by Suzy Banks
Walking sticks from around the world sold for a buck apiece at the last garage
sale I browsed. Frenzied shoppers snatched up hundreds of hand-whittled or au
naturel canes, with the collection site penciled carefully on a sanded section
of the stick – Bryce Canyon, Utah; Split, Yugoslavia; Ryoko, Japan. I grabbed
six, but wanted more. One woman stuffed the trunk of her Mercedes with the
collected treasures and wrote a check for $150. Other sticks left one by one,
scattering across Austin.
I brought my walking sticks home and leaned them in a corner by the cabinet
that holds my collection of old, tattered children’s books. When I die, where
will all these books go? Will anyone recognize my name scrawled at an early age
across the first page of the Better Homes and Gardens Story Book, so
politically incorrect it contains stories of both Little Black Sambo and
Br’er Rabbit? And what about my collection of yellow pitchers and my weird
aluminum platters? Will all this be scattered like the walking sticks of that
childless old man, chronicles of a lifetime of travels, a tangible record of
his relentless efforts to lug home branches and twigs from Africa, Asia, and
the Soviet Republic to store in a barrel by the television in the den, to
ponder and stroke and remember when he was too old for globetrotting? Is it
reason enough to have children just to have someone to inherit my kitchen
wares?
But I don’t have children, and probably never will, because I fell in love
with a man who fell off Yosemite Falls. Okay, so Richard didn’t exactly go over
the big falls – no one has ever survived that tumble – but he did slip off the
ledge along a pool near the top (marked with enormous signs warning hikers not
to swim there) and jet through the whitewater in the steep valley that links
the two main falls. There were many rocks along the way. One broke his jaw. One
smashed many of his teeth out. One, which he grabbed just before going over the
big fall, saved his life. And one clobbered him in such a way as to qualify as
a natural vasectomy. He clung to the rock for eight hours, bleeding, spitting
out teeth, and freezing to death while rescuers risked their lives to save his;
the vasectomy was the least of his problems.
He told me all about it on our first date. In the short term, I considered it
a blessing in disguise. I could quit worrying about birth control. In the long
term… well, I was 22 then and long term was deciding what to have for
dessert. Fourteen years later, I still consider it a blessing. No worries, no
surprises, no pills, no contraptions. But every once in a while, when we’ve had
a few too many margaritas or when a friend’s kid does something especially cute
like sing and dance on command or when we witness an achingly tender moment
between my best friend and her daughter, we wonder if we’re missing something.
For now, our child-free life is great. We can live on the edge of a
treacherous cliff. We don’t have to save for someone’s college education. We
can travel any time of the year. We don’t have to worry about crazed baby
sitters, guns in schools, driver’s ed, teenage pregnancy, junk-food diets,
octane booster highs, that frightening late-night call or visit from the police
– at least not intimately. Actually, we do worry about those things for our
nieces and nephews and the children of our friends and kids in general. We like
kids and we wish the world were a better place for them, but it’s not the same
as if our own little trolls were marching around in this mess. Our lives seem
so calm and uncomplicated compared to those of our baby-making friends.
I like it now. But what about when we’re old and gray? Our biggest fear is
that we’ll turn out like Leo and Ethel, an older, childless couple that lives
next door to a house we own. They never go anywhere except to University of
Texas sporting events. They know everything there is to know about all their
neighbors and they share the information freely and bitterly.
They take apart their box fan to clean it every week. They cover their 1984
station wagon with a drop cloth every single moment it’s parked in their drive.
They eat ham every Sunday. Leo and Ethel remind me of the goldfish in a tiny
bowl a TV preacher held up during a late-night broadcast I was watching when I
couldn’t sleep during a thunderstorm. “These goldfish will never get any bigger
because they have adapted to the size of their habitat,” he said, grinning at
the little fish. Then he pointed to some huge goldfish in a pond behind him.
“These are the same kind of fish but they’ve grown bigger because they’ve had
this whole pond to explore. It’s important for people not to limit themselves
to a tiny fishbowl if they want to keep growing. Their pond should get bigger
and bigger.” Well, Leo and Ethel live in a shot glass. Their world is so tiny,
Leo knows the instant a leaf hits his lawn and Ethel knows what time the woman
across the street takes a nap on Saturdays. Is this just their personalities or
is it because they never had kids to help them push out the boundaries of their
lives?
I also don’t want to be like a group of people I heard interviewed on the
radio. They had formed an organization called something like Childless Couples
With Chips on Their Shoulders. They claimed they had been discriminated against
or pestered by breeding advocates or slighted by the government in a myriad of
ways. They were angry about paying for public schools or dealing with other
people’s rowdy children in grocery stores or taking up the slack when a
co-worker went on maternity leave. They were embittered by other people’s
choice to have children and I wanted to tell them, whether they had children or
not, people weren’t going to like them anyway because they were grouchy and
whiney.
Occasionally, baby-loving zealots preach to me about the joys of childbirth,
dirty diapers, and parental bonding, and thump me on the stomach and demand we
join their ranks. But among my friends – an honest, straightforward group that
would, of course, throw themselves in front of a train to save their babies,
but nonetheless wonder out loud, “What on earth have I done?” when the kid
won’t sleep or it breaks the oven door or it throws a wall-eyed tantrum in the
middle of Central Market – we are occasionally envied and always tolerated.
If we really wanted children, there might be a way around Richard’s accident.
