Val laughed. ‘I don’t want much. I just want to change the world.’
Iso turned to Mira. ‘I don’t know.’ She was a little surprised. ‘When I was young, I wanted to … live. Whatever I meant by that. Whatever it was, I still haven’t done it.’
‘Chris?’
‘I don’t know either.’ Her young face looked sober and almost sad. ‘I’d like to make everybody happy. If there was a way to do that. I guess I’d like to help people who are starving. All over the world.’
‘That’s a noble thought.’ Iso smiled at her.
‘What about you?’
Iso laughed. ‘I’d go skiing. Really. Whenever I think of intense satisfaction, I think about skiing. I’m not serious, like the rest of you.’
‘But that’s serious,’ Ava said sweetly. ‘It’s as serious as dancing.’
‘No, one’s art and one’s just pleasure.’ She sipped her wine. ‘But it makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing here.’
Val groaned. ‘Do we have to go through this again?’ She turned to Ava. ‘All day long, every day, everybody sits around in Lehman Hall drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and beating our breasts and probing our souls trying to decide what the fuck we’re doing here.’
‘Well, I wonder what you-all are doing here too. It’s such a terrible place,’ Ava shuddered. ‘Nobody talks to anybody else and when they do, it’s always about such strange things.’
‘Why don’t you all leave, then?’ Chris looked at them. ‘Why don’t you,’ she turned to her mother, ‘buy a big farmhouse in the country? I’d love to live in the country with all the cows and pigs and shit.’
‘Literal,’ Iso shot in.
‘And we could all live together. I really liked living in the commune except some of the people were so spacey. But it would be cool with all of you. We could take turns chopping wood and shit.’
‘Chris, did you know that shit was not synonymous with et cetera?’ her mother said.
‘And Ava could dance all day, and Iso could ski all day, and Mom could go out every morning and change the world and Mira could sit around and figure out what she wanted to do and I could ride the horses.’
They all agreed that would be wonderful indeed, and set about planning it: the size of the house, the location, what animals they would have and who would be responsible for which. They got into an argument about pigs, Iso insisting they were clean and Ava insisting she would not have them. They had another argument about household chores, all of which Ava refused to do. In fact the only thing she was willing to do was feed the chickens.
‘I love chickens,’ she sighed, ‘when they go cluck, cluck!’
The arguments ended in screaming laughter and a few wry comments on the bleak possibilities for human social harmony.
When they had gone and she had finished the dishes, Mira took the bottle of brandy into the living room, turned out the lights, and sat beside the window, breathing in the chill damp October air. Footsteps passed on the sidewalk below, a man’s footsteps. She listened until they vanished.
She felt swirled up in something rich and alive but also strange. She wondered about the relationship between Iso and Ava. It was almost as if Iso were Ava’s mother. And about the list Chris had ticked off: were they the names of Val’s lovers? Did Val bring men right into the house in front of her daughter? Did Val not mind the language Chris used? Of course, she used it herself. But Chris was only sixteen. She thought about Chris’s suggestion they all live together. It was a thought: she was not particularly happy living alone, yet it had never occurred to her there was any alternative but marriage. It could be fun living with a group of friends like these, so full of ideas, so full of life, not like men, always trying to insist on themselves and their dignities. Norm would have been horrified by the evening she had just spent, at the subjects discussed, the language used, at some of their notions – especially Val’s – and at its frivolity, its playful pleasure. He would have stood up looking disapproving, looked at his watch, spoken gravely of tomorrow’s important schedule, and left at eight thirty.
Yet it had been so much fun. She felt rich, full of energy, she wanted to plunge into her work. She felt as if things were continually being freed from her, as if her imprisoning those things had made her tired all these years. But what things they were she did not know. It was just that somehow with these friends you could be honest: that was the only word she could come up with.
She thought about Val and Chris. Under their banter or squabbling you could sense the closeness, the trust. It seemed enviable. Her own sons, those babies who had come out of her own body, whom she had loved so much once, she hardly knew now. She remembered how her heart had felt as she gazed at them when they were toddling, when they came home from school able to read the first pages of a book, when they looked at her with a child’s clean gaze and told her a story about school. She remembered burying her nose in their sheets, smelling their bodies.
And now. She wrote them every week, short polite letters telling them about the weather and what she was reading and where she had gone. She had had one short note from each of them at the beginning of school, nothing since. They were probably not sorry to be away from her. She’d been distant since. It was all so mixed up: her rage at them for being Norm’s children, for resembling him; her guilt toward them for failure – for surely if she had been better, the marriage would not have dissolved: and resentment too. Once Norm had gone, her position was clearer than ever: servant to a house and two children. And did they appreciate? Yes, she had felt all that, and more too, probably. So she had abandoned them not physically but psychically. And now physically too.
Suddenly she was overwhelmed with grief. There was no way to apologize, no way to go back, no way to wipe it all out of their memories. There was no justice, she remembered. But maybe there could still be love.
She decided she would insist on their spending Thanksgiving with her.
