Elizabeth Crane - The History of Great Things

—. .

You return home to Baton Rouge energized and excited. You tell Dad every detail you can remember about the trip: the few sights you saw ( I went up in the Empire State Building! I went to Macy’s and Gimbels! Oh, I’ve never seen such a thing as Macy’s! Of course, the only thing I bought was a scarf on sale at Woolworth’s ); every single word Carolina said about your singing (notable adjectives including facile! bewitching! like molten silver! ); what you did with Audrey when she came to visit; your trip to the Automat ( Great fun! Food behind little doors! ); how you reunited with another friend who recently moved to the Upper West Side from Binghamton, a mezzo, who knows about an apartment you might share with her for the times when you return. Dad tries so hard to share your enthusiasm — he truly believes in your talent and is happy to see you so excited — but he feels this pulling you away from him, all of it, and that it’s not in his power to hold on tight enough to keep you. A small part of you wishes he would, it would be so much easier, safer, but though you will travel back and forth for two whole years, you sense early on that you’re putting off the inevitable. You continue to practice every day for hours, according to Carolina’s instructions; you do fewer and fewer of the typical wife things, but you also do the typical mom things, make supper, more sewing, reading to me (though at one point you are displeased with what you feel is my overly dramatic interpretation of Mother Goose: It’s not an opera, Mommy. You don’t make your voice go up unless there’s an exclamation point. Do it like how Daddy does it, just normal , I say, which provokes in you a desire to swat me on the behind that you thankfully resist). And you think about New York City, and what’s there for you, always, every minute of every day, no matter what you’re doing.

On the next trip to New York, you call the handsome married tenor from the pay phone down the hall at the Barbizon just as soon as you put your bags down. He was hoping you’d call. He wants to know if you can meet right away, but the Barbizon has a curfew, which is in about an hour. He doesn’t live far, tells you to meet him at Schrafft’s and he’ll have you back home on the dot; you freshen up your lipstick and run right outside into the New York night and this is without a doubt the most thrilling moment ever, more thrilling than your wedding day, more thrilling than your first opera performance, more thrilling even than what happens next, though that is up there too. You dash to Schrafft’s, a couple of blocks away, you’re Holly Golightly in your kitten heels, New York belongs to you right now, and frankly, no less than owning an entire city in this way will ever be enough. Which will be a problem later, but right now is yours. Handsome married tenor says all the right things in the first five minutes, holds your hand under the counter, you talk about the last few weeks, but this is all just time-filling, you share a milkshake that doesn’t get finished, he glances at his watch at five past ten, your curfew, you don’t know it but he’s done this utterly on purpose, and even if you did know, you would not care one whit, all cares about anything outside of now, this night, you and this man, simply do not exist.

In the morning, there are, of course, regrets. You play the evening over in your head: earlier it had felt like this was what life really is; there are still currents of it in your body, the city and the man; but right now all that’s left is shame. You haven’t forgotten what you learned in church and Sunday school, about good women and bad ones, or what was said when rumors went around Muscatine about the one or two loose women in town, and the payment due for this type of behavior (though the specifics of that were always vague to you, it seemed to have something to do with being spoiled for the right man); these weren’t crimes, but it doesn’t matter what the Christian punishment is, because you have now commenced the portion of your life in which you will punish yourself plenty. You try to call up Carolina’s words, what were they, she had said this was okay, didn’t she, you’re sure of it, it doesn’t feel okay today, but it will have to be okay, and thus ensues an endless amount of configuring in your head in which it is okay. It’s happened in New York. A different, distant city. Your husband will never know. You’ve fibbed before, about a purchase here, a lateness there, and he never knew. It won’t happen again. And it won’t happen again, not with this man, not on this trip. You do not feel your very best, this morning, you did not get your beauty sleep, and you have a lesson later and you missed an extra hour you could have spent practicing this morning, and you want nothing, absolutely nothing to come between you and your future as an opera star, and you tell this man so. He claims he is crushed, that he would leave his wife and children for you; leaves messages upon messages at the Barbizon for you, flowers, gifts. You send the gifts back and are about to trash the flowers, but instead you give them to the girl at the desk. You don’t want to look at them, but they’re too pretty to toss.

— You’re very good at this. I bet maybe you did become a writer after all.

— I’m noticing that it’s extremely uncomfortable but also way easier for me to write as you than to write as you writing me.

— I don’t know what to say about that. Are you blaming me again?

— You don’t have to say anything about it. I don’t blame you for anything.

— Hah! You don’t blame me for ruining your life. Right.

— I might have, when I was twenty-five and miserable. But my life isn’t ruined. There’s nothing to blame anyone for.

All right, then. Your life isn’t ruined. You grieve. You join a support group to talk about it. You tell the group that you had a complicated relationship with your difficult mother, but that you loved her, and you miss her. You wonder if you’ll ever stop crying, and it takes time, but you do.

But now another year’s gone by, and you still don’t have much to show for yourself. You’ve stopped drinking, but haven’t really started anything else. You teach at a preschool for seven dollars an hour, and you like the work, but it’s demanding, and you could make more at Starbucks, where you’d also get the health insurance you still don’t have. You want to be a writer, but don’t have idea one about how to make money doing that, so you decide to use the money I left you to quit the preschool job and go back to school to get a writing degree. It might be a good idea to keep your job, but you’ve already established a pattern of kicking up dust behind you, so this isn’t any different in that respect. You enroll at the University of Chicago. You’ve seen an Off-Broadway play, or whatever the equivalent of that is in Chicago, an Off-Michigan play, and it’s weird and experimental but also inspiring, so you decide to study playwriting, which really seems to be your thing. Of course, the plays are all about you, or mostly about you, or about you and me and how I ruined your life, even if you insist I didn’t, but they’re also sort of experimental, like maybe I’m dead but return as a stray dog you can communicate with psychically; they’re definitely funny, you were always funny, like your father, and you get some attention when your first play is put on at a prestigious Off-Broadway-equivalent Chicago theater, and you fall in love with the man who plays the stray dog version of your father, which is weird, but there it is. By this time you’re forty, though, so it’s basically too late for you to have children, but you discuss it with the stray dog man, and he doesn’t believe in bringing children into the world anyway, though he would consider it for you even though he’s one of these idealistic radical types who believes he’d ever see a world where that happened, zero population growth, so it’s a big deal that he’d even consider it, and you would both certainly consider adoption, but together you just table the conversation indefinitely. Secretly — you’ll never admit this to anyone — even though you like kids, and have always been good with them, you’re not so sure you’d be a good mom anyway. You’ve lost your patience babysitting a time or two, and fear that any parenting style you might come up with would be a response to whatever you think I did wrong, like a lot of parents do, like maybe I did, maybe, which of course only fucks up their children differently.