The waitress was tolerant, but the Bagel Café was closing. And printout may be impersonal, but it’s easier on the eye. For that matter, I worry that throughout that handwritten passage you’ve been skimming, reading ahead. I worry that the instant you spotted “Chatham” up top you could think of nothing else, and that you for once couldn’t care less about my feelings for the United States. Chatham. I go to Chatham? I do. I go at every opportunity. Fortunately, these journeys every two weeks up to Claverack Juvenile Correctional Facility are aimed at such a restrictive window of visiting hours that I am not free to consider going an hour later or another day. I leave at exactly 11:30 because it is the first Saturday of the month and I must arrive immediately after the second lunch slot at 2:00. I do not indulge myself in reflection over how much I dread going to see him, or, more improbably, look forward to it. I just go. You’re astonished. You shouldn’t be. He’s my son, too, and a mother should visit her child in prison. I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules. If anything, following the letter of the unwritten parental law was one of my failings. That came out in the trial—the civil suit. I was appalled by how upstanding I looked on paper. Vince Mancini, Mary’s lawyer, accused me in court of visiting my son so dutifully in detention during his own trial only because I anticipated being sued for parental negligence. I was acting a part, he claimed, going through the motions. Of course, the trouble with jurisprudence is that it cannot accommodate subtleties. Mancini was onto something. There may indeed be an element of theater in these visits. But they continue when no one is watching, because if I am trying to prove that I am a good mother, I am proving this, dismally, as it happens, to myself. Kevin himself has been surprised by my dogged appearances, which is not to say, in the beginning at least, pleased. Back in 1999, at sixteen, he was still at that age when to be seen with your mother was embarrassing; how bittersweetly these truisms about teenagers persist through the most adult of troubles. And in those first few visits he seemed to regard my very presence as an accusation, so before I said a single word he’d get angry. It didn’t seem sensible that he should be the one mad at me. But in the same vein, when a car nearly sideswipes me in a crosswalk, I’ve noticed that the driver is frequently furious—shouting, gesticulating, cursing—at me, whom he nearly ran over and who had the undisputed right of way. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad. If I’d had the presence back then to seize on the first part of that proof, I might have glimpsed in Kevin’s instantaneous dudgeon a glimmer of hope. But at the time, his fury simply mystified me. It seemed so unfair. Women tend more toward chagrin, and not only in traffic. So I blamed me, and he blamed me. I felt ganged up on. Hence, when he was first incarcerated we didn’t have conversations as such. Simply being in front of him made me limp. He sapped me even of the energy to cry, which anyway would not have been very productive. After five minutes, I might ask him, my voice hoarse, about the food. He would gawk at me incredulously, as if under the circumstances the inquiry were as inane as it actually was. Or I’d ask, “Are they treating you all right?” although I wasn’t sure what that meant or even whether I wanted his minders to treat him “all right.” He’d slur that sure they kiss me beddy-bye every night. It didn’t take long for me to run out of pro forma Mommy questions, for which I think we were both relieved. If it took little time to get past my posing as the loyal mother who’s only concerned that sonny is eating his vegetables, we are still contending with Kevin’s more impenetrable pose as the sociopath who is beyond reach. The trouble is, while my role as a mother who stands by her son no matter what is ultimately demeaning—it is mindless, irrational, blind, and sappy, hence a part I might gratefully shed—Kevin gets too much sustenance from his own cliché to let it go quietly. He still seems intent on demonstrating to me that he may have been a subjugant in my house who had to clean his plate, but now he’s a celebrity who’s been on the cover of Newsweek, whose fricative appellation, Kevin Khatchadourian —or “KK” to the tabloids, like Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia—has tsked chidingly off every major network news anchor’s tongue. He’s even had a hand in setting the national agenda, sparking new calls for corporal punishment, juvenile death sentences, and the V-chip. In lockup, he would have me know that he is no tinhorn delinquent, but a notorious fiend of whom his less accomplished fellow juveniles are in awe. Once in those early days (after he’d grown more talkative), I asked him: “How do they regard you, the other boys? Do they... are they critical? Of what you did?” This was as close as I could come to asking, do they trip you in hallways or hawk in your soup. At first, you see, I was hesitant, deferential. He frightened me, physically frightened me, and I was desperate not to set him off. There were prison guards nearby, of course, but there had been security personnel in his high school, police in Gladstone, and what good had they been? I never feel protected any more. Kevin honked, that hard, joyless laugh forced through his nose. And said something like, “Are you kidding? They fucking worship me, Mumsey. There’s not a juve in this joint who hasn’t taken out fifty dickheads in his peer group before