Читать книгу Tantra Goddess - Caroline Muir - Страница 8
ОглавлениеChapter One
The All-American Dream
The horizon line beckoned as I drove the open highway from New York City to Colorado, my hair flying in the wind and my spirit soaring. With a couple of duffel bags stuffed with jeans and flannel shirts and my cat in a carrier in the back seat, I was freedom bound, headed for whatever was calling me. If I needed other clothes, I’d buy them later. My box of jewelry-making tools and supplies was tucked in the back in case I decided to try to make some money at it. A thermos of coffee would get me over the first state line, and from there it would be adrenalin and snacks I’d buy when I stopped for gas. I would drive until the night seemed too long and I had to pull over to get some sleep, then I’d pitch my tent at a KOA, dwarfed by monstrous camping trailers, and curl up in my sleeping bag, my kitty purring beside me. The next morning I would be back in my Jeep for the last leg of the journey to my brother’s doorstep.
“I can see why you’d want to leave New York,” Johnny had said when I called to say I needed a place to stay for a while, “but why would you leave your family?” Didn’t I have everything I wanted? A husband with a good career, an adorable five-year-old daughter, a two-story house in the suburbs? What had happened to the life and the city that had thrilled me? All I could say was New York was poisoning me. I had to go.
Twelve years earlier Arnie and I had rented an upstairs flat in the Bronx, the instant his army duty was done. Pelham Parkway was worlds away from the Kansas prairies of my childhood, with our flat that shared a fenced yard with a row of identical brownstones lining both sides of the street. I loved everything about our neighborhood—the bakeries, the delis, the Italian markets, the hair salons everywhere. “Hey, Wonder Bread,” our friend Ed Yaconetti would say to me as I lifted another fresh pastry out of a pink box. “Ever have a cannoli back there in Kansas?” This love affair with opening a waxed paper envelope filled with a chocolate éclair or chocolate chip cannoli drove me not only into the bakeries but into the offices of diet doctors in Manhattan, a very “in” thing to do in 1963.
Every day I rode the subway to Manhattan to my job as a secretary at New York Life Insurance on 39th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Grand Central Station. After work I picked up fresh loaves of bread for nineteen cents and wedges of Parmesan and spicy Italian sausage to make Arnie’s favorite dinners—his mama’s good Italian sauce over every kind of pasta. Arnie’s career in advertising was taking off, and at night we’d share stories about our workdays in the big city.
I was in love with my life, our friends, our Saturday evenings with the Yaconettis for an Italian dinner that Marie or I prepared while our husbands talked and laughed about the pros and cons of everything. We stayed up late playing cards or board games and having a zany, hilarious time. Life with Arnie in the Bronx was a hundred times better than anywhere in the playgrounds of my childhood.
Until November 22, 1963, that is. After President Kennedy was shot, people seemed more serious on the subways. The whole world seemed a different place. Culture seemed to be changing around us, and sex suddenly became a bigger part of our lives, with Arnie asking me to go with him to sex shops on Times Square and sit with him in half-empty theaters watching porn films. I tried to be interested, looking around the dusty, sleazy shops as he pointed out this and that and sitting through movies that seemed endless. Playboy arrived in the mail every month, and I pored over the slick pictures of buxom women with him and dressed up for the Playboy Club some Saturday nights to have drinks and look at the Bunnies, their oversized bosoms pushed into a daunting cleavage. I didn’t like how women were objectified, and I liked it even less when Arnie and his friends called out from our car window, “Hey, look at that!” every time a shapely woman walked by. But Arnie was my husband and I wanted to be a good wife, so I didn’t say a word.
When Arnie and I had married two years earlier I was a virgin, and I was still a virgin a week after our wedding. Maybe it was because of all the douching—a friend of my mother’s had undertaken my education in “feminine hygiene” and I was so well douched every day that I had none of the natural fluids that might have made penetration possible. And maybe it was Arnie’s inexperience at stimulating me and my discomfort at being naked with a man. We had petted heavily during our year of dating, but never naked. Now I slept in pink curlers and baby doll pajamas and made sure the room was completely dark when we climbed into bed. (I had to be in a dark room for the next several years every time we had sex.) When we finally stumbled onto a jar of good ol’ Vaseline, I said goodbye to my virginity. It hurt, it was bloody, and it was disappointing, but I was officially Arnie’s wife and a member of the world of women and wives at last.
