The Breakdown Lane

  Julieanne, with one hand

  Dismisses my brown, brown study,

  Replaces me, a sloping boy, with a rain-drenched man,

  Upright, clean, open to violent blue, purple, ruddy hue

  Unused to passion, fearful and yet true,

  With one offhand hand, waved by

  Julieanne.

  Has anyone past college age ever used the word hue?

  Well, good God, how could I fail to fall in love with a boy who was not only assured of earning a good living, but had also already formally designated me his muse? Business management was transparent, if uninspiring, to Leo. He understood and committed things to memory that were impenetrable to his classmates. And he already had a decent business going, ghostwriting term papers.

  On fire, burning through the racks of Trojans, we waited until the following fall, enduring a hideous summer apart. Then, with our parents’ bemused permission, I married the boy who described himself as “the only Jew from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.”

  I was twenty. Leo, who’d had to take fewer class hours to have time to earn out his scholarship, was nearly twenty-five. Think of that. Twenty. Barely. Had our life been normal, I don’t know if I’d have let my son Gabe go to Florida on a road trip at twenty, much less get married. Well, maybe a road trip to Florida. But why did our parents permit this? Were they nuts? Was it a more innocent or perhaps not so tarnished time of the world?

  Were we just so evidently right for each other?

  The comedy of our parents’ meeting was rich.

  Hannah and Gabe Steiner Sr., funereally attired in black wool, in the month of June, came to dinner. They were as properly impressed with Ambrose and Julia Gillis as my parents’ droit de seigneur required. They gazed around my parents’ tenth-floor (of ten), ten-room flat at the Venecia, overlooking Central Park West, with the affect of people who feared they might at any moment be arrested. But after three glasses of champagne, my father grew historically and histrionically teary over Hannah’s simple description of the disappearance of her entire family into the maw of Buchenwald, their rescue, at the eleventh hour, arranged by the wealthy family of a German priest who’d been a boyhood pal of Hannah’s father so captured Dad with its poignancy that I was terrified he would get up and start singing “Sunrise, Sunset.”

  “I’ve always admired the chosen people,” Father intoned, as Leo and I tried to fold ourselves into a corner of a loveseat.

  “We keep hoping the Lord will admire the Lutherans,” Gabe Senior told him. They exchanged cigars.

  The Steiners’ adoration of their beloved, excellent, and only boy was extravagant. My parents clearly considered me a pearl beyond price. My sister, Janey, thought Leo delectably ethnic, though he truly was anything but. He said he’d never even owned a yarmulke. Despite their antecedents, the Steiners were the most casual of Jews, my parents the merest literary Episcopalians, fond of quoting Saint Luke at Christmas. For holiday fare, both families preferred Chinese food. There was no question of a clash of values. In short, we went from dinner to a match. Six weeks later, at Thanksgiving break, we left my parents’ apartment for a six-day sail in the Seychelles—my parents’ wedding gift—and then set up housekeeping in a crummy apartment of our own, but with good towels and wineglasses.

  We didn’t let our parents down and ruin our educations. We were a good girl and boy. Much as we craved to dispense with the rubbers and mingle chromosomes, we dutifully withheld. When a concoction of the Pill that didn’t make me blotchy and fat came along, we got better at pleasing each other’s bodies. There never was a question about pleasing each other’s minds. Leo and I played Bartlett’s in bed, and he could match me quote for quote. We saved our nickels and backpacked in Greece, swam naked in the Aegean. Leo held and looked at the circle of my white breasts, in the surrounding topography of brown and blondest blonde, as though he’d discovered uranium. I felt ever so…beyond the other little girls on campus. I wasn’t pinned. I was married.

  Leo’s first job was at a huge insurance firm in Chicago. I sat smiling blondly as Leo sucked down the indignity of juniority at American Liability Trust. But Leo was a comer.

  “It’s a six-day week, of course, son,” said Mr. Warren, aged by then approximately one hundred and ten, as Leo was promoted from amanuensis to human being within the firm’s hierarchy. “And the occasional Sunday. We pride ourselves on being a gentler firm. We know people have family lives. Everyone is out the door by eight every night, latest.”

