He wasn’t a handsome man, but he had a handsome man’s chin. And a voice that made up for pretty much everything else. I could not get over his voice. It’s the only thing about me, he once said, that I can control. He was on his college debate team and I could only imagine the suckers that thought they could actually talk him out of anything. I spent years trying to find a voice that resembled his, just so I could hear it again, but I never could. He was also quite tall, which was nice in theory, though I really didn’t ever get to see him all that much.
When I was twenty-six, we had the briefest of brief love affairs that lasted really only a couple of weeks; well, really only about four nights. But then, after it was over, we swirled around in each other’s heads for years, each not really aware that the other had never forgotten those four nights. Was, in fact, still thinking about them.
We had met in the backyard of my first real boyfriend four years before our actual love affair. I heard that voice and saw him casually snap a cigarette out of my first real boyfriend’s hands and I thought, Oh. This is the kind of guy I should be with. And then when a bunch of us were hanging out a few years later, after he’d moved out west, and then returned briefly, I realized I still felt the same way. But he had to go back west, he told me, as we stood in the dark outside a bar, and he continued to explain why, even though it seemed like we could be dating, we couldn’t really be dating.
But we both thought about it for a long time. Long after he moved back west and after I got married and after he got married. We had been in and out of touch for all those years that followed. I would write to him out of the blue and he would write back and it was just basic how are you doing sort of emails, nothing much, really. But it thrilled me anyway.
And then one time I wrote to see how he was, and it turned out he just happened to be visiting relatives back east, not far from where I was now living with my husband and two children. And we thought that hey, wouldn’t it be fun if we got together? It was. He came with his wife and his young son and we all got along well. At one point, when the two of us were talking alone together in the kitchen, he leaned against the counter and knocked a bowl to the floor. It shattered. And he was incredibly flustered, but I told him it was no big deal at all, just a bowl, jeez, wanting so much to make him feel comfortable. I noticed again that he was really quite tall. Thirteen years had passed. I was almost forty.
One night, soon after this, when he was safely back across the country, I asked him, in an online chat, to tell me something he’d always wanted to tell me. There was something about how he had knocked that bowl onto the ground. There was something I thought I knew. And eventually, after asking me if I was sure I wanted to know, he wrote that he should have never gone back west way back when we should have dated but didn’t. We should have, in fact, dated. I mean, there was more, of course, but that was basically it. We had never stopped thinking about each other for all those years. So now what?
There are people that make an appearance in our lives at exactly the right time. Sometimes you recognize it immediately but, other times, you don’t quite see it until long after the fact, when a series of events that seemed random and scattered begin to line up in your memory with a surprisingly linear precision.
So for instance, not long after the online chat just described, I was with my husband at a friend’s birthday party when I started talking to a woman I had known just a little bit. We were both giddy and a bit drunk at this party, and she told me about a writing workshop that was offered through a local university. I suppose we were talking about writing, but I can’t really remember how we got there. She told me that the university got good writers to lead these workshops and all you had to do was apply. If you got in, it was free. “You should do it!” she said, hardly knowing me at the time.
And I did. And it was at this workshop, where I found myself sitting at a table with total strangers, not a mother or a wife but a writer, where I began to feel my real self emerging again, the one I had buried for years, buried so that I could not see what was right in front me: my terrible unhappiness, my difficult, exhausting marriage.
When I think of the beginning of the end of my marriage, I always return to that random conversation with a woman who had been an acquaintance, a conversation that very casually set off a long series of events that quite simply changed the entire direction of my life.
But what about the man with the handsome man’s chin? Did you think this was going to be a love story?
It was, in a way.
After our online confession, he wrote me gorgeous poems, the sort of poems you dream of receiving when you’re twelve years old, studying your face in the mirror, and imagining love. It was intoxicating, of course. There were secret phone calls in which we talked about our love for each other, with a plan to meet secretly, somehow, even though we still lived thousands of miles away. We were never going to run away together. But maybe we could meet just one time. We had never, in all those years, spent more than a few hours together.
This is the guy you’re supposed to wait for your whole life: the one who gets you, who thinks you are more beautiful, more special, more interesting, than any other woman in the world, who says exactly the things you want to be told, things that you assumed no one could possibly know you’d want to hear.
We had never, in all those years, spent more than a few hours together.
In the end, we stopped talking. He had to stop. He couldn’t see me. He thought he could come all those thousands of miles by himself, just for a time, but in the end, he could not. And in the end, it was too much, too sad, too painful for everything. And then his emails got less and less frequent; he would not answer his phone when I called. It was too hard for him to keep up with his normal life and to have this secret life. I got that. But I missed him. I kept trying to contact him, but he was gone. For a long time, I was angry, frustrated, sad. Years passed. My life took a turn for the worse, and then, after another series of events, a turn for the better. Which is where I am now.
When I think of him, this man whose love for me was like the love you are told to wait for your whole life, I can only think of him as someone who, more than once, simply showed up in my life at exactly the right time. He was never going to be the love of my life, not really, much as I thought so at the time, but the one who would make me think (more than once), Oh. This is the kind of guy I should be with. Not him, exactly. We were never quite real to each other. Our relationship, if it had really happened in our twenties, would have ended. Maybe after a few months. Or a few years. Instead, nearing the age of forty, it was one last gasp at our youth, a way to recapture those few weeks, or really, those four nights, that we barely spent together. Even at the time, I could see that we were setting ourselves up for a disappointment, but not quite the disappointment that it turned out to be.
But I like to think that we both showed each other a window in which a different swirling life existed, and then once the blinds were quickly drawn, we could keep that image in our heads. We could hear a faint voice on the other side, waiting for us to get over there, to see what was possible.
•••
REYNA EISENSTARK is a freelance writer living in Chatham, New York. You can read more of her writing at reynaeisenstark.wordpress.com.
It’s supposed to rain. That’s the prediction. A hurricane sweeping northward, swiping an angry claw at the Midwest. I have a bad feeling as we drive to Forever Sports, the boat outfitter near the freeway overpass, nothing I can pinpoint specifically, just low-grade anxiety. I predict lightning. I predict marital discord. “I can see the newspaper headline now,” I tell my husband as he steers our car, Man O’ War, down the rutted dirt driveway to Forever Sports: “Newcomers zapped by lightning.”
A hot Tuesday morning, muggy and still, as if the world is holding its breath. We’re in the middle of the country, hundreds and hundreds of miles from either coast. We moved here a year ago after I took a tenure-track job teaching writing at a small liberal arts college in Southwest Ohio. Our teen-age son gone, out in Colorado visiting friends, I’m off for the summer, and Rudy has been job-hunting for the past year.
In between sending out resumes and going on interviews, he’s been restoring the old house we bought: stripping, scraping, sanding, painting. The bank repo is slowly evolving from a hopeless bag lady to a well-upholstered matron at a garden party. Renovating the house is hard, sweaty, solitary work. It’s dirty. And lonely. Not having a meaningful job has put Rudy in a deep, deep funk. Sometimes when we drive past Wal-Mart he says he ought to stop by, fill out an application. “Maybe I can be a greeter,” he joshes. But the joke is wearing thin. These days, asking him about his job prospects is like asking a woman trying to get pregnant if she’s ovulated that month. Our marriage is filled with these little bogs and shallow marshes, soft fleshy depressions where it’s easy to get stuck if we don’t watch where we’re going.
The boat place looks closed, although the sign on the door says Open. Rudy tries the door. Locked. He pounds on it. No answer. We’re already way too invested in the canoe trip, swept up in the idea of a sylvan day on the water. We spent the morning making the sandwiches, carefully zippering them into Baggies, filling the cooler with ice and beer and mineral water. I went to the supermarket for Georgia peaches and Cutter Deep Woods Bug Spray; then Rudy had to go for sunscreen. We are more than ready, over-prepared, in fact. I have a pen and my arty little seventeen-dollar black Moleskine notebook favored by famous authors like Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. They’re dead and I’m not, and who knows, maybe inspiration will strike out on the river. After a walk around the building, we learn the front door to the barn is really the back door; a few quick steps and we’re inside, shaded from the sharp summer sun.
The cavernous barn is dark. Pool tables gather dust under ancient hanging lamps. For what feels like a long time we stand by the counter. Finally a kid in baggy overalls and tousled blond hair emerges out of the fungal gloom. He reminds me of what Dennis the Menace might’ve looked like as a grown up. That is, if Dennis had been raised in a basement by Mr. Wilson and fed through a trap door.
“Can I help you?” Dennis says, wiping his hands on a rag.
“We’re here to go canoeing on the Mad River,” I say. “We called earlier this morning.”
The kid just stares at me. He can’t be older than seventeen.
“We called,” I repeat again. “Someone said we could rent a canoe.”
He looks at me with suspicion. “Where exactly are you headed?” he says, stuffing the rag in his back pocket.
“We thought you were closed,” I say. So much sweat has pooled in my bra, I could wring it out. “The door was locked.”
“A lot of people make that mistake,” the kid says, clucking his tongue. Well, why don’t you put a sign on the door or something and help us all out? I want to say. Instead, I squint at the river map on the wall behind him, with its filaments of wiggly blue lines. There’s an arrow pointing to one of the lines and fuzzy words that say—I think—“You are here.” I can’t really read the map very well without my glasses, but if I put my prescription sunglasses on inside, Dennis will think I’m trying to look cool.
Last semester a student of mine in freshman composition, Kyle, a big goofy football player, wrote about all the Sasquatch sightings along Ohio’s Mad River for his big research paper. Five people in Donnelsville, a small town several miles downriver from Forever Sports, had reported seeing a huge hairy biped that “looked in their window,” according to Kyle. Kyle’s source? A Mad River Sasquatch “study” he found on-line, which included blurry photos of a strapping creature with a muscular, naked backside. During his Power Point presentation to the class, everybody laughed, Kyle especially.
But staring at Dennis standing at the counter with a sullen expression on his face, I wonder if he knows something I don’t. Everything this morning seems to hint at disaster; it’s like watching a science fiction movie where you already know the planet is doomed. The clues are everywhere: razor-cut crop circles, genetically altered locusts, cow mutilations. Woo-woo. Bad mojo. Honestly, I’d just like to call it a day. It is going to rain. The sandwiches are already soggy. But I won’t give Dennis the satisfaction. Wilted seconds tick by. There’s no air conditioning in the barn; the air is as moist as a frog’s belly.
Instead, we pay the kid, surrender our drivers’ licenses and settle into the back of a rusty Ford Econoline van pulling a trailer stacked with dented canoes. Dennis is at the wheel. We’re heading for Champaign County, just north of us, where we’ll put in at Millerstown Crossing. Paddling—or floating—back on the Mad River should take about five hours, the kid says, looking at us point blank in the rear view mirror.
“Yippee,” I mumble, staring at the cowlick on the back of his head.
The clouds are starting to pile up. Sweat streams down my forehead. I glance over at Rudy. He’s gazing out the cornfields, lost in thought.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?” I ask Dennis, just to see if he’s capable of making small talk.
He nods his heads and says, a trifle too gleefully, “Oh, we’re definitely going to get some.”
The Mad River. I like that name. It reminds me of how Lady Caroline Lamb described her lover, Lord Byron: “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” That gives this baby-sized river a thrilling frisson, an aura of danger when in truth it’s lazy and safe, a whisper instead of a roar.
“Have you ever canoed the Mad?” Rudy asks.
“Nope,” the kid says, and the word is flat, flat as the ripe green cornfields and the black road before us, flat for as far as the eye can see.
At Millerstown Crossing, Rudy and the kid lift the canoe from its rack while I grab the heavy green cooler from the van and frog march it down to the river. The kid waits as I put on the moldy-smelling orange life vest and fumble with the rusty latches. Then I step clumsily into the boat. It wobbles with my spasmodic movements.
“Careful there,” Rudy says as I flail. “Watch the first step.” I shoot him a dirty look.
The kid lingers on the shore. I feel his eyes boring into our backs. What does he see? Two paunchy fifty-ish geezers out for a suicide run on Ohio’s sleepiest river? Does he see it all—as I do—as the prelude to some terrible accident? Is there something he wants to tell us? Watch out for Sasquatch? But no, he’s one of the Children of the Corn, a slit-eyed zombie in on the secret. Then Rudy steps into the boat. Metal scrapes across the rocks. The boat pops and creaks; it’s like God cracking his knuckles.
There are all kinds of theories about who should sit where in a two-person canoe. The person at the bow is supposed to be on the lookout for danger ahead: branches, rocks, anything that will swamp you. This person must “read” the water. The person at the stern is the one who really steers though, the one who has the muscle and power to set the course. I’ve never been in a canoe but honestly, how hard can it be to navigate one?
“Do you see that V on the surface of the water up there?” says Rudy, who is sitting in the stern. “If it’s facing you that means—”
“Aye, aye, your majesty,” I say, cutting him off. “Anything else I should know?”
He sighs. Five hours is a long time to be in a boat with just one other person, even if it’s someone you love. It can be forever, or at least an exceptionally protracted day. So what are we doing out on an eight-inch river in the middle of scalding July?
On our very first date—at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Long Beach, California—Rudy earnestly talked about the float trips he’d taken in rural Missouri. Lazy and slow, wild and fast, beer-drenched, sunburned, alone and with friends. Ah! The pull of the river! He talked of stories told around the campfire, friendships forged over sweaty, mosquito-slapping portages. A river trip is a test of character, he said. I looked at him over my coffee and thought, wow, sweet and deep. He was new to California, out visiting a buddy who worked at the same newspaper I did. Missouri had always sounded like Squaresville to me, someplace I’d never wanted to visit, but Rudy painted it with dogwoods and rolling hills and jagged limestone bluffs. As he talked, I saw eagles drifting on the thermals above a wide rippling river and felt the sun on my back. You’ve got to see the Show-Me State, he said and grinned. I smiled into my coffee. I wanted to be shown.
That was years ago, when we were in our thirties. Since then, we’ve lived in San Francisco and Marin County, places so precious, I used to worry about getting pulled over at the Golden Gate Bridge toll booth for not being rich or pretty enough. There’s no border patrol like that in Springfield, Ohio, a small, unpretentious, blue-collar city. I’ll admit I’m still getting to know my way around Springfield, which has a Bob Evans restaurant and a J.C. Penney, but not a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble. It’s easy to dismiss a town like Springfield until you’ve lived there. Then you need to learn to seek charm and allure with new eyes. Beauty is everywhere if you’re invested enough in finding it.
The river is practically deserted, except for a couple of men in thigh-high waders fishing for brown trout. I’m sitting in the bow, dutifully scanning the river’s surface, on the lookout for rogue rocks and sunken logs. Passing the men with their poles, we wave. The breeze picks up. We drift under a canopy of dappled green. The trees shake, branches flutter, leaves twirl. A crane flaps overhead and lofts gracefully into a tree. A cardinal calls. Cicadas chir. A big catfish swirls past. Summer in Ohio. I take off the stinky lifejacket and ceremoniously toss it in the back with an extra snap of my wrist, as if I’ve just flung off the top of my bathing suit. How’s that for a show-me-state? I tell myself, trying to quell the anxiety bubbling through my veins.
