The Stuff That Never Happened (16 page)

“It’s a novel! It’s really a novel!” he said, and he grabbed Brice by the hands and started jumping up and down with him. “Oh, Bricey, your mama is going to be so mad when she finds out what Daddy is doing with his sabbatical. Who would have guessed that I’m writing a novel!”

“But why should she be mad?” I said. “Isn’t she, like, all in favor of everybody being as creative as possible?”

“Ha! Have you observed
nothing
in your time here, my dear Annabelle? That’s lip service. Girls—excuse me—
women
are allowed to be creative, but guys are supposed to be paying the bills. Being a Columbia professor of history and all that.”

I had to admit he had a point. Carly had ambushed me one night early on, after the guys had gone to bed. “You can’t let these years go by, you know. It’s bad enough that you’ve displaced yourself, stopped going to college because of your
husband’s
career, but luckily you landed in New York City instead of in South Podunk, North Dakota, like so many college wives. So now you need to take over your own life and make sure you get exactly what you need out of the deal. Get things the way you want them.”

But how, when I didn’t even know what I wanted? I had squirmed under her gaze. We needed money, I told her. That’s why I’d signed up with the temp agency. Already I’d worked at a bank, a talent agency, a public relations firm, and a law office. That seemed fine for now.

Carly slammed her fist down on the counter and said all that was shit work. “You know what this is? It’s depression!” she said. “When an artist is not doing her art, she starts to lose touch with her essential self.”

“I don’t really think it’s depression. I might just not have any ambition,” I said.

“Well, I’m not going to give up on you even if you’re giving up on yourself,” she said. “Just remember that when you’re ready, there are plenty of opportunities. And sometimes you need to push yourself through the next door. For God’s sake, just don’t do what I did and have children.”

I couldn’t believe she’d just said that. It seemed to me permissible to be vocal about not wanting children in advance—nameless, faceless children that you would never know—but to speak so callously of existing children was surely wrong. She saw my expression and leaned forward suddenly and spoke through clenched teeth.

“Listen, I love my kids as much as anybody loves their children,” she said. “I bow to
no one
when it comes to being a good mother! But I’m talking about something else now. A career! And not getting swallowed up by all the domestic concerns. Kids are great when you’re ready for them, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say that it’s just the most wonderful thing in the world, a woman’s greatest crowning achievement, because it
isn’t
. I lost my body when I had those twins. Having two at once was a piece of bad luck, really.” She stared at me again, daring me to disapprove. “Annabelle. I’m talking from
the standpoint of my body
. That’s all I’m saying. I gained fifty-three pounds that I’ve had to sweat off every inch of. But I’m doing it. I’m flourishing again, but I’ll never make back that time. You—you have nothing constraining you, and yet you just go out to shit jobs every day. Let me tell you, because nobody else will:
you need these years
. I won’t ever be great because of the time I took off. You don’t know it, but the longer you just stand in place … You’re losing time. I’m older than you are. Be careful, is all I’m telling you. Stop letting people take advantage of you.”

“Who’s tak—?”

She tucked a tendril of red hair behind her ear. Her nostrils flared. “Your
husband,”
she said. “And mine, too, if you let him. I heard that last week you took the children to day care twice. I warn you: don’t let him do that to you. He’s the one with the free time. Men have all the cards. Don’t let them take yours.”

ACTUALLY, THOUGH, it ended up being Carly herself who took my free time. She had a fight with the day-care lady, Marjorie, a motherly woman I had come to like on my frequent trips with Jeremiah to pick up the kids. Marjorie was in her forties, an old hippie-type with one long gray braid down her back, harried but sweet, and she genuinely seemed to like the children in her care. Often she and I and Jeremiah sat outside on the stoop, drinking a glass of wine at five o’clock while the kids played in her tiny gated yard. But Carly had problems with her. Now that Brice and Lindsay were about to turn three, she only wanted books read to them that did not have sexist references. The moms in the books should
not
be shown as the only ones taking care of children. They should not wear aprons or cook. The dads should be shown grocery shopping and putting children to bed. It was, I thought, an excellent point—but what were we to do about it? Stop reading books altogether?

