“My wife worried endlessly about whether she was ready,” he poured out. “When she decided she was, first came the thermometers, then the sex calendar, and we did it and did it and did it and finally she got pregnant with Jillian, thank God. You have no idea how hard it is to perform and perform. Then came all the problems with Jillian’s hearing, and just when she started healing from the last operation, my wife starts in about whether we were ready for another one. Well, I wasn’t ready. That I was able to say. Just give me a rest. So she rested for about six months, and out came the thermometers and the sex calendar again. I’m telling you, I didn’t know what hit me. These children seemed to be her prerogative. After Hugh was born she said, ‘Now we have our family.’ We! If I’d have ever, ever been half conscious of how much responsibility I would take on with my wife and my kids, I know this is a terrible thing to say, because I love my kids, I really do, and I love my wife, but I’m not fit for this. I’m a goddamn nervous wreck all the time.” He stopped briefly to scratch his lip, then rushed on. “It’s almost impossible to stay centered. I’ve got the fleet of cabs on my shoulders with all the maintenance and the new car buying—if we can afford new cars this year—and Jillian’s ears still have problems. Just making sure the kid isn’t in pain, or that she heard the teacher’s homework assignments, takes loads and loads of attention. I’m not an absentee father. I’m an involved dad. And I’m a committed husband. But I’ll tell you the truth, I can regret it. I have noise till ten P.M. and then I have exhaustion. Complete exhaustion. I thought in my twenties, well, first marriage, then kids. I didn’t give it any more juice than that, and I can’t give it more than a passing thought now, because the decisions are made. But I’d be more conscious next time. This really doesn’t suit my personality.” He panted as if he’d been doing laps.
Since Leo is one of the few men, other than Mike, I ever have a soul-to-soul talk with, I seized the opportunity. “So, Leo,” I inappropriately queried, “if you hadn’t had children, would your marriage have a purpose?”
Leo got a nosebleed.
“Companionship!” he said as I ran inside for the tissues. “Simple companionship, thanks,” he whispered as he mopped up his nose. “I don’t usually get nosebleeds, but it’s the emotional way you talk.”
“Me? The emotion I have when we talk? Oh look, Leo, I’m sorry. Thank you for these irises.” I handed him more tissues. “Is it stopping?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” He held his head back. “All this whether to have children stuff is very emotional. It’s emotional for men. It really is. The guys I know, they would never say this, but really, it’s their lives. What we’re talking about when we talk about marriage is the pattern of your life.”
“Yes, it really can be an important, or, an overwhelming part of life. Though not everyone is married, Leo.”
“God, everyone I know is. I think it’s stopping. Hey look!” He was very pleased, and so was I, to see the next Kleenex almost white. I went inside to get a paper bag for him to dispose of the tissues. “And they all have kids,” he shouted after me. “Everyone who works for me full-time. Plus the two women who drive. Most of the student part-timers are married and have kids. Even the gay couple who drive on the weekends have adopted a kid together.” I returned with the bag.
Leo shook his sizeable head of gray and red hair, looking stricken and overwhelmed. “Of course there’s a purpose to marriage without children!” he said. “It’s about simple companionship. Partners on life’s path.” He thought a moment, then said quite formally, as if he were testifying, and I suppose he picked a good place to do it, since we were standing on the half-constructed brick path in my garden: “I would like to go along life’s path sharing it with someone—and not running wildly down the path either. Just going along it. A nosebleed for God’s sake,” he said. “I can’t talk about this shit.”
“We’ve got to stick to gardening. Really, I’m sorry. I never meant to cause you to bleed, Leo.”
He got up to leave. “The next conversation we have is strictly about beetles,” he called over his beefy shoulder, then lumbered over the lawn toward his cab.
