Joy Enough Read online

  Problems: a husband who flexed in the mirror each morning after swimming laps, a tony town of Joneses she didn’t care to keep up with, and even with all those kids, that same dogged loneliness followed. There was a longing still. If the farm of her youth was cloaked in a kind of quiet separateness, at least the family she made felt different, loud, and braided like a lasso.

  My older brother says our parents’ bedroom door was locked for most of his childhood. “I thought it was because they were Democrats,” he said.

  “Your mother must love being pregnant,” my Brownies troop leader said when my mother pulled up in our red Suburban, the other three already in the car.

  My sister came home for college vacation and announced on the way to buy spring dresses that the vagina was a hole. She’d read something. I was fifteen and in the backseat.

  “The vagina is not a hole,” my mother said. “The vagina is a vessel.”

  She sewed wrap skirts she could wear at any size waist, chose colors for the baby’s room, supervised sleepovers. There’s a photograph of her pregnant at a picnic. She has one hand on her belly, another holding a glass of iced tea, the red curls at her temples damp with sweat. My sister is inside, my brother at her feet, still in diapers.

  Introduced at a cocktail party or turning to a fellow dinner guest, she could see the boredom in their eyes when she said she was a mother. But hers was the real work, she thought, the kind that defines a civilization. Her materials were empty toilet paper rolls smeared in peanut butter, rolled in birdseed, and hung from the honeysuckle bush outside the dining room window.

  “The thought of life after my children are grown depresses me. I will probably read some and drink a whole lot,” she wrote. She thought there might be a novel in this about a thirty-nine-year-old woman who doesn’t want to stop having children. “But I don’t know where the plot would take her.”

  Husband and wife are both blue, really. They see a marriage counselor. The early diagnosis is that she is grieving the end of childbearing. “But I wonder if I really want more children, or if I just want to be sure I remember all the joyfulness I’ve felt.”

  To remember all the joy.

  TWICE A WEEK she takes her two-year-old to swimming lessons. Bliss is ready to spring from the edge, shouts 8–9–2–3–4–JUMP! Voice and splash bounce off the cool tiled walls, and the sun is bright on the turquoise water. The class sings the “Hokey Pokey” and the “Wheels on the Bus,” and when they are done with those he says, More song, Mommy. But class is over, and they must emerge from the pool. Mothers and children file off, their wet feet slapping the deck. In the echoing locker room, everyone showers in an open room, the easy roaming bodies of naked women and children together. Women lean their heads under the blare of hand dryers. They button oxford shirts and slip into leather penny loafers and hand their children snacks of saltines and bags of granola. The parking lot thrums with heat, and their cooled skin is still faint with chlorine. Click into the car seat, and on the way home, waiting at a stoplight, she sees in the rearview mirror her son has flopped his head into sleep.

  SHE DIDN’T LOOK at anyone the way she looked at my brothers. She deemed kindergarten Duncan the kindest person she has had the luck to meet. Grown, he will send her money to supplement her social security checks, she predicts, and she is right. Her girls are studious and wound tight, like her. I begin to set an alarm clock with crayon hands in elementary school, and Katy, the night before first grade, not trusting even that fail-safe, sleeps in her first-day outfit. But the boys fascinate her with their difference. Bliss only yawns when my mother calls him by name each morning, and later still, after she has climbed the stairs to his room, stirs sleepily under the sheets when she shakes his shoulder to wake him. She shops for their size fourteen shoes, leans girlishly into their six-foot-plus frames. They are physically big and emotionally kind, and she had made them so, though she didn’t entirely understand how.

  She loved my father and my stepfather and some men in between, and I watched her love all of them bravely, without fear or restraint.

  But after the divorce, I also watched from a magnolia tree while a family friend delivered sacks of groceries to our front door. Aside from a stint in a jewelry store while my father was in law school, my mother had never had a paid job in her adult life. This is also what comes from loving a man without fear or restraint.

