Everything You Want Me to Be

by Mindy Mejia

  Later we’d walk down to the market and stroll through the stalls. Sometimes we only bought a baguette for brunch and ate it on the way home, tearing off chunks and washing them down with a smoothie. A few times we decided to make things on the spur of the moment and came home with forty tomatoes and peppers, splattering the kitchen with a blind attempt at salsa. Those were usually my ideas. Mary always had a shopping list and a plan; she coolly checked off items as we made our way down the rows.

  When we first started going, she raised her eyebrows at the number of Hmong vendors, but she never said anything beyond, “They don’t farm out by my family,” and she bought anyone’s produce as long as it was good quality and not overpriced. She talked shop with the farmers, discussing rainfall and temperatures. She didn’t care about herbicides or how the cows were treated. I was the one who insisted on the organic stalls while Mary would roll her eyes and laugh. When I tried to show her articles about the effects of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, she scoffed and said, “There’s a study for everything. You know you’re going to die anyway, don’t you?”

  She was never interested in organic farming. So where the hell had this come from?

  “I’ve been talking to a guy near Rochester who has the whole operation down. Mobile coops and vegetarian feed. He sells to restaurants in the cities at a premium price, and we’re going to start doing the farmers’ market circuit in the spring.”

  “We?”

  “Me and him and a few other farmers in the area. There’s a demand. All those people in the cities like you, wanting their eggs from happy chickens, wanting their meat grass-fed and humanely slaughtered.”

  She shook her head on the last two words. It was a point we agreed on, but for cosmically different reasons.

  “Where is this coming from, Mary? You know Elsa’s not going to last the year.”

  She flinched at the words and I backpedaled, lowering my voice.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that, but it’s obvious the doctor was right. She’s weaker every day. She remembers less and less of what anyone tells her. The other day she didn’t even know who I was.”

  I didn’t mention that—because she didn’t know me—she was nicer than she had been since my wedding day. She patted my hand and called me Hank and asked me to read her a few obituaries. Hank was happy to oblige. It was the first time in months I’d felt welcome in this house.

  The retention-rate issue was becoming hard to ignore. She’d weakly asked Mary every day for two weeks why we’d bought “that five-dollar pepper” until it was finally drilled into her head that it was “Peter’s fancy pepper.” She watched the weather forecast on the news at least two times a night and still acted surprised when it snowed the next day. If the oxygen wasn’t sufficiently reaching her brain anymore, how much longer could the rest of her body survive?

  I phrased the next question carefully. “Why would you invest in a whole new business when we’re only here on a temporary basis?”

  She didn’t say anything and, to be honest, I already knew. The answer was right in front of me.

  “You’re not just here for Elsa.” I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and stared at her profile. She didn’t confirm or deny. “You like it here. You’re not going to move back to Minneapolis when she dies, are you?”

  Still she didn’t speak. She just kept washing dishes, her hands idly squeezing the rag over a saucer as she gazed out the kitchen window into the abyss of white.

  “Dammit, Mary, answer me. I think I deserve an answer. Have you been planning this since before we moved?”

  She rinsed a dish and set it in the rack, then slowly pulled a coffee cup out of the suds. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Clearly I don’t. How can I understand what you won’t say?” I crossed my arms, determined not to leave this room until she came clean.

  “It’s . . .” She stopped, shook her head, and started again, moving the soapy cup from one hand to the other, still staring absently through the glass framed by faded gingham curtains. “I don’t know how to say it. It’s like the trees.”

  “What?”

  “In the city you can’t see them.” She paused, thinking. “They’re all squished together, tangled into each other until you can’t tell where one tree stops and another starts. Their branches are sawed off so they don’t hit power lines or roofs. Some of them have those red spray-painted death rings around their trunks and they’re chopped down when their roots grow too big under sidewalks. They’re sad to look at, all contorted and disfigured or pruned down into nothing.

  “But here, here you can see the trees for what they really are. My whole life I watched them growing at the edges of the fields like cross-stitches holding a quilt together.” Her gaze focused on the pines behind the garage and her voice lost that hardened edge she’d acquired around me.

  “They stand tall in windbreaks around the farms and you can really see them. You can trace their silhouettes, follow how their branches bend and curl. Some are craggy. Some are thick and strong. Some are stooped like old men against the wind. You can understand their nature here. I didn’t realize it until we moved back and I felt myself breathing again. I was walking home from Winifred’s one day and I just stopped and stood there studying the shapes of the trees on the horizon. They were like portraits, each one of them, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen. I knew then that I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t breathe in the city; I was suffocating more every day.”

  “But we live in the city.” I felt compelled to make some stab at an argument. “Our lives are there. Our friends, your job. Your boss said you could come back anytime.”

  Logic was all on my side. I knew it, could taste it on the words, but they felt hollow against Mary’s eloquence.

  “And work in a beige, five-foot cubicle for ten hours a day? With no sunlight? Surrounded by stale air and browbeaten, angry people? No, Peter. I can’t spend my life like that. I’m going to terminate the lease on the front forty this year and buy more chickens next spring. I’m going to be a farmer, like my father, and his father. I’m going to sow my fate with the land.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while. The weight of her decision blanketed the room, silencing both of us, forcing us to confront what we’d both known. Eventually she finished the dishes, hung the rag over the faucet to dry, and sat down across from me.

  I looked at her, really looked for the first time in months. The transformation I’d sensed, and resented, in her was complete. The girl I’d married had long, glossy locks of blond hair streaming from beneath her veil. Her cheeks had been flushed as she walked up the aisle and her eyes glowed with tears and simple, untainted emotion. The woman in front of me sat practically emotionless, radiating only a calm confidence. All the romance had been carved from her like baby fat, making her strong, making her whole. Her description of the trees echoed through the air between us, plain poetry that could have graced the pages of any number of pastoral novels, and I realized how beautiful she was, and how insignificant I’d become to her.

