I am Emily Hudson. I live in an old stone house in Connecticut. My yard
is fenced with broad white pickets, lined with pink azaleas and blue hydrangeas
but, still, it's not the best yard in the neighborhood. The shrubs are
old. The lilac tree looks weary. The garden is strewn with soccer balls
and old pails and shovels. There is a basketball hoop at the bottom of
the gravel driveway embedded in a square of cracked pavement. Two of my
sons are shooting baskets, perspired, shirtless, red-faced. My third son
sits at the kitchen table studying his biology book, a pencil stuck behind
his ear, a can of root beer too near the book. My daughter, the youngest,
is upstairs. She is on the phone. Even though I can't see her, I know
she is tipping back in her chair, bare feet up on her desk. I can hear
her laughing.
The kitchen is deep green
and blue with wide-planked oak floors. I am chopping green peppers and
tomatoes on the cutting board. The radio is playing low, a golden oldies
station. The late-afternoon sun is sinking in the sky, hidden behind the
pine trees outside the bay window. I can't see the sun setting but I know
it is because of the way the shadows dance on the wall and the counters
are spotted with gold drops.
I have become a quintessential
suburban housewife, mired in school schedules, orthodontist appointments
and bake sales. All this in between working at my painting. Lately I paint
oils from a perch on the bluff at Tod's Point. I write words to go with
my paintings. Short texts that tell a story, not believing that only pictures
paint a thousand words. I drive the half hour's drive from New Canaan
to Tod's in Old Greenwich every day. It was there at that beach where
my parents rented a house each summer from the time I was an infant. It
was there I disobeyed my parents for the first time when I walked with
my friends to the pond.
"We told you never to go to
the pond," my parents said. "The pond is thick and slimy and had you fallen
in you could have drowned."
I felt so surefooted, though,
even at the age of eight when I was small. Sneaking off to the pond. Climbing
the rocks on the beach. The rocks were slippery with lichen but I never
feared I'd fall. Digging furiously in the sand, convinced that I'd reach
China. Determined. Until recently I was afraid to dig too deeply into
anything, to venture anywhere remotely perilous. Though lately I navigate
my way to places in my past where I probably shouldn't go. Looking back
has come to give me solace. It is easier than looking ahead to a future
where the crystal ball I once felt in my hands is now filled with blue
fog and uncertainty. I am filled with a sense of reality. An awareness
of middle life when something tells you that you have come to a fork in
the road and you have to choose which path to take. I know all too well
that looking back is a sure thing. The memories are trustworthy. They
are faithful. Dependent only on the way I remember. And I am grateful
that the past is etched with certainty since the future sometimes seems
so hazy.
There was something else at
Tod's as well. Something that until the last few months I tried not to
think about as I looked across the horizon where it's hard to tell where
the sky stops and the sea begins and they fuse into dubious infinity.
I remember the summer of 1967. I think about the boy I loved who said
he was a Cherokee. That might have been the only lie he ever told me.
I was sixteen and he was seventeen. I had known him and loved him for
merely four months but it seemed like forever. He stayed with us in the
summerhouse for the week before he went away. My mother gave him the guest
room next to hers. Ever-watchful. Ever wondering aloud why he was with
us and not his own family.
Has he told you why he's here?
she would ask me.
I've never asked him, I would
say.
I thought it was so obvious.
It seemed so right that he was with me. We stood on those rocks where
I now sit with my easel and paint and I remember that boy who was tender
and tough. That summer, when we stood on those rocks overlooking the horizon
and I leaned my head on his shoulder while his arm held me so tightly,
I was certain that he and I would be endless. But as the summer wore on
after he left, I felt differently, not quite so sanguine. It was a sense
that maybe the feeling I had for the boy who said he was a Cherokee would
simply be one I would never have again, not with him or anyone else. It
was a sobering epiphany I dismissed with denial that only adolescence
can capitulate.
I go to Tod's now in winter
while my children are in school and in summer, when they are at camp.
I set up my easel, a wooden folding chair, the palette of oils and I paint
the beach. I paint the lighthouse and the sand sculptures, the people
picnicking on the dried-out redwood tables that have faded to a dusky
gray.
In the summer, the air smells
like hot dogs and cotton candy. The beach is filled with little girls
in ruffled bathing suits, the kind I wore when I learned to swim. Mothers
kneel at the shoreline beside naked babies carrying heavy pails of water.
Older women sit together in groups, coated with oil. The straps of their
bathing suits hang down their shoulders, tops drooping with the weight
of their bosoms. I see the teenage girls in their bikinis, their bodies
so smooth and firm, their even tans glistening the color of toast. They
lie on sandy beach towels with their boyfriends whose stomachs ripple,
a radio crackling beside them, their fingers entwined tightly as the sun
beats down on them.