  I do not want to be made a fool of, I repeated in one romance after another, as if anyone were capable of assuring that but me.

  “Oh, Sarah,” my mother explained once I was married. “I wasn’t a fool. That is a little girl’s understanding of a grown woman’s problem,” she said. And: “I would do it all again.”

  What is a grown woman’s understanding of a grown woman’s problem?

  That if I, too, am quick to fall in love, and I am, it is because of her. See: guileless; also: open, unguarded. It occurs to me loving this way may not be smart for a grown woman. Romantic love so often seems at odds with seriousness, and it does not endure. But what does? Why should duration equal significance? Besides, I know no other way. She would say there is no shame in relationship—in deep feeling, a surge of hormones, the pleasures of the body, she would say. Nor is there in its end.

  “I never understood the term ‘codependent,’” she said. “Isn’t that the nature of being human, to depend on each other?”

  OTHER FAMILIES we knew sent Christmas cards of a particular type—a studio portrait, each parent and child in coordinating ivory cashmere sweaters, a teenager with a wedge haircut, a hand positioned on a sister’s shoulder to suggest love. Or a full-denim portrait, chambray shirts and 501s in the great outdoors, a tree swing for the youngest and everyone else’s shiny boots and loafers buried in the colored leaves.

  When our Christmas tree was decorated with miniature birds, strings of wooden red beads, classroom-crafted paper chains, and bubbling, multicolored lights, a photographer arrived for our own season’s greetings. We sat on the burgundy velvet couch in the living room.

  It started civil enough. Parents in the center with baby Bliss on our mother’s lap, and the rest of us crowded around. I am in a six-year-old’s perfect outfit: pigtails and pink tights bunched at my ankles above patent leather Mary Janes. Then Katy, already regal at eleven, her hair glossy and smile beguiling. Duncan’s eyes look naughty beneath his thick wave of hair, but he is thirteen, and that is his job. Everyone in this picture has a different shade of red hair.

  We can only hold it together for so long. Duncan cracks a joke and calls a kid rebellion. Then I’m splayed across my parents’ laps screaming with laughter, my hands cupped around Bliss’s smiling face, as if to remind him he’s one of us, he’s on our side. Katy sticks her tongue out at the camera, puts her thumbs in her ears. Duncan’s legs spill off the couch. He cocks his head; the white collar of his striped polo shirt goes from flat and folded to rumpled. He is the leader of our loudmouthed mutiny. The photographer keeps snapping.

  In the first of these photographs, my parents are laughing. These crazy kids. Then their faces become obscured by our mayhem, visible only from their laps down. The kids take control of the couch, the photo shoot, the picture’s frame. We are cracking one another up, spurring one another on. It is four against two, and we are winning. This is us at our best, a wild and raucous team, stirred into a joyous mania. Peace on earth, good will to men.

  I do not know if my mother mailed one of these pictures as our Christmas card that year. It would have been like her to see the charm of our madhouse and take pride in her delightful, expressive children—a mother’s description. I cannot say for sure. But I do know she preserved what others may have called outtakes, that the series hung in the hallway in a large, poster-sized frame, and that the photos tell two stories unfolding alongside each other. Read from left to right and down the page, it is both a portrait of sibling unity and a prescient view of a family’s unraveling.

  THIS WAS THEIR recurring argument.

  I woul
d like you to defer to my judgment in most matters, he says.

  I have only one precious life to live, she says, and I shall make my own decisions. She tries, at least.

  Away from home, outside the domestic sphere, she liked the dynamic better. In Santa Fe for the weekend, both sick, they stayed in their room reading aloud from a best seller and gossiping about the characters. “Our noses were so runny that neither of us could be on top. It was very funny. It was very romantic.”

  IT IS THE BEGINNING of the end for their marriage, and the Brownie leader is at it again. When my mother pulls up to the curb, she learns I have entertained the troop during circle share with details of her latest marital dispute. The troop leader leans against the driver’s side door and speaks to my mother through the open window. I liked the part where you said he had been a jerk the entire year he turned forty, she said, and now it is your turn.

