Domestic Affairs (33 page)

We went to Disney World on Ice in Boston, and to the circus, but we didn’t go to concerts much. We did, once, drive to the city to hear one rock performer we liked, when I was eight months pregnant with Charlie. Steve and I were the oldest ones in sight, and certainly I was the only mother in evidence. The music was amplified very loud, and I had no paper napkin with me. I can still remember the extraordinary feeling of Charlie, in my belly, motionless through every number but kicking wildly every time there was applause. Around the third song, the audience got up on its feet, and stayed there the rest of the evening. My ankles hurt, so I stayed seated—fuming at the thoughtless behavior of the younger generation, that made it impossible for me to see.

Two years later, when I was pregnant again (with Willy), I got a magazine assignment to fly to England and interview the rock singer Elvis Costello. I spent a week listening to Costello tapes, bought myself the most new-wave maternity outfit I could find, and hopped on the plane. I was staying at a hotel frequented by a lot of rock singers: in the dining room, the next morning, my coffee was served by a waitress with a purple streak in her hair. Two tables away, a man in a black leather jacket and mohawk was eating French toast.

It had been a long time since I’d been out on an assignment like this—not since before I was married—and I worried that I wouldn’t seem sophisticated enough. As it turned out, Elvis Costello (wearing a jacket and tie) behaved pretty much like any businessman. After the interview was done, I walked back to his house with him, to meet his wife and son. Their kitchen looked a lot like mine. Their son was getting ready to go camping.

That fall Charlie started going to a babysitter who got MTV, and he developed a passion for Michael Jackson. Every night after his bath, he and Audrey listened to the
Thriller
album—Audrey doing a graceful, restrained version of breakdancing, Charlie (still naked) going wild. It got so he could render a pretty convincing imitation of Michael, with a simulated moonwalk. He talked about Jackson all the time. (Charlie could spot his picture on the cover of a magazine in the supermarket from way over in the cereal aisle.) So when I heard the Jackson Five were going on tour, remembering what it had meant to me to see Joan Baez all those years back, I got myself an assignment to write about them so that I could bring Charlie and Audrey to the concert.

I thought we’d be among the oldest people in the hall that night, but it turned out there were many parents like us, bringing children. The crowd was orderly and there was no smell of marijuana wafting over the crowd the way there used to be in the concerts of my teens. This performance resembled a sporting event more than a concert. We all had a good time, but it also seemed to me that the best concerts of our youth were more powerful, more stirring.

But last night, Joan Baez came to a nearby city to sing, and we got tickets. It was, I realized as I waited for her to come on stage, twenty-two years since I first saw her perform, when I was so excited I could barely catch my breath.

She has cut her hair (that happened a while back), and there’s gray in it now. She was not particularly dressed up, but stylish. She is still a beautiful woman. And her voice, after all these years, is still marvelous.

She sang a few of the old songs: “Stewball,” and “Farewell, Angelina”—giving us an imitation of Bob Dylan during one verse. She sang a song she wrote about her love affair with Dylan and one about her ex-husband. (Remarried now, I guess, and with another child. She herself never married again.) She also sang a song by Pink Floyd, and one by Elton John, accompanied by a grand piano. She brought up a few causes—Nicaragua, Libya—but there was a kind of detachment to the way she spoke about those things, rather like someone saying “here we go again.” She has been crusading for close to thirty years now; she’s seen plenty of causes come down the pike.

A lot has happened since those early days when she stood barefoot, with her guitar, wearing a dress that looked like a burlap bag, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Times have changed: for her on the stage; for us in the balcony.

I think I had been a little worried when I bought my tickets: afraid her voice would be thinner, afraid she would seem old. (Afraid that seeing those things, I would feel that way myself.) But what I felt as we filed out, heading for home and my sleeping children, was wonder—and relief—at all the stages a person passes through, and all the things a person can survive.

