Me (gulping): “Your grandpa is Dr. Seuss?”
Karen: “Yes. And if he likes it, he’ll get it published for us.”
I just stood there with my mouth open, thinking maybe if I rubbed her head, some of whatever made her grandfather magic would rub off on me.
Two days later the first agent, Fred Klein, called to say he loved my book and he was sure he could sell it. He was utterly charming about the fact that another agent had the manuscript. “It’s an important decision,” he said. “You need to pick someone you’re comfortable with.” And within minutes, I’d said I’d withdraw the manuscript from the other agent, and sure, I’d be happy to send him something on my second novel—as if I really did have something to send.
The moment we finished that phone call, I scooped up Davy and twirled him around, singing a tuneless, “Yes, yes, yes, I have an agent!” I called Danny in Canada—he was in a meeting and couldn’t be interrupted—and I knew I couldn’t tell anyone until I’d told him. So I waited, and called again, and waited and called yet again. Then decided I really ought to tell the Wednesday Sisters first—they were the ones who’d been writing with me. And my mom called just after I’d hung up with Kath, so I told her. And of course everyone who saw me when I went to pick up Maggie from school knew something was up and had to know the news: Maggie’s teacher and several of the parents, and, yes, her little friend Karen, whose mother responded to my inquiry about whether Karen’s grandfather was really Dr. Seuss with “Dr. Seuss?”
On the way home, Maggie picked me a bouquet of dandelions, which we put in a little pewter vase, and while they ate snacks, Davy made me a picture of a penguin—why a penguin I cannot imagine—and Maggie drew one of me with a cake and candles, my book in one hand and, ever practical, a fork in the other.
A cake is what the Wednesday Sisters showed up with that afternoon, too. A cake and champagne.
I was cleaning up the dinner dishes, exhausted and a little tipsy, when Danny finally called back. The moment the phone rang, I thought, I can’t believe I told Karen’s mother—I don’t even know her name—and I haven’t told Danny yet. I thought, This must be something like what it’s like to tell your husband you’ve been unfaithful. I thought, But I tried to tell him first. I did.
“An agent,” he said. “That’s great, Frankie.” No “future famous novelist M. F. O’Mara.” No “I’ll try to get home this weekend to celebrate.” But he had been working so hard, hoping to wrap up things in Ottawa in the next month or so. He was exhausted.
That night, Maggie lost her second tooth. Getting ready for bed, she started explaining the tooth fairy’s magic: “She’s got this magic that, if you see her, then you get her magic, you get to be the tooth fairy instead of her. So that’s why she comes at night.” She was up the next morning at 5:18, standing by my bedside with her quarter in her hand and the most wonderful look on her face. She woke me from a dream—my book had sold quickly and Danny had brought me flowers and was calling me “M.F.”—and I was so disoriented that for a minute I wondered if she really hadn’t seen her tooth fairy, because she sure seemed magical to me.
I never did get back to sleep that morning, a spectacular spring morning that I was certain boded well. I took Maggie and Davy to the park after school and watched them scavenging for the most unreasonable treasures (bottle caps and stubs of chalk and broken crayons they collected in a tennis ball canister they also found), all while I started thinking about my next book, mapping out in my head the details of my new chapter 1.
THE FRIEND OF THE FRIEND of the woman Linda had met at that AAUW meeting, the publishing-job possibility for Kath, turned out to be a Mrs. Arlene Peets, and she was indeed looking for someone to replace a gal who was leaving when she married that March. The day Kath went in for the interview, finally, Mrs. Peets asked her all the expected questions—Could she type? File? Take dictation?—and Kath had to confess she didn’t know shorthand. She thought the interview was over when Mrs. Peets said, “Why this particular job?”
“Why this job?” Kath repeated.
“Why do you want it?”
Kath sat there feeling mute and stupid for a moment, as worn out as the fabric on Mrs. Peets’s chairs. “All I know is books,” she said finally. “I was an English lit major. What do English lit majors know how to do that’s practical?”
