Authors: Joyce Maynard
And then six weeks ago came the call. A young man and his wife, newly married, had spent the day walking our land (as Steve and I had, a few years back), and now they wanted to make an offer. Not on the smaller pieces we’d planned to sell, though. They wanted to buy the big piece—where we’d dreamed of building a house someday. The piece with the beaver pond and the watercress and our campsite and Audrey’s twig villages and the sawdust pile.
Steve and I argued again. He pointed out—rationally, unsentimentally—how much easier our lives would be without that big payment to come up with every month. “You and I wouldn’t have to work so hard,” he said. “We’d have more time with each other and the children. More time for camping trips and swimming. Less worry and strain.” Of course he was right, and of course I denied it.
It wasn’t easy for either of us to think of parting with that land, and because of that we drove a hard bargain (I secretly hoping our prospective buyer would lose interest and go away). When he didn’t (like us, he and his wife had already begun building a house in their heads, right there beside the brook), I cried. Knowing I was spoiled. Knowing we still have our house and our small piece of not-quite-so-breathtaking, but still pretty land on that brook. Knowing that in the scale of things, letting go of a beautiful piece of brookfront land is nothing, compared to all the sorts of things people have to give up all the time.
The day of the closing, as we drove down to the realtor’s office to sign the final papers, we were both pretty quiet. “I feel as if a chapter of our lives is about to end,” I said. “The most romantic, most hopeful part. It makes me feel old.”
“You know,” said Steve, “that piece of land was too big for us to get a handle on. We never could get around to thinning the trees or clearing a path along the brook for the kids. The land that’s left is small enough to be manageable. We can make that parcel a real gem.”
Which cheered me up. Better a few well-shaped Christmas trees you have time to look at than a forest full of spindly ones you never get to, after all. We’re not old yet, I decided. Just mature enough to know what we can handle, what we can’t. And what matters most.
Our friends Greg and Kate got together around the same time as Steve and I. But where we were married within months, and celebrated our first anniversary with Audrey in a high chair beside us, the two of them got around to making it legal only a couple of years back. And while, in the years we’ve been together, Steve and I have been largely occupied with having and raising children and keeping the home fires burning, Greg and Kate have always been the adventurers. They’ve swum in Morocco and off a remote Greek island and rented a cottage in a little Italian village. For a month every summer, Kate always took off on her own for an island in northern Maine, to write. They drive an old sportscar, with just two seats—a convertible. They don’t have a lot of money, but every New Year’s Eve they put on evening dress and hire a caterer to come to their New York City loft, where a waiter in tails serves them and around ten of their friends a midnight dinner that costs each guest a hundred dollars.
They invited us once to drive down to the city and join them for the big annual dinner, and I longed to say yes (only partly to know what a hundred-dollar dinner tasted like, and partly to prove to myself that three children had not totally robbed us of the spirit of adventure and romance we’d known in our younger, less domesticated days). But common sense and practicality got the best of us (as they usually do, these days) when we reminded ourselves of all the other things we could do with that money. In the end we used the two hundred dollars to buy a pair of new steel-belted radials for our van, and toasted the new year at ten because we were too tired to stay up until midnight. “Just wait,” I laughed, a little sorrowfully, when we called Greg and Kate with our regrets. “Wait till you have kids.”
Two weeks ago (with our youngest out of diapers now, and our oldest informing me that she’s now reached the stage where she and I can begin trading clothes and accessories), Greg and Kate had their first child (a daughter they call Lily). And last weekend I took my own firstborn (now eight and a half) to New York City for a weekend—the first time we’ve had for just the two of us since her littlest brother was born. So, naturally, we paid a call on Greg and Kate and Lily. And where, so often, it had been Kate who blew in, in the red convertible, to see me (when I had one child or another in arms, or crying, or keeping me up all night), this time I was the footloose one—with my black sequined evening jacket on and my arms full of shopping bags, heading to the theater—and she was the one who sat at the kitchen table in an old T-shirt, nursing the baby. And where once, (when it was me with the baby) I remember feeling wistful, seeing my friend so unencumbered and so free, (also so slim and rested looking), this time I felt a little wistful that the stage Greg and Kate are just entering may be permanently behind Steve and me. It felt like a hundred years since I was the one in the rocking chair, crooning to an infant Audrey. We may or may not have another baby someday. But one thing is certain: We will never again have a first baby.
