I sit cross-legged on a towel, and we talk about how the group has changed us. Deb says, You just don’t seem so mad anymore.
Mother and I talk on the phone every morning—not about much, but the connection’s clearer. She doesn’t exactly know she’s my mother—she’s not housewifey Donna Reed but Madonna Reed. That’s okay now.
The waves keep slapping the sand and withdrawing with that hushed hiss of gravel tumbling. A single gull hotfoots away from the water.
Deb asks us to guess at the shape of our lives five years down the pike. I say, I’m scared to speculate, since I have a habit of wanting the wrong thing.
Now that’s real progress, Mare, Deb says.
Mostly, Liz says, I wish I’d found it easier to love myself without having to love you two.
After a second, I give Liz the finger, and she gives it back—it’s our group handshake almost, so I snap a picture of Deb and Liz doing it from their deck chairs.
I’m scared to leave you guys. I don’t even know if Warren and I are gonna make it.
You’ll be okay, Deb says.
I pick up Dev’s plump and sandy foot and weigh it in my wide hand, sensing from its heft the resolute slumber in him. Behind him, there’s a see-through moon, like part of it’s sanded off. The sky’s going midnight blue, and it calls up in my mind the eyes of Chris—Dev’s babysitter for a day—with snowflakes in her lashes. I quote her to the ladies: Why is it that everybody else is traffic? Deb and Liz saw her the week she died. She’d lost an eye and tried to get one of them to take the baby she didn’t realize was dead. She couldn’t comprehend she wasn’t pregnant anymore.
Could’ve been us, Liz says.
The incredible fortune that it wasn’t floods up as Deb lifts her lemonade, saying, To Chris. Nobody even says how corny it is. Our empty glasses gleam in the salt air.
36
Lake-Effect Humor
The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love.
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clocks strike, is hollow and old;
The pilot’s relief on landing is no release.
These perfect and private things, walling us in, have imperfect and public endings…
—Weldon Kees, “The Smiles of the Bathers”
So we move to upstate New York, into a house on a leafy block with a skylit master bedroom off which is a balcony so buried in branches that it feels like a tree fort where you can smoke cigars and shoot off a pop gun. Is it Warren’s August birthday or Christmas when I get him a golden retriever puppy from Deb’s dog’s new litter? Grace, we call her. There’s a park two blocks away we go to every day and a pond with ducks and a trail in the woods. Dev walks to kindergarten in the frosted mornings with his backpack on. Warren and I keep differing orbits and finally start sleeping in separate rooms. I whipsaw back and forth on whether to stay or go, but no solid message shows up, as if the magic 8-ball’s still saying, Ask again later.
Otherwise, the landscape seems less blunted and monochromatic. Stepping outside some mornings, it’s like that instant in the optometrist’s office when the right lens clicks over, the letters on the chart sharpening. There are individual leaves on trees where once was a lime smudge.
The writing has come back—with a polished quiet around it. Somehow I feel freer to fail. But the work mortifies me. Previously I’d seen the poems as adorable offspring, but they’ve become the most pathetic batch of little bow-legged, snaggle-toothed pinheads imaginable. Even the book I published with such pride a few years before—eager to foist it on anybody who’d read it—now seems egregiously dull, sophomoric, phony. If the pages were big enough, I might well use them to wrap fish.
In the past, I strafe-bombed poetry editors with pages, the old insatiable-for-praise ego desperate to carve my name on any vacant surface. Now my instinct is to rathole.
Just before Christmas, the publisher I most admire—an aging patrician I’ve never met—writes me the only fan letter I ever got. James Laughlin from New Directions published and palled around with titans like Pound and Williams, plus Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whose spiritual books I’ve fallen for. Laughlin wonders do I have a second collection, adding cautiously they hardly ever take anybody on.
Usually, I’d have retyped everything with a watchmaker’s precision before mailing it off in a fancy binder. But so certain am I that the rejection letter’s going to wing back like a homing pigeon, I just jam what I have in an envelope with an apology for how cobbled up it is.