Simple companionship. My parents rarely had it, though both sets of my grandparents seemed to. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I skipped the married with children part of my life and proceeded right into the atmosphere of grandparenthood, the companionship two people feel after their kids have left home. But for Mike and me, it’s after we’ve separated from our youthful miseries. Nothing holds us but a We we have constructed.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, as I typically do, I love his back on the other side of the bed. In the circle of the tiny book light attached to whatever novel I’ve kept to read at those times, I think how thankful I am for that furry spine, and how I can barely have enough of it. I don’t actually read so much as watch the print of my book, and feel my nightgown slip against the sheets as I turn around to see him happily sleeping (for nothing wakes him up) through his routine eight hours. When I put my novel down and shut the light and lightly tap him, he turns and throws one arm over me and then I sleep again.
—
Having only had the routine of art in my life, and the external routines of classes and school, the internal life of domestic routine was very new for me. The beginnings of our marriage were fraught with my mother’s death and complicated with our adjustment to our Canada–New York commute. But we were determined to preserve the best of our former lives and merge it with the new life we were creating. It really was like bringing a garden back to life, hauling soil, carting stones, nailing up trellises, pruning trees. And I had other adjustment problems, coming not only as a galumphing American into Canada’s quieter society, but as a New Yorker, a woman who learned by hard experience to act boldly to get what she wanted. It was as if I were a thick-stemmed sunflower crashing into a shade garden of ferns and feathery pink astilbe. In New York I was used to demanding, in Canada all I had to do was ask.
And yet the sense of completeness I have, the wholeness and fulfillment, did not come from insisting that the world fill my internal prescription. It came because all I had to do was ask. I asked myself who I was, and eventually I knew what I needed. My old life, like deadheads on rangy petunias, completely fell away.
If I could have told that girl, who waited to hear her father’s car crawl up in the driveway, that things would never be as bad as they were at that moment, I think she would not have believed me. I imagine whispering into her ear, a skinny little shrimp with lank hair wearing a soiled blouse, her face at once both horrified and grim, that her life will be an adventure and that she will become a poet and live in two countries with a boy she would meet very soon. I see her turn her head a little bit on her neck, straightening her slump just a bit, and watch a slow, noncommittal sort of astonishment begin in her spine, delight moving up her vertebrae till it hits the top of her head and moves her shoulders back. I tell her—she is fourteen years old—that if she holds on for thirty years she’s going to love her life. This girl does not say, “Thirty years! How will I hold on?” She does not dare complain or hope; instead, she walks. She walks across the empty plain, requiring that emptiness completely. Paradoxically, for her it will become full of creativity.
When I said No to having children, I felt as if I went to some viscerally interior place, the place of recognition. I’d always thought that the positive, the embracing, the Yes that is so characteristic of women’s assumed responses, would let me affirm who I am. But it was a refusal that led me to understand my own nature. It was the saving no. The saving no seemed to emerge from the ready emptiness that is required for all creativity, not just for the making of art. That No can’t be confused with loss, or the painful emptiness of not having what you need. Like a well-proportioned, unfurnished room with open windows, the affirming refusal invites life. It’s a room, not a womb. Like a womb, it harbors life, but unlike a womb, it leaves room to create the rest of life.
&n
bsp; —
Mike Groden in a James Joyce T-shirt and a pair of ratty running shorts is making his lunch. He is methodical. He has the same lunch every day: one vegetarian sandwich, whole grain bread, one turkey sandwich, one Granny Smith apple. He makes the sandwiches on a paper towel and uses it to flip the crumbs into the sink. Then he uses the paper towel for a plate and goes to our former dining room, now a music room, and plays an Elvis Costello CD while he eats and feeds minute bits of turkey to the cats. He talks to them, gently teasing them and scratching their ears. I can see and hear him because I’m in the sunroom with a pile of manuscripts, still in my bathrobe looking up from my schedule having realized, not for the first time, that I made two commitments at the same hour. I ask him what he thinks I should do and he has a sensible answer. Roma, the calico, leaves for her postprandial nap upstairs and Fellini, the orange tabby, flops next to him on the couch. When a student calls, Mike is patient and kind. When a colleague calls, he is serious and witty and makes a good suggestion. His editor faxes him a query. He decides to call the producer of a project he’s working on. But before he calls her, he comes in to tell me what was in the paper that morning. Clearly, I am so busy reading the manuscripts I am not going to get to the paper.
