The tiniest, almost unnoticeable chip of ice fell into Lisa’s heart. Of course saving desperate communities was important, but couldn’t a ceremony of their marriage be kind of important, too? Where was the romantic Erich who had so dramatically proposed to her in Le Languedoc?
They compromised. They were married in Lisa’s living room by the local county clerk, with her parents and her best friend Rachel in attendance. Erich’s parents were in Africa that month, and couldn’t come. They sent flowers, champagne, and a silver ice bucket engraved with the couple’s names and the date. After the brief ceremony, the small wedding party toasted with champagne, split the flowers among Lisa’s mother, Rachel, and the county clerk, and the newlyweds headed back to Middlebury to pack up and prepare for graduation.
* * *
—
After graduation, the married couple moved to D.C. where Erich joined his father in the bank. Lisa and Erich rented a small apartment in Washington near the Mall, and Erich dove headfirst into his work. Lisa cooked healthy meals and did laundry and spent the swampy hot summer visiting all the marvelous museums in the area. She missed Nantucket so very much—it was summer, after all. But she understood that this first year of marriage was crucial. She wanted to prove herself loyal, helpful. She couldn’t leave Erich for two weeks or even one.
Besides, she was realizing that she had to change if she wanted to be the right wife for Erich. The more she saw of Erich’s mother, Celeste, the more Lisa believed that Erich had chosen Lisa because she was warm, honest, receptive, a hugger, a toucher. Erich’s mother was so very much not a toucher, not even with her son. Celeste was elegant, but cool, communicating her displeasure most often by simply lifting one cynical eyebrow.
Yet Celeste was kind to Lisa, even generous in her way. After Lisa’s first huge Washington society party, Celeste asked if Lisa would mind if Celeste gave her a few pointers about, for example, appearance. She suggested that Lisa have her long, wavy hair cut into a neat chin-length bob, trim and tidy. She approved of the two expensive and simple dresses Lisa had bought for the numerous cocktail parties. Celeste suggested simple dark pumps with no more than a two-inch heel, anything higher was tacky. Accessorize with small earrings and perhaps, as Celeste did, with an Hermès scarf. Lisa didn’t own an Hermès scarf, so Celeste told her to wear her pearls. When Lisa admitted she didn’t own pearls, Celeste gave her a pearl necklace for Christmas. After that, Lisa received an Hermès scarf for every birthday and every Christmas. Lisa was grateful to Celeste for the pointers and the advice, even though Celeste seemed to give them out of a sense of duty rather than friendship or love.
It would be smart for Lisa to take part in some non-partisan organization, Celeste continued. Lisa could make friends that way, and she could also be a representative for the bank. It was a good idea, Lisa thought, a great idea, actually. Washington was so enormous and complicated it made her feel lost, and when she took refuge in her apartment she was troubled by loneliness.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts was looking for an intern in their library and research center. It was a nice fit for Lisa. She was young, energetic, and knowledgeable about the arts. Once she started working there, she began doing research at night into women artists of past decades and centuries, and she loved it. Soon the cocktail parties where she’d once stood tongue-tied became fascinating, especially when she told some diplomat or correspondent where she was working. As the months passed, she became not the quiet, small-town Lisa, but an accomplished researcher and a minor expert on women’s art.
Erich was delighted with the new and improved Lisa. Over the next few years, they took their vacations in foreign cities with great art museums—Paris, Amsterdam, Florence, London. They were really working vacations for Erich, who sandwiched meetings with diplomats, bankers, and scholars of economics. Lisa didn’t mind going out alone; she preferred strolling through museums by herself, pausing when something caught her eye.
It was when she was twenty-eight, with the dreaded year thirty looming over her, that she realized she was tired of traveling. She wanted to make a real home.
She wanted to have a baby.
One evening as they returned from a cocktail party and were getting ready for bed, Lisa said casually, “I’ve stopped taking the pill.”
Erich sat in the overstuffed chair in their bedroom to take off his black patent leather shoes. “What pill?”
“My birth control pill.”
Erich peeled off his black silk socks. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
Lisa went to her husband and knelt before him, her hands on his knees, looking up into his face. “I want children with you, Erich.”
His reaction was odd. He frowned, as if she’d spoken in an alien language he had to interpret. Then he said calmly, “Of course. Children would be good.”
* * *
—
“I’ll help you find a nanny,” Celeste told Lisa the day Juliet was born.
Lisa looked at the sweet perfect face of her daughter, wrapped in a hospital blanket, wide eyes gazing at the bright new world. “I won’t need a nanny.”
“But your work with the women’s museum!”
“I’ve resigned. I can always return to it. I don’t want to miss a moment of Juliet’s first few years.”
“I think you’ll find,” Celeste said dryly, “that there will be many moments during your daughter’s infancy that you’ll wish to miss, especially those in the middle of the night.”
“Oh, Celeste, you’re so funny,” Lisa said.
* * *
—
Erich was pleased to have a daughter, and he did share some of the work, walking a fretful baby in the middle of the night, carrying her in a backpack when they strolled along the Mall. Celeste and Erich’s father—Lisa had never been asked to call him by his first name, so she always thought of him as Mr. Hawley—were helpful in their own very generous and controlling way. Erich’s parents helped find a small house in Georgetown and, in celebration of Juliet’s birth, they paid the down payment. Lisa’s parents, thrilled at having a grandchild, came often to help Lisa with small, perfect, rosy-cheeked baby Juliet.
Erich rose quickly in the ranks of the Swiss bank. It helped that he was fluent in French, German, and Spanish. Lisa admired her husband, and understood completely all the time he spent traveling, especially because when he returned home, he was so happy to see her that she quickly got pregnant again.
When Theo was born, Lisa expected that her husband would spend more time at home, that he would be even more in love with her because she had given him a son, and yes, she knew that was an old-fashioned way to think, but she was quite sure that Erich and especially his parents thought that way. She was realizing, because of her babies, how she had coasted through her early adult years, letting life make her choices for her. Now the sweet, exhausting gifts life had given her—which she had chosen—forced her to pay attention to the choices she had to make to keep her children healthy and happy.