Summer of '79: A Summer of '69 Story(3)

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.