The Marriage Plate

fishinghearts — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.studiofuller.com

By Jessica Handler

The auctioneer’s receipt for my mother’s tableware reads, 78 pieces Rogers ‘First Love.’ $150.00. I put the receipt in a green plastic file marked “estate.” The hundred and fifty dollars I put in a household checking account.

Copious, easily tarnished silverware with extravagant names was a standard wedding gift in the fifties, when marriages were copious.

Salad forks, dinner forks, olive and pickle forks. Knives for checking for food between your teeth by eyeing the slim mirror of the blades. Soup spoons, dessert spoons, serrated grapefruit spoons, nestled large protecting small and smaller.

Marriages are easily tarnished.

I doubt that my father was my mother’s first love, despite the brightly named wedding silver. When she was fourteen, she held an unfulfilled crush on her cousin. His name was Paul, and he was sixteen. He could play the hell out of the piano: he rolled through some boogie-woogie. She never mastered boogie-woogie, but she played the hell out of Chopin.

At twenty-three, my father appeared to be a good catch.

I have a blurry memory of going fishing with my father, of gray predawn light, of mist, of trying to bait a hook.

My father was no outdoorsman: how could it be possible that we went fishing? Squinting at the narrow mirror of my mind’s blade, I can’t find an answer.

I have a memory of failing to catch anything.

A few years ago, a student told me he knew the guy who’d whistled the Andy Griffith theme for the TV show soundtrack. You know it: someone whistles a hearty tune while Opie and Andy amble to the fishing hole.

They appear to love each other.

I borrowed the idea in another classroom. I explained to my students how, when writing a screenplay based on a novel, a writer needs to show what’s inside a character. How to show closeness? Opie and Andy, walkin’ to the fishin’ hole.

It’s kind of a dumb example of depicting physical representation of the unspoken.

Try showing this in a screenplay: my husband laughing at a video on his computer of a mud-soaked hippo letting loose a blast of farts. My husband is in tears from laughter.

He’s a very funny guy.

I shine from the inside when I can make him laugh. I see him bent large in the blade, and I see myself small, barely a fleck. Turn the blade and I loom, large eyed and small mouthed, and he tightens to a speck.

That’s easy to show, but not this. Sometimes we don’t have anything to say to one another.

A colleague once told my husband to warn her if he planned to employ humor in conversation.

We think that’s very, very funny.

We didn’t register for silver when we married. We got beautiful dessert plates from Tiffany’s and a hideous, sharp-cornered crystal bowl that I wish now I’d had the sense to return. I lost it, buried it in the basement or a closet.

You could put your eye out with that thing—it’s worse than with a knife.

We came to the marriage with our own flatware from brand-name discount stores. The forks and knives, the soup spoons and those other spoons for what—yogurt? cereal?—cohabitated nicely.

Someone bought that fancy silver as a wedding gift for my mother and father. My father’s parents, most likely. They had money. My mother’s parents might have scrimped and saved for it. They loved her more than silver.

I polished that silver after Thanksgiving dinners, after the Seders over which my father intoned, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” I appreciated the diligence required to wash, dry, polish, wrap, settle. Salad forks, dinner forks, olive and pickle forks. Knives and soup spoons and dessert spoons and serrated grapefruit spoons. A silver claw with four retractable prongs for sugar cubes. An archly modern Georg Jensen cheese knife, adopted by this silverware family.

You had to wash the silver in warm water, dry it, then dull each piece with a menacing-smelling cream from a plastic jar, polish it with a soft gray cloth, then put it to bed like dressed-up kittens in perfectly shaped red velvet forms inside a walnut case.

And I sold it all, earning less than the cost of a week’s groceries. One hundred and fifty dollars is padding, polish, a sliver of safety money.

I baited the hook: the silver had become small fish in the estate world.

The auctioneer took the heavy walnut box (heavier than I remembered) along with a quality but faux Mission desk, a cedar-lined blanket chest (I kept the linens), boxes of various “smalls.”

My own first love wasn’t a cousin, but a good looking boy in my high school whose parents had emigrated to Georgia from South America. He taught me to say “love” in Spanish. Yo te quiero.

This means I want you.

We had sex for the first time in my bedroom. My parents were at work. My sister was somewhere in the house, watching television, or practicing the piano.

Andy Griffith, maybe, or a Satie Gymnopedie. No boogie-woogie yet.

I was twelve, and my boyfriend was thirteen. I had made a bet with my best friend—which of us will lose her virginity before the other? I caught the first boy. I won.

I lay there and thought of groceries, of what was in the refrigerator and the pantry. I’d need to start dinner before my mother came home from work. I would make coq a vin. Or meat loaf. There were also fish sticks. I didn’t realize, at twelve, that these could be seen as sex jokes.

Sometimes when I set that table, I used the good silver.

Now, my husband and I polish each other until we shine. We nestle together, large protecting small protecting large. We look in the distorted images we make in silver blades, and we laugh.

•••

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief (St. Martins Press, December 2013.) Her first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009) is one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read.” Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize.

Ashes

young tree woman — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Jon Magidsohn

Late on Boxing Day, well after dark, I scanned the collection of tools I’d stowed in my backpack to see if I was prepared for my mission: garden spade, claw hammer, flat-head screwdriver, keyhole saw, chisel, anything I thought might help whittle away at the hard soil. If I’d owned an ice-pick, I’m sure I would have packed one. I went upstairs and changed my clothes, convinced my outfit should be head-to-toe black like in the movies. I couldn’t be sure if what I was about to do was illegal, immoral, or simply frowned upon. Still, I thought I should try to blend into the shadows, if only for discretion. I grabbed Sue’s canister from the dresser and carried it downstairs. I put on my black wool coat, threw the backpack full of tools over my shoulder, and quietly went out the back door. I tossed the backpack into the front seat of the car and then carefully strapped the canister into the baby seat in the back. Should I encounter a sudden jolt during the ride, I didn’t want ashes embedded forever in the loosely-woven Toyota upholstery.

Down at the Toronto Beaches, I parked the car on Lee Avenue halfway between our old apartment and the new tree, planted two months before. The tree stood as the closest thing to a gravestone Sue would ever have. I shut off the engine and sat in the dark stillness of the night. All I could hear were the sleepy Lake Ontario waves treading up to the shore and my breath in the icy December air. I unfastened Sue from the car seat, pulled out my backpack, and closed the car door. I walked with purpose toward the lake, cradling the container in my left arm, until I reached the young sugar maple, proud and lustrous under the nearby streetlamp.

Standing on the boardwalk in front of the tree, I momentarily considered changing my mind. The wall of frozen mist suspended over the shore bore down on me. I looked east into the wind and then west toward the lights of downtown to see if any people were out for a late walk. The coast was clear.

I knelt at the tree, placed the canister on the ground, and removed the small spade from my backpack. One last look around before I plunged the spade into the dirt about eight inches from the tree trunk. The ground was harder than I’d expected; the spade barely made a dent, just a tink, tink sound like metal on stone. I reached for the hammer instead and tried loosening the dense earth with the claw end. This proved to be more effective. I scooped out the free soil with my other hand. Clawing and scooping like this for two minutes—I went down maybe four inches—my heart pounded like I was panning for gold. Then I heard voices. I stood up and saw two people and a dog heading my way from the west. I quickly covered the partially dug hole with my backpack and took my cell phone out of my coat pocket. Pacing slowly in front of the tree, I pretended to be just another late-night stroller having a private conversation.

“Yes … Uh-huh … No, no, everything’s fine …,” I said as the people drew even with me, their dog obediently heeling. “I’ll be home soon … I just have one more thing to do.”

The interlopers passed by, and I was left to resume my campaign of digging. But I began to doubt my fortitude. The hole in the ground looked like more of a grave than I’d originally considered. Graves are final; irrevocable. Within them, I imagined, people disintegrate. They disappear forever.

I picked up the hammer again and switched to auto-pilot. Claw. Scoop. Claw. Scoop. I worked quickly, nervously. The ground still resisted like frozen rubber, but I persisted. I had nearly reached what I thought was an acceptable depth when I heard the voices of more people coming down the boardwalk. Backpack over the hole, I stood up and resumed my pantomime with the cell phone.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said. And suddenly Sue was listening on the other end of the phone. “I’m here now, sweetie. I’m at the tree right now … Can you help me?”

She was sitting comfortably in a quiet, warm, white, dare-I-say “heavenly” place, cordless phone in her hand, listening peacefully to my supplication. She wasn’t smiling as I typically pictured her, but rather she had that serious, stern look she’d get when she was fixed on something critical; something she wasn’t quite sure how to manage.

“I need you to steady my hands or whatever it is I need steadying.” I wasn’t sure what I meant by that. I’d never relied on Sue for physical guidance. “We can do this together. Can’t we? You and me forever … And after we do this, I might be able to move forward, little by little.” This was more of a question than a prediction. I had no idea how I’d get on from here.

The people passed by, completely ignoring me. I wiped my eyes and looked at the container of ashes sitting at the foot of the tree. Sue told me to keep talking.

“There’s so much I want to tell you,” I said. “But I’m not sure how. All of my memories are changing colour. When you died, so did the future I thought I’d been promised. Without you things are … blurry.”

I looked toward the lake, the frothy white waves fading to distant black. The cold night burrowed into me under my wool coat, but I’d stopped noticing. I thought of the road trip I’d taken with my ten-month-old son the summer before. We’d left Toronto three months after Sue died and criss-crossed North America for six weeks on our adventure of healing, an expedition meant to kick-start my new life as a widower and single father. Being alone with my son and my thoughts brought clarity after the claustrophobic home-grief and it secured a bond between father and son. It also brought to light some alarming revelations that I wished I’d been able to share with Sue. I wondered if I should confess.

“Everything I’ve discovered since you left is pulling me in a different direction,” I said. “I could have spent the rest of my life with you … and that would have been fantastic … but, you know, we might not have made it. We weren’t perfect. But I’ve accepted that … Because that was us.”

That was us: imperfectly in love.

“I know you loved me. But … we got it wrong a lot of the time.” I swallowed and took a cleansing breath. “If you hadn’t died … we may still have ended up apart.”