  I got work copyediting at the Sun-Times, the graveyard shift, reserved for the desperate, the daylight drunk, and the constitutionally bizarre. And so Leo worked fourteen-hour days, and I worked fourteen-hour nights.

  Neither of us was the perfect mate. Leo slept like the dead until three in the afternoon on Saturdays while I sat around and carped that we never went to the Art Institute. He asked his parents along on our vacation to the firm’s condo at Disney World, and gave them the master bedroom. We went from being bunnies who could wiggle on any horizontal space in Colorado to the world’s youngest celibates. I was mad at Leo for loving fucking insurance settlements instead of fucking the loving me. I got eyes for a golf writer. Once, during one of Leo’s business jaunts, I let the writer sit in my car and kiss me, the transgression strictly above the waist and outside the blouse. But it scared me. It was a sign that Leo and I were ready to get on with the next step. I still loved the rain-drenched man.

  There are times, and I would never tell Gabe this, that I still do.

  In any case, I wanted a life that felt more substantial. Sheboygan provided that through a double whammy, luck in disguise. Even now, I don’t regret it.

  Leo’s parents were still running the five-and-dime on Pine Street when Grandpa Steiner got prostate cancer. Despite the hopeful prognosis, Grandma Steiner was dumbstruck with fear. Steiner’s Sundries went to hell. Grandpa’s treatments wore him transparent. It was time for Leo to act like the knight in armor on his company’s letterhead. For his family, Leo was the insurance policy. But he had to sell me on Wisconsin: the quality of the schools, the beauty of the north woods a few hours away, the cost of living well, the chance to put Leo’s degree to work for us, not for Mr. Warren. The Steiners were willing to do anything to save the store—the equivalent, to them, of Tara.

  Just before we made the decision to move, we spent our tenth anniversary in St. Lucia. I came home dive certified, second-degree burned, and certifiably pregnant. That sealed the deal. There was the chance for the embryo we began to call A. Gabriel Steiner (Ambrose for my father, a nod we’d never use as a name) to grow up safe and clean, near his nicer grandparents. In Chicago, it would have been a major catastrophe, this being a time in the world when firing a pregnant woman was not considered an outrage but common sense. In Wisconsin, where we could live on more for less, I could help out as Leo phased out the racks of kite strings and boxes of checkers and phased in a picture-framing section, more Hallmark-type collectibles, and classier local crafts—making a store into a “shoppe.”

  The new arrival was a congenial part of the general game plan. I felt more part of a family than I ever had at home. Always having liked Hannah and Gabe, I grew to love them.

  Grandpa got well. Business soared. Gabe was born. The Steiners were all but ready to host a ticker-tape parade.

  But, then, I lost my mind.

  Staying home with your baby wasn’t “done” then, by women such as I. After giving him a good start, I was expected to turn Gabe over to the kindly moonbeams at someplace called the Red Giraffe or the Little Caboose. What I hadn’t counted on was the volcanic quality of love that would overawe me when he finally emerged, limp and gray as a wet muskrat, after thirty hours of mind-altering back labor. In the early 1980s, people gave the slant eye to anyone who required a whole aspirin during labor; they’d see your one-inch episiotomy and raise you one. I was spent, and so was Gabe, barely able to mewl. When the big, brusque Swedish nurses slapped an oxygen mask over his face, I roared like a r
everse Medea at their offhand treatment of my morsel, the only being on earth who needed only me. I never wanted to leave him, never wanted him to grow up. By the time he was two months old, I was already able to make myself cry at the thought of missing him for eight hours, and so I hadn’t done a thing about the Little Caboose. Grandma Hannah, though her eyesight was poor, was as strong as a mustang. She stepped in gratis, while I churned out a couple of successful (but theoretical) magazine articles on getting in shape after pregnancy, the importance of being in shape before pregnancy, and the ease of delivery afforded by…guess what? Being in shape during pregnancy.

  Leo, however, was wondering, and finally asking, why are we eating variations on rice pilaf every night, Jules? Why are we not the two-income household we planned—as in the kind of people who could buy a house? Still, life remained mostly genial. Gabe Senior and Hannah bought a (modest but cute) cottage in Door County, where we often went on weekends, and “went in” on a condo in Sarasota with their best friends, Leo’s godparents.

