Her Mother's Daughter (28 page)

It didn't work out that way.

Brad's parents were horrified by the entire thing. He was only twenty-one and had a year of college still to complete. First they cast aspersions on my character. They didn't know my reputation, they would have done that to any girl. Brad, who
did
know my reputation, also knew the baby was his, and was noble through that phase—doing such heroic things as refusing to eat dinner, storming out of the house and disappearing for a few days (holed up at his friend Tim Derry's college apartment), then refusing to speak to his mother at all. Finally, they were forced to concede that my pregnancy could conceivably have been caused by their sweet boy. Then, they wanted me to have an abortion, and offered to pay for it. Under their pressure, my noble dingbat wavered, but I stood firm. So at last they were resigned to our getting married; their greatest problem at this point was how I was going to look in my wedding gown.

We solved this problem by getting married on a Saturday afternoon in a dingy office in Manhattan with Tim Derry and my friend Erma Greenspan as our witnesses; afterward we went to the Automat for coffee and dessert, laughing at our brass. For several years after that, Brad's parents were unable to look me straight in the eye; and they never recovered from the feeling that their poor naive sweet boy had been railroaded by a scheming desperate female. This attitude of theirs was subtle, but constant. It had no effect on Brad for the first few years.

What did have an effect was that they agreed to our marriage only on condition that Brad finish college, that he work weekends in his father's real-estate office, and go into his business after graduation. In return, Brad's father would pay him fifty dollars a week, so we could manage to live by ourselves.

It was useless for me to argue that he didn't have to do this. I protested, I kept summoning the pictures I'd invented in my daydreams, holding out an alternate path for us. He'd just shake his head. “You don't know, honey, it would be really miserable. You don't really know the music world. It's no place for a baby, it's not even a place for a wife.” His father kept reminding him that society had decreed that a man take responsibility for his acts, and that responsibility lay in properly supporting his wife and offspring, and that to support them a man needed something reliable and steady (as if real estate were either!), he needed to provide a decent environment for a child to grow up in, etc., etc. The pressure never eased, because a life like theirs was what they wanted for Brad in any case, and Brad simply couldn't hold out against it.

My heart felt like a squeezed prune. Because what led him to give in to them was what I loved in him: his sweetness, his affection for his parents, his sense that people should do the Right Thing, his lack of aggressiveness. He would come to me at night after a session with his father, his shoulders curved, his neck pulled in. He looked shorter, older, smaller. He'd say, “But they're right, sweets, you know they are. I mean, can you picture a kid growing up on Eighth Street?”

“They do!” I'd protest, and then immediately caress him, trying to restore his spirit.

“You didn't. I didn't. We don't know how to survive in that world.”

One night, when he sounded more determined than usual, I began to cry. I didn't want it, I said, I didn't want that kind of life. What was I supposed to be doing while he was out selling real estate? Taking care of the baby and cleaning the house? That was no life for a person! I didn't want to be married to a real-estate salesman, I wept, I wanted my off-in-the-clouds boy, with his silliness and joy, with his underwear shirt showing above the open neck of a frayed sports shirt he refused to throw away, his eyes dancing after ten minutes of Serious Talk, who would grab me and dance across the room to a polka that he managed to sing and whistle at (almost) the same time.

Through all this, Brad sat with tears in his eyes, aghast at the singular sight of me in tears, and when I calmed a bit, he held my head against his chest and patted my head. It was then I knew: he'd never patted my head before. And he said it then, in the Serious Voice I came to know so well in later years:

“Sweetheart, we have to grow up. We have to be mature. These dreams are just childish fancies. We have to put them aside. When you are a child, you speak as a child and understand as a child and think as a child; but when you become a man, you have to put away childish things.”

My head came straight up off his chest. That was not Brad talking, he'd never so much as opened the Bible. It was Brad imperfectly quoting his father, who was an elder or something at the Episcopal church they attended. Even his tone of voice was his father's. I'd lost him, I'd lost Brad.

“Well, I'm not a man!” I cried. “And I don't want to put away childish things! If life has to be the way they live it, I don't even want to live.”

