The Atomic Weight of Love (16 page)

While I worked about the house, I kept the radio on for company, listened to Dinah Shore singing “Buttons and Bows,” danced through my dusting with Perry Como, and dreamed of Chicago nightclubs while swaying to Kay Kayser’s “Slow Boat to China.”

Cornell had written officially to withdraw its offer, which in the end was no surprise to me. I suppose I had delayed the inevitable for as long as I could. Still, it was hard seeing what felt like a rejection spelled out in businesslike print. Resigned, I chose to see the new house as a fresh start, and I vowed to be a better wife, to create a new start for Alden and me. Like the crow with the withered foot, I would adapt.

“HEY, NEIGHBOR!”
A WOMAN
crossed the street to where I knelt in the front yard, planting white and magenta pansies in a small bed Alden had spaded for me the evening before. “I’m June, June Jacobsen,” she said as she crossed the lawn. “Bob and I live across the street. Bob leads the chemistry division.”

“Hi,” I said, brushing dirt from my knees. “Meridian.”

“You’re a gardener?”

“Barely,” I said, “but I saw these at the hardware store, and they looked so cheerful. I love the faces of pansies.”

“My father was a botanist, so I come by it naturally.”

“Maybe you can give me some tips?” I’d written to Mother, but her gardening expertise applied to Pennsylvania, not the high-altitude desert.

“Watch for late frosts, this time of year. Wait for May for more fragile plantings, to be on the safe side. And some things just don’t do well in this altitude. I’m still figuring that out, but I have a logbook, and I can keep you posted, let you know what plant species simply won’t work. Did you use any soil additives?” June bent and pinched the sandy soil. “The organic composition of our soil is inadequate.”

“No. I didn’t know.”

“I have a master’s in chemistry.”

“Birds are what I know.”

She stood and shaded her eyes with her hand. “I’ve got a few experiments running so I that can figure out what organic matter makes the best addition to our soil. Organic matter improves both drainage and aeration and also allows better root development. Liberal amounts of organic matter help sandy soil hold water and nutrients,” June said, and I felt transported back to the classroom.

“All right then,” I said, although she’d already turned back toward her house, was leaving. “Good to meet you,” I added pointlessly.

THE FIRST YEAR IN
our new home passed quickly. Between establishing a home and keeping up with my crow studies, I managed to keep regret at arm’s length most of the time. Alden sent Mother a ticket, and in the spring of 1949 we met her at the train station in Lamy. I hadn’t seen Mother in a few years—not since my graduation. Mother had been thirty-five when she had me, and she was sixty when she came to New Mexico. In my photo album she stands on the platform wearing her sensible black low-heeled pumps and a lavender cotton dress she’d stubbornly stitched by hand after her sewing machine broke. Painted on the side of the Pullman car behind her are the words
RIO GRANDE VALLEY
.

Other photos show her on the climb to the mesa-top site of the Tsankawi Pueblo ruins, where she walks the narrow troughs worn into the white rock by thousands of Indian footsteps. Laughing, she is wedged in between two immovable chunks of rock. How uncomplaining she was about our taking her on a hike in her dress shoes, sand and sharp pebbles sifting into them with each step.

In another photo she balances on a wooden ladder in Bandelier, the dark rectangular opening to an ancient Indian lodge framing her beautiful white hair. Her shoulders in her black wool coat are hunched, her hands grip the side rails of the ladder, and looking at that photograph now I see her fear—the fear I had not seen back then. Maybe I couldn’t acknowledge that my mother could be fearful, so great was my need to siphon strength from her.

“YOU’RE SO UNHAPPY.” MOTHER
and I were sitting on a blanket on a green expanse of lawn outside of Fuller Lodge, near Ashley Pond. She’d made fried chicken the night before, and we enjoyed a lunch of cold chicken and her German potato salad, licking the grease from our fingers. Alden was at work, and it was the day before we were to take Mother to Lamy for her return to Pennsylvania.

“What’s the matter?” she tried again, this time putting her hand about my ankle, just above my bobby sock. I saw with some surprise that the skin on the back of her hand had become thinner than I remembered, with a scattering of dark age spots.

Where to start? What to say?
How much to reveal without compromising Alden, without destroying her good opinion of him?