There is a brand of baby stroller I’ve always wanted and never owned. I have had three babies now, and probably walked the mile from our house to the brook a little way down our road at least a thousand times with one or more small children in tow. But what I’ve been pushing all these years has been a cheap folding stroller, and though it’s hardly the most difficult part of parenthood, let me tell you, pushing those cheap bargain models down that stretch of road hasn’t been easy.

Our road is dirt, and very bumpy. There’s a steep hill out here too, and so many rocks that sometimes I give up pushing altogether and simply lift the stroller in my arms, baby and all, and carry it over the roughest spots.

This road is hard on strollers. In all our years of parenthood Steve and I have gone through six cheap ones, where that one Cadillac of strollers might have lasted us right through: We’ve spent about as much on twenty-dollar strollers as we would have if we’d simply bought the good one in the first place. The problem was, we never had that much money all at once. But you know, in all those years of pushing our kids down our road (or sometimes watching well-dressed young professional-type city parents push their well-dressed babies in that brand of stroller I coveted), I don’t think there was a single time I took a walk without wishing I had a good stroller and feeling a twinge of regret.

Well, for our youngest child there remains, at the outside, probably no more than a year of being strolled before he chooses to go wherever he is going on his own steam. I offer protestation (cannot bear the finality of this), but Steve tells me, firmly, that he’s ready, with this third child of ours, to put having babies behind us. It has been hard, no question, and we both know our lives will be a lot easier once we have put away the stroller and everything that goes with it.

Already we are beginning to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel of baby care. They’re just fleeting glimpses, mind you: one morning out of twenty, when we’re able to loll around in bed until six forty-five, without a single request for cereal, bottle, or book. The odd half hour when all three children are playing together, totally peacefully, without needing our intervention. I can sometimes duck into the bathroom unaccompanied now. I have begun wearing makeup again, and socks that match. We no longer spread newspapers on the floor under the table—to catch flying food—before every meal. And for the first time in ages, we are paying our bills on time, and going out to dinner now and then.

Last weekend, for instance, I thought I’d take the children to Toys R Us and let them each pick out a summer beach toy. Buckets, snorkels, swim fins, that sort of thing. No special occasion—I was simply celebrating the beginning of the beach season and the general easing up of our lives.

Then suddenly we were in the stroller aisle, and there it was: the one I always wanted and could never afford. The one our friends Tom and Diane had just bought, following the birth of their first child. (Unlike ours, a baby who was carefully planned for. For whom they waited several years, until the time was right.)

So I pulled over my shopping cart and just looked at it for a moment: the stroller of my dreams. I looked at the price-tag: $149.00. A lot of money, but still I knew I could write a check for that much. I was spending half that on plastic beach equipment and a backyard water slide that would probably be wrecked by Labor Day.

I lifted the stroller off the display stand and gave it a little push. (Smooth ride. Good suspension.) I tried folding it up. (That took about two seconds.) I ran my hand over the upholstery. I pictured Willy in the seat, waving a stalk of grass the way he likes to do on stroller rides, or a daisy with all the petals pulled off. And I pictured myself behind him, pushing up the hill so effortlessly I could manage one-handed.

I guess I’d been standing in the stroller aisle for several minutes, because Charlie began to get impatient. He could see the tricycles ahead, and pedal cars shaped like fire engines and police cars and rocketships. That’s where he wanted to be.

Not Audrey. Audrey understood. Often these days (usually when I’m trying to get dinner on and the boys are pulling on my legs), I’ll ask her to take her little brothers for a walk, with Willy in the stroller and Charlie holding onto the side. I pay Audrey a quarter to take the boys down our long driveway and back, and it’s a job she likes—only partly because of the income she derives from it. The one problem is our stroller, which is so flimsy and beat up that even pushing it on level ground is hard for her.

“Look at that stroller,” she said dreamily, as only a first child—a stroller pusher herself—could do. “If we had one like that, I wouldn’t mind pushing Willy a hundred miles.”

In the end, of course, I didn’t buy the stroller. I bought our beach stuff and a Barbie doll for Audrey, for which she will pay me back over the summer by taking Willy for more walks.

