dining table. I noted that the altar guild, ladies all, set up and cleaned up after the meal presided over by a man. I clung to my love of this meal I felt sure was somehow mine—while writing in my diary about sex and spinster fear and Bill Brakeman.
“Bill Brakeman is such a dear handsome man, don’t you think?” my mother, who had taken Bill to lunch while I was in Spain, cooed. Yes, I did think Bill was dear and handsome and I did love him. We’d had this Lindy Hop pattern to our relationship for years, swinging away from each other, nearly losing grasp, then crashing back together so hard I’d feel crushed and pull away again, because of some inner unidentifiable hesitation I didn’t understand. Letting go of the security of understanding, I became engaged to Bill. We were a ringed “item” now, quite normal. Under a Danforth fellowship, I taught Spanish at Smith for a year while Bill finished up at RPI. We married in June 1961. My overjoyed mother orchestrated a voluptuous outsized celebration at their Darien home. I wore a plain white unembellished wedding dress.
Now we were married. We could do it. It was our sexually legal debut—and we couldn’t do it. My vagina set up its own “No Admittance” sign. I cried, over-apologized, and together we downed a whole bottle of champagne. The next morning while waiting for our flight to Bermuda I called my mother. It’s true, I did.
“Mom,” I whispered, cupping my hand over the phone receiver.
“Darling, how are you two lovebirds?” she asked.
“We’re not lovebirds,” I said.
“What?” she said. “Speak up, I can’t hear you.”
“We couldn’t do it,” I hissed into the phone.
“You mean . . .” she said.
“Yes, I’m not normal.”
“Of course you are darling. Just relax. I remember when Daddy and I were married he was so nervous he poured a whole bottle of champagne down the sink by mistake and ordered a poached egg on toast for dinner in a fancy hotel . . .”
“Okay bye. Have to run catch the plane. Bye.” I hung up before she could say one word more.
I told Bill who said, “Thank God we didn’t waste our champagne.” We laughed hysterically at Mom’s perverse consolation, which nevertheless worked to relax us, so by the time we got to Bermuda we did it. I’d worry about orgasms and any other aspirations later. For now more school. You’d think I’d know who I was by now. My mother did. Bill and I moved into a one-room apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan where I attended Columbia University to earn a master’s in Spanish while Bill, degreed as an electronics engineer, commuted from New York to Connecticut for his job with an engineering company. My mother selected and installed the drapes for our new apartment. We looked completely normal.
I didn’t go to church but I visited some sanctuaries and stared at the magnificent altars at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and at Riverside Church. I didn’t talk to God. I just sat still and knew: an emotional distance had begun to creep into our marriage. We were both introverts, both oldest children, both had dads we loved who drank too much, and both of us were more motivated to succeed alone than together, yet we wanted to be together. We just didn’t know how to talk to each other about our fears, resentments, longings, needs, worries, much of anything, but when we drank together we shared freely—up to a point. What we’d talked about that had connected us the night before by morning had vanished. We’d learned our ways growing up in a culture and families where drinking to excess was acceptable, and feelings were less so. We were normal.
I got pregnant while completing my course work at Columbia and we moved back home to Connecticut—to Ridgefield, a town of our own. Bill’s mood began to go haywire. For example, he once couldn’t locate a book he’d been reading. He accused me of losing his book, called me an asshole, and punched through the cheap plasterboard wall with his fist. This kind of thing only had to happen once or twice before I became sure lots of things were my error or fault.
Wrapped in a blanket I piled up notes upon notes to study my compulsive brains out for comprehensive graduate exams, which I took two months before our daughter, Beverley, was born in January 1963. Bill held our baby daughter and gazed into her face with a mixture of fear and adoration. We were parents—normal.
Pregnancy and childbirth put me back in touch with God in new ways. Birthing hurt like hell, but the force of my uterus’s natural push felt downright omnipotent—pushing for life, forcing embodied life into the light. I could imagine God’s laboring to breath life into a hippo, because that’s what eight pounds thirteen ounces of slowly emergent baby girl beauty with heaps of black hair felt like. The body I’d divorced after the old god-man incident did all this. Having children reinforced my own capacity for unfathomable and impossible love, a capacity I’d thought I’d lost.
Another daughter, Jill, was born in fourteen months. In three years a boy, Robert William Brakeman III. Bill’s father, who had been orphaned at a young age, felt relieved. His name would live on. We vetoed Bobbie or Billie and his sisters’ choices, “Skippy” and “Timmy,” and called our son R. B. Then we cast a vote for the American dream and purchased our first home back in Darien, an architectural double of my parents’ house, one street over.
All around me the sixties were exploding. I felt itchy inside. But I was not the decider. Bill had a career opportunity in Anniston, Alabama, and we moved, this time far away and into a foreign land. The children adapted and developed thick drawls. I didn’t do as well. I drank too much, spent too many hours wielding my new floor waxer around the spacious black-and -white–tiled foyer, helplessly watching black flecks spinning off black tiles onto white tiles. I couldn’t remember whether the psalm said you could or could not sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land so I went church shopping and discovered the uptown Episcopal parish was segregated and the downtown one was more Baptist than Episcopal.
Bill’s boss was a tyrannical boozer who called late one night for Bill to come rescue him from a Birmingham hospital where they were “holding” him for unstoppable hiccups.
“Let the asshole hick himself to death,” I said.
“He’s my boss,” Bill said.
“Well, fire him!” I yelled as he left.
Bill imitated hiccups. We laughed and . . .
The failure of birth control for an “old and tired uterus” (quote from the doctor) brought wonders: the feeling of life moving within me once more. Life multiplies life. I am never sure how or why such paradoxical happiness mysteries happen but I suspect it is through some bright combination of divine and human co-creating. In this case, Dad, now retired after a long and successful career, invited Bill to start a business with him—in the Hartford area. We piled into our blue Chevy wagon named Roosevelt Franklin, and headed north—home. I patted my huge belly and told it to wait. John Thomas was born just three days after we arrived—another new town, another new life, another new baby, another new chance.
The 1970s could work.
Chapter 3 It Was a Very Good Year—for Cookies
By 1973, we lived in a four-bedroom colonial in North Canton, Connecticut. I relished my children’s blossoming lives with affection and some uncertainty. Were we settled? Were we normal yet?
Bill and my father had very different ways. Dad, through Mom, complained to me about Bill’s making promises they couldn’t keep—ping!—and Bill complained to me that my father was too damn organized—pong! Dad finally
