Domestic Affairs (6 page)

But I inhabit a state of perpetual ambivalence too: part homemaker, part career person. Not as ambitious or successful as lots of childless women I know in New York City. Not as free as my children would like, either, to be there with the chocolate chip cookies when they come home from school ready to play Old Maid. Of course these days they show working mothers on television, but there is nobody I see on the screen whose life looks remotely like mine. There is no name for what I do. With one foot in the door and one foot out, I often feel wistful, looking at the lives of women who know precisely where they stand.

Ten years ago, when I was single and living in a studio apartment on the East Side of Manhattan—wearing silk blouses to work and picking up my dinners from a gourmet shop around the corner—I bought myself a pair of couches covered in Haitian cotton. Nine years ago, when I met Steve, those couches were among the few possessions we moved with us to New Hampshire, where we live now, and where I never put on a silk blouse or buy dinner at gourmet shops. And the truth is, the white couches, with their hard, streamlined edges, always did look a little out of place in our house.

But over the years the couches got beat up enough to fit in a little better. The Haitian cotton ripped, Charlie built forts with the pillows, Audrey took to practicing her gymnastics routine on the sofa back, and balancing her cereal bowl on a sofa arm, while she watched her cartoons. An extended family of mice set up residence inside the hide-a-bed a couple of years back (Steve and I would be sitting on the couch sometimes, after the children were in bed, and I’d say, “Do you hear something?” and he’d say, “It’s just my stomach rumbling.” But in the end, it turned out to be a whole mouse city, coming out among the increasingly unsprung springs. They had pulled out the cotton batting, stored acorns under the seats, and gnawed on the strings of loose threads of the Haitian cotton. Which, as you might guess, was no longer even close to being white).

So this fall we finally decided to get some slipcovers. Steve—who had the kind of mother who would have taken it upon herself to make them—commented that it might make a wonderful fall project for me, sewing those slipcovers. I said no thanks and started asking around for the name of someone who’d make them.

This morning she showed up. Her name is Peg. She’s a small, trim woman in her early fifties. She was at our door at seven-thirty sharp.

But because I was still pretty busy getting the children out the door to preschool and second grade, getting the lunch boxes packed, the library books gathered up, I had to ask Peg to wait a minute. There was just too much going on, it seemed, even to run upstairs for my bolt of fabric.

Then finally the children were gone, and I spread out the material while Peg got her scissors. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s pretty hectic around here in the mornings. Getting three children dressed and out the door …”

“I know,” she said. “I had nine.”

I thought about that for a moment, then asked their ages. She put down the box of straight pins so she could use her fingers to count.

“There’s Alice, she’s—let’s see—thirty-one. Mary. She’s thirty. Bob, twenty-nine. Douglas—no, not Douglas. Roger, twenty-eight.
Then
Douglas. Then Noreen …” It went pretty much like that (with a few more years between the last couple of children), all the way down to Joseph, who was seventeen and just finishing up his senior year in high school.

“Caring for all those children was no big deal,” Peg said. “Everybody pitched in, and everyone behaved, because they just had to.” When it was time to bathe the baby, the others would all gather around, and it would be “go get the powder” to this one and “go get the diaper” to that one. Every night Peg made a list of everybody’s jobs for the next day. “Every one of my children knows how to cook, clean, do laundry, and sew,” said Peg, scrambling around my living room floor, cutting fabric and drawing chalk lines as she spoke, while I stood there, feeling awkward and guilty at having nothing but a cup of coffee in my hands. Still, I wanted badly to talk to this woman. “Forget about the slipcovers,” I wanted to say. “Just sit down and tell me how you did it.”

She made all her children’s clothes, of course—usually out of her husband’s worn-out shirts and pants (because the sleeves went first, and that left lots of good fabric in the middle). It would be nothing for her to put up two hundred quarts of beans, she said. Every day she baked bread. Every night they ate meat—casseroles mostly. Plus, her husband did a lot of hunting.

For Christmas there’d be doll beds made out of old oatmeal boxes, and knitted yarn balls, and necklaces of old wooden spools, painted in bright colors. “You should see our house at the holidays,” she said. “My supper table seats twenty-two. But sometimes we’ll feed up to thirty-five people in my dining room.”

