Today begins PILCROW’s Inaugural Serialized Novel Contest. Over the next three weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our three Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack.
Our Finalists for this round:
Seasons Clear, and Awe by Matthew Gasda
Mites by Gregory Freedman
Notes on the State of Virginia by Michael Pilarz
We’re excited to have all of you as a part of this endeavor to forge a new path for fiction on Substack. If you believe in what we’re doing, please consider offering a paid subscription.
“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
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Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
— Hart Crane
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye
— Wordsworth
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—1992—
They had bought the house from the estate of a woman named Emily Ebberly, who had died in her 80’s, childless. The kitchen was in bad shape, the tiling coming up, and the floorboards needed sanding and lacquering. But the potential was there and they were, for the time being, happy.
Adele had taken her husband’s name, unlike her best friend Mariana, who had opted to hyphenate, and Adele took a secret pleasure in not making such a fuss out of family life: it all came so naturally to her, or so she imagined. Michael, already having been married and divorced once, was not fussy either, not at this point; he had wanted to start a family, and now he had, or, rather they had, and there was a shared sense of pride in having done the thing.
Stephen, their son, almost four, played with a toy truck on the floor, while his sister, Elizabeth, who was two, toddled around, gurgling. The cat, Betsy, friendly and old and fat, originally Michael’s from his previous marriage, slipped in between the kids, who recognized her as a playmate and equal.
The midsummer twilight was closing around the house like a glove.
—We should probably put the kids to bed… Adele whispered.—I’m wiped…
—We can, sure.
Adele watched her husband’s body. A former football player at Lehigh, Michael still was broad in the shoulders, thick-necked, and though his black hair was thinning slightly, at 39, he was youthful, and, at 6’3, powerful. The couple still had sex almost every night, even if they were exhausted by keeping the kids occupied, which they always were. Thankfully, during the summers, Michael, a high school teacher, had off.
The Phillies were on the TV, which, along with a stereo system, and a VHS player, occupied the entertainment console in the living room.
Adele watched her husband’s eyes flick repeatedly towards the TV, and away from her.
Adele worried, watching him scoop up Stephen and whirl the gleeful child around, with her obsession for order and cleanliness and consistency, whether she was draining the joy out of him, aging him prematurely. She didn’t like, for instance, his taste in music, which ran more towards folk and classic rock, and preferred, having grown up playing the piano, classical music. Was she becoming a shrew (like his ex-wife Sally)? She didn’t think so, not exactly, but her instincts and tastes so often ran contrary to his, and she couldn’t hide her judgements of him most of the time.
The only fundamental thing they had in common, actually, was a desire for kids, and a solid middle class respect for the duties entailed therein. There was respect and attraction, thank god, but there wasn’t that inherent sympathy or natural affection which was the hallmark of the best marriages.
Michael rarely talked about his first wife, Sally, stonewalling any of Adele’s attempts to investigate what had gone wrong. Adele couldn’t help but speculate, had always speculated about what went wrong. Michael needed someone spiritual and emotional to balance him out, and Sally sounded materialistic and shallow from the little Adele had been able to gather.
His reticence to explore the past frustrated her, and her frustration made him anxious. He just wanted her to enjoy what they had and didn’t understand why she had to break down and dissect everything; it struck him as, if not cruel, cold or callous, and he didn’t want to think of himself, his past, or even hers as subject to laboratory experiment.
He was a history teacher, and, technically, a Catholic, but he only understood these catechisms now in a firm way: the way his father had understood them, and his grandfather, standing on Ellis Island with the bride he had bought for the price of a bought ticket back in Slovakia when it was still the Hapsburg Empire.
When they’d met, she had been in psychoanalysis in Philadelphia, but she’d terminated psychoanalysis when they moved back to Bethlehem where they were both from, and, in the absence of psychoanalysis, she’d turn to him, somewhat relentlessly, to absorb her mental energy, and he was, he was all too aware, a poor shock absorber. Subliminally, he sensed that she was waiting for Stephen, verbally precocious, and clearly gifted, to grow up a little more so that she could turn her son into her confidant.
—What country is that? she said, squinting at the TV without her glasses.
—Canada.
—Mike…?
—What’s up?
Adele picked up Elizabeth, who was starting to fade, rocking and bobbing the child gently in her arms. —Nothing. I was just thinking about what a beautiful night it is…. I find it very moving.
Michael nodded, turning his head generally towards the porch door, which was open, so that they could hear the night sounds through the screen door.
—Vroom, blruggggg, baaaah! Stephen intonated, rolling his truck along the blue, rather cheap carpet, smashing it into the leg of the couch.
—We should probably stop by my parents’ tomorrow at some point; maybe for dinner.
—That’s fine, he said, accustomed to going along with her plans.
—They get upset if we don’t come on Sundays.
—Sounds good.
