The Love Children Read online

  I sank down on the bed and I thought about what she had said. It did seem stupid. Why was I doing it, anyway?

  I think that may have been the moment when I made up my mind about something nameless but important, something I didn’t so much think as feel. About how to live my life. I didn’t know that at the time. I made up my mind not to steal anymore. Not that I’d ever let my mother know she’d influenced me.

  I vowed hotly to see Phoebe all I wanted, but in fact I stopped wanting to see her so much. When she would sidle up to me and ask in that sneaky way of hers if I wanted to hang out, I’d say I couldn’t that afternoon. After a few weeks she stopped asking, and by Christmas we barely spoke to each other.

  That fall I got an after-school job rehanging clothes in an expensive dress shop on Brattle Street. I made twenty dollars a week, so I could afford to buy my magazines and cigarettes. I never stole again.

  2

  Funny how deeply those high school years are engraved on my memory. College is a flash; I barely remember the name of the first boy I made love with, and my twenties are only a blur. But the three years of senior high sprawl across my brain, taking up nearly all the room there is.

  I do remember a time before that. I think it was happy; I remember summer days at the cabin, swimming in the lake, paddling with Daddy in the canoe. Sometimes Mom would invite my best friend of the moment to stay with us for a few weeks. I recall good times in Cambridge too, when there were visitors on a Sunday afternoon. Daddy was always nice when other people were around, and he would cook chicken or hamburgers on the grill, and Mom would make ratatouille or potato salad or macaroni and cheese, serving the food on paper plates on the patio or the porch. If they had company on a Saturday night, Mom would cook for two or three days and serve a fancy meal in the dining room with candles on the table and would let me help her.

  They often invited Annette and Ted Fields, who lived in Newton, to visit. The Fields were as good looking as movie stars. Annette was tall, with a beautiful shape and curly golden red hair and creamy skin and big blue eyes; she looked like a dancer. Ted was tall too, with glossy black hair and brilliant blue eyes and very white skin. They were the most beautiful grown-ups I’d ever seen.

  Their children—they had three, Lisa, Derek, and Marguerite—were not like them. Lisa was pale, with crooked teeth and close-set eyes. She was smart and athletic. She was younger than I was, but we played Ping-Pong together in our garage, or croquet, if Dad or Ted would set it up for us on the lawn.

  But their next two children suffered from terrible problems. The Fields talked about it to Mom and Dad in low voices, saying they wouldn’t dare to have another child. Derek, who was ten, never looked at anybody; he didn’t speak and was deaf. He couldn’t walk very well. They had a red wagon for him, with a back he could lean against. They would settle the wagon in a corner of a room with a complicated puzzle spread out on a board they had fitted across the wagon, and he would be happily absorbed for hours. He was brilliant; he could do the most impossible puzzles. Marguerite was even worse off. Her eyes did not work together, so she walked unsteadily, taking one direction, then another. She would work her way to where she wanted to go with amazing persistence, knocking things off tables trying to keep herself steady. When the Fields visited, Mom would put all the breakable things on the mantelpiece or in the hutch. At seven years old, Marguerite still had to be diapered and was fed in a high chair. Her speech was a kind of growling. Only Annette understood what these noises meant. When the Fields brought the younger children with them to visit, they tried to keep Marguerite in her high chair, but she would cry to get out. You could understand she was frustrated, and Annette would lift her out and try to keep her on her lap, but she would squirm loose. Annette would hand her to Ted, who would lean forward to take her, with such love that I couldn’t get over it. They never seemed annoyed or impatient. Once in a while they hired a woman to watch the two younger children and came without them, but they had trouble finding anyone willing to stay with them.

  These children could not have been more unlike their gorgeous, smart parents. Ted was an engineer and Annette had studied to be a librarian. Later on, she went back to school and got a degree so she could teach disabled children. Daddy really liked Annette; he paid a lot of attention to her. She liked him too, but she was so taken up by her kids that nothing else got her attention for very long. In those days, she would get this odd expression on her face when people talked to her, as if she were surprised at hearing a foreign language. When I mentioned this to Mom, she said, “Just imagine what her days are like. She’s in a totally different world. You have to be kind to her no matter what she does.”

