“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m like everyone else: I love to talk about other people. Not
peoples
. People I know, people close to me—people who drive me crazy. But I feel as if I’m using my family up. My father was killed before I was born; one brother and one mom make for pretty slim pickings. Honestly, Franklin, maybe we should have a kid just to have something else to talk about.”
“Now
that
,” you clanged the spinach pan in the sink, “is frivolous.”
I stayed your hand. “It’s not. What we talk about is what we think about, is what our lives are about. I’m not sure I want to spend mine looking over my shoulder at a generation whose lineage I’m personally helping to truncate. There’s something nihilistic about not having children, Franklin. As if you don’t believe in the whole human
thing
. If everyone followed our lead, the species would disappear in a hundred years.”
“Get out,” you jeered. “Nobody has kids to perpetuate the species.”
“Maybe not consciously. But it’s only been since about 1960 that we’ve been able to decide without joining a nunnery. Besides, after nights like this, there might be poetic justice in having grown kids talking for hours to their friends about
me
.”
How we shelter ourselves! For the prospect of such scrutiny clearly appealed to me.
Wasn’t Mom pretty? Wasn’t Mom brave? Gosh, she went to all those scary countries all by herself!
These flashes of my children’s late-night meditations on their mother were gauzy with the very adoration so signally absent from my savage dissection of my own mother. Try,
Isn’t Mom pretentious? Isn’t her nose huge? And those travel guides she grinds out are sooooo boooooring.
Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.
Yet even in retrospect this craving for “something else to talk about” seems far from frivolous. Indeed, I may have first been enticed into the notion of giving pregnancy a go by these tempting little imaginative packages like movie previews: of opening the front door to the boy on whom my daughter (I confess I always imagined a daughter) has her first crush, soothing his awkwardness with easy banter, and assessing him endlessly—playfully, ruthlessly—once he is gone. My yearning to stay up late with Eileen and Belmont for once ruminating about young people whose lives lay before them—who made
new
stories, about which I would have
new
opinions, and whose fabric was not threadbare from retelling—was real enough, it wasn’t flip.
Oh, but it never entered my head what, once I was finally provided my coveted fresh subject matter, I would have to say. Much less could I foresee the aching
O
. Henry irony that in lighting upon my consuming new topic of conversation, I would lose the man that I most wanted to talk to.
November 28, 2000
Dear Franklin,
This carnival in Florida shows no signs of picking up stakes. The office is up in arms about some state official who wears a lot of makeup, and a number of my overwrought coworkers are predicting a “constitutional crisis.” Although I haven’t followed the details, I doubt that. What strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter when before they ate in silence is not how imperiled they feel, but how safe. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.
But having come so close to extermination within living memory (I know you’re tired of hearing about it), few Armenian Americans share their compatriots’ smug sense of security. The very numerics of my own life are apocalyptic. I was born in August 1945, when the spoors of two poisonous mushrooms gave us all a cautionary foretaste of hell. Kevin himself was born during the anxious countdown to 1984—much feared, you’ll recall; though I scoffed at folks who took George Orwell’s arbitrary title to heart, those digits did usher in an era of tyranny for me.
Thursday
itself took place in 1999, a year widely mooted beforehand as the end of the world. And wasn’t it.
Since I last wrote, I’ve been rooting around in my mental attic for my original reservations about motherhood. I do recall a tumult of fears, though all the wrong ones. Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, “son might turn out killer” would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:
2. Less time just the two of us. (Try
no
time just the two of us.)
3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid’s insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.)
4. Turning into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn’t say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)
5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I’m a pig.)
6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note
curtailment
. Not
conclusion
.)
7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)
8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend’s five-year-old in the room.)
9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew—every woman, too, which is depressing—would take me less seriously.)
10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother could feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter’s life is hideous, too.)
Those, as best I can recall, are the pygmy misgivings I weighed beforehand, and I’ve tried not to contaminate their dumbfounding naïveté with what actually happened. Clearly, the reasons to remain barren—and what a devastating word—were all petty inconveniences and trifling sacrifices. They were selfish and mean and small-minded, so that anyone compiling such a catalogue who still chose to retain her tidy, airless, static, dead-end, desiccated family-free life was not only short-sighted but a terrible person.
Yet as I contemplate that list now it strikes me that, however damning, the conventional reservations about parenthood are practical. After all, now that children don’t till your fields or take you in when you’re incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it’s amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all. By contrast, love, story, content, faith in the human “thing”—the modern incentives are like dirigibles, immense, floating, and few; optimistic, largehearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded.
For years I’d been awaiting that overriding urge I’d always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers’ strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (
With child:
There’s a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgment that for nine months you have company wherever you go.
