Page 2 of Summer of '79
“Knock on Wood.”It’s like thunder, lightning / The way I love you is frightening.
After they finish singing at the top of their lungs with Bonnie Tyler to “It’s a Heartache”—Nothing but a heartache—Kirby turns down the radio and says, “So what happened with you and Theo, anyway?”
Jessie doesn’t want to talk about Theo but she needs to come up with some kind of answer for her family.
Jessie met Theo her first week at NYU. She’d done her undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke, and so New York City—and men—were a dramatic change. Theo Feigenbaum had thick dark hair, green eyes, and remarkably long dark lashes. He sat next to Jessie in their lawyering seminar and asked her to borrow a pencil and a piece of loose-leaf, which Jessie gave him while wondering what kind of bozo showed up to the first day of class unprepared. But when he raised his hand to offer an example of jurisprudence, Jessie fell in love.
They dated the entire first year, then through the summer, then into autumn of their second year, when they basically cohabited. But the second year of law school was more difficult than the first, just like the second year of a relationship. The things that had been fun, even blissful—studying together in the park, getting pizza at St. Mark’s Place, splurging on a foreign film at the Angelika, or sneaking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it was easy enough to find discarded metal buttons on the steps and attach them to their collars)—lost their luster. And there was no time, anyway. Besides which, Theo grew increasingly jealous of how well Jessie was doing in class and how easily she had landed a summer associate’s job at Cadwalader. He started to turn mean and surly, he put Jessie down in public—at McSorley’s, for example, in front of their mutual friends—and argued with every single point she made in class.
Jessie would be embarrassed to admit to Kirby how she backed down, how sheapologized,how her main objective became to placate Theo and defuse his growing anger, how she intentionally turned in a sloppy opinion so that he would get a better grade. Jessie watched herself make concession after concession even as she yearned to be strong and stand up for herself like a proper women’s libber. But she had wanted Theo to be happy. She had wanted him to love her. And so she yielded, she flattered him, she diminished herself to make him appear bigger.
And what had this gotten her? It had gotten her a kick to the gut, a fat smack to her pride. One night when Jessie had spent the last dollars of her monthly stipend on Reuben sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli, Theo stood her up. The sandwiches, which Jessie had transported back downtown on the subway as carefully as she would have her own newborn baby, grew cold and greasy. Jessie left them in the white paper bag and stormed down to McSorley’s, where she found Theo at a back table with a girl named Ingrid Wu, a first-year. They were all over each other.
“He cheated on me,” Jessie tells Kirby. “So I threw him out.”
Kirby is smoking again in a more relaxed way, with her elbow hanging out the window. “Good for you,” she says. “You deserve better.”
Jessie rummages through her macramé pocketbook for her sunglasses because suddenly, she feels like she might cry. She’d wanted to call Theo when Exalta died but she hadn’t because she was afraid it would sound like a plea for attention. A dead grandmother, how unoriginal. And yet, Exaltaisdead, and it hurts. Jessie and Exalta hadn’t beencloseexactly, but there had been something—a mutual respect and admiration that was, in a way, more meaningful to Jessie than the more typical variety of grandmotherly love. Exalta was proud of Jessie’s accomplishments—her impeccable grades at Brookline High and Mount Holyoke, her high LSAT score, her admission to NYU law. Exalta could be stingy with praise, but she had, more than once, said that Jessie was a young woman with a good head on her shoulders who had a very bright future.
Along with her cutoffs and her crocheted tank, Jessie is wearing the gold knot and diamond necklace that Exalta gave her for her thirteenth birthday. Jessie lost the necklace the very first time she wore it, and she’d spent one fraught week of her thirteenth summer in a state of agitated panic. Mr. Crimmins found the necklace—thank God!—and Exalta kept it in her custody until Jessie turned sixteen. At that point, Jessie put it on—and she has never taken it off. It has been witness to every second of the past seven years. It’s a talisman and a reminder of Exalta’s belief in her.Good head on her shoulders. Very bright future.
Theo Feigelbaum be damned.
“You’re right,” Jessie says, thinking maybe her sister isn’t such a terrible influence after all. “I do deserve better.”
