Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life

by Abigail Thomas

  Despite the exhilaration, it was not a good time. Along with the excitement was always the fear, running by her side. She didn’t know what would become of her and her three children. Because what was she doing? She was like the eye of a hurricane, high wind and water all around. She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she’d been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, “Hey Jude” was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth.

  She walks back along Eighth Street toward her subway. It’s cold, and she is wearing warm clothes and boots, and a coat that fits and has all its buttons. Her children are grown now, with good lives of their own. She pauses, waiting for the light. For some reason the old Whelan’s on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street occupies a soft spot in her memory. It is gone now, that dreadful place with a lunch counter where twenty-four hours a day people sat slumped over cups of bad coffee and at four in the morning you could buy cigarettes and Binaca. She wouldn’t return to those days. But she can cry over them. As if youth were a limb that had tormented her, and its phantom remains, and she can still feel it aching, and she misses it because it was her own.

  Mumps and My

  Second Husband

  I remember you called me up. You had been given my name by an old friend. You asked if I would like to go out for a drink sometime. I was busy and distracted. I forgot you were a physicist, that I would have nothing to say to you. “Have you had mumps?” I asked, a dish towel over my shoulder, a cigarette in my left hand. “My children have the mumps.” You asked your mother. She was still living in the same apartment she had occupied for forty years. You called your childhood pediatrician, but he was dead. Your aunt remembered though. “I’ve had mumps,” you called later to say. “Okay then,” I said, no inkling that we would know each other until the day you died. “Come over.” My children were already better. My sister would babysit.

  He Filled My Door

  He filled my door. He wore a winter coat that hadn’t come off a thrift-shop rack. He was tall. He had a presence, as they say. And he looked familiar. There are the ones you recognize, after all. Oh, I thought. There you are. He came in to meet my children. He sat down on the white rocker for a few minutes, then he got up. He had come to take me out to dinner. I knew he liked the looks of me. I liked the looks of him. He had nice hands. He had big shoulders. He had a wonderful wicked smile. What did we talk about? Maybe he told me then he had grown up on Washington Square in a brownstone with a Tiffany ceiling. That when he was a little boy he had crawled out over the ceiling on a grid that allowed you to replace the bulbs. He had done this quite often, although he had been forbidden, shorting out all the fuses in the house. His father, incensed, would try to catch him, but if he could make it to the dining room table, his father could never catch him. He could run around it faster and finally his father gave up. His father was a doctor with two sets of patients, the rich ones whom he charged and the poor whom he did not. There were separate entrances. At this point I may have told him my son had cut the cords to a couple of lamps in my mother’s living room. We had heard popping sounds, tiny explosions, and running into the room we found him under a table with the scissors in his hand. He was four. He liked the noise and the sparks. But maybe my mind is putting these together now. Anyway, we went somewhere in his green Mustang and afterward he said he’d like to see me again. We barely grazed mouths, but the air was electric.

  He was very attractive; even my sister thought so. I liked him. I believed it when he said he’d call me again, although my sister was skeptical. But he knew what he wanted and he went after it. I understood that in the first five minutes. I felt strong suddenly. I was twenty-seven and he was forty-six. I had three children and he had never been married. I thought I knew what I needed to know. He thought he knew everything. He was my knight in shining armor come to save me. From what? From myself.

  Nine months later we were married. We made each other laugh. What could go wrong?

  Something Overheard

  It was at a party in what was to become SoHo, lots of drinking, lots of smoke, and somebody said something I didn’t catch, and another man replied, one hand on the back of his own head, the other holding a cigarette, both men wearing togas as I recall, “Oh honey, any sense of security is a false sense of security.” Everybody laughed, but I didn’t get it. I just didn’t get it. What was so funny? What did it mean?

  Now I get it.

  In the Morning

  The first night I slept at your apartment I thought you had two dogs, both of them barking at me. It turned out there was only one. I never liked your dog. She ate a hole in my best skirt, the only truly expensive thing I had ever bought myself. She dragged it off the chair where I’d thrown it. Look at my skirt! I cried. Buy another, you said laughing, handing me some money. But it was one of a kind, I said, I can’t buy another, but you didn’t hear. You were happy. You couldn’t fathom skirt=damage. I did take the money though. Fifty dollars was a lot in 1969.

  The Money

  My sister is upset about the money.

  How much did he give you? Fifty dollars? Did you ask for that much?

  It’s what the skirt cost, I tell her. You remember that skirt. It was handmade. I got it on Greenwich Avenue. It was the one you said made my ass look like two basketballs bouncing up and down when I walked.

  I remember it now.

  Ha-ha, I say.

  Didn’t you feel funny taking it? she asks.

  What. The money? Sort of, yes, I say.

  Why did it make you feel funny? she repeats, her eyes fixed on my face.

  I don’t know, I say. It just did.

  Because it was like payment?

  I look at her, astonished. Of course not, I say.

  Are you sure? You spent the night with this man and he gives you fifty bucks in the morning.

  The dog ate my skirt, I say. Or did you forget that little fact.

  I’m just asking why you felt funny, that’s all. Don’t get so hot under the collar.

