Domestic Affairs (17 page)

On the night of the spaghetti party Steve and I fell into a routine of preparations so familiar we don’t need to discuss them anymore. He scrubbed the bathroom. I waded through the grass to pick a bouquet of flowers. This being the first cool night of the season, he laid a fire, while I spread a tablecloth and chose my twelve favorite unmatched flea-market dishes. I stuck the garlic bread in the oven, he rinsed wine glasses. I fed the children early, Steve lit the fire. I put on a record and my best apron. And then we waited for the guests to arrive.

I love this moment: after the preparations are done, sitting by the fire, admiring my clean house, smelling dinner on the stove, listening for the sound of cars in the drive. On this particular evening, our guests were all old friends who come here a lot. All except for the travelers passing through: a couple named Jo and Martin, probably in their early thirties like Steve and me.

Before she even got out of the car, I knew Jo was going to be beautiful, with the kind of looks I most envy, because they have nothing to do with makeup or rollers, or days of trying on clothes in Bloomingdale’s. She was tall and slim, but not skinny, tanned, with long straight hair held back by a tortoise-shell clip. She wore jeans that fit perfectly and a belt she had probably owned for fifteen years, and a white cotton blouse with mother of pearl buttons, and she carried an ancient-looking leather backpack, which, I later learned, contained all her worldly goods. Reaching out my hand to shake hers, I realized my other went—automatically—to stroke Willy’s blond head. Because who I become, at a moment like that, is my children’s mother. Who Jo was, was simply Jo.

She turned out to have an accent: exotic, implacable. I asked where she was from and she thought for a second. “New Zealand, sort of. But nowhere anymore, really.” She and Martin, a lean, dark, remote-seeming man, were on the road—had been for over three years. They had spent last winter in Nepal, last week in London. Tomorrow they would set out for the west coast of Canada. But tonight they were in this little town of ours in New Hampshire, where spaghetti sauce was bubbling on the stove and an applewood fire was burning.

I’ve never been much of a traveler myself. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in one small New Hampshire town. When—during a brief stint in New York—I met Steve, we thought we’d get a van and just travel around for a year or so, picking up odd jobs on the road. Our friends took us at our word and showered us with sleeping bags, outdoor cooking sets, and road atlases for wedding presents. And they kept asking (a sore point) just when it was that we were planning to leave.

Our scheduled departure date was always being put off. I would find myself poring over seed catalogues. Steve began talking about how nice it would be, after our trip was over, to build a studio here. Intellectually, we knew that this was the time in our lives to be footloose and free. But we acquired a dog. And I kept thinking about what to name a baby.

We never precisely canceled our travel plans; they just got less and less ambitious. In the end, we spent a long-delayed honeymoon weekend at a beach a hundred miles from home, remarking frequently to each other on how good it was to have a change of scenery. Then we came back to this place in New Hampshire and had Audrey. Followed four years later by her brother Charlie. And two years after that by Willy. Now here he was in my arms, resting one sauce-orange hand in a proprietary manner on my shoulder, while Steve got Martin a beer and Jo examined my flowerbeds. Our dog Ron was licking her foot. Charlie was demonstrating his breakdancing.

Jo and Martin had no children. Neither did they own pets, a garden in need of weeding, a mortgage, a mailbox to which bills are delivered daily, or a pantry full of spaghetti sauce and preserves. Sitting by the fire, seeming instantly at home the way perpetual travelers often do, they told us the story of how they’d met. Jo had just come from India, Martin from France, when they ran into each other in a Moroccan cafe. From there they went to Scandinavia, working on a fishing boat, and then to Poland. “Never go to Poland in January,” said Jo.

During dinner Jo told us about climbing the Himalayas, about an ashram she visited in India, how she’d sold liquor and cassette players on the black market and how much better it was to get dollars than rupees. She told us about a meal of hallucinogenic mushrooms they’d been served in Nepal. A fabulous dinner, she said. Adding that my spaghetti sauce was also very good.

But on this particular evening being a good cook seemed not to matter very much, and my stocked pantry seemed more like an anchor than a treasure chest. I asked Jo if she didn’t find it hard, in her travels, to avoid the temptation of picking up possessions. (Knowing that, for me, part of the pleasure of a trip would be the acquisition of things to fill our house with when I got back.) No, she said. Things only tie you down.