  “So this is it? It doesn’t matter what I want?”

  “You’ll have to make your own choice. Whether you want to stay with me or not.”

  “How am I with you now? We don’t talk to each other. We haven’t had sex since last fall. Christ, what happened to us, Mary?”

  She was quiet for a minute, to the point where I thought she’d retreated into her silence again, but then she drew a breath and made a quiet admission.

  “I think it was easier to be angry with you because you hated it here than be angry with myself because I hated the reason we were here.”

  Before I could reply, Elsa shuffled into the kitchen, coughing weakly and asking about dinner. We went through the motions. I helped Elsa to her chair and Mary served something from the crockpot that I ate without tasting. By the time I went upstairs to stare out our bedroom window at the chicken barn, any ire I’d harbored toward Mary had turned inside out
. Her honesty was contagious. I’d always assumed I was a good person—eating right, running, living consciously, whatever the fuck that meant—when the exact opposite was true. I was the guy who cheated on his wife while she took care of her dying mother. I was absolute slime.

  I stripped off my clothes and was searching for pajamas when Mary came upstairs.

  “Under the sheets in the basket,” she murmured and brushed by me, changing into her own.

  We both climbed into bed and lay there for a minute. Mary turned on her side and I felt her looking at me. Jesus, she would have been better off with anyone else. Maybe that guy, that window guy, had a crush on Mary in high school. They could have had three kids and a chicken farm dynasty by now. Instead she had a dead father, a dying mother, no children, and a selfish, asshole husband. She deserved so much more.

  “You’re right about the windows,” I said.

  “I know.”

  Another minute passed while I stared at the ceiling and neither of us pretended to fall asleep. Then she propped herself up on one elbow.

  “Will you stay?” she asked. “I know things haven’t been good, but that can change, can’t it?”

  What changed was that her hand moved under the covers, snaking over my chest.

  “Mary.” Everything I couldn’t say was wrapped up in the two syllables of her name. No, Mary. It’s too late, Mary. When you shut me out I didn’t wait for you, Mary.

  Her lips touched my neck and I closed my eyes. Inhaled. Her hand slipped down my stomach and I caught it, holding her off.

  “This isn’t a good idea.”

  “Peter,” she murmured. “Let me try.”

  I had no right. Self-loathing coursed through my veins as her hand wriggled free and found a rhythm. And then I was trying, too, rolling her to her back and trying to return her unexpected gesture, trying to act like a husband should, trying to make up for the fact that, even now, Hattie beckoned from the shadows of my mind.

  HATTIE / March 2008

  SPRING BREAK in Minnesota sucked. There was always still snow on the ground and only the choir people got to go anywhere, because they competed in a tournament in Nashville. I hated country music and Nashville was probably the last place I’d visit, but it was better than Pine Valley. Portia was an alto and she’d brought up the trip constantly ever since Peter posted the cast list for the spring play.

  I’d gotten the female lead of Lady Macbeth. Portia was cast as my understudy.

  And go figure, that’s also when she started getting really weird about this curse stuff. At first when Peter posted the casting call, Portia had mentioned the curse of Macbeth, but it was all in her gossipy, I-know-more-than-you voice. After she found out she wasn’t in the play, all of a sudden the curse was real. She spent every rehearsal telling us about famous Macbeth accidents, and by the time we held our last session before spring break, everyone was doing her insane cleansing ritual.

  The deal was this: if anyone said “Macbeth” inside the gymnasium when we weren’t directly rehearsing the lines, they “invoked the curse.” To pacify the curse gods, they had to immediately run out the door, race around the outside of the gym, spit over their left shoulder, and recite, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us.” Then someone else had to officially admit the person back into the gym before we could continue rehearsing.

  The first time Peter said “Macbeth,” Portia tried to get him to perform her routine and he totally snapped at her. He threatened to ban her from the production if she even so much as mentioned it again. After that she operated in whispers until everyone said “the Scottish play” or “Mr. and Mrs. McBee.” Portia even started running out on Peter’s behalf when he said the word, and all the underclassmen followed her, so every time Peter called Macbeth up to the stage, half the cast dropped their scripts and ran like lemmings into the hallway. It was hilarious. Sometimes while we waited for them to do their penance I crossed myself “in the name of the father Macbeth, the son Macbeth, and the holy Macbeth spirit. Amen.” Peter couldn’t help laughing whenever I did it.

  After the last rehearsal before break I went over to Portia’s house to hang out for a while. Instead of watching movies like we normally did, she just tried on a bunch of outfits for her Nashville trip and pretended to want my opinion.

  “How about this one?” She spun around in a short-sleeve twinset and knee-length skirt that looked exactly like my back-to-school outfit.

  “That seems a little too prep school. Shouldn’t you go for more of a southern belle?”

  “It’s not a costume, Hatts. I just want to look like me on vacation. Like a me without parents.”

  She slid on a pair of sunglasses. Show-off. I lay down on her bed and hung my head over the edge, looking at her upside down. “Très parentless.”

  “What are you going to do all week?”

  “Work. Run lines.” I threw a jab of my own. At first I thought it was a little mean of Peter not to give Portia any part, but the more she rubbed in her “fabulous” trip, the less mean it seemed. And I really was planning on working on it. Opening night was only three weeks away and I didn’t have all my longer speeches down yet.

  “You can call me on Thursday if you need help. We have a free day and I’ll probably be all over the Opry Mills, but I can spare an hour or so to rehearse.”

  “We’ll see. I might get Tommy to help me.”

  Portia snorted and I couldn’t help smiling, too. Tommy Kinakis reading Shakespeare sounded as wrong as Carrie Bradshaw plowing fields. He’d been bