Go Ask Fannie, page 9
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• • •
IT WAS MAYBE A FEW MONTHS after that discussion that Lillian awoke in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat. The dream had been so vivid! Swimming at night, a neighbor’s pool, the sound of crickets . . . For the first time since before she had children, words and images were spilling from her head. Quietly she got out of bed. She removed her nightgown and rubbed herself dry with a towel, then slipped into a fresh gown and tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen. A magical moment: if this had happened while she was cooking dinner, she might have only been able to scribble a note to herself. But no: tonight, with nobody to distract her, she found one of Murray’s legal pads and immediately wrote, The night after her neighbors went on vacation, Mrs. Klarner went skinny-dipping in their pool. She paused, and reread the sentence. Who was Mrs. Klarner? What possessed her to sneak into the neighbor’s pool? Was there a Mr. Klarner? Her husband found out, she continued, but instead of chastising her for trespassing, the next night he joined her for a swim, and afterward they made love on the neighbors’ chaise longue. It was the first time they’d ever had sex out of doors, and Mrs. Klarner climaxed to the sound of crickets whirring noisily in the dark, close by.
“I could get used to this,” she said to Mr. Klarner.
Suddenly Lillian wanted to work on a real draft, wanted the feel of her fingers typing at ninety words per minute. She found a flashlight and went out to the garage—a small detached garage, just another repository of junk. They hadn’t parked a car in there since they moved in. She beamed the flashlight about, searching amid the clutter of garden tools, skis, bikes, Christmas decorations, and trash cans. Ah! There it was, the gray plastic case, under a utility shelf.
Back in the kitchen, she set the dusty case on the table and opened it up. Inside was her Smith Corona—powder blue, with creamy white keys. She ran her hands over it and recalled hunkering down in her tiny overheated room at Smith, pounding out term papers on Eaton’s Corrasable Bond.
Lillian unfastened the holding clips, lifted the typewriter out, and set it with a clunk on the table in front of her. She found a sheet of blue-lined notebook paper and rolled it into the platen, feeling that satisfying catch with each incremental turn. To her amazement the keys did not stick; the ribbon was low on ink, the a’s and o’s solid black due to gunk, but it was good enough for now. She began to type, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The words fell from her fingertips. No, they flew, with the little bell dinging as she neared the end of each line, prompting her to whisk the carriage back for a new line.
They began to make a regular practice of it, bringing a bottle of wine and slipping naked into the cool water, making love on a blanket, or even up on the neighbors’ settee on the back porch. Mrs. Klarner envied the porch furniture and sometimes felt a wash of anger that Mr. Klarner didn’t make enough money for them to afford nice porch furniture and a swimming pool, but the sex was so good that she didn’t say anything.
Then one night, when they were lying spent on an old sleeping bag, they heard a car pull into the driveway—
She heard a noise, and looked up and noticed little Lizzie standing in the doorway in her plastic-footed pajamas.
“Oh!” she said. “You scared me.”
“What are you doing?” Lizzie asked.
“I’m writing,” Lillian said.
“What are you writing?”
“A story,” Lillian admitted.
“Will you read it to me?”
“Go back to bed,” Lillian said. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“But you’re up.”
“Yes, but I don’t have school tomorrow.”
Lizzie padded over and tried to climb up into Lillian’s lap, but Lillian was firm. Couldn’t she be off duty at three a.m.? “Back to bed,” she said, standing, but Lizzie reached up and tried to push a key, which stuck. Lillian debated letting Lizzie type a line or so of letters, but she didn’t want to set a precedent. “This is Mom’s typewriter,” she said sternly. “You don’t touch, do you understand? It’s not a toy. Now off you go!” In the end she had to carry Lizzie upstairs and tuck her back into bed, which she suspected Lizzie wanted all along. Then she returned to the kitchen and picked up where she had left off.
Mr. Klarner grabbed his pants. Mrs. Klarner picked up a towel and fled, stubbing her toe on a garden gnome. “Call the police, Bill!” she heard her neighbor say. “Somebody’s in the backyard!”
