Yankees.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I don’t mind. It’s interesting.”
“That’s not how I would describe it.”
“How would you describe it?”
“It’s tiring,” I found myself saying, “staying on top of your game.”
The breeze was stronger now, blowing the pages of the book and lifting one corner of the quilt. Downstream I could see two children playing beneath the footbridge as I had done when I was small, pitching stones into the water.
“It’s a mistake to base your entire life on one man’s approval,” my mother added quietly.
“It was the way women lived when you got married,” I said.
“I was talking about you, Ellie,” she said.
“Jonathan and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“I wasn’t talking about Jonathan,” she said.
We grew quiet again. The carillon across the river that Samuel Langhorne built to foster a sense of spirituality on campus rang out “Amazing Grace.” When it stopped, “was blind but now I see,” hung in the air for a moment like a cloud.
“Why didn’t you finish the book the first time?” I finally said, the notes dying like the sun going down.
My mother wrapped her hand around the paperback in her lap and held it to her chest. Her knuckles gleamed like four round white stones in the pale yellow light. “I left my copy at City Hall the day I married your father,” she said. “It was a library book, too. I had to pay to have it replaced.”
“I’m not sure how this book-club thing works,” I said. “When we’re done, do we set up some time for discussion?”
“Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” my mother said.
“No, I mean about theme and character and that sort of thing.”
“Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” she repeated.
“So we talk as we go along?”
“Why not?” my mother said.
“And when do we move on to the next one?”
“Ellen,” she said, laughing, putting the book down and picking up her needlepoint, “for an intelligent girl you need an awful lot of direction. We’ll go on to the next one when we’re finished with the one we have.”
M y parents met and married in 1967, and though we later came to think of the 1960s as a time of great upheaval and liberation, the truth was that for them the upheavals came later, in their everyday lives. They were married at City Hall, took the subway downtown to Chambers Street, and were back in time for my father’s four o’clock tutorial.
My mother went back to work in her parents’ dry cleaners on Broadway, but after she locked up that night she went up to my father’s one-room apartment at 135th Street, climbed into his bed, and next morning began to make curtains out of sheets. She cooked casseroles on a hot plate. They even had dinner parties, my mother once told me, chili and garlic bread balanced on the laps of half-a-dozen starving students.
By the time the Upper West Side was rife with consciousness-raising groups and faculty members were shedding their twin-set Smithy wives in favor of graduate students with short skirts and long hair, my parents were on their way to Princeton and then Langhorne, one a place in which change came slowly, the other a place in which it came hardly at all.
I was a clever child, with the ceaseless goad stabbing away deep inside me that comes from being the eldest child of a clever parent. While my mother drove us to swimming lessons and taught us to string stale cranberries for the Christmas tree and scolded us for using vulgar language and laughed at our knock-knock jokes, my father’s distance was as seductive as his smile.
Nothing changed when my mother became sick. If anything my father was more distant than ever, and more mannered in his manner when he arrived. “What ho, crew?” he would say, putting his briefcase on the bench near the door. Or “You’ve never looked lovelier,” he would say to my mother, bending over her hand, and she would reply, as she always did, “Oh, Lord, Gen,”
“Oh, come on.”
“I don’t mind. It’s interesting.”
“That’s not how I would describe it.”
“How would you describe it?”
“It’s tiring,” I found myself saying, “staying on top of your game.”
The breeze was stronger now, blowing the pages of the book and lifting one corner of the quilt. Downstream I could see two children playing beneath the footbridge as I had done when I was small, pitching stones into the water.
“It’s a mistake to base your entire life on one man’s approval,” my mother added quietly.
“It was the way women lived when you got married,” I said.
“I was talking about you, Ellie,” she said.
“Jonathan and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”
“I wasn’t talking about Jonathan,” she said.
We grew quiet again. The carillon across the river that Samuel Langhorne built to foster a sense of spirituality on campus rang out “Amazing Grace.” When it stopped, “was blind but now I see,” hung in the air for a moment like a cloud.
“Why didn’t you finish the book the first time?” I finally said, the notes dying like the sun going down.
My mother wrapped her hand around the paperback in her lap and held it to her chest. Her knuckles gleamed like four round white stones in the pale yellow light. “I left my copy at City Hall the day I married your father,” she said. “It was a library book, too. I had to pay to have it replaced.”
“I’m not sure how this book-club thing works,” I said. “When we’re done, do we set up some time for discussion?”
“Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” my mother said.
“No, I mean about theme and character and that sort of thing.”
“Wasn’t that what we were just doing?” she repeated.
“So we talk as we go along?”
“Why not?” my mother said.
“And when do we move on to the next one?”
“Ellen,” she said, laughing, putting the book down and picking up her needlepoint, “for an intelligent girl you need an awful lot of direction. We’ll go on to the next one when we’re finished with the one we have.”
M y parents met and married in 1967, and though we later came to think of the 1960s as a time of great upheaval and liberation, the truth was that for them the upheavals came later, in their everyday lives. They were married at City Hall, took the subway downtown to Chambers Street, and were back in time for my father’s four o’clock tutorial.
My mother went back to work in her parents’ dry cleaners on Broadway, but after she locked up that night she went up to my father’s one-room apartment at 135th Street, climbed into his bed, and next morning began to make curtains out of sheets. She cooked casseroles on a hot plate. They even had dinner parties, my mother once told me, chili and garlic bread balanced on the laps of half-a-dozen starving students.
By the time the Upper West Side was rife with consciousness-raising groups and faculty members were shedding their twin-set Smithy wives in favor of graduate students with short skirts and long hair, my parents were on their way to Princeton and then Langhorne, one a place in which change came slowly, the other a place in which it came hardly at all.
I was a clever child, with the ceaseless goad stabbing away deep inside me that comes from being the eldest child of a clever parent. While my mother drove us to swimming lessons and taught us to string stale cranberries for the Christmas tree and scolded us for using vulgar language and laughed at our knock-knock jokes, my father’s distance was as seductive as his smile.
Nothing changed when my mother became sick. If anything my father was more distant than ever, and more mannered in his manner when he arrived. “What ho, crew?” he would say, putting his briefcase on the bench near the door. Or “You’ve never looked lovelier,” he would say to my mother, bending over her hand, and she would reply, as she always did, “Oh, Lord, Gen,”
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