The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [28]
He’s thinking, she can see, of something else.
“Do you remember that Rilke poem we both liked?” he says. “We both liked it so much we set ourselves the task of memorizing it. The bowl of roses, how he described all the different colors, ‘the anonymous pink that picked up the bitter aftertaste of violet … that one made of cambrick, like a dress / the soft breath of the warm slip still clinging to it / both flung off in the morning shadows / near an old forest pool.’ ”
He’s embarrassed that he has said something that calls up the image of clothing cast aside. He says quickly, “A group of friends and I have agreed to memorize one poem a week. I guess that’s what I do instead of gardening. I read about flowers instead of growing them. I often wish I did more things that ordinary people do.”
“It was difficult for me to discover how to live an ordinary life,” Miranda says. “A life in a house that didn’t make me feel I was drowning. Or suffocated. There were so many things I didn’t want to do my mother’s way. The anxious way. I didn’t want to be always saying to my children, Be careful with that … wash your hands. Don’t sit there. And there was the other kind of domestic life, the Berkeley kind, dinner parties that were Olympic events. Decoration as a competitive sport. I didn’t want any part of that either. Particularly after I’d lived in places where there was so much hardship, so little comfort. Where each decision involving food and shelter had to be carefully considered. I remember my mother sent me some cans of tuna fish when I was working in India. I would wash out the cans and throw them away, and the people in the village were shocked: they could do twenty things with an empty tuna-fish can. To them it was a sort of treasure. So I began to think of things a new way. But I didn’t want that other kind of Berkeley way, that false renunciation. I think I could only live an ordinary domestic life after I had children. And after I’d known Yonatan. Being Israeli, so many things were just not issues for him. Food, clothing, shelter: they were important, and they were to be enjoyed. But not to be making any kind of point; simply for themselves.”
What she doesn’t say to Adam: One of the reasons I married Yonatan was that he seemed to find so few things difficult. He liked to say, “After the ’67 War, everything seems easy.” One of the reasons I married him was because he was so unlike you. But she doesn’t want to be bringing her husband too much into the conversation, too much into the space where she is, with Adam, now. This hum and bustle of ordinary life. This celebration of what has been given, what can be taken. For the asking. For a price.
Instead, she says: “One of the things I had to understand about myself was how much I wanted an ordinary life. I had thought I would spend my life working in the developing world, in India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, all of which I’d worked in. But after I came back from India the last time, and I met Yonatan, I realized that I had grown weary and discouraged. That the kind of people who were good at that kind of work had the temperament to just do what they were doing and be satisfied that they were moving the mountain just an inch or two. They didn’t keep feeling crushed by the size of the mountain, as I did. So I had to live with falling out of love with myself, with falling out of love with the heroic person I had never really been, but only dreamed I was. And I wanted children, children whose safety and health I wouldn’t have to worry about every day. As most of the mothers of the world do.”
“You still feel bad about it.”
“Yes, I fear we will all be grotesquely punished for taking much too much of the world’s goods.”
“But cooking, and in your garden, and with your children, certainly you must think you are moving the mountain a little bit.”
“When