In winter, the picnickers
are older people, wrapped in rough wool sweaters drinking steaming coffee
from thermos bottles that serve as weights for the day's newspaper, eating
sandwiches wrapped in foil. An old man tries to light his pipe in the
wind.
But there's something that
isn't quite the same now despite the sameness of the seasons and the same
sweet smell of the cotton candy. The snack bar is old now. Its Formica
counter is pitted and discolored. Signs for Fresca and Tab are worn and
peeling. The town has taken away the old phone booth. The one with the
seat and the black dial phone where you'd put in a dime, shut the door
and the fan goes on inside. The one where you stepped in barefoot and
felt the wet sand on the floor. There are three phones now, gleaming stainless
steel, hanging on a wall with a sign that warns you of the fine for vandalism.
It's just not the same. Sometimes I sit there on my folding chair and
feel like a ghost lording over what used to be. Watching my memories the
way I used to watch my children play at the shore. "Come back," I'd wave
as they ventured too deep into the water. "Come back. Don't go above your
head."
I paint mostly from my memory
of summers. But when I go back there in the winter I see the beach for
what it is, empty and untainted. The winters let me start with a clean
slate, a white canvas. Memories undisturbed by time. By progress. Memories
can be what I want them to be. Though sometimes I question them, wondering
if perhaps some of them aren't merely dreams.
It is spring now but just
quite spring. The air no longer has that edge of winter. Somewhere within
the cool breeze there is a pocket of warmth, a portent of what is to come
but still, I need my cardigan over my shoulders. The beach still holds
that November sparsity. It's hard to tell where winter left off. The water
swirls thick like mercury. It is still the color of charcoal. The sky
is still more opal than turquoise. But lately when I go there, I am courageous
as I look back. I picture the boy and myself sitting there. I can see
his face so clearly, his long, shiny black hair, his hands jammed in the
pockets of his blue jeans. White T-shirt. The way he walked with his head
down as though he was afraid to look up at the sky, afraid to see how
vast it was. Everything must have seemed so vast to him back then and
riddled with doubt. Eternity and mortality. But suddenly he'd lift his
head and smile at me and his eyes would blink and, looking back, I wonder
if he was blinking away tears, but again, I am not sure what is memory
or fancy. We were the only certainty for each other back then. This I
know. This I clearly recall. I grip the cardigan that has slipped down
past my shoulders, I check my wristwatch and push the images away. I pack
up my canvas and oils, rinse my brushes in the sea and head back home.
I throw everything into damp
brown cartons that sit in the back of my old Volvo station wagon. The
car is pale blue, old and rusted through in little patches, but it holds
my children and my paints. It reminds me of the one my mother drove when
I was a girl. It makes me feel attached. Connected. It is continuance.
We drove the boy to the train station in my mother's Oldsmobile wagon,
a relic of a car like mine. That was the day I realized there could be
something other than happy endings. The day I was no longer certain.
I have been married for nearly
twenty years now to someone else. Years where lately I believe there have
been too many long and silent nights ending in angry dawns. There are
mornings when I awaken and find the bed empty beside me. Scrawled notes
("Had to leave early, see you later") on the mashed pillow where my husband
Peter's head has slept have become all too familiar. There were the nights
when I watched my youngest baby cradled in an eyelet bassinet next to
my toddlers who smelled of talc and baby shampoo. They were swaddled in
furry pastel blanket sleepers in little beds with crib sides, foamy beads
of milky spittle around their soft mouths. Shallow breaths, little sighs.
And I watched them alone. Grateful for them, but alone.
There were too many nights
when the white wine on the kitchen table grew tepid while I waited for
Peter to come home. Nights after long days alone with babies who barely
spoke. Days when I longed for a pipe to burst so the plumber would come
over for conversation. I chatted while he banged away, metal on metal,
pinging and clanging, allowing me to hear my own voice, the man answering
with an occasional, distracted "Uh-huh." He was a man with broad shoulders
who made some repairs.
There was the man who polyurethaned
the kitchen floor. He held a bag of ice on my hand after I burned it on
a short-circuited sconce. I had turned on the switch and the light exploded
like firecrackers, the baby in my arms shaken by the eruption. The man
shook his key chain to calm the baby who sat on my lap and cried. Call
the electrician, the man said. I'll stay until he gets here. A knight
in shining armor with an ice pack.
