This story happens in a movie theater. On screen, it's a Sunday afternoon, June 12, long ago. And my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. His clothes are neatly pressed, his tie is too tight, and his high collar.
He jingles the coins in his pockets, thinking of the witty things he's going to say. He arrives at my mother's house. He's come too early, and so suddenly embarrassed. My aunt, my mother's sister, answers the loud bell with her napkin in her hand, for the family is still at dinner.
As my father enters, my grandfather rises from the table and shakes hands with him. Finally, my mother comes downstairs, all dressed up. And my father, being engaged in conversation with my grandfather, becomes uneasy, not knowing whether to greet my mother or continue the conversation. He gets up from the chair clumsily and says hello, gruffly.
Well, in 1937, the same year that Django Reinhardt recorded this song, this very song, Yelmore Schwartz published a story, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Its originality and its beauty, its stunning beauty, was immediately and widely recognized. It was the lead story in the first issue of the influential magazine Partisan Review. And we take it as the inspiration for our radio program today.
It's This American Life from the BBC Chicago. I'm Ira Glass. And with Valentine's Day nearly upon us, we at This American Life, we wanted to do a show about romance. And we figured, with all the writing about love and romance and dating and the rules, there are really only two romances any of us really want to hear about, really.
And those are our own and our parents. And we're sick. We are sick of hearing about our own and talking about our own. So we thought we'd spend an hour talking about our parents.
As this Delmore Schwartz story continues, it's pretty much one disturbing scene after another. This story isn't romantic in the usual way that we use the word romantic. These parents do not seem to be falling in love. They don't really seem to be in love.
Instead, it's romantic in the way that great tragedy is romantic. All through the story, you can just feel the hand of fate moving in on their lives. We see their sad destiny, though they do not. They walk down the street.
My mother is holding my father's arm and telling him of the novel which she has been reading. And my father utters judgments of the characters as the plot is made clear to him. This is a habit which he very much enjoys, for he feels the utmost superiority and confidence when he approves and condemns the behavior of other people. My mother feels satisfied by the interest which he's awakened.
She's showing my father how intelligent she is and how interesting. My father tells my mother how much money he's made in the last week, exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated. But my father has always felt that actuality somehow falls short. Suddenly, I begin to weep.
The parents, all through the story, they're vain. They seem unfeeling. They have pretensions. They go to Coney Island, but they avoid the rides and the shows as being beneath their dignity.
At one point, they decide to get a picture taken. And the photographer looks at the camera at them, and he just feels that something is wrong. And he poses them this way and that way. But nothing he tries makes it look right.
Something is wrong. And finally, the father gets impatient and makes him snap the picture. When it's developed, the picture shows the father's smile turned to a grimace and the mother's smile right in false. The parents go to eat dinner at the best place on the boardwalk.
There's a live band playing the waltz. The father in the story starts talking about his plans for the future. And the mother shows with an expressive face how interested she is and how impressed. The father talks more and more excitedly about his future.
And the waltz is playing. And then comes this moment. I'll read. And then as the waltz reaches the moment when all the dancers swing madly, then, then, with awful daring, then he asked my mother to marry him, although awkwardly and often puzzled, even in his excitement, at how he arrived at the proposal.
And she, to make the whole business worse, begins to cry. My father looks nervously about, not knowing at all what to do now. And my mother says, it's all I wanted from the moment I saw you, sobbing. And he finds all this very difficult, scarcely to his taste, scarcely as he thought it would be on his long walks over the Brooklyn Bridge in the reverie of a fine cigar.
And it was then that I stood up in the theater and shouted, don't do it. And then the people in the theater shushed the guy, you know, shushing up. The story of our parents' romance is mesmerizing because it contains everything that we are. And when we hear it, you know, there's a part of us that wants the lovers to get together, you know, as we do with any romantic TV show or movie.
You know, you root for the people to fall in love. But there's another part of us that knows the consequences of that love, that knows how complicated things will get after years. And we pause. Well, today on our program, a variety of people tell stories about their parents' romances.
Act 1, a more cheerful take on this whole subject. Act 2, parents, childhood, and bats. Act 3, Julia Showalter's dad quizzes his hand onto her mother's lower back and leads her into the bedroom while the kids watch TV and eat popcorn. Act 4, Bill Nile's mom comes to America for his father.