After we had our pie and got the kids into bed, I asked Martin whether they saw many people with young children on the road.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “They have a great time. Who wants to see their children get stuck in a rut?” But domestically minded as I am, I was wondering what those babies’ parents did about naps and diapers, and thinking that our children have known too much of rootedness already to move easily into a nomad’s life. Like me, our children are attached to familiar objects and rituals: Audrey lines up her dolls and animals in a particular order on her bed every night. Charlie maintains a corner of his room he calls his Keeping Area, where he arranges his two favorite Astrosniks, a postcard of Pinocchio he got two years ago, a cardboard teepee we made, and a plastic Happy Meal bucket from McDonald’s. Even Willy likes to drink out of a particular cup, while sitting in a certain chair and watching his beloved
Pokey Little Puppy
video. I guess Martin would say my children are stuck in a rut.

This particular evening, what we were watching was Charlie Chaplin, in
The Gold Rush,
playing a lone vagabond who strikes it rich. When the movie was over, one of our friends took out his guitar and we sang a few songs. Sometime around midnight, the party broke up.

The next morning, eating breakfast, Steve and I talked about the travelers. What struck him about Jo and Martin, Steve said, was how you couldn’t quite place them. Sort of like television characters who inhabit one of those towns with no climate or dialect, that could be anywhere. “They seemed weightless,” he said—not really critically, just bemused. “I kept on thinking Martin was walking on air.” Feeling, myself, weighed down by about three thousand pounds of excess baggage, I said walking on air sounded fine to me. I looked at the sinkful of plates waiting to be washed, and the cat, licking scrambled eggs off Audrey’s plate, and my two sons, fighting over a water gun, and said there were days when I wouldn’t mind locking the door and walking away, standing on a highway, and sticking out my thumb.

Where I went that morning, instead, was into town on our weekly excursion to the dump, with a carload of trash. We ran into Jo and Martin on the way, just as they were setting out on their travels again.

“You know,” I told Martin. “I dreamed last night that I was traveling. I woke up envying you.”

He said that was funny; he’d dreamed he had a house like ours. I asked him if he thought of how he and Jo lived as just a stage in their lives, or if this was how their lives would always be.

“I don’t believe anything lasts forever,” said Martin. I thought at first he meant the traveling. But, studying the unsentimental face of this man who has got used to saying good-byes daily, I guessed that might apply to Jo, too, and wondered if she felt the same.

We are differently constructed, all right, those travelers and I. When I hear a song I love, I want to buy the record; when I spend a really pleasant evening somewhere, I want to spend another; when I met a man I loved, I wanted to set up housekeeping with him. When I encounter people who interest me, I write down their address and telephone number.

Martin and Jo, on the other hand, moved on that day, writing down nothing. I don’t think they got our last name, or that in a month or two Martin, at least, will remember in which New England state they spent a night, eating spaghetti and blueberry pie. I got the sense, that night, looking across our living room, that Steve and I, and our children and our guests, were a few more characters in the epic drama of his travels. People he might tell about, in passing, some night in Nepal.

For a couple of days it depressed me, thinking of the adventures that they were having and we were missing. Wincing over what Jo must have thought about my stacks of women’s magazine back issues, with recipes cut out, and the sentimental songs we sang that night. “Country Roads.” “Red River Valley.”

But I also thought of Charlie Chaplin, walking down that dirt road as the thatch-roofed farmhouse faded from view, twirling his cane with that brave jauntiness. And I know that though I may take some trips and wander down some roads in my time, it’s life under the thatched roof for me.

Sometimes I find myself thinking of the night the travelers passed through, as we lie in our bed under our patchwork quilt, listening to the slow, sighing respiration of our dog, or our children murmuring in their sleep; sometimes an image of them flashes before me, just as I’m reaching for a jar of this year’s batch of spaghetti sauce on my pantry shelves. Like Martin, I am never sure that anything can last forever. Still, I like having a few tomatoes growing in my garden and knowing I’ll be here to harvest them.