I rushed upstairs, leaving an embarrassed Brad sitting alone in the small side room my mother called the porch. But he was frightened, I guess he thought I planned to kill myself, and maybe I did at that moment. The bubble had completely blown away. All I could see was a life like my mother's, a life like those of the people all around us, and I could not bear it: in the car, out of the car, in the house, laundry, cooking, dinner, television, bed. Saturdays on Sunrise Highway shopping, Sunday dinner at a parents' house. NO.

Brad tiptoed upstairs. Although everyone knew I was pregnant, it still seemed forbidden for him to enter my room. But he did, and came to where I was lying with my hands over my eyes, not crying, just sunk in horror, and he touched me with the same light tender touch he'd always had, and sank down on his knees next to the bed and whispered, “It can't be too bad, Stahz, can it, if we are together, if we have each other? We'll be able to be together all the time, we and the…” and he patted my still flat stomach. And of course I turned to him and put my arms around him and cried and held him and submitted, me the stiff-necked, the refuser, the proud fierce rebel, submitted to my fate.

W
E FOUND A ROOM
with a kitchenette and bath on the second floor of a house in Lynbrook. We looked at it with my mother, who drove us—Brad still had no car—and took it because it was cheap, even though to reach the apartment you had to walk straight through the owner's living room. After we took it, my mother refused to visit me there because she was uncomfortable walking through the Charleses' part of the house. I stared at her.

“Why did you let me take it if you knew you'd never come there?” I asked in outrage.

She looked at me as if she didn't understand my words. “What difference does that make?” She was bewildered.

And I, for once, was speechless. In our family, the word
love
was never mentioned, nor did anyone ever touch anyone else, except for my father's nightly peck on my mother's turned cheek. But, I thought, we felt it: felt it, extraordinarily. All my sitting night after night with my mother, asking her about her life, my pain and rage at her life, my lying in bed night after night planning revenge on those who had hurt her, planning brilliant triumphs to lay at her feet, planning above all to buy her a mink coat as soon as I sold my first painting…And she did not know, she had no idea! How, how could she not have felt it!

It sank, this knowledge, into the dank place where I kept so much else. Because I could not bear to follow up this awareness with its corollary: that she could have been unaware of my deep feeling for her only if she did not love me back. I refused to think this, but thought it nevertheless, the way we do, as if we could stand on both sides of a door at once, the way we can do something and not let ourselves know we're doing it, something magical and strange about us, creatures for whom symbols are stronger than realities. I looked at her, her eyes pale and weary, her hair coiffed and blond, her clothes smart, her patent leather pumps matching her bag, and I wanted to get up from the lunchroom where we were sitting having roast beef sandwiches on white bread and coffee, and simply evaporate. Those days I often wanted to vacate my life. Maybe I would have if I'd been able to come up with any other life to enter.

Because underneath the wild foliage, the brilliant flowers of my behavior, there was a swamp of confusion. I claimed to be happy about being pregnant, about getting married, I assured everyone Brad and I would have an ecstatic life together, and for months I insisted we go to New York and take our chances living as artists. But my gaiety and laughter served as noise to drown out some other voice—just as, perhaps, my mother's crying had when she was pregnant with me. You need to drown out the voice because it possesses no language to express its knowledge.

It's easy now to say what I could not even let myself think then. I was not a foolish girl, not unrealistic or impractical, although I tried to be. I shrugged off reminders of practicality in the same way I cut classes, insulted teachers, ignored my art teachers' advice—out of terror of a fate that I felt hung over me, invisible but unavoidable. I could not bear constriction; yet I felt it was inevitably my lot. I felt it was
women's
lot.

You couldn't grow up during the Depression, with the double whammy of a depressed mother, and not know how vulnerable people were without money, without a place to live, decent clothes, decent food—especially if they had a baby. But I couldn't stand settling for those things. I knew I was an artist—I'd known that since I was a tiny child—and that I was learning, would learn, nothing in college; that there was no job on this earth that I could have that I wanted; that even male artists felt that the door to the future opened onto a concrete wall—but that a female had no chance at all. How many of the great painters were women? None, that's how many. The only woman painter I'd ever heard of was Mary Cassatt, and no one ever wrote about her, she wasn't respected. Besides, she always painted women and children, not important things like…well…it's true Dégas painted a lot of ballet dancers, and Cézanne painted a lot of fruit, and Toulouse-Lautrec also painted dancers, and Renoir painted mainly women and children…but it was the way she did it, I guess, that made her insignificant….