Act 5, can children really understand their parents' lives? Scott Carrier and his own 11-year-old daughter talk about his marriage. Stay with us. Act 1, lighten up.
Let's change the pace a little, shall we? Hello, America. I'm Brett Leverage. I'll be reading to you today from a series of columns that I've written for Might Magazine entitled Men My Mother Dated.
Let's start with Bob Petronik. Mom's one date with Bob Petronik in her freshman year of college was an eventful evening of firsts. He escorted her to her first fraternity party, a semi-formal affair at which she imbibed the very first beer of her young life. One beer led to another and then a third, and in short order, she was pretty tight.
Another female partygoer bumped into her there in the crowded ballroom, and before anything could be done, she and mom became embroiled in a hair-pulling, eye-gouging catfight, the first such row mom had ever been involved in. The fight was broken up by the campus police. Mom's arrest, her first, on drunk and disorderly charges led to her first night in jail. Bob, much to his credit, took up a collection around the fraternity house and posted her bail the next morning.
But he never called for another date. Mom garnered 30 hours of community service, six months probation, and a reputation. Vince Skankly. The summer after her junior year, mom met a man who led her on an exciting, if frightening, adventure.
His name was Vince Skankly. He was the knife-thrower in a small regional circus called Blitzstein Brothers. Mom, accompanied by her friend Lois, attended each of the troupe's four performances. It was after the Saturday matinee that she met Vince.
He was standing near the performer's entrance to the lone Blitzstein Brothers tent, smoking a lucky strike. Darkly handsome and quite a bit older than mom, he had a worldly quality about him. He seemed cut of different cloth than any male she'd ever encountered in Okima. They chatted a few minutes, and just before she left, he asked her to meet him following that evening's performance at the coffee shop in the town square, just a few blocks away.
Mom, surprising herself, agreed. Over several cups of Joe, Vince regaled mom with tales of the places he'd been, the things he'd seen. Blitzstein Brothers covered four states in their touring, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri. So Vince had been as far as Kansas City and St.
Louis, towns mom had only dreamed of seeing. Mom was enraptured, swept away by this man. As they stepped outside the cafe, Vince revealed that his assistant, Zora, was leaving him after the next day's matinee. Taking mom in his arms and kissing her, he implored mom to come with him on the road and be his partner.
Mom agreed. They decided she would meet him the following weekend in Tulsa, where the Blitzstein Brothers were next booked. Vince met her at the bus station and took her to the room he'd booked for the duration of the circus's two-week stay in Tulsa at a downtown boarding house. He carried with him, while on the road, a fold-up cork board which he used to keep his throwing skills finely honed.
And he wanted to get in a little rehearsal time with mom before that evening's performance. As mom stood with her back to the cork, facing this man she hardly knew as he took aim with his knife, her knees began to tremble. Before she had time to protest, however, the first blade whizzed through the air towards her. It stuck in the cork firmly, just above her head.
A second followed shortly thereafter, firmly embedding itself in the cork board just an inch or two away from her left shoulder. When she felt the cold steel of the third blade at her right shoulder, she knew she'd made a horrible mistake. She screamed at Vince to stop and stepped quickly away from the cork board. The cut on her shoulder was a small one, but it b She probably tried to put it out of her mind as much as possible, but I'm guessing she could recite dialogues from the film.
She knows pretty much anything we want to know about Eddie Cantor. At least the Hollywood version of it. She could probably recite lines from it, I'm guessing. What do you think the fascination is with this kind of story?
I think that most of us have an interest in our parents' lives before they were our parents. It's sort of hard to imagine them where we are, you know, in our 20s or 30s or teens, dating and struggling with all that and deciding what to do with our lives. And so any stories that reveal the classic mom at an earlier stage in her life when she was going through some of the travails that we all face, I think are sort of attractive. See, I wonder if part of it is, you know, people need an origin myth, especially secular people.
You know, you need a myth of where did I come from to explain who you are. True enough, I think that's probably very true. A little glimpse into the world before me. More stories about everage's mom as our program continues.
Maybe he has sandy hair, oh maybe his eyes are brown or blue. Maybe he has a fault or two, but I like men. I like the masculine, I like the mind. And I like any other kind that I can find.
