Domestic Affairs Read online

  Anyway, the two men end up falling asleep in the Nelsons’ station wagon. Harriet and the boys, David and Ricky, wake up, imagining that Dad must be reeling in trout by now. Harriet (whose hair looks about as messy as Nancy Reagan’s) announces she’s getting her hair done and drives off to the beauty parlor with Oz and Thorny still asleep in the back. The men wake up in the parked car and skulk around Main Street, trying to call someone to come pick them up. Harriet drives off in the station wagon. They’re stranded in their PJs.

  It was all pretty amusing stuff—though I guess I’d have to say Steve and I enjoyed the shows somewhat more than our kids did. “Didn’t you have anything else besides Pepto-Dismo, back in the olden days?” said Charlie, after the fourth commercial. Sure we did, I say. There was Alka-Seltzer.

  I’m trying hard to remember what else we had back then. Looking at the words flash across the screen, knowing I must have seen all this before. Trying to put myself back into the head of the little girl who used to sit there on the green TV-watching chair, eating Fritos, taking it all in.

  Even in 1960, the life of the Nelson family (and all those other television families whose escapades I followed every week) seemed pretty far removed from my own. Pretty far, too, from the life I lead now (the life—I remind myself—that I have chosen). Because in addition to being Mom and Honey, what I am, frequently, is Gone. Sitting at my desk, trying hard to put my children and home out of my mind and attend to my work. If they made a TV show of our life, it would have to feature our babysitter, Vicky, as a key character. A typical line at the breakfast table—delivered almost every day by my son—would be, “Is it a Mommy day or a Vicky day?”

  I do believe I am a good mother to my children—though not the same kind of good mother Harriet Nelson was. I’m definitely more concerned with personal fulfillment than Harriet ever seemed to be: which doesn’t mean I’m more fulfilled, only (often) more frustrated. I want the kitchen table and the children gathered round, but I also want important conversations to be taking place there. I want my husband to tell me what he’s feeling, I want to tell him what I’m feeling. As for the feelings themselves: I take a reading on my emotional well-being at least as often as Harriet used to get her hair done—though my head is seldom as well under control as hers. I want to grow old with my husband; I want passion and romance. I want to have babies; I want to write books. I want my home to be a safe haven for my husband and children; then again, I want to go trekking in Nepal.

  I’m no fool. I know it’s not all possible. Left to choose, I do, consistently, opt for family well-being over complete and utter personal gratification. I mean to say only that I suspect I feel the pull more keenly than wives and mothers did in 1960, when options were more limited, possibilities fewer. Of course, times have improved. I keep in mind the fact that right about the same time that Harriet Nelson was probably taking yet another batch of rolls out of her oven, Sylvia Plath—a wife and a mother and a poet too—was sticking her head into hers. Today, maybe, it would be a little easier for a woman like that to follow a different path.

  Steve and I won’t ever pull off an Ozzie and Harriet routine. Naturally, we’d both say, we’re after something different. There are bigger problems than finding yourself downtown with your pajamas on. You won’t find me wearing an apron or sitting across the table from Steve talking about the bridge club.

  There’s no telling, either, what it was really like for the Nelsons after the cameras stopped rolling and the lights were turned out. Maybe Ozzie was tormented by the thought that he was a bandleader and not a symphony conductor. Maybe Harriet really longed to run off with the milkman. Then again, maybe they were all just as happy as they seemed. As for Ricky, we all know he ended up divorced from the beautiful wife he married (on the show and in real life). And died in a plane crash, heading to a singing engagement.

  But back in 1960, that life looked good. I may have tuned out the commercials, but I bought the stuff about Mom and Dad and the kids. Getting into scrapes, sure—even fighting sometimes. But being—more than anything else, more than they were themselves, maybe—a family. That first.

  “I wish they lived next door to us,” says my daughter dreamily, as the credits on the video roll. (My son has already expressed a preference to live on Sesame Street.) And both of those do look like nice places to be.

