The Melting Pot Read online

  They both quieted, a welcome hush like the sudden cessation of a truck grinding garbage just outside the window. They had been standing, the better to rage; they sat down to gaze at each other across a coffee table like harmless, relieved strangers who have rushed to the same sheltered doorway in a downpour. Okay, okay, he said in an astonished calm.

  Divorce, they well knew, began with physical separation. But she had never, even in the most noxious of spells, felt she had the right to uproot him from his family, nor had he any more wished to be so uprooted. And certainly she could never leave her children. No more could he, but ... a mother is a mother, he conceded in this polite conversation of strangers in a doorway.

  Look around, she said. There’s no hurry, now that we’ve decided. And after a pause, feeling an embryonic wifely panic, added, Meanwhile, we might as well keep our system running as usual. To avoid total disorder?

  The domestic system, aspiring to justice, had been meticulously and with great boredom worked out during the era of working such things out. It was not, to her, a thing to be tossed aside lightly, even in the face of divorce.

  The system, he said judiciously, existed to support a marriage, which no longer exists. A system runs on expectations, and if we’re divorced we hardly have the right to expect very much of each other, do we? That is the whole idea.

  His reasoning saddened her, given the climate, heavily scented with sweet expectation, in which they had been married. Though it was less saddening than the prevailing weather.

  Look, I don’t want total disorder either, he said more sweetly. I’ll abide by the system. I promise! This more sweetly still.

  But can you still promise? If we’re divorced?

  They would have to approach the divorce from another path. Money, which made them groan. What money they had was all commingled. The money was as married as they were, if not more so, and how to disentangle it seemed beyond any household remedy. Why not let it remain commingled for the moment? After all, the money was not quarreling uncontrollably, it was not weeping in the shower or behind the wheel of the car with the radio tuned to rock lyrics which, however inane, managed to strafe the exposed heart. And neither one of them was likely to abscond or, heaven forbid, contemplating remarriage. Well, what luck! they exclaimed. Too good to be true! smiling like strangers in a mood of wonder becoming friends in the doorway, sensing some tenuous future connection. So many divorces snagged on money, turning good people vindictive. While in theory, divorce might remove all need for vindication. The war would be over by decree, and like the clouding dust of combat, marriage would settle; you could see the enemy plainly, and draw up plans for coexistence.

  What about ... ? He hesitated. I suppose you’re expecting me to sleep here on the couch?

  She looked hurt. If that’s what you want ...

  Not at all. I’m just trying to ... You understand, if we’re going to be free ...

  Free, she echoed nostalgically, though whether it was nostalgia for her marriage or for her earlier freedom would have been hard to say. A fleeting vision of adulterous adventure next brightened her eyes, until she realized there could be no adulterous adventure, once divorced. I’m not relegating you to the couch, she replied. I never suggested anything so extreme.

  They studied each other like strangers who have arranged to have a cup of coffee together after the storm passes, a gaze of acknowledgment, of anticipation of something risky yet promising, at the very least something as opposed to nothing.

  Living in sin, she said.

  These days they call it simply living together.

  It’s not quite the same as living together after we’ve raised two children, is it?

  Well ... He rearranged his body in the chair, shifting into a new phase of the divorce. Now that that’s settled, how shall we tell the children?

  They’ll be sick over it.

  Yes indeed. It will seem most peculiar to everyone we know.

  And we shall have to explain and I hate to explain.

  No one ever had to be sick over our marriage, he said, except us. Somehow marriages, unlike divorces, do not need to be explained, merely announced.

  Their eyes caught and held. Do you think ... maybe we don’t have to tell anyone? Until you really move out, that is?

  It was his turn to look hurt. Actually there’ll be plenty of room here when they go to college, he muttered like a married man.

  Maybe we don’t have to tell anyone just now, she repeated, bypassing his mutterings like a wife.

  He recovered the graciousness of the single. I don’t mind. You do as you like.

  You really don’t mind if I’d rather not tell anyone?

  I haven’t any right to mind what you do anymore, do I? If we’re divorced?

  You have a right to mind when it’s something that concerns you.

  Everything you do concerns me.

  No longer, she protested. We’re divorced. And yet she was touched, even pierced, very nearly impaled by that slender arrow of love, which recalled why they had gotten married to begin with.

  Noticing, he said, Marriage begins to appear as a state of mind.

