Domestic Affairs Read online

  My father’s drinking shaped my view of him in all sorts of ways, of course. I knew I couldn’t count on him. I worried about him all the time. And I knew he would embarrass me. (Calling up my English teacher to rail at the mediocre poem she’d assigned us to study. Asking my sixteen-year-old boyfriend to give him a definition of Beauty.) The one thing I never did was to stop loving him. You don’t blame an alcoholic for getting drunk any more than you blame a pneumonia sufferer for running a fever. The blame is all with the doctor, who cannot make him well.

  So the more my father floundered, the more I rescued, and the more I rescued, the more he floundered. And always, always, always, I worried about him, and always I held out the hope (like the King and Queen, parents of the infant Sleeping Beauty, burning every spinning wheel in the kingdom to keep her from pricking her finger) that if I could just get rid of every bottle, hide every pair of car keys, take him on enough walks, he wouldn’t drink any more. I might just as well have tried to hold back the tide.

  When I was nineteen, and safely gone from home, my mother gave up and ended what all the rest of us had always imagined to be a marriage that would last (however unhappily) forever. A wife can divorce a husband, after all. Even if a child can’t divorce a parent.

  There came a point, though, when I stopped trying to rescue my father—not because he was getting better, but because things looked so bad that there seemed no hope at all. I thought there was nothing more I could do to save him. He was seventy-five years old. He had no home, no money. His health was failing fast, and I thought he would die soon.

  Instead, he got himself to Alcoholics Anonymous, and he got sober. He packed up the paints and paintings he’d put aside more than forty years earlier and headed back to Canada, where he’d lived as a young man. He lived five good years there, before a painting trip to Alaska laid him up with pneumonia that locked his joints, made it impossible for him to paint, and sent him off into one last, self-destructive round of vodka drinking, from which he never recovered. Nine months pregnant with my second child, I got a middle-of-the-night phone call, telling me my father was dying. I felt violently ill then and began to shake and lay down on our bed and didn’t know, until the moment Charlie’s head appeared, that it wasn’t simply my father’s death my body was registering after all. I had grown so used to thinking of my father as my chief source of pain. Lo and behold, this time it was my son. (Who came out, not dark like my daughter and me, but blond-haired and blue-eyed, like his grandfather.)

  My father’s death, and my son’s birth, freed me, I think, to look at the man without guilt, or frustration, or embarrassment, or regret over all he never could give me. I think of my father very often, of course: sometimes when I hear a particular bird call, or catch sight of an interesting cloud formation, sometimes when I spot a field of cows. I hear him quoting me poetry or a line from the Bible, or instructing me on the correct cultivation of tomato plants. I hear him railing at mediocre art, immoral politics, and the way you can never find Scotch tape, when you need it. I think with regret of my loneliness, all those years not knowing the world was filled with alcoholic parents, and their children trying desperately to save them. And I grieve over how great his misery must have been—loving us, and knowing what his drinking cost us, and having to go out and buy another bottle anyway.

  But I no longer wish I’d had a different father, because if I had, I would be a different person myself. And I no longer wish I’d been a different daughter (one who might have been able to stop the drinking), because I no longer believe such a daughter could have existed. I couldn’t keep him from drinking. He couldn’t keep me from loving him anyway. And no family should keep the truth from one another.

  I’ve known only two homes in my life: the one I live in now, with my husband and children, and another one, just sixty miles from here, where I grew up. My father’s dead now, and even before that, my parents were divorced and my mother moved away from our old house. But though she rents the house out nine months of the year and hasn’t spent a winter there for thirteen years, she hasn’t sold our old house yet. It’s still filled with our old belongings from our old life. And though my mother has another house now, and a good life, with another man, in a new place, she still comes back to the old house for a couple of months every summer. Every year I ask her, “Have you considered putting the house on the market?” And every summer the answer is “not yet.”

