The Headmaster's Wife(37)
Elizabeth does not like when Arthur gets in his cups and seems fit to say to perfect strangers that she was the one who was unsure about having children. He presents this information casually, like a conversation one might have about snow tires, and it pisses her off when he does it, but she feels unable to protest. She was ambivalent about it, that part is undeniably true, and it almost killed her, this ambivalence, but it welled up from deep within her, from a place she didn’t fully understand. Of all the things to be ambivalent about! Either you want children or you don’t, she figured, and for a time she imagined that something was wrong with her, deeply wrong with her, that she could be so indecisive about something so important. It was easier, frankly, to be cavalier about God.
She had friends who said that women know when they are done having children, as if it were hardwired and beyond their control. The women who have one child and demand a second, and the women who have two children and suddenly want them to flow like rabbits.
And then there are the women, like her, who don’t know if they even want a kid at all, and with that feeling comes a weird guilt, because what could be more f*cked up than not doing what your very body suggests is the one thing you were born to do? It’s like turning your back to the ocean for no other reason than that you dislike beauty.
And so she finds herself, at twenty-five, back at Lancaster, living in a small apartment in the same dorm she lived in as a student, though now with a Wellesley degree, a faculty husband, and a job assisting J.V. field hockey and working the reference desk at Gould Library. She is, in short, what she probably always secretly desired to be: a faculty wife.
And in some ways she has never been happier. It is like reliving the best part of her life, though with money and a car and the freedom to play adults. At night the girls in the dorm check into their apartment—so young, the lot of them; is it possible she was ever that young?—and then she makes martinis for herself and Arthur, and she reads books on the couch while he meticulously grades essays, writing in the margins of the little blue exam books all the students still use.
The campus feels like theirs finally, not like when she was a student and somehow understood she was just a visitor. There is something wonderful, she decides, in the certainty that they will most likely never live anywhere else. Arthur has his sights clearly set on the house where his parents live, and like the scion who goes to work in the mail room, teaching is part of the apprenticeship, though he will not admit this to anyone outside the two of them, not even to his father.
She loves the structure of the school year, how it mirrors the seasons. She loves her job in the library, dressing in pencil skirts and cardigan sweaters and sitting behind the desk, helping the young people carve their way through the voluminous amounts of knowledge in the stacks behind her.
She loves not having to worry about any of the concerns of other newlyweds, cooking and keeping house and paying bills—all of that is taken care of for you at Lancaster. It is as if you had all the trappings of adulthood with none of the responsibility.
And perhaps, deep down, this is why she is resistant to the idea of children. It is a fundamental selfishness, maybe, a realization that a child will change everything, and this state of suspended adolescent animation they are living in will vanish forever.
But around her—all around her, pressing in—one by one the other young faculty wives begin to get pregnant. They are almost biblical in their pregnancies, babies begetting babies, all this fertility like the advent of spring in the verdant hills that rise up and away from the floodplain and the small town with its small school.
At faculty parties on weekends, after the students have gone to bed (or pretend to have gone to bed, more likely), she sits on couches with the women while the men smoke in another room. Other women, she realizes, have this incessant need to put their babies in her arms. And when she looks down at those shriveled little faces, those hooded eyes, she says all the right things, oh, how beautiful and so on, and she coos appropriately and knows her social role, but she can’t help but wish that she were a man—not literally, of course, for she cannot imagine that, but conceptually, certainly, the freedom not to have this responsibility, other than in the most general sense; the freedom to stand around with other men and smoke and drink and talk about politics and sports and not hold a baby, whose weight is pleasant enough, she supposes, but whose visage she finds not beautiful but rather odd, old manish and sad.
What could be wrong with her?
Though part of her knows that her reluctance is ultimately futile. On nights when Arthur rolls into her and wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her to him (his signal that he wants to make love), she still has him put on a condom. Though, afterward, when they lie in the dark and look out the window to the stars above the river, he often says, “When are you going to give me a baby?”
And while this provides the opening for her to tell him about her ambivalence, to try to give it words beyond the nagging thoughts in her head, she does not.
“Soon,” she whispers back, and then after he falls asleep, she considers all the happenstance that led her to this point, back at school, next to her sleeping husband, already a revered teacher of English and destined one day to fill his father’s shoes and become the living embodiment of Lancaster itself.
Maybe, she thinks, it all goes back to 1954, when a boy, a sophomore named Augustus Holt, drowned on a warm spring day when the runoff from the hills swelled the river to twice its normal size.