The World Below (10 page)

It mattered, I think, because appearances, surfaces, counted for so much with them. Because this was where they lived, for the most part. Because, it seemed to me then—and it does now too—they didn’t have the habit of examining their lives, of looking under the surfaces for what was dark or difficult. Their days together were predictable and ordered from the moment they got up. My grandmother made a full, hearty breakfast every morning: freshly squeezed orange juice—though she allowed herself the frozen kind when it became available—bacon and eggs, or pancakes, or muffins, or waffles, with maple syrup. She moved around her kitchen as she moved through life—as a hummingbird moves: a rush in one direction and a focused stillness about her work at that station. Then another rush, and the concentration on whatever needed to be done next.

And all the while she kept up a light, easy chatter, a kind of perpetual warm invitation to her view of the world. Ah! she’d just
remembered: she’d had a funny dream in the night, had anyone else? How many pancakes, by the way? Lawrence? John? Cath? Looky here, Lawrence shouldn’t let his grandfather show him up that way, surely he could do as well, squeeze a few more in. Now, her dream, if she remembered it rightly, was one of those pickles—you know them—where you end up in your nightie right in the middle of the town crossroads. She’d waked up with a start, she was so embarrassed.

“Which nightie was it?” my grandfather asked.

“Why? Whatever difference would that make?”

“It would make a difference to me,” he said.

My grandmother laughed, and we did too, though we didn’t know why. “Aren’t you ashamed,” she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder as she leaned forward to slide a stack of pancakes onto his plate.

Darker events than these took place in our house, and it was my pleasure, mine and Lawrence’s, to soak up what seemed the light, the air, the sense of play that was the atmosphere in my grandparents’ house, that surrounded my grandmother even when she was busiest at what was clearly her work. And if we didn’t notice the charged quality in a silence that fell between them occasionally, if we chose to disregard a sudden burst of impatience on her part toward him, or a long hard look from time to time, who could blame us? We had every reason to find it perfect—their life—to think of it as a safe haven, a refuge. For us it was.

“Oh, your grandfather!” she would say. “His big idea was, he wanted to lock me up in a castle with a big moat around it—the moat to be called tuberculosis, you understand—and he the only person supposed to cross the drawbridge. Well! Little did he know!”

And we’d all laugh, my grandfather too.

It was only later that I thought,
What? Little did he know what?

Five

O
f course I idealized them. I took the pieces I knew of their story and made from them a great and uncomplicated romance, a thing of deep and enduring fidelity and devotion, which I heard in my head in my grandmother’s rhythmic, storytelling voice. Why wouldn’t I have been eager to believe in it this way, growing up as I did? And as my life went on, and filled up with what seemed to me its own sordid adult complications, I didn’t revise that view. Instead, I idealized them even more. I wanted to. I wanted there to be a world where things were simpler and cleaner and finer than the world I seemed to have landed in as I started making my own way in life.

Occasionally I still hear about my first husband, Peter, or read about him. He was famous for a while as a political activist; even now he’s still unearthed from time to time—dug up, as it were, from where he’s buried himself in his present life—to comment on those times, the times in which he had his fleeting fame. Once I was watching a television documentary on those days and there he was, both young and old. Young, much as I remembered him,
but with that pall of the ridiculous—hair, clothes, manner of speech—that falls over those we knew then, even over ourselves, when we look at old photos or films. It’s not there in memory, of course. There we are only who we were, young and beautiful and passionate. But in the record that’s been made, we wear the absurd uniform of the time: hairy, wildly patterned, deliberately frayed and worn, hippie. We speak in ways we’ve come to mock in this more ironic age.

But I wouldn’t have mocked Peter in this documentary. Everything he was saying—about life, about the government, about Vietnam—was what I believed then.

The older version was a shock. He’s heavy now. Those mournful, delicate features have become doughy and thick. His hair is scooped back smoothly on his head. It looks wet. He wears rimless spectacles. In this documentary he spoke of the fate of Jerry, of Abbie and Rap. He spoke of his disillusionment with political answers, of the importance of self-actualization and living mindfully.

I don’t mean to suggest he sounded stupid. To me, he didn’t sound stupid. He just sounded lost. He sounded, really, wrecked. Destroyed by what had happened in the passing of all that time.

At the time we separated, he said I was what was destroying him.

I had just had Fiona. I was in a daze of nursing and sleep and child care. My episiotomy was swollen and sore. My body was immense and slack. I still looked pregnant, actually, in a baggy, softened way. But that wasn’t all he had to complain of. There was the way I kept, or didn’t keep, the house. Every time he went to use the toilet, there were dirty diapers soaking in it. I had spilled a sack of flour in the kitchen and it took me three days to clean it up—three days in which the two older children played in the powder as though it had been arranged for their pleasure, like sand in a sandbox. The house was tracked with it, the furniture bore little white handprints. I didn’t care, and this, to him, was unforgivable.

I didn’t care about much, actually, except making it through each day. For days there was no coffee in the house, nothing for dinner except what I fixed for the kids: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, macaroni and cheese. Someone had scribbled on the living room walls with Magic Marker. I didn’t care. He said living with me was like living with a zombie.

I felt a sorrowful sense of betrayal. He had forgotten the first two births; for each of those he had been a zombie with me. He’d get up in the night, then, and change the baby—Karen or Jeff—and bring it to me in bed to be nursed. Sometimes we talked companionably for a little while before we slept again. Sometimes we slept leaned together while the baby nursed. In the mornings we all had breakfast in bed. I remember those as the happiest days of our marriage.

