Domestic Affairs (9 page)

And then one of them spots it: not at the edge of the garbage, of course, but about ten feet out, and twenty feet down. A GI Joe doll with only one leg missing. A pair of gold curtains that would be perfect for dress-ups. A stack of carpet samples. … Lucky I wore my boots.

I was in a furniture store the other day, looking at carpeting for my children’s playroom, when something made me stop in the chair department. In my whole married life, I’ve bought exactly one piece of furniture new, but something made me sit down in a big, ugly, and indescribably comfortable chair, the kind with the extending foot rest and the lever on one side to tilt it backward. I laid my head back, put my feet up, closed my eyes. I could hardly bring myself to get up.

“I want this chair,” I told Audrey. (Though the price tag made the purchase unlikely.) But of course what I really wanted was something money can’t buy. To sit down. To lie down, even. Something I haven’t done much of for the last few years.

Now, I’m seldom one to concede the commonly accepted notions of how men and women differ. (That men are more mechanically minded. Women are more sensitive. Men are more rational. Women are more emotional. I’ve known men and women who broke all of those stereotypes.) But there’s one overwhelming and universal sex difference I’ll grant you: Men take naps. Men know how to make use of a chair like that. Who ever heard of a woman stretched out in the middle of the day in a La-Z-Boy lounger?

This is not to say that men are lazier. I’ve never met a more hard-working person than my husband Steve. When he’s awake, he’s never idle. He puts in long, hard days—far more arduous than mine—without complaint. He can repair a car, build a shed, clear an acre of land, do fifty chin-ups. But his ability to put out huge amounts of energy is matched in equal measure by another aptitude I lack completely. He can stretch out on a couch, open a magazine, and sixty seconds later be sound asleep.

And once he is, it doesn’t matter what’s going on. His children may be crying. The phone may ring, our dog may need to be put out. I may be (almost certainly will be) clanging pans in the kitchen, as loudly as possible. None of it makes any difference. Steve remains dead to the world.

Of course, it’s not as if I’ve never taken a nap myself. But mostly I catch up on my sleep in other places: at the movies (where I seldom make it to the rolling of the final credits of a second show). Driving home from our standing Saturday night out. And once, during what was supposed to be another of our romantic evenings alone together at an expensive restaurant we’d treated ourselves to, halfway through dinner, my head simply dropped to the table, missing my swordfish steak by inches. The waiter doubtless thought I’d had too many glasses of wine, but the truth is, it was only too many children.

What I can’t do, though, and what no woman I know can do (no woman with children at home, anyway) is stretch out somewhere in my own house, during the middle of the day, and take a nap. You might as well ask a fireman to eat a sandwich in the middle of a burning building. Even if the children were all somehow, mysteriously, being attended to. (Off playing Monopoly somewhere, or doing puzzles. Not asking for glasses of water. Not fighting over who gets to use the garlic press with his Play-doh, or who gets the purple marker.) Even if my children were all over at friends’ houses. (When in fact, invitations for Willy do not exactly tie up the phone lines around here.) Even then I couldn’t spend my precious free time sleeping. I would want to take advantage of the opportunity to sort through old toys or wash the bathroom floor.

Maybe there is a physiological basis for this fundamental difference between the napping abilities of men and women. (Because this isn’t just a pattern I observe in Steve and me. I’ve seen the same tendency in the males of countless other families as well.) I wonder if men are more prone to sudden, extraordinary bursts of adrenaline output (the kind required to lift a piano or jack up a car), whereas women keep a steadier, less intense, but unbroken energy level. I think there’s something psychological there too, though: My husband can block things out when he wants to, while my antennae are permanently, irreversibly tuned to pick up every piece of household static. If Charlie has a friend over, my ear is cocked, listening for any sound of trouble. If Willy’s out in the sandbox, I’m hovering near the window.

In my more mellow moments, I can look into our living room, catch sight of my sleeping husband stretched out with an open copy of
Sports Illustrated
on his chest, and simply smile lovingly. At other times, I see him sleeping, think how nice that would be (and how equally impossible), and then I start slamming doors or turn on the vacuum cleaner. Eventually he’ll wake up, get up, and give me a hand. Looking at those moments from an objective distance I can see they never really serve to make me feel better. They only ensure that he’ll feel worse.