Our babysitter Vicky, who’d been living with us for a year and a half and to whom our children were devoted, had moved on. Unable to face the prospect of replacing her with a stranger right away, I took the summer off, but by late August I knew I’d better get to work, so I started running my ad. I had been interviewing job candidates for several days when Lydia called, and we had a number of pretty good prospects lined up. But I could see, with many of them, that like all the babysitters who have come and gone before, they would move on sooner or later (probably sooner) to children of their own, or better jobs, new places. And where other applicants needed to be sure they’d be home by four, or specified (wisely enough) that their evenings and weekends were always reserved for their own families, Lydia burst into our lives to say that she would always be there for us. She had almost no family of her own anymore, and no home. (She’d been a live-in housekeeper, for the last year or so, for a man who owned a weekend place in the next town but almost never used the place, who paid her no salary, just kept the refrigerator stocked and attended to her bills. She was starved for companionship and activity. And I knew we could provide it.) “Whatever you can manage to pay me, that’ll be fine,” she said when I apologized for not being able to offer a handsomer wage. “I just want to work for you.”

She was fifty-seven years old, but looked younger. She wore a T-shirt that said “I gave my soul to rock and roll” and big purple earrings, and she promised to show Audrey her entire costume-jewelry collection (a quick route to an eight-year-old girl’s heart). She happened to have a spare pair of earrings on her, in fact. She put those on Charlie’s bear—filling him with awe as well. Also in her purse: a harmonica (“you never know when you might need one of these”), a couple of coupons she thought I could use, and some interesting shells. She was full of cleaning tips, plans, recipes, good ideas of adventures to go on with the children. “Your kids will never be bored with Lydia around,” one of her references told me, when I called the next day. Or as Lydia put it (hearing of our struggle to get Charlie to stop sucking his thumb), “he won’t have time for that, I’ll keep him so busy.”

None of Lydia’s references was a former employer, precisely, but they all knew her from way back and attested to her boundless energy and enthusiasm, her wonderful cooking, her efficiency around a house, and above all, her love of children. Ours were fascinated with her: She told them about meeting an Indian chief in Nova Scotia who made her a feather headdress. She told them about the meteor that landed on her cousins’ Indiana farm, where they grew corn for corncob pipes, and how that meteor burned right through one side of the farmhouse and came out the other. She told me I should throw cucumber peels into our wood-stove, to guard against chimney fires, and (hearing me start up the engine on our old Plymouth Valiant) warned me that the starter motor was about to give out. “Nonsense,” laughed Steve. “I just gave the car a tune-up.”

I hadn’t officially hired her yet, but in the week or so while I was tracking down her references, Lydia called daily, sometimes twice a day. “I’ve been thinking about your kitchen floor,” she would begin (cutting right through the small talk). “I know just the kind of oil to put on it. I’ll get that floor so shiny you’ll see yourself.” One time she called to say she wanted to let me know she’d be out for a few hours. Just in case I called.

The truth was, I felt as eager to have her working here as she felt to work for us. Our lives (in the absence of Vicky) had already become so frazzled and hectic that I couldn’t wait for her to start. Steve—always the cautious, moderate one—suggested we take some time before making a decision. But he was so busy, too, that it was usually ten o’clock before I’d get around to raising the babysitter issue, and by then we were both too tired to discuss it.

So finally I called Lydia and told her she had the job. She came right over, in a borrowed car (having none of her own), and began moving boxes in: Her crown of thorns plant. Her record collection: Jim Nabors. The Grateful Dead. Beethoven. Shoeboxes full of jewelry, stuffed animals, more plants, a Mr. Coffee she’d found at a yard sale, hardly broken at all. A wine carafe in the shape of a geisha girl. Her Indian headdress.

She spent the next few days moving in. Sometimes, when she’d come with another carload, I’d be working at my desk in the downstairs of the little house where she’d be living, and once I was under such a tight deadline I had to tell her, as she bustled in and out, that this wasn’t a very good time for me. “I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” she said, hauling her spider plant up the stairs. But she wanted to show me a recipe she’d been saving, and a painting someone had given her, and a necklace, and a stained-glass plant hanger. One time she just wanted to come over to the desk and give me a hug. “I love your family,” she said. “You know, you’ll never get rid of me.”