“Joy is your little sister, and she adores you. She follows you around like a little puppy. She looks up to you. You shouldn’t treat her that way.”
“I hate her!” Anastasia would flash back. “She crayoned all over my new book, the one I got for Christmas. She ruined it!”
“She’s only a baby, Anastasia, and you’re a big girl. You have to overlook things like that, she can’t help them, she’s just a baby.”
But Anastasia only sulked and frowned and said nothing. Belle knew that Anastasia was a special person, and lived in her own world, and she did not try to intrude upon it. Whereas Joy; cute and funny as she was, seemed to be happy by nature, like Dafna Dabrowski. Belle believed Joy was a Dabrowski and Anastasia was a Brez, brilliant like Michael, and difficult. Whereas Joy, like Ed, could be happy with so little, with nothing at all, really. They, the Dabrowskis, really had no standards.
After Anastasia had gone back to school, and she had led Joy upstairs to her new big bed for a nap, Belle finished the laundry. The last batch was the dark things—Ed’s socks, a dark skirt of Anastasia’s, and a dark print housedress of her own. The line was full now, so she had to wait until something dried before she could hang these things, but she was relieved when she finished with the washing, rinsing, and wringing, and starching. Then she could scrub the deep tub with Bon Ami, and replace the metal dish-drain that covered it. She sighed and sat down with a cigarette before starting the next step. She looked out at the yard and thought with pride that it looked neat and pretty—it was the prettiest yard on the block. She had dreams for it—maybe Ed could build some Adirondack chairs and she could sit out there next summer. Sit out in her own yard, just like a lady! In the air, in the sun, smelling the flowers! And maybe someday he’d build a table and benches for the children, so they could sit there in the summer and play, or have a little picnic lunch with fresh lemonade with mint in it—she had already planted some mint she got from Momma. They would have a childhood, they would not be like her. The thought of the children sitting out under the trees on a summer afternoon, drinking lemonade and playing—maybe they would do a puzzle, maybe she’d buy Anastasia a jigsaw puzzle for her birthday—made a picture that moved her heart, that ached it almost, like a long-forgotten wound she had suddenly, accidentally, touched.
She began to bring in the dry things—the sheets and pillowcases, Ed’s shirts and shorts. She let down the ironing board from the side cupboard where it was normally concealed, and got the high stool and the iron. Today she would iron only a clean shirt for Ed, for tomorrow. She was tired. She chose one, sprinkled it, and rolled it neatly into a loaf. Then she hung the rest of the wash on the line, put the starch pot in the sink and ran cold water into it, and wiped down the stove and sink with a damp dishcloth. She sighed. She was very tired, and she still had to cook dinner. Maybe tonight she’d make frankfurters and beans: everyone liked that, and it wasn’t much work. She’d peel and boil some potatoes and pour butter over them. She’d send Anastasia up to the butcher for some frankfurters. She was just finishing ironing the shirt when Anastasia came in from school, and minutes later, Joy woke up from her nap. Anastasia seemed cheerful about something, but Belle was too tired to really listen. Her back ached when she bent to put on Joy’s shoes and socks, and she did not speak, because she didn’t want to scream at the baby. She never raised her voice to her children: she never had and she never would. Their lives would not be like hers.
3
OH, I REMEMBER THOSE years, the total immersion in babies, the isolation and confinement. After Billy—Wilton Bradley Carpenter, Jr.—was born, almost all activities were too hard. Arden was only a year and a half old, and couldn’t walk far or long. I had a seat that attached to the big carriage, so I could lay Billy inside it and sit Arden on top, but this made the carriage very heavy, and left little room for packages. Since I couldn’t push it and pull a shopping cart at the same time, it was almost impossible for me to do the marketing at any one time. I complained about this to Brad, asking if I couldn’t have the car one afternoon a week, but he said, with considerable self-righteousness, that I didn’t have a license, was a terrible driver, and besides, he needed it. My mother would help me.
