At home in the world, p.29
At Home in the World, page 29
* * *
I had hoped, when Steve and I married, that I would get to take a little time off during my pregnancy to fix up the house and get ready for the baby. I pictured that once the baby was born, I would spend my days for a while rocking and nursing and walking to the waterfall or sitting on the shores of Loon Pond, I figured Steve would be selling paintings by this point. If not, he would have figured out another way to make some money.
By October all of our bills are overdue, and I’m feeling desperate. We fight about money. Steve retreats into his studio. Many nights we eat our meals in silence. I no longer ask him what he’s thinking about.
One time we pull into the gas station in Hillsboro, where we have taken to buying gas just a few dollars’ worth at a time. A man approaches my side of the car and asks if I’m Joyce Maynard. Yes, I say, although I go by my married name now.
He hands me a piece of paper: Having broken my lease on my New York apartment months before, I am being sued for all the back rent, plus damages, which now totals several thousand dollars. In the end, Steve and I find a lawyer in town who settles the suit for a thousand dollars, but even that is more money than we have.
By my twenty-fourth birthday, in November, I am on the telephone to editors at women’s magazines in New York, proposing articles I will write. I haul out my old, youth-spokesperson mantle for an article on my generation’s attitudes about marriage. I write a story for one of The New York Times special sections about the time Steve and I had the mistaken impression that we were in possession of a winning ticket in a lottery run by our local supermarket chain. It turned out we were wrong.
In my retelling, I make this story into a comical event. This is the first of many occasions when I take devastating experiences and turn them into funny stories.
In recent years, I had said I was done writing for the women’s magazines. I have voiced Jerry Salinger’s scathing views of the kinds of work my mother pursued in the pages of Woman’s Day and Good Housekeeping. I have called my mother’s writing dishonest, inauthentic, a terrible compromise of commerce over art. Now I’m on the phone to all my mother’s old contacts, pitching ideas for stories about keeping the romance alive in marriage, having fun in lean times, encouraging your husband to communicate. More than once over the course of these months, I fling myself on the bed in tears. “Where is the money going to come from?” I ask Steve. “What are we going to do about this?”
One day, after one of these explosions, he disappears quietly into his studio. He comes back in the house a few minutes later, with a stack of pieces of paper cut to the size of dollar bills and painted with a face meant to look like George Washington. He stands over me where I lie, pregnant and weeping on the bed, and scatters the pretend money over me and walks away.
* * *
Sometime near the end of January, I set out alone in our Renault to see the midwife in Concord. It’s snowing and the road is slick. The car skids into a tree. I’m unhurt, but the car is totaled.
We have no money for another car, or even a rental, until our insurance check comes through. For two weeks, we’re stranded at the house. Now and then a neighbor stops by with groceries. Then comes the worst snowstorm to hit New England in a hundred years. It’s days before the power is restored and snow plows reach our road. The snow’s so deep we can’t see out the windows on the ground floor. Steve skis out to the mailbox everyday, looking for the insurance check. It finally comes on Valentine’s Day. With only days to my due date, we locate a 1966 Valiant sedan. We head straight to the mall, where Steve helps me pick out a bright pink chenille bathrobe and three sleeper suits for the baby. Two days later, I go into labor.
* * *
Years before, with Jerry Salinger, the muscles of the most intimate, private part of my body had clamped shut when I tried to open them. All through my pregnancy, I have had a secret fear that when the moment comes to give birth, my body will fail me again.
The contractions, when they begin, are the most powerful feeling I’ve ever known, but I know how to handle them. The image that comes to me, as I lie on our bed, breathing, is of myself surfing—though I never have. I ride every wave perfectly. I wait out the currents. I catch the next one, and I ride that one, too, always managing to keep just ahead of the point where the water would break over my head and pull me under.
Then I’m pushing. Steve kneels beside me on one side, while the midwife kneels between my legs at the foot of the bed. With one more roaring scream, I feel our daughter burst into the world.
From the moment of her birth, Audrey is a beautiful baby—dark as a gypsy, with a full head of black hair and large eyes. I put her to my breast. Seeing her mouth on my nipple, her tiny fist wrapping around my finger, the soft little snuffling noises she makes as she sucks for the first time, the world falls away. I am so elated and amazed, I barely notice the searing pain that accompanied that last, explosive moment when her head emerged from inside of me, followed, a few moments later, by the placenta. Now I realize my body is torn and ragged. I feel so tender that when the midwife suggests stitching me I scream, “No!” She doesn’t repeat her suggestion.
The next morning Steve buries the placenta in the snow beside the cherry tree in our field. It is a year, almost to the day, since he first showed up on my doorstep in Gramercy Park, but those days now feel like part of somebody else’s life, not mine.
* * *
I have wanted to be a mother since I was a little girl. Now that I am one, I say I have everything I’ve wanted most.
But there are times when I put Audrey to my breast that I feel a sinking so profound it almost crushes me. For nine months, all my energies have gone into making this baby. Now she is no longer inside me, and I experience a terrifying sense of my own emptiness. I had so totally given myself over to her, for all those months, I no longer knew who I was, separate from her.
