First published in Crossed Out Magazine, 2013
I spy the moon on the eastbound Long Island Expressway service road from between a tow truck and a Parks Department pick-up loaded with dead limbs and recently felled branches. Green leaves form a rooftop garden on top of the truck.
No, not a garden. A tangled mess infested with invasive longhorn beetles and debris from the hurricane last week. The moon lays low in the sky: round and big and orange. My first thought is that it is beautiful. But this is reflexive thinking, based on a conditioned response. I look again. It looks dirty, too close. At least the tow truck is unambiguously ugly. My nose is running–clear mucus drips down into a tissue I hold to my nostrils with the hand that isn’t on the steering wheel. The Sudafed I took to get through class has lost its medicinal effect, but I still feel jacked and speedy. I realize that I just rambled on about mid-nineteenth century domestic fiction and never made it to realism. My students will read The Awakening over the weekend as a sentimental novel. I have made a horrible mistake.
It takes me about ten minutes to go two miles–not too bad. At 8pm, the LIE is often more congested than at 6:00. People don’t leave work at five anymore. That is a quaint notion. In her memoir, Bits of Gossip, Rebecca Harding Davis begins by idealizing an agrarian time in America: a time that was before hers, before clerical disestablishment, the war between the states, the industrial revolution, and the postbellum shift to a market economy. Davis waxes nostalgic about the self-sufficient family farm. I wax about the waning of the days when work actually ended at some point. The car radio is tuned to NPR, and an economic historian discusses the double-dip recession, the stalled recovery, and the likely return to a national and global recession. Well, so it is. As of right now my kids are well-fed, my car runs, and my marriage, although fragile, remains. Dan and I save money for our children’s future college educations but not for our retirement. My job provides inexpensive health care for my family and pays me $100 every two weeks after expenses (babysitting, dry cleaning, take out, expensive cooking short cuts like buying skinless boneless cutlets already pounded thin and pre-made marinara sauce). I work part-time so that is lucky too, isn’t it. I can drop the children at school, dine with them most nights, taxi them to swim class and play dates, and still be able to make it to class to teach my students about nineteenth-century literature and how to write a college-level essay in six easy steps.
The moon is beautiful. The moon is dirty. The moon is too close.
I finally reach exit 27N off the sluggishly popular LIE, which takes me onto the briskly obscure Clearview Expressway. When I’m not high on Sudafed and stuck in a loop about domestic fiction, I tell my students that the Civil War destroyed the utopian philosophies of the Transcendentalists as well as the sentimental ideals of True Womanhood. I also tell them that the Marxist insistence that the economy caused the war between the states is pretty much bullshit. The perennially heated debates about the immorality of slavery had been escalating for decades. Westward expansion, Northern industrialization, and the global importance of Southern agricultural exports all heightened the existing tensions, but Thoreau’s powerful and persuasive invocation to civil disobedience against the Fugitive Slave Act appeals to his contemporaries’ ethics, not their budgets. Just like God’s love cannot be trivialized in the Ptolemaic system of the European Middle Ages since it was, essentially, gravity–the only thing holding mankind to this wretched Earth, so far from the heavenly Empyrean layer–the importance of morality as a cultural concept in the 19th century cannot be dismissed.
The ironic thing is that both sides thought they were morally right. I use poems and songs from Unionists and Secessionists to show how they each paradoxically claimed God’s favor. However, as the war raged on, freedom for enslaved people became an ideology that lacked power for many northerners, so the notion of cohesion, of nationality, replaced it, became rhetoric that was potent enough to indulge the brutal waste of life. Staying together, as a concept, trumped individual happiness. Trumped, even, that very American keyword, “freedom.”
The Clearview Expressway, glorious in its emptiness, is a highway to nowhere. An earmark. Pork Barrel. Wasteful spending. An abandoned project. It is 5.6 miles long, starts after the Throg’s Neck Bridge in the Bronx and ends abruptly at Hillside Avenue in Hollis, Queens. It is what makes Bayside, Queens special. It connects residents of Bayside, and only Bayside, to every major artery into and out of New York City. Dan calls it our own private highway. As always, I repress the urge to speed. After the cramped and overladen LIE it is difficult not to stretch one’s legs, press one’s foot onto the gas pedal and fly. But I know that State Troopers in their sleek black Dodge Chargers wait patiently just around the bend after the Union Turnpike exit, headlights off, flashers off, until they spring suddenly into action and pull over speeders three, four at a time.
