Authors: Joyce Maynard
As for Beverly, she’s in her own world here. There are more accomplished skaters, of course (a young girl in purple, who jumps and spins; a white-haired woman in a black skating outfit, who dances the Society Blues as if she were born on skates; Mike, cutting across the rink in what looks like a single move), but few float better than my friend. She’s unfastened her long hair, so it trails behind her, and she moves her arms as if she were conducting a hundred-piece orchestra. It happens we’re in a prefab warehouse with cinder-block walls, called Skate World, listening to a little old man play the electric organ, but this might be the stage of the Kirov Ballet, or Lincoln Center, or Paradise itself, to look at her. “It’s hard to believe she just started skating this spring,” says one old-timer, standing on the sidelines with me, watching.
Her husband has never seen her skate. One of these days, he’ll come along with her. What she’d really love would be for him to learn also; there can’t be many feelings better than doing the Mirror Waltz across the rink with someone you love. There are a half dozen really accomplished married couples out on the floor tonight, and though most are in their forties or beyond, and some are gray, it’s easy, watching them, to imagine how they would have looked as teenagers.
But it’s also true, Beverly sort of likes it this way: coming here all by herself, doing something that is all hers. Coming to Skate World, where, as she says, “I’m not Mrs. So-and-So. I’m just myself.” She knows nothing of Oliver’s life, or Mike’s, or Mary’s, outside the rink, and they know nothing of hers. “I think of them all as friends, but I never picture them away from the rink,” she says. “I just imagine them going round and round forever. All the rest of the time, I’m so many things: a singer, a wife, a mother. But what I love is that here all I am is a skater.”
I was in New York—a city where I once lived in a Gramercy Park penthouse, carried on a career, maintained charge accounts—for the first time in over a year. These days I give little thought to my old life in the city. Nearly all the clothes I bought and wore when I lived there have gone out of style, and the rest I have little occasion to wear. But I came back to New York to celebrate the marriage of our two good old friends Greg and Kate, a painter and a writer, like Steve and me, who met at the same time we did but chose a very different course—of freedom, work, travel, each other.
We were in our friends’ downtown loft—exquisitely remodeled, white and spare—for the post-wedding party. My first thought, entering the room—and finding it filled with men in good suits and women in three-inch heels, wearing real pearls and carrying mixed drinks—was surprise at what a lot of older people had come. Then I realized they were just my age, these lawyers and psychiatrists and television executives. We went to the same schools; I even knew some of them, nearly a decade ago, when we had all just come to this city, had just gotten our first apartments and grown-up clothes.
An elegant-looking woman came over to me. We were both due to turn thirty in a matter of weeks, we discovered. Not surprising, really, that the information emerged so swiftly; the knowledge of my upcoming birthday had been much on my mind and clearly much on hers.
But she was a vice president with a large advertising agency handling the Johnson & Johnson account, a woman who flies all over the country looking at cute babies, while I at that point dealt mostly with my own, and the one on the way. (There were, at this gathering that included surely fifty women of prime childbearing age, just two—me and one other—who were pregnant, and only one child present.)
She pulled me aside, sat me down, leaned in close. “How do you do it?” she asked. “What’s it like?” She might have been talking about conquering Everest or kicking heroin, but in fact what she meant was having children, being a mother.
And she wasn’t talking about the elaborate balancing act pulled off by so many successful New York professional women who manage to have children and a high-powered career too. She was talking about my having made the choice of motherhood at the expense of career. Though she didn’t say it quite this way, what she was also talking about were my five-dollar Chinese shoes and my self-cut hair, and how invisible—not unwelcome so much as incongruous—a “nonproductive” pregnant woman was at a gathering like this one, where every conversation begins with “What do you do?” I identified myself as a mother of two young children. It’s a real conversation stopper, that one.