breakfast—in his head. I’m the only one with the stones to do it in real life.” Whenever Kevin cites “real life,” it is with the excessive firmness with which fundamentalists reference heaven or hell. It’s as if he’s trying to talk himself into something. I had only his word, of course, that far from being shunned Kevin had achieved a status of mythic proportions among hoods who had merely hijacked cars or knifed rival drug dealers. But I have come to believe he must have once garnered some prestige, since, in his oblique fashion, just this afternoon he allowed that it had begun to ebb. He said, “Tell you what, I’m fucking tired of telling that same fucking story”—from which I could infer that, rather, his fellow inmates were tired of hearing it. Over a year and a half is a long time for teenagers, and Kevin is already yesterday’s news. He’s getting old enough to appreciate, too, that one of the differences between a “perp,” as they say in cop shows, and your average newspaper reader is that onlookers are allowed the luxury of getting “fucking tired of the same fucking story” and are free to move on. Culprits are stuck in what must be a tyrannical rehearsal of the same old tale. Kevin will be climbing the stairs to the aerobicconditioning alcove of the Gladstone High gym for the rest of his life. So he is resentful, and I don’t blame him for being bored with his own atrocity already, or for envying others their capacity to abandon it. Today, he went on to grouse about some “pipsqueak” new arrival at Claverack who was only thirteen. Kevin added for my benefit, “His cock’s the size of a Tootsie Roll. The little ones, you know?” Kevin wiggled his pinkie. “Three for a quarter.” With relish, Kevin explained the boy’s claim to fame: An elderly couple in an adjacent apartment had complained about how loudly he played his CDs of the Monkees at three in the morning. The next weekend, the couple’s daughter discovered her parents in their bed, slit from crotch to throat. “That’s appalling,” I said. “I can’t believe anyone still listens to the Monkees.” I earned a begrudging snort. He went on to explain that the police have never found the entrails, which is the detail on which the media, not to mention the boy’s overnight Claverack fan club, has seized. “Your friend’s precocious,” I said. “The missing entrails—didn’t you teach me that to get noticed in this business you have to add a twist?” You may be horrified, Franklin, but it has taken me the better part of two years to get this far with him, and our black, straight-faced banter passes for progress. But Kevin is still not comfortable with my gameliness. I usurp his lines. And I had made him jealous. “I don’t think he’s so smart,” said Kevin aloofly. “Probably just looked down at those guts and thought, Cool! Free sausages! ” Kevin shot me a furtive glance. My impassivity was clearly a disappointment. “Everyone around here thinks that twerp’s so tough,” Kevin resumed. “All like, ‘Man, you can play, like, “Sound of Music” loud’s you want, I ain’t sayin’ nuttin. ’” His African-American accent has become quite accomplished and has made inroads into his own. “But I’m not impressed. He’s just a kid. Too little to know what he was doing.” “And you weren’t?” I asked sharply. Kevin folded his arms and looked satisfied; I had gone back to playing Mother. “I knew exactly what I was doing.” He leaned onto his elbows. “ And I’d do it again. ” “I can see why,” I said primly, gesturing to the windowless room whose walls were paneled in vermilion and chartreuse; I have no idea why they decorate prisons like Romper Room. “It’s worked out so well for you.” “Just swapped one shithole for another.” He waved his right hand with two extended fingers in a manner that betrayed he’s taken up smoking. “Worked out swell.” Subject closed, as usual. Still I made a note of the fact that this thirteen-year-old parvenu’s stealing the Claverack limelight aggrieved our son. It seems that you and I needn’t have worried about his dearth of ambition. As for my parting with him today, I had thought to leave it out. But it is just what I would like to withhold from you that I may need most to include. The guard with a mud-spatter of facial moles had called time; for once we had used up the full hour without spending most of it staring at the clock. We were standing on either side of the table, and I was about to mumble some filler line like “I’ll see you in two weeks,” when I realized Kevin had been staring straight at me, whereas his every other glance had been sidelong. That stopped me, unnerved me, and made me wonder why I had ever wanted him to look me in the eye. Once I was no longer fussing with my coat, he said, “You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga mother with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you’re not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don’t be dragging your ass back here on my account.” Then he added, “Because I hate you.” I know that children say that all the time, in fits: I hate you, I hate you! eyes squeezed with tears. But Kevin is approaching eighteen, and his delivery was flat. I had some idea of what I was supposed to say back: Now, I know you don’t mean that, when I knew that he did. Or, I love you anyway, young man, like it or not. But I had an inkling that it was following just these pat scripts that had helped to land me in a garish overheated room that smelled like a bus toilet on an otherwise lovely, unusually clement December afternoon. So I said instead, in the same informational tone, “I often hate you, too, Kevin,” and turned heel.