12
In the fall of 1968, Normie was sixteen and Clark fifteen. They were quiet, shy boys. They had been more outgoing before their parents’ separation, but something had happened to them after it. They were typical suburban monsters, however, expecting every luxury, expecting to be driven everywhere, terrified of independence and full of blame of their parents for this terror. And both were slow developers; neither had hair on his chin yet, and Normie’s voice still squeaked out of control at times. Private school had shaken them somewhat. Normie’s response to the change had been to become extremely gregarious, and his grades were suffering. Clark’s had been to become withdrawn, and to sit watching television for long periods, and his grades were suffering. When Mira called saying she had cleared it with their father and they were to spend Thanksgiving with her, both had only one question.
‘Do you have a TV set?’
‘NO!’ Mira stormed, insulted.
They arrived at Logan with two canvas bags and a boxed-up portable TV.
Valerie was having a big Thanksgiving feast and had invited fourteen people, but Mira was apprehensive about Val’s effect on her sons, and explained that she had not seen them in a long time and preferred to be alone with them. She had, indeed, a plan in her mind. They would talk, really talk. She remembered the times they had tried to talk to her and she had cut them off, and the memory wrenched her heart.
They arrived late on Wednesday, and were tired, so she was not upset when they sat sleepy-eyed in front of the TV set, and went to bed early. Thursday, she was busy cooking and they wanted to watch a football game. But when they wanted to keep the set on during dinner, she protested. The game was not over, they shrilled at her, outraged.
‘Dad lets us keep the TV on when we’re there!’ they yelled. That was a tactical error.
‘Does he! Wonderful! Well, I don’t!’
They sat glumly through the meal, responding to her continual questions with the briefest possible answer, and as soon as the meal was over, they looked at her.
‘May w
e leave the table, ma’am?’
She sighed. It was hopeless. ‘Go ahead. But I expect you to dry the dishes.’
They leaped up and went into the bedroom, which Mira had given over to them for their visit, and lay on the bed and watched TV. The dishes, she noticed after they had gone to bed, still stood in the rack.
Friday she took them along the Freedom Trail. They dragged, they looked reluctantly as she explained the importance of one building or another; they looked at each other with faces that said she was crazy when she grew excited about the people buried in the cemetery. They did like Old Ironsides, though, and the Italian ices they bought in the North End. Once home, they headed for the TV set.
Saturday she walked with them through the Yard and in the Square. They liked the Coop and spent considerable money on records. She took them to a French restaurant for lunch and they wanted double cheeseburgers.
‘Quiche, you’re having,’ she hissed at them. ‘That’s why I brought you here. Quiche and salad and wine!’
But they left most of it, tasted the wine and left it, asking for Coke, and complained about the salad dressing, which was made of vinegar, oil, and tarragon.
They looked strange to her too. They were handsome boys, and still tan from playing tennis. Their hair was clipped very short, and both had come up in navy blue blazers and flannel trousers. She had seen nothing like them in several months: at first she looked at them as if they were Arabs at a B’nai B’rith convention. And they said ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ Norm had wanted them to speak that way, but she had never insisted upon it. Apparently the school agreed with Norm’s position. They were clean-cut and polite and blank. She tried to think of what they reminded her; it was Ken, the doll who went with Barbie.
By Saturday night she was simmering. She picked up a bagful of cheap cheeseburgers and French fries, and a couple of bottles of cola. They ate with relish: it was, they said, the best meal they’d had. She eyed them coldly.
‘May we be excused, ma’am?’
‘Damn it! Will you stop calling me ma’am?’ she screamed. They were shocked. ‘Anything else will do,’ she added with sweet acidity. But they did not laugh. They looked at each other with bewilderment.
‘Look,’ she pleaded, ‘I don’t see you very often, and I’d like to talk to you. To find out how you are, and how you like school and … everything. Do you understand?’ Her voice was a little shaky.
‘Sure, ma – Mom,’ Normie said quickly. ‘Only we already told you. We’re fine.’
She insisted on going through the litany again. Their answers were the same: ‘Okay.’
‘Well, let’s talk about other things, then. How do you feel about Daddy and me getting divorced?’
They looked at each other, then at her. ‘Okay,’ Normie said.
‘Do you feel funny? Do you feel different from the other kids?’
‘Naw. Everybody’s parents are divorced,’ Clark said.
‘How do you like Daddy’s new wife?’
‘She’s okay.’
‘Nice. She’s nice.’
‘How did you like Cambridge? What do you think about my apartment?’
‘Cambridge is okay. Your apartment – I guess it’s okay for an apartment.’
‘You oughta have a TV though.’
‘I suppose you have more fun when you’re with Daddy.’
Clark shrugged. ‘Yeah, you can play ball.’
‘And he lets us watch TV with dinner,’ Normie reminded her casually.
‘And do you talk to him?’
They looked again at each other and back at her, silent. Finally, after thinking about it, Clark said, ‘Well, he’s never there.’
‘And what do you think about my going to graduate school? Does it seem strange to you?’
‘No,’ they both murmured unenthusiastically.