I see a kind, consistent, intelligent, sensible, sensitive, stable man with an easy sense of humor—he has just made a wicked arcane joke about textual criticism that only a player in the James Joyce wars (or the player’s wife) would understand. We make an appointment to have sex. We love doing this. We love knowing that we’ll put our minds down at a certain time and get into bed, make love, have a tiny nap, and then make dinner.
Another student calls and my husband is clear about his directions, and fair in his deal. It occurs to me, not for the first time, what a terrific father he would have made. He is even-minded, even-handed, and understanding, all my dad was not.
One day on a train ride from New York to a poetry reading I was giving in Providence, looking out at the marshes, counting the snowy egrets that have come back to the New England coast, I found myself reading a book about women who have chosen to be childfree. The book was Will You Be Mother? by Jane Bartlett, a British journalist. She had compiled lots of interviews with women, and one group of those interviews was about sterilization, and how relieved and happy those women interviewed were to put the childbearing issue to rest. One of the interviewers mentioned reversing the procedure. Reversing the procedure? I thought in a panic. What if I could reverse the procedure I’d had? Then Mike could be a father! I fantasized wildly, but deeply, as longing dislodged regret inside me. Like a tide pool stirred by the stick of the possibility, I suddenly thought of myself as able to bear children again—If it were possible, I thought, would I, would I try for a reversal and suddenly take it all on? After all, life had become so different! My mother didn’t live to see my child! Mike and I had spent five decades becoming who we were and could be excellent parents. (Or, at least, he could be…Would I have made such a lovely mother?) Another snowy egret in the greeny marsh. They had come back, they had repopulated…
It was as if the heavy stone moved by the stick of this idea had been flipped up to lodge with a thud on my heart. What if my so-called choice was a sham? Aware of how fast I was breathing, how fast the train was flying—it was my life, that train, flying through five decades—I saw suddenly how empty the car was. No one in the seat beside me, only a few tops of heads in the other rows. Literally and figuratively I was in a relatively empty car, having made a minority decision. The marshes stretched on. Patches of white, like crumpled sheets of paper, materialized as water birds when we flew past. Why was I breathing so shallowly? I was panicking.
Come on, think it through. What if you could reverse it, would you? Now that you have your beautiful life? Mike is perfectly happy the way he is. He wants you, he doesn’t want a family. There was nothing in the idea of a family that thrilled him. Besides, the two of you are a family. I knew we both seemed larger and more encompassing together than the two individuals we were when alone. Don’t you value this relationship beyond anything? Now was I going to change it? For what? To supply Mike Groden with an opportunity he himself didn’t think he’d missed? Wasn’t I acting just like all the people who think life’s only fulfillment is having children? Was I going to overfill the magnificent emptiness I’d just managed to achieve?
I couldn’t answer at first, busy imagining myself pregnant with enormous medical complications, even if it were possible. An infant in my arms and Mike in the hospital…Dishes, laundry, spit up, measles, aunts, uncles, cousins, mother-in-law, schools…A little girl walks with Mike—how kind he is to her….Baby shit, schedules, car pools, telephones, insomnia, chiropractors, frantic calls to Ruta, now I am yelling at Mike in the hospital, now my child howls from the back seat of a car broken down in a snowstorm, we’re lost, I take off my coat to cover the child, who is cold, and my skin comes off in the coat. Hitchhiking in a snowstorm to rescue my child in the car, I stand at the side of the road without a skin, a mass of pulsing muscles over a skeleton, but pushing on, living somehow, doing what has to be done, has to be done….
As the train came into Providence, I stepped into a beautifully restored station, like my own restoration to my senses. No, even if I could have reversed the tubal ligation, I would not have reversed my decision. Yet no woman can decide against having children without questioning it again and again, I thought, as I shook the hand of the man who had come to pick me up. Every piece of this complex issue has a place: after all, who has a real life that goes on a purposeful glowing arc from A to Z? The issue of children is never dead. It raises its head like an errant red tulip popping up in a hedge. Inside the next opportunity lies the very refusal of the option that created it, and sometimes that refusal reemerges, then resettles.
