Living Out Loud (7 page)

Perhaps for some of my colleagues this pledge meant they would never cry. For me, however, it meant occasionally going to the jane, locking myself in a stall and sobbing while I flushed the toilet repeatedly so that no one could hear me. I would then emerge with a complexion as mottled as Genoa salami, make a few remarks about something stuck under my contact lens (I do not wear contact lenses), and then take out the blush, the blush brush, the lipstick, and the rest and wash and remake my face while everyone in the jane tactfully looked away or pretended to be talking about sexual harassment, the latest Supreme Court decision, or the white sale at Bloomingdale’s. I would emerge from the jane looking as if nothing had happened.

I shouldn’t suggest that there are no bad things about the jane, because there are. One of the most unforgettable bad moments of my life took place in one, my last year in high school. I entered and the room fell silent, so silent you could hear the water running through the pipes. There was only one explanation; everyone had been talking about me. To this day I can remember the color of the wall tiles. They were beige.

But at the same time, some of the fastest friendships I have ever made were made in the jane. There is something about washing your hands side-by-side with another human being that breaks down socially learned barriers of reserve. (This explains why surgeons are so friendly with other surgeons,
sometimes to the exclusion of everyone else.) I met many of my female friends by swapping exasperations with them in the jane: “What a day!” “I’ve had it with this place!” “If he gives me a hard time one more time!” and the like. Some of them were even people who had seen me cry, although they would never say anything, except maybe, “Need a tissue?”

I think any of those people could tell you that if the proposed equal rights amendment was likely to turn the jane and the john into some androgynous hybrid called the jackie, I would be one of the first to stand up and say, “Enough!”

I
am on the telephone to the emergency room of the local hospital. My elder son is getting stitches in his palm, and I have called to make myself feel better, because I am at home, waiting, and my husband is there, holding him. I am thirty-four years old, and I am crying like a child, making a slippery mess of my face. “Mrs. Krovatin?” says the nurse, and for the first time in my life I answer “Yes.”

This is a story about a name. The name is mine. I was given it at birth, and I have never changed it, although I married. I could come up with lots of reasons why. It was a political decision, a simple statement that I was somebody and not an adjunct of anybody, especially a husband. As a friend of mine told her horrified mother, “He didn’t adopt me, he married me.” It was a professional and a personal decision, too. I grew up with an ugly dog of a name, one I came to love because I though it was weird and unlovable.
Amid the Debbies and Kathys of my childhood, I had a first name only grandmothers had and a last name that began with a strange letter. “Sorry, the letters I, O, Q, U, V, X, Y, and Z are not available,” the catalogues said about monogrammed key rings and cocktail napkins. Seeing my name in black on white at the top of a good story, suddenly it wasn’t an ugly dog anymore.

But neither of these are honest reasons, because they assume rational consideration, and it so happens that when it came to changing my name, there was no consideration, rational or otherwise. It was mine. It belonged to me. I don’t even share a checking account with my husband. Damned if I was going to be hidden beneath the umbrella of his identity. It seemed like a simple decision. But nowadays I think the only simple decisions are whether to have grilled cheese or tuna fish for lunch. Last week, my older child wanted an explanation of why he, his dad, and his brother have one name and I have another.

My answer was long, philosophical, and rambling—that is to say, unsatisfactory. What’s in a name? I could have said disingenuously. But I was talking to a person who had just spent three torturous, exhilarating years learning names for things, and I wanted to communicate to him that mine meant something quite special to me, had seemed as form-fitting as my skin, and as painful to remove. Personal identity and independence, however, were not what he was looking for; he just wanted to make sure I was one of them. And I am—and then again, I am not. When I made this decision, I was part of a couple. Now, there are two of me, the me who is the individual and the me who is part of a family of four, a family of four in which, in a small way, I am left out.

A wise friend who finds herself in the same fix says she never wants to change her name, only to have a slightly different identity as a family member, an identity for pediatricians’ offices and parent-teacher conferences. She also says that the
entire situation reminds her of the women’s movement as a whole. We did these things as individuals, made these decisions about ourselves and what we wanted to be and do. And they were good decisions, the right decisions. But we based them on individual choice, not on group dynamics. We thought in terms of our sense of ourselves, not our relationships with others.

Some people found alternative solutions: hyphenated names, merged names, matriarchal names for the girls and patriarchal ones for the boys, one name at work and another at home. I did not like those choices; I thought they were middle grounds, and I didn’t live much in the middle ground at the time. I was once slightly disdainful of women who went all the way and changed their names. But I now know too many smart, independent, terrific women who have the same last names as their husbands to be disdainful anymore. (Besides, if I made this decision as part of a feminist world view, it seems dishonest to turn around and trash other women for deciding as they did.)

