I felt this sense of continuity just the other night. It was a cold night, a wintry night, and I was getting ready to go to sleep when my husband said, “I don’t like that nightgown.” And once again I felt that magic little thrill you always get when you realize that some things in your life are immutable. It was a flannel nightgown I was wearing, one of those little numbers that looks like a fallout shelter and is designed to reveal only that the body beneath possesses ankles. It’s warm and comfortable, but I’ve always known, deep in my heart, that the only person who would consider it seductive would be Buddy Ebsen. Once a year my husband looks at one of these things and says, “I don’t like that nightgown.” I guess if I was what my grandmother used to call a dutiful wife, I wouldn’t wear them. But just think how out-of-kilter that would throw my husband’s whole existence.
Luckily neither of us ever has to go for long without these little touchstones that keep our relationship solid. More than that, I think they bring home to me constantly the differences between men and women. These are important to keep in mind, because the clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible—that is, that one is male and the other female. There are all those times when I’ve purchased a new dress for a special occasion and my husband has glimpsed those telltale price tags in the trash. “Did you need a new dress?” he will always say, once again illustrating the gender-based distinction between necessity and desire. Or there’s the ever-popular “You look fine without makeup,” usually uttered when I am applying eyeliner five minutes after he has determined we should be in the car. To which the obvious answer is, “The only place I’ve ever gone without makeup is to the recovery room.” I think it’s worth noting that I was once at a party at which a man said quite loudly, “You look fine without makeup” and eight women turned around, each thinking it was their husband.
(Of course, these things can backfire on you, too. If I ever am divorced by my husband, for example, it will probably be because I have made it a practice throughout my life never to put the caps back on things. With those grounds and the right judge, he could probably get the kids, the house, the dogs, and all the toothpaste tubes, as well as the jar of mayonnaise that has tinfoil molded over the opening.)
However, I am beginning to think that the flannel nightgown is larger than this, figuratively as well as literally. Perhaps it is an extended metaphor for the difference between what men want from a marriage, and what women want. There’s a real temptation to say that women want a relationship that is secure, comfortable, and enduring, while men are really looking for excitement, sex, and black lace. Obviously those are stereotypes. Lots of the bachelors in this magazine piece seemed to be interested in a secure relationship, although some of them had settled for touch football instead. I even have one friend, who previously had the kind of lingerie collection usually confined to a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, who fell in love with a man who thinks flannel nightgowns are sexy, in the way the librarian with the bun and the glasses turns out to be something else entirely once she takes her hairpins out. (I know your next question. Forget it. This man is not available. He is taken.) And I know lots of women are interested in having some excitement in their lives, although a great many of the single women I know wish that excitement didn’t so often include cheating, lying, and uncomfortable undergarments.
It’s a little late for me to fall in love with a man who likes cotton flannel and the allure of the dowdy. I’m already taken, too. And I know all his little winning ways, and he knows mine. I believe this is the secret to a successful marriage. It beats me why someone like Madonna, for example, would think she had irreconcilable differences with Sean Penn. Now there’s a man you can count on: point a camera and he throws a punch, as predictable and consistent as can be, still spitting and swearing and indulging in fisticuffs, the same guy today as he was the day she married him. I like a certain reliability in a man, and I’ve got it. I put a plate of radicchio salad on the table, step back, and count to five. “What is this stuff?” my husband says suspiciously, poking it with his fork. It warms my heart.
MARRIED
Each night for the last week, as I have gone out to walk the dogs or leave the trash at the curb, the boy and girl have been shadows in the doorway of the house next door. Even when it was raining, lightning bisecting the sky, they were there, entangled in one of those kisses that last forever, that end only when the oxygen supply gives out. One night the boy spoke as the dogs sniffed at the steps below. “Do you know how much I love this girl?” he asked, a rhetorical boast to a middle-aged stranger.
“Oh, God,” I said, tugging on the leashes, and though the lovers might have thought my response indicated disapproval, it was really the shock of recognition, sharp and silver as the lightning. I remember being in love like this. Entering into a state more like a tropical disease than a relationship, listening to one catchy piece of bubble-gum music over and over again and getting the same odd feeling in the stomach and the chest. When I was in high school, the song was by the Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”: “Though it’s gonna make it that much better/When we can say goodnight and stay together.” The big payoff. Not so much sex, at least for the girls, as a kind of mythical domesticity: napkins and matching place mats, unlimited kissing, no adults, flowers every day. What our parents referred to as playing house.
It’s getting on to ten years that I’ve been married. I’m not sure when I realized that reality was going to be both something less and something much more. Luckily many of us know this before we marry, or there would be even more disasters than we now suffer through, many more people packing away an expensive wedding album in some corner of the basement where, it is hoped, it will mildew.
When I was younger, I tended to fall in love with just one thing: a kind of bravado, a certain smile. (The girl in the doorway, I am convinced, has fallen for blond hair and a crooked grin.) I even fell in love with a certain set of bony shoulders in a sport jacket years ago. But unlike a lot of my friends, who went through more than a few Mr. Wrongs and have now settled down with Mr. Maybe, I married the person inside the sport jacket. And I held on like a dog with a bone to a love affair between a girl whose idea of awesome responsibility was a psych midterm and a boy who painted his dorm room black, long after that boy and girl were gone. I held onto what has been going on in that doorway long past the time when I was really too old to believe in magic.