Our son’s absence reminds us of what’s soon to come: his leaving home more or less for good next year. When he leaves for college, it will just be the two of us, somebody steering the boat, somebody scouting what’s just ahead, paddling, reading the current. We’ve come so far since the morning of his birth, when, after thirty-three hours of labor, the doctors cut him out of me. I remember Rudy holding our wailing son and crying, for Joel, for himself, for the father he wanted to be, and for the one he didn’t have. His own father had virtually vanished after Rudy was conceived, forsaking my mother-in-law for another woman. Later, he was hardly a presence, just another guilty dad showing up on Friday night with the child support check. Rudy held Joel as if he was holding his own infant self, vowing to do better, to be a man, to show up, to be there. It seemed like he never let our son go during that first bleary week I spent recovering from the C-section. Birth had hollowed me out; barely sutured together, I moved gingerly, afraid the rawness of my love would rip me open. The scar across my abdomen has morphed into a hard, upraised line, more of a grimace than a smile. Underneath, I still feel vulnerable, and sometimes, barely together.
But on the water, it’s easy to forget those fumbling, foggy parental years, of trying to be selfless and failing miserably, of wanting to set boundaries and then trampling all over them, of yearning to be good or at least, good enough. I tried too hard as a mother and then sometimes I didn’t try at all, escaping into bed with a novel and a plate of cheese and crackers. The boat eases down the river under our gliding paddles. Sun strobes on the water. Stroke, stroke. It is not going to rain after all. In fact, it’s a steam bath. Blue, the sky is blue and stretches into a seamless bolt of turquoise silk. Stroke. I’m getting sunburned. Rudy and I talk about nothing. We don’t talk about the job search, or how heavy and oppressive time can feel when waiting for something big to break. Stroke, drift, stroke. We return to a familiar topic, a novel he wants to write, based on a woman he once knew who went to a party where she met a man. She left with him—and nobody ever heard from her again. Her body was never found. We talk about plot, motivation, and character. Does he know the ending yet? Was this woman murdered or did she just wander away?
Write it, I tell him. Quit talking about it and do it.
Rudy takes a deep breath. “It looks like I’m going to have the time now to write,” he says slowly. And there it is, out in the open. I swallow hard. There are so many things I want to tell him: We’re in this together. I love you. Don’t worry. You’re a good man. I take a breath, prepared to say all those things. Instead, what comes out is “Oh, honey.”
We were married in 1984, which, even in the middle of that crazy year’s unfurling, seemed full of portent. This was the year Michael Jackson’s hair ignited during the filming of a Pepsi commercial, the year scientists finally isolated the virus that causes AIDS, the year of Geraldine Ferraro’s nomination as the first female vice presidential candidate. It was also the year I borrowed my sister-in-law’s wedding dress and her backyard for a wedding under the unflinching California sun. This was years before expensive wedding planners came into vogue, before every moment of one’s wedding had to be stylized and burnished and curated to look like a spread in Martha Stewart Weddings. Halfway through the ceremony, our Old English sheepdog casually lifted his leg and urinated on the floral arrangement, which was really just a bouquet of daisies tied to a trellis, and afterwards, the best man’s wife got drunk and changed into a long flannel nightgown and wandered down to the bay. It was a cloudless day at the end of August and the hills were as brown and dry as Shredded Wheat. One woman, a very big woman, stripped down to her leopard-skin bikini and took a dip in the chilly tidal estuary across the street from the house, and my mother-in-law broke down and cried her heart out. I never found out if the two were incidents were related. I was wearing a colander on my head at the time and distracted by cheap champagne and gaiety and I failed to write down all the wedding gifts that had been given, and to this day I know that I have neglected to write all the thank-you notes I should have. I hope I’m forgiven. We were oblivious back then. We felt lucky. We were lighthearted and life lay before us and we were never going to get old or blow it or look back.
The wind has come up on the Mad River. Clouds swallow the sun. It’s going to rain. We’re screwed. Lightning can’t be far behind. We’ll fry on this river. Somehow this foreknowledge doesn’t even register, nor does the sign we pass, a sign that says emphatically, in no certain terms: “Take Out.” Accompanying the sign is an arrow pointing to a path by the shore.
“I wonder what that means,” I say idly.
“It’s probably a place for people who want to get off the river.”
“Or maybe that’s where you go if you want to order Chinese,” I say.
“Ha, ha,” Rudy says.
We float on fifty more yards. For the first time, we hear rushing water. This part of the Mad is a Class One river, a baby river, a moving puddle, so why should there be rapids? Suddenly a distant bell goes off in my mind and I get it. “Take Out” means what it says. Take yourself out of the damn equation. Get off the damn river. Skedaddle. Scoot. My god, we’re going to go over, we’re going to—
“We’re going to capsize!” I shout. Oh god, god, this is like a bad novel, one of those freak newspaper stories. Headline: “Couple drowns in two feet of water.”
“Just go with it,” Rudy says. “It’s too late now.” As if to underscore his point, thunder rumbles in the background as we teeter over on a low head dam.
There’s the rushing of the water and the point of no return, we’re falling, going over, we’re going to fly over that froth. Then there’s the sickening sound of the canoe bottom scraping across metal. We see-saw over the edge. Crunch! The bow noses down as if to nuzzle the river, then rears back like a Praying Mantis. We’re just too heavy to get over the dam. Rudy tries to rock us over the edge and with every motion the boat sways from side to side. I scrabble like a crab, ass-walking down the spine of the boat, trying to find the center of balance.
“Hold still,” my husband says, rocking back and forth. “Don’t move.”
In other circumstances, those words can be the passenger pigeons of desire, carrying an erotic promise: hold still, don’t move. But now they’re infuriating. Don’t move? My coccyx is gravel and you’re telling me, don’t move?
“We’re stuck!” I shout over the bawling of this shrunken little river. ”Stuck, stuck, stuck!” The word flies back at me, reminding me of the scene in the movie A Christmas Story, when nine-year-old Flick puts his tongue on the flag pole, and it freezes. We’re stuck like that, glued in the eternal now, teeter-tottering between oh no! and holy fuck!
Rudy rocks once more time and we spit over the dam. Bloop! All at once we’re in the water, sputtering and blinking and flailing. And it’s cold and all our stuff is sailing down the river. There goes my virgin Moleskine notebook and the bug spray and the sunscreen, there goes the Budweiser out of the cooler. One can, two, three. Bottled water. Beach towels. A dozen velveteen peaches lovingly packed just two hours before are now released, fuzzy goslings learning how to swim. There go those cheap-ass mildewy life jackets.
“The paddle! Grab the paddle!” I shout.
“Good thing I packed that towel,” my husband says, spying it swirl away in the current like a drunken manatee.
“Let’s just hope the beer floats,” I retort. I lunge for my backpack and slip on a slimy, moss-covered rock. The river is much deeper and swifter than I’d figured. I’m completely under, baptized in the Mad. Coming up for air, I stagger towards Rudy. And laugh. We’re both punchy. We turn and stare at the overhead dam we just went over. No, it’s not Niagara Falls, but it is quite a drop. These dams, we’ll later learn, are called “drowning machines” because of the way the re-circulating currents can trap people and boats, but in the ebullience of the moment, we’re carefree. Yes, there’s a dam. Get over it. There is nothing to do but clamber back into the boat and try to beat the storm.
Downriver, we retrieve a life vest snagged on a tree branch, pluck the sunscreen from the water, and recover the beer. The wind comes up again, hard this time, stinging and stabbing and strangely invigorating. Go home, it says. Hurry. Rudy paddles on the left, I on the right.
Rain pocks the Mad’s surface, just a drop or two, then the sky opens and it’s a Biblical deluge, straight out of the book of Genesis. Should we stop and take shelter? We’re already drenched, soaked to the skin, mad, bad and dangerous to know. We’ve come this far already; there’s nothing to do but float. Still, I learn forward, eager for once to read the current and see what’s below. But I can’t discern anything except the rain. It plashes and patters on the surface, it zings and sings and stings. The river is running away from us, running with us, stretching and flowing and rearranging itself in a buoyant, irreversible sheet. There are no questions or answers, just silver water, tumbling over and under, cold and fast. Chilled and wet, miles from home, we put up our paddles and let it take us, forever sports.
•••
D’ARCY FALLON teaches creative writing, English composition, and journalism at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. She is the author of a memoir, So Late, So Soon, about living in a remote Christian fundamentalist commune in the early seventies. Before turning to teaching, she was an award-winning journalist, working for such newspapers as the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the San Francisco Examiner, and theColorado Springs Gazette.
“You would have hated me if you’d known me back then,” my husband would say, telling me stories of his drug-using days, and I’d agree: You’re lucky I didn’t meet that guy—I wouldn’t have looked at him twice.
But that wasn’t the guy I’d met. Luciano’s past was behind him: He was five years clean and proud of his sobriety. Like many former drug users, he was working in the field of substance-use and addiction, using his experiences to help people. He was magnetic and funny and interesting and full of life. We fell in love, became a couple, then a family. We’d sit at the dinner table, planning our future together. We’d both suffered setbacks in our pasts and failed to jump onto conventional paths, but together, we were going to create something good. We were counting on being late-bloomers.
Over time, though, our marriage began to fray, as Luciano’s undiagnosed, then misdiagnosed bi-polar disorder got worse, exacerbated by the international travel that had become a bigger part of his job. Our life together became a cycle of stressful overseas phone calls, resentful homecomings, deferred fixes. Still, at the end of every day, we’d sit down over dinner and talk about art, and writing, and drug policy, and sexual politics, and stupid things people did that pissed us off, and our cats, and TV shows, and a hundred other things. Even on the worst days, we could make our way back to each other this way.
Finally, though, things reached the breaking point, and we decided: Our marriage was important to us and we needed to find a way to save it. We made a plan to figure out how we were going to do that, as soon as he came home from an extended work trip to Thailand.
When he returned, though, something wasn’t right. One day, sitting across from him at the dinner table, I noticed that his tongue was twisting upside down in his mouth when he talked. Also, his mood was strangely amped up, but without the usual underlay of good spirits. There’d been other signs, too: While he was in Thailand, I’d started to notice that his emails were being sent at odd times of day—three-thirty, four, five in the morning, his time. On the phone, small things would trigger a full-blown rage—he’d end up bellowing and ranting, hanging up, calling back, hanging up again. And when he did return, the jet lag this time seemed intractable; after a week home, he was still sleeping till three or four in the afternoon.
A dedicated observer of my husband’s micro-moods, I suspected it had something to do with substances—he was relying increasingly on a mix of prescribed sleep aids, anti-anxiety medication, and anti-depressants to cobble himself together, especially when he traveled. I questioned him about his dosages, asked if he’d taken anything over the counter, maybe done something recreationally—some weird street drug—in Thailand. My inquiries were met with a blast-furnace rage and an unprecedented physical assault—he threw a portable hard-drive across the room at me, hitting me in the head. Later, I rooted through his briefcase and found a meth pipe and a lighter—arrogantly just there, not even hidden—in the open inside pocket.
When I confronted him, he told me it was no big deal: He was only using meth occasionally. And besides, the danger of meth was over-hyped by the media. It was basically no different than Adderall—which he had a prescription for. He liked meth—it helped him work, made him focused, and gave him energy. Besides, his history had proven than he could kick any drug, so addiction wouldn’t be a problem.
I argued with him. It really didn’t seem like a good idea to me.
He argued back, then abruptly changed tacks. He’d stop doing it, if it really upset me so much. I was so relieved, I almost forgot to think about the fact that the decision to do such a risky thing, and to lie about it, was completely and bafflingly outside the bounds of the way we conducted our marriage. The old Luciano might have done that but not the guy I’d chosen to be with.
Still uneasy, I looked in his bag again the next day. I found a lighter in the same pocket I’d cleaned out the day before. I took it. The next day, there was another one. I confronted Luciano again. Why was he carrying around lighters if he wasn’t using meth? He erupted in rage. How dare I go through his bag?
I mounted a bigger search, found bags of meth in his bathroom, in coat pockets, in the little space in the wall next to the basement crawl space.
We played this cat-and-mouse game for about a month. My heart would break every time I found another stash. Each time I’d confront him, he’d alternately admit, deny, or downplay the problem.
“Yes, Stephanie! I’m addicted!” he’d roar one day; “No, I’m not addicted!” the next. “My only ‘problem’ with meth is that you don’t want me to do it!” he screamed at me, one day. Every day was going to be his last day using.
•••
I lived these days in a state of constant, adrenalized emergency. I spent my work hours poring over online articles and forums and videos about methamphetamine, researching rehabs and treatment models, trying to figure out at what point I was going to have to kick him out, looking at ads for one-bedroom rentals in our area, making up budgets for how we’d support two households till we got him through this emergency and he could move back home.
The friends who knew what was going on didn’t understand why I didn’t kick him out. But I didn’t experience the decision as simple. A hallmark of Luciano’s bipolar illness was that life for him was a constant string of emergencies, and I was acclimated to the dysfunction. Reacting to and compensating for Luciano’s emergencies had become like an endurance sport for me. Though I was furious at him, and terrified, in this crisis as in all the others, I’d be the strong, sane one, the one who’d hold things together until we figured out what to do.
The other reason I didn’t kick him out was, simply, that he lied. He lied long and hard and deep, and up one side and down the other, and every which way from Sunday; and it took me too long to understand that I didn’t have the right information and was making bad decisions because of that.
•••
I went to a few Al Anon meetings, but I didn’t like their one-size-fits-all message about “detaching.” I didn’t feel it applied to me; I wasn’t ready to give up on Luciano. We’d only just started down this road. We might possibly still turn back without too much damage.
I started going to Crystal Meth Anonymous meetings, instead. The people were nice to me there, thanked me for coming. They told me it was good to be reminded—in the form of my presence—of the cost of their actions, the collateral damage. Everyone told me how sorry they were—which alarmed me. One guy took me aside and said, “However bad it is now, six months from now, you’ll be looking back, thinking these were the good old days.” Uniformly, people said that going to jail was the only thing that forced them to stop using.
A month later, Luciano moved out so that he could do meth full-time, unharassed by me. By “moved out” I mean: One day, in the middle of a rage, he sprang from his yelling-chair, as I had named it, thundered down to his room and threw some clothes in a bag, grabbed his computer, and slammed out the door. Six hours later, he called to tell me he wasn’t coming home. When I asked where he was, he said he was staying at “a cheap motel in the neighborhood.” I actually spent hours, that night, walking the streets of our residential neighborhood in the dark, panicking and in tears, looking for a cheap motel or rooming house that I knew wasn’t there. The memory of that’s a little scary.
•••
The next year and a half unfolded just the way you hear about. Luciano lived across town in a seedy hotel—I didn’t know where. He stopped paying our joint bills and the mortgage, defaulted on his credit cards, ruined his eighty-five-year-old father’s credit, lost his health insurance, life insurance, car, job. He spent his retirement funds on meth. Ashamed, he stopped talking to our daughter. When I found out about the infidelity, boggling in scope—lots of sex with strangers, exchanged for money and drugs—it was just another item to put on the list.
•••
I have a blank spot in my brain where the “higher power” thing is supposed to go. Consciousness is my only god. I used to believe that by being strong and present and brave, using communication and the power of my own brain as my only tools, I could hold the people I love close to me, figure out how to fix anything; protect my family and make it last. Having a bi-polar mate definitely gave that belief a workout. The awesome force of a meth addiction did it in completely.
•••
Eventually, with the assurance to myself that I had done everything I could, everything I was willing to, I accepted the fact that I had no power to make things turn out differently, and I began to let go.
I spent eight hundred days alone, grieving, writing a new book. I took comfort in the company of my dog. I wondered if you could actually die from crying. I’d wake up every morning and go to the mirror to see if my hair had turned gray overnight.
The part that killed me the most was the empty space across from me at the dinner table each night. I’d cry as I ate, sometimes, feeling the magnitude of my loss, thinking I would never heal.