Around us, friends were getting pregnant and having babies, but try as I might, I was not. I had no idea what having children really meant to me, but Arnie was certain he wanted them—four daughters, to be exact—and I wanted whatever he wanted. We tried everything we knew. Once I even stood on my head after intercourse to help the sperm find their way.
It was around this time I ventured outside my marriage. There seemed to be opportunities everywhere! I flirted with my handsome, married boss and heated up afternoons in his office making out pressed up against the mahogany paneling, impaled by an erection that never saw the light of day. On my lunch hour one day I met one of his clients, the CEO of a thread manufacturing company, at a midtown hotel, trading my cotton briefs for something black and lacy at a department store nearby. His desire for me was fulfilled before I even unwrapped our sandwiches. So much for another attempt at this thrilling thing called sex. But I kept on with the kissing and fondling and many times released my pent-up sexual energy in the ladies’ room on the 42nd floor, perched precariously on the commode with my legs in the air. I wondered if any other secretaries did this, too.
Later, after I left that job, I told Arnie about these escapades. He was shattered to think I would break our vow of monogamy so casually. “You don’t even like sex that much!” But that was exactly why my indiscretions never seemed a big deal to me, because I didn’t like sex that much. The sexiest we got was counting how many clitoral contractions I could have during orgasm. We had read that women can have several clitoral contractions during orgasm, and this interested us. Every chance Arnie got he would find his way between my legs to give me orgasms with his mouth and try to increase my number of contractions. “Just lie back and let me taste you,” he would say. Not a problem! I was happy to receive Arnie pleasuring me, and I liked that he seemed to love doing it. But oh, if only sex could be over after my orgasm! When it came to intercourse I could only pretend to like it, and I was never interested in oral sex with him. Anything having to do with his penis caused me to numb out and disappear inside, and at twenty years old, I was too naïve to wonder why.
On New Year’s Eve 1964, sex was hot and heavy after celebrations at the Yaconettis’ house, and just before dawn I woke with a terrible shock. Fiery pain shot through my insides. “Holy shit, Arnie!” I moaned, doubling over. “I think I need an ambulance.” My gynecologist met us at White Plains Hospital. Two hours later I was in emergency surgery to save my life.
The next morning I lay in a hospital bed with a painful ache in my belly. I was black and blue above and below a wide ribbon of gauze wrapped around my abdomen, up to my waist and down to my knees. What the hell had happened?
Dr. Carey finally came in, and he gently explained. A cyst the size of a large grapefruit had ruptured and was spilling poison into my bloodstream. I had lost a significant amount of blood internally. “But you’ll be as good as new when the incision heals,” he assured me, “minus one ovary. We had to take it out along with the cyst around it.”
I’d lost an ovary? The night before, intercourse had been fast and hard. I was still trying to get pregnant, and my only association with that now was debilitating pain. My kind doctor was suddenly my hero; he helped women. Arnie was the perpetrator; he caused me pain. How could I make sense of all this?
Two years later I was hospitalized again, this time to find out that my fallopian tubes had been deformed before birth. More surgeries. We’d been married eight years when a second ovarian cyst was discovered and another surgery resulted in a complete hysterectomy. I was twenty-six years old. It was the end of my menstrual flow.
“Like a cigarette?” Dr. Carey said, offering me a Marlboro as I took a seat in his office. He lit my cigarette and then gave me the news that he’d decided to remove my uterus while I was “under” since it was clear I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant anyway. I inhaled deeply to block the torrent of tears. “You can always adopt,” he said.
What now? I felt lost without a purpose as a wife. Arnie agreed with the doctor: we could adopt. I wasn’t so sure. How would I know how to mother when I couldn’t even carry a baby in my own body? There was no one to talk with about it. My mother had stopped being a mother so long ago she wouldn’t have any idea what to suggest. My Aunt Helen was busy raising her four children and whenever we talked about it, all she did was encourage me to follow my husband’s lead.
