Given Up for You Read online

  “We can. People do it all the time. It’s about being prepared.”

  “To dig a snow cave and freeze to death in it?”

  “It’s my birthday,” Chris said, sounding uncharacteristically childish. “I want to spend it on top of a mountain. Forty is a really big deal. You’ll understand someday.”

  Chris was worked up about turning forty. It seemed that the day had to somehow be everything her life currently was not: independent, adventurous, childless. Romantic. I wanted to be a good wife, to plan something wonderful for her, but I needed her birthday celebration to be something that didn’t involve crampons and potential blizzard-condition mountaineering. I thought of suggesting a southern peak, maybe somewhere in the Blue Ridge, but I didn’t really want to be that far away from Grace. So instead I suggested other ideas: museums in Manhattan, wine tasting on the North Fork. She didn’t like any of my ideas. “What about Rhinebeck?” I asked. “We could go to Val-Kill, to the Roosevelt library.” I knew she had wanted to see Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hudson Valley home ever since we moved to New England.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  Chris didn’t want to give up on Mount Washington. I was not sympathetic. We have a two-year-old, I wanted to say. I can’t be on a mountaintop in winter with you. I wanted Chris to know this, to understand it as the fact it was, and not to ask me—yet again—if my first loyalty was to her. I did not want to have to say no, actually, it no longer is.

  Finally Chris agreed to Rhinebeck, to the Roosevelts. My sister and her boyfriend came to take care of Grace, and early on Friday morning we drove down the rolling and quiet Taconic Parkway into the Hudson Valley. We checked into a tiny inn near the Roosevelt library. Our room was white—white walls, white down comforter and pillows. It had a gas fireplace with a remote control. I turned it on. We took off our clothes and had fast and quiet sex, because we didn’t remember how to have the other kind.

  The next morning we went to Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s modest estate. It was early November, and so there were no leaves on the trees but also no snow, which gave the landscape a sense of decay, making the house and grounds seem older and shabbier than they were. We bought tickets for a tour of the house. The tour guide brought us first into Eleanor’s dining room, where we stood behind a braided silk cord separating us from the thick-legged oak table set with pale china. The tour guide told us that Eleanor hosted dinners with the best minds of her generation, Nehru, Kennedy, Robert Frost. “Sometimes she would send the cook home and cook dinner herself,” the tour guide told us, “despite the fact that the only thing she knew how to cook was scrambled eggs.” The tour guide laughed.

  I looked at Chris and she shrugged and gave me a look of feigned innocence. Scrambled eggs were also the only thing Chris knew how to cook. At first, when we were dating, I found her culinary ineptitude rather adorable, but lately I found it maddening. And now, listening to the tour guide, I felt like a bit of a fool. If you don’t know how to make anything but eggs, you don’t make dinner very often. And while I understood that Eleanor didn’t know how to make anything other than eggs because she was a woman of privilege, Chris was clearly proof that even women raised in the working class can absolve themselves of all culinary knowledge. After all, both her sisters could cook. But when you don’t cook, your thoughts aren’t occupied with shopping lists and defrosting times. Your mind is filled with ideas. And your time is filled with work. You eat takeout; you eat the dinner your wife made.

  When I was in fourth grade, I did a report on Eleanor Roosevelt. My parents took the time to read my research books with me, to talk with me about Eleanor’s descent into the West Virginia coal mines, her invitation to Marion Anderson. I understood even then that Eleanor Roosevelt was the best sort of woman: humble, courageous, and dedicated to justice, and for a long time I strived to be those things, to embody those ideals. But not anymore. Since Grace was born I had become insular and myopic, homebound. I had also become a skilled cook.