They’d ended up talking for an hour about their favorite novels, and by the time Kath left that office, she was working for a boss who was not only a woman but also just about the nicest, smartest person she’d ever met. Arlene, she insisted on being called, not Mrs. Peets. Kath would be a copy editor: instead of spending her days typing boring letters with too many numbers in them and fetching coffee and the accountant’s dry cleaning, she would spend her days reading. The only catch was that she had to watch for typos, grammatical and factual errors, awkward phrases, deviations from the publisher’s style.
“Drop the ma’am, too,” Arlene told Kath. “You’re not in the South anymore, Dorothy. If you want to be taken seriously, don’t be calling people ma’am and sir. And don’t feel your shoes have to match your bag every day, either. You’ll make me look bad, and I’m vainer than you might think.”
THE FIRST PUBLISHER’S rejection of my novel rolled in a few days after Kath’s interview. “A lovely rejection,” Fred said. “‘ . . . Nicely written, with a likeable protagonist. As strong as it is, I’m afraid it didn’t keep me turning the pages as I would have hoped. A close call, though.’”
No amount of paper squid ink could make it easier to take.
In the following weeks, I mowed the lawn, and painted Davy’s room, and recaulked the tub—chores Danny always did but that, with him out of town, fell to me. I listened to Linda’s updates on women’s rights: the Supreme Court ruled women couldn’t be refused jobs solely because they had small children unless fathers of small children were also refused jobs; the Women’s Caucus sued every law school in the country for discrimination against women; a Pittsburgh paper was ordered to end the sex segregation of its help wanted ads. I nodded sympathetically as Kath and Linda worried over the sit-in at Stanford Hospital, concerned for Lee’s and Jeff’s safety should it turn violent. I drove for Maggie’s field trip to a park where the class grubbed in the stream, where I talked with other moms about anything but writing while the children ate a picnic lunch and had a water-balloon fight on a playground rich with puddles they couldn’t resist. I took Maggie and Davy to the library, despairing of all the books on the shelves—so many books that surely there was no more room for mine.
Nights, I stayed up late reading, and woke early and tired, and started the whole routine again. And the rejections just kept coming: “I’m sorry to say . . .” “. . . not quite right . . .” “I’m sure another editor will . . .” I saw what Fred meant by “lovely,” though, when less flattering responses came in: “. . . the more I read, the less enchanted I became.”
DANNY GOT HOME from his stint in Canada just in time for us to catch the plane for Kauai that May, for a three-day party paid for by the company, with all the employees who’d been in Canada and their wives. He’d arrived home late that morning, had lunch with Mags and Davy, and repacked his bag while I dropped Davy at Linda’s and walked Maggie back to school. We’d barely even spoken ourselves before we boarded the plane, which cast a certain spell of unreality over the whole trip.
“Hawaii, Danny, can you believe it?” I said as he hoisted our hanging bag into the overhead bin and took the seat next to mine, on the aisle.
“You gave Linda the hotel number?” he asked. “And Mags has Allo blanket and Davy has Mutt?”
“They think a three-day sleepover is as big an adventure as going to Hawaii,” I said as the stewardess started the spiel about all the things you really don’t want to hear when you and your husband are on a plane while your children are at home, ready to be orphaned: oxygen masks, flotation devices, “in the event of a crash.”
“I miss them already,” Danny said. “
I wish we were staying home.”
I’d known he would feel this way the minute he saw the children and had to leave them again. I’d offered to skip the trip in a half dozen phone conversations, but he always said he didn’t want to disappoint Bob or Andy. I wondered now if that was the problem, or if
it was just me he didn’t want to disappoint.
He’s tired, I told myself. Cranky. He’s been working too hard.
I looked around at all the familiar faces on the plane. “If this thing goes down, there goes the company,” I said.
Though Bob wasn’t there, I realized; I supposed as long as he survived, anyone else at the company could be replaced. “Where’s Bob?” I asked. “Isn’t he coming?”
