What We Have (3 page)

And at first they did. After a short spate of house hunting we found a place we loved, a narrow town house facing the aviary in the zoo. We weren’t married yet, so we set up a legal partnership, splitting everything fifty-fifty—Jacques had money from his house in Arlington, and I had the contents of my savings account—and after we signed stacks of papers, the house was ours. I couldn’t get over it. I’d never owned more than a file cabinet and a futon. I loved every last stick of that house: the moldings; the sagging floorboards; even the ominous burn marks on the exposed brick in the kitchen. We met our neighbors, and to my amazement, one, Lori, turned out to be an old friend I’d known when I was studying in England. We’d lost touch, though I knew she was writing for a newspaper here. She and her husband, Dave, lived in a house that backed onto our alley, nine houses farther from the park.

It was easy to think nothing could go wrong in a place like this.

I loved my department at Georgetown. I had my own office with my name on a plaque on the door, and classrooms full of bright-eyed, attentive students who took notes on things I said. After being a graduate student for so many years, it was liberating to be an assistant professor. Students dropped by to see me and I loaned them books. I talked for hours with my colleagues. In graduate school, my advisors barely spoke to one another (or by the end, in the case of the first one, to me). Here, my colleagues met on purpose for drinks after work, sharing stories about students with a mixture of concern and genuine affection. This was a whole new world.

And people in DC were friendly! Much friendlier than in Boston. Sometimes people I didn’t even know said hello on purpose.

We closed on our house and split a bottle of champagne in our empty dining room with Julie and Jon. I sent pictures of our unkempt garden to Sara. Life was good.

Granted, there were issues. For one thing, Jacques wasn’t actually working in DC. Not officially. He was commuting, an arrangement that had evolved when he talked to his company over the summer about leaving his job. Every Tuesday morning he flew back to Boston for a day of meetings (US Airways, 7:00, Terminal B). Other days, he rode his bike to an office share in Foggy Bottom, where he kept flexible hours, held telephone conferences, and wrote computer code.

I worried about this. Could it last? Wasn’t it tempting fate to fly so much? “It’s fine,” Jacques said, when I shared some of these worries with him. “What’s the problem?”

Privately I call Jacques “the Optimist,” and during those first months in DC his approach to life was so infectious I started adopting some of his phrases—like “what’s the problem?” or “why not?”—phrases previously as unknown to me as the odd bit of Farsi or Aramaic. “It isn’t like you,” Annie pointed out, when she called to check on me. “You used to be so . . .” She was hunting for the word. “Skeptical,” she managed, after a pause.

I could change, couldn’t I?

Secretly, though, I hated the commuting. I watched the Weather Channel every Monday night and dreaded approaching storms. I did research. Ice can collect on airplane wings at thirty-two thousand feet. Birds can be sucked into a plane’s engine on takeoff. Drug-resistant infections circulate in closed cabins. The more you fly, the greater the chance of an incident.

“Nothing will happen,” Jacques told me, over the static of the early morning forecast on NPR.

By spring, Jacques’s one-day-a-week commute had turned into two. He couldn’t fit all the meetings in on Tuesdays. Thursdays, he said gamely, would be for “overflow.”

“How,” Julie asked me, “is
that
going to work?”

It was Thursday, a (new) Boston day for Jacques. Julie and I were sharing a hummus platter at Lebanese Taverna, near the Metro station.

“We’re taking it one step at a time,” I said, not meeting her eye. Of course, my worries had multiplied. Twice a week doubled the chance of disaster. Secretly I thought the travel was taking a toll on Jacques, who had started complaining about being tired and seemed to be losing his usual good humor. Some of his tolerance for my love of planning was wearing thin. We’d decided to get married in June, but Jacques wasn’t sharing my mounting need to button down details—swatches of linens for the tables, tapes of jazz bands, and samples of butter cream frosting all elicited the same exhausted vote from him:
later
.

I didn’t like it. All during the swath of ice storms and high wind that buffeted the East Coast from October till April, I kept my eyes fixed on the tiny font running along the lower edge of the TV screen, as if my anxiety alone could keep him airborne.

The phone would ring and I’d lunge for it, heart pounding—disaster! Notification of next of kin!—but it would just be my mother, curled up on the family room couch in Michigan with her before-dinner Chablis on ice and her Ancient History textbooks, checking to see how I was holding up.

My mother called each of us daily. She was emotional air traffic control, nudging us, alerting us, connecting us to one another. My sisters and I sometimes complained we didn’t have to bother to catch up—we already knew each other’s news inside out. With my mother, you didn’t just get headlines, you got editorial and op-ed. My mother knew, for instance, that the shower in our master bath was leaking, the “good” caterer was too expensive, our next-door neighbor had a photo of himself posing with his ex-wife and Ronald Reagan that he liked so much he’d cut out a picture of his new wife’s head and glued it to his old wife’s body. On top of that, my mother knew the antics of our other neighbors, the ones with twin teenage daughters. One daughter climbed out the window at night to meet her boyfriend, like a twentieth-century Juliet; the other liked to squeeze her pet budgie in her mouth. “She could get diseases,” my mother said, though it wasn’t clear which twin she meant. My mother wasn’t afraid to offer opinions on any of these stories, either to me or to Sara and Julie, who heard them secondhand, the way I heard
their
stories. Second marriages, political affiliations, curfews for teenagers, the problem with twins, hiring caterers or contractors . . . each of these, she believed, demanded advice and counsel.

If I wasn’t forthcoming during these calls, my mother coaxed stories out of me, like an ace reporter. How was Jacques handling the commute? What was I having for dinner? What about Jacques—was he living on salty peanuts and Diet Coke? What was the A minus caterer like? Her ostensible worries—too much travel for Jacques, too much time alone for me—masked deeper ones.
What about tenure? Was I still looking for a position back in Boston? When would I finish the revisions on my book?