When I’m tired and grouchy, and the dishes are stacked up on the counter and one of my sons has just spilled granola all over the kitchen floor and my daughter is in tears because she can’t find her jelly shoes, and there lies Steve, peaceful as Rip Van Winkle, I can’t rouse much affection or understanding when it comes to his naps. At the moment—from a tranquil distance—I can say (or would say, to a young bride with five hundred nap arguments not yet under her belt) that men and women are simply different here. You can’t fight it—although the impulse to try is just about unavoidable. But if you have yourself a fundamentally good and fair man, the moments when you rest and he works, and the moments when you work and he rests, will all even out in the end. Spend all your time scorekeeping, and you’re almost sure to fall behind in the game.

Hardly a day goes by around here in the summertime that we don’t head for the beach—not the ocean, but one of the several lakes and ponds and swimming holes in our town, where the children can make sand castles and splash in the water, while the mothers stretch out on the sand, catching up on everything that’s happened in the twenty-four hours since they were last at the beach. Over this past summer, we have been following the progress of one mother’s pregnancy and another’s divorce, one woman’s struggles with her visiting stepchildren and another’s kitchen renovations. We talk about what teachers our children are going to have in the fall and what to do with the last few inches of an old permanent wave. When one little boy (a known troublemaker) calls one of our sons a Care Bear (this particular boy is nine years old, and there is evidently no worse name to call a nine-year-old boy), and when that son responds with a punch, we compare notes on appropriate disciplinary action. In between all of this, we pass out nectarines and granola bars, peanut butter sandwiches and fruit roll-ups. When one of our children announces, loudly enough for everyone to hear, that he needs to go to the bathroom, we take him. When he simply asks, quietly, what he should do, we may simply whisper, quietly, that he can do it in the water.

Some people, driving quickly past this beach we’re spread out on (with our buckets and shovels, our coolers and floaters and suntan lotion and trucks), might imagine that we live the life of leisure, these women and I—and it’s true, there aren’t many better ways to spend a summer afternoon. But as any parent of young children will tell you, it’s hard work too: arbitrating every dispute over who gets the green tractor; being there to applaud every time one’s child does a handstand, every time he jumps off the big rock. And all the while, of course, knowing just where the very littlest ones are, the ones who have only recently got secure footing on dry land.

Because it only takes one little wave from a passing motorboat, one wrong step, and a child the size of Willy can be underwater and unable to find his way up again. Even with a four-year-old like Charlie, even with an eight-year-old like Audrey (who’s swimming over her head now, but so anxious to keep up with her friends that she won’t always come in when she’s tired), there is danger, danger, danger.

Well, our friends Robert and Suzanne (a pianist and an opera singer) were visiting from out of town last week with their two daughters, Victoria and Claire, and I wanted some time to see them. At my favorite place—the beach.

Suzanne is a good and dear friend. We are also (as she would admit, as readily as I) very different in our approaches to child raising. She peels the grapes her children eat and stands behind baby Claire when she mounts the stairs, while I give Willy whole chicken bones to gnaw on and let him climb the ladder to the slide alone. Suzanne worries about germs and chills, while I let my children swim on all but the coldest, darkest days, and if somebody drops his cookie on the floor, there’s no question somebody will still eat it. And though I think Suzanne is a wonderful and loving mother, it’s also true, I’ve always felt she makes a mistake in worrying over her children as much as she does. Privately, I have to admit, I have occasionally congratulated my husband and myself for having raised our children to be a little tougher and more resilient.

So this particular afternoon we were standing by the shore, watching our children play. Suzanne’s older daughter, Victoria, didn’t want to go in the water because it was cold and the bottom was muddy, but she did want to play with Audrey, who was looking for tadpoles on a little island a few feet out. So she began, cautiously, wading to the island. She got halfway out and stepped on a rock. Then she let out a really bloodcurdling scream and called for her mother to come carry her across. And Suzanne, who had been digging in the sand with Claire and Willy, rushed to Victoria’s side, calling out to me, as she went, to watch the baby.

