The Story of a Marriage Read Free Page A

is coming .
    People have an idea about the fifties. They talk about poodle skirts and bus strikes and Elvis; they talk about a young nation, an innocent nation. I don’t know why they have it so wrong; it must be the consolidation of memory, because all that came later, as the country changed. In 1953, nothing had changed. We were still so haunted by the war. Fluoridation seemed like a horrible new invention, and the Woolworth’s on Market a beautiful one. In those days, the firemen still wore leather helmets; William Platt the Seltzer Boy still left fizzing bottles on our doorstep, waking me with the ring of glass on concrete; the milkman still drove his old-fashioned wagon with gold script on the side—Spreckels Russell—and, impossible as it seems, the iceman still pulled blocks out with his medieval tongs like a dentist doing an extraction on a whale, making his rounds for those last households without a refrigerator. The rag man and the knife man, the fruit truck and the coal truck and the dry cleaners, the fish man and the Colonial Bread man and the egg lady—all came down the street with their echoing cries of “Rags bottles trash!” and “Grind your scissors! Grind your knives!”; a sound that’s gone forever. No one had ever heard anything wilder than a big band, or seen a man grow his hair longer than his ears. We were still trying to figure out how to live in a war after a war.
    It was a medieval time for mothers. When he was three, my boy, Sonny, was playing with his loving father in the backyard when I heard shouting. I came running to find my son collapsed in the bower vine. My husband picked him up, rocking him in his arms, hushing his frightened boy, telling me to call the doctor. In those days, they had no idea what caused polio or what to do. The doctor told me it was “brought on by summer”—a magical diagnosis for a city without a summer. His treatment was leg splints, bed rest, and hot towels, which I applied carefully, and our only other solace was church services where weeping mothers held up photographs of children. It wasn’t a time of freshness and freedom. It was a time of dread; the war was easy compared to this. It’s a wonder we didn’t run screaming into the streets and set fire to one another’s houses.
    Instead, we hid our fears. Just as my mother hid a lock of her dead brother’s hair in the throat of her high-collared Sunday dress, in a pocket she had sewn there. You cannot go around in grief and panic every day; people will not let you, they will coax you with tea and tell you to move on, bake cakes and paint walls. You can hardly blame them; after all, we learned long ago that the world would fall apart and the cities would be left to the animals and the clambering vines if grief, like a mad king, were allowed to ascend the throne. So what you do is you let them coax you. You bake the cake and paint the wall and smile; you buy a new freezer as if you now had a plan for the future. And secretly—in the early morning—you sew a pocket in your skin. At the hollow of your throat. So that every time you smile, or nod your head at a teacher meeting, or bend over to pick up a fallen spoon, it presses and pricks and stings and you know you’ve not moved on. You never even planned to.
    “It is equal to living in a tragic land,” a poet once wrote, “to live in tragic times.”

    Yet I have to admit I loved our house. I had chosen it, after all; in defiance of the aunts, I had pressed Holland to take that old Sunset property, and at first it was the fulfillment of our dreams. A house with a yard; a bedroom my son didn’t have to share; carpets and folding blinds and even a place behind the bathroom mirror for Holland to drop his razor blades. It was a miracle: a house that had thought of everything before me. You could never have convinced me, back when I was young, that all the real moments of my life would happen in that vine-covered house, just as a telephone installer