Go Ask Fannie, page 8
She sure did.
“You’re mean,” George sniffled, carrying a bag of trash to the garage, later that afternoon.
“Yeah, and what about Daniel?” Ruth said, wiping her brow. “What are you going to make him do? Because it isn’t fair that he just took off before you decided to make us do this.”
“Daniel will get his fair share of work,” Lillian assured her, though she dreaded giving Daniel any task, because she knew he would complain to the point where she would just want to do it herself. Her funny, good-humored son had turned so unpleasant in the last year. Just fifteen he was, and he thought the world owed him a big giant favor. Lillian suspected there was a girl involved in this most recent mood swing, but Daniel wasn’t volunteering anything and Lillian certainly wasn’t going to ask.
“Thank you,” said Lillian to the three sour faces when the van was done. “Who wants a Popsicle?!”
The original idea had been to view the fireworks as a family; but with Ruth leaving at six to meet friends, and Daniel having failed to show up for the barbeque for even a minute, it was just George and Lizzie who accompanied the parents to Memorial Field, and even George, who’d promised to take Lizzie to get some cotton candy, spotted some friends and took off.
Lillian spread out an old quilt. The mosquitos were biting and she fumigated Lizzie with bug spray. Lizzie was not happy at being abandoned by her siblings.
“Look what I have,” Murray said, and he brought out a box of sparklers. Cradling Lizzie from behind, he struck a match to a sparkler, and, placing his large broad hand over her small plump one, he guided her in spelling out her name with light. When the fireworks began, the three of them lay back and watched the spectacle, standard red and blue chrysanthemums but also the towering rockets that sizzled and popped, and spiral-tailed bursts, and the silent ones with a flash of light followed by a loud sonic boom.
In the darkness, Lillian felt Murray’s warm hand close over hers.
“Don’t ditch me now,” he murmured.
“Don’t blow it,” she whispered back.
“I’d be home on weekends,” he said.
Counting chickens, Lillian thought. Crossing bridges.
A pop, and a boom, and curlicues of smoke spun dizzily toward earth.
“It hurts my ears,” cried little Lizzie, wriggling with delight.
* * *
• • •
LILLIAN HOLMES WAS just twenty-three when she married Murray Blaire in front of a justice of the peace in Boston. Lillian’s father, a banker, didn’t bring a shotgun to the ceremony, but he might as well have; John Holmes had taken the news of Lillian’s pregnancy with the harsh disappointment of the Puritan that he was. By contrast, Murray’s parents, liberal Democrats from conservative New Hampshire, were simply thrilled that their thirty-one-year-old son was finally settling down and producing a grandchild for them to fawn over.
At the time, Murray was in his second year of law school in Boston. He’d met Lillian the summer before, when he’d been working as a summer associate at the downtown law firm where Lillian was a secretary. He’d wasted no time in asking her out, and soon they were officially dating.
Lillian hated her job. She’d graduated from Smith with a degree in literature and considered herself a writer before anything else. In fact she was working on a novel, and she could sometimes be seen at her desk after hours, taking full advantage of the firm’s IBM Selectric with its busy little ball. At one point she received a stern reprimand from the head of the secretarial pool; Lillian refrained from using the typewriter, but stole paper and other supplies as often as she could, rationalizing that a big corporate law firm should be happy to subsidize a struggling artist like herself.
She and Murray had been seeing each other for almost six months when she skipped a period. “I can’t be!” she gasped, when the doctor at the clinic gave her the news. She and Murray had diligently used protection. “Condoms aren’t foolproof,” the doctor told her. “I’m sorry.”
This was right before Christmas, and Murray had already gone up to his parents’ house in New Hampshire. That night she called him with the news.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
Lillian knew her options were limited. This was 1966, when a girl who didn’t want to be pregnant had two choices: get a back-alley abortion in the United States, or fly to Puerto Rico. Well, three, actually: she could do it herself. For Lillian, the notion of a back-alley abortion was daunting; one friend had gotten an infection that left her sterile; another had almost bled to death. And she didn’t have the money to go to Puerto Rico, or the guts to attempt something herself.
Besides, she wasn’t sure she even wanted an abortion. It had occurred to her that this could be her ticket out of a stifling situation. Not that she was trying to scam Murray, not at all—she truly did love him—but she thought that motherhood would be more compatible with novel-writing than a nine-to-five job typing up other people’s legalese. She figured she could write while the baby napped.
“I’ve got money,” Murray offered.
“I don’t want an abortion,” she said. “Marry me instead.”
“Marry you!” Murray thought about it for a moment. “Well, I guess I could do that. I was going to ask you after law school, anyway.”
“I proposed to him,” Lillian would later tell her children, whenever they clamored for the details of their parents’ courtship. It was a story they never tired of hearing. “No getting down on one knee, either. I asked him over the phone. We got a marriage license. We stood before a judge. I wore a green dress.”
“I want to be a real bride,” Lizzie would declare. “I want a real gown.”
“Don’t make Mom feel bad,” said George.