  My children call the place where I grew up the yellow door house. They love the place, with its big, overgrown yard, the old goldfish pond, the brick walkway, the white picket fence. On the front door there’s a heavy brass knocker my sons like to bang on to announce their arrival for visits with their grandmother, and French windows on either side that I was always cautioned against breaking as a child. (As now I caution my children.) There’s a brass mail slot I used to pass messages through to a friend waiting on the other side. Now my daughter Audrey does the same.

  It’s a big house, a hip-roofed colonial, with ceilings higher than anybody needs, and a sweeping staircase rising up from the front hall, with a banister that children more adventurous than my sister and I (mine, for instance) are always tempted to slide on. There are plants everywhere, paintings my father made, Mexican pottery, and a band of tin Mexican soldiers—one on horseback, one playing the flute, one the tuba. We bought those soldiers on the first trip I ever made to New York City. They cost way too much, but my mother said we could get them if we took the bus home instead of flying. So we did.

  One room of the yellow door house is wood paneled and lined with books. There used to be a big overstuffed armchair in it that I’d settle into with my cookies and milk, when I came home from school, to do my homework or watch Leave It to Beaver. (That chair is in my house now.) There’s a porch with a swing out back, and a sunny corner in the kitchen where I always ate my toast—grilled in the oven, sometimes with cinnamon sugar and sometimes jam, but always the way my mother made it, buttered on both sides. My mother is a wonderful, natural cook, who would announce, on a typical night, three different dessert possibilities, all homemade. Now I wouldn’t think of eating a third piece of blueberry pie. But the old habits return when I walk into my mother’s kitchen. The first thing I do is go see what’s in the refrigerator.

  It’s been fourteen years since I lived in the yellow door house, but I could still make my way around it blindfolded. There are places where the house could use some work now, and my mother never was the best housekeeper. I open a drawer in the big Welsh dresser in the dining room, looking for a safety pin, and so much spills out (though not safety pins) that I can’t close it again. A person can choose from five different kinds of cookies in this house. There’s a whole closetful of fabric scraps and antique lace. Eight teapots. But no yardstick, no light bulbs, no scissors.

  My children’s favorite place in the house is the attic. The front half used to be the studio where my father painted, at night, when he came home from his job as an English teacher. The paintings and paints are long gone now; but my father was a lover of art supplies and hopelessly extravagant when it came to acquiring them, so every once in a while, even now, thirteen years since he’s been here, I’ll come upon a box of unopened pastels, or watercolor pencils, or the kind of art gum eraser he always used. I’ll pick up a stub of an oil pastel and hold it up to my nose, and a wave of feeling will wash over me that almost makes my knees weak. Cadmium yellow light. Cerulean blue. Suddenly I’m ten years old again, sitting on the grass in a field a couple of miles down the road from here, with a sketch pad on my lap and my father beside me, drawing a picture of Ski Jump Hill.

  Beyond the room that was my father’s studio is the part of our attic where my mother—a hoarder, like me—has stored away just about every toy we ever owned, and most of our old dresses. A ripped Chinese umbrella, a broken wicker rocker, a hooked rug she started and never finished, an exercise roller, purchased around 1947, meant to undo the damage of all those blueberry pies. Songs I wrote when
I was nine. My sister’s poems. My mother’s notes from college English class. My father’s powerfully moving proclamations of love to her, written when she was eighteen and he was thirty-eight, when she was telling him she couldn’t marry him and he was telling her she must.

  Every time we come to the yellow door house to visit, Audrey and Charlie head for the attic—and though we have mostly cleaned out my old Barbies now (and a Midge doll, whose turned-up nose had been partly nibbled off by mice), we never seem to reach the end of the treasures: My homemade dollhouse furniture (I packed it away, room by room, with notes enclosed, to the daughter I knew I would someday have, describing how I’d laid out the rooms.) An old wooden recorder. A brass doll bed. Wonderfully detailed doll clothes my mother made for us every Christmas (at the time, I longed for store bought). One year she knit a sweater, for a two-inch-tall bear, using toothpicks for knitting needles. Another year she sewed us matching skirts from an old patchwork quilt.