Getting the poems off my desk frees me to label a folder MEMOIR, which stays pristinely empty for months, till I stuff a few scrawled notes in. Next summer maybe I can set off down that row.
That winter, snow falls without letup. From the eaves, the icicles grow jagged fangs big around as my thigh, past the windows. Living in the mouth of the winter witch, a friend calls this phenomenon. Also, we must’ve pissed off the snowplow driver, who has a nasty habit of dropping his shovel loads in our driveway. Hours on end, Warren and I, faces chapped, hack away at mountains of ice while Dev frolics in his blue snowsuit.
The marriage has become nights on end of cordial agony. In the two years since I’ve gotten sober, Warren and I have alternately clung to or given room to each other till—over a tense series of months—we can no longer hold on.
An old sociological or Darwinian theory holds that when we’re looking to gin out babies, we’re biologically propelled toward the partner who’ll color in dull spots in our own genetic code. So when opposites attract, they’re biologically combining to form the perfect offspring. Looking back, I can see how Warren’s very essence looked like a corrective to who I was and didn’t want to be, which is unfair to him. Nor does that theory account for the love we had and the long, pure, edifying conversation we shared. Still, it must be said that someone who doesn’t like herself very much (i.e., me: age twenty-five), someone who views a man as an antidote to her very being, will find—over time—that antidote becomes an irritant. I don’t want to rehash the times we wooed each other again and the times we withdrew, or the million fights we had. The truth is, as noted, we’re inclined to gloss over our failures.
One spring morning my students come to help Warren lug his parents’ cherry antiques with all their heft and curlicued fittings from our small house. We unhitch our son’s bunk bed into halves for his dual households, since we’ll share custody. There’s a schedule magnetically stuck to the fridge with a red mom’s house and a blue dad’s house and an iconic Dev who slides from one to the other. At the kindergarten graduation, while every other kid heartily sings and claps and stomps, Dev rocks from side to side, staring from one to the other of us and barely moving his lips. Stabs of guilt like flaming arrows fire into me at his blue-eyed puzzlement.
We’re poor, all of us. You can’t turn one home into two the same size. Since my salary comes closer to making the mortgage than Warren’s, he takes a town house in a ghetto complex near a graveyard. With the Whitbread furniture gone, Dev can skateboard in the living room. Even after I rent out my attic to a grad student—a motorcycle-driving lesbyterian who sets my Republican neighbors’ tongues wagging—I can’t make ends meet. At first Warren and I plan to sell the house to give back Mr. Whitbread’s small down payment, till Warren figures out my engagement ring could buy the whole place outright, so I fork that over instead.
That’s the kind of stuff we bicker about. Maybe he feels, as I do, that he’s given too much up—in furniture and car (on my part), house (on his part), or time with our son (on both parts). But when two different lawyers urge us separately to chase payouts we both know don’t exist, we fire them. With a mediator, we hammer out a deal neither of us can imagine surviving on, then we sign it.
The Whitbread family tree sports nary a divorce, and it shames Warren to break the news. Once he does, the channels between the family and me snap so totally shut, I don’t hear the fallout. While my
clan views the split as a done deal, Mother can’t feature me without Warren’s solidity. The boat I row (financially speaking) is fully loaded and taking water, but so’s Warren’s.
Warren loans me our sole vehicle pretty much on demand, but it galls me to ask him. Facing walls of ice at my drive’s end, I try to tell myself that not having a car to shovel out is a bonus, but climbing over slippery, filthy edifices to reach a bus stop, Dev’s mittened hand in mine, I curse the oyster-gray sky and the fat flakes that Dev never tires of catching on his tongue. The bus to Dev’s after-school takes a full hour each way, and pulling him in a red wagon to and from the grocery store leaves me feeling stranded as a polar explorer. (People who’ve never seen a credit-union employee roll her eyes when you request a two-thousand-dollar car note will say, Just borrow.)