Underneath everything else was my despair about myself. I could not envision a life for myself. What would I do, how would I live? Perhaps, if Brad had the courage to risk it, we could go out together into the big dirty dangerous world and try to survive on whatever he could earn playing the sax, while I painted. I could not imagine making money painting; nor could I imagine any work I could do that would satisfy me except painting. If I had been able to imagine either of those, I would have insisted we move to the city and try it; and I think that if I had insisted, Brad would have gone along with me.

But I was too frightened to try to live out my vision. And so I surrendered, became a passive person, leaving decision in god's hands just as if I believed in a god. Living like my parents, Brad's parents, the people around us, seemed to me like walking open-eyed into hell. But hell had a passageway leading to it: no other road was available. I surrendered to the fate that had always hung over me (didn't I know, when I watched my mother doing that fucking laundry, that someday I too would be doing it?). I surrendered to the ordinary in the same way my mother did.

And once I had, a possible future showed itself. Maybe, if Brad got a regular job, I could paint: If he sacrificed
his
art, I could pursue mine. It is a selfish thought, written out baldly like that. I guess it was selfish, even though it arose from despair. Because for some reason, Brad seemed
willing
to sacrifice his art. That might mean he was not as committed an artist as I. Or it might mean—but I didn't recognize this then—that as a man, he felt a terrible pressure to
be
a man as our society defines one—to produce money, to earn status, or, sentimentally rendered, to take care of his family—me and the thing growing inside me.

These confused feelings, thoughts, muddied my mind for the nine months of my pregnancy. I couldn't put them into words, I didn't dare. Had I dared, I would have revolted against everything—the way the world was set up, the way everyone I knew thought and felt, and even my own sex, my own body. I couldn't risk that, couldn't risk the rage, the hatred. So I took the coward's way out and buried it all. I said nothing, but expected my mother, at least, to know how I was feeling. And perhaps she did. But she treated me the way she had always treated herself when she was unhappy—she withdrew into vacancy, and went through motions. She was polite, even pleasant; but she treated me like an acquaintance, not like a daughter.

And something hard and cold entered my feelings for my mother for the first time. She had dismissed me; I dismissed her in return. I told myself I was damned if I would care so much what she thought, what she felt; she would no longer be the center of my sorrow, the spur of my ambition, the cause of my existence and its content.

Of course, telling yourself such things doesn't make them true, and I was deeply upset that she had allowed me to take an apartment she refused to enter. But Brad and I had signed the lease and paid a deposit and furnished the apartment with pieces from relatives' attics, so we had to move in or lose a year's rent—something we couldn't afford. I made jokes and pretended I was happy; I kept insisting we would have fun. I did what I could with the apartment:

There wasn't much daylight in the place, but I set up an easel in one corner of the small room, and hung some powerful lamps above it. I put a small tottery table behind the easel for my paints. But in fact I painted only a few times. I blamed my neglect of “my art” on Brad, who complained about sleeping in a small room pervaded by the odor of turpentine. The truth was that for a long time I had been unhappy with what I was doing. I knew I had a strong sense of composition, and a good sense of color, but I could not get my hand to realize what I saw in my head. Maybe the fault lay in my ignorance of technique, a quality I inclined to underrate in those days. All my art teachers had praised me so easily, for any effort; none of them knew much about technique. I had an easy schoolgirl fame, and a deep grating fear that it was unearned. I packed up the paints and brushes in a fury with Brad, but I knew, and maybe he knew too, that my fury was not with him. I walked around the town and on impulse walked into Jimmy Minetta's Camera Shop and asked for a job, and got one. In those days, all film was not sent to photo labs, and I was to help take orders and do developing. I'd always liked photography, I told myself. Besides, what else did I have to do, now that school was out and I was not in any case going back, now that summer had arrived and Brad was working six days a week at his father's agency, now that I was four, five, six months pregnant, waiting, waiting, waiting for whatever future would descend upon me? I left the easel up, with an old painting of mine standing on it, but after Arden was born, I packed it away too, to make room for her cradle.