Truth is, I still believe in magic, and it’s still there, although there’s no point denying that it is occasionally submerged beneath a welter of cereal bowls, dirty shirts, late nights, early mornings, and all the other everyday things that bubble-gum music never reflects. But what I didn’t know about marriage, the less magical parts of it, has become perhaps more important to me. Now we have history as well as chemistry. An enormous part of my past does not exist without my husband. An enormous part of my present, too. I still feel somehow that things do not really happen to me unless I have told them to him. I don’t mean this nonsense about being best friends, which I have never been able to cotton to; our relationship is too judgmental, too demanding, too prickly to have much in common with the quiet waters of friendship. Like emotional acupuncturists, we know just where to put the needle. And do.
But we are each other’s family. And while I know people who have cut their families loose, who think them insignificant or too troublesome to be part of their lives, I am not one of those people. I came late to the discovery that we would be related by marriage. I once made a fool of myself in front of a friend in the emergency room of a small resort hospital after my husband’s stomach and a bad fried clam had had an unfortunate meeting. “Are either of you related to him?” the nurse asked, and we both shook our heads until our friend prodded me gently in the side. “Oh, well, I’m his wife,” I said.
There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, t
oo. I suppose that is what I find so dreadful about divorce; lovers are supposed to leave you in the lurch, but your family is supposed to stick by you forever. “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relations,” the folksy folks always say. Ah, but in this one case you can. You just don’t realize it at the time.
What does it mean that I do not envy the two of them, standing in the doorway, locked together like Romeo and Juliet in the tomb? I suppose when I was their age I would have assumed it meant that I was old and desiccated. But of course what has really happened is that I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation.
That doesn’t mean I don’t still get an enormous kick out of infatuation: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart. At a cocktail party the other night I looked across a crowded room and was taken by a stranger, in half profile, a handsome, terribly young-looking man with a halo of backlighted curls. And then he turned and I realized that it was the stranger I am married to, the beneficiary on my insurance policy, the sport jacket, the love of my life.
BECOMING
A
MOTHER
UNDERSTUDY
When I was nineteen years old, the temporary female caretaker of four younger siblings and a split-level house on a corner plot in the suburbs and desperate to get back to college, I put an advertisement in the local paper. It read:
HOUSEKEEPER
to cook and clean for five children.
Own room.
References required.
At the time I was surprised that only one person called. (Now, I am amazed that anyone did.) I arranged an interview with the sole applicant and read the letters from the past employers that she carried in her purse. Then I hired her. Her name was Ida. She moved in with a collection of wigs, a half-dozen housecoats with snaps up the front, and a Bible with a black Leatherette cover. She was my salvation.
Ida is blind now, and lives in Florida. “Girl,” she said at the christening of my second child, her sinewy hand curled around that of the woman who was caring for my children, “if the Lord had not taken my eyes you’d be out of a job.” And she was right. Ida was perfect. She was a passable cook, a marvelous raconteur, and a good sport. Most important, she believed she was on a mission from God. One day in her second week of work, a strong wind blew through the open windows of our house and Ida took it to be the meteorological incarnation of my deceased mother. It did no good to mention that my mother was not the strong-wind type; Ida felt that she had been called and that God had charged her with looking after us.
I have been thinking of Ida lately because the person who most recently helped with my children left us in the lurch. I like to think that I would not be so angry if she had handled it better, but that is a delusion. When Kay, who after two years with my children had become my friend as well as theirs, gave me plenty of time to plan for her departure, I was irrationally enraged. How dare she leave, I thought, not soothed by her willingness to stay until I found someone else. And when, after nearly a year, Margaret suddenly decided to move on, I thought the same: How dare she abandon my children, my wonderful, well-behaved, happy little boys? I didn’t allow myself to think of the other side of that question: How dare I?
That isn’t fair, exactly; it has become clear to me that my kids do very well with a judicious mixture of Mommy and someone else, and that I do very well with that mixture, too. But still, when it collapses I become aware of how tenuous this structure is, of how my work life is built on sand.
My husband is more businesslike about all this, but then, he is more removed from all this. One of our friends was flabbergasted, two weeks after Margaret had begun working for us, to find out that he had never met her. Despite all our best efforts at an equitable distribution of parenting, it seems that the public perception, and the private one, too, is that I have hired these people to do my job. I work, and they work at the life that takes place while I am working. I hold the money, they hold the power to give me peace of mind while I make the money. No matter how good the relationship between us, we are ultimately at each other’s mercy, which is not a comfortable place to be.