Everything about having a baby in the house is new for these friends: the little toes, the smooth pink soles of her feet. The way she startles every time they take her clothes off to bathe her. The brow, that wrinkles clear up to the hairline, and the belly button, so newly formed you can still see the last vestiges of her umbilical cord. Here is a person they will know and love for the rest of their lives. And they have yet to see her first smile. They don’t know about Fisher-Price people or Esprit clothes yet, can’t recite the words to
Goodnight Moon,
haven’t been to Chuck E. Cheese, don’t buy a new jar of peanut butter weekly. When I think of all the things we’ve already done that lie ahead of them, I feel weary and nostalgic, both at once.
Every couple I’ve ever been with, after the arrival of a brand-new baby, wants to tell about the birth. (Even years later, that impulse remains; I still savor the familiar stories of my three children’s entrances into the world.) And so, because I love hearing friends’ stories too, we spent a happy half hour or so going over the contractions, the trip to the hospital, the stages of dilation, the familiar feelings: “I can’t go through with this.” “There really is a baby in there after all.” … And then the moment when the baby finally emerged. At which point in the story, these two good old friends just looked at Audrey and me—overcome—and shook their heads in wonder. “It was just—” they began, and then stopped, at a loss for words. And it doesn’t matter that every day, every second, everywhere in the world, babies are born. The moment when the baby being born is yours feels like the first, the only, time something this extraordinary has ever taken place. And you’re like those fifteenth-century explorers, charting new courses on never-before-traveled oceans. You have discovered the land of parenthood, and it’s that strange and mysterious.
As for me, I’m an old veteran. I have to resist the impulse to offer my friends advice (on the use of a pacifier, on the inadvisability of playing with one’s newborn when she awakes at three
A.M.
). I love and admire these two friends, as I know I will love their new daughter, but maybe (having got there first) I feel a certain need, at a moment like this, to stake out the territory (babies) as mine. (Just as, if we ever made it to Morocco, they might want to show us around.) But of course, when it comes to having children, we all have to learn the lessons, all over again, on our own. Steve and I are the world authorities on our children only, as Greg and Kate will be about theirs.
So Kate handed me the small package of Lily, and I held her close, walked her around the room, stroked her cheek, whispered in her ear, hummed for her the little tuneless series of notes I always hummed to my babies. I left my favorite new-baby activity for last: the sniffing of the top of her head—expecting to find there the faintly remembered smell my children had when they were new. And found, to my surprise, I could smell nothing. And then I realized: Lily’s scent is for Kate and Greg alone, as Audrey’s and Charlie’s and Willy’s were for Steve and me. I handed her back, with a combination of regret and relief. (I loved having new babies. But I also love seeing them grow up.) Then we said our good-byes, my eight-year-old and I, and took a subway uptown, to a Broadway theater where there were a couple of seats waiting for us for a musical I knew Audrey would love. And I found myself thinking that there are many ways to be a romantic adventurer: in a sports car, or a station wagon. And that there is no way to move forward without leaving certain things behind.
I
RODE THE RAPIDS
of the Contoocook river once, on a rubber raft in early spring, when the water was at its highest and most wild. I remember thinking my heart might burst, I was so terrified, as we crashed over the rocks and swirled down the river, with the water shooting into our faces. After it was over, somebody told me those were class-four rapids we’d traveled. More than one rafter has died on that same stretch of river. And of course, if I’d known that, I never would have set out in the first place.
