Domestic Affairs (30 page)

Standing at the baggage carousel waiting for our suitcases to emerge, images of other items in that purse kept coming to mind: a pair of screw-on earrings in the shape of fruit baskets, that I’d bought at a flea market. (They always hurt, so I’d often end up taking them off and sticking them in my purse. But I loved those earrings.) A favorite toy of Charlie’s. A long letter I hadn’t got around to mailing.

Well, we found our suitcases, and Steve went to bring the car over to the door just outside the baggage claim. We buckled ourselves into our seats, shivering in the winter weather, still dressed for Georgia. Here in Boston it had begun to snow, and we had a hundred-mile drive ahead of us. I could tell from the way Steve held the wheel and the look on his face that the roads were very slick.

It usually takes us an hour and a half to make that drive from the airport, but that night we took twice as long. Three times we started to go into a skid, and we passed half a dozen cars that had turned around completely, or spun off the highway and landed in a ditch. I gripped the seat covers and pictured Steve and me killed in a crash, our children orphaned.

I also thought about my purse. I’m not sure whether it was the loss of the purse that made me feel more vulnerable in the storm or the storm that made me feel more vulnerable without my purse, but whatever it was I know I felt as if the ground had slipped out from under my feet. I was without my children. Our car was skidding. And my purse was in some strange southern city, where I wasn’t.

About twenty miles from home I remembered my address book was in my purse, and in it were the names and addresses of everyone I knew and care about on the face of the earth, including at least thirty people I hadn’t seen in years—old acquaintances I’d never be able to find without that address book. Never mind that I hadn’t written or called them in years. As long as I had my address book I knew I could. And now they had all disappeared forever.

Well, we made it home safely, got the report from Vicky on how things had gone, tiptoed upstairs to take a look at the children, asleep in their beds. No disasters had taken place in our absence: the house was immaculate. There was no bad news in our four days’ accumulation of mail. Still I felt unsettled, and lay awake a couple of hours, running over and over in my head the places where I might have left my purse. I pictured it hanging from the hook against a ladies’ room door in Savannah. Propped on the floor next to a water fountain in North Carolina where I’d stopped to take a drink. I drifted into an uneasy sleep (dreams full of car wrecks) and woke with a gasp. I had just remembered one more thing that was in my purse.

A set of photographs (and negatives) taken one weekend in early fall. There were half a dozen shots taken on top of a mountain we’d climbed with the children: Audrey had just lost a tooth; Willy was bundled up in three layers of sweaters—the only time in his life, Audrey pointed out, when he actually looked chubby. There were pictures of a play the children had put on: Willy in a rhinestone-trimmed hat and an orange silk gown that trailed along the floor; Charlie as a cowboy; Audrey, as always, the queen. There was a really goofy bunch of pictures—my favorites—taken at a place we’d stopped at, on a Sunday drive, where they sold garden sculptures. The children loved that place, would’ve happily stayed there all day. We took Charlie’s picture on the back of a nearly life-size ceramic deer, and Audrey’s embracing a statue of a Greek goddess she’d begged to buy.

The day after we got home, when the man from the airline called back to say my purse hadn’t been found, I began sorting my losses. There hadn’t been much money in my wallet. Canceling those credit cards was a nuisance, but I could bear that too. Glasses were replaceable. About the names in the address book, I told myself that at least those old acquaintances could always find me.

Losing the pictures was the worst. I understood, for the first time, what it must be like for people who get wiped out in a fire and end up (the lucky ones, who survive) with no record of their children’s babyhood. Family history wiped out. All I’d lost was the record of one good weekend, and still I felt devastated.

I spent most of the next day and a half on the phone to airports—New York, Charlotte, Atlanta—trying to trace the route that plane had taken after we got off. I thought, crazily, of taking a drive up to that mountaintop again, to retake those pictures, of stopping again at the place with the garden sculptures and repositioning our children on the backs of those elves and deer. Of course I was glad to be home with my real, flesh and blood children. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about that roll of film. I imagined the stranger in whose hands my purse must have ended up—pictured him flipping through the pictures of our family, thinking about us briefly (filling in the pieces of our life), and then tossing the envelope in some trash can. I wept.

