Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

You and Dad come back from Germany and move to Binghamton, where he has a teaching job.

— You forgot about Minnesota, Betsy.

— I’m just conflating. Nothing happens in Minnesota that’s all that different from what happens in Binghamton.

— That’s probably true.

You move into a little Cape Cod, excited to set up your first house. Your budget is still laid out down to the penny, so you sew more curtains, shop sales, make a braided rug out of wool flannel remnants for the living room, take it apart about four times until it lays flat. You fix supper for Fred most every night, broiled, buttered chicken breasts with frozen lima beans, pork chops with frozen green beans, Jell-O or vanilla ice cream for dessert, Mother’s three-bean salad in the summer, nothing fancy. Sundays are his turn to cook but he would just as soon have TV dinners, which are fairly newly popular, and which Dad considers to be one of the brilliant innovations of their time, so when his turn comes it’s either Salisbury steak with peas, mashed potatoes, and apple pie, or he’ll fix up some braunschweiger sandwiches on Hillbilly bread. For a while you’re pleased with yourself for being such a good homemaker, write letters to your mother thanking her for all the ways she taught you to save pennies, but once the place is all decorated, you’re not altogether sure what to do with your time. You’re thought of as a good faculty wife, whatever that might mean, showing up with a smile to cocktail parties in a smart wool sheath, pearls, and circle pin, and you know Dad never so much minded that you wanted a career as much as he just hadn’t fully understood what that might mean, and that he hadn’t thought about it at all before you got married. You’re not even sure how much you did, honestly. You knew you wanted more than what Muscatine had for you; that was about it at the time.

There’s a small opera company in Binghamton, and you and Fred have attended a few performances there, though you secretly think most of the singers are positively dreadful, that you would be better than any of them. But you and Fred have been trying to have a baby, and soon after this you get pregnant; you’re only twenty-two, and this is what people do, though you have some lingering uncertainties about whether it’s what you really want, or at least this soon. Still, when you eventually miscarry, you find yourself unexpectedly sad. You imagine a boy (though you’ll never know), standing over his changing table, tickling his tummy, observing the utter perfection of every part of him, his long eyelashes, his chubby fingers, thinking how lucky he is to be a boy. The image vanishes though, and your mind takes you somewhere else: you’ve failed. This is not something you have much experience with — none, to be precise. You have never known anything but triumph, no matter how small; you got straight As throughout school, you behaved like a proper young lady, always, never once got in trouble, although you haven’t forgotten that time you brought your friend Ginny over to play, how even though you weren’t punished, you had failed to see that your judgment was utterly wrong. This new but gripping sense of failure settles in as though it had been there the whole time waiting for the best opportunity to come forward, like a creature with a mind, as though you are fully made up of whatever the chemical components of failure might be; you now clearly see where you’ve been made of failure all this time, that you will simply have to work your absolute hardest against this from here on. Shortly after this, you consider trying again, wonder what it would be like to have a little girl to dress up, to pass down all the things your mother taught you.

Your friend Audrey is about your age, already has two kids, a boy and a girl just over a year apart. Audrey is the perfect mother; she was in nursing school when she got pregnant the first time, decided to finish later. You spend a great deal of time at Audrey’s with your friend Inge, observing Audrey’s endless patience with her toddlers (she laughs when you tell her this, but it’s more or less true, she’s a gentle soul); mostly, though, you are making notes in your head, as you are fairly sure that your patience is a finite resource. Fred is ready , you tell them, but I might want to wait a while . You love having Audrey’s baby in your lap, his tiny fingers gripping your thumb, but he is crying soon enough, so you hand him over to Inge, who has no plans for children herself, but who also has a good way with a baby. You fall a bit silent, realizing that if you have a crying baby, your handoff is likely to be at work. In her soft German accent, Inge says Not efryone has to haf babies, Low-is. Dan and I aren’t going to. You’ve known this about Inge, but it’s an idea in your head that people who don’t have babies can’t have babies, that if you choose not to have babies, there’s some extreme reason, like a family history of leprosy or hysteria or who knows what, not that you might simply prefer not to be a parent. At the same time, there’s a speck of a thought that this doesn’t seem quite right: Who decided this? It seems like something that was decided. Inge is one of the most rational, even-tempered people on the planet, capable of making a decision on the basis of her own research or perhaps even her own instincts about what’s right for her, but why doesn’t that seem to apply on this issue, or at least not to you? You don’t feel like you have a choice. A part of you loves the idea of having a child. Another part feels like having kids will be a terrible, terrible idea.

Soon enough it happens, and when you’re about three months pregnant, barely showing, you attend another faculty gathering where the director of the local opera company learns that you’re an aspiring singer and invites you to audition for an upcoming oratorio. You haven’t been practicing recently, an hour here or there, having gotten caught up in making house and babies, and you tell him so, but he insists that it can be casual. You ask for a couple of weeks, during which you practice “Caro Nome” several hours each day, and when it comes time to audition you wear an A-line maternity dress you made just for the occasion (though you still don’t really need maternity clothes yet) from a light gray wool that was on sale (you are especially pleased with the sleeves, which are not always easy to line up right with the armholes, sometimes it’s necessary to rip them out several times before you get the seams to match up in a perfect line underneath the arms). The maestro greets you with kisses on both cheeks, even though he’s from Albany. When you’re done, he jumps to his feet, claps, yells Brava! — laughs with joy — and he is not humoring you because you’re Dr. Crane’s wife, he’s genuinely moved. This is all you. The maestro says he can’t wait to introduce you to the world and this is the absolute greatest thing that’s ever happened in all your twenty-three years.

Nina is getting married. You are not at all fond of her fiancé, the two main reasons being that he’s not that into getting to know you, and that he takes up most of her available time. Nina hasn’t abandoned your plan to be famous authors, marry best friends, live next door to each other, and have kids (who would either be best friends or marry each other); she’s just followed through, while you’ve been held up in a bunch of saloons along the way. She’s asked you to be her maid of honor, which as far as you know means walking down the aisle and standing next to her, possibly in a horrible dress. That seems manageable enough, though you’re not looking forward to it. It’s maybe not so surprising that she’s getting married before you; Nina’s an always-has-a-boyfriend type and you’re a wait-for-some-movie-star. Still, a part of you, a big part, feels like this is something she’s doing to you, or at least something that is happening to you with some sort of cosmic intention. Frankly, this seems emblematic of your life in general. Your worldview is perilously close to being fixed on Life Is a Series of Events Specifically Designed to Fuck with Your Head. That’s a worldview, right? You’re from New York. What else would it be?