Authors: Lynn Austin
“It’s going to take me a while to get used to this, Jeff,” I finally said. “What did Jacob Krantz say when you told him you were job hunting?”
“I can’t repeat it in polite company.”
“I can well imagine! You said yourself that commercial artists were nothing more than prostitutes, painting for hire. But advertising! That involves greed and manipulation and entering the middle-class rat race—everything you hate!”
“If you’re trying to talk me out of this, you’re doing a great job.”
“Isn’t there any other way? I’m just afraid that you’re losing so much more than I’ll be gaining with my journalism degree.”
“It’s only for two years. Besides, it won’t be a total loss. If I join corporate America, I’ll be earning something more than a paycheck.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “What else will you earn?”
“Your father’s respect.”
“Guess what!” Jeff said when he came home a week later. “I have my pick of advertising jobs!” His starting salary was twice my receptionist’s pay. We felt rich. We moved back to Pennsylvania to begin a new phase in our married life. Now it was my turn to go to school while Jeff rose early every morning to commute to work.
Each time Jeff got a haircut, the barber trimmed it a little shorter. “Congratulations on your new set of ears,” Daddy said when he saw him. By the time I finished my first year of graduate school, Jeff owned two suits.
“Hurry up! I’m going to be late for class,” I hollered at Jeff through the bathroom door one morning. “What’s taking you so long?” When he finally came out, I burst into tears. He had shaved off his beard.
“Jeff, no! What did you do that for? Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I shaved it because I have to make design presentations to corporate clients. My boss suggested I lose the hippie look. And I didn’t tell you because you would have tried to talk me out of it.”
“You look so different!” I wept.
“Yeah, the beard hid my ugly mug, didn’t it? Now you see the real me.”
I took his smooth face in my hands and kissed him. “Hippie or not, you’re still a mighty good-looking man, Jeff Pulaski.”
We both enjoyed spending all the bonuses he earned, and we started buying stuff—a decent stereo system, a better car, real bookshelves instead of bricks and boards. Jeff’s creativity made him a huge success in advertising. Then, three months before I graduated with a master’s degree, Jeff came to the university library after work to find me.
“I’m taking you to dinner,” he said. “We have to talk.” I needed a break from writing my thesis, but the somber expression on his face had me worried.
“What is this all about?” I asked when we were seated in a trendy restaurant.
“I got a job offer today from a larger, more prestigious ad agency,” he said. “They offered to double my salary.”
“There must be a catch,” I said. “You’re not smiling.”
“I would have to sign a two-year contract.”
“Don’t do it,” I begged. “Two more years sounds like a life sentence. I’m so close to graduating now. I’ll be able to look for a job in a few more months, and you can go back to painting.”
“I don’t want to quit working until we’re out of debt,” Jeff said. “If I accept this offer, we can pay off your tuition loan faster. I never liked the idea that Grandma Ēmma had to co-sign for us. And we’re going to need a second car soon.”
Jeff signed the contract. He was away on his first business trip for the new company when I received two pieces of news—one astounding and one devastating. I waited until he returned home to tell him, unwilling to share either piece of news over the telephone.
“Which do you want first, the good news or the bad?” I asked when he staggered into our apartment. Jeff looked exhausted. I slipped his suit coat from his sagging shoulders and helped him loosen his tie. He could afford tailored shirts and suits now.
“I don’t care, Suzanne,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I’m too tired to—”
“I’m the new assistant editor at
New Woman
magazine.”
“Really? Isn’t that the job you wanted so badly? That’s fantastic! When do you start?” I burst into tears. “Hey, what’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Jeff went limp. “Oh boy,” he mumbled. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.” They were not cries of joy.
“I don’t know how it could have happened,” I said, sobbing.
“Oh, I do. Remember that night we . . .” His mouth held a hint of a smile.
“Jeff, what are we going to do?”
His arms came around me. He held me tightly. “My corporate health plan will cover all the hospital costs,” he said quietly. “And your new magazine is very hip when it comes to women’s rights, isn’t it? I’m sure they’ve thought of everything, from maternity leave to day-care centers. We’re going to celebrate, that’s what we’re going to do.”