“Are you lonely, is that it?”

“Sometimes, yes,” I said, my voice surprising me when it broke. I took a deep breath. “I’m lonelier when he’s home than when he’s at work. I’m lonelier with him than I am without him.”

She tightened her grip on my ankle. “But you have your friend Belle. I like her, even if she is a little wild. Still,” she said, sighing, “I know that’s not what you mean.” After a couple of minutes of silence, she released my ankle and brushed crumbs from her lap. “Maybe every marriage has those quiet, lonely times. I don’t know,” she said. “There were times when your father and I barely spoke, when we lived largely in silence. Those times always passed.”

“But Alden and I used to talk all of the time. It was everything to me.” Then I thought for a few seconds, decided I should reassure her before she left town. “We’ll get it back, Mother. I’m sure you’re right. Maybe it’s just one of those lulls. I just have to try harder. To be happy, I mean.”

We watched children picnicking with their mother on a rectangle of bright yellow tablecloth that floated like a magic carpet on the green lawn. The girls’ dresses lifted to reveal the edges of frilly white petticoats when they ran.

Mother scooted behind me, began braiding my hair into one long tail. “Remember when you wanted to go to Girl Scout camp?” she asked. “After your father died. I told you we didn’t have the money.”

“And you let me try; you let me earn it. Mrs. Anthony’s sheets!” I said, remembering ironing the neighbor’s laundry for a dime.

“You were a determined little girl,” Mother said. “And then once you got to camp, you convinced them to let you stay on for a second week, as a scholarship girl.”

“We’d sit around the fire at night, listening to the common nighthawks as they dived in the air above us,” I smiled. “And I taught myself to swim in the giant scooped-out swimming hole. In the mornings, I’d get up before the other girls and lie in the dew to watch white-tailed deer graze in the wet grass.”

“You learned you could accomplish things, if you set your mind to it.”

I remembered my pond-scented skin, how camp had solidified my love for wild places.

“I don’t know how to stop being angry with Alden.” I looked out across the grass to the shadows where robins hunted for worms. “How do I turn it back into love?”

“Oh, boys,” she sighed helplessly. I buried my head in her chest, smelled her talcum powder. I could feel her heartbeat against my forehead as I sheltered in my mother’s arms.

AS A THANK-YOU
FOR
the visit, Mother sent me a copy of
The Perfect Hostess
, a publication of the Aluminum Cooking Utensil Company. It was a slim volume, with a purple cover featuring an orchid held fast by a pink ribbon. The table of contents included “Menus With Correct Settings,” “Company Meals,” “After-Sports Parties,” and “Summer Frolics.” There were photos of centerpieces the perfect hostess could create for a musical party, graduations, housewarmings. Along with it, she sent a letter.

June 18, 1949

Dear Daughter,

Thank you for showing me your beautiful home, your enchanting New Mexico. It is wild, and so very different from everything I’ve ever known. I think of you, so far from me in distance but never far from my heart.

I don’t know Alden well, but I think you are well suited in many ways. He is as smart as you are. You need a man who is as smart as you are, and there can’t be many of those. I know he loves you. He can give you security. He has a good job, an important job. Maybe I didn’t teach you enough about how couples get along or about the necessary compromises wives must make. Love does not stay romantic. It changes. Sometimes it’s even boring.

No one has all the answers, although I encourage you to go to church, talk to a pastor. Pray for guidance and patience. Don’t ask Alden to give meaning to your life. Your meaning will be found in children, in making a good home, in supporting your husband. I wanted for you to have your studies, and you got that in Chicago—you also found Alden in Chicago, and I believe that was a good thing. There must be things other than birds that make you happy. Find those things.

I pray for you, Meri. You can do this.

Love, Mother

Mother’s letter led me to realize something: love, the marrow of a relationship, was not something Alden and I could learn in a classroom or comprehend by reading a textbook. Neither of us was particularly well suited to deciphering the other’s subtle clues, to understanding motivations and intentions. What had initially held me to Alden—his intellectual prowess—was not what would hold us together in the long term. And, given Alden’s particularly inept grasp of social graces, the majority of the work would be mine to carry.

