Living Out Loud (8 page)

And so it came down to the subways: men looking at their feet, reading their newspapers, working hard to keep from noticing me. One day on the IRT I was sitting down—it was a spot left unoccupied because the rainwater had spilled in the window from an elevated station—when I noticed a woman standing who was or should have been on her way to the hospital.

“When are you due?” I asked her. “Thursday,” she gasped. “I’m September,” I said. “Take my seat.” She slumped down and said, with feeling, “You are the first person to give me a seat on the subway since I’ve been pregnant.” Being New
Yorkers, with no sense of personal privacy, we began to exchange subway, taxi, and deli counterman stories. When a man sitting nearby got up to leave, he snarled, “You wanted women’s lib, now you got it.”

Well, I’m here to say that I did get women’s lib, and it is my only fond memory of being pregnant in New York. (Actually, I did find pregnancy useful on opening day at Yankee Stadium, when great swarms of people parted at the sight of me as though I were Charlton Heston in
The Ten Commandments
. But it had a pariah quality that was not totally soothing.)

One evening rush hour during my eighth month I was waiting for a train at Columbus Circle. The loudspeaker was crackling unintelligibly and ominously and there were as many people on the platform as currently live in Santa Barbara, Calif. Suddenly I had the dreadful feeling that I was being surrounded. “To get mugged at a time like this,” I thought ruefully. “And this being New York, they’ll probably try to take the baby, too.” But as I looked around I saw that the people surrounding me were four women, some armed with shoulder bags. “You need protection,” one said, and being New Yorkers, they ignored the fact that they did not know one another and joined forces to form a kind of phalanx around me, not unlike those that offensive linemen build around a quarterback.

When the train arrived and the doors opened, they moved forward, with purpose, and I was swept inside, not the least bit bruised. “Looks like a boy,” said one with a grin, and as the train began to move, we all grabbed the silver overhead handles and turned away from one another.

M
y friend’s voice was as plaintive as a bird’s song at night. “Do you know what I really want to do?” she said. “Look for floor tile, make pies, and have another baby?” I replied. “No,” she said. “Shop for wallpaper, go to antique shops, and have another baby. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“I think you’re average,” I said.

I’ve had this conversation a half dozen times this winter. The women in question all have one great child and one great job. They’re enamored of the kid and tired of the work, in part because it takes too much time away from the kid. That doesn’t mean they want to quit, necessarily: “How does four mornings a week sound to you?” another of them said to me one day, rhetorically. But they’ve all heard the stories about how it’s the second baby that’s the hole in the bottom of your career boat, plunging you to the depths of domesticity. And they want the second baby. And maybe the boat, too.

But what a lot of them also miss I’ll call, for lack of a better term, nesting. It’s the wallpaper, the pies, the altogether trivial assemblage of those small component parts that make up life for many of us. Nesting has been traditionally undervalued. This is because nesting has largely been the purview of women.

I, on the other hand, have traditionally overvalued nesting, because I am a crazed nester. It gives me the illusion that the world is a secure and predictable place, with certain pictures on certain walls and certain little piles of pillows on certain beds. I do not always like making soup, fudge, afghans, quilts, and brownies, but I like to at least consider making them. One Saturday at the end of my first pregnancy, I bought fresh flowers for the kitchen, the bedroom, and two of the bathrooms, hung curtains in the baby’s room, went to the butcher for lamb chops, and cooked them, along with a cheese soufflé. When the flowers were arranged, the curtains hung, the dinner eaten and the dishes washed, I went into labor. There’s a term for this routine in pregnancy books. They call it the nesting instinct, and they warn you about it because if you’ve been running around buying flowers and lamb chops during the day you’ll be too tired to push that night. However, it gave me a certain sense of pride, when the nurse wrote down what I’d last eaten, to be able to say cheese soufflé.

We undervalue nesting now in part because we think of it as a fifties kind of thing, the kind of thing that Mrs. Cleaver did when Wally and the Beav were away at school and she could just sit back with a cup of coffee, go through some pattern books, whip up café curtains for the kitchen and then make some chocolate-chip cookies. Like many of the other things we believe about the mothers in our lives, this one is largely wrong. With five children spread over ten years, my mother had no time for nesting. She didn’t have the job, but she didn’t have the sitter, either, and it would be years until she got us all in school at the same time. The closest she ever
got to paging through wallpaper books and restoring furniture was when she sprung for a diaper pail in a nice pastel.