“But we’re not ready to start a family . . . are we?”
“Ready or not, here it comes!”
“You’ll never be able to quit your job and go back to painting now.”
“I like my job. I don’t want to quit.”
“But we can’t squeeze a baby into this apartment, and your car—”
“Those are hardly insurmountable problems,” he said, laughing, “and certainly not worth crying over. People move to larger apartments every day. We’re having a baby, Suzanne. Think of it! He’ll have your Irish good looks and my enormous talent.”
“No,
she’ll
be the first Pulitzer-prizewinning Polack!”
“Either way, our kid can’t lose.”
We started searching for a bigger apartment and discovered that monthly mortgage payments were not much more than a month’s rent. Daddy offered to lend us the down payment. Buying a house seemed like the logical thing to do. Of course, that meant buying more furniture. When Jeff went to my father for investment advice, Daddy taught him to play golf. They discussed stocks out on the fairway. Without even realizing it, we had joined the middle-class rat race—and before long, the rats pulled into the lead.
Hurry up and end this dreary sermon
, I silently begged. The preacher had been droning for nearly twenty-five minutes, but I couldn’t have said what any one of his three points were. I caught Jeff nodding off. We sat in the very last row of the church, an invisible block of ice resting on the pew between us. We had started the morning with a screaming baby and a screaming match—we’d run out of coffee and we each blamed the other for it. Given the mood we were in, it had been a waste of time to get dressed.
The church we attended near our new home had never satisfied either one of us, but by Sunday morning we were much too tired to shop for a new one. We hadn’t made any friends there because juggling the responsibilities of marriage,
a new baby, new jobs, and a new house left us much too weary to get involved in church activities. Even when we made the effort to come, God seemed very far away.
At last the service ended. “I’ll get Amy from the nursery,” I said in a monotone. “I don’t want to stay and socialize.”
“I’ll get the car,” Jeff said in a growl.
I hurried downstairs to the nursery, hoping to make a quick escape. I always felt out of place among the other new mothers. They were all stay-at-home moms who breast-fed their babies and baked bread from scratch. I nearly groaned aloud when I saw Marlene Rogers bouncing Amy on her shoulder. Marlene was a “Super Mom”一the type who loved staying home with her five children, baking cookies, growing all her own vegetables, sewing frilly curtains.
“Amy was a perfect lamb today,” Marlene cooed. “Is she always this sweet and good-natured?”
“She wasn’t sweet this morning when we were trying to get ready for church.”
“Babies get tired of being hauled around sometimes,” she said as she handed Amy over to me. I hoped I had imagined the rebuke I heard in her voice, but I hadn’t. “You still work full time, don’t you, Suzanne?”
“Yes, I do.” I shoved Amy’s arms into the sleeves of her snowsuit.
“Have you considered taking some time off to spend with your daughter?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Look, Marlene. I worked very hard to get a good education, and my husband and I both sacrificed a lot to get where we are. It would be a terrible waste to throw all that hard work away. Besides, I believe God gave me brains and talent for a reason.” I zipped up the snowsuit and tied on Amy’s hat. She struggled, hating the confinement and my none-too-gentle handling.
Marlene decided it was her duty to exhort me regarding God’s divine will for mothers. “You’ll be very sorry that you missed the most precious years in your daughter’s life, Suzanne. You can always work again, five years from now, but you can never retrieve your daughter’s first steps or her first words once those moments are gone.”
There was more, but I strapped Amy into her infant seat and fled. The following Sunday we stopped going to church altogether.
Jeff had worked until after midnight Saturday night on a huge advertising campaign for an important client. “I’m part of the team that will make the
presentation Monday morning,” he explained. “Winning this account could be a tremendous boost to my career.”
I had been up with Amy three times during the night, so when the alarm went off Sunday morning, we both rolled over and went back to sleep. I felt guilty the first few Sundays we missed, but having an extra day to catch up with laundry, shopping, and housework soon overshadowed my guilt. It also gave me more time with Amy. After working fifty or sixty hours a week, Jeff needed the extra day to unwind too. We never discussed our decision, we just stopped attending.
