Domestic Affairs (20 page)

“You lost something, didn’t you?” I said.

She nodded miserably. “One of Crystal Barbie’s shoes.”

I didn’t have to say I told her so. I pushed back all the furniture and took every pillow off the couch. I lifted the rug, and I emptied the wastebasket full of wrapping paper. Something had taken possession of me—I was irritated, upset, even a little frantic at the mess I was making in the room I’d just finished cleaning a half hour before, but I couldn’t stop looking for that shoe.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Audrey said finally—more upset by this time, I think, by the vision of me going crazy than she had been by the lost shoe. I would be embarrassed to say how many wastebaskets I went through before I finally gave up.

It was a few hours later that the memory came to me of something eerily similar that my own mother had done, one spring twenty years before. I had just got a new Skipper doll—to cheer me up, because my father had been in the hospital. I’d taken the doll outside and lost her shoe. My mother had spent an hour on her hands and knees, helping me search for that shoe in the thick grass. My mother—who, I always believed, could do anything—found it.

I always tell that story with affection, but I have always made fun of my mother a little for that too. What a lot of fuss to make over something so small, I have thought to myself.

Only the fuss was about something besides a doll’s shoe, of course. It was about loss and pain. Small pain, minor loss, in the scale of things. The kind of pain a mother can still control, can still prevent, maybe. Knowing, all the while, how many other sorrows there will be that she can’t do anything about: Little girls who don’t come to her party. Children on the playground who make fun of her overalls. Boys who ask someone else to the dance instead. Colleges she won’t get into. A lover who leaves.

The next day we went for a walk. It was a sunny, spring-like day. Maple sap was dripping into our buckets. Up ahead Charlie splashed happily in a muddy puddle. Willy, in the backpack, grabbed for branches overhead.

“You know what I wished for when I blew out the candles?” Audrey asked me. (She could tell me, because she hadn’t got them all out in one breath anyway and knew that meant her wish wouldn’t come true.) “I wished I’d never have to die, and you wouldn’t either, and neither would Dad and the boys.”

As I said, I wanted that birthday to be perfect, and I wanted to shield my child from loss and pain. And I actually thought that if I could only find that Barbie shoe, I could do it.

Charlie’s birthday comes a month and two days after Audrey’s. And because hers has always required such elaborate preparation, his tends to catch us short. Of cash, and of energy. The year Charlie turned two there was also the birth of Willy—two days after Audrey’s birthday. Followed two days later by the broken arm Audrey sustained on the Smurfette roller skates she got for her birthday, and two weeks after that by the broken arm Steve sustained at the end of an afternoon of skiing that was designed as a celebration of our having apparently survived the other calamities. (An excursion he made, incidentally, out of a desire to escape our house, and my high anxiety, on the eve of Audrey’s postponed party for twenty-two of her classmates.)

So on March 24, the second anniversary of Charlie’s amazing birth, all I could do was whisper the news to Audrey and tell her to keep it from her brother. Charlie had been primed for the event by Audrey’s two cakes and innumerable presents, and would (I thought) expect more hoopla than either Steve in his full-arm cast or I, nursing newborn Willy, felt able to orchestrate just then. We postponed his party until things got more normal.

Time passed, and I stopped knowing anymore what normal was supposed to be. Willy proved (by necessity) to be what’s known as a good baby. Dinners at our house, that spring, featured hot dogs with ever greater frequency. The aquarium started smelling pretty strongly of fish, and the plastic scuba diver had tipped over and was now buried, up to his goggles, in blue gravel, but no one had time to do anything about it. Steve found a mouse nest (but no socks) in his sock drawer. And Charlie took to asking every few days, “Where’d Charby’s birthday go?”

It was April by this time—and the longer I’d put off the birthday, the greater my anxiety and the more elaborate, it seemed, the party had to be. I made lists of things to buy, while Charlie checked the closet from which his sister’s presents had emerged back in February, asking “Birthday cake now? Candles for Charby?”