In the sharp moment of silence before Danny answered, I knew I’d said something wrong. “What?” he said. “Are you dying to tell him your book—”
Didn’t sell. He’d stopped himself from saying the words, but I heard them anyway. And while I was recovering from that blow, my face turned to the window, to the long stretch of nothing but deep ocean below, I saw that he was right, that my novel hadn’t sold and it wasn’t going to, that what Fred Klein had been saying in our last conversation was that “Michelangelo’s Ghost” was as dead as the Cubs would be that entire season. Eighteen publishers had passed. Fred might well have been a Cubs fan, though, because he remained staunchly loyal, unreasonably optimistic. “This new one you’re working on,” he said. “Get it done and we’ll send it out.” There’s always next season, was the idea. But the Cubs hadn’t won the World Series since 1908.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that . . .”
He never said what it just was, though. “Bob is coming separately,” he said. “Flying himself.”
We arrived the way one arrived in Hawaii in those days: greeted by hula-dancing, grass-skirted young women who draped leis around our necks—and we would wear leis every night of that vacation. Corny, maybe, but it was what we needed, or we wanted it to be, anyway: something to break us out of the gloom that had set in between us on the plane. To be honest, I’m not sure we even thought it was corny any more than we thought, consciously anyway, that this was Hawaii, perhaps the trip of our lifetime, that it would be unforgivable to arrive barely speaking to each other, especially after we’d gotten through all those months apart.
I straightened Danny’s lei, which had caught up on his collar, and kissed him on the cheek, and I said, “I’m sorry, too,” not able to give voice to what I was sorry for any more than he was. I was sorry that I’d told Bob I was writing before I told Danny? If I said that, Danny would have to swear he wasn’t jealous of Bob, that he hadn’t felt betrayed, and that would leave him feeling the pettiness of carrying that thorn in his paw all this time, and it would leave me feeling that pettiness too, feeling Danny would throw my dream out with the dirty dishwater of his pride.
“It looks like the bags are coming in,” I said, relieved for the excuse to turn away.
Our room at the Surf Hotel was ultramodern and stark, its only inviting feature a rope chair that hung from the ceiling. Not at all what I’d expected, none of this was going as I’d expected, as I’d hoped, and we were only just there. And I suppose it’s worse to live life without expectation than to live through the pain of expectations crushed, but it never feels that way in the moment, it always feels as though life would be so much easier if only you could stop hoping for things that would never come.
The room did have a glass door opening to a balcony, it did look out over thatch-topped sun umbrellas and sand and waves and an outcropping of land beyond, a view we took in standing side by side, without touching. Standing there with the warm breeze flowing over me, I imagined that if I looked out rather than in all weekend, I would like what I saw, what I was doing. I imagined it would all be okay.
We ate chateaubriand for dinner that evening, and drank umbrella drinks—coconutty pineapply rummy piña coladas I sipped like lemonade while we listened to a jazz band. Around us, everyone was relaxing, unwinding. It was the first time most of these guys had really relaxed since the back-and-forth to Canada had begun. The first time Danny and I had had to really relax, too, though we weren’t. We were drinking the same umbrella drinks everyone else was, but we weren’t drinking to relax, we were drinking to anesthetize.
You’d think I’d be smart enough to know to avoid those umbrella drinks in that situation.
Everyone else was keeping pace with us, even Bob, who’d arrived just in time for cocktails. After dinner, he made his way around to the tables, thanking the men for all their hard work and their wives for all their patience. As he approached our table, I slipped off my glasses. He sat next to me, took my hand, kissed my cheek.
“Frankie,” he said. “I do hope you got some writing done while Danny was in Canada.” His voice was so warm and encouraging and enthusiastic that it made me want to spill my guts again, it made me want to tell him I couldn’t write a word anymore, my novel was dead, it was never going to sell.
We talked and talked, Bob and I did, while Danny sat back with his arms crossed over his chest, only moving to drain his fourth drink. I was just being the good corporate wife, I’d have claimed, but I knew even as I was laughing with Bob that it was more complicated than that.
Danny and I had sex that night. Not made love. Had sex. Sex that started the moment we closed the door to our hotel room after a silent walk down the long corridor back to our room. “My diaphragm,” I said, but he only wrapped his fingers in my hair and held it tight, pulled it tight, and he yanked my lei off and my blouse open, and he squeezed my breast till it hurt. I bit his lip, and he lifted my skirt and took me like that, standing up against the wall of the sterile hotel room, with the sliding door to the balcony closed, the drapes drawn, even the ocean waves crushed into an awful silence that was still with us the next morning when we awoke, hung over and embarrassed and sad.