I let myself gain fifty pounds during my pregnancy with Audrey. I imagined the day after she was born, I’d step on the scale and find myself with most of them gone. But the day after giving birth to my seven-pound baby, I still have over forty pounds to lose. A year before this, I was living in New York City, working at The New York Times, riding in taxis, and charging my clothes at Bloomingdale’s. Now I have no career, no money. I’m living at the end of a dead-end road five miles from a very small town where I barely know anyone.
I am also experiencing such severe pain from the birth that every time I go to the bathroom, I weep. I have no friends here with babies of their own, so there is nobody to ask, Is this normal? When the midwife checks me out she says, again, that she’d like to do a little stitching. I can’t bear the thought of being touched.
* * *
Three days after Audrey’s birth, my mother comes to see us. There is no one in the world I want to see more than my mother, stepping off the plane in her big hat, shopping bags in each hand, carrying soup and cookies and baby blankets she’s been sewing out of old cut-up nightgowns. She’s the one person who will be as interested as I am in every detail of my baby’s existence, and my own. The first thing she says as she greets us at the airport is, “Well, I guess now there can be no doubt about it. You two definitely did it.”
Steve is stunned to learn that my mother plans to stay for at least ten days, and that she will be staying at our house instead of a motel.
Within an hour of my mother’s arrival he is suffering from a massive migraine. The next day he’s worse. For my mother’s part, she seems to ignore Steve almost totally, commenting to Sydney over the phone about how much Audrey looks like me, and calling her “Joyce’s baby.”
With Steve still suffering, I make tea, and with Audrey in my arms, suggest that the three of us sit down to talk. I tell my mother that I feel she’s ignoring my husband. I tell my husband that in Jewish families, there’s a different attitude from the one he’s used to. More emotional. I tell my mother I think the distrust she shows my husband may have to do with her tendency to associate him with my father—and with her distrust of men, in general. I tell Steve how much I love my mother, and that I want her here to take care of me.
When I’m finished talking, I feel I’ve done a good job of communicating how I feel in a way that shows them both my love. My mother unexpectedly announces, shortly after this, that she needs to return to Toronto immediately. Sydney needs her, she says. I’m disappointed, but too caught up in our baby to give much thought to my mother’s abrupt departure.
Three days after my mother’s return to Toronto, I call her collect, as I always do. I hear her voice say to the operator, “No, I don’t accept the charges.”
“Mum,” I say. “You must’ve heard wrong. It’s Joyce.”
In a very cold voice this time, she says again, “I don’t accept the charges.” Then she hangs up. Hearing this, I fall to the floor.
Steve calls her back to ask what’s going on. “I think it’s better that Joyce and I discontinue our relationship,” she tells him. “Clearly she doesn’t want me in her life anymore.”
* * *
Over the course of the months that follow, my sister attempts to sort out what has happened. She reports that my mother has said I made anti-Semitic comments to her. My mother relays her deep sense of betrayal at hearing Christian hymns played at my wedding the summer before. “How could Joyce do such a thing? There were Holocaust survivors in the congregation.”
It’s very cold in our house that winter. I partly blame Steve for leaving me to make the impossible choice between my husband and my mother. I ache to talk to her. I see my father, who is renting a small apartment with Laura in a nearby town, but my father has never been a person to offer support or care, least of all now. He reports that Laura is trying to kill him. He would like to “make an escape,” but he cannot leave Nicky, his dog. He tells me his hands are so twisted he can barely drive, let alone paint. He needs to borrow money or he will be evicted from his apartment, and though we have very little ourselves, I give him three hundred dollars.
One day he calls in tears. My mother has sent him a letter in response to one of the dozens he has written to her. Now he reads it over the phone.
She doesn’t want to hear from him, she tells him. She has nothing to say. She signs off with Drayton’s “Sonnet on Parting,” one of the first poems she and my father read together.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.…
She does not sign her letter “love,” or even sign her name.
* * *
Audrey becomes the great joy of my life. After I have my daughter, I feel connected at last. At the supermarket, strangers come up and admire my baby. We talk about feeding and sleeping, teething and rashes, when the baby will smile, when she will stand, her long eyelashes.
The person I really want to show my daughter to is my mother, and she’s not speaking to me, or sending me her wonderful typewritten letters full of funny stories. I send her letters, though. My letters are not about me, or the terrible rift that has taken place between us. Now, when I write to my mother, I simply give news of my daughter, and enclose snapshots. These she will be unable to resist, I know, even as she’s resisting me.
Six months after she disowned me, my mother calls to say she’ll be in New York visiting Joe and Joan. “I was thinking perhaps you’d feel like bringing the baby into the city,” she says.
Of course I feel like it. I put on Audrey’s red dress for the trip, with white lace tights and little knitted booties. Steve and I set out on the highway.
I am not sure how this happens, but just as we’re approaching Manhattan, with me at the wheel to give Steve a break, the car goes into a 180-degree spin. I can see the car that’s about to hit us, and even the horrified face of the driver as he slams into us. Miraculously, no one is hurt. We are even able to drive the Valiant the rest of the way into the city. When we get there, my mother is waiting for us.
