George drove out with me. He’d never been to Long Island before and attended to my brief history of the place with interest; he leaned back and relaxed, listening to my tape of the Brahms clarinet quintet. He rested his hand on top of mine, holding the gearshift. We smiled at each other without speaking.
As soon as I drove into the Long Island village with its huge shade trees and quiet streets, my body began to relax. My house, a seven-room cottage, was on an inlet off Gardiners Bay. It had a screened porch along the back; beyond that, the lawn extended to a dock. The house was surrounded by meadows and trees, so that I had no visible neighbors. By then I’d lost George. I unpacked the few things I’d brought out (including the leftover lamb shank from dinner the night before), then stripped off my clothes and threw myself into the water. After my swim, I sprawled naked on a chaise.
I lay there in the warm sun with my eyes closed and tried not to think about George. I tried not to feel the nervousness that had infected my entire body like a virus, the uncertainty and dread and fear that warred with my desire, my sense that he desired me.
My skin throbbed and my breasts ached. My body was clamorous, it tingled all over. I felt like a sick person whose body is crying out for water. Mine was crying out to be pressed against another body. I tried to escape into sleep, but I dreamed about George. Waking, I pulled myself up slowly. I felt like a horny adolescent. It was humiliating.
I sat up and, feeling chilled, pulled the towel around me and ran to the shower behind the garage. I stood there letting warm water pour over me, wondering if Molly could be right, if I had learned a Cinderella view of life as a child. I had always thought of myself as having been forged into steel by my early life. From the day I decided to take the scholarship to Mount Holyoke, I had seen myself as selfish and willful, a woman who succeeded because she refused to sacrifice for others. If I ever made sacrifices for my kids, it was because I preferred the result of the “sacrifice” to the result of not making it. For example, I preferred to work hard and write an extra novel so the kids could go to camp summers rather than hang around New York City, bored and maybe in trouble. That wasn’t a sacrifice; it was a choice. Still, I suppose my mother could have said the same about her life. Anyway, being willful and selfish seems to rule out having a soupy romantic view of life and love. Doesn’t it?
Maybe not.
N
ORMALLY, I SETTLE QUICKLY
into the different rhythm of my life in Sag Harbor. In the city, I work mornings and give my afternoons over to pleasure. After all, why else live in Manhattan? After lunch at home or out with a business associate or a friend, I go to a gallery, a museum, or an art exhibition. If I’m with a friend who loves window-shopping, we might walk down Lex or Madison, gazing in shop windows and occasionally buying something. Most nights, I meet friends to attend a concert or ballet or play or movie or lecture. I almost always have dinner out. My New York life is exactly as I had pictured it, dreamed it, back when I was seventeen and imagining a life not dominated by misery. It was packed with social and cultural stimuli, wonderfully rich if a little exhausting.
On Long Island, too, I spend my mornings writing, but then, before lunch, I always go for a swim—even in the rain. After lunch I garden or run errands: I have no assistant in Sag Harbor, so I do my own marketing, go to the dry cleaner, pick up books from the bookstore. I do not only my own errands but my own cooking. I could of course hire someone to do these things for me, but the whole point of being in the country is to do them myself and enjoy the luxury of being alone in my house. It’s a pleasure to touch the fresh vegetables at the farm stand with my own hands, to feel the firmness of eggplants and tomatoes, to smell the melons and cucumbers and basil. It’s lovely to prepare a fine meal and eat it with only a good book for company. I find my country life restful, and there is no problem keeping in touch with affairs in New York. My assistant, Lou, who is a wonder of efficiency and sweetness, is as close as the telephone. When she takes her month’s vacation, a friend of hers takes over.
I had instructed Lou to give George my Long Island number if he called while she was there, but I did not expect to hear from him right away—although it would have been nice.
