Elegies for the Brokenhearted (24 page)

Mike Murphy begins to drink, to stay out late after work. “Better enjoy myself while I can,” he says. “Pretty soon, you know, holy shit.” When he comes home you're in bed and he puts his hand on your shoulder, he presses himself against you, but you turn around and slap him.
Like I'm not miserable enough already,
you say. He says, “Jeez. Sorry. Jeez.” His breath is sour.

Then finally the baby itself. The long, sweaty labor, the delivery, the ass slap and the phlegmy cry, the baby wrapped in blankets and presented to you. Pink, squirming, with swollen eyes and a misshapen head. You are supposed to feel something here—something besides dread, bitterness, tearful agony—but you don't, you don't, you give the baby away to whoever wants to hold it.
Take her,
you say.
Take her away.

I think there's something wrong with me,
you tell your mother.
I don't want it.

“It's natural,” she tells you, “you'll be fine in a few days.” But in a few days you're sitting around the apartment in your nightgown, watching television, and you're not fine, in fact it seems that your life has ended. The baby cries and you heat up formula, feed it, burp it, change its diaper. It spits up on you and falls asleep, you fall asleep, then it wakes crying and you go through the whole thing all over again. How long will you last? Two more days? Three? You carry the baby over to your mother's and hand her over.
I can't do this,
you tell her.
I can't fucking do this
.

“Have a drink,” your mother says, and she fixes you a high-ball. Every morning of your life, after your father (and then later, your stepfather) left for work, your mother mixed a drink with which to swallow a sedative, then spent the rest of her day refilling her glass, going around in a dreamy, imperturbable fog. She has always been cool toward you and your sisters, has gone around the house tending to her business as if you weren't there. If she touched you or your sisters it was in the way that one touches an insect in the bathtub—with a quick, dismissive pinch. She's never in your life told you she loves you—she simply isn't that kind of woman—and you've always judged her for this.
Heartless bitch
, you've called her. But you see her side of things now, you see it all quite clearly.

You start drinking at home, but the effect is less predictable for you than it is for your mother. You are relaxed for long stretches. But you also suffer fits in which you cry, sulk, rage. You throw things simply to break them, you leave shards of glass and porcelain on the floor—your wedding gifts, the cups and saucers, the creamer, the gravy boat—for Mike Murphy to sweep up when he gets home, which is later and later, less and less. The baby cries and you leave it. You go out for long walks, you simply leave it.

Sometimes when Mike Murphy gets home from work you are dressed and ready to go out. “There's a bottle in the fridge,” you say. “I gotta get out of here.” You go out to bars and men buy you drinks. You drink so much that you have to be packed into their cars and driven home. Twice you wake up in a strange apartment, with no recollection of being brought there. More often you are brought to your parents' house—your license still lists their address—and your mother sets you up on the couch. She leaves a large plastic bowl beside you on the coffee table. “Darling,” she says, “don't vomit on the chintz.”

Just before the baby's first birthday you feel a soft, swift, unmistakable kick in your gut.
Jesus,
you think.
Jesus Christ.
A few months later, when you are showing again, people start punching Mike Murphy good-naturedly in the arm. “You kids,” they say, “can't keep your hands off each other.”

One night, drunk, Mike Murphy crashes the car into a telephone pole and breaks his nose. He is scraped up, swollen, and he comes home wanting sympathy from his wife. But instead you rail at him.
You fucking asshole, you fucking idiot
. You slap him across his bruised face.
I'm stuck here all day with a kid, and you're out crashing the car? You should be kissing my fucking feet!

“You think you're so hot? You think you're such a hot catch? You're a miserable fucking bitch is what you are. A spoiled fucking brat.”

You limpdick little shit,
you say,
you piss-ant son of a bitch.
He turns away, you stab your cigarette into the back of his neck, he turns and smacks you across the face, takes you by the shoulders and shakes you, shoves you to the floor.

Fuck you,
you say.
I'm going back to my mother's
.

“Fine,” he says. “Be my fucking guest.”

And so there you are, twenty years old and divorced, pregnant with your second child, living with your parents. The second baby is born, another girl, and Mike Murphy comes around now and then, wanting to see the children. “I got rights,” he says, and you tell him to go fuck himself. Then you change your mind, walk the girls over to his apartment and drop them off.
Here,
you say,
here are your goddamn rights. Enjoy yourself
. The girls cry when you leave. They have no idea where they are. Hours later Mike Murphy brings them back, with a look of terror on his face. Both girls are splashed with vomit. “I can't do this,” he says. “I'm sorry but I don't know what to do.”

It is as if everything between you and Mike Murphy—the marriage, the children—were some kind of vacation gone bad, and now you want to return to normal life, you want a full refund (
Excuse me, but I would like to return these
). You have never managed to feel for the girls what you suppose you ought to feel. Instead, you regard them as younger siblings whose care you've been unfairly saddled with. You take them on long, aimless walks, one of them in the carriage and the other toddling beside you. “What beautiful children,” people say to you.

“They're for sale,” you tell them. “Two for one.”

You always refer to the babies in the plural, as if there were no difference between them.
It's their bedtime, get them to shut up, their diapers are shitty, they're sick and they're driving me crazy.
Occasionally one of them does something individually, in which case you differentiate between them by saying
one
and
the other one
.
One of them falls down the stairs, and it turns out she's fine, but the other one starts crying!
They are quite different—one is fat and one thin, one squalling and the other sullen, one with your fine symmetrical features and the other warped, like the reflection of the first in a spoon—but they are joined in your mind, nearly indistinguishable, they exist only in relationship to one another, like two sides of a coin. Tweedledee, Tweedledum.