A few years younger than her husband, Adele still considered herself much more emotionally mature; she could actually deliberate and weigh her decisions before making them, unlike Michael, who just seemed to do whatever caused the least resistance in life. He was a rule follower; she was a rule breaker.
—Can you take Stephen up to bed? I’m going to put Elizabeth in her crib.
—No problemo.
—Idonwannagotobed! Stephen wailed.
—Alright buckaroo, let’s go.
—Noooooooo!!
The sun grazed the earth as it fell into the open mouth of night. The grass started to collect dew as the last shouts of children playing, which died as the bugs took over from the birds. And the air became flush with new sounds. Inside the house, all up and down Huntington Street, Arlington Street, and Henderson Street, out onto Easton Avenue, lights were on in the kitchens as families prepared or finished dinners. TVs were on, and the Olympics were on. There was something abundant, foliate about the late summer. The feedback loop of the entire planet was expressed or represented in the miniature of the neighborhood. The latticework of ions becoming crystals, becoming larger structures, proteins, cells, membranes, organs, limbs, eyes, brains, bodies, families.
After the kids were settled, which took at least a half an hour, Michael and Adele went out onto the porch for a drink (Adele drinking wine, Michael beer) in the almost holy quiet of the suburban night. The sycamore in the front house grew over the porch, and in the back, two dogwoods, one pink, one white, were divided by the driveway. Few of the yards along the back alley had fences, and during the days, neighborhood kids much older than theirs roamed up and down, inventing games and adventures as they went.
No one else seemed to be up except for Gary, a high-schooler who lived across the alley, who was up fixing his car, an old convertible that he had inherited from his father. Michael occasionally played golf with Gary’s dad, Bob Davies, who was manager of the Liberty High School baseball team (Michael envisioned that his son might one day play shortstop for Bob).
Sometimes they heard the Davies family fighting; Gary was something of a fuckup. He had transferred to vo-tech, but apparently, might not even last there. He was old enough to drop out entirely.
Gary’s presence across the alley represented the haunting possibility that the middle class might become the underclass again at any time. Michael and Adele, whose father and grandfather respectively had worked at Bethlehem Steel, were privately mortified by this visible sign of social backsliding. Michael and Adele had decided to raise their kids in Bethlehem in part to avoid the urban blight that affected Philadelphia, or on a smaller scale, nearby Allentown. Bethlehem wasn’t backwoods, like the Poconos, where Michael taught high school, or fucked-up like Philly or New York, which were also close; it was just right: the right place to raise kids.
As soon as he cracked open his beer, Michael asked, —Would you mind if I get a quick Phillies score?
—Sure, Mike.
Michael disappeared into the living room. She heard the TV: Phillies-Cardinals, from St. Louis. 2-0 Cardinals. John Kruk up to bat. As far as she knew, the Phillies were bad this year, from what her husband had told her, so she didn’t really understand the appeal of the score-check. More than that, she sensed avoidance in the score-check, as if, now that the kids were asleep, and it was just them, he wanted to be alone. She was worried that she annoyed him. Her therapist had told her, when they were dating and on a trip to the beach and he had been content just reading a book instead of fucking all the time, or even just cuddling, that she shouldn’t get upset or freak out; just because her other boyfriends had been erotically and emotionally overbearing didn’t mean Michael didn’t care about her. He was a steady husband, a warm and giving lover, even after two kids; she knew she shouldn’t be so hard on him… and yet… —Michael, she called through the screendoor, —come hang out with me.
—Be right there.
Adele looked out into the yard, towards the dogwoods, which were faintly visible in the last of the twilight.
It seemed to her that a mystery had been unveiled in motherhood; her sense of things had changed. Childbearing stamped the body with its own transformation, rendered it totally other than it was. Until she was 32, she’d been a single woman who could have her choice of boyfriends, living alone in a two-bedroom apartment in Narberth, Pennsylvania, an attractive, accomplished woman, in a sense, immune to nature, only vaguely aware of what your body was capable of, and now the threshold had been crossed. Youth was over: the youth of the body and the sexual fury of childlessness driving at insemination was over. Now her belated late coming, true or real, or real adulthood had finally begun. Motherhood had begun. There were scars on her stomach from two C-sections. She grew tired more easily. Her face looked the same and, in a way, was prettier because of the progesterone produced by her body during her pregnancies, but her body was frayed and unrecoverable, a worn motherly body that she associated with her own mother or her grandmother, the body of women. Michael would have to love this body for the rest of their lives, and she would have to love this body for the rest of her life.
It was sort of crazy to think that for all the advances of the 20th century, for all the amazing technologies that had been invented, even in her lifetime, there was nothing that could arrest the one-way arrow of time. With the possible exception of painkillers and the C-section, her body would experience childbirth and motherhood the same way that all of her female ancestors had, as a sacrifice and transference of vitality.
