“It happens when parents aren’t getting along, when there’s a divorce, when things around them start to fall apart,” Anastasia says authoritatively. “My kids did that too. Took them a couple of years after the divorce to calm down.”
“Oh. And Jenny bursts into tears at the least thing….”
“Franny does that too, since Toni left.”
“Yeah. And other problems…school…things like that. Getting along with other kids.”
Anastasia murmurs sympathy, falls silent.
“I can’t figure out whether it was our moving around so much, or whether it was Justin, the way he treated them, the way he was. Is. But you think it’s our separation,” Joy concludes in a cold voice.
A spasm of irritation crosses Anastasia’s face. “No.” Irritation in the voice as well. “That’s not what I said. I think all of it contributes, anything that gives kids a sense of instability. There isn’t anything you can do about it, Joy. It isn’t your fault, for god’s sake! Most families experience problems, dislocations, crises at some point. Kids just have to learn to handle them, same as we do.”
“Oh.” Fists unclench. “Would you mind if I had another cigarette?”
Anastasia tosses the pack across the table to Joy’s lap. “Help yourself.”
“I’m smoking so much. I shouldn’t. But most days I only have two or three cigarettes, some days I don’t smoke at all. Like tomorrow, I won’t smoke at all. But then, in one night I can smoke a whole pack. I hope I’m not leaving you short.”
“I have another pack. You’re lucky not to be addicted the way I am.”
Joy’s face relaxes a little. “Yes, I am lucky.” She lights the cigarette, exhales deeply, lets her face smooth out further, and leans back luxuriously as if the nicotine were a shot of relaxant. “Anyway, I don’t know what Amy thought. She’s really terrific, Amy, but she…well, of course she adores Justin—he’s her only son. And Jane lives so far away, she’s lived in London for years. I don’t know what she sees when she looks at him—she probably still sees him the way he was, her baby, you know. She was sweet, she kissed me and hugged me when she left. But she probably left feeling that I wasn’t going to change my mind.
“So then Justin writes saying he wants a divorce, he doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life living in quarters, he doesn’t want a frigid wife and kids who treat him as if he were a monster, what have I been doing to them brainwashing them to hate him…stuff like that. Oh, it was awful! And he said since I was working and not staying home like a proper mother, he wasn’t going to support us anymore unless we all lived together and he gave me a month to decide.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, lighted another.
“It’s so ridiculous! The amount I earn is ludicrous, thirty-eight hundred a year, what can you do with that? I can’t even pay for our food, and after taxes it’s even less!”
Anastasia bursts out angrily, “Oh, that’s terrible! Why don’t you get a job in the city? Secretaries earn decent salaries in the city!”
“Oh, Anastasia! I’d be gone from seven in the morning until seven at night. I’d have to spend money on clothes and I’d have commutation….I just can’t be away from the kids that long, and in the end I probably wouldn’t have that much more money either!” Joy calms a bit. “It won’t be like this forever. In another two years, with the credits they’re giving me from Hilton Academy, I’ll have a degree, and I can teach. Teachers start at seven thousand. That’s why I’m putting myself through this ordeal.”
Anastasia grimaces. “It’s ironic. He blames you for working, saying it isn’t proper for a mother, and here you work for slave wages so that you can be a decent mother! They’ve always got you, coming and going. It’s always been like this for women!”
Joy stares at the redness on her thumbs. “My hands are all broken out,” she murmurs. “Nerves, I guess.”
Anastasia waves her hands; Joy tosses the cigarette pack back to her. She lights a cigarette. “Did you answer his letter?”
“Yes. I wrote that I could understand how he felt but I wasn’t going to move the kids again. And that I’d give him a divorce if that’s what he wanted, but he’d have to support his own children. And that I never tried to turn his children against him. You know, An, I never say a word against Justin! I never have, no matter what I felt. Even when he was strapping Jonathan for some little thing, and Jonny was only a baby, he was four or five, I didn’t say a word in front of them. I’ve always supported him!”
