Kramer vs. Kramer (4 page)

“What? What would bring in enough to make it pay?”

“Something. I know public relations, don’t I?”

“You were a secretary, Joanna. That’s all.”

“I was not. I was assistant to the—”

“That was window dressing. You were just a secretary.”

“That stinks, you know?”

“It’s the truth. I’m sorry. And I just don’t see disrupting the well-being of a two-year-old so you can go be a secretary in some office. You’re past that.”

“I am?”

“Look, when he’s older, when he’s in school nine to three, maybe you can take on some part-time work.”

“Thank you for permission.”

“Joanna, where is all this coming from?”

“Two years of boredom.”

“I’d like to know how other mothers manage.”

“They all don’t. Some work.”

“Yes, well—”

“Well, what?”

“Let me think about it a little.”

“You’re on notice.”

“It’s funny, I was wondering maybe we should be talking about having another child.”

“You were, were you?”

“People say if you wait too long, it gets harder and harder.”

“Do they?”

“I mean—”

“I don’t want another child, Ted.”

“It’s just that you are so good with him. We’re all good at it.”

“I can’t bear to think of any of this all over again. God! The feedings and the crap all over again!”

“It could be a lot of fun. We’d get a seat on your bike, scoot around the city.”

“Why don’t you rent one, Ted?”

Clearly, she meant a child and not a bike seat. She sought out her new friend, Amy. Joanna said it all in one rush—how she could not get a handle on it, she was bored and confused. Amy was the wrong person. Amy loved children, she loved being a mother, she loved the idea of going back to children in a classroom when her children were older, supporting Ted’s thesis. The boredom is “self-inflicted,” Amy said crisply, Joanna feeling as though she had just received an F in deportment. And then, self-righteous Amy dropped a bombshell. She had something on her mind, too, that she hadn’t been able to talk about to anyone. Amy was having an affair. He was married. A psychiatrist. Joanna had only been on the other side of affairs as a single girl. Here was the first woman she knew who was married herself admitting to an affair—and with a psychiatrist.

“Are they allowed to do that?” Joanna asked, trying to conceal her awkwardness.

They said goodbye with hugs and kisses, soul sisters now for having exchanged confidences, except Joanna was not sure she had received what she wanted in exchange. An affair? That wasn’t going to do it, she thought. It would be a different set of complications. Although the notion of hiring a baby-sitter so she could have an affair amused her slightly.

T
ED WOULD HAVE SAID
he was sympathetic to the Women’s Movement. He made an effort to “do his share,” as he regarded it, to call Joanna before he came home to see if she needed anything in the house. It was her house to run, though. He would assist with Billy, give him baths, take him for a few hours on the weekends. She was still in charge there, however, to deal with his clothes, his diet, his health, the pediatrician, his stages of development—when he was to be toilet trained, taken out of a crib, given a bed. He was the daddy, but she was the mommy. He wanted to help. He felt he should help. What he did was just help. Billy was still, basically, her account.

F
OR A WHILE, EVERY
child Billy’s age in the playground was pushing the same giraffe, then they were all riding the same motorcycle, and now at three, they were all going off to nursery school. Ted asked how he had managed to develop into an adult person without going to a $1400-a-year nursery school, and wasn’t that a helluva lot of money to pay for a three-year-old to draw pictures? If Billy went, though, Joanna knew she could be free for a few hours each day. What she told Ted was that all the children were going, and if Billy did not he would fall hopelessly behind and would lose the verbal skills he seemed to have, never to catch up. Ted wrote a check for the Pussycats Nursery School.