  Then, quite suddenly, the Steiners’ “shoppe” went belly up, victim to creeping strip-mallism.

  Instantly, Leo took advantage of the prime location and sold it. Shocked at the worth of their property, the Steiners retired, Gabe Senior (never idle) began to fool with a little stock-marketeering. They virtuously shared their profits with us so we could, as Hannah liked to say, “put something by.”

  Leo was still a genius.

  We put a down payment on a postwar two-flat so huge it was actually two complete houses, slapped one on top of the other. We had four nice bedrooms and a little corner that Leo and I used as an office. We immediately rented the upper floor to a Danish couple, Liesel and Klaus, professors in the Department of Entomology at Wisconsin State, who so often flew off to this or that bug-infested paradise they were practically benign ghosts who paid our mortgage. They had three big bedrooms—one of which they used as a lab. Leo often said he was glad they studied bugs instead of tropical diseases.

  Then, Leo decided to spring one on me. He was going to use part of what we’d “put by” to go to law school at Marquette. Unemployed and hoping to stay that way, I wanted to kick him in the knee, but he quite rightly pointed out that, with a law degree and an MBA, he’d be even more marketable.

  “Jules,” he added, “now you have to get some kind of job. We’re not going to be able to afford his checkups.”

  “You know,” I’d respond, “did you ever think that with both the degrees you’re going to have, you could probably be an FBI agent?”

  “Jules,” he’d steer me back, but sweetly, “I know you don’t want to leave him.”

  “I don’t want to leave him. I think I should nurse him at least a year, and—”

  “Even a job share with somebody would help. Get partial benefits.”

  “We can go to the student health service.”

  “It’s in Milwaukee, Julie. It’s thirty miles away.”

  I knew he was right. If it hadn’t been for Liesel and Klaus, and the scholarship Leo got, we’d have been living on the rice without the peas.

  I became a temp. The less said about this, the better. Leo went to the expedited program for grad students with previous advanced degrees, nights and right through the summers.

  And then.

  I was nursing and, of course, impregnable.

  Theoretically.

  The Packers were in the playoffs. Everyone in town went crazy, and so did we.

  Hannah Caroline was the extra point.

  Two infants did have the effect of making me long for any extended conversation that didn’t include bowel movements. I tried to nurse them both, fighting to keep my weight up with lots of beer and cheese curds, nevertheless eventually looking like a lumpy and yet malnourished alcoholic. And though Leo did finally get his degree (summa, of course), the importance of my getting a job was real-life necessity, well beyond political theory.

  A law student Leo met brought her two-year-old to our house and took over so I could get outside work. Caro was only six months old, and I’ve always thought this was why she never seemed to like me as well as Gabe did. Smacking together a résumé, with my stint at the Chicago Sun-Times in boldface, I headed down to the News-Clarion. Leo bought me a Donna Karan skirt and sweater for my job interview, coral-colored, and the first new thing except underwear I’d owned for two years. (My folks, ever pragmatic, had that Christmas given me a fox-and-leather jacket, which we sold to fix our Subaru.)

  I started out editing copy, and, gradually, I made it over to the features department, where the advice columnist, Marie Winton, had written “Winona Understands” for forty years, and had to be eighty-five if a day. I edited her column and, once in a while, when it was too cold for anyone else, got to write the occasional fifteen inches on the ice-sculpting derby.

  Marie was still answering letters about whether printed instead of handwritten thank-you cards were ever appropriate. The department’s secretary, Stella Lorenzo, the Hot Lips of the newsroom, and I were as signed to copy down numbers of emergency organizations from Al-Anon to Parents’ Respite and send them off on cards stamped, “With best hopes, Winona,” for every letter we got that didn’t involve etiquette.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” I would whisper to Stella, “she’s basically ignoring the real cries for help.”

  “Tell me about it,” Stella replied, rolling her huge, Annette Funicello eyes and lofting her big pile of corkscrew hair with a pencil. “I open letters every day from people who ask her whether their children might not be better off without them. Mother of Mercy, Julie, these women are thinking of killing themselves. I don’t know what to do.”