In Syracuse, I find another circle of identical shit-brown chairs occupied by sober strangers, and I call Joan the Bone to complain about the mildewy carpet and the chilblains I get wearing wet boots in the unheated room. She says, Uh-huh. Are they sober?
While Joan’s never more than a phone call away, she can’t be my polestar at such a remove. Before I moved, we’d agreed I’d have to find a local contender. You’re irreplaceable, I tell her on the phone.
I am, aren’t I? she says, nudging me by phone to court Patti—a former English teacher who helps run an outpatient rehab—a petite woman with a blond bob and the energy of a fire truck. She has enough outlaw in her to start, at one point, dating a biker in our acquaintance, and while I see her heart-shaped face at public lectures and bookstores, I also catch sight of her at a stoplight on the back of a Harley-Davidson, staring from the helmet’s visor like a road warrior.
Over coffee, she worries that she doesn’t have the time to counsel me, what with her hellacious job and raising two kids alone while caring for an aged mother. But she takes my calls and listens to me whine. (Still does, seventeen years later.) When Dev has bronchitis and his codeine cough syrup looks tasty one night, it’s Patti who squirrels the bottle away in her glove box and drives by after work every evening to dispense his single teaspoon.
But—shameful confession in this land of relentless, capped-tooth cheer—I’m lonely. Within weeks, Warren’s taken up with a smart blonde I call my girlfriend-in-law, which act stings a little, however long our dissolution has been in coming. Seeing them hold hands at school events shines a spotlight—in my mind—on me in my solo chair. Part of me is glad for him, glad for the note he writes calling our match a poor one. It’s the hand of friendship. (Ever after, we’ve shared parenting with conviction if not always ease, which is more than the divorced usually get—joint birthdays and graduations; phone conversations about school.)
Not long after, I’m sleeping on a pallet on the floor when I hear a glass-blasting crash downstairs. I grab Dev’s aluminum bat and edge down all bug-eyed, reaching bottom in time to see our black cat devouring Dev’s pet frog, the flippered feet disappearing between the tom’s thin black lips. So determined had the cat been to eat the frog—he’d been studying it through the glass for weeks—that he must’ve gotten behind the aquarium with his shoulder and body-blocked it off the table.
With my insides thumping from the adrenaline, I sit on the glass-spattered floor stroking the sleek tom a long while, figuring that’s the closest I’ll get to male company.
The next day in a bookstore with Patti, I tell her woman does not live by bread alone. I have a sexual nature, I tell her.
Who doesn’t? she says. But right now you’ll glom on to anybody who makes you happy in the sack. That’s how I wound up remarried to the coke addict. Just date for a while.
I never really dated.
Then you need to learn how. Try different kinds of guys.
I thought I wasn’t schtuppable yet. If I start kissing a guy, he’ll start to look like Elvis.
So we come up with a plan dubbed date-o-rama, whereby pals fix me up with a long string of guys, regardless of age or education level, income or looks. It’s neither boyfriend nor sport-fuck I’m after. In advance, I offer to pay my own way and warn all comers that I don’t so much as kiss. This is my way of demystifying the whole gender, plus giving myself wardrobe opportunities—an excuse for witchy shoes and lip gloss.
There comes a string of good eggs who never make boyfriends, all ages and shapes. If it moves, I’ll date it. At a faculty party, I agree to dinner with a surgeon who turns out—how?—to be in his mid-twenties. (Our sole point of commonality is that I’d babysat one of his undergrad frat brothers.) I date a local mogul twice that age and stay friends with his family for years. A comedian and a fireman, a legendary undercover narc, the occasional prof or publishing dude, an arbitrager. None of these do I so much as press lips to.
Only one straitlaced captain of industry even tempts me. Fit and well traveled, he shows up in a snazzy convertible, and it thrills me that he doesn’t drink. On our second phone call, though, he confesses a sex addiction that involves—among other shockers—hospitalization for masturbation injuries.
Meanwhile, I’m broke enough to be filching toilet paper from the school bathroom. It’s Patti who suggests I put God in charge of my financial woes, which sounds nuts unless you’ve spent a few years during which prayer keeps you from driving into stuff.