Until then I’d kept my epiphanies to myself, but telling her how I felt was proof that I was moving on; the thick, aching emptiness was starting to lift. If Sue had really been there, she may have protested as she usually did, but I was in control of this one. I looked up the road toward the building we lived in a lifetime ago; before we moved away so Sue could chase down her journalism career, before parenthood, before cancer. Eight months earlier as Sue lay in that hospital bed, I’d said goodbye to her and felt the relief of seeing her out of pain. But now my own pain was lifting without aid, without wondering what she’d think.

“The more I think about it,” I said, “the more I believe you would have found some reason to leave me … and I wouldn’t have had the strength to fight you.”

I still loved her but I hated the memories that had recently become clear. I’d awoken that morning knowing I’d been holding onto the past for fear of the future. And if this telephone conversation was any confirmation, Sue was giving me her consent to let go. But I didn’t want to hang up the phone.

“Whatever happens to me from now on, good or bad, it will be because of you. You got me here … and without you, I’ll go in some other direction; some other path than the one you and I would have travelled.”

Instead of dreading a future without Sue, I realized, I could choose to welcome the opportunities that came my way because of her absence. Some good things could still happen to me. I was thirty-five years old; I still had a lot of life left. Accepting the possibility of a good future wouldn’t mean I’d forgotten the life I’d had with Sue. The good wouldn’t negate the bad. They would simply be the two sides of one life.

“I have to do this now … It’s time.”

Maybe this is what Sue meant by life after death. I might have taken her too literally when she spoke of her beliefs. Because I knew she would always live within me. My life evolved with her. Before she came along I was an immature, lazy, idealist looking for a mate. Sue gave me perspective, energy, wisdom and love. She forced me to grow up. She gave me a son. She’d live in him and the person I would become.

I moved over to the hole completely oblivious to whether or not people were walking by. The cold beach had grown peaceful, composed. I could no longer hear the whispering waves.

‘This tree will be here forever and so will you.’

I knelt at the hole, the cell phone still at my ear with Sue breathing on the other end. “Okay, I’m going to hang up now … Here I go … “

The calm of night wrapped me in its dark cloak. I looked down at the shadowy hollow I’d mined, pausing in a moment of pseudo-prayer. I can do this. Everything’s going to be all right.

“I love you … Sweet dreams … Bye.”

I put the phone in my coat pocket, removed the lid from the container and lifted out the clear plastic bag holding the ashes. I’d never taken it out before. The volume seemed curiously low and it weighed less than I’d imagined. A bag of sand the same size would have weighed more. I wondered if all of Sue was in there. My cold hands shook as I fumbled with the knot in the plastic bag. For fear of lingering too long, I tore the bag open and tipped it toward the hole in one motion. The little bits of black, grey and white filled it up like water flowing into a bowl. In the heavy, frozen air no residual ash dust came off the empty bag. She was all out. Without pausing, I put the bag into the container that once held Sue and then ladled the cold dirt back over the ashes with my hands. I stood up and packed it down with my feet, firmly enough to level the soil but not so firm as to feel like I was stomping on her. I surveyed the area, making sure it didn’t look like someone had just buried his wife in the roots of the tree named after her.

But it wasn’t Sue I buried that night. What filled that icy hole was a piece of the past I no longer clung to. Not ignored, just set aside. A past, I’d figured out, that could stay in the past without fear of it extinguishing my future. Eight months of grieving, sadness, hard work, confusion, personal challenges, epiphanies, and loneliness were buried. The tree that sprouted from that struggle stood as a marker in time, resting between what was and what will be.

I packed up my tools and walked back to the car. The icy air filled my lungs and cleared my head. I breathed easier than I had been an hour earlier. Before I stepped onto the sidewalk, I passed a Department of Parks regulation garbage can. The generic canister that Sue had rested in for the past several months had no more symbolic meaning than the lamppost the garbage can was chained to. Sue had always been worth more than what housed her. What had true meaning had been left at the roots of the sugar maple next to the boardwalk. The cheap ceramic container landed at the bottom of the garbage can with a thud.

•••

JON MAGIDSOHN is originally from Toronto, Canada. He has written about fatherhood for dadzclub.com, the Good Men Project, Today’s Parent, and Mummy and Me magazines. He’s also been featured in Mojave River Review, Chicago Literati, What’s Your Story?-Memoir Anthology (Lifetales) and currently publishes three blogs. He moved to London, UK, in 2005 where he received an MA in Creative Non-Fiction from City University. Jon, his wife, Deborah, and their son, Myles, are now in Bangalore, India, where Jon writes full time. www.jonmagidsohn.com

The Dance: Dad’s Lead

bethbride — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.studiofuller.com

By Sarah M. Wells

“What song do you want to dance to, Dad?” I asked, scrolling through lists of popular father-daughter dance songs.

Nothing seemed right. No Michael Buble or Paul Simon or Stevie Wonder would cut it; this, after all, was my father—my flannel-shirt-and-faded-blue-jeans, muddy-work-boots, calloused-hands, five-o’clock-shadow, “fetch-me-a-Miller” father. What qualified as “our song?” Maybe “Feed Jake.” Maybe “Friends in Low Places.” Maybe “Act Naturally.” Maybe “There’s a Tear in My Beer.” Hank and Garth and Buck and the Pirates of the Mississippi sang about misery, friends, beer, and mama; they didn’t sing anything about their daughters.

By the day of our wedding, Mom and Dad had settled on a song. “It’s a surprise,” they said.

Four months earlier, I had come home from college graduation with my boyfriend who they liked well enough but were still warming to, and an engagement ring. Brandon had asked my dad’s permission first, of course, out of my hearing the day before, and Dad had said yes—he hugged me extra-long before I left, cap and gown still on.

In the early planning days, Mom and Dad offered to write us a check instead: big party vs. down payment on a house. We waffled for a day or two, but in my head were visions of a white dress and a man in a tux waiting for me, dreams of dancing and spinning under a spotlight, all of our friends and family clapping and celebrating.

It was my day to plan, along with my mom, who navigated the wedding planning with me like she was my maid-of-honor. Mom and I picked the flowers—sunflowers and blue delphinium—the same that decorated the cake display we chose. We taste-tested the catering, got weepy-eyed over my bridal gown and veil, and designed the party favors together. The reception venue was our decision, too, even as my soon-to-be mother-in-law raised her eyebrows and said, “Really, a barn?”

After the father-daughter dance to whatever song Mom and Dad had picked, Rhonda and Brandon would get the party started. Rhonda’s choice for the mother-son dance was easy: Louie Armstrong would sing “What a Wonderful World” for thirty seconds, then the record would screech to a stop. Brandon and his mom would look confused for a second until Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5” would begin to play. It fit them perfectly.

I wrote the order of music and communion and rings; I designed the program and inscribed a poem; I recruited our friends as musicians. Brandon and I selected most of the songs and all of the Bible verses for the ceremony. We picked the pastor and the bridal party and the style of music to be played at the reception. We determined the flavor of this wedding, and this wedding would taste just like us.

The guest list: that was their decision—the parents—and it grew, and grew, and grew, until we all silently stared at it sitting on the kitchen counter. Who could we possibly cut? No one. Maybe there were a lot of other commitments that weekend, and the guest list would just… trim itself. Maybe in true Father of the Bride fashion, we could declare, “Well, cross them off, then!”

Also their decision: the alcohol. We toyed with the idea of a dry wedding for about a twelve-hour timespan because Brandon had just gotten a job at a new school, and we weren’t sure yet exactly how conservative they were. A few of his new employers made Round One of the guest list. It hadn’t been decided if they’d make the Round Two cuts.

“You want a what?!” Dad asked, his voice rising steadily. “We are not going to invite all of our friends to a wedding and not have alcohol. What kind of a party is that?”

“But, Da-ad,” I said. “We just thought, you know, the school… and maybe…” but it was no use. My excuses were weak, anyway; it wasn’t like Brandon and his family and our friends and our relatives never kicked back and drank a glass of wine or a can/ six-pack /case of beer, so why pretend otherwise and ruin a good time? Besides, it was Dad’s call. Dad’s decision. Dad’s lead.

So, okay, beer and wine, Dad. And yes, invite all of those people, even those people I won’t know when they come through the receiving line, and I’ll look at Brandon and he’ll look at me, and we’ll both smile and shake their hands and give them hugs and thank them for coming. And, okay, yes, pick our father-daughter dance.

•••

Down the aisle we went, Dad in his black tuxedo looking sharp, no John Deere hat to cover his balding head or shadow his features. His hand was tight in mine, tense against a few hundred sets of eyes that watched us while we two-stepped—left-together, right-together—our paces matched, the Fugman stride slow and easy like a mosey.

I saw only my future husband at the end of the aisle where Brandon waited for me. When we reached the pastor and he asked, “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” Dad answered gruffly, “Her mother and I.” I turned my gaze back to him for just that second and wrapped my arms around his neck, and he held on, squeezed and squeezed, then released me to my groom, taking his seat in the sanctuary while I remained standing.

Later, after the bridal dance ended and I parted with a kiss from my new husband, our spunky blue-haired emcee called Dad onto the floor. Dad had donned his Father-of-the-Bride ball cap as soon as the wedding ended and wore it now as he met me for our dance. The bubbles from the bride and groom dance settled and popped on the dance floor. A slow piano, slide guitar, and light percussion played.

The cut-time of Mickey Gilley singing “True Love Ways” carried us along the hardwood, Dad’s calloused palm in my manicured hand. I smiled, even though the tune was unfamiliar to me. I guess it went to number one on the country charts in 1980, the year my parents started dating. Dad would sing it to her in the car as it played on the radio. So romantic, Mom says later. But this was our dance, our slow turn under the spotlight. It didn’t seem like the right fit—know true love’s ways—but what would have been?

Earlier in the afternoon, Dad gave me over, his daughter, his only daughter, his dazzled blue-eyed daughter grinning with confidence over the man she had chosen. I came into the sanctuary my father’s daughter. I walked out of the sanctuary my husband’s wife.

