Domestic Affairs (24 page)

I was aware, though, through all of this, of the fact that Steve’s name hadn’t come up. I had a child, and obviously she had a father, but after a couple of hours, when the fact still hadn’t emerged that I had a husband back home (and two little boys), it occurred to me that maybe Ned thought I was divorced, and available.

He was a really nice man. Just the sort of person with whom—if I’d met him at the airport, before I met Steve—I would’ve been happy to have dinner. It was very easy and natural, talking with him. He gave me his scarf and hat when he noticed I was cold. He really paid attention to Audrey.

Now comes the part that’s hard to admit: that there came a point, somewhere along the line, when I began consciously avoiding mention of Steve and my two little boys back home. Not that I planned to head off into the night with Ned (and Audrey, and the Barbie Dream Carriage). Not that I planned anything more than a handshake, and maybe a gift, in the mail, of some home-baked Christmas cookies. But the fact is, I guess I liked holding on to the image—for a few minutes anyway—of a young single mother, being cared for, and, I supposed, courted by a kind and attractive inventor who knew how to talk to children and told me I could make standing in a parking lot for two hours on a night with a windchill factor of negative ten degrees feel like fun.

Twice, while Ned worked on our car, a couple of men came up to see if they could help. One of them even appeared, for a second there, to be making some progress with the lock for a second there. And I saw, when that happened, how much Ned wanted to be the one to get our car door open.

Which he did, finally, by taking off a window, using the coathanger to lower in a towel to remove four separate interior screws, in a procedure that was (as I told him) nothing less than brilliant.

“Now,” Audrey said brightly (always up for a party), “we have to take you out to dinner. To celebrate.”

It was ten o’clock by now. I explained, with embarrassment, that we were out of money. “Don’t be silly,” Ned told us. “This is my treat.” And though I protested that we really had to get home, Audrey was starved and so was I. And I needed to warm up before the long drive home in a car with one window missing.

So we went to a restaurant that served enormous hamburgers, and Audrey had a sundae, and we all talked a lot more (I was surprised at how much there was to say that had nothing to do with my marriage and my family). Ned told us this was the best evening he’d had in months. And then, just after our second cup of coffee, I got up and said I’d better call Steve and tell him why we were so late.

I think back on this today and wince, because I saw the look on Ned’s face when I said that. Now it seems just about unavoidable to conclude that I was somehow leading him on—toying with his affections, giving him reason to hope that things might turn out the way they would have in certain highly romantic movies, where the man, the woman (a widow, probably), and the child (Shirley Temple) walk off hand in hand and become, instantly, a
family.
I do know that I wasn’t just using him to get my car open. For a moment there I probably allowed myself a romantic fantasy or two as well. None of which is to say that I don’t love my husband, and want to stay married.

Well, it was late. Ned had been very kind. There was no danger, anymore, of my being misunderstood. So I told him I’d drive him to his hotel before we set out for the long drive home. When we got into the car and I turned on the ignition, my obscure folk music tape clicked on and he shook his head. “I didn’t know anybody besides me listens to this,” he said. And it turned out he played the banjo.

By the time I pulled up beside Ned’s hotel, Audrey was asleep. “Be sure and say good-bye for me,” he said. I shook his hand and said, “If you’re ever in New Hampshire …” He picked up his briefcase and then closed the door very carefully, so as not as not to wake Aud.

The next morning I told Steve what had happened. Later that day (setting out for the grocery store with Charlie and Willy) I found, on the floor of the car, a package belonging to Ned, and called the hotel where he was staying. It turned out to be a crucial piece for the machine he was installing at MIT. I said I’d send it Express Mail that day. He wrote to me once, after that, saying it would be nice to get together in Boston, sometime when he came into town again. He had some records he’d like to tape for me.

I didn’t write back.

I
T WAS THE MORNING
after our first real snowfall of the year, and school had been called off. I didn’t go out to work, which meant I had an extra half hour to hang around in my nightgown, refilling cereal bowls. And then everyone wanted to go outside and investigate the snow.