  Now sometimes I think I’d like to be Tina Turner or Margaret Mead. Amelia Earhart. Sarah Bernhardt. Madame Curie. Sometimes I just want to run off to a little cottage in the mountains and write a novel and learn to play the flute.

  And then sometimes all I want to be is Harriet Nelson, sponging off her counters, ruffling the tops of her sons’ crew-cut heads, giving her husband a peck on the cheek and flipping the pancakes.

  I was supposed to go to New York City and work. Fly in on a morning commuter plane, put in an eight-hour day at the office of a magazine I sometimes write for, get on another commuter plane, and be home by midnight. That was the plan.

  I awoke early. I took my shower, washed my hair. I hunted for panty hose, and made some, finally, by combining the good leg from two different pairs. I put on makeup, earrings, a squirt of my new Christmas perfume. I set out juice for my sleeping children, gave Willy a bottle, compiled a list of instructions and reminders for Steve. Audrey was going to her friend Sage’s house. Charlie was having a friend over. We needed to call a babysitter for the weekend, and we were almost out of coffee and paper towels. All of that happened before the sun came up.

  Then I assembled my papers. I took out my city boots and arranged a pin over the orange-juice stain on my blouse. Charlie woke up; I changed his diaper, read him Where the Wild Things Are and the special issue of People magazine devoted exclusively to Michael Jackson. I fixed him his bowl of Cheerios; he wanted strawberries in the bowl, like the ones they show in the photograph on the front of the Cheerios box. I took some strawberries from the freezer.

  Audrey woke up, tousled and bleary. Steve got up, and I ran outside to warm up the car. I ran back into the house to check on the children, discovering Wheat Chex all over the floor and Willy eating dog chow. I gulped down my coffee, stuck my eyeliner pencil in my pocket for some future quiet moment, and raced out the door, calling out the babysitter’s phone number.

  And then I was alone, driving down our road, just as the sun was coming up. I put a tape of jazz piano into the tape player. I stopped at the foot of our hill to put on my eyeliner. Heading for the highway, I sang.

  Forty-five minutes later I was at the airport, buying my ticket. There were two men wearing suits and carrying real leather briefcases; one had a lock, even. There was a woman with a perfect manicure, and a purse coordinated to match her boots. Frequent flyers; the man at the ticket counter knew their names.

  We were experiencing a slight delay, he told us. Icy runway conditions, low visibility. He wouldn’t know for another half hour whether the plane would be flying.

  It was over an hour before they told us we could go and led us out to the ten-seater commuter plane on the runway. I climbed the steps, found my seat, buckled my seat belt, picked up an issue of Savvy magazine. The propellers were just starting to spin.

  And then I did something I have never done before. I unbuckled my seat belt and called out to the pilot, “Excuse me, I’m getting off.”

  When I got home, Charlie was still in his sleeper suit and Willy had just overturned another bowl of Wheat Chex. “You’re back,” said Audrey. Nobody seemed that surprised to see me, standing at the counter again, loading plates into the dishwasher.

  I took off my silk blouse. I took off my stockings. I took off my high-heeled boots and put on my slippers.

  I know what the people on that plane thought. That I’m afraid of flying. That icy runway, that fog. That comment someone made as we stood outside waiting to board: “Got your parachute?”

  The truth is, I’m accustomed to navigating treacherous skies: I am trying to be a mother and a career woman, both in the same one lifetime,
and it’s probably the hardest thing I’ll ever do. I don’t want to suggest, for a moment, that women who have young children can’t handle a career or that they’ll end up doing their jobs less well than undistracted men. Only that it’s hard, finding the babysitter, keeping up with the laundry, baking at midnight, getting up at dawn. It’s hard scheduling dentists’ appointments and car inspections and immunizations. It’s hard, when there are three little mouths all asking for three different brands of cereal, catching what that other adult, halfway across the kitchen table, has to say, and hard having something to say to him besides “Can you take the compost out?”