Even so, it did not relieve Joanna very much. Sometimes Ted dressed Billy in the mornings and dropped him off at the school. But Billy was home by noon with what seemed like an entire day for her to deal with. All three-year-olds are that way, the mothers agreed, which was no solace to her when she had to undo the fact that he wanted his peanut-butter sandwich in squares not triangles, his milk in the clown cup not the elephant glass, that he couldn’t use the coloring paper because it was creased, that his hamburger had too much crust, that Randy in his school had a yellow bicycle with a bell not a horn, and that ten minutes and $20 after the cleaning woman left, the floors were sticky with spilled apple juice. And if Ted grumbled that everything cost so much and the company wasn’t doing very well and he might have to take a pay cutback, at least he had a job to go to where they discussed page rates and readership and not Jiffy, I forgot it should be Jiffy, Billy, I thought you said Skippy, no, dammit, you cannot have an ice-cream sandwich for breakfast, and yet he was sweet, too, and beautiful to look at, and this did not help.

“I’m coming, I’m coming. I was in the bathroom! Can’t you reach that truck yourself, for chrissakes?”

“Mommy, don’t yell at me.”

“Stop crying, dammit!” and he would cry more and she would hold him and comfort him, while no one at all was comforting her.

A
S SNOW WHITE IN
the school play, she was Snow White with hives. As runner-up in the Class Prettiest on prom night, she had hives. Her first time with Philip, a boy from Harvard, hives. Her parents were always there for her to buy whatever cashmere sweater or charm bracelet she needed to compete in the adolescent Olympics or to help subsidize her rent in her early years in New York. So they sent her checks. In the middle of her third affair with a married man she wondered if this was a pattern and got hives. She spoke to her mother, her mother felt she did not sound right, and they sent her a check for $25 to buy something nice. Under pressure she got hives, and they had always kept her in calamine lotion.

When she was first learning to type and take dictation, she would begin to feel the awful itchiness under her skin. She would break out, like insect bites spotted here and there, which would fade in a few days, embarrassing her that she got them again. She did not like to place herself under stress. She always kept a neat desk and did not like to fall behind and then have to race to catch up. She did not wish to extend herself too far. It was all right to be a secretary, if you were a good one. She did not have to be a career woman, high-powered, tense, eating too much like the woman copy chief, eyes twitching like the woman media buyer—it was all right. She did not wish to have hives.

“W
HAT’S THAT?” TED ASKED,
seeing her undressed as they were about to have their not-so-frequent, maybe once-a-week sex. A three-year-old was so demanding. They were both tired so often. “Nothing. I must have eaten too much fruit.” Tennis turned out to be the antidote. After a few hours on the court, the hives were gone. After a few weeks, she had become obsessed by her affair with Messrs. Wilson and Dunlop. Her parents had given her tennis lessons in high school, just as earlier they had given her piano and tap. She played regularly while she was in college, surprising her jock dates by getting the ball over the net. In New York she did not play very often, a few times in resort areas before she met Ted. With Ted she did not play at all. Ted rode a bicycle and sometimes went down to a local schoolyard to play basketball with the neighborhood kids, usually returning tasting blood and still gasping, longing for his wonder days in the Bronx. Amy said she played a bit of tennis, she and Joanna bought tennis permits, and at Central Park Joanna began playing again. First they played once a week during nursery school hours, then twice, then Joanna signed up for a tennis lesson the third day of the week. She was elated if she played well, depressed if she did not, she took mental replays of her strokes with her wherever she went, her last thoughts at night were of points well played or poorly played, she began to watch the matches on television, her game improved, she was beating Amy regularly by wide margins. Tennis carried her through the spring.

Ted had been asked to take a 10-percent cutback in pay and limit himself to a one-week vacation while his company labored financially. Joanna insisted that if she had to spend every day taking Billy to an empty playground in the blistering summer her brains would fry. Ted wanted to be understanding, and they agreed to make the money available for Billy to attend a summer play-group at his nursery school. They would take a modest one-week trip to the country in August, but Joanna would have to give up the expense of tennis lessons. She still had her regular games, though, and with Billy away in the mornings, she joined a daily doubles group with Amy and two other women from the nursery school. She was tan, trim, with her tennis whites, her hair in place with a designer scarf, pom-pom socks, and Adidas racquet bag. Outwardly, at any rate, she looked like she was winning whatever she was doing.