Before the children were born, we had been two kids in love with each other; even after I got pregnant, we’d been together, equally responsible for the pregnancy. But once Arden was born, and ever after that, the children were mine—my responsibility entirely. Brad didn’t want to hear that things were hard for me, and if they were, that was my problem. He had his own problems, and although he never explicitly said this, he conveyed it—I was on my own. His responsibility to me ended when he handed me thirty-five dollars a week to pay our bills with.
I didn’t question this, I accepted it. I didn’t question the thirty-five dollars either. I knew he’d made a lot of money with the one sale, but he hadn’t had a big one since, and I assumed he had put the money in the bank to draw on in leaner times. I was unhappily surprised to discover later that he’d used the money to buy an empty lot just off Merrick Road as an investment. In truth, that land helped to make him a rich man years later, but in the meantime, we were often hard pressed. Brad did a number of things in those early years, following his father’s advice, that would make him wealthy later on, but being a first wife, I never saw any of the fruits of our early hardship. And it is true to my character, I guess, that I never managed to be anybody’s second wife—I did everything the hard way. I was too vague about such things even to teach my daughters to be only second wives, never first ones. So now Arden is living in a farmhouse that doesn’t even have a toilet. I tell her it’s bad enough to repeat one’s mother’s mistakes, but unforgivable to regress. She only laughs. She knows I can’t get serious about money.
I wasn’t then either. Maybe that came from watching my mother’s face harden into lines of worry and disappointment, watching, all those years, as penny added to penny eventually purchased a washing machine or got paid to the doctor. Part of the problem was real enough—she sometimes lacked money for food. If Joy was sick, as she often was, or if the winter was especially cold and we needed more coal than usual, or if a large purchase like a warm coat for my father was utterly necessary, why then she tightened her mouth and made stew from the neck and breast of lamb (the best kind, in my opinion) and gave us Jell-O for dessert; or maybe just soup and baloney sandwiches and canned peaches. We were never so poor we were without food. We were without a telephone, a car, warm winter clothing, luxuries of any sort. But my mother’s anxiety was not about survival; it was about something else, and I didn’t realize what until I saw that will of hers I burned.
Because all the things she had listed in her will were expensive—dishes, glassware, sterling silver flatware—things that people had if they were members of the middle class. We were not in the middle class, but we had them just the same. They were wedding gifts. She also had a silverplated coffeepot and a tray for it; she had bought these herself before her marriage and planned then to fill out the set with a cream pitcher and a sugar bowl, but she was never able to do that. Jean had a full set like this, only in a fancier pattern, on her dining room buffet, and when I grew up, I saw them in other people’s houses: coffeepots with pitchers and sugar bowls, like emblems of class or money. They were always hideously ugly, and a pain in the neck because they had to be polished regularly. And our set was really silly, because it had only a coffeepot and a tray and Mother could never set it out anywhere—it looked naked. Anyway, we didn’t in those years have a dining room buffet; we didn’t even have a dining room. The Haviland Limoges, the crystal goblets, the silver service for eight, sat in their boxes and were brought out only two or three times a year, or maybe only once—around Christmas, when visitors came.
But that was what my mother’s worry and her anger were all about: entering into the middle class. That was why the lace-edged tablecloth came out when a neighbor came in for coffee; and why we had piano lessons; and why she worked so hard
to dress us with taste. What I thought and felt to be a struggle for survival was really a struggle for status. And status was beyond my father’s ken, beyond or rather outside his aspirations. He probably had almost no sense of class except for manners: he was concerned always to behave like a gentleman, and he always did. But he could be happy with franks and beans, with work and dinner and bed and work and dinner and bed because he didn’t imagine a whole entrancing life beyond those, a world in which the basic terms of existence were different. And my mother’s rage against my father, which grew and grew during those years of my childhood, was rooted in this difference between them. She wanted something more, imagining that it would be different. He only wanted a car.
I don’t know why, because I suffered from not having middle-class appurtenances, but when I was a young woman, these things meant nothing to me. Status be damned! I was a bohemian, an artist, I didn’t care about middle-class values. And money—well, I refused to worry about it as long as we had food and a roof and a bed to sleep in. And in a weird reversal, Brad felt the same kind of contempt for me that my mother had felt for my father because of my indifference to dining room sets and even dining rooms.