Then one afternoon Audrey came home from school and instead of turning on
Love Boat
or going upstairs to play, she asked if she could bake. I was nursing Willy and trying, at the same time, to do a puzzle with Charlie. With his good arm, Steve was working on the car, which had been running erratically again. When I told her I couldn’t bake with her, she asked if I could just put out some ingredients and she’d do the whole thing herself. And though the house was a terrible mess, and I was pretty frayed (but maybe because of those things too) I said okay.

I gave her a couple of eggs, a little pitcher with some milk in it, a few nuts, a few sesame seeds, some cocoa powder, and lifted canisters off the high shelf. I suggested an oven temperature of 350 degrees, but beyond that I left everything to Audrey, who did a lot of rushing back and forth to the mixer, mashing in a banana, tossing in a spoonful of mayonnaise. She cracked the eggs herself and chose a pan shaped like a star, which she greased, and into which she poured her batter. She cleaned up most of her mess. I turned on the oven light so she could look in and watch her cake as it baked. I told her not to expect too much. A cake is a pretty delicate thing, I said. She wasn’t worried.

After about a half hour of cooking I lifted the pan out of the oven and the cake tester came out clean. The cake, turned upside down on a gold plate, slid out of its pan perfectly star-shaped. Audrey ran to get two candles (not little birthday candles, but a pair of half-burned tapers) and stuck them in the center. “Charlie,” she said. “It’s your birthday now.”

For presents all we had was a dollar-twenty-nine cowboy hat we’d picked up a couple of days before, still in its brown paper bag, tied with a ribbon. I lit the candles, and we all gathered around. We sang “Happy Birthday,” Charlie extinguished the flames, and Audrey served up the cake—which probably wouldn’t win a bake off, but tasted okay. One might even say tasty.

Then Charlie opened his present, put it on his head, and began to gallop around the living room, whooping, “Cowboy, cowboy.” Audrey, without a moment’s hesitation, stuck her fingers in the remains of her cake, smearing brown crumbs on her cheeks. “I’m an Indian,” she said. She tied the ribbon around her head for a headband, handed Charlie his hobby horse, and the two of them ran around and around chasing each other until bedtime.

There is a lesson in all of this. I hope I have learned it.

T
HE FIRST CALL CAME
around nine o’clock one night, more than a dozen years ago. I was living alone in the country—unmarried, twenty years old. Watching whatever happened to be on TV, finishing my second bowl of ice cream, when the phone rang. The man talked like a cowboy, said he lived in Oklahoma and his name was Lloyd. He’d read and liked a book I wrote. The name of my town had been mentioned somewhere, and my phone number was listed with information. He wanted, he said, to be my friend.

I thought it was a joke, someone I knew from college (I’d dropped out after my freshman year), one of my old acting friends trying out an accent for some play he was in. That’s what I figured. But there was also the odd way this call had come at a moment (not by any means a rare one, in those days) when what I needed badly was someone to call me up and say he’d be my friend. There were things he said that made me feel he really knew who I was. A Hank Williams record that I owned too was playing in the background while we talked. He’d held a lot of different kinds of jobs, worked at a Campbell’s Soup factory one time just because he wanted to see the tomato soup he loved. He talked about books he read, promising to send me about a dozen he mentioned: American history, obscure short-story collections, movie-star biographies. He was a birdwatcher, and said I had to have a copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide. Hank Williams was singing all this time: “Jambalaya,” “Your Cheating Heart,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

“Come on,” I said, as we were finally about to ring off. “Who is this really?” Your friend Lloyd, he said. From Oklahoma. I said all right then, what’s the Oklahoma state bird? “Scissortail Flycatcher.” That sounded like a joke for sure.

The next day I looked up the answer to my question in an almanac, and of course he’d been right. A week later came a package containing the only picture I ever saw of him (cut from his high-school yearbook) showing a very handsome dark-eyed boy, the center forward, plus the books he’d promised, each one elaborately inscribed with my name in oversized capital letters on the first page. “Property of … Hands OFF. KEEP OUT!!!” Now and then, reading along or flipping through the pages, I’d come across a few words that were underlined, with a comment in the margin. In a biography of Vivien Leigh, her birthday (the same as mine) circled in red, with exclamation points all around it. Something about birds, or country music, and sometimes a subject I didn’t even think I’d mentioned (a food I liked, a movie I’d seen four times). If a character in a novel wore her hair the way I did on the cover of my book, there’d be a comment. And over and over again there the words, “Don’t forget, you can always count on me.”

