Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life

by Abigail Thomas

  Thirty years later, long after we had been divorced, our three children grown, my father lay dying and my first husband asked if he could come to pay his respects. “Yes,” I said, “of course.” I wondered what he would say. They hadn’t seen each other more than half a dozen times in many years. I wondered what he would say; what could he say? I stood outside the hospital room, and although I didn’t want to intrude, I heard my former husband speak.

  “I’ve come to wish you well,” he said.

  Unfamiliar

  So there we were, my husband and I, up for the weekend at my parents’ new apartment where soot gathered quickly on the windowsills and the hall smelled funny. My parents had moved. We were on our best behavior—napkins in our laps, speaking when spoken to, laughing at jokes, feigning interest in the news. Then it got late, and my husband and I were lying in bed with the lights out when my father came in unannounced. He didn’t knock. He was in a very good mood; he had that excited happy tone in his voice. He wanted to tell us something, or perhaps read us a scrap of something interesting from the paper. It was past midnight. He flipped on the lamp. We lay there politely, and after a while he left, the smell of whiskey in the air. Good night, he cried happily, good night you two. Suddenly my husband sat up in bed. He was wearing pajamas. He was in a furious rage. Your father has no respect for me, he said. I said in a small voice, What do you mean? He said, To have just come barging in like that. He wanted me to tell my father how rude he had been. He was nineteen. I felt bad. My poor father. It was my fault, everything. The light was still on.

  That night the baby kicked so it wasn’t a complete wash.

  Visiting Nurse

  My baby and I ate scrambled eggs and creamed spinach every night for several weeks. We both liked this meal. She was my first baby and I was young. My husband was at the library studying, and my baby and I sat at the kitchen counter in our tiny apartment. Our parents paid the rent. We were living near the college where my husband was finishing his sophomore year. The super came up and told me not to leave Brillo on the radiator as it was bad for children. My child is not going to stuff a Brillo pad into her mouth, I didn’t reply. Instead I thanked him humbly. Everybody knew more than I did. Everyone had advice. Bananas are good for babies, the visiting nurse said. Potassium. And it will bind the bowels a bit. My child and I had had problems in the loose-bowel department, too much creamed spinach, too many scrambled eggs, too many nights in a row.

  My child had gotten hot, too, a fever, and this was why I called the visiting nurse who came and put the baby right away in a tub of ice-cold water. She didn’t look twice at our unmade bed, the books piled on the floor. My baby screamed and screamed, but the nurse explained what she was doing and what I should do next time. The nurse was not scornful of me and she didn’t condescend. I stood in the doorway with my hands clasped tight behind my back, concentrating on what I needed to know.

  Young Wasn’t It

  You weren’t young, my sister says. You have to explain it better.

  What do you mean, I say. You think eighteen is mature?

  Unprepared, she says. You were unprepared. Why?

  Because I was young, I insist.

  No. That’s not it. Were we told to wear our scarves?

  That was for sissies, I say. We didn’t care about those things.

  Did we care about wet feet or chapped hands?

  Certainly not.

  Mom didn’t exactly spend her days in a red-checked apron plying us with little goodies, now did she.

  Well, why would she? I ask. That didn’t float her boat.

  Au contraire, says my sister. It torpedoed her boat. She wasn’t born to put on our little mittens and then hang them up to dry.

  No, but we knew where Ovid was buried, didn’t we? Banished, she says. Where Ovid was banished.

  Right. Banished. Where was it again?

  Some island, she says.

  An Issue of Clothes

  We had a laundry chute. You opened a little door and threw things. They slid down, and they ended up in a basket in the basement, but from there they didn’t go anywhere. It was a dead end. Nobody in the family knew how to do laundry. Pretty soon you were out of clothes. We don’t recall our mother doing laundry. Once a week she counted handkerchiefs and socks and sent them out. I remember this made her very mad. She stood there in the hall with an angry look and counted noisily, ticking things off on a list. We didn’t disturb her. It all seemed very mysterious. So finally it seemed wiser to hang on to your clothes and keep wearing them even if they got dirty.

  We think she never learned how to do laundry because where she grew up laundry just got done. For a while our mother employed a Russian woman named Mrs. Gregorette. Mrs. Gregorette loved to iron. She took a mouthful of water from a glass she kept on the counter and then sprayed it on the clothes. Right out of her mouth! My mother enjoyed this very much, and our horror. Laundry was not what our mother concentrated on. She concentrated on our father. They were very much in love.

  Watching Her Father Eat Cake

  I remember making cakes when I got home from school. They were always yellow, as I didn’t know how to separate an egg, and always from mixes, but they were thrilling to make. I looked forward to it all day and rushed home from school. I can still remember the silky feel of the cellophane bag that held the yellow powder and cracking the eggs one by one on the side of the bowl. I usually ate so much batter that the cakes were very small. The icing was made out of confectioners’ sugar and butter and milk, and I melted bitter chocolate and poured it on top of the whole thing, my grandmother’s recipe. My father sometimes had two pieces. “This is very good cake,” he told me. “How did you make such a good cake?” and I would explain it to him. He was an important man, a scientist who often stayed at his lab till all hours. It made me shy to have his full attention, but I watched carefully as he ate every bite, his jaw clicking now and then as he chewed.