“Nothing can make me feel bad about my marriage to your father,” Lillian said. “And I look good in green.”
In any case, after the quick civil ceremony, the newlyweds and their parents all went out to dinner in downtown Boston. Murray’s parents were appropriately celebratory, but John Holmes was grumpy the whole time.
“Study hard,” he told Murray as he paid the bill. “You’ve got a family to support now.”
“I couldn’t be happier,” said Murray.
“I hope you mean that,” said John Holmes.
“Sir,” said Murray, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
* * *
• • •
AFTER MURRAY GRADUATED from law school, they moved up to Concord, New Hampshire, where in the state capital Murray joined his father’s law firm. For the first few months they lived on the top floor of an overheated duplex with a long, narrow sagging porch. Lillian was always on the lookout for a real home. One bright fall day, after a harrowing excursion at the supermarket with thirteen-month-old Ruth trying to climb out of the grocery cart, she was driving through a tree-lined neighborhood when she happened to spot a For Sale sign. She pulled over and stopped the car.
Set back from the street with a large yard on all sides, the house stood three stories tall, with a wide, wrap-around porch and leaded windows and a rounded Old World tower that clung to one of the corners on the second floor. Rhododendrons flanked the front of the house, and the yellow leaves of a droopy catalpa tree shaded the double swing on the front porch.
Back at the duplex she called Murray. “Come quick,” she told him. Murray was able to get off at four; and at five o’clock, standing in the sunlit master bedroom, the young couple shook hands with the real estate agent on the full purchase price of $32,000.
The house was made for a big family—five bedrooms, a big yard, and a basement rec room made for tumbling around when the weather was bad. Lillian had recently found out she was pregnant again, and the next April Daniel was born, followed by hungry George and then, after a six-year respite, tiny Lizzie, after which Lillian finally prevailed upon Murray to get a vasectomy.
The Blaire children: theirs was a childhood of open lawns and unlocked bicycles, of neighborhood games of Kick the Can and Capture the Flag and touch football on those flaming October days. If Murray didn’t get home too late, during the languid June evenings he could be seen with his sleeves rolled up, pitching a whiffle ball to young batters out on the back lawn, while Lillian enjoyed an after-dinner gin and tonic on the back porch.
Lillian, meanwhile, hadn’t written a word since Ruth was born. Her novel lay packed away in a box in the garage. Motherhood was not in fact compatible with writing, she had found, especially with the arrival of more children. Nobody really napped, and there was always a skirmish to deal with. Besides, even if she had the time, what would she have written about? Diaper rash? Her fear of failure, in truth, was epic.
And so instead of trying to write during this time—and failing—Lillian became a model mother. She joined the Junior Service League and worked every Wednesday at the thrift shop, where she economized by buying good-quality coats for the children. She served on the PTA and baked mountains of cookies for their bake sales. On Saturdays during the winter she drove a carload of kids to nearby Mount Sunapee to ski; in the dog days of summer, when they weren’t vacationing at Murray’s beach house or the Holmes’s lake house up in northern Vermont, she drove them to Newfound Lake for the day.
“Very happy,” she wrote on her Smith alumnae questionnaire. “Couldn’t ask for more.”
* * *
• • •
BUT IF PRESSED, Lillian would probably have admitted to a sizeable hole in her life when her children were young. Every once in a while, she climbed the stairs to the third-floor guest bedroom, which had become a catchall for the unwanted. There she surveyed the random boxes and broken chairs, the trunks and suitcases and a rack full of clothes for the thrift shop, and she imagined it as her own writing space. Cleared of junk. Painted white. A lone table up against the wall, with the Smith Corona that had gotten her through many a term paper in college.
One night she mentioned it to Murray. He jumped on the idea. He said he’d always felt bad she didn’t have a place to write, and all that junk could be moved to the garage. He encouraged her; he said the room could be ready in a weekend.
Lillian knew she should be falling over backward with gratitude. But she wasn’t.
“I meant sometime,” she said hastily, draining her gin. “Not necessarily right now.”
“Well, I’m ready when you are,” Murray said.
She told herself to be glad that her husband was so gung ho. But his enthusiasm tickled another nerve, one she generally tried to ignore, which was the way Murray often had of prevailing on things, of orchestrating their lives. He was a good man, but he had strong opinions. Especially on matters of finance—for instance, if they disagreed on how to spend some extra money, Lillian more often than not found herself giving in, vaguely conscious of an unchallenged assumption that since Murray earned the income, Murray got the ultimate say. Hence new gutters instead of new drapes, the ski vacations up north instead of a week in the sun.
And it was not just Murray but his family as well. Lillian loved her in-laws, but they, too, could steal the show. Take vacations. Usually they split their two weeks during the summer, with one week at the Holmes’s lake house in northern Vermont, and another at the Blaire family’s beach house on New Hampshire’s small stretch of seacoast. It was clear which place the children preferred. John Holmes ran an austere summer cottage at the lake, with oatmeal for breakfast and Edgar Allan Poe before bed. By contrast, Murray’s parents lived with one goal in mind: to cram as much good food and fun as possible into each twenty-four-hour cycle. Hence the clambakes, the boogie boarding, badminton, volleyball, and silly parlor games every night.