“That’s true.” At what cost, too: so brittle, edgy, you were.
“Anyway, I haven’t heard anything since I wrote. It was only last week. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But he didn’t send me the usual check on the first of the month—he only sent me a few hundred dollars. Not that he’s been sending me what he agreed to before I came. He says it costs him more to live than he thought—so the hell with us. It’s been tight ever since I bought the house. Don’t tell Mother! That’s why I got the job in the first place. And I figured things weren’t going to get better with him, so I started school—I can’t go on working for such measly wages. But this month I couldn’t pay the mortgage. I told him in my letter—after all, it’s his money we put down on this house, does he want to lose it? But I haven’t heard anything.”
“It may be time to hire a lawyer.”
“Oh, Anastasia, how would I pay him?”
Anastasia’s mouth is grim. “I know. Christ! Always the same fucking story! All they’re good for in the end.”
“What?”
“That’s what Mother thinks. She never says it straight out. That all men are really good for is to bring money into the house. That’s their entire function once they impregnate women.”
Joy lifts her head, laughs. “It’s true, she does believe that!” She wipes her eyes, sighs, folds her hands in her lap. “I hope she’s not right,” she says in a small voice.
“It’s what she thinks, it’s not how she lives. Dad is more to her than a paycheck.”
“That’s true.” Joy frowns. “At this point, though, I’d settle for a paycheck.”
The sound of a key turning in the front-door lock startles them. The door opens, both women focus on it, alert. Jonathan enters, his face pink and puffy. He glances into the living room, sees his mother and his aunt, turns away, and starts for the staircase.
“Jonathan! What is it? Why are you home so early?” Joy cries.
A muffled voice retreats up the staircase. “I got sent home. I got expelled!”
Joy rises, white-faced. Anastasia rises, moves to Joy, puts her hand on her arm. “Wait. Don’t get upset. It could be nothing. Arden was expelled a couple of times, just for a day or two, an argument with a teacher, lateness, they may just want him to apologize, it may not be serious.”
Joy turns her drained face toward her sister. She utters a tiny moan. “It doesn’t matter. It’s one more thing and god, I’m so tired. I can’t take any more. I don’t understand how I got into this mess. How did I, Anastasia?”
“By caring about the kids,” Anastasia says bitterly.
3
WOMEN: CARING ABOUT THE kids or ending up with them, somehow, willy-nilly, refusing to leave them. We cannot give them up. So rare is it that when we do newspapers report on it.
Like me, lying on my bed wondering why I ever got married to anyone at all, and my kids informing me sweetly that if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have them.
I scoffed, but that was cynicism. I adore them, I would not be without them. Then and now: I still…what can I call it? Not love. More than love and not excluding hate. My heart is tied to them with unbreakable cord. The cord is scarred, pulled thin, has been hacked at, but it does not break, it is a towrope stronger than what it is attached to, strong enough to rip apart the heart before it breaks.
There we were, the two of us, my mother’s daughters, not yet her shame (but that would come: “What did I do that both my daughters are divorced? No other children in the f
amily are divorced. Is it something about me?”). We were already bitter, even before we knew that Joy had only a few months left in her beloved house: Justin refused to pay for its upkeep and she had to sell it, give up the one prize she had garnered from what was it? fifteen, sixteen years of marriage.
Then she had to tell her mother. But Belle did not judge her, raise eyebrows, ask prying questions; she and Ed closed around Joy as if our family were celeries instead of carrots, clung to her tightly to keep her up, to keep her children up, helping her with money (all they could spare) and child tending and moving to a small apartment—Belle washing and drying all the dishes and putting them away in the tiny kitchen with its few cabinets (“Well, at least these have doors, Joy”), Ed putting up curtain rods and pictures, moving chairs from one side of the living room to the other as Joy, face strained, voice tense, trying to fit the old dream into a shrunken reality, says, “Well there will be less housework now,” and sells off whatever she owns that is of value. Within months, we are both recognizably, publicly, without men, raising children on our own.
