When we broke up I was living in Columbus, Ohio, where I’d moved six months before for a teaching job. He was still living in the house he’d bought for his family even though he was all alone in it now. The two youngest were in college; the third-youngest had joined the Marines. He was looking at practices in central Ohio as we made our plans for him to join me the following year. Meanwhile, the children drifted in and out of the house, with their laundry, or when they needed money, or for a shoulder to cry on or (more likely) a bracing talk.
We were chatting amicably enough on the phone that night when it was as if a veil lifted, suddenly, and we both understood that it would be impossible to make a life together. For four years I had listened to him talk about his future and felt, affectionately, that he deserved this dream—the dream of having it go right when it had gone so wrong for his parents. But I thought he knew it was a dream; after all, he had heard me talk about my work—he had read my work—and about my uncertainty about whether I wanted to have children at all, not only because of my intention to devote myself to writing, and the teaching job I hoped to land someday, but because I was afraid, for this and other reasons, that I would be a terrible, neglectful mother. And I didn’t attend synagogue, it was true—but hadn’t I left him and his family to travel for a month alone in Poland, the land of my grandmother’s childhood, where I did virtually nothing but visit synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, or what remained of them?
I had made myself plain to him, I’d thought. And he, it seemed, had told himself the same thing.
When we saw that we had both been wrong we agreed at once, with sadness but without bitterness or anger, that it was time to call it quits. And although I wanted to stay in contact, both with him and with his siblings—but especially with S.—I didn’t insist. I wanted to make things as easy on him—for whom things had always been so hard—as possible.
Every time we did talk—including that last time, the day of his first daughter’s birth, I asked him to pass along my phone number to S. and let her know that I’d like to hear from her, but I didn’t press him—I didn’t make him promise to give it to her, and when I didn’t hear from her, I didn’t call him back and ask him why I hadn’t. I left it to him to do what he thought was best.
Just as I didn’t argue when he said he didn’t want us—him and me—to stay in touch. I thought he knew what was best for him; I wanted him to be happy. And sitting with him in the diner, looking at the pictures of his children, hearing him talk about the woman he’d married, about the land they lived on, out in the country, just as he’d hoped, and about his work—just the kind of work he’d always wanted to do—I was struck not only by how happy he was but by the fact that he had what very few people have: exactly what he had wanted when he was young.
But something else occurred to me, too, in the moments before I had to leave, to start on my journey toward the next stop on my book tour—the town in which we’d met, where we’d both been students, where I hadn’t been back since. I realized that I had all I’d wanted, too, and that I owed much of it to him.
When we met, I had been living alone and supporting myself for almost a decade, but in the ways that mattered most I was still a child. With him—with his family—I had had to grow up fast, just as he had, even before that. Maybe we hadn’t been kidding ourselves, it occurs to me now, staying together long past the point when it should have been obvious that our relationship was doomed. Maybe we just couldn’t admit—to ourselves, to each other—that we needed each other just then. That for him, my help was invaluable. And for me—well, I wanted to help. I wanted to grow up.
I kept growing up after we parted, too. I learned that becoming a mother wouldn’t mean giving up on my work—that the opposite would be true: it would help me become a better and more disciplined writer. I learned to trust the love of another good man, as unselfish and loyal and responsible as the first one I’d ever met. Even the ragtag, make-it-up-as-you-go-along religious life my family has—in which we celebrate Sukkot with a sukkah built each year by my daughter and my artist husband, the Southern Baptist preacher’s son; celebrate Christmas with lasagna; eat matzoh at our Easter dinner and are joined each year for our Passover seder by our daughter’s best friend’s non-Jewish family—required a leap of faith that I don’t believe I would have been capable of before. And if I never for a moment wanted to have six children, after much trial and error I’ve finally become the sort of mother to my child that I had deeply, secretly, always hoped to be—even before I grew up.
***
I only know, really, of one way to tell a story—embedded in its context, unslipped from meaning, rich in character and history—the shell cracked, its entire contents spilled into one bowl. Only then can I see what I mean to tell fully. Only then can I see myself fully, and make myself seen.
There is nothing in our lives, it seems to me, that does not deserve this treatment. This cracking-open, this fullness and wholeness. Not carelessly, but cautionlessly. Cautionlessly. Uneasily. Not carefully, not easily. That paradox. The paradox I do my best to live by.
***
For a long time I didn’t write about my life, about myself, without making fiction of it. I still make fiction of it and on occasion a poem. I have never entirely understood why writing in verse is not subject to the same genre distinction—is this true or is it made up?—to which prose is, but more and more often lately, in my middle age, I have been writing true accounts of myself, too. Partly, no doubt, this is the result of, or in response to, the forceful swing in our culture toward nonfiction—the literary memoir, the documentary film. Reality television. Suddenly, it seemed to me, I was reading more nonfiction that I enjoyed; the movie I saw that I liked best one year was Spellbound, a documentary about children in spelling bees. The personal essays I read in Anne Fadiman’s American Scholar interested me more than the short stories in the Atlantic or the Missouri Review. But something else was afoot (and quite possibly something else was afoot in the culture itself): I began, for the first time in my writing life—a period that I consider to have begun at age seven or so, and thus had already spanned forty years—to want to tell things as they really were. I was impatient with my characters, and with my customary narrative methods. I was tired of hiding behind a tree (as I saw it), slipping from tree to tree throughout the forest, narrating without revealing myself as myself. I wasn’t bored or impatient with making things up—it’s hard for me to imagine ever growing bored of writing fiction; I was, however, restless, fidgety, wanting to take a chance for once at approaching something head on. Not writing around love, for example—characters in love, struggling with, toward, or against love—but writing about love, directly, plainly: telling what I knew. It’s middle age itself, I sometimes thought. I’ve learned some things; I know some things. I just want to talk about them, straight out. What would happen, I asked myself, if I stepped away from shaping meaning, from artful closure? What would happen if I didn’t pretend to be writing about anything other than the subject itself?
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