•••
When people who I haven’t seen in a while ask how I’m doing, I say, “It’s been a hard couple of years.” I tell them about my new book, what my daughter’s been up to. “We lost Luciano to meth use, unfortunately,” I say, to those who don’t know. If they look alarmed, I add, “He’s still alive. Just, not with us anymore.” To the people I can’t lie to, I say, “Actually, he’s living in my basement.”
In a culmination of his run of terrible decision-making, Luciano moved to Cambodia, where he finally reached the end: He was living on the streets, out of money; he’d pawned his phone and computer; lost everything but his passport and the clothes he was wearing. One of his few remaining friends bought him a ticket back to the States, where he landed penniless and homeless in Berkeley—scarier than the streets of Phnom Penh, he said—and decided he wanted to live. His father bought him a train ticket to New Jersey.
He asked if he could come home for a few days on the way. Just to see me.
Not home anymore, I told him. But I said yes.
It had been a year and a half since we’d seen each other. Among other things, meth had ended our marriage without discussion. My story of what had happened was this: He’d become a meth addict, and meth had destroyed our life together, and that was tragic and stupid. If he had any different way of telling it, I wanted to know.
When he arrived, it quickly became evident that he was completely out of his mind—ranting, raving, paranoid, psychotic. He wasn’t using meth, anymore, but it hardly mattered. He was in a hole so deep it was hard to imagine how he could possibly climb out. I listened to his delusional plan to live with his parents, stay clean, find work in the City—nothing under seventy-thousand, an executive directorship, he was thinking. I watched as he rummaged through the storage room for Plan B—his tent and sleeping bag—and I changed the terms of my offer. I told him he could stay in my basement for a month, two if he needed, that he could share my food, and—if it was what he wanted—I’d help him not to die.
He’s been here for over a year. I laid down conditions, helped him think through some steps. He reconnected with a generous ex-colleague who got him access to good free mental health care at the drug treatment center where Luciano used to send his clients. After many months of looking, he finally got a job: low-paying, part-time—he was ecstatic. With his first paycheck, he bought me an enormous TV to show his gratitude, carried it home on the bus—then carried it back when I told him maybe he wasn’t thinking completely clearly, yet.
Properly diagnosed and medicated for his bi-polar disease for the first time in his life, and under the care of two good mental healthcare practitioners, he’s a different person. Or else he’s himself—he says he’s not sure. It’s hard for both of us to think about the ways so many things might have been different, if he, if we, had figured it out sooner. With his brain recovering from the damage meth did to it, he can finally think clearly again. He hasn’t raged in over half a year. He is full of regret, and he admits that doing meth was a terrible decision; that meth is a terrible drug and that the damage he did to our family was devastating and real.
And probably lasting. We’re not what we once were, to each other. We’re not a couple, anymore—though we think we’re probably some kind of family.
One night, a few weeks after he came back, we cautiously sat down at the dinner table together again. It was hard at first, but it’s gotten easier, as we’ve worked through some of the most painful pieces. Sometimes, we even laugh. But without a future to plan for, the conversations aren’t like they used to be.
He says I saved his life, and it’s probably true. Crisis averted, it’s probably time, now, to save my own.
•••
STEPHANIE ROSENFELD lives in Salt Lake City, where she writes fiction and works as a non-profit grant writer. She is the author of a collection of short stories, What About the Love Part? and a novel, Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu. Stories of hers have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Bellingham Review, Northwest Review, Cream City Review, and Other Voices. She recently finished a young adult novel, and is currently at work on a graphic memoir, written in collaboration with her ex-husband, about the effect of his methamphetamine addiction on their family. You can read an excerpt on it here and more here.
January 2012: Staring back at my husband’s pixilated face, I purse my lips and remain silent on my end of our Skype conversation. His sadness, shaved head, and obnoxious mustache (trimmed to fit perfectly along his upper lip, but no further than a quarter inch, according to Navy regulations) make my husband sound and look so different; they make him seem that much further away.
I don’t know, Tom finally says.
I’m a pretty good rambler, one who’ll blabber on about anything to avoid awkward silence, but it’s times like this when I too have nothing to say. So instead, I question.
We can’t just get up and leave. Can we?
Again he has no answer or at least not one I can write here. There’s a lot he cannot tell me, and then there’s what he can tell me but has asked me not to say. Instead of giving a concrete answer, he lays out the pros and cons, going back and forth, back and forth, just like the commentators on NPR. Everyone seems to be asking the same question: after over ten years of war, shouldn’t we, as Americans, know exactly why 89,000 American troops are still in Afghanistan?
Tom cradles his clean-shaven cheeks in his hands, then rubs his palms over closed eyes, pulling the lids sideways as they move across his temples and finally rest behind his ears.
Can we talk about something else?
The desperation in his voice surprises me, a flip from the excited reaction he had after the big phone call—the one when he pulled to the side of the road and Sir, yes, Sir’ed that he was ready to deploy, while my heartbeat matched the cadence of the cars I watched whizz by.
I think I’m going to head to bed, Tom says.
No, not yet! I say, but I struggle to find anything new to talk about, something interesting enough to keep him on the line.
He sighs, rubs his eyes again.
You look so tired, Love.
Barely a month into his deployment and already his sense of adventure is flickering. Deep lines I’ve never seen before have etched into his forehead. I resist asking if his skin is still painfully dry, if he’s using the face and hand moisturizers I sent. Neither do I ask about the dark circles under his eyes. I know. He’s been working sixteen-plus hour days. Every day. I don’t know how to respond when he wonders aloud whether all this work will have any lasting consequence.
I know what you should do, Love.
What? he asks flatly.
You should just come home right now! I say with a big, epiphanous smile, like a child egging him on to join her world of make believe. But my goofy grin goes unreturned, save for a slight rise in one corner of his lips. The same half-smile I’ll earn every time I try this line, like the half-answers I reap in response to my perpetual questions: Why are we still at war? What more can we accomplish? Change how a society has been functioning for thousands of years? … Can’t you just come home?
•••
People keep asking me about the war as if my recent connection to it through Tom’s deployment makes me somehow privy to the untidy details—the how and why, when I’m still fuzzy about the other four Ws. I’m tired of answering, “I don’t know.” Tired of feeling stupid. Ignorant, really, which feels more worthy of blame.
Since the ten-year anniversary of the war passed in October 2011, I’ve been re-asking the same questions as everyone else, all umbrellaed under one question—how’d we get to where we are?
And since Tom deployed last November, I’ve only become more confused. Each time I listen to or read the news, there are too many answers, too many variables, too many voices for me to fully understand why we are still at war, much less why we ever went. I thought I knew—retaliation for the 9/11 attack, right?—but if I’m honest with myself, I have not religiously followed the news about the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq. I’ve kept up with the world outside my microcosm via NPR snippets on my drive to and from work. When the war took over most of the programming again in connection to the ten-year anniversary, I was taken aback. Had it really been that long?
As a high school English teacher, over the years I’d taught lessons linked to the Middle East and Afghanistan, and during those times, I dug a little deeper, but soon after we pressed on to the next unit, my brain tucked the specifics along with other dusty facts, like when to use semi-colons rather than commas in a serial list. I feel a bit guilty every time I have to consult Strunk & White. I majored in literature and took linguistics classes. Grammar rules are what I know. Or should know. And now that people are asking me about the war, this similar guilt rises. Our country is at war and has been for a third of my life. As an American citizen, especially one married to a Naval officer, especially one currently deployed in Afghanistan, shouldn’t I know why?
But like the guilt of having to source the nuances of semi-colon usage, the guilt of having basic, watered-down answers to this question has always been easily pushed aside by more pressing things, like grading papers, planning lessons, buying groceries, and avoiding laundry, until my Tom received that phone call. Now, I want answers.
But this new craving has only sparked another question—would I be hungry for this information if Tom had never gone to war?
I wish I could answer, “I don’t know” to this question too, but I do know, and it’s this guilt that motivates me to search. Late one night, alone in our bed, I start browsing headlines on newspaper archives online. Search September 12, 2001, and find our nation’s first reactions to the Twin Towers attack. See again our confusion, anger, sadness, and fear shout in capital letters on front pages across the nation and around the globe. Shudder at the sight of New York City’s skyline swallowed in a cloud of smoke, ash, and dust. WAR, TERROR, DARKEST DAY repeat headline after headline.
“America’s Bloodiest Day: ‘This is the Second Pearl Harbor’” (The Honolulu Advertiser)
“FREEDOM UNDER SIEGE: World Trade Center Collapses, Pentagon hit Bush vows retaliation for ‘cowardly actions’ Thousands feared dead beneath the rubble” (Times Union)
That catastrophic day, there was no way to know what else could possibly happen the next second—planes flying into buildings? on American soil?—much less how our next steps would lead to our next steps would lead to where we are, fighting a War on Terror without end.
How was I to know that the curious draw I felt toward this lip-pierced, spiky-haired guy I met two days after the attack would lead to love and marriage, and that this person I exchanged vows with would not pursue real estate investment or music production or working for a law firm, that he’d instead trade in his lip ring for a uniform that he’d wear in a warzone while I try to live my life as close to normal as possible?
There was some comfort, I realize now, in knowing that Tom had raised his hand, on multiple occasions, to deploy. As if his desire to go somehow made it more like an adventure, not a duty. But I’ve realized I was wrong, about a lot of things.
•••
More research: Back in December 2009, when President Obama refocused the war effort in Afghanistan, he ordered a surge of 30,000 more troops, aiming to defeat the resurgence of al Qaeda (now scheming from safe-havens along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border), reverse the Taliban’s regrowth in Afghanistan, and train the Afghan military to defend its country on its own. During his controversial Afghanistan strategy speech at West Point, Obama promised that 33,000 troops (3,000 more than the surge he ordered) will return home by the end of 2012, and that troops would continue returning until all combat operations are completely pulled out in 2014.
For Tom these dwindling numbers had translated into dwindling opportunities. A history major with an interest in Middle Eastern studies, he saw serving in Afghanistan as not just a career enhancing opportunity, but a meaningful life experience that he’d like to have. It just seemed crazy to me. Even crazier was his hope to work with the SEALs or the Marine Corps. To be honest, I was glad when he was assigned detainee operations. He’d be behind the “wire,” protected on base, doing legal work with Taliban or al Qaeda or terrorist suspects that were captured and held in the detention center on Bagram Air Base.
But on base is exactly where Tom did not want to be. If sent to Afghanistan, he wanted to actually experience the country and be in the villages amongst the people, not in some high security office. In my mind, his work with the accused insurgents, providing some sense of due process, seemed less dangerous, more useful; less violent, more peace-driven. Less like war.
But I had it all wrong.
He isn’t working with Afghan judges and lawyers establishing a stable justice system. Neither representing the Afghan detainees nor the American government, Tom is what they call a neutral recorder. He compiles and presents evidence collected about each prisoner to a board of American senior military officers who then decide if the detainee actually meets the criteria for remaining detained—not as a prisoner of war, but as what the Bush administration called an “unlawful enemy combatant” and what President Obama’s administration now calls “unprivileged enemy belligerents.” In other words, people accused of participating in or aiding the Taliban or al Qaeda or other enemy forces.
When it’s been a while since we’ve talked, Tom visits me instead in my daydreams. I imagine him in the prison preparing for a board and watch as he walks into a plain room then stands in front of board members dressed in beige camo. I turn to look at the prisoner accused of being an enemy combatant and do a double take, then try to shake off the image of Osama bin Laden’s face and the faces of his cronies, their long beards, white robes. These TV images are all I know to imagine.
What do the prisoners look like? I ask Tom one day on the phone.
Not prisoners, detainees.
Okay. What do the detainees look like?
Like people.
Well, how old are they?
Some are young, but they all look old. The conditions in Afghanistan are harsh. Their beards and weathered skin make them all look older than they are. But very few of them actually know their own age—they often don’t know what year they were born.
I imagine blowing out candles as a child, the white and rainbow confetti cake my mom baked for all of our birthdays, how despite having the same flavor cake as my three siblings and the same song, when I blew out those candles, I knew that moment was mine alone.
So why are they there? I ask, though I already know his response —
I can’t say.
During trials, do the detainees ever look at you?
Boards. Some stare me down.
Yeeesh. Are you ever afraid?
Maybe a little intimidated at first, I guess, but never afraid, he says.
He has no real interaction with the detainees: he never speaks with them directly, only through translators. As a writer and reader, I believe in the power of words—of true dialogue—to wage peace, but sometimes words take longer, especially when passed on through a multi-lingual game of Telephone.
•••
January 9, 2012: We’re fortunate (I’ve been told repeatedly by spouses who didn’t hear from their partners for months, if at all, while they were deployed) that Tom and I are able to stay connected through emails, phone calls, even face-to-face on Skype, GChat, or FaceTime. Sometimes Tom’s voice is too distorted to understand; sometimes I see his face for over an hour. Don’t take this for granted, I remind myself whenever my phone or computer wakes me up or rings right when I finally start the work I’ve been avoiding all morning.
I’m finally getting into a groove when, with impeccably bad timing, Tom’s face — miniaturized in the Skype icon — appears on my computer screen, accompanied by a techno style ring, all upbeat and cheery.
Again? I groan. My shoulders drop. Then, realizing, my stomach follows suit: how could I be bummed he’s calling?
I click the green video icon, wait for my husband’s grainy smile to appear, and get excited when it does, despite his creepy facial hair.
Seriously, Tom. The mustache?
It’s fun! he says, eating up my mustache-hate.
Can’t you find another type of fun?
Unfortunately, there’s not much of that around here, he says. Winning.
Tom smiles again playfully and rests his head on the dinosaur pillowcase from his childhood that his mom gave me to send him. He’s wearing his headlamp, completing the image I prefer in my mind: a boy at play, on an expedition, a fossil hunt.
Thinking about my to-do list again, I hesitantly continue.
Love, you know I want to talk to you and see you whenever I can, but … is there any way you can try me right when you get off work?
I did just get off work.
Wince. Though mid-morning here, the sun set long ago there.
And you complained when I called early and woke you up.
I wasn’t complai…whatever. You just keep magically catching me right when my fingers hit the keyboard. It’s just really hard to start up again —
My voice fades, begins to shake.
His face blurs momentarily: a shaved head, hazel eyes, and mustache in pixilated lines.
What? he asks, not hearing what I said.
I shake my head. I can’t repeat what I already feel guilty about saying aloud. I’m getting so good at forgetting where he actually is, but sometimes I accidentally let myself remember, let it sink in. The shaved head. The dinosaurs. The goofy mustachioed grin. All I want is to touch his face, to feel the curve of his smile in my hand.
Bre, are you okay?
I shake my head again. Like a weather goddess, I command a drought, but my eyes don’t dry that easily, nor does the bulge in my throat unknot. I don’t want him to add worry about me to what he’s already going through.
The timing, I manage, while still shaking my head, trying to signal I’m changing the subject. Don’t worry about it, okay? Don’t turn it into a water chestnut thing.
But you don’t like water chestnuts, Tom says with a mischievous smile, and I can’t help but laugh, relieved by the comfort of an inside joke. He always stole those white, crunchy morsels from my plate our first few years of dating. No, not water chestnuts, I hate bamboo! I’d say and slap his fork away with my own. Each time he’d get embarrassed, only to forget and steal them again the next time. While Tom’s effort to take away anything I dislike is charming, sometimes he misconstrues things or takes chivalry too far. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. Now I’m afraid he won’t call at all.
I know it’s hard, he says, his face shifting to serious.
All day I want to talk to you, but I can’t call you. I still have to live while you’re away. Just can’t wait by the phone. What am I saying? I think, then backpedal. I mean, I will, if that’s how it has to be… Forget everything I’ve said. I like your calls. I hate bamboo.