But I knew already, that February, about Toni.
I know that Toni isn’t coming back, no matter what he says or thinks. I imagine he tells himself he is because otherwise he would lose all self-respect. He does not intend to be a bad person, he does not want to feel like a bad person. He is having fun and does not want self-contempt interfering with his pleasure. Toni is out in Hollywood writing a screenplay, earning hundreds and hundreds of dollars every week, driving his red Corvette, living in a rented house on the beach in Malibu, he’s on top of the world, his family is even speaking to him now, now, suddenly they’re proud of him.
Trouble brought Joy and me closer too. Finally one day she asks her question and gets answered truthfully: “How long did you say it takes to write a screenplay? He’s been gone an awfully long time.”
So I tell her. The truth. For the first time in our lives, we are telling each other the truth. Will this last?
I told her about the day Jay called and told Toni Paramount was picking up their option and would like him to write the screenplay. I’d just come back from a longish trip, and I was doing my laundry. I heard the phone ring and when I came up from the basement Toni was standing in the kitchen with his back to me, he was staring at the window, and I asked who had called. He turned around, the light behind him. His hair was on fire, his eyes were like flares. The only time I’d ever seen him look like that was the first time we’d embraced each other, the first night we made love: burnished. Rose-gold. Body taut, afraid to move, afraid a shift in position will shake the dream loose.
He spoke just above a whisper, afraid to move the air. He told me. And in that instant I knew it all, saw it all.
Or did my sense of it impel me into making it happen the way it did?
Screenplay. Hollywood. Money. Fame.
I didn’t move immediately to embrace him, sensing his need to be inviolable just then. I waited until my exclamation, the congratulations, the felicitations, all that was over, before I embraced him. But he wasn’t there. His body eluded me. It was inside my arms, but he was not present in it, it was living on some other plane. Although a second later he hugged me back, he tried to hug me back, he tried to be present. But I knew.
How long? I wanted to know. I asked this with trepidation, not wanting him to perceive the ground of my fear. It wasn’t separation from him I feared: he’d been gone from me for a long time. I was terrified I was going to lose Franny. But I didn’t want him to know this, I didn’t want to ruin his moment of exaltation by intimating that his leaving would not devastate me, nor to give him any more weapons than he already possessed. There is, after all, vengeance in every heart, and I knew he had never forgiven my betrayals. My guilt was weapon enough for him.
A couple of months, he thought. Not long. And he’d be making so much money, we could afford to pay someone to take care of Franny when I traveled.
I turned away so he could not see my face. I pretended to be looking for my cigarettes, I was looking for my cigarettes, but I couldn’t find them because my eyes were blurred. He had told me what I was afraid to ask: he was not going to take her with him. This late child, this burden, this baby I had not raised completely as I had the others, this almost unwanted young life in the house: I could not have borne losing her.
I yelled enthusiastically, “I want to hear all about it! I just have to pee, I’ll be right back!” And ran into the bathroom and blew my nose and washed my face with cold water and tried to calm down. He wasn’t going to take her. I wasn’t going to lose her.
When I came out, he was pouring champagne into two glasses, grinning, full of delight in himself. He was himself again, and I could hug him more spontaneously, and he could hug me then the same way, we could be children giggling in pleasure. And sit down across from each other in the breakfast nook, two people who love each other, or who live on the memory of having loved each other, and talk about plans and hopes and break in with congrats and self-congrats and all the excesses of elation, and smile at each other until we wore down into silence, only our hands clasped across the table. In the stillness I saw us as a photograph, framed by the window, the afternoon light tinged green by the shrubs beyond, our heads haloed with sun, the softening colors, yellow and red burnishing the trees in the garden, a portrait of something momentous, what is happening in this photograph? an arrangement mysterious, unreadable, opaque.
I was happy for him. It was the right fate for him, the right future, although I had not realized it before. I could see now it was what he had always really wanted. And why not? The austere dedication to art alone comes late, after the realization that the ability to make art is all one is going to be given; that the acclaim and the reward, the world-hand stretched out to receive what one knows one has to give are not contained within one’s portion, that in the eyes of the world, except for ten or a hundred people, one is a failure. Who wouldn’t want everything, if it were available?