By dawn she had written a dozen pages. The Klarners’ marriage was now in shambles. The neighbors sued. All sorts of bad shit was happening, and Lillian was thrilled.
* * *
• • •
AND IT WAS, indeed, the start of a new phase of Lillian’s life. She and Murray finally cleared out the third-floor guest room and gave it a fresh coat of paint. She moved an old sewing table up there as a desk, where she set up her typewriter, along with a box of Corrasable Bond and a cup of pencils. She moved her books up as well, arranging them by course offering: the Modern American Novel, James Joyce, the Russians. She bought herself an electric teakettle so she wouldn’t be tempted to go downstairs. A heavy glass ashtray that she wouldn’t have to empty every time she turned around.
Every morning, as soon as the kids went off to school—Lizzie was in kindergarten now—Lillian climbed the stairs to her office and wrote. There was no phone extension up there, so if the phone rang downstairs she let it go. Whoever it was, they would call back. She chain-smoked. She talked to herself. Sometimes she typed fast and furiously. Other times she did not in fact have anything to say and found herself standing murderously in the middle of the room with a fly swatter. Regardless, she worked until eleven thirty, at which point she went to pick up Lizzie. Her three hours of golden time were over.
The children weren’t allowed in the room unless there was an emergency. Once Daniel raided her paper supply and she felt vandalized. “Do I have to put a Keep Out! sign on the door?!” she shrieked.
“Respect your mother,” said Murray.
Lillian wasn’t too keen on showing the family members her work, because she felt like she was starting at square one again as a writer. Plus there was sex in her stories. As a result of this secrecy, everyone had a different attitude toward her writing. “Mom’s little writing projects,” Ruth sniffed to friends, covering up a sense of injustice over her mother’s refusal to share her work with a daughter who routinely got A’s in English. “Whatever she does up there,” Daniel mumbled, because he couldn’t conceive of what she was doing and had little interest in trying. “Mom’s work,” said George, with respect. “Mom’s special alone time” was how Lizzie characterized it, a note of fear in her voice.
“Just don’t write about me,” Murray joked.
* * *
• • •
AS FOR MURRAY’S CONGRESSIONAL AMBITIONS, after that first discussion they hadn’t gone very far; Republicans continued to control the state, and Murray kept toiling away at his law firm. But in February of the year Lizzie was in kindergarten, one of the state’s representatives got embroiled in a sex scandal, and Murray’s friends told him that his time was now or never. Based on a rudimentary poll, Murray determined that the people of New Hampshire’s second congressional district might, just might, be ready to elect a Democrat. He thought he had a good shot.
Lillian was wary. She knew she was never going to be a good Candidate’s Wife. And she didn’t want anything to cut into her golden time. It was hard enough as things stood; there was still cooking and cleaning and laundry to be done outside her writing time, and if a child was sick in the night, it was Lillian who stayed up and fell asleep at her desk the next day. So many of the great women writers had opted out of children completely, she remembered from her literature classes, and of those who had children, many had had just one. Was she doomed, with her brood of four?
Well, all she could do was try. Be stern, be selfish for those three hours a day, she told herself. And if Murray wants to run for Congress, let him. They’d figure it out.
“Okay,” she said. “As long as I get three hours a day in my room to myself.”
“Six hours,” Murray corrected her, “starting next fall, when Lizzie’ll be in first grade.”
Six hours of writing time! She could hardly believe it. Maybe she would even dig her novel out of the box in the garage.
It was going to be a very careful balance for Lillian.
And so Murray registered his candidacy. They had a long talk with the kids one night about the importance of remaining on good behavior while Murray was running for office. “You don’t have to be perfect,” Murray told them. “But no arrests, okay? No drug dealerships? No babies out of wedlock?”
“Dad!” exclaimed Ruth, turning red.
“Just being clear,” said Murray.