So the way that I feel, it's not hard to decide. I'll take southern hospitality or northern pride. Act 2, mom, dad, bats. Well, in fact, the story of our parents' romance is part creation myth.
We offer this story from BOL. It's 1962 and I will soon be 12 years old. Thus far I have lived in fear of Littlefoot vampires. My father drinks, my parents fight, the bleak house trembles, but I fear only Dracula.
In these olden days, the story of Dracula is a bedtime waking nightmare, a drama in which I stockade myself against the dark powers of annihilation. All children are fundamentalists and every cell in my body is zealous to win the fight against the night, my small ego trying to sustain itself against the forces I cannot name. In 1962, my parents traveled through the Mediterranean. They were in their mid-40s and looking back on it, I'm sure they were trying to rekindle the romance in their troubled marriage.
Under the lax supervision of my grandmother, I spent hours alone in the woods. One day I explore an old chicken shack, a derelict chicken coop. The timbers are weathered to a pewter and lichen, this finely blazed as anima casters have grafted themselves to the siding. At first there is little inside to sustain my intrigue, some ancient straw and a few daddy longlegs.
Then I notice something furry in a crack near the doorjamb. I poke it with my finger, but nothing happens. I poke again. This time a small claw strikes back, calling my bluff.
I feel silly to be reprimanded by such a small creature, but I don't push my luck. Though I've never seen one before, there's no mistaking it's a bat. The little foot shredding the air between us has permanently marred the membrane between the real and the make-believe. From that day forward, I try to strike a compromise between the tiny creature in the doorjamb and the emblem of my dread.
Bats were sprinters on the evolutionary track and while our forebears were still small as lemurs, still clinging to branches, their ancestors looked remarkably like themselves. Our limbs took painstaking millennia to grow beyond a childhood of rodentia while their fingers already extended, Nosferatu-like, to support the open umbrella of their wings. No wonder we fear them. In the presence of bats, we sense the occurrence of time before us.
In their impossible faces, we see a life that eludes us. Centuries of caves, forests of unfamiliar trees, Edens buried under rubble. We are like Nabokov's friend who, upon seeing a home movie taken before his birth, realized to his horror he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. One morning in 1962, after my parents have returned from their trip, I enter their bedroom to have my mother sign my blue books.
She's disappeared from her half of the bed, but my father, propped on his elbow, volunteers his signature. I reach across the bed and offer up my exams, which are the color of robin's eggs. As he autographs them and I smell the spice of his skin, I notice my mother's form concealed under the covers behind him. Later that day, I'm sent home from school with my first menstrual cramps.
I lay in bed and savor my morning's discovery, the only time I ever suspected my parents of having sex. Recently, I was sitting with my mother in the house she has shared for 20 years with a new husband I've come to think of as a father. We rest our feet among piles of magazines on a small wooden coffee table. It's the oldest thing in this house that bears the stamp of my history.
I remember the sour taste of its varnish, how my 4-year-old tongue once traced the carved bodies that ran on all sides. I'd always thought they were the bodies of flying men or dogs in capes. Are those bats? I ask her.
Yes, it's the first piece of furniture your father and I ever bought. We were living in a little flat in Chinatown. The Chinese believe bats bring happiness. I imagined my parents then, smooth-skinned, thinner, little to live on but love.
Their room is furnished with the donations of well-wishing relatives, a hooked rug, mismatched chairs, a creaky four-poster. I can't help thinking my mother likes being on top, that in those young days their sex was playful, their smell mingling with the smoke and ginger of the street. Near the bed, at the center of their new lives, is the table, bought for hope and a toss of the future. The bats draw back the seam of night like coverlets for my parents to fall into and sew that seam back up at dawn, like the last good luck kiss before rising for work.
These lovers are strangers to me, un-parents, animals not yet flexing around the beginning of my life. Their cells mingle hundreds of times before a fluke will yank me from the void. An excerpt from B.L.O's essay, Bats, which appears in a book, Wild Ride, and she's working on another book of essays. Act 3, It's Not the Heat.
For a long time, when asked if my parents loved each other, I would arch my eyebrow and say, Love? Well, I guess by their standards. Thereby implying that I knew more about love, neurotic dependency, and the difference between the two than they ever did. Julie Shellwalter's parents were married in 1944, high school sweethearts from Dimmitt, Texas.
