Home Alone

“I don’t know why, but I love it when he’s out of the house,” she says with a sigh.

“And what do you do while he’s gone?” I ask.

“Nothing special. Nothing I wouldn’t do if he was around. I just enjoy having the house to myself,” she shrugs.

Ever since I reached a certain age, I’ve had some version of this conversation with a number of women friends. It often includes expressions of guilt (“I feel bad about wanting to be alone …”) accompanied by reassurances of the otherwise healthy status of the relationship (“It’s not as if we don’t get along...”).

I  haven’t questioned friends in same-sex relationships, or long-married heterosexual men, so I don’t know whether this sort of thing happens to them as well. But I suspect that women with male partners are the most acutely afflicted.

Usually the situation doesn’t arise until the couple retires, when, after years of spending the days in their respective workplaces, they suddenly find themselves sharing a living space 24/7. All kinds of revelations ensue. I, for instance, learned that my spouse liked to listen to NPR all day long. After intense negotiations, we arrived at an arrangement involving closed doors and earphones after Morning Edition goes off the air.

When couples downsize, space becomes an issue. Getting rid of things seems to come more easily to women than to men. “You wouldn’t believe all his stuff,” my friends complain. By stuff they mean aircraft carrier-sized desks covered in tilting piles of papers, outdated electronics in various states of disrepair, and slithering tangles of neckties that once enhanced his business attire.

And then there is Order and Neatness, another mostly female fixation. “When I used to come home from work,” one woman explains, “I was too tired to care if the newspaper was on the dining room table, or the closet doors were left open, but now…” Now the parka draped casually over a chair instead of hung in the closet, the rug left askew, and the imperfectly-shut dresser drawer become a major irritant, especially since the culprit is right there, all the time, doing nothing about it.  It’s possible that there are obsessively orderly men out there who suffer from their wives’ slatternly habits, but if so I wish they’d speak up.

Nevertheless, putting aside Noise, Stuff, and Neatness (too much of the first two, and not enough of the latter), there remains something about a male presence in the house that makes women long for regular doses of solitude. For one thing men, even less-than-king-sized ones, seem to occupy a lot of space. I first noticed this when I entered a co-ed high school. I couldn’t believe how much room boys took up, and how much noise they made. Whooping in voices that swooped unpredictably from bass to soprano, they loped through the halls, dropping books, slamming locker doors, jostling each other at the water fountain, stretching out their long legs under desks, and generally wreaking havoc.

True, by the time they reach their sunset years, most men have tamed that adolescent turbulence, but they still dash around more forcefully than women. In my half century of marriage, I have learned to keep well away from a closed door, in case my spouse should suddenly burst in. Even with gentle, slipper-wearing husbands who creep silently around the house, male energy has a peculiar quality that makes periodic breaks from it essential for the wife.

I suspect, however, that the need for conjugal respite has mostly to do with the heart’s propensity to grow fonder in absence. When the beloved’s presence adorns each day from dawn to dusk, it’s a necessary luxury to miss him for a while, in full knowledge that the pleasure of an empty house will soon be matched by that of hearing the key in the door, and the door shake in its hinges as the wanderer crashes in.

The Face of Love

I don’t have the words yet to explain why what I want is so important, so I open my mouth wide and yell, and stamp my feet.

“Olé, olé!” my mother claps, “Are you a flamenco dancer?”

If I had been frustrated before, now I am enraged. How dare she? How dare she mock me when I am trying to communicate something crucial? I would like to fly across the room and bite her on the leg. But her ploy has worked, and I swallow my tantrum, lest she laugh at me again.

My aunt swears that she taught me to read when I was three, so this next scene must have happened around that time: I am in a store with my mother. A nice woman, dressed in black (women in black are everywhere in Barcelona in these days after the Spanish Civil War), strokes my cheek and, for some reason, asks me if I can read.

“Yes, I can,” I answer.

“No. You don’t know how to read yet,” my mother says.

“Yes! Yes! I can read!” I insist.

My mother pulls an envelope out of her purse and thrusts it in front of my face. “O.k., then, read this.”

The letters on the envelope are small, rounded, and crowded together--not at all like the big, clear letters of the alphabet that I have just begun to learn. The writing swims and blurs before my eyes, which are filling with tears. How can she humiliate me like this in front of a stranger? Isn’t she supposed to be on my side? And didn’t she just the other day, when I finally made it to the end of the alphabet, exclaim “What a big girl you are—you’re reading!” I feel betrayed and full of spite, and I would bite her if I could….

It seems odd that a little kid would have a fully developed sense of personal dignity, and would react with such force when it was attacked. Where did this come from? Was there an extra gene for dignity in my DNA? Or does the fact that those rages felt so primal mean that they were less about dignity than about survival as my own person?