  Mom had a couple of friends she saw alone, among them Eve Goodman. Like Mom, Eve was studying for a PhD, Eve’s in psychology. She was tall and thin with an oval face and long, straight hair. I loved to look at her, she was so lovely; she wore long beads and tight tops and hip-huggers with bell bottoms, when Mom was still wearing plain old jeans. She brought me presents once in a while, often books with beautiful, sophisticated pictures in them.

  Eve lived with a psychiatrist in Boston. Mom said he was funny and loud and a little vulgar; Eve would quote him and make Mom laugh. She always whispered these jokes.

  She and Mom spent hours analyzing people, including Eve herself, who had had a terrible childhood. I sat on the floor just outside the kitchen listening; I learned that her father had committed suicide when she was just three or four years old and that her family then acted as if her father had never existed. Then her mother had married a man who owned a gun and who hated Eve. It scared me just listening to the stories. As I lay in bed at night, I would imagine this man with a gun threatening me. I assured myself that I would yell so loud he’d be scared of me. Sometimes I’d pretend I was Eve’s sister, and I’d yell at the ogre and make him stop scaring Eve. By the time I was ten, I was wishing that the man was still alive, so I could find him and tell him how bad he was.

  Mom had a friend she talked about for years, but whom I only saw once, when I was six or seven, named Kathy. I remember her because she brought a baby, and I was enchanted with the baby. She was pretty too, with freckles and a pug nose and curly brown hair and a giddy laugh. I remember her talking all day about Sean, I thought it was spelled Shawn of course, it was Shawn, Shawn, Shawn, and I wondered who he was and how he was so wonderful. Mom often mentioned Kathy, and a couple of times she went to visit her in South Boston. Something was wrong in Kathy’s life, I didn’t know what, and Mom worried about her and made a nasty mouth when she said Sean’s name.

  When I was seven or eight, Kathy fell down the stairs or something, Mom was vague about it, and was badly hurt. Mom raced to a hospital to see Kathy, but she died. Mom’s eyes were red for days afterward. When she went to visit Eileen, Kathy’s sister, she’d always take clothes or a cake, or something, for Kathy’s children. I never heard what happened to Sean.

  There were other friends who came and went; I don’t remember them all. But I do remember that when I was about nine, some man came to visit, a very important man, from New York. Mom was nervous about him and asked Daddy to take off his paint-stained pants, but he wouldn’t. The man went out to Dad’s studio and stayed there a long time. Afterward, he had drinks with Mom and Dad in the living room.

  The man talked about Daddy’s work. Daddy got very quiet and after the man left, Mom cried and embraced Daddy, and Daddy got drunk. It was then that Daddy became famous. That man came back once or twice, and sometimes he brought other people with him. They never paid any attention to me.

  After Daddy became famous, they didn’t have people to dinner anymore. Daddy went to New York a lot without Mom. And then, when I was thirteen and got my period and Mom gave me a party, Dad got annoyed about it. Then he went to Vermont to live and there was no more “social life,” as Mom called it, though she did still see Eve and the Fields and other friends.

  I try to remember only the happy times. I was building my life,
with my own friends, and I wanted to be happy. In high school I got closer to Sandy and Bishop and Dolores. I picture us in 1968, Sandy and Bishop and Dolores and me, tramping the Cambridge streets, our breath puffing out in front of us. The world is exploding around us: Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in April, and there is a presidential campaign. We’re for Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern or Robert Kennedy, and people are teargassed on the streets of Chicago as they gather for the Democratic convention and lots of people say they will not vote for Hubert Humphrey because of that and people are pouring gasoline over themselves and setting themselves alight on city streets.