When her father died 41 years later, they were still married. In between, they had three daughters and divorced each other twice. This is our program, of course, about our parents' romances, and Julie remembers hers this way. Because she was beautiful, he wanted her to be glamorous.
When we were the poorest we ever were, living on a turkey farm in a four-room house with linoleum floors, he bought her a silver tea and coffee service for Christmas. We'd just gotten television then, and I think he saw her as Bess Meyerson floating in mink on The Big Payoff, or Arlene Francis pouring coffee for her guests on The Home Show. Another year he did buy her mink, a cape from Sears. She exchanged it for a gas range.
They were hot, an embarrassment to growing daughters. She put her hand flat against his cheek after he'd shaved and just held it there while he moved his lips against her thumb. When guiding her into a room, he put his hand on the small of her back, and you could see his fingers flex, see him feeling her back under the dress, see her responding. Sometimes in the evening, they'd have a drink, put on an old record, and dance to Glenn Miller.
My sisters and I would watch them, handsome, graceful, sex-charged. Then they'd go to bed early, leaving us trying to concentrate on TV and popcorn. When I was 11, I saw her reach up from where she was sitting and zip his trousers. Then she patted him just below the belt.
This is marriage, I thought. This is sex. This is knowing another body. Drinking was his weakness, and sometimes when he was drinking, there'd be a woman.
A certain kind of woman finds your father very attractive, Mother told us. Their second divorce may have been the shortest in Missouri history. The day after it was final, a week after she'd sent her diamond rings out to be reset, rings, by the way, that she was still paying off, another one of his flamboyant gifts. The next day, she took him back, literally took him.
I was 19, the oldest, so she made me drive. We're going to get your father, she said. We knew where he was. He was with Lorna, one of those women.
When we pulled up, Mother shook her head at the degradation. Lorna's house had no grass in the yard, just hard-packed dirt. An old ringer washer that someone had tried to make into a planter sat on the sagging front porch. Mother sent me ahead.
Make sure he's in there. Through the screen door, I could see half a dozen men playing cards. My eyes adjusted enough to pick out Daddy. He looked loose, happy, drinking, but not drunk.
Lorna came in from the kitchen carrying a bowl of Bob Wills. My parents hadn't been together very long when they were invited to join their friends, Don and Dorothy, for an evening at the Chinaon Ballroom in downtown Oklahoma City. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were the headliners on that evening's bill, and their special brand of Western swing kept the dance floor packed the whole night long. From mom's initial turn around the dance floor, Wills couldn't take his eyes off of her.
He tipped his huge Stetson hat every time she turkey trotted by, and winked whenever he managed to catch her eye. Mom, a young woman at the peak of her beauty, certainly had no desire to encourage Wills, who was well into his fifties. But Don and my father, having a good time at mom's expense, kept swinging her right up stage side and turning mom so that she was forced to face the winking Wills. Mom, finally fed up, refused for a while to dance, but when, after a bit, she heard the orchestra strike up the opening strains of Faded Love, her favorite Bob Wills tune, she gave in and accompanied my father to the dance floor.
Soon, dad felt a tap, tap, tap upon his shoulder, signifying that someone was seeking to cut in, to take a turn around the floor with mom. By now you must surely have guessed that it was Wills. Dad stepped aside and mom found herself firmly in Wills' clutches. Mom felt there was little she could do but to grit her teeth and behave in gracious fashion until the song's end.
But as the orchestra, missing nary a beat, segued right into San Antonio Rose, mom felt, as he pulled her into an even tighter embrace, Wills' right hand slowly but steadily creeping downward along her spine, until it came to rest upon her left, well, let us say her left hip. Uttering not a word, mom fixed upon Wills an angry glare of an intensity that few have experienced, and fewer still have survived. Having wilted under the heat of his glare a number of times myself, believe me when I say, gentle listener, it can make a strong man weep. Wills was not up to the challenge.