But you don’t like water chestnuts, he says, attempting a confused expression that breaks into a burst of laughter that I join in on. Soon our shoulder-shaking guffaws subside into a ripe silence, filled with only what our eyes say as we stare back at each other and share a smile.
Call me anytime, I say. Call me anytime, okay?
•••
More research: President Obama’s proposed plan—to pull our troops out by 2014—seems implausible. A month after our invasion, a UN-led meeting of Afghan leaders created a five-year road map to rebuild the country, devastated and disorganized after decades of corruption and war. At first, according to a Gallup poll, “eight out of ten Americans support[ed the] ground war in Afghanistan.” Now, a decade later, according to CNN, just over a third of Americans still support the war effort, an all time low.
If polled I would struggle to bubble just one answer. Though I didn’t want Tom to join the military much less go to war, I still cling to the hope that his work will help build a secure justice system in Afghanistan. But the process of forming a democracy will take much more than another two years. That is, if all our troops actually pull out in 2014. The two-year plan could double like the initial five-year plan. Two years, then four years, then … Will we ever leave?
(President Obama announced the formal “end of the combat mission in Afghanistan” on December 28, 2014. Yet troops linger, training and supporting the Afghan security force and working on counter-terrorism efforts. Already the initial withdrawal plan has slowed. In late March, 2015, President Obama announced that 9,800 troops will remain until the end of the year. “We want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to help Afghan security forces succeed so we don’t have to go back,” the President explained. Considering the rise of ISIS in Iraq, I understand that military withdrawal is more complex than simply asking should we stay or should we go.)
But who will pay the price if we stay? An All Things Considered article reported, “Just one-half of one percent of the American population has served on active duty during the last decade.” I remember Tom mentioning a similar statistic before he deployed, one of the many conversations we had that summer and fall on our back patio after dinner, watching the flames dance in our fire pit as we danced around the pain of his imminent departure, failing to convince the other that his career was the right or wrong direction for our lives.
I hear Tom’s argument echoed in the words of the military ethics interviewee who said, “It becomes much more easy to deploy U.S. forces in tough environments for long periods of time because the vast majority of Americans don’t feel they have any skin in the game”: exactly why Tom decided to join the Navy. He’d never mentioned this sense of duty before that night.
When Tom first talked about applying to the JAG Corps, we were a few years into our marriage. I thought this Navy idea was just another phase he’d get through like his former blue hair and piercings, like his knack for doubling whatever dares his friends concocted, the last stunt ending in a broken ankle, his foot flipped sideways. Tom was never one to follow orders. I figured he would complete his Navy internship, graduate from law school, then work for a firm or maybe a nonprofit.
In hindsight, I guess he had revealed the military tradition of his family, but I never thought anything of it in connection to our own lives. Before applying, Tom touted the prestige of the Navy JAG Corps, how difficult it would be for him to even get in. We were fresh out of college when we married; underlying our vows was an unspoken agreement to encourage each other to pursue our dreams. He’d supported my summer spent doing a teacher exchange in Uganda, hadn’t he? And, with the odds stacked against him, I figured why not let him at least apply? Again. And again.
But then he got in. And thrilled he was for the life change I never thought we’d actually have to make. For four years I’d dedicated my life (and soul, he protested) to teaching. Four years, now, he’d serve.
Tom never mentioned this moral dilemma until after he’d joined. In resolving his own, he sparked mine. Love, grace, and peace are the values I aim to live by; non-violence naturally falls into my paradigm. Now, whenever I allow it to sink in that my life is funded by the military, I cringe: my very comfortable life is funded by the antithesis of who I say I am.
Yet Tom felt he had to join, asking if more of us were involved, would our country be as willing to go war? I’d never thought about it this way before. That night by the fire, my moral dilemma doubled. Simultaneously I felt guilty for being connected to the military and for not.
•••
More research: I pause and then reread a New York Times editorial written by Abdul Matin Bek, an Afghan whose father Mutalib Bek—an Afghan Parliament member and former Mujahedeen fighter—was assassinated by a suicide bomber. Bek says he feels the need to speak up: “The line between a peaceful, stable and prosperous Afghanistan and absolute chaos is thin,” he warns. “The nature of its political climate will have ramifications for the whole world, as has been shown in the past, yet the multiplicity of Afghan voices has been lost in the fog of this war.”
•••
January 28, 2012: “Obama’s Bagram Problem How Afghanistan’s Prisons Complicate U.S. Withdrawal” (Foreign Affairs).
I’m confused, I tell Tom on the phone after reading the article about the detainee review boards he’s doing. I thought the boards gave the detainees some sort of due process. I don’t get why the article critiques them. Aren’t they like trials?
They’re hearings, not trials.
But the article says a lot of information remains classified. Do the detainees really not know why they’re being held in prison?
It’s not something I can talk about.
Ugh. Okay. But I just don’t understand why they can’t see all of the evidence used against them. Is it like the identities of witnesses? You’re afraid the witnesses will be killed?
Bre, it’s not something I can talk about.
My stomach tightens. Forehead wrinkles. I imagine Winston’s hideaway. The secret police, secret cameras, everywhere. We’re Big Brother?
I want to trust my husband, our government, and the Enduring Freedom part of the Operation’s name. I want to trust that there is a reason why the information remains classified, that revealing this information would endanger our national security so heavily that we have no other choice, but the article makes a strong case: the board is a façade of due process if the accused can’t defend himself against evidence he knows nothing about. I imagine Lady Justice struggling to under the weight of imbalance.
It’s like people forget we’re at war, Tom finally says, passion fueling his voice for the first time in a while. In World War II, when German POWs were captured, we never stopped to hold trials to figure out if they were actually Nazis. What we’re doing has never been done before. We are fighting an enemy that wears no uniform, that simply shoots then blends into the civilian population.
A piece of American history, he is living. A piece too abstract and convoluted at present for us to fully understand. History others will make obvious sense of in future books. Complex issues summarized, spelled out in neat straight lines. I’ve tried to understand, yet I still can’t decide what is right. Though I’ve always thought of myself as one who would’ve run part of the Underground Railroad, paraded with the suffragists, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., I live as a beneficiary of others’ picketing signs. Besides these words I write, the only action that speak my beliefs is riding the fence. I remain absorbed in my work and creative writing studies, asking questions when deep down I know the only answer I truly want is for my husband to come home.
•••
March 11, 2012: I’m driving to the commissary supermarket on base in Newport when I hear the BBC Newshour report on the radio. Before dawn, an American soldier snuck alone off base and murdered sixteen Afghan villagers as they slept. Nine of the victims were children.
No! I scream, then slap the steering wheel. No, no, no, I yell and slap and slap and slap in time with the march of my pleas.
My jaw remains dropped as the translator relays the victims’ neighbor’s trembling account: “It was 2 a.m. We heard the gunfire and dog barking—they shot the dog dead and entered the house and opened fire on the children and making martyrs of them. … After they killed them they set fire to the bodies. Is a two-year old baby a Taliban?”
Chills run up my spine.
“I swear to god we have not seen a Taliban in five months!”
My sight too overcast to clearly see, I have to park. How could we let this happen? As I sit and listen to the report, the woman’s desperate question echoes in my mind.
Fear she had for the Taliban she now has equally for us? I look around the base parking lot, longing to be anywhere but here, but I can’t drive away. I can’t do anything but sit and listen.
Since Tom left, whenever I hear news of our service members losing their lives, I feel more than ever before the need to pause, to honor their loss, to honor the family mourning the loss I pray I never have to feel. The same guilt and sadness swirls in my stomach as the report continues. An Afghan official says they’ve lost all trust in us.
The innocent have no one to trust? But with no way to know, especially at a glance, who’s an insurgent and who’s not, our service members likewise don’t know who to trust. And this changes hour-to-hour, day-to-day. Distrust breeds distrust, violence breeds violence. Again my mind is clouded with questions, a multiplicity of voices lost in the fog of war: Is the two-year-old a Taliban? Should we stay or should we go? And if we leave will we return? A war on terror without end? Can’t you please just come home?
•••
Tom returned home safely in July 2012. This essay is an excerpt from a book project in which BREAWNA POWER EATON wrestles with the question: how did we—as a nation and a couple—wind up tangled in our country’s longest war? For more of her travel stories, features, and essays visit Breawna.com .
1. When I was a child, my family lived in the south of France, in the town of Aix-en-Provence. My father had been transferred there for his job. He worked for Shell Oil and had not yet learned to hate it. Later, when my brother and I were old enough to think seriously about what kinds of jobs we might have, he warned us away from working for anyone; he felt he had wasted much of his life in servitude to bland corporate life. He urged both of us to be our own bosses!, to not get stuck in what he considered the unimaginative hell of middle management.
The advice was mostly lost on me, but that came later anyway. This period in the south of France was before my father’s disillusionment. He was still a young exec in the early seventies and Aix was not an expensive city then. My parents found a second-floor apartment for rent that, while not large, was palatial in its high ceilings, tiled floors, elaborate moldings, and the most extravagant wallpaper in the living room. In photographs, though discolored with time, it is still stunning: a deep green background with bronze vines in vertical lines.
None of this was of much interest to me at the time, though. Instead, for my brother and me, the appeal of the place lay in the gigantic terrace. It still amazes me to think that this was where I learned to ride a bike. It was sized like a mini-mall parking lot. Except it was beautiful and sunny, with geraniums growing out of old planters and a wrought-iron barrier to keep us from tumbling into the street below.
Across from our building was a gated property. Though the house was not visible from the terrace, the garden was, and it had a pool. I heard it said that Alain Delon lived there. The name meant nothing to me then, except I realized it must belong to someone important or famous, because of the thrill I discerned half-suppressed in its saying. It was clear that to have a pool like this, you had to be important or famous or at least rich.
The pool was shaped like an old-fashioned mirror, straight on the sides, and curving in and out at each end. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone swimming in it. It was just there, turquoise and sparkling, inviting but inaccessible.
Amazingly, my father put up a huge blow-up pool on our terrace, big enough for my brother and me to swim in. Now that I’m an adult, I can’t imagine doing such a crazy thing. The terrace was not built to hold the weight of that many thousands of gallons and might have collapsed. Or, if the pool had burst suddenly, I can only imagine the awesome spectacle of all that water gushing out and flooding our apartment and the one below. But neither of these things happened, and my brother and I splashed and shrieked and swam all summer long. It was nothing like the beautiful and stately pool across the street but it was still heaven to us.
Plugging the building’s address into Google maps, I am a little stunned to have a satellite view of the terrace, and, across the street, Alain Delon’s former garden with its cypress trees and Mediterranean pines, and its pool gorgeously intact. It is surprising somehow to see my childhood memories so unambiguously confirmed. We moved away from Aix when I was five so there is much about our life there that I don’t remember clearly. The terrace and the pool and the wallpaper, among a handful of other things, remained vivid to me but it seemed the vividness of a dream.
The convergence of dream and reality in this one memory sends a chill down my spine. Time has passed and so many things have changed, but this thing has remained the same.
2. Fast forward fifteen years. After my French schooling, I went to college in the U.S. My college boyfriend, though majoring in history, was a musician, almost famous at a couple of east coast colleges, including Dartmouth where his band played a couple of times a year and where Michael Eisner’s son went to school. The young Eisner had ambitions to start a record label or a management company—I can’t exactly remember now—and he wanted my boyfriend to be his first client. The summer after we graduated, he arranged for my boyfriend to play a showcase gig at The Viper Room. The club was legendary to me, because only a few months earlier River Phoenix had OD’ed on the sidewalk outside, which broke my heart for his family and friends, and for all that wasted talent and beauty.
I was living in San Francisco right after college, though I felt utterly adrift, struggling to find a job and a place to live. My mother had arranged for me to stay for a few weeks with a friend from her own college days. Instead of being grateful for this generosity, I resented having another parental figure and labored to hide my sullenness. By the time my boyfriend called to tell me that he was being flown out to L.A. by Eisner’s son and did I want to spend a few days with him in a hotel there, I felt desperate to escape the claustrophobia of my own fumblings and failure to get a toehold on adulthood. Yes, I wanted to go! I was too broke to fly and didn’t know how to drive so I bought myself a bus ticket to L.A.
This was by far the longest bus ride I had ever taken. It left at five a.m. from San Francisco and took almost twelve hours, through the Central Valley. No one actually wanted to be on the bus, but it was a fifth the price of a plane ticket, and we all had places to go. We stopped in Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Visalia, Delano, Bakersfield—towns with names that were intriguing and mysterious to me. I was new to California, and the Central Valley presented such a strange contrast to the foggy, winsome beauty of San Francisco. I was gobsmacked by this demonstration of how gigantic California was. In France, a trip that long would mean you had crossed into another country, but here mile after mile after mile under the beating, hard sun and still there was more road between the bus and L.A. With each stop the bus filled more until every seat was taken. Many of the passengers were older, and some were infirm. One or two looked like they might have just been released from prison. One woman spoke loudly to herself the entire bus ride.
When we stopped at the Greyhound depot in downtown L.A., I was relieved and euphoric to see A. waiting for me with a borrowed car. My lust for him woke me up from the grogginess of the journey. We hadn’t seen each other since I’d decided to move to San Francisco, and he had decided to pursue his luck in New York. While not exactly broken up, the distance between us had seemed to contain a resounding finality. And now we were here. Together. In L.A.
It was late afternoon but still very warm. As we drove, I noted that I liked L.A.’s wide streets. I didn’t mind that the traffic moved slowly since I had no particular agenda. I was happy sitting next to A., and I was interested in everything moving past my window—billboards, palm trees, convertible cars with their tops down. I felt calmed by the gentle weight of A.’s hand on my leg. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us in the long run, but here we were together now.
In another half hour, A. and I were in Michael Eisner’s pool. I imagined the dust of the trip washed off by this pure and cool water and was pleased at this image. In the back of my mind I was a little horrified at how rag-tag I must have seemed to the Eisners, sweaty and rumpled and dazed from so many hours of sitting in one place. But this was only in the back of my mind because in the front of my mind was A. We stood in the shallow end of the pool, facing each other, skimming the surface with our fingertips. I didn’t trust myself to touch him, but I could feel the water conducting the electricity between us. How perfect it would have been to fuck in this perfect pool. But the whole Eisner family was inside, and in another half-hour we were going to sit down to dinner, and however bold I wanted to imagine myself, I wasn’t bold enough to do that.
I don’t remember much about the dinner, except it was lovely and generous of them to host me and A. Michael talked to his son, giving him advice about dealing with the music bigwigs who were coming that night. I had no idea how to interact with anyone in this particular situation so I was quiet. All I could think about was going back into the pool with A. and having the whole place to ourselves. It no longer seemed incongruous for us to be there. I didn’t consider us out of place. If anything, everyone else seemed out of place, superfluous. Such a beautiful pool only needed two people, in love with each other.
3. A few years later, I moved to L.A. Despite our best efforts, A. and I broke up, and I made new friends to distract myself. One of them, Jason, was a production assistant on Ted Danson’s short-lived TV show Ink. Jason had become friendly with Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, and they’d entrusted him with their house and pets while they went out of town for a few weeks. Jason found a way to insert “Ted and Mary” into his every other sentence, which I liked because I would have done the same thing.
One evening Jason invited me to swim at Ted and Mary’s with a couple of other people. When we got there Jason led us through the back gate to the pool area. He went inside the house to get towels, saying, “You guys stay here.” We hadn’t particularly been planning to go inside, but at his admonition, we teased him by coming up to the French doors. We found he’d locked them behind him. We were faintly outraged at his having done this and teased him—“Jason, we’re coming in!” we shrieked softly, rattling the doorknobs for effect.