‘You certainly are articulate,’ she said and stood up and went into the bathroom and cried. She told herself she was suffering from self-pity and that Rome was not built in a day. She tried to fight down the rising gulps in her throat. She washed her face with cold water and reapplied makeup. She returned to the kitchen. In her absence, they had brought the TV set into the kitchen. Unwilling to defy her – they had not been excused from the table and they were polite children – they had brought the monster right into the kitchen. At her look they turned down the sound, and she started again.
‘Look, what happened between Daddy and me had to have some impact on you. I would really like to know how you feel. I’m not trying to run an inquisition. I’d really like to know.’
They gazed at her blankly, and suddenly Normie hit Clark on the shoulder. ‘Did you see that pass?’ he cried with real animation.
Mira stormed over and turned the set off. She whirled on them. ‘I’m TALKING to you! I’m trying to talk to you!’ They both looked down. She saw they were embarrassed at her lack of control, and resentful, possibly fearing a wild scene like some three years earlier. The tears came again. She sat down across from them and put her head in her hands. They sat silent, watching her intensely. ‘Okay, okay. If you won’t talk to me, I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you how I am. How I am is Miserable!’ She saw their eyes meet, but they did not move their heads. ‘I hate this place, I hate the kids, they’re such spoiled brats, and everybody is disconnected and if it weren’t for a couple of people, I’d have gone stark raving mad! And this goddamned school is antifemale, they look down on women, especially women my age. It’s a goddamned monastery that’s been invaded by people in skirts and the men who run it only hope that the people in skirts are pseudomen, so they won’t disturb things, won’t insist that feeling is as important as thinking and body as important as mind …’
She could see the glaze in their eyes, but they were staring at her as if they understood that something important was happening, even if they did not understand her words. She persisted.
‘They make me feel just as rotten as your father did. As if I’m nothing, invisible, or if not, that I ought to want to be. And sometimes I do. And even worse, I’m lonely, I’m so damned lonely …’ She was crying again. ‘Do you know that in three months not one man has so much as asked me to have a cup of coffee with him? Not one!’ She was sobbing now, half surprised at herself, having been unaware that her feelings were so strong, that she was as miserable as that, that these were the feelings buried in the darkness and the brandy. She was no longer looking at the boys. She had buried her face in her hands and turned away from them. She remembered sharply now how she had felt toward them during the year she had been in despair, feeling that they were just there, flesh of her flesh, perhaps, but unconnected to her. They did not know who she was and did not care as long as she serviced them. They were only accidentally of her production. She remembered hating them for that and berating herself for her irrationality, expecting consolation and concern from boys so young who did not understand what was happening. But she had felt that they turned their faces away from her purposely. She felt so now: she was utterly alone.
Then she sensed something warm and solid near her. She looked up. Clark was standing beside her. He put his arm awkwardly on her shoulder. She leaned her head against his body, and he patted her back lightly, unrhythmically, unsure in the role of consoler. ‘Don’t cry, Mommy,’ he said, and there were tears in his voice.
13
The snow began to fall the day before Thanksgiving and it never went away until spring. Cambridge was covered all winter; there were permanent walls of snow along its sidewalks. I walked in it thinking about snow symbolism in literature, something I had never found persuasive. But that year I did feel that nature was trying to purify what men had done, to cover over the blood-gorged earth and let it rest.
Maybe no single year is worse than any other; maybe just as much flesh is slashed and scarred, just as much blood driven violently into the soil in every twelve-month span. It would be hard to get statistics on violent death – what do you count as murder? When people starve to
death because of the policies of governments and corporations, is that murder? Nature does a fair amount of murdering itself, which is why this whole notion of dominating nature arose: it was one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time. No one ever believes a cure will prove worse than the disease. And maybe it isn’t. An invasion of microbes that destroys a body could also be called murder. All deaths are violent deaths, I suppose. You can see that when you think the way I do, you never reach any conclusions.
Still, 1968 felt more terrible than other years. I felt as if I was a cell in a huge convulsed body sprawled across a continent, jerking in spasms from the shots that killed King, Kennedy, and some nameless folk in a ditch in My Lai. One suffered from being the murderer – for hadn’t they come from among us, hadn’t they learned what we learned? – and the murdered. Of course one is always both: the killed – body shrieking the trail of hot metal through brain or chest or stomach, the heat, the burn, the pain expanding through every sensible member, the slow-motion turn and fall, one thin line of hot lead in a body sufficient to undo all of it, standing and understanding; and the killer – the nervous itchy boy’s finger on the trigger, the soft sweating armpits of the conspirator, the mindless eyes of the paid murderer, the taut back of the saver of the world from Jews or Communists or Albigensians – the one, for it must always finally be one who kills, one who is killed. That year, 1968, was a slow-motion murder, spanning the year, spanning the continent, a photograph capturing an eternal falling.
But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I’m playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compensate for the horror, or even redeem it. Humans are fond of finding ways to be grateful for their suffering, calling falls fortunate and deaths resurrection. It’s not a bad idea, I guess: since you’re going to have the suffering anyway, you might as well be grateful for it. Sometimes, though, I think if we didn’t expect the suffering, we wouldn’t have so much of it.