On the night of the Fourth, Murray and Lillian returned from the fireworks to a stifling house. After putting a crabby Lizzie to bed, they turned on the oscillating fan in their bedroom and lay on top of the sheets, feeling the cool, silky air glide across their tired limbs. They made love and were still wide awake. As they waited for their other children to get home, they strategized for the upcoming campaign. Despite the heat, and in a good mood that she attributed to her writing the day before, Lillian felt magnanimous and open-minded. They would tour the district in their van during weekends, they agreed, with everyone dressed in matching blue-and-white T-shirts. (“We’ll call it the Blaire-Mobile,” Lillian decided.) They would saturate the bean suppers, the county fairs, the Friday night football games in the fall. They would work as a team to get Murray elected.
Team Blaire.
7.
Zipper
The more immediate question after the Fourth of July was where to take their vacation that August, and since Murray planned a campaign blitz for his two weeks off, it made the most sense to go to the beach house for the entire time. Lillian couldn’t really argue with this; it was only an hour from Concord, after all, as opposed to the lake house up in Vermont.
As she didn’t expect to get much writing done during those two weeks of raucous family activity, she agreed to spend much of her time campaigning with Murray. The idea was for Murray’s fun-loving parents to supervise the children while Murray and Lillian traveled across the state. And so during those two weeks, they rose at six to shower and gulp down some coffee. At seven they got picked up by two aides in a humble Ford and were driven perhaps to Concord to meet with the public employees, to a rally on the town common in Keene, up to Claremont to keep Murray’s face alive in the Connecticut River Valley, and back to Concord for an early evening fish fry with the electrical workers. The scheduled day over, Murray and Lillian and his two aides drove back to the beach house and retired to the living room to talk strategy over pizza. Murray’s numbers showed a good solid lead over his opponent, who managed to keep putting his foot in his mouth with the sex scandal.
“Speaking of which,” said Murray.
“What?” Lillian said warily. She didn’t like sentences that began with “Speaking of which . . .”
“Martin here thinks you ought to start making your own appearances.” Martin Tobin was Murray’s chief aide.
Lillian didn’t like the idea. She’d never been comfortable speaking in front of groups; she was much more comfortable putting words on a piece of paper. But she was conscious of feeling a little like Pat Nixon these days, always smiling by Murray’s side. Take one for the team, she told herself. Martin suggested that she start with a coffee, something informal, and the second week in August, Lillian found herself on the schedule with a meet and greet down in Salem. The teachers’ union would welcome her.
“Try and keep the focus on education,” Murray said the night before. “Maybe talk about Head Start and WIC. Keep it light. And don’t get into gun control. Same with abortion—stay away from those kooks.”
He was referring to a couple that had been protesting at an abortion clinic the week before. They had been carrying graphic signs, and at one point they blocked the way of a young woman who had shown some hesitation upon seeing the photographs—a possible convert, they might have thought. In any case, the office manager came out to shoo them away, at which point the couple barged into the clinic and started shouting at the people in the waiting room—girls with their boyfriends, girls with their mothers; girls alone. A scuffle ensued between the man and one of the boyfriends, and the police had to be called in to extricate the couple from what was, of course, private property.
Murray’s feelings about the right to choose were pretty black and white. Occasionally he thought back to that evening in December when Lillian had called to tell him she was pregnant, and although he couldn’t imagine life without Ruth, and had no regrets about marrying Lillian, how nice it would have been if they’d had a real, safe, and legal choice. And these days, with four children who might find themselves in the same predicament someday, he often gave a silent prayer of thanks to Justice Blackmun for his opinion in Roe v. Wade.
But Murray was also courting the Catholic vote in his district, and while he was firmly pro-choice, he didn’t want to go out on a limb to emphasize this. Lillian thought it was cowardly of him.
“Those ‘kooks’ you’re referring to ought to go to jail,” she said, cracking an egg on top of some ground beef in a mixing bowl. She was making meat loaf tonight. Too much pizza. “They started the fight. You should say that. If people are antiabortion to begin with, you’re never going to get their vote, anyway.” She heard the beginning of an essay in her head. Imagine: You’re sixteen and pregnant . . . With the cookbook open before her, she wiped her hands and simply wrote down one word at the top of the page: “Imagine:”—the colon being essential to the clue prompt.