So you can see why I needed a pick-me-up coffee. It was an effort to resist the bar. Driving home, I was reflecting that however much I might wish to eschew a country whose citizens, when encouraged to do “pretty much what they want,” eviscerate the elderly, it made perfect sense that I would marry another American. I had better reason than most to find foreigners passé, having penetrated their exoticism to the chopped liver they are to one another. Besides, by the time I was thirty-three I was tired, suffering the cumulative exhaustion of standing all day that you only register when you sit down. I was forever myself a foreigner, feverishly rehearsing phrase-book Italian for “basket of bread.” Even in England, I had to remember to say “pavement” instead of “sidewalk.” Conscious that I was an ambassador of sorts, I would defy a daily barrage of hostile preconceptions, taking care not to be arrogant, pushy, ignorant, presumptuous, crass, or loud in public. But if I had arrogated to myself the whole planet as my personal backyard, this very effrontery marked me as hopelessly American, as did the fanciful notion that I could remake myself into a tropical internationalist hybrid from the horribly specific origins of Racine, Wisconsin. Even the carelessness with which I abandoned my native land was classically of a piece with our nosy, restless, aggressive people, who all (save you) complacently assume that America is a permanent fixture. Europeans are better clued. They know about the liveness, the contemporariness of history, its immediate rapacities, and will often rush back to tend their own perishable gardens to make sure that Denmark, say, is still there. But to those of us for whom “invasion” is exclusively associated with outer space, our country is an unassailable bedrock that will wait indefinitely intact for our return. Indeed, I had explained my peripatetics more than once to foreigners as facilitated by my perception that “the United States doesn’t need me.” It’s embarrassing to pick your life partner according to what television shows he watched as a child, but in a way that’s exactly what I did. I wanted to describe some wiry, ineffectual little man as a “Barney Fife” without having to tortuously append that Barney was a character in a warm, rarely exported serial called The Andy Griffith Show, in which an incompetent deputy was always getting into trouble by dint of his own hubris. I wanted to be able to hum the theme song to The Honeymooners and have you chime in with, “How sweet it is!” And I wanted to be able to say “That came out of left field” and not kick myself that baseball images didn’t necessarily scan abroad. I wanted to stop having to pretend I was a cultural freak with no customs of my own, to have a house that itself had rules about shoes to which its visitors must conform. You restored to me the concept of home. Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me. My neighbors now regard me with the same suspicion they reserve for illegal immigrants. They grope for words and speak to me with exaggerated deliberation, as if to a woman for whom English is a second language. And since I have been exiled to this rarefied class, the mother of one of those “Columbine boys,” I, too, grope for words, not sure how to translate my off-world thoughts into the language of two-for-the-price-of-one sales and parking tickets. Kevin has turned me into a foreigner again, in my own country. And maybe this helps to explain these biweekly Saturday visits, because it is only at Claverack Correctional that I need not translate my alien argot into the language of the suburban mundane. It is only at Claverack Correctional that we can make allusions without explanations, that we can take as understood a shared cultural past.