“Why can’t we just spend both weeks at the beach house?” Daniel often complained.
“Oh! I just love the beach,” Lizzie declared, removing a lollipop from her mouth.
“It’s just more fun with Nana and Bumpy,” Ruth admitted.
“Mom?” said George. “Are you crying?”
Nobody said anything. Outside a blue jay screeched. A lawn mower started up. Lizzie was staring at her, fascinated. Lillian wished everyone would just go away.
“Knock-knock,” said Daniel.
Ruth bit. “Who’s there?”
“Euripides,” said Daniel.
Lillian blew her nose. “Euripides who?”
“Euripides jeans, you pay for them,” Daniel said.
And Lillian burst out laughing. Everyone laughed, relieved. A sad and awkward moment had been averted. Daniel told more knock-knock jokes. He had them in stitches. Lillian could laugh just looking at Daniel.
And yet when the children finally left the room (in search of food), despite all the welcome jollity, Lillian couldn’t shake the unease she was feeling, a sense of disquiet. Her tears weren’t about the beach house, she knew; they were about the fact that these days she just felt swallowed up as Mrs. Blaire. Even if Murray fixed up the guest room, it would be for Mrs. Blaire. Wasn’t she something more?
She thought of her novel, packed away in the garage. Was she a writer, if she wasn’t writing? When was she going to get over her fear of facing the blank page with nothing to say? When was she going to give Murray the go-ahead to fix up the writing room, and actually write?
Sometime. Just not right now.
* * *
• • •
BUT NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM, especially one involving any version of ambition. One summer night, after a long day at the lake and a hot ride home, Lillian and Murray were sitting on the back porch. Lillian had fed the family a slice of boloney, a scoop of cottage cheese, and fruit cocktail for dinner, then put Lizzie, three at the time, to bed. Now Murray had made them each a Tom Collins and they were watching the older children and a bunch of neighborhood kids horsing around in the Geesons’ plastic swimming pool next door—at four feet above ground and twelve feet in diameter, it was not really built for a gang of nine—and Murray was worrying about property damage with all the water that was getting slopped onto the lawn. Lillian was going through the day’s mail.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Murray.
“Oh great,” said Lillian. “Another dentist’s bill. That Chuck! Charges you to remove a piece of popcorn.”
“I had lunch with Robert today,” said Murray. “He was down for a doctor’s appointment.”
Robert was a friend of Murray’s father who lived up north.
“He said it was time I thought about running for Congress,” said Murray.
“You’ll never win,” she said bluntly. “You’re a Democrat.” At the time, New Hampshire was overwhelmingly Republican; since the Civil War, it had elected only a handful of Democrats to Congress.
“That’s what I said.” Murray chuckled. “Robert said I should give it a try someday.”
“I don’t want to move to Washington.”
“You wouldn’t have to. I’d get myself an apartment and come home on weekends.”
“And leave me with the kids.”
“Well, yes,” said Murray.
“Why don’t you just run for the state legislature? It was good enough for your father.”
There must have been something petulant in her voice, because Murray asked, “What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? What about my plans?”
“For writing? I’ve told you, I’ll fix up that room for you any time. You keep putting me off.”
“Well, maybe I’m ready now.”
“Then let’s do it!” Murray exclaimed, growing impatient.
“But you’ll still leave me with the kids. How am I going to do anything, if you’re jetting back and forth to Washington every week?” She stood up. “Ruth!” she shouted. “Daniel! George! Time for bed!”
“I just thought I’d put it out there,” said Murray. “You knew something like this was coming at some point.”
He was right; she’d known all along that he had political ambitions.
“But not now,” she said, definitely grumpy at this point. “I don’t want to be a candidate’s wife right now. I feel enough like Suzy Homemaker as it is.”
“You don’t have to get mad,” said Murray.
“I’m not mad.”
“You seem mad.”
“I’ve had a long hot day. I’ve driven home with sand in my crotch and a car full of screaming kids. And I’m sorry if nobody was happy with dinner tonight, but it was too damn hot to cook.”
“I was happy with dinner,” said Murray.
“You would have been happier with a steak.”
Murray was silent.
“You see? Nothing I do is right these days! Everyone complains all the time! You try taking care of the kids and getting dinner on the table every night and scheduling all the doctors’ appointments and filling out the school forms and making sure Ruth isn’t ruining her eyes by reading in bad light and Daniel actually goes to his swim lesson and George isn’t eating all the leftover chicken and Lizzie isn’t running away to feed the ducks at the park. You try it.”
“I’m not saying it’s easy,” Murray said hastily. “You work your tail off.”
Lillian stubbed out her cigarette. “I could use another one of these,” she said, handing Murray her glass. “No you don’t,” she said to the children, who were tromping up the steps sopping wet. She went and got towels from the dryer and tossed them out. “And wipe your feet, I don’t want the Geesons’ fresh-cut grass all over my house.”
