Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [90]
“I don’t know how to live with this.”
Mom looked at me and said, “You’ll have to find a way to try.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Big Freeze
The waiter brought us another round of margaritas, and I took a sip, already feeling a little buzzy from the first. I rarely drank since having Jennifer, but it was her nap time and the nanny was with her, so I joined in the festivities. Darlene rubbed a coconutty suntan lotion on her arms, and her husband, Hal, leaned back and massaged her neck. Cary shuffled a deck of cards. Half of his attention was on his game of solitaire, and the other half was on the conversation, which was light and intermittent.
The four of us—Jennifer, the nanny, Cary, and me—had set sail from California to Acapulco, where we were docked for two nights before cruising to Europe. At my suggestion, we were bringing Jennifer to meet Elsie, and we were taking the long way around, south down the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and then across the Atlantic. In Acapulco, we spent the day at the famous Las Brisas Hotel, and I took in the view of Acapulco Bay showing white tufts of surf amidst the otherwise smooth surface of the water that sparkled like blue quartz. And I wondered, seriously, what was wrong with me.
I wondered if I was crazy, and I berated myself for being crazy. Then I decided, no, not crazy, just terribly ungrateful, and I berated myself for that. How could I be discontent, if not outright unhappy? What did I have to be unhappy about? Here I was, married to Cary, with a beautiful baby, visiting with good friends, and all I felt was stifled and drained. We were sipping margaritas in the Acapulco sun. I was visiting with my dear friend Darlene, who had married a nice Jewish boy and moved to Mexico City. What was wrong with this picture? Me. That’s what was wrong with it. Me, me, me. Me had everything and everything wasn’t enough. Who did I think I was?
I thought of the night Darlene and I went with Cary to Palm Springs, how engaged he was, how interested. How he made us cocktails and teased us and laughed and ate from our plates. Now he was merely polite and, in company, superficially convivial. He’d retreated behind a mask of amiable civility, and I’d retreated into a shell of uncertainty. I no longer trusted myself or my thinking about much of anything.
The day before, I’d taken Jennifer into the pool. “Dyan!” Cary moved to the edge of the pool and beckoned me toward him. “Get her out of the water,” he ordered. “There are too many people in the pool.” I started to dismiss his objection. But then I stopped myself and thought that maybe he was right. Anything could happen. Hazards were everywhere. I was starting to believe that I was too dim to see them, so I saw them through Cary’s eyes.
Really, I had stopped thinking for myself. Little by little, I surrendered my very mind to Cary and let him do the thinking for me—except he never really let me in on the actual thinking process. I only got the commandments that came from the thinking, and the less they made sense to me, the more I obeyed them without question. I felt like I was driving a car blindfolded, and Cary was in the passenger seat giving me directions I did not understand. I never knew when I was going to hit a bump or take a wrong turn and draw a recrimination.
There had been an awkward moment when Darlene asked why we hadn’t brought Bangs. I said something like, “Traveling with a baby is enough,” and let it go. I was trying to let it go. It was hard, though. The morning after I came home to find Bangs gone, I tried to nurse Jennifer but overnight my milk had dried up. I had to supplement what little was left with baby formula. Cary never told me where Bangs was. Cary made a big point of the fact that he’d given Gumper away, too, to his driver. But Cary had never given Gumper much thought; Gumper was an ornament. Sometimes I felt like an ornament, too, one that had become tarnished and dull.
I tried my best to see things from Cary’s perspective. When I told