A Million Years with You (12 page)

My favorite of his memories was of his work on the oil rig. Steve worked the night shift, and by day slept in a still-warm bed vacated by a man who worked the day shift. The rig was near a river on a prairie that sloped gradually upward to the crest of a hill, but the noise of the rig was so loud that Steve would lose all sense of his surroundings, working as if in a cavern of noise. Sometimes the machine would stop suddenly and there'd be silence. Steve would need a moment to remember where he was. Then he'd see the prairie drenched in moonlight. One morning the rig stopped just as the first dawn light appeared. A group of pronghorn antelopes came up from the river and went over the crest of the hill.

That story was enough for me. I wanted to go with him. Girls couldn't do things like that back then, for fear that their adventures would compromise their virginal reputations, so I planned to cut off my hair and dress as a boy. I never got to do this, which is one of my regrets. But I did ride with Steve on the motorcycle he purchased with his summer earnings, on which we went everywhere, the noise in our ears, the wind in our faces. That made me very happy.

Steve also was funny. I fancied myself as the queen of comedy, but he was twice as funny. His humor had a brainy quality that I couldn't resist. Once some of us were playing “I want to be an animal” and coming up with such choices as horse and panda. Steve said he'd be a sessile benthic organism. And what might that be? It might be a tubeworm stuck to a rock at the bottom of the sea, far away from silly games and ill-equipped to play them.

And then there was the first time he asked me for a date. Dressed not in his usual jeans and sweater but in a necktie and an ill-fitting, secondhand tan suit which he might have obtained from the Salvation Army just for the occasion, he came to our house and rang the doorbell. When we opened the door, he seemed unsure, and as if to escape a suddenly daunting situation, he shinnied up a post that supported the porch roof. He wanted us to know that he was respectful and would take nothing for granted. My mother thought his behavior was strange, but I was enchanted. Even though he was nine months too young, I thought he was wonderful.

Not so my parents. They had liked him well enough as a friend of my brother, but they didn't like him as a friend of mine. They had no notion of his star-studded academic record, and everything they did know about him, such as his motorcycle and his scofflaw attitude regarding the Memorial Hall tower, went against their grain. They didn't think anyone should climb cliffs and mountains, at least not without a responsible, professional guide, and as for the tower, they didn't want to believe that anyone, not even he, would do anything so pointless. He did it, of course, for the same reason that Hillary climbed Mount Everest—because it was there—but to my parents this was not a good reason. They kept pushing me toward some of my other suitors, all nice young men who planned to be businessmen or other professionals and who never did things that seemed unusual. I liked these young men too, but Steve wowed me. My parents sensed this. Once when Steve came to our house to get me, my dad shut the door in his face.

Steve's parents didn't like me either. They lived in New Canaan, Connecticut. Steve's father was an executive of a pharmaceutical company and he commuted by train to New York. Steve's mother, every inch a lady, was a homemaker and a deaconess at the Congregational church. She traced her ancestry to Priscilla Alden on the
Mayflower
(yes, Priscilla Alden, not John Alden, perhaps as a rebellious stab at feminism), and she embraced the social values of country-club Connecticut. She was horrified that Steve was interested in someone like me—someone who cursed freely, wore jeans, never went to church, and scoffed at the debutantes she kept trailing in front of him, hoping he'd choose one of them instead of me.

The subculture of my parents and Cambridge did not include debutantes or “coming out,” which in those days had nothing to do with sexual preference but was a party given by a girl's parents to announce her entrance into adult society and her readiness for marriage. My parents would have nothing to do with such a thing. To them, I think, a coming-out party was nothing but an upscale form of pimping. I didn't like the idea either. Why would I want to parade myself around so that strangers would know I was marriageable? How disgusting. Steve knew I was marriageable, and that was all that mattered.

Steve's mother once described in roseate terms the party of a girl who came out and asked if I had done the same. She knew perfectly well that I hadn't, but she didn't know why, and she hoped to force me to admit my failure, proving that I was of less value than the girl she had described. She all but sneered, anticipating her triumph.

I would rather have lost an arm than be a debutante, and loftily told her that while that girl was prancing around at her party, I was driving an army six-by-six through the Okavango Swamp. To me, a debutante was a moron in a prom dress. To my future mother-in-law, a swamp was unclean mud, especially if it was in Africa, and I was nothing but a tomboy in an army truck. We turned up our noses at each other.

 

Many years later, when she was a widow in her eighties, she told me how much she had hated me. By then I was older and wiser and wondered if she had more in mind than just the jeans and bad language. I wondered if her hatred had to do with the difference between her early choices and those that I seemed to be making. She was extremely intelligent—her IQ, which Steve inherited, was astronomical—and although many women of her generation did not go to college, she went to Smith and majored in geology. There she achieved such high academic standing that at the end of her senior year she was invited to join the Smith faculty immediately, to teach geology.

She didn't accept. Why not is unclear, except that brilliance and scientific excellence were not much valued in women back then except by other brilliant, scientific women such as those who taught at Smith. Believe it or not, to marry a successful man and keep house for him was generally seen as a higher calling, certainly in top-drawer Connecticut. So instead of having a career, Steve's mother did what was expected of women of her upbringing. She got married, wore a mink coat, drove a Cadillac, belonged to an exclusive country club, and had a maid and a manservant. These people were African Americans. I don't know what she told them to call her, but she told them to call Steve “Master Steve.” Perhaps they did when she was present. They didn't when she wasn't, though. Instead, they befriended Steve, and the man taught him how to throw a knife.

