An Intimate Life (15 page)

Becoming parents didn’t slow Michael and me down in the bedroom, but his new schedule did mean we had to carve out other times for sex. Even when it was only Jessica, I timed naps to coincide with Michael’s arrival home from school and, with the vigor of two healthy twenty-somethings, our sex life continued unabated.

Our easy domestic routine held up until around June. That’s when Michael suggested that I take Jessica out of town to my friends Marshasue’s and her husband Ron’s farm in New Hampshire for a couple of weeks. Finals were just around the corner and he claimed he wanted some time to study without distraction. By this time I was almost seven months pregnant with our son. I really didn’t feel like traveling—and I was suspicious.

Women were always fawning over Michael. Because of his unconventional attitude toward just about everything, I wasn’t sure that he would consider having a wife a reason to resist them. He certainly was never jealous when other men came on to me, and no matter how happy I was about him, about us, I pretty much always had this gnawing feeling that I was not at all special to him, that I was just one of many who swirled around him vying for his attention. I wanted Michael to keep his free-spirited, alternative lifestyle and outlook, but I also wanted him to be so enamored of me that other women would appear unattractive by contrast. This wasn’t about rules. It was about desire, and I wanted his desire to match mine. He wouldn’t deny himself anything by being faithful to me because he wouldn’t want anyone but me. I yearned for a comfy mix of bohemia and conventionality, one that would ensure my image as a rebel without inflaming my insecurities. Even at twenty-three I suspected real life was rarely so obliging.

But when Michael pressed for two weeks alone, I acquiesced. On a humid June morning I packed a suitcase for myself and Jessica, loaded our Volkswagen bug with a small zoo of stuffed animals, and headed north on I-93.

Michael and I talked every night. He told me how much he missed us and promised me he was preparing to ace his finals. I wasn’t happy about being banished, but if it meant Michael’s success at college then I would just have to suffer through a couple of weeks away from him.

Finally, Michael was done with his last exam and Jessica and I made the two-hour trip back to Boston.

“Daddy home?” Jessica asked as we turned onto our street.

“That’s right, Sweetheart,” I answered.

I parked the car, quickly freed Jessica from her car seat, and scooped her up. She giggled all the way to the front door.

Michael’s grin lit up his face when he saw us. Jessica stretched out her arms and he pressed her to his chest and kissed her forehead. Then he planted a big smooch on me.

“I missed you two so much,” he said.

“Not as much as we missed you. How did your last final go?”

“Nailed it. I’m expecting straight A’s”

“Great!” I said and gave Michael another big kiss.

He went out to pick up burgers and fries for dinner. I unpacked and got reacquainted with my tiny home. It may not have been much, but it was all I needed. Besides, even the Taj Mahal wouldn’t have been big enough to contain my love for my sweet little family.

Since Michael was now out of school, he went to work full-time at the deli. That his grades would be stellar was simply a given, and as the summer drew on it never occurred to me to ask about them. A few weeks later, I stood in my kitchen chopping carrots for the stew I was making for dinner. My belly was now so big that I had to fully extend my arms to reach the cutting board on the kitchen counter. My mind wandered as I mechanically chopped the carrots into rounds and then half-moons. Just as I was about to toss them into the pot on the stove the phone rang. It was Sadie.

“I just checked Michael’s grades,” she said.

Because of her position at the school Sadie had early access to final grades. Her voice sounded strained, but I couldn’t imagine why.

“Yes?” I said.

“He dropped out of all of his classes. He got incompletes in every one.”

I felt dizzy. I grabbed the back of one of the kitchen chairs and then lowered myself into it.

“What?” I stammered and then realized I did not want her to repeat herself. “How . . . how could that be?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Cheryl. I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

Well, I couldn’t, and any explanation I could conjure up hurt too much for me to think about it for very long.

I was hurt, scared, and angry, and when Michael came home I lashed out.

“What the hell is going on?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I know, Michael. I know you didn’t take your exams. Your mother told me. What were you doing those two weeks when you told me you were taking finals?”

Michael looked down at his shoes.

“Were you with another woman while Jessica and I were out of the picture for two weeks?”

“No. I was hanging out in the school cafeteria. I couldn’t tell you, but I just didn’t want to be in school anymore.”

“So why did I need to leave?”

Michael said nothing.

I grabbed a lava lamp off an end table and slammed it down on the floor. The glass broke and the red-veined liquid expanded out on our hardwood floor like an amoeba.

Jessica started to cry.

“Mommy broke lamp,” she said.

I picked her up and cuddled her.

“I’m sorry, Sweetheart. Mommy’s sorry.”

Jessica’s tears were the only thing that could have stemmed my anger.

We ate dinner that night in total silence. I could now add guilt and humiliation to the list of toxic emotions coursing through me. I was stuck, and I knew it. What was I going to do? Return to my parents with my toddler and another one on the way? I could just hear the chorus of “I told you so.”

And then there was the undeniable fact that I still loved Michael too much to walk away. Even if I had a warm, welcoming home waiting for my children and me in Salem, I would never go back to it. I loved Michael not just for who he was, but for how he made me see myself. I became the person I wanted to be with him. Around Michael, I was smart, funny, adventurous, and sexy—or at least that’s how he made me feel. Michael listened to me. He wanted to hear what I had to say. He understood me. I had revealed myself to him and he had embraced me when many others had reproached me. I could no more leave Michael than go to the moon.

