Domestic Affairs (26 page)

We placed our order, careful to specify that half the pizza should have the works on top and half (the children’s portion) should be plain. The man told us to come back in half an hour, and we did—in good spirits, but starving.

But when the pizza was set before us, it was covered completely with mushrooms, anchovies, and onions, and I knew the children wouldn’t touch it. I sent it back, thinking maybe the pizza man could scrape off the extra stuff and replace it with a new topping, ready to go. He said it would take twenty minutes.

And—hungry, tired, frustrated at seeing our dinner out on the verge of being ruined—I exploded. I told the pizza man a few things about two-year-old boys (what they’re like after sitting in a high chair for twenty minutes, waiting for dinner). I told him (the way I tell my children; it’s a habit I can’t break) that he should at least say he was sorry. “I’m only human,” said the pizza man. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

Which was fair enough, but didn’t do much for the children, who were already losing their good humor. I tried taking Willy for a walk, but having once seen the pizza so close nearly within reach, he didn’t want to come. Charlie wanted to work the video games. Audrey was wriggling. “Why don’t you go walk around the block by yourself and let off some steam,” said Steve, seeing my clenched fists and tight-lipped expression. So I did.

When I came back, the pizza was nearly ready again. But just as the pizza man (to whom I had apologized, by now) began to cut our pizza, Steve got up from the table and headed out the door with Willy. I couldn’t imagine why, and he didn’t stop to tell me.

The rest of us sat at the table then for a couple of minutes, waiting for Steve to come back. Three minutes. Four. I drummed my fingers on the table exaggeratedly. Charlie began sucking his thumb. Audrey wanted to know if we could just start without the others. I said no. We were going to have a happy family dinner if it killed us.

When Steve had still not returned, after precisely six and a half minutes of waiting, I ran out of the restaurant after him. He was halfway down the block with Willy, and the two of them were walking back in our direction—but slowly, taking their time, admiring cracks in the sidewalk. “Steve!” I screamed, in a voice that must have made him think the restaurant was on fire.

Of course then he came fast, scooping Willy up in his arms and running, while I returned to our table and sat stonily across from our children and the still-untouched pizza, while the pizza man stared at me curiously.

Steve came in a minute later and sat down very calmly, explaining that he had taken Willy out to give the pizza time to cool. What was the matter with that?

Now comes the part that’s hard to tell: About how I stalked out of the restaurant with my beer, all appetite for pizza gone, and then sat, alone, for twenty minutes in the car (which was parked directly in front of the pizza parlor, in perfect view of my friend the pizza man), staring at a woman’s magazine that had been lying on the seat. How my family came out of the restaurant at last and Steve (not really angry) said quietly, “Ready to apologize?” And how I said nothing, and just kept staring at a recipe for Coffee Macadamia Nut Torte.

Neither one of us said anything, then, for a pretty miserable ten minutes. I was sorry, by that time, but I was also in so deep I didn’t know how to turn things around. I was tired, I was hungry, I was mad at myself for ruining our lovely day. I didn’t talk, then, about how I’d felt abandoned, back in the restaurant, with the pizza man giving me the evil eye and Steve gone and all the rest of us just sitting there, waiting. I didn’t talk about how badly I had wanted us all to have a good time. I didn’t, as I should have, close my eyes and think back to that morning and the happy whoop our children had let out when they heard that I was coming along with them. I just looked at my beer and a terrible urge came over me to throw it, and because nobody else had done anything wrong (except maybe the pizza man), I raised my cup and poured its contents all over myself.

I’m here to tell you, it didn’t work. Didn’t make me feel better, didn’t make my children happy again, didn’t result in a big hug from my husband. And if what one gets from throwing crockery, pouring the Rice Krispies out the window, snipping the clothesline in two, is more of the feeling I got from having beer drip down my hair into my eyes, then I think I’ll pass on future outbursts.

