both of us striving so hard. I even got Victor to grow out his hair. We went to Paris and to Crete, a romantic week in each, and then came Boston. Victor got the call from Harvard, his big break, and so began the Cambridge period: Victor, in his early thirties, the relentless seeker, hard-charging in the lab, and me taking afternoon strolls with graduate students, who quizzed me for their theses on performance art. Furloughs when Victor had a conference, but he rarely had a conference. There was too much work for that. I never saw him. He was so focused on research and making a name for himself that we were landlocked by his lab schedule, him at sea and me in the window. I tried playing housewife for a year to an empty house. Then I got a grant to start a tiny theater in Somerville, sandwiched between a hardware store and a salon. We ran eight productions in twenty-four months, none of them mine and every one a stinker. By that point, though, I was visibly weakening. I was tired of life, what we called a life. I was exhausted from avoiding putting demands on my husband, the workaholic. I bought a biography of Emma Darwin at one point to please Victor, thinking it could be adapted for the stage, and threw it away after reading ten pages. Honestly, deep down, I was simmering with rage, prepared to light Cambridge on fire, and meanwhile my husband was beaming with success. He was part of the team that helped figure out Alzheimer’s core mechanism. For me, though, every month there was another knuckle in the fist pinning me to the floor.
Then Victor got an offer. Our fortunes lifted, as if from Fate: associate professorship, support for a lab and in New York no less. I may as well have drunk champagne the whole way down I-95, this glorious spring day. Victor clipped the car over to the Merritt Parkway, and both of us were happy and in love again, laughing, passing glances back and forth, fully knowing we were on our way.
And knowing I would, I regained my groove. Soon I was writing again, having plays produced. Small productions with meager budgets and students for personnel, but at least I was working. Plays produced, stories published. Yes, yes, yes! Though here in each citation I should note, Victor does deserve billing. For that which I know I’ll write later on, I’ll credit him now, because he did help immensely, he was involved in each stage of everything I wrote. Because Victor’s brain, analytically, even creatively, is a first-class engine, and finely tuned. He has plenty of sensitivity for detection, for seeing patterns and shapes (and yet how specifically it’s applied). And he loved me. It showed. So he deserves credit for his notes down the margins, his nights running out to fetch Chinese food, his patience for reading dialogue in bed some January midnight, and he still sees connections in a text I don’t pick up. Got to the point where on a dark day, alone at noon and not writing, I’d convince myself he was the better writer between us, if only Alzheimer’s didn’t need his gifts more than literature.
And in some cave inside, some deep heart of hearts he didn’t (doesn’t) see because it wasn’t (isn’t) on paper, he probably agreed (agrees). Oh, Victor believed in me as an artist, but to a point. He was timid. He identified my limitations privately, perhaps unconsciously, but I saw them in his edits, encouraging me to stay safe, to work inside the framework of my capabilities and to avoid regrets.
Framed by love, but no less belittling.
Sara Gardner was a late bloomer, one could say. In the spring of ’88, I was teaching theater studies part-time at Hunter, where somehow I wasn’t fired. Once, by anonymous complaint, I was brought up to peer review for presumed “malicious intent” in grading papers, and there wasn’t anything presumed about it. I loathed my students. I resented my colleagues. And of course I thought much worse of myself. I’d become a cartoon of the academic’s wife, a
Then Victor got an offer. Our fortunes lifted, as if from Fate: associate professorship, support for a lab and in New York no less. I may as well have drunk champagne the whole way down I-95, this glorious spring day. Victor clipped the car over to the Merritt Parkway, and both of us were happy and in love again, laughing, passing glances back and forth, fully knowing we were on our way.
And knowing I would, I regained my groove. Soon I was writing again, having plays produced. Small productions with meager budgets and students for personnel, but at least I was working. Plays produced, stories published. Yes, yes, yes! Though here in each citation I should note, Victor does deserve billing. For that which I know I’ll write later on, I’ll credit him now, because he did help immensely, he was involved in each stage of everything I wrote. Because Victor’s brain, analytically, even creatively, is a first-class engine, and finely tuned. He has plenty of sensitivity for detection, for seeing patterns and shapes (and yet how specifically it’s applied). And he loved me. It showed. So he deserves credit for his notes down the margins, his nights running out to fetch Chinese food, his patience for reading dialogue in bed some January midnight, and he still sees connections in a text I don’t pick up. Got to the point where on a dark day, alone at noon and not writing, I’d convince myself he was the better writer between us, if only Alzheimer’s didn’t need his gifts more than literature.
And in some cave inside, some deep heart of hearts he didn’t (doesn’t) see because it wasn’t (isn’t) on paper, he probably agreed (agrees). Oh, Victor believed in me as an artist, but to a point. He was timid. He identified my limitations privately, perhaps unconsciously, but I saw them in his edits, encouraging me to stay safe, to work inside the framework of my capabilities and to avoid regrets.
Framed by love, but no less belittling.
Sara Gardner was a late bloomer, one could say. In the spring of ’88, I was teaching theater studies part-time at Hunter, where somehow I wasn’t fired. Once, by anonymous complaint, I was brought up to peer review for presumed “malicious intent” in grading papers, and there wasn’t anything presumed about it. I loathed my students. I resented my colleagues. And of course I thought much worse of myself. I’d become a cartoon of the academic’s wife, a