God’s just gonna tell me to have another tag sale, I say, I’d sold every silver pie server and cake plate we got for our wedding.
So you know what God thinks now? (What is your source of information?)
I confess I don’t much know what God thinks.
Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I’m in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold ingots to roll to my door. I manage it for three or four nights max. Then—when Dev and I pick through trash piles for furniture—I find myself upending dresser drawers and (once) even pawing through an old golf bag in case somebody accidentally threw out any bearer bonds. After the mortgage, I have a few hundred bucks each month for every bill, morsel of food, and tube sock. During a sweaty night praying over a stack of unpaid bills, I literally kneel before them (in some ways worshipping my fear, it strikes me now).
Because I signed up to take my whole salary over the nine-month academic year, all money clicks off in June. Even with summer jobs, I face missing mortgage payments. If I had a few years to cobble up a book, maybe some publisher with sufficiently low standards would pony up enough to pay off my maxed-out credit cards so I could qualify for a rust-bucket car loan. But that’ll take years. How to start while teaching, raising a kid, and working in some local restaurant? It’s a bone I pin between my paws at night and work with my jaw teeth.
I once read some science article claiming that 90 percent of what our brains gin out involves jockeying for position. Will I get that subway seat? That job? Does he like me as much as I like him? This mind-set works in a pack of lions inclined to tear deer meat out of your chops. But in my case, it pits me against others, keeps me inwardly growling. Cut off, it leaves me. Maybe this is the brain’s natural instinct, but so is my urge to boink the UPS dude, who—as I get lonelier—starts to look like Sean Connery, which is why the phrase Think twice about that proves useful.
37
The Death of Date-o-Rama or The Romance of the Prose
Every lover is a soldier.
—Ovid
Ill advised though it is, I start trolling for a beau—forget the semaphores Patti flaps in warning before my face. Reading St. Augustine’s memoir, I come across his seminal line: Give me chastity, Lord. But not yet.
Which is my battle cry by the time David of halfway-house fame shows up. He leaves Boston to rent a boxy monk’s cell spitting distance from my house. Ponytailed David with his gangster Timberland boots and red bandana holding his head together. Not yet thirty, with the habit of referring to his less than bright local bed partners in meetings as the Bimbo Brigade, David must’ve seen me
—a single mom in academia—as some final doorway toward a cleaned-up act.
He’d looked like an old friend when he’d first rolled in that summer with a pal. Both were shopping for a cheap place to hole up while finishing freelance writing projects they’d taken advances for. (A prodigy like David did Harvard philosophy as a mere detour.) Over cheap Chinese, we all sat for hours reordering green tea and bowls of deep-fried whatnot till fortune-cookie slips confettied the linoleum booth top.
Back in Boston, we’d always talked books—nobody had read more than David. When I’d whined in early meetings about not writing, from across the room, he’d shoot a conspiratorial grimace. He edited Joan’s dissertation before it was published, and a year later, he and I even swapped and slashed up each other’s first, sober work. But he’d seemed like a stray and forlorn undergrad on Easter when Warren and I had invited him over.
In Syracuse, I must bat my eyes at him or fluff my hair like some cartoon seductress (What a ma-yan!), for right after, David starts packing my mailbox with bulging envelopes. Logorrheic, he calls himself. Words just pour from his pen. His yards-long letters come hand-printed in weensy, meticulous mouse type, painstakingly footnoted. Soon he’s pleading his troth, signing his missives Young Werther (after a tragic swain in book and opera, with a crush on an older woman).
David is the only guy rash enough ever to get my name tattooed on his bicep—in a heart with a banner. Even before we’ve kissed on the lips, he does this. Watching those flesh-colored band-aids peel off in a phalanx to show an arm scarred and bloodied, a thinking woman would’ve hied for the hills. My response is more pitiful. I think, Wow, he might really like me—a thought nobody past grade five gets to have about anything bigger than a hamster. I plant a big wet Texas mouth on his.