With no one to hear me and no idea what else to do, after a year of discussions I decided to say yes to adoption. I would give notice at work, and we would move from our brownstone in the Bronx to a house in New Rochelle that my grandfather Nank would buy us so we could start our family in the suburbs. Arnie would commute to the city and be home with us all weekend.
Fifteen months later and three days after we moved into the four-bedroom split level in New Rochelle, the American Dream was realized: Our baby was here. We hurried to the agency when the call came, nervous and excited, and when Robin Lee was placed in my arms and I saw her blue eyes for the first time, it was love at first sight. We signed the papers and took our daughter home.
But why did Robin Lee cry so much and so loud for so long? I did everything Dr. Spock advised—her formula was warm to my wrist, her room was perfectly appointed, Mommy and Daddy loved her so much. Through the long days at home alone with her I smoked pack after pack of cigarettes, worried there was nothing I could do to console my baby. Granted, I was her third mother in the first eighteen days of her life, but she had it all now, didn’t she? While Arnie was in the city, juiced by the creative atmosphere at the advertising agency, I was home all day with her, washing diapers and folding and putting them away. In the afternoons I settled her into her English pram and took her for long walks. I kept the house spotless, watched afternoon soaps while she napped, prepared hot dinners, and entertained our friends on weekends. Our Christmas party had a list of seventy-five to one hundred guests, and invitations went out just after Thanksgiving and before the round of Christmas cards went out. I worked for days on the appetizers—bacon-wrapped Chinese savories and cheesy puff pastries, foie gras–topped poppy seed crackers, and melty Brie en croûte. We rented glassware, dishware, and silverware, and we served martinis and Champagne on silver trays that Arnie’s ad-men pals in their striped ties and three-piece suits passed around the crowd. I loved these gala affairs; entertaining seemed to come naturally to me.
I was in the groove of my life. Who cared that my Scotch and waters had become Scotch on the rocks, that my 5:00 p.m. cocktail hour gradually started earlier and earlier? When Arnie rented a studio apartment in the city so he could stay there Monday through Thursday to work on a screenplay he was writing, I was happy for him. He came home for long weekends to play with his daughter, play golf, watch sports, and have sex with me on Saturdays. Robin was the center of our universe, all we could talk about—what she was learning, when and where she would start preschool.
And then Musak turned to music, orange linen golf slacks became tattered tie-dyed jeans, the Village Voice replaced the New York Times, and sex on Saturdays became sex five times a day. Arnie’s teenaged nephew, Steven, came to live with us.
Steven was seven years younger than I was, only a child when I was a senior in high school and invited to his house for dinner sometimes by his parents, Jill and Frank. I’d met Jill and Frank at the school football games, when I was head cheerleader and their eldest son was the leading tight end. When they introduced me to Jill’s twenty-three-year-old brother, Arnie, he fell in love with me as quickly as they had. But time had passed, and now Arnie and I had our own child. Steven was a high school dropout, dropping acid and smoking pot. Frank and Jill thought we could help him shape up and find his way in society.
Steven’s adoration for us was clear right away. What I didn’t know was that I had been the object of his sexual fantasies for years. I could tell he was undressing me with his eyes, and I flirted back, letting him know I liked that look he gave me. I needed something new in my life, something to take the edge off.
One morning, while Robin napped, I slipped into the room where Steven slept. He opened his eyes as I was undressing. In moments, I ravished this boy-man, who then ravished me. Afterward, we lay together close in each other’s arms. “I know it doesn’t make sense, Steven,” I whispered, “but I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong.”
“How can love be wrong?” Steven said. “I’ve loved you since the first day you walked into our house.”
With this tender, passionate lover, a “nanny” for my child, and a great helper around the house, life in the suburbs improved overnight. And Arnie was ready for some improvements, too. He joined me in trading our “straight life” for bong hits and perfectly rolled joints as we let Steven usher us into the New Age. We listened to Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez on a record player that had only known Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Big Band. Steven baby-sat so Arnie and I could go to our first rock concert—Sly and the Family Stone—at the Fillmore in the East Village. That night, smoking grass right there in our seats, connecting with the masses of rock fans, we feared we looked terribly straight, but nobody seemed to mind our off-the-rack polyester. It was all about doing your own thing.