I glanced at the interior, which looked cozy in an English-countryhouse-via-Beverly-Hills kind of way. This was a popular decorating style for a certain Hollywood crowd, I guessed, but when I thought of England I didn’t think swimming pool. It was thinking of the south of France, and of Aix, and the mirror of water across the street, that put me in the mind of pools.
Soon enough we were bored of pestering Jason and instead we jumped into the luminous water. At night, pools are mysterious and alluring. With the lights turned on they have an eerie, glowing beauty. The deep shadowy places where the light doesn’t reach makes them a little bit frightening too. Movement at the water’s surface is magnified. Light breaks apart and comes together again. Planar geometry makes its own strange kind of sense in the refraction of moving light. Bodies glow in a way they never otherwise do.
The setting was so beautiful, it seemed to call for some flirtation and it seemed wasteful to pass up this opportunity. I began to banter with a boy in our group.
A few years later, I would marry him, but I didn’t know it yet and just then such a thought would have seemed ludicrous. At that moment we were simply making jokes and observing each other from this new vantage point. We were buoyed by the water and by the sense of having stepped out of our ordinary lives. A few steps away there was a cozy interior but the doors were locked and we were out here in the eerie luminescence.
4. In Santa Monica, right off the Pacific Coast Highway is the pool that Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst built for their beach getaway. Now it exists as the Annenberg Beach House, and it’s open to the public in summer. On Sundays I often go with my guy and our kids around five o’clock. The air is still warm then and the pool is heated to a decadent eighty degrees. What a crazy luxury to swim in the late afternoon in clear water that is almost bathtub-warm, with the scent of the Pacific around us and the entire sky overhead. The pool is spectacularly beautiful, its perimeter tiled in a Greek key pattern and its bottom encircled with mosaics of ocean life. Speckled green and blue and yellow fish swim among the octopi and the billowing seaweed.
The main house, designed by Julia Morgan, was torn down in 1956 but I can imagine, floating in the dreamy water, that it is still there and that Hollywood intrigues are just out of earshot. I think of Marion Davies who is so often reduced in popular imagination to her caricature as Charles Foster Kane’s untalented, complaining mistress in Citizen Kane. Watching the real Davies act, in The Patsy for instance, she deploys her charm and her comedic chops with a dazzling ease. She gives side-eye like a boss, she pouts adorably, and she transforms herself in quick-witted imitations of her contemporaries.
It is easier, though, I suppose, to see Davies as the “mistress.” An untalented hack, in other words, for whom a smitten Hearst bankrolled pictures. It is easier somehow to reduce her to that narrow role, than to take in a whole person and her complex relationships to others. Hearst was older than she was. He was by far the richer of the two. We believe we understand what this means. “Oh, it’s like that. Of course it is.”
As I rise and break the surface of the water, I think of the trajectory of my own life, of my early childhood in the South of France, of the life I’ve made in Southern California, of how, if I were rich or famous of the object of any curiosity, it might be read in this way or that, to make more sense, or at least to make easier sense. My choices so far have been rather conventional, but even so each one was made for its own particular reasons, generated by circumstances and emotions that take root in the mix between the personal, the cultural, and the societal. My life is not scrutinized, but I loathe that famous women’s choices so often are, and then reduced to categories of convenience.
Plunging underwater again, the sound of my own blood throbbing in my ears, my mind wanders. I think of Alain Delon, who said recently about his love affair with the beloved Franco-German actress Romy Schneider, that while he still grieved her death at only forty-three, it had at least preserved her beauty: “It’s difficult to admit, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see her at 70. It’s better she went this way.” I turned forty-three this year, and while far from possessing Schneider’s beauty, the thought that in any universe it would be “better” to die at forty-three rather than to age—as we all must if we are to live, as Alain Delon himself has—strikes me as obnoxious in the extreme. Can there be a starker example of reducing a multi-faceted person to a mere surface? If Delon loved her, how could he not take in that she was more than just her physical beauty? That Schneider had depth beneath her surface loveliness, that she was more complicated, more flawed and more profound, should not be so very difficult to understand.
5. If I ever figure out how to have a pool of my own, it will be like a David Hockney painting. Sparkling and rippling in the sun, a nude figure emerging from its cool clearness.
When my children are teenagers and have their friends over, I will leave them to their youthful splashing. They will be surprised, and a little annoyed perhaps, at how much skinny-dipping there is when my friends are over, though. They will hardly be able to believe how comfortable we are in our middle-aged bodies. At least that is how I picture it all when I daydream my pool into existence.
I think of growing older with M. How impossible this was to envision when I was a young adult—a lifetime spent by another’s side. How easily I picture it now—now that we have almost two decades together under the bridge.
I think of our children growing up and the pools into which they will dip their own toes. The choices they will make, the paths their lives will take, and the nostalgias they will carry with them. I think of us swimming together in Marion Davies’s old pool. I think of the long summers of their childhood and try to picture where they will choose to make their lives. I imagine the possibility of some far-off day holding grandchildren as I wade with them into welcoming waters somewhere—perhaps even in my own backyard. I am wistful contemplating the adventures my children will undertake, and the unguessed ones still ahead for me, for M., for all of us.
•••
LAURENCE DUMORTIER writes essays and fiction. She is finishing her PhD in English, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. You can find her online at twitter.com/ElleDeeTweets
There are several ways to get to Siena, Italy. For Erik and me, to get out of Lecce, a town notched in the heel of the boot of Italy, and into Siena, where, if these boots had laces, you would tie the knot, we had to take a car, then a train, then a taxi, then a plane, and then another train and then walk straight up hill to the medieval city that is like Florence if Florence had not become heart-of-the-Renaissance-Florence. We took our first train from Lecce, through Brindisi, to Bari.
We are competent train takers. We take the subway when we’re in New York. We know you can sit forward or backward. We don’t get motion sickness. We can walk up and down the aisle. We know it is not like a car or a plane, but, admittedly, even though the Burlington Northern and Amtrak make us wait at the crossing in our Flagstaff hometown twice a day, we know trains as occasions, not everyday transportations.
The train from Lecce into Bari was late. We got into the cab to head to the airport. I told the driver, “We are late,” in whatever pretend Italian I knew then and have since forgotten. We were blond and carrying rolly suitcases. In Lecce, no one pretended to know English like I pretended to know Italian. But in Bari, the cab driver pretended to understand. Maybe I showed him the plane ticket. It was 11:40. Our flight left at 12:15. The train station is nowhere near the airport. I know he understood me because he spoke the international language of late-for-the-airport. He drove on the sidewalk. He took a left in a lane marked “right turns only.” His tires scraped curb. He stepped on the accelerator to speed around a bus to turn in front of it, bus honking, breaks squealing.
Now might have been a good time to tell the cab driver I was pregnant. Being pregnant shifts your perspective. Suddenly, your life, as protector of fetus, becomes much more precious, even if it’s a pregnancy you’re ambivalent about—it’s hard to be pregnant in wine country. Unlike normal times, making the plane on time seemed less important than surviving the cab-ride. But I did not know the word for pregnant and, although my perspective had shifted slightly, I didn’t want to bug the driver who was concentrating very hard to make a third lane for the taxi-cab where two lanes only existed.
•••
We thought we missed our flight. But then we read the arrivals and departures wrong. We had time to make it to the gate where we had prepaid for assigned seats. In Europe, people who fly Ryan Air rush like Barian cab drivers across the tarmac, suit coats flying, hand holding hat, to get their seats. Erik and I fly in America where our seats are assigned, and we board as soon as possible because sitting in a too-small seat ensures on on-time departure. In Bari, I walked to my seat like a pretend-calm person even though I did not understand why there were two staircases leading up to one airplane. The flight attendants had opened the back door of the plane to let us board. I did not know planes had back doors although I did know, thanks to my desperate attempt to keep the plane from crashing by listening attentively to the safety speech at the beginning of every flight that “the nearest exit may be behind you.” That an exit can also be an entrance is a very European idea.
After that, easy peasy, as Max, who was then only a two-month-old fetus, would say as a five-year-old now. He lived. We lived. The flight. The cab ride. I did not know how dangerous knowing only iPod Italian might be. When we arrived in Siena, our host spoke English. The knot that had been in my stomach, squishing fetus Max, unwound. I would give anything for a host for forever, someone to take me to a foreign country, find the airport on time, speak Italian to the taxi driver, explain why Americans don’t use two staircases to board the airplane from the front and the back.
•••
It’s impossible to know how high the seas will rise. Maybe they won’t rise much at all. Maybe whale poop will sequester the carbon. Maybe the mushrooms will. But some maps predict a bleaker future. In Grist Magazine, Greg Hansom describes pictures of sunken cities, newly named reliefs like Sea of San Diego and Archipelago of Bainbridge. San Joaquin Peninsula is all that’s left of Orange County. The coast we know now probably won’t disappear in our lifetime but in the next or the next or maybe sooner if the coal keeps burning and the cars keep driving.
I say “the cars” and “the coal” as if I am not sitting in a house, typing on a coal-burning laptop as the heater kicks on and pours naturally gassed heat upon me. As if the “the” means I won’t drive my Honda CRV to pick up my kids from school. Another article in the same magazine claimed that it’s liberals as much as Republicans who are the problem. We blame them for denying what we believe is there. But somebody else’s denial is necessary for us to believe that we liberals are doing the right thing, which is a whole lot of nothing. Nobody wants to be blamed for the Santa Monica pier falling into the ocean, but no one also wants to turn the heat down to fifty-five degrees in the winter or the air-conditioning to eighty in the summer. Heck, I have a dream to drive Route 66 all the way from Santa Monica to Chicago, Illinois. I wish I’d driven my car to Italy. Cars are a host country, like a planet. Every gum wrapper and seat print is our own. Our dreams are our cars. They take us out of here without it having to feel the pain of the unfamiliar. But, as the seas rise, perhaps we should get familiar with the boat.
•••
In Siena, the Palio happens twice a summer. Around the Piazza del Campo, horses race. Men, called Camparsa, in medieval outfits parade flags from their district through the streets toward the piazza. The streets, lined with nearly black cobblestones, are bordered by tall, connected houses from the 1300s, red flags, black stone, a Duomo, the Siena Cathedral.
The food in Siena was not the food of Puglia, which was dominated by broccoli rabe and orchiette, a whole-grain pasta. Siena had pizza. It had gelato. It had the food of the American Italian Vacation and it had wine I couldn’t drink. Like a proper tourist, I bought a scarf for ten euros. Like a tourist full of regrets, I should have bought a hundred. We stayed in a hotel that overlooked a garden. The piazza formed a circle where, during the parade, the horses rode around and the centuries swirled around and everything was stone which is how you make a city last—make it stone, make it circular to keep the art inside and the pillagers out. You keep the Renaissance at bay by keeping Florence down the street. You keep nature managed by turning it into a vineyard called Tuscany. Italy is a land of circles made by square painting frames and plots of grape and tomato vines. In Siena, you can’t see far because of the tall houses and the circling streets. It is easy to get lost although most of the time, the Duomo is in sight but the middle of the Duomo too is round and so if you end up on the wrong side of it, you might never know.
And I didn’t know, when we were on our way back to Lecce, to return to Zoe, the already-born kid, who was being watched by her attentive but window-opening grandparents who didn’t know about the Vape that you plug into the wall and emits some mosquito death vapor—and who could know of them? They, like we, are from the United States where we have DEET but no Vapes and so invited a thousand or so mosquitoes into their cottage to feast upon our already barely-alive daughter. She wasn’t really barely alive, but she had the Bad Lungs and the RSV and the inhaler broke the minute we plugged it into the wrong wall adapter. We adapt less well to the foreign world. We have made mistakes. We repeat them. Mosquitoes can sting more than once.
•••
The mosquitoes are getting worse. The Natural Resources Defense Council reports that mosquito-borne diseases are already spreading more rapidly. In the regular times, like the eighties, at seven-thousand feet elevation, people are safe from mosquitoes carrying Dengue Fever. Dengue-fever-carrying mosquitoes once didn’t travel higher than 3,200 feet. But it’s getting warm up here. Mosquitoes don’t suffer from altitude sickness, just the cold. Which it is not. Not even in December. Scientific American, in a September 27, 2013 article notes that incidences of Chikungunya, a disease carried by the Tiger mosquito, which causes high fevers and rashes, is on the rise in Western Europe. Zanahoria, Italian for mosquito, was a word we all knew when we left Italy. Chikungunya is a word we do not know but maybe experienced that long night in Lecce when Zoe couldn’t sleep.
•••
Erik and I wouldn’t be late for the plane this time. We made it to the Siena train station early. I read the schedule. Or, I tried to read the schedule. Pisa CSE, Pisa Centrale. Trenitalia. One stop in Empoli. Isn’t there a nonstop?
Erik and I peered through the glass, the train schedule old and blurry. Our phones didn’t work then, in Italy. The computer, as the nebulizer adapter died when we plugged it in, died on the plane in from Rome. If it were 1960 and Erik and I were on the platform, perhaps then things would have made more sense. We would have studied the book harder, not being so lulled into submission by easy info access on our smartish phones. We would have taken trains more often, understanding that Centrale and One Stop were the same idea. Perhaps, in the 1960s, when the mosquitoes were happy at 3,200 feet and San Diego was confident of its shores, we would have been more versed in chivalry. Perhaps it would have been a time when Erik understood One Stop and Centrale to be the same destination, I would have trusted him. Perhaps if all our verses had been written in 1960s chivalry, he would have waited for me while I was in the bathroom instead of getting on the train without me. Perhaps I would have trusted him and his new British friends as they all waved to me to get on the damn train. Perhaps my 1960-self would have been more credulous. Of course Erik made new British friends and boarded a train without me. If only we could go back in time and then, again, in time, because it keeps coming, time, perhaps I would have jumped on that train, full of belief and trust in trains I did not know and toward the only Pisa that could have been waiting for me.
•••
We use the word “believe” when we talk about climate change. Fox News doesn’t believe it. Members of the National Resources Defense Council do believe it. Readers of Scientific American mostly believe it. Belief is the word you use when you cannot be sure about the future. And the scientists aren’t sure how high the mosquitoes will fly. They aren’t sure how high the oceans will rise. Belief, though, whether you do it or not, only worries about the future. When you believe in God, you pray to him to make good things happen. When you believe in climate change, you believe that maybe good things don’t. One of my mentors believes science will save us—big carbon scrubbers in the sky. How is hope different than belief?
•••
Instead, I did not get on the train. Erik did not get off the train. I stood on the platform as the train pulled away. Erik stared at me through the train window. Incredulity is another word for stubborn. I sat down on the concrete platform, underneath the schedule that predicted when Erik would come back. I’d figured out the train schedule by then but not my husband. I figured out that he might have been right about all trains leading to Pisa but that didn’t necessarily make me wrong. I waited as one train came back. Two trains. Three trains. He was not on any of them. I figured out that maybe sometimes it’s important to just go with the person you are with rather than let your butt get cold on the concrete platform of the Tranitalia Empoli station. Longing is another word for not knowing what to do next.
•••
If I had a house on the Olympic Peninsula, built fifty feet behind the neighbor’s property, which reaches out to the shore of the Puget Sound, how long would I have to wait until I could claim millionaire status for my now-ocean front property? When the water swallowed the neighbor’s strangely-suburban lawn? When the water lapped at my neighbor’s duck-dotted welcome mat? When the country duck hanging as a welcome sign is as wet as the doormat? When the roof of my neighbor’s house makes a nice fishing dock? You are silly to think oceanfront property will mean anything when you have to stay indoors to keep the mosquitoes from injecting their malarial parasite near the now-warm waters of the Puget Sound.
