Through all this, Brad sat with tears in his eyes, aghast at the singular sight of me in tears, and when I calmed a bit, he held my head against his chest and patted my head. It was then I knew: he’d never patted my head before. And he said it then, in the Serious Voice I came to know so well in later years:
“Sweetheart, we have to grow up. We have to be mature. These dreams are just childish fancies. We have to put them aside. When you are a child, you speak as a child and understand as a child and think as a child; but when you become a man, you have to put away childish things.”
My head came straight up off his chest. That was not Brad talking, he’d never so much as opened the Bible. It was Brad imperfectly quoting his father, who was an elder or something at the Episcopal church they attended. Even his tone of voice was his father’s. I’d lost him, I’d lost Brad.
“Well, I’m not a man!” I cried. “And I don’t want to put away childish things! If life has to be the way they live it, I don’t even want to live.”
I rushed upstairs, leaving an embarrassed Brad sitting alone in the small side room my mother called the porch. But he was frightened, I guess he thought I planned to kill myself, and maybe I did at that moment. The bubble had completely blown away. All I could see was a life like my mother’s, a life like those of the people all around us, and I could not bear it: in the car, out of the car, in the house, laundry, cooking, dinner, television, bed. Saturdays on Sunrise Highway shopping, Sunday dinner at a parents’ house. NO.
Brad tiptoed upstairs. Although everyone knew I was pregnant, it still seemed forbidden for him to enter my room. But he did, and came to where I was lying with my hands over my eyes, not crying, just sunk in horror, and he touched me with the same light tender touch he’d always had, and sank down on his knees next to the bed and whispered, “It can’t be too bad, Stahz, can it, if we are together, if we have each other? We’ll be able to be together all the time, we and the…” and he patted my still flat stomach. And of course I turned to him and put my arms around him and cried and held him and submitted, me the stiff-necked, the refuser, the proud fierce rebel, submitted to my fate.
3
WE FOUND A ROOM with a kitchenette and bath on the second floor of a house in Lynbrook. We looked at it with my mother, who drove us—Brad still had no car—and took it because it was cheap, even though to reach the apartment you had to walk straight through the owner’s living room. After we took it, my mother refused to visit me there because she was uncomfortable walking through the Charleses’ part of the house. I stared at her.
“Why did you let me take it if you knew you’d never come there?” I asked in outrage.
She looked at me as if she didn’t understand my words. “What difference does that make?” She was bewildered.
And I, for once, was speechless. In our family, the word love was never mentioned, nor did anyone ever touch anyone else, except for my father’s nightly peck on my mother’s turned cheek. But, I thought, we felt it: felt it, extraordinarily. All my sitting night after night with my mother, asking her about her life, my pain and rage at her life, my lying in bed night after night planning revenge on those who had hurt her, planning brilliant triumphs to lay at her feet, planning above all to buy her a mink coat as soon as I sold my first painting…And she did not know, she had no idea! How, how could she not have felt it!
It sank, this knowledge, into the dank place where I kept so much else. Because I could not bear to follow up this awareness with its corollary: that she could have been unaware of my deep feeling for her only if she did not love me back. I refused to think this, but thought it nevertheless, the way we do, as if we could stand on both sides of a door at once, the way we can do something and not let ourselves know we’re doing it, something magical and strange about us, creatures for whom symbols are stronger than realities. I looked at her, her eyes pale and weary, her hair coiffed and blond, her clothes smart, her patent leather pumps matching her bag, and I wanted to get up from the lunchroom where we were sitting having roast beef sandwiches on white bread and coffee, and simply evaporate. Those days I often wanted to vacate my life. Maybe I would have if I’d been able to come up with any other life to enter.
Because underneath the wild foliage, the brilliant flowers of my behavior, there was a swamp of confusion. I claimed to be happy about being pregnant, about getting married, I assured everyone Brad and I would have an ecstatic life together, and for months I insisted we go to New York and take our chances living as artists. But my gaiety and laughter served as noise to drown out some other voice—just as, perhaps, my mother’s crying had when she was pregnant with me. You need to drown out the voice because it possesses no language to express its knowledge.