What about when she went places, I asked her.

“Well,” she said, “except for grocery shopping and church, mostly we stayed home. We raked leaves and jumped in them in the fall. We made snow angels and snow forts in winter. My kids had a two-story tree house. They always had each other. What else did they need?”

Peg was pinning fabric together on my couch as she spoke. She never stopped moving. I told her she made it look easy. “This is nothing,” she said.

But surely she didn’t sew slipcovers when the children were small, I asked (I who can’t get a page of a newspaper read until after all three children are in bed). “Of course I did,” said Peg. “Even with my husband working two shifts, we needed the money. The children always knew just how to entertain themselves. Anytime they were idle, I’d just tell them to pick up my washcloth and start scrubbing something.”

Weren’t there times, I asked her, when it was all just crazy? Out of control? Times you just wanted to throw up your arms and scream?

Peg looked at me, thought for a moment, took the pins out of her mouth, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t say there were.”

“I don’t know how you did it,” I told her.

“Maybe you don’t have enough kids,” she suggested. “When there’s only three there might be too much leeway. These women who only have one now—I don’t know how they do it.”

“Of course,” she said, “you young girls are different, and I’m not criticizing. You’ve got your own needs. You want to go jogging. Want to go out at night. Me, I never knew anyone, besides my husband and my kids. I hardly even knew who was president. My children were everything: my career, my friends, my exercise program, my hobby. I guess I was sort of a child myself: down on my hands and knees half the day, playing with them. Your mind goes a little funny. But I’ll tell you, I had fun.”

I asked Peg what the hardest times were, raising her nine children. One, she said, was when her oldest daughter left home to go to nursing school thirty miles away. “I cried and cried to lose her,” she said.

Then she told me this story:

She only gave birth to seven children. But one day a neighbor called, asking if Peg would watch a friend’s two babies (a girl and a boy, both under two). Just for a few hours. Peg said no problem, which was true. Two more babies fit in just fine.

A few hours later the neighbor called again, asking whether Peg could keep the babies overnight. Once again Peg said no problem. The mother didn’t come the next day, or the day after that. After a few months Peg had the children baptized. After five years she and her husband decided they’d better file papers to adopt the kids. That’s when the mother finally showed up, and took the boy and girl away.

Did she ever see them again?

Not until Roxanne’s funeral. The girl was eighteen years old. Running with a bad crowd. Killed in a car accident. The boy was deeply into drugs too.

So now she has just seven children. Plus one of her sons is divorced; the ex-wife doesn’t have anything to do with their three-year-old daughter, and the son has to work all the time. So the little girl lives with Peg and her husband. She keeps Peg company, drawing or looking at books beside her, while she sews or scrubs the appliances.

This morning now, Peg got up at three o’clock to finish up a set of slipcovers for a customer. Then she made blueberry muffins. Then she did a load of wash and hung it up to dry. Then she got her granddaughter up and fed her breakfast. Then she mixed up a batch of bread dough and set it out to rise. By the time she got home, she told me (picking up the last of her pins, packing to go), she figured it would be about ready to pop into the oven.

I told her I was a writer. I explained to her that now I would be leaving my house, too, leaving my littlest son with Vicky, our babysitter, and heading out to my office, to sit at my typewriter all day. I asked if she’d mind my writing about her.

“Why would you want to do that?” she said. “There’s nothing special or interesting about me. I just did what I knew. Fed my children, loved them, kept them busy. Made sure they said their prayers every night. That’s all I ever wanted.”

But just before she left, Peg noticed the old pink piano we got recently from my friend Ursula. She sat down at the keyboard. “Do you play?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “Not really. Not for forty years.” But suddenly she was playing a tune with both hands, not badly at all. From memory.

“It’s good I don’t have one of these around my house,” she said a few minutes later, closing the piano firmly. “I’d spend all my time playing it. But it sure would’ve been nice to have, for the children. Your little girl must love it.”

