“I can’t possibly know how you feel, Liz, but I’m so terribly sorry,” I said, and let her sob.
Moe sat miserably on a chair across from us. I listened to Elizabeth tell me how only a week before, she and Moe had painted the baby’s room a soft yellow, with a border of little ducks around the ceiling. She was weeping again.
“It’s awful, Liz—about the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, and nothing we can say will change it,” I told her.
“I thought I had d-done everything right,” Liz said. “I never lifted anything heavy, I gave up wine and b-beer . . .”
“I know. I saw you refuse champagne at my wedding. And you told me you were taking prenatal vitamins.”
“She was great—did everything the doctor said,” Moe offered.
Pamela had called, Liz told me, and Gwen was coming later. I knew we all wanted to do and say the right thing, whatever that was. I gently rubbed her back.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to p-paint the room. Maybe it was paint fumes that affected the baby,” Liz said anxiously.
“Liz,” Moe interrupted, “the doctor said that wasn’t it.”
But I let her talk on, exhausting all the things that might have caused the miscarriage, and now she changed course still again:
“I was doing so well,” she wept. “I felt good and everything, and that’s what’s scary.” Elizabeth’s nose was so red, it looked almost raw, matching the acuteness of her pain. Her face scrunched up, and for a moment she looked like the little girl I knew back in sixth grade who cried when she fell off her bike. “If I did all the right things this time, and I still miscarried . . .”
Moe got up and left the room, one hand over his eyes.
She buried her head against me again, sobbing, and I stroked her hair. “And if you asked your obstetrician, I bet he could tell you about dozens of women who miscarried the first time, just like you, and went on to have a whole houseful of children,” I said.
After a long time her sobs subsided, and at last she pulled away from me and leaned back on the cushions, staring up at the ceiling.
“Well,” she said finally, “maybe God had a reason. Maybe it will teach me to be more patient and humble. Or when I do get pregnant again, maybe it will make me love that baby all the more. I’ll just have to accept it.”
This time there really wasn’t anything to say, because religion is so personal, and it’s different for every single person. But it occurred to me that God gets the blame for a whole lot of stuff that “just happens,” and if he wanted Elizabeth to be more patient and humble, he could have thought of a better way than that.
“It’s possible, Liz. It’s also possible that—like rain—it just happens and has nothing to do with humility.” And then I added, knowing that sometimes the best way to work out grief is to concentrate on someone else, “But remember that Moe’s sad too. You told me he wanted a large family. There’s someone else around here who needs comforting.”
And that seemed to be the right thing to say, because she stared at me for a moment, and suddenly she swung her legs off the couch. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ve been thinking only of myself. Oh, Alice . . .” She hugged me. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
I knew that was my signal to leave, because her feet were pointed toward the kitchen, where Moe was silently drinking a cup of coffee.
This wasn’t a magic bullet, nothing that would stop the next round of tears or the sleepless nights to come and the endless worries, but Moe was like a tree in a storm, something strong she could cling to, and I felt he’d see her through.
* * *
I loved being married. When Patrick and I got home each day, we liked to just stretch out on our bed and talk. Cuddle and talk. Sometimes I rubbed his back, sometimes he rubbed mine. Once in a while we even made love before we made dinner, but mostly, it was just a close, sharing kind of time that set the tone for the evening.
He’d tell me about a difficult issue they were studying at work—trying to find the research on it—and I’d tell him about a difficult student. We never solved the problem by talking about it, but it helped clarify it and—whether because of the talk or the back rub—we always felt better afterward.
“What did I ever do without you?” I murmured against his neck.
“Got through college, for one thing,” Patrick said, and kissed my nose.
“You know what I was thinking the other day?” I continued. “That it’s nice being in between.”
“As in . . . ?”
“Liz wants a baby so badly, and Pamela wants just as badly not to have one. We don’t want children yet either, but if I did get pregnant, we’re ready to care for it and love it.”
“And you’re telling me this now because . . . ?”
“Because I’m happy.”
“You’re not off the pill, are you?”
“No. And we’d have talked about it first, if I was.”
But having a “Mrs.” in front of my name didn’t change much outside the apartment. For some reason, I’d thought that not only would the world treat me differently but that I would be transformed somehow. I was now a “married woman.”
But salesclerks didn’t wait on me any faster or more courteously because of the ring on my finger. I had just as much trouble making omelets. My hair still looked awful in humid weather, and my face still broke out if I ate too much chocolate.
Worst of all, I still did such stupid things. Said stupid things. There was a bad leak under our bathroom sink, for example, and the apartment manager said that a plumber would be coming at eight o’clock Saturday morning to fix it.
“Oh, not before eleven!” I told him. “My husband and I like to sleep late on weekends.”
And he said, “Mrs. Long, do you want your sink fixed or not?”
Even after we’d been married a year, I hadn’t seemed to learn much. On our first anniversary, even though we’d already agreed to celebrate a few days later when it was more convenient, I made a candlelit dinner, with steak and chocolate pie, I put on a sheer dress Patrick particularly loved, and there I was, waiting for him when he came home from work.