  The little town where I grew up (and where I used to know just about everyone) has been growing so fast that my mother hardly knows anyone on our street anymore. A house like hers has become so desirable that within days of her arrival this summer, my mother got a call from a realtor asking if she’d be interested in selling. He named as a likely asking price a figure neither one of us could believe. My parents bought the house, thirty years ago, for a fifth of that amount, and still, they sometimes had to take out loans to meet the mortgage payments.

  For years now, I have been telling my mother that it makes little sense to hold on to the yellow door house (and to worry about tenants, make repairs, put away the Mexican tin soldiers every Labor Day and take them out again every Fourth of July). But I suddenly realized, hearing about this realtor’s call, that when the day comes, that my mother sells the house, I will be deeply shaken. I doubt if I will even want to drive down our old street after that, or even come back to the town, where I scarcely know anybody anymore. I don’t much want to see some other family inventing new games, new rituals, in our house. Don’t want to know where they put their Christmas tree, or what sort of paintings they hang on their walls. It would be crazy—impossible—to pack up and haul away all those dress-up clothes and bits of costume jewelry and boxes of old book reports and crumbs of pastels. But neither do I relish the thought of someday having to throw them out.

  My mother’s yellow door house is a perfect place to play hide-and-seek, and last weekend, when I was there visiting with my three children, that’s what my two sons and I did. I found a hiding place in the wood-paneled room, behind the couch. I scrunched myself up so small that several minutes passed without my sons’ finding me, even though they passed through the room more than once.

  Many families have rented the house since my mother ceased to make it her full-time home, but the smell—I realized—hasn’t changed. Listening to my children’s voices calling out to me through the rooms, I studied a particular knothole in the paneling, and it came back to me that this knothole had always reminded me of an owl. I ran my finger over the wood floors and the upholstery on the side of the couch, and noted the dust my mother has always tended to leave in corners. I heard the sewing machine whirring upstairs: my mother, sewing doll clothes with Audrey. I smelled my mother’s soup on the stove. And for a moment, I wanted time to freeze.

  But then I let myself make a small noise. “We found you, we found you,” my boys sang out, falling into my arms. And then we all had lunch, with my mother’s chocolate chip cookies for dessert—and headed back to the house I live in now. Whose door is green.

  OTHER CALLINGS

  Babysitter Problems

  Tuning in to Ozzie and Harriet

  Getting Off the Plane

  Death of the Full-Time Mother

  Mother of Nine

  WE WERE HAVING BABYSITTER problems—again. Our sitter had quit, I was spending my days placing ads in the Help Wanted columns and interviewing replacements. As many as four women a day were taking a tour of our house and our life. Every one had to hold Willy, play blocks with Charlie, meet Audrey’s dolls, inspect the changing table, take a look at our bathroom. Dinnertimes I quizzed the children: What did they think of Liz? Bonnie? How did they like Roxanne? How did the walk with Susan go? We were all exhausted—not just physically, though there was that too. (For every visit, the house had to be neat, the children clean and rested.) It was the emotional weight of projecting so many different strangers into our life that was hardest, though—the weight of making such an important decision, knowing what a wrong choice would cost us: namely, another period in our lives like the one we were presently going through.

  I wonder all the time whether it’s worth the struggle. Every morning I wake up having to assess the situation anew, asking myself (based on the current day’s information) whether it makes sense to have three children and not spend one’s days being their full-time mother. Why—given how much time and energy I go through in searching for a suitable replacement for me—I don’t simply fill the job myself and be done with it. There are many days when I feel like throwing in the towel.

  Of course I know why I work. Beginning with the fact that I have to, if we’re to have enough money. “Enough” meaning—naturally—the amount we’ve become accustomed to having since I’ve been working full time. You earn more, you spend more. Then you have to keep earning. I know that much about economics, anyway.

