So Happy Together, page 3
And the backyard, where all three of them hung upside down from the swing set and where we buried the ashes of our beloved chocolate lab. Where the children collaborated on constructing his plywood tombstone and writing his epitaph: HERE LIES BRUNO, A DOG. WE THANK HIM FOR THE HAPPINESS HE GAVE US WHEN HE WAS YOUNG.
This is my children’s home. This is the keep of all their childhood memories. I almost lose my resolve, but then shake my head to send those lovely pictures back to my heart where they belong. The children will be all right. They have to be.
I take one last look around my white-on-white kitchen. The gleaming copper pots hanging from the ceiling are lovely. I reach up to touch one, but then remember what a pain in the ass it is to keep them shiny. I think I’m ready for take-out pizza eaten in a furnished room. Or better still, in a crash pad in the East Village. Whatever happened to crash pads? They’ve all gone condo, I guess.
I promise myself that I will devote my full attention to the kids: no daydreaming, no thinking about where I am going or who I hope to find, until after they’re on the bus. I will pay attention to every word, precious or otherwise, make a mental note of each request, and store up enough memories of that last morning, when my children’s world was still intact, to get me through the summer.
That flies out the window as soon as I hand out the gum. I’m a “no junk food” mom, and Greg and Sarah aren’t supposed to be chewing gum, per orders from the orthodontist, but today I’m breaking all the rules.
I’m giving the kids gum this morning because if I leave for good and if, somehow, Jack keeps me from getting custody of my babies, I don’t want them to remember me as the witch who not only had the nerve to abandon them, but never let them chew gum, buy crap cereal, or stay up late to watch Miami Vice (“Hey, she was okay. I remember she let us have gum once.”).
I hand each of them a pack of Juicy Fruit.
“Why are you giving us gum?” Sarah sounds suspicious.
“Yuk, Juicy Fruit. I hate Juicy Fruit. Why didn’t you get Bubble Yum?” Greg demands, his voice cracking on “Bubble.” Even though he’s being snotty, I feel for him. Puberty sucks.
“Yeah, the purple kind,” Sarah adds.
Caleb says nothing. He unwraps a piece of gum, carefully folds it into his mouth, and then remembers his manners: “Thanks, Mommy.”
Despite the protests, two more pieces are hurriedly unwrapped and stuffed between two sets of wire-encased teeth, lest mean, stupid Mom have second thoughts and take back the not-quite-right offering.
An unmistakably artificial fruity odor fills the car, and my resolve disappears. I can’t help it. It brings me back to Peter, and that time we both tried to quit smoking by chewing packs and packs of the stuff until our jaws ached and our tongues were coated white and our teeth were set on edge. And it didn’t work: it sent us right back to our Marlboros.
I can barely remember what he looked like then, although I still have one blurry photograph. He was clean-shaven. It was taken several months before he grew the beard that made him appear so Christlike. Or was that an attribute I assigned him later? Nevertheless, the bearded image is the one I’ve carried all this time.
It’s a mystery, my ties to this man. I don’t know why I never severed the connection. I certainly did with the others from those years, but not with Peter. The thread that binds me to him has woven in and out of whatever garment happens to be my life at any given moment, sometimes out for months or years at a time. But it always wends its way back, and it has never broken.
“Mom, put your signal on! You’re gonna miss the exit! Mom, I’ve been telling you that for the last five minutes. Mom, what’s wrong with you? Are you deaf?” Greg is frantic.
“I’m sorry, honey, I guess I was thinking of everything I have to do this week.”
“Yeah, like have a great time now that we’re out of your hair!” Sarah loves camp, but that doesn’t stop her from laying on a little guilt. As if I needed any reminders to feel guilty.
“I will miss you every single day,” I reply truthfully. “All three of you. I’ll probably even miss the bickering.”
With Greg’s timely reminder, I manage to make the exit for the Stamford shopping mall where the Willoway bus is waiting. Greg and Sarah, spotting long-lost summer friends, grab their gear and are off, forgetting all about their well-intentioned promises to look after their brother. Caleb hangs back, biting his nails.
