Careful Intimacies

pin heart — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Sarah M. Wells

I wear my tall brown boots and short white dress and walk with you like we haven’t been married over a decade and don’t have three children. They are at your parents’ house, baking ginger cookies and picking daffodils and dandelions, for me, because they’re sweet.

We will not talk about the kids tonight, not because we do not love them, but precisely because we love them.

“Just imagine, in four years,” you say, “we could tell Lydia we’ll be back in a few hours and just… leave.” I try to imagine it and can’t.

We talk about anything except upcoming coach-pitch practice, Cub Scouts, and gymnastics. We order two sides and a couple of drinks at The Lockview. It’s our kind of crowd, our kind of bar, hipster, and you secretly love hipster-ish things.

“I can’t pull off hipster,” you say.

“Yeah, skinny jeans don’t work for you,” I say.

“No way, but if big-ass-baggy-short-white-guy jeans were popular, I’d be in.”

“We could market that,” I say, “It has a nice ring to it.” We drink and people-watch. That guy diagonal from us, he could be my grandpa’s cousin. “Maybe he is my grandpa’s cousin,” I say.

Grandpa’s been dead for over seven years. Our middle son, Elvis, was four months old when I sat alone next to Grandpa’s hospice bed and prayed for him to give up his spirit while Mom and Grandma rested, my skin prickling as he sighed one last time and I half-spoke and whispered, “Brandon? I think he’s gone.” You came in quick with Elvis in your arms, our tiny cranky infant who nearly died just four months earlier because he couldn’t breathe as he exited my interior, capillaries sticky and stubborn.

But we’re not talking about them now, because the sun is shining and it’s just us this evening, just us and your Old Fashioned, my Lemon Ice martini. I am determined to take as many selfies with you as you do with the guys when you’re on the road for work. I tag it on Facebook, “Bold and the Beautiful?” and you say, “You mean baold and the beautiful,” because it’s been almost twelve years since we married and you feel bald and old, though you are neither. It doesn’t matter because you feel it, my Mr. Smooth who walks slow sometimes, suave through his back pain, knee pain, elbow pain. Mr. Smooth’s hairline is receding but come on, husband, I don’t notice. You grew out your goatee again, and I love you with a goatee, its bristles against my chin when we kiss.

This is the second time we’re seeing Lyle Lovett and the third for John Hiatt. You raise your drink and toast, “Happy Valentine’s Day!” these tickets a gift from me to you. One Valentine’s Day, we saw a Christian rock group and the next we spent in the hospital for a follow-up miscarriage procedure. It’s April 26 and the second time we’ve been out together this month, with so many road trips and conferences, gymnastics and softball practices.

I have my hand on your thigh and your hand covers mine. Our knees are touching in orchestra row J, seats three and four, and we are keeping time to the beat with our touching knees. John Hiatt finishes singing, “Marlene, Marlene, my love for you’s obscene,” and Lyle Lovett says something to John Hiatt about his songwriting, how he knows Mrs. Hiatt and Mrs. Hiatt’s name isn’t Marlene. Hiatt has been married twenty-nine years, and I squeeze Brandon’s hand. I try to imagine life in another seventeen years.

The guy in front of us is passed out and hasn’t moved for at least an hour. You lean in close and whisper-yell how that happened to you once at a Merle Haggard concert, back when you were dating Devin, maybe? We call that “BS,” before Sarah. The guy in front of us will have a crick in his neck when he wakes up. He still isn’t waking up, even as Lyle Lovett sings, “Some things, my baby don’t tolerate from me.”

•••

Twenty-four hours ago, you asked, “Do you mind if I go play golf with Jerry?”

I stuffed one sock inside the other as I folded laundry and said, “No problem. Do you know when you’ll be back?”

You smiled with your golf gear in your arms and said, “I don’t know.” I grabbed a shirt and folded it the way my mom taught me.

“Well, are you going to play nine holes or eighteen, are you going to eat dinner together? Do you think you’ll go to sing karaoke after?” I replied, the way my mom never replied, and you laughed, “I just don’t know, okay?”

I dropped a pair of Henry’s underwear into the stack of minion-printed briefs, the way you prefer because it’s stupid to fold boys’ underwear. It’s underwear, you say.