In the coming years, I learned to divert my rages and do to myself what I would like to do to my mother. In my room, with the door closed, I would roll up my white uniform blouse and bite my forearm hard enough to leave tooth marks.

I don’t think that my mother, who was not a cruel woman, realized any of this. If she had been mean all the time, it would have been easier for me to take a stand, and simply hate her. But hers was the face of love in my life.

The happiest moments--happier even than the morning of January 6, when the Magi brought me gifts--were those occasions when, my father being away, she would let me share her bed and we would cuddle before I fell asleep enveloped in the smell of her skin.

To me she was more beautiful than any woman in all of Spain, possibly in the entire planet. I embarrassed her one day when, coming back from Mass, I confided that I’d been examining the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, demure in her white veil, blue sash, and mild expression, and concluded that my mother was every bit as beautiful as She.

But if in the daytime I found my mother as beautiful as the Virgin Mary, at night I had a recurring nightmare in which a green-faced witch, not unlike the one I’d seen in The Wizard of Oz, drew me irresistibly toward her.  The horror of the dream lay in my utter helplessness, in the knowledge that, no matter how hard I tried to oppose her, she could, by the sheer force of her personality, bend me to her will.

To my huge relief, just before I disappeared into the witch an angel who looked to be my own age appeared and whispered, “Stay with me, and you will be o.k.” I did, and we watched together as a gust of wind carried the witch away. I haven’t had that dream in a long, long time, but I remember with gratitude the heaven-sent angel of my childish rage, who, in the nick of time, flew down and returned me to myself.

My Cat, Master of Intermittent Reinforcement

All my life, in my loves and in my friendships, I have preferred a reliable stream of constant affection to sudden passionate outpourings followed by unpredictable periods of silent withdrawal.

So why, you ask, do I have a cat?

My little red dog, Bisou, provides the constancy. Whether I'm happy, sad, bored, or impatient, she's right there, next to me, quietly waiting for my next move. On the other hand,Telemann, the gray cat, treats me in ways that I would never tolerate in a member of my own species.

Take, for example, nap time. When they see me put the special siesta afghan on the bed in the afternoon, Telemann and Bisou come running. I lie down, pull the blanket up to my shoulders, and Bisou subsides by my right leg.

But now where is Telemann? He's on the windowsill, looking at the clouds as if he's never seen them before.

I really want him to get settled before I doze off, because it's upsetting to be awakened by eleven pounds of cat landing on my chest like an asteroid crashing into Siberia. So I call him, using my best coloratura tones, and if I'm lucky he comes to the bed. He clomps around on my torso, digging his adorable white paws into my ribs until things feel just right, and then curls like a skein of alpaca wool on top of my diaphragm and slowly, slowly closes his eyes.

As long as I lie like a stone effigy on a tomb, all is well. But what if I have to answer the phone, or get a drink of water, or add something I just remembered to my to-do list? No matter how gently I try to slither out from under the afghan, Telemann gives me an offended glare--how COULD you do this to ME!--and departs for the bathroom rug, which is soft and fluffy and (since the bathroom floor is heated) warmer than I. Plus, unlike me, it can be counted on to stay put.

Every time this happens, and it happens a lot, I feel a little hurt, and embarrassed that I feel hurt. For crying out loud, he's just a cat.What do I expect? If he's annoyed at me, and he must be, because I haven't seen him for a while now, I can respond with cool indifference. I'm certainly not going to go looking for him and make amends. He can darn well make the first move.

In the evening, I'm lying on the sofa reading when Wham! Telemann lands on me, all slitty-eyed and  purring like an eighteen wheeler at a truck stop. And it's o.k. I'll forgive him. After all, I'm the human here. I will lie quietly and let him have his pre-bedtime nap.

But now it seems that he's not in the mood for a nap. He's in the mood for putting his cold wet nose against mine and patting my cheek with that damned little white paw, and turning around and around with his tail high and his rosy derrière two inches from my nose. And there's nothing for it but he must settle not on my belly or my diaphragm or my chest, but on my neck, right between me and my book.

Reader, I let him. What can I do? That cat literally walks all over me--such is the power of intermittent reinforcement, a skill that he mastered in infancy. Like some character out of Dangerous Liaisons, Telemann figured out that, to make a human your love slave, all you have to do is run emotionally hot and cold, overwhelming your victim with passion one moment and turning away disdainfully the next. If you never give affection, the victim loses interest. If, on the other hand, you are constant and reliable, she takes you for granted and may even gain the upper hand in the relationship.