Who would I be if I couldn’t reconsider? All of importance contains its opposite.
“Ya can’t send the stuff till I’m moved, Molly!” Gail yelped into the phone. “They’re kickin’ me outta here! Outta my little house where I been for ten whole years!”
“What’s going to happen?” I asked neutrally.
“I gotta go in an apartment, Mols, a dump. I gotta get Hannah Banana my dog and pack everything up and go up the mountain to the apartments up there. I’m movin’.”
She was losing her little house.
Mike and I had gone to Buffalo and cleaned out the storage unit where I’d shucked all the things from La Grange after Polly died. I had all I wanted: the dining room table and sideboard, the dishes and the washstand. No matter what you stored in it, the smell of La Grange roared from the drawers. Ruth was everywhere, and solid. The rest was going to the other grandchildren, and to Gail, too, though she’d probably sell it.
“Now you’ve got the card, Gail,” I said, “so all you have to do is just dial when you get moved in.” I’d gotten her the kind of phone card people get their teenage kids, the one where they can call home collect, but nowhere else.
She’d broken her hip from falling drunk out of a second-floor window, she walked with a cane from a beating a boyfriend had given her, and she had arthritis. She was forty-five years old. “I got a nice little honey of an old man with me, now, a Vietnam vet and we draw pictures together!” In the mail I got a line drawing cartoon of Gail in a clawfoot bathtub with a Woodstock poster behind her on the wall. She was bare-breasted and wore sunglasses. Smoke from her cigarette curled toward the top of the picture. It was like the kewpie doll my Dad had sent me, but I didn’t destroy it.
Finally she moved in, and I shipped her the bed and the kitchen table and the piano stool and the dishes with the gold rims from Polly. Earlier I had sent what Polly had insisted Gail have: her wedding ring. I always earmarked the diamond ring for Gail. That, and my fur coat, Polly said.
“I got ’em, Mol, I got ’em, oh I love you! I haven’t slept on a real bed in years! I got drawers for my clothes and everything! And I’m wearin’ the jewels, the family jewels! Oh thank you
, thank you! Here, I’m puttin’ Hannah Banana on the phone to thank you. Come on, Hannah, ya gotta bark up for Molly and thank her!”
“I’m glad you got everything, honey,” I said. Hannah was barking in the background.
“So whatcha doin’ today, Mol?”
“Well, I have a couple of conference calls about a project this afternoon, but right now I’m a filthy mess. Mike and I are cleaning the basement.”
“My God!” she said in wonder. “You have a basement?”
“Yep, a real basement.”
“Shit, I wish I had a basement.”
—
And so went our calls. All I could do for her was listen, and so I did. I dug in the garden and worked with my students by fax. I got on airplanes and lectured at universities and returned to Mike and went swimming and gossiped with my friends and I wrote the beginning of this book, which I sent to my sister.
“I’m really sick, Mol,” she said when she called. “I got this throat thing and my vocal cords are shot.” Now whispery as seed pods, her gravelly voice had lost all its volume.
“I’m running this fever, Mol, and we can’t get it down. My honey’s got me sitting in a cold tub. This place is a mess. It’s an apefuck. I ain’t got no doorknob, Mol! Anybody can walk right in here! But Hannah Banana, she’ll bite ’em.” Hannah was squealing in the background. Gail whisper-yelled, “Lay off the friggin’ dog, you asshole!” to the person stepping on the dog.
Getting a sore throat, starting to feel the glands under my ears swell, I walked the phone into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
“But I read what you sent me, Mol!” Gail burbled, her whisper now conspiratorial. “And could I tell you stuff! Ya know, I always hated kids, Mols. They don’t go with the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll lifestyle. And that’s my lifestyle. I could puke around kids, I really could.”
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 29