Men were asking her to play, people willing to step down in class on tennis to step up their social lives with the pretty girl with the fairly good game. She was tempted with fleeting fantasies of playing a smooth set with good-looking Luis or Eric or Cal and then go back with them, still glistening with sweat and make love, and talk tennis.

The vacation week in August was endless for her. Ted wanted to talk about business, the company, would he have his job through the year. This was a difficult time for him, which she understood, but then it was for her, too. Why didn’t they talk more often about her and how did you talk intelligently about minutiae? The accumulation of little details she had to deal with was dragging her down. He would have thought these problems were petty.

They had rented an inexpensive efficiency apartment in Hampton Bays, a middle-class resort area which looked promising in the brochure, but was heavy on boats, fishing, and mosquitoes. In strange surroundings with older children, Billy was not adjusting; he kept circling around her legs like the bugs.

“Go play, Billy! Don’t you have anything to play?”

“I can’t decide.”

Decide. She wondered—did three-year-olds use the word decide? He was so bright, so pretty, such a pain in the ass.

“Go swim, then.”

“Jesus, Joanna, how can he swim?”

“You swim with him, then. I’m resting. Can’t I rest?”

Her guys went off to splash in the pool and she vowed never to go on a vacation for them again, never to be where there was not any tennis.

Ted found courts. A local tennis club rented hourly time to outsiders during the week, with a baby-sitter on the premises, too, and hadn’t she said she would play with him? She had taken her racquet, he could borrow one there. In the city he had referred to himself in front of people as a tennis widower, but they were on vacation now, she could spare an hour of tennis for him, couldn’t she?

The hour was nearly as long as the week for her. Ted had played only a few times in his life. He was like a wild bear on the court. They were next to a mixed doubles game of older players. Ted’s balls kept interrupting their game, he kept forgetting not to cross behind them to get his balls, he was slow in returning theirs, Billy somehow escaped his teenage captor and peered through the fence behind her with his dark eyes, whining for apple juice, they only had Seven-Up, he hated Seven-Up. She chased him back to the sitter, Ted lost a ball over the fence, put a ball in play from the next court. She was humiliated. He was a clod from neighborhood schoolyards, crude. That night, when he pulled at her, she made love to him mechanically, waiting for him to get done.

The next day, their last, finally, she left Ted and Billy at the pool and wandered down to the bay beach. She sat down on a dock, staring into the oily water. Did they know she was gone? Did they care? She did not care. She could sit there for hours and not miss them. She would call Amy first thing back in the city and play Monday morning, she had lost a week, Ted probably set her back with his clown act. It was very hot. Was this the worst vacation ever? The worst time ever? Rowboats had been set out for guests. She found a dry boat and pushed off. She dipped her oars for a while and then pulled them in and floated. Motorboats would pass and she would be tossed around. She rowed to keep up with the tide, but largely she floated. When was the best time? High school? Having Vicki Cole’s face turn red when Marty Russell asked her out instead of Vicki. Knowing then she was pretty. Where were they now? Was Vicki floating in a rowboat somewhere wondering what happened to her? College was not bad, some of it. The first year in New York was exciting, up and down after that, but all of it, any of it was better than this. It was so boring, and when it was not boring that was only because she was under pressure and fighting with Billy and even the fights were getting boring and Ted was boring and the vacation, a break from the boring, was boring. She could just tumble over the side into the water. Better than sticking your head in an oven. That was not for a hot day like this. Her parents would cry a lot, and chip in for the funeral, which they would see was the best. Billy would be rescued from having her yell at him. Ted would cope beautifully. He would remarry inside of two years, a fat cow from the Bronx, who would cook until he got round like his father and who would make him happy by going down on him more than she ever would.

When she rowed back to the dock, she saw them standing at the water’s edge, her men. They had a milk bottle attached to a string with bread in it and they were catching little fish in the bottle. They had not realized she was gone.

“I
WENT TO J.
Walter today.”

“You did?”

“To see some people, ask around.”

“And?”

“There’s not much doing.”

“Of course there’s not. Times are tough. Didn’t I just take a pay cut?”

“But they said they’d keep me in mind.”