No. Apparently she had a plan to remedy the situation, and one night after the kids were in bed, she brought a bunch of the day-care books out of her bag, along with some Magic Markers. We were going to black out the offending passages and change some genders, she said with a big smile.

“Wow. How did you get these?” I asked her. Behind her, out of her line of vision, Jeremiah raised his eyebrows for my benefit and pantomimed somebody shoving books into a bag and tiptoeing away. I had to stifle a laugh.

“Well, today,” she said, “I told Marjorie I wanted to join the twins for lunch, and she said okay. And then, while we were having a picnic in their little back area, I just slipped inside and put about ten of the books in my bag. And now tomorrow I’ll give them to Jeremiah to take back. Next week I’ll see if I can’t get some more.”

“Wow. You just
took
them?”

“Yep! Don’t look at me like that. Marjorie should be happy about it. She’s one of us, you know. She and her husband are both feminists. He marched against Vietnam and she hasn’t shaved her legs in about a decade. So I think she probably would have done this herself if she’d had the time. I actually see doing this as a kind of present to her.”

Marjorie, of course, didn’t see it that way. When she caught me trying to slip the books back on the shelves the next day, she was horrified at what we’d done. I hastened to explain about women in positions of power and the importance of boys and girls growing up realizing women could be anything they wanted, but my mouth was dry while I was doing it.

“But … isn’t this … like censorship?” she said. I explained again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It had been a terrible idea.

“But Goldilocks was a
girl
!” she said, thumbing through the book and discovering that Goldilocks had become a boy named Locks, a change that Carly had thought was particularly brilliant. “She had curiosity, and stamina, and judgment, all good qualities …”

“Carly said it was sexist,” I said, although I was suddenly sure that Goldilocks was not sexist at all.

“You know,” said Marjorie. “I love Carly’s children, but I’m just about sick to death of Carly Ferguson-Saxon herself. She came in here yesterday and asked me a million questions about the lunch I was serving—was the macaroni made from whole-wheat pasta, where did the apples come from, and wasn’t it interesting that the little boys happened to get their food first before the little girls did? When really it was all because of where they happened to be sitting. And then she went into this whole big thing about nap times, and which songs I sing. I tell you, she’s a pain in the ass.”

“She’s got a lot of opinions,” I said.

“And you live with her! I don’t know how you do it.”

“I find her … refreshing,” I said loyally.

Marjorie stared at me. “I don’t know how you do it,” she repeated. “But I don’t need this hassle. I think I’m done with her.”

She gave Jeremiah and me a note that evening when we went to pick up Brice and Lindsay. They had two weeks to find some other arrangement. Marjorie and her husband were cutting back, the note said. They were sad to say they could no longer offer day care.

As we walked home, Jeremiah and I couldn’t stop laughing about it.

“Fucking Carly!” he said, shaking his head. He was pushing the twin stroller with Brice and Lindsay in it. “I can’t believe how she gets us into such scrapes. Is she unbelievable? Now we can’t have day care anymore because she’s a book thief! And you know what this means, don’t you?” he said. “For you and me. You know what this means.”

“What?” I said. Just his saying the words “you and me” made me weak.

“We’re going to have kids around all the time. She’s going to ask you if you’ll babysit them. Just watch.”

She did, promising that she’d keep looking for other arrangements for them, but the time for her show—or
happening;
she didn’t like it to be called a show because that put too much pressure on the dancers, she was quite firm about this—was drawing close, and she needed even more hours out of the house. “Since you’re not doing art anyway …” was the way most of Carly’s sentences now started.

“But do you want to do this?” Grant asked me. We were taking a walk that evening. It was late November, and at last it was truly cold outside. The leaves were mostly in piles, and I scuffed through them as we walked down the residential streets. I looped my arm around his so he would have to slowdown.

“I guess so,” I said. “I mean, I like the kids and all.”

