Goodbye Without Leaving (16 page)

The second month there, as I was waiting to pick up Little Franklin, I noticed a woman giving me what used to be called “the hairy eyeball.” She stared and stared. Finally she came over.

She had a quantity of fuzzy yellow hair, freckles and a diamond ring on her finger that probably made it hard for her to lift a fork or spoon.

“You don't know me,” she said.

“I don't,” I said.

“But I know you.”

“You do?”

“I used to be Pixie Lehar,” she said. “I'm Paulette Goldberg.”

“Oh, right!” I said. “Spider Joe Washburn told me you lived in this neighborhood.”

“That sleaze,” she said.

“I thought you were probably dead from being a hairoyne addict,” I said.

“Vernon,” she said. “What an old lady. I only snorted a few brown flakes once or twice, but you know what that does to a girl's eyes. Vernon thought he could spot a junkie a mile away. What a nance! But you were a good girl. That was the buzz. What are
you
doing here?”

“My little boy just started the twos program,” I said.

“My daughter, Cilia, is in the nines, and my son, Otis, is in the sevens.” She took a lipstick out of her bag and painted her lips bright red. “I'm on the parents' committee,” she said.

“Do you keep up with anyone from old times?” I said.

“Keep up!” she said. “Are you kidding? It's bad enough to be hit on by a jive-hummer like Washburn. It was a phase, you know. Sort of fun at the time, but I'm glad it's over. I mean, look what washed up on the shore! All those dumb girls in their little dresses drugging their brains out and thinking that they had a million years till adulthood set in. I mean.”

I sighed. Probably I was just like one of those girls, except I hadn't drugged my brains out.

“How did you get,” I asked, “from there to here?”

“Hmm,” she said. “Well, let's see. I was a very bad girl at college. I mean, a girls' school, can you believe it? I dropped out and, you know. One thing. Another, then another. I used to dance at the old Bombsite, remember? Then I backed up this group called Big Thing and Little Ed. Remember them? They were sort of nowhere but I was with Little Ed at the time so it seemed like a good idea, and then we opened for Ruby one night, God knows why. We were pretty terrible, but loud. I still think I have partial hearing loss in my right ear from jumping around in front of those speakers. Then Vernon fired me. It was your very friend Spider Joe Washburn that I used to get smacked up with. He hung around the scene, that scunge. What a jerk! Then I worked for that guy Lenny Decatur, he repped all these acts. You probably don't remember him. Another sleaze in the music business. Like my father used to say, a real American Indian: a Schmohawk. Just when I thought the light at the end of the tunnel had just about gone out, I met Bob Goldberg, who had nothing to do with the music business really, except that he happened to be Lenny Decatur's cousin and when they were in college they had collaborated on that song ‘You Make Me Go on Fire.' Remember?
‘Ooh woo, smoke! Smoke
!' It was kind of a novelty song and made a million dollars. So we got married and eventually I had Cilia and Otis and now I work at
Kids
Magazine. And yourself?”

I said I had quit the tour and worked at the Race Music Foundation, got married and had Little Frankln. It sounded totally reasonable, a straight line. “I don't know what next,” I said.

“Next,” said Paulette, “I have to go pick Cilia up for her dentist appointment. Catch you later.”

I looked at my watch. It was time to pick my baby up.

Oh, Little Franklin! The look of happiness on his face when he saw me waiting made my heart open and close like a sea anemone. I had never imagined I could love anyone so much, and when people asked, as they did incessantly, when was I going to have another, I was always struck dumb. I had one husband, one mother and one father. Why was I supposed to have two children? The idea of sharing myself with some other child and Little Franklin seemed to me totally out of the question.

At night I tossed and turned and wished that in the welter of books about child development there was one about stages in parent development. What about separation anxiety among parents? What about stages of independence from your child? At night I held my darling Franklin in my arms and realized that I would never know him as an old man. Johnny said, “In a couple of years you won't know anything about his bowel movements. Think of that!”

I did think of that. I thought and thought about that. Franklin on a bus by himself. Franklin and his buddies going off to play hockey. In my imaginings I myself grew smaller and smaller, like a person seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Pretty soon the whole idea of having a mother would be a joke, from Franklin's point of view. “Aw, Ma,” he would doubtless say. “Lemme alone. Don't kiss me goodbye in front of school, okay? It looks queer. Nobody else's mother kisses them.” And sooner than later I would hear, “Aw, Ma. I can get home by myself. It's no big deal. Stop treating me like a baby.”
Stop treating me like a baby
—the same words I and millions of other developing children had uttered time after time, and soon my little baby boy would utter them to me. Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said:
I have a child who is at school at the moment
.

When I smiled at mothers with their children in the supermarket, they stared at me as if I were insane, and perhaps I was. There was no book to tell me what I was supposed to feel, but one thing was perfectly clear: eventually, I was going to have to get a job.

39

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.

I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. I had once been something. Now it was time to become something else. Being someone's mother was not enough.

Ann Potts (whom Mary referred to as “the Smoking Poet”) and I discussed these issues endlessly as we sat at “Carole and Peter” Café, a little joint in our neighborhood that sold sandwiches, cookies, coffee and groceries. We had taken Franklin and Amos there as babies and as toddlers, and now we brought them in after school for ice cream. In the mornings we sat by ourselves drinking coffee, reading the paper and conversing in a meandering sort of way. I found these mornings lazy and beautiful.

“I think I have to look for a job,” I said.

“Here,” said Ann, handing me the paper. “You can have the want ads.”

