She Matters (3 page)

In another year, Patricia threw my baby shower, bottles of sparkling cider to mimic champagne open along her kitchen counter. It was a sweet afternoon, women I admired and liked welcomed into the house, directed to the enormous, happy me by Patricia with her determined, boundless generosity, which only faltered between us when we'd been arrested by pain's inexplicable hand.

• • •

Patricia, Liza, Judith, Susanna. We gathered each Monday morning, ten o'clock. I couldn't wait, up since five or six, dragging through the repetitions with my sunny baby, my energy devoted to the mental catalog of his clean clothes, his diapers in diminishing stacks by the changing table. Hoist him, change him, nurse him, sponge him, hoist him, nurse him. He couldn't do anything without me. At ten I'd be with Patricia, Liza, and Judith, all of us collapsed and loud, and someone would bring coffee cake. Women
to notice, nod. Someone would have had a worse night than mine. Someone would tell a tale on her husband, or scald him, and then I could say the same, or be glad for not having to. I'd become part of a quartet, which was a responsibility, a privilege, that didn't feel natural. Patricia had invited me to join the playgroup when Daniel was still in arms, meet her two dear friends. Clubs seemed tedious to me, book clubs, knitting groups, artificial associations that demanded you relinquish independence, specialness. When I wanted a friend, I wanted her across a table. Confide, reveal, dish, commiserate, then go. For strife, I coped on my own or with one dedicated other, didn't want a chorus. Also, I was suspicious that the playgroup women—this prominent Liza and Judith—ate away at my friend's allegiance
to me
. “That's not really my thing,” I said. Patricia, with her faith in communal reliance, scoffed. “You'll love them,” she said. She possessed an abiding belief in the happy outcome.

Several weeks in, I did love them—Judith's harried warmth, her voice laced with resigned Jewish humor, Liza's intense face inquiring as she checked my expression up and down; our delicious and dense loose laughter. The three of them had daughters, girls older than Daniel and already walking. The daughters could squat, open cabinets, pick up one black bean at a time, one goldfish. Their nakedness appalled my eye, no penis. The playgroup lasted through our next pregnancies, then past those babyhoods. Once two writers and early friends, Patricia and I became a crowd. In the space of five years, we'd become a quartet of mothers, each with two children—twelve of us massed into a living room in winter. In warm weather we met on the grass in the park, handing the bottle of sunblock around, working the many limp arms with cream as we talked. We talked. We talked in cars and in parks, we talked at birthday parties, at weddings, relegated to the periphery as we
bounced our restless children in weary arms. I found us interesting in the very things that otherwise made us infinitely dull. Tasha's meltdown in the parking lot? Tell! Tell of the perplexing hives on Frieda's back, your worry over Maddie's teeth, the bully at day care, the dingy smell of stubborn pee. Describe the appointment with the specialist, the rudeness of the pediatric nurse—What does
she
know—the dreary bathroom mess at day's end, the pink vomit after a wasted dose of antibiotics, the defeated glance at the kitchen floor; the preposterous neglect of the laundry room, pets, sex life. Tell what you said when you called poison control, and then what they said. You did the right thing. I would have called, too. How tired are you? When did you last pee?

We reminded one another to drink water, to keep appointments, we reminded the others of our degrees and achievements—Liza the scientist, Judith the educator—the desired careers that had taken root, then been put on hiatus or abandoned as we obeyed the mystifying compulsion to bear children and tend them. With equal heat we could talk about the anthrax scare or the manufacture of strollers; we talked of news stories—that
mother
who drowned
all
her children in the tub (“How horrible,” “How could she?” “Oh, I could see it . . .”); or of certain, future dangers: People would break our children's hearts, unimaginable cruelty in our gigantic new business of love. Prom, we said. Driving, we said, laughing so hard, as if they'd ever be larger, as if they'd ever zip their jackets or use a Kleenex. We talked and talked, and when our babies in a roaring foreground were cranky or truculent or unfit for common errands, we scattered fragments of that talk, hands on their backs, our attention filtered, diluted, exasperated, but no one missed a Monday morning.