  We are talking about the meaning of life. Bishop is saying life has no meaning at all, it simply is, that we are as transient as butterflies, hovering for our instant, and that God is breath, a warm breeze caressing our faces. While he says these things, he leaps over a hydrant, trips over a curb, flies into the air at the sight of a child with a balloon, puts his arms around Sandy’s neck and smooths her hair, kisses my forehead, pats Dolores’s arm (she hates to be hugged or kissed), pulls out a chocolate bar and passes it around.

  Sandy says life has to have meaning, how could suffering be meaningless? She walks steadily, staring straight ahead, speaking in a low, calm voice. Sandy is always calm and sure. She talks about The Brothers Karamazov. She says, “Remember Ivan Karamazov and his scrapbook of clippings? He insisted suffering had to have a purpose, it had to make us better, or why would God have created it?”

  She takes a bite of Bishop’s chocolate bar and smiles. “Ummm,” she murmurs, and we all smile. Sandy loves chocolate.

  Dolores doesn’t say anything. She looks at us with her large eyes that always seem to be on the edge of tears. She’s our listener but I know she doesn’t think there’s a god at all. Neither do I.

  I say that Ivan Karamazov goes crazy because he realizes that suffering has no purpose. I say that my mother says the only good thing about suffering is that it sometimes teaches people to care about each other, but that on the whole pain is bad for the soul and often teaches people to be unkind. Words explode out of me; everything comes out of me like a protest; my voice is too loud; I can hear that myself. I don’t want to talk that way, but I can’t help it. I say (and I know I sound angry saying it), Why did Sandy think a god created anything, life was too complex and multitudinous to come out of a single brain, it had to just evolve gradually, chemically, one system after another. And I say, When you think about all the horrible things that have happened in history, who’d want to worship a god who made things like that happen?

  We think we are being brilliant. We feel profound; we feel that no one else on earth has ever had such discussions. We question whether we should write down our ideas, publish them in the school newspaper. But no one wants to bother doing it. I wonder if my daughter had discussions like that. When she was thirteen, she came home with a brand new volume of Kahlil Gibran, not knowing that I had an old one in the attic in the same box with one that belonged to my grandmother, that my mother found when she was thirteen or so, and took as her Bible.

  It’s amazing to me that babies are still born utterly helpless and ignorant. You would think that with all the other progress humans have made, there would be some change in infants too, that by now they would be born able to walk and feed themselves, and knowing how to use a computer. But every one of us still has to go through every one of the same damned steps, the same time-consuming, tedious progressions: learning to walk, to dance, and to march; to come to love Kahlil Gibran and to abandon him to the attic.

  One day in November 1968, Sandy, Bishop, Dolores and I were walking around near Porter Square. Nixon had just won the election and the more radical kids were saying that this would cause a revolution. I didn’t believe that. I thought nothing would change. It was freezing cold, the kind of day when your breath turns to fog, and we were broke. We longed to go someplace where we could get warm, but we didn’t know where to go. We were miles from our homes. We passed an empty store. Bishop stopped. But he was always stopping short or leaping in the air and we paid no attention until he cried, “Hey!” and waved his arms in the air.

  “I bet I could get us in there,” he said, pointing. It was an ordinary store, empty, its owner gone. It had once sold picture frames: the word gallery still fluttered on its torn awning.

  “Let’s walk around to the back. Saunter,” Bishop ordered, “casually.”

  There was a parking lot behind the stores, and we cut through it to the back of the gallery. The door was secured by a hanging lock. Bishop reached into his backpack and fished out a hammer.

  A hammer?

  He looked around furtively, then slammed at the lock. After a couple of hits, it fell open. He removed the lock, opened the hasp, and tried the door. It opened. We crept in. It was dark and cobwebby inside, but somewhat warmer than outdoors. Bishop found the light switch, and the lights came on. We gazed around, awestruck.

  Sandy said, “There’s a deli down the block. I’ll get a couple of coffees for us to share.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  When we returned, Dolores said wistfully, “I wish we had a place like this to hang out in.”

  “Why don’t we just appropriate it?” Sandy asked.