2. Baby, What a Big Surprise
Over her mother’s protests, Blair tells her nine-year-old twins, George and Gennie, to climb into the once-red-now-nearly-pink International Harvester Scout, their family beach vehicle that refuses to die. Blair is taking the twins into town for hot fudge sundaes at the Sweet Shoppe. They arrived on Nantucket an hour earlier and ice cream sundaes are their first-afternoon-on-island tradition.
“Your grandmother’s body isn’t even cold yet,” Kate says, before Blair heads out the door after the twins. “What are people going to say when they see you and the children with whipped cream all over your faces?”
“They’ll think we’re trying to cheer ourselves up,” Blair says. She gives Kate a pointed look. “The kids have been through a lot recently.”
“Well,” Kate says, and she meets Blair’s gaze. “Whose fault is that.”
“Mmm,” Blair says. She has been waiting for this exact confrontation, the one where Kate blames Blair for her divorce from Angus, even though their split was hardly Blair’s fault. Angus dragged Blair and the children down to Houston for the most miserable year of their lives so that he could work at NASA on the Viking mission to Mars. The children despised their new school—the other kids made fun of their “accents”—and Blair felt adrift in the astronaut-wives society. It was as though she had stepped back in time rather than forward. The astronaut wives didn’t have careers. They spent their days getting manicures and planning fondue parties. When Blair mentioned—at the one “garden lunch” she attended, which was held looking at the garden through a plate glass window because it was too beastly hot to eat on the patio—that she resented having to give up her adjunct professor job at Radcliffe, everyone at the table had stared at her, forks suspended over their cottage cheese as though Blair was speaking in tongues.
Blair hadn’t made a single friend and neither had the children. Even a swimming pool in their backyard didn’t cheer them up. The kids sat in front of the color television and started speaking to each other in a new language they called “Brady,” saying things like “George…Glass” and “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” in a way that seemed to have a secret meaning.
Angus was, of course, never around. He had a cot at NASA and spent the nights there.
In a moment of desperation, Blair had bought the children a dog, thinking this might help. And it had, initially. They went to the SPCA and picked out a mutt, some kind of spaniel-terrier mix. The children named him Happy, which made Blair melt a little—her twins were remaining optimistic!—but Happy was not happy once they brought him home. He was lethargic; he slept twenty-two hours a day, rising only to limp over to his bowl of chow.
A trip to the vet revealed that Happy was a very sick dog. He had tumors all down his spine—in the X-ray, Blair could see them, evenly spaced like pearls on a string. The vet said the kind thing would be to put the dog to sleep.
The death of the dog brought Blair to the end of her rope. She surprised Angus at his office and begged him to return to his job at MIT in Cambridge. Angus was his usual opaque and uncompromising self. He had a project here in Houston. The Viking mission. Mars.
“Then the children and I will go back alone,” Blair said.
She hadn’t necessarily meant to ask for a divorce. She had imagined they could work out some kind of long-distance commute. But Angus said he planned on staying in Houston. In addition to the Viking mission, he was in on the ground floor of the Space Shuttle program. His future was at NASA and if Blair and the children refused to support him, well then, he supposed that constituted irreconcilable differences.
“There’s no reason we can’t work out a civil arrangement,” Angus said. “You and the children will be well cared for.”
And they have been, financially. Blair took sole ownership of their home in Chestnut Hill; the children are enrolled back at Noble and Greenough. Blair will return to Radcliffe in the fall. Their life is remarkably similar to the way it was before they left. The interlude in Houston was like the pain of childbirth: as soon as it was over, Blair forgot about it.
This is not to say all was hunky-dory. Angus hasn’t flown up to see the children even once since they left. They have a Sunday evening call scheduled. This consists of Angus asking how the children are doing (“Fine”), then how things are going in school (“Fine”). Are they getting good marks? (“Yes.”) Then he tells them, “Be good for your mother.” (“We will.”) And then, with what seems like enormous relief, one or the other of them will hand the phone back to Blair, who will listen to Angus say, “This month’s check is in the mail. We’ll talk next week.”
Being a divorcée at Radcliffe is no big deal. Cambridge is filled with “Free to Be…You and Me” families—divorced mothers and fathers, unmarried couples with children, gay and lesbian couples, biracial couples, married couples with adopted children. Blair’s best friend from her Wellesley days, Sallie, has given up on ever finding a suitable man and is now a “single mother by choice.” She used a sperm donor—a six-foot-two engineer with dark hair and dark eyes—and she now has a four-year-old son, Michael.