The times they were a-changin’.
For the rest of the year, my love affair with Steven stayed undercover, but it woke a sleeping sexual giant in me. Steven’s soft voice and gentle manner, his loving focus on me, his availability, and his desire to spend all of his time with me fed a new fire inside. I did like sex after all! In fact, I couldn’t get enough of it. The part of me that had questioned my identity as a woman since losing my ability to give birth gave way to a sense of belonging. I never felt like a Playboy Bunny with Steven. He wanted to caress my lovely breasts, not look at slick pictures of naked women. He wanted to make love with me, not ask me to watch two women making love in some porn film I could see over his shoulder while he took his pleasure with me. I was his porn film just being myself, playing out the role of wife and mother. We rode bicycles in Central Park and marched for peace in DC with Arnie. We got high on life, on marijuana, on each other. We roamed Greenwich Village, met Arnie after work and rode the Staten Island Ferry just for the view of New York City at night. We took Robin on daytime excursions and held her while she napped, breathlessly gazing at her sweet face. We played Dylan and the Beatles while preparing Arnie’s favorite pastas on Friday nights and we never missed a beat in our integrity to show up with our love for him.
Reports to the family in Florida, meanwhile, were that Steven was adjusting well to family life in New York and he would soon have a direction for his life. He was in good hands. Truth was, it was Arnie and I who were in good hands, as Steven brought to us the unfolding wave of expanded consciousness sweeping the country and the world.
Finally, a year after he had come, Steven boarded a plane to return home to Florida. We said a tearful goodbye at the Kennedy Airport and I drove home, sad to face a cavernous house.
When Arnie came home that weekend, we sat in our matching TV chairs with a clean ashtray and fresh packs of Marlboros at our side, and I told him we needed to talk. He leaned back and lit a cigarette, classic ad-man style. “What’s up?”
My mouth was dry. “Arnie,” I said, “you might have noticed I’ve been more distant from you than usual.”
He shrugged. Maybe he hadn’t noticed.
“I’ve been having an affair.”
“Who?” he said, without taking his eyes off me.
“Steven.”
He jumped up and practically ran to our guest bathroom, slamming the door shut before vomiting up the news into the black commode. I stayed in my chair, squirming, wondering what could possibly happen next. I had no idea what I wanted. I just knew I couldn’t go on with this secret any longer. When Arnie came back, he sat down, lit another cigarette, and inhaled deeply. “I’ve had an affair myself.”
“You had an affair?”
“A photo rep at work. We even snuck into the house one night when you were away.”
I was horrified, amazed, and impressed all at once. “Did the neighbors see you?”
He shook his head. “She stayed on the floor of the car until we got into the garage.”
We howled with laughter at that and rolled a joint, smoking and laughing and sharing our secrets. This was the friend I’d needed. I felt genuinely happy for Arnie, happy our affairs had brought us so much joy. And I was freed from guilt, which was a huge relief. But we knew we needed something to help our marriage if we were going to stay together and personally thrive.
That’s when Dr. Thelma came into our lives.
We started seeing Dr. Thelma, first separately and then together. Dr. Thelma was a marriage and family psychotherapist in White Plains. At her suggestion I joined one of her therapy groups, and it was there I had my first awakening. Dr. Thelma asked each woman in the group to ask the woman beside her to identify herself. Easy. The woman seated to my left faced me. “Who are you?” she asked, her brown eyes looking boldly into mine. “I’m Kern,” I smiled, using my childhood nickname to introduce myself. She glanced at Dr. Thelma, who nodded for her to go on. She looked at me again and repeated it: “Who are you?” “I’m Arnie’s wife,” I said, still smiling. She came back a third time. “Who are you?” I was starting to squirm. What was this game anyway? “I’m Robin’s mother,” I said, knowing that my success with answers was over. She asked yet another time. “Who are you?” At that point I shattered, dissolving into tears. “I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!”
