She wanted only to work, but Evelyn’s body still had ways in which to betray her. It held the bundles of tiny eggs, the little stirrings of life, and soon one of them was brightened with a mate, divided, divided, lodged and began to grow. Evelyn felt convulsed with sickness, immediately forsaken for the parasite. Though she had not expected to get out of motherhood altogether, she had meant to put it off.
Paul was happy for the news. He looked forward to a person in the house more helpless than himself. He was, so often, an abstraction. Half the time he lay alone, brain scrambled and so deep in ache and confusion that he truly was not part of the world. The days when he was well were spent waiting to be unwell again. He made just the gentlest motions towards living — ate meals, read about the tightening of the Iron Curtain, dressed himself, walked in the prairie and along the lakeshore, voted on one or another board’s agenda, went to the club to which all the men belonged, oaken and ancient, a place where money was like atmosphere: vital to every breath the membership took but completely invisible to them.
Evelyn said, “We’re going to hire help. Don’t think I’m suddenly going to turn into a mother with a stuffed pork shoulder in the oven.” In twenty years, when women burned their bras and quit getting married and slept with bearded men in parks, in communes, in apartments with full ashtrays and empty refrigerators, Evelyn would understand perfectly. If only she had been born a half-century later, she would have been the first one to set the world alight.
“Hire whoever you want,” Paul said. He knew that he would be little help, rendered useless by his own brain.
Evelyn got bigger and bigger, swelled past the point that made sense. The doctor felt her belly and declared with glee “Twins!” Her body, her own ever-inventive ruin. Paul celebrated with chocolate cake and red wine even though he knew they were both headache triggers, knew that he would spend the next day in a cave of delusion and pain. He figured he might have anyway, and sometimes he needed a good thing, sometimes pleasure was worth it. Evelyn took a nap while the babies inside her roiled like they were their own storm.
By the time she went into labor she was so huge and uncomfortable that she could hardly walk, much less sit or stand to work. Her hands were nervy without their clay. Their driver took them to the hospital where Paul was as clear-headed as he could ever remember having been, where he paced the waiting room like a chained dog while the other husbands smoked and drank coffee.
To Evelyn, the doctor yelled, “A boy!” first, and she felt relief like a punch in the face. “Thank God,” she said. But then, a moment later, “A girl!” and Evelyn said, “Shit.” Paul was there then — had he always been there? — and he was holding the first baby, the boy, while the doctor had given the girl to Evelyn. In the girl’s scrunched face Evelyn saw the entire path: pigtails, dollhouse, riding lessons, foxtrot, engagement, white dress, all in service of the repetition of this very same moment. Another perfectly wasted life. Maybe the girl would care about something along the way — art or history — but it would be pressed out of her slowly until she was nothing but a woman, nothing but a mother. “I want to trade,” she said to Paul. He was happy to because he wanted to examine all of his treasure, these two pinkened elves that had suddenly fallen into his life. He looked forward to everything about them. The only thought he needed to banish was the fact that he would miss half their lives, locked alone in the dark while the children splashed in the rain, learned the Greek myths, fell in love.
The nannies were Irish girls who would stay on until it was time for them to get married, and Evelyn had chosen the least beautiful applicants in hopes that they would take longer to find suitable mates. After the birth, Evelyn stayed in bed as long as directed by her doctor and then handed the little pink and blue bundles of Fern and Ben to the nanny and went back to her clay. Evelyn had wriggled out of wifedom by marrying a cripple and now she wriggled out of motherhood by paying other people to do the work for her, but she could not wriggle out of being a woman. Her sculptures were purchased all the time but she was never paid well. She knew, and she was right, that if she were male her work would have been collected in museums, but because she was female it all ended up in cemeteries.
The Cold War began, the first monkey astronaut was shot into space and the President ended segregation in the United States military. That was all peripheral, reported on the news. Meanwhile Evelyn marched through her universe’s particular vision of womanhood: luncheons in fine homes, fundraiser galas, horse shows, thank-you notes, condolence letters, garden tours. Much later she would wonder why she had not skipped all of it and become a recluse, going outside only to walk between studio and house. It was not a sense of duty that had made her go to the events but her abiding fury. To see the other women, the little wives, shuttling across the house like game pieces, everything from waistline to fingerbowls to rose varieties suffered over, made Evelyn’s own prison seem a little bigger. Her social life was like entering a zoo; leaving it made her feel, at least for a moment, almost free.
—
The babies turned into children. Evelyn paid minimal attention to Fern, who seemed sweet but ordinary. She played with dolls like all girls played with dolls. She also ran and climbed trees when no one was looking, not realizing her mother would have been relieved to see her attempt something dangerous, something dirty. Ben, no matter how hard Evelyn tried to see him as strong or quick, the picture of masculine ease, remained a vague smudge of a boy, someone passed by and passed over. He was hugely tall and it was as if he did not have enough self to fill that whole body. He was quiet and so pale as to look out of focus. As time wore on, Evelyn slowly gave up on him. She had hoped that because he was a boy he would not have to suffer or fight, that his voice would be easily heard in a room. Not Ben.
And what about from the inside? He wanted just like every person wants; he had an encyclopedic knowledge of predators and prey. He imagined exploring caves and caverns in faraway continents where the click of the bats and the echo of water dripping were the only sounds. He liked the idea of being sealed off. It was a relief to think of being intentionally alone.
Even though he was big, Ben had a way of blending into the background. Fern sometimes felt as if she hadn’t seen Ben in days, though he had been right there all along, his huge frame seated at the kitchen table, silently reassembling with tweezers and glue the skeleton of a dead sparrow he had found and dissected. Still, Fern counted on Ben. His vagueness made her look and feel specific, normal. Her father was sick and her mother did not like to look at Fern, the girl of her. The siblings watched the family’s color television where news of the world filtered in between cartoons. Segregation was ruled illegal, a black woman refused to give up her seat on the bus, a pretty actor died in his car. All of it felt far away. The place in which they lived was an unrippled surface. Fern felt safe, yet even as a girl she sensed that safety was a lie. Everything else was also true.
Fern and Ben shared a bed, and in sleep their twin bodies did not recognize their separateness. For Ben it was the kindest the world ever felt. Fern liked it too — lying beside him was the only place where the searching hum of the world went quiet.