  After the dining room the tour guide led us into Eleanor’s office. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and opposite the hearth was her unassuming desk, its surface covered with neat stacks of papers and books. It was, like the dining room table, staged, but still I felt tears prick my eyes at the sight of it. I looked over at Chris, who was also looking at the desk, but I turned away before I caught her eye. I didn’t want to think about Chris then, didn’t want to think about what she saw when she looked at the desk. Chris was seven years older than I was, which for a long while made the discrepancies in our professional accomplishments seem reasonable—surely by the time I was as old as she was I would have made comparable career strides. But now she was forty and I was thirty-three, the age she had been when she was offered an in-house counsel job, when the managing partner at the law firm she was leaving came into her office and asked her what he could do to make her stay. And I hadn’t even finished my first book. Our discrepancies were no longer a matter of time.

  I looked at Eleanor’s desk and I saw what I no longer had. My own desk was now covered with Grace’s carefully dated crayon scribbles, my to-do lists and Mini Boden return labels. And I only occasionally sat there anyway, to write emails or update a blog I was keeping as a record of Grace’s childhood. I hadn’t written anything of significance since Grace was born.

  After the tour, Chris and I walked slowly through the gardens. The perennials and roses were cut back in anticipation of winter; the shrubs were covered with wooden tipis that would shelter them from the impending snow and ice. Still, the day was warm and we walked without our coats. Chris put her arm around me. “Let’s have another baby,” she said, “and name her Eleanor.”

  Another baby! This was the first time Chris had brought up the idea; usually it was me, and usually she said she wasn’t sure, wasn’t ready. I had hoped for as much from this weekend away, hoped that she would, with a little distance, remember the sweetness of life with a baby and not only the chaos and exhaustion. But I hadn’t expected that being away from Grace would make me wonder about a second child. I hadn’t expected Eleanor’s desk. Still, I couldn’t help but take Chris’s bait. “You named Grace,” I said, leaning into her. “The second one is all mine.”

  16

  Remodel or Divorce

  When I was pregnant with our second child it seemed that all our married friends were either remodeling their kitchens or getting divorced. “Are those the only two options?” Chris asked when I pointed out the trend to her. “I like our kitchen.”

  “We could do the bathrooms,” I suggested.

  “Could we go to Italy?”

  “No,” I said. “That doesn’t count.”

  We were joking, but we were also anxious. Gaby and Kelly were separating. A few weeks before, we had gone out with them for what we suspected would be the last time. They had decided to separate a few days before Kelly’s birthday, and while the customary dinner party was off, they still needed to mark the occasion. “For Emmet,” Gaby explained when she called to invite us, and I said, yes, yes of course, although I didn’t really want to go. But we did, we met for an early dinner on the deck of an old ski lodge that had recently reopened as a restaurant. Chris and Grace and I arrived first, and we rose from the table as the three of them arrived, looking tired and drawn.

  “Happy Birthday,” I said to Kelly, kissing her cheeks.

  “Congratulations, Mama,” she said in a tender voice. She gently brushed her hand against my belly, which was already straining my skirt. We gave Kelly a stack of books and a bottle of gin; Gaby gave her some framed artwork of Emmet’s. Grace and I left early, offering her bedtime and my nausea as an excuse, and Gaby and Emmet left with us. Chris stayed with Kelly, drank with her by the river for a few hours. We didn’t know it then (although I suppose in some ways we did), but Kelly would get us in the divorce. We didn’t see Gaby much after that birthday dinner. Sometimes I thought we could have tried harder to remain friends with both of them, but mostly I understood h
ow impossible it would be.

  Our second daughter, June, was born in late winter, nearly two weeks after her due date. After such a short, relatively easy labor with Grace, the complications of June’s long and painful labor were surprising, and tinged with injustice. She was born in the early hours of the morning, and Chris stayed in the hospital with the baby and me all through that first day and night. My parents were taking care of Grace then, and while I had expected to miss her, to want to get home as quickly as possible, I found I liked the hospital. I liked being alone with June, and with Chris.