  It’s hard to walk out the door, when there’s a two-year-old boy standing there behind you, stretching out his arms and saying, “I want you.” But the hardest part comes after.

  Out the door, down the road, on the plane. You’ve made your escape, and now you can open your briefcase, plug in your computer, make your summation to the jury. Buckle your seatbelt and soar …

  Only all you can think of is their faces. Did you remember to set out his Masters of the Universe training pants? Are we out of peanut butter? Does she know one of her winter boots is underneath the living-room couch, with a dinosaur stuck inside?

  “When you were growing up,” I asked Steve the other day, “how many of your friends’ mothers worked?” At jobs outside the home, I was careful to add, as always, knowing all the things a stay-at-home mother does, that make the life of a woman sitting at a desk seem pretty uncomplicated by comparison.

  He thought a moment. His own mother never held a job, until her four children were in high school and college. She is one of those women (that dying breed) who made running a home her art. More than once, over the years, I’ve heard my mother-in-law say, “I loved being a housewife. Those were the best years of my life.” Since then she has returned to school, worked as a librarian, run her own bookstore. But the job she loved best was (what I have never really been) full-time mother. At the executive level, and irreplaceable.

  Back to my question. As I said, Steve had to think about it for a while. Finally he gave up. He couldn’t think of a single mother he had known, in those years from the early fifties to the mid-sixties, when he grew up, who’d held a full-time job. Of course, he’d lived in a pretty middle-class suburb. But try finding a community anywhere, today, without one employed mother.

  Well, my mother held jobs when I was growing up, but I remember what an oddity that was, how torn she felt, and how unfair it seemed to me. There were no day-care centers or after-school programs back then. And somehow my mother always managed to make pies and keep our cookie tin filled, to sew dresses for us and our dolls, in spite of her jobs. There was no model, yet, of that other sort of mother who’s become pretty commonplace today—the one who comes home, at six, with a pizza or a box of fried chicken. The one who serves cookies from a package that says Almost Home.

  Now, among the mothers of my daughter’s classmates at school, nearly every one holds down a job. I know, because Audrey’s teacher has told me how hard it is, these days, to find a mother who’s able to help out with the class field trips or type up the children’s stories or volunteer to make cupcakes. When the first grade held their Pilgrim banquet, half the mothers signed up to supply juice and no one came forward with home-baked cornbread. As for me, I sent paper cups.

  There are still a handful of these other mothers in our town, and because there are so few of them now, they’re in big demand. I know all their names, because they’re always the ones at the Friends of the School meetings and the fund-raising yard sales. Sometimes their children come over to play, and they wear hand-knit sweaters, or a home-sewn dress identical to the one on their Cabbage Patch doll. I hear little things about them: They have ruffled curtains in their rooms, to match the bedspread. Their houses have window boxes filled with pansies. Their socks match. They wear their hair in French braids. The stockings they hang on the mantle at Christmas feature their names embroidered on the toe. While around here we’re always scrambling. The dress Audrey needs got washed but not dried, or dried but not sorted. Charlie’s sneakers are too tight, but we haven’t got around to buying new ones. There are items in the back of my refrigerator that are so far gone they could bypass the compost pile and go directly into the garden.

  Of course I know about the other side of it: the boredom and isolation many of those women felt, back in the days my husband remembers so fondly, when the children came home from school to find their mothers waiting with the milk and cookies. I know about the Feminine Mystique, and the importance of financial independence from husbands, and the crisis that can occur, for women who have spent fifteen or twenty years feathering a nest, when that nest becomes empty. I know how lucky I am to have all sorts of freedoms my mother’s generation missed.

  But I inhabit a state of perpetual ambivalence too: part homemaker, part career person. Not as ambitious or successful as lots of childless women I know in New York City. Not as free as my children would like, either, to be there with the chocolate chip cookies when they come home from school ready to play Old Maid. Of course these days they show working mothers on television, but there is nobody I see on the screen whose life looks remotely like mine. There is no name for what I do. With one foot in the door and one foot out, I often feel wistful, looking at the lives of women who know precisely where they stand.