  “We could have a kind of club room,” I suggested.

  “Or an art gallery,” Dolores offered. “It says gallery on the sign.”

  “We even have electricity! We could install a heater,” Bishop said.

  At school the next day, we spread the word. We brought brushes and soap and buckets and washed down the walls and windows; one kid brought some paint from his father’s store and we painted the place white. Dolores hung artwork contributed by all of us. We stole candles from home, and cushions, and even a couple of rugs from our parents’ attics. Dolores found—we don’t know how—an electric heater. She brought in pillows and a blanket and began to sleep there. We noticed an improvement in her after that.

  We had an opening shortly before Thanksgiving; we invited just about everybody in our class and some kids we knew from other classes. They had to bring drinks and food, and everyone did—soda or potato chips or Doritos or Twinkies; a few guys brought beer. After that, we had a place to go afternoons. We used it all that winter. I don’t know who got the electric bills. One day, the landlord stumbled onto our arrangements when he was showing the space to a prospective renter, and that was the end of that. But by then it was spring, and warm.

  One afternoon after Thanksgiving that year, my father showed up. When I came home from my after-school job at the dress shop, there he was, sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper, drinking a whiskey and smoking.

  “Hi, Jess,” he said, hugging me with one arm when I went over to him.

  “Hi, Daddy.” I touched his face. “You growing a beard?”

  He shrugged. “No. Not intentionally. Maybe. Who knows?”

  I giggled. “You mean you’ve just been too lazy to shave.”

  “Got it in one.” He smiled. “Where’s your mother?”

  “At work.”

  “She sure spends a lot of time at that place for someone who only teaches two courses.”

  “She has independent study too. Two students. They’re writing senior theses. And she’s doing research.”

  “Research? Research?” He asked sarcastically. “Who’s that when he’s at home, huh? What the hell do you mean, research?”

  “She reads,” I said.

  “Why the fuck are you crying?”

  “You’re yelling at me.”

  “For Christ’s sake, I am not! I just want to know what this exalted stuff is, research!”

  I took a can of soda from the fridge and started out of the room.

  “Jess!”

  “Ask her!” I screamed. “Ask Mom!”

  I let the door swing shut behind me. He pushed it open, hard, and followed me to the stairwell.

  “So what does she have, twenty-two students?”

&
nbsp; I hated that tone of voice. “I don’t know,” I said, as flatly as I could, climbing the stairs to my room. It was clear he had come to Cambridge to fight.

  “Jessamin!” he barked.

  I stopped.

  “I’m sorry I yelled. I just want to know, what the hell is research?”

  I sniffled. “She’s reading books and articles, you know? She’s writing a book.”

  “She’s writing a book?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does she know enough about to write a book on?”

  “Emily Dickinson.”

  “Why the fuck are you still crying?”

  “I can’t stand your barking at me like this. Like you hate me. You’re my father. You’re supposed to love me.”

  He staggered backward so suddenly he knocked into a chair, which fell over. I started at the noise.

  “Oh, Christ!” He walked up four steps and put his arms around me. I flinched; I thought he was going to hit me. But he patted me, hard. “I’m sorry. I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with your mother and taking it out on you. Sorry.”

  “Okay,” I said faintly. I just wanted to go. He released me and I ran upstairs.

  I guess it was understandable that my father was mad at my mother because she wouldn’t live in Vermont with him. I thought it was odd too, us not living with him, but I liked living in Cambridge. Vermont was pretty, but the cabin was primitive, and there wasn’t much to do up there. My mother said the only thing she could do in Vermont was work in a cheese store. My father would hold forth on what she should do, reciting his rules, but she would get the look of a bulldog on her face and say he was being macho.

  That day, I hadn’t got home until a little after five; Mom was usually home by then, but she was late. I was taking a nap and was woken by a roaring sound. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to see what was happening. I didn’t want to know. But they were in the kitchen and I couldn’t avoid hearing them. My father was shouting: “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to keep on sending you money to spend on other guys!”