In the dampness of the summer heat, annoyed by bugs (they should have had the porch enclosed, but they couldn’t afford unnecessary projects on his salary), she felt weirdly alive despite her exhaustion. All this, by contrast to her life with her ex, Allen, the son of a wealthy fund manager, was hers (or hers-and-Michaels). Her name was on the deed, on the mortgage. Her savings had been a major reason why they could afford it.
From what she could tell, Michael was intent on finishing the Phillies at bat. There was no point in nagging him, though she wanted to. She was fighting her own insecurity.
Though she was enjoying sitting by herself, listening to the trees, the bugs, even the sounds produced by Gary working on the car across the street, it was strange that they couldn’t just admit to one another that they wanted to be alone after a long day of entertaining the kids, putting on a show of being good parents. They could only allow themselves the luxury of solitude indirectly, while pretending to want to be together. There wasn’t really that much to talk about. Michael wasn’t much of a talker.
Few people, Adele thought, had as elaborate rituals as married couples raising families. There was an artless religiosity to making it all work. Marriage was a constant fine-tuning of constants, and you had to have faith in the fine-tuning process and the little adjustments that enabled coexistence. Michael was constantly haggling to watch an extra inning. She was haggling with him to rent a movie, one that she actually wanted to watch. He liked historical epics, she liked rom-coms and foreign films. She couldn’t remember, however, the last time they watched a movie without one or both of them falling asleep.
—Michael…
—Ok, strikeout. Coming.
Michael opened the screen door, looking dumbly happy. He was so handsome, Adele thought; it made up for so many of his defects. He really looked the part of a good father, and he was a good father: loyal, fiercely protective, kind. There were inklings that he might be hard on Stephen, but that was how fathers were with sons; her own father, Arturo, who had emigrated from Italy when he was a boy, had instilled fierce loyalty in her brothers, Dave and Don (a doctor and lawyer respectively). Her brothers worshiped her father (and so did she for that matter, though for slightly different reasons).
Adele wondered, by logical extension, whether she would have the same issues with Elizabeth that she had with her own mother, Maria.
It was a strange thought: that one could be conscious of patterns and yet repeat them anywhere.
And yet, as she had learned in psychoanalysis, that was the essence of people and families, of the whole tribal cast of the human mind.
Around the porch, which was unscreened, were moths and mosquitoes, tree-dwelling katydids, and crickets. Fireflies in the grass. A centipede, which lived under the broom in the corner of the porch. There were bats in the alley, but not many. The creatures of Bethlehem were long since accustomed to people. Rabbits were asleep for the night. There was a rumor of a fox that lived in a wood pile a few blocks up the alley, where you could also occasionally find garters or rat snakes, which lurked under porches and in woodpiles, although these were rare. Of course, there were skunks, raccoons, and occasional opossums that lived near compost, scavenged in trash cans, and looked for grubs.
The foxes hunted rabbits. The owls hunted rodents. The bats ate mosquitoes. The raccoons ate garbage. The snakes ate rodents too.
—Phillies losing?
—Yeah. They’re awful, Michael said with earnest sadness. —Absolutely awful.
Adele found this aspect of him cute, though she didn’t entirely respect it. She didn’t come from a house where the men watched sports. Her brother had wrestled; she herself had learned to play tennis (and well) with Allen, but the obsession with sports that marked Michael and his teacher buddies and friends from college escaped her. She posited that all-American men in Michael’s mold needed sports to escape from their deeper problems and anxieties; because the Phillies couldn’t hit, Michael didn’t have to worry about his own issues with emotional intimacy, for instance.
—That’s too bad, Adele said. —Wanna have a seat?
—Yup. Michael came back down with his beer (Yuengling) and leaned back in his chair. Though, unlike his wife, this was not his first house, technically, it was the first home that he could honestly imagine spending the rest of his life in. —How was Lizzy?
—Oh, she conked right out. How was the heir apparent?
—He wanted to come down and watch the Phillies with me.
—Oh, you shoulda let ‘em.
—I think it’s good he gets used to the routine.
—Yeah, I guess you’re right, Adele said, not sounding entirely convinced.
—Elizabeth was really motoring tonight.
—I think she’s about three months ahead of where Stephen was in all things except verbally, Adele noted, taking care to defend the aspect of her son that reminded her most of herself.
—We’ve got to get him to shit on the actual toilet.
—I think tomorrow I’m just gonna rip the diaper off him and if he screams and cries well that’s fine.
—He’s not really giving us a choice.
They had both observed that Stephen was born with a somewhat clandestine and obstinate will. His emotions were fierce; his desires entirely pointed and fixed. He was the household’s natural aristocrat: the Prince.