Still, even without high expectations, I couldn’t settle down to my usual country routine. I couldn’t find a restful place in my mind. After years of experience, I usually could write even when I was upset; after Mark died, I was paralyzed and unable to write for only a month or so. But now I worked on the novel ploddingly. Though it was nearly finished, I couldn’t dredge up the slightest interest in my heroine or her plight. I had to force myself to sit down at the computer every morning—a far cry from my usual driven writerly self. My mind kept manufacturing scenes for a different narrative, one starring me and George. Unfortunately, I was still uncertain about the plotline and, above all, the conclusion of this narrative. So much depended on whether George was a hero or a villain: I had no sense of his motivation. And motivation, after all, is the only real difference between a hero and a villain. And here I was, after all these years, still unable to figure it out.
I would get up from my desk, throw myself on the chaise, and stare out at the trees. I’d lie in the warm sun after my swim and gaze out at the water, my body throbbing like a huge metronome.
Desire was constant in my life. I moved and walked in an erotic cloud. When I touched something, my hands tingled with the touching; I was keenly aware of the surfaces of things, the way you are when you are choosing a fabric. I felt the air around me, touching my body, my arms in my sleeveless blouse, my neck, kissing my face. I was a walking throb. This went on day and night. I could not sleep. I bought myself a sleeping mask. I took sleeping pills. I even got up and poured myself a gin and tonic one night. But my mind whirred on with these scenes, and nothing I did could stop it.
I kept seeing George and me, our mouths permanently swollen from kissing, full and soft as overripe plums. Our eyes were electrically connected; they set off sparks when their gaze met. Our short, shallow breathing was fast and uncontrollable. Our bodies were constantly aware of being alive, tingling with knowledge. George smelled musky, dusty, like dried peaches, and his damp skin felt oiled, perfumed. He leaned over and kissed my neck with his open mouth, and I wanted him to devour me.
It was really intolerable.
I sat on the chaise, sat so still I must have looked paralyzed. My hot heart, hotter body, felt familiar. You’d think I’d been in love often. Had I? As far as I could remember, I’d been in love with three of the four men I’d married, and with a few I didn’t marry. Yet all my marriages had had bitter endings except the one that wasn’t based in love. After all, when a loved man dies, it feels as bitter as his leaving you for someone else. I remember weeping to Molly after Mark died that I would never fall in love again, that I couldn’t bear being hurt that way again.
And here I was.
But in love was one thing; full of romantic delusions was another. I had no memory of such things, even from my adolescence. I never lolled in my room as a teenager, modeling new hairstyles in the mirror while the radio played one lovesick song after another. Tina and I didn’t even have a radio in our room—although I must admit the radio played constantly in the kitchen where we worked, and it offered strictly romantic music. That’s all there was in the forties, and it was enough for us: we loved Peggy Lee and June Christie, Frank Sinatra and Dick Haymes, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. The popular music of my era was all of unrequited love, lost love, broken hearts. It was steeped in nostalgia, as if, young as we were, we were already doomed to lose whatever love we found—as if loss of love was preordained.
But my first experience of so-called love and marriage was far from romantic. Comparing my actual romantic life with the romantic books I wrote was laughable. A joke.
After Mother’s funeral, after Merry and Tina went to New York with Susan, and Jerry went back to Bridgeport, I took a job at the doughnut shop—which was far less demanding than working in Mother’s bakery. In fact, the doughnut shop was luxurious by comparison. I worked eight hours a day, five days a week, and when my shift ended, I enjoyed the long walk home, knowing I was free to read or study or listen to the radio, that I didn’t still have to knead dough or ice cakes or decorate cookies or scrub down the porch. I was much alone that summer and often lay in bed wide awake, thrilled and terrified by the new sensation of having a room to myself and being alone in a big house. But being alone, being free, opened my mind to think about things I had never considered before.
Mother had had to mortgage the house when Father got sick. This upset her so much, it changed her posture: she never stood quite straight again. Like people in former ages, her family had prided itself on never being in debt, and she never stopped worrying about making the mortgage payment every month. It was more important to her even than food, which is why we so often had cake for dinner. And before she died, she had paid the mortgage off. It came to me that, sick as she was, she delayed her death until she could burn that note. I hated thinking this. I wished she’d kept herself alive to be with us and see us grow and enjoy us, not to pay off a mortgage—even though I know she did it for us.
