Michelle Herman, Telling the Story

But even though I didn’t feel like his teacher, he looked up to me, I could tell. And that was appealing—this I confess with a little more shame than I do our rule-breaking (although I’m not sure there were rules in place yet then, in the mid-eighties). I’d never dated anyone before who admired me. *** Twenty-one years after he had been my admiring student, twenty years after he had taught me to drive, sixteen years after we split up, we sat eating breakfast together as we had so many times before. Over eggs and coffee, he took out his wallet, took out the photos: seven of them—one of each of his six kids, and one of all of them together, the littlest two propped up against their bigger brothers and sisters. There they were: the children we’d broken up over. We broke up when it became clear, over the phone one night, that neither of us were going to budge: he wanted them; I didn’t. It was an insurmountable obstacle—that, and the closely related obstacles of his wanting those theoretical children to be raised Catholic. “Jews don’t convert,” I kept telling him, but until that night he didn’t believe me. “Writers don’t quit writing,” I told him. “Not by choice, anyway.” But this too he hadn’t believed. I was guilty of disbelief too. All that time I hadn’t taken him seriously. Surely if he wanted six kids and a Catholic wife devoted exclusively to their care he wouldn’t have been with me. *** J. was the eldest of eight children. The year before we met their mother had been killed in an arson fire. He didn’t tell me that right away; we were dating for at least a month before he came out with it. He said then that he hadn’t wanted to overwhelm me; he’d wanted to wait as long as possible to tell me the story, which he told me patiently, in detail: it was no set piece; it was a narrative, and it was complicated and ugly and unbearably sad. I knew by then that his mother had died, of course, just as I knew that his father had disappeared years before that—abandoning wife and children on the farm where they lived—and I knew that his mother’s death left him the guardian of the six of his seven younger brothers and sisters who were still under twenty-one. Four of the children were under eighteen, and the youngest, S., turned thirteen just after J. and I started dating. I won’t tell the story of their mother’s death. This is a story that is his and his family’s, not mine to tell. The fact of it alone shook me, and that is mine. It shook me so hard that I, who had just learned to drive, listening to this story as I drove us along a country road, drove us off the road, into a ditch, and wrecked the car that had been his mother’s. After his mother’s death he acted with what I would later learn—and later grow both fond of and wearied by, in turns—was his customary decisiveness and calm authority: he bought a house in the city nearest to the farm where they’d lived, and began at once to remodel it for what was left of his family. The two youngest children were girls; the boys, and the one other girl, ranged from sixteen to twenty. There was one brother, the next-to-oldest child, who was already established on his own; he lived elsewhere. He bought a house in the city and installed the kids in it. For his last two years of med school he ran his ready-made family from a distance with multiple daily phone calls and visits every weekend he wasn’t on call. Then, when he graduated, he moved into the house himself and began his medical residency at a hospital less than a mile away from it. Into this complicated life I followed him—on weekends at first, after he graduated and while I was still a student (those driving lessons came in handy, as I put in 466 miles roundtrip every weekend during my second year of grad school)—and, after that, moving 233 miles west, into a rented house of my own exactly halfway between the hospital and his house. I helped with meals, and took S. shopping for school clothes in the fall. I made Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners (the first Christmases of my life—and what an introduction to Christmas it was: we didn’t just have a tree, we went out into the woods to chop down a tree). I housed S. in my guest room on the nights when her brother was on call, and cooked her meals that seemed motherly to me—meat loaf and mashed potatoes, homemade macaroni and cheese. I supervised homework, talked to her about her boyfriend, tiptoed into her room to remove the phone from her ear after she fell asleep talking to him. I had never before been responsible for—or to—anyone but myself, and every time I brushed the hair out of S.’s eyes or set a plate of food before her, I was startled by how much I loved her. I loved the others, too, especially the second-youngest, who was more self-sufficient and self-contained than S. But sometimes she wanted to talk, and when she did, I listened—mostly just listened. The others came and went, and I fed them, and listened to their troubles about boyfriends and girlfriends, school, jobs, and, of course, their eldest brother. They complained about him the way all children complain about their parents. He was too strict, he wasn’t fair, could I intervene about curfew, money, changing majors, changing schools? You know how he is. Can’t you do something? *** As I say, I am the sort of person who likes to stay in touch with everyone, and when people fall out of touch, it is I who makes the effort to reconnect. But when J. said he thought it would be better if we didn’t talk again, I knew he meant better for him, and I wanted things to be good for him, so I dropped what was by then the very delicate thread of our relationship.