Mislaid. Nell Zink
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him. Could we have a little time alone?”
“Yes, could you weigh anchor, darling?” Lee said.
“I’ll go fix you some formula,” his mother said, looking around for supplies. “Don’t tell me you’re going to—no. I refuse to believe it.”
“It’s the natural way,” Peggy said. “It’s good for him.”
“You’ll be tied to that baby like a ball and chain. You can’t let him out of your sight and no one can help you with him. No self-respecting woman does that. It’s like turning yourself into an animal.”
“I got news for you, lady. Guess where he came from.”
“Don’t get all in a snit,” Lee said.
“But that’s exactly it,” his mother said. “You don’t know the chemical composition. There could be anything in there. It’s unscientific.”
“Science gave us the bomb and DDT,” Peggy said.
“Moms,” Lee said, pushing his mother toward the door, “please just let us handle this. It will be fine. It will be right as rain. Little Rhys Byrd here is a Fleming. If anybody can survive mother’s milk, he can. She’s just, I don’t know,” he said, turning to Peggy as he looked for a word, “anxious. It’s her first grandchild.”
“She sure acts like an expert.”
“Well, she raised me. That’s what makes me think anyone can do it.”
There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgment.
She settled in with baby Byrdie. She did all the housework. She did more laundry than had ever been done before at Lee’s house, and by September you could see exactly where on the front lawn the septic system was, traced out in darker bluegrass.
She couldn’t fit into the clothes she’d bought for school, so she wore Lee’s polo shirts. She seldom got around to washing her hair, and it seemed to be coming uncurled. Her breasts were heavy and sore. But she felt that the thing that was terribly wrong with her would soon be all right. The thing that was wrong with her was so right about Lee and Byrdie that she figured it didn’t matter. They were in perfect health and looked like they belonged in magazine advertisements for shirts and baby food, respectively. She looked like their maintenance man.
Lee had visitors who sat by the fire and bullshitted until long after Peggy fell asleep. She didn’t know what they did after she went to bed, but she didn’t care. She was as exhausted every night as if she’d played five hours of flag football. By the time Byrdie was eight months old, he was moving around so fast she was having to chase him. You couldn’t have gates and childproofing in a house like that. There were a million things he could have killed himself on. Landings with loose rugs, big glass vases done up as lamps. Peggy spent most of her time upstairs in the playroom, keeping him cleaned and fed. She was made to bring out the baby and accept praise for her work as if she were a being of a slightly lower social class—which she was. A woman. Even if they hadn’t all been gay men and thus more or less not interested in her at all, almost blind to her existence; even if they had been models of chivalry, rushing to pick up things she dropped and giving her flowers, instead of bullshitting parasites who thought they had invented crass vulgarity before inventing maudlin sentimentality as a foil (exposure to them was making Peggy at once articulate and sullen), a monosyllabic high school graduate in an oversized polo shirt with baby food on it was not going to get their attention. She couldn’t pose around in pedal pushers and offer them cigarillos and sangria. She had given up smoking and drinking, and she didn’t think she was obliged to wear party clothes any more than a bathing suit and goggles. Mothering was a different activity. Everything in its proper time and place. When Byrdie was three, she would put him in nursery school and drive to New York to get her degree. She was purposely vague with herself about the exact details of what kind of nursery school takes kids for a semester at a time, but she was sure it would work out.
By the time Byrdie was two, Peggy had begun to forget why she first came to Stillwater. She thought of it simply as “the college” where she was a faculty wife, a fine and worthy social position. Pushing him in a shopping cart through the aisles at the Safeway, she felt that the other housewives looked at her with respect. Her social position at Safeway was better than it was at home. Strangers called her “Mrs. Fleming,” as though she wore a name tag.
On one occasion when she was feeling edgy and exhausted and her cartilage ached the way it sometimes did, she stopped off at the memorial park on her way home. It was the biggest public open space in the county. She drove up and down the long rows of granite grave markers set flush to the grass singing, “If you are going to San Francisco,” thinking about smothering Byrdie and taking the car and just running away. Her life could start over as it was meant to start—but how was that, pray tell? As a lesbian? What about those two or three months of fixation on sleeping with Lee? Is that what lesbians do? She looked back at Byrdie asleep on the back bench seat and said, “Byrdie boy, I love you so much.”
On the next occasion when she was feeling down and nasty, she drove to the state beach and sat on the sand with Byrdie for almost an hour, digging in the grit by her feet with a little piece of crab shell. She walked him along the waterline to look for fossil shark teeth. They found tin can lids and a lucky penny. The sky was clouding up. She did some shopping, drove home, parked next to a strange car, and walked right into a scene she had not expected: Lee and Emily, using the hanging bed from India.
“Fuck, Lee!” she screamed. He laughed and didn’t allow himself to be distracted. The baby was still in the car—a baby, unlike milk, won’t spoil in the heat—so she walked right back out of the house, got in the car, and drove to the college, thinking she didn’t know what. She wanted to rat him out. It had to be against college policy, a professor making one student after marrying a different student! She drove the loop road, looking for a familiar face, and pulled up in front of her old dorm and cried.
For Peggy it was a life of work, mostly. Occasionally she got creative. She made cuttings of the lilacs and forsythia at the college, rooted them in water, and stuck them out in rows around the edge of the yard.
Sometimes Lee got invited to give readings. As he explained, he wouldn’t have any time at all to devote to her at these other colleges in strange cities. Poets and professors would want to have late dinners with him, after his readings, and then they would probably stay up drinking until all hours. The compatibility with Byrdie’s habits was nil. The plane tickets were only for Lee. He didn’t have the money. A reading is not a business trip. It’s nonstop socializing. She was his wife, not an appendage.
She went along once, to a literary festival half an hour away at VCU. It was as bleak as he said. Byrdie had no patience for up-and-coming writers. Poetry made him throw toys that clattered on the linoleum. Too big for a stroller, he couldn’t be rolled captive around the business district. She ended up watching him play in a dry fountain, longing for home.
Lee felt that vacations were a chance for her to see her family, and that it would be ridiculous to go on expensive trips when you live in a country place so pretty that famous poets leave New York and Boston to spend entire weeks there. So their first real excursion as a family took them up to Westmoreland County, where Lee’s brother, Trip, had a place on the Potomac. For such a rich man, it was an awfully rustic house, built as a hunting lodge when men used to rough it. The woods were full of snags that were still allowing huge grubs to mature and reproduce, so that if you left the light on in the outdoor shower, you would find things sitting on the bar of soap in the morning that looked like they were from the Precambrian. Luna moths thudded against the screen like birds, trying to get at the porch light. Hemlock groves towered over wild myrtles and rhododendrons. Every sunny spot had its snake, black or green or copperhead. It was beautiful, creepy, threatening.
You couldn’t swim in the river, because the jellyfish were swarming, so Trip took his houseguests to Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. First he showed them the house in Pevsner’s book on architecture and emphasized its beauty and