One True Thing (6 page)

“I suppose that’s Austen fighting back. She was that kind of woman and she knew that it was the sweet and good girl who was esteemed in society, not the one like Elizabeth who speaks out.”

“But Jane Austen should have known better than to make women into that kind of either-or thing—”

“Do you really think she does that?”

“Yes, I do. It happened in another book, too.” She looked out over the river again.
“Little Women,”
she said after a moment. “There was the sister who was the writer, and the one who had babies.”

“Jo and Meg,” I said.

“It’s all the same,” she said. “Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one. Women professors do it at the college, too, at faculty teas and things.” My mother pitched her voice low and looked from under her brows. “‘Oh, you keep house—how turrrribly innnnterresting.’” She laughed, but I did not.

“Perhaps Austen just meant them as prototypes,” I said.

“No, they’re real enough, both of them, Jane and Elizabeth. Jane admires Elizabeth, and Elizabeth admires herself.”

“Not true,” I said. “Elizabeth admires Jane plenty.”

“Really? Where? When you’re reading it this time pay attention to that, show me where, tell me if you still believe it when the book is done.”

“I thought you’d said you’d already read this book.”

As though I had not spoken she went on: “I remember how relieved I was to see that they all had names I could pronounce. I’d just finished reading some Russian novels and the names drove me crazy. There’d be these long names in
War and Peace
and I’d just skip over them. Does that surprise you?”

“I think most people do that.”

“I didn’t mean about the names. I meant that I read the Russian novelists.”

“No,” I said. It did.

“When I was your age, or a little earlier I suppose it was, because when I was your age I already had you, I used to go over to the library at Columbia when I wasn’t working at the dry-cleaning
shop. I’d read for hours. My parents gave me off from ten to two most days and I went over there and studied. I think in the back of my mind I thought it would be a substitute for not going to college. I found a reading list for freshman English once and I read all the books on it, although afterward your father said most of them were no good.”

“But you didn’t meet him in the library.”

“I met him at the cleaners. He had one sports jacket, a navy blue blazer, and he brought it in. It had a big spot of tomato sauce on it from the Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, and my mother made that clicking noise with her mouth she used to make when a customer brought in something really dirty. He told a funny story about taking a girl to that restaurant, the daughter of his thesis adviser I think it was, and having her father walk in the door and hitting his fork with his elbow and getting sauce all over them both. That episode killed the romance. Or I did.”

“Grandma and Grandpa must have been wonderful chaperones.”

“All your grandmother said when he brought the jacket in was ‘Ready Tuesday.’ But I kept reading in the library until he recognized me and then I kept reading in the library until he took me out to the Hungarian bakery for coffee and I kept reading in the library until he took me to the Italian restaurant. His hair was all black then, and he was thinner, but not much. He was very handsome.”

“Still is.”

“Yes.” My father’s regular features had lost flesh in some places, sagged in others, his rather thin mouth becoming more of a liability as the parentheses of middle age appeared around it. He was the male equivalent of that handsome woman about whom people say, “She must have been a beauty when she was younger.”

“And he was so smart,” my mother added. “The moment he opened his mouth you knew how smart he was.” She looked from the river to me and she smiled, a smile so full of remembered joy that it hurt my heart to see it. “I leaned across the restaurant table
and said, ‘I would be the ideal faculty wife.’ And when I leaned back, all red in the face, or at least that’s what George said, hair red, face vermilion, he said, I leaned back and the entire front of my pink turtleneck was covered with tomato sauce.”

“You never told me this!”

“You never asked.”

“Oh, Mama, that’s a smartass answer,” I said.

“Was it?” my mother said, brightening. “Smartass?”

“Definitely smartass. And are you saying that that’s it, that that’s why he married you, because you asked him?”

“Oh, Ellie,” she said ruefully, as though she was surprised I didn’t understand something so simple, “I imagine he married me because I reminded him of his mother.”