Three days after I lost my purse, I got a call from the airline, telling me the purse had turned up in Miami. When the woman who called with the news began running down the list of credit cards she’d found in my wallet I interrupted her. What about those pictures, I asked.

“They’re here,” she said. “I figured you’d only want to hear about the valuables. We’ll send everything up to you this afternoon.”

So now I have my pictures back, and today I’m sticking them in our album and thinking about what it is that makes me so compulsive about my children’s photographs. (Also an envelope full of hair from Willy’s first barbershop haircut. A pair of binoculars Charlie made out of two taped-together toilet-paper rolls. A pebble Audrey once gave me, with the instruction that I hold onto it forever—which I’m attempting to do.)

And here’s what I think: So much of raising children is about letting go. No wonder I’m always trying to hold on to whatever I can.

I can still remember the struggles I went through over my hair and clothes when I was growing up. I remember what it felt like, being made to wear an outfit I hated. I remember the naked feeling of too-short bangs. Practical brown shoes, when what I wanted were red ones. Undershirts, cardigan sweaters, snowpants. I vowed I’d never make a child of mine endure those indignities.

And later, when the choice of what to wear was finally up to me, I remember the daily indecision. Changing three times, four times, five … laying pools of clothes on the floor of my room as I tried on one outfit after another, searching for the one that looked and felt right on that particular day. The practice of those endless changes carried on into my twenties. The tears at the mirror. The impulsive visits to beauty parlors. (Let me be a redhead. Give me curls. Take them away.)

Then I was married, and, right away, pregnant.
There’s
the ultimate humbling experience, for someone who’s spent twenty years examining her reflection from all angles for the least indication that she might look fat. Suddenly—no doubt about it—I was, and not just in the belly either, but round-faced and thick-ankled too. I gained fifty pounds with that first pregnancy (thinking, innocently, that I was simply eating for two). The day after giving birth to my seven-and-a-half-pound baby girl, I stepped on the scale and found I still weighed forty-two pounds more than I used to. I cried and cried and cried.

Well, I lost the weight eventually. The time came when I once again fit my jeans. But though I still get dressed up now and then, and still put on my eyeliner every morning, without fail, motherhood signaled the end, for me, of a particular sort of vanity. These days I have no time to spend agonizing over which blouse, which stockings, which pair of earrings. I step into the same pair of jeans every morning, and one of the same three tops. I, who used to spend sixty dollars on a city haircut and perm, now cut my own hair, and I don’t even check a mirror when I do the back.

But the end of one kind of vanity brought with it the beginning of another sort. It began the day Audrey was born, the first time I put her in a dress. Of course I would’ve loved her if she’d looked like a monkey, but from the first she was beautiful, with dark skin and black eyes, lots of dark-brown hair, and eyelashes so long a woman once bent over her stroller and pulled at them to see if they were real. A friend of mine says that in the early days after the birth of her first child, she once spent twenty minutes dressing her son, then walked out of the house with him in his new outfit and herself stark naked. Heading out the door to a party, a few weeks after Audrey’s birth, I once found myself saying to Steve, “I’ll be right with you as soon as I put her eyeliner on.” For a moment there, I had forgotten who was who.

Having a child is part birth, part death. It means stepping back, leaving the younger generation to join the older, being no longer the newest, most precious. You look in the mirror, and it tells you someone else is fairest in the land.

I never minded that. I have always reveled in my daughter’s strange, exotic beauty. But it’s dangerous too. I am not her. She isn’t me. Brushing her hair won’t make mine shiny.

In my mind I know that. But mornings, lately, getting her ready for school, I have had to keep reminding myself of our separateness, and how dangerous it is to invest one’s self too deeply in one’s child. In her looks, especially.

With our sons, the problem seldom arises. Very often my boys’ faces are dirty or their hair’s a mess, or Charlie wants to wear his red Superman cape with his maroon Oshkosh overalls, or Willy’s hand-me-down socks have ruffles on them or his pant cuffs go just below his knees. None of which causes me a moment of pain.

But Audrey’s another story. For years I could dress her like a doll, exactly as I pleased: in smocked dresses and A-line jumpers, overalls with turtlenecks, 1950s-style thrift-shop treasures. I styled her hair in pigtails and French braids. She owned tights in every color of the rainbow.