Eva
December 8, 2000
Dear Franklin,
I’m the one at Travel R Us who volunteers to stay late and finish up, but most of the Christmas flights are booked, and this afternoon we were all encouraged as a “treat” to knock off early, it being Friday. Beginning another desolate marathon in this duplex at barely 5 P.M. makes me close to hysterical. Propped before the tube, poking at chicken, filling in the easy answers in the Times crossword, I often have a nagging sensation of waiting for something. I don’t mean that classic business of waiting for your life to begin, like some chump on the starting line who hasn’t heard the gun. No, it’s waiting for something in particular, for a knock on the door, and the sensation can grow quite insistent. Tonight it’s returned in force. Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Which inevitably puts me in mind of that seminal May evening in 1982, when my expectation that you would walk into the kitchen anytime now was less unreasonable. You were location scouting in the pine barrens of southern New Jersey for a Ford advertisement and were due home about 7:00 P.M. I’d recently returned from a monthlong trip to update Greece on a Wing and a Prayer, and when you hadn’t shown up by 8:00, I reminded myself that my own plane had been six hours late, which had ruined your plans to sweep me from JFK to the Union Square Café. Still, by 9:00 I was getting edgy, not to mention hungry. I chewed distractedly on a chunk of pistachio halvah from Athens. On an ethnic roll, I’d made a pan of moussaka, with which I planned to convince you that, nestled against ground lamb with loads of cinnamon, you did like eggplant after all. By 9:30, the custard topping had started to brown and crust around the edges, even though I’d turned the oven down to 250˚. I took out the pan. Balanced on the fulcrum between anger and anguish, I indulged a fit of pique, banging the drawer when I went for the aluminum foil, grumbling about having fried up all those circles of eggplant, and now it was turning into a big, dry, charred mess! I yanked my Greek salad out of the fridge and furiously pitted the calamatas, but then left it to wilt on the counter and the balance tipped. I couldn’t be mad anymore. I was petrified. I checked that both phones were on the hook. I confirmed that the elevator was working, though you could always take the stairs. Ten minutes later, I checked the phones again. This is why people smoke, I thought. When the phone did ring at around 10:20, I pounced. At my mother’s voice, my heart sank. I told her tersely that you were over three hours late, and I mustn’t tie up the line. She was sympathetic, a rare sentiment from my mother, who then tended to regard my life as one long accusation, as if the sole reason I ventured to yet another country was to rub her nose in the fact that for one more day she had not left her porch. I should have remembered that she, too, had been through this very experience at twenty-three, and not for hours but for weeks, until a slim envelope flipped through her front door slot from the War Department. Instead I was cruelly rude, and hung up. Ten-forty. Southern New Jersey wasn’t perilous—timber and farmland, not like Newark. But there were cars like primed missiles, and drivers whose stupidity was murderous. Why didn’t you call? That was before the advent of mobile phones, so I’m not blaming you. And I realize this experience is common as dirt: Your husband, your wife, your child is late, terribly late, and then they come home after all and there’s an explanation. For the most part, these brushes against a parallel universe in which they never do come home—for which there is an explanation, but one that will divide your whole life into before and after—vanish without a trace. The hours that had elongated into lifetimes suddenly collapse like a fan. So even though the salty terror in my gums tasted familiar, I couldn’t recall a specific instance when I had paced our loft before, head swimming with cataclysms: an aneurysm, an aggrieved postal worker with an automatic in Burger King. By 11:00, I was making vows. I gulped a glass of sauvignon blanc; it tasted like pickle juice. This was wine without you. The moussaka, its dry, dead hulk: This was food without you. Our loft, rich with the international booty of baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import outlet: This was our home without you. Objects had never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory. Your remnants mocked me: the jump rope limp on its hook; the dirty socks, stiff, caricatured deflations of your size eleven feet. Oh, Franklin, of course I knew that a child can’t substitute for a husband, because I had seen my brother stooped from the pressure to be the “little man of the