Spirals: A Woman's Journey Through Family Life

by Joan Gould

Overview

“A journey to the center of a woman’s life.”—Maggie Scarf
 
“A moving and exquisitely drawn portrait . . . Spirals is about commitment, courage, and the meaning of love.”—New Woman
 
“Family. Familiar. Only my family isn’t familiar at all. My friends are familiar, my friends are as dependable as telephone poles, but the members of my family change in size, looks, powers, burdens and expectations, when all I ask of them is that they remain the same.
 
Children grow, gather power while their parents lose it, leave home, travel in other orbits. Parents move, remarry or don’t remarry, dwindle away, die. Spouses may stay around for a long while—mine did, for twenty-eight years—but sooner or later they leave.
 
And I keep changing too, even though I’m the one who stays home. I picture myself in the role of mother, particularly the mother of young children, because this is a self I like—distracted and short-tempered, I grant you, but well-meaning in spite of outbursts. Still, I have to recognize that this is different from the self who was a daughter or wife—and these don’t have much in common with the new, apprentice selves, who have to learn a whole set of limits, as mother of adults, mother-in-law, widow and grandmother. One thing these selves have in common, however: They’re not the same as my self when I’m alone.”—from Spirals

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307826459
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/31/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Joan Gould's work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. The author of Spirals, she lives in Rye, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
 
Begin then, as everything always began in my life, at the moment when Martin comes through a door.
 
Start in fog on an October evening in 1978, past the time when the lamppost at the end of the front walk ought to be lit, nothing to be heard except the foghorn lowing on Execution Rock—two seconds out of every fifteen, but the sound stretches itself out to slide under the fog—a chesty tone that flows through the bottom layer of air without inflection, as if Long Island Sound itself is breathing in and out. At this point in the year, my sailboat is out of the water. The racing season has ended.
 
Suddenly, tires come rushing down the street from the Post Road, a heavy whirring recognizable to me as soon as it is to Ralph, the collie: an old Thunderbird barely slowing for the turn into the driveway, then braking. A few seconds later, the garage doors are thrown open one at a time, the car roars again (a man’s foot, too heavy on the accelerator, not a good driver, not a person who cares about engines). The dog barks frantically and jumps up from beside my chair as one car door thumps shut and then the other (a lot of packages tonight, too many for the front seat). Ralph hurls himself against the front door, which my husband, Martin, is about to fling open, his overcoat slung over his shoulders, his suit jacket unbuttoned and flapping, a briefcase under one arm, two cake boxes in one hand and a shopping bag in the other, and silence is shattered into a thousand fragments lying in small heaps around his feet, which he kicks aside as he and the collie mount the stairs.
 
Reaching the bedroom, he flips on the overhead light, flips on the air conditioner (never mind the fact that it’s autumn already, he likes the hum), tosses his briefcase and packages on the bed, twitches his finger through the mail on his night table, pushing aside the few that interest him, before he takes time out to kiss me.
 
“I didn’t remember the dry cleaners until too late,” I say. “You’ll have to manage without your plaid bathrobe this weekend.” Martin takes a crumpled shirt out of his briefcase, along with a stack of papers that he arranges on the table to be read after dinner, then runs the water in the bathroom sink full blast, before the dog has even stopped barking.
 
“Pete,” I call to our son as I leave the room, “did you take in the badminton set the way you promised?” He’s in his room with the door closed.
 
“Is it any wonder I love you best?” Martin says to Ralph, as I go downstairs.
 
Twenty minutes later, at the dining-room table, Martin demands some oak leaves, ordinary dry oak leaves, which I go out and get from the backyard. He steps into the kitchen, returns with a plate covered with a dish towel, and makes up a chant on the spur of the moment:
 
“Abracadabra, bric-a-brax,
Bonwit Teller’s, Bergdorf’s, Saks,
Hoop-la, hope-la, water and soap-la,
Hey, I say, Presto!”
 
Snapping his fingers, he whisks the towel away—and what do we have? Not crackly old oak leaves any more but chocolate leaves, straight from the best New York bakery. Peter looks warily at the plate. He’s ten years old, on the verge of eleven, during the season that I’m talking about, and chocolate leaves are his favorite, but he’s old enough now to see through the trick—that’s what his father mustn’t be allowed to realize—and not yet old enough to pretend that he doesn’t.
 
This is the child we had no right to have, born two days before the sixteenth birthday of our older son, Ted. “Never have your youngest until your oldest can drive you home from the hospital,” I told our friends when our daughter, Karen, was fourteen and I was forty. Strangers meeting us, way back then, were sure this little one must be the product of a second marriage. Neighborhood women, carrying tennis rackets or attaché cases, were convinced that he must be an accident, and that I must be bizarre or slovenly or devoid of inner resources to be so out of keeping with the times. Delayed motherhood wasn’t due to come into fashion for another decade.
 
“We didn’t trust our children to do right by us,” Martin used to say to new acquaintances, “so we decided to produce our own grandchild.” The strangers would look from one of us to the other, while I waited for them to laugh entirely too vigorously, to show that they understood this to be a joke. Martin enjoyed flashing his family life in front of people in the same spirit in which he stuffed a colored silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, coordinated to match his tie, even though he knew this had gone out of fashion, and what was worse, out of taste, some time ago.
 