It’s a week now since the episode my children speak of as the night Mom threw her beer, and things are back to normal. For more days than I like to remember, though, every time I’d turn around, Charlie and Willy were dumping something (cereal, orange juice, bristle blocks) over their heads, and shrieking wildly. Of course I told them again and again that what I’d done was wrong, that it only made me feel terrible. Keeping things under control is a strain, all right. But losing control is worse.

This morning I baked a blueberry pie for my friend Barbara, who just gave birth to a baby boy. Then I ran in a five-mile road race, finishing 248th out of about 260 runners. I picked up my free T-shirt, stood under an open fire hydrant to cool off. And then I came back home, peeled off my sweaty running clothes, pulled on a dress, and drove with Audrey to a hillside a few miles outside of town to attend a memorial service for the daughter of friends of ours who died, three days ago, at the age of twenty months.

There is more, of course, that can be said about all of these events, beginning with Lindsay Turner, who was born with a serious congenital heart defect and died on the operating table during the sixth major heart surgery of her life—a very beautiful baby girl you might have seen, in her stroller, without realizing anything was wrong, unless you went to change her diaper and saw the scars that went from the front of her chest clear around to the back.

We barely knew the Turners when we offered to take care of their older daughter, Hannah, one time when Lindsay went into the hospital last fall. After the parents came back to town Joan told me what their year had been like: Lindsay’s birth was smooth and uncomplicated, but a few hours later she suddenly turned blue. An ambulance rushed her to Boston, where Joan and Donald learned that without a brand-new surgical procedure—the first of a whole series, whose oldest survivor was not yet four—their baby would be dead within hours. Of course they chose the surgery, although, describing it later, Joan told me softly that sometimes she wished they’d simply let Lindsay die. Terrible as it would have been to lose her then, it would get worse later.

By last spring, Lindsay had survived all but the final and most life-threatening stage of heart repair, and her parents dared to be optimistic—Donald boundlessly so, Joan cautiously. They’d go to her crib every morning wondering if she’d still be breathing. And still they carried her everywhere, too weak to walk, while Willy, three months younger, raced through our house and up the stairs, tumbling down them more than once, leaving me near tears from trying to keep up with him.

The Turners had money problems, but that was the least of it. There were problems with Hannah, who had to be left with friends and neighbors every time Lindsay went to the hospital again. There were days when Joan felt so bleak she simply couldn’t get out of bed. There were people who would stop her in the supermarket and, seeing Lindsay’s blue lips and fingers, tell her that she should dress her child more warmly. No one wanted the responsibility of babysitting Lindsay, so Joan and Donald never went anywhere, except to the hospital. And there was also the knowledge that they would never have another baby. The risk was too great that another child would be born with the same heart defect.

I called Joan and Donald sometimes, to see how they were doing, and now and then we’d bring Hannah over to our house to play But the truth is, I didn’t ever call as much as I should have. The demands of our own three children often seemed all I could handle—more than I could handle, sometimes.

And then too, people like helping out with small, manageable problems, and this one—about which nothing cheering and hopeful could be said, for which there were no real solutions—was just so overwhelming. Sometimes I just wanted to forget about Lindsay, and of course, for me, that was possible.

So I hadn’t talked to the Turners all summer, and didn’t even know that Lindsay had gone into the hospital for surgery at the beginning of July and had fallen into a coma. She remained there for weeks, until finally the doctors decided they had to operate on her heart immediately, even though the prospects looked grim.

But two days ago, driving into town with Steve and the children, heading out for an afternoon at the circus, we passed Joan and Donald and Hannah, driving in the opposite direction, and saw their car turn in to the funeral home.

No questions were necessary. We went to the circus anyway; we even laughed at one particularly funny clown. We got home very late, and I called a friend who told me that yes, Lindsay had died. The memorial service would be today. She was also the one who told me that our mutual friend Barbara had had her baby. We moved on to that other happy subject with relief.

When I first heard the news that Lindsay was dead and the service was today, the day of the five-mile race, I figured I wouldn’t run. But running this race was a deferred goal of mine, and I’d been determined all summer that this was the year I’d do it. This summer—the first in four years that I was neither pregnant nor nursing a baby, recovering from one pregnancy or contemplating another. For a few years there it had felt as though I’d given up my body to my children. I had just now begun feeling I’d got it back. Running the race was a sort of milestone.