It’s easy now to say what I could not even let myself think then. I was not a foolish girl, not unrealistic or impractical, although I tried to be. I shrugged off reminders of practicality in the same way I cut classes, insulted teachers, ignored my art teachers’ advice—out of terror of a fate that I felt hung over me, invisible but unavoidable. I could not bear constriction; yet I felt it was inevitably my lot. I felt it was women’s lot.
You couldn’t grow up during the Depression, with the double whammy of a depressed mother, and not know how vulnerable people were without money, without a place to live, decent clothes, decent food—especially if they had a baby. But I couldn’t stand settling for those things. I knew I was an artist—I’d known that since I was a tiny child—and that I was learning, would learn, nothing in college; that there was no job on this earth that I could have that I wanted; that even male artists felt that the door to the future opened onto a concrete wall—but that a female had no chance at all. How many of the great painters were women? None, that’s how many. The only woman painter I’d ever heard of was Mary Cassatt, and no one ever wrote about her, she wasn’t respected. Besides, she always painted women and children, not important things like…well…it’s true Dégas painted a lot of ballet dancers, and Cézanne painted a lot of fruit, and Toulouse-Lautrec also painted dancers, and Renoir painted mainly women and children…but it was the way she did it, I guess, that made her insignificant….
Underneath everything else was my despair about myself. I could not envision a life for myself. What would I do, how would I live? Perhaps, if Brad had the courage to risk it, we could go out together into the big dirty dangerous world and try to survive on whatever he could earn playing the sax, while I painted. I could not imagine making money painting; nor could I imagine any work I could do that would satisfy me except painting. If I had been able to imagine either of those, I would have insisted we move to the city and try it; and I think that if I had insisted, Brad would have gone along with me.
But I was too frightened to try to live out my vision. And so I surrendered, became a passive person, leaving decision in god’s hands just as if I believed in a god. Living like my parents, Brad’s parents, the people around us, seemed to me like walking open-eyed into hell. But hell had a passageway leading to it: no other road was available. I surrendered to the fate that had always hung over me (didn’t I know, when I watched my mother doing that fucking laundry, that someday I too would be doing it?). I surrendered to the ordinary in the same way my mother did.
And once I had, a possible future showed itself. Maybe, if Brad got a regular job, I could paint: If he sacrificed his art, I could pursue mine. It is a selfish thought, written out baldly like that. I guess it was selfish, even though it arose from despair. Because for some reason, Brad seemed willing to sacrifice his art. That might mean he was not as committed an artist as I. Or it might mean—but I didn’t recognize this then—that as a man, he felt a terrible pressure to be a man as our society defines one—to produce money, to earn status, or, sentimentally rendered, to take care of his family—me and the thing growing inside me.
These confused feelings, thoughts, muddied my mind for the nine months of my pregnancy. I couldn’t put them into words, I didn’t dare. Had I dared, I would
have revolted against everything—the way the world was set up, the way everyone I knew thought and felt, and even my own sex, my own body. I couldn’t risk that, couldn’t risk the rage, the hatred. So I took the coward’s way out and buried it all. I said nothing, but expected my mother, at least, to know how I was feeling. And perhaps she did. But she treated me the way she had always treated herself when she was unhappy—she withdrew into vacancy, and went through motions. She was polite, even pleasant; but she treated me like an acquaintance, not like a daughter.
And something hard and cold entered my feelings for my mother for the first time. She had dismissed me; I dismissed her in return. I told myself I was damned if I would care so much what she thought, what she felt; she would no longer be the center of my sorrow, the spur of my ambition, the cause of my existence and its content.