  Just after dark on that first day, Chris left the hospital and drove the twenty minutes to Northampton for our favorite hamburgers, and we sat together on the hospital bed, eating and talking while June slept in the cradle of my bent legs. Chris told me again and again that she was in awe of what I did to get that baby out; she told everyone she called, everyone who came into the hospital room, how amazing I was. I felt a bit wrecked, honestly, and didn’t want to think so much about the birth, although I appreciated Chris’s pride, and her recall of details that were entirely hazy to me. All I could remember then was the pain, whose echo still rang in my body. But I was happy. The baby was finally here, and the task of her—which had, three years before, crushed us like a tidal wave—was easy to manage, leaving Chris and me space to pay attention to each other, an attention tinged with the high and relief of birth, with our shared immodesty over the miracle we had wrought.

  It was a different story when we returned home. Two children were their own sort of tidal wave. Grace, who adored all things baby and had awaited June’s arrival with great anticipation, cried when I scolded her for putting her finger in June’s ear. “June is a total bust!” she yelled, then ran to her room and slammed the door as though she had grown into a teenager while we were away.

  It was Chris, not me, who offered Grace consolation. During the first weeks of June’s life, Chris took Grace on all manner of excursions to places I didn’t like and they did: the indoor butterfly pavilion, the pet store, the pizza restaurant that gave children a tiny ball of pizza dough to play with before their dinner arrived. Chris took Grace to the consignment store to buy leotards and let her choose a lavender one made of crushed velvet, which Grace wanted to wear every day. I hated the leotard, and I was annoyed with Chris for buying it. But I didn’t say anything. Grace was Chris’s responsibility, the way that June was mine. We all missed each other then: I wanted more time with Grace; Chris wanted to hold June while she slept, the way we had held Grace when she was an infant. “Put her down,” I would say, in a not-very-nice voice. “This one can sleep without you.” I was angry at Chris for what I saw as her elective engagement with June. When she told me she felt as though she didn’t even know her, I wanted to reply, “Well, she’s free tonight at eleven.” But I didn’t.

  When Grace was a baby, Chris shared the night shift with me, even when she was working again. But she wasn’t going to do that now. I could see that much of her involvement the first time around was a result of the great shifting of our lives and our uncertainties about Grace, our anxieties, which we shared. Was she eating enough? Was she warm enough? But it turned out Grace was fine. More than fine, really. So Chris wasn’t so vigilant this time. She wasn’t worried that June wasn’t getting enough food, or that I wasn’t drinking enough water. And not only that, Grace had become her responsibility, almost entirely. She drove twenty minutes out of her way each morning to drive Grace to child care so I didn’t have to wake June; she bathed and put Grace to bed each night, took her on weekend outings. She answered her calls in the night, even when she called for me, even when upon seeing Chris, she cried, “I meant the other mama!”

  But Chris would not get up in the night for June; she would not bring her to me, would not change her diaper before putting her back to sleep. She would not even take an occasional shift with June’s 10 p.m. crying jags. And so I spent those nights alone, most often in the bathroom, where June liked the sound of the exhaust fan, liked to look up at the chicken-and-egg mobile I had hung many years ago for Grace, which was now less of a mobile and more just a chicken hanging from the ceiling.

  Chris wouldn’t take a shift because she had to sleep. “I’m older this time around,” she said, “and I’ve been sleep-deprived for too long. I can’t do it again.” End of story. Or I should say, end of her story, beginning of mine.

  I was starting to see Chris as that imaginary woman we were all told we could be: a woman with children and a career, a woman who knew the importance of exercise and a good night’s sleep, who got her hair highlighted every six weeks. It was hard not to see Chris as a rebuke. Of course she could not have had the life she did without me, in the same way I could not have been the person I was, namely a stay-at-home mother—something I had wanted to be—if I didn’t have her. But we didn’t see each other’s lives that way then. We saw each other as obstacles rather than helpmates. We were not really on each other’s side. I was frightened by our opposition, by the inky depths I sensed below us when we fought about time and laundry and money, fights during which we both said hurtful things, clenched our teeth with outsized rage. We resolved our fights, sometimes only through a mutual desire to be finished, to stop trying to resolve. I felt us swinging on a weakening rope then, could see us trying to cross a bridge whose splintering boards would hold us, but barely.