“Honey, you’ll get to know some really neat kids and by next summer, you’ll be acting just like Greg and Sarah, rushing off to see your friends and forgetting all about your old Mom.”
“I’d never forget you, Mommy. Please, please don’t make me go,” he implores hoarsely.
“C’mon Caleb, I got some guys I want you to meet,” Greg has suddenly reappeared.
Reluctantly, my youngest drops my hand, squares his shoulders, and follows his brother. He is still looking at the ground as he joins Greg’s meet-and-greet, and no doubt an awkward “Hi” is all he can manage in the midst of those older boys. I see him whisper something to Greg and, in a moment, all three of my offspring surround me to receive last-minute hugs and kisses, and, impatiently, last-minute instructions.
“You two, don’t forget about using the Water-Pic every night. And if any wires break, don’t pull on them or try to fix them yourselves. I’ve left instructions on your health forms for the camp to contact a local orthodontist, don’t forget. And don’t chew any more gum.”
They giggle.
“And help Caleb make friends.”
Greg and Sarah roll their eyes and Caleb is suddenly fascinated by his shoelaces.
“And don’t let anyone touch you where you don’t want to be touched. . .”
“Mom, you are so weird. That’s just gross!” Sarah grimaces and shakes her head, her ponytail whipping back and forth.
Yeah, she is definitely wearing mascara.
The camp director’s whistle breaks into my litany, and with quick hugs and “Love you”’s two of them are on the bus, but Caleb turns to me in one more desperate attempt to change his fate.
“Mommy, what if I lose another tooth at camp? The Tooth Fairy won’t know where to find me. She’ll get lost. I have to go home!” He is clinging to me and trying not to cry.
“Oh, sweetie, I’ll send her your camp address this afternoon, I promise,” and I shoo him up the steps.
He lingers a moment in the doorway, sensing my ambivalence, hoping for a last-minute reprieve, but when he sees that I will not relent, he, too, moves towards a seat.
In a moment, to the strains of “Camp Willoway Forever,” my offspring are off to the Maine woods. I head to the car. The back seat is empty, save for some yellow gum wrappers, a forgotten G.I. Joe comic book, and the echoes of three children’s voices.
“I love you,” I mouth as I embark on my own journey to parts unknown, to a person who, after twenty years, is also an unknown. I am off to a small town in North Dakota to find Peter, who might need me as much as I need him. Never once, since my phone call to Ernesto, did I entertain the thought that Peter might not even be there. I guess I figured if inertia had kept him home for the last twenty years, it would have the decency to pin him down for another six months, give or take a few days, until my arrival. So, I am driving 1,537 miles to see if I can go back, make that other choice, and pick up that other road. Perhaps, just perhaps, it will make all the difference.
CHAPTER THREE
Long distance driving leaves a lot of time for thinking, especially in those radio dead zones where nothing but easy listening comes over the airwaves. I find myself going back to my laundry list: Where am I going to find a lawyer who doesn’t know Jack or his firm? Will Jack contest the divorce? Will he try to get custody, based on the fact that I am a crazy woman who left her kids to follow . . . what? A twenty-year-old rescue fantasy? Oh, shit, did I remember to unplug the iron this morning? It’s too painful to think about the children and what my present actions might mean for their future. What if Peter’s not interested in being a stepfather—then I’d be a single parent. Do I even know any? Oh, yeah, Tricia, back in Tucson . . . but she, at least, could depend on her mother for help. And she only had one kid. How would I raise three? It’s too guilt-inducing to think about Jack. I wonder if he’ll miss me. To be absolutely fair, he does have some very admirable qualities, not the least of which is that he really does love our children, and if I were in his shoes, and he left for another woman, would I move heaven and earth to make sure I got the kids? I’d like to think I would. No, I know I would . . .
Oh, God, I was so cavalier with Caleb about the Tooth Fairy this morning. What if he does lose a tooth? He’ll never believe in her again . . . or in me, either. Maybe I’d better call Jack and ask him to arrange something with the camp . . . oops, nope, can’t do that.