I tease Peter sometimes. He
says the teasing is really accusation. You missed the day we moved, I
say. The day the light exploded. The day Jack took his first step. And
except perhaps for Jack's first step, Peter doesn't feel he's missed too
much. He doesn't see the importance of the mundane as I do. But with Jack's
steps, he ached. "I was working, Emily," he said. "I know. I know. You
think it wasn't worth it."
There were so many days when
I looked in the mirror, longing for a reflection to gaze back at me for
a brief moment and tell me I was worth seeing. Worth looking at. So many
times I wished the reflection in the mirror spoke to me. I often longed
to talk to someone other than my children. I could see my shoulders, sculpted
still, no longer from youth or dance classes but rather from carrying
babies on my hip, baskets overflowing with laundry, pails of trash. Lifting
babies into playpens, catching them as they hurled down the slide in the
park, pushing their swings, first one, then the other.
Every night, I stood at the
picture window, a glass of wine in my hand, looking out at the dead-end
street where the streetlamp flickered every few minutes to remind me that
it wasn't the moon. Sometimes I cried. Not flowing tears, but hot tears
that stayed trapped and burning. I stood and waited while the babies slept,
their narrow chests rising and falling. I stood by the window, cracked
open, blowing blue cigarette smoke into the cool night air, waiting for
Peter to come home. I would listen for the crackle of the gravel in the
driveway and I would light the candles on the kitchen table and hope for
conversation. I would hear his key open the door. The house was so quiet.
Babies sleeping. The warm wine waiting.
We would sit at the kitchen
table and I would ask him about his day: What happened at the office?
Where did you have lunch? Any interesting new cases? And he would be too
tired to speak: Nothing happened. I had lunch at my desk. You know I shouldn't
discuss my cases. So I would fill in the blanks: A new word uttered by
a child learning to speak. We need more sand for the sandbox. Perhaps
we should replace the gutters this year. Repoint the bricks in the fireplace.
And after dinner, Peter would read the paper in the den. I would listen
to the sheets of paper turning and shaking as I cleaned up the dishes.
I would turn on the dishwasher and flick off the lights and then I would
hear Peter fold the paper and drop it on the floor beside the arm chair.
I would leave the kitchen, peek my head into the den. He would step into
the hall. We would crack open the doors to the rooms where the children
slept and stand for a moment, listening to the silence. We would leave
the doors ajar. Good night. Good night. Another day was done.
People say to me, "You are
so lucky. Your husband is charming and handsome." Yes, yes, yes. Successful
and intelligent, well-respected, sought-after. But I often feel that my
husband does not belong to me, nor I to him. Then there are the times
when I am not sure I want to belong to him or to anyone.
My husband joked and said,
"I do not beat you, drink up my paycheck or run around with other women.
What is it that you want?"
And I wanted say, "Talk to
me. Listen to me. Answer me. It's not a joke." But I would have felt foolish.
Sounded like wives on the soap operas. I thought of the early days before
we were married. When Peter and I would sit across from each other in
a pub and I saw paradise every time I looked into his eyes.
So I tried to explain how
I wanted to sit over a glass of wine and dream the way we used to before
we had children. Before we were married. Remember how we used to picture
who our babies would look like and we argued?
"I hope they look like you,"
he'd say.
"No, they should look like
you," I'd say.
I longed for the times when
we were sights for each other's sore eyes and sometimes questioned if
those times were ever really there. Instead I asked him why he read the
newspaper after dinner and he asked why I couldn't leave the dishes until
morning. And then I'd ask him why it is that he looks the other way when
I speak to him and he'd say that I am too demanding.
"But sometimes, lots of times,
you barely even answer me," I'd say, feeling as though I were reading
a laundry list, telling myself to stop as the litany of what he takes
as criticism tumbled out.
Sometimes he'd protest, "I
do answer but you don't hear me" or "I guess I don't say what you want
to hear" or "Can't you simply understand that I am tired?"
People say that I should seek
salvation in other places. That this is the way life is.
"Women friends are good enough
companions," my sisters and my mother say to me. "Volunteer work, your
painting, your children. These are the things that should fulfill you.
Make your own life." I think they are so simplistic, my mother and my
sisters. They have what they always wanted: the house, the kids, the husband.
It is the way it was when we were little and my sisters and I played house:
Even then the husbands weren't home. Daddy is working late, we said to
the doll in the pink plastic high chair, spooning make-believe peas into
her mouth. The Daddies were off working. We were diapering dolls and having
tea parties and pushing prams. My sisters can be happy with all that still.
I cannot.
My sisters say I am unrealistic.
Your expectations are too high, they say. They tell me nothing is perfect.