“Well,” I said, “I think it’s only fair to give some clue as to when you will be home—it’s not that I care, I don’t,” I lied, trying to negotiate the same space as usual, quality time and childcare and your priorities and my neediness. “I just want to know so I know whether to be excited you’ll be home soon at eight or to settle into an evening of reading, knowing you’ll be back after I’m in bed. Either way is fine. I just want to know.”

“I don’t like these kinds of restraints,” you said, and I started to say, “Then maybe you shouldn’t have gotten married.”

As the words fell out, I remembered our confessions just a week earlier, my blubbering, “Why can’t you just say you think I’m pretty?” at the most intimate moment, when things weren’t working in harmony, in that fragile space. You rolled off of me and sobbed, “You make me feel like such a failure!” How we held each other, how we apologized, how we touched each other’s faces and whispered all our truths into old wounds.

I remember this as the words drip, maybe you shouldn’t have gotten married.

When we hit an impasse, you angry and calling off your golfing, me angry and finishing folding laundry, I carried our daughter’s clothes back to her bedroom to find her with her friend tucked behind the door. “What are you doing?” I asked, reading their guilt.

“Nothing,” they said, “You can leave those on my bed, I’ll put them away,” Lydia said and left. I wondered what she overheard, what she was listening for in between our living room remarks. I thought back to my own ear against the door eavesdropping on my parents as my dad yelled his frustration in the dark of night. “You never…” he said, my ears too young to hear or know what she never did but old enough to know my mom was crying and lying in bed, my dad standing somewhere in the dark bedroom. I wondered if they might divorce, maybe even cried into my pillow and prayed before drifting off to sleep.

“She said they weren’t listening to us,” you told me when I returned to the living room, “‘We didn’t hear one word you said,’ she said.” We rolled our eyes and smiled thin lines. You went out to the front of the house and I went out to the back of the house. Later, we would lean close into each other in our bedroom and forget, but until then, you shot hoops and I cut shrubs all afternoon, one of each of our children by our sides, separate.

•••

But we’re not talking about them now, or that. Like love keeps no record of wrongs, it took me a long time to remember exactly what it was Lydia and her friend might have overheard, and now that I have I’ve remembered, too, a long list of other wrongs dealt and received. I flinch a little because now John Hiatt is singing, “I’ve been loving you for such a long time, girl, expecting nothing in return, just for you to have a little faith in me,” and your fingers are interlaced with mine. This is the song you burned onto that CD you made me a month after we met, along with a dozen others I remember.

I remember it all again in a moment, it’s all here, Grandpa and my parents and your parents and our exes, our vices, our joys, John Hiatt singing, “Have a little faith in me,” all of it is here between us now, held in between our interlaced fingers.

Okay, so our love keeps record of wrongs, but also mercies. After all, we are here. We hold our wrongs and mercies together in careful intimacy. I run my fingernails across the grooves in your big-ass-baggy-short-white-guy jeans and you put your hand on my knee, just below my dress’s white hemline.

At any moment, I think John Hiatt’s voice might splinter and that’ll be it, but he just keeps hanging on to those notes, he just keeps singing, Won’t you have a little bit a, a little bit a, please! Please! Please, now baby! Ohh, won’t you have a little faith in me? By the time the concert is over, the drunk man in front of us is up and clapping. It’s only 9:16—you guessed 9:15 and I guessed 9:30, so you win. We want them to play more, longer, but they are finished.

We slip out the side exit, your fingers grazing the small of my back as we walk through the sheep-shuffle concertgoers. “Want to get a drink and a bite in the Valley?” you ask, even though it’s Sunday and I have to get up for work tomorrow, you have to take our children to school. We are not tired, and our children might not even be asleep yet.

Let’s stay away a little while longer, darling.

•••

SARAH M. WELLS is the author of a nonfiction e-book, The Valley of Achor, a collection of poems, Pruning Burning Bushes, and a chapbook of poems, Acquiesce. Her essays have been listed as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2012, 2013, and 2014. She recently completed a memoir-in-essay collection about love and attention, marriage, parenting, and desire titled American Honey. Sarah serves as the Managing Editor for the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and as Associate Editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.

Things that My Mother Supposes

By Christine Wenzel

“I don’t suppose you’ll be coming to my funeral.” This matter-of-fact statement popped into our conversation right after my mother asked me to pass the salt shaker. We were having dinner at her favorite steak house.