Since this was the first storm of the season, we didn’t really have our winter routine down yet. I had to go up to the attic and dig out our collection of snowpants, to locate an old pair of Audrey’s for Charlie and an old pair of Charlie’s for Willy. I dumped a bag of mittens on the middle of the floor, in search of pairs, and found (what would the odds be for this to happen, I’d like to know?), among twenty-some mittens, not a single matched set. I untangled a clump of scarves and leg warmers, plus various sorts of novelty headgear: earmuffs in the shape of teddy bears, a hat with bumblebee stripes and antennae sticking up from either side, one of those total face masks, with holes cut out for the eyes, nostrils, and mouth. I found the remnants of a couple of mouse nests in there too, but I’m used to those.

Then it was time to get the children dressed. I weighed the situation for a moment and decided to start with Willy, because he’s young enough not to insist on helping me much, which can be a relief.

So I stripped him of his pajamas. I’m sure I cannot be the only parent in the world who’s observed the sudden and dramatic change in behavior a child undergoes the moment he’s liberated from clothing. Because they love being bare, the taking-off part tends to go smoothly. The only trouble is—once bare, the child disappears (with a whoop and, very possibly, his underpants on his head). Then you spend the next five minutes catching him.

But eventually I got Willy cornered and was able to proceed. I put on his turtleneck shirt (how many thousands of times have I said the words: “Where did your head go?
There
it is!”). I kissed his belly button, reached for his socks (not a matching pair, of course). But in the split second it took me to get his shoes, the socks were flung behind the refrigerator. And because Charlie was getting impatient to go outside by now, I reached for another pair of socks instead of fishing around for the lost ones.

Overalls. And then the ritual in which I give Willy a penny for his pocket. This morning, because I was harried and rushing, I didn’t (as I usually do) hunt for a shiny one, and I pushed his toes into his boots a little more roughly than I might. He looked faintly puzzled, but unshakably jovial still. I worked his thumbs into the thumb pockets of his mittens. He flung them off. I tied his hat under his chin. He shrieked, “No hat.” I gave up and sent him out the door.

Then it was Charlie’s turn, and we started the whole procedure again. I pulled his sock on (to hurry things up a bit) and he pulled it off and then spent five minutes lining the seams up along his toes. After hunting down a shoelace—he took one out yesterday to make a lasso for GI Joe—I laced up his boots. But he could still feel the seam of his socks against his toes. The boots had to come off. We tried again.

Meanwhile I heard Willy outside, crying. He’d fallen down in the snow, of course. His hands were frozen. As I raced outside (barefoot) to pick him up and blow on his fingers, inside I could hear Charlie wailing, “You forgot me!”

Not likely. I made sure he went to the bathroom before putting on his snow pants. Then I zipped up his jacket (only, he has to do it. I forgot). At last I pulled his hat over his ears and launched him out the door to join his brother.

Then I had, I figured, about three minutes in which to get dressed before some disaster or other left one of the children crying in a heap of snow. I raced for my own winter socks and wool pants, sweaters, jacket, mittens, hat. I was lacing up my second boot (using garbage-bag twist ties, because it appeared that someone had absconded with my shoelace too) just as the first wail started up.

Outside, my two younger children stood stiffly (too tightly bundled for any sudden movements) while I dusted off the sled and sat Willy down. He demanded his bathrobe. Charlie munched on a piece of snow with a faint yellowish tinge to it. A few feet away, our dog, Ron, began to chew on Willy’s discarded mitten.

“Let’s make a fort,” I said cheerily.

“I think I’m ready for a little snack,” said Charlie, and Audrey agreed that hot chocolate might be nice, with an island of vanilla ice cream floating on top.

It was half past nine. It had taken us just under an hour to get dressed. We had been outdoors exactly eight minutes.

So we piled back into the kitchen and reversed the whole process, right down to the underwear, because everybody’s clothes had gotten wet in spite of the snow pants, and Willy needed a change.