This served Adele’s ego, but threatened her husband’s. She felt that she had to tame and discipline her son oftentimes just to put Michael at ease, to prove that Stephen would be parented the right away, with clear rules and moral boundaries, and to extinguish or mitigate her own influence; she felt that she had to raise her son against her own instincts. Her husband made her feel ashamed, without even really realizing it, because middle class normality was normal to him, so ingrained, of being slightly deviant, and of the life she led before meeting him (promiscuity, cocaine use, even cultural snobbishness). By choosing Michael, she realized, playing devil’s advocate with herself, she had chosen to return not only to the place where she was born and raised, but its values, and to its rules; a part of her had wanted this, so she couldn’t really resent Michael too much: he was only performing his role.
If she had really wanted something else, if she (who had transcended her unprestigious degree in Psychology from Moravian College with intelligence and charm) had wanted to live in the wealthy old parts of Philadelphia or in Manhattan, she could have married a wealthier man who worked for Citibank or at a big accounting firm or as a dentist, surgeon, doctor, or possibly a college professor, someone with a degree from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams College, or Amherst, and take vacations to Long Beach Island, the Hamptons, or Martha’s Vineyard.
Someone who would have never considered cutting coupons and would have sent their kids to private school. That’s what her friend Mariana had done in marrying John. And that’s what would have happened if she’d married Allen and stayed on the Main Line. But she had wanted someone affectionate, manly, middle-class like herself. She wanted someone who craved the middle-class closeness of her own childhood and who’d had that same middle-class, based on a really working-class upbringing. She wanted someone familiar. Actually, she needed something more.
And the part of her that had assimilated into the cosmopolitan urban circles of the late 80s elite who rubbed elbows with Vice President Bush at the garden party at Allen’s father’s house wanted some kind of recognition from someone, anyone, that she was not just culturally speaking, in Bethlehem. She’d gotten out, she’d chosen to come back, and Bethlehem would have to adjust to her as much as she had to adjust to it. She would have the best of both worlds. She had to.
Her children would inherit the synthesis. They would not be like other Bethlehem kids. It was already clear that they had her brains, her quickness and cleverness, Michael’s memory for facts and dates, and both of their beauty. There’s no way they would stay in Bethlehem. There’s no way her kids could stay in Bethlehem. That was Adele’s sacrifice.
On some level, she knew that she wasn’t meant to be in Philadelphia or New York. She hadn’t quite made it up to the level to stay in a place like that for the rest of her life, to compete in the fierce way that people competed in those places for social status. So she retrenched, and her kids would be the next wave. Not for superficial reasons, but because there was something in her intelligence, and by extension, her ancestral intelligence, and the whole parade of Italians and Albanians and Slovaks that had to be expressed, that had to impact the world of movers and shakers, that had to stamp its name on something. She didn’t mind if it was her husband’s name, Gazda. What she wanted was to know that her blood and lymph pulsed and grew in the future, like a climbing vine, or like mushrooms in a forest, suddenly extending and radiating out from her womb that could not and would not die.
As they drank in silence, they became increasingly aware of each other’s bodies. It was easy to forget that they still had them, that they were still relatively young and hadn’t lost their looks at all. Even though she was aware of the effect that two pregnancies had on her body, her hips and ass especially, Adele was still quite beautiful, long, permed hair falling past her shoulders, casually framing her Renaissance lips and eyes, her long nose. Michael thought, even, that motherhood had made her more beautiful, maybe shockingly so. The long days in the backyard, in the sun, had left her tan and healthy; she was more of the earth than when she was still working at PNC Bank; she looked like the pictures of her distant, Italian relatives in the summers; it was really like she transformed completely.
And all these wild, unaccountable feelings, as wild as geraniums or rabbits or bees would be quiet and still. And the Eleusinian mystery of Pennsylvania. Of Bethlehem and this house on the face of the earth rotating around the sun in space would be second to the oncoming mystery of death. The wonderful thing about early middle age was how you could forget that death was coming.
There was no doubt that the choice to quit her job was a good one, Michael thought. It would have been depressing not to have these summers together, which he had off. The winters were rough, teaching and coaching football (mainly for the extra $1,250 a semester) wore him down (he was out the door by 5:45 every morning), and so there was a preciousness to these three months. If Adele was working as a bank teller five days a week, sitting in a shitty prefab office in stale air, and the kids were just sitting in front of the TV watching cartoons all day, then some of the magic of this time in their lives would have been lost. Eventually, she intended to return to the paralegal profession, but it was going to be difficult to make as much as she had been making at Diamond, Polsky, and Bauer in Philadelphia. Being a paralegal had been fun when she was single. It was not appealing now that she had children and a piece of earth with a house and fat worms in the garden soil and old dogwood trees in the backyard that flowered pink and white every spring.
At night, despite the street lights and the lights in the alley, you could still begin to feel like you were further off in the country than a neighborhood built between 1920-1940 (as theirs was); you could start to feel like you were on a homestead, surrounded by nature. Maybe it was just the beer (he’d had one earlier), but Michael felt at peace. He wanted to touch his wife, stroke her thighs, kiss her neck… fuck.