I felt helpless and at sea when I realized that Margaret would not be coming anymore, and I am not a person who feels that way often. Put an advertisement in the paper, my husband said, but it was not as simple as he made it out to be, like hiring a carpenter. There is not even a name for what I am searching for. Nanny? Too starchy and British. Sitter? Too transient to describe someone who (please God) shows up every morning. Housekeeper? If it was the house that needed looking after, I could be calm right now. Mother? Bite your tongue! What I want is what I had with Ida, the illusion of mother, the feeling of total care without the total emotional commitment on the part of those cared for. I want an understudy, someone who knows the role but will step aside for me at performances. I want a paid member of the family. I want permission to sometimes go my own way.
I’ve heard all the horror stories, but somehow I’ve been very lucky in my searches: first Kay, smart and funny and full of an endless supply of silly nursery songs, the disenchanted former manager of a rock-and-roll band; then Margaret, the mother of four grown sons, warm and nurturing even if she did take off on me. Now it is Sandy, quite literally the girl next door, more like a big sister than a surrogate mother, who carts the kids off to Burger King and teaches them how to moonwalk. My sons, who never called any of them Mommy by mistake, loved them while they were around and yet let them go with equanimity. Each of these women was discreet enough not to mention the first step or the first word if it took place while I was away from home.
Of course, between one leaving and the other arriving, I have thought the same thing: Do it yourself. No one can do it as well as you. That’s not true, actually; each one of them did certain things better than I did, gave something that I simply don’t have in me. It is hard to find someone who will give your children a feeling of security while it lasts and not wound them too much when it is finished, who will treat those children as if they were her own, but knows—and never forgets—that they are yours.
It is a paradoxical relationship. And, if the truth be told, when I put the advertisement in the paper what I really want to write is PERSON WANTED: Must be on a mission from God.
THE MOTHER OF SONS
In the bottom drawer of the changing table, beneath the snowsuits and the hats, is a pink-and-white striped dress with a white pinafore. It is a size twelve months. The wife of one of my husband’s law partners sent it, when my first child’s somewhat androgynous name and my stubborn feminist refusal to put a colored ribbon on the birth announcements led her to the conclusion that Quindlen Krovatin was a girl. He was not. I wrote in the thank-you note that I would return the dress for a jogging suit or a pair of overalls, but I never did, and there it lies in the drawer, with the tissue still stuffed inside it, like some limp little body. It has been joined by a pair of white socks with pink birds on the cuffs and a pink cardigan sweater.
There she stays, my phantom daughter, equal parts of cotton, wool, and fantasy. For I am the mother of sons. Somehow I always knew it would be so. Never fastidious, always a pal or a sister, a haphazard fan of both the Yankees’ uniforms and their bullpen, I was the girl always taken aside by some boy who confessed his love for someone remote, tremulous, girly—that is, someone else.
I have been mothering boys all my life, from brothers to boyfriends. The only girl I ever mothered was my sister, who has turned out awfully well, but it was a struggle for me. I remember one long drive to the Y, when she was nine and I nineteen, when I delivered a long-rehearsed explanation of copulation and conception, as one of the most torturous moments of my life. She says it never happened. Who knows which of us is right? The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, with a boy it would have been more matter-of-fact for me, less a lesson in life than biology. Try as I might not to do so, perhaps I am perpetuating stereotypes. I am the mother of boys the way we’ve long thought of boys
as being. In fact, it seems to me now, the way they are.
Once it was fashionable to suggest that there were no differences between little boys and little girls; in fact, I was one of the people doing the suggesting. But I don’t believe that anymore. I’m not sure whether we treat them differently from the moment those little pink or blue signs are plastered on the maternity ward bassinets, or whether it is hormones, or whether it is some mysterious alchemy like puppy dogs’ tails and sugar and spice, but when we watch our children from the park bench at the playground, I and the other mothers can’t help noticing that something is different. It is not so much that at school the girls head toward the tables and chairs and modeling clay and crayons, while the boys careen down the slides and build with blocks, although all of us remark on it. It is that the girls seem reactive, subjective, measuring reactions, gauging responses. My son, a simple machine, direct, transparent, is as like them as a hammer is like a Swiss watch.
And so I am the other in my family. They are all three like this, hammers to my Swiss watch. My husband and my two young sons will all wear the same sort of underwear, and they will all have the same last name, and I can see sometimes, although one is still at the age when he is little more than a collection of firing synapses, that they sometimes think there is something a little strange about me. But I do not feel lonely, although strangers on the street feel compelled to feel sorry for me and say that maybe next time I’ll have a girl.
That would be nice, but in some ways more difficult. The other day a friend called and told me that her newly adolescent daughter, with whom she had been only moments before the best of friends, had just told her to do something that, included in a movie, would change its rating from PG to R. From what I’ve seen of the world, her son will not do that. Or as my mother-in-law, the mother of six boys—and never mind the sympathy, because she likes it just fine—said to me, “My boys have respect for me.” If my sons are like a good many others I know, they’ll reach a point when they will measure themselves against their father and find him wanting: a has-been, a never-was, a sellout, a fat cat. My husband has sufficient backbone to stand up to those few years when his children will preoccupy themselves with what a flimsy figure of a man he is and how they will never be like him. Falling in the toilet occasionally because someone has forgotten to put the seat down will be a small price for me to pay for taking a pass on that.