  Ten years ago, when I was single and living in a studio apartment on the East Side of Manhattan—wearing silk blouses to work and picking up my dinners from a gourmet shop around the corner—I bought myself a pair of couches covered in Haitian cotton. Nine years ago, when I met Steve, those couches were among the few possessions we moved with us to New Hampshire, where we live now, and where I never put on a silk blouse or buy dinner at gourmet shops. And the truth is, the white couches, with their hard, streamlined edges, always did look a little out of place in our house.

  But over the years the couches got beat up enough to fit in a little better. The Haitian cotton ripped, Charlie built forts with the pillows, Audrey took to practicing her gymnastics routine on the sofa back, and balancing her cereal bowl on a sofa arm, while she watched her cartoons. An extended family of mice set up residence inside the hide-a-bed a couple of years back (Steve and I would be sitting on the couch sometimes, after the children were in bed, and I’d say, “Do you hear something?” and he’d say, “It’s just my stomach rumbling.” But in the end, it turned out to be a whole mouse city, coming out among the increasingly unsprung springs. They had pulled out the cotton batting, stored acorns under the seats, and gnawed on the strings of loose threads of the Haitian cotton. Which, as you might guess, was no longer even close to being white).

  So this fall we finally decided to get some slipcovers. Steve—who had the kind of mother who would have taken it upon herself to make them—commented that it might make a wonderful fall project for me, sewing those slipcovers. I said no thanks and started asking around for the name of someone who’d make them.

  This morning she showed up. Her name is Peg. She’s a small, trim woman in her early fifties. She was at our door at seven-thirty sharp.

  But because I was still pretty busy getting the children out the door to preschool and second grade, getting the lunch boxes packed, the library books gathered up, I had to ask Peg to wait a minute. There was just too much going on, it seemed, even to run upstairs for my bolt of fabric.

  Then finally the children were gone, and I spread out the material while Peg got her scissors. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s pretty hectic around here in the mornings. Getting three children dressed and out the door …”

  “I know,” she said. “I had nine.”

  I thought about that for a moment, then asked their ages. She put down the box of straight pins so she could use her fingers to count.

  “There’s Alice, she’s—let’s see—thirty-one. Mary. She’s thirty. Bob, twenty-nine. Douglas—no, not Douglas. Roger, twenty-eight. Then Douglas. Then Noreen …”
It went pretty much like that (with a few more years between the last couple of children), all the way down to Joseph, who was seventeen and just finishing up his senior year in high school.

  “Caring for all those children was no big deal,” Peg said. “Everybody pitched in, and everyone behaved, because they just had to.” When it was time to bathe the baby, the others would all gather around, and it would be “go get the powder” to this one and “go get the diaper” to that one. Every night Peg made a list of everybody’s jobs for the next day. “Every one of my children knows how to cook, clean, do laundry, and sew,” said Peg, scrambling around my living room floor, cutting fabric and drawing chalk lines as she spoke, while I stood there, feeling awkward and guilty at having nothing but a cup of coffee in my hands. Still, I wanted badly to talk to this woman. “Forget about the slipcovers,” I wanted to say. “Just sit down and tell me how you did it.”

  She made all her children’s clothes, of course—usually out of her husband’s worn-out shirts and pants (because the sleeves went first, and that left lots of good fabric in the middle). It would be nothing for her to put up two hundred quarts of beans, she said. Every day she baked bread. Every night they ate meat—casseroles mostly. Plus, her husband did a lot of hunting.

  For Christmas there’d be doll beds made out of old oatmeal boxes, and knitted yarn balls, and necklaces of old wooden spools, painted in bright colors. “You should see our house at the holidays,” she said. “My supper table seats twenty-two. But sometimes we’ll feed up to thirty-five people in my dining room.”

  What about when she went places, I asked her.