“I
had felt it coming for days: I had been crouching inside the walls of
my consciousness terrified to move too far or too violently in case they
collapsed and left me looking at the wild beasts. In the pre-crisis
days I feel like someone living in a paper house surrounded by predatory
creatures. They believe the house is solid so they don't attack, but
if I were to move they would see the walls flutter and collapse and they
would be on to me in no time.” Margaret Drabble, A Summer Bird-Cage
****
The
house was made of cement blocks, painted dingy white, and there was
plastic covering all the windows. Behind the house was a sagging
chicken house, surrounded by giant azalea bushes and woods with
branches tangled with wisteria vines. I first went there on a beautiful
fall day, the sunlight dropping through the dusty air and settling on
the wild flowers and weeds that had taken over the back yard. The house
was in the city, and the woods backed onto a major artery clogged with
strip malls, but there was a remnant of the country feel from what had
been a farm before urban sprawl swallowed it up. The neighborhood was
iffy. Some of the houses were substantial enough but there were lots of
tacky little cracker boxes that had been squeezed into the bare spaces
between them. The house next door was the original farmhouse, and on
the other side another small wood separated us from a quaint little
cottage. I looked for every glimmer of beauty I could find and tried to
forget the adult bookstore we had passed just a couple of blocks away.
My
children ran around, getting burrs stuck on their clothes; “ beggars'
lice” is what we called them when I was a kid. Bob wanted the house for
the chicken coop. It had no water or electricity, but it was a large
empty space, and he could make it into a studio. The house was a
filthy mess inside, and I made the kids keep their shoes on and not
touch anything in the kitchen, where the red linoleum counter was black
with ancient grease and worn bare in places. That would be the first
thing to go—after all the plastic that covered the windows for
insulation. Every room was painted the same horrid green, the floors
were linoleum over concrete, and the only heat source was an old oil
burner in what became Bob's and my bedroom. The boys shared a room, and
Saskia had her own room at the front of the house, where it was always
cold. I spent the first weeks and months making the place habitable.
Bob went off to teach and I painted, scrubbed, laid a new kitchen
floor, put up wallpaper in all the bedrooms, and gradually added pieces
of furniture found at flea markets and consignment shops.
Graduate school proved to be my salvation and the proximate cause of my divorce from Bob. The first year in Greensboro was not too bad. We joined the Unitarian Universalist church where we made friends and I became less lonely. It was good to feel a sense of belonging and to see my children making friends. There was no dogma to reject, no demands for any particular belief, and the company of intelligent people who were mostly, like me, refugees from more traditional religion was immensely comforting. But what had seemed so promising came to an abrupt end when Bob lost his job at G.C. Yet again, he had alienated his colleagues with his superior attitude and contempt for students he deemed unserious.
It
was a stunning setback, and Bob's drinking increased as our financial
situation became more precarious. I had taught high school for two
years back in Greencastle before we moved to Canada, and I still had
nightmares about it. I simply couldn't face the prospect of going back
to that, and I was determined not to take on anything that would keep me
away from the children for long hours. I was not about to put Saskia
into one of the daycare centers that seemed to occupy every other block.
These centers looked to me like prisons with their sun-baked
playgrounds and regimentation. We applied to the pre-school at UNCG and
were accepted, probably because we provided diversity with our
mixed-race family. I applied to graduate school at the same time and
began the long slog toward what would eventually result in a PhD in
English.
***
I
was excited but scared too. The course was contemporary American
literature, something I was interested in and felt some competence in
already. I had done well on the GRE and been awarded an assistantship;
it wasn't a lot of money, but it would at least keep my family fed while
Bob tried to sell his paintings. I sat in the middle of the front
row, as I figured that's where eager students sit, and I was more than
eager, especially when our professor entered the room and introduced the
class. C. was about my age and gorgeous, tall, lanky, and bearded.
I'd heard he'd been a basketball coach before getting a PhD and getting
into college teaching, and he certainly didn't project the image of the
typical effete English professor. Instead, he was a Hemingway
character come to life, athletic, manly, and brilliant. I was
gobsmacked, as the Irish like to say.
By
the end of the first class I had a massive headache. When I learned
everything we would have to do--write a 20-page term paper, give a 45
-minute oral presentation, take a mid-term and a comprehensive final—I
thought, No way can I do all that. How can I possibly say anything new
when there's a whole library filled with literary studies by other
people far more learned and experienced than I? And yet, that's what we
were told we would have to do. And how on earth would I ever be able
to manage a 45-minute presentation on anything whatsoever? When I got
home from that first night class, Bob was waiting at the door. I told
him about the class, and he said, “Well, if it's going to make you sick,
you should just quit.”