I know all this, but it doesn't matter. They tell me I am insatiable and
I wonder if they're right. Maybe I just like the chase. Maybe if I caught
the brass ring I would only try to catch it again. Maybe nothing would
ever be enough. My sisters say that no one has everything. My sisters
are twins. Cookie cutter wives who preach to me. My mother sits behind
them like a silent echo nodding her head up and down as though to say,
"Listen to Sara and Catherine. No one has everything. You are impractical.
Unrealistic." It's not that I want everything. It's simply that I want
enough.
Maybe this is why I started
thinking again of the boy I loved in that summer of 1967. Not that I ever
really stopped thinking about him but, until recently, I managed to push
him out of my mind. He is the one I think about still when I paint on
the beach. The one I had longed for and yet, until recently, could not
paint.
My best friend, Jennie, stayed
with us that summer of 1967. Jennie's parents had divorced two summers
before. Her mother took off for the Himalayas. Jennie got a postcard and
read Lost Horizon. So Jennie came with me. Jennie's father didn't quite
know what to do with Jennie, still reeling at the notion that he was wifeless
and left with a teenage daughter. We were right there in Connecticut.
The house was across the street from the beach at Tod's Point. I pass
the house each day when I drive to the beach but it doesn't look the same.
For one thing, it is painted gray now and the shutters have been removed.
My parents rented that house in Old Greenwich, so close to the water you
could listen and count the waves hitting the shore in the middle of the
night. So different from our apartment in Manhattan where the night was
pierced only by sirens and concrete skyscrapers muffled the wind. The
Old Greenwich house was pale yellow with blue shutters, peeling and weathered
by sea spray. It had a front porch with columns so wide my younger brother,
Robbie, could play hide and seek with Jennie and me and hide behind the
columns. Robbie was the baby born when I (the youngest then of three)
was ten. I was old enough to know how he happened, sickened and baffled
at the thought.
The house had a cobblestone
driveway, long and narrow. Jennie and I pulled Robbie in his Radio Flyer,
back and forth, bumping over the stones, until the lightning bugs came
out at night. Robbie captured the bugs in jelly jars, holes humanely punched
into their metal lids. Jennie and I ran through the yard behind Robbie,
slapping at mosquitoes that stuck to our arms and legs.
Jennie and I wrote short stories
and poems and read Rod McKuen aloud to one another that summer. Jennie
and I wore purple granny glasses and love beads. We baked in the sun,
walked barefoot in the rain and burst into a wild dance on the beach when
"Light My Fire" made number one on the hit parade. The days were so hot
and humid that summer it was as though the air stood still and dared you
to take a breath. We sprayed lemon juice in our hair and ironed it until
it was stick-straight. We fanned ourselves with paperbacks and Seventeen
Magazine. Jennie had a crush on Jean-Claude Killy.
The room I shared with Jennie
had two pink canopy beds with a sunporch off to the side. The sunporch
was wrapped in glass around the treetops, upholstered chintz cushions
on carved-out window seats. The rain pounded down at night relieving us
for a little while from the heat of the day and you could smell the salt
and the strong stench of clams washed up on the shore. Jennie and I would
open the jalousies on the porch and feel the breeze on our bare arms.
Curled up on the seat cushions in lacy baby-doll pajamas, we listened
to the breakers slapping the sea wall. The treetops glowed like silver
and shook in the lightning only to be black a moment later. Wind swayed
the branches against the house. Dramatic backdrop for the poetry and the
strumming of my guitar.
I wrote in my diary and Jennie
wrote in hers. And every night, I wrote the boy a letter telling him how
much I missed him, how much I loved him, how I waited for him to come
home. While my sisters went to movies and parked their Mustangs at the
lover's lane on Tod's Point, Jennie and I sat at home pulling Robbie in
the Radio Flyer. Watching him chase fireflies. She was the dutiful friend;
I was the dutiful girlfriend.
That was the summer Jennie
and I made origami fortunes and stuck our slender fingers in their enveloped
sides and turned and counted numbers until the fortune answered our deepest
questions. That was the summer I wrote Jim's name in all different variations
with mine beneath it. James, Jim, Jimmy, James Robert Moran. I'd cross
out the corresponding letters, counting "Love, Marriage, Friendship, Hate"
and going on and on until I got the right combination. I'd write my first
name with his last name over and over to see how it would look: Emily
Moran. Emily Hudson Moran. I never dreamed that one day I would shun any
man's last name as my own.
"Mrs. Walters?" the voices
ask now when I answer the phone.
"No, I am not Mrs. Walters.
I am Emily Hudson," I say. "I am Mr. Walters' wife."
Jimmy Moran was seventeen
when he joined the Marines. His parents signed his enlistment papers because
he was failing in school. The other boys who failed at his private school
went to boarding schools in New England. Their fathers bought their way
in. Legacies of the affluent. But Jimmy's father opted for the military.