He quickly removed his hand, cleared his throat, tipped his hat, said, excuse me ma'am, and hurriedly made his way back to the stage, whereupon he immediately called out for, take me back to Tulsa in double time. Throughout the remainder of the evening, whenever mom came within ten yards of the stage, Wills managed somehow to look busy, sorting through the musical charts on the bandstand, attending to an out-of-tune string on his fiddle, conducting the orchestra on a number they'd played hundreds of times. During the next intermission, the waitresses brought a round of beers to mom and dad's table and explained that they came compliments of the king of western swing himself, Bob Wills. Terry Plumpton.
Terry has remained a real mystery to mom. They dated for five months during her sophomore year of college, even talked a bit of a future together. Terry was, in many ways, mom's dream man. A perfect gentleman, a terrific dancer with a wonderful voice, a gourmet cook.
Their shared interests were many. They liked the same movies, the same music, though he was a bigger Judy Garland fan than she. Without warning, though, he left school and took off for San Francisco, where he remains to this day. Terry never married.
Kathy Simpkins. This would-be suitor was not a man and mom never really dated her. Still, the story will be told. After her sophomore year of college, mom decided to take a very difficult course load in summer school.
She knew that she would have to be terribly focused to pull this off, so she swore off dating for the duration. Not that it was easy. The phone rang often, but mom spoke with these gentlemen callers just long enough so as not to seem uncivil. The answer was always the same.
I'm sorry, I'm concentrating on my studies this summer and I'm not interested in going out. Thanks for calling. Mom's roommate for the summer was an older woman of 25, Kathy Simpkins. Kathy had just begun her studies as a physical education major that spring after serving a stint in the Air Force.
Mom and Kathy got along fine. They often cooked dinner together on those summer evenings, but they were not particularly close. In fact, Kathy knew nothing of mom's romantic or sexual proclivities. All she knew was that every man who called for mom was firmly, if politely, rebuffed.
So it's not so hard to understand how Kathy might have reached some misbegotten conclusions regarding mom's orientation. It all came to a head after one of those home-cooked meals. Mom and Kathy had gone shopping together that afternoon and splurged on a leg of lamb and a bottle of Beaujolais. Once the food was finished and the plates placed in the kitchen sink, Kathy, emboldened by her third glass of wine, sat right beside mom on what was rather a large and roomy davenport, and much to mom's surprise, transformed into an octopus diamoré.
Mom, caught more than a little off guard, extracted herself from Kathy's clutches, excused herself, and hurriedly sped off to her bedroom, quickly locking the door behind her. Things were a little awkward for a day or two afterwards. Only a few words were exchanged between the two, but eventually they sat down and talked things over. Mom explained that her moratorium on men was a temporary one, and Kathy apologized for her aggressive behavior.
The rest of the summer went by without incident. Today Kathy resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she enjoyed a long career as a physical education instructor. She retired only last year. She and mom still exchange Christmas cards.
Brett Leverage's column Men My Mother Dated is in Mite magazine and on the net at www.brettnews.com. That's B-R-E-T-T-N-E-W-S dot com. Act 4. He'll now his mother called herself a negress.
He now spoke with women he writes about how she used the word. He says the word usually conjures certain stereotypes. Single mother, public aid, low-paying jobs, like his mother. The stoic mom, selfless to a fault, who takes life as it comes, like his mother.
But he says in reality his mother was really not much like these stereotypes. That's part of his story. Another part is about her long illness. He says that she was sick for years, sick in a way that got a lot of attention from everyone around her.
She lost a leg to diabetes, lost a kidney, lost the vision in one eye. Here's how his memoir begins. Until the end, my mother never discussed her way of being. She avoided explaining the impetus behind her emigration from Barbados to Manhattan.
She avoided explaining that she had not been motivated by the same desire for personal gain and opportunity that drove most female immigrants. She avoided recounting the fact that she had emigrated to America to follow the man who eventually became my father and whom she had known in his previous incarnation as her first and only husband's closest friend. She avoided explaining how she had left her husband, by whom she had two daughters, after he returned to Barbados from England in the Second World War, addicted to morphine. She was silent about the fact that, having been married once, she refused to marry again.
She avoided explaining that my father, who had grown up relatively rich in Barbados and whom she had known as a child, remained a child and emigrated to America with his mother and his two sisters, women whose home he never left. She never mentioned that she had been attracted to my father's beauty and wealth partially because those were two things she would never know. She never discussed how she had visited my father in his room at night and afterward crept down the stairs stealthily to return to her own home and her six children, four of them produced by her union with my father, who remained a child. She avoided explaining that my father, like most children and like most men, resented his children, four girls, two boys, for not growing up quickly enough so that they would leave home and take his responsibility away with them.