Spurred by my new determination, I decided to experiment with the lessons offered by
The Perfect Hostess
. I began with the Chinese theme from the book’s “Round the World Menus.” I made invitations with pretend Chinese lettering and sent them to three of Alden’s fellow physicists and their wives. In Santa Fe, I found a Simplicity pattern for a belted dress with capped sleeves and a wide, pointed collar, and I bought yardage of green polka-dotted rayon. I also sewed muslin placemats and stenciled Chinese symbols in black on dinner napkins. I even dusted off the punch bowl Mrs. Hudson had given us as a wedding gift. It took me weeks to get ready. When I asked Alden for five dollars extra so that I could go to Santa Fe to find ingredients such as duck gizzard for Ap Chen and Pei Tan, or preserved eggs, he said: “Meri, I’m glad you’ve found a project, but let’s not build the Great Wall of China.” Still, he opened his wallet.

I was relieved when the day of the party arrived, because it was the only thing that finally stopped me from incessant preparations and daily improvements upon those preparations. At one point, Alden teased that he was afraid he’d come home and find me painting the walls or reupholstering the chairs, just to be sure the house was absolutely perfect. A half hour before the guests arrived, I tottered about in my new black Naturalizer heels—the ones that featured a decorative swirl of leather curling gently over each open toe. It was fun, for a change, to dress up and feel feminine. Alden emerged from the bedroom wearing his bolo tie with the turquoise and red coral stones.

“I didn’t get the crease right on your khakis,” I said, inspecting him.

“Let it go, Meri.”

“Are you going to wear your sports coat?”

“I’ll just end up taking it off.”

“Well, the others will have theirs.”

“All right, all right.” He disappeared into the bedroom.

Georgia Sykes and her husband Gus were short, stocky—they looked like brother and sister, with bulbous eyes behind thick eyeglasses.
Well, at least they found each other
, I thought, taking Gus’s jacket and admiring his plain, highly-polished silver belt buckle. I stole a look at Bernadette Lambert’s thick ankles, and I thought about Belle’s ankle bracelet, the one she’d bought after seeing the way Fred MacMurray looked at Barbara Stanwyck in
Double Indemnity
.

After dinner, the women gathered on the couch with their coffee while the men stood admiring Alden’s new Polaroid Land Camera. I could hear Alden detailing the steps in the process, the chemicals and the magic of near-immediate photographic results. The other physicists peppered Alden with questions and posited various theories as to how the camera could be improved.

“Beverly is how old now?” Louise Hamilton asked Georgia.

“Six. Tommy’s three and a half. And yours?”

“Didi’s seven, if you can believe that. Donny’s five. Eve is two.”

Bernadette, whose cologne was a perfect, light floral scent I could not identify, chimed in with her children’s ages, and then the three of them bustled off to the bedroom to grab their purses so that they could share snapshots. I sat suspended in Alden’s chair, trying to look comfortable until they returned.

“Oh, Meri, you have to see,” Louise said, scrunching next to me in the chair. “Isn’t Didi just cute as a button? Here she is at Christmas, opening gifts from Santa.”

“What a sweet little velvet dress!” I said.

“We bought it at Macy’s when we were in New York. It’s the most gorgeous shade of crimson. But,” Louise fingered the silver pin on her blouse, a silhouette of a Hopi flute player. She raised her eyebrows to the other women, who stood around the chair looking over our shoulders, and continued, “The maid nearly ruined the dress.”

“She didn’t try to iron it!” Georgia said, smoothing the cotton of her sky-blue dress. Her belt was cinched too tight, and soft rolls of fat spilled over.

“She did.” Louise grimaced. “And, she used spray starch. On a velvet dress!”

“Oh, no!”

“Well, what can you expect,” Louise gestured with a hand. “They live in such poverty and ignorance on that pueblo.”

“You have to keep a careful eye on them. My girl, Tomasita, she scorched my silk blouse.”

“No!”

“How about you, Meri? Who’s your maid?”

“I don’t have a maid.”

“But how do you manage?” Louise asked.

“She doesn’t have children,” Bernadette said. “But when you do—
hoo!
” she sang, and patted my knee. “Look out! Before we go, I’ll leave you my maid’s number, just in case.”