And that gets me started thinking about him again. Jack’s not a bad guy, and he still, on occasion, can make me laugh . . . and, in those rare instances when we found ourselves in the mood for sex, it was still pretty good. But it wasn’t enough. Truth be told, I doubt very much that anyone looking at our marriage would have reason to believe that “I’m just not happy,” should tip the scales. But I can’t even find myself in this family. When I look at the picture of the Tanners of Westport, Connecticut, Jack and the children stand out in bold, bright colors. I am barely etched in bas relief. And then, of course, there’s Peter. I used to be bold and bright and colorful when I was with him. Sometimes I even sparkled.
But I keep second-guessing myself. What am I doing, all alone, driving west across the country when I should be home planning the PTA fall fundraising fair, dressing for dinner at the club, doing the laundry or writing my monthly column for our local newspaper? That’s where I belong, right? I am not without doubt.
About an hour into my trip, I pull into a rest stop to use the pay phone. No one answers, so I leave a message.
“Hi, this is Carolyn Tanner. Greg, Sarah and Caleb’s mom? Listen, could you do me a huge favor? Caleb was pretty anxious this morning when he got on the bus. He’s only eight and it’s his first time. He was worried that the Tooth Fairy wouldn’t be able to find him at camp. So, if he loses a tooth, could you please ask his counselor to remind him to put it under his pillow, and then could someone collect it and leave a dollar there? I’ll pay it back. Thanks so much.”
I am breaking so many promises to my children right now, but this one, at least, I’ve kept. And then, as I am tallying up all my failures, I remember this: even before I had my kids, I was determined that my mothering would be a 180 from the way I was mothered. But look what I’m doing now. Maybe this apple hasn’t fallen far from that tree after all.
Yeah, about that tree. . .
A couple of years ago, waiting in the dentist’s office, I started to read a magazine article about adult children of alcoholics. And I suddenly heard my mother’s voice berating me: What, you’re going to blame me because you’re an approval-seeker and have lost your identity? I had nothing to do with that. Because you think like a victim and are attracted by that weakness in your love relationships? So, this is what you saw in that Peter-person? So maybe you confused pity with love? Because you have a low sense of self-esteem? Don’t blame me, Carolyn. Look in the mirror. You’re a smart girl and you let people walk all over you. Especially that shiksa mother-in-law of yours. And that stuck-up husband? Please! You weren’t good enough for him the way you were? I’m ashamed that any daughter of mine turned into such a doormat.
Guilt is exhausting. After mustering all my energy to create a normal going-off-to-camp morning, to not give myself away, and then that whole Tooth Fairy scenario, and picturing my mother’s disapproval, I already need another cup of coffee. I linger at the rest stop and try to focus on the details of the trip ahead. I’m an hour into the twenty-three hours from Westport to Peter’s home in western North Dakota. I figure I can drive about seven hours a day, with coffee and pee breaks, so a little over three days, maybe four at the most, and I should be there. The nearness of it excites me but then terrifies me, and then I start to think about Jack and home and a kind of clipped-wing safety that I am defying with my flight.
Once I was going to be a writer, a playwright, to be specific. But now, once a month, I write a newspaper column called “Running in Place,” in which I voice my opinion on school budgets, extoll the virtues of our local library, and come up with tricks to get your kids to eat their vegetables. Jack calls these efforts my “little hobby,” an acceptable outlet for my trickling creative juices and naive politics. Sometimes I wonder if he, too, is disappointed in me, that I didn’t become the next Jean Kerr or Lillian Hellman, and that Wendy Wasserstein did. But if I try to reach into my brain and find the words that once flowed to paper, I come up empty. Maybe I was just kidding myself. Maybe I wasn’t that good in the first place.
But no, I was, and when I find Peter, it will all come back. I know it will. At least, I think it will.
And then I start doubting again and suddenly my gutsy flight seems pointless and ill-conceived.