First of all, he was tired because there had been all kinds of complications on the job. Second, he was late because he’d had to work overtime, and I’d put the steaks under the broiler as soon as I heard his car. And third, he’d grabbed a sandwich from a vending machine, so he wasn’t particularly hungry, whereas I was ravenous. To make matters worse, I got salad oil on the dress I was wearing, and finally, true to form, I started to cry.
Patrick tried to be patient. “I thought we’d agreed to celebrate this weekend, hon,” he said. “How was I supposed to know you were making a special dinner?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” I wept.
“Well, I’m not a mind reader,” Patrick said, pulling off his tie. “I’m hot, I’m tired, and I need a shower.” But he came to the table anyway and ate half his steak. He said he’d have the pie later after he’d cleaned up. Instead of a shower, however, he sprawled out on the couch and fell sound asleep. And that was my first lesson in learning that I wasn’t made of glass and that there were a lot of things Patrick couldn’t possibly know unless I told him.
* * *
Elizabeth, Pamela, and I were all working full-time. Since her miscarriage, Liz seemed to throw herself into teaching. She was good at it, according to the many notes she received from parents, and she and Moe were planning a trip to Greece sometime in the future.
We saw very little of Gwen, now that she was in medical school, but Pamela was doing remarkably well in the advertising business, seeing as how her training had been in theater. She’d broken up with the man who first hired her, though, and was working for another company, but Pamela always seemed to land on her feet.
Meanwhile, Patrick was working days and taking night courses a few at a time for his graduate degree at American University, and sometimes it was hard to find time for each other.<
br />
“Being married is actually work,” Elizabeth said once when we were comparing notes. “It’s not as though, once you’ve made a commitment, you can take the other for granted and things will be fine. You have to work at making a good marriage.”
Amen to that.
“But you know what helps?” she continued. “Whenever I think I can’t stand one of his habits one minute longer, I force myself to remember something I’ve done or said that really ticked him off, and suddenly they seem to cancel each other out.”
One spring Saturday, Patrick was out of town, and Elizabeth drove over to spend the afternoon. We had just come back from the garden store with pots of flowers to be arranged later on the apartment balcony and were taking time out for a beer.
Liz sat down on the couch, moving a pillow to make room. “What’s this?” she asked, reading a note taped to the back of it: Wish I were here in your lap.
I instantly colored. “Patrick and I leave each other notes from time to time, especially when he goes away. I put notes in his suitcase, and . . . he leaves notes all over the house. When we watch TV together, he likes to lie with his head on my lap on that pillow.” Elizabeth looked at me rapturously, and I continued: “Also in the refrigerator, under my towel, taped to the toilet seat . . .” We laughed.
“Moe and I celebrate all our firsts,” Liz said. “The anniversary of our first kiss, the night he proposed—things like that.” She sighed, smiling. “I hope we can stay in love forever. I hope that what we have now is the real world, because—except for losing the baby—I like things just the way they are.”
* * *
It was at my job that I felt most in contact with the real world, because I realized just how sheltered my life had been up to that point. The only place I’d ever worked for any length of time was the Melody Inn, with my father as my boss. Now I was a member of a faculty, and Principal Sims was an attractive dark-haired woman who reminded me a little of Snow White’s stepmother.
It wasn’t that she was cruel or malevolent. It was her perfectionism and the way she gave orders that got to me—and the fact that I was in no position to object.
“Is that understood?” she often said after she’d explained how she wanted something done. Or, after giving each of us a task for the coming field day or student talent show, she would say, “Now, Steve, what are you going to do?” or “Alice, your job is . . . ?” and then wait for us to parrot it back to her as though we couldn’t be counted on to remember. The rest of the faculty sort of humored her, smiled behind her back, and let it roll off, but for some reason, it really rankled me, perhaps because I felt I got the brunt of it much of the time.
The students, however, were fascinating.
“Were we ever that awkward?” I asked Patrick. “Honestly, when the bell rings and kids surge out into the hallways between classes, you take your life in your hands just to be out there! They charge around corners, arms flailing, and a lot of the boys are as tall as the gym teacher. Were we ever like that?”
Patrick took the salmon out from under the broiler and sprinkled it with lemon juice. “Of course not. We were agile and intelligent—responsible with our money and kind to little old ladies and dogs.”
I wasn’t surprised that girls came to me more readily than the boys did. When I saw boys in my office, they were generally sent there because they’d been disciplined by our assistant principal, and I was expected to do the follow-up, see what was causing the problem.
I got along with most of the students. I liked to collect funny posters for my walls to help the kids lighten up—like the old photo of the little kitten clinging to a tree, with the caption HANG ON, IT’S FRIDAY! A lot of the kids could sure have used some lightening up. Many led such complicated lives and had experienced far more than I had—abuse, drugs, alcohol, an abortion, even.
“There are so many of them, Patrick,” I said. “For every student I counsel, there are probably ten more I never see, with awful things going on in their lives. There are backup cases for the psychologist too. It all seems so hopeless sometimes.”
“We felt that way in the Peace Corps,” he said, “until someone told us the starfish story.”