I'd never had such friends, women to count on, who counted
on me. It sounds simple, a natural equation, but I hadn't succeeded at it before. A code emerged. One woman would gather another's child in any situation. Emergency, hurry, helping. We swept each other's floors, after Cheerios, frozen blueberries, then put the broom away. None of them could have done a single thing I'd have protested, and they granted me the same absolute permission. What a thing, balance with women. I didn't wonder who liked whom better, who got more; camaraderie reassured me. Collective strength prevailed. I liked baking the apple cake on the fourth Mondays, everyone at my house, liked talking about ingredients and allergies and recipes. I liked the sight of our breasts, three or four of us nursing at the same time, the room quiet, except for our voices, delicate and pitched to reverberate through our chests, another calming trick to mothering that I could see at work around me. We hoisted car seats, strapping in extras for the afternoon while someone went to her shrink, while my husband and I went to our shrink. Christopher and I had become workers, united in dry tasks, neither noticing what the other did, just needing the other to do it. I saved romance for Patricia, Liza, and Judith, thinking up cards for them, or corn chowder, coaxing out their triumph or woe, sharing the hardest, storing my best till Monday.

Our husbands were undone from us, phantoms of some former interest. I had nothing to say to men. Men! I could barely fathom their use, now that we'd made children. The men didn't speak our minutiae, or pass hours gathered with toddlers and strangers' babies, overhearing bad parenting in waiting rooms and supermarket aisles. They did not gentle the kids' stiffened legs as we did, lifting them from the carts. What else could be important?
Today,
I could say to my three friends, on the weariest, hopeless days,
I fed my family
.
That is enough,
they said back.
That is so much.

• • •

Just because we were friends, Patricia let me attend the birth of her second child. When I'd asked, she hadn't hesitated. “I'd love it,” she said, as if I'd come to her with a great idea. “Let me check with Mark.” Daniel was a year and a half old, and I'd been trying to make sense of the reordered self. I'd already done so much of that in Patricia's encouraging company, becoming a mother. She trusted me, which made me feel trustworthy. Mark called me when her labor started. I drove fast, slammed into a parking spot. I needed to be back in the delivery room, to revisit this gamble and inside-out undoing, where my boy had changed me. How could that be an ordinary room? The hospital door slid open for me, time machine, on my way to my crucial friend.

Patricia didn't greet me. Next to her Mark looked up, said hi. I went to the elevated head of the bed and pressed my forehead to hers. “You're doing it,” I said. We knew the body's dire work.

She moved deeper into labor, and Mark whispered at her ear, face turned against hers and hers altered by the fury of intent. I couldn't hear, but I watched his words form. Her arm in Mark's grasp, his hand inside her thigh, her head tilted to him, her chin squarely into her sternum. The couple's gravest truth, never meant for exposure. It backed me away, this haunting privacy beyond friendship. The baby's head crowned, and he was properly born, and there was a sweep of activity, paparazzi movement around them.

Patricia was gone into the baby, and as I quieted my absurd emotion, the little-girl feeling of
What about me,
I knew I should leave. He's beautiful, I said, kissed her. I made my way to the car and sat cupped in the seat. The ecstatic adrenaline of a birth was
buzzing through my body, and I cried. I cried for all I'd lost when I gave birth, the unbidden changes, and for all I'd gained with the enormous, replenishing love for my son. And I cried, amazed by the friend who would share her private efforts with me, without worry. Uninhibited with her intimacies, Patricia assured me of a way to be the right woman and right friend. She didn't demand more or prepare for less. She gave me a closeness I hadn't known how to have without its being awful. How could I thank her?

• • •

When Patricia's father died, I understood that it was major, or rather, I had a mere sense. By then, our kids were in middle school, uninterested in one another, which seemed incredible to us, the linked mothers. We no longer met on Mondays, sometimes went weeks without calling, but at the service I found Judith and Liza right away, and we moved as one to sit in the last pew, we still-whole daughters, each with two parents.
How is she, have you talked to her,
we said in low asides.
I did last night, I left minestrone, I took some groceries over
. This was our benediction in the face of our friend's pain. Our radiant, optimistic Patricia had crossed over, fatherless. She'd lost big. The eulogies began, and we stopped our talk, watched her closely. I realized we were going to lose, too. She guided us.