There’s nothing to do but go on pretending in those situations. You can’t have a knock-down-drag-out on vacation in Hawaii with all your work cohorts, with your boss. You can’t sulk or pout or do anything but pretend to be having as great a time as everyone else is clearly having, to hide the hurt and smile politely and say yes, the pineapple does taste better here, and no, you’ve never seen an ocean so blue, felt air so soft.
Well into a second night of umbrella drinks, we found ourselves out on the beach—not just Danny and me but the whole expedition, the men stripping off their white shirts, shoes, socks, belts, and pants, stripping down to their undershorts to go for a swim. Never mind that their swimsuits were just a minute away, in their rooms. Never mind that Danny was wearing a pair of embarrassingly frayed-at-the-edges boxers, an orange, monkey-adorned pair I’d tossed into the trash months ago only to have him indignantly fish them out. They were so soft, so comfortable. His favorite undershorts.
“O’Mara, you’re sacrificing everything to buy more stock, aren’t you?” someone joked. “Even your underwear!”
Danny looked all skinny and leggy and vulnerable standing there in the bright moonlight, dwarfed by the palm tree looming over him, unable to come up with a comeback, witty or not. It reminded me of our wedding night, of Danny slipping his tuxedo shirt off, then inhaling self-consciously, trying to make himself look more manly, as if I needed to be impressed, as if I weren’t already madly in love with him.
I wondered if he could see that all the men around him were pulling their stomachs in, too, and trying to flex their arms. That it was as impossible to look comfortable in nothing but your under-shorts as it was to stack yourself up favorably next to a Miss America, or even just a Miss Illinois. Even Bob was sucking in his stomach; I wanted to laugh, it seemed so incongruous. I wondered then how I’d failed to see that despite Danny’s bravura he doubted himself sometimes, too, just as I did. That everyone sometimes doubted themselves, even if they were college graduates or held swanky positions at swanky companies, even if they’d pu
blished a dozen novels and won the Pulitzer Prize.
I climbed up to stand on a teak beach chair, wobbling, nearly losing my balance, but I could see it didn’t really matter, no one was looking at me, all the women were looking at their husbands in their boxer shorts (or maybe at the other husbands, what did I know?), and all the men were comparing themselves with the fittest of their colleagues. I put my thumb and middle finger to my lips then, “charmingly unladylike.” Femininity, I thought as I let that whistle rip, consists in being myself, in not putting myself or my sisters down.
The whistle pierced through the crash of the ocean and the drunken chattering of the assembled group, and everyone was suddenly looking at me as surely as they had that morning I’d tripped in church. I took my lei from my neck and wrapped it in a circle just smaller than the circumference of a head, steadying myself again on the beach chair, looking up at the moon, not quite full. I cleared my throat and, in my best Bert Parks imitation, called out, “Mr. Illinois, in shredded orange monkey shorts, hails from Chicago, where he graduated valedictorian at Northwestern University at the age of nineteen.” I dropped the lei-crown on Danny’s head and started singing, “Here he is, Mr. America . . .” And I’m here to tell you, there is a reason I volunteered to read at church rather than sing in the choir. There’s a reason my talent for the Miss America Pageant would have been the baton.
Everyone was laughing then, Danny hardest of all.
“Damn, Danny. Nineteen?” Andy said. “But I knew you were a genius. Wasn’t that the first thing I told you, Bob, when I said we should hire him?”
You could practically see Danny’s chest expanding. He hopped up on the beach chair beside me, put his arm around my shoulder and, sloshed as he was, still I could feel him standing up straighter, looking as though he’d finally realized he might actually belong with these men after all.
Bob took the opportunity to show off then, plunging headfirst into the ocean—only to discover the tide had gone out. He came up scraped raw and cursing and laughing at the same time. And everyone laughed with him, even harder than we’d laughed before. I watched Danny watching him, laughing as hard as I was, and I thought, Of course he’s jealous, of course he would be, with all the admiration he has for this crazy lunatic boss of his.