Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life
Abigail Thomas
Acclaim for ABIGAIL THOMAS’s
Safekeeping
“This beguiling memoir reads like a novel, with characters one cares about and an engrossing and moving story.”
—Hilma Wolitzer, author of Wish You Were Here
“Abigail Thomas has created magic for smart, curious readers. Her prose is poetic, charged with hope and promise. I admire every word she writes: her work makes me happy.”
—Kaye Gibbons, author of Ellen Foster and Charms for the Easy Life
“Abigail Thomas wears her wisdom so lightly, so jauntily, that you barely notice a vision creeping up on you. Her memoir explores how women build selves out of scraps and shards—not just from love and happiness but from sorrow and failure too. Thomas has made a life for herself like a cook whipping up dinner from what’s in the refrigerator. The result is a giddily satisfying feast.”
—Lisa Zeidner, author of Layover
“An artful scatter of snapshot moments … revealing a life that’s remarkable not for its events but for the way it’s recalled, with rue, insight and wit.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“Comprised of small, astonishing moments which have been strung together in a wholly fresh and gorgeous way … Consistently humble and beautiful … Thomas has given an honest shape to the fluidity of memory.”
—Bomb
“Safekeeping sparkles like bits of a smashed mirror … Each is a moment reflected, and reflected upon. Peer into enough diamonds and shards and you see the story, you glimpse the soul.… Thomas also bears eloquent witness to her own life, as refracted by her keen eye and recorded in prose that verges on poetry.”
—Newsday
“Precisely lyrical, silver-gilt, fevered, and in the end, sweet.”
—Booklist
“Reads like a collaboration between Richard Brautigan and Joni Mitchell … A refreshing testimonial for the unrepentant—and in Thomas’s case unsinkable—youthful free spirit.”
—The Austin Chronicle
“Finally, a memoir in which sorrow and regret are part of a larger, more resounding joy. From bits and moments of her life—its quiet feminism, its loves and upheavals, mistakes, loyalties, adventures, and domesticities—Abigail Thomas offers up herself, most surprised by what is most familiar. To read Safekeeping is to be in it.”
—Abby Frucht, author of Life Before Death
ABIGAIL THOMAS
Safekeeping
Abigail Thomas is the author of the novel An Actual Life and the story collections Getting Over Tom and Herb’s Pajamas. She lives with her husband in New York City, where she teaches in the M.F.A. Writing program at the New School.
Also by ABIGAIL THOMAS
Herb’s Pajamas
An Actual Life
Getting Over Tom
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Abigail Thomas
All rights reserved under International and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Something to Remember You By” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Copyright © 1930, copyright renewed by Warner Bros. Inc. Rights for extended renewal term in the United States controlled by Warner Bros. Inc. and Arthur Schwartz Music Ltd. Rights for the rest of the world controlled by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
Thank you to Double Take (and especially David Rowell), The Alaska Quarterly, and The East Hampton Star, where some of these pieces originally appeared. And thanks to the MacDowell Colony, for the quiet to figure out what I was doing.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Thomas, Abigail.
Safekeeping : some true stories from a life / Abigail Thomas—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Thomas, Abigail. I. Title.
HQ1058.5.U5 T48 2000
305.48′9654—dc21
[B] 99-040783
eISBN: 978-0-307-80195-1
Author photograph © Nancy Crampton
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
For my family, again and again
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Before Before
Offering
Something Valuable Given Away on the Street
Apple Cake
What a Waste
Invent a New Creation Myth
Spelling It Out
Good Manners
Unfamiliar
Visiting Nurse
Young Wasn’t It
An Issue of Clothes
Watching Her Father Eat Cake
Jimi
I Ran Away
Everyone Agreed
Not Just for Myself
Respect for My Elders
Inappropriately Dressed for the Occasion
No Underwear
Exhausted
A Simple Solution
“Hey Jude”
Mumps and My Second Husband
He Filled My Door
Something Overheard
In the Morning
The Money
A Proposal of Marriage
You Felt What You Felt
The Stanhope
We Had a Daughter
Definition of “Marriage”
I Found Out Later
Fencing
An Artist of Sorts
His Suggestion
Nothing Was Anywhere
Chaos
Nothing under Her Hood
Overturned Rowboat
Then What Did He Say?