Two years later, Melissa was born. Not long after that,
New Woman
magazine promoted me to associate editor. It meant more work, more responsibility, but it also meant climbing the next rung on the ladder. I could be editor in chief one day. It was what I was working toward. I was so excited when I learned of the promotion that I called Jeff’s office from work. Maybe we could meet downtown to celebrate.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Pulaski,” his secretary told me, “but he’s in a meeting right now, and then he has a conference call scheduled for seven o’clock tonight with a client on the west coast. He probably won’t be free until at least nine.”
“Oh well. I guess it can wait until the weekend.”
“This weekend? Mr. Pulaski will be attending a conference in New York, remember?”
No, I hadn’t remembered. “Never mind,” I said, hanging up.
My victory felt hollow without Jeff to share it with me. I took Amy and Melissa to McDonald’s to celebrate, but the noise gave me a headache. Later, I cried myself to sleep long before Jeff arrived, thinking about how little time we had for each other.
For the next few years, the hurts and slights and missed occasions piled up like snowdrifts. Buried beneath their weight, our relationship cooled. Jeff’s scheduled vacations came during the summer when my magazine was busy preparing the holiday issue. My vacation came during the winter when Jeff had new advertising campaigns to plan for the new year. When my magazine won an important press association award, Jeff wasn’t free to attend the dinner with me. When one of his corporate clients offered him a trip to California, I couldn’t arrange time off or child care to go with him. Jeff flew out of town
once or twice a month to attend conferences and meetings. I flew out of town on alternate weeks to interview influential career women for the magazine’s main feature. We felt like the proverbial ships passing in the night, and after a while neither one of us made the effort to meet halfway.
We were supposed to share the household duties, but Jeff did his share by hiring a maid and lawn service because he was rarely home. Too tired to cook, I threw fast food in the microwave or ordered takeout. When it came to shared parenting, he missed most of the girls’ school programs and teacher conferences, then tried to compensate by being overly lenient with them. I resented the fact that the job of disciplinarian usually fell on my shoulders.
Six years of mounting pressures came to their inevitable conclusion a coupie of months ago. I arrived home late from an out-of-town trip, long after the girls’ bedtime, and found them eating pizza in the den with Jeff. I exploded.
“It’s not fair that I have to enforce the laws around here, and you get to be Mr. Nice Guy, having fun and bending all the rules!”
“Leave it to you to spoil a festive occasion,” Jeff grumbled as he stuffed pizza boxes, paper plates, crusts, and pop cans into the garbage. The girls scampered upstairs to bed.
“And what occasion would that be? International Slob Day?”
“No. My promotion. I’m the new vice president in charge of the design team in our Chicago office.”
“
What
? We can’t move to Chicago!”
“Thank you, Suzanne. I’m very happy for me too.” He stormed upstairs into our bedroom and slammed the door. I stormed upstairs right behind him.
“Don’t you dare drop your little bombshell, then walk away from me, Jeff Pulaski! We need to discuss this.”
“Discuss what?”
“This decision! When does the company need
to
know your answer?”
He planted his hands on his hips. “I already gave them my answer. There was never any question in my mind. I accepted their offer.”
“You
what
?”
“I accepted it! If you had bothered to ask me what my goals and dreams were lately, you would have known that this is the career opportunity I’ve been waiting for. I’ll be the boss for once. No more jumping through other people’s hoops. It will also mean a very hefty pay increase. With stock options, I’ll be making almost as much money as your almighty father does.”
“You
accepted
the job? Without even
asking
me?” He stared at me as if he didn’t understand the question. “What about
my
job, Jeff? What am I supposed to do?”
“They know how to read in Chicago. There are plenty of magazines there.”
“You expect me to give up my retirement plan, my seniority, and everything else I’ve slaved for at that magazine and start all over again at the bottom of the ladder somewhere else?”