  Jimi

  A familiar sound is coming from behind her grandsons’ closed door. The walls shake. Her grandsons are into Jimi Hendrix and she thinks she will buy them a poster. She remembers Jimi from the old days, how sexy he was, how wicked. A kind of god, really. She can swoon even today with the memory. “Are You Experienced,” she finds herself whispering as she walks into a store. Imagine her surprise when she looks at the poster. What she sees is not someone she would take home to bed but take home to feed. He is so skinny. So young. She would make him chicken and dumplings today, and her apple cake. She would give him her pot roast and vegetables. Eat, she would say, eat.

  I Ran Away

  I ran away from my first husband. Often we fought, and when we weren’t fighting we were polite. “Excuse me,” we would say if our feet touched under the table, like strangers in a restaurant. We were children, not meant to be married, but we did make beautiful babies. I ran four hundred miles away and lived in my parents’ basement. They had a house in New York City. I was twenty-six with three children. We all threw up our hard-boiled eggs on the airplane. My middle daughter brought her dee-dee, a pink fuzzy bathrobe that was her companion. The children’s ages were seven, five, and three. My parents welcomed us, but their hearts must have been filled with fear. How will she live? When will she leave? I imagined them whispering at night. At the end of every day my mother would collect our scattered belongings and lay them at the top of the stairs to the basement in hopes I would get organized. After a few months I got a job. I made $56.90 a week.

  The children were still small. Good things might still happen. We might all live happily ever after if only I could find the right man.

  Everyone Agreed

  It was 1968, but she was a child of the fifties, she needed a man. And not just any man, a husband. A husband would provide her with a center. She had none of her own. Her parents too wanted her to marry again. After a suitable interval. After a quiet time, as her mother once put it. Her parents were happily married. Didn’t her mother still take her glasses off to dance
with her father? Didn’t they still kiss with their eyes closed? Marriage was safer than being at large.

  Not Just for Myself

  I was looking for a father for my kids. I was not in it just for myself. Would you make a good father? I would wonder no matter who it was, no matter if we’d met five minutes before. No matter if he drove a truck or sold loose joints. They would have been amazed if they’d known what I was thinking. Of course it wasn’t the only thing I was thinking. A lot of the time I wasn’t thinking at all. I slept with many men. One was paralyzed and we made love on the living room rug in my parents’ apartment. They were in Washington, and my children were all asleep. I can’t recall his name. We took off his leg braces and laid them to one side. He’d had polio when he was little. They invented the vaccine six months after he got sick. He would have made a good father to my children, I thought. But he never called me up, and he lived in North Carolina anyway. After a few days I slept with somebody else. He worked in an office. He was much older than I was, and he was married, but he kissed me in the mail room and he said my lips were soft. After that we took his motorcycle every Wednesday and ate French fries and hot pastrami. We drank celery soda. Then we went to a cheap hotel. I still remember the old yellow blinds.

  It was this same man who gave me a plastic blow-up banana, six feet tall. That was to make up for the fact that he stood me up one night he’d been going to come over. I waited downstairs on the stoop for hours. I didn’t know what else to do. I already had the babysitter. I wasn’t too bright in those days. Up yours, I hadn’t learned to say. Besides, he was a genuinely nice man. He sent me to the dentist and paid for it. He sewed the buttons on my coat himself, with skill. I never called him by his first name, not even in bed. I put the banana in the living room and after a few weeks I let the air out and threw it away. It took up too much space. The kids were disappointed.

  Respect for My Elders

  I had respect for my elders, which was why I never called him by his first name. He was a friend of my boss. Mr. Gladstone, how’s about a blow job? No. I never said such things. I didn’t have to. We all know certain things intuitively, such as when a man smiles at you and pushes your head in the general direction of his crotch. I thought it was romantic because of the absence of words. I felt sophisticated, experienced. I don’t mean to sound bitter. I’m not bitter. I am only a little bit amused, looking back, this view from the person I have finally become. Now if I thought my daughters were calling anybody Mr. Anything in bed, then you’d see the fur fly. “I’m all out of estrogen, but I do have a gun.” I heard that from my friend Tracy. But bitter? Not me.

  Inappropriately Dressed for the Occasion

  The music was still playing, and here and there drunks were asleep on the furniture, but she found herself in a dwindling group. Where was everybody? Her friend appeared at her elbow. Come into the bedroom, he said, that’s where everybody is. She was awfully drunk. Not stoned, she hated marijuana. It was 1968.

  There were a whole bunch of people on the bed and clothes all over the floor. She had only heard about orgies, never been to one. But I’m wearing my new dress, she protested to no one in particular. She did look awfully good in it; it was brown and clung to every part of her and it was short as was fashionable. Come on, said a friend, beckoning. How young he looked without his clothes on. He was smiling. She put out her cigarette. The Doors were on, or was it Cream? The music was wonderfully loud. I’d like to have another kiss. Oh me too, she must have thought. Who wouldn’t.