She avoided recounting how my father, because he was a child, tried to distance himself from his children and his resentment of them through his derisive humor, teasing them to the point of cruelty. She also avoided recounting how her children, in order to shield themselves against the spittle of his derisive humor, absented themselves in his presence and, eventually, in the presence of any form of entertainment deliberately aimed at provoking laughter. She avoided explaining that in response to this resentment, my father also vaunted his beauty and wealth over his children as qualities they would never share. She was silent about the mysterious bond she and my father shared, a bond so deep and volatile that their children felt forever diminished by their love and forever compelled to disrupt, disapprove, avoid, or try to become a part of the love shared between any couple, specifically men and women.
She avoided mentioning the fact that my father had other women, other families, in cities such as Miami and Boston, cities my father roamed like a bewildered child. She was silent about the fact that my father's mother and sisters told her about the other women and children my father had, probably as a test to see how much my mother could stand to hear about my father, whom his mother insisted felt only they could understand and love, which is one reason my father remained a child. She avoided explaining that she created a position of power for herself in this common world by being a mother to children and childlike men as she attempted to separate from her parents and siblings by being nice and attitude they could never understand since they weren't. Negress was one of the few words she took And being ill was one way to get it.
My mother first became ill at the end of her love affair with my father. As with most aspects of my parents' relationship, it is unclear whether or not my father dictated the course their relationship would take. The difference between my mother and the woman he became involved with after my mother was significant. She consented to live with my father, whereas my mother had not.
After my mother refused to marry him, my father never asked her to again. I know my mother encountered my father's girlfriend once on the street. My father's new girlfriend was in the company of one of my father's sisters. My mother saw a certain resemblance between my father's new girlfriend and herself.
They were both homely but spirited, like Doris Day. It was clear to my mother that his new girlfriend was capable of withstanding my father's tantrums, his compulsive childishness, and his compulsive lying. I think the resemblance my mother saw between herself and my father's new girlfriend shattered any claim to originality my mother had. And, being a woman, she chose to be critical of the similarity rather than judge my father.
Shortly afterward, she was made sick by a mysterious respiratory illness. In the end, I think my mother's long and public illness was the only thing she ever felt she experienced as an accomplishment separate from other people. And it was. She was in love with my father until the end.
They spoke every day on the telephone. They amused and angered one another. She called him Sip, which was short for Cyprian, his given name. When he said her name, Marie, he said it in a thick, beigen accent, said that the A was very flat.
In his mouth, her name sounded like this. Marie. For years, I wanted to be part of a narrative as compelling to me as my mother's was. A narrative in which I, too, would be involved with a bad man, resulting in heartache that would eventually lead to depression and endless suicide and the attention that can be garnered from all that.
I was dwarfed by my mother's spectacular sense of narrative and disaster. She could have been a great writer. I have never been comforted by the idea that writing her narrative down in fragments is at all equal to the power of her live while trying not to experience. She is so interesting to me as a kind of living literature.
I still envy her lore, and I still envy her ability to love, no matter how terrible, no matter how coarse, and to allow that love to consume her, or literally parts of herself. I stand back from the model of her courage, just as I stand back from my desire to be taken in by love, even as I fear its power. I avoid all of this even though I have considered myself a Negro in the tradition of my mother. Time has not changed my point of view, nor has the knowledge that what divide people are not the dreary marginal issues of race or class or gender, but this, those who believe friendship and love dispel our basic aloneness, and those who do not.
This was the difference that divided me from my mother. Maybe all I can say in support of my difference from her is that she never missed herself while I was around. An excerpt from Hilton House's book, The Women. Ain't love grand?
Ain't love great? Ain't love the tastiest food you ever ate? Ain't love romantic? Well, the stage is set for lovin'.
But ain't love frantic when the kids are screamin' and smoke's pourin' out of the oven? Act 5. What can we really understand about our parents' romances? Well, this hour we've heard from grown children talking about their parents, and now we hear from a parent, reporter Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City, and one of his children.