•••
Eventually, I got on a train to Pisa. Eventually, Erik came back. Our trains must have passed each other. When I got to Pisa, he wasn’t there. I went back to Empoli. He wasn’t there either.
•••
The seas have risen far enough to turn Queen Anne into an island at least once before, Jurassicly. They can do it again. Of course, the pretend house I built on the Sound will be under water by then, but, then, the sea doesn’t mind the taste of human constructs.
•••
Finally, our flight back to Bari, back to our mosquito-ridden daughter, back to our flight back to Rome that would get us out of Italy nearly departing, I rode the train back to Pisa. I had the plane tickets. He had to be there. And he was. He stood at the edge of the platform. If this had been a movie, I would have run to him. He would have run to me. Open arms.
•••
I am a good swimmer. If not a good reader of schedules or husbands. I am ready for you, warm waters of the Puget Sound. I know it would be too much to ask for you, dear ocean, to leave me any oysters.
•••
But this is not a movie. His arms are folded. Crossed. I’m so happy to see him. My heart thrills. I am home. But still. I cannot believe that he left me behind.
He says, “I cannot believe you.”
Which I take to mean, I cannot believe in you.
But I say, “You can’t believe me? I can’t believe you!”
I touch my arms. My hair. I am here.
“You’re the one that left me,” I say.
“You never trust me,” he says.
“I’m the one who speaks Italian,” I say.
“You cannot read a map,” he says.
“I came to you. Twice.” I say.
“I went back for you,” he says.
We each folded our arms because no one wants to believe they misunderstood a schedule, a wave, a bathroom break, a pregnancy, a train-trip to somewhere so beautiful so badly. If this were an O’Henry story, this would have been a love story. But this is not O’Henry. Erik was raised by a single-mom who did everything by herself—made peanut butter and jellies, went to work, paid the mortgage, bought a car, hiked in the desert, took the kids to the dentist, mopped the floors. He doesn’t believe that just because I had to pee, just because I was pregnant, just because I wanted to be convinced by the signage, that I shouldn’t have just gotten it together, got on the next train, and met him in Pisa. A feminist is the guy who figures his wife will figure it out. His mom could have done it herself. And, on my side, I don’t believe I should have just trusted him, just gotten on the train just because he said so, without even talking to me. I’m a feminist who doesn’t believe anybody should tell me what to do, even if that means I wait on the platform for two hours to be rescued by some chivalrous husband who does not believe in chivalry. Two stubborn faces staring through the window. There’s no way to know how to go back. I sing a version of the Charlie on the MTA song,
Did he ever return, no he never returned
And his fate is still unlearned
He may ride forever ‘neath the streets of Pisa
He’s the man who never returned.
Erik doesn’t laugh. And then he does.
•••
You can know a few things. You can know this: No one is going to rescue us. We are going to miss our flight from Pisa to Bari. We are going to miss seeing our kid, with her mosquito bites, harboring a virus we cannot pronounce. We are going to spend the rest of our lives passing our traveling companions on the train from Pisa to Empoli, from Empoli to Pisa. But we won’t know what it feels like until we open the windows and actually touch the water. Until then, all we will see is our warped faces, reflected back at us. Duck decorations can’t swim. I should have believed Erik instead of staying put and hoping he’d come back to save me.
They say with time, you look back and laugh. For Erik, that’s not so long. For the island of San Diego, it’s too soon to know.
•••
NICOLE WALKER’s Quench Your Thirst with Salt won the Zone 3 Award for Creative Nonfiction and was released in June 2013. She is the author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street 2010) and edited, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, (Bloomsbury, 2013) and with Rebecca Campbell—7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment from the Arts, she’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University where she will host the 2015 NonfictioNOW Conference in Flagstaff, Arizona where it rains like the Pacific Northwest, but only in July.
On my first night living alone, I found myself in a room containing only a bed, a nightstand, and a single Tiffany-style lamp—the only thing I requested as inheritance from my aunt who passed away just over a year before.
It was Wednesday. Monday I had been in court petitioning an end to our marriage. Tuesday I had closed on a house. It was late at night and the next day my sister and parents would be coming up from Salt Lake and St. George to my little townhome in West Haven, Utah, to spend Thanksgiving with me. There would be no turkey cooking in my oven that year, but I was thankful they came all the way to spend it with me.
I’d received the keys to my house just hours before, and I stayed up late that night prepping the walls of my new bedroom with blue tape, getting ready for a fresh coat of paint. I chose a dark brown color named “Bay Colt” from the Martha Stewart line of colors. It was a comfortable color, grounded, and it would contrast perfectly with my new heavy, red bedspread that I had my eye on buying in the next couple of days. I painted accent walls that included the wall behind my bed. A healthy, rich soil color was perfect as a place to replant myself. Besides, the designer Vera Wang, three-hundred-dollar bedspread would be my way of being seductively mischievous (if only for myself!).
•••
Just two days before, I sat in a courtroom with Jim, two bailiffs, the court stenographer, our lawyer, and the judge. All the gallery seats behind us were empty. Once the proceeding started, life’s reality began to settle in and the tears were uncontrollably escaping, enough that the bailiff brought me a box of tissues. I tasted the saline as the tears dripped past my lips. I had to swear the truth, the whole truth, and I had to convince the judge to grant an annulment to a marriage that could have/should have been annulled four years prior. Though Jim didn’t have to go under oath, he was there and nodded in agreement at the implications of an unconsummated marriage. The judgment was final. It was as if Jim and I were never married.
I never understood the phrase as if you were never married. That’s what our lawyer said an annulment legally meant. How can someone say that a marriage didn’t happen? I experienced it. I was there. It existed to me. Legally, however, it never happened.
Remarkably, I never felt like a failure. Even on that day in my empty bedroom, I was exhausted and relieved. It was finally over. I had done everything I could think of to save my marriage—twice. We’d consulted with therapists (good and bad), physicians, energy healers, and clergy, but none could give us an answer or a cure.
I never gave up until I knew we were done. It was over when the truth that he didn’t even want to want me finally resonated with me. If Jim did not want to want me, then there was no practitioner or prayer that could change his desire. So what was the purpose of discussing big purchases or planning future trips? What else could we get out of this relationship besides frustrated companionship? Those years felt like pedaling a bike on a treadmill, working so hard to go nowhere. There was no progression. If anything, I wished I had caught on sooner that this was a doomed marriage from the start.
We followed our belief to stay chaste before we were married. For a long time, I thought that if I hadn’t been so strict in practicing my religion, I would have known. When we dated, he often told me he was uncomfortable with my forwardness. I thought I was the one whose sexual perspective was skewed due to a handsy ex-boyfriend. After we were married, I felt justified to find a way to ease the frustration outside of the marriage. I could have cheated on him and felt I could defend my actions, but I’m thankful I never strayed. Ironically, there were times I hoped that he would cheat on me so I would be angry enough to call it quits and feel justified to call off a God-sanctioned marriage. Other times, I would entertain the thought of getting him drunk and taking advantage of his stupor. Damn our religion. No sex outside of marriage and no drinking.
After so many years of silence, never telling anyone outside a professional few, I finally opened up. No more secrets from society. My mom lost a lot of her hair trying to take in what I told her. When it grew back in, it wouldn’t hold the color as it did before. She had been caught up in our myth of perfection. Opening up also meant answering a lot of questions. Answering questions about that marriage has always been complicated. To those casual friends or acquaintances I would simply answer the question of “what happened?” with “It just didn’t work”—only sometimes divulging the secret pun on the word “it.” “It just didn’t work” and it didn’t. Others that got more detail would ask, “Is he gay?” or “Was it pornography?” Having been his wife, I could honestly answer “no” to each of those. I wished I had the answer as to why it didn’t work.
•••
That day in my new bedroom was the beginning of my new life. I was McKel Nobody and I could be me and love me and want to be me. And, although I was surviving the trauma of an upturned life, I was going to be selfish for once.
After I moved in, I had a point of realization: this was my house, and I had complete, creative control. There was no compromising, no rationalizing, no male opinion, no collaboration of details. I was going for it. The color: Brazilian Blush. The room: my home office.
I then found a can of bright white, semi-gloss paint that I had used to paint floorboards in another house. I dabbed paint onto a small sponge and pat it onto a stencil of a butterfly. Instead of following straight lines as the stencil intended, I rotated each butterfly, one at a time. I worked myself around the room. I even hid a couple behind the door knowing I would be one of a select few who would get the secret.
By the end, I had a room full of butterflies gliding over my desk and around the black bookcases filled with books, over and around the window and above the closet. The idea of one butterfly being alone made me sad, so each butterfly was paired off with a companion or in families. “Well,” I thought, “only this one can fly alone.” So I let one independent butterfly have her space to prove that she could make it.
•••
About a year into our marriage, Jim finally sat me down to explain what he saw was going on. We sat in our 1975 split-level home that we bought a month before we were married. It had fake hardwood floors that were installed incorrectly by the previous owners.
“I, uh,” he staggered to get the words. “I’ve been praying a lot about us.”
My breath slowed.
“I’ve known I’ve needed to tell you for a while, but…” He stopped again. I thought we had a relationship where we could share anything, but his delay of telling me something made me uncomfortably aware that this wasn’t going to be a fun conversation.
He then proceeded to tell me in the most logically constructed way that he could. “I am not physically attracted to you.”
“What?”
This is where friends would say, “Well, why did he marry you?!” But it would be a few more years before I would ask that question and when I did, he replied, “I didn’t want to be shallow.” At this time, though, my mind processed everything slowly, methodically. I needed to obtain every bit of information I could to make a valid judgment.
“I am not physically attracted to you.” Maybe I needed it repeated because the first one didn’t take. “I see girls on campus that dress immodestly, and I instantly get excited,” he confessed. “I don’t get excited with you.”
I sat there, honestly not knowing what to make of the information he was telling me.
“I think it has something to do with chemistry. We don’t have any chemistry.”
Chemistry. Sex is sex. What does chemistry have to do with it? Besides, isn’t compatibility more important in a relationship than chemistry?
He sat there relieved, grateful that he was finally freed from the weight of his confession. I sat there heavy, burdened and wondering when the tears would start. They didn’t for another twelve hours.
“Well, what do we do now?”
Jim was the one that suggested going to a therapist. When we arrived, we met with a tall, thin man who seemed as if he rode his bike to work and wasn’t willing to make mid-morning appointments because it interrupted his morning ritual. I had no idea how to find a therapist that could help us, especially when we weren’t asking for referrals from friends. I found him on an internet search on a whim. His name wasn’t worth remembering.
“So, tell me what’s going on?” he asked us.
The two of us sat closely on the couch, our arms crossing as we held on to the other’s thigh. Jim explained our situation due to lack of chemistry, that thing that couples have that makes you bubble inside and want to jump on each other. “We don’t have chemistry,” he said. “I don’t want to have sex with my wife.” It never got easier to hear, although at the time I was thankful that I didn’t have to guess what he was thinking.
The therapist smiled as if Jim had made a joke. “You don’t need chemistry.” He then continued with a question to Jim, “What do you not find attractive about her?”
Jim squirmed, “Nothing. I think she’s beautiful.” If he thought I was beautiful, why did we have a problem?
“There is nothing you would change about her to make her attractive to you?” He asked again as if I wasn’t sitting right in front of him.
Ironically, I was hoping he would state something, anything—give this therapist some meat to work with! “No. Nothing,” he admitted again.
I sensed the therapist and I had the same idea; he needed more than just crumbs, “What do you find attractive in a woman?”
“Well, I like redheads,” he stammered.
At this point, the therapist turned to me and asked, “Have you tried dying your hair red?”
Apparently he thought that a year’s worth of sexual incompetency would be remedied by a ten-dollar bottle of L’Oreal. “No,” I said, though secretly wondering if it would work—if only for a second.
It was becoming painfully clear that all the therapist saw were two overweight virgins who got married and now couldn’t figure out how sex worked. “We’re asking for help, not to be your entertainment,” I wanted to say but didn’t. We scheduled two more appointments with that man.
•••
After that, we had a handful of therapists before I settled on one for myself. Her name was Tam, and she was there during my transition from as-if-it-never-happened to single. As I was preparing for my new house, she was the only one that didn’t think I was silly for losing sleep over wall colors and furniture placement. “This is all part of your process for coping,” she said. “You are focusing on your future, and that’s good.” If she had visited me in my house and saw the boldness I expressed in that blushing pink room, she would have been proud.
Although that room was my home office, I referred to it as my Alice in Wonderland room. I spent the following weeks and months finding trinkets and sayings that would fit into the theme. I handcrafted phrases such as “Why, this clock is exactly two days slow!” and “Off with your head!” and placed them on my bookshelves. Displayed on the far wall first seen when you walk were three black frames each holding a word in the phase “Whoo are you” and a fourth frame holding the tailing question mark. There was a time that Alice didn’t know who she was either. Throughout the following months, I added a ceramic tea set, a large Mad-Hatter hat, ceramic mushrooms, a black, old-fashioned alarm clock and a caterpillar on a mushroom.
My fascination with Alice in Wonderland started one year before when Jim and I went to see the new Tim Burton movie in the theatre. Two months before the film’s opening, I found myself forty pounds overweight (trying to fill my emptiness) with back, hip, and neck problems that caused serious discomfort and lots of chiropractic bills. That night at the theatre I was two months into my progressive goals of losing weight and obtaining therapy for myself and not for him (or us). Perhaps that is why I was so open to receive the messages of the film and why the Mad Hatter’s line to Alice—“You have lost your muchness”—resonated with me. Alice couldn’t remember who she was.
Two weeks later, friends and family from both sides descended on our house to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. And since I was born in 1980, what better way to celebrate than by a 1980s theme? Guests arrived in leg warmers, side ponytails of crimped hair, blue eye shadow, brightly colored mixed-matched socks, jelly shoes, upturned shirt collars, and the macho style single earrings that would make George Michael proud. My brother wore his letterman’s jacket from high school that was a little tighter than he remembered. Jim wore a thick, black glamour rock wig and a Goonies t-shirt. People were smiling. I was smiling. The smell of freshly grilled hamburgers hung in the air as my family presented me with a cake with six-inch long candles jetting out of it.
Before the smoke from the extinguished candles reached my nose, I remember thinking, “This year will either be the best year of my life or the worst.” Things would either begin to work or they wouldn’t. I knew a change was coming. I had thought this during the weeks leading up to the dreaded thirtieth birthday, and I added it to my broken-record thought collection which already included the lyrics of the song “I Want You to Want Me” from the band Cheap Trick. That song had been on repeat for over a year already. No one knew about my thought collection. Surrounded by people that truly loved me, I knew that they couldn’t hear my thoughts just as I knew that they couldn’t see the gaping hole hidden behind my new “Everyone loves an ’80’s girl” tee-shirt. McKel had lost her muchness.
•••
The pinkness of that butterfly-filled Alice in Wonderland room proved that I hadn’t quite lost everything. I had made a place for myself. I was still undecided if my thirtieth year was the best or the worst year of my life. It was certainly one of the hardest but deciding to leave that marriage was a relief. For the first time in years, I felt like I could finally progress, even on my own.
As the months followed, I finished painting my house—except one room. It was the third bedroom, between the Alice in Wonderland room and the second bathroom. My L-shaped couch was wall-to-wall without an inch to spare. I dubbed this room the “makeout room,” mainly as a joke. Having been married to a man who couldn’t perform and wouldn’t accept me (and a lousy kisser, at that), I figured, as the phrase goes, “If I build it, they will come.” Pun intended. It must have worked because once, while making out with a guy, the man suddenly jumped up, said, “I’ve got to go,” and ran out of my house. I never got an explanation.