This time around he had no patience for that. We had just moved back to California, after his stint as a postdoc in the Midwest. He was anxious to prove himself to his mentor at San Francisco State. What’s more, the timing of Fiona’s birth couldn’t have been worse. Peter had a full month to go until the end of the semester, the busiest month of the year in terms of his workload: papers to grade, exams to prepare, final conferences, planning for the fall. All of this gave him a clear distance and perspective on me and the children and what we had done to his fine and interesting life.

Here’s how it ended.

One sunny afternoon, I decided I’d take the children out to the park just down the hill from our house. Out of guilt, primarily—I’d had three naps already that day, I’d given them Cheerios for both of the meals they’d eaten, they’d been squabbling and fighting with each other all afternoon. All right, I said, around three. All right. Here’s the story. We’re going out. We’re going for a walk.

I found some shoes for all of us. That took awhile. Responsibly—noticing how responsible I was being—I put an undershirt and a tiny sun hat on Fiona. I bounced her carriage down the front steps and we all went out into the glaring midafternoon light.

The children were wild with the sense of release. Possibly also with excitement—I bought them each an ice-cream bar when the truck pulled up beside the playground. And then I bought them another, the thought being that maybe I could get away with just fruit and milk for supper. Sticky, sweaty, they ran and swung and dug in the sand. I’m not sure what time we headed home—I didn’t have a watch on—but most of the other kids and mothers had left, and we cast long pointed shadows on the sidewalk.

The children were whiny and fussy now, though the baby was sound asleep. In the front hall they started to fight, grabbing each other’s hair, hitting. I squatted with the baby tucked up against me and tried to separate them, yanking wherever I could get a hand on one of them. Jeff had a metal Matchbox truck in one fist. He hit me in the face, across the mouth. I cried out in startled pain, and suddenly they froze, staring at me. I tasted blood, then felt it filling my mouth, rolling down my chin. The baby’s undershirt had a big splotch on it, then three splotches, then a single, widening stain. Karen started to cry.

I grabbed a clean diaper from the stroller and pressed it to my mouth. My voice shrill, I ordered the two older children to their room. In their terror, they obeyed me.

I laid the baby on our bed and went into the bathroom. There was a deep clean slice across my upper lip, already swelling open from underneath. I washed it with soap. I pressed a towel against it. The baby started her scratchy cry. When I bent over her to check her diaper, drops of blood started to land on her again. I changed her, biting down on a towel. When I was done and she’d quieted, I went back to the bathroom and found one of Peter’s styptic pencils. The bleeding finally slowed to an ooze of thickened blood.

I carried the baby to the kitchen. I gathered up some bananas, some apples. I took them to the children’s room and propped myself up against Karen’s pillow to nurse Fiona while they ate the fruit. I sang softly to them for a long time: “The Wheels on the
Bus”; “I Bought a Goat”; “Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Rabbit”; “Clementine.” The sun streaked sideways into the room and then turned pink and faded. The children lay tangled together. The baby had fallen openmouthed and stunned with sleep away from my breast. In a minute, I thought, I’d get up and run a tub for Jeff and Karen. In a minute I’d get out their clean seersucker pajamas. I’d read them a story and tuck them in and pick up a little before Peter came home.

And then suddenly his dark shape was in the doorway, the hall light bright behind him.

“Jesus Christ!” he said, and in three steps was upon me, grabbing the baby.
“What the fuck 
…?”

Karen moaned and turned on her side, tucking her hands between her thighs. The baby had started to cry. “Shhh, shhhh …” I began.

“Get out here!” he said. “Get the fuck up.”

He had the baby, he was under the hall light. Blood was all over her. She looked horrible, I saw that. The cut must have opened again while I slept. There was even blood on her face now too. “It’s not her,” I said. I was shutting the door behind me on the dirty sleeping children.

“What the hell is going on here?” he said. He was handling the baby roughly, trying to find the source of blood, and she had begun screeching—a dry, ratchety noise.

“Here,” I said, trying to take her from him, to comfort her.

He thrust his elbow hard into me and I stumbled and fell. My head hit the door frame and I cried out. He looked down at me pitilessly, at my swollen bloody mouth, my open blouse, my heavy breasts, my dirty bare feet. In his face I saw that it seemed possible to him that what he thought had happened could have happened—that I could have hurt the baby, badly, and hardly noticed, or perhaps not even have cared.

How do these things change? That what you loved you come to hate? That it is gone, all the love? In any case, it all poured out from
him—how he couldn’t stand it anymore: my dazed incompetence, my unconsciousness, my miredness in my body, in the children. I took my turn too, of course. He’d abandoned us since the move to California. There was no car, no way to shop for anything, no money with which to shop anyway. The baby, in case he hadn’t noticed, was two weeks old. How could I not be mired in her? What did he think I ought to be doing instead?

At one point he said, “I didn’t want any of this,” and that seemed so deeply offensive to me—these were our children!—that I told him to leave. We went round a few more times before he did. My lip was bleeding again now, I’d nursed the baby once more. But finally he picked up the car keys and started toward the door.

“Leave the car,” I said. That’s how I knew it was over. My practicality. My hardness.

He was startled.

“I’ve got three kids. I’ve got shopping and doctors’ appointments and errands. You leave the car right here.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. But he left the key and walked out. There were apparently other places he could go to spend the night, something that couldn’t have been said for me.

In fairness—ah, in fairness! which came much later—it was a hard time for him too. Everything else had fallen apart in his life. The war was over, Watergate was resolved, Nixon was gone, Saigon had fallen and been shamefully abandoned. The glory days of the academic political scientist were past. His youth had run out. Now he was an assistant professor hoping to get on the tenure track, hoping desperately for what he’d once scorned, a middle-class bourgeois life. The arrests, the magazine interviews, the cocktail parties, the all-night strategizing, the TV appearances, the access to the famous and the infamous, to women, to drugs, to free meals—they were done, all done.