I thought back to my Gulden grandparents, who had run a summer camp in the mountains of New York State. Both of them were dead now, but when I was a little girl I had gone to them for the two weeks before school started, after the children from Long Island and Manhattan and Connecticut had gone home from camp, sunburnt and covered with mosquito bites. I had wandered through the reeds around the horseback-riding paddock picking up the arrows gone astray from archery and bringing them to my grandfather, a strong, quiet man with forearms that stretched the seams on his short-sleeved Banlon shirts so the stitches showed.

My grandmother was different. She looked like my father, lithe and fine-featured, and she sat on a rock while I hunted for crayfish in the creek and let me bake baking-powder biscuits with a thumbprint filled with jam in the center of each one. She smelled of roses and flour, sang Christmas carols at bedtime, braided my hair each morning and tied it with bits of yarn left over from arts and crafts.

“I guess I can see that,” I said.

“I remember liking what I read of
Pride and Prejudice
, only wishing that it could be told from Jane’s point of view. Your father said that would have made for a very dull book. Your father never really liked to talk shop when he got home. Except with you, of course, but that’s different. I think he thinks of that as part of
your education. Sometimes when I listen to the two of you I feel like a Little League player listening to the Yankees.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I don’t mind. It’s interesting.”

“That’s not how I would describe it.”

“How would you describe it?”

“It’s tiring,” I found myself saying, “staying on top of your game.”

The breeze was stronger now, blowing the pages of the book and lifting one corner of the quilt. Downstream I could see two children playing beneath the footbridge as I had done when I was small, pitching stones into the water.

“It’s a mistake to base your entire life on one man’s approval,” my mother added quietly.

“It was the way women lived when you got married,” I said.

“I was talking about you, Ellie,” she said.

“Jonathan and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”

“I wasn’t talking about Jonathan,” she said.

We grew quiet again. The carillon across the river that Samuel Langhorne built to foster a sense of spirituality on campus rang out “Amazing Grace.” When it stopped, “was blind but now I see,” hung in the air for a moment like a cloud.

“Why didn’t you finish the book the first time?” I finally said, the notes dying like the sun going down.

My mother wrapped her hand around the paperback in her lap and held it to her chest. Her knuckles gleamed like four round white stones in the pale yellow light. “I left my copy at City Hall the day I married your father,” she said. “It was a library book, too. I had to pay to have it replaced.”

“I’m not sure how this book-club thing works,” I said. “When we’re done, do we set up some time for discussion?”

“Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” my mother said.

“No, I mean about theme and character and that sort of thing.”

“Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” she repeated.

“So we talk as we go along?”

“Why not?” my mother said.

“And when do we move on to the next one?”

“Ellen,” she said, laughing, putting the book down and picking up her needlepoint, “for an intelligent girl you need an awful lot of direction. We’ll go on to the next one when we’re finished with the one we have.”

M
y parents met and married in 1967, and though we later came to think of the 1960s as a time of great upheaval and liberation, the truth was that for them the upheavals came later, in their everyday lives. They were married at City Hall, took the subway downtown to Chambers Street, and were back in time for my father’s four o’clock tutorial.

My mother went back to work in her parents’ dry cleaners on Broadway, but after she locked up that night she went up to my father’s one-room apartment at 135th Street, climbed into his bed, and next morning began to make curtains out of sheets. She cooked casseroles on a hot plate. They even had dinner parties, my mother once told me, chili and garlic bread balanced on the laps of half-a-dozen starving students.

By the time the Upper West Side was rife with consciousness-raising groups and faculty members were shedding their twin-set Smithy wives in favor of graduate students with short skirts and long hair, my parents were on their way to Princeton and then Langhorne, one a place in which change came slowly, the other a place in which it came hardly at all.

I was a clever child, with the ceaseless goad stabbing away deep inside me that comes from being the eldest child of a clever parent. While my mother drove us to swimming lessons and taught us to string stale cranberries for the Christmas tree and scolded us for using vulgar language and laughed at our knock-knock jokes, my father’s distance was as seductive as his smile.