The slight, beautiful, poignant book about his youth had cost him much and given him little beyond the satisfaction of making it. And I thought: drop your snobbery, Anastasia. You know by now what you never learned in school, that art is what nourishes, what feeds: art is food. The oversweetened or overspiced food that is most of popular culture makes a society sick, thin-blooded and vacant; but the wan delicate work of the self-engrossed nourishes not at all, is papery dry as communion wafers offered as body and blood. Maybe Toni’s story would make a wonderful movie, maybe it was in its way art.
And maybe he did not have another book in him like the one he’d written. What could he write about the last nine years of his life that would not be received as a joke? A diary of a house husband, like accounts of housewifery, offering the tragicomedy of the quotidian in the self-deprecating humor of those who realize their insignificance? Could he lavish pathos on the last years of Pani’s life? On learning to love someone else’s children? On having, finally, his own baby? On what it is like to take care of them, every day, every day, what it costs, what is repaid, what it really feels like to hear a child scream in the middle of the night, or the other feeling that comes after they’ve been crying on and off all afternoon? Fear and rage and absolute love are matters for tragedy, but how could the man write tragedy with no prince or king, no sword or gun, no castle or palace but only someone wearing an apron with a diaper thrown over one shoulder, only the dailiest of scenes, the kitchen, the nursery?
In truth, it was no life for a man, the life he’d been living for the past nine years.
That’s what I thought, sitting awake in the dark living room that night, Toni in the deep sleep of the drunk. He’ll have a hangover tomorrow: champagne. Thought—and then caught myself. If it was no life for a man, then why was it an acceptable life for a woman? Everyone thought it was, even women. Not me, though, I’d always hated it. I’d evaded it, scrunched down along hedges, shimmying through sewer pipes, finding ways to avoid the main highway. But
it was crazy, all mixed up, because partly I liked it. But wasn’t everything like that? I loved my work and my worklife; I loved being away from home, traveling, photographing, meeting people, carousing, going to bed with whom I felt like, living “like a man.” But I hated it too, often—the tedium of travel, the anonymity of most hotels, the need to wind yourself up like a mechanical toy to meet new people, to converse, to impress, to act alive when you simply want to feel at rest. You can’t feel at rest when you are traveling, even when you sleep. For that you need home, the kids, Toni, the contentment of tedious eternal recurrences.
No life for anyone, maybe, stuck in one or the other. And Toni deserved his chance, any chance. Still: a part of my heart petrified that day, even as I congratulated him and he congratulated himself, as we celebrated, as he crowed, pouring more champagne. As if I’d had a stroke and a part of me ceased to feel, stopped moving.
What I couldn’t understand was How could he do it?
I didn’t say a word, I didn’t show a thing on my face, I didn’t question or challenge. Because if I did, he might feel guilty and decide to take her with him. And then I would die.
So how could he do it?
I hadn’t really wanted her, a child twelve years younger than my youngest, a baby when the older ones were almost grown. I hadn’t had her fully voluntarily, I had had her as a gesture of love to Toni. For Toni.
She was his. But he could leave her.
How could he do it?
Oh, I know how he managed it on the surface—claiming he was going only for a few months, that he would be back by Easter, maybe even by Christmas if things went well. But how could he not know that he was lying? He even talked about it, explained that he’d thought of taking Franny with him, but had decided against it. She had just started first grade—he had walked her to school himself that first exciting day; in California he would have to find a place to live fast, maybe just a small apartment or even rooms somewhere, it would not be a home for her. And he would be gone all day every day, working at the studio, she would be left with strangers, she would be lonely, frightened, she would miss her sister and brother, her mother. It would be bad for her. I agreed. But still I wondered how he could stand the pain of the wrench of the unbearable loss of…and the even worse pain, the knowledge of her agony in losing him….