I know what all this sounds like (psychopath twisting the phone cord; unhappy young woman alone in the woods). My mother, hearing about Lloyd, made no comment, then called back a day later to say, “I can’t stop thinking about that man in Oklahoma. I’m scared for you.” I told her, told myself (and the many people I entertained with the story of his increasingly frequent phone calls) that I was getting into this because it was such a good story.

And though he called me, by now, twice a week (very often after the old
Mary Tyler Moore Show,
that he and I—hard to say
we
—both loved) and though I seldom cut the calls short, I never phoned him. At some point, though, I realized that if he disappeared, I’d miss him. He sent packages weekly: books, newspaper clippings, tapes—but I never (though I copied down his address) mailed him anything. Even his strange form of communication—forming an attachment based on a photograph from a book jacket, talking only by phone and exchanging precious little information about the basic facts of either person’s daily life, work, family—made an odd kind of sense to me. Never mind that he was thirty-eight and I was twenty, that his passion was the Oklahoma Sooners football team and I built dollhouse furniture. The very fact that our two lives held so little in common seemed to me, now and then, to suggest the presence of some much deeper form of kinship. Of course it seemed crazy that I was sitting in my house in the middle of a New Hampshire winter (and then another one), on a Saturday night, talking for an hour with a man I’d never met, who lived two thousand miles away, someone who had just got home from his office Christmas party, where a divorcee from the secretarial pool had stuck his cowboy hat on her head and invited him to be her date at a rodeo next weekend, a man who said no, because he wanted instead to stay home, watch Mary Tyler Moore, and call me. But every now and then I’d go to a party too or visit friends at college, where I’d find myself face to face with some young Ivy League type, and I’d ask him what his major was, and he’d tell me about applying to medical school—and all the social rites and customs we’d go through, on the way to absolutely nothing more than the cheese-and-crackers platter, seemed just as crazy to me as what was going on with Lloyd. Maybe more so.

He sent me strange, wonderful presents. A deluxe two-key harmonica (with the request that I learn how to play “Red River Valley” in time to perform it, over the telephone, for his birthday in May). A pair of blue cowboy boots and an Oklahoma football jersey. A four-record set of bird calls. A pair of apple-head dolls made by Oklahoma Indians. An antique green-velvet doll-sized chaise longue. A hand-inlaid veneer table that played “Lara’s Theme” from
Doctor Zhivago
when you lifted the top. One of the first American Cuisinarts, with a gold plaque attached to the side inscribed with my name and the words “HANDS OFF!!!” He sent so many books that I had to buy two new sets of shelves. For my part, I sent nothing, but any time an article I’d written showed up in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
or
Seventeen,
he’d know about it. He was keeping a scrapbook about me, he said.

Once in a while he’d make some remark about paying me a visit in New Hampshire. There were one or two times, real low points in my life, when I felt I had to go away somewhere, and Oklahoma (more than some other place where old friends and family lived) came to mind. But it was easier to be brave on the telephone than in real life. In real life, I left my house in New Hampshire and got a job in New York. Had a few appropriate-seeming boyfriends who weren’t nearly as interesting or funny, as good company or as devoted to me as Lloyd, and whose names and faces I can’t now recall. Lloyd still called on Saturday nights—though sometimes I’d be out and I’d come home to find his message on my new answering machine. He never got the hang of waiting for the beep.

Then I met Steve (whose family, on his father’s side, were Oklahomans), and within a month I’d quit my job, given notice on my apartment, and made plans to move with him back to New Hampshire and get married. And even though over the four years since Lloyd had started calling, not one word of love or commitment had been spoken, still, with Steve there in the room, I felt guilty and two-timing the next time Lloyd called me. I meant to tell Lloyd about Steve that night, and then the next time he called; but he was full of the story of a cheese dish that he was sending me he’d seen in a store window in Oklahoma City, and a toy bird in a cage that sang just like a real one. He’d made a tape for me of the last episode of the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
that he was sending enclosed in a five-pound can of macadamia nuts.