Maybe the damage is reversible. If not, as far as I know, I’m still capable of
making babies – although the cut-off date is rapidly approaching – so
artificial insemination is an option. (An option that gives both of us the
willies, quite frankly. What if my egg is saddled with a sperm loaded with the
genes of a liar or a zealous golfer or a big-game hunter or a redneck militia
geek? Could I possibly love a lying golfer who drags home dead lions and
gazelles and owns a closet full of camouflage outfits as if he were my own?)
There’s always adoption, I know. Yet despite the thousands of successful,
fulfilling adoptions out there, I stubbornly remember only the occasional
horror story: of the birth mother demanding her child back after three years;
of the seriously abused toddler whose past is confidential, and irrevocable
even if it were disclosed, who grows up to be a tortured adult; of patricide
and serial murderers; of terrible genetic diseases. Sometimes, I do want to
fill my house with Wednesday’s children and every tiny orphaned AIDS baby and
Romanian child and neglected inner-city kid I see on 60 Minutes or
Dateline.
But the moment is as fleeting as the time it takes for the toll-free number to
flash on my screen. The insistent ticking isn’t pounding in my head and my
heart, driving me to the lengths it would take for us to become parents. It
would be an effort, never an accident, for us to create a family.
Perhaps because I don’t have children, I weigh parents’ responsibility to
their child much heavier than some people with children do. The casualness with
which many parents – teenage mothers, philandering Don Juans, couples who hate
each other, religious zealots who are trying to fulfill some spiritual baby
quota – bring another person into this world astounds me. I take pet ownership
more seriously than these folks take the nurturing and raising of their own
offspring. Hell, I take growing tomatoes more seriously.
This heavyweight view of responsibility may also stem from my own childhood,
not because it was terrible, as it seems the majority of childhoods must be
judging from the weeping, screaming families that strut the stage on Geraldo
or Oprah, or from the stream of confessional autobiographies
written by celebrities, or the personal growth directives of psycho-pop
therapists. My childhood was magical and my parents worked hard to make it that
way. My dad walked us upside down on the ceilings and let us dance on the tops
of his feet. My mom made us the most spectacular Halloween costumes in town.
She cut all the crusts off my bread when I was sick and served me liquid Jell-O
(why, I’m not sure, but it certainly showed concern for my health, just the
same). My dad made me an electric car when it was apparent I was too
uncoordinated to learn to ride a bike. He made up elaborate games to pull our
baby teeth, made an official document for my sister’s second grade teacher
declaring Cindy was excused from eating the dreaded Turkey and Dressing on
Thursdays, and framed our art work and hung it at the office.
Meanwhile, Mom drove us to dance class, swim class, cooking class, ceramics
class, horseback riding lessons, Brownies, the library, the allergist, and play
practice at The Little Theater on the Bay. (And made us stunning cockatoo,
Peter Pan, princess, pirate, and Huck Finn costumes.) That’s an awful lot to
live up to, don’t you think? And if the sweet little kiddos I had tended so
carefully grew up to be the volatile, sulking, belligerent teenagers my sister
and I became, I would get on a large ship and sail far away, as quickly as
possible. Or at least hit the talk-show circuit. But my brave parents stuck it
out. I don’t want kids because I can’t forget my past and I’m afraid I wouldn’t
repeat it with my own offspring.
Last week I helped my mom
clean up around her house. As altruistic as I want everyone to think my efforts
were, I had ulterior motives. I knew she’d be tossing tons of clutter and I was
hoping to convince her to toss a few things my way: a cookie jar she painted,
an awkward-looking vase I’ve loved for years, and a reproduction of an antique
cast-iron toy truck. These goodies are now all mine. But it was the unexpected
gift of two books that was more than payment in full for my three days of
scrubbing and tossing.
One is Milton’s Poems with the inscription “This book was a gift from
Clinton L. Moody [my great-grandfather] to Georgina Hunt [my great-great-aunt]
on Feb. 8 1884, C.L. Moody, Forest Glade, Limestone Co., 1884”. The other is
Shakespeare’s Works. The title page is missing, but I can tell this is
an ancient book that has endured countless moves and rough handling.
Someone had attacked the back of the cover with an orange crayon and dog-eared
the pages. There are cryptic notes in the margins: “learn how Claudious
killed…” in Hamlet and “do what is right as is to know what’s right”
in The Merchant of Venice. The only notes I understood were the initials
penciled alongside the characters in Titus Andronicus. “P” and “D.” Pat
and Dot. My mom and my aunt, assigning roles somewhere on a ranch in West Texas
near Aspermont. No radio. No car. A block of ice once a week. Dust everywhere.
And they’ve discovered mother’s book of plays, determined to plow through lines
like “Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds! Lo, as the bark, that hath
discharged her fraught, Returns with precious lading to the bay…” Whew.
Remember, too, Cliff’s Notes hadn’t been invented yet.
These ancestral treasures are now tucked on the shelf with my old children’s
books. What is their future? I’ve decided all I can do is cherish my fragile
books and goofy glassware and walking sticks while I’m here, revel in the love
of my friends and husband and family while they’re here, and stop worrying
about who will appreciate me or my stuff when I’m old, then gone.
It seems so simple living this life in the present tense. I even brought a
walking stick home from my last trip to California. n
This article appears in October 6 • 1995 and October 6 • 1995 (Cover).