Pregnant
, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: “I’m
pregnant
.” I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table—pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend—forcing herself to blurt out her mother’s deepest fear.)
Whatever the trigger, it never entered my system, and that made me feel cheated. When I hadn’t gone into maternal heat by my mid-thirties, I worried that there was something wrong with me, something missing. By the time I gave birth to Kevin at thirty-seven, I had begun to anguish over whether, by not simply accepting this defect, I had amplified an incidental, perhaps merely chemical deficiency into a flaw of Shakespearean proportions.
So what finally pulled me off the fence? You, for starters. For if
we
were happy, you weren’t, not quite, and I must have known that. There was a hole in your life that I couldn’t quite fill. You had work, and it suited you. Nosing into undiscovered stables and armories, searching out a field that had to be edged with a split-rail fence and sport a cherry-red silo and black-and-white cows (Kraft—whose cheese-food slices were made with “real milk”), you made your own hours, your own vista. You liked location scouting. But you didn’t love it. Your passion was for people, Franklin. So when I saw you playing with Brian’s children, nuzzling them with monkey puppets and admiring their wash-off tattoos, I yearned to provide you opportunity for the ardor that I myself once found in A Wing and a Prayer—or, as you would say, AWAP.
I remember once you tried to express, haltingly, what was not like you; not the sentiment, not the language. You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself. You feared that too much examination could bruise the feelings, like the well-meaning but brutish handling of a salamander by big, clumsy hands.
We were in bed, still in that vaulting Tribeca loft whose creaky handworked elevator was forever breaking down. Cavernous, sifting with dust, undifferentiated into civilized cubicles with end tables, the loft always reminded me of the private hideout my brother and I had fashioned from corrugated iron in Racine. You and I had made love, and I was just swooning off into sleep when I sat bolt upright. I had to catch a plane for Madrid in ten hours’ time and had forgotten to set the alarm. Once I’d adjusted the clock, I noticed you were on your back. Your eyes were open.
“What is it?”
You sighed. “I don’t know how you do it.” As I nestled back to bask in another paean to my amazing adventurousness and courage, you must have sensed my mistake, for you added hastily, “Leave. Leave all the time for so long. Leave
me
.”
“But I don’t like to.”
“I wonder.”
“Franklin, I didn’t contrive my company to escape your clutches. Don’t forget, it predates you.”
“Oh, I could hardly forget that.”
“It’s my job!”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
I sat up. “Are you—”
“I’m not.” You pressed me gently back down; this was not going as you planned, and you had, I could tell, planned it. You rolled over to place your elbows on either side of me and touched your forehead, briefly, to mine. “I’m not trying to take your series away. I know how much it means to you. That’s the trouble. The other way around, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get up tomorrow to fly to Madrid and try to discourage you from meeting me at the airport three weeks later. Maybe once or twice. Not over and over.”
“You could if you had to.”
“Eva. You know and I know. You don’t have to.”
I twisted. You were so close up; I felt hot, and, between your elbows, caged. “We’ve been through this—”
“Not often. Your travel guides are a runaway success. You could hire college students to do all the grubbing around in flophouses that you do yourself. They already do most of your research, don’t they?”
I was vexed; I’d been through this. “If I don’t keep tabs on them, they cheat. They say they’ve confirmed that a listing is still good, and don’t bother and go get slammed. Later it turns out the B&B has changed hands and is riddled with lice, or it’s moved to a new location. I get complaints from cross-country cyclists who have ridden a hundred miles to find an insurance office instead of a hard-earned bed. They’re furious, as they should be. And without the boss lady looking over their shoulder, some of those students will take kickbacks. AWAP’s most valuable asset is its reputation—”
“You could hire someone else to do spot checks, too. So you’re going to Madrid tomorrow because you want to. There’s nothing awful about that except that I wouldn’t, and I couldn’t. You know that when you’re gone I think about you all the time? On the hour I think about what you’re eating, who you’re meeting—”
“But I think about you, too!”
You laughed, and the chuckle was congenial; you weren’t trying to pick a fight. You released me, rolling onto your back. “Horseshit, Eva. You think about whether the falafel stand on the corner will last through the next update, and how to describe the color of the sky. Fine. But in that case, you must feel differently about me than I do about you. That’s all I’m getting at.”
“Are you seriously claiming that I don’t love you as much?”
“You don’t love me in the same way. It has nothing to do with degree. There’s something—you save out,” you groped. “Maybe I envy that. It’s like a reserve tank or something. You walk out of here, and this other source kicks in. You putter around Europe, or Malaysia, until it finally runs low and you come home.”