Well, I am not as a rule a risk taker in life. I have spent most of my thirty-two years being cautious and fearful about many things: fast toboggan rides, high diving boards. But I plunged into my marriage and parenthood almost without a second thought or a backward glance, much as I entered the Contoocook that day: at a calm spot, the waters smooth and free of boulders, with the rocks and drop-offs concealed around the next bend.
I was twenty-three years old. I had come from New Hampshire to New York City the year before. I had a great job as a newspaper reporter, and good prospects. I had a penthouse apartment overlooking the park. It was the year of the bicentennial: I could stand on my balcony at night, sipping white wine, and see the Empire State Building lit up in red, white, and blue. I’d go out on a Saturday afternoon and pick up three new outfits at Bloomingdale’s and a couple of new records. I bought myself African coffee beans and bouquets of calla lilies. I had plenty of friends; I went to lots of parties. Sometimes I went out on dates, and always, when I went out with a man, I tried to imagine myself married to him. But this was 1976; women my age—career women—weren’t supposed to be thinking about marriage.
Sometime in the fall of that year, I started getting calls from a man named Steve whom I’d met briefly, years before, back in my one and only year at college. He was an artist, raised in the Midwest, who was supporting himself as a house painter and living in a downtown loft he shared with a struggling jazz singer. He remembered me from a bike ride we took together a half dozen years earlier, and he wondered if we could get together some evening.
I always put him off with one excuse or another: I had to cover a singles’ convention for my newspaper. I was writing a story about celebrity bathrooms. I had to do my laundry. Really, though, I think I avoided Steve because—after dealing with all the men I had been meeting (who needed space, or couldn’t handle commitment, or who simply disappeared, or didn’t disappear, only I wished they would)—I had reached the point where nothing made me so suspicious of a man as to hear him say he liked me and wished he could see me again. Steve said those things, and he kept calling. (In New York, the city where, every thirty seconds, there’s a new face coming down the street. Where no one’s irreplaceable.)
I turned him down one weekend; he tried again the next. I told him, “Call me in a couple of months,” and he did. I was seeing a food photographer at the time—a man who would, on occasion, spend an entire morning looking for the perfect anjou pear, or pour mug after mug of beer in search of precisely the right combination of bubbles and foam for a beer ad. A man who would eventually end our relationship, around eleven-thirty
P.M.
on Christmas Eve, drive off in his Porsche, and then return five minutes later to pick up his imported German fruitcake. It was sometime after the fruitcake incident, when Steve called again, that I remember telling a friend, “This guy is probably a psychopathic killer.” He sounded so nice there had to be a trick.
He called me up one Sunday in February to ask if I’d like to go to a museum with him, and I don’t know why, but that time I said yes. We spent the afternoon walking around the city, came back to my apartment, where (as usual, in those days) there was nothing in the refrigerator but a couple of eggs and a piece of cheese. He made us an omelet. Even that first night we talked about marriage and children, I think, in a way that strikes me now as reckless and crazy, knowing what I know now about those things. (How hard it is to be married. What an enormous and irreversible thing it is to take on the responsibility of a child.)
But we were twenty-three and twenty-five then—very different types of people, but both of us in love, both driven by a pretty unfashionable longing for family and home. Later (first, when I was pregnant with Audrey, and dozens of times after that) I would accuse him of marrying me only because of those things. “You just wanted me for a wife,” I would say, as the clincher to a long list of accusations. “You just wanted to have a baby with me.”
And really, I guess, there was some truth to that, for both of us—only it no longer seems to me like a crime. We were wildly in love, but neither of us was the person the other might have run off with to Bora Bora or the coast of France. Our work, our interests, our friends, our style of life, could hardly have been more different. (I loved to talk. He fell silent swiftly. I had spent my life sitting in chairs, thinking, analyzing. He would get restless if a day went by that he hadn’t taken a run or played ball or fit in a ten-mile bike ride or a long swim. I looked at his paintings—large, abstract, undecorative—and didn’t know what to say. He didn’t ask me what I’d been writing about.) What we loved best about the other from the beginning, I think, was our dream of the family we could make together and the home we’d build.