But how could I prove that I wasn’t this child’s grandmother? Easily, easily. Not because I’m young or pliant—God knows I’m neither, especially not on autumn evenings, and most especially not on this one—but because, when I’m with Peter, I’m irritable, impatient, vainglorious, prideful, furious, niggling, passionate and, above all, full of remorse that I should be filled with such ungraceful feelings. My vision is knocked silly by the force of my desire that he should go get a Kleenex and blow his nose, instead of sniffing up into his sinuses or dripping down on to his plate.
 
Now I begin to understand why there’s something wary in his nature, a protective coating that shields him from the overboiling of my love. How else did I acquire a son who has already asked for a filing cabinet for his room, in which to keep papers of interest to him laid away in alphabetical order? How account for a boy who hates circuses, mistrusts foreign travel, likes butcher’s-shop lamb chops and chocolate truffles, but curbs his desires and asks for nothing that transcends the supermarket? When he sleeps, he lies flat on his back with his head turned to one side, folded away for the night as neatly as one of the papers in his file.
 
He’s small for his age, and a year younger than the rest of his class, and this affects not only the way he sees himself but also the way in which we treat him. Of course, he never suspects that I’m the one who has done this to him, I’m the one who has betrayed him by willing his body to remain small a while longer, because of the intensity of my need for a child in the house. How much taller would he be today if I’d been ten years younger when he was born?
 
I remember the day that Martin fell in love with this child. It was a Sunday at noon, a year after the baby’s birth, an hour that existed in no one’s schedule, like a hammock slung between two weeks for us to lounge in.
 
“Gross,” said Karen, who was fifteen at the time and skinny, and hadn’t come into her beauty yet, “absolutely gross,” riffling her hair to show us her dandruff, which was unbelievable, unbearable, and bound to get much, much worse because no one was doing a single thing to cure it. We were sitting in the kitchen, the only spot in our 1920s Tudor house that catches the sunlight on a winter afternoon. Or rather, four of us were sitting at the table in our accustomed symmetry, Ted and Karen, Martin and I, a junior couple and a senior couple, while the baby stood in his playpen at our side, stretching his neck over the rail like a pony to take any tidbit that might come his way. I don’t remember if Karen was cranky because she’d slept too long that morning, beyond her usual bounds, or because she still had to go to Sunday school that year and hadn’t slept long enough.
 
Martin, on the other hand, sat in his bathrobe, greatly at his ease, his abundant straight brown hair not yet combed but falling over his forehead. It may have been that straight hair, so thick and flip and casual, so unusual for a Jew and yet in perfect harmony with the line of his nose, that made me fall in love with him in the first place. Apparently he was pleased by the number of hours of sleep that he’d banked in his account that night, helped by pills, I was sure, but what else were the pills there for, he’d have demanded. Martin feared insomnia the way other people fear starvation; in fact, in his mind there wasn’t much of a gulf between them. If he didn’t sleep well, he wouldn’t be able to work well, and if he didn’t work well, he wouldn’t hold on to his rank in his law firm; he wouldn’t be able to supply this family with the food, the table, the Tudor house within walking distance of Long Island Sound, the garden with winter sunlight glinting, and beyond the yew hedge, the shapes of college tuitions and weddings and calamities still to come.
 
When I saw him asleep on a Sunday morning with the shades pulled down to the sills and the air conditioner humming even in midwinter to drown out any stray household noise, I never felt that I recognized this man. During the night, his face, with no body to be seen beneath it, flattened out into a seamless mask, vast and still, twice as large as the face I knew and as empty of thought as the heads on Easter Island. No, not like the heads on Easter Island. Like his mother. That was his trouble, although we didn’t know it yet. He looked like his mother. His mouth was half open, but no sound came out of it. His smell—the smell of this man who used Binaca mouthwash and French cologne in astonishing quantities—condensed wet and middle-aged in the folds of his pajamas.
 
But now, here in the kitchen, he was restored to us, he was back from that dense and primitive land in which he traveled alone; from his look of relaxation, the night’s journey had been a good one. He handed a potato stick to the baby in his playpen, and Karen offered him a sip of grape juice from her glass, which the baby accepted with equal good will. While she was distracted, I slipped an extra slice of cold leftover steak on to her plate.
 
Ignoring the juice, Martin went to the cabinet and took out a giant bottle of Coke, which he opened. He must have shaken it first, because it frothed all over the table. Bits and pieces were always flowing or falling from this man. At that very moment, if I went up to the bedroom, I’d find Seconal or Dalmane or Miltown or Maalox, quite possibly all four of them, scattered on the night table or lying on the floor (“Don’t you ever worry about the baby? Or at least the dog?”), bath towels tossed on the bed, dimes that had dropped through holes in his trouser pockets lying on the carpet, tissues, which later clogged up the washing machine with lint, stuffed in the breast pocket of his pajamas, and dollar bills that he kept on hand for a quick tip or taxi left in the pockets of suits on their way to the cleaners. There was too much of him to be contained. He emitted a steady stream of memos to his associates and secretary, writing at night with a battery-lighted pen. Even his beard needed shaving twice a day, on the nights that we were due to go out.