If I was unhappy when the kids were little, it wasn’t because we had little money, but because I hated my life. I hated my life even though I had a washer-dryer in the corner of the kitchen, and we, if not I, owned a car and sometimes went out on Saturday night. I hated my daily life, day by day by day. Sitting alone over a cup of coffee, feeling very grown up (what else did mommies do?), I decided I had to change it. But I didn’t know how: I hadn’t a cent left over, ever, of the money Brad gave me. All my underpants were torn, and I kept mending them and putting in new elastics, but I couldn’t even afford to buy a new pair of underpants. (That was all right. I knew Brad’s mother would give me three new pair of Lollipops—pink, blue, and yellow—for Christmas. She gave us both underwear, and she bought Brad a new suit: every year.)
I discovered the public library. And what I found I was drawn to, after I had exhausted its collection of the novelists I wanted to read and its few art books, was books on photography. The library hadn’t many in those years, but I studied those it had. I’d had a camera, and taken pictures since my ninth birthday. I picked up the first photography book accidentally, but found myself fascinated by the differences among photographers. After I’d examined, over and over, the books in the library, I’d squeak out seventy-five cents every once in a while to buy a photography magazine. I discovered Man Ray and Cecil Beaton and George Rodger; Cartier-Bresson, and Eliot Porter, and Walker Evans. And then, oh heavens! I’d known about Margaret Bourke-White, but now I discovered Imogen Cunningham and Berenice Abbott, and Eve Arnold! WOMEN! Lots of them, not just one Cécile Chaminade, the way there was in music, a fact that so disheartened me when I was eleven that I abandoned (wisely) my ambition to become a composer. I became very friendly with the librarian at the little local library, and convinced her I was writing a book on photographers, so she got me books on photography from all over Nassau County, and sometimes even from larger New York State libraries.
There was frustration in all this, because I was not at the time taking photographs: I couldn’t afford film. But one night I told Brad, sort of casually, that I wished I could take pictures of the kids—they were so cute, this age passed so quickly, every argument I could come up with. I was hoping only for a couple of extra dollars for film. But he got excited by the idea. He had little to do with the kids, he wasn’t interested in them, but the notion of taking pictures of the kids appealed to him. A few nights later, he came home with a new camera for me (“All you have is that ridiculous Brownie, can’t take decent pictures with that”), a big Kodak that made me almost cry because if I’d picked it out, I’d have bought a used Rollei, which would have cost only a little more. But I wasn’t carping then, I took what I could get however I got it. And he bought me three rolls of film: color film. I knew of course that great artists with the camera used only black and white. But I didn’t complain. I did wonder how he could afford these things. A new idea entered my mind: Brad had more money than I did. We weren’t sharing, I was getting an allowance.
By then, our relationship had deteriorated to the point that I dared not mention my new awareness. Brad and I hardly ever saw each other. He worked every day, even though he didn’t have to. He was trying, he told me, to “take some of the load off of the old man.” But I knew what he was doing was trying to prove something to the old man. On slow days, he did reams of paperwork for the agency. His father now had to come in only on weekends and maybe one or two days a week. The rest of the time, he played golf, “making contacts,” he claimed.
The truth was Brad didn’t want to be home. Home meant a four-room apartment, two screaming kids, and me, wearing my old jeans and one of his discarded shirts, trying to think up a game that would occupy the kids until bedtime. Nights we sat, he with his newspaper, me with my photography book or a novel, at least until television became cheap enough for him to come home triumphant one night with a twelve-inch set, crowing as if he’d bought it for me. I hated the thing, but after that I couldn’t escape it unless I went to bed early to read while he watched the roller derby or Milton Berle or wrestling or whatever other garbage was on it, anything rather than come to bed with me. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have wanted to go to bed with me either. When you have no self-esteem, you have no desire, and you can’t imagine anyone else could desire you. Whatever sexuality I’d possessed had vanished, and I thought I finally understood Hamlet’s outrage with his mother for wanting to fuck even though she was thirty-five or forty. Here I was, twenty-one and a half, and I’d already outgrown desire. Brad didn’t have much either, so we rarely screwed. I noticed he was horny mostly after we’d been to the movies and seen something with almost-naked women in it, or with extreme violence. Then he’d be insistent about sex, and screw with his eyes closed as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. And he’d ram himself into me as if sex were some kind of self-assertion, and he was proving he’d learned enough of it to be a good salesman.