  THE HOUSEKEEPER has been gone six weeks. Economy move. Someone is always home sick: chicken pox, strep throat, another chicken pox, stomach flu. The pharmacist greets her by name when she places the telephone orders for lice shampoo, Kaopectate, orange Triaminic. She puts on the Dirty Dancing CD when she vacuums and pops a chocolate cake in the oven to cheer everyone up. A father arrives to pick up his daughter who has come over to play, and he and my mother stand in the front hall amid wet bathing suits, a rocking horse, and a month’s worth of unopened mail. This man is also a pediatrician. He says it looks like she’ll be needing a penicillin shot soon. But she doesn’t get sick, and when she next sees him, she is wearing blue jeans, the mail is still in stacks, and baby Bliss sits on her hip. He says she reminds him of something he learned early in his practice. God didn’t make mothers, he says, He made women. Whatever that means, she thinks, annoyed. It is only later that week, perhaps, when the house is finally quiet, the dishwasher humming in the downstairs dark, her husband not yet home, and upstairs the kids are asleep or at least pretending. When she is finally in the soft light of her own bedroom with her hair brushed and her face clean, sinking into the down pillows with something to read, she arrives in a moment that is her own and not in relation to anything else—not a carpool, a nursing infant, nor a man she loves. She is self-contained, not only a woman but the sole measure of her own life.

  HER HUSBAND SAYS he has an ulcer. He says he is so worried about money he cannot sleep. He says they cannot afford a trip to London to celebrate her birthday.

  His doctor tells him to get a hobby. He chooses calf roping and barrel racing and buys a $250,000 farm with a five-bedroom Victorian farmhouse in unsettled country far out of town. He cannot afford it, but he cannot resist. The house, he says, is his private getaway. He says she gave him the ulcer. She says, I certainly am powerful, aren’t I?

  He spends all of his time within the barbed-wire fencing of his new farm. It is a neglected place. The previous owners left behind a pony whose hooves have begun to curl up in the shape of elves’ shoes. The terrain is rolling but treeless, the landscape an ill yellow. He forgets to come home for Christmas dinner.

  She struggles through the ticktock of the lonely weeks just to make it to Friday mornings, when the kids are at school, and she leaves baby Bliss at the church nursery and goes to see the marriage counselor by herself. He is kind with his fragrant pipe and soft cognac leather chair, and he tells her he looks forward to their hour all week. He is her bright spot, too, so patient as she wonders aloud what is going on with her husband. Why she had to spend so much time wondering, I do not know, except that certain dreams are harder to wake from than others. She had nursed a desire for this family for more than twenty years, and that hope had rocked her into willful slumber.

  SHE IS PROFOUNDLY uninterested in sex and thinks it a separate issue that she is very angry at her husband. Their bed has been their reliable return to each other, and without it, they must find other ways to communicate. They take a walk on the gray November sidewalks to sort themselves, and she begins to describe her inner life. Feeling is living, to her, she says. She has only just begun to speak. Can’t they talk about literature or art instead, he asks. She has no idea why she married this man.

  SOMETIMES HE WOULD come home late at night and in the dark tell her she did not know how to be a woman. The culprit in their marriage, he told her, was her mother. There are games men like to play, he said, and her mother had failed to teach them. I don’t know what games he was talking about, since I didn’t learn them either, but I do know some things about my grandmother. That she spent her adult life flirting through offices in pink lipstick and shift dresses. That when my brother-in-law met her, he told my sister he now understood oversexed to be a family trait on my mother’s side. And that long before that, when my grandmother’s beau went off to serve in the Air Force in his tailored green uniform, she gave him one last good time for the road and something to remember her by: a wallet-sized leather book filled with photographs of her own tame pinup poses. A skimming rayon dress, saddle shoes, a wide and knowing smile. Hurry home, lover, she wrote on the back of one; Remember these lips . . . on another, stamped with the red outline of her mouth. When he returned, they married, and when he died, she discovered the photographs still tucked inside the sleeve of the wallet he carried in his back pocket every day, and every night placed in the top drawer of his bureau as he undressed for bed.