I lifted him onto the changing table, sighing heavily, thinking what a long winter this would be. He pulled off the hat I’d forgotten to take off and did a little dance with it. He touched the top of his head to the pad on the changing table and looked through his legs at me, grinning. I unfastened the diaper tapes—still not amused.

You always open a diaper a little cautiously, until you know how major the clean-up operation is going to be. This time, I could tell, my son was merely wet.

But there was one other thing I could see, as I started to toss the wet diaper away: a copper penny. It landed neatly in my palm, like a tip. And I decided not to be mad after all.

It had been a lousy season for tomatoes. Too dry at first, and then, just at the point when they’re all that pale shade of orange, and in need of two or three hot days to ripen, what we got instead were cool, rainy days and downright chilly nights. The sort of weather that makes a person feel like canning tomatoes. Only there weren’t any around.

So I had been calling farm stands everywhere within a twenty-mile radius, in search of canning tomatoes. Just when I was about ready to give up, I got the word that a produce market a half-hour’s drive away had three bushels of tomatoes at a good price, if I could pick them up that night. Naturally I said yes.

In truth, it was the worst possible moment for three bushels of tomatoes to come my way. The next morning was Audrey’s first day in second grade, the day after that was Charlie’s registration at preschool. And I still had to hem up one size seven miniskirt and get Charlie’s health forms filled out, along with borrowing my friend Laurie’s pressure cooker and dropping off some overdue library books and getting Willy to the doctor and me to the chiropractor and somewhere in there attending to the stacks of work piled up on my desk after our week’s vacation at the beach. Steve had been working on a big job that got him home late and tired every night. And on top of everything else, I had to go into the city the next morning to work on an article.

A person might ask (as Steve did) why it was so important to me to can all those tomatoes, all that spaghetti sauce. True enough, the spaghetti sauce I make is great: all fresh vegetables, and no paste, simmered on the stove all of one night and the next day. But, Steve pointed out, stopping on his way to bed around twelve-thirty to watch me still standing at the kitchen counter chopping onions, with tears streaming down my face, something has to give. A woman with a full-time job and young children simply can’t do everything mothers used to do when they didn’t have full-time paid jobs. (Not that we don’t try.)

In fact, I think it’s because I’m not always home, not always free to read books to my children and give them kisses, that this sauce of mine seems so important. I love the way my house smells when my sauce is simmering. I love the look of all those jars lined up on the pantry shelves. And on cold afternoons in December, when it’s already nearly dark by the time I come in after my day’s work, I love being able to take down a jar of my spaghetti sauce and feed my family a dinner just as good as anything I could have come up with if I’d been in my kitchen all day. When I see the plate of steaming spaghetti on the table, I feel (there is no way to say this without sounding corny, I guess) that I’m offering up tangible proof of love. No one in her right mind would spend all these hours making sauce from scratch just to save money—that’s for sure.

Well, the night I got the tomatoes I set them on the back porch, with the plan that I’d get to them over the next few days. Nights, actually: after the children were in bed. The next morning, at seven-thirty, I drove Audrey to her first day of school. She kissed me a little distractedly and then ran off to compare jelly bracelets with other second-grade girls. Though few children wept, many mothers looked a little teary. I didn’t cry, but I found an excuse to walk past the window of her classroom to catch a fleeting glimpse.

Then I drove off to my day’s work. I put in long hours. Got a bad headache. And because I knew Steve would be tired from watching the boys all day (we were between babysitters), I picked up a pizza on my way home. I walked in the porch door, vaguely noticing that the floor had been mopped and thinking how thoughtful it was for Steve to do that.

Then Audrey ran out to meet me, breathless. “Tell me all about school,” I said, giving her a hug. “Oh, that,” she said. “Fine. But listen. That’s not what I wanted to tell you.”

It seems that her younger brothers had been getting a little wild, throwing cottage cheese. So Steve put them out on the porch with orders to play outside for a while. Audrey, meanwhile, was upstairs in her room, playing with her Glamour Gals ocean liner. Steve stretched out on the sofa with the current issue of
Sports Illustrated
and, evidently, fell asleep.