As a Catholic schoolboy, he certainly had a lot of anxiety around sex, which was not something that Adele respected or understood. But that was part of the package. With his kindness, his steadfastness, his material, biological steadiness, and trade-offs, she accepted that.
She was the more fully modern person. She’d been in psychoanalysis for six years, read Kafka and Freud in German in college (and other writers like that in general, for fun). She thought of herself as something of an intellectual. She liked Woody Allen movies and Bergman movies (and when they met, she outright resembled Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, a movie which she took him to at an arts cinema in Philadelphia during a retrospective in 1988 when they were still dating).
Nevertheless, there was something essentially right about their differing attitudes towards the body and soul. She drew him out, past his narrow erotic boundaries, past the buoys into deeper waters. She wanted to have sex every night, still, even when she was exhausted, which surprised him (this was not his experience in his first and childless marriage)... so he wondered how long that pattern would hold. It might be years before they could go a few days without fucking without anxiety.
A part of him was worried that, if he eventually couldn’t keep up with her sexually, she would find somebody else like his first wife Susie. Adele was clever. She was a good liar. It wouldn’t be impossible to imagine that he would never find out. That was more devastating, he thought: the possibility of being confronted with his wife’s infidelity. Susie, who he’d met at Lehigh, had cheated with two different guys, possibly more; he didn’t really want to know. For his part, Susie was the third woman he’d ever slept with. Coming from a fairly traditional family, however, Michael never really embraced ‘68, aside from smoking grass at a few concerts. Michael didn’t consider that there was much he was missing by missing the sexual revolution. His first time had been with his first wife Susie in college.
—Feels good to be off my feet, Adele said, as they entered the house. —It’s going to be hard when the school year starts again…
—What choice do I have? I have to work.
—I’m sorry. I know.
—It’s hard for me to leave in the morning. Come here.
Michael wrapped Adele up in his arms from behind the doorway. Michael was thinking of Adele’s ex-boyfriend, Allen. Allen was rich. His parents were family friends with President Bush. Allen wasn’t a good guy (alcoholic, rage-aholic), but he didn’t have to work; he could have offered her anything. At a public school in Pennsylvania your salary progressed fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a year to keep pace with inflation. Unfortunately, he’d started teaching for a few years in the Catholic school system, which didn’t count towards any kind of public pension, so he’d only entered the system at twenty-seven. In that time, his salary had gone from $22k to $34k. By the time Stephen was eighteen, Michael would be lucky to be earning in the sixties. Adele would almost certainly have to go back to work if they were going to have enough money to pay for the kids’ college, which was something they’d sworn they would do; they wanted to give the kids the opportunity to choose their education without economic anxiety. This was their baseline agreement as parents. A lot of families they knew went on cruises, bought new cars, new TVs… but not Michael and Adele: they drove used cars and cut coupons. Their only major vacations were cheap camping trips. And there was something beautiful about that: the willingness to sacrifice, the bond of love.
In the kitchen, they discovered dishes from dinner (meatloaf Adele had made from her Italian grandmother’s recipe). Somehow they both managed to forget about all this or convince themselves that one of them had done the dishes. They decisively avoided the kitchen, in fact, since dinner had ended. But sure enough, here were the dishes where they’d always been.
—I love you, Michael said, continuing to touch his wife’s tanned thighs (she played outside a lot with the kids).
Would they have a third child? Michael didn’t really think it was a good idea and neither did Adele. If it happened, it happened, but they weren’t going to actively try like with the first two kids. They didn’t use condoms, but Adele, who hated birth control, took her temperature, and she was very good at tracking when she was ovulating. On nights when she was ovulating, she would blow him or he would come on her chest.
Still, there was some anxiety about the ideal size of the family. Michael’s sister already had three kids and was pregnant with the fourth. His brothers all had at least three kids. One had five. For her, each baby was a test of will. Each baby cost more. Each baby committed you further to the marriage, to the family. There was something deeply appealing about that for him, because he, underneath everything, was afraid of being abandoned again, though he never expressed the thought to himself, or anyone else. Even though he was 6’3 and a former athlete, Michael, the youngest of his own siblings, still felt like something of a runt: incapable of providing the full Catholic-Patriarch experience.
Adele, thankfully, was content with two kids; her values were modern, restrained, liberal. The kids would definitely not go to Catholic school like their cousins, Michael’s nieces and nephews; at best, they would go to church once in a while as a family. Stephen and Elizabeth might get confirmed, but really only as a superstitious nod to Michael’s deceased mother, Mary, who died when he was a teenager, and who was very religious, like all of her brothers and sisters, both of them second generation children and immigrants. Tradition, for them, children of the mid-century, was associated with alcoholic, violent old people in the family who had been ruined by the Great Depression.