  It’s because money was not the answer. I’m sorry was the answer.

  My sister nods vigorously. Bad dog was the answer.

  Damn right. Bad dog. But I took the money.

  A Proposal of Marriage

  After nine months I asked what his intentions were. “I can’t keep leaving my children like this,” I said, “every weekend.” I had had a few swigs from the Vandermint chocolate liqueur bottle that he kept on the marble sideboard. Every time I walked past I took another delicious swallow. It wasn’t like liquor. It was like candy with attitude. “I think I’m probably going to marry you,” he said. He was sitting at his kitchen table. Why did this frighten me? What did I know? “Oh my god,” I probably said, “thank you.” I was desperately young. I’m certain we kissed.

  But maybe not. Maybe I said, “Oh really? Have you thought about asking me first?” This is perfectly possible. At twenty-seven I had a certain moxie that passed for pride. But my memory fails me. I know he was a handsome man. Later, “Dance for me while the chicken is cooking,” he suggested, sitting back on the sofa, his hands behind his head, feet on the coffee table. That I remember clearly.

  But I married him anyway.

  You Felt What You Felt

  Before they got married he bought a house for all of them to live in. For her and her three children, and the child they planned to have together. It was an old house that overlooked the Hudson River. It sat high on a hill next to some woods. This seemed like a good idea. They needed lots of room. He had never been married before and never lived with children. There were five bedrooms and four bathrooms and three floors. There were three fireplaces. Was she a princess in a fairy tale? Was she as happy as she was supposed to be? She kept worrying about this.r />
  When the kids had gone to school and her husband to work, she would sometimes sit in the living room holding tightly to the arms of the chair feeling afraid and think, Maybe it is the woodwork getting me down. The woodwork was dark and chin high around all the rooms. Then she got pregnant and for a little while knew who she was again. When the child was born, everyone loved her. But all was not well. She wanted to live happily ever after, but that was an awful responsibility. Her children were supposed to live happily ever after now too and they weren’t doing that either. What she had done in a small apartment seemed harder on this giant screen. And there she was, tiny in the corner. She didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to feel anything. You felt what you felt.

  The Stanhope

  Being no dummy, her second husband had introduced himself to her parents by taking them to the Stanhope for lunch. They liked him immediately. He knew art, which put him in good with her mother, and he was a scientist, which gave him lots in common with her father. He showed himself to be witty and happy, he was successful and interesting, he was handsome and solvent and in love with their daughter. She didn’t even have to talk. Her mother and father looked at each other and smiled when lunch was over. Everything would be all right; she could feel their relief. They could stop worrying. After lunch they could stroll across the street to the Met and look at Caillebotte. She felt proud to have bagged such a big fish.

  We Had a Daughter

  We had a daughter together. You loved her. You were in the delivery room when she was born, something unheard of, undreamed of, when my first three babies came. You held her in your arms when she was minutes old. I was happy. You were the man to share my children with, a father ready to be a father. My three children loved the baby too, although my son had hoped for a baby brother. There is a snapshot of my oldest daughter, then twelve, holding tight to the baby, as if she didn’t want to give her back.

  Definition of “Marriage”

  My mother said to me, “Your father likes to think he is personally responsible for the sunrise. He thinks that if he didn’t stand in front of the window every morning and supervise, the sun would never come up. What he doesn’t know,” she went on to say, “is that he couldn’t do any of it if I didn’t get up first and make the coffee and open the curtains.”

  For the longest time that was the definition of “marriage” for me.

  I Found Out Later

  My second husband wanted to mold me. Those were his very words. How I found out was he told somebody who told my sister who then told me. This was years later, of course. Way after. It was yesterday, in fact, as my sister and I were sitting at a table drinking expensive coffee cooked by furious youths. “He planned to mold you,” my sister repeated, shaking her head in disbelief. “And this a man with a Ph.D.? And you say you were uneducated?”

  It didn’t work out. He wanted a woman who could set the table without once forgetting what kind of spoon he ate his cereal with. Forgetting the right spoon he interpreted as anger, and he couldn’t enjoy food served by an angry person. Pretty soon I began leaving off the forks as well. So I can understand his complaints up to a point. But if the brisket did get cooked, and if it was melt-in-the-mouth tender, and the carrots and potatoes were perfect and distinct, and he couldn’t quite tell—what did you put in the sauce that gives it the piquancy? (the answer is cinnamon, but I never told)—in other words if the food was good, I don’t see that he should have held her mood against the cook. If she had more than one, which of course she did.

  Neither does my sister.

  Fencing

  For him love/marriage was a fencing match; you never allowed your opponent the upper hand. Your mate was your opponent, although it was all in good fun. You never revealed your vulnerable spot, but you went after theirs with the lightest of touches. Touché, you might whisper under your breath, proud of your ability to remind but not wound. Touché. But you kept a certain distance. This did not of course preclude love. Love was most definitely part of this. It made the game so much more interesting. You laughed, you lunged and parried, you were nimble on your feet, you aimed not to hurt but only to touch lightly some sensitive place and then back off with a smile. I always loved talking to you, he told me later, even at our worst I always loved talking to you.