When
ran through our conversations like a mantra. None of this was ever directly stated—it was more like background noise. But trained as I’d been since childhood, like a hunting dog capable of detecting frequencies humans are deaf to, I could hear her real question loud and clear.

She wasn’t the only one wondering. That was on my mind, too. Constantly. I knew I was behind schedule. I needed to get going.

It was time to seize the day.

 

ALL THAT FIRST YEAR TOGETHER
in DC, teaching, watching the Weather Channel, adopting a yellow Lab we named Bacchus, waiting for Jacques’s taxi heading to or coming back from Terminal B, eating Ethiopian food with Julie and Jon, talking about flower-girl dresses for my nieces with Sara, I was thinking about babies.

I was thinking about babies all during our honeymoon in Portugal, tearing up and down the heat-mirage-laden highways of the Algarve.
Thinking
is the wrong word. It was more like channeling.

I counted backward. If we started trying next spring—

February. A Valentine’s baby!

OK, problem. That would be in the middle of the semester. Not good. If we started sooner—

I counted. I did the math. I made up calendars. A May Day baby. A Fourth-of-July baby (like my mother). A Halloween baby. A Christmas baby.

I liked long, formal names with unexpected nicknames.
Alexandra. Nadia. Elisabeth
.

Maybe we could start trying now! I mentioned this to Jacques somewhere outside of Lisbon, looking for ceramics at a roadside stall.

Jacques didn’t say anything. He was squinting noncommittally at a painted tureen, turning it around and around. What had looked like abstract markings from afar appeared up close to be rabbits fleeing pointy spears.

Jacques doesn’t like to rush when it comes to major life choices. “A baby will change everything,” he said. “Are we really ready for that?”

Ready? What is “ready”? Had I ever been anything else?

MY FAMILY DOESN’T DEFINE “READY”
the way other people do.

Women in my family die young. For generations—as long as anyone can remember—they’ve all died from the same thing. Ovarian cancer. In my parents’ house in Michigan, we had black-and-white photographs of all the dead aunts and grandmothers and great-aunts hanging in the hallway of our second floor. My mother had them all framed at the same time, white mats in silver, and somehow this added to the impression that the pictures were all really the same. Waiting for Sara or Julie to finish using the bathroom we shared when I was growing up, I used to walk up and down the hallway and look over this ill-fated, all-female family tree. They all looked like one another, these women, like sepia-colored ghosts, leaning on each other’s arms, standing in front of antique jalopies, squinting in front of foamy spray on some unidentified beach. In one picture Sylvia, my mother’s mother, five feet two and flaxen haired, had her arms linked with Pody, her younger sister. They were both laughing, their mouths wide open, maybe at something whoever was taking the picture had just said. You’d never guess, looking at them, what the future held: Sylvia dead at forty-three, Pody at forty-five. They looked so wholesome and unassailable, their gazes locked on the future like they’d never let go.

My mother was nineteen when Sylvia died. My sisters and I always knew this was the single most important thing about her. When I looked at my mother I used to picture Sylvia inside of her, like a tiny stopped clock.

Sylvia. Always Sylvia, her portrait haunting us with canny eyes. “If only you could’ve known Sylvia!” my father would exclaim wistfully from time to time. This was meant for my sisters and me, stuck to the present like glue. It wasn’t that we didn’t care. We weren’t disinterested in
their
past, just in the past itself. My parents cared enough for all of us put together. They found the past mesmerizing—each had dedicated a profession to it—my mother, history; my father, psychoanalysis. The past for them was like a country they’d visited and preferred to our own. They were constantly comparing, as if our world—with its princess telephones, microwave ovens, eight-track cassette players, and color TVs—was a poor substitute for the one they’d given up.
Remember?
They’d exchange sidelong glances and we’d know an anecdote was coming. The Sylvia stories got rotated over and over again, and eventually we knew them so well we could recite them ourselves, like episodes from
I Love Lucy.
There was a whole cycle. The time Sylvia stood on a stool and yelled at my mother for using her new lipstick—Kissproof Red—without asking. She needed the stool because my mother (age fourteen) was already two inches taller than she was. Sylvia and her dancing clothes—ostrich feathers and beads. The summer Sylvia fell madly in love with a young man named Jerry at a lakeside club in Wisconsin—he wore a white jacket, played the sax, and drank other people’s whiskey. Like Scott Fitzgerald, my mother said, only Jewish. And without the novels. How they got married, Sylvia in a long ecru dress with a filmy veil. The years Jerry drank and drank and spent all their money, until one night Sylvia threw a Limoges plate at him, and another night—much later—he moved out and left them with nothing. How it was just Sylvia and my mother and their housekeeper Jennie, who lived with them. The winter Sylvia started working in a hat shop—her first job ever, she’d been a pampered first daughter—and learned to wrap parcels in brown paper with hospital corners, curling ribbon with a paring knife. The year the hat shop closed and they ran out of money but still kept Jennie with them, even when (eventually) Jennie and my mother had to share a double bed. The way Sylvia ironed her silk stockings, spitting on the iron first to test its heat. The time their cat ate tinsel hanging off their artificial Christmas tree and died in my mother’s lap. Gray eyes still as stone.

My mother tried to keep Sylvia alive for us. She pointed out traits she thought we’d inherited from her: Sara’s gift for watercolors, Julie’s music, my love of poetry. But none of it seemed real. Sylvia was no more than a black-and-white photograph hanging in the hallway, laughing, arms linked with her younger sister, every bit as dead as she was. What could she possibly have to do with us?