My Summer With George (21 page)

Delia came with him, which made me teary, and I hugged her and held on to her all the way to the hospital. They stayed with me as long as they could before the nurses took me away. Jerry promised to keep trying to locate Bert. I had no idea what I was in for: the enema, the shaving, nurses and orderlies checking between my legs. I didn’t cry or even whine or whimper; I had determined I would not. But as I lay there in pain, in a roomful of screaming women, without a friend or relative to hold my hand, only the brusque nurses swishing around, I thought this had to be the worst experience of my life.

The baby wasn’t born until one-thirty in the morning, and by then Bert was there. When he saw me being wheeled out of the delivery room, he started babbling guiltily: he’d been playing poker with some cops at a guy’s house, he said. As if I cared where he’d been, as if I had a big account book and was going to give him a demerit. He didn’t even ask how I felt. I was zoned out from the Demerol and the ether but I looked for Jerry and Delia. I was so happy to see them. They were the only ones who loved me, even if Delia was mad at me, and I reached my arms out to them like a baby and they bent over and held me. Bert was still apologizing.

Over the noisy objections of the entire Shiefendorfer clan, I named the baby Lettice, a name I’d found in a novel. Bert asked nastily if I intended to name the next one kohlrabi. I laughed: this was the first example of wit I’d seen in him. But before long, everyone but me was perfectly happily calling her Letty.

Ironically, in those days of inhumane birthing, they allowed you to stay in the hospital for five days. The bad part was, they didn’t let you see the baby except to nurse her. Fathers and grandparents could glimpse the infants only through a glass. It wasn’t good for the babies not to be close to their mothers from birth, but it did let you rest up a bit, gain strength for the ordeal ahead.

And an ordeal it was. Baby crying all hours of the day and night, dirty diapers piling up, stinking up the entire room, baths and oilings and powderings to be administered daily, and all that laundry! The whole apartment was given over to the baby, and Bert hated that. Truthfully, I didn’t love it myself. But I had no alternative; he did. Once he started training, I hardly saw him: he no longer had to work at Mario’s, but he was either at the police academy or out drinking with the boys. I didn’t blame him. If I could have escaped from my life in any way short of suicide, I would have.

From the day Bert started training as a cop, he began to change. He’d been a passive, dense, selfish boy with a sweet nature—at least, when he was not unhappy. He became a stubborn stupid man obsessed with displaying control. He swaggered around with his gun on his hip, often touching it like a talisman. He seemed to think of the gun as a means to enforce his will; he stroked it for reassurance. He would make irrational assertions, in a tone of utter conviction, about the proper roles of men and women.

One of the things he was intent on proving his control over was the baby. I told him that the only way to control a baby is to kill it, but he would yell orders at me, demanding I keep her quiet. Lettice was what they used to call a “colicky” baby: she cried a lot and would not be calmed. I would walk her around the room for hours, or put her in the carriage and walk her for miles, but between four in the afternoon and eight in the evening, she wailed unceasingly. When I could not quiet her, Bert would slam out of the house.

He calmed down somewhat once he finished training, though. He’d probably been afraid of failing; maybe he too was shocked by the macho police ethic (of course, we didn’t have the word
macho
in 1950; at the time, I didn’t know how to describe his behavior).

The first time Bert, white-faced, shrieked at me, “Can’t you keep that brat quiet, woman!” in a contemptuous tone of voice, I made an instant decision: I would leave him as soon as possible. After Bert went off to his afternoon shift, I felt cheerful for the first time in almost a year, so I knew that leaving was the right thing for me to do. I knew women were not supposed to leave a marriage, they were supposed to find some way to make their husbands happy, but my determination made me feel—for the first time since I had found myself pregnant—like a human being with a future, instead of a dumb animal caught in a trap.

It was fortunate that I had already accepted that I was not a good person, because if I had had ambitions of goodness, I would have been tormented. As it was, my decision made things considerably easier between Bert and me. I stopped getting upset that he noticed Lettice only when she cried, that he refused to change her diaper, that he never held her. I knew it was just as well he didn’t care about her, because he wouldn’t miss her and I wouldn’t feel guilty taking her away. And while he more and more often treated me with an easy, arrogant contempt, I could keep my temper, reminding myself that it wouldn’t be long.