“Very funny,” I said. “At least you know what you want to do.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Ann said. “You don't think I'm sitting at home writing sonnets in my five minutes of spare time, do you? Eventually I'll have to see if I can get my job back at the Poetry Society, if they haven't given it to some beautiful young thing. Of course,
I
used to be the beautiful young thing. What a tragedy! I keep thinking I'll call them but I keep doing the laundry instead. It's kind of a tic.”

“Laundry,” I said, yawning. “I never really understood about laundry before. It's a kind of Möbius strip—no end and no beginning.”

“Men never understand about laundry,” Ann said. “I mean, Winnie doesn't. I guess he doesn't get much call for clean laundry at Squirrel Productions.” This was the name of Winnie's design company.

“I'm sure at Johnny's firm they do the laundry for them,” I said. “They seem to do everything else.”

Ann spun the magazine racks. Among the fashion and news magazines were those for women, the very magazines that said we must be totally available but make our children independent.

As the mother of a young child, I was supposed to be totally related to my child but not so much as to cripple his emerging sense of self. By being completely available, I would also be able to know when to let go. All this, and laundry too!

“‘Fun dads,'” Ann read. “‘More fun, more time.' These fun dads give me hives. Carole, do you mind if we buzz through
Vogue
if we promise not to get any smudge marks on it?”

“‘Care-giver for small child,'” I read from the want ads. “‘Academic family.' Hey! Here's my job!”

“I'll give you a reference,” Ann said. “Amos thinks you're a very nice mother.”

“I'm a lovely little mother,” I said. “Turn that page around, will you? We have to go out this weekend and I have no clothes.”

“Endless laundry and nothing to wear,” Ann said. “Isn't it a bite? How 'bout one of your little fringe dresses, or is it a formal affair?”

“Even my formal clothes have child smearings on them,” I said. “Of course, that's only a manner of speaking. I have no formal clothes.”

We sat in the yellow sunlight, drinking our coffee. The café smelled enticingly of coffee and salami.

“We're going out, too,” Ann said. “So I guess we can't baby-sit for each other.”

“I hate going out,” I said.

“I love it,” said Ann. “The bliss of going to the ladies' room without having someone under three feet in there with you.” She yawned and stretched her arms. “Last time we went out, I found that I had packed a box of raisins in my handbag.”

I said: “I hate leaving my nice warm house right when I'm most exhausted and then going out somewhere with awful food and where everyone has a swell, high-powered job, plans to take their six children under four skiing in Tibet, and full-time child care. It makes me tired.”

“It's all guilt. You feel guilty because you stay home and they feel guilty because they don't.”

“I guess part-time work is the answer,” I said.

“Then you feel guilty because you're not giving either thing your full attention. Gosh, I'm sleepy. Amos won't go to bed anymore. He stays up until eleven without a nap and then he falls into a kind of coma on his bed and turns the color of a white cabbage.”

“Really? A white cabbage?” I said. “I'm sort of a white cabbage myself. I've been up since quarter to six.”

“Gosh,” said Ann, turning a page of her magazine. “Get this! Velvet and suede. How gorgeous! Only one year's tuition at Malcolm Sprague and I could have it. Maybe I should read more role-appropriate trash, like
Kids
Magazine. Speaking of which, what's the name of that attack dog who works for it?”

“Pixie Goldberg. She's really very nice,” I said. “She's just a little aggressive. She was one of Ruby's backups, you know.”

“No,” said Ann. “You're kidding.
Her
?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “And furthermore, Vernon fired her because he thought she was a hairoyne addict.”

“Otis and Cilia's
mother
?”

“Yup,” I said. “She wasn't, but there you are. Accused of being a hairoyne addict and now she has a rich husband, a mink coat, live-in help and a full-time job.”

“Gee,” said Ann. “I don't know, but she makes being a drug addict look good. I smoked a lot of dope and I don't have any of those things.”

“You're a
poet
,” I said. “She sits in her office and writes headlines about fun dads.”

“I have nothing,” said Ann. “My cigarettes are my friends. Gosh, look at the time! We have to go get our boys any minute, and I bet neither of us has our dinner menu planned.”

We ambled off to the greengrocer's and then we picked our darlings up at school and went back to the café for a snack. I took Little Franklin home, settled him down for a nap or an attempted nap, did the laundry, picked up the toys, put away the dishes, folded the laundry, got the mail, and then relaxed for two or three minutes before rest time was over.

Then off to the park, or to the supermarket, or to buy new shoes or a raincoat, or to Amos's house, or to the bakery for a snack if Ann and Amos were coming to visit us.

Then it was time to make dinner, to serve Franklin dinner, to scrape some of the dropped dinner off the floor. Then bath, time for Daddy's homecoming, story reading, good-night kisses, drinks of water, adjustment of the night light. When Franklin was asleep Johnny and I had dinner, during which I propped my head on my hand to keep it from falling into my plate.

And so another day slipped by, at the end of which I was totally exhausted and had done absolutely nothing whatsoever about my future.

40

I did not wear my dance dress to Simon and Alice's dinner party. I did not get drunk, throw up or try to seduce Simon, a small, intense person whom Ann Potts would doubtlessly have labeled “verbally aggressive.” Their two horrible-looking children were on show for half an hour before the haggard French au pair girl put them to bed. Alice and Simon did not approve of a second language for young children, but, “in context,” it was different, and it was so nice to have Geneviève around.

“I didn't know you guys spoke French,” I said.

“Oh, I had it in college. I can make myself understood,” Alice said. “It's important for the children.”

“We're thinking of getting a Chinese au pair,” I said. “It's definitely the language of the future, and it would be so helpful later on in Chinese restaurants.” Johnny gave me a terrible look.

“What a great idea!” Alice said. “You know, there's a program—I can't remember where—that offers Chinese to young kids. I mean, it would be such fun for them to learn how to write it!”