It’s not too late, I can turn around now, stop at the mall, pick up a few things, and when I get home, Jack will ask how the leave-taking went and I will tell him about Caleb and the Tooth Fairy and he’ll say he wished he could have been there but, I needed to understand, the golf game had been with an important potential client and they really wanted to represent him and then he’ll give me a swing by putt by chip description of the game, blah, blah, blah, and I’ll pretend to listen, and somewhere in there he might actually ask me what I did after I dropped off the kids.
“Oh, nothing all that interesting, just stopped at the mall and bought some new tablecloths, then picked up the dry cleaning.”
If I used this as material for my column, I’d call it “Fear of Flying.”
And then I think about the whole empty summer spooling out in front of me, and I press on.
Back when I used to hang onto his every word, Jack told me this sweet story: When he was little, maybe six or seven, his mother used to park him and his brothers (two at the time, with three more to join them in a few years) in front of the TV so she could get a couple of hours of peace and quiet. Jack loved the old films from the 1930s and ’40s on Million Dollar Movie, and since he was the oldest, he usually got to decide what they watched, even though his younger brothers would have chosen cartoons. All those Busby Berkeley extravaganzas had him convinced that in those bygone eras, in real life, everyone tap-danced and rode around in Packards with running boards, and they all lived in a black-and-white world.
I saw my parents’ 1940s, though, in glorious Technicolor, like the Emerald City. Their story began in 1943. Manhattan was teeming with young soldiers and sailors, ready to embark for hostile shores. My mother and her best friend, both from Orthodox Jewish families in Borough Park, Brooklyn, decided to sneak into “the city,” each telling their parents that they were spending the night at the other’s house. My grandparents did not own a telephone, and not in their wildest dreams could they imagine that their pious eldest daughter would disobey them and behave like some kind of hoor, so there was little chance that she would be found out. The girls were going to a USO dance for some harmless flirtation, to do their part for the war effort by providing our brave young men a few hours’ distraction from the horrors they would be facing overseas. I can see those two—they were barely nineteen—on the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit train, applying forbidden red lipstick and the blackest mascara, both exhilarated and terrified at what they were about to do.
And it was there, at that dance, on an evening she recalled years later as the most exciting night of her life, that she met my father, a Methodist farm boy from Vermont who was studying to become a large-animal vet.
“He was so handsome, Carolyn,” she would tell me on those infrequent afternoons when I dragged out the old leather suitcase full of photographs and we both sat cross-legged on my parents’ chenille-covered bed.
“Look . . . so tall and blond and dashing, just like Prince Charming . . .”
Yes, I could see them, the dazzling second lieutenant, Charlie Mills, and the kosher butcher’s knock-out beautiful daughter, Shulamith Goldstone, the lights of Broadway behind them, falling in love while dancing the Lindy Hop to Kay Kyser’s music. I wish I could have met those two.
Then her voice would turn bitter as she recited the familiar litany: “How was I to know that Prince Charming would spend most of his days with his arm up a cow’s tuchus and come home smelling like the barn floor? And we’d live in this godforsaken place where they think the height of culture is talent night at the Grange?” She’d spew this out while lighting one cigarette after another.
I always knew what was coming next.
“I could’ve had a career on Broadway if it hadn’t been for him. I could have kept my family . . .”
I was too afraid of her wrath to point out, with a twelve-year-old’s unfailing logic, that a family that disowned a daughter for marrying a gentile would surely do the same to a daughter who opted for a life of sin on the wicked and un-kosher Broadway stage.
“What did you expect?” I wanted to yell at her. (I was feeling a little protective of my dad). “That it would be like all White Christmas-y, and Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney would come over for dinner?”
But I didn’t. The furthest Shulamith had ever been from Borough Park was Jones Beach.
Why she stayed married to my father, why she stayed in a community that never made her feel welcome, was beyond me, but, even at twelve, I thought it must have had something to do with the magical night of the USO dance (and maybe that her family would refuse to take back damaged goods?). It never even entered my mind that they may have been staying together because of me. In any case, when my own marriage started unraveling some twenty-five years later, I had no paradigm for how to work things out. Two weeks after they met, four days before my father shipped overseas, they were married at City Hall. No one from either family was there. Two city employees were enlisted as witnesses, as Shulamith Goldstone became Shelly Mills.
