“That’s typical. I might have known he wouldn’t come.” Suzanne’s voice had a bitter edge to it.
“You feel so thin, Suzy!” Emma said as she hugged her. “Have you lost weight?”
“I don’t know. Jeff took the bathroom scale.”
At first Emma didn’t realize what she meant, then she walked into Suzanne’s living room and saw the gaping holes, like extracted teeth, where Jeff’s belongings had once been. Faded rectangles on the walls marked the places where his paintings had hung, dusty shelves stood empty where stereo components and books were missing. Twin scars of crushed carpeting revealed the absence of Jeff’s favorite recline.
Emma’s eyes filled with tears. Two lives, joined together as one flesh, had been cruelly ripped apart. “Where did it all go?” she murmured, meaning the love that had once flamed between Suzanne and Jeff.
“He boxed everything up and stored it in the garage until he finds an apartment in Chicago,” Suzanne replied. “And that was just the stuff we agreed on. There are a bunch of other things, like the antique rolltop desk in the den, that we’re still battling over.”
“I hope you don’t argue in front of the girls,” Grace said.
“Sometimes it can’t be helped. When the girls and I came home the other day, he had a real estate agent here appraising the house. Needless to say, I lost my temper. This house is joint property, in both of our names. He can’t sell it unless I agree—and I don’t!”
“Can you afford a house this big on what you make at the magazine?” Grace asked.
“Of course not, but Jeff can. He’s going to pay big time too! I refuse to live the typical, substandard life of a single mother.” Suzanne bent to pick up a few scattered toys, as if she needed an outlet for her restlessness.
“This bitterness and greed is so unlike you,” Emma said.
“Well, you and Mom should know firsthand that the majority of single mothers live well below the poverty line. Would you rather the girls and I subsisted like you did during the depression?”
“Divorce is such an ugly word,” Emma said with a sigh.
“Supper is all ready, so we may as well eat,” Suzanne said, gesturing to the dining room. “We would have starved to death years ago if we had always waited for Daddy.”
Emma followed Suzanne into the dining room, where the table was beautifully set for dinner. Nothing seemed to be missing from that room, but when they took their seats around the table and Suzanne served the food, Stephen’s empty place setting was an unwelcome reminder that they were three women on their own, without husbands. The sadness that enshrouded the house began to descend on Emma.
“You know, Suzanne, Karl Bauer was a prosperous man,” Emma said. “I was very well-to-do when I was married to him. But it isn’t the loss of material things or the poverty that makes divorce so difficult. It’s the loneliness. In my case, I was lonely before I left Karl. We’d never had a loving relationship to begin with. But from the very first time I ever laid eyes on Jeff, the two of you were twined together like a vine and a trellis. You loved each other.”
“That was ages ago, Grandma,” Suzanne said briskly. “We’ve been busy raising a family and building careers since then.”
“Maybe you and Jeff should have worked as hard on your marriage as you did on your careers,” Grace said.
“Mom, please. I didn’t invite you here to give me a lecture.”
“I know. You need our company and our support. Believe me, honey, Grandma and I do support you—but not in the way that you think. We’re not going to take your side against Jeff—”
Suzanne slammed down the bread basket. “Oh, that’s a switch! You and Daddy should be happy we’re getting a divorce, since you didn’t want me to marry him in the first place.”
“I was wrong about that.” Grace’s voice remained gentle in spite of Suzanne’s bitterness. “I’ve grown to love Jeff. He’s the father of my grandchildren. God joined the two of you together, and I’m not giving up until your marriage is restored.”
Suzanne shook her head. “Well, that isn’t going to happen. Jeff’s gone.”
A sorrow-filled silence descended over the table. Emma ate the casserole Suzanne had prepared without tasting it. Grace didn’t even pretend to eat. Emma saw tears in her eyes.
“Sue, what do your girls think about their father leaving them?” Grace asked. “What will they think about God because of it? Will they think that He’ll leave them and move far away too? Remember what Father O’Duggan once told me about how our fathers shape our attitudes toward God? How will Amy’s and Melissa’s attitude toward God be affected if you get a divorce?”
“It was Jeff’s choice to leave home, not mine.”
“But it was your decision not to move to Chicago and make a new home with him there.”
Suzanne pushed back her chair and sprang to her feet. “Did you ever stop to consider what I learned about God from Daddy? That I have to constantly work to win his approval, that I’m always begging for the smallest scraps of his love, that he’s always too busy for me!” She picked up Stephen’s unused dinner plate and threw it to the floor, shattering it.
Emma quickly rose and drew Suzanne into her arms. She had never been fooled, like most people, by Suzanne’s tough exterior and fiery independence—inside, she was a wounded child. In spite of Suzanne’s seeming indifference, the breakup of her marriage was hurting her deeply. Emma remembered well the painful years after her own divorce, and how—even as she’d made everyone around her laugh—she’d wept within.
Grace sat across the table from them in stunned disbelief. “Suzanne . . .? Is that really the way you see your father?”
Suzanne was weeping too hard to answer. Emma answered for her. “You’re much too close to Stephen to see it, Gracie, but Sue has tried all of her life to win his approval—even at the cost of her own happiness. But she could never be the kind of daughter Stephen expected. She could never be you, Gracie. Sue is too independent, too spirited . . . too much like me! I did the same thing when I was young. I tried so hard to fit into my mother’s mold, to be the kind of daughter Papa wanted. That’s why I married Karl. But I didn’t fit Mama’s mold, I wasn’t like her at all, and the effort to be someone I wasn’t cost me dearly.”
Grace looked shocked. “So you’re saying Suzanne should do the same thing you did? Divorce her husband?”
“Not at all! I think leff and Sue were perfectly suited for each other-free-spirited, creative, life-embracing. That’s why they fell in love, and that’s why I encouraged them to get married against your wishes. But Jeff is not in the least like Stephen, and Sue is nothing like you . . . and I think they both tried to fit your molds to win your approval. It didn’t work. And I think that’s why they fell out of love. Am I right, Suzanne?”
“It’s such a mess, Grandma.” Suzanne’s hands still covered her face. “We started out so happy . . . and now everything is in such a mess.”
Emma bent to pick up the pieces of the shattered plate, laying them one by one on the tablecloth in front of Suzanne. “Your mother is right. It isn’t too late to put the pieces of your marriage back together. But it won’t be the same marriage it was before. It shouldn’t be. That pattern was flawed, which is why it broke apart to begin with.”
She gently pulled Suzanne’s hands from her face and held them in her own. “I’m taking a pottery course at Birch Grove,” Emma said. “It’s great fun, you know, getting splattered with mud up to my eyeballs! But one thing I learned is that before you can create a good pot, you have to get the clay perfectly centered on the wheel. Otherwise, as you try to shape it, the pot gets more and more deformed as the wheel spins faster, until the whole mess flies off and crashes into the wall. How did your marriage get off-center, Sue? How did it come to this?” Emma gestured to the shattered plate. “How did you get here from where you started?”
Suzanne scrubbed impatiently at her tears. “I don’t know . . . I suppose there’s a lot of truth in what you sai
d about wanting to please Daddy and not fitting into Mom’s mold. . . .”
TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
From the time I was a little girl, I knew I wasn’t cut to fit Mom’s mold. I think I first realized it one day while playing hospital with my brother, Bobby. I was five years old and he was seven. He had gotten a toy doctor’s kit for Christmas, and I, of course, got a nurse’s kit. We used my Betsy Wetsy doll and some stuffed animals for the patients and set up an operating room on the coffee table in the den.
“Scalpel!” Bobby demanded, his hand outstretched. His voice was crisp and bossy like Daddy’s. He always tried to be exactly like Daddy, from his crew cut to his arrogant swagger. “Nurse! Scissors!”
It didn’t take long for me to grow tired of doing the boring jobs, like handing Bobby all his surgical instruments. I looked at his outstretched hand and rebelled.
“No. It’s my turn to operate now. It’s my doll.” I folded my arms across my chest.
“You can’t operate, you’re only the nurse.”
“I don’t want to be a nurse anymore. I want to be a doctor. I want to operate too.”
“You can’t be a doctor. You’re a girl. Girls are nurses, like Mommy. Boys are doctors, like Daddy.”
I whacked Bobby on the head with his doctor’s kit. The blow quickly wiped the smirk of superiority off Bobby’s face. When he ran crying to Mom, I collected all the patients and opened my own hospital in my bedroom. I promoted myself to chief surgeon. I didn’t want to be like Mom with her pearls and lipstick and high heels. I could never be as sweet and soft-spoken as she was.
Once at a backyard cookout with my parents’ friends, Mom was circulating through the crowd in pink pedal pushers and a peasant blouse, serving hors d’oeuvres while Daddy grilled everyone’s T-bone steaks to perfection on perfectly heated charcoal briquettes. Bobby and his friends had climbed up in his “boys only” tree house to devise pranks against the girls. And I was supposed to be twirling my Hula-Hoop with those girls, but I had grown bored with swivelling my hips. I decided to hang around the adults, instead.
“What line of work are you in?” Daddy’s golf partner asked our next-door neighbor.
“I’m an attorney . . . And you?”
“Obstetrician.” Ritual handshakes and nods of respect followed this exchange of identities.
Daddy introduced a late arrival to the group by saying, “This is my friend John Moore. He’s my stockbroker.”
I wandered over to where the women lounged beneath a flowered patio umbrella. “This is our neighbor, Gloria Clark,” I heard Mom say. “Her husband is an attorney.”
“What does your husband do?” Gloria asked the other woman.
“He’s an architect. His firm designed the new Crawford building down-town.” Judging by the admiring oohs and ahhs, the woman might have selected every brick and support beam in the building herself, instead of merely ironing the architect’s shirts and cooking his hard-boiled eggs.
I was a tomboy, confronting snakes and spiders and starting fires as fearlessly as my brother, Bobby. Mom despaired of ever making a young lady out of me. “Don’t sit like that, Suzanne, it isn’t ladylike. Please use a hanky, Suzanne, not your sleeve. . . . Young ladies walk, Suzanne, they don’t gallop.”
My brother could sit, sneeze, or gallop any way he wanted to. When he crawled around under the pews after church one Sunday morning, Daddy said, “He’s all boy.” I tried it the following Sunday—ripping my crinoline and scuffing my patent-leather shoes in the process—and was declared a disgrace. Bobby never had to wear hats to church that looked like straw saucers with glued-on flowers, or suffer in hot white gloves that made his hands sweat. Daddy served on the board of elders—Mom served chicken a la king at potluck suppers. Daddy passed the collection plate and shook hands with people after church—Mom stood a few demure steps behind him, smiling and looking pretty.
The older I got, the more I rebelled against my Sunday schoolteachers for reinforcing this stereotype of submissive women. “Why did God give me talents and brains and curiosity if I wasn’t supposed to use any of them?” I asked the pastor once during catechism class. “Why can’t women pass the blasted collection plate too?” My behavior outraged Daddy. I quickly learned that if I wanted his approval and affection, I had to be quiet and ladylike. Impossible.
My brother didn’t have to do anything to earn Daddy’s approval except brag about how he was going to be a doctor someday. At first I was determined to go into medicine too, just to prove that I was as smart as Bobby. But my straight As in biology and advanced algebra didn’t impress Daddy the way I had hoped they would.
He called Bobby and me into his den, one at a time, on report card day to discuss our grades. Bobby had already emerged from the dark-panelled room smiling. But Daddy was very quiet as he read over mine. I hopped from one foot to the other in front of his desk, reading all his diplomas and awards hanging on the walls and waiting for the words of praise that were sure to come.
“So do you think my grades are good enough to get me into a pre-med program?” I blurted when he finally looked up.
“Pre-med?” he repeated. He made the word sound shocking. “Is that what your guidance counselor at school recommended?”
“Of course not. My guidance counselor is a jerk!”
“Suzanne . . .”
“Well, he is. He told me I was ‘college material,’but he advised me to choose a profession that would work well with a family, such as teaching or nursing.” I did a nasty impression of the counselors prissy voice.
“He has a point.”
“No! The last thing in the world I want is a June Cleaver life like Mom’s. She’s nothing more than your glorified maidservant!”
Daddy held up a warning finger. “You be careful how you talk about your mother. Don’t you dare be disrespectful.”
“I respect her as a person, I just don’t want her life.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I’m just as smart as Bobby. I could go to medical school too.”
Daddy frowned and leaned back in his leather chair, toying with the stethoscope on his desk. “There is always a handful of intelligent girls who try medical school,” he said, “but it’s a very difficult field for women to break into. They’re not readily accepted. And in the end, it seems like a waste of time and money because they’ll eventually give up medicine to get married and have children anyway.”
There were those dreaded words again—married and children. “How come every time my future is discussed, those two words always surface? Why is my future so narrowly defined when the whole world is open to Bobby?”
Daddy shook his head. “I never know what to say to you, Suzanne. I don’t understand you at all.”
Say you are proud of me, I thought. Say I’m just as smart’ just as important to you as Bobby. But I said nothing to my father.
Throughout high school, I wavered between trying to prove I was as good as my brother by going into medicine, and doing what I loved the most, which was editing the school newspaper and expressing my opinions in scathing editorials. I loved books, loved manipulating words and ideas, loved telling stories much more than I liked dissecting worms and bisecting angles. I decided I would be a career woman on my own terms; I would win a Pulitzer prize in journalism, then advance to editor in chief of The New Yorker magazine, and eventually retire as CEO of a publishing empire. I would not be a housewife.
Bobby enrolled in the pre-med program at the Ivy League college where Daddy had done his undergraduate work. Tired of living in my brother’s shadow, I chose a college that was renowned for its literature department. The pastor of the church I attended near campus was the first minister I’d ever met who didn’t seem to consider women an inferior species under man’s dominion.
“God has a unique plan for your life, Suzanne,” he told me. “He expects you to use the gifts He has given you, not wrap them up in society’s expectations.” I was on good speaking t
erms with the pastor’s God.
Being away from home suited me. By my junior year I had joined the best sorority, found a steady boyfriend, and earned the kind of outstanding grades that put me on the dean’s list. I steered clear of the campus radicals and avoided all the turmoil of the ‘60s, like pot parties and love-ins and campus take-overs. I preferred to attend classes rather than protest the Vietnam War. My life hummed along nicely. Daddy approved.
Then, the first semester of my junior year, I took Introduction to Art.
* * *
The art building seemed like a foreign country to me, a messy, disorganized, third-world country with bizarre people in exotic costumes. The halls smelled like turpentine and plaster dust and wet clay. I hadn’t wanted to take art, but my schedule gave me few choices, so I dragged myself to class three times a week, not daring to miss a lecture and ruin my grade point average. As if studying art history wasn’t challenging enough, the professor made us learn the fundamentals of drawing too. Once a week, he would set up a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers and we’d have to practice sketching it so we could learn about perspective and proportion and shading.
One day he brought in a live model to pose for us—a guy I’d seen around campus, hanging out with the “peaceniks.” The hippie sat sprawled on a wooden chair wearing only his bell-bottoms and sandals, and I saw right away why the teacher had chosen him to pose. His shoulders and torso were as beautifully muscled as the Italian statues we’d studied.
I pulled out my sketch pad and began to draw, my eyes traveling from the paper to the model and down again. While I sketched, I analyzed him as if he were a biology specimen—strong biceps, solid pectorals, tight abdominals. The next time I glanced up, the hippie was staring back at me. His simmering gaze totally unnerved me. I didn’t want to admit it, but I found him extraordinarily attractive. I usually preferred the clean-cut fraternity-type like my steady boyfriend, Bradley Wallace. This guy wore his dark hair tied in a po-nytail, and the bottom half of his face was obscured by a thick brown beard and mustache. A peace necklace on a leather thong hung around his neck, dangling against his bare chest. Every time I glanced up to sketch him he was looking straight at me, staring intently with a dangerous Jimmy Dean look in his eyes. I decided to concentrate on his foot.