One of their first dates, one of the rare moments of talking about himself, talking about his past, Michael told her about having to pick his father up from the bar near Bethlehem Steel every night after he got his driver’s license at 16. Even when he was at Lehigh, he would drive his father home from the steel: the loyal son.
As her husband touched her leg as she leaned against the sink, attempting to do the dishes, Adele felt both acute exhaustion and desire. Michael was both soft and strong. She loved just falling asleep on his chest.
—Can you help me with some of the dishes?
—Yeah, no problem.
—I just want to get everything cleaned up before we go to bed. I don’t want to have to wake up to a mess.
Adele was thinking about what it was like for her parents when she was a kid. They drank much more, smoked. She and Michael didn’t smoke. In so many other ways, however, her instincts were so much like her own mother’s: to keep a clean house, to practice the art of house cleaning, to stay at home. Her mother had been a secretary in an elementary school before she and her brothers were born, but, then, like so many other women in the 50s and 60s, she decided to stay home and raise kids. Adele’s mother, Maria, was ‘not an easy woman’ in the words of her father. Adele always felt at her mother’s mercy. And watched her brothers and her father be attacked. It was not a stretch to say that Adele’s whole life philosophy was defined by this struggle for, and against, her mother’s personality. By consciously being the opposite of her mother, at least on the surface, she avoided many of her mother’s mistakes; but, by instinctually, and simply, doing the opposite of everything her mother did, Adele created new kinds of internal and external conflicts.
Adele’s internal contradictions resulted in an underlying feeling of anxiety, one which despite years of psychoanalysis (now aborted), had never really abated. Her last therapist in Philadelphia had been getting somewhere, but coincidentally or not, she’d gotten married to someone and moved back to Bethlehem. So that was that. She wasn’t going to drive to Philly for psychoanalysis and couldn’t find the same quality of therapist, frankly, in the Lehigh Valley. Bethlehem wasn’t that small, but culturally it was, philosophically it was. It was just a fact of the matter. Her best friend Mariana, who lived in Manhattan, and had gone to Brown, always reminded her that Bethlehem, the place where they’d both grown up, was a backwater.
Adele felt proud of her decision to move home to raise a family, though. The decision felt right. It was better to raise kids here than in New York. Adele couldn’t afford to live in New York. She wasn’t a New Yorker. She wasn’t really even a Philadelphian. That was the problem. Mariana had married a banker at Morgan Stanley, which was the only real reason she could comfortably escape Bethlehem (which was not to say that Mariana’s husband was a bad guy; he was a great guy). Mariana simply had been attracted to different things from the start; she’d always known she would leave Bethlehem. People basically married the person who reflected their values, Adele thought. That’s what a marriage was: a values contract, an agreement to raise children, a framework within which children could be raised. Every choice of spouse reflected something significant about who you were.
—I can do the dishes, Michael said. Go to bed.
—This is your summer vacation.
—No, no, no, Michael said. Seriously, go to sleep.
—I won’t be able to fall asleep.
—Yes you will.
Marriages lasted because you were committed to that initial set of choices. Fundamentally, this is why Adele believed her marriage with Michael could work out. Despite their struggles with communication and disagreements on small issues, they were completely in sync when it came to important matters, such as family and their children, Stephen and Elizabeth. Michael was extremely reliable and kind, qualities that Adele valued. She had dated other men whom she was more compatible with, but they were not as dependable or kind as Michael.
Why did she prefer dependability over strict compatibility? Experience had taught her that compatibility had no real relationship to the other person’s moral quality or trustworthiness. In fact, getting along too well with someone, a relationship being too easy, made it difficult to actually face adversity or build anything together. Richard, Adele’s hippie boyfriend from college, for instance, who worked at the Moravian College radio station, was the nicest guy, the coolest guy. All they did was smoke pot and fuck, listen to music. They never argued. But one day Richard was gone, he just decided to move across the country, and she didn’t really care. Because the lack of friction or tension meant that no muscle had been built. Nothing had been ripped apart and then repaired and grown stronger. There was no evolutionary process within that relationship.
Weirdly, her relationship with Michael, because they naturally agreed on so little, had real strength and musculature.
Michael rubbed his forehead, perhaps unconsciously, where the hair was starting to thin just a little bit. Michael had been thinking about conversations he’d had with his father recently.
Michael’s dad didn’t have many years left to live. Wouldn’t do him much good being alive, anyway. He was too old for anything other than watching baseball and convincing various children and grandchildren to smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink beers in his room (which was attached to the house of Michael’s sister, Mary) in addition to the original house which Joe had largely built by himself in the 1950s (a neat little brick house with three bedrooms, each of which had originally housed two children, Michael and his three siblings).
The house was on to its second generation. There was a big screen TV in the living room, a monstrous black apparatus which looked like a used car almost.