  I suspect marriage is something more fragile yet, namely an illusion. Divorce, whatever its snags and constraints, appears a less illusory state.

  But the curious limbo of this hour may be a possible state too. This is a fairly affable conversation we’re having, isn’t it? The most affable in many a moon. Like unmarried people. Or previously married people. Or ... something.

  And yet they all complain so piteously of their state, without, however, envying ours.

  Frankly, he pursued, what I dislike most about divorce is the word. I would like to propose that we simply think we are ... not married.

  At this point, she said, that is far too ambitious. The moment one of us rises out of our chair to perform any significant act, our relation will want to be defined. No, we have to get divorced now, despite the vulgarity of the word, for the same reasons that we had to get married years ago and not just think we were.

  What were those again? he asked slyly.

  Ha ha. The true marriage we imagined ... Yet true marriage, she mused aloud, a thing that cannot exist because of the nature of human nature, would be like salt dissolving in water to make brine, like the action of wind on rock which makes sand, like red and black making brown, like a peach and a plum making a nectarine. All that fury in our marriage was the wind wailing its weariness of beating against the rock and the rock shrieking as it was pulverized, the peach crying for its fuzz and the plum for its dripping pink sweetness, the red and the black moaning as their brilliances muddied, streaming together, the salt drowning in the water and the water becoming tears, tears, tears. Thus true marriage is a brown dusty salty weeping fruit, an anomaly, a contradiction in terms, an impossibility.

  But if marriage means that, he said, it would also mean sperm and egg making a child. And then the only true and beautiful and possible marriage is a child. That we have accomplished. Two. That you cannot deny.

  Yes, we have served the institution. We have had our marriage.

  And this is the place to leave off, for most likely this hour suspended between marriage and divorce, this so brief escape from any defined or decreed connection, affable strangers winging it in a doorway during a downpour, became the hour in which they were the least distorted and the apogee of their lives in common.

  So You’re Going to Have a New Body!

  I

  TAKE GOOD CARE OF yourself beforehand to be sure of a healthy, bouncing new body. Ask your doctor all about it. He can help.

  Your doctor says: “Six weeks and you’ll be feeling like a new person. No one will ever know.”

  Your doctor says: “Don’t worry about the scar. We’ll make it real low where no one can see. We call it a bikini cut.”

  He says: “Any symptoms you have afterwards, we’ll fix with hormones. We follow nature’s way. There is some danger of these hormones causing cancer in the l
ining of the uterus. But since you won’t have a uterus you won’t have anything to worry about.”

  He says: “There is this myth some women believe, connecting their reproductive organs with their femininity. But you’re much too intelligent and sophisticated for that.”

  Intelligently, you regard a painting hanging on the wall above his diplomas; it is modern in aspect, showing an assortment of common tools—a hammer, screwdrivers, wrenches, and several others you cannot name, not being conversant with the mechanical arts. A sort of all-purpose handyman’s kit. You think a sophisticated thought: Chacun à son goût.

  You are not even sure you need a new body, but your doctor says there is something inside your old one like a grapefruit, and though it is not really dangerous, it should go. It could block his view of the rest of you. You cannot see it or feel it. Trust your doctor. You have never been a runner, but six weeks before your surgery you start to run in the lonely park early each morning. Not quite awake, half dreaming, you imagine you are running from a mugger with a knife. Fast, fast. You are going to give them the healthiest body they have ever cut. You run a quarter of a mile the first day, half a mile the second. By the end of two weeks you are running a mile in nine minutes. Pretty soon you can run three miles in twenty-three minutes. From the neck down you are looking splendid. Perhaps when you present your body they will say, Oh no, this body is too splendid to cut.

  II

  You will have one very important decision to make before the big day. Be sure to consult with your doctor. He can help.

  He says: “The decision is entirely up to you. However, I like to take the ovaries out whenever I can, as long as I’m in there. That way there is no danger of ovarian cancer, which strikes one in a hundred women in your age group. There is really nothing you need ovaries for. You have had three children and don’t intend to have any more. Ovarian cancer is incurable and a terrible death. I’ve seen women your age ... However, the decision is entirely up to you.”

  You think: No, for with the same logic he could cut off my head to avert a brain tumor.

  Just before he ushers you out of his office he shows you a color snapshot of some woman’s benign fibroid tumors, larger than yours, he says, but otherwise comparable, lying in a big metal bowl wider than it is deep, the sort of bowl you often use to prepare chopped meat for meat loaf. You nod appreciatively and go into the bathroom to throw up.