I thought I was watching. But I was also thinking about the scene, with Victoria screaming, and Suzanne running, and Audrey standing there, holding her tadpole bucket, watching everything.

And for a moment I forgot about watching Suzanne’s baby—I let down my guard. Then suddenly there was Suzanne’s voice. (She is an opera singer. Her soprano can fill a concert hall. She can blow up an inner tube with a single breath.) “Get the baby!” she screamed. “The baby’s drowning.”

I whirled around then, of course, and saw Claire—just Willy’s age—floating underwater, with her hair fanned out in all directions, and her arms and legs flailing, not touching ground. In half a second Suzanne was there with her arms around the baby, and she was safe—not even crying, in fact, just a little dazed looking.

There was nothing to say, really, though of course I said everything, and kept on saying it all that day and night. How sorry I was. How I had just been looking at Claire—just a moment before—and she was fine. How I got distracted and turned my head. Just for a second.

We didn’t leave the beach right away after that. I paced the sand, hovering over my children—everybody’s children—like a cat. I kept coming back to Claire, touching the top of her head. All through that afternoon I kept returning to Suzanne on her towel, going over it all again. She must have forgiven me a dozen times. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m always watching, even when I ask someone else to watch.” A true friend, she even asked me to keep an eye on Claire again for a moment while she packed up their car to leave.

It’s a few weeks later now. Robert and Suzanne and their children have left for the summer. Although my mouth still goes dry, thinking about that afternoon, I’m able to stretch out on my towel again, at the beach, looking relaxed and easy, talking with my friends. Anybody driving past would think, “Boy, those women sure have it easy.”

But oh, are we ever watching. Our eyes are fixed on that beach as if it were Normandy and this were D day. We never stop counting heads.

Things had been pretty crazy around our house. Steve was finishing up the illustrations for a children’s book we wrote together, which had to be at the publishers by Friday. In his off hours, he was down in our woods chainsawing up a lot of trees he felled last spring, in a place where we’re about to have a pond dug. The bulldozer’s due in five days, and there are still about thirty trees to get out of the way. He hauls the wood in our 1960 Jeep, whose engine needs a jump-start every time you drive it. The car he uses to jump it is a 1966 Valiant, because our other, newer vehicle has been in the repair shop. I was given a loaner car to use, but halfway home it burst into flames in the middle of the highway and I had to hitchhike back to the shop. That’s how things have been going lately.

And our new bunk beds had just been delivered (unassembled) and were sitting in the middle of our kitchen. Willy had just lifted the porcelain top off our toilet and dropped it on the bathroom floor, where it landed in about fifteen pieces. (“A puzzle!” he said happily.) And we had friends visiting for the week. And our blackberries had all come ripe and needed picking. And Charlie had suddenly remembered that I’d never got around to holding his fourth birthday party, last March, and that I’d promised I would as soon as things quieted down around here. (“Is it time for my birthday yet?” he asked the day I came back from the repair shop.)

There are times in my marriage when I am angry at my husband, and times when I’m hurt. I have stalked out the door, on occasion, cried, poured dinner down the sink, and sometimes, when we’ve had a bad argument, I have simply stopped talking to him altogether. Nothing like that has happened lately. Only, we have both been so busy these last few weeks that it may be Friday before I get around to telling him about a phone call we got from an old friend the Monday before. Last Saturday (the night we try to reserve for going out together) Steve started our evening alone together with a discussion of the broken toilet and went on to the bunk beds and the question of what to do about our septic system. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I told him. “I’m not your business partner.” And then I said some things about how we were in danger of forgetting what it is we’re about here. That our relationship is supposed be the foundation of our household. Not the other way around.

The expression I’d use to describe how it was when Steve and I met, nine and a half years ago, is “head over heels in love.” Although maybe heels over head describes it better. Heart over head, anyway. My feeling about this man standing on my doorstep was immediate, instinctual, and absolute. And it was all that romantic feeling, that weakening in the knees, that made me want to settle down with him. Have children. Make a home.