• • •

Once, after Patricia gave a reading—I wasn't thirty yet, she wasn't forty—I asked for a copy of the piece, and read it many times, marveling at tricks I wished to try. She used to come to my readings, sit in front, cheer afterward her unabashed cheer. In the next years, motherhood's inescapable assignments and the struggles of our marriages made us forget writing, how we had first studied
each other, enjoyed each other and connected. Now our husbands earned most of our incomes, our independence thinned by their money, trumped. Something had happened to us. And Mark and Christopher, they also were writers, and we said to each other how proud we were, how jealous. We wanted what they had, their selfish time, their closed doors and concentration, their bodies ignored by the babies. We knew something of writer unions that other friends didn't get, the artist husband, the artist wife vying for praise, for success, wanting to outdo each other, pretending not to want that. A room of one's own, we often said, if only. After the first babies, Patricia and I stopped talk of our writing, that sacrifice a greater sorrow than the dozen others parenthood demanded. We washed out each other's sippie cups, dropped off library books. At the Monday gatherings we could look at each other over the heads in need of a shampoo and bemoan our loss without a word. At least the kids are worth it! We love them so! And then we could say, but only to each other, we could whisper,
Maybe they aren't worth it. What about me, where have I gone?

• • •

Patricia's back. I see her at the high school, her enormous smile visible at a distance. We stop and hug in the hallway, read each other's faces.

“How
are
you?” she says in her way. I feel such good relief. She's frazzled by the move, not quite at home yet.

“Can you
believe
this,” we say, “they're
sophomores
!” We compare the kids' schedules, which we're holding in our hands, and see they have two classes together. We're thrilled, imagining their rediscovery, and then we laugh at ourselves, our enthusiasm, because we know we must resist urging them to be friends. Such alchemy is private and unplanned.

“How are you?” she asks again, and I tell her about the book I'm writing—my friendships with women.

She glows. “I've almost finished my novel.”

Together, our voices warm and matched, we are saying, “When can I read it?”

H
ere's my home of women, blood's beginnings: I share a bunk bed with my sister. We live on the fourth floor of an apartment building on the Upper East Side. Even though it's east of Park Avenue, what my mother calls the unfashionable side, the monthly rent is an “astronomical” $400. My mother tells us we deserve this, having stayed in the residential hotel after we left our father. His parents pay the child support, and she has money for the rent, and for coats and chokers at Bonwit Teller, and for restaurants along Third Avenue, where she knows the owners and the maître d's, men's names her special song. She drove a taxi, briefly, and had a small part in someone's movie, but she doesn't work. She doesn't go anywhere. The grandparents also pay for private school, the pediatrician and dentist, the Cape Cod camp in the summer. We see them when our father takes us down Lexington Avenue to the mansion where he grew up. He comes to collect us, and he and our mother tease each other in the front hall. Then he kisses her, her pale arms up around his neck, and takes us. I'm not sure why they're separated, then divorced, but I am sure he's not one of us. He doesn't belong in our apartment.

My mother had been nineteen for a month when she gave birth to me at the London Clinic. Then my father, just twenty-nine, brought his new baby and his young wife from England to New York. We lived in a hotel on Fifth Avenue, with my father's valet
and a nanny for me, while we waited for the town house to be ready. Later I asked to hear the chronicle repeated, me as the five-month-old on a ship as it crossed the wintry Atlantic. My mother threw up on the voyage, she told me, but I was perfect, such an easy, happy baby. I made friends everywhere. At twenty-one, she had my sister, and the next summer she left the marriage. In these stories, we make a triumvirate. My mother is cowed and overwhelmed; I am peaceful, sociable; and my infant sister, a siren of discord, is inconsolable. My father, before I'm allowed to remember him, is already invisible. Not until I grew up could I consider that when she arrived in New York in 1966, my mother was a teenage girl, that she missed her best friend, that she was scared of her husband, who was often mean, and that she made herself sick aching for home.