His Affair
Her Affair
She Imagines His Side
Not Meaning to Brag
The World Looked Different
No Happy Answers
But It Got Better
I Had a Good View
Such Appetites
Friends Again
And He Told Good Stories
Married Men
Free to Give
Mortality
Part Two: Mortality I Ate There Once
Her Second Husband’s Lack of Beliefs
Bluefish and Her Father
The Horse Chestnut
An Elegant Theory
Gone
To Keep Him Company
Eating Peanuts
Skipping Stones
Sufficient Information
Her Third Husband
Insomnia
Social Security
Ponds
This Thanksgiving
What Goes through the Mind While Stripping the Meat from the Bones
Where Are the Kids
Weather
Impatience
Tomorrow
Witness to His Life
When He Told Her
His Cosmic Joke
What It Was Called
Coming Home Tomorrow
The Animal They Made
Drifting Away
Part Three Here and Now The New Year
Rocking Chair
Grateful
The Mothers of New York
Power
Nothing Is Wasted
What I Can’t Resist
Formidable
What We Want
Comfort
Safekeeping
My Name
A Present
Hugs
Look
Passion
Ephemera
What I Know
What the Moment Can Hold
Acknowledgments
Take a sad song and make it better.
—THE BEATLES, “Hey Jude”
PART ONE
Before
Before
Before I met you I played my music on a child’s Victrola. I played Music from Big Pink over and over. “Tears of Rage.” “The Weight.” Wheels of Fire. I had three kids. We ate on the overturned kitchen drawer because I didn’t have a table. I was young. I didn’t know what things could happen. I spent my time in the moment; everything else was shoved ahead, like furniture I didn’t need yet. We were crammed into a small space. My bed was in the living room.
I am remembering this time just before I knew you, and then I knew you, and then you died. It makes the parentheses within which I lived most of my life. Not knowing you, knowing you, and then you died. Twenty-seven years. A long time. You introduced my kids to a dining room table, you liked to joke proudly. Sometimes we sang songs. You were impressed. I knew the words to everything.
When we were together I remember my bedside book for years was How to Stay Alive in the Woods. “Anyone Can Build a Lean-to,” my favorite chapter. All you needed were two forked sticks and a pole. I studied the diagram and watched your face. I looked at the woods. They were right outside the door.
Offering
While you were alive the past was a live unfinished thing. Like a painting we weren’t done with. Like a garden we were still learning to tend. Nothing was set in stone yet, and weren’t we ourselves still changing? We might redeem our past by redeeming ourselves. I had in mind a sort of alchemy. But then you died, and just like that, it was over. What was done was done. Now we could never fix it. All I can do is chip away, see what comes off in my hand, look for a shape.
Something Valuable Given
Away on the Street
A middle-aged teacher is walking down Broadway in her big white sneakers and her yellow socks, her too-long skirt (stained where three drops of hair-tinting stuff fell on it); she is wearing her daughter’s jacket, a new red velvet scarf, and her two haircuts, both bad, and she is thinking about desire, that old plaything, whose provenance is no longer detail but a vast inchoate longing. And so when the man bearing the basket of freshly baked bread, round loaves with cracked tops, some large, some small, gets out of his truck and begins to walk toward the West Side Market and their paths cross, she can’t help saying, “God, those look so beautiful.” He smiles. He actually looks at her. “Take one,” he says. She says, “Oh no, I couldn’t.” She almost bursts forth with I am just on my way to exercise, otherwise I wouldn’t look like this, in these shoes for instance and no lipstick, with my bad hair and so forth, I put on thirty pounds since I got married again … but she holds her tongue. It isn’t that sort of moment. Perhaps there will never again be that sort of moment, and that is okay with her. Instead she pauses, looking at the loaves. “Go ahead,” he urges her again, holding the basket out to her, smiling. She smiles back.
“Really?” She chooses a small round loaf.
“Portuguese bread,” he tells her, “very good.”
“Thank you,” she says, stuffing it into her purple plastic bag on top of her gym clothes and her copy of Winesburg, Ohio. As she walks away she feels not young again, perish the thought, but oh so glad to be alive, and middle-aged, and female, and walking down Broadway. She is not wishing he had invited her back to his bakery to bed her later among the bowls of flour and yeast. She is not regretting the loss of youth. She does not want more than the bread he gave her and the moment on the sidewalk. Does this mean she has finally grown up? And what was this new feeling but a sort of all-purpose longing which does not need to be satisfied but rather must be renewed each day on the streets of her city? I live in a perpetual state of desire, she realizes. Things could be worse.