Then she started school, and what she wanted were shirts with pictures of Strawberry Shortcake and Cabbage Patch Kids on the front; jeans, tailored shirts, her hair held behind her ears with a plastic headband. She wanted what the other girls were wearing: conservative knee-length corduroy skirts and matching blouses. Or, the other extreme, crazy, ill-matched combinations, or some beloved but too small dress.

Some mothers with whom I conferred on this told me they simply set out their child’s clothes every night; but with memories of my frustration at being told what to wear as a child, I’ve resisted that. As a result, the kilts and smocked dresses I’ve bought for Audrey—and even a lot of outfits she chose herself—hang at the back of the closet. On good mornings, when she comes down in one of the same three outfits (none of them, in my opinion, the most flattering of her clothes), I bite my tongue. But there are bad mornings, too (often the ones when I have just studied my own reflection in the mirror and been unhappy with it), when I snap at Audrey, “Can’t you ever wear something different?” or simply send her upstairs to change. At my worst, I have pointed out to her how much money I spent on those unworn clothes hanging in her closet, while I say (indicating my sweat pants and T-shirt), “Look at me.
I
dress in rags!”

Our arguments make her so late that I have to drive her to the school bus—both of us close to tears. I watch her trudge across the street and mount the steps of the bus, the pompom on her hat bobbing, and I want to call out, “Come back.” This morning, after the worst showdown yet, I ended up driving the five miles into town to meet her getting off the bus and to tell her I was sorry. Next time, I vow throughout the whole drive home, next time she comes down the stairs (as she did this morning) wearing crew socks and black patent-leather shoes, a too big skirt and a too small sweater, I will say to her only that I love her smiling face.

If I were talking to a therapist about my daughter’s dollhouse (and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea) the first thing I’d say is that I never had a dollhouse of my own. Variation on a theme of parents everywhere—who move through their children’s youth attempting an odd mix of re-creating their own, compensating for everything their own failed to provide, and attempting to construct, for their beloved offspring, that most elusive of experiences known as a happy childhood.

In fact, it’s not entirely accurate to say I never had a dollhouse: The year I turned six, my parents gave me a split-level ranch house with fireplace, doors, windows and paintings printed directly on the walls, and a set of furniture meant to symbolize beds, chairs, bureaus. But none of the drawers opened. There was no way to tuck a doll into beds whose spreads and pillows were molded in plastic, with not a wrinkle present. The view out the windows was always the same: sun shining, red geraniums in bloom.

What I actually played with—nearly every day of my life, from age five to nearly thirteen (when self-consciousness, not lack of interest, finally led me to pack it all away)—was actually a set of bookshelves: wallpapered, carpeted, and filled with mostly homemade cardboard and balsa-wood furniture, with matchbox drawers that always had something hidden inside. I was the only one who knew that if you cut open the Play-Doh food in the dollhouse refrigerator, inside the eggs you’d find a yolk, and in the watermelon, seeds. In 1967, when I finally packed it all away, I set the contents of those shelves in boxes according to rooms, with written instructions describing how things should be arranged, for the daughter I always knew I’d have. I’ve gone through the years, since, still saving the paper parasols from tropical drinks at restaurants, the miniature pencils that sometimes come inside magazine subscription offers. Because as surely as I knew I’d have a daughter, I knew the two of us would someday have, not wallpapered bookshelves, but a real dollhouse.

There are children who don’t make possible their parents’ fantasy-childhood reenactments: daughters who want haircuts when the mother’s idea is French braids, sons who greet their father’s presentation of Celtics tickets with the news that they have other plans for the evening. But I have a daughter whose natural leanings, combined with a heavy dose of indoctrination, have usually tended to follow the lines of my passions. Even before she was tall enough to see into display cases without being lifted up, Audrey—breathing heavily—was fogging up the glass separating her from the museum dollhouses I took her to see, crying out in a way some might mistake for distress when she’d spot a chandelier or a mouse hole or some other particularly heartbreaking detail. And she has always set up little houses of her own— outdoors with sticks and leaves, and in her room out of cigar and shoe boxes. To Audrey every commonplace object suggests a miniature variation. Thimbles are flower pots, a burnt-out flashcube is an aquarium.