No question, the thousands of hours Steve and I have spent reading
Goodnight Moon
and Babar to our children, zipping and unzipping their snowsuits, singing them “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and the
Love Boat
theme song, have taken us away from work. But there’s a drain on us greater even than the physical one, the hours of child care and dollars gone to ear infections and Barbies. It’s the way the focus gets blurred, the concentration lost, the way every day begins (not even close to unpleasantly) in a bed faintly dampened by our son, rescued in the early morning hours from his crib and asleep now between us with his Sesame Street pillowcase wrapped around his thumb. The ritual daily listing of breakfast possibilities: Cheerios, Rice Krispies, toast, egg (white only). The question, always asked though the answer is always no: “Can I have a doughnut?” Packing the lunchbox. Braiding the hair. Pinning Charlie down to wash his face, retrieving the boot he throws, comforting his sister, on whose head it has landed. Racing out the door at ten past eight to a seventeen-year-old car whose ability to start is always up for grabs.
By nine-thirty, when I’m home again and putting groceries away, washing juice glasses and loading the dryer, the house is empty and quiet. But haunted too, by the children who inhabit it—the concrete evidence (in the form of Matchbox cars and Fisher-Price people, barrettes and an experiment Audrey has set up involving celery sticks, water balloons, dirt, and cups of water with various shades of food coloring in them), and more than that, the energy field that lingers, nearly crackles, even when they’re gone.
A few years ago, when my father was slowly dying of pneumonia, I flew out west to see him for what I knew would be the last time. I was pregnant then too, with Charlie. And what I remember best about that trip was the feeling I had, greater even than my grief at saying good-bye, of something close to embarrassment at my condition. My father was a man of enormous promise and ambition who saw himself as waylaid by domestic life, detoured from what had looked like a brilliant trajectory into thirty years as an assistant professor of English at a small New Hampshire university. “Children are hostages to fortune,” he said regularly, not unkindly, to me, his too-well-loved younger child.
Of course there are parents who want only for their offspring to lay grandchildren at their feet, but what my father wanted from me, on his deathbed, were timeless novels and glorious reviews, and what came instead (though he didn’t live to see this) was a baby boy, fair-haired and blue-eyed like him, from his own dark daughter. Another irresistible hostage, come to wreak pleasurable havoc on his parents’ lives. In a half year’s time, the little inheritance my father had socked away, with enormous advance pride and pleasure in the freedom it would bring me, was mostly gone to pay bills unwritten novels had left unmet. What would he have thought if he could have seen me, two years later, pregnant again, in 1978’s maternity dress (my chief extravagances are babies), sipping champagne and answering the advertising executive’s question: Doesn’t it bother you that your children have, well, sort of messed up your career?
Of course I know well the answers one gives here—all of them well constructed by the countless numbers before me who’ve taken this exit off the expressway’s faster lanes. All about how comparatively brief the period of total responsibility for one’s children comes to seem in the “broad overview” of a life, how the experience of parenthood transforms all the rest of one’s days, increases a person’s humanity. That what one does is not (the old notion) to martyr one’s self for the next generation, but to enrich one’s own existence through parenthood. (I remember reading a comment made by Meryl Streep, a while after she’d given birth to her first child, that the experience of being a mother would make her a better actress.)
My own view is somewhat less totally assured. I joked to our just-married friends (Kate, the bride, slim and beautiful in a strapless Norma Kamali gown with five layers of organdy flounces that I will draw for Audrey later, back home, and that she will color in, pink): I told them that in ten years I’d be spending my days at my typewriter while they were walking the floor with babies. But the truth is, maybe not. One’s art can also be one’s only child, and one’s child can be one’s only true art. It may well be that I never again do anything else as wholeheartedly as I am currently engaged in being my children’s mother.
The day after Greg and Kate’s wedding, I stood on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 22nd Street, holding Audrey’s hand. I pointed out to her the lights in the windows of the apartment that used to be mine, overlooking the park. I told her how I hung the terrace with flowers. I told her how I served dinner on the roof one night and the meal blew away while I was bringing out the candles. There were statues of knights in armor holding up the awning at my front door, I told her, and a doorman and a shiny brass elevator. You could stand on the balcony and see the Empire State Building, lit in red, white, and blue that year, for the bicentennial. I was relieved to discover how nearly painless it felt to get into our old car and head for home.