I quit Dr. Thelma after that meeting. I was tired of her tough-love ways of banging at the locked doors of me. This was my second bad experience with psychotherapy—a cold, clinical Freudian psychiatrist I’d seen when Arnie and I were first married wouldn’t stop trying to get me to say “penis” and was fascinated by what I’ve always called “rocking my legs.” Robin was about to enter kindergarten, giving me even more time to wonder what I was doing with my life, but I enrolled in some classes at Westchester Community College. I signed up for a yoga class and jewelry-making and devoted myself to flirting with my hippie jewelry teacher. These were comfortable protections, easy distractions. On Arnie’s weekends home he continued to devote himself to his daughter with the kind of adoration I wanted from him. I felt invisible to them except when it came to fulfilling their needs for food and comfort.
At Christmas that year we visited Johnny and his new wife, Cherrie, in Colorado. It was 1972, and Cherrie was pregnant with their first child. I was excited for Johnny. We were each other’s lifeline to family, and he and Arnie were like brothers. Johnny had visited us in New York a few times when he was on leave from the army and, later, when he was in college. We confided in each other about our confusion and sadness about our mother, who had long suffered from mental illness, and about Dad and his wives and our stepsisters, and how we felt about what they expected of us. The truth was always easy to share with Johnny. I was the older sister, and in some ways, I suppose, a replacement for the lost parts of our mom.
After we visited Johnny and Cherrie that Christmas, on the way home, we stopped in Chicago for a friend’s New Year’s Eve party. There, I met a man who would instantly shake up my world and lead me to this day, driving west to start a new life.
“This is my brother Eddie,” our friend Lee had said, and Eddie and I shook hands.
Eddie returned my smile with all the information I needed.
I endured the evening, my thoughts a zillion miles away as I sat close to Arnie while he made everyone laugh. Eddie hugged me goodnight in the wee hours of the morning, his eyes gazing longingly into mine. He whispered, “I’m meeting a friend in April to sail from England to Spain in his forty-five-foot ketch. There’s plenty of room for you, Kern. Come with me!”
All the way home and for weeks after that, all I could think about was Eddie’s invitation. We talked often by phone after I put Robin to bed when Arnie was away at his studio in Manhattan, and I trembled uncontrollably as we spoke, which worried me. Why was I so affected by this man? I was a responsible mom, a loving wife. Eddie was single with little to tie him down besides an apartment in Chicago he’d give up to go to Europe. I had to join him. I had to know life wasn’t passing me by. I had to grab this brass ring. The adrenalin was intoxicating.
One Saturday night after Arnie had read Robin her bedtime story and turned out her light, I joined him on the couch. I had already decided to tell him as plainly as I could that I’d been invited to go on a sailing trip with Eddie and his friend.
“I need to go on this adventure, Arnie.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I need a break for a while. And I need a break from mothering for a while, too.”
Arnie frowned. “Are you seeing someone?”
I told him I wanted to sail from England to Spain with Eddie. I would leave in early March and return in early July. “I want to taste parts of life I have missed before it’s too late, Arnie. Can you understand that?”
“And who is Eddie?”
I reminded him.
Arnie nodded, probably remembering my silence on the long drive back to New York after that New Year’s Eve, my fading interest in serving him his favorite dinners on his weekends home. He sighed a long sigh. “Are you in love with this guy?”
“I don’t know, Arnie, but something big is happening. I haven’t stopped thinking about him since we met. This is the chance of a lifetime to learn more about myself, an opportunity I may never have again.” Eddie and I planned to travel through England, Wales, and Scotland, then sail from southern England to the northern coast of Spain before I returned home.
“You’ve been talking to this guy, making plans?” Arnie was surprised, but curious. “What about Robin Lee? What about us?”
“I suppose you could call it a leave of absence,” I said. “We can look at it all when I’m home in three months.”
I reminded him that I’d gotten engaged in my senior year of high school and had married him just after my eighteenth birthday, and he surprised me then, with the greatest possible show of true love. “Do what you need to do, Kernie. I may be your husband, but I’m also your friend.” I flung my arms around his neck and held him close, loving him more in that moment than ever before.