About a week later Steve and I were driving down our dirt road without the children, to dinner and a movie. I was wearing the first new dress I’d bought in a while. Steve was talking about maybe getting away to the beach this summer, just the two of us. Making plans to put in raspberry bushes this year. Paint the house. Maybe we might begin looking into how much a used tractor would cost.

“I almost bought a stroller the other day,” I told him, naming the brand I’d always wanted. I thought he’d laugh, or simply look horrified, but he didn’t. He just nodded and patted my hand. Then we drove on to the restaurant, where dinner probably came to forty dollars. Not that anyone was counting.

I was taking a walk one day. This was a long time back—more than ten years ago, before I was married. I was on a dirt road near where we live now. No houses in sight, just woods. Through the trees was a path that looked as if it hadn’t been explored in a while, and I took it. Where it led was a clearing filled with wildflowers. And beyond that, a roaring brook with watercress growing in the shallow parts, and beaver dams along the edges that made a pool deep and long enough to jump into. Which is just what I did that day.

Half a dozen years later—married and, very briefly, in possession of a little extra cash (I’d published a book that looked as if it might become a bestseller. It didn’t.)—Steve and I heard that piece of land along the brook was on the market. Not just a few acres, mind you, but more than a hundred. More than we could comfortably afford—we knew that. “But we can always sell some off,” we told ourselves. “It’s a good investment.”

Truth is, we are neither of us cagey investor types. We just loved that land. We’d spent a perfect afternoon tromping the woods along the banks. Rolled up our pants and waded across to the other side. Inspected the tree stumps the beavers had left, like well-sharpened pencils. Tried to identify mushrooms. Picked wildflowers.

We talked, that afternoon, about where we might build a house someday. How we’d keep a little boat on the beaver pond, and maybe build a sauna beside it. We had only one child then, but I pictured the others who would follow, and what a wonderful place this would be to grow up. Catching fish for dinner. Building tree houses. Inspecting frogs.

We bought the land, using our small lump of cash for a down payment and signing a ten-year mortgage for the rest. We had another baby, and I began to realize that writing another book would be harder than I’d imagined. Steve started taking on more and more house-painting jobs, to come up with that monthly payment money. I stopped buying myself new clothes, started cutting my own hair. Steve ran out of more and more colors of paints and didn’t replace them. “I think I’ll just use black and white for a while,” he said.

There were fights too, and usually what they were about (directly or indirectly) was money. We talked less about building a new place down by the brook and more about how to find more room in our existing house. By this time, there was another baby on the way. We decided, finally, that we’d put some pieces of that land on the market, and save the largest, best one for ourselves.

Hard as it was coming up with the money every month to make those payments, I loved owning that land. We didn’t get down there all that often, because it was pretty thickly overgrown with brush, and hard for the children to manage. But now and then we’d take them down for an afternoon of fishing and a cookout by the water. A few times we set up our tent and spent the night. (Waking, once, to the sound of a beaver hitting the water and our dog Ron splashing in after him.)

There had been an old sawmill on the site of the clearing where we camped, and what remained of it was a enormous pile of sawdust, perfect for children to climb on and jump in. Audrey liked building little shelters out of twigs and moss for dolls made out of acorns, with twig bodies and leaf dresses. Charlie liked throwing stones into the water and chasing frogs. Steve and I would sit by the campfire, sharing a beer, looking out over the children and beyond them, to the water, feeling no need to say a word. It was that place, those moments, I’d seize upon and hold onto any time I wanted to calm or comfort myself: during Willy’s birth and at the funeral of my father, after a bad argument with Steve or on some February morning when it seemed as if winter would never end. Our land—that’s what I’d think of then.

We also headed down to our land every December to cut our Christmas tree, and though those trips were usually complicated some by my dissatisfaction with the spindly trees we found there, I always loved our tromps through the woods to find one. Last Christmas, a year after putting our land on the market (with no takers still) we found ourselves eyeing other smaller trees, for future Christmases, as we hauled in our spindly pine. Maybe we won’t sell the land, I was thinking. Maybe we’ll manage to keep it after all.