That house served its purpose well through the seventeen months that I lived there. I healed in that house. I started grad school and did my homework while in that house. My husband, Daniel, and I found chemistry in that house while we were dating.
I met Daniel six months after moving in. He was from Brigham City, thirty minutes north of West Haven, and the thought that I almost bought a house closer to Salt Lake made me wince with what-ifs:
“What if I had bought a house farther away from you? We may not have met!”
“I would have found you,” he replied.
Nearly a year after Daniel and I started dating, we were married. And while preserving the sacredness of my marriage with him, I will confess that it is blissfully normal and that it works.
•••
McKEL JENSEN is a newbie to the world of published personal essays. She has worked behind the scenes in the non-fiction book publishing industry and currently works as a technical writer/editor for a large manufacturing company in Utah. She has recently received her MA in English from Weber State University, where she was selected to be commencement speaker for her graduating class. She lives in northern Utah with her wonderful husband and ever-curious son.
“Syncope and sudden death are the same thing, except in one you wake up.”
—Dr. B. J. Carey, Irish Medical Journal, June 2003
No dainty wilting violet, he. His whole body thunks to the floor. He can’t see. He can’t hear. He can’t speak. He can’t think. And here I am, new to the scene, with my notions gleaned from Victorian novels: fainting couches and smelling salts and fluttery ladies caught by dashing gentleman at the most romantically opportune moment. Not he. He throws everything into it, or rather is thrown, flung. From wherever I am in the house, I’m jerked into the room by the sound of the crash. I kneel down, take his hand. He stares through me, unblinking, as I hover above him, trying to catch his eye like a schoolgirl with a crush. I repeat his name into the void, love unrequited. I pat a stiff, clammy hand that is no longer his hand. For five seconds, ten seconds, twenty seconds, he is motionless. His heart stops. He is dead.
Then, as I am preparing to dial 911 and trying to remember my CPR class from high school, the face suffuses with berry-red. The unmoored eyes dart, saccading across the ceiling until they rest on my face with a look of great alarm. Kembrew has said that when he first comes to, he has no idea where he is or how he got there. So I’ve learned to tell him. He listens with intense attention—“You passed out; you’re on the bedroom floor; you’ll be okay”—and the eyes start to reflect light again; he speaks, remembers, a skipped record needle sinking back into the groove of life.
More than once I’ve I dragged Kembrew to the emergency room after one of these incidents. It’s maybe the worst thing I can do: the anxiety of being in a medical situation tends to cause more episodes of vasovagal syncope, a condition in which the chutes of the blood vessels open in response to some physical or emotional trigger, and not enough blood can reach the brain, which in turn causes loss of consciousness. In other words, fainting. Blacking out. A common condition, often benign.
I simply don’t learn, though. I can’t be alone with him, with it—especially in the middle of the night, when it always seems to happen. The word “syncope” comes from the Latin and Greek “syn” (together) and “kope” (to cut off). Each time, this cutting off of everything that holds him together, that holds us together, unnerves me. To see him in an unresponsive state, even for a few seconds, is intolerable.
All the more so because my husband is not the kind of person who is normally known for being at a loss for words. Kembrew teaches for a living, leading discussion in small classes or lecturing to large ones. In his spare time, he organizes protests. He writes multitudes of letters to the editor of the town newspaper. He delights in the fact that upper officials at the university where we both work consider him a troublemaker and give him dirty looks at receptions.
I remember one of the first times I heard his voice, back when we barely knew each other. I was driving somewhere with the radio on; he was a guest on a local NPR show. A listener called in to vehemently disagree with his position and hold forth upon his own. Rather than being taken aback, as I would have been, my future husband jumped into the fray—“Let me ask you this,” he interrupted when the caller took a breath—and gleefully debated his opponent, matching the man’s intensity, never backing down. And yet, when it’s three a.m. and he’s sick, or he’s struck by sudden medical fears for himself or others that remind him of his childhood when his family couldn’t afford to go to the doctor, he succumbs. And I’m the one who has to step up, fill the silence with my words, and I can’t. “Syncope” also has a grammatical definition: the excision of part of a word. In his proposed absence, words whose significance we built together—marriage, family, love—become distorted and lose their meaning. My vocabulary fails.
So I end up driving Kembrew through our sleeping town toward the permanently-lit red EMERGENCY sign. I tell myself that since the fainting spells are usually brought on by dehydration caused by ailments like the flu, it’s worthwhile to make the trip since they can give him fluids through an IV. Really, I just want company. I want someone else to be there.
During our most recent trip to the ER, a nurse hooks Kembrew up to an EKG machine, and it catches the next syncope on its ticker tape. I watch as the heartbeat, that clichéd beeping line with its regular jerk upwards followed by a slow slope downwards, just keeps sloping down and sloping down and sloping down. “Um, hello!” I call out to a group milling at the nurses’ station. In a flash, our small room is crowded with people. “Get the cart,” someone says. They place defibrillator pads on his chest. They inject his IV with atropine. Then we all stand around and watch.
Again, notions. Notions of heroic rescue. Not the Victorian novels, but TV hospital shows this time. Everyone leaping onto the body, massaging it back to life, deploying machinery. Instead, we hover ineffectually, exactly the way I do when it’s just me and him and the bedroom floor. The nurses and residents and a rumpled cardiologist-on-call who has been paged and still seems halfway in whatever dream he was having—we all stand there in the presence of the body’s lonely struggle to survive. It’s not like the TV shows: at some level, he must do this for himself. The heroics are all internal. My voice sounds from somewhere in the back of the room, repeating my usual mantra: “You’re okay, sweetie.” Someone glances at me as if I’m insane. “He’s breathing,” one of them says, looking on the bright side in lieu of a heartbeat.
I think back to the early morning of June 12, 1999, to the paramedics’ unfamiliar voices in the background as my mother’s familiar one, catching on her fear, tells me over the telephone, “They say he’s still breathing.” By the time I hang up and put my clothes on to go to the airport to get on the next plane to St. Louis, my father’s dead from a heart attack. Breathing often continues for a few moments after the heart has stopped.
But that was then and this is now, and now the usual invisible hands—not mine, not the doctors’, which are all just hanging there useless—throttle him back to life; Kembrew’s face goes scarlet, and he is again among us. Only now do I notice that taped to the side of the crash cart is a laminated sheet of paper that says, “When there is no pupil response for X seconds”—I can’t now remember how many—“page the social worker/grief counselor on call.”
When we were first in love, I would watch him as he slept. One morning, as I was watching him, he opened his eyes and looked right at me, and that simple action seemed like such a miracle that I started to weep. I remembered how I was taken to see my dad in the ER exam room where they put him after he died, in the same hospital where I was born, and how I studied my father’s face then, touched his cheek. For a long time afterward, whenever anything good happened to me, I would think, “I’d trade it all for another five minutes with my dad.” All of the accumulated good in my life since he died, over two years, over five—I’d have traded it all without a second thought. Then I fell in love and wondered if that was indeed true anymore. You have turned my mourning into dancing, I thought, looking into the eyes that were looking back at mine, having performed the miracle of opening on a summer morning. It was a verse from Psalms I had somehow picked up during my atheistic life. You have taken my sackcloth and clothed me in joy.
After the drama is over and our room empties of hospital personnel, I corner one of the doctors in the hall and explain that there’s been a small misunderstanding, ha ha, that this has happened before, that perhaps we could try not to alarm him with more talk of how serious it is. “But it is serious,” she tells me. “Your husband scared the bejeezus out of us just now. His heart stopped.”
“Okay,” I say, thinking, Yes, course. This is how it is. I knew it. It’s not benign; how could it be? The body doesn’t lie. Into the Cardio-Vascular Intensive Care Unit we go, where his new neighbors are gray lumps on their hospital beds. Having fainted three times in quick succession this morning, Kembrew looks almost as gray as they do. They say he must remain for a couple days of observation. There is talk of implanting a pacemaker. There is talk of implanting an emergency pacemaker to cover the time before a permanent pacemaker can be implanted. But after a few hours, during which I watch the green line of his heartbeat and the blue line of his respiration on the monitor like it’s the most fascinating show on TV, it’s broad daylight out, no longer the fluorescent-hued night of the ER. A new mood arrives with the day shift.
He doesn’t look like his neighbors any more; anyone can see that, so they set him free. It’s benign, the day-doctors tell us. It mimics sudden death so naturally it causes alarm. And his heart didn’t stop, they clarify: it just paused briefly. It maybe pauses longer than some others’, but it’s still an acceptable pause. This makes us feel better, but for me, every day still has a tinge of three a.m. around the edges, and it always will. Each time it happens, the floor will fall away from my life, and I can’t help that any more than Kembrew can help fainting. How many seconds is X?
Back when few of our friends had children, and long before we contemplated it ourselves, babies seemed like alien beings to us. In one of our first up-close encounters with one, we marveled at how small and delicate our friend Chris’s newborn son was. The baby plunked into our arms, we each displayed the stiff, awkward don’t-break-it arm-crook of the childless. “Don’t worry,” Chris told us, already a seasoned father with one older child. “They’re not as fragile as they look. They cling to life!” His hearty “they cling to life” has stuck with me over the years. I believe it and I don’t believe it about anyone I love, because it’s true and it’s not true, and I’m sure Chris or any parent, or any wife, or any daughter, must feel the same way. The body’s drive to live is invincible. Until it isn’t.
Dismissed from the cardiac unit and the hospital, which in the daytime is once again our friendly, local, familiar hospital where we get check-ups, we walk to the parking ramp on our own two feet with no follow-up appointment scheduled. It’s what I’ve come to think of as the get-out-of-jail-free card, yet another to add to the several we’ve accumulated as we approach middle age: that breast lump that turned out to be nothing, the stomach pain that required a peek with the stomach-camera. Outside in the bright sun, back in the community we know so well, everyone looks outrageously healthy: so ruddy, so active, so obliviously jogging and pink. It’s easy to believe that there are plenty more of those cards in the deck.
When it happens again, though, it’s always night. Since Kembrew knows I’m not strong or fast enough to catch him, he aims for the floor. Sometimes he makes it all the way there before he passes out. Sometimes he falls the rest of the way. I run in, always too late, in no way the dashing Victorian gentleman, appalled to find that the person who most pleases and irks and understands me in the world has cut himself out of our shared experience. And there isn’t a thing that I can do about it. I can’t catch him. I can’t resurrect him. I can just be there.
•••
LYNNE NUGENT is managing editor of The Iowa Review. Her essays have appeared in the North American Review, Brevity, the Modern Love column of the New York Times, and the anthology Moving On: Essays on the Aftermath of Leaving Academia.
Maybe it’s nothing to be proud of, but tonight I felt my life coming together at a chichi grocery store. At home, things are in disarray, beyond disarray: the result of multi-front home improvement projects undertaken by my husband Stephen, perfectionist and reluctant decision maker.
Acrid fumes volatilize from newly varnished kitchen cabinets. The bathroom stands hallow, stripped of its porcelain fixtures. On the wide douglas fir boards where the tub once stood, the contractor applied an outdoor-only rot-prevention paint. Cursory internet searching vaguely links its ingredients to neurological problems. An oil-based primer seals off that toxic layer but simultaneously introduces hydrocarbonic vapors to the mix. A layer of dust covers the floors, ledges, and window sills. Mostly disintegrated plaster, but molecules of cancer-causing petrochemicals certainly encase each tiny particle.
All of this might be okay for us, but not, I think, for the developing lungs of our not-quite two-year-old son Nico.
We have already been staying at two other places, first a housesitting gig, then the rental house next door ours, until it was rented, which it now is. There is nowhere to go except Miriam’s, while she and her two kids are back east visiting family.
After work, I pick up Nico from his sitter’s and meet Miriam at her house to put dibs on it. If I feed her cats, we can stay there. It buys us a week out of our place.
Miriam tours me around, apologizing for the mess. She opens the door to her playroom, swinging it wide with a ceremonious ta da gesture. Behold. Here, a child’s plastic basketball hoop, the net torn, juts at an angle from a cardboard box sliding off a Navajo rug folded across the arm of a badly cat-scratched sofa. Nearby, a red and black checkerboard and two palm tree bookends are viewable in a thirty-two–gallon aquarium. Normally I don’t care anything about messes, but with this much chaos I’m concerned that keeping an exploring toddler out of trouble will be a challenge. I make a mental note to keep this door shut.
Cats are independent. This sink drain goes nowhere. The water gets hot quickly. The door is locked when the knob’s button is horizontal.
“This is Maya’s pet beetle.” A little roll of Miriam’s eyes. “It was one of those meal worms. Its name is Pepsie. I don’t know what she’s doing.”
(Assume it will die. Assume it won’t stay in the container.)
“Maybe,” Miriam ventures, “when we’re back, you could stay at the house down the street that’s for sale. You’d love it. There are so many kids around, and it’s nice to be so close to Whole Foods. We even memorized the dinner sales. Monday night is burritos. Wednesday, the rotisserie chickens are only six dollars. “
I say yes. Yes to the chickens. I bought a rotisserie chicken at the Co-op last week. It was the best thing I did all month.
She agrees. “My kids love it. I got three meals out of it!”
Our enthusiasm is delivered slightly deadpan, winking and grimacing to ourselves. After all, I once made a practice of pressing my own soy milk to avoid the non-recyclable foil lined packaging. But now I embrace chicken in a plastic bubble.
Miriam and I agree to meet up at Whole Foods after she makes a spare key to the house.
•••
Gleaming steel grocery cart, with a tray projecting in front of the child seat. In the style of a cookie cooling rack, the tray has narrowly spaced metal bars such that Nico’s little wooden Gold Dust Thomas Choo Choo can perch at an angle between two bars without falling through. Off to one side, a circular gap in the tray can hold his sippy cup. This thing was built for us.
Even so, it’s difficult to get through the store. Tired and hungry, Nico writhes in the seat, straining against the nylon seat belt. He grabs my coat collar and tries to pull himself out. He yells.
At last the checkout line. And there at the end I see just the set up I was looking for:
Tall tables, bar height, and stool chairs. Twisted cast iron legs and slate tops. Behind the table, a smoky-gray tinted mirrored wall, an attraction, engagement for a toddler. More wholesome than TV, like a fish tank.
I must have expected to look alright by that half light, because I startle at my first glimpse of myself in the mirror, dark circles under my eyes, my hair pulled tight with frizz escaping along the hairline. I do look how I’m always afraid of: old.
But, hey, the cart pushes right up to the table, the seat at just exactly same height as the tabletop.
Looking down at our browned chicken, condensation forms under the plastic dome. A paper ribbon seals the package. Everything would be perfect if I had a knife and napkin. I can’t muster the will to leave the table and venture to the silverware bar.
I pull the chicken apart with my fingers, but the avocado?
Nico screams, “AVO AVO!”
He is loud. People in line look at us.
One man radiates judgment. Does he think this is how we eat every night? An entire encapsulated chicken between us? Popping the airtight seal to tear meat from its bones?
I look over toward the counter of silverware, and there is Miriam, wondrously materialized, bringing napkins and forks and knives and Maya.
We take up a conversation that we, two mid-Atlantic transplants to central California, have been having since we met seven years ago. Without even mentioning any of it, we talk about the greenery, the rain all year, the architecture, the pull of home.
“How long have you been here?”
“Eight years.”
“You?”
“Twenty years. And you know, as recently as last summer thought I’d move back, but not anymore.”
“How old are you now, Maya?”
“Seven.”
I had been staying with Daniel while Miriam and her friend made the trip to bring Maya home from China. When I ask how she did it, I don’t mean it to be patronizing. I remember the autism parents who have said simply you would do it too.
But Miriam says, “I don’t remember. I felt called.”
I don’t remember her complaining.
She says she actually doesn’t remember much of the first couple years, when Maya was one and two, and Daniel was four and five. It was too busy to remember.
As we talk, I recall the stone statues of basket-carrying ladies just outside that adorn the exterior roofline of this grocery store and remember an essay that came through my writing group describing their architectural and mythological history. Remembering those moments of hearing that essay cinches that time together with this time at the table, the stitches of my life gathering tighter. The mirror behind the table reflects Miriam and I, where we have arrived through this more than half-decade of conversation.
And with these threads pulling through time, I am back in memory to a day in Virginia, snow flurries swirling out the window all day and late afternoon as dark falls, until I had to turn on the porch light to check if they were still falling. One year to the day after you died, Mom.
There in the kitchen, I reflected on Isak Dinesen’s writing about the pattern of a life, a pattern that can only be discerned with the space of time. As if looking down from above on a person’s life—the movements and places travelled—the pattern will emerge like a constellation shape. I believe Dinesen described the shape of a wading bird, but I never have been able find those words again. In the Virginia kitchen, warm and light with snow outside, I thought of your life. What was the bird pattern? Was there one, if you had trouble seeing it even at the end? What if the path never did arrive?
I think of you talking about the way you would watch your Christmas tree. Your childhood trees with real candle flames and weighted metal tinsel lametta sparkling. Shining silver balls hanging half hidden toward the interior branches. Light glinting between these and the ornaments with miniature scenes inside half-glass globes. On our oral history tape you said, I remember just sitting in front of the tree. The reflections of all the little lights. I could just sit there for hours and watch it, because the icicles would move because of the natural candles, because they would move. A door opened or some little wind would come, and it was going through the whole tree and it shifted all to one side.
I imagined your life as that tree, a web of moments, points, reflecting back and forth each other, amplifications and interferences. All the moments like tiny hanging mirrors.
The next day, when I get to Miriam’s, there will be a note on the container where Maya’s beetle lives. In blue crayon, in child’s variably sized lettering, it says:
Please chang apple every DAY (drawing of beetle) Two little sqeres of apple (heart).
Also labeled are Pepsie bed and Pepsies tunnel.
Most of the week, I ignore Pepsie. He has a chunk of apple, although it looks browned and withered on the outside. On the last day, I cut a small fresh slice and put it next to Pepsie’s toilet paper roll cave, and, unbelievably, he trundles out right away, and extends some sort of proboscis and sucks, sucks and sucks, on the apple.
I leave Maya a note: I think Pepsie missed you.
But this I don’t know yet as Miriam and Maya and Nico and I finish dinner together, and somehow it feels leisurely.
Before I head home, I pat my pocket and discover the change that I’d scavenged from my car the day before, when I’d planned to get some cocoa but then misplaced my car keys and missed the chance.
I walk up to the beverage counter to buy cocoa for the road. The young man tells me that Harvest Cocoa is the drink of the hour. I can get any size I want for the price of a small. I get a medium.
Carrying it in one hand, I push Nico out to the car. It is dark, and light sprinkles have started.
One of the first rains of the year in this place where we go months without rain. The rain feels like everything. The dirt, the leaves, the stomata, the dirt, even the sand in the sidewalk opens up. Like pores. Breathing. Drinking. Petrichor.
Driving now, I pull the car off the dark access road into an Amaco station, lit bright as an alien outpost. I swipe my magnetic strip and stand by. I try not to inhale too deeply the vaporized hundred million year old liquefied remains of giant reptiles as they are pumped above ground to burn in the furnace of my car, propelling our course home.
Tank full, I swing out and onto the highway ramp.
We drive the twelve straight miles on the highway. Through fine rain drops, red tail lights stream out in front of me and white lights trail the other way. And I am so surprised to register a net of connection around my heart as we slip along this path of least resistance.
•••
ANDREA MUMMERT PUCCINI is a mother, environmental biologist, and writer. She is a native of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay lowlands. She now lives in northern California with her husband and two sons, where she works with farmers and ranchers to improve water quality and create wildlife habitat on agricultural lands. She co-authored California Wildlife: Conservation Challenges prepared at the University of California, Davis, and her work has appeared in the Yolo Crow, Pilgrimage, River Teeth online, and a number of scientific journals. She can be reached at http://andreamummertpuccini.blogspot.com/
The beat-up Volvo station wagon hummed softly. It idled in the vacant parking lot of the sports stadium at the far corner of campus. My hands lay in my lap, my legs folded underneath me against the tan leather interior. We weren’t touching; I could feel his familiar look of desperation from across the console. Even in the half-light, I glimpsed that endearing gap between his two front teeth.
The clear New England night tapped at the windows, but the air that hung between us was stagnant. Heavy with the weight of our weekend away, it held the closeness of two people who’d traveled together. I fiddled with the fraying fringe at the bottom of my jeans as he spoke.
“Which is more likely?” His voice cracked. “That your parents would get over you marrying a non-Jew or that you would get over me?”
There it was: our impasse. It was just like him to cut to the heart of the matter.
•••
There is a framed picture on my parents’ mantel of my father holding my face in his hands. We’re both crying, though he is not a man of tears. He was whispering the traditional blessing parents give to their children every Friday night—and there was something else too, words I can’t quite recall. But what remains in the sieve of memory is the sound of relief mixed with hope.
Moments later, I walked down the aisle to someone I’d long known but waited until adulthood to love. We shared a common past, a summer camp, and now a cup of wine under the huppah, the Jewish wedding canopy. The room rejoiced. It was just as I’d always pictured it.
•••
A phone rang in my freshman dorm room in early October. He’d sat three rows in front of me in the massive lecture hall with his perfectly tattered baseball cap and freshly pressed prep school charm. I’d noticed him instantly, and every day thereafter.
An innocent request to borrow a course packet was quickly followed by an invitation to meet for coffee one evening. Easy, endless conversation flowed over my grande house blend and his hot chocolate with whipped cream that stuck to his top lip. First kisses on a dimly lit dorm porch led to nighttime snowball fights in Roger Williams Park and private flights in the campus Cessna.
One February night, my right arm dangled off the edge of the top bunk in his dorm room. A thin white undershirt separated his skin from mine as we exchanged pre-dawn confidences. He told of the time he sang to a dying pigeon as a child. Then, propped up on one arm, he looked down with aching eyes that ripped right through me. “I hope this doesn’t scare you,” he said, “but I think I’m falling in love with you.”
He sailed in regattas, sang a cappella, piloted planes. He was the captain of the squash team and several numbers punctuated his last name. His parents were Republicans.
He was Episcopalian. I was the rabbi’s daughter.
We had nothing in common.
We fell in love.
I shouldn’t act so surprised. It was, in a way, inevitable.
•••
Something about winter stirs up memory. Tiny reminders drift down like snowflakes, settling just long enough to make me shift with unease.
It was winter when I first stepped foot in a church. On a family trip to London, I’d insisted we visit St. Paul’s Cathedral. Religion had become academic for me; I was endlessly curious, inevitably skeptical.
St. Paul’s was dark, quiet, ornate. Candles cut through the black and cast strange shadows on the coarse granite stones underfoot. It was silent, save for shuffling feet and serene hymnal music. It felt thrilling, almost scandalous somehow, to be there, and with my family. As we stood in its echoing, cavernous belly, I was struck, above all, by how familiar it felt.
•••
I’d long stayed the course—years at Jewish day schools bled into summers at Jewish camp. Synagogues were second homes where I’d spend Saturdays sneaking around back hallways and swelling with pride at my father perched on the pulpit, masterfully holding court.
But even the most charmed childhood is no match for coming of age. My small, unconventional high school encouraged critical thinking about religion in a way the Orthodox schools of my youth had not. Long after class let out, I spent late nights sprawled on my gray carpet, a telephone cord tangled in my fingers, debating and dissecting faith with provocative friends. Questions led to more questions with answers that all ultimately led to God. It felt cyclical and unsatisfying, and I hungered for proof that wouldn’t come.
The quest itself became a kind of creed, and if I believed anything at all, it was that we were all connected in our shared uncertainty. I felt suffocated by the singularity of perspective, the smallness of my world. I still followed, more out of familiarity than faith, but it grew harder for me to reconcile religious practice with my steady skepticism. Doubt became my dogma, and I set out for college drunk with desire for diversity and distance.
Even in the earliest weeks away, I’d stopped observing the Sabbath and avoided eager solicitations from the Jewish groups on campus. I drafted term papers disputing the divine and touting the relativity of morality and truth. I rolled the word agnostic around on my tongue.
Now my safe, inner explorations had propelled me into the arms of another. Now they lived outside of me—in pleading eyes that reflected back my deepest doubts.
•••
I hear a knock on the bedroom door and I throw on a damp towel, droplets from my hair tickling my arms. My middle son stands on the other side, gripping a glass perilously filled with electric green smoothie.
“Daddy made this for you.”
Ours is a different love, no doubt. No two people love the same. Not even the same two people over time.
Ours is no forbidden affair and our first kisses have long since faded. We share a mature love of burden and responsibility, of bearing other people who fill our hearts and hours.
Ours is a love not of questioning, but constancy and comfort, of leftovers and lights left on. It’s routine and real, not sexy, but sturdy and sure. It is as it should be.
•••
I was the one who subconsciously sabotaged our secrecy over winter break. He’d given me a single iris on the night before we left campus. I’d brought it home, openly clutching it so as not to crush it in my carry-all. Never one to lie outright, when my parents asked its origin, I uttered his Anglican name. On a sleepless night, through streaming tears that distorted the once familiar fixtures of my high school bedroom, I sat opposite my mother and father as they drew their line in the sand—and I was too close to home, in age and at heart, to cross it.
We returned to campus that winter with renewed resolve to plot our relationship’s untimely death. Our lips locked, but our hands were tied. Come summer, we vowed, we’d end it. In the meantime, we busied ourselves with letting our love linger longer than it should.
•••
One October afternoon, my high heels click-clack on the uneven Philadelphia pavement as they carry me home from work. I clutch my cell phone with my free hand, catching up with my mother en route.
Our conversation is casual as we chat about my husband’s sister and her strong interfaith family. But then, with a carelessness more misguided than malevolent, my mother flippantly remarks that perhaps she could have made peace with me ending up with a non-Jew.
My reaction is not my standard-issue irritability, but a searing blood boil that turns me inside out until words form at my lips.
“You’re not allowed to say that.” I choke out. “It will never be okay.” And it isn’t. I hang up and hurry home, holding back tears until I cross the threshold of that cozy first marital apartment on 24th Street.
•••
By late spring, under the pretense of a squash tournament in the neighboring state, we set out on a secret road trip to Concord, Massachusetts. I’d shifted uncomfortably on plastic bleachers as I watched his lithe, lean body flit back and forth across the court. I impatiently awaited our evening reunions, our no-frills dinner fare. We wandered Walden Pond in late afternoon light and spent nights on dorm room floors of dear friends. We’d driven ourselves deeper into the heart of the thing.
Upon return, unwilling and unready to reenter campus life, we hid out in his old station wagon at what felt like the edge of the world. In this makeshift refuge, we talked of our incompatible faith and future. We imagined a world where our love could live, where it could defeat difference.
“I believe in the god that brought us together,” he whispered into the darkness. As if that settled everything.
•••
It’s nearing bedtime on a visit to my parents’ home, and eight o’clock finds my mother and me jockeying for access to toothpaste, sink space, and my two older sons’ mouths. The boys are wound up, and I steel myself for the inevitable resistance to lights out.
My well-worn “time for bed” speech is met with their most fervent protests until the volume in the little bathroom reaches a fever pitch. My mother, a panacea always at the ready, offers up the Shema—the daily prayer—if the boys get in their beds. They dutifully file out of the bathroom and climb under covers, my mother trailing behind.
Instead of turning right, with them, I duck left into my old bedroom so they wouldn’t see the tears forming.
I could hear my mother’s soft voice sending the ancient words of the Shema into the night—Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord Is One.
An innocent profession of belief and devotion. But also, unavoidably, a pronouncement, a tribal rallying call, ushering my children off to sleep as it once did me.
•••
I leaned against the car seat, exhaling deeply. My mind wandered back to the open road, to that stretch of New England highway that rose and fell while Fields of Gold played in the background. Where we could quietly consider a different life.
Just the day before, we’d slipped into a diner on the side of the road, flushed with the promise of two more hours together. We sat across from each other, laughing and coloring on the backs of our menus with kid crayons. We were stealing time. Eventually, our casual conversation stuttered, giving way to the familiar desperation that followed us everywhere. To the outside, we must have looked so normal, I thought. Like a regular couple.
I stared straight ahead. There we sat. Steeped in the thick, black night. The station wagon. Our impossibly idealistic love.
“Which is more likely? That your parents would get over you marrying a non-Jew or that you would get over me?”
His words hung there. I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.
•••
Winter again, and I’m sitting on the scratchy den carpeting surrounded by the smiling, soft-skinned loves of my life. They watch kid TV while I sip afternoon coffee. A silly bit flashes across the screen featuring cartoons introducing the Chanukah holiday to their wide-eyed audience. A character turns to the camera and simply says, “Chanukah celebrates the miracle of light.”
Yes. I look out the back deck door and up to the gray afternoon light of a quiet December day. For a moment, I let out the breath that it feels I’m perpetually holding and my shoulders slacken. Maybe I could do this, I think. Extract morsels of meaning and weave a tradition that could draw me back in, make me whole.
It’s true—it remains where I am most at home.
In the smell of freshly baked challot on Friday afternoon. At an evening prayer service overlooking the lake at my summer camp, where I now return to work. Familiar melodies float up in the open air; I mouth the words without intention but through force of habit.
And yet. If I let myself think, I no longer belong. Familiarity, even love, cannot foster faith.
I tiptoe through the hallways of my childhood home. I sit with secretive silence and summon a smile. I’m an outsider looking in, faithful to a faith in which I only have doubt, belonging to a life that accepts only almost all of me.
I will forever be stuck in the stagnant air of that station wagon, staring into the darkness, searching for answers.
•••
We stayed late on campus, a week past semester’s end—he to sing a cappella, me to be with him. Both of us to savor and suffer a relationship that felt far from over. Our months had become minutes, but we kept our vow. We left for summer separate and single, admitting—only to each other—that the love lingered on. Of course it did.
Still, we ended it. A choice made when there was none: a promise to a faith I no longer had and an inability to imagine traveling the unpaved road that lay ahead.
•••
I collapse on the bed one night after tucking in my boys. I can hear my husband clanking around in the kitchen below, fielding a few last phone calls as he readies his evening tea.
New impossible questions follow me: “Maybe God is like the wind?” asks my oldest after lights out. “Invisible and everywhere.” I hum a non-response, then softly step into the baby’s room to stare with longing at his simple sleep.
In this season of life, the day’s demands leave little room for worry or wonder. I welcome intrusions—endless child chatter, babies stirring in the night. I’m uncertain, yet content. Winter’s restless reminders, the grounding weight of home, the not knowing—it’s who I am now. It’s what’s left.
He finishes his work, climbs the stairs, and settles at the edge of the bed. I wedge my feet under his legs for warmth and finally drift off to sleep.
•••
DINA L. RELLES is a lawyer, writer, and mother of three young sons. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Brain, Child Magazine, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She is a blog editor at Literary Mama and writes regularly on her own site, Commonplace. You can find her on Twitter @DinaLRelles.
Follow