After that, though, the tension between us was thick. We slept on the farthest edges of our king-sized bed, and every day I had to steel myself against what I would miss, or I may never have gone. I couldn’t bear thinking of Robin wondering why I wasn’t there to send her off to school in the mornings after brushing out her long, tangled hair. Why I couldn’t cook dinner for her, or read to her, or talk to her about her friends in preschool. To distract myself, I spent hours on the phone with Eddie, making lists of travel arrangements I needed to make, filling and re-filling my duffel bags with “cute outfits for Europe,” and going through the motions of mothering and housekeeping with my mind thousands of miles away. Arnie changed his schedule to be home more nights while I was gone, and we began training a part-time nanny to pick up Robin from school, watch her in the afternoons, and cook dinner for them.
At last the morning of my departure came. I packed Robin’s lunch and saw her off to school, then sat with my bags, waiting for the taxi that would take me to Kennedy Airport. I felt heavy and exhilarated. It was a major crossroads, choosing the unknown and unpredictable over everything familiar. It also meant I was now a carrier of the great scarlet letter “A,” for abandonment. My mother had carried that letter, and look how well I survived. I assumed those I was leaving would survive just as well. How could I create harm with this choice?
Springtime in Paris may be romantic, but England in April is nothing but bloody cold. Right away, I had to buy wool clothing and rain gear, as Eddie and I traveled through England, Scotland, and Wales. We stayed in quaint bed-and-breakfast inns and made love while gazing out the windows at a life so different and so far away from New York or Chicago. I had hoped for something sensational with Eddie, something like the passion I had enjoyed with Steven or even the comfort and sense of family I felt with Arnie, but Eddie had far less experience with relational love than I had, and sex was disappointing. It didn’t matter much, though. I had other things on my mind. Adventure was the fuel that drove me as we got ready to sail the open sea. And London! The pubs and the people, the British Museum, Piccadilly, the double-decker buses, the birdman in Wellington Park—all of it gave me a joyous sense of aliveness as we geared up to meet the boat in Falmouth, on the southern coast.
On June 1, we set sail on the Seawatch, Captain Chuck’s forty-five-foot vessel. We had trained hard in the art of sailing, traveling through inlets and around the harbors near Falmouth, admiring the southern English countryside and learning from Captain Chuck how essential it was that we wear life vests, take orders, and pay attention at all times. In less than two hours we were outside of predictable waters surrounding the Port of Falmouth and on our way. In three nights and four days we would be across the Bay of Biscay. Then we would dock for a few weeks in Santander, Spain, and go on to sail the northern coast of Spain into warmer weather south toward Portugal.
From the start, the waters were rough. The boat rocked hard and the swells rose high around us, sending poor Eddie below deck to his bunk, severely seasick. It looked like it was going to be up to Captain Chuck and me to get us through. “Kern,” Captain Chuck said to me that first night, “you and I are going to have to split Ed’s watch. Can you do it?”
Eddie’s watch was six hours on, six hours off. I would have to take the wheel while Captain Chuck slept. I knew I had no option but to say yes. Our lives depended on my answer. “Sure, Chuck,” I said, as confidently as I could. “I can do it.”
That night, when the moon was high in the sky, Captain Chuck set the compass for our destination. My job was to watch those degrees on the compass, hold the wheel on course, and line the tall mast with a particular star. “Do a good job,” the captain said, bidding me goodnight before heading down to his bunk.
Enough adrenalin pumped through me to sail us to China as I sat alone that night, the icy wind whipping my face and threatening to send my wool cap and goose-down hood flying. I was too thrilled to be frightened as I kept an eye on the compass, the water, the sky, and the sails. The world seemed huge and amazing. The next two nights were the same, thrilling and mind-blowing. My two overstuffed duffle bags of “cute outfits for Europe” sat zippered in the hull, leaving me little space to lie down during my precious few hours of sleep time. But that was nothing compared to what went on for poor Eddie, who never left his bunk while Captain Chuck and I traded off guiding the Seawatch to our destination.