I made my choice. I haven’t changed my mind. I’ve just changed my life. Sometimes I feel like one of those worms I used to hear about in biology, the ones that, snipped in half, walked off in different directions. My name works fine for one half, not quite as well for the other. I would never give it up. Except for that one morning when I talked to the nurse at the hospital, I always answer the question “Mrs. Krovatin?” with “No, this is Mr. Krovatin’s wife.” It’s just that I understand the down side now.

When I decided not to disappear beneath my husband’s umbrella, it did not occur to me that I would be the only one left outside. It did not occur to me that I would ever care—not enough to change, just enough to think about the things we do on our own and what they mean when we aren’t on our own anymore.

I
have two enduring memories of the hours just before I gave birth to my first child. One is of finding a legal parking space on Seventy-eighth Street between Lexington and Park, which made my husband and me believe that we were going inside the hospital to have a child who would always lead a charmed life. The other is of walking down Lexington Avenue, stopping every couple of steps to find myself a visual focal point—a stop sign, a red light, a pair of $200 shoes in a store window—and doing what the Lamaze books call first-stage breathing. It was 3:00
A
.
M
. and coming toward me through a magenta haze of what the Lamaze books call discomfort were a couple in evening clothes whose eyes were popping out of their perfect faces. “Wow,” said the man when I was at least two steps past them. “She looks like she’s ready to burst.”

I love New York, but it’s a tough place to be pregnant. It’s a great place for half sour pickles,
chopped liver, millionaires, actors, dancers, akita dogs, nice leather goods, fur coats, and baseball, but it is a difficult place to have any kind of disability and, as anyone who has filled out the forms for a maternity leave lately will tell you, pregnancy is considered a disability. There’s no privacy in New York; everyone is right up against everyone else and they all feel compelled to say what they think. When you look like a hot-air balloon with insufficient ballast, that’s not good.

New York has no pity: it’s every man for himself, and since you are yourself-and-a-half, you fall behind. There’s a rumor afoot that if you are pregnant you can get a seat on the A train at rush hour, but it’s totally false. There are, in fact, parts of the world in which pregnancy can get you a seat on public transportation, but none of them are within the boundaries of the city—with the possible exception of some unreconstructed parts of Staten Island.

What you get instead are rude comments, unwarranted intrusions and deli countermen. It is a little-known fact that New York deli countermen can predict the sex of an unborn child. (This is providing that you order, of course. For a counterman to provide this service requires a minimum order of seventy-five cents.) This is how it works: You walk into a deli and say, “Large fruit salad, turkey on rye with Russian, a large Perrier and a tea with lemon.” The deli counterman says, “Who you buying for, the Rangers?” and all the other deli countermen laugh.

This is where many pregnant women make their mistake. If it is wintertime and you are wearing a loose coat, the preferred answer to this question is, “I’m buying for all the women in my office.” If it is summer and you are visibly pregnant, you are sunk. The deli counterman will lean over the counter and say, studying your contours, “It’s a boy.” He will then tell a tedious story about sex determination, his Aunt Olga, and a clove of garlic, while behind you people waiting on line shift
and sigh and begin to make Zero Population Growth and fat people comments. (I once dealt with an East Side counterman who argued with me about the tea because he said it was bad for the baby, but he was an actor waiting for his big break, not a professional.) Deli countermen do not believe in amniocentesis. Friends who have had amniocentesis tell me that once or twice they tried to argue: “I already know it’s a girl.” “You are wrong.” They gave up: “Don’t forget the napkins.”

There are also cabdrivers. One promptly pulled over in the middle of Central Park when I told him I had that queasy feeling. When I turned to get back into the cab, it was gone. The driver had taken the $1.80 on the meter as a loss. Luckily, I never had this problem again, because as I grew larger, nine out of ten cabdrivers refused to pick me up. They had read the tabloids. They knew about all those babies christened Checker (actually, I suppose now most of them are Plymouths) because they’re born in the back seat in the Midtown Tunnel. The only way I could get a cabdriver to pick me up after the sixth month was to hide my stomach by having a friend walk in front of me. The exception was a really tiresome young cabdriver whose wife’s due date was a week after mine and who wanted to practice panting with me for that evening’s childbirth class. Most of the time I wound up taking public transportation.