  It was hard to know where to climb aboard so to speak. There were so many bodies already on the bed. It was like being part of some coral reef, only soft, with many moving parts. You couldn’t tell where you ended and the others began. It wasn’t sexy at all, not really, it was something else she can’t explain. Good-natured, maybe. And she kept her dress on. But here it is thirty years later, and sometimes she misses it, whatever it was.

  No Underwear

  I can’t explain it, I say.

  My sister says, There were shops. You could have bought some.

  I can’t explain it, I say again. I didn’t wear any. I wasn’t happy about it. It’s just the way it was.

  Why, why, why, asks my sister. How could you have gone out into the street in a miniskirt?

  How could I have done it? It gave me a focus. Instead of thinking about how I had no education and no job experience and couldn’t type and had no husband and three kids and no future that I could even begin to imagine, instead of that I could focus on Jeez here I am with no underwear again. Better stand up straight.

  I don’t think that’s it, says my sister.

  Maybe I just wanted the attention, like a six-year-old who knocks the lamp off the table while his folks read the paper. Very childish. I agree completely. How about that? Does that hold water?

  My sister shakes her head. No, she says, but her voice is patient. What do they want, she asks, those young girls who are so promiscuous?

  I don’t know, I say.

  Yes you do, says my sister. What are they looking for?

  I don’t know, I say.

  Yes you do, says my sister.

  Love? I ask.

  Right, says my sister. That’s right.

  Looking for love in all the wrong spaces? I say, laughing.

  And that’s all they think they have to offer, says my sister. You have to say that.

  But of course, I say. That’s so obvious.

  Well you have to write it, says my sister.

  Okay, I say. I will. I went around with no underpants. It was like a big advertisement. Here. This is all I have to offer. Check it out. And everyone who showed any interest I followed home. There. Are you satisfied now?

  Exhausted

  She was always tired then. That is why being tired now makes her feel young. She was up all day and half the night what with the kids and the boyfriends. What with the cigarettes and the whiskey. What with the wild wild women. (She was the wild wild woman herself of course.) Got no sleep. Didn’t really care. Still looked good. Loved her kids. Once she hitched a ride home at three in the morning from Avenue C. She was waiting for the bus, and a couple of guys stopped; she could see through the car windows they had martini glasses in their hands. One of them rolled his window down and started to hit on her a little bit. “Lookin’ good,” he probably said, or “Big legs,” one of the compliments of those days. It was four degrees above zero and she was wearing loafers with no socks and no stockings and her coat had only one button left. She wasn’t much of a dresser. The driver said, she could hear through the window, “Leave her alone, man, it’s too cold. Don’t hassle the chick.” She said, “Can I have a ride to Fifth?” and they opened the back door. They were friendly and very nice. She knew it would be okay. And it was okay. They let her out on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street where she lived. She was sure she knew what was safe and what wasn’t. And luckily for her, she was right most of the time. The rest of the time she was lucky.

  Those days are gone forever and good riddance no doubt. What is it, thirty years ago? The world seemed innocent then. She knows now it wasn’t. She looks at her watch. Two-thirty in the morning. She is tired, but nothing is wasted, she uses it to remember the old days. Exhaustion is her servant, where once it was her master. She looks out her window, uptown, at the water towers, at the squares of light in other windows. Where a man she hadn’t met back then, a man she was about to meet, a man whom she would love and hate and love again, a man with whom she would spend the next thirty years, give or take, has died. Died. It seems impossible. She can almost see his windows from her window. She can almost hear his voice. Anything might happen. She doesn’t want to go to bed.

  A Simple Solution

  At suppertime I pulled out the bottom drawer in the kitchen cupboard and turned it upside down because we didn’t have a table. Then we sat on the floor and ate off it. I felt resourceful. We had moved out of my parents’ house into our own apartment. The rent was chea
p. You could live on nothing in 1969. I made $90 a week, but my monthly rent was only $143.35. We lived on West Twelfth Street between Sixth and Seventh. It was a nice neighborhood, St. Vincent’s across the street. We made do with what we scrounged up.

  My middle daughter complains of those days, but something else bothered her. When they were all three in the tub, she and her sister and her brother, she says, I would put in my dirty feet, stuck all over with raisins and soot and god knows what all. I went barefoot and it was New York City. She says I did this over her protests night after night. I did not, I want to say, but I think she’s right. It rings a bell. I didn’t understand what was so bad. Perhaps I wanted to be one of the kids instead of the mother. Forgive me. There are so many things I would never do again.

  “Hey Jude”

  Sometimes she goes back downtown where she lived so long ago, and she walks through the park at Washington Square. She was barefoot here all summer in 1968 and 1969, her feet tough as hooves. She was slender and foolish and skimpily clad. She sat on the rim of the fountain, and her three young children splashed with all the other children in the water. It was a place so full of life and what seemed like hope back then, and possibility, and adventure. The Vietnam War was on, and they all believed so earnestly that things must and could change, a single voice raised with other voices would fix the world. And making love was really making love, they thought, something hopeful was released into the air, every time, like a nutrient for the planet. She craved experience and she confused experience with sex. Not to knock it. But it isn’t the be-all and end-all she’d once thought.