“Well, then, the way I see it, there are two good reasons for it,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a way to pay them back for letting us live with them. And maybe you’ll get some experience taking care of kids so that when we have our own, you’ll be all set.”

Something about that made me mad. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“What? What’s wrong with that?”

“I think it’s sexist. I mean, why is it up to me to pay them back for letting us live there? And also, why should I be the only one to get experience taking care of kids? What about
you?”

“What are you talking about? I’m working a million hours a day. You know that. And what’s wrong with saying you need experience? We all need experience in things.”

“But what about my painting? Don’t you care anymore that I’m not doing my art?”

We had stopped walking. He stood there looking confused. “Well, then why don’t you paint if you want to paint? What’s stopping you?”

I was as shocked as he was that I was having this fit, but I plowed onward. “What’s stopping me?” I said. “Just where am I supposed to paint?
Where?
In the corner of our tiny little room, where I can’t even keep bobby pins without them getting in somebody’s way? Or maybe on the kitchen table, where the twins constantly knock everything over? Where would
you
suggest I paint?”

He looked stricken for a moment; his eyes were like holes in his face in the shadow of the streetlights. He held up his palms, the universal gesture of an innocent man being wrongly accused. “Hey, if you want to paint, then we can find a way to make that happen. You’ve never talked about this. Didn’t Carly know some people you could rent from … somewhere … and paint, you know, all together? A kind of co-op deal?”

“I’m not going to paint with a bunch of artistic snobs.” I burst into tears.

“What’s going on here? How do you know they’re snobs?”

“Because they are! Because I met them. And because Carly thinks I just let everybody take advantage of me, and she doesn’t know that I’m not ready to paint with a bunch of people who think I’m just an amateur! I’m out of place here. I don’t know what I want to do, and so I’m going to do this damn babysitting thing because there’s nothing else for me to do, but I want
you
at least to know that I’m miserable.”

“Great,” he said. “And what am I supposed to do about it? What do you want from me?”

“What do I want from you? What do you think I want from you? I want you to be my
husband
, and be on my side and look out for me. I want you to bring out the best in who I am.” I struggled to think of words Carly had used. “I want you to empower me and make me use all my best self.”

He laughed. “Good God! What is all this talk? You know I’m on your side. I love you! I adore you. Look, if you don’t want to do the babysitting thing, then say you can’t, and don’t. It’s simple.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it.”

He sighed and stared off into the distance, squinting. He looked adorable, with the wind sort of ruffling his hair. But then he had to do that throat-clearing thing he did, and the spell was broken. “I don’t get you. You want to do the babysitting, but you want to be miserable. Is that it?”

“Listen, what I really, really want is for us to move into our own place, and I want to have my own career, too. You’re in way over your head, you’re gone all the time, the only people I really know are Jeremiah and Carly, and now I feel like I
have
to take care of their kids so we can stay here, and I’m not doing my art—” I couldn’t stop myself from crying and saying all these nonsensical things that I wasn’t even sure I believed.

What I wanted was for him to keep holding me, to say I was beautiful, to say,
Don’t be in love with Jeremiah. Love me instead
.

He shifted his weight to the other foot. “Annabelle,” he said, “let’s not fight. I’ve got a million papers to grade, and I’m writing a proposal, and I’ve got a student coming in at seven thirty tomorrow morning to talk about his grade. Just do what you want. I’ll back you up. If you want to paint, if it’s a real calling for you, then do it. If you want us to find another place to live, go back to checking with Realtors. If you don’t want to watch Carly’s kids, tell her you’ll help her make other arrangements. Now let’s go home. Can we?”

“Home, he says. Like we have a home.”

“It’s our home for now. And you can find us another place. Okay, baby?” He put his arm around my waist and leaned me against him, and we slowly started to walk back. We walked in silence for a long time. I couldn’t believe how far we’d gotten from Carly and Jeremiah’s apartment. The night air was crisping up. I leaned in closer, and he tucked me into his coat with him. I felt the anger draining away and was relieved. It had been like a small storm, nothing so serious after all.