How long had I dreamed of becoming Mrs. Anyone? A boyfriend, a boyfriend, a boyfriend: I wanted one, as long as he would stay around. And then another one, and then I wanted that boyfriend to become a fiancé and that fiancé to become my husband, so I could become Mrs. Anyone. In college, that was the title that mattered: I wanted a partner. I wanted someone I could pour my heart into. That’s what I thought you did after high school and certainly after college. My mom and dad had grown up across the street from each other; she was nineteen when they married and twenty when she delivered her first baby: me. Today it’s ill-advised to marry young, trouble from the start, they don’t know what they’re getting into, a whole life ahead, plenty of time for that, but from where I stood, I felt behind already.

Yes, I also earned a bachelor’s degree. I sought out opportunities to lead and to stretch and to achieve, to do more, earn praise, perform. Dad always said Fugmans aren’t afraid of work, Fugmans are hard workers. He instilled this drive. He was the man who had been my guide. But Brandon was the man I had chosen to walk with me out of the sanctuary, the man who would walk beside me from the altar forward. He brought me a different sort of pride. We had weighed and measured our potential, considered our compatibility, discussed the ways we would raise children, established our priorities. In him, I had found a worthy Scrabble opponent, someone I could adventure with, a man who could say “I’m sorry,” a man who would forgive me, too. For all of that and more, I had chosen him.

Now, Dad held the hand and waist of Mrs. Brandon Wells as we danced. Far in the past, a little girl crawled across his chest and stole his John Deere cap, blue eyes grinning into the face of the camera. She asked for Hooper Humperdink at bedtime again, and now we can all recite it from memory—Pete and Pat and Pasternack, I bet they come by camel back! Back there, too, she watched her mom and dad spin slowly in the living room to “If We Make It Through December,” not knowing then the depth in that melody, not knowing then the weight behind eyes connecting and smiles, what it means to make it through December, together. He taught that little girl the cast of a rod, the slow click and reel after the bobber plunked onto the surface of the water, how to bait a hook with a squirming night crawler. He coached the in-and-out of orange construction cones for hours until she mastered how to parallel park before her final driving test. Whether intentionally or accidentally, he had been preparing me.

Now, we turned slow around the dance floor, each sway a step closer to the last note in the song. Gone was the night we stared up at the cloudless sky on the hill by the old maple and waited for the meteor shower. Evenings swaying in front of a fire pit, turning front ways then back to warm our bodies as we talked about God and faith and family and regret, until the coals flashed red and black, flames dying, then walking slowly into the house to bed. There would be no more creasing wrapping paper in the dry heat of the excavator’s shop on Christmas Eve with him, no more Dad topping off and lifting my bushel basket of corn from the end of a row and spilling it with ease into the bed of the red pickup truck, Dad gunning the accelerator of the snowmobile through the fields with me clinging to his coat toasty in my snowsuit and helmet, Dad showing me the slow slide of a cue stick between thumb and index finger and then the thrust that sent the cue ball breaking against the racked triangle of billiard balls.

All of life before that day squeezed between his dusty calloused hands and mine, a slow turning, slow turning until the end notes began to play. My fingers are my father’s; long and lean, rough along the palms from a summer shoveling mulch, tough where a pen had rubbed and formed a writer’s bump. They were made for work; they were made for pouring your sweat into the thing you loved.

Even over the black tuxedo, fresh trim, and aftershave, I could breathe him in when we embraced, the scent of sweat and sun and earth and oil, “I love you, Sare,” he said.

“I love you, too, Dad.”

“It is a beautiful song,” Mom tells me later, “and we chose it for a beautiful girl.” Sometimes we’ll sigh, sometimes we’ll cry, and we’ll know why, just you and I… Maybe it was perfect. As Mickey Gilley lulled a final “…know true love ways,” Dad spun me out, then pulled me back in, my white dress billowing, the bill of his father-of-the-bride cap shadowing his smile.

•••

SARAH M. WELLS is the author of Pruning Burning Bushes and a chapbook of poems, Acquiesce. Poems and essays by Wells have appeared recently in Ascent, Brevity, The Common, The Good Men Project, New Ohio Review, Poetry East, Puerto del Sol, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Sarah’s poetry and essays have been honored with three Pushcart Prize nominations. Two essays were listed as notable essays in the Best American Essays 2013 and 2012. Her memoir-in-progress on dads, husbands, and the girl between is tentatively titled American Honey. She is the Administrative Director of the Ashland University MFA Program and Managing Editor of the Ashland Poetry Press and River Teeth. http://sarahmwells.blogspot.com.

Getting Ginger

paw and hand — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Michele Coppola

My ex-husband died and left me his dog. It wasn’t an official bequest, but since all of his friends claimed to love her to death, really, but just couldn’t take her in, I drove five hours south to pick up the rickety Staffordshire terrier named Ginger who we had rescued together ten years prior.

“It’s wonderful what you’re doing,” said my ex-sister-in-law when she called me. “I’m sure Marty is smiling down on you.”

Not likely. The first time he’d gone to the hospital in liver failure, I’d texted him and asked if he wanted me to come down and get Ginger—but the only response I got was second hand from a mutual friend. He said that even though Marty knew he wasn’t able to care for the dog properly, he’d be damned if he was going to let me take her away.

“Alcohol is what’s taking his dog away,” I’d said angrily. “The same thing that’s taken everything away.”

•••

Ginger had been our first foster dog when I brought her home from the shelter a decade ago, her hopeful eyes looking up from a skinny, dun-colored body dangling with exhausted nipples. Confiscated from a home where she’d already been bred twice, the last go-round resulted in nine puppies who’d drained her completely. It hadn’t been hard to do since she’d barely been fed and had nothing to drink save a puddle of muddy Oregon rainwater. Marty and I were in love then—with each other, and with the idea of turning our three-acres-and-a-trailer into an unofficial dog rescue.

After several weeks of fattening her up and teaching her a few commands, we re-homed Ginger with an affable long-haul driver, who took her on cross-country adventures and fed her truck-stop meatloaf. It was a fine life for a sweet dog. But a year later, a bad accident on the interstate took the trucker off the road for good and brought Ginger back to us, also for good. Once she was again curled up on our couch, Marty and I found we couldn’t part with her.

“Animals were also close to McGuire’s heart,” read the article about my ex-husband’s death. At one time he’d been a popular DJ in the small town where he’d lived most of his life, and his passing made the front page. He was indeed an animal lover, poetic and soulful, with a malleable heart that never seemed to recover from the blows and dings that come with daily life. We were immeasurably compatible, and when we moved in together, we didn’t spend the weekend unpacking; instead, we used our rent money to take a road trip through Northern California, pulling off at scenic overlooks to make out and licking fast-food barbeque sauce off each other’s fingers. Tunes from an old Allman Brothers’ CD completed the new love movie montage.

Eight years later, he refused to look at me as we sat in our second marriage counselor’s dim office. “I’m not giving up alcohol for her,” he said. I felt my face flush red—not with anger, but with embarrassment. How lousy a spouse was I that my husband wouldn’t even consider sacrificing a half rack of Milwaukee’s Best to keep me? I remember wanting to protest that I’d cooked all of his favorite meals whenever I had the time and that when my face wasn’t mottled and puffy with crying, I wasn’t half-bad looking. But I didn’t. Instead, I moved into the other bedroom and told him I wanted a divorce.

•••

That memory still cuts me as I reach over to the passenger seat in my car, where Ginger is now coiled into a petrified ball. My hands smell like french fries and old socks after I pet her—just like the house where Marty had been living. It’s been seven years since I tearfully agreed to take our three other dogs to Portland with me and let my ex have the member of our canine family most likely to never leave his side. Ginger is fourteen now. When I tried to put the leash on her back at Marty’s house a couple of hours before, she hid behind his roommate. Finally I got her to come to me and I stroked her ears, something I remember she always liked. Still, her expressive brow was wrinkled with worry.

I’m a little worried myself. My current husband Bryon isn’t happy about having a third dog, but I have promised him that I will find Ginger another home quickly, something I already know will be nearly impossible. He and I squabble frequently; you can smell the dependability and routine on him like a nose-burning aftershave, and sometimes his rigidity is beyond exasperating. While he likes animals, he certainly didn’t want a house full of them. But he did want me, and I come with canines that bark when a squirrel sneezes and a cat who sleeps on his head. He never swats her down in frustration, though. He gently lifts her from his face and places her, carefully curled in the same position, at the foot of the bed.

We argued about Ginger the night before I went to get her. “I don’t mind you going to get the dog. I understand that,” he said. “What I don’t like is all the baggage that comes with her.”

“What baggage?” I asked, wiping away yet another large, infuriating tear from my clammy cheek.

“Yeah, what baggage,” he said, turning back to his laptop. “Go. Do whatever you need to do.”

I hate like hell that nearly every emotion I have comes out in tears. I don’t miss my ex-husband; during our marriage I slowly realized that this was how it would end for him and it’s why I left. And yet … there is something so profoundly sad about the way Marty slowly deteriorated in the last few years, like watching a fragile sandcastle that took a whole afternoon to build get washed away in the tide. But I still wasn’t prepared for his death when it happened, and now Bryon looks at my downcast eyes and thinks I’m hiding remnants of an old love. What I’m actually trying to conceal is the fact that I am beyond angry that after all of this time my husband thinks I could still be carrying a torch for my ex, and also furious that Marty was in such deliberate denial about his condition he wouldn’t make arrangements for Ginger, the companion he swore he loved more than anything in the world.

Back on the road, I stop for a sandwich at a drive-thru outside of Roseburg. I tear off a meaty corner and offer it to Ginger, who sniffs it warily, then buries her nose back in the dirty crocheted blanket that had been on Marty’s bed back at his house. I took it so that the old girl would have a familiar smell to comfort her, and also because I recognized it as one I had made for my ex many Christmases ago. Just one more thing from the past I’m dragging into the present that my husband and I will absorb because it’s what we do. We are boring and stable and responsible.