Anyway, I acted thrilled with the camera and the film, and the very next day, I started to take pictures of the kids. But that’s not a simple matter. All those adorable things kids do, they utterly refuse to do when there’s a camera aimed at them. The first time I tried it, I had an odd kind of success.
I was feeding Billy, who was about six months old and able to slump in a padded high chair. Arden was hovering around us angrily, and I knew she was jealous, so I talked to her and tried to caress her as she passed me. But she darted away from my hand. There was a toy on the tray of the high chair—a suction cup with a rattle affixed to it. If you pushed the thing, it rattled, but didn’t fall off the tray. It was intended to save mothers forty-four bends a day. Arden very suddenly went up to the high chair and looked at Billy and pushed the rattle. Billy grinned with delight, and Arden did it again. Although the expression on her face was not sweet, I thought she was being sweet almost against her will, and I was enchanted. It was the first time she had paid any attention to him at all, except to demand a bottle every time he had one—although she’d been weaned before he was born.
So up I got, excited. It was November, and grey. First I pulled Billy up out of the high chair right in the middle of his lunch, and set him on the floor and carried the high chair out to a little wooden porch at the back of our apartment. It had a roof, but more light than the kitchen. I bundled both kids up in snowsuits, put on my own coat and hat, got the camera and some cookies, and went outside with them.
The light was pale and pearly, and I opened the shutter wide and held the camera to my eye.
“Push Billy’s toy, sweetheart,” I urged Arden. She glared at me. “Go on, do what you did before, honey. Then you and Billy can both have cookies.” “Cookie” would be Billy’s first word; Arden’s first word had been “no.” It was “no” now, too. She was just about to be two, and had a head full of blond curl
s and big blue eyes with rage in them. Wherefore, I wondered. Whenever my mother was disgusted with me, she would announce, “I hope when you have a daughter, she is just like you, stubborn and willful and impossible!” I thought my mother’s curse had come true, because Arden had always been those things.
I sat down on an old wicker chair with a broken arm, and prepared for a long wait. While I waited, I played with them, pushing the rattle for Billy and telling Arden to look at the bird settling out on a bare branch, asking her if she wanted to play patty-cake, whatever. But she watched me as warily as any Eve a snake, and Billy drooled, oblivious to all of it. I kept this up for ten or fifteen minutes. My feet were getting cold. Then I urged her again.
“Come on, honey, show me you know how to push the rattle.” Saying this, I recalled Dr. MacVeaney, and hated myself. But Arden was smarter than I had been. She headed for the back door, pulled the storm door open, turned to me, and, setting her teeth in a wide grimace, she screeched long and loud.
I got a great picture, if not the one I’d intended.
Still, it wasn’t the sort of picture other mothers would want, I knew that. I had to wait until the following summer to get that kind, wait for a time when I could be outdoors with the children, lying on the grass in the park with my camera ready at all times. I couldn’t pose them. But eventually I did come up with a set of snapshots that would make every mother on my block jealous.
I caught Arden with a butterfly. I’d dressed her up in a little smocked dress my mother had made for her. I didn’t normally put such things on her, because I hated to wash and hated even more to iron, but I bethought myself of my grand plan and put first things first. I’d taken the kids to my mother’s that day. She had a nice garden, with three big beds of flowers, and a lot of green, and the old Adirondack chairs my father had made years before that were still as strong as new, and which he repainted so they still looked new. My mother and I were sitting outside drinking iced tea and the kids were running around in the garden and I kept putting the camera up to my eye and dropping it, so they’d lost any self-consciousness, and then it happened. A butterfly landed on a zinnia. And Arden was standing right there: her little arms were held out stiffly like wings, and her whole body leaned toward, yearned toward the butterfly, and her face was awed and open and I got it, I caught her.