“You brought her,” she says.
Chapter Sixteen
OUR MARRIAGE CHANGES after Audrey’s birth. We are parents, but less and less are we lovers. We also argue more about money, about who cares for the baby, about my wish that Steve would talk to me more, and his that I’d leave him alone.
He is spending long days in his studio. He also adores Audrey. He draws beautiful pictures of her, and when he goes for his run he bundles her up and puts her in the front pack on his chest, and cradles her head so she won’t be too jostled.
But he was also raised in a family where child care fell to his mother. Steve burns to paint. He says he needs time alone. He wants to go running, and play sports, and do things a man can’t do with a baby. Particularly since I am the only one who can feed her.
From the first, the roles we establish as parents are very different. I am just so happy to have a baby, I figure I can handle anything. I will care for her and write magazine articles and be a loving wife and lose the extra forty pounds.
But the effort leaves me weary. In my dream picture of motherhood, I see myself rocking by the fire with my infant in my arms, not propping her up on a pillow in the crook of my arm so I can simultaneously nurse her and type. In my dream picture, my husband comes home with a paycheck.
Several months before Audrey’s birth, I had been approached by a small college in Southern California to deliver a talk about writing. The pay wasn’t that much—five hundred dollars plus airfare—but I accepted. Now, with Audrey less than four weeks old, I board a plane bound for San Diego with my infant in my arms.
The flight makes her cranky. The time change disrupts her sleep. When the hour comes to deliver my speech, Audrey is wide awake and wailing. Accustomed to being fed on demand, she will be comforted by nothing but my breast. As the head of the English department concludes her introductory remarks, I unbutton my shirt and drape a borrowed blanket over me like a poncho. With Audrey concealed under the blanket and my arms around her wriggling body, I step out onto the stage to begin my remarks.
Twenty years later, I will meet a woman who was among the students in the audience that day. “At first we didn’t understand,” she tells me. “It just looked as if you were wearing some kind of shawl. But then there started to be all this movement under that blanket, as if something was alive under there, and you could see this little foot kicking. Then you explained.”
When Audrey is six weeks old I get an assignment from New York magazine to do a story on houses of prostitution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Because I am a nursing mother, I take Audrey with me to New York, strapping her into her infant seat beside me when I drive into the city to conduct my research. Through an old contact, a detective I’d interviewed back in my reporting days, I get the name of the proprietor of an escort service who can only be reached by telephone so late at night it’s almost time for my daughter’s first feeding. He gives me the address of an East Side town house where one of the women he employs has agreed to talk to me at midnight the next day.
Audrey cries when I’m supposed to be taking notes. She doesn’t want to be bundled into her front pack at an hour when she’s accustomed to lying next to me in bed. By the second day of my trip, I realize that completing my assignment is impossible. Driving home with Audrey once again placid in her car seat, I have no idea how I will earn a living now. I am filled with despair.
* * *
When Steve first moved to New York City after college, he’d promised himself two years to become established in the city. He left before the two years were up. Now, the winter after Audrey’s birth, we agree to leave the house in Hillsboro again and return to Manhattan. We sublet a loft space on West Twentieth Street and find a day care situation for Audrey that will allow me to work half-days. In addition to spending more time taking his slides to galleries, Steve can get work as a housepainter again.
Shortly after our move—the week of Audrey’s first birthday—I discover I’m pregnant again.
We have no money. We are also arguing a lot about all the old themes of money, child care, what Steve sees as my excessive need for intimacy and affection, and what I see as his distance and aloofness. Still, I cannot help feeling elated when I get the results of the pregnancy test, and I give Steve the news the minute he comes home from his painting job that night.
“There’s no way we can have another baby,” he says.
“It will hardly cost anything,” I tell him. “We’ll have a home birth again. We’re already set up for babies. Taking care of two won’t be that much different from taking care of one.”
“I had other things I wanted to do with my life besides being a father,” he says. His voice is flat. “I’m going for a walk,” he tells me. When he returns, he says, “You know what we’ve got to do.”
All that week, the prospect of my having an abortion hangs in the air. Steve says very little to me about this or anything else. He gets another of his paralyzing headaches. Audrey spends all of one night screaming with pain from an ear infection.
I remember how happy Steve was when we found out I was pregnant with Audrey. I picture the loneliness of a pregnancy he could not celebrate. I have never seen his mood so dark.
A week after getting the news of my pregnancy, I agree to the abortion. We are so broke we have to borrow money from Steve’s housepainting partner to pay for it.
Steve is working, so I take a taxi alone to the Upper East Side for the procedure, after explaining to Audrey’s babysitter, when I drop her off, that she’ll be staying longer than usual.
In the waiting room, I study the faces of the other women. Most are very young, teenagers. A couple of them have come with their boyfriends. One rests her head on her mother’s shoulder.
When it’s my turn, I am led into a room and given a hospital gown. A nurse comes in to explain the procedure and gives me a mild sedative. I lie down on the table and put my feet in the stirrups.