I’ve got the sitter, all right, but I also have the job. The last time I looked at wallpaper, I took the kids along, which shows that even fairly intelligent people are sometimes rendered unbelievably stupid by their own competing interests. And I thought seriously about killing three birds with one stone and writing a piece about selecting wallpaper.

Occasionally, over the last ten years, I have met a woman with children in school all day and no job, and I have thought, quite uncharitably and almost reflexively, what in the world does she find to do with herself all day? I don’t think that anymore. Now I imagine lunch with a friend, considering slipcovers, doing a little gardening, spending an hour working on dinner before everyone arrives home. That life—of ladies’ lunches, of appointments with the upholsterer, and shopping trips stretched to fill the empty hours—is something I ran from with furious little feet when I was growing up. It’s something that barely exists now, except among the very rich; it’s something that’s barely tolerated by men—or by women. It’s not that I would like it as a way of life. I’d just like a little fling with it every once in a while.

I’m making this sound a bit too much like an alternative to work. And it’s quite distinct from that, and from home decoration, and from having children. (I am sure, for example, that the reason you have such a manic urge to nest the day before you give birth is that it is nature’s way of telling you you will not be able to so much as purchase pillowcases for six months.) The word “nesting” is right for it—the sporadic assemblage of small bits and pieces, woven together, arranged correctly, until you are comfortable sitting amidst them. Or perhaps the precise word is something that’s almost become an expletive in recent years. I know a fair number of women who wouldn’t mind spending just a little more time being homemakers. Making
a home. Getting all the fine points right. Surrounding themselves and their families with a cosy twig house of gimcracks and linens and plastic containers filled with good things to eat, in the mistaken belief that this will make everyone happy and safe. It’s not a big thing. But I’m tired of big things. Sometimes I just want the time for the little ones, the hours to feather my nest.

I
t was not until my last year in college that students could live in a coeducational dorm. As with the inauguration of any social experiment, there was a fair amount of press coverage and a lot of alarmist talk, mostly about how we would all wind up swinging from the doorjambs naked and giving birth to unwanted triplets.

This could not have been further from the truth. Instead of orgies, the arrangement bred familiarity. Our tiny tubs of yogurt commingled on the windowsills during the winter. And on a few occasions, a member of one or the other sex ignored the elaborate system of signs rigged up for the bathroom doors and some slight shrieking ensued. It was, in some ways, good preparation for marriage, but not in the way our parents feared.

Nevertheless I came away, unfashionable as it was, thinking that there are still times when I prefer the company of women, particularly when
I am in pajamas. I have recently returned from a week of female bonding, and remain convinced of this. A friend and I flew south with our children. During the week we spent together I took off my shoes, let down my hair, took apart my psyche, cleaned the pieces, and put them together again in much improved condition. I feel like a car that’s just had a tuneup. Only another woman could have acted as the mechanic.

And yet it is still widely assumed that a woman who goes off on a trip with other women missed the booking deadline on something else, or is contemplating divorce and has gone away to think things over. Women without men are still thought to be treading water. Men without women have broken loose.

There was much general sympathy for my situation, in which my husband and my friend’s husband were too embroiled in their work to lie on the beach and chase children around the swimming pool. We tried to cajole them, but to no avail. “I can’t believe the two of you are going alone,” said a friend, as though we were fourth graders taking the crosstown bus for the first time.

So we went alone, and each night re-created our personal universes. I cooked, she cleaned. I blathered, she analyzed. Neither felt the need to be sociable, or polite: more than once, we picked up our respective books and started to read at opposite ends of the couch. Most of the time we talked and talked, not in a linear way, but as though we were digging for buried treasure. Why did you feel that way? And what did you say then? What are you going to do about that? How long did that go on? It was an extended version of the ladies’ lunches in which we bring our psyches out from inside our purses, lay them on the table, and fold them up again after coffee—except that I shuffled around in a T-shirt and underwear, my ensemble of choice.

It wouldn’t have been the same if our husbands had been
along, and not just because I would have had to put on some decent clothes. The conversation would have been more direct, less introspective, less probing for probing’s sake. That’s not to say I don’t have probing conversations with my husband. But they usually revolve around a specific problem; they are what management consultants call goal-directed, not free-floating attempts to make order out of daily life.