  Gathering my courage, I asked Marie, who wore a hat to work each day (ceremonially placing it on its stand before she sat down to her Smith Corona), “Are we doing enough for people who are in crisis, Miss Winton? Sending them a phone number doesn’t seem to be enough.”

  “I don’t deal with such nasty, personal matters, dear,” Marie told me. “My readers aren’t all that concerned with those kinds of things.” It was only my third or fourth month in the department, but, on the quiet, I started to answer a few of Winona’s worst-case correspondents, calling on Cathy Gleason, a friend and family therapist I’d met in a community production of Oklahoma! I became obsessed with the letters. The more I read, the more patterns emerged. All humans had their heads on backward. Bank tellers and brick layers. Secretaries and surgeons. I would despair, as I read, at how adults, with jobs and driver’s licenses, could exhibit such a stunning dearth of self-awareness. I started wondering how anybody ever stayed married or raised a kid or worked for ten years for bosses whose personalities strongly resembled Dr. Mengele’s.

  The whole phenomenon of writing a total stranger to ask for advice seemed, at first, eerie but deeply, overpoweringly poignant. But really, it’s not very different from pouring out your soul to a stranger on a plane. It’s a potent temptation. You’ll never have to eat your words.

  One day, Miss Winton went into the ladies’ room and never came out—well, not as Winona Understands. An hour later, one of the general-assignment reporters found her sitting properly, her smile melted, on the pot nearest the door. Ambulance summoned. Miss Winton carried off to Sheboygan Mercy, then to The Oaks. (We went to see her, Stella and I, bringing her handfuls of letters, and she answered them, although you couldn’t read what she wrote. We smilingly assured her we’d get them into the mail. The next time, we brought Stella’s Kmart coupons, and Miss Winton answered those, too.) The snappy new editor, Steve Cathcart, found out via Stella what I’d been up to. One morning, he stepped up to my gray metal desk, planted his feet Colossus-fashion before me, and said, “Gillis. I know you’ve been tinkering. We need to spice up the advice. Can you do that? Okay. Done. We’ll call it ‘Tell Julie.’”

  “No,” I said to him, stunned that I’d dared to contradict an editor, a new editor whom I barely knew. “It’s not about me, a person. I want to call it…‘Excess
Baggage.’ After all, that’s what these letters are, stuff people haul around that’s breaking their backs.”

  He liked it!

  Not even one anniversary at the paper and I was a columnist!

  I didn’t know then, but I do now, that this line of work is one everyone drifts into. I thought Cathcart was impressed by my sense and sensibility. He later told me he figured that since I was a girl, I’d have empathy, and since I was my father’s daughter, I’d be able to write an English sentence. We are almost all women, except the MDs. And yet I never met an “agony aunt” (yes, we were called that fifty years ago and still are) who, at age twelve, said to herself, you know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be the next Dear Abby. Dear Abby probably didn’t even think that. Most of us were on our way to a psychology practice or some other kind of writing when we were caught and held by the sheer power of being asked and believed. There now are advisers for the young, the aged, for every affectional preference, for politicos, pet lovers, quilters, and gardeners. But we’re the foremothers, offering comfort over the faithless lover, the thankless child. Most of us have no more credentials than I did. And everyone has a pocket psychologist, like an ace in the hole, to help out. Cathy’s a family therapist whose own family, at that time, consisted only of her and her dill pickle of an Irish mother but she knew the ropes of loss and adjustment too. Cathy was gay, and I met her and her then sweetheart, Saren, and we instantly bonded. Cath loved the notion of spreading her gospel on sensitive relationship topics while hidden behind my semi-serious column photo. She once said advice columnists should have a 900-number: 1-900-AW-HONEY. When she and Saren parted—because Saren fell in love with a guy—I was that hotline for Cath, and we grew closer, spending long nights with red licorice, red wine, and the Joni Mitchell Blue album, the universal soundtrack to women’s grief. I questioned, naively, how Cath could so utterly fall apart, gain weight, and spend whole Saturdays in bed, given that she had advanced degrees in knowing how to take care of herself in a period of mourning. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you,” she said to me once, “that knowing how you should be reacting to a loss has anything to do with how you react when it’s your loss.”