  There are other reasons, of course, and one is the work itself, and the way it allows me to be something besides my children’s mother. I love being a mother, admire women who can do that job full time without losing patience or spirit, but I’m also a little frightened of what uninterrupted, all-day seven-day-a-week motherhood of our three children would be like for me after so many years of another kind of life. I wonder whether—without my quiet, solitary cup of morning coffee at my desk, and the moments I give myself, sometimes, to just put on a record and look out the window; without the chance for a quiet adult conversation, and unbroken reading, and unbroken thought—I might become so frayed I’d unravel.

  A whole day of painting with my children, playing cars, making boats, dressing dolls, reading out loud, taking walks—there’d be no problem with that. It’s all the things in between: wiping off the counters, sponging up the juice, folding the laundry, picking up the blocks, tying the shoes, wiping the counters again, never doing any one task longer than the time it takes for a two-year-old to lose interest in his ball and need help finding his truck.

  There’s a rhythm mothers—successful mothers, anyway—get into. The pace is slower. You might move pretty fast (you’ll do plenty of running), but you never get anywhere fast. You have to be prepared to stop and study a caterpillar for five minutes, or hop up three times in the middle of a conversation to pour juice. Walks are seldom taken in straight lines. Children move as if they had all the time in the world—and the best full-time mothers I know act that way too.

  While a mother with another job besides mothering—if she’s to survive—has to be forever rushing. And switching gears, going from child-pace to work-pace and back again. Never wholly in either one place or the other. Always knocking herself out to give her children what they need, to make up for her absences. Dealing with childhood illnesses, middle-of-the-day crises. And then, on top of everything, coping with the periodic and recurrent problem of child care; filling the unfillable job of part-time mother, when a good part of her longs to be doing it herself.

  I’ve been sitting here close to an hour, trying to figure out whether it makes sense trying to do what I attempt, and I have no answer. I do believe some women can manage to work outside their homes and raise children, and do both well. But never without a struggle.

  I keep looking for an absolute solution myself: the perfect babysitter. The right ages of children. The right type of work, the right work schedule. Women keep lobbying for better day care, longer maternity leaves (and paternity leaves), child care on the job, more flexible hours—and those are all good t
hings. But as for ultimate solutions, I don’t believe, anymore, that they exist. It should be a struggle to leave one’s children. It should be hard to give them everything they need, because they need a lot. Eventually, I know I will find and hire a new babysitter. (A woman who will be willing to perform a job I can’t imagine taking on: caring, forty hours a week, for somebody else’s children. Taking on the kind of responsibility that I myself am able to shoulder for one reason only: because these children are mine.) And still I know I’ll be filled with reservations about the whole thing and with a sense of compromise. She will buy the wrong kind of apples. She’ll chew gum. She will mix the Legos in with the Bristle Blocks. When of course the real problem will simply be, as it always is, she’s not me.

  We rented a video of Ozzie and Harriet the other night. Two episodes, from back around 1960, complete with commercials for Pepto-Bismol and Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix. I would’ve been eight the first time I saw those shows. That’s how old my daughter is now.

  So there they were: the Nelson family. A family, not just on television, but in real life too. (Knowing that added an odd dimension to the show. Contributed to the notion that television can be like life, and life can be like television. Not that mine, back in 1960, bore much resemblance.) You never knew what sort of job Ozzie had. (Did they maybe sometimes refer to his being a bandleader, or am I getting television confused with life again?) As for Harriet, you didn’t have to ask her about her career aspirations. She was Mom, and Honey (as in, “Honey, I’m home”). She must’ve had those aprons permanently stitched onto her dresses. She was always sponging off her kitchen counters, even though they were spotless to begin with. Always pouring coffee. Passing out the Aunt Jemima pancakes. Nobody in that family needed Pepto-Bismol, you could just tell.

  The first show we watched was about a fishing trip Ozzie and his friend and next-door neighbor, Thorny, are planning to take up to Rainbow Lake. Then they lock themselves out of their houses with their pajamas on. (Is this why I’m always trying to talk my husband, who favors T-shirts and shorts for nightwear, into checked flannel PJs? Is it Ozzie Nelson I’ve been after all this time?)