And yet, I am immensely appreciative of the fact that I have a working vehicle and the gas money to come rescue Ginger and a comfortable home where, until I find her a permanent situation, she can spend her days snoring contentedly on the couch. These resources are at my disposal in no small part because of Bryon, the man who has already called me twice to make sure I’m doing okay on the slick mountain passes. I feel reasonably sure that if the situation had been reversed—that I died and Marty were called on to come get a dog we’d owned together—he would have been both unable and unwilling to help. Not that he wouldn’t have regretted his impotency; in fact, my guess is it would have taken at least an entire bottle of booze before he didn’t feel bad about it anymore.

The sky is a watery blue-gray when I pull into the driveway of my house, the sun resigned to another day behind clouds. Ginger sits up in the passenger seat and shivers. I can barely breathe when I think about having to convince some reluctant person to take her in and then leaving her there to curl up in the dark corner of a strange-smelling place, leaving her to wonder why the man she loved so much didn’t want her anymore.

•••

“So we have a third dog now, right?” says Bryon, who is sitting on the bed smirking and rubbing Ginger’s belly. It’s been two weeks since I brought her home, and in that time we’ve discovered that in addition to being somewhat deaf, my ex’s dog is a bit incontinent, requiring potty breaks every two hours. Unfortunately, she is also petrified of the doggy flap, so we must get up and let her out several times a night. My husband doesn’t complain about it; he just rolls out of bed and stumbles to the back door with a sigh. I’d be happy to do potty duty, but Ginger wakes him up when she’s got to go; she sleeps on the floor by his side of the bed and follows him to the kitchen, where he feeds her bits of the flatulence-inducing cheese that she loves.

“Well, no, I’m still working on it. I posted her picture on Petfinder,” I say halfheartedly.

“Oh come on. Who’s gonna want her? She’s old, deaf, has to pee all the time. But she’s such a good guuuurl,” he purrs into her floppy ear. Ginger rolls over on to her back and snuggles her grey muzzle into his lap. She attached herself to him immediately when I brought her home, and if I’m being honest, I felt a twinge of resentment. Dogs live in the moment, so it’s entirely possible she didn’t remember me at all—but apparently she knew instinctively that Bryon, with his understanding eyes and strong, warm hands, was someone to be trusted.

I get up and wrap my arms around him. “Thank you,” I whisper. I love him so much for this, for the absolute conviction that society will start to unravel if he doesn’t step up, for believing that dismissing this dog to become someone else’s problem is just wrong. That is what Bryon does—even when it’s exhausting, even when I tease him unmercifully about his Eagle-scout code of honor and wish he could just relax, already. What I didn’t realize is that it’s hard to lighten up when you’re made of such sturdy stuff.

Perhaps Ginger knows what I am just learning: that in the end, love is really about showing up, again and again and again. I was there for her. Bryon is there for me. No matter where I step in this marriage, even out to the edges of his tolerance and my good sense, the floor is sound; there are no soft spots, no decay. It will hold me up, even with the added weight of my ex-husband’s elderly, incontinent dog.

•••

MICHELE COPPOLA is a veteran radio personality, copywriter, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Oregonian and Spot Magazine as well as the literary journals So To Speak, Melusine, and Short Story America. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she shares a bed with her husband, two dogs, and two cats. Ginger passed away a little over a year ago in Bryon’s lap.

Transference: Love Me, Love My Problems

under desk — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By D. Baker

I’m crazy. I have been my whole life.

It was my first inheritance from my parents. On my father’s side, everyone’s a bipolar; they approached their insanity with buckets of alcohol. My mother’s family, though, settled into a nice, major depression, self-medicating through anxious and determined hard work.

I shook out in the middle—a mental illness called “Soft Bipolarity.” I’m too miserable to be a classic bipolar, but too irritable to be simply depressed. Doggedly atavistic, I’ve tried both the family home remedies. Neither worked.

Fortunately (?), I was born in the seventies; I could turn to counseling. In counseling, though, the dreadful reality of transference loomed inescapable: a miserable fact. Transference—like the wily Pan—always led me, unwitting, into inappropriate attachments to my counselors. I felt helpless against the inevitability that I would always pour unintended meaning into the interactions within the confines of four beige walls.

I recall my first experience with this, which was innocuous enough. I wasn’t sure how much older the counselor was than me—probably double my seventeen years. At the time, he seemed ancient. But his gentle and reproachless listening was a gift so deep and wide that none could compare. I came to conceptualize his small, windowless office as a down-coated nest, and I began to regard him as my BFF.

The next one was closer to my age. His office was furnished, audaciously, in black leather. The conflict that knotted inside me entering felt palpable and real. Only moments earlier, I had fumbled out my father’s car—a jalopy that held together through the creative application of wire coat hangers and duct tape.

Without insurance of any kind, how much did my father spend for my hour in air-conditioned luxury, face to face with this man whose chocolate curls and mahogany bookshelves dizzied up my mind? Whether my father expressed resentment at the cost, or whether I imposed it on myself without outside provocation, the money to buy those cool hours left me sick with guilt. Back at my house, there was no leather; the broken down, stained couch hid beneath a garish, threadbare sheet. How could I possibly justify treating my mental malady when, for the price of a few sessions, my parents could have replaced their couch with something clean and sturdy, if not new?

I recall nothing of what he might have said, that second counselor. What remains in my consciousness is yearning. I willed him to pull me close, so I could free his silken hair for my fingers to curl in as he pressed his lips to my throat, collarbone.

He never did.

There were others along the way. Although the impressions that they left don’t stand out in sharp relief, I know that I wanted them all. Because they, alone, understood. They—each of them—cared for me as no others had.

Free, with purchase.

•••

The last in my list of head trippers was a cognitive-behavioral therapist. Over the course of our time together, I went from calling him Dr. Mendenhall to Captain and finally to his first name, Jack.

We knew each other for a long time, if sporadically. The misfortune I faced with him lay in the reality that we had the twin brothers of sarcasm and irony lodged in our brains. Our conversations played out in wit and hilarity.

That was my problem. I wished it were his problem, too.

He warned me of it. I went to see him again after an eighteen-month tour through the depths of hell when my in-laws moved into my house and a dear friend died at the age of thirty-four. “This is dangerous,” Jack said. “When you try to work through emotions this intense, transference happens.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him, unwilling to settle for euphemisms and jargon.

“Well, we have to keep it real. I’m telling you up front so you know. Instead of being unwilling to discuss the giant elephant in the room, we talk about it. Acknowledging your feelings for me will be half the battle.”

When he said that, I both loved and hated him for it.

Loved, because he understood; he knew what would happen to me.

Hated, because I felt shorn of my defenses. He may as well have cut me to my nerves, and then blown cold air over them. The desperate, clutching nature of the lunatic embarrassed me. How I wished that I could pretend that I was not that being, not that irrational woman who would inevitably pine for her mental health care giver! I hadn’t expected to be called out on my junk. If we both recognized it at the outset, how could I pretend it wasn’t happening?

As predicted, the ever-mounting disappointment I felt at the end of our therapy hours seeped through me like a slow leak. And the eagerness that flitted in the space where I once had a heart and lungs annoyed me when I realized I’d traded in vital body parts for time in his presence.

One day, I wept in rage and shame for hating my mother-in-law. Rage, because I had newly stumbled upon an old journal entry made on a Christmas morning after she told me my husband and children were happier in my absence. Shame, because I did not believe that hatred was the right choice.

I importuned him, “Jack, fix me.”

But there was no simple solution for a situation in which one has been truly, deeply, and repeatedly wronged. So he set the problem back in my lap, leaving me with prayer as my ongoing, if ineffective, recourse.

Before he did, though, we laughed, exchanging sarcasms. I told him I didn’t want to kill her; I simply wanted to make her suffer.

“To the pain!” he said, borrowing a line from The Princess Bride. That he should know the movie well enough to quote it made my skin shiver in delight—was this not proof that we were kindred spirits?

“Let’s take away her Xanax,” I said, filled with glee.

“No; let’s not take it away, but replace half of it with sugar pills so she never knows when she’s going to get one that works.”

“No,” I said. “Not sugar pills. Poison.”

“Hmm.” He smiled. “I’m thinking something dark and sexy … what about hemlock?”

“Nightshade,” I said.

“Exactly.”

How, pray tell, could a girl hope to keep her wits about her in the presence of a man who knew to suggest dark, sexy hemlock? As I laughed, a tear slid over my top lip, salting the tip of my tongue. Shields up, I warned myself. You’re looking into his blue eyes far too long.

•••

I don’t see Jack anymore. We worked through so much that he became my biggest problem. I dreamt of him at night and woke to a sodden pillowcase, my eyelashes wet with tears. Catching myself, I choked back sobs, hoping my husband wouldn’t wake.

“Is this hurting your marriage?” Jack asked me. “Coming here?”

“Don’t speak,” I answered.

That night was Halloween. I stood outside in the cold for five hours, miserable at the spectre of the one right choice that faced me. Because, ultimately, my husband didn’t deserve my divided allegiance. Yes, he had failings, but so did I. My husband’s Asperger’s Syndrome was woefully ill-paired with my Soft Bipolar Disorder. Our cosmic mismatch spanned the emotional spectrum—where my husband felt almost nothing, I felt everything to the utmost degree.

The last time I saw Jack, my stupid voice betrayed me with its tremble, and I stared at the crumpled tissue in my hand. “Teach me how to be as unmoved by you as you are by me.”

“Am I unmoved by you?” he asked.

The moment held. I wanted to kiss his eyelids.

Siphoning off the intensity, his voice took on a theatrical tone. “Oh yes. I’m just a cold and unfeeling counselor.”

I cut him off. “I’m not coming back. I can’t do this anymore.”

“You don’t have to make that decision today,” he said. “I know you want everything wrapped up in a neat package, but this is something you have to think about.”

I steeled my resolve. “Do you imagine that I have thought of anything else this week?”

If he felt the same way, his feelings for me would have been called “counter-transference.” Something for which he was trained, instructed on how to remain professionally detached. But though he may have come to our encounters prepared, I owned no such clinical armor.

•••

Last summer, the gamble of life dealt me a heart problem. As I sat pondering my thirty-six years, I marveled that I had it all—a husband, two beautiful children, a house, and a dog. I owned the veritable American Dream. Crowning that, I’d even been published a couple of times. There was nothing of any import that I’d left undone.