  SORTING THE LAUNDRY, my mother finds condoms in the pocket of my father’s jeans. It is becoming difficult to find a good book to read when her own life has become such cliché-ridden trash.

  WHEN SHE STOPPED nursing her final child, her breasts disappeared. The fullness she craved was draining from her life. Was it then, or long before, when her husband ceased to moan when she unbuttoned her blouse each evening? Was it then, or not long after, when she knew she would not have another child with him? She makes an appointment with a plastic surgeon and voices a vague concern about no longer feeling sexy. He gets it, he says, he is losing his hair. His hair doesn’t matter, she says, and he says her breasts don’t matter, either. They laugh at their lot, and he sends her home. Yet the facts remain: One year her husband boasts he knows how to make her come like a pet monkey, and the next he has left her alone in the soft evening light, aching with the embarrassment of her own unmet desire. The only pet monkey she knows is Curious George, who never does as his owner expects.

  IT IS A RAINY SUNDAY afternoon, the first day in a long time her husband has stayed home from the office. It is the domestic witching hour. Nearly dinnertime, she has mashed potatoes on the stove, wet lettuce leaves in the sink, a chicken sputtering in the oven. They argue about a plastic video cassette holder my father has purchased at Woolworth’s for the living room and which my mother deems hideous. (It is never about what it’s about, a friend’s mother will tell a group of us girls in college.) As he storms out, she is seized by a feral, vicious impulse. She follows him to the porch, and throws her hot tea on his starched shirt. She grabs his arm, and snaps her jaw shut on the wide bone. There is the sour, metallic taste of blood in her mouth. Miss Sunday supper, she snarls at him, and never come back. We do not regularly attend any church, so the ritual of this meal, in particular, matters. But he is already down the steps, and when his engine roars she is wilder still, racing through the house, ripping artwork she never liked from the walls. She gathers dirty socks and expensive, unused sports equipment, hauls his case files from the hallway, and dumps the whole heap of it on the wet porch. The oven timer beeps and beeps again. The phone rings. Hey, baby, he says. She cannot abide her own threat, and now she must race again: She collects his belongings from the porch and stuffs them in the hall closet. He takes his place at one end of the table, and she at hers. We bow our heads and say grace. Typically, the most reliable source of joy in her life is right here, when the glass salad bowl is passed around the table, and the children are loud and pouring milk from the cat-shaped jug, and either she or her husband—they take turns—winks down the length of the table at the other. That night we all eat dinner in mis
erable, utensil-scraping silence. She would say she acted childishly, but even her own children have never bitten someone in their rage.

  WE HAD A STEREO with speakers the size of my Barbie Dreamhouse, and I remember Willie Nelson’s plaintive timbre filling the house as my father carried me up the staircase to bed one night, softly singing “The Party’s Over” into the shell of my ear.

  She returned to the gynecologist when she felt her uterus was slipping out of her. The gynecologist said it was. A harder problem to solve: Her husband complained it was impossible to get enough attention from a woman with four children. The doctor told her she didn’t have four children but five. Divorce him, he told her, and you’ll have men climbing in your window at night. He blushed when he said this, and my mother thanked him for blushing.

  The divorce didn’t happen that way, but it did happen.

  I LEARNED THE WORD “cunt” the night my mother ran into the street to scream at my father. They argued in the red taillights of his Cadillac, his girlfriend’s hair hot-roller curly and blonde through the car window. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians were under siege in Waco. On the news and at school, people talked about “cults.” The words sounded the same to me.

  YOU ARE JUST LIKE your mother, people say. They mean long-winded and loud mouthed, wide faced, charming in finer moments, obnoxious in others. Actually, I don’t know what they mean, so one day I asked her.