“All I’m saying is try to avoid the issue,” said Murray. “I need to be pragmatic. I don’t want a huge blaring headline.”
The next morning Lillian was ready at seven, dressed in khakis and a longish white sweater that covered up the little pooch she’d developed after four children. Meanwhile, Murray’s parents had come down with some kind of summer bug, so Ruth was going to drive the children up the coast to Old Orchard Beach for the day.
Lillian gave them their last-minute instructions. “No cotton candy, unless you want to pay the dentist bills,” she said. “And remember: your father’s running for public office. Don’t do anything that’ll embarrass him.”
“I’ll make sure,” Ruth vowed.
“Oh, thank you, Ruth,” said Daniel, in his best falsetto.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” George asked.
“I don’t know; go ask Fannie,” Lillian replied absently. Actually, maybe they’d just get Chinese.
“Am I tall enough for the Zipper, do you think?” little Lizzie asked.
“Absolutely not,” said Lillian.
“You’re tall enough for the kiddie cars,” said Daniel.
Lizzie stuck out her tongue at him.
“Nobody goes on the Zipper,” Lillian declared. “It makes everyone throw up. Here,” and she handed them each a five-dollar bill. “Have fun, and I’ll see you for dinner.”
The coffee in Salem was held at the local high school, with about thirty teachers in attendance. To her dismay, Lillian got stage fright; her voice cracked as she began, and she found it difficult to breathe. But she quickly recovered and thanked them for all they were doing to shape the next generation of thinkers. She talked about the need for early childhood education and cited figures that showed the success of programs like Head Start. She talked about all the budget cuts President Reagan had proposed, and stressed that Murray would fight for more education funding.
But she quickly moved on to Q and A, thinking it would be easier than speechifying. Someone asked about merit pay, and Lillian explained that without standards, it promoted cronyism. Someone else wanted her to talk about the Seabrook nuclear plant, and she deftly noted the risks of nuclear power and the need to start investigating alternative sources of energy that wouldn’t give us another Three Mile Island.
It was all going well until someone from the back raised his hand.
“This is perhaps off topic,” said the young man, “but I understand that Mr. Blaire thinks it’s okay to kill innocent children.”
Lillian took a sip of coffee. It was burned and bitter. She set the Styrofoam cup down.
“If you’re talking about abortion, you’re talking about a fetus,” she said calmly. “Let’s get our terms straight.”
The man held up a photo. “This is a fetus?” The photo showed a seven-month old . . . well, call it a fetus, call it a baby; whatever. It had arms and legs and a big alien head and was sucking its thumb.
Lillian felt her neck burn. These people loved showing photos that blurred the lines. She wished she had a comparable photo of a six-week embryo.
“How can your husband condone the murder of a child like this?” he asked.
Lillian tucked back a loose strand of hair. “What he condones, and supports,” she said carefully, “is a woman’s right to make the very difficult decision when and if to bear a child. As articulated by the Supreme Court.”
“But this is a child,” the man said. “How can you deny that? And an abortion would have killed that child. Therefore abortion is murder. How can you refute that?”
“Come on, Richard,” protested a teacher from another table. “Write her husband a letter if you want him to know how you feel.”
“No,” said Lillian. She felt fueled by the Imagine: essay she was planning to scratch out on one of Murray’s legal pads later that night. “It’s okay. I’ll tell you what’s wrong here. What’s wrong is men like you telling women like me what we can and can’t do with our bodies. Are you trying to tell me that if my daughter is raped and becomes pregnant, she has to spend the next nine months of her life in a state of incubation—and then feeding, clothing, and educating a real child for the next eighteen years? I don’t think so. I don’t see your people stepping forward with a tax plan to help women in that position,” she said. “You’re pro-birth, is what you are. You’re not pro-life. So quit giving me that bullshit abortion-is-murder argument and vote for my husband who will at least try to allocate more money for all those innocent little children who have already been born.”