Back when I was eight months pregnant with our third child, broke, snowed in, with Steve out of town for two weeks, my children sick, our pipes frozen, and the engine of our eighteen-year-old car refusing to turn over, Audrey and I got into the
Love Boat
habit. At four o’clock every afternoon—the hour that used to be reserved for
Sesame Street
—we’d fix ourselves a big plate of peanut butter on crackers and (the diet version) peanut butter on celery sticks, and tune in to the daily
Love Boat
rerun. Even Charlie got into the routine.
“Love—exciting and new. Come aboard, we’re expecting you. …” That was the theme song. Then, one by one, and sometimes two by two, the guest stars would come on board, each one presenting his or her own terrible or comic problem. By the end of the hour, they had all managed to solve their problems, or at least to live with them, and acquired a good base tan while they were at it.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” Audrey would murmur, with one hand on my belly and one hand on the crackers, “if
we
could go on the Love Boat.” But of course, we were dry-docked. The idea of lounging in a bikini, alongside a kidney-shaped pool, sipping a drink out of a coconut shell while someone like Bert Convy rubbed suntan oil on my back—well, it couldn’t have seemed more remote to me, as I folded laundry and chopped onions for soup.
But I could dream. I could do more than that, in fact. I wrote a note to the Cunard Lines, entertainment division, offering my services aboard ship as a lecturer on writing. A few weeks later I got a form letter acknowledging receipt of my note, and then nothing. The next month our second son was born. Then came postpartum depression, mud season, blackfly season. And then one day in late May came a phone call from the entertainment coordinator of the
Queen Elizabeth II.
Could my husband and I be ready to set sail for England, first class, all expenses paid, in ten days?
We didn’t agree right away. Steve is the type who feels no day is complete if he hasn’t chopped some wood or hammered a few nails. A reluctant vacationer. A man who tries to keep his shaving down to once a week, and his three ties as dusty as possible. When he heard dinners on the QE2 would be black tie, he groaned.
As for me, I was still nursing Willy and hadn’t spent a night without him. I was dropping into bed at eight-thirty every night. I wasn’t sure I could muster the energy for a vacation, even if we could think of a way to leave the children.
But it was also, we decided, a chance we couldn’t pass up. In our seven years of married life, we’d never had a vacation like that, with no children, no work (the lectures didn’t really count)—and we had never needed one more. We found a good friend who was willing to take care of our boys, and another friend who agreed to see us off at the ship and then put Audrey on a plane to her grandmother’s. We leaned against the rail as the ship pulled out of port, throwing streamers and watching our daughter growing smaller and smaller on shore. It was terrible to see Audrey crying and not be able to put my arms around her.
After that, though, we had an idyllic twelve days, during which I thought about my children surprisingly little. I had brought along a state-of-the-art breast pump, in the hope of being able to continue nursing my son when we got home, but otherwise we behaved like carefree, footloose types who wouldn’t know Luvs from Huggies. We drank a lot of champagne. We danced every night, sometimes so late that we watched the sun come up over the ocean. We started every morning with a jog around the deck and ate caviar with every dinner—the new rituals that replaced pouring Cheerios and emptying the diaper pail. Our new shipboard friends included an opera singer, a golf pro, and an avocado grower, and on the return trip, a retired couple who had just purchased thirty-five pairs of shoes for themselves in Portugal and invited us to come visit them sometime in Boca Raton. There was a French nobleman (who, when jokingly I asked how many ancestors of his had been beheaded in the French Revolution and whether he had a castle, answered nine and then took out photographs of two castles—his, and his cousin’s). Then there was a young man with five Rolls Royces in the ship’s hold and a lady friend sporting $100,000 worth of jewelry, a fellow who confessed to Steve (while the two of them sweated side by side in the sauna) that his underworld connections had been making things dicey lately. We thought he was kidding until we got our pictures back and discovered that in every one where he appeared, he had succeeded in obscuring his face behind a beach umbrella or a piece of rigging.