Of course, telling yourself such things doesn’t make them true, and I was deeply upset that she had allowed me to take an apartment she refused to enter. But Brad and I had signed the lease and paid a deposit and furnished the apartment with pieces from relatives’ attics, so we had to move in or lose a year’s rent—something we couldn’t afford. I made jokes and pretended I was happy; I kept insisting we would have fun. I did what I could with the apartment:
There wasn’t much daylight in the place, but I set up an easel in one corner of the small room, and hung some powerful lamps above it. I put a small tottery table behind the easel for my paints. But in fact I painted only a few times. I blamed my neglect of “my art” on Brad, who complained about sleeping in a small room pervaded by the odor of turpentine. The truth was that for a long time I had been unhappy with what I was doing. I knew I had a strong sense of composition, and a good sense of color, but I could not get my hand to realize what I saw in my head. Maybe the fault lay in my ignorance of technique, a quality I inclined to underrate in those days. All my art teachers had praised me so easily, for any effort; none of them knew much about technique. I had an easy schoolgirl fame, and a deep grating fear that it was unearned. I packed up the paints and brushes in a fury with Brad, but I knew, and maybe he knew too, that my fury was not with him. I walked around the town and on impulse walked into Jimmy Minetta’s Camera Shop and asked for a job, and got one. In those days, all film was not sent to photo labs, and I was to help take orders and do developing. I’d always liked photography, I told myself. Besides, what else did I have to do, now that school was out and I was not in any case going back, now that summer had arrived and Brad was working six days a week at his father’s agency, now that I was four, five, six months pregnant, waiting, waiting, waiting for whatever future would descend upon me? I left the easel up, with an old painting of mine standing on it, but after Arden was born, I packed it away too, to make room for her cradle.
Our bed—a daybed we pulled open at night—our licit, legitimate, legal bed, was never as much fun as the lumpy dusty Green Room couch. I don’t know what happened. We didn’t even reach for each other with the same absolute need, and we didn’t seem to fit together as naturally and perfectly as we had. We didn’t know if something had come between us, some shadow had fallen; or whether we had changed in the months since we’d last been together on the Green Room couch; or whether we misremembered the experience, endowed it with more radiance than it had actually had. We still loved each other then; it wasn’t that. I felt it was that somehow the people we were now no longer satisfied the other’s deepest dream; we had lost the enchanted realm. After a few months, after I’d been unable to reach orgasms dozens of times, after Brad had been unable to get erect a half-dozen times, we could no longer discuss it.
“It was the thrill of the forbidden,” he pronounced. “Now it’s legal, prosaic. That had to happen. We had to grow up. Besides, it’s hard for me to make love to you with the baby there. I keep being afraid I’ll hurt it.”
I acceded to this explanation, and we postponed sex for two months. But I saw Brad’s face when he came home from the real-estate office every night—for it was summer, and he worked with his father six days a week now. He was drained and grey, and his mouth was set in lines that had never been there before. I’d make jokes and act silly, but he’d look at me with a new superior look and tell me to stop acting childish. Even his voice was different now: louder, and somehow hollow, and he didn’t talk so much as declaim. He was turning into his father, and if I complained, he said—naturally—that a man had to do what he had to do, that I was immature, oh, all the same things over and over, as if by diminishing in me the qualities we both possessed, he could destroy them in himself.
I was a lunatic that summer, because I was determined I would remain cheerful, happy, gay, when I had no reason at all for such feelings. I attached myself more to Jimmy Minetta, whose camera shop was the best for miles around, and attracted newspaper and magazine photographers who lived on the South Shore. They hung out there, in the back room, where Jimmy kept a bottle of bourbon and a coffeepot and plastic coffee cups, and they talked f-stops and light and wondered about all the new technology that had begun to appear on the camera market, and I listened and made coffee and helped out generally and was accepted as a servant-pal. There were no sexual innuendoes—how could there be when my belly was a foot out into space? But if Jimmy was busy in the front of the shop, the guys would launch into long laments about their relations with the women in their lives, and ask me why she was so…well, you can fill in the blank—angry, bitter, mean, helpless, weepy, unfaithful…. As if I knew, or could do more than murmur consolingly. But I liked these guys, and I felt sorry for them in their unhappy love lives, and each time I heard a new story about what Ellen or Mary or Doris or Betty had done, I’d determine, my teeth set, that I’d never do such a thing to Brad. Over the months, I determined not to do so many things that I could hardly act at all with Brad.
