LITMIR.BIZ

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      The next morning I lay in a hospital bed with a painful ache in my belly. I was black and blue above and below a wide ribbon of gauze wrapped around my abdomen, up to my waist and down to my knees. What the hell had happened?

      Dr. Carey finally came in, and he gently explained. A cyst the size of a large grapefruit had ruptured and was spilling poison into my bloodstream. I had lost a significant amount of blood internally. “But you’ll be as good as new when the incision heals,” he assured me, “minus one ovary. We had to take it out along with the cyst around it.”

      I’d lost an ovary? The night before, intercourse had been fast and hard. I was still trying to get pregnant, and my only association with that now was debilitating pain. My kind doctor was suddenly my hero; he helped women. Arnie was the perpetrator; he caused me pain. How could I make sense of all this?

      Two years later I was hospitalized again, this time to find out that my fallopian tubes had been deformed before birth. More surgeries. We’d been married eight years when a second ovarian cyst was discovered and another surgery resulted in a complete hysterectomy. I was twenty-six years old. It was the end of my menstrual flow.

      “Like a cigarette?” Dr. Carey said, offering me a Marlboro as I took a seat in his office. He lit my cigarette and then gave me the news that he’d decided to remove my uterus while I was “under” since it was clear I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant anyway. I inhaled deeply to block the torrent of tears. “You can always adopt,” he said.

      What now? I felt lost without a purpose as a wife. Arnie agreed with the doctor: we could adopt. I wasn’t so sure. How would I know how to mother when I couldn’t even carry a baby in my own body? There was no one to talk with about it. My mother had stopped being a mother so long ago she wouldn’t have any idea what to suggest. My Aunt Helen was busy raising her four children and whenever we talked about it, all she did was encourage me to follow my husband’s lead.

      With no one to hear me and no idea what else to do, after a year of discussions I decided to say yes to adoption. I would give notice at work, and we would move from our brownstone in the Bronx to a house in New Rochelle that my grandfather Nank would buy us so we could start our family in the suburbs. Arnie would commute to the city and be home with us all weekend.

      Fifteen months later and three days after we moved into the four-bedroom split level in New Rochelle, the American Dream was realized: Our baby was here. We hurried to the agency when the call came, nervous and excited, and when Robin Lee was placed in my arms and I saw her blue eyes for the first time, it was love at first sight. We signed the papers and took our daughter home.

      But why did Robin Lee cry so much and so loud for so long? I did everything Dr. Spock advised—her formula was warm to my wrist, her room was perfectly appointed, Mommy and Daddy loved her so much. Through the long days at home alone with her I smoked pack after pack of cigarettes, worried there was nothing I could do to console my baby. Granted, I was her third mother in the first eighteen days of her life, but she had it all now, didn’t she? While Arnie was in the city, juiced by the creative atmosphere at the advertising agency, I was home all day with her, washing diapers and folding and putting them away. In the afternoons I settled her into her English pram and took her for long walks. I kept the house spotless, watched afternoon soaps while she napped, prepared hot dinners, and entertained our friends on weekends. Our Christmas party had a list of seventy-five to one hundred guests, and invitations went out just after Thanksgiving and before the round of Christmas cards went out. I worked for days on the appetizers—bacon-wrapped Chinese savories and cheesy puff pastries, foie gras–topped poppy seed crackers, and melty Brie en croûte. We rented glassware, dishware, and silverware, and we served martinis and Champagne on silver trays that Arnie’s ad-men pals in their striped ties and three-piece suits passed around the crowd. I loved these gala affairs; entertaining seemed to come naturally to me.

      I was in the groove of my life. Who cared that my Scotch and waters had become Scotch on the rocks, that my 5:00 p.m. cocktail hour gradually started earlier and earlier? When Arnie rented a studio apartment in the city so he could stay there Monday through Thursday to work on a screenplay he was writing, I was happy for him. He came home for long weekends to play with his daughter, play golf, watch sports, and have sex with me on Saturdays. Robin was the center of our universe, all we could talk about—what she was learning, when and where she would start preschool.

      And then Musak turned to music, orange linen golf slacks became tattered tie-dyed jeans, the Village Voice replaced the New York Times, and sex on Saturdays became sex five times a day. Arnie’s teenaged nephew, Steven, came to live with us.

      Steven was seven years younger than I was, only a child when I was a senior in high school and invited to his house for dinner sometimes by his parents, Jill and Frank. I’d met Jill and Frank at the school football games, when I was head cheerleader and their eldest son was the leading tight end. When they introduced me to Jill’s twenty-three-year-old brother, Arnie, he fell in love with me as quickly as they had. But time had passed, and now Arnie and I had our own child. Steven was a high school dropout, dropping acid and smoking pot. Frank and Jill thought we could help him shape up and find his way in society.

      Steven’s adoration for us was clear right away. What I didn’t know was that I had been the object of his sexual fantasies for years. I could tell he was undressing me with his eyes, and I flirted back, letting him know I liked that look he gave me. I needed something new in my life, something to take the edge off.

      One morning, while Robin napped, I slipped into the room where Steven slept. He opened his eyes as I was undressing. In moments, I ravished this boy-man, who then ravished me. Afterward, we lay together close in each other’s arms. “I know it doesn’t make sense, Steven,” I whispered, “but I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong.”

      “How can love be wrong?” Steven said. “I’ve loved you since the first day you walked into our house.”

      With this tender, passionate lover, a “nanny” for my child, and a great helper around the house, life in the suburbs improved overnight. And Arnie was ready for some improvements, too. He joined me in trading our “straight life” for bong hits and perfectly rolled joints as we let Steven usher us into the New Age. We listened to Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez on a record player that had only known Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Big Band. Steven baby-sat so Arnie and I could go to our first rock concert—Sly and the Family Stone—at the Fillmore in the East Village. That night, smoking grass right there in our seats, connecting with the masses of rock fans, we feared we looked terribly straight, but nobody seemed to mind our off-the-rack polyester. It was all about doing your own thing.

      The times they were a-changin’.

      For the rest of the year, my love affair with Steven stayed undercover, but it woke a sleeping sexual giant in me. Steven’s soft voice and gentle manner, his loving focus on me, his availability, and his desire to spend all of his time with me fed a new fire inside. I did like sex after all! In fact, I couldn’t get enough of it. The part of me that had questioned my identity as a woman since losing my ability to give birth gave way to a sense of belonging. I never felt like a Playboy Bunny with Steven. He wanted to caress my lovely breasts, not look at slick pictures of naked women. He wanted to make love with me, not ask me to watch two women making love in some porn film I could see over his shoulder while he took his pleasure with me. I was his porn film just being myself, playing out the role of wife and mother. We rode bicycles in Central Park and marched for peace in DC with Arnie. We got high on life, on marijuana, on each other. We roamed Greenwich Village, met Arnie after work and rode the Staten Island Ferry just for the view of New York City at night. We took Robin on daytime excursions and held her while she napped, breathlessly gazing at her sweet face. We played Dylan and the Beatles while preparing Arnie’s favorite pastas on Friday nights and we never missed a beat in our integrity to show up with our love for him.

      Reports to the family in Florida, meanwhile, were that Steven was adjusting well to family life in New York and he would soon have a direction for his life. He was in good hands. Truth was, it was Arnie and I who were in good hands, as Steven brought to us the unfolding wave of expanded consciousness sweeping

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