But of course, it was a pipe dream, because how was I going to get away? I took to reading the local paper every day, poring over the want ads. The jobs for women ranged from clerk to typist to stenographer to secretary. Only top-notch secretaries could earn enough to support themselves. And I did not want to leave Bert to move across the street or across town; my goal was New York City! I began to push Lettice’s carriage to the public library every day and read the want ads in
The New York Times
and the
Herald Tribune.
But they were the same as the local ads, only somewhat higher paid. There were no interesting or well-paid jobs for women. I thought about my mother creating her own business, without money, with just her skill and energy and drive. But I didn’t have any skill at all. I couldn’t do anything.

I walked to the laundromat several times a week, piling the bag of laundry on top of Lettice in her carriage. I always took a library book with me; I still entertained notions of improving myself. But the truth was, I could no longer concentrate on serious literature. My mind rejected it. I wanted trash, I wanted escape. So I often picked up one of the tattered “women’s” magazines lying around the laundromat—movie magazines and
True Stories, Modern Romances,
and
True Confessions.
Rocking Lettice’s carriage with my foot, I would leaf through it idly, adopting an attitude of superior contempt. But the stories caught me, and I began to read them with a growing fascination. I read them the way I watched television (when I was forced), like an anthropologist studying the customs of an alien people. Yet the people in these magazines were not alien; they were women just like me.

One after another story was about women who had “fallen,” who had given in to a night of passion and ruined their lives. The question was, what did they do then? Only a few tried to raise the baby themselves. Some of them gave their babies up for adoption and tried to go back to their old lives. But they were forever haunted by their dark secret, which would rise to crush them just when they thought they were safe. Often, a poor girl fell in love with the boy from the big house on the hill, who was a spoiled brat and denied any responsibility for her; sometimes the girl was from the big house on the hill, and she had a mad passion for the dark-haired angry boy who lived near the railroad tracks. But in the end, through sincere repentance and good behavior, some women were redeemed! A redeemed girl learned to speak and dress and act properly, so she could marry a man with a little money and pass into the middle class.

On the back pages of these magazines, there was always a true account, written by an ordinary girl about her sufferings. You wrote your story and sent it in, and if it was chosen, you got a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars! That was a fortune. In a fit of daydreaming, I had checked out the price of a tourist-class ticket on the
Île de France:
it was $165. If I could win two of these contests (and of course, if I did not have Lettice), I could go to Paris. Paris! That was even better than New York!

I began to spend the hours I walked Lettice back and forth in our attic room imagining my own story. Not my real story, of course: it was too bleak. But suppose Bert and I had found after we married that we really
did
love each other. It was possible, wasn’t it? He could be a little nicer than he was, a little less stupid, a little more educated; I could be a good person like Delia and a little less educated, not quite so bright. We could learn through suffering.

I decided to try my hand.

It was much harder than I imagined. The hardest thing was to get the tone right, to have it sound like the work of a sweet, honest, well-meaning girl who wasn’t too smart—yet without sounding like complete drivel. Day after day, I worked on it, concealing my efforts from Bert. I never threw scratched-out sheets into our garbage but folded them and the good pages and slid both into the Kotex box I kept in my bureau drawer. I knew Bert would never look there. When I went out each day, I took the bad pages and, tearing them up, threw them in a Dumpster near the supermarket. After a month, I had a story I thought was passable. I sent it off to
True Stories.
You had to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you wanted your manuscript back—which I did, figuring I could send it to the others—so I used my name and Jerry’s home address, and called to warn him that something might come for me in the mail.