house”; I had seen the way it tortured him that Mother was always searching his face for resemblances to that ageless photo on the mantle. It wasn’t fair. Giles couldn’t even remember our father, who died when he was three and who had long since transformed from a flesh-andblood Dad who dribbled soup on his tie into a tall, dark icon looming over the fireplace in his spotless army air corps uniform, an immaculate emblem of all that the boy was not. To this day Giles carries himself with a diffidence. When in the spring of 1999 he forced himself to visit me and there was nothing to say or do, he flushed with speechless resentment, because I was reviving in him the same sense of inadequacy that had permeated his childhood. Even more has he resented the public attention refracted off our son. Kevin and Thursday have routed him from his rabbit hole, and he’s furious with me for the exposure. His sole ambition is obscurity, because Giles associates any scrutiny with being found wanting. Still I kicked myself that you and I had made love the night before and one more evening I had absently slipped that rubber hat around my cervix. What could I do with your jump rope, your dirty socks? Wasn’t there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi? No offspring could replace you. But if I ever had to miss you, miss you forever, I wanted to have someone to miss you alongside, who would know you if only as a chasm in his life, as you were a chasm in mine. When the phone rang again at nearly midnight, I hung back. It was late enough to be a reluctant emissary of a hospital, the police. I let it ring a second time, my hand on the receiver, warming the plastic like a magic lantern that might grant one last wish. My mother claims that in 1945 she left the envelope on the table for hours, brewing herself cup after cup of black, acid tea and letting them grow cold. Already pregnant with me from his last home leave, she took frequent trips to the toilet, closing the bathroom door and keeping the light off, as if hiding out. Haltingly, she had described to me an almost gladiatorial afternoon: facing down an adversary bigger and more ferocious than she, and knowing that she would lose. You sounded exhausted, your voice so insubstantial that for one ugly moment I mistook it for my mother’s. You apologized for the worry. The pickup had broken down in the middle of nowhere. You’d walked twelve miles to find a phone. There was no point in talking at length, but it was agony to end the call. When we said good-bye, my eyes welled in shame that I had ever declared, “I love you!” in that peck-at-the-door spirit that makes such a travesty of passion. I was spared. In the hour it took a taxi to drive you to Manhattan, I was allowed the luxury of slipping back to my old world of worrying about casseroles, of seducing you into eggplant and nagging you to do the laundry. It was the same world in which I could put off the possibility of our having a child another night, because we had reservations, and there were many more nights. But I refused to relax right away, to collapse into the casual heedlessness that makes everyday life possible, and without which we would all batten ourselves into our living rooms for eternity like my mother. In fact, for a few hours I had probably been treated to a taste of my mother’s whole postwar life, since what she lacks may not be courage so much as a necessary self-deceit. Her people slaughtered by Turks, her husband plucked from the sky by devious little yellow people, my mother sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose benevolence is a collective delusion. In 1999, when I entered my mother’s universe for good—a place where anything could happen and often did—toward what Giles and I had always regarded as her neurosis I grew much kinder. You would indeed come home—this once. But when I put the phone down, it registered with a whispered click: There could yet come a day when you did not. Thus instead of going slack and infinite, time still felt frantically short. When you walked in you were so tired you could hardly speak. I let you skip dinner, but I would not let you sleep. I have experienced my share of burning sexual desire, and I can assure you that this was an urgency of another order. I wanted to arrange a backup, for you and for us, like slipping a carbon in my IBM Selectric. I wanted to make sure that if anything happened to either of us there would be something left beside socks. Just that night I wanted a baby stuffed in every cranny like money in jars, like hidden bottles of vodka for weak-willed alcoholics. “I didn’t put in my diaphragm,” I mumbled when we were through. You stirred. “Is it dangerous?” “It’s very dangerous,” I said. Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.