“Why are we talking about your funeral?” I asked.

“I have already been to the funeral home and picked out my casket.”

“Mom, are you dying?”

“I’m eighty-six years old. I suppose I will sooner or later.”

Long ago, when our relationship was shakier than it is now, I asked if she could please, please eliminate the word “suppose” in conversations with me. If she had a question or a statement just say it, don’t cloak it. She said that she didn’t even notice she used the word.

“I suppose you’re not going to eat that food on your plate.”

“I don’t eat meat.”

“I suppose you think you’re old enough to go out on a date.”

“Yes, Mother, I’m sixteen.”

“I suppose you realize teenage marriages have a high failure rate.”

“Ah, yes, this is the umpteenth time you’ve mentioned it.”

I noted the teenage marriage fact, waited until I turned twenty, and married two days later.

My mother’s dire warnings and the fact that no one in my family liked my choice of husband fueled my high-and-mighty, them-against-us mentality. Which meant that when the abuse started and then escalated, I hid it from them, until I couldn’t any longer. I hold the title of the first—and, to date, only—divorcee of the family.

I was the classic middle child, believing that my sisters received preferential treatment. I think that the friction between my mother and me started early, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to follow in the footsteps of her firstborn, studious, introverted daughter, the one easier for her to understand. My rebellious childhood carried into my adult life. Our disagreements became a habit. When I moved to another country, not so much to get away, but to follow a path that made me happy, it actually helped our relationship. We were good with short visits. It’s hardly worth the effort to try and change someone when you only have a week here and there.

What neither of us ever supposed is that peace would exist between us before she died. Not just peace but we would finally get each other and let each other be who we are. It’s taken me a long time to get here.

An example: I was a demonstrative kid. My dad nicknamed me “Kissie,” a play on “Chrissie,” which I was known as before I got everyone trained to use my more grownup name. Before puberty and teenage attitude set in, bedtime netted a big bear hug and kiss from Dad, then I’d roam the house looking to say goodnight to Mom. I’d find her buried in a book or at her desk, a magnifying glass in hand, studying the condition of a stamp. I’d attempt a goodnight kiss on her cheek. As I leaned in, she’d jerk her head to the side and my lips would brush her ear. I’m not sure if she knew I made a game of trying to plant one on her cheek, sneaking up from different angles to see if I could be the faster one and land that kiss on target. The score was heavily weighted in her favor.

The age gap between my older sister, Vicky, and me is enough for her to have grown up with a different maturity of understanding towards our family dynamics. “You know Mom had two nervous breakdowns when we were growing up. That’s why she was often remote.” Vicky dropped this tidbit into a conversation, suggesting, could I really be that clueless?

“She did? Why didn’t she ever tell me? I just thought she didn’t like kids.”

This new perspective, along with seeing an unfamiliar softness in my mother when she spends time with my son, started me on a path of realization. She did the best she could. I push her buttons. And, we will always be there for each other.

I started counting to ten rather than responding to her unfiltered comments.

“Mom, I just got back from the hospital. I lost the baby.”

“Don’t you think you’re getting a bit old for having more babies?”

One, two three… And once I get to ten, enough time has passed for me to change the script to what I believe she means: “I don’t want to see you hurt or sad, so don’t get pregnant anymore.” In her world, practicality trumps sentimentality every time.

Talking about her funeral is in keeping with her pragmatic nature. I’m just wishing she wasn’t talking to me about it. I actively avoid the thought of her dying. It’s enough of a reminder seeing her body shrink and her movements slow—why do we have to talk about it, too?

I’ve witnessed her busyness around death. I can’t manage being in the same room with a dearly departed, but I’ve stood outside, listening to her tell the funeral director that he had to re-part my grandfather’s hair on the right side. She took the decision to cremate her mom, had a big burial ceremony, and then later showed us an identical urn where she had kept half of the ashes. This half now sits on a shelf in her closet. I assume this gives her comfort. I kept waiting for her to cry when my dad died, thinking that this would be the time her stoic facade crumbled. It wasn’t.

“Mom, let’s leave the discussion about whether I will or won’t attend the formal part of your funeral off the table for right now. I’m more interested in why you are asking me to write your eulogy. Vicky or Janet would be much better for this.”

“You’re the writer in the family,” she says.

I’m tempted to say, Really? You know this even though I stopped sending you things I write long ago? You’ve never commented on anything I’ve written. Good or bad. But I’m past biting back. My sisters and I have compared notes and discovered that although she doesn’t give any of us direct compliments or encouragement, she does often say nice things about us when we’re out of earshot. No swelled heads in our family.

She continued. “Yes, I suppose they’ve been around more than you”—one, two, three … —“witnessing my day to day, my work the awards banquets, my volunteering. I believe you’re the one who can find the words to show who I was, not just tell what I did.”

“A little fast with the past tense, aren’t you, Mom?” A lump was forming in my throat.

“What I’m thinking is you can write about some of the stories, like why geese terrified me—that might get a laugh. And how impressed I was with your father’s presence of mind on our first date when he handed me his false teeth for safe keeping, then jumped into a fight to help his brother. Maybe mention how my father was a hippie before anyone knew what that was and how hard it was growing up with his instability, but I still managed to go to university.”

“Should I mention the time that the doctor’s solution to your menopause was Valium and you took so many you fell asleep standing up and then—”

Before I could finish, she said, “That could be left out.”

As we were leaving the restaurant, she touched my arm. “Could you work on it sooner than later?”

“I assume you want a chance to edit it.” I said.

“I suppose that wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

•••

CHRISTINE WENZEL is a Canadian who has been living in Mexico for twenty-two years. This is her first essay to be published, and she is thrilled that it is with Full Grown People. Her sisters’ names aren’t Janet and Vicky. You can find some articles she’s written about the town she lives in on her website, christinewenzel.com.

So Happy Together

chairs — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Jennifer Niesslein

We met in the dim basement of a fraternity. The fraternity—we can’t remember which now, any one of those old columned houses lining Rugby Road—pumped music loud and we had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. We were refilling our red Solo cups from the keg of cheap beer when we first yelled to each other. We were dressed alike, in tee-shirts and denim shorts. We joked later that we found each other because we were the two people who looked as if they shouldn’t be there, vaguely alternative kids in a sea of khakis and L.L. Bean.

We were nineteen years old. It’s funny to think that we danced that night—Hey, show this person your least impressive skill! We went outside to talk and stood close to each other. We didn’t want the night to end so we piled in with the others in Kathy’s little Honda; we slept in the same room that night, one of us in the bed, the other on the futon. From that night on, we were inseparable.

We both lost weight that first year. We woke each morning giddy that something good would happen that day: we would see each other. Of course, in the first few weeks, we were both a little cautious, consumed with a heady mix of romance and doubt. Was it completely reciprocal? Would we run out of things to talk about? Would some terrible, deal-breaking flaw reveal itself?

There was a certain kiss that tamped the doubts down. We were walking from a party, holding hands during the few blocks it would take us to get to the convenience store. We were going to buy a pack of cigarettes. We stopped and turned toward each other, savoring those seconds when our mouths were near but hadn’t yet made contact, the salty scent of our faces, the delicious nerves. We kissed. After that, we threw out caution. We took a sort of ownership of each other’s bodies, a jumble of legs and arms and mouths and love.

•••

On the university grounds, there was another couple that looked like us, her tall and with a sheet of long hair, him taller with a mop of curls. They broke up before graduation, but we wondered if they got the same sort of comments we did. A mentally ill woman—the one who did somersaults on the pedestrian mall—told us that we were going to make beautiful children; strangers we’d just met would remark on how well matched we were. Our chemistry seemed like a force field.

We twined our lives together. We stood together outside the hospital room door and heard the first cries of our oldest nephew after his birth. We took cheap vacations to places like off-season Chincoteague, using our last ten in cash to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. We stayed up late waiting for the other to get off shift waiting tables or tending bar. One summer day, we skipped work to go hiking at Sugar Hollow. It was a ways out of town and we drove with the windows open and the music pouring from the speakers. We found an easy sun-dappled trail that led through some streams, and we walked the gentle incline, bumping into each other just as an excuse to touch skin. We took pictures of each other posing on a rock that lay just beneath the surface of the water, an optical illusion of levitation.

That’s how we felt about each other: we walked on water.

•••

We grew up to be the people we are now, shape-shifting together, holding hands like the Wonder Twins. We were the engineering major and the English major, morphing into the trumpet player and the local journalist, turning into the chemical engineer and the aspiring short-story writer. We became husband and wife, father and mother, good cop and bad cop, fly fisherman and Scrabble addict, quality assurance engineer and business owner.

We can see our flaws now, both in ourselves and each other. On the eve of our thirteenth wedding anniversary, a strong thunderstorm blew into town. A huge limb fell off our maple, hitting the yard with such force that it stuck into the earth at a forty-five degree angle. Worse, the city sewage line backed up into our basement.

We spent most of the night on the phone, calling the city and the sort of companies that clean up murder scenes. It was certainly grisly down there, the pipe in the recesses near the hot water heater spewing whole neighborhoods’ worth of filth. We rolled a dampened towel and placed it under the basement door so the smell wouldn’t permeate the rest of the house.

The next day, the city came to clear the wreckage and the cleaning company came back to scour. We lost nearly everything in the basement. We were tired and both missing work to deal with this minor catastrophe. After everyone left, we sighed, assessing our lost belongings—the antique chest that held sports equipment, a basket of laundry, the bright ceramic flowerpots bought on a long-ago Mother’s Day. Our Christmas tree and ornaments, including every one that our son had ever made and the Lenox china one of two doves, bearing in gold script “First Christmas Together 1991.”

“Did you at least save the ornament—our ornament?” one asked the other.

“No—the whole box was disgusting.”

Exhausted, we snapped then, reverting to type: one of us irritated and pragmatic, the other seething and sentimental. We didn’t speak for the rest of the day, not so much as a punishment but to avoid saying something that we couldn’t unsay. We took a nap; we came to our senses by dinnertime. It was our anniversary, for God’s sake. We had each other, even if our keepsakes, as we’d later put it, went down with the shit.

•••

It’s been so many years, we might be the kind of people that some refer to as “smug marrieds.” We don’t know. Every partnership, it seems to us, is a locked box, knowable only to the people in it. We don’t feel smug. We feel grateful for the constant accrual of all these minutes together—the winks across a crowded room, the ass grab in the kitchen, the phone call from home, the car sex on a (whoops, not quite) deserted road, the arm to cling to at the funeral, the mispronunciations of words that our son made when he was little.

Last year, we turned forty. It sounds odd to say, but we don’t know what the other looks like anymore. We have too many associations—love, passion, comfort—to see one another with any degree of objectivity.

For people like us, forty is when you start to realize that you’re out of big beginnings. Unless something unexpected happens (or you force it to happen), there will be no new romances, no new weddings, no more of your own babies to nuzzle. You know very well that you’re not going to relocate.

Couples around us have started to break apart, tender bands of skin on their ring fingers, new apartment keys in their key chains. Even in the very best of circumstances—amicable, mutually decided, no kids—we find it sad for them, something with such a hopeful beginning coming to a close. No matter how much better off our friends wind up being—and they are, they always are, at least emotionally—there is pain.

On a more self-involved level, though, these break-ups remind us of something every couple loses sight of: that it only takes one of you to develop an itch for something new, and there is nothing at all that the other can do about it. It’s the lesson we learn from our newly single friends, over and over. We try hard to lose sight of the lesson for the sake of ourselves. As someone wise once said, “You gotta have faith, faith, faith.”

•••

We got married on the grounds of a sprawling bed and breakfast, just beyond the koi pond. It had sprinkled earlier in the day, but by the time the pianist struck up “Here Comes the Bride,” the sky was clear and warm. We were twenty-four and wrote our own vows. The ceremony itself lasted all of five minutes.

It was a lovely beginning, but essentially it was just a party in celebration of us.

In novels and in jazz, the big squishy middle is where all of the interesting stuff happens. In our story, this is where we are now.

We don’t know which events will seem important years down the road, but we’re living the details right now. In 2013, in our big, messy house, our son practices his clarinet. Our Boston terrier mix is still alive, goofy as ever. We haven’t used a babysitter in a long while, and we usually go out to eat on Saturdays, just the two of us; weirdly, our son despises eating out. We laugh ourselves silly over a random lyric we hear on the radio. We eat lunch together most days in the TV room and finish off with a piece of chocolate. One day in February, you come home from work with Chinese food for us, and I ask you, my valentine, to read this, and you do.

This essay originally appeared on The Nervous Breakdown, which is an excellent site you should check out.

•••

JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is the founder and editor of Full Grown People. Her website is jenniferniesslein.com.