This kind of thinking reinforced my already bad character: contrary to everything I’d been taught by my schooling or by the culture around me, I came to believe that self-sacrifice was worthless and oppressive, and selfishness a positive good. No matter how I turned our history over in my mind, I could not reach any other conclusion.
I kept such ideas to myself. I felt my sisters would have found them—and me—monstrous. Jerry would probably have stopped speaking to me. They all worshiped Mother and spoke of her as a saint. They would have pointed out, as Susan did, teary-eyed, that Mother’s worry and conscientiousness was responsible for our each getting $2,500 when the house was sold, that she had provided a head start for us, to set out in life. I wanted to tell them that I’d rather have had Momma. But I didn’t. Depressed as she was, Momma had been the only solid thing in my life. I missed her more than my sisters did, because I had had less anger at her than they (not that they admitted, or maybe even realized, it). I could love her because I’d gotten out of the bakery.
Jerry had used some of his inheritance to buy a car, and he returned several times over the summer, to clean out the house and the piled-up junk in the basement and garage. He took the few decent pieces of furniture back with him, saying he’d keep them until we had our own places and could claim what we wanted.
After the house was sold, I wrote the teachers at Millington High and told them about my inheritance, offering, in all gratitude, to repay them and relinquish future help. But they wrote back that I was now an orphan and in a most vulnerable position. So they would continue the monthly allowance, suggesting I put what they called my “tiny nest egg” in the bank. I was a little insulted at their calling a sum purchased by my mother’s lifeblood a tiny nest egg; it didn’t seem tiny to me. But I was also relieved. I thanked them and justified the situation by reminding myself that even with their help I had to work. I had to supplement their generous allowance in a time when textbooks cost as much as twelve dollars and a pair of shoes twenty dollars!
At the end of August, the family gathered again, at Jerry’s wedding to Delia Urtnowski. The house had been sold and almost emptied, and my sisters had rid Susan’s apartment of its last roommate and were happily lodged together in New York, all with secretarial jobs. In the middle of September, I packed my bags. Jerry came back to Millington to see me off—he was such a sweetheart! After taking me to the train station, he would put the last bits of furniture out for the trash collectors and lock up the house for the final time. Alone, I boarded the train for Boston, where I would get the bus to school. I went back holding myself very still: I felt that moving fast or hard would break something delicate inside me.
At school, I became even more aloof and superior than I had been. Everyone was used to me that way and ignored it. The truth was, I always felt like a spy—a mole—at Mount Holyoke. I was constantly expecting to be discovered for what I was: a person who knew nothing. Most of my classmates came from well-to-do or even rich families. I had nothing in common with them, and I knew they looked down on my manners and my clothes. I could tell. I felt vulnerable being so much younger than everyone else, such a baby: I had started college at an immature sixteen to everyone else’s eighteen. I was still babyish compared to the others. And now I felt utterly alone in the world.
But I wasn’t. My family worried about me, and called or wrote regularly. They all invited me for holidays. It was decided that I’d go to Jerry’s for Thanksgiving and spend Christmas in New York. Jerry even came to pick me up and drive me to his house.
Jerry and Delia had a five-room apartment on the second floor of a three-story clapboard house, which they entered by an outdoor wooden staircase. Delia called the second bedroom her sewing room; there I slept comfortably on a daybed, sharing the bathroom with only two other people—a luxury for me. Delia and Jerry were sweet and generous, but Bridgeport was boring. So was Delia’s family, with whom we spent Thanksgiving. In addition to Delia’s parents, there were her two brothers and their wives and kids, her sister and her husband and children. The women cooked all day long. In our family, we never really celebrated Thanksgiving; cooking was what we did on workdays, so on holidays we opened cans of Spam, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and peas to approximate the traditional meal. I was nearly thirty before I learned that some people enjoy cooking. The men sat in the Urtnowskis’ little living room—they called it the front room—crowded around a box with a glass front called television. It was boring too; it showed women on skates pushing each other around and fat men wrestling.