Page 389 - WhyAsInY

Portrait of a (first) MarriaGe
helpers who lived with us during four or five summers starting in 1974 and the women who acted as full-time live-in housekeepers-sitters, starting right after Rachel was born. I was the breadwinner who played with the children when I could, usually on Saturdays and Sundays. I saw them briefly before I had to leave early in the morning to work at the firm and during some evenings at or after dinner, and I often got home in the late evening, too late for me to put them to bed. I also missed out when I had to work during weekends and holidays when things were especially busy.
We were two nicely and neatly dressed middle-class, educated, Jewish, and non-adventuresome people who didn’t picket, march, or rebel, who did like rock ’n’ roll and folk music, who didn’t go to Wood- stock, who did like to dance, who did try recreational drugs but only a few times, and who never had any interest in joining a country club. Over those years, we attended to our children, socialized with friends and family, played a lot of bridge together, skied together, biked together, and went to synagogue together. But as I would learn, once you stripped away the background similarities that made for what seemed like an enviable, almost-arranged marriage, and once you took the children out of the picture, you were left with two very different people, with very different personalities and interests.
Phyllis was cheerful, quiet, serious, even-tempered, loyal to her family, deferential to authority, faithful to rules and structure, mindful of appropriate conduct, prudish, closed, determined, and very decent; I was irreverent, critical, skeptical, compulsive, playful, funny, consciously and (I suppose) unconsciously inappropriate, given to mood swings, critical, and needy. We were both conflict-averse.
Phyllis was traditionally observant from the heart; I was observant to the extent that I could please. I don’t know whether she believed in God; I was an atheist. That didn’t get in my way; what grated on me were some of what I regarded as the affectations of the culture. For instance, I could never quite get myself to say “Shabbat shalom” when greeting people in temple on Saturday, or say “Yasher koach” (“You
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