I didn’t tell her that as a matter of fact, the one who’s taking the beginning piano lessons in this family is me. I just shook her hand, circled the date on the calendar when the slipcovers would be ready. Headed out to my office, and looked out my window at Vicky, pushing Willy on the swings.

O
F COURSE LIFE WITH
young children has its surprises. (Sometimes it’s the child himself who is the surprise.) But our days around here are probably more defined by repetition. If I have read
Scat Scat Cat
once, I bet I’ve read it five hundred times. I’ve sung “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word” nearly every night for the last eight years. Made ten thousand peanut butter sandwiches. Kissed five million places where it hurt.

There’s no denying some of the tasks of parenthood are simply tedious. But in fact I guess I also love and need the familiarity of the territory. (At best, we have rituals. At worst, ruts.) I love ending my day with a tour of my sleeping children in their beds. Setting out the cereal bowls for morning. I even like folding my sons’ pajamas, still warm from the dryer. I know by heart the
Joy of Cooking
recipe for blueberry muffins and the names of all seven dwarfs and eight reindeer. I guess they add up to a kind of household rosary, and I can’t imagine ever forgetting any of it, though women older than I assure me I will.

So much of life remains uncertain. But I always know the punch line to Charlie’s one joke. (What kind of car does Humpty Dumpty drive? A yolkswagen.) I know Audrey will always make a face out of her meatballs, arranged on top of her spaghetti. Willy will always claim his pants are dry. Charlie will always, before settling down to read a book with me, run to get his bear, whose string he likes to twirl in his ear.

For years now, the routine around here has included looking after a baby. And while living with an adolescent may be more emotionally demanding, for pure physical rigor there’s nothing to match those first few years with a young child.

Now, even as the end of baby tending comes into view, I find myself feeling not only liberated, but ensnared, looking back as much as I look forward. Partly, perhaps, my wistfulness comes simply from not wanting to see a stage I have loved come to an end. Maybe I’m also scared. (When my children were all very young, my life was clearly laid out. There was not so much room to question what I should be doing. There was little opportunity for experiment and adventure, but also that meant less opportunity for failure.) And partly I am wistful simply because there is not much I like better than holding a baby in my arms.

I have been spending my evenings this past week watching Olympic skaters spin around the ice. In my dreams, and anytime I find myself on a smooth frozen pond with no one watching, I am Tiffany Chin. I hum myself a soundtrack. I rely heavily on hand gestures rather than triple jumps and camels. Because the truth is, I’m not much of a skater—even when I’m not, as I am now, nine months pregnant, with thirty extra pounds and a sore back.

For the first eight and a half months of this third pregnancy of mine I have been carrying on my life pretty much as usual. It’s the two children with us already who demand the attention I once gave to childbirth manuals and nursery decoration. Also, I tell myself I know all about babies and having them. When people inquire how I am, I tend to register surprise at the question and then say “How about you?” I have almost forgotten that around March 1 a baby is going to be born here.

But there comes a point—and it’s here—when the body and the mind get pretty much overtaken by a pregnancy and every inch is occupied territory. (With even my hair no longer normal, I am advised to hold off getting a permanent.) Three times in the past six years, I’ve reached that point in a New Hampshire winter. (My son’s and daughter’s birthdays coincide with the full moons of one February and one March.) And now here I sit once more, staring out a window at nothing but mud and snow, putting off taking the ten steps between my chair and the door, where our dog is scratching to be let out, because the task just seems too tiring. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes drawing moustaches on the models in the annual
Sports Illustrated
bathing-suit issue. I might as well belong to a separate species from those flat-bellied, golden-skinned women in their silver bikinis.

It’s an odd state to be in, this period just before the birth of a baby. The mind empties. I see my true self slipping away, being replaced by a person who behaves, not like me, but like full-term pregnant women everywhere. Unexplainable tears. A ravenous appetite for salt one night and sweet the next. A need—as real as an artist’s for paint or a keyboard—to wax the floors and repaint the kitchen. I want to hold not only babies, kittens, puppies, but a nearly full-grown Irish setter. “That letter you wrote had the word tiny in seven places,” a friend tells me.