Stacey grew almost independently, because later in life people again called me that. She became a finished product, in the full sense of that phrase: polished, and complete. She was finished at least a decade ago, and I have been living since in a dark little room behind the store that sells her replicas. I’ve been living like a body that has fallen from and is being dragged by a sled, pulled by the momentum of something I set in motion but am no longer a part of. But this time, I am old and too tired to manufacture a new me, to devise someone I’d like to be and try to become it. That takes an energy and drive I no longer possess. Yet the only alternative is to let myself live buried alive.
Clara says I’m depressed. I say I have damned good reason. It’s an impasse.
4
WE MOVED INTO THE apartment in time for the kids to start school in Lynbrook. It looked shabby and bare, especially by comparison with the furniture store we’d been living in, and we were all a little irritable despite Mrs. Nowak’s pot of stuffed cabbage, sent up for our first evening meal. I found myself concerned with the placement of furniture and knickknacks in a way I hadn’t been since Brad and my first little one-room household—strange, given the little I had to work with here. It was almost as if having so very little to work with inspired me. I, who never in my life had been able to sew on a button once (it took two or three attempts before I got it sewn on the proper side of a garment), found myself shortening curtains and using old drapes to make swags for the living room and my bedroom windows. I suddenly began to pay attention to food prices and set myself challenges to make wonderful meals out of nothing—and succeeded, too. I was doing this for the children.
Because they were a couple of wrecks. They squabbled all the time, burst into tears at nothing, were surly and sulky and as relentlessly grouchy as I was cheerful. I tried to jolly them out of the blues, to make an adventure of poverty, but they were having none of it. They came near to killing each other in arguments about whose T-shirt got accidentally tossed into the dark wash and turned pink (they both wore the same size), or whose nickel it was that was found in the hall on the floor outside the bathroom. Their worst fight was over who would take which of the two small bedrooms; one was a little lighter than the other, but the other had a closet: The choice was impossible.
And there was I, only I, alone. I knew the divorce was my fault—it doesn’t matter how you try to work things out on a moral scale of judgment—my feelings, my behavior, had cost them a father and a nice big old house with a huge yard full of big old trees. Most of all, it had required them to leave a school they knew and enter a new one as strangers, to make all new friends, to suffer the initial loneliness and fear. Everything was my fault. They felt that way, and truthfully, so did I. It was up to me to make things better for them, however I could. I tried; I violated the old Anastasia as far as I could imagine. No longer a wife, I finally became a domestic.
Still, although I learned to be firm and quash their vituperation of each other, I couldn’t touch their unhappiness. I could keep them quieter, but not content. Billy would come home from school every afternoon scowling and turn on the television set; when I forbade watching television in the afternoon, he went into his room and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. (I could remember doing that, feeling unloved and unhappy; so when he did it, I would go in there and put my arms around him and ask him what was wrong and tell him I loved him and kiss his cheek: but he’d turn away, turn his back on me and whine at me to go away and leave him alone. And I thought of my mother giving us what she hadn’t had, and our finding it insufficient; here I was, giving them what I hadn’t had and they wanted something else, domestic security, a father, popularity, whatever…and I felt a turn of despair in my stomach.) Billy would lie there all afternoon, unless I scolded him and made him do his homework. He’d usually do it, but not until I scolded; and then insist he be allowed to watch television. I’d let him.
Arden stalked home early too, at first, and would walk in with her head high, eyes glaring, a surly answer to my sweetsie cheerful “How was school today, honey?” She’d refuse even Oreos and milk. She’d go into her room and slam the door (they’d ended by Billy taking the lighter room and Arden taking the one with the closet) and sit and read all afternoon, another thing I remembered doing. I’d knock on her door and enter at a growled (insofar as a ten-year-old can growl) reply, and sit on the bed and ask her what was the matter. Proud head still, “You wouldn’t understand,” she’d shoot at me. “Try me, I was a kid once,” I laughed, but she was having no laughing. Glaring eyes: “I don’t care to discuss it!” And that was that.
The house seemed very empty after they’d gone to bed, though: odd, since they’d barely been in it while they were awake. I missed them after they were sleeping. I guess it was when they were sleeping that I could conjure their old selves, and miss those. I’d be reading, or looking through some old prints; sometimes I’d get out my equipment and do some cropping. But the house got quieter and quieter, and colder too: Mrs. Nowak went to bed at ten, and turned the heat down when she did. And finally I’d get up and go into the kitchen and pour myself a rye and soda and carry it back to the living room and turn out all the lights except the one over the desk, and sit down by the window (wherever did I learn that?) in a soft old armchair I’d found at Goodwill, and try to think things through.