  III

  Your hospital stay. One evening, in the company of your husband, you check in at the hospital and are shown to your room, which is not bad, only the walls are a bit bare and it is a bit expensive—several hundred dollars a night. Perhaps the service will be worth it. Its large window overlooks a high school, the very high school, coincidentally, that your teenaged daughter attends. She has promised to visit often. Your husband stays until a staff member asks that he leave, and he leaves you with a copy of People magazine featuring an article called “Good Sex with Dr. Ruth.” This is a joke and is meant well. Accept it in that spirit. He is trying to say what he would otherwise find difficult to express, that your new body will be lovable and capable of love.

  Your reading of People magazine is interrupted by your doctor, who invites you for a chat in the visitors’ lounge, empty now. He says: “You don’t have to make your decision about the ovaries till the last minute. However, ovarian cancer strikes one in a hundred women in your age group.” Hard to detect until too late, a terrible death, etc., etc.

  As he goes on, a pregnant woman in a white hospital gown enters the visitors’ lounge, shuffles to the window, and stares out at the night sky. She has a beautiful olive-skinned face with high cheekbones, green eyes, and full lips. Her hair is thick and dark. Her arms and legs are very bony; her feet, in paper slippers, are as bony and arched as a dancer’s. Take another look at her face: the cheekbones seem abnormally prominent, the eyes abnormally prominent, the hollows beneath them abnormally deep. She seems somewhat old to be pregnant, around forty-five. When she leaves, shuffling on her beautiful dancer’s feet, your doctor says: “That woman has ovarian cancer.”

  The next morning, lying flat on your back in a Demerol haze, when he says, “Well?” you say, “Take them, they’re yours.”

  You have anticipated this moment of waking and have promised to let yourself scream if the pain is bad enough. Happily, you discover screaming will not be necessary; quiet moaning will do. If this is the worst, you think, I can take it. In a roomful of screamers and moaners like yourself, baritones and sopranos together, you feel pleased even though you have only a minor choral part. Relieved. The worst is this, probably, and it will be over soon.

  A day or two and you will be simply amazed at how much better you feel! Amazed, too, at how many strangers, men and women both, are curious to see your new bikini cut, so curious that you even feel some interest yourself. You peer down, then up into the face of the young man peering along with you, and say, “I know it sounds weird, but those actually look like staples in there.”

  “They are,” he says.

  You imagine a stapler of the kind you use at home for papers. Your doctor is holding it while you lie sleeping. Another man crimps the two layers of skin together, folds one over the other just above where your pubic hair used to be, and your doctor squeezes the stapler, moving along horizontally, again and again. Men and women are different in this, if you can generalize from personal experience: at home, you place the stapler flat on the desk, slide the papers between its jaws, and press down gently. Your husband holds the stapler in one hand, slides the corner of the papers in with the other, and squeezes the jaws of the stapler together. What strong hands they have! You think of throwing up, but this is more of an intellectual than a physical reaction since your entire upper abdomen is numb; moreover, you have had almost nothing to eat for three days. Your new body, when it returns to active life, will be quite thin.

  No one can pretend that a postsurgical hospital stay is pleasant, but a cheerful outlook should take you far. The trouble is, you cry a good deal of the time. In one sense these tears seem uncontrollable, gushing at irregular intervals during the day and night. In another sense they are quite controllable: if your doctor or strange men on the staff drop in to look at your bikini cut or chat about your body functions, you are able to stop crying at will and act cheerful. But when women doctors or nurses drop in, you keep right on with your crying, even though this causes them to say, “What are you crying about?” You also do not cry in front of visitors, male or female, especially your teen-aged daughter, since you noticed that when she visited you immediately after the surgery her face turned white and she left the room quickly, walking backwards and staring. She has visited often, as she promised. She makes sure to let you know she has terrible menstrual cramps this week, in fact asks you to write a note so she can be excused from gym. Your sons do not visit—they are too young, twelve and nine—but you talk to them on the phone, cheerfully. They tell you about the junk food they have been eating in your absence and about sports events at school. They sound wistful and eager to have you returned to them.

