorite—pulled myself together eating a maple doughnut—Polly’s other favorite—sniffled through a cup of tea, and squalled again like an irate child, just as the weather was squalling, at the top of my lungs in the Pigmobile with no other passenger cars on the Queen Elizabeth Way, just tractor trailers that passed me throwing road sop on my windshield, but whose guiding red taillights I was grateful for. Oh little pig eating Mommy’s food in your Pigmobile, oh little honeypie, you can do it, you can leave your husband for tonight with his cats by the fire, and you can drive. Honey, you can drive all night. And I did. And no accidents, either, though two close calls, both with tractor trailers fishtailing on the ice by Lake Ontario.
I arrived trembling.
“Hi, Mom!” I screamed, shaking the snow off my hair.
“My God, Molly,” Flo exclaimed, “what happened to you? You look terrible!” I hadn’t even bothered with lipstick. Somehow I’d managed to lose my slithery makeup case. It wasn’t nearly the size of that Masai face paint drum. I’d been driving and crying for six hours.
“Hey, Mol,” my mother said, looking at me with expectation, “didja bring me my milk shake?”
I’d forgotten.
“God, I forgot! I’ve been on the road six hours!” I had called them twice from the highway to report on my progress.
“It’s a snowstorm out there, Polly,” Ann Louise said. “Molly, you poor thing, let me get you some coffee. Have you eaten?”
“Well, I ate two doughnuts.”
“Oh, what kind?” my mother asked. “Peanut? Maple? Oh, I wish I could eat ’em now!”
Don’t worry, I ate them for you. The doughnut communion. This is my body. Do this in remembrance of me.
My mother could eat very little. She had decided against chemotherapy. The radiation treatments her doctor had scheduled were over: She had diabetes, lung cancer, hypertension, and the onset of senile dementia. Like tearing off the pages of a calendar backwards, Polly was getting younger and younger as her body diminished.
“OOOh, I’ve been waiting for you, Molly!” she said, raising her arms from the BarcaLounger like a child from the crib. “I wouldn’t let no one cook me dinner, but you!”
Her two friends, both much better cooks than I, looked at me helplessly. She wouldn’t allow them to feed her. Only me. I took a step into the room and twisted my ankle in my oversized boot.
“Molly, you better sit down,” Flo said. “You look terrible. We tried to tell her you’d be late and we should
feed her, but she wouldn’t let us. She only wants you. All she said was, ‘Molly is coming.’ ” Flo talked about her friend in the third person, though Polly was only three feet away.
“Oh your mother’s been waiting for you!” Ann Louise said. “She wouldn’t let us do anything. She wants you to do it all! The nurse was here and she’s had all her pills and her doctor called in, and she’s fine for the night, but she needs her dinner.”
“You mean,” Polly said in a weak voice, “you didn’t remember my milk shake?”
“Oh God, Ma, it’s a snowstorm out there! I forgot it. I’ll get you one tomorrow. Two. From the good place. Not just McDonald’s, OK?”
“Oh, I was looking forward to one….” She looked desolate, and a guilt and an anger rose up in me with stems thick as rhubarb. “Scramble me some eggs!” my mother was saying. “And toast, too, make me toast, Mol.”
I went in my boots and my coat to the stove.
“Take your coat off, Molly,” Flo said.
“Hey, you’ve still got your boots on!” Ann Louise said.
For that matter, I still had my bag in my hand.
I took off my wet boots, having messed up the rug. I went into the bedroom and put my coat away. I would sleep in my mother’s bed. She slept in her chair, which, to her, was more comfortable. She said she hoped she would die in her chair.
I went to the stove and got out the frying pan and the eggs. The eggs smelled disgusting to me. The butter smelled metallic from being too long in the refrigerator. I hadn’t had dinner myself, but I knew I was not going to be able to eat what I had cooked. Scramble, scramble. Baby food. I cut the toast in strips the way my mother had cut toast in strips for me when I was sick with chicken pox, so long ago. I loved her and drove through snowstorms for her. And I hated her, loathing that she had not let her friends cook dinner. Hysterical, hungry, and exhausted, I could have smashed her head open with the frying pan I instead made her meal in. Flo and Ann Louise had gotten her chair turned around toward the kitchen area of her apartment, so Polly could watch me make the food.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 27