When the Port of Santander came into view, ecstasy surged through every cell of my being, my legs sprawled over the bow and encircling the carved Nordic sea goddess. I had helped guide us to safety. I had done it. I was more than a wife and mother. I was courageous. I helped save lives. I could be counted on.
And I had to start a new life.
When we got back to the States, Eddie planned to move to Aspen, Colorado. I would move to Colorado, too, with Robin, and live in the mountains near Johnny and his family. I’d see Eddie in Aspen now and then and do everything I could to find out what more there was to this life besides living in a container that wasn’t my size. I wanted to discover my potential, and I could only do that by moving forward, sails set on the brightest star in the sky. That had been my epiphany during my second night at sea.
I rehearsed my words: “Arnie, I have to get out of New York. I know you have no desire to live in the wild, and I’m burnt out on city life. I have loved New York with you, but I need to be free.” When that didn’t sound right, I tried, “I can be a better friend living closer to nature than I can a wife living in this container that’s too small for me,” and “I am questioning my ability to stay sane if I have to remain a housewife and mother.”
But back in New York I discovered it was easier to rehearse the truth than to confront someone I truly loved. My resolve quickly faded. Robin was bubbling over with stories about school and summer plans, and Arnie was as attentive to me as he’d been when we were first together. He seemed confident things would return to normal. It was easier to sail a forty-five-foot boat all night, responsible for three lives, than it was to tell Arnie I had to go.
Then one day, I hit bottom. A cop flashed his lights in my rear view mirror during rush hour as I drove home to New Rochelle. I didn’t understand at first that he wanted me to pull over, so I turned onto the East River Drive ramp. Traffic stopped in both directions as the police car somehow wound through it to pull me over. I was doomed. I had read about cops who harassed, even raped, innocent women like me, women who had done nothing more than make a wrong turn. Certainly this cop would rape me in the dark tunnel just ahead. I locked the car door and sat trembling as he approached. He banged on the driver’s side window. “Open the window, lady.” I let him knock a few more times. Finally, I rolled the window down just enough to reach out and smash my burning cigarette into his cheek. As he reeled in pain, I jumped out of the car and ran through the slowed traffic, begging drivers to help me. But this was New York. No one paid attention.
After the officer apprehended me and calmed me down, he wrote out two twenty-five-dollar tickets. By then he seemed okay to me, and I apologized for the big burn mark on his cheek. We talked for a few minutes about our kids at home, and I realized this cop was just a man, someone’s dad. I felt terrible. I knew at that moment I had to leave New York. The city was turning me into someone even I didn’t want to know.
That night I told Arnie I would always be grateful for our nearly twelve years together. In many ways, we’d grown up together, sitting in our matching armchairs as America the Beautiful changed in front of our eyes on the TV screen. We’d watched combat in Vietnam, race riots on city streets, civil rights marches through the South, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in front of thousands. We’d ridden the end of the Kennedy Era into the Sexual Revolution, seen the first man walk on the moon, had almost gone to Woodstock—too much traffic made us turn back for home, a decision we regretted later. We’d entertained friends, gotten high at rock concerts, never missed a New York Rangers or Giants game, adopted our daughter, and created a beautiful home for our family. I appreciated all of it.
Arnie said he understood. He’d expected this. But when I said I wanted to take Robin with me, he roared. “You will not take my daughter from this house!”
It was clear there would be no debate. My throat burned as I agreed to grant him full custody. I knew Robin would be in good hands with her father. He was stable. He adored her. He always had her best interests in mind. We would work out the visits.
Three weeks later the Jeep was packed, and Arnie and Robin stood on the doorstep as I forced myself to make this ride toward my rising star. I would break up my own family with only vague hopes of a better future halfway across the continent. Arnie’s eyes were cold. With one hand holding firmly onto our daughter’s shoulder, I revved the engine. Part of me wanted to run back and hug them both, to reassure them—reassure myself—but I couldn’t. I had to make this departure as smooth and light as I could, for Robin’s sake, for all of us. It was heartbreaking, but there was no turning back.