Ever
since returning from France, I'd suffered from migraines, especially
when under stress. The day I took the GRE I had a memorable one. In
fact, many of my memories are anchored by those headaches. I remember
them the way I remember the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger
explosion, with every surrounding detail crystal clear. I would not
quit. I was afraid, but I knew I wanted to do this. I'd missed out on
graduate school when David was born. Now I was older and ready to get
serious in a way I hadn't been in my early twenties. It was a relief to
go to school and think only about that, not whether I was going to have
a date that weekend or all the distractions of undergrad life. Now I
could focus and learn. I'd never dreamed I'd go to grad school, despite
my father's constant urging. I liked being at home with the kids and
writing short stories. I liked being free to read what I liked when I
liked, not according to someone else's agenda, but I also wanted to know
more, and I knew grad school was the place to find what I was looking
for.
After
that first class, I moved out of the front row. I needed a little
distance from C’s intensity. He was as passionate about literature as I
was and talked about it with the fervor of a Baptist preacher touched
with fire. His classes were like a religious experience for me, and I
would take more courses with him, be his teaching assistant for a
semester, and have him on my dissertation committee, but that was still
years away. I was nervous about getting back the first mid-term. I had
written a lot and felt good about it, but I had no idea what to expect.
When C stopped by my desk, my heart jumped. “Do you mind if I read
your exam to the class?” he asked. And he did.
That evening changed everything for me. I'd done well. I'd done
really well, and no one was more surprised than I was. Maybe I'd found
something I could do with some competence after all. I hadn't been
enthusiastic about being a copy editor, and I'd found teaching high
school exhausting and frustrating, but I loved writing. That first A
was like a shot of vitamin B12 to my intellectual system. I had
succeeded on my own, not as my parents' daughter or my husband's wife or
my children's mother but as myself. I was known for the work I did, my
ideas, my writing, and best of all I was rewarded for those things. It
was astounding.
I
had always been able to compartmentalize my life. The fact that I was
David's mother was the most salient fact about me, but I kept it
completely separate. When I taught high school, I was one person at
school, quite another at home with Bob and Tanner. I felt the strain of
living a double life, but I'd done it for so long I didn't have to
think much about it. I had my life at school, studying, getting to know
my professors, absorbing knowledge that enlarged my soul, and I had my
life at home, which was becoming more and more difficult. Money was
tight, but that wasn't the worst of it.
I had class two nights a week
and got home around 10:00. I was taking a writing workshop, and the
class had a tradition of going to a local bar for a beer and
conversation afterwards, but I couldn't go. Not once in two years of
taking those workshops did I ever get to join that group of ambitious
young writers. I felt left out and resentful, because it was Bob who
prevented me from going. Every time I returned home, there he was,
standing in the doorway, and if I was five minutes late he'd ask where
I'd been. School became my escape, the place where I could be myself
and be free for the hours I spent there. Bob sat in the dark in the
bedroom, drinking one beer after another in an endless succession of
pops every time he opened another can. The more pops, the more tricky I
knew the night would be. If I was lucky, Bob would be asleep by the
time I got to bed after tucking the children in; if he was still awake
there was a 50-50 chance he would start an argument and I'd lose a night's
sleep to silent tears and the anguish of being called a slut, a whore,
an unsupportive and unloving wife. His words washed over me like
scalding water, and how could I defend myself? It was all true; I had
slept with someone else (albeit before I met Bob); I had given birth to a
child that wasn't his. And he hated me for it. We read Theodore
Dreiser's Sister Carrie one semester, and I saw myself in this bleak
novel about the reverse rise and fall of a poor girl and her protector.
As her fortunes improve, his decline into ruin. Who says literature is
not life?
***
I
bought a swing and set it up in the back yard, facing the chicken coop
and the woods. If I hadn't been able to hear the traffic over on High
Point Road I might have been lost in nature. In the spring the wisteria
dropped heavy purple blooms from the trees and scented the air. The
overgrown azaleas blazed against the weathered boards of the coop, and a
gnarled crab apple tree sported pink and white blossoms. Spring and
fall were the best times to sit in the swing, rocking and thinking, looking for peace that was too often elusive. I've always loved
an early summer evening, when the day hovers near its end, the wind
drops into stillness, and the birds settle down for the night. Dinner
was over, the kids were inside watching TV, and I sat alone in the
gathering dusk and tried to assess my life as a single mother with next
to no money. Exhaustion and fear were my two companions, but for a
few peaceful moments I could suspend myself in time. I'd borrowed
enough money to get us through the summer. I knew I'd have to pay it
back eventually, but for now I had the security of a fridge full of food
and the promise of teaching in the fall. My children were safe, or so I
believed, I had friends, I loved my work, but the future was a total
blank.
