My husband tells me I romanticize those years, that in reality I was lonely and wept a lot and complained about betraying my principles by being a lowly housewife. He claims I called the girls little vampires, sucking the life out of me with their constant need. His version would explain the electric jingle of my nerves the day before that first poetry class, why all afternoon I caught the girls watching me carefully, as if they were afraid I’d suddenly explode. The class that evening seemed at once the most difficult thing I’d ever attempted and the most immensely silly. It was, of course, Sam’s idea. I had been absently filling scraps of paper with the words that bubbled up in my brain as I cleaned the house, and Sam had found them, and enrolled me in the class for my birthday.
“Harriet Buxbaum,” he scolded after I’d refused his gift. “You have talent. And you seem so tired. Your very soul seems tired.” True, I was deeply tired, but I believe I would have skipped the class entirely had Sam not come home that night with a weary pale face and a briefcase of papers he still had to wade through before sleeping. I kissed him, smelled the law firm on his skin, and was chased out of the house more by a desire to never return to that life of codicils and affidavits than by anything else.
On the drive from Manayunk to the University of Pennsylvania that night, the streets seemed made of wet tar, and inside the building the corridors smelled of mushrooms and raincoats. I was in such a flutter of panic I could barely clutch my pencil or look at the other students in the circle about me. All I wanted was the warm effacement of home.
When the room had filled, the teacher, a slight man with a quivery Vandyke, began rustling his papers and hemming to begin. Before he could, though, the door opened again. A subtle shifting in the chemistry of the room; like everyone else I found myself looking toward the doorway. There, smiling, stood a fashion model. Surely a mistake. I waited for someone to tell her that the life-drawing class was down the hall, but the woman stepped inside. She was tall, her dark hair shot with copper and studded with tiny white flowers.
This was Blythe Cantor, extremely thin back then and making one of her brilliant entrances. She looked nothing like anyone I had ever known; my familiars were floury types, wholesome and good. My friends, my family, potato knishes all.
“Poetry?” Blythe said in a husky voice.
“Yes,” said the instructor, pulling at his bowtie. “Please, sit.”
Blythe glided across the room to fold her long self into a chair beside me. I felt resentful at the scent wafting from her, cigarette smoke and perfume like some overblown peony about to shiver apart. When I looked at the frumpy people about me, I knew this woman had no right to be in the room. We were serious poets. She could be only a dilettante. A WASPy poetaster. She seemed raw in the way silk can be raw, and still shimmery, elegant.
That’s when I felt my ambitions begin to solidify, if only to defend them against fakers like this woman.
So I fumed until the teacher began to speak, and Blythe leaned over to me, green eyes brilliant with tears. She whispered, “Lord. Lord. I am so very frightened. You’ll be my friend, won’t you?” It was only when I smelled bourbon on her breath and watched one of her flowers unpin itself and fall down her collar that my heart fell for her with a decided plunk, the sound of a stone dropping into water. I squeezed her hand. Blythe wouldn’t let go, not throughout the entire hour, though I had to take unruly notes with my left hand, or even afterward in the beer-stinking undergraduate bar where we’d fled after class was over.
I had planned on going home directly after class — I knew Sam was waiting for me — but that night seemed to ring with a new kind of freedom, and so I followed her. The bar was so dark that at first all I could see of Blythe was a series of sparkles: eyes, necklace, glossy lips. We perched on our stools, and, over the first round of stingers — her choice — we found out that our children were the same age. She lived in Merion, a place that evoked Tudor-style manors and tennis courts and Katharine Hepburn; we were renting at the ridge of a steep hill between Manayunk and Roxborough, where old men would sit on their porches in their wife-beaters and drink homebrewed beer from mason jars. From her clothes it was clear that Blythe had few money worries, while Sam and I lived a series of small economies, our law school debts enormous, my salary gone when Mackenzie was born.
That night we talked and talked. Even then, Blythe had the ability to look at you as if you were the most stunning person in the world, and I, who had spent years as a ghost, basked in this new sun. We discovered that I had been in law school with a cousin of hers; she remembered visiting my parents’ candy store when she was a little girl; I had an uncle who once worked in her father’s investment company. With every particle of ourselves that we brought up we found a connection, a subtle link. I know now that if one digs enough one can find such confluences with practically anybody, but that night, under the spell of her magnetism, those connections seemed miraculous.
“Do you know what this means?” said Blythe. “Harriet, we’re destined to be best friends.” She clasped my hand and kissed it. Then she frowned. “I should tell you something before we fall madly in love, of course, which we will. It’s just that I’m probably crazy.”
“Me too,” I said, tipsy and laughing. “The girls drive me nuts all day long.”
“No,” said Blythe. “I mean I’ve been in the hospital. I’ve tried to kill myself three times. In July, I left my littlest son in the car and tried again. Bridge. I came home from the hospital a week ago. I’m only in this class because my shrink said poetry is good for me.” She rolled her glass in her hands and gave me a strained smile. “Now that you know, you don’t have to be friends with me. I’ll understand.”
But my whole good self had cracked open that night like a walnut; I felt fresh. Blythe was so little like me — plain, quiet — that she seemed like hope embodied. Besides, other than a maniacal professor in college who began hooting like an owl during an anthropology class and had to be escorted from the room, I’d never known anyone who was actually clinically insane. I thought of Sam, my gentle parents, my sensible activist friends. “Oh, Blythe,” I said. “I don’t think there’s been enough madness in my life.”
Blythe raised one eyebrow. “Careful what you wish for,” she said. Then she grinned and kissed me on the temple and raised her glass so that the liquid swung in the light. She said, “To us.” She downed her drink, wiped her mouth with a delicate pinky finger, and signaled for more with a coy little wink at the bartender.
A FEW WEEKS LATER ON THE LAST moderate afternoon of the year, my girls and I were paddling around the Cantors’ pool like ducks. It was a chilly day and fog lifted breathlike from the heated water, but Blythe lay on her chaise longue in a bikini that showed off her smooth waist and lovely small breasts. It seemed vaguely obscene to see how eagerly her nipples pushed against the fabric. I tried not to look.
That day, Blythe’s sons hovered around their mother, small satellites. Tom carefully conveyed ice cubes from the kitchen in silver tongs, to deliver them one by one to his mother’s glass of vodka like an officiant. Bear, the baby, was playing with his blow-up floaty at Blythe’s feet, from time to time patting them as if reassuring himself that she truly was there. Both boys wore a calm film over their faces like plastic wrap. Sometimes when the film slipped I saw fear beneath, and I had to look toward my own babies: Mackenzie, three, strawberried by the sun, pudgy little Susan, a joy.