My mother’s mother had an unhappy and troubled marriage. For that matter, so does my mom, but we never talk about it. The last year of Granny Furey’s life I was pregnant with a very impatient Maggie, my second daughter; she kicked and fought even then, shook her uterine cage, caused signs of early labor that placed me on bed rest from five months. Granny was already demented, scarred by Alzheimer’s or senility, whatever ailment it was that turned her cortex from plasticine to cheesecloth, that shrank her memories of the years of want and trouble with Grandpa, the years she worked double shifts at the cosmetics factory. Granny used to tell me never to spend money on name-brand cosmetics. “It is the same thing, Sheila,” she would say, “just different packaging.” While Granny worked, Grandpa sat on the couch in the back room, chain-drank cans of Pabst, and stared out the window at the mountains and the house where Granny’s sister Kay lived. Gran and Kay lived next door to one another their entire adult lives, and they bickered constantly.
When I had the first troubling ultrasound with Maggie, Una was 18 months old. I remained calm at the ultrasound clinic, listened attentively to the information being given me on cervical length and width, on fluid levels and fetal development; I mentally marked terms to look up later. But in the car on the way home I became frightened. I was five months pregnant, and I loved her already. I didn’t want to lose her. I felt her kick. I felt short of breath. I pulled the car over and called Dan to tell him that Dr. Chin had instructed me to go on bed rest for the rest of the pregnancy. “We can’t do that.
“You can’t work? You can’t move? What am I supposed to do with this?” he yelled over the phone. Una sobbed when I wouldn’t carry her up the stairs to our apartment.
My Mom said I could stay with her. The chair of my department found a mid-semester replacement. My mom was patient for about a week, then the sighs and the jokes about getting me a bell started, the impatience with Una. The way my mom would say “Yes” with an exaggerated, elongated serpentine lisp, then utter “Una” in a flat monotone when she asked for more oatmeal, a snack, or a different television show unsettled and angered me. Yet there remained nothing to do with these emotions: we were dependents living in her house.
Granny Furey came over a lot. She called Una “sugar foot.” She couldn’t always remember my name, much less Una’s, but she held her and crooned to her, answered all her questions, even the same ones, over and over, without a hint of annoyance. Nobody was telling me the truth–Dr. Chin said that bed rest would help, the internet foretold the opposite. Dan remained convinced that nothing was actually wrong. A part of him seemed to think I had conjured this distress. He took a two-hour train ride from the city out to my mom’s every weekend. He’d arrive late on Friday night, drawn, tired, anxious, and distracted, but he would take Una to the park for hours every Saturday. He’d send me pictures from his phone: Una smiling, running, red-cheeked. But when they came through the mahogany facade of my mom’s front door their smiles vanished. The weight of my body, stranded on the couch, sucked in all lightness and pleasure, and breathed out only anxiety and obligation. Meanwhile, Maggie kicked constantly: every twinge, every contraction, every pain frightened me. A baby born this early would surely die. Every grilled cheese sandwich I made for Una because I just didn’t want to bother with waiting for my mom, I made a choice–Una’s contentment over Maggie’s life.
Granny, quickly slipping into more advanced dementia, was the only one who spoke honestly. She told me about her miscarriages, her stillborns, the baby who lived for two weeks then died.
“Maeve,” she said, “I never thought I would forget how many there were, but I have. There were too many. But we move on. We get by.”
On the Clearview, the moon disappears. I have 75 term papers in my bag that I need to grade by the end of the week. The house will be a mess when I get home. Dan tries to clean up after dinner the evenings I work but our standards are different. He’ll greet me with a nonchalant “hey” or a not-unfriendly grunt as he balances Maggie on his knee to minister her last bottle of the night with one hand, while he types on his laptop with the other. Una will be asleep, probably curled up in our bed, clutching that week’s favorite toy, tears of frustration against the unfairness of enforced bedtime drying on her cool, plump cheeks. Sometimes the highway seems so beautifully lonely that I want to stay on it, miss my exit, drive without a purpose. But I stay under the radar, keep to my course, set the cruise control at a respectable 58, and steadfastly drive the two miles home without getting pulled over. The shoulder is littered with idling cars, disappointed drivers, and busy cops.