I had once found a refuge in a small private high school in Ithaca, and
now I had found another in this mid-sized southern university. I
basked in my professors' regard and found my feet as a teacher.
Teaching college students was so different from teaching younger kids.
At first I was still young enough to feel closer to my students than
to their parents, and being a parent myself made me more tolerant of
their immaturity. Being a mother made me a better teacher, and in later
years, when I was old enough to be my students' mother and then
grandmother, I found an outlet for my maternal impulses in the
classroom. My mother, consummate teacher that she was, always said you
couldn't be a good teacher if you didn't love the kids. I didn't love
my eighth-graders, but I came to love many of my college students and
took a maternal pride in their achievements. Children never fully
realize how much their parents love them, and students never understand
just how much they mean to their teachers. The best student-teacher
relationship is based on love, certainly not on fear.
Having
a baby opens you up like nothing else. We now know that a mother and
her fetus exchange cells during pregnancy, cells that replicate and form
a literal physical connection. When you have a baby, part of your
physical being goes with him, and the emotional connection is equally
real. When I was pregnant with each of my children, they created a
space in me that no one but they could fill. I've lost both parents;
I've divorced two husbands; I've parted from close friends and while I
miss them all, I am no less whole because of their absence. Losing
David made me less whole and left a space that nothing else and no one
else could ever fill, though I would try repeatedly in my relationships
with men. Tanner and Saskia created new, unique spaces in me that fit
only them, but the emptiness where David should have been persisted. I
thought, though at an unconscious level, that adopting Dabbs would fill
that space, but Dabbs came to me, not from me. I loved him with the
same muscles with which I loved my husbands, lovers, or friends, but
not with the same muscles I exercised with Tanner and Saskia. I was so
hungry for love.
My
second husband was initially my professor, my dissertation director, in
fact. Here was the quintessential English professor with the beard and
leather patches on the sleeves. All he needed was a pipe to complete
the look. A marvelous lecturer, a charming dinner companion, and a
lover of women, M had his own demons in the form of a difficult wife
and two sons who tested their parents' every nerve. M’s
mother died of tuberculosis very soon after he was born prematurely.
It's doubtful she ever even saw him. He was raised by his father and
aunt until his father remarried and had two more sons. When he was 14
his father died, and his stepmother soon decided to ship him off to
elderly relatives in the North Carolina mountains. So M grew up
without a mother, never really wanted, an inconvenience to be passed
along to whoever would be willing to take him. He was a needy, weak
man who masked his deficiencies beneath a mask of bonhomie and
brilliance. His appeal was to a certain kind of woman who was
intelligent, romantic, and motherly, and he was notorious for having
affairs. He preferred married women, because, as he put it, there was less likelihood
of complications.
Once
the word spread in the English department that I was separated, he
invited me to lunch. I was flattered and told him that wasn't
necessary, but he insisted. He knew me as a student, now he made an
effort to know me in other ways. He was fifteen years older than I, and
I was more than a little in awe of him. When he lectured, he sounded
not unlike Morgan Freeman, with a drawl that was more aristocratic than
southern. The lunch was pleasant. He asked me to address him by his
first name and invited me to have dinner with him the next week, as his
wife would be out of town. As I drove to meet him that night, I knew I
was going to begin an affair with him. It was a deliberate decision,
not a surge of desire. I was so fucking lonely, so scared, so tired of
coping that an affair with a distinguished older man seemed an escape of
a kind. I didn't want to introduce a step-father into my children's
lives. Dabbs was a challenge I couldn't expect any man to take on, and a
very private relationship met my needs of the moment.
It
began with the appearance of innocence. We went in my car to a park
near my house, where we shared a picnic lunch. I wanted to get out and
sit on the grass, but M wanted to stay in the car, so we did. He had
brought along a small book of poetry, Philip Larkin, I believe it was,
and he read me some of his favorite poems. Larkin is a favorite of
mine; I love his despairing realism. He writes beautiful
poems about sorrowful things, making the tragedies of life, large and
small, into something bearable. Being in M’s company, I felt alive in
ways I had all but forgotten, as if a film I'd been watching had
suddenly shifted into 3-D. In the beginning, the effervescence lasted
from one meeting to the next, but it wasn't long before the weight of
absence began to outweigh the delirium of his presence. The two
cancelled each other out, so that I only felt alive and whole when I was
with him. I no longer inhabited my own life and mind and instead
needed him, it seemed, even to breathe. This, I thought, is true love.