  During the first two years of Gaby and Kelly’s separation, Kelly often slept over at our house. She and Gaby wanted Emmet to remain in his house, which meant that the two of them moved in and out each week. Kelly came into our house like a warm wind, her hair always lovely, her makeup done, her clothes professional and polished. Sometimes Chris would work late and I would put Grace to bed while Kelly tended to June, then after June was asleep we would eat the take-out dinner she brought from town. Sometimes she brought little gifts for Grace, sticker books or bath beads or flip flops, and she read to her before bed, asked her thoughtful questions, told her funny stories. At the time I couldn’t understand the breadth of Kelly’s loss, how much she missed her own son and how wrenching it might be to spend the evening with someone else’s children. It was years before I really understood how hard it had been for her to be away from Emmet. All I could see then was her free time, her leisure.

  By the time June was born, Kelly had a girlfriend in New York, so she stayed with us less often, although I still looked forward to the nights when she did. I looked forward to her New York stories. Her new girlfriend was an activist, and a vocal critic of gay marriage. Kelly often shared her regret for buying into an idea and a system that she hadn’t even believed in. “There was a critique, but I wasn’t listening,” she said, berating herself. “But it was also historic, so how could we not? But I was blindsided. So many of us were. But we’re not about marriage, you know?”

  I didn’t answer. I actually was about marriage. Not that I could—or wanted to—defend my allegiance. I was angry with my wife most of the time; I was always tired and often lonely. I wasn’t exactly a poster child for personal fulfillment through lifelong commitment.

  June stayed up late and slept in—she would have made a delightful first baby—but I had to get up and make Grace’s lunch and get her ready for school, so I got up with Chris. She rose early to exercise, and then took a shower, blew dry her hair, and made her breakfast, which she often did wearing only her underwear. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked her one morning.

  “Not really. I don’t want to get food on my work clothes.”

  “How about a bathrobe?”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  But there was a problem, although it was too hard to explain, even to myself. I didn’t want to see so much of Chris’s body. When she walked into the bedroom naked after her shower, I turned away. When she left the house for work, her shirt still unbuttoned enough to show her freckled chest, the edge of her bra, I tried not to see either. I told myself it was because there w
asn’t time, we were too busy, we were too tired. But this wasn’t the truth. I didn’t turn toward the body that used to stop me in my tracks because I didn’t want to be stopped anymore.

  I had been pregnant twice now; twice I had given birth, and now I was nursing again. And Chris’s body had become a sort of fun-house mirror. These are your small hips, it seemed to say to me, your narrow ribcage, your firm belly. This is you and not you. This is your lover, who remains unchanged as you expand and contract, leak and bleed and ache. It was the wrong way to see Chris, and it kept me from her, kept me from receiving her desire, which I knew to be genuine, and yet I could not help myself. I thought often of men then, of crawling into bed with a person to whom I bore no resemblance so that I could lose, if only for a little while, the confusing burden of my body.

  I complained to Kelly about what Chris wasn’t doing, or what she was doing that I wish she weren’t. I told her more than I had in the past, certainly more than I did when Grace was younger and Kelly was so vocal in her criticism of Chris’s involvement. But I was no longer as interested in protecting Chris. So I complained and Kelly rolled her eyes; she laughed and commiserated. Which always—always—left me feeling worse. But I kept doing it. I can see now that the mistake I made was in thinking that the things Kelly could see were the things that mattered most.

  “Do you ever think about having an affair?” Chris asked me one night when Kelly was sleeping over. I had come to bed late, thinking she was already asleep, and was startled by her question. It was a different question than she used to ask me, all those years ago when we first got together and she was worried that I was too inexperienced. “Do you want to date other women?” she would ask. “It’s really fine with me.” I would always say no. “You’re asking because you want to,” I would say. But this time I didn’t think she was asking for permission.