How have we made it through all these years? Mutual respect comes to mind. Flexibility. Devotion.
Two souls in transit.
The ability to change everything and at the last minute if necessary. Autumn. A walk on the Poet’s Walk. We are going to have a baby!
All those years of my youth working those terrible temporary jobs in all those law firms for all those idiotic lawyers and slowly, slowly dying. Those years when all I could do it seemed was weep.
In the eighth inning, she says, maybe we could have the child.
Are people from unhappy or broken families constantly trying to remake, retrieve, make whole, complete? Maybe we could have the child, once, she said.
I felt my early life to be completely smothered by my mother’s children. Though I was never asked to take care of them. Still, there was always so much commotion. I had to go far and live long to want to have a child of my own.
At the top of the ninth — Helen, I don’t think so.
My mother — the saddest of childhoods — and her five little ones.
Virginia Woolf: “I shall make myself face the fact that there is nothing — nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing, all are disguises; and relationships with people. Yes, even having children would be useless.” —A Writer’s Diary
A while back when we were in one of our efficient phases, we made an appointment with a fancy lawyer to handle the legal aspects of having a child. She was big deal — had represented Hedda Nussbaum, all kinds of characters. She decided to read The American Woman in the Chinese Hat and told Helen that even though she knew it was fiction she felt concerned about my ability to be a mother. Perhaps, when the time came, the baby might need some representing. Protection. That I already had a very, very dim view of lawyers could not prepare me for her stupidity, or her arrogance.
Intrigued by every single moment of this — even the frightening parts as they come. There is always some terror. Of course. Loving every aspect of being pregnant is an odd thing. Not used to such simple happiness — not since childhood at any rate. It all comes back. The dark afternoons of music. Ballet lessons three times a week with that marvelous diva Irene Fokine. In the summer I took painting lessons. My brother and I played Scrabble for hours and hours on the dock of my grandparents’ lake house.
I really do glow. Happily, happily sitting on my nest.
The baby moving inside. A foot. A fist. An elbow perhaps. A fin.
Accretion of the days. To attend to every trembling, every motion.
I am a novelist in part because I love the long haul, my stamina is of the long-distance sort. In the pool I am best after the first fifteen laps. I believe in relationships for life. Things cut off abruptly shock my system badly. Only once did I have to end something in that way. The obsession on both sides over time had grown monstrous. Finally there was no other option. It took years to recover.
It is a little disconcerting to have those friends who did not have children — those who made that decision, those who had counted me among them, one of the childless — to turn away now, if only slightly.
Disregarding what one gives up for this. Seeing it as only rosy, and resenting it.
On the street some women avert their eyes when they see me. I am a reminder of what they have failed to do. I sympathize, I really do. But I, for better and worse, have always been a person who acts on my impulses. Because, for the most part, I am someone incapable of living with regret.
Action, driven as much by intuition as by reason. I have always been amused by the yuppies, who think they might open some sort of ledger and see if there was enough money yet, enough “quality time.” And a nursery school and college lined up. We’d better get on a waiting list!
Children cannot be thought through — could not for me at any rate. The logical conclusion would have been no.
Dear Douglas Culhane. His role in all of this never to be forgotten or underestimated. How he made the desire for the child precise. Brought it to full cognizance. The strange workings of this world. Douglas was wonderful in all ways.
I might say more but am reluctant to invade his privacy. The particular dangers of keeping a journal that others might see. A suspect project in many ways.
Also not to forget the Quiet Monsieur, as we called him, standing discreetly in the corner. His favorite color is red. His favorite animal, a dog. He admires most, fidelity. I am speaking in code a little, because I feel I must. He was all in all a perfect little gentleman.
Drunk at a dinner party, our eyes mistakenly meet and we forget for a moment that we do not love each other anymore.
Granted, it has not always been easy.
Not always such smooth sailing.
This struggle against ruin. This vote, as Louis says, for the future — this infinitesimal gesture — against the vanishing.
Once a crimson wreath… I shall carry it the rest of my life.
Language is a rose and the future is still a rose, opening.
Unable to hold on to them I watch them age. All acts of retrieval doomed. I remember that late fall afternoon in the woods near the MacDowell Colony where my parents and I walked and walked and grew increasingly lost — those mortal woods.
Last night my back to the utterly black living room and the feeling is — what? That everything is about to be taken away. One of us, or both. Helen making a Valentine’s Day dinner. I sitting by the fire.
Ah, the old terror returns.
My idols, my models, the ones I respect most: Woolf, Beckett, Stein — all childless.
“From that day forth things went from bad to worse, to worse and worse. Not that she neglected me enough, but the way she kept plaguing me with our child, exhibiting her belly and breasts and saying it was due any moment, she could feel it lepping already. If it’s lepping, I said, it’s not mine.”
Emily, six years old today, wanted to replay the details of her birth. I was not there. I was teaching in Illinois that year. The most awful of winters and how I kept having to fly home. The worst of all times for our family. My sister in labor for days it seemed. Emily followed me around the birthday party feeding me sweet things because she’d heard that might make the baby move. Her little hand on my belly. She says Sally and Julianna are her favorite names.
From the March Vanity Fair: “Michael L. tells Pisces to expect at least one more miracle… With Jupiter in your sign all this year, such a miracle is destined to happen at least once more.”
I feel like a planet these days. Some heavenly body. Hauling the universe and stars. Floating into every room.