Not that he really noticed. He was so consumed with learning his new mature role, and with drowning his utter misery, that he no longer really saw me. His eyes were always opaque grey. It was hard for him. Selling real estate requires a certain kind of personality—a willingness to treat people as means, as walking money that you wanted to put into your pocket, and a habit of appraising everything—people’s appearances, their clothes, their shoes, their cars, houses, furniture, everything—in terms of dollar value. Brad, who if he had ten dollars in his pocket when he went out drinking, and the bill was four dollars, would simply leave the whole bill, had had no sense of money at all, and learning to see in this way required his killing some other part of himself. I watched it happening. And even then, young as I was, inexperienced, ignorant, I knew what it would do and I knew more than that, I knew I would have to leave him someday. That thought made my heart squeeze up in pain like a mouth that has drunk straight vinegar; I pushed it away, stuffed it down into what I thought of as my basement, the room where I kept everything that was broken and dangerous, everything unusable, slimy, coated with dust and dirt.
How I lived in those days, it was really crazy. The thing is, I was trying to be good, I was doing, or not doing, things everyone said a woman should do or not do. I made Brad my center, I did everything around him, I didn’t think about myself, or my “career” or my art—I couldn’t bear to think about that anyway. I thought about Brad’s needs, his likes and dislikes, and I arranged myself as best I could within them. My old proud sense of myself as a bad girl had vanished—except in one area.
While Brad was trying to learn to be his father, his mother, Adeline, was trying to train me to be like her. Adeline stopped in regularly. She cleaned her house mornings, and made dinner for Brad Senior nights, but she went out every afternoon. I worked in the afternoons, and hung around the shop until around seven, when Brad would be getting home, and I’d throw something in a pan for dinner—hamburgers or hot dogs, usually, I didn’t cook anything else except eggs. Adeline had wormed a key to our apartment from Brad, and she had no compunctions about crossing the Charleses’ living room, so every few weeks or so, she would stop by
to show one of her friends our “darling little nest.”
Usually, Brad and I hung around the apartment in the mornings. We slept until nine or ten, had coffee leisurely and read the paper. Then Brad would go down to the agency in the car his father had lent him, and I’d make up the daybed and wash our coffee mugs and the pot, dress and walk down to Jimmy’s. But after Adeline told me about her surprise visits, I began to leave everything as it was. The first time Adeline came in and found the daybed unmade and soiled mugs in the sink, she told me in horrified tones:
“Anastasia, I took Mrs. Whitney by to see your darling little nest on Wednesday and my dear! The bed wasn’t made and there were dishes in the sink! Were you ill, my dear?” she asked with mock concern across the Sunday dinner table. Brad—Junior and Senior—looked at me.
“Wednesday? Ill?” I thought about it. “No, I can’t recall feeling ill.” I answered innocently.
Brad Junior’s mouth twitched: he was still on my side. But there was a ghastly silence from the elders, and it was some time before conversation could resume.
But even that didn’t stop Adeline. She continued to take her friends in, and I, thinking I’d stopped her, had returned to cleaning the place up in the mornings. But now Adeline didn’t tell me about her visits. I discovered them one evening when Brad and I drove over to his parents’ house to drop off their vacuum cleaner—which I’d borrowed for my once-a-month sweep of the floor—and found a visitor, Adeline’s friend Mrs. Andretti. She was a warm little woman with bright red hair, and she engulfed me with affection, hugging and announcing in an enthusiastic voice, “And your place is so darling! Adeline took me around to see it last week, Anastasia, and you’ve just done wonders with it!”