  IV

  At last the day you’ve been waiting for arrives: taking your new body home! You may be surprised to learn this, but in many ways your new body is just like your old one. For instance, it walks. Slowly. And if you clasp your hands and support your stomach from below, you feel less as though it will rip away from the strain inside. At home, in the mirror, except for the bikini cut and the fact that your stomach is round and puffy, this body even looks remarkably like your old one, but thinner. Your ankles are thinner than you have ever seen them. That is because with your reproductive system gone, you no longer tend to retain fluids. An unexpected plus, slim ankles! How good to be home and climb into your own bed. How good to see your children and how good they are, scurrying around to bring you tea and chocolates and magazines. Why is it that the sight of the children, which should bring you pleasure, also brings you grief? It might be that their physical presence reminds you
of the place they came from, which no longer exists, at least in you. This leads you to wonder idly what becomes of the many reproductive organs, both healthy and unhealthy, removed daily: buried, burned, or trashed? Do right-to-lifers mourn them?

  You sleep in your own bed with your husband, who wants to hold you close, but this does not feel very comfortable. You move his arms and hands to permissible places, the way you did with boys as a teen-ager, except of course the places are different now. Breasts are permissible, thighs are permissible, but not the expanse between. A clever fellow, over the next few nights he learns, even in his sleep, what is permissible.

  Although you are more tired than you ever thought possible, you force yourself to walk from room to room three times a day, perhaps to show this new body who is in control. During one such forced walk ... Don’t laugh, now! A wave of heat swirls up and encircles you, making you sway dizzily, and the odd thing, no one has mentioned this—it pulsates. Pulses of heat. Once long ago and with great concentration, you counted the pulses of an orgasm, something you are not sure you will ever experience again, and now you count this. Thirty pulses. You cannot compare since you have forgotten the orgasm number; anyhow, the two events have nothing in common except that they pulse and that they are totally overpowering. But this can’t be happening, you are far too young for this little joke. Over the next few days it is happening, though, and whenever it happens you feel foolish, you feel something very like shame. Call your doctor. He can help.

  A woman’s voice says he is extremely busy and could you call back later, honey. Or would you like an appointment, honey? Are you sure she can’t help you, honey? You say yes, she can help enormously by not calling you honey. Don’t give me any of your lip, you menopausal bitch, she mutters. No, no, she most certainly does not mutter that; it must have been the tone of her gasp. Very well, please hold on while she fetches your folder. While holding, you are treated to a little telephone concert: Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” Repeatedly, you hear Frank Sinatra explain that no matter what has happened or will happen, he is gratified to feel that he did it his way. Your doctor’s voice is abrupt and booming in contrast. When you state your problem he replies, “Oh, sweats.” You are not sure you have heard correctly. Could he have said, “Oh, sweets,” as in affectionate commiseration? Hardly. Always strictly business. You were misled by remembering, subliminally, “honey.” “Sweats” it was and, in the plural, a very hideous word you do not wish to have associated with you or your new body. Sweat, a universal phenomenon, you have no quarrel with. Sweats, no. Your doctor says he—or “they”—will take care of everything. For again he uses the plural, the royal “we.” When you visit for a six-week checkup, “they” will give you the miraculous hormones, nature’s way. In the meantime you begin to spend more time out of bed. You may find, during this convalescent period, that you enjoy reading, listening to music, even light activity such as jigsaw puzzles. Your twelve-year-old son brings you a jigsaw puzzle of a Mary Cassatt painting—a woman dressed in pale blue, holding a baby who is like a peach. It looks like a peach and would smell and taste like a peach too. At a glance you know you can never do this puzzle. It is not that you want another baby, for you do not, nor is it the knowledge that you could not have one even if you wanted it, since that is academic. Simply the whole cluster of associations—mothers and babies, conception, gestation, birth—is something you do not wish to be reminded of. The facts of life. You seem to be an artificial exception to the facts of life, a mutation existing outside the facts of life that apply to every other living creature. However, you can’t reject the gift your son chose so carefully, obviously proud that he has intuited your tastes—Impressionist paintings, the work of women artists, peachy colors. You thank him warmly and undo the cellophane wrapping on the box as if you intended to work on the puzzle soon. You ask your husband to bring you a puzzle of an abstract painting. He brings a Jackson Pollock puzzle which you set to work at, sitting on pillows on the living room floor. Your son comes home from school and lets his knapsack slide off his back. “Why aren’t you doing my puzzle?” “Well, it looked a little hard. I thought I’d save it for later.” He looks at the picture on the Jackson Pollock box. “Hard!” he exclaims.