So my heart problem brought with it an endowment of gratitude and contentment.

And yet.

And yet, once in a while a certain slant of light or scent on the breeze conjures Jack, unbidden, from my memory. I marvel at how freshly lanced I feel. A part of me wonders if my flight left Jack equally wrecked, if I had somehow slipped under his training and gotten to him, as he did me.

•••

Turns out you can tell this to your husband. All of it. Turns out, he will try to commiserate by telling you about a girl in college that he studied with all the time. And it turns out that all you will hear is, “I fell in love with someone and kept it a secret all these years.” That’s how bipolarity works. That’s the bad news.

The good news is you finally have decent medication. And with the help of decent medication, you move forward. You don’t have to carry it around for decades, mourning from the depths of your mood-disordered soul. After a few days, you can see what your husband’s intent was; in place of subterfuge and infidelity, he was really offering understanding and empathy.

You get to go back to being crazy—incognito. You get to tuck those unwelcome memories of Jack back in the mental box where they belong.

When you wake up and swallow your pretty pills, your handful of Skittles, you can, at long last, live life in the middle. And the middle rocks when compared to the bi-poles.

•••

D. BAKER is a writer living in the Intermountain West.

Picking Up

By Sonya Huber

Stuck in traffic on the Merritt Parkway heading south in Connecticut on a Tuesday morning, I’m staring at the tailgate of a beat-up, black pickup truck in the lane ahead of me. An extension ladder hangs on the struts of a metal support above the truck bed, which is scattered with buckets of tools. The tailgate sports the geometric logo of Narcotics Anonymous and the slogan “Never alone, Never again.”

Traffic unclogs, and the green of a New England morning in July blurs past. Even as my car speeds forward, my mind has been hurled backward into to my former life with the sight of that bumper sticker. No—I never met anyone in a parking lot to pay for drugs. I never shook with the physical ache of withdrawal. I just loved an addict. For a long time.

•••

The addict I loved drove a weathered, blue pickup. When we first locked eyes over coffee, he told me a heartbreaking version of the hard-life stories in own family. I saw a man valiantly struggling to right the legacy of wrongs in the fruits of his family tree. He didn’t say, “Hi, would you like to sleep with someone with a substance abuse problem?”

He took me on adventures: fossil picking near a hidden waterfall, a flea market, a drag race. He wrote me notes and left flowers and cooked dinner. As we ate the chicken he’d cooked and ladled from his own crockpot, he told me I had saved him, and I protested. No, nobody did any saving, I said. But I enjoyed the stories he told in which I was cast as Wonder Woman. The stories in my own head starred me being good enough, so a cape and invisible car gave me a rush. Plus, he was sexy.

Once, early on, he left me naked on his loft bed for an uncomfortable moment of silence. I heard the tinkering of his drug tools. As the sweat cooled on my body, I knew another love had taken my Wonder Woman status. No—I half-knew she’d been there long before me. No—I had no idea how deep she was into him; she was his origin song, his mother. I pulled on my jeans and ran from his house, and he chased after me. Later, as we walked beneath the oaks that lined my street, he mulled and said, “I should just quit. I’ve thought about it.”

I, for my part, honestly thought quitting was an option, a simple decision.

I weighed and mulled. I sought advice. “He’s great on paper,” said a sympathetic single friend. The dating pool had slimmed out through marriages, hopelessly twisted personalities, and band guys.

Fast forward years of Googling—is he an addict?—and wondering and diagnoses and indecision about whether to leave.

Because…it was just pot.

So of course I didn’t think it was a big deal at all until I got sucked up into a maelstrom and watched as this one life was derailed.

Yes, I have heard about Sanjay Gupta. No, I don’t think pot is a problem for most people, but people get addicted to standing in front of a slot machine. This is not even about pot. This is not an attack on your Saturday night or your aunt’s legal medical marijuana treatment for cancer. This is about a distant cousin: addiction. If you don’t know much about addiction, you are lucky you don’t know much about addiction.

I clung to my coffee cup and my to-do list and my furious ability to work, and almost nobody knew. I amped myself up on work and my checkbook balance and the hope of scraping enough together to make Plan B. And we stayed together.

The sordid scenes left me shaking. I could frame the moments with their fractured details, but each postcard of me crying in the night could be turned over to read the secret message: Wish I Wasn’t Here With Him. Why AM I Still Here? I was still there—with him. For my own complicated reasons involving hope, my own drug of choice.

•••

Then one day he called me, said, I can’t do this any more. The world had crumbled in a friend’s back yard, where the summer light made the undersides of the dense trees look like an inverse x-ray, a web of black with light at the edges. A knot had tied in his soul. He touched some electric edge in himself. He told me on the phone that he got too high—even with all his experience, he had crossed into the raw slippery meat of his own brain.

It was a secret day for him, maybe not a day he celebrates now.

I trembled as I waited for him to come home, scared like the waiting before birth or death: he was choosing us or maybe something different that included me. He saw the outlines of his life as unworkable, which took such guts.

He entered the house with the colors of his face in livid contrast: reds and whites, blacks of the eyes, the mouth. Half of himself had fallen to the inside. He lay on the bed and I was terrified for him. I had longed for this afternoon, had imagined the action in film stills. In the living of it, I was frozen in a strobe light of my uselessness.

More symptoms would come: The creepy crawlies, a splitting headache that triggered his migraines, dizziness and nausea, sweating. Flu-like symptoms and chills. Later, the insomnia and nightmares. Weeks of aggression, blasted thoughts, plunging depression.

We paged through the phone book—tiny letters, thin pages—in a low spot for which there was no 911 to call. This was too common, we learned, and too expensive for 911. I left messages, handed him the phone when I reached the intake nurse. We took turns on hold with cell and home phones, nodding, taking notes, eyeing each other frantically as we heard phrases like “two month waiting list” or “we could call you when we get an opening” or “we don’t take insurance.” All those private places at the outskirts of the city would be too expensive and too slow. The timing of the crisis and the solution seemed incredibly mismatched. What they didn’t say: twenty million people per year in the U.S. needed treatment and could not get it due to cost and lack of beds. We just wanted one.

We found the city option on the cheap: an intake meeting tomorrow and then outpatient meetings during the day and groups at night. He’d stay at home for detox. Work was out of the question. The schedule would keep him contained and safe, with time filled and one place to go. I revered his effort and his guts.

I had hoped for this upheaval, but in practice it a quiet accident, a water leak. No one could know.

One day after he’d gone to group, I sat in the park. I went for a walk where I always walked, but I didn’t even make it to the path. I sat down in a kind of squashed kneel in the outfield of a baseball diamond, my calves alongside my thighs, the way kids sit. I closed my eyes and could not even scream. I felt a glowing heat devouring me, not grief but anger in its purest form. The meteor in my stomach weighed me down, too heavy to even carry. Why be angry?

Dumbfounded, dumbstruck: I had not imagined I’d be shattered at being right. I had guessed that this secret might define our lives, but even more secretly I hoped I was wrong. I hoped this phase would pass without a crisis. This was the birth of the next part of our lives, but dirty, like in a gas station bathroom off an anonymous exit.

A friend put me in her car, and we drove past the outskirts of the city, along a highway to a tourist attraction near the town where she grew up. There was an ice cream stand and a goat pen. You could put a quarter into a red metal machine and twist the knob to get kibble to feed the goats with their angular slotted pupils.

I have those flashes frozen like fresh rescue in my head: a goat clambering up a slanted board to reach his neck over the planks of a fence, his lips straining and flapping to reach nuggets of processed food. My hand on his bony back, the bristly fur. Inside the breezy stand with chained-off looping lines like a carnival ride where I stood. I think I bought a shake, and I think it was strawberry. Even as we rode the highway loop, I knew it would end up with me back at home, empty handed, no comfort to offer. In the end, there were times I had to put stuff in the car and flee, just to get out of the way of the unhinging, unspooling.

•••

The other addicts mocked him in the meetings, planting the seeds of his relapse as they all ground their teeth and raged with red-rimmed eyes. THC can’t make a lab rat’s heart explode. God, how those newly clean, irritable, and strained people in chairs railed at each other, raw as pain without skin, competitive about how close they’d come to the lip of hell. Whose hell was better, stronger, faster. The sickest turn on each other, as they will turn on loved ones, rounding on anyone to shred to distract from their own misery.

His counselor met with him privately and sketched out his damage: because he had used regularly before he was fifteen, he was five times as likely to be an addict as your average smoker. Starting early was kind of a cause, but there was always another factor—everything in his young life—that led to smoking up. Call it the genes, the interaction of the drug in the brain, a crushing narcissism, stresses in the home and beyond—new studies even say that the high itself is not what the brain craves, but that the high comes with a dose of doom that only the drug will lift, and the brain yearns only for relief.

We heard figures I had to look up later to understand, the numbers of people unhappily dependent. It wasn’t cool to worry about pot, his gateway sweetheart, but we were so uncool now. His drug won first prize, four and a half million no-big-deals seeking treatment per annum.

Rehab and recovery brought us to family meetings where we sat in circles, telling secrets. And I got to see him, who he really was behind the chemical screen he’d worn the whole time I’d loved him, and I fell in love twice as hard as the first time. I re-pledged myself to him, then he relapsed. Then again.

•••

I kept going to group meetings for friends and family members of alcoholics and addicts, and I had to pass the gauntlet of alcoholics and addicts who stood near the church basement’s entryway, wreathed in cigarette smoke. They’d nod and say Hey, and I’d ignore them. Or worse, I’d give them the look that equaled death. You demons. You homewreckers, all of you, I thought.

Not so many years ago, I would see a car on the highway with a recovery message on its bumper, and I’d shudder. I’d send out a prayer to that poor sap’s partner, if she hadn’t already left him.

We wore our relationship down to nothing and the drugs won, or I lost. Or I won. Or the battle got played out. After I left, I stayed in the groups because they helped me understand the person I had become. I parked in lots next to cars with bumper stickers saying “Never Alone. Never Again.” I passed through the smoke-wreathed gauntlet of addicts and alcoholics so often that they began to frighten me less. Then I began to go to some of their meetings to hear them speak. I knew their spouses and kids. I began to see in their eyes a humanity that I had lost the ability to see in my former love.

Now he’s still with me in the thousand pop-culture reference to the drug in songs and on t-shirts and in casual conversations. He’s with me when I see any of the thousand references to his drug of choice.

Now I accelerate to pass the black pickup truck and turn my head to the right to catch a look at the driver. I am a practiced eye, even racing on a highway in tandem. I see, despite his sunglasses, a posture of calm and a skin color of health gracing the presence of this stranger up as early as I am on this Tuesday morning. I want to roll down my window and cheer him with a hero’s greeting, but I settle for flashing him a smile.

•••

SONYA HUBER has written two books of creative nonfiction, Opa Nobody and Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and a writing textbook, The Backwards Research Guide: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield Low-Residency MFA Program. She’s at work on a book-length essayistic memoir on the topic of substance abuse. More info at www.sonyahuber.com.

The Love of My Life, The Thief of My Sleep

sleepy dog — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser

When he first started to stay over at our house, my then future-stepfather brought my mother a curious gift. It was a rather large brass horn, used by hunters, he said. The brass curled around itself; the flare of the horn was handsome. But it was odd, this object. We all stared at the horn and then at him when he presented it to her. The gift wasn’t romantic, nor did it have to do with dreams of hunting trips. It was supposed to be practical. “If I snore too loudly,” he explained, “just blow the horn.”

My mother practically giggled at the gift. She certainly blushed. She mumbled something along the lines of his snoring being “not that bad.” She was happy, that much was clear, and I was relieved and pleased for her.

By rights, though, he should have brought me a kazoo—or a foghorn. His snores traveled through the ceiling of what had been her room and quickly became theirs right through my bedroom floor. He was, indeed, a loud snorer—the loudest, in fact, I’ve ever known. The sound resembled a cross between a drone and a series of honks. You could picture some cartoon character with a big bill or an outsized schnozz.

Their romance began near the end of my high school career and my leaving for college. The snoring served as a tiny sign to get out, a harbinger. Things were changing in the household. That was fine—I was ready to leave. Most of the time, I found the incredibly thunderous sounds from below more amusing than annoying. It was loud, but it was at a safe remove.

•••

Years later, I met the love of my life. It turns out that Hosea, too, snores. His snoring is a honking, snuffly, schnozzy, start-and-stop affair. Sometimes, it reminds me of a monologue, comedic to the listener, dramatic to the performer. Except the performer sleeps through it and the listener finds herself in a tragedy, the one of being awake to hear it in the middle of the night. I can’t say whether he snored less early in our relationship or whether I was so entirely smitten for the first decade and a half that I just didn’t care. I care now.

My boyfriend-turned-husband displayed an uncanny ability to sleep through anything. Hosea snored and he slept, the one never disturbing the other. At the beginning of our relationship, in fact, I was in the midst of a kitchen renovation that required some work on the roof just beneath my bedroom. Think hammers that pounded loud enough to seem as if the work were going on inside your bedroom. He slept right through the ruckus morning after morning, long after the sun rose high in the sky. My usual wakeup time was more in the dawn hours and so I’d go about my day, incredulous that neither heavy construction nor full sun woke him. He often worked into the wee hours; he wasn’t a slacker. Our opposite tendencies had advantages from the perspective of an early riser: Hosea didn’t bother me when I did my best work, because he was fast asleep during my most cherished work hours.

When we became parents, his natural night owlish tendencies cut both. Chicken or egg, the first baby was a night owl, too. They hung out—and the baby slept in, once he was old enough not to wake up all day and night long. We had to wake him for preschool. On the positive side, the middle-of-the-night stuff could fall to my dear husband before he’d actually want to go to sleep. On the negative side, every early morning waking—with each child, the hours got more “kid normal”—fell to me and my precious early mornings evaporated. Back on the up side, Hosea can drive teenagers at night and recently chaperoned a cast party at our house that began at one a.m. and ended at four. I slept through the entire shebang. Also on the up side: I tend to go to bed before he does. Often, he’s in bed, reading, and turns the light off for the two minutes it takes for me to drift off. That’s sweet—quiet and sweet.

I’ve come to imagine snoring is much like the ripeness of high school and college-age males. Back when our bodies first discovered one another’s, the funky ripeness became part of the appeal. A strong scent was a strong sensation. Their funk was, when we were together, mine in a way.

At some moment over the last few years, when the very dear and lovely and loud husband’s snoring woke me, I ceased to be charmed—or forgiving. I went from unflustered to fully furious with flip-of-a-switch speed. I’d poke him. “You’re so loud!” I’d call out, not quite yelling but certainly not whispering. Whispers had no impact at all. I needed to put more muscle into my voice than was readily available in the middle of the night, which is part of why I got so enraged. Ginger prods did not rouse him either. I had to poke or shake. This required effort. The act of attempting to get him to roll over or shut up woke me up more, after I’d already been awoken by his sonorous snores. This was a recipe for a trip to nowhere good and quickly.

Every next snore that he snored once I was awake and trying to get him to stop snoring just pissed me off even more. This assault on my sleep, after years of babies and toddlers and anxiety over the babies and toddlers, was kind of a final straw. I didn’t want to be bothered by my husband. All those parenting hours that had chipped away at our alone time and our romance time were compounded in the middle of the night by his being the one to steal my rest from me. It was the opposite of romantic. It was burdensome and enraging.

Still, divorce did not enter my mind.

I began to fantasize about separate rooms. Sometimes, when it gets bad, Hosea shifts to a kid’s bed or the couch in the room off our bedroom. Sometimes, if a kid has already moved into our bed, he’ll simply take the kid’s bed. Mostly, though, he prefers our bed and his position beside me. Lucky me. I mean that, you know, except for the sleeplessness. “Would separate rooms help?” he asked one morning after I hadn’t slept much at all. “If that’s what it takes, let’s do it. It’s not like we’re doing anything in our bed at night surrounded by all these children other than sleeping.

“Sleeping,” he added, “if we’re lucky.”

It was practically the most romantic offer ever made under the circumstances. I felt cared for and understood. Our romance remains alive, despite all those children. Our love is strong. Partners in exhaustion (and often in anxiety, too), we both covet ever-elusive sleep. Regardless of whether I’d like my own bedroom—and I know I’m not the only woman to want one—the truth is we don’t have an extra bedroom.

•••

After years of practice, Hosea responds pretty well to being jostled. I don’t have to shake so hard or poke so pokily or yell so loud. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles whenever I have to do so. He is, I know he is, as he slumbers on and I lie awake for a while. Unromantic as snoring is, insomnia is pretty much of a mood dampener as well. Some nights I lie awake, perplexed that I’m awake and that what bothers me are such silly things as snoring—or teenagers’ socks strewn across the floor or loads of other things I never thought I’d be bothered by, for that matter. I don’t know what I thought would preoccupy me. It just wasn’t stuff like this.

Rather than simply have me furious at him every single night, we began to seek solutions. Hosea wears anti-snoring nose strips when he sleeps. They resemble band-aids. Some nights, they really help; other nights, they seem decorative, like the Dora the Explorer band-aids my daughter insists on wearing. After years of my badgering, Hosea finally visited an allergist. The allergist identified allergies and prescribed new medication. The snoring has decreased in frequency and audibility.

The white noise machine I bought to help drown him out helps some, too, although not once I’m in awake and especially not once I’m kicked into worried mode. My mother’s white noise machine is the public radio station, which drones on all night long—and serves the secondary purpose of distraction if she wakes up anxious. Also, my son notes her hearing isn’t quite what it used to be. We got into her car recently—the radio blasting—and I’d have to agree with him. I guess I’m still hopeful that, like my mother has somehow done, I will eventually reach a state of accepting accommodation in regards to my husband’s snoring. She continues to insist it’s “not that bad.” Hosea hasn’t gotten me a horn, and I haven’t begun to lose my hearing, not even selectively.

•••

SARAH WERTHAN BUTTENWIESER is a writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband and four children. Her work has appeared recently in the New York Times, Salon, and Brain, Child. Follow her on Twitter @standshadows.

First Thing

snowy couple — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By William Bradley

My Hodgkin’s Disease had returned—my doctor was fairly certain. It turns out he was wrong, that the strange glows on the scan were … well, something other than cancer. But Emily and I didn’t know that at the time.

This was in 2006, six years after my last radiation treatment. This time, it was in my thigh rather than in my neck and chest area, but nonetheless, the doctor seemed sure that it was back. I would need to have a biopsy performed, of course, but that felt like just a formality. A hunk of lymph nodes would be cut out, and then we’d begin treatments—likely radiation therapy, but a bone marrow transplant remained a possibility as well. Time was off the essence. I was likely going to die. My wife and I had serious thinking to do.

What we did know was that, when I’d had my bone marrow transplant in 1998, my doctor had said that I had a forty percent chance of living for more than five years. We also knew that I had radiation therapy to treat a recurrence two years after the transplant. Emily and I didn’t meet until after I had completed these treatments, but we had discussed my medical history, and what it meant for our relationship, once we were “seriously” dating—we met in grad school while working on our Ph.D.s in English, and had tried to keep things relatively casual so that we wouldn’t be tied down to another person. Neither of us wanted to compromise on our professional ambitions by becoming too attached to someone similarly ambitious, so we self-consciously tried to limit our relationship to one of hanging out and hooking up—a bit more intimate than friends-with-benefits, but nothing too emotionally consequential.

But at some point while hiking through the Missouri wilderness, or discussing the latest academic scandal reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education over coffee, or drinking cheap wine in her small basement apartment, we fell in love with each other, and we decided the best thing to do would be to get married. I couldn’t quite tell you when I realized that Emily mattered more to me than keeping all of my options open for the sake of my career, but I know that it happened.

Our life together was filled with reading, writing, sending out academic articles and creative work, supporting each other when the eventual rejections came, applying for academic jobs, worrying about money. We also played Scrabble, sought out strange landmarks like the world’s largest statue of a goose (“Maxie” in Sumner, Missouri), watched livestock shows at state fairs, and—in the words of the girl in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”—we would “look at new things and try new drinks.”

We had both been involved with other people before we met each other, of course. Both of us had been in college relationships that had continued for far too long, with protracted break-ups and broken hearts. After my bone marrow transplant, my college girlfriend and I were breaking up for the final time. I reflected on what I wanted in a romantic relationship. Someone adventurous, willing to travel and have new experiences. Someone who loved literature as much as I did, but who could also enjoy the same type of lowbrow culture I enjoyed—I wanted to be able to talk about books and art with someone who could also appreciate the sublime genius of Don Knotts’s performance in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Someone who had a sense of humor, who would laugh if I called her “scumbag” and would be willing to high-five me after sex. In short, I wanted to be in a relationship that was fun—I’d had enough of passive-aggression and adolescent angst.

As it happens, Emily had recently reached similar conclusions about her own love life. It wasn’t love at first sight, but we immediately knew that we made each other laugh and had fun together—she was not only down with the high-fiving but was willing to call me “dude.” Things grew from there.

As Emily and I contemplated what a malignancy would mean for our relationship, I realized I couldn’t really say that life was unfair. I had been fortunate to be disease-free for as long as I had been, I figured, and I had experienced a powerful love and friendship the likes of which I don’t think too many people get to experience. The only disappointment was that we couldn’t make it last forever, and it looked like our time together was coming to an end.

In the week between the tentative diagnosis and the biopsy that would ultimately be reassuring, we spent our days crying, our evenings drinking wine and trying to reassure each other that this would be okay, nothing we couldn’t handle. I’d done all this before, with only my parents for companionship and support, listening to depressing music like Warren Zevon’s Life’ll Kill Ya or Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss alone in the den that my parents had hastily converted into a bedroom when I’d been diagnosed. With Emily beside me, it wouldn’t be nearly as lonely or depressing. She knew how bad things had been before, how dark those days had been.

“I’m going to take care of you,” she said, looking at me from across the table on our screened-in porch while we drank our Pinot Grigio. “It’s not going to be like last time.”

I nodded and tried to agree. We said such things to each other, but hanging between us—unspoken, but mutually understood—was the understanding that a recurrence at this point could very well mean I would die.

The morning of the biopsy, Emily drove me to the hospital. After the nurse called me from the waiting room to the pre-op area, I handed Emily my wedding ring, which she put on her thumb. I kissed her goodbye.

What followed seemed to take forever—the shaving, the pre-surgery talk with the doctor, then watching the anesthesia drip through my IV.

I shut my eyes, then opened them to find myself sitting up, in recovery. It happened that fast. Emily and a nurse were laughing. I had a Diet Coke and a glass of water in front of me—my usual beverage order, if I’m not drinking wine or beer.

“Where did this Diet Coke and water come from?” I asked.

Emily smiled. “You asked the nurse for them when you woke up after your surgery.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I must have thought I was at a restaurant.”

At this, both Emily and the nurse exploded in laughter again.

“That’s the fourth time you’ve asked that question,” Emily said, “and then followed with ‘I must have thought I was at a restaurant.’”

I laughed too—although I should tell you that, later, when we told the story to friends, they were horrified. “I would have been afraid that it was permanent,” one friend replied. That obviously hadn’t occurred to Emily—or else, she is so used to the way I am normally that she didn’t worry that any lasting brain damage would be noticeable or change her life in any fundamental way.

At one point—still foggy and a bit confused—I glanced down at my left hand. My wedding ring was back where it belonged.

“When did you give this back to me?” I asked, holding up my hand.

This time, Emily did not laugh as she ran her hand up and down on my arm, telling me that it was the first thing I’d asked for—before the beverages, even—when I saw her after coming out of surgery.

“You said that you missed it,” she told me.

Emily and I have been together for eleven years, and as happy as that time has been, I have to tell you that we argue as much as any couple. Maybe even more—we can both be strong-willed and opinionated, especially when it comes to matters of teaching and writing, which are important parts of our careers. Sometimes, we argue over a work of literature. Sometimes, it’s pop culture. We rarely argue about politics, but it happens, sometimes.

More rarely—but more seriously—we fight about the important things in our marriage. Whether one of us takes the other for granted. Occasions of self-centeredness. Concerns that one of us prioritizes work over our relationship with each other. These are the serious fights. The ones that result in tears for her, or me stomping out of the house to “go for a walk, to clear my head.” These are the times when we get overwhelmed with thought—fears, suspicions, and pressures that probably come from outside the marriage itself, but are nonetheless real when we contemplate them.

But what I like about the story of my recovery from surgery is that it testifies to the fact that loving her isn’t something I have to think about—that even when my mind is wrapped up in a confused fog, when I’m basically just a being incapable of reflection, operating on instinct, unconscious habit, and biological imperative, I still love her. More than I love my job, more than I love literature, more than I love anything in the world. And I love her first, even before I get my Diet Coke and glass of water.

•••

WILLIAM BRADLEY has been married to the poet and Renaissance scholar Emily Isaacson for almost nine years now. She was the one who encouraged him to try to publish the creative nonfiction he wrote, and since then, he has had work appear in Fourth Genre, Brevity, The Normal School, Utne Reader, The Missouri Review, and other magazines. They spend most of their time in Canton, New York, where he teaches at St. Lawrence University.

The Women Before Me

By Sue Sanders

“Tell me about your girlfriends,” I ask the man I’ve been seeing for the last few months, my bare leg sprawled over his, my fingers grazing the graying hair of his chest. He holds me closer and begins to talk.

My relationship with Jeff was young, but we weren’t. At the time, I was in my late thirties, a single mom a year removed from the end of an eighteen-year relationship.

He’s ten years older, tall and fit, with silver curly hair and Delft blue eyes.

I want to hear about Jeff’s girlfriends not for the intimate details about those relationships (he’s not the type who would ever kiss and tell, anyway) but because learning about his past makes me feel closer to him. Plus, I’m nosy—although I like to think of it as “being curious.”

Dating in midlife is quite different from the last time I dated, in college. Then, there was still a shiny newness to it; everyone I met had only recently shed the protective wrappers of childhood. We each had fewer years of relationship experience than fingers on one hand. My college boyfriend and I had had other lovers before we got together during our sophomore year. But those early forays into sexual relationships were far more sexual than relationship; with inept fumbling in assorted cars and dorm rooms, it was mutual lust rather than lasting love. Youth may be exuberant, but it often doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.

Jeff had dated for far longer than I had. With decades of dating backstory, he was a bit like a book I’d been dying to read but one that started at chapter ten. I wanted to find out what happened in the previous chapters. It was, after all, the prologue to our relationship.

When my ex and I had met, we were essentially children. At nineteen, I was still a teenager. And like kids on a really great play date, we didn’t want the fun to end. We quickly became close, spending all our time outside of our classes together. We slouched on the grass of the quad, grabbed (too many) post-study drinks at an off-campus bar and, a few hours after that, huddled in a diner’s red vinyl booth, feeding each other greasy scrambled eggs and bacon. We skipped classes far too often, instead spending the day naked on his futon under the navy polyester-and-cotton blend comforter he’d brought from home, the one that made me itch and sweat in New Orleans’s humidity. When we graduated, we didn’t really discuss our future—we both just assumed that we’d stay together. And we did, for almost two decades. Then it was over, a twisted Theory of Relativity, parts of our universe expanding and each of us moving away from the other seemingly faster than the speed of light. For a year, I focused all my energy on our young daughter and surrounded myself with friends. It was more than enough until one day it suddenly wasn’t.

I was determined to meet someone—or someones—but, because of the large gap in my dating resume, I wasn’t quite sure how. In college, everyone wanted to connect with someone, for a night or for far longer. Now the only men I met were married to my mom friends. I saw other men, lurking in my favorite cafe and at the local food co-op, so I knew they existed, but they seemed strange and exotic and as approachable as the Yeti. So how did a middle-aged single mom of a young child meet men?

I asked my ex-sister-in-law (with whom I’d remained close) when we got together at a cafe for drinks. She suggested I give online dating a try—she’d met her husband that way. Sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc, she leaned closer on the edge of her chair and reminded me to practice safe sex. (I was actually going to have sex! … if I met someone). She plonked her glass on the table and warned me that some men actually lie and say they’re not married when they really are. I suddenly felt gullible and incredibly naive. The last time I dated, no one was married and cordless phones were the size of cereal boxes. Forewarned and forearmed (she’d given me a couple condoms), I joined a dating website, threw together a profile, and uploaded a digital photo.

Jeff quickly responded, sending me a thoughtful letter, and I immediately wrote him back. It was like a game of tag by email. As soon as one of us received a note, the other would reciprocate. Neither of us wanted to be the first one to stop writing. Email led to phone calls that led to a real-life meeting that led—eventually—to me snuggled into him, asking about his ex-girlfriends.

Jeff had an entire life before we met which, to me, sounded terribly fascinating and glamorous. He was a writer in New York City, and he’d met and dated a slew of interesting, talented women: dancers and writers, actresses, social workers and businesswomen. I moved closer and asked about the other women, the earlier ones. What were they like? Why had the relationship ended?

“So what happened with Anna?” I asked. (Anna isn’t her real name.)

“We were just at different places in our lives,” Jeff said, slowly. “She’d married young and divorced right before we met. She wanted to see what was out there.”

I was recently separated and Jeff was the first man I’d dated in almost twenty years. I told him that.

“Uh oh,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He brushed a strand of hair out of my face and smiled. “I guess I should ask where you are in your life, right?”

“I’m right here, right now,” I said, laughing, as I rubbed his arm. “And I sort of like this place. A lot.”

There were other questions that I didn’t ask: Would I have liked them? Would they like me? And why did this matter to me? As Jeff and I lay together and talked, my mind wandered. Thinking about his exes, I imagined how my life could have gone differently. I wondered what it would be like to try on an alternative life (and the men that might possibly have gone with it), like a pair of Levis. What if I hadn’t married my college boyfriend? What if I’d done something other than teach? What would my entire life had been like if I’d chosen a different path? I shut my eyes and pictured alternatives:

Me as a successful businesswoman, focused on my career in banking—no, corporate law!—meeting a series of businessmen for a quick wine spritzer after work. The men I date—power brokers in their fields!—have to have a greater net worth than me, and I’m very successful. (I’d tried dating a Ph.D. student once—a nice guy and extremely attentive in bed—but I’d had to pay for almost everything.) After yet another drink and scintillating talk of mergers, I catch a cab to my prewar classic six on the Upper East Side, stash my imaginary briefcase under the mahogany desk in the home office, and … I feel a very real nausea wash over me. Even in my imagination, I dislike Business Sue.

Instead, I pull on a black beret, tuck a cigarette behind my ear and move into a small walk-up studio in the East Village. (In my dream life, it’s 1986, and the East Village is still affordable.) I paint tiny canvasses with an eyelash brush or make jewelry from gold macaroni. (I relax a bit; this fits better.) I only date men like me, men who understand the creative process. We talk a lot about the creative process as we drink cheap red wine from chipped stoop sale teacups on my fire escape, dangling our legs over the edge. My love life is complicated. I immediately shoo away the man with the heroin habit. I get into heated arguments with another. We scream, break dishes, and make love amid the shards. Rubbing my backside, the fantasy dissolves as quickly as the imaginary relationships do with East Village Sue. She’s simply too unstable.

As Jeff reminisces about his earlier life and girlfriends, I wonder if I should’ve kept my mouth shut instead of asking about them—I’m jabbed by what I think are pinpricks of jealousy. How could I, a single mom pushing forty, a preschool teacher for goodness sakes, compete with the accomplished, interesting women of his past?

I weave the threads of my self-doubt into an insecurity blanket, pull it tightly over my shoulders, and say, “I’ve got to tell you, I’m a bit anxious. You’ve dated all these amazing women. I guess I’m feeling a little afraid.”

Jeff held me, looked into my eyes, and said, quietly, “Why? Dating was fun, but lonely. I spent an awful lot of time wishing I’d found someone who made me happy, who made me laugh, and kept me interested.” He laughed. “I wish I’d met you all those years ago.”

Real Sue smiled.

A year or so later, we got married. And now, closing in on fifty, I find there’s a comfort in knowing so much about the years before we met. But there’s also the small thrill of learning something new about Jeff (like, as a child, he never had a stuffed animal or that Frank Rich once sent him a fan letter) that keeps the relationship fresh. It’s newness and comfort rolled into one. And I still love hearing about his girlfriends.

•••

SUE SANDERS alternatively fights and embraces her neuroses and very much enjoys being Real Sue. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Real Simple, Brain, Child, Salon, and others. Her first book, Mom, I’m Not a Kid Anymore, was published in the spring.

Young Love

By Zsofi McMullin

My phone buzzes just as I drain hot pasta over the sink with Sam hanging on my leg and my husband talking about the mortgage or some electrical issues in our basement or something else house-related. I try to nudge Sam away from the boiling water and towards the dining room table—with a quick stop to wash his sticky little hands. I hear my phone again, impatiently beeping and buzzing, and I recognize that someone is trying to send me a message over Skype. It could be my mom or my brother, so I settle Sam, serve dinner, and quickly glance at the screen.

It’s not my mom. It’s not my brother. It’s Him. It’s a short message and it’s written in German and despite not having spoken one word of German in oh, about fifteen years, I know and understand every single word immediately. “I was at a charity event tonight and I don’t know why but I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

That’s it.

That’s it and I am nineteen again.

That’s it and I am back in his small, dark college dorm room, lightheaded from one too many fuzzy navels and giddy with excitement. I am sitting on the floor across from him, cross-legged, but all I can think about is how much I want to wrap my legs around him and pull him even closer. We are both wearing flannel, and Whitney Houston is playing in the background. A friend of ours stops by for a few minutes, but quickly realizes that he is interrupting whatever it is that’s about to happen. He laughs and rustles my hair as he gets up to leave, like he is happy for me.

I feel happy and confident when he finally kisses me—I’ve done this before, I know what comes next, but I am amazed that it is actually happening to me. I mean, he is so cool. So blond. So blue-eyed. So dreamy and smart and worldly and, oh my God, that accent. I am a chubby Jewish girl from Hungary—I don’t get swept off my feet by sparkly-eyed blonds. Ah, but I am now, and we quickly make our way to my room—my roommate is away for the weekend.

There is some confusion about whether I am a virgin or not, but after I reassure him that he is not about to deflower me, he is tender and hungry and talks to me in German the whole time. I wake up in the middle of the night, squished between him and the cold cement wall and spend the rest of the night in the lounge of my dorm building, watching bad TV and thinking that what I have just done was so cool and so grown-up and so sophisticated. And so very unlike me. I don’t see him leave in the morning, but he leaves a note on my bed. “You are a wonderful woman. See you soon.” And his initials: PD. I realize in a panic that I have no idea what the “D” stands for.

It’s March now, and he is graduating in two months. It quickly becomes clear that our night of passion does not guarantee me any privileges when it comes to seeing him, or talking to him, or eating together in the cafeteria. It does not gain me invitations to the cool parties he attends or to the spring dance. I think we go on one date maybe—a movie and an uncomfortable dinner.

It doesn’t matter. I am in love.

It’s easy to think back and say that I was young and stupid and confused sex with love. It was probably true. He was doing what handsome German students do during their study-abroad year. I was doing what bookish lonely girls do when said handsome German students pay attention to them. It is all so dull and obvious now, but it was so tragic back then and it would have stayed like that in my memory if our story had ended there.

But it didn’t. In fact, our story is still not over and that’s an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach every time his name shows up in my inbox.

After our (well, mostly my) tearful goodbye on a cool May morning before I headed back home to Budapest for the summer, I was convinced that I would never see him again. But for once, I was pleasantly surprised. He came to visit me that summer and the next, flew to the U.S. to see me at college several times. We talked on the phone and e-mailed all the time, and we met up at international airports for quick, furtive rendezvous in business lounges. Most memorably, he showed up at my office, unannounced, a month before my wedding.

Through all those years of not seeing each other much, we somehow became friends and moved on from our beginning as a tipsy one-night-stand. I think we both found it easier to open up when we were so far apart from each other, yet just a phone call away. The heart and the mind are so easy to reveal in a quick e-mail, a brief message, a silly card. There was always something easy between us, something natural and light-hearted. He was six years older than me, already weighed down by starting a career and figuring out what grown-up life is about, and I think for a long time—and maybe even now—I represented a carefree and happy time in his life. It was a comfort to both of us to recall our haphazard romance and to share a laugh about our youth and naïveté.

We never really talked about it, but obviously we both dated other people and I got married first. When he showed up at my office on a cold November morning, my heart stopped because again, this was not something that happened outside of movies—a scandal before my wedding? Did he come to take me away? To confess—finally!—that he is truly and madly in love with me? Did I even want that anymore?

He made no confessions. He came to say goodbye—I suspect that by then he was in a serious relationship with his future wife and had to put an end to whatever was going on between us. We held each other for a long time. He kissed me on the forehead and brushed his knuckles playfully across my chin before he left my apartment. I watched him walk down the long stairway leading to the street from my front door and for a moment I almost—almost—called him back. But I knew that would have been a mistake and that neither one of us were the kind of people who would do that before our weddings.

We stayed in touch for the next decade, exchanging a few phone calls, a few e-mails about birth, death, jobs—the big stuff of life. There was always so much tenderness and so much history in our exchanges, assuring us that we weren’t alone in navigating all of this uncharted grown-up territory. It felt like we were finally on equal footing—I didn’t feel like the chubby Jewish girl anymore, and he didn’t seem like that shiny, untouchable person I remembered him to be. We were just two people who knew each other from way back when, who built a friendship out of an ill-fated college romance.

So here we are now, almost thirteen years later. Here is this message on my phone, beeping and wanting attention. I want to give it attention, because it’s …well, because it’s Him. I am a practical person: I believe that love is a choice every single day; that marriage is a choice every single day. No matter how hot the passion is in the beginning, to sustain a life together the passion must cool and every morning must begin with a choice—to be present, to be kind, to be understanding, to iron shirts, to cook a favorite meal, to listen.

But whatever this other thing is, it is not my choice—and it never has been. Whatever pulled me to him on that March night when I was nineteen is still in me—irrational, unexplainable, unstoppable, and I assume never-ending. I have felt this stupid love-like-thing for this man for the past eighteen years of my life and I have no reason to think it will change.

The next morning he e-mails me to say that he is thinking about what the rest of his life holds for him, how to handle the responsibilities thrust upon him and still find happiness. “Right now, but also for the past few years I wish I had you by my side,” he writes. “For many reasons.”

I know that, years ago, a message like that would have had me in tears of joy. And I am in tears now too as I look at my iPad screen in the early morning darkness. But it’s not joy I feel. I want to scold him. I want to be angry. Has he not learned how easy it is to believe that life would be different—better, more exciting, sexier, easier—with someone else? Does he not know that if he did have me by his side, he would not write me lovelorn notes in the middle of the night? I would be the nagging wife who only has time for the kids and I would not be the young love that got away.

I turn off the iPad and try to go back to sleep. As I drift off, I think about how I don’t want our story to be a sad one. I don’t want it to be about regret, or the road not taken, or opportunity not seized. I don’t want it to be about making the wrong choice or picking the wrong person. I am not sure what our story is about, but I can’t let it be about those things. I want it to be about possibility, about love that endures in whatever shape it appears in life. I want it to be about making a choice and sticking with it.

I want it to be about that little corner of the heart where I tuck away what I treasure most: an old friend with sparkly blue eyes, the smile of my baby, the reassuring weight of my husband in bed next to me.

•••

ZSOFI MCMULLIN was born in Budapest and lived there until she turned eighteen. She became a “full-grown-person” over the past nineteen years spent in the U.S. She lives on the coast of Maine with her husband and her four-year-old son. Her day job is in publishing, but she spends all of her free time between four and five a.m. every morning imagining that she is a writer.