 

W
hen the younger girl is a year old you take a job as a secretary at a junior high school, and it isn't long before one of the teachers—a tall, slope-shouldered man named Michael Collins—starts making advances toward you, which are so innocent and pathetic that you sometimes can't keep yourself from laughing in his face. After work, he always falls into step with you on your way to the parking lot, as if by chance. “Look who it is!” he says. “I almost didn't see you there!” As you approach your car he leaps ahead of you so that he can open the door for you. You protest, but he keeps doing it, like some errant knight compelled to perform useless acts of chivalry. One day in December he kicks your tires and says that they are low, that they need filling.
I don't know how,
you say. So he accompanies you to the gas station and fills your tires. He checks your oil level, also low, as is your wiper fluid and antifreeze. He fills all of these fluids to the top, then smacks his hands together, satisfied.

Thanks,
you say.

“My pleasure,” he says. And you get the feeling that it is, it actually is.

Well,
you say,
I live just around the corner
.

“Okay,” he says, and stands waving as you pull out of the parking lot. Not until the next morning does it occur to you that he had to walk back to his car at the school, over a mile away through the snow.

In your judgment this man is flawed in a number of ways: he is too tall and too thin, too pale and soft-spoken, his nose is crooked and has a bulbous tip, he is weak-natured, boring. Still, he is kinder to you than anyone has ever been, and he worships you in the way that you feel you deserve to be worshiped. He starts taking you to dinner, to movies. He meets the girls, who clasp his nose in their fists. He seems to know what to do with them. He tosses them up in the air and they squeal.

No one in your family has ever been to college, and so there is something of a triumph in this man—a man with a master's degree, a man who wears a tie and a corduroy blazer to work. “An educator,” your mother calls him, with a certain amount of reverence, and you like the sound of it.
An educator,
you say, looking at yourself in the mirror.
I'm married to an educator
. For it is only a matter of time before he asks you.

As Mrs. Michael Collins you live a dull, steady life in a three-bedroom ranch home, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. You are with your husband almost all of the time. You drive to work together, drop off and pick up the girls together, go to the grocery store together, dinner on Saturday nights, church on Sundays. This goes on for years, and by all appearances you have settled down. Yet you are not at home here. This is the kind of place, you think, where people go to die, quietly and alone, like elephants. Your house starts to look like a coffin. It gets so that thoughts of escape run more or less constantly through your mind.

One day your neighbor, a stuffy widow named Mrs. Barsotti, knocks on your door to inform you that a black man in a Ford Nova has been driving around the neighborhood. “With no apparent purpose,” she says. “I just wanted to warn you that there might be trouble afoot.”

You close the door in her face.
Bitch,
you say.

“It's her generation,” Michael Collins says. “She doesn't know any better.”

Something snaps in you, begins to unravel. You start going out at night, to all the old places you used to go, and once again there are men lined up to buy you drinks. You drink, you drink. One night you come home and find Michael Collins waiting up for you, sitting at the kitchen table with the younger girl, building a model ship, and the sight of him taking care of your child, while you've been out with other men, strikes you as funny.

How's your little boat?
you say to him, and laugh.
What a bitty little ship you have. What a junior little schooner.
You start laughing and can't stop. You fall down laughing and he tries to pull you up, off the floor.

Michael Collins says, “Come on. She doesn't need to see you like this.”

Like what?
you say.
Like this?
You unbutton your dress, step out of it, fling it across the room.

“Maggie,” he says, “come on now.”

Am I making you nervous?
you say. Your mood begins to slide, from playful to angry.
Would it make you feel better if I went outside? Would it?

“Maggie!” he says, but you're already outside on the front lawn in your bra and underwear. “Hey, Mrs. Barsotti!” you cry. “Quick! Call the cops! A black man stole all my clothes!” And then Michael Collins tackles you with a blanket. But you scramble away from him, screaming, and soon enough Mrs. Barsotti comes outside, clutching her bathrobe together at the neck. “Shall I call the police?” she says. “Oh dear, shall I call the police?”

 

Y
ou quit your job, move into an apartment of your own. The girls are eight and nine that year, and much of your daily routine is harried—it seems you are constantly yelling at them.
Get up
, you say to the girls,
get dressed, brush your teeth, comb your hair, wash your face, put your shoes on, did you put your shoes on? Where are your goddamned shoes? Jesus Christ, how should I know? Get your coat on. Go on, go then, go without a coat, the bus is coming, I can hear it coming, go on, get out of here, get out of here!

When you get home from work the girls chirp at you like baby birds, chirp about their various needs and ailments (they are bored, one of them has a loose tooth, a stomachache, one of them has to make a shadow box of Abraham Lincoln's childhood home and needs your help, one of them needs money for a field trip) until you crack.
Get out of my sight,
you say.
Go play outside, would you leave me alone, would you leave me alone for two goddamn minutes?
You come down with headaches and retreat to your bedroom, shut off the lights. But they follow you not five minutes later. “Now?” they say. “Can you help us now?”

It's even worse when they try to help you. They bring glasses of water and bottles of pills. “Here, Mom,” they say, “for your headache.” You see in their eyes they are afraid of you. As if you'd ever harm them.
Get out of here!
you say, slapping the pills from their hands.
Leave me alone!
They run away crying.

For a while they are malleable. You can send them away and still they love you, still they come running for you when you call their names. For there are times when you love them desperately. You come out of your bedroom and see them sitting on the floor, playing a board game together, one of them says, “Here's your hotel, ma'am,” and the other says, “Why thank you, sir.” Their voices are high and earnest. They have not yet fallen into sarcasm. You love them, you love them. You sit on the floor between them and kiss them, you make growling noises and pretend to eat their ears, they squeal, they climb on top of you. You love them so much you want to crush them.