The Love Children (31 page)

He grimaced. “A woman on the faculty at BU—Alicia Estevez. A dynamo, like your mother.”

“Your age?”

“No. Older than me. But younger than your mom.”

“And . . . ?”

“Oh she was great! Terrifically smart and she says what she thinks. She's had pieces published in
PMLA
.
PMLA
!” He rolled over on the grass and sat up again. “I'd give my eyeteeth to be published in
PMLA
. She works on a bunch of French guys—Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan.”

“I know about them. Sandy's sister Rhoda worked on Derrida.”

“He's starting to become really well known. He's part of a movement called deconstruction.”

“Yes. Sandy said it was really hard.”

“Well, the principles aren't difficult, but the way they write about them is.” Philo laughed.

“So you don't follow it?”

“I'm starting to. You can't be in academia these days and not be involved in it.”

“Are you still with Alicia?”

“No-o. We split up. Actually, she didn't like the way I acted with her kids.”

“Why?” I was outraged. “You were wonderful with me!”

He shrugged. “I don't know. They were smaller, little kids. I thought they should do what she said, what she told them to do. They were kind of wild.”

“I can't picture you being severe.”

“I wasn't. I didn't think. Oh, I don't know. They were awfully hard to handle, and I insisted they do what she said. She was a fierce woman, but not with her kids. Well, she was fierce with her kids, but in a protective way. Whenever they cried, she let them do what they wanted. She was the opposite otherwise. She'd fly into rages at faculty meetings. They called her
La Passionara
.” He laughed. “She was a peace activist like your mother, but she felt anybody who wasn't was morally deficient. And she went crazy at anything she thought was sexist. A faculty member, a guy
known for patronizing women, said something insulting to her. He belittled her or something she wrote, I'm not sure which. To her face! In her office! He started to leave and turned back and laughed at what he'd said, and she was standing at the door with him smoking, and she raised her cigarette and put it out on his cheek. He screamed. He created a huge to-do in the department but he was so hated that she wasn't reprimanded.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you start to worry that one day she might do that to you?”

“No. I admired her. What guts!”

I wondered about that a little, but most of what we said to each other was conveyed by shining eyes and smiling mouths and glowing skin. We didn't touch. After an hour or so, we agreed that we were hungry and wandered back down into the Square and over to Bailey's, still there after all those years and looking just the same, except for its new banquettes and floor. My heart ached with all the past it held for me and the people I'd lost. I told Philo about the commune and Sandy and Bishop and Dolores, whom I hadn't yet looked up. I left out why I left Pax. He didn't ask and I didn't say. I brought him up to date about Alyssa and Eve and Annette and Ted. And Mom. He was weepy about these friends, whom he'd lost when he and Mom split up. Philo was as nostalgic and romantic as I was, and together we indulged in an afternoon of sentiment.

I touched his hand lightly a couple of times, and he did the same to me. Clearly it was up to me what happened next: he was giving me control. A surge of power lightninged through me, and my heart flew at the thought that finally Philo and I could be together.

But nothing happened. Affectionate as I felt, I could not bring myself to move toward him and he did not move toward me. We
had sandwiches and coffee and sat over second and third cups for hours, until both of us were twitchy. We sighed and looked at each other. We knew.

So Philo signaled for the check and paid for my lunch, which was nice, since I was still broke, having left Pax with about fifteen dollars in my wallet. We stood up. I couldn't believe I was letting him go—Philo, my dream lover. But I had to: it felt almost like he was my brother. Slowly, we walked outside and stood in the warm air for a few minutes, and I remembered that the last time I'd stood like this outside a restaurant I was with Steve outside Sonny's, and Christopher was watching us. Philo and I clasped hands a final time, then he turned toward the T and I toward home.

All the way walking home and even after I got there, I was sunk in feeling. I felt loved, which I hadn't felt in quite a while. I don't know why—did Stepan not love me? I had thought he did. Maybe I didn't love him. Didn't the Pax people love me? Wasn't that the magic of commune living, being with a group of kindred souls connected by fellowship and good feeling? Where had the good feeling gone? When? How?

But I also felt hollow. For years now I had let myself dream or fantasize or imagine, or do something more profound than dream, about living happily ever after with Philo. Letting him go felt like letting go of the hope of happily-ever-after, and I almost couldn't bear it. My temptation was to brush it aside and not think about it, and I decided that was the right thing to do. Other people might make themselves stronger by facing things, but not me. I handled things by putting them in a cubby.

Our fireplace was on a wall that projected a couple of feet into the living room; around the bend from it, set in the floor like a big mousehole, was a cubby with a door, a brick floor, and plaster-finished walls. It was meant to hold dough during bread making, to protect it from drafts. In its warm shelter, the dough
would rise to its yeasty fullness. I thought I did best in life when I put things that hurt me or made me uncertain in the bread cubby of my soul and let them rise in their own time. I stopped thinking of myself as a coward and just went ahead and hid things, certain that they would rise when they were ready.

 

The next day I went to Sonny's to get a job. Sonny wasn't surprised to see me; I was following a common female pattern. Women quit waitressing when they finish college or get a real job or marry or have a baby. But an awful lot of them come back, because things don't pan out—few jobs pay women decent wages and women always have to work around their responsibilities to children and men. Waiting tables allows them to do that. At least, this was the way it was then, in the 1970s.

I was just biding time. I had no idea what I would do when Mom left for France, but I would have to vacate the house on Kirkland Street. I thought vaguely of applying to UMass in Boston, not because I had a driving desire to learn—although I would have liked to take some poetry courses—but to pass time until I knew what I wanted to do. The thought drifted across my mind that I could maybe share an apartment somewhere with someone.

