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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Gertrude and Alice
When Alice B. Toklas met Gertrude Stein, she heard bells ring. They went on to have one of the happiest marriages of the 20th century.
By Amy Benfer
[11/18/99]

The case against matrimony
If marriage is risky, doomed and expensive, why bother?
By Larissa Phillips
[11/18/99]

No regrets
I was an unashamed mistress.
By Anna Sorelli
[11/17/99]

The other woman
She is a narcissistic sex worker with no knowledge of true love.
By Jonathon Keats
[11/17/99]

That Was Then
Keep it clean

[11/17/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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We chat about possessions. He has an apartment on a Los Angeles beach; he has a car. The car is a Mustang, a '68.

"A '68 Mustang?" I inquire. "Terrific."

I'm faking here.

"You didn't use to know much about cars," he remarks correctly. We look at each other. There's recognition, recollection. And a touch of sadness, probably. We laugh. I'd forgotten about that straightforward laugh, with the eyes engaging you directly.

I'm aware of myself in my yellow dress, leaning against the couch-back, balancing a wine glass. I've started feeling good. Simply and straightforwardly; here's someone who begins to make me feel healthy and younger. It's been a long time since I knew about that.

And it's been a long time since Mel and I laughed. The last time we were together we didn't laugh. That was when we were saying goodbye. That is, I said goodbye; he hardly spoke.

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It's night, September, balmy; we are outdoors on the grounds of our housing project in suburban Washington. The year is l95l. He and I sit rigidly on the opposite edges of a small green sandbox, not talking, each clutching a corner of sandbox frame, each staring into a tiny prickly sandbox landscape decorated with broken plastic shovel handles.

It's dark; all of this illumined by the lights of our housing project. Albemarle Terrace is in the southeast section of the District of Columbia. The Albemarle builders intended their fake colonial brick boxes for young ordinary folk -- that's how the Terrace was advertised -- EX-SERVICEMEN! FAMILIES! But by some accident -- nobody understands just how -- the project got co-opted by Communists. By young ones, ex-serviceman ones, lower middle-class ones. By us, in fact, who are almost what the builders intended, except for being Communists.

That's what we are -- Communists. Both of us. Mel is more devoted and loyal than I am; he knows the Party can abolish unemployment, discrimination, war. We don't tell people who we are. Being Communists has made us different. Back in the good days it made us serious and pious. And lately it has made us paranoid.

"Say something," I demand of my husband. But he doesn't respond, doesn't even budge, stares into the set of sand hills, his long dark face immobile.

Too handsome, that's what I thought when I first met him, the intense look too much like the second lead of a bad movie, the guy with the big frame and dark hair and eyebrows and mustache who dies at the end and sets the heroine free. But Mel isn't like that at all; he's gentle, stubborn, shy. Shyness can make you seem intense. He's loyal, awfully loyal.

Please stop looking that way. I try for a deep breath, my lungs feel locked shut. He's loyal to me. Loyal to the Party.

"I want," I say now, making my voice calm and flat, but louder than usual, "a divorce." He waits a beat. There's a noise in the distance -- a plane. Finally he says, "Oh." No movement, nothing; I look at his shoulders, broad against the building lights, at his hands on the sandbox rim, no inflection. And then at last he says, "NO."

This is pretty awful, I think; I can't do it. Then I know that I can; here I am doing it; I'll stick with it. Back inside the project, in one of the rooms above the sandbox, we have a 2-year-old child, asleep, window open so we can hear him if he cries. I tell myself he's the reason I'm sitting here saying this, but also I think maybe that's a lie; maybe I'm just scared, the way the comrades have been saying to each other, passionately, every time there's a meeting of more than four people. "What are you -- scared?" they say, or hiss, as if it were salacious.

Can you hiss a word like scared? I'm angry. And fiercely, achingly sad. I won't go to jail and let my child be raised by his grandmother. Because that's what is threatened in this year of 1951. McCarthy has entered the headlines and our Communist friends are getting arrested.

Mel hasn't spoken since his gut-wrenching NO. Light from a window hits the side of his face, contorting it into the mask of a Goya sufferer -- there I go, standing aside and making artistic comments at myself, even when it hurts. Self-centered, the genuine me, always watching. Please, please.

Next page | What did I expect from this encounter?