It was passion, for sure, but as for love? I'm no longer sure. Surely
real love grows with time and makes a place where breath comes easy and
trust replaces anxiety.
I had six wonderful years with M before he left his wife. We'd go out
to dinner and go away for the weekend when his wife was away. We even
managed a trip to England once. He was solicitous, a brilliant
conversationalist, and I learned so much from him. I'd had a pretty
decent education in art history from Bob, and now I had my own personal
resource for my passion, English literature. Once again, I was in the
position of adoring acolyte, the younger woman absorbed in her man and
his interests, only this time his interests were the same as mine. M didn't know as much about art as I did, but he knew more about music and
literature, and I soaked up everything he could teach me.
I
tried to keep my affair secret, especially from my children, but I
failed miserably. In no time at all Dabbs and Saskia figured out what
was up, and I assume Tanner did as well. Still, we all persisted as if
nothing were going on at all. My entire life was a lie. I had a child
and my children had a brother, and no one knew. I was in love with a
man who wasn't free, who was in fact off limits in all sorts of ways.
It was a continuation of the duplicity I'd been living with since I was
pregnant with David. I was steeped in subterfuge. I hated it, but I
could see no other way.
M’s
wife often went to France for several weeks in the summer, and one
summer M and I took a week to fly out to Missouri to revisit his aunt's
farm and the small town where he'd grown up and his father had owned a
sawmill. It was a bleak little place with a main street that might have
been prosperous in the 1930s but was now run-down and empty. It was
obvious that the Burger King and McDonald's on the edge of town was
where the action was. M was in his sixties when we made this trip, and
now that I am approaching seventy, I understand his need to revisit the
past, to reorient himself in relation to the boy he'd been, to solidify
his sense of himself. I became his audience, his witness. Here was
where the old sawmill stood and here the house his father built, the
biggest in town for many years. There was his aunt's farm, the house
missing the front porch he remembered but the old barn still standing.
We
visited the old swimming hole, now a fish hatchery, and while we were
there M stumbled and fell on the gravel path. He hurt his arm badly
and was sure it was broken, so I drove him in our rental car to the
local hospital emergency room. M was quite shaken and insisted I stay
with him while he had his arm X-rayed. He seemed that day not like the
robust bon vivant I'd fallen in love with but like a little lost boy.
If I had truly loved him, I would have been happy to gather him up and
soothe him with attention. I was kind enough, but his weakness
frightened me. I would realize later than this weakness was more than a
passing wobble; it lay at the core of his character, and it would be
the ruin of us. A few years later, after we were married, I had to have
cataract surgery. He drove me to the surgical center but refused to
come in with me. A nurse assured me my husband was welcome to remain
with me during the preliminaries, but he stayed outside in the parking
lot, and I made his excuses. His neurotic fear of doctors was stronger
than his concern for me, and I never really forgave him for it.
That
day in the park, I had felt poised at the edge of a great adventure.
I believed fulfilment was to be mine after all, and I would possess
something rare and precious, something lesser spirits could never know.
And so began the years of delusion. I had my life of children, work,
house, visits with family, anxiety about money and uncertainty about the
future. That was real. And I had brief spurts of passion on hot
summer afternoons when my kids were at the pool or chance weekends out
of town, where a motel bed could seem to contain everything I could ever
want. I lived in an unreal place, and like a drug addict who knows
he's destroying himself and those he loves, I couldn't bear my own
existential solitude. I couldn't sit alone, peacefully, with my own
thoughts. I had no peace, only the emotional high of attraction that,
if not more real than the bulk of my days, gave me at least the illusion
of meaningful connection.
Sometimes
I tormented myself by imagining that I'd found a job in another city
and had to move away. How could I ever bring myself to get in my car
with my belongings in a U-Haul truck and my children in the back seat
and pull out of my driveway for the last time? I knew I couldn't do it.
I wanted a true home, with my love and my life in the same abode, and
so after six years of stolen weekends and a secret trip to England, I
told M I was going to marry another man, an Israeli stockbroker I'd been
seeing who wanted to marry me and rescue me from poverty, insecurity,
and loneliness. He was a nice man, and I really thought I would marry
him. I was so unhappy and desperate that marriage to a man I didn't
love seemed a reasonable solution. It was very doubtful that M would
ever leave his wife. I decided to jump
ship and make for shore, not believing for a moment that he would make
any effort to follow me. But he did.