  Me too, I said. Me too.

  An Artist of Sorts

  One year he took a sabbatical to paint. Physics was put away for a while. He made something out of everything. He made cats out of oaktag with pennies glued on for feet. They stood up sturdily and he was proud of them. He twisted birds out of scraps of wire. He made profiles out of Styrofoam, a head with a small cigar clenched in its mouth, a button for an eye, and shreds of god knew what glued on for hair. He made dogs and birds and faces. He was as interested in the packing materials of an object as in the object itself. He painted flowers. He once painstakingly cut a hand out of thick brass. His own, of course. “Dog Contemplating the Universe” was the caption of one of his favorite drawings. It was a brown dog, gazing blankly up at the moon. He wrote poems and stories. He made rhymes. “Rise and shine, rise and shine, you’ve had your sleep and I’ve had mine” heralded the start of a good day. “We only live once, if at all,” one of his favorite sayings. It took me twenty years to find that funny.

  His Suggestion

  One time, when they were first married and he was still interested, he suggested she might want to wear a padded bra. He said it would look good on her, that her body was really made for a bigger bust, the proportions would look nice. She agreed. She appreciated that he had an opinion about what she was wearing, how she looked. He was much older than she and had a lot of experience with women, many of them quite well dressed.

  But she felt very funny putting it on the first time. What am I doing? she wondered, adjusting the straps, looking this way and that in the mirror.

  Nothing Was Anywhere

  Her three kids sat around the wooden table in the kitchen. She was cooking supper, the baby cooing on the counter in her infant seat. Everything was everywhere. Potato peels, eggshells in the sink. Her husband came in and it made her jumpy. He hated a mess. He opened a drawer, then banged it shut. “Where do you keep the can opener?” he asked. The truth was she didn’t keep the can opener anywhere. The can opener was wherever she’d last left it; the can opener was where she found it. Sometimes it was in the drawer. “What do you need it for?” she asked. “I’ll do it.” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

  “Can opener, can opener,” she half sang as if nothing were wrong. “You have no system,” he said wearily, picking up a magazine and watching a piece of paper flutter to the floor. She stooped for the paper and then rifled around in the sink. There it was, under the cake pan. “Here,” she said, wiping it off on her apron. He didn’t say anything. He opened a bottle of raspberry fruit drink and left the can opener on the counter. She was by now back at the stove humming in a casual fashion. But her face fell in spite of herself. Later, with a mouth full of home fries, one of the kids asked, “Mom? Are you happy?” “Goddamn it!” she shouted. “I am very happy!”

  Chaos

  Of course housekeeping was only the ostensible reason. The truth is it alarmed him to have to stick with just one woman. Here was a man who appreciated them all. Just one? he must have thought to himself. For the rest of my life, just this one? Such limitation smacked of mortality. And of course there were her kids. They made noises and demands. They were apt to misplace his Scotch tape. They finished all the milk. The household he lived in now was so chaotic. Chaos also meant death. He needed control of his habitat.

  Not that they hadn’t had hopes. There were wild grapes in the backyard of the house he bought and she planned to make jelly or something out of them and he thought about wine. Then they had stood together with their arms around each other, surveying the hilly yard. “Look at that tree,” he’d said with wonder. “That’s my tree. I could even cut it down if I wanted to.” Later he built her a special platform so
she could knead her bread more comfortably, with no strain on her back. She loved to bake, and he loved her anadama bread. His eyes would close when he put a piece in his mouth and stay closed while he ate. They had a big window installed in the kitchen that looked into the woods. In the fall afternoons she used to watch them empty of their light like a glass of bourbon slowly being filled to the brim.

  Nothing under Her Hood

  She wasn’t like a car. You couldn’t open her hood and tinker around. Besides, there wouldn’t have been anything under her hood. Just empty space. She was afraid that there was no herself, that somehow she had gotten into this body, but she was too small for it, tiny. She was fooling people who thought she was real, and here. Her husband used to say, “But we are all nothing. None of us is anything at all.” But she didn’t know what he meant by that.

  Overturned Rowboat

  When she was very upset (“very upset” was how she put it to herself) and didn’t know why yet, she went to her father. She couldn’t help herself. This was toward the end of her second marriage. They sat out back on an overturned rowboat. She stared at the gray paint peeling off the boat and the grass growing up alongside. She told him she was scared all the time and that it scared her that she was scared. She said she got dizzy in the mornings. She said she was afraid to drive. Her father listened; she didn’t recall his ever listening so carefully before. He called her dearie-pie. He patted her hand. This was so unexpected that it made her not recognize herself. It made her feel good, but it took her outside herself, as if the real her were sitting at the other end of the boat, watching. What does a grown woman do when her father pats her hand? How does she respond? She wanted him to know his gesture was welcome but at the same time it didn’t fix anything. She tried to remember if he had ever patted her hand before. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, he was being so kind. But she was not okay. How should she act? She kept watching herself from the stern of the boat. This made her all the more scared. Because what if she was going crazy?