Not just some academy but the real thing.
That summer, Jimmy wrote me
a letter every day from boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. Jennie
and I would run down the stone walk to the mailbox every morning. My hands
would shake as I searched the mail for the pale blue envelopes with the
military insignia and then I would sit on the ground, my knees bent, buttocks
resting on my ankles. Jennie sat silently next to me as I read the scrawled
notes. Jennie made sure not to look over my shoulder. She busied herself
by picking up clovers, muttering how there never were any with four leaves.
Then I would read the letters to her, sometimes leaving out a line here
or there. Like the part in one letter where he said he missed kissing
the curve of my neck. I wasn't sure what Jennie would say. I was afraid
she'd roll her eyes, say something giddy or maybe squeal so loud it would
make it all seem too much, too silly. And it wasn't silly. It was all
too private to share even with Jennie.
Jennie would look into my
eyes when I finished reading the letters. It became a ritual.
"Jimmy loves you, Emily,"
Jennie always said.
"Are you sure?" I would ask.
"I am positive," she would
say nodding her head in one short affirmation, bringing her chin down
but not back up, and then she would clasp my hand in hers.
And then Jennie and I would
walk slowly up the stone walk to the house, Jennie still looking down
for four-leaf clovers and me with my hand over the letter in my pocket.
We'd go inside the house and sit at the kitchen table, flip on the television,
drink juice from glasses with painted-on oranges, scrape butter on English
muffins that by then were cold, and scoop out cottage cheese since we
were "dieting."
In between the game shows,
we took off our jeans and peasant blouses, revealing bathing suits underneath.
We spread Johnson's baby oil on our bodies. The bulletins came over the
old black-and-white television with the reporters standing at the battle
lines. News reports glowed with gunfire that summer. Bombs burst in midair
and cameras panned to sad-eyed children with dirt-streaked faces. Maybe
the dirt was blood. It was hard to tell in black and white. Helicopters
whirled around the reporters as they crouched in front of a jungle. My
breath would catch in my throat. I could feel myself swallowing hard and
my eyes would dampen and sting. Salt mixing with mascara.
"I'm turning it off, Emily,"
Jennie would say angrily. Then she'd slam the button on the television
and pull me by the hand and we'd run down to the beach, towels bunched
under our arms. Jennie carried the radio. I carried the paperbacks, pens,
crosswords, a deck of cards.
Jimmy left on July 5, 1967.
My mother and I drove him to the train station. My mother had a strange
look in her eyes when she said good-bye to him. Godspeed, she said. An
expression I had never heard her say before and haven't heard her say
since. And then she even kissed him on the cheek and I think she looked
at him for a moment as if she wanted to remember him. As if she was memorizing
his face.
Jimmy walked me behind the
ticket booth, away from the Oldsmobile and my mother's sight. He placed
his arms around my waist and his lips to my lips. He whispered in my ear
that he loved me. He ran the back of his hand down my cheek as he always
did. The train came too quickly down the track. We saw the shiny dot in
the distance becoming closer, brighter, glaring. My ears were still moist
from his whisper when the train roared in. And Jimmy was gone.
I had my ears pierced later
that day because I made a bet with myself that no one knew about: If I
pierced my ears, Jimmy would come back, although deep-down inside I already
knew he probably couldn't come back to me. Jennie knew that, too. I wrote
in my diary that day after Jimmy left. Words that could only belong to
a sixteen-year-old: "Loving him and knowing it will end wears away at
my innocence. He leaves an indelible stamp on my soul." I never showed
that part to anyone. Not even to Jennie.
My sons throw the screen door
open with a pop and it bangs on the metal frame. My oldest, Jack, puts
a sweaty arm around my shoulder and steals a pepper from the cutting board.
The middle boy, Sam, is fifteen. He swills Gatorade from the bottle. My
fourteen-year-old son, Charlie, closes his biology book and stretches.
Julie, who is twelve, comes downstairs and I can tell it is two steps
at a time. Her feet are bare. Her hair is gathered on top of her head
in a bright blue elastic.
I set the table for dinner.
For six, even though we all know one place will not be used.
"Mom, hey! Look at you! Where
are you now? Your eyes are very far away," Jack says to me.
I notice that he is wearing
blue jeans and a white T-shirt. It hits me that Jack is seventeen.
I smile at him but I am barely
here. I am on the beach with Jimmy Moran. I am waiting for someone to
come home.
Excerpted from Jimmy's Girl © Copyright 2008 by Stephanie Gertler. Reprinted with permission by Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