After
30 years of an unhappy marriage, punctuated by horrific fights that
dismayed their neighbors and no doubt scarred their sons, M left his
wife and his big house and his place in his social world to move in with
me and my fifteen-year old daughter. Two weeks later, I knew I had
made a terrible mistake, but it would take me six more years to rectify
it.
M
had told me about a Spanish dish that was baked with an egg on top of
each serving. Everything was supposed to cook through, but the yolk of
the egg was meant to remain runny. I carefully followed the recipe,
threw together a green salad, opened a bottle of wine and called
everyone to the table. M sat at the head with Saskia on his right and
me on his left. He lifted his fork and stuck it into the steaming
dish. The yolk was hard. He slammed the fork down and pounded his two
fists on the table, making the cutlery jump. Saskia and I stared at
each other in silence. M told me his wife had said he preferred things
to people, and now I believed her.
Life
for M was a series of performances, and he demanded a particular
backdrop. It required his worn leather couch and chair, a library full
of books, reproductions of dark English landscapes, and a rack of pipes
on his over-sized desk. M knew all about the accoutrements of a
gracious life; what he lacked was the capacity to inhabit his own soul
without the scaffolding of a strong woman to hold him up. He was a
wonderful man to have an affair with, but as a husband he was a cipher.
Between
us we managed to transform my house into something that more closely
resembled the aesthetic retreat M required. We built floor-to-ceiling
bookshelves in what had been the garage, put in carpet over the
oil-stained cement, and replaced the broken garage door with a wall and
a French door. We did the work ourselves, taking a year and a half of
weekends and holidays to accomplish it. When I had threatened to marry
my stockbroker—with every intention of following through—M promised me a
whole list of life-changing things, including a new house in a better
neighborhood. Perhaps if we had moved, and I had not felt imprisoned
with no chance of reprieve in that house of Bob's choosing, we might
have managed to stay together. He might not have spent his last years
alone in that dreadful house or suffered a chill, when the power went
out in a winter storm, that hastened his death. I feel responsible for
that. I can't help identifying with Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch
(incidentally M’s favorite character in all literature) and her escape
from Casaubon. My identification with literary heroines, Hester Prynne
being another, is probably what led me to think life could be a
dramatic plot and my pursuit of the seminal event, the fatal moment, the
intensity of what can only be fleeting, a genuine modus vivendi.
As it turned out, M didn't have the comfortable income his former life in his old neighborhood had indicated. He was, in fact, far more deeply in debt than I ever knew until after our divorce and his death. There would be no new house, no trips abroad, no money for my daughter's education. He could put a complete set of Wedgewood china, a new couch, materials for the study, and a bust of Verdi on a credit card, but I continued paying the mortgage and the utilities and bought our food. Mac was always very generous with the extras; it was with the basics where he fell short.
If I had truly loved my first two husbands, I believe I would have accepted the alcoholism and the congenital weakness as a burden to be shared. As it was, I withdrew into a self-protective shell. I could go through the motions; I was adept at that. But once I admitted the truth to myself, that these men were not who they claimed to be, that like the Great Oz they hid behind a curtain of pretense, I could no longer admire and therefore could no longer love. Even Bob had recognized that admiration has to precede love, and when I lost respect for my second husband, I once again had to amend my life.
What
does it mean to act selfishly? How can we be sure our actions are
justified? Is making excuses to ourselves the best we can do? I tried
to act unselfishly when I relinquished David, a decision I have always
bitterly regretted. Had I been more selfish would our lives have been
better, less damaged? I acted selfishly when I took M away from his
family. I told myself at the time that I was rescuing him from decades
of unhappiness and a shrewish wife, whom he stayed with because he was
too weak to leave. I think he didn't want to die with her, which would
be to die essentially alone. He was getting older, prematurely older,
and he wasn't confident of finding another woman to console him. That
had been so easy for him in his youth. Now here I was, the last of a
long line of adoring women who tried to love him enough to fill his
emptiness, to prop up his weakness. He told me he wanted to die in my
arms, and I felt as if he were trying to pull me into the grave with
him. I had to get away while there was still time, before he had a
stroke or heart attack and I was stuck for years nursing a man who had
lied to me, spent money frivolously on things we couldn't afford—the
marble bust of Verdi from Italy being one example—and failed to get me
out of a house I hated. Now, after five years of marriage, I was about
to leave him to his own devices. I had acted selfishly when I took up
with him and I acted selfishly when I left him. In both cases I felt
close to spiritual death, so I saved myself. I couldn't save Bob, and I
couldn't save M, but should marriage be a matter of rescue? Perhaps
what frightened me about these two men was recognition, not of their
weakness but of my own.