She gets to her gym and assumes her position on a treadmill in the window, which nobody ever looks up at. She is on treadmill number 8, her favorite, because of the handlebars. She nods in friendly fashion to the women on treadmill numbers 7 and 9. One of them is the one with the Frida Kahlo eyebrows. It is a women’s gym. We are all middle-aged, she thinks merrily, treading away at 3.9 miles per hour. The only eyes that meet ours on the street are one another’s. Except her husband who sometimes walks by and salutes her on his way to his aged mother. And the occasional baker. She has slung her purple bag over the treadmill handlebars and can see the bread in there. Life is so sweet, she thinks, her brain taking up the rhythm of her stride, one two three FOUR, five six seven EIGHT, one two three FOUR, five six seven EIGHT.
She will have to tell her class. Make up an assignment. Write two pages in which something valuable is given away on the street. What will they come up with, she wonders, wanting to know.
Apple Cake
I am not a girl. I am the grandmother of six. I bake cakes for all my grandchildren. My name is synonymous with “cake.” I have taught them this. Nana, Cake, and they clap their little hands. Apple cake, this is my specialty. In the past twelve days I have baked seven apple cakes for seven separate occasions. These cakes contain walnuts and raisins as well as golden oil and apples. You would beg me for a slice if you could see these cakes. You would beg for their perfume alone. They do well for holidays. Thanksgiving, for example. Anniversaries.
I have had my good times and my bad. This was long ago, my dears, before most of you were born. I was not a prudish girl. Nor was I wise. When I was young I gave myself away; it was all I had to offer. But not today. Today I will bake a cake. The cake is not a metaphor. Say the words “apple cake.” Apple cake.
See how the mouth fills with desire.
What a Waste
She was not always a teacher. She was a girl once, a girl who married and married again, hoping to find happiness for both herself and her children. It was as simple as that, although she herself was complicated, as were her husbands, not to mention her kids. Her second husband didn’t know what he wanted in a wife. No doubt that was why he had never married. Still a bachelor at forty-six. Oh so eligible. “Are you pregnant?” one of his old friends asked her rudely. “How did you get him to marry you?” She wanted to be witty but wasn’t. The woman was fat and she leaned against a beautifully curved banister. That’s all she remembers from that party, at which she got drunk.
Her new husband thought it was funny and dismissed it with a wave. “What do you care?” he asked her, winking at his old friend across the room. He had many sophisticated old friends and all she had were her kids and some ragtag-and-bobtails from the Village. It would have been easier if only he had said he loved her, but instead he was scientific. Love, he would say, what is it? A word. Later she found out that he thought it gave a woman the upper hand if you told her you loved her.
Invent a New Creation Myth
Her old friend, formerly her second husband, is sick in bed. She has brought him lunch. Once upon a time when they were married he was always upset. With her housekeeping. With her cooking. There is no marmalade on this table, he might well have said. But now they are friends, and he loves her to bring him food. “When did you become such a good cook?” he wants to know. She no longer reminds him that she was always a good cook. She smiles instead. “Eat,” she says. Around his place at the table there is always a little circle of spilled food. Rice, peas. She watches him now sitting on pillows, eating in the sunlight, talking to her, happy, and now and then crumbs fly out of his mouth, small particles borne on his breath, his excited talk. Maybe this was how the universe was created, she thinks. A deity at breakfast, talking with his mouth full, and
the crumbs shooting forth became the stars and galaxies. She laughs but doesn’t tell him the thought. Am I making a mess? he might ask her. She wants him to keep eating. She wants him to get well.
Spelling It Out
There are already a lot of husbands floating around, my sister says.
Well yes, I say. I married three times.
That’s what I’m saying. A lot of husbands. Somebody’s going to get confused. Maybe even annoyed.
Well then I’ll spell it out. I got pregnant when I was eighteen. I got married. My husband was a student. We had three kids, but I left after eight years.
That’s one, says my sister. That brings us to 1968.
Then I went back to New York City with my kids and after two years I got married again. He was a physicist and we moved to the suburbs. We had one child. Then we got divorced.
That’s two, says my sister. Now it’s 1978.
Then I moved back to New York City and after eleven years I married again, this time a reporter. We’re still married.
That’s three, says my sister. Now what was so hard about that? she asks.
Good Manners
“I’m going to have a baby,” I told them. My boyfriend and I were holding hands on the brown couch in my parents’ living room. “I’m really sorry,” I added. I was eighteen. It was 1960. My father and mother were understandably upset, but they got hold of themselves. “We will make it all right,” my father said.
Soon I was married. Everyone had good manners; that was how we got through it. Sometimes the four of us sat in my mother and father’s living room and they asked my new husband, nineteen years old, about school and politics and what books he’d read and listened politely when he answered. It was civilized. Once a friend of my young husband’s came to the door and after meeting my mother pronounced her a real babe. When I told her, I thought it would please her, but I was wrong.