The next morning, you said while we dressed, “Last night—you didn’t just forget?” I shook my head, pleased with myself. “Are you sure about this?” “Franklin, we’re never going to be sure. We have no idea what it’s like to have a kid. And there’s only one way to find out.” You reached under my arms and lifted me overhead, and I recognized your lit-up expression from when you’d played “airplane” with Brian’s daughters. “Fantastic!” I had sounded so confident, but when you brought me in for a landing I started to panic. Complacency has a way of restoring itself of its own accord, and I’d already stopped worrying whether you would live through the week. What had I done? When later that month I got my period, I told you I was disappointed. That was my first lie, and it was a whopper. During the following six weeks you applied yourself nightly. You liked having a job to do and bedded me with the same boisterous ifyou’re-going-to-do-anything-do-it-right with which you had knocked up our bookshelves. Myself, I wasn’t so sure about this yeomanlike fucking. I had always fancied the frivolousness of sex, and I liked it down and dirty. The fact that even the Armenian Orthodox Church would now look on with hearty approval could put me right out of the mood. Meanwhile, I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for. The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species’ heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist. Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement. I don’t want to pretend that I’m the first woman to discover the birds and the bees. But all this was new to me. And frankly, I wasn’t so sure about it. I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn’t initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used. I’m sure you remember those fights about booze. According to you, I shouldn’t have been drinking at all. I balked. As soon as I discovered I was pregnant— I was pregnant, I didn’t go in for this we stuff—I’d go cold turkey. But conception could take years, during which I was not prepared to killjoy my every evening with glasses of milk. Multiple generations of women had tippled cheerfully through their pregnancies and what, did they all give birth to retards? You sulked. You went quiet if I poured myself a second glass of wine, and your disapproving glances despoiled the pleasure (as they were meant to). Sullenly, you’d grumble that in my place you’d stop drinking, and yes, for years if necessary, about which I had no doubt. I would let parenthood influence our behavior; you would have parenthood dictate our behavior. If that seems a subtle distinction, it is night and day.
I was deprived that clichéd cinematic tip-off of heaving over the toilet, but it doesn’t appear to be in moviemakers’ interests to accept that some women don’t get morning sickness. Although you offered to accompany me with my urine sample, I dissuaded you: “It’s not as if I’m getting tested for cancer or something.” I remember the remark. Much like what they say in jest, it’s telling what people claim something is not. At the gynecologist’s, I delivered my marinated artichoke jar, a briskness covering the intrinsic embarrassment of handing off smelly effluents to strangers, and waited in the office. Dr. Rhinestein—a cold young woman for her profession, with an aloof, clinical temperament that would have suited her better for pharmaceutical trials with rats—swept in ten minutes later and leaned over her desk to jot. “It’s positive,” she said crisply. When she looked up, she did a double take. “Are you all right? You’ve turned white.” I did feel strangely cold. “Eva, I thought you were trying to get pregnant. This should be good news.” She said this severely, with reproach. I got the impression that if I wasn’t going to be happy about it, she would take my baby and give it to someone who’d got their mind right—who would hop up and down like a game-show contestant who’d won the car. “Drop your head between your legs.” It seems I had begun to weave. Once I had forced myself to sit up, if only because she seemed so bored, Dr. Rhinestein went through a long list of what I couldn’t do, what I couldn’t eat and drink, when I would —never mind my plans to update “WEEWAP,” as the office now called our Western European edition, thanks to you—return for my next appointment. This was my introduction to the way in which, crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression “you’re eating for two now, dear,” is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair; indeed, as the land of the free has grown increasingly coercive, the inference seems to run that “you’re eating for us now,” for 200-some million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five major food groups. The right to boss pregnant women around was surely on its way into the Constitution. Dr. Rhinestein itemized recommended brands of vitamins and lectured on the dangers of continuing to play squash.
I had the afternoon to assemble myself into the glowing mother-to-be. Instinctively, I chose a plain cotton sundress more pert than sexy, then gathered the ingredients for a meal that was aggressively nutritious (the sautéed sea trout would be unbreaded, the salad would sport sprouts). In the meantime, I tried on different approaches to a shopworn scene: coy, delayed; bemused, artificially offhand; gushing— oh, darling! None of them seemed to suit. As I whisked about the loft twisting fresh candles into holders, I made a brave attempt at humming but could only think of show tunes from big-budget musicals like Hello, Dolly! I hate musicals. Ordinarily, the finishing touch on a festive occasion was choosing the wine. I stared dolefully at our ample rack, bound to gather dust. Some celebration. When the elevator clanked at our floor, I kept my back turned and arranged my face. With one glance at the tortured collection of conflicting twitches we make when we “arrange” our faces, you spared me the announcement. “You’re pregnant.” I shrugged. “Looks that way.” You kissed me, chastely, no tongue. “So when you found out—how’d you feel?” “A bit faint, actually.” Delicately, you touched my hair. “Welcome to your new life.” Since my mother was as terrified of alcohol as she was of the next street over, a glass of wine had never lost for me its tantalizing quality of the illicit. Although I didn’t think I had a problem, a long draught of rich red at day’s end had long been emblematic to me of adulthood, that vaunted American Holy Grail of liberty. But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules. So I poured myself a flute of cranberry juice and toasted, brightly. “La chaim!” Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon—the smallest of compromises, the little roundings off or slight recastings of one emotion as another that is a tad nicer or more flattering. I did not care so much about being deprived of a glass of wine per se. But like that legendary journey that begins with a single step, I had already embarked upon my first resentment. A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. For that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won’t pee away. Hence, hard as I tried to be a grown-up about my cranberry juice, chosen carefully for its resemblance to a young Beaujolais, deep down inside I was a brat. While you came up with names (for boys), I wracked my brain for what in all this—the diapers, the sleepless nights, the rides to soccer practice—I was meant to be looking forward to. Eager to participate, you had volunteered to give up booze for my pregnancy, though our baby would be no more bouncing should you forgo your predinner microbrew. So you began festively knocking back cranberry juice to beat the band. You seemed to relish the opportunity to prove how little drinking meant to you. I was annoyed. Then, you were always captivated by self-sacrifice. However admirable, your eagerness to give your life over to another person may have been due in some measure to the fact that when your life was wholly in your lap you didn’t know what to do with it. Self-sacrifice was an easy way out. I know that sounds unkind. But I do believe that this desperation of yours—to rid yourself of yourself, if that is not too abstract—burdened our son hugely. You remember that evening? We should have had so much to talk about, but we were awkward, halting. We were no longer Eva and Franklin, but Mommy and Daddy; this was our first meal as a family, a word and a concept about which I had always been uneasy. And I was short-tempered, discarding all the names you came up with, Steve and George and Mark, as “way too ordinary,” and you were hurt. I couldn’t talk to you. I felt pent up, clogged. I wanted to say: Franklin, I’m not sure this is a good idea. You know in your third trimester they won’t even let you onto a plane? And I hate this whole rectitudinous thing, the keeping to a good diet and setting a good example and finding a good school... It was too late. We were supposed to be celebrating and I was supposed to be elated. Frantic to recreate the longing for a “backup” that had got me into this, I roused the memory of the night you were stranded in the pine barrens— barren, had that set me off? But that May evening’s rash decision had been an illusion. I had made up my mind all right, but long before, back when I fell so hard and irrevocably for your guileless American smile, your heartbreaking faith in picnics. However weary I might have grown with writing up new countries, over time it is inevitable that food, drink, color, and trees—the very state of being alive is no longer fresh. If its shine had tarnished, this was still a life I loved, and one into which children didn’t readily fit. The single thing I loved more was Franklin Plaskett. You coveted so little; there was only one big-ticket item you wanted that was in my power to provide. How could I have denied you the light in your face when you lifted Brian’s squealing little girls? With no bottle over which to linger, we went to bed on the early side. You were nervous about whether we were “supposed” to have sex, if it would hurt the baby, and I grew a little exasperated. I was already victimized, like some princess, by an organism the size of a pea. Me, I really wanted to have sex for the first time in weeks, since we could finally fuck because we wanted to get laid and not to do our bit for the race. You acquiesced. But you were depressingly tender. Though I expected that my ambivalence would evanesce, this conflicted sensation grew only sharper, and therefore more secret. At last I should come clean. I think the ambivalence didn’t go away because it wasn’t what it seemed. It is not true that I was “ambivalent” about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple, we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.
Eva
