“Wow!” reacted Mother Lalah Justine Goddard (née White), twenty-four, when told she had given birth to quints.
And now Lalah and Bob have their hands full with broken bones, gadgets, horses, social climbing, and the quints (who, incidentally, they named the most ordinary names they could think of: Timmy, Susie, Annie, Jennie, and Johnnie). And Dr. Bob is making more money than ever, since it appears that having mulatto quints is the greatest way of building up a medical practice since Vitamin B shots. As for Lalah, she writes me once a year to ask why I don’t stop “farting around with poetry” and “do something meaningful” like have quints.
After Randy’s Arab and Lalah’s Negro and my first husband’s conviction that he was Jesus Christ, my parents were actually quite relieved when I married Bennett. They had nothing whatsoever against his race, but they greatly resented his religion: psychoanalysis. They suffered from the erroneous impression that Bennett could read their minds. Actually, when he looked most penetrating, ominous, and inscrutable, he was usually thinking about changing the oil in the car, having chicken noodle soup for lunch, or taking a crap. But I could never convince them of that. They insisted on thinking that he was looking deep into their souls and seeing all the ugly secrets which they themselves wanted to forget
That only leaves Chloe Camille, born in 1948 and six years my junior. The baby of the family. Chloe with her sharp wit, sharp tongue, and utter lassitude about doing anything with it. Plump, beautiful Chloe, with her brown hair and blue eyes and perfect skin. With the only really gorgeous set of knockers in a fairly flat-chested family. Chloe, of course, married a Jew. Not a domestic Jew, but an import. (Nobody in the family would stoop to marrying the boy next door.) Chloe’s husband, Abel, is an Israeli of German-Jewish ancestry. (Members of his family once owned the gambling casino at Baden-Baden.) And Abel, of course, went into my father’s tzatzka business. To a business dominated by former Catskill Mountain comedians, he brought lessons learned at the Wharton School. My parents rebelled at first and then virtually adopted him as everyone got richer. Abel and Chloe had one son, Adam, who was blond and blue-eyed and obviously the favorite grandchild. At Christmas reunions, when the whole family regrouped at my parents’ apartment, Adam looked like the sole Aryan in a playground of Third World children.
So I was the only sister ohne kinder, and I was never allowed to forget it. When Pierre and Randy last visited New York with their brood, it was just during the time my first book was being published. In the midst of one of our usual noisy fights (about something unmemorably idiotic), Randy called my poetry “masturbatory and exhibitionistic” and reproached me with my “sterility.”
“You act as if writing is the most important thing in the world!” she screamed.
I was trying to be rational and calm and well-analyzed about my family that week so I was painfully withholding the explosion I felt coming.
“Randy,” I pleaded, “I have to think writing is the most important thing in the world in order to go on doing it, but nothing says that you have to share my obsession, so why should I have to share yours?”
“Well I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing-do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all. And if I don’t kill you myself, then Pierre will. Do you understand?”
There ensued a long and fear-splitting discussion of autobiography versus fiction, in which I mentioned Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Boswell, Proust, and James Joyce-all apparently to no avail.
“You can damned well publish your filthy books posthumously,” Randy screeched, “if they contain a word about any character who ever remotely resembles me!”
“And I assume that you are going to kill me so as not to delay publication.”
“I mean after we die, not after you die.”
“Is that an invitation to a beheading?”
“Stuff your literary allusions up your ass. You think you’re so goddamned clever don’t you? Just because you were a grub and a grind and did well in school. Just because you’re ambitious and go fucking around with creepy intellectuals and phonies. I had as much talent to write as you and you know it, only I wouldn’t stoop to revealing myself in public the way you do. I wouldn’t want people to know my secret fantasies. I’m not a stinking exhibitionist like you, that’s all… Now get the hell out of here! Get out! Do you hear me?”
“This happens to be Jude’s and Daddy’s house-not yours.”
“Get out! You’ve already given me a splitting headache!” Holding her temples, Randy ran into the bathroom.
It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You’ve given me a splitting headache! You’ve given me indigestion! You’ve given me crotch rot! You’ve given me auditory hallucinations! You’ve given me a heart attack! You’ve given me cancer!
Randy emerged from the bathroom with a pained look on her face. She had pulled herself together. Now she was trying to be tolerant.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” she said.
“Hah.”
“No, really. It’s just that you’re still my little sister and I really think you’ve gotten off on the wrong track! I mean you really ought to stop writing and have a baby. You’ll find it so much more fulfilling than writing…”
“Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, Randy, it may seem absurd to someone with nine children, but I really don’t miss having children. I mean I love your kids and Chloe’s and Lalah’s, but I’m really happy with my work for the moment and I don’t want any more fulfillment just now. It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it… now that I can finally do it… I’m realty raring to go. I don’t want anything to interfere right now. Jesus Christ! It took me so long to get to this point…”
“Is that really how you expect to spend the rest of your life? Sitting in a room and writing poetry?”
“Well why not? What makes it any worse than having nine kids?”
She looked at me with contempt. “You don’t know a thing about having kids.”
“And you don’t know a thing about writing.” I was really disgusted with myself for sounding so infantile. Randy always made me feel like five again.
“But you’d love having kids,” she persisted, “you really would.”
“For God’s sake, you’re probably right! But you’re enough of an Ethel Kennedy for one family-why the hell do we need any more? And why should I do it if I have so many doubts about it? Why should I force myself? For whose good? Yours? Mine? The nonexistent kids? It’s not as if the human race is about to die out if I don’t have kids!”
“But aren’t you even curious to have the experience?”
“I guess… but the curiosity isn’t exactly killing me. Besides, I have time…”
“You’re almost thirty. You don’t have as much time as you think.”
“Oh, God,” I said, “you really can’t stand anyone to do anything but what you’ve done. Why do I have to copy your life and your mistakes? Can’t I even make my own damned mistakes?”
“What mistakes?”
“Like bringing up your children to think they’re Catholics, like lying about your religion, like denying who you are…”
“I’ll kill you!” Randy shrieked, coming at me with her arms raised. I ducked into the hall closet as I had so many times in childhood. There were days when Randy used to beat me up regularly. (At least if I have kids I’ll never make the mistake of having more than one. Being an only child is supposed to be such a psychological hardship, but it was all I ever wished for as a child.)