Steve's mother was a product of her time and culture, with no outlet for her intelligence and high standards except her house. Every stick of her furniture sparkled with polish; every closet, drawer, and cupboard was organized to perfection. But the perfection didn't make her happy. I was not nearly as intelligent, but my opportunities were different, hence my choices were too, as I unfailingly pointed out when visiting her. I didn't know what I'd do with my life, but I knew I'd do more than get married. Thus, to my way of thinking, I would be a better match for her truly brilliant son than some of those airhead debutantes she kept talking about. I even scoffed at her ambitions for Steve—she wanted him to be a stockbroker. How horrifying her picture of me as a stockbroker's wife must have been: smoking cigarettes, stomping around in boots and jeans, telling his clients to fuck off. How could she not hate me?

When she pointed that out, we were in my car, on our way from a retirement community in New Jersey where, as a widow, she had been alone and unhappy, to an apartment in a retirement home very near our house in New Hampshire, where she would live from then on. I had been driving to New Jersey once a week to visit her, and knew that she was lonely and that her alleged caretakers not only were neglecting her but also were stealing her things. In her new apartment, she would have better care and we could be together. At that point in her life she was very fragile and her voice was weak. In the car, I could barely hear her. It took me a moment to realize she was asking why I was doing all this for her, considering her former negative feelings about me. I said it was because we loved her and she was Steve's mother. Whatever she might have felt long ago didn't matter, and anyway, I hadn't known what she thought because she had hidden her feelings.

But that last part wasn't true. She didn't even try to hide her feelings. And that was why, when Steve and I decided to get married, we kept it to ourselves.

 

We graduated on the same day but didn't attend the ceremony because we thought it would be boring. Before graduation, we both were called upon by the deans of our respective colleges to discuss our futures. Steve had excelled in all his courses, and had been urged by the professor of Anglo-Saxon studies to apply to the Harvard graduate school in that field. But the Korean War was in progress, and Steve was about to be drafted. He couldn't accept the offer, nor would he have done in peacetime. Somehow, in addition to Anglo-Saxon, he had managed to learn French, German, and Russian. His real interest was in the history of Russia and Central Europe, even though, because of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, he had little chance of working there. His future remained unclear.

Mine did too. Rather than following my inclinations and majoring in biology, I had reluctantly majored in English, which in those days meant English literature, because my parents wanted me to. I never asked myself where it might lead, except that it would make my parents happy. And why was that? Even in Cambridge in those days, a woman was expected to prepare herself to be a perfect wife, able to talk winningly at cocktail parties about poetry, music, and art and thus enhance her husband. She would not enhance him if she talked about snakes, rodents, and bacteria. So I did what my parents wanted of me. After all, they had my best interests at heart. But the lure of biology was hard to shake. I spent class time looking out the window at the squirrels in Harvard Yard, and on the day the professor discussed the umpteenth verse of Spenser's
The Fairie Queene
, a poem of 15,000 words in over 200 verses, very few of which I'd read, I realized I could recognize most of the squirrels as individuals. That would have been a huge advantage had I been studying squirrel behavior, but it didn't help on the exam, although I somehow managed to pass, and anyway, unknown to my parents, I was going to marry Steve, who didn't need enhancing.

The squirrel-watching didn't help my grades, of course, so I was merely an average student, never expecting an A, glad enough for a B or a C. But thanks to majoring in English, I could take writing courses for credit. I was pretty good at writing and was accepted into the prestigious courses, and the grades I got in them raised my cumulative average to a respectable level. In my junior year, a writing teacher suggested that I enter a fiction contest sponsored by the now defunct girls' magazine
Mademoiselle
. So I did, with a story about a Herero woman in Angola. Exotic subject matter always helps. That year, two of us won the contest, me and Sylvia Plath. Good things came from this, not the least of which was my career. But I had no idea what that might be until I met the dean of Radcliffe for the obligatory senior interview.

My mom came with me, I'm not sure why. Maybe she wanted to protect me from the dean, or maybe she also wanted to know my plans. Maybe she hoped I had some. Alas, I did not. I felt that my biology dreams would never come true, and I lacked enthusiasm for a substitute. It was only when the dean asked what I would do after college that I suddenly realized I was expected to know. So with only one real skill at my disposal, I made a quick decision and said, “I guess I'll be a writer.”

The dean was infuriated. “You
guess
you'll be writer?” she cried. “Have you any
idea
, any
notion at all
, of what it
takes
to be a writer?” She must have seen my grades. But then came one of the best moments of my life.

“Well,” I said, “last year I was cowinner of the
Mademoiselle
College Fiction contest, the story was published in
Best American Short Stories
, and I have a book contract with Knopf. My agent thinks I could be a writer.”

The dean almost exploded. I believe it was the word
agent
that did it. This underachieving student in front of her, this nobody wearing jeans and sneakers without socks, had an agent! My mom, who already knew all this, of course, never changed her congenial expression, but the dean turned bright red. “Why didn't anyone tell me?” she shouted.

Ordinarily, I would have felt guilty. I didn't know I was supposed to tell her. But I didn't feel guilty. In fact, my sense of triumph at that moment was so great that it became another memory to cherish. So, rather than abandoning my dreams, I joined the American Society of Mammalogists, did a little reading, did a little fieldwork, made some observations, and wrote about animals. I wrote about people too, but only about those of different cultures who were involved with the natural world. You could say I devoted my professional life to the Old Way—partly as a rebellion against people like my dean. But I think it may have been my calling ever since my father took me for walks in the woods.

7

I
MARRIED STEVE
when he was in the 525th Military Intelligence Unit at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina—home of the 82nd Airborne and also the Green Berets. In Fayetteville we rented an apartment upstairs from some very southern southerners, one of whom was still fighting the Civil War but had become despondent. “You in the North have the A-bomb now,” he told Steve bitterly. I was astonished. To me, the Civil War amounted to a few boring dates I was forced to learn in high school and forgot right after the test. Now here was a man who was living it. That was my first hint that life in the South would be a little different.