I was too nervous to sit around waiting for the results, so I immediately started another story. This one was different: in this one, the girl was in college, had come from a more middle-class background, and so was even more reprehensible. It was harder to write, because the girl was bright and a little privileged and had to be so penitent. In one night of sordid passion with a boy who works in a gas station, she blows her future with handsome, wealthy Clarence Bellows, a Harvard junior who is in love with her. Giving up her baby to a woman who has longed for a child for years, she ends in quiet, patient acceptance of her sin, working in a maternity hospital to help others like herself, hoping for redemption. It was truly sickening.

All I had to do to write these things was to imagine what a good woman would do, or feel, or say about the single most loaded situation women seemed to face. And I knew plenty of good women: my mother had been one. Delia was a good woman, so was my sister Merry, and most of the women in Delia’s family and in Bert’s were good women. At least, they tried to be. They thought they were. I just had to conjure them up, with sentences out of their own mouths. Now, when Bert and I had Sunday dinner at his mother’s house, I took interest in what was going on, I paid attention; if someone said something especially typical, I dashed into the bathroom to jot it down. Whatever happened with the stories, my new project was making my life a bit more bearable.

I must have done something right, because the third story I sent in won. I wrote more, under different names, and won again later that year. I had two hundred dollars! Enough to go to Paris, but not enough to get me and Lettice out of Bridgeport.

In the spring of 1950, a little bookstore opened in the same strip mall as the supermarket. It offered new and used romances, mysteries, and adventure tales, like the shop Merry used to patronize. In those days, public libraries did not carry romances, on the ground that they were not literature. But books were bound in paper now and could be bought new for twenty-five or fifty cents, returned for a dime, and bought used for twenty or thirty cents. Passing the shop, I remembered how romances had gotten Merry through a hard time of her life. Vaguely wondering if they could do the same for me, I suddenly found myself inside.

I didn’t know how to choose from so many books, all bearing similar covers—most often, a young woman with a ripped bodice, and a dashing man in boots, carrying a whip. A glance at the back cover suggested that they all had the same plot too. But certain authors seemed more popular than others—the shelves held tens of books by them. I decided to go with those and chose one by Barbara Cartland. One was all it took to hook me. Feeling alone and unloved, unlovable even, living a life of such tedium that a telephone call was an event, I was sucked into the heroine’s passionate adventures as into quicksand.

Having completed only two years of college, I couldn’t claim to be an educated person. But I was aware that the book I was reading offered a false vision of reality. Yet there was some kind of reality in it, one I couldn’t pinpoint or name, a kind that was somehow tied to what I’d been reading in the magazines. I had a vague sense that women’s lives lay untouched, unseen, like tiny violets covered with snow. No one knew they were there, and no one cared, really. No one was interested in depicting them. The closest anyone came were these sweetish teary books that were soaked in fudge or caramel or strawberry sauce, allowed to dry, cut into pages, and sold. I felt I understood both the books and the thinking behind them, understood them with some part of myself, not necessarily my intellect.

I fell into the habit of getting a book each time I went to the market. I could easily have gulped down several of these confections a day, but I couldn’t afford to. I had to make the book last a few days or be without one.

In time, I became quite knowledgeable about the genre and knew the names and pen names of the better-known authors. I felt I could tell if the author was male or female (all the authors’ names were female), and I was familiar with the plots, basic morality, and taboos that characterize romance fiction. I became aware when an author was stretching convention—by introducing a mixed-color or mixed-religion relationship, for example. It occurred to me that these books could be agents of moral change—although I didn’t use such an exalted phrase at the time.

I never confused these books with mundane reality, never expected the glamorous men who inhabited my literary fantasy life to appear in actual life or let myself slide into delusions that I had any glamour myself. Only I did think that someday I would like to travel to the thrilling places in which many of these novels were set, places like Egypt, Rome, Paris, London, Singapore, Macao. (What a disappointment when I finally visited Macao!) I alternated romance with good fiction obtained from the library—that year, I read all of Trollope and Galsworthy—but the pull of romance was irresistible. When I was not reading a romance, I daydreamed one, sitting in the laundromat or ironing to radio music or on my knees, washing the bathroom floor. It’s true that during this time, I had a sense that I was wasting my life. I felt sickly sweet, like a child who’s eaten too much candy. I felt I was damaging myself.