Adele worshipped her father; Michael couldn’t really respect his, and thus couldn’t love him (love and affection weren’t really something that his family did much of). And Michael thought that Stephen would probably feel the same way about him one day; his son, tragically, would fail to love him, would fail to feel any bond of affection. The sense of repetition, possible repetition, the possibility that nothing could or would change were profoundly haunting to him. He thought about his son upstairs asleep. He wondered if one day he would be sitting in his living room thinking about his own son and his own fate, if the cycle would just continue indefinitely, forever. He felt guilty because a part of him wanted this, implicitly wanted his son to be like him. He wanted his son to have freedom, but putting aside too much freedom, he didn’t resemble his son. That would be something else, a profligate, an apple fallen too far from the tree.
Stephen had all of her talents, especially her high verbal IQ. He had high verbal IQ; she talked about that all the time. Well, Michael’s verbal IQ wasn’t so bad. In fact, he read way more books than Adele did, their history books, which she didn’t count as real literature. Michael had a sophisticated vocabulary, and he used with Stephen as many big words as he could. His wife tended to define being intelligent or cultured as knowing the things and thinking the things that she thought, watching the movies that she watched, reading the books that she read.
And so Stephen would only be in her mind. Stephen would achieve in her mind the potential of his high verbal IQ if he took on her tastes, not his father’s.
Watching Michael enter the house, Adele felt a branching, disconsolate loneliness. Marriage was palatable and digestible when there was a sacred element in the grain. When you sweetened everything, even artificially. When you let the pure wheat ferment and become sugar. But Michael resisted. He was hard. Not bitter, but dry. He was Indian corn. Nutritious, but brittle. Hearty, but not pleasing. Here she was in the night. The night of the summer. Past midnight, when the earth spirits were on their feet. Poking in the bushes and making strange sounds. Entering the warm, fruitful, sad, nocturnal atmosphere. A little demonic and uncanny. She got scared being on the porch by herself. But she wouldn’t go in, not yet. She thought about her own childhood. About three miles west of Huntington Street. And she and her friends would play tag well into the dusk. And then they would run from porch to porch. Ringing doorbells and laughing. Sweating down to their shoes. At their bare feet. And her brother shooting BB guns. How one summer, the dead body of a small boy who lived in the neighborhood washed up at the Lehigh River. A suicide. His name was Bobby. And only later did she hear through the neighborhood grapevine that Bobby’s father used to drink and beat him. Darker things too. Rape maybe; she never knew. People never talked openly about those things. But it was insinuated. All this was always insinuated. Nobody ever arrested Mr. Stevens, Bobby’s father, because there was no crime. Bobby had drowned himself. Had run away and drowned himself. He’d had a crew cut. And had played saxophone with her brother. In the middle school band.
The kids were asleep. Her husband was getting ready for sleep and so was she. This was not eternal life, but it was the essence of eternal life. If there was a heaven, it was this: snug, warm, full of the nearness of others. She wondered whether her husband thought like this. One day the kids would be grown up and she and Michael would be old. And all these wild, unaccountable feelings, as wild as geraniums or rabbits or bees would be quiet and still. And the Eleusinian mystery of Pennsylvania. Of Bethlehem and this house on the face of the earth rotating around the sun in space would be second to the oncoming mystery of death. The wonderful thing about early middle age was how you could forget that death was coming. And immerse yourself in the task of raising children and paying off the mortgage and digging out the garden every spring and redoing a new room of the house every year.
Brushing his teeth, a little beer-drunk, Michael felt a deep sense of satisfaction and pride; he had built this, and this would be his forever: house, spouse, kids; there was something permanent for the first time; that, in a way, connected you to everything, both history and God. He was a history teacher, and, technically, a Catholic, but he only understood these catechisms now in a firm way: the way his father had understood them, and his grandfather, standing on Ellis Island with the bride he had bought for the price of a bought ticket back in Slovakia when it was still the Hapsburg Empire.
He wanted to have sex; desire was part of his contentment, his freedom within the house, the his-ness of the house, and the moral, spiritualized quiet of knowing your children were asleep on a summer night, that the earth was revolving towards day, and that you had spliced your branches to its trunk. There was nothing better. He owned the house, he owned the trajectory of time, which defined the life cycle of the family. He owned the house and he had his children, and therefore he owned some part of the future, something permanent. His old house, smaller, split level on the west side of Bethlehem. The house that he’d owned with Sally hadn’t felt this way because they’d never had kids, and because Sally had been determined not to have kids. Only the sheepdogs that Michael had bred as a substitute and sold for extra money. That house had felt lifeless and dead, the prosthetic assemblage of wood, plywood, drywall, glass, steel, and copper. The Huntington Street house felt like an engine which produced or printed the future, a closed system which catalyzed the production of eternity. His son and daughter, and their sons and daughters and so on, all spiraled out from this place. He was sheltering infinity here. He was sheltering the Gazda line, which was something independent and external to him, something that would continue to emerge as it had emerged over the slow centuries from here.
