Domestic Affairs by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

the mantle at Christmas feature their names embroidered on the toe. While around here we’re always scrambling. The dress Audrey needs got washed but not dried, or dried but not sorted. Charlie’s sneakers are too tight, but we haven’t got around to buying new ones. There are items in the back of my refrigerator that are so far gone they could bypass the compost pile and go directly into the garden.
    Of course I know about the other side of it: the boredom and isolation many of those women felt, back in the days my husband remembers so fondly, when the children came home from school to find their mothers waiting with the milk and cookies. I know about the Feminine Mystique, and the importance of financial independence from husbands, and the crisis that can occur, for women who have spent fifteen or twenty years feathering a nest, when that nest becomes empty. I know how lucky I am to have all sorts of freedoms my mother’s generation missed.
    But I inhabit a state of perpetual ambivalence too: part homemaker, part career person. Not as ambitious or successful as lots of childless women I know in New York City. Not as free as my children would like, either, to be there with the chocolate chip cookies when they come home from school ready to play Old Maid. Of course these days they show working mothers on television, but there is nobody I see on the screen whose life looks remotely like mine. There is no name for what I do. With one foot in the door and one foot out, I often feel wistful, looking at the lives of women who know precisely where they stand.
    Ten years ago, when I was single and living in a studio apartment on the East Side of Manhattan—wearing silk blouses to work and picking up my dinners from a gourmet shop around the corner—I bought myself a pair of couches covered in Haitian cotton. Nine years ago, when I met Steve, those couches were among the few possessions we moved with us to New Hampshire, where we live now, and where I never put on a silk blouse or buy dinner at gourmet shops. And the truth is, the white couches, with their hard, streamlined edges, always did look a little out of place in our house.
    But over the years the couches got beat up enough to fit in a little better. The Haitian cotton ripped, Charlie built forts with the pillows, Audrey took to practicing her gymnastics routine on the sofa back, and balancing her cereal bowl on a sofa arm, while she watched her cartoons. An extended family of mice set up residence inside the hide-a-bed a couple of years back (Steve and I would be sitting on the couch sometimes, after the children were in bed, and I’d say, “Do you hear something?” and he’d say, “It’s just my stomach rumbling.” But in the end, it turned out to be a whole mouse city, coming out among the increasingly unsprung springs. They had pulled out the cotton batting, stored acorns under the seats, and gnawed on the strings of loose threads of the Haitian cotton. Which, as you might guess, was no longer even close to being white).
    So this fall we finally decided to get some slipcovers. Steve—who had the kind of mother who would have taken it upon herself to make them—commented that it might make a wonderful fall project for me, sewing those slipcovers. I said no thanks and started asking around for the name of someone who’d make them.
    This morning she showed up. Her name is Peg. She’s a small, trim woman in her early fifties. She was at our door at seven-thirty sharp.
    But because I was still pretty busy getting the children out the door to preschool and second grade, getting the lunch boxes packed, the library books gathered up, I had to ask Peg to wait a minute. There was just too much going on, it seemed, even to run upstairs for my bolt of fabric.
    Then finally the children were gone, and I spread out the material while Peg got her scissors. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s pretty hectic around here in the mornings. Getting three children dressed and