Do you know how Mom and I met? I think you were working on an antelope story and Mom was doing filming or something. You met each other and then you liked each other and then you married each other. I remember sitting on my front steps in the morning waiting for her to ride up the hill on her bicycle.
It was in the spring, late April, and it had been raining, steam coming up off the street and sidewalks. I was waiting on the steps and I realized that I was in love with her and that everything was going to be different now. She'd ride up the hill and set her bike down on the grass and we'd go inside and she'd live with me there for a long time, maybe forever. I knew it.
I saw the whole thing coming, just like I see everything now. The only thing missing is the ending. I remember lots of times you were nice to Mom. I mean, she told me once that for her birthday or for Christmas or something you bought her perfume and you wanted to get her the right one and so you went around and you had like a sample of each and you were smelling it and you were deciding what you couldn't decide which one to give her.
And then when you come home, you hug her. My house inside had no furniture other than two chairs and a table. I made some coffee and moved the table over by the window so she could sit in the sun. She was a modern dancer, small and thin, wearing a white cotton blouse, no bra, no need for a bra, shorts and sandals, and sweating a bit from the ride.
Her skin was dark tanned already so early, lovely legs but with lots of scars on the knees and shins, and feet that were like little creatures unto themselves, beautiful and frightening. They had the structure of the Golden Gate Bridge, a high sinewy arch with built-in springs and pulleys and long toes stretching out for purchase. Do you feel like anything's a mystery between Hillary and me that you don't understand? This week when I asked our 11-year-old daughter Jessie this question, she pauses for at least a half a minute.
I've asked maybe a million questions in my reporting career, but this has got to be the longest pause I've ever heard. I don't really think about it much and it's a hard thing to think about. Why? Because I usually don't pay much attention to what you and Mom are doing between each other, but kind of I do.
And I don't really wonder anything. I don't think that there's something that I don't know that I really want to know, like a mystery or anything. I'd seen her dance the night before in front of a small audience downtown, and her style was wrapped around the idea, her idea, that she really weighed nothing at all and that her body was only there to tell little jokes, her little jokes, whatever might come to mind. I asked her if she liked my house, and she said she liked the view.
She asked me what I thought about her concert, and I said I thought it was funny. She said, funny? Only funny? Funny and beautiful, I said.
And she said, that's better. Do you think Hillary and I are in love? Yeah. I mean, you...
I don't know, because you sometimes have fights. I don't... I think people who love each other have to have fights sometimes, otherwise they don't understand each other very well. Like, they might...
Not everybody is exactly the same, and so people might disagree about something, but two people who love each other have to understand each other, and to understand each other, they have to know what they're thinking. Up until this time, I'd been living alone and was not unhappy. I had a house and a dog and a car, no job, no need for a job. I had money from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce a radio story about chasing antelope, which, as far as I could tell, only required a wholehearted effort to live as much like a primitive hunter as possible.
It was a problem I was working on by myself, and really, I had no idea how to go about it, other than by trying to live simply and by trying to stay outside and cover as much ground as possible. But there she was, finally arrived, come to stay. When you get married, you ever thought about getting married? Not really, not much.
You ever thought about it at all? You never thought, like, when I get married, it'll be like this? No, I never thought, like, when I get married, I will have, or it will be exactly like this, or something like that. Maybe a little bit?
I don't know. I mean, I don't believe we can ever guess the future, or, like, I can hope, but I never, I don't like saying what I want to be when I grow up, because you never know. She asked me why I only had one fork in the kitchen. I said it was all I needed.
And then asked her how many she had in her kitchen. Eight, she said, and at least ten spoons. And I have some glasses, different kinds, even wine glasses. I like to have friends over.
I like to cook and have friends over to eat. Don't you have any friends? Yeah, I have a friend, but he doesn't have any hands, I said, looking over at my dog. You know, she said, I've been dreaming about you.
I think I'm in love with you. How do you know she supports me? She doesn't wish, I mean, she doesn't say to us that she regrets that she married you or that, I mean, not having a job sometimes. And so she still appreciates what she has.
I went downstairs and brought up the pieces of a wooden bed frame that had been left there by a previous tenant. I had the mattress and everything, and I asked where she'd like to have it. She said, I like to sit in bed in the morning and drink coffee. So I moved the table and put the bed there in the sunlight.
When you get married, if your marriage turns