Why am I being so bitchy?
Because I’m hostile.
Next question?
No, let’s remember how this went. He said, “Jan, baby, this isn’t working out, is it?”
A moment of panic. What wasn’t working out? Our Vietnam policy? Our marriage? The new color television set? Rice Galitzianer?
“What I mean is that this is no way to start a family.”
“Oh.”
“You can’t get pregnant watching television.”
“Unless we do it doggie style.” (I didn’t say this. Like most good repartee, it occurred to me twelve hours after the moment when it would have been effective. What we all need is the opportunity to go over our lives with a blue pencil the next day.)
(And cross everything out? Maybe.)
“You know something, darling? I love you.”
“And I love you, Howie.”
“Baby, let’s go upstairs.”
“Sure, honey.”
We live in a ranch house. Everything’s on the same floor. One’s speech patterns seem to derive from the culture in which one lives to the point where one summons one’s bride unwittingly to the roof. I used to think, when Howie first invited me to an upstairs which wasn’t there, that he had spent his childhood in a two-story house. Not so. He had never lived in a two-story house, had in fact never lived in a house before we moved to Eastchester. It was always an apartment somewhere or other in Brooklyn or the Bronx. When he and I had the apartment on Seventy-seventh Street, there was none of this Let’s go upstairs cuteness. It came with the house, like the thirty-year mortgage and the leak in the basement and the army ants or whatever they are. Sometimes he catches himself, and sometimes I remind him, but it doesn’t matter, he does it again the next time. Movies and books and television taught the poor man that when you live in a house you have to climb stairs to go to bed.
So we went upstairs — why fight it? — and went to bed, and he kissed me boozily and felt my breast — felt one of them, anyway — and thus inspired he gave a great sigh and passed out. Went to sleep? No. Passed out sums it up fine.
Leaving me to feel guilty about feeling glad.
I don’t want a baby.
I guess I’ve never said that out loud. I guess most of the time I don’t really believe it myself, but I do now. God, yes. I mean God, no.
I don’t want a baby.
I wonder if he does, really. I don’t think so. Men are supposed to have these undeniable impulses. I have a feeling they’re as deniable as anything else. Mine certainly are.
You know what I think? I think it’s all part of the image. Being a few years married, and past the honeymoon (God in heaven, are we ever past the honeymoon!) and having moved out of the crowded evil city and into the fresh (?) air of sweet suburbia. The car we bought, for example, is a station wagon. We never owned a car in New York — that was one of the things I hated about New York, you had to go through a big production whenever you wanted to go somewhere — and here we finally have a car, one car for the two of us, and what kind of car is it? A cute little sportscar? A cunning and sensible compact? A big showy ostentatious ballsy sedan?
None of those things. A station wagon, a big klutzy station wagon with room for eighteen kids, none of which I want to have.
None of which I probably will have, having gone two years now without coming any closer to pregnancy than I don’t know what. (You have a way with words, Giddings.)
And if I were using this book as a way of keeping compulsive records, rather than a place to jot down the observations of the moments (I think I mean the observation of the moment, both singular, although how few moments are truly singular, Doctor?) I might in that case feel compelled to state here in blue-black and white that in this year, now eight days old, we have, if memory serves, fucked once, and then not very well.
January 12
It snowed today. The snow that we already had was just about gone. For the past week or so it’s been turning brown in the gutters, becoming slush, and bit by bit finding its way down the sewers. (You would almost think it was human.) So now it’s snowing, coming down in big wet sticky flakes. I sat at the window and watched it and thought how beautiful it was, and how depressing.
Why is my first reaction to everything to think how much damned trouble it will be? Why don’t I enjoy things?
January 14
Marcie Hillman thinks I should have an affair!
She came over this afternoon for the pause in the day’s occupation she calls the housewife’s hour, before her kids were due home from school. I made real coffee in honor of the occasion. The nice thing about instant coffee is that there is no way to screw it up. Not so with this afternoon’s pot. You would think that after seven years of marriage I would know how to make a simple thing like a pot of coffee. You would think that, wouldn’t you?
We sat in the kitchen and pretended the coffee was all right. And, like fighters warily circling one another in the opening round, we played Who’s Depressed? (That’s the first time I’ve named our game, but not the first time I’ve seen it as such. If there were a way to package it as a board game for two or more players, a way to introduce dice and spinners, I think it would outsell Scrabble.) We fence around, Marcie and I, alternately bubbly and sulking, until through some hard-to-follow process we mutually determine who will be patient and who will be therapist. The roles float back and forth from day to day and week to week. Her hangups are at least well defined, and I guess pretty standard. She keeps going on and off diets and forever weighs I guess twenty-five pounds more than she should. And she is periodically incapable of keeping her house as clean as she wants it, and never capable of keeping it as clean as Edgar wants it, Edgar being her husband. She is, for all of that, a tall and pretty blond with a pretty if ample body. She is also a year and a half older than I am, which is to say that she is thirty, has in fact been thirty for a half a year, and it hasn’t seemed to destroy her.
“You,” she said, “are in a bad way.”
“I suppose.”
“What’s the matter? The periodic distress of the female ilk?”
“Ilk? My periodic ilk isn’t due for a week.”
“And maybe you won’t have it.”
“Oh, I’ll have it.”
“You could be pregnant right now, kiddo. And then you’ll glow with motherhood, and all the doubts and fears—”
“Oh, sure. Anyway, I’m not pregnant.”
“I don’t like to keep harping at it, but this one particular doctor is supposed to be fantastic. Every woman who goes to his office comes home pregnant.”
“From his office?”
“I didn’t say that exactly right.”
“It sounded as if he screwed them himself.”
“Well, whatever works, doll. American pragmatism in action. Better things for better living.”
“Uh-huh. Who wants to be knocked up, anyway?”
“I thought you did.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe I’m getting a little old for that sort of thing.”
So we tossed the age pillow around for a little while, and other things, and then Marcie cocked her head — I think that’s the word for it, set her head at an angle and swung her eyes at me — and told me I ought to have an affair.
“You know what?” she said. “You ought to have an affair.”
“Just what I need.”
“You think I’m kidding, don’t you?”