I called Dolores but couldn't find her. She had written me a couple of times at Pax, and I had intended to answer. But somehow we lost touch. The people presently at the halfway house didn't know where she was now; the director knew that she'd lived there and had completed her BA. He thought she had gone to graduate school somewhere, but didn't recall where. He hadn't personally known her and no one from her time there was still there.

I wondered if I'd ever see them again—Dolores, Sandy, Bishop, or Philo. Now I had to add the people at Pax. It felt as if my life had burned up, leaving no residue. But by the time June
rolled around, a residue exploded across my calendar, changing everything for me.

I discovered I was pregnant. I don't know how it happened. Stepan had used condoms and I made him be careful, most of the time. But sometimes, he was broke and couldn't afford to buy any, and sometimes, when we were out in the fields working we would get hot for each other and just do it. He hadn't worn anything the last time, I recalled. It must have been that night I went to his room just before I left; or maybe it was that day when we fell in each others' arms on a shady bank of grass near the pond: green deeds in a green shade. When he didn't have a condom, he would withdraw before coming. He said that was what most men in Russia did, and that it worked dependably. I should never have believed him. It was mid-June before I realized I had missed my May period. I began to worry immediately, but in those days they gave you a really hard time when you wanted to find out if you were pregnant.
You weren't allowed to know
. You would go to a drugstore and give the druggist your urine sample and ask for a rabbit test but the test didn't work until you were two months on, and some druggists made you swear you were married before they'd give it to you. So you had to put a ring on your finger and reverse it, so it looked like a wedding ring, and lie. I didn't find out I was pregnant until early July.

Mom was beside herself. She kept cursing herself for agreeing to go to Lyon. She said she would cancel her trip, and if she couldn't stop the man coming to live in our house, she'd rent another house for us to live in. She said she would help me, take care of me, do whatever necessary to see me through this. Unless, of course, she added, I wanted an abortion. She didn't go further, but isolated as I had been, I did know that abortion had been legalized a few years before, and that there was a clinic in Cambridge. I didn't know what to do.

I had no desire to have a baby for Stepan, if that is ever a woman's motivation. I'd often seen plays and movies in which a woman wants to have a baby for a man, but by that time I'd realized they were almost all written by men who knew nothing at all about real women. I had never met a woman who wanted a baby for a man. I suppose it's possible, but I wasn't one of them.

What I had to decide was if
I
wanted a baby or not. My thinking on the subject consisted of pictures of me living with a baby. Since I couldn't imagine how I was going to live at all, I could invent stories at will, and I did. I lay in bed, night after night, envisioning myself taking courses at some college, being supported by Mom and, somehow or other, taking care of this baby. It seemed a grim life, hard and unrewarding. And Mom would have to do most of the work, and how could she? Her job was demanding. Besides, it wasn't fair: she'd already done her share of child rearing with me. This one was my turn.

I pictured Stepan leaving Pax to get a job and support me. He'd be sulky and raging. I pictured Stepan and me living together in Boston or Cambridge. It wasn't pretty. I did not and could not picture returning to Pax while Bert and Brad were there.

I then tried to picture myself without a baby. I went back to school. I got some sort of job. I asked Sonny to hire me as a cook. But these images all felt grim and empty too.

Whatever stories I told myself about my future, I was scrupulously realistic in my daydreams. I never let anything imaginary happen that couldn't happen in life or wasn't likely to happen. As a result, my visions were tamer than life, because in real life, things that can't happen, do—things you couldn't have predicted, that weren't probable. That was the most wonderful thing about life: magic was real.

But an odd thing: once I'd pictured my possible lives
with
a baby, and removed it, I felt this aching loneliness, a hole in my soul. I knew it had been there at least since Daddy had left, and
maybe before. Nothing had ever filled it, not any of my girl-friends, not the Andrews boys, not Christopher, not Stepan, and not even Philo. I had the suspicion that it was never going to be filled. Girls think it will be filled by a lover or husband; I don't know what boys think—maybe they expect it to be filled by adventure or career. But I sensed that nothing would ever fill it for me—except for brief snatches of time, for example, when I was writing that paper on the Bible that thrilled me so much, or when I was cooking a great meal—like a baby would. It could only be filled by something I cared about more than my own life—and that could only be a child. I wondered if that was the reason older women often seemed content, and men not, and why so many men went from woman to woman all their lives. Maybe women who put a child in that space felt less empty, and maybe men didn't know they could do that.

But a woman could not fill that place for a man any more than a man could fill it for a woman. Children, not lovers, assuaged emptiness. I didn't know if that was a good reason to have a child, or if I would be able to be a decent parent, despite all the resolutions I'd made as a teenager. But I couldn't think of anything better to do right then.

I let myself remember what I had lost by leaving Pax: my garden, cooking for the commune, and a sense of mattering to others. I didn't miss writing poetry, because I could—and did—write wherever I was or whatever I was doing. I had written dozens of poems at Pax and a couple since I was back at Mom's, including one I liked:

I had been working on this for some time, adding “complete” to the last line, then removing it, changing the order of some words, and adding and removing spaces. I was working on another poem I had tentatively called “Anthurium,” but I wasn't satisfied with it yet. When I was writing, it filled me completely, satisfied me; but I couldn't write every day, I didn't have the energy, the right kind of energy, didn't have the drive. Writing poetry was something I did for pleasure, not for a living. I also cooked for pleasure but I did not get the same kind of satisfaction just cooking for myself or for Mom and me. To get fulfillment from cooking, I had to cook for a lot of people. Cooking was like playing the piano or singing; it was something you did for an audience. So I thought I could cook for a living.