I was overwhelmed by how little I had done for my children. Here my mother, with zilch money and little education, had thought to and managed to take us kids to the Prospect Park Zoo and the Bronx Zoo, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and the opera. She persuaded my father to drive us to Floyd Bennett Field, and paid one dollar apiece for us to go up, with Daddy, in a two-seater Piper Cub airplane, first me, then Joy. Belle herself stayed on the ground. She took me to Carnegie Hall to hear Nelson Eddy sing, and to Town Hall to hear Ruth Sczlenzinska play. She’d saved enough one year so that we went to the Catskill Mountains for a week, staying in a tiny cottage that was the equivalent of today’s motels. We swam in Silver Lake, crowded as it was, when we could. Mostly we sat in the cottage, because it rained all week, steadily. Belle cooked on a kerosene stove while Joy and I lay on one bed, playing memory, and my father fiddled with something that was broken, and she opened cans and put food on plates and the smell of kerosene permeated the tiny room and made me ill. Another year she got us to Washington, D.C., for two days, and my father drove us to see the monuments and the Capitol.
And what had I done? These past four years or so Brad had earned a lot of money, but the only trips I’d taken my kids on were to the railroad yards or the backs of shopping malls. I hadn’t even taken them to a zoo—well, I hate zoos, I can’t bear seeing animals in cages—although Belle and Ed had. They’d taken them to the circus, too, and reported, on both occasions, that the children were not very interested in anything except what they would have to eat. They wanted frankfurters and orange soda and cotton candy, and had got them. I had given my children piano lessons, but that was all. I let them go to the movies on Saturday afternoons with their friends, but only in the past year or so. We’d never taken them on vacation—well, that was Brad’s doing, he didn’t want the hassle—and anyway, we’d barely gone on vacations ourselves. A three-day trip to Niagara Falls, and another to Lake George—that was all.
I had been selfish and self-involved. I was a rotten mother. I was a rotten person. Such thinking made me squeamish with self-hatred and I tried to find ways to comfort myself. I had always been affectionate with them, physically and otherwise; I had always listened to them. I had answered their questions. Wasn’t that worth something? I hadn’t sighed, or turned away from them; I hadn’t treated them as troublesome burdens. That was good, wasn’t it?
From the looks of them just then, it didn’t seem so.
I couldn’t even really fall back on blaming Brad, because my mother had managed all of what she’d done without much help from my father. But at least he had been willing to spend his weekends driving children to Floyd Bennett Fi
eld, or to the slums, or the beach. Brad had always worked weekends, and had been unwilling to go much of anyplace en famille except to his parents or mine.
It stared at me, my failure of them. And now what was I to do? The money Brad sent was barely enough to keep us alive. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to keep the car, because I had nothing set aside for the insurance which would come due next year, and no way of setting anything aside. Even if I now had the imagination to come up with some project that would cheer up my miserable children, I couldn’t afford to realize it. Nor did I see much point in appealing to Brad. He didn’t have time for them what with his new wife and selling the house and buying another, one with Greek pillars and a pretentious front lawn (never used) and no yard, in Garden City this time. He took the children out for dinner once a week, to a place where they could get hamburgers and french fries, and they always returned from seeing him more irritable and taciturn than usual.
I had to do something. Having had no luck talking to them separately, I would talk to them together. Maybe being together would give them the courage to speak. I waited until Sunday morning, after making them a nice breakfast of waffles (which they barely touched. Why hadn’t I got them the kind you make in the toaster, as I usually did, they wanted to know). It was raining out, a coolish day in early October, the leaves just beginning to turn. And now being driven from the trees by wind and rain, so we would not even have the little beauty that resides in that part of the year. I poured myself another cup of coffee.
“You know, kids, you’ve both been awfully grouchy and unhappy since we moved. Since Daddy and I got divorced. Would you tell me what’s bothering you?”
Silence. Hostile stares.
“Do you miss the old house? Your friends?”
“No, of course not,” Billy drawled sarcastically. “It’s fun to have to make all new friends in the third grade. And have a room without any closet and hardly any room for my toys.”
“I hate my room!” Arden announced.
“I’m really sorry,” I said sincerely. “Sorry you don’t like your rooms, and sorry you have to start in a strange school. But you know you will make new friends. It’s hard, but you will.”
“I won’t!” Billy exclaimed. “I hate all those kids.”
“They’re stupid!” Arden agreed.
“They’re not all stupid,” I said calmly.
“Yes, they are,” Arden said authoritatively. “The kids in Rockville Centre are smarter because there are more Jews.”
“Where did you hear that?”
She shrugged. “Everybody says so.”
I knew “everybody” probably had a name like Joan or Eileen, but I didn’t probe. “There are some Jews here, too,” I suggested. “What about the Lench children? Aren’t they Jewish?”
Arden nodded sullenly, “I guess so.”
“And isn’t there a really smart girl in your class—the one that got a hundred percent the day you got ninety-nine percent on the arithmetic test?”
“Math, Mommy, math!” Billy corrected me with contempt.
“Yes, math.”
Arden shrugged again, pulling her shoulders close into her body as if I were pushing her inside herself. “Mmmm.”
“What’s her name?”
“Joan Tebaldi.”
“And didn’t you go to Joyce Lench’s house to play one day last week?”
She nodded, even more uncomfortable.
“See? You’re making friends.”
“She has friends!” Billy exclaimed, his face red with the strain of letting his anger out. “I don’t! It’s different for girls!” The word girls dripped with contempt. “They talk all the time, talk and giggle. Stupid!”