So this morning I woke before my children did and took out my biggest mixing bowl and my pastry blender. I made two pies: one for the family that gained a child, one for the family that lost theirs. Sometimes I take shortcuts with the crust: neglect to put ice cubes in the water, prick holes in the top crust randomly instead of in a flower pattern. Today I took my time. And I could tell, just by looking at them, that these were good pies.

Then I put on my shorts and chose a T-shirt, tied my hair back and laced my sneakers tight. “I hope you win,” Charlie called out as I took off for the race, but (never having run five miles in my life) all I wanted was to finish.

The temperature had already reached around eighty when the race began this morning, and the course—even for experienced runners—was what they call a killer, with a mile-and-a-half-long uphill stretch halfway through the race. Around the two-mile point I felt ready to drop. Even children were passing me.

I guess all runners use little tricks to get them through the hardest parts of a race. The owner of the supermarket sponsoring this particular event, knowing how hot and tired we’d be, had posted a sign halfway up the big hill, with a picture of an overflowing beer mug on it. But as for me—feeling more pain, by then, than I had during childbirth—what I thought about were my children, and other people’s children. How much children put one through, and how much their presence in one’s life enlarges one’s capacity to withstand it. The way children take it out of you (all those mothers, jogging a little ahead of me, who like me were getting back in shape after childbearing). And what they give you back, too, that you didn’t have before.

Before I had my children, when I was in my early twenties, I was stronger, faster, with a firmer stomach and more time to exercise. But when I was younger, I would have quit in the middle of that hill, when the pain got bad, or sooner. As it was, I thought of going home and telling Audrey (who sometimes tells me she’s afraid she’ll never learn to ride a two-wheeler or execute a cartwheel) that I finished the race, and because of that, I think, I finished.

I guess that hill felt like a kind of penance, too, for ever allowing myself to feel anything but lucky that my children are healthy enough to sometimes drive me crazy. Of course I never stop loving and wanting them, but sometimes I focus on all the ways they’ve made my life harder, all the things they keep me from doing. When the truth is, of course, they also make possible everything that’s best.

T
HERE ARE FIVE CHILDREN
in Charlie’s preschool car pool. The school is a thirteen-mile drive from our house, and the children in the car pool all come from different directions, so getting them all together is a complicated business. Some days we drive only as far as a lunch counter/grocery called the Corner Store and then hand our passengers over to another driver. Some days we pick up a couple of children at the Corner Store and then drive four more miles, to Route 31, to meet up with another driver who takes them the rest of the way. And once a week we make all the stops and drive the full thirteen miles. Wednesday’s our day for that.

Usually it’s our babysitter who does the driving. I’m out there in my nightgown and felt-lined boots, standing in the snow, buckling my two sons into the car and hurrying Audrey off to her school bus when they set out in the morning, running back to the house for the odd mitten or pretzel. But then they’ll disappear down the driveway, driven by Vicky or (now) Joanie, and I’ll head back into my empty house to throw on my jeans and head out to work. By the time I’m turning on my typewriter, I figure they’ve reached the Corner Store. I sit there for a few minutes, sipping my coffee, trying to empty my head of sandwich making and sock hunting, and pour myself a second cup round about the time the children have probably reached Route 31. They’re probably just getting their coats and hats off, and sitting down for circle time, as I begin to type.

That’s how it is: my mind is always divided, and my concentration with it. Many mornings I wish it could be me driving in the car pool, and if Charlie has asked me particularly plaintively, sometimes I do. But then, along with the joy of that extra hour with my own children and the others (listening to their discussions of Halley’s Comet or afterschool plans, theories about how frost heaves happen and whose Mad Ball is the disgustingest), there’s always a part of me that ends up feeling anxious and rushed, knowing I’ll be falling behind with work and more distracted than ever.