“What’s that?”
Patrick put down his fork. “A man goes out on the beach and sees that it’s covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back in the water.
“ ‘What are you doing, son?’ the man asks. ‘You see how many starfish there are? You’ll never make a difference.’
“And the boy pauses thoughtfully, picks up another starfish, and throws it back into the ocean. ‘It sure made a difference to that one,’ he said.”
I smiled across the table. “I’ll remember that, especially because you told it to me,” I said. “Thanks, honey.”
My most difficult case was a student named Tarell—a bully—who was teetering on the edge of failing seventh grade, even though his intelligence scores showed him to be above average. He’d be okay for a while, getting passing grades and not causing trouble, and then he would do something especially cruel or humiliating to one of the sixth graders—yank his jeans down in the hallway, perhaps, or heckle him in the cafeteria about the shoes he was wearing. He would often latch on to one particular boy and taunt him for several weeks, then drop him and pick on someone else. He seemed especially determined to show that nobody could beat him up.
He’d had detention and been threatened with expulsion, but he remained silent when spoken to, passively aggressive. In my office he would invariably arrive late, throw himself into a chair reluctantly, and stare out the window, just putting in his time, answering my questions in monosyllables but rarely offering me anything substantial to work with.
One day after he’d been in detention for breaking a boy’s glasses, we sat across from each other while Tarell, as usual, stared sullenly out the window, occasionally glancing at his watch and shifting in his chair.
Finally I broke the silence and asked, “Tarell, who did this to you?”
He still didn’t look at me, but I saw his body tense. “Did what to me?”
“Turned you into a hostile, unhappy bully.”
This time he jerked about and faced me. “Nobody does nothing to me! I can take care of myself!” he said.
“Who are you trying to get back at here?” I continued. “You can’t possibly be mad at some ninety-pound sixth grader who never did anything to you. Who are you really angry at?”
The breakthrough didn’t come all at once, but once the floodgates were opened, I heard about his sadistic father, a man who never laid a hand on him, in either affection or anger, but who also never had a kind word for his son. Who was as abusive with his put-downs and insults as some parents were with their fists. And as the anger eked out in my office, it wasn’t as necessary for Tarell to take it out on other boys. At the end of the year he still had problems, a lot of them, but he also smiled more and had actually made a few friends.
* * *
“So how are you liking your job, Al?” Dad asked me one evening when we had him and Sylvia over for dinner.
“Love it!” I told him. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
“Same with me,” he said. “I can’t imagine retiring, though I suppose I’ll have to one of these days. It’s just too much fun at the store.”
But I was having problems I didn’t tell him about. Just as Tarell seemed unable to get to our sessions on time, I seemed to continually turn in reports late to Marsha Sims, and I couldn’t understand why. All through high school and college, I managed to get assignments in on time, yet now I invariably discovered that the day I was to hand in a report on a student, I’d left the papers at home. Or I had done all but the last part. Or I had misplaced test scores that were to accompany it.
“Just get on the ball, Al!” Patrick said to me when I confessed. “Put it on your calendar. Write yourself a note.” I did, and it helped some,
but not a lot. It almost seemed as though I were asking to be called into Marsha Sims’s office, and one day it happened.
She sat behind her desk in her navy-blue suit with the navy and turquoise pin on the lapel. With her fingertips together, lightly tapping her chin, she studied me.
“You know, Alice,” she said, “I can’t quite figure you out. You get along well with the staff, the students like you. You never seem to miss appointments, you rarely take sick days. And yet . . .” She pointed to some papers on her desk, and I knew what was coming. “At least a third of your reports are late. I’m supposed to schedule conferences with parents, and I have to nudge you to get a report to me when it should be in my box without any prompting. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
I began apologizing all over the place, but Marsha waved me off. “That’s not needed here,” she said. “You don’t have to like me, Alice. Not everyone does. But you do have to work for me and respect my rules. And one of my rules is that I have to have reports on time. I’ve got enough problems on my plate without the added annoyance of having to nip at your heels to get something done.”
I nodded.
“If there’s anything I can do to make this easier for you . . . ,” she said.
“I think it’s my problem, and I’m going to have to solve it,” I told her.
“Good,” said Marsha. “I hoped you’d see it that way.”
As soon as I got home that day, instead of sitting down with a cup of tea and a cookie and scanning the newspaper, I went out for a walk. I walked several miles hardly aware of where I was going.
I was behaving just like Tarell, passively aggressive. I’d felt I couldn’t really tell Marsha Sims that she gave orders like a martinet. That she treated me, in particular, like an adolescent. So I’d been displaying my resentment in childish ways, and the one way I could annoy her, without actually realizing what I was doing, was to get my reports in a day or two late. They were well-written reports, meticulously done, and in every other way I did my job well. Yet I was like a fly buzzing around her head.
And strangely, once I knew why I did it, I stopped. The missing test scores were found, the test papers attached, and the reports were in on time. I learned to speak up at faculty meetings and found that if I made a humorous comment without being hostile, she would listen. I was growing up along with my students.