For a cat, that would be the ultimate disgrace, and Telemann is not about to let it happen in our house. So we hobble along, he and I, squabbling and reconciling. I don't know where this relationship is headed. I'm certainly not the one in control here. All I can say is, thank heaven for Bisou's quiet reliability. Which leads me to this bit of advice for those who are thinking of getting a cat: go ahead and get one, but, if you want to retain your sanity, get a dog as well.

 

Passionate Cursive

Life of my heart, the only woman I have ever kissed, I want to kneel at your feet forever… my 28-year-old father writes.

A stack of letters between my parents has lately come into my hands. The first letter dates from 1941, at the very start of their courtship, when he is her violin teacher, and the last is probably from 1953, the year before we leave Spain for Ecuador.

Between those two dates there are dozens of letters, most of them written by my father in Barcelona during the times my mother is at her parents’ farm in the country. But during their courtship he writes even while they are both in the city and he sees her every day. He walks her home from the university and then goes to his parents’ apartment, finds a quiet corner and pours out his adoration on paper (goddess of my dreams, star of my firmament, joy of my life…).

The next day he meets her at the usual place. “When I would see him coming,” my mother once told me, “I always looked at his breast pocket, to see if there was a letter peeking out.”

There usually was, and these and the letters that he wrote during their times apart make for overwhelming reading. The first time I plowed through them, I had to take breaks, because their intensity made me gasp.

Does anybody still write love letters like these (adorable angel, without you the city is a desert, gray and dead, and I wander the streets like a soul in torment…)? Her beautiful hair, the soft skin of her cheeks, her hands, her eyes, her sublime spirit have kindled in him a flame that will never be extinguished…With his music and her love, he tells her over and over, he needs neither wealth nor fame to be the happiest man on earth.

In letter after letter, my father’s elegant handwriting unfolds across the page like a visual melody. How can these harmonious loops and strokes, these impeccably parallel lines, hold so much ardor?

My mother’s letters—there are several in the collection—match his in intensity, but the writing is often illegible. Sometimes the handwriting leans forward, others backward, and the words stretch out or bunch irregularly on the page, propelled by the changing rhythms of her feelings. 

But my musician father was accustomed to containing his emotions within the boundaries of a certain form, and even in the transports of amorous passion, his pen-holding fingers kept a steady beat. Which is why, reading his letters almost a century later, I can feel his young heart, beating in my hands.

Better Than Roses

Celebrated St. Valentine's Day by washing the curtains in the master bedroom, which is the only room in the house to have them.  Since the view out of our windows constitutes a major part of the entertainment around here--the storms coming in, the mountains changing colors, the deer in the meadow, the turkeys in the driveway--we like to keep it unobstructed.  Besides, we don't care if the deer and the turkeys can see into the house.  We do have window shades, which we pull down on really hot summer days, and I've noticed that our guests from the city tend to keep them closed at night.

We have curtains in our bedroom because I don't much like its proportions, and I thought that, short of tearing down the walls, curtains might make it look and feel better.  The curtains are yellow-and-white-striped toile, to go with the yellow, white, and blue duvet cover, which has medallions featuring a shepherdess and her lute-playing mate--all of which I made myself.  (Don't be too impressed:  these are the first curtains I have sewed since 1967, although I have in the interim sometimes made curtains out of bedsheets by poking holes in the hems and running the rods through them.)

I hadn't touched the bedroom curtains since the day I hung them three or four years ago.  They didn't look particularly dirty, but I thought they must be, so into the laundry they went.  I thought about ironing them after they dried, but I've never ironed curtains, and I don't intend to start now.  I know that Ma, in Little House In The Prairie was always hanging "freshly washed and ironed curtains" on the windows of their various cabins, and it seemed to cheer everybody up, but I gave up trying to imitate Ma a long time ago--autres temps, autres moeurs.

My Valentine helped me take the curtains down and put them back up, and did not get upset when I tugged too hard at one curtain and pulled the rod bracket out of the window frame, but went quietly to get a hammer and fixed it.  That's something we've gotten quite good at, he and I:  when one of us spills red wine or wrecks the car, we figure he/she already feels bad enough, and does not need additional scolding.

Then he took the car to have snow tires put on (don't ask) and I followed in the truck so he wouldn't have to wait in the shop.  Before all this, at breakfast, we exchanged little gifts, and it's always a good thing when neither of us forgets. 

But if he had forgotten, I think (I hope!) I would have had the sense to pay attention instead to the help freely given, the mistakes calmly tolerated--and known that these gifts, given seven days a week, all year long, nourish the heart better than dozens of roses, armfuls of chocolates, or even a diamond tennis bracelet.