“Girls are more friendly than boys, usually,” I said, still calmly, trying hard not to smile. “But boys make friends too, just more slowly.”
“He’ll never make friends!” Arden spat at him, returning contempt for contempt. “He’s too scared!”
“I am not!” Billy was full red now. “You…” He began to rise from his chair.
“Calm down, Billy,” I ordered. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe you’re shy. But most people want to make friends. You have to try. You have to talk to them. They’ll want to talk to you.”
“They don’t! They don’t! I have so tried! What do you know about it?” His eyes began to run, and his cheeks were splotchy, and he jumped from his chair, toppling it, and tore off into his room and slammed the door.
Arden watched him with fury. “Baby!” she muttered.
“So what are we going to do about your room, toots?”
“It’s horrible. There’s nothing you can do.”
“Maybe we can paint it. Or put up some posters.”
“Oh, Mommy!” Contempt and disgust.
“You know what we could do? We could paint a mural on the wall, the long wall beside your bed. We could paint a big window, with the sun coming in, and trees outside, and flowers, or whatever you wanted.”
“That’s stupid! It’s stupid!” She was near tears too.
“It would be fun!” I went on cheerfully. “You and I could do it together, and you can order anything you like to go in it. You could have houses, or animals, or children playing…whatever!”
“Train yards and factories! That’s what you think is pretty! That’s what you’d put in it!” She jumped down too then and ran into her room and slammed the door. The house reverberated with silence.
I cleaned the kitchen.
I was no more successful at finding a job. The only one available in the stores in the Lynbrook village was at the Kent dry cleaners, for minimum wage. I almost took it: almost let myself spend my days taking in soiled clothes and handing out receipts; handing out cleaned clothes and taking in money: for 85 cents an hour: but the hours available were 1–5 six days a week, impossible for me. (Saved!) In the end, I drove toward Rockville Centre, where the Long Island Herald offices were, and wheedled and wormed my way into a part-time job as file clerk, receptionist, and switchboard operator. I’d never worked a switchboard, but claimed I had, sensing it would be easy to learn. I couldn’t claim to know typing, since my method when writing term papers was hunt and peck, and not very quickly, either. They too paid minimum wage, but were willing to have me 9–12 five days a week, and I was close enough to home to drive back hurriedly so I’d be there when the kids came in for lunch around 12:10. And I told myself that the job might help me get work as a photographer.
After taxes and deductions, I took home a little over eight dollars a week. I thought about my mother making hats. Maybe she had known more than I did. Still, the eight dollars helped: it paid, for instance, for the paint needed to decorate Arden’s wall. She came home from school a few days after our talk and asked, “Well, when are we going to do it?”
“Do what?”
“Paint my room. I want the other walls pale pink, and the mural with a blue sky and yellow sun.”
“Oh!”
“You said. You said you would!”
“I thought you didn’t like the idea.”
She sniffed a little and pulled her shoulders in, a gesture that remains characteristic of Arden to this day when she feels attacked. From picking and probing at her, I discovered she had mentioned my idea to some other girls, and all had oohed and ahhed and said they wished their mothers would let them do that. She’d started by describing the idea as stupid, but had listened to them and decided that maybe it would be all right. “They want to come and see it, so when can you do it? Today?”
We started it over the weekend, but didn’t finish for a month. Then there began a parade of ten-year-old girls marching through the house to view with awe the large window on the wall beside Arden’s bed, a tree outside and the sun pouring down from above, billowy white curtains on either side of the window frame, a beagle (like Joan’s), a cat (like Joyce’s), and some flowers. After this was done, Arden stared at it thoughtfully. “It needs something here,” she pointed to the horizon on the r
ight. She was right. The tree dominated the left foreground.
“What would you like?”
She wanted some factories, squat buildings with tall smokestacks rising from them.
“Why would you want things like that?”
“You seem to think they’re pretty, you keep taking pictures of them,” Arden said haughtily. “So maybe they are.”
Eventually, Arden’s irritability diminished, although she was not the carefree child she had been. When I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she said billowy white curtains, like the ones in the mural, for the window in her room. So I went shopping with my mother and bought white organdy, and made, yes made, broad billowy white curtains on Mother’s sewing machine (and with her help). I also painted the bookcase and bureau in her room white; and made a billowy white skirt for her inner spring, and bought her a red-and-white-patterned quilt. By the spring term, it had become a mark of great favor to be taken home by Arden Carpenter. And she would often say to me, “You know, I was lying on my bed thinking last night, and…” whatever. And I told her how I had lain on my bed beside two windows, staring out at moon and clouds and the patterns they made, and the occasional star.
“I wish I could see the moon and the stars,” Arden mused, not complaining.
“Maybe I could make it do that.”
“You could!” Mommy was turned heroine.
I drove to Brooklyn, to a discount art-supply store, and bought a roll of heavy blue film; then I went to a hardware store and bought fixtures for a toilet paper roll and a heavy-duty stapler. I went to a lumberyard and bought a three-foot wooden cylinder one inch in diameter. I stapled the film to the cylinder, attached the toilet paper holders, and slid the cylinder into their openings. I attached a cord to the bottom. Then I began to paint.