Michael spit the toothpaste out and held his head on the sink (he still had a thick neck from football and wasn’t very flexible). After splashing water on his face, he turned off the faucet, toweled off, and shut off the light.
Twenty minutes later, Adele was face up in bed; he crashed over her, kissing her neck, tugging off her white cotton underwear, kissing her breasts, kissing down across her belly’s residual baby pouch, down to her thighs and the flower of her sex. —I love you, he murmured.
—Yes Michael, that’s so nice; I love you too…
He was so warm and alive; his toes, his hands, the tips of his fingers, his cock, his eyeballs: everything was alive; and everything in his wife was alive and electric. Should they have a third child? They’d discussed it; if it were a boy, they would name it Michael. Michael Junior. He wanted to. The two boys could share a room; he’d build bunk beds. Or no: they shouldn’t: three kids was more than they could afford, eventually they’d have to move into another house; he’d have to get his Principal’s License, give up these summers off.
Michael yawned loudly.
There was something perfect about the way things were, and about Stephen and Elizabeth. It was hard to imagine a third child. The house had three bedrooms. The kids had big, strange, wonderful personalities. There was something wrong, actually. The family of four felt balanced. The four of them somehow could defeat the nothingness of death (the thing that took his mother like a wolf grabbing a stray sheep). The herd, the smallness of the house kept them close. They could not scatter. They could not grow too big. They could not grow diffuse, or otherwise death would mow them down.
From now on, then, sex for pleasure. For letting off steam. For keeping the sacred flame of marriage alive. Just because.
—I’m not ovulating, Adele said. I checked my temperature, and…
Adele wiped herself, threw the toilet paper in the bowl, closed the lid, flushed, washed her hands. She could already hear Michael snoring down the hall.
She was in her robe, aware that the kids could wake and call for her, naturally aware of the shame that would come with seeing their mother like this: naked, flushed with sex, with the odor of sex still on her body. Sex changed and didn’t change after having kids; in some ways it was like being a teenager again because the need to procreate had been met; sex could be for the thrill of it again, and there was something illicit, except now her young children played the role that her parents had played: the Others who might catch you, who knew, but didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.
In a little more than a decade, her own children would be sneaking lovers over, and would perform these acts in the house, or the car, or in a field or copse near the house. That’s just how things were. Would she encourage her kids to be open about it? She couldn’t and wouldn’t judge them. That was outdated. Even her own parents hadn’t really. Her own parents still had sex, actually, as far as she could tell; she remembered her father giving her a quarter to run and buy ice cream so that, as she gradually understood, he could be alone with his wife.
The human animal. She was comfortable with it. She had always enjoyed sex. She’d had maybe fifty men in her life, and a woman once, during a ménage-à-trois she’d never told Michael about. He wouldn’t have wanted to know anyway.
She was a little hungry, she realized, and the exhaustion from earlier was gone. So she went downstairs, careful to minimize the creaking of the stairs and her own joints.
She just wanted a glass of milk, some butter and toast.
It was nice just to have the house to herself; it was nice that everyone else was asleep, content.
Not every night would be like this (so contented), she understood, so she had to enjoy this. They were lucky, she and Michael, despite differences of disposition and temperament; marriages could go bad so fast; some of her friends weren’t having a good time raising families. Susan, who lived on the west side of Bethlehem, wasn’t happy with Brian, her husband, for instance. She’d talk about it on playdates she’d set up with Mariana and her daughter, Carrie; the two women would talk in the backyard while the kids ran around, playing their nonsense games (Carrie was younger than Stephen and older than Elizabeth).
—Brian doesn’t hit me, but he smashes things, yells, Mariana had told her. His temper’s getting worse. He’s just a jerk. He’s become such a jerk since we got married; I don’t get it. He really used to be sweet. I mean, he still is… sometimes… but after a beer or two?
Admittedly, Adele found this (Mariana’s failing marriage) a little gratifying, because Mariana had always been so superior, and made more money (working in H.R. for Air Products). The two friends had been competitive since 7th grade: looks, grades, college, boyfriends, career, and now husbands… and inevitably kids.
Adele had little doubt that Stephen and Elizabeth would be special. Her IQ was 140 (as measured in elementary school) and both children were already precocious, or pre-precious, in obvious ways. Michael, a history teacher, was smart too, but more in a ‘facts’ way. He liked concrete facts. He liked accumulating facts, in fact, while Adele liked theories. Michael didn’t really have any theories. Whatever notions of the world he had, he’d build up from his own experiences, from details, from pieces, which Adele found absurd and inefficient and often counterproductive. Theories were to help you, there to help you make sense of experiences, not the other way around.