When early July came around, Michael announced that he wouldn’t return to Boston State in the fall. I could feel the blood draining from my face as he explained that he was bored with the education program and that he needed more of a challenge. I would have been angry if I wasn’t so scared—scared of losing Michael, scared that I wasn’t enough for him, scared that he regretted marrying me. So, I simply said “okay.”

A month later, in August 1968, our son, Eric, was born. Within four years I had left home, gotten married, and had two children. My life had radically changed, and soon it would take another major turn.

Michael and I had occasionally talked about leaving Boston for California. It was the heady days of the late 1960s and we both believed the world our kids were destined to inherit would scarcely resemble the one we knew. We were building a more just, freer, more tolerant society and it was just a matter of time before the transformation was complete. From our perspective, the epicenter of this new world was the San Francisco Bay Area. In the last few years some of our friends had headed there and we wondered what it would be like to join them. Sometimes they would call us from their apartment and hold the phone out the window so that we could hear the bustle of the street. “You’ve got to come to San Francisco. People smoke grass in the street here!” they would cry into the phone. In October 1968, we called our friends and asked if we could stay with them for a few weeks until we found our own place.

I so wished that moving to California would motivate Michael to do something more with his life. I hoped that he would hit his stride out there and discover what it was that would make him happy. I was excited about our new life. So many possibilities waited for us, I was sure. I was also scared as hell.

Michael earned some cash by taking an exam for a friend who wanted to get into a doctoral program and we emptied our savings account. After buying a Volkswagen camper we had a $1,000 left to start our new life, no small sum at that time. We lined the back of the camper with sleeping bags and crammed in Jessica’s menagerie of stuffed animals, plenty of drawing paper and crayons, and enough books and toys to keep her occupied for the cross-country trip.

On the morning we left we stopped by some friends’ houses to say goodbye and then drove to my parents’ house. My mother was furious. She took our leaving as a personal affront, and when I hugged her she stiffened her body and kept her hands at her sides. My father had tears in his eyes, and when I turned to him he said, “Go ahead and leave. The next time you see me I’ll be in my coffin.” My father was a healthy forty-six-year-old, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about how unrealistic and melodramatic this was. Peter, my fourteen-year-old brother, was crestfallen. He looked as though he was at a funeral. “I’ll come back and you’ll come visit me,” I said to him, fighting back tears. Nanna was sad, but she said she wanted me to be happy. I promised I would call or write every week. I didn’t stop sniffling until we were hours down the road and my sadness started to give way to excitement about the life that awaited us on the other coast.

Most of the trip was a lot of fun. We camped in KOA campgrounds. We stopped off at the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest and drove through cities like Oklahoma City and Santa Fe, which were so different from where I came from that they seemed nothing short of exotic. I nursed Eric, who started the trip just as he turned ten weeks, and three-year-old Jessica delighted in seeing the new sights that flashed before her every day. Everything was going smoothly, until about two weeks into our journey, when we were less than a 150 miles south of San Francisco.

The day started out like most days on the trip. We got up early, brushed our teeth with water from a canteen, and ate dry cereal for breakfast. I lay Eric in his car bed and Jessica lay on a sleeping bag in the back of the camper. Just as the sun started to rise we drove onto Highway 101. We traveled north for a few hours, the roadside scenery quickly unrolling alongside us. By 11:00 AM we were hungry and by noon we were famished, so just before we entered the town of Hollister we pulled into a diner. Including us there were probably ten people in the place, so we were served fast. We ordered club sandwiches for Michael and me and silver-dollar pancakes and a hot chocolate for Jessica. Michael and I each drained two cups of coffee and then asked the waitress to fill our thermos with more. Before 1:00 PM, we were back on the road. We all had full stomachs and Michael and I were caffeinated and ready to drive straight through the remaining two and a half hours to San Francisco. We would arrive at our new home before dinner.

As we pulled out of the diner parking lot, I took off my seat belt so I could nurse Eric on my right side. He stopped sucking for a moment and I look down. I wiped away a froth of milk bubbles that had collected around his mouth. I looked out the window and I saw a pickup truck with a camper built onto the bed barreling toward the interstate from a dirt road that led into it like a tributary. A brick-colored plume of dust kicked up behind it. They’re going fast, I thought. Then we were close enough for me to see the rust on the fender. I saw the woman who was driving turn to the woman in the passenger seat, most of her profile obscured by her hair that hung loose. Isn’t she going to stop?

Then an ear-shattering crash. Metal assaulting metal. Glass shattering into jagged shards and cascading to the pavement. The smell of rubber and the screech of tires moving with a new, uncontrollable momentum. I shouted, “Oh God!” All of us, in both vehicles, were trapped in the collision, slammed around by a force that gathered impossible strength in only seconds. We were upside down and Eric was on top of me, his mouth open and my chest covered in milk. The horn wailed. Then we were right side up again. Smoke wandered out of the truck’s hood like a ghost. Michael leapt out of the driver’s seat, leaving his door open, and ran around to the passenger side. He helped Eric and me out of the camper. I screamed, “Jess . . . Get Jess.” He ran to the back of the camper, ripped open the door, and extracted Jessica. Eric’s face was blue. This isn’t right. That’s not how he should look. “No, no, no,” I cried to Eric. Then he gasped and took a breath and the blue dissolved into pink as he screamed. I limped to the back of the camper and saw Jessica rubbing her sleepy eyes. “What happened?” she muttered.