Nothing changed when my mother became sick. If anything my father was more distant than ever, and more mannered in his manner when he arrived. “What ho, crew?” he would say, putting his briefcase on the bench near the door. Or “You’ve never looked lovelier,” he would say to my mother, bending over her hand, and she would reply, as she always did, “Oh, Lord, Gen,” the pet name she had invented years before, shorthand for Gentleman George. Often my mother was already in bed when he got home. Sometimes, when I heard him quietly close the kitchen door long after night had fallen, I felt as though I was losing both my parents at the same moment, although I did not feel in the slightest like a child. I saw them with the cold eye of the adult now.

One night shortly after my mother and I had had our picnic and formed our book club, my father and I found ourselves together in the dark and sweet-smelling living room, with its bowls of homemade potpourri. Looking up from
Pride and Prejudice
and the circle of golden light cast by the reading lamp, I finally said, “Why am I doing this alone?”

“Doing what alone, may I ask?”

“Tending to your wife.”

His mouth got very thin, and his voice very English, a prelude to meanness. “My wife? My wife? That woman is your mother. I have sat here hundreds of times watching her do for you, care for you, cook for you—”

“And for you,” I said, refusing to be shamed.

“Ellen,” he said, “I have to earn a living. To pay the mortgage. To pay the medical bills. Your mother understands.”

“Is reconciled, you mean.”

“You know nothing about it.” He picked up my book and raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t you read this a hundred times?”

“Apparently this is the book your wife gave up to marry you,” I said.

“You’ve lost me.”

“We’ve formed a book club. Mama wanted to read
Pride and Prejudice
. She started it at Columbia and stopped reading it the day you two got married.”

“I don’t recall that she liked Austen very much.”

“That’s not really accurate. She thinks Austen is condescending to women. Especially women with more conventional characters and expectations than those of Elizabeth Bennet.”

My father shrugged. “Jane Bennet is as satisfied with her lot as any young woman in nineteenth-century fiction, as you well know.”

“I’m not sure I remember,” I said. “Now that I’m a housewife I’ve got other things to think about. Floor wax. Ironing. Which brings us back to our original discussion.”

“Which seemed to me particularly futile. You and I have different roles to play here.”

“I don’t like mine.”

“It won’t last forever.”

“That is a low blow,” I said.

“Ellen, there is no reason for the two of us to be at cross-purposes. Your mother needs help. You love her. So do I.”

“Show it,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“Show it. Show up. Do you grieve? Do you care? Do you ever cry? And how did you let her get to this point in the first place? When she first felt sick, why didn’t you force her to go to the doctor?”

“Your mother is a grown woman,” he said.

“Sure she is. But wasn’t it really that you didn’t want your little world disrupted, that you needed her around to keep everything running smoothly? Just like now you need me around because she
can’t. You bring me here and drop me down in the middle of this mess and expect me to turn into one kind of person when I’m a completely different kind and to be a nurse and a friend and a confidante and a housewife all rolled up in one.”

“Don’t forget being a daughter. You could always be a daughter.”

“Oh, Papa, don’t try to make me feel guilty. What about being a husband?”

“That is none of your business. That is between your mother and me.” He rubbed his eyes with the flat of his hands. “These days at the beginning of term are very tiring. And I don’t have the energy for anger.” And he disappeared into the dark of the hallway and up the stairs. His voice came out of the black, disembodied, a kind of Cheshire Cat without the smile. “Don’t forget,” he added, “I take the night shift.”

As I stood up to turn out the lights and go to bed I glanced at the picture of the three of us on the piano. I saw my mother’s glowing face, and thought of how she had made it possible for my father to believe that his world would be effortlessly cared for because she had, seemingly effortlessly, cared for it. I was beginning to understand the effort in the care now, and that made me angry, to know how she had pretended that he had a job and she had something so much less. And it made me fearful, too, of the future. The essential differences between my mother and me seemed less essential, now that I could see her sitting in the library at Columbia, reading her way through the classics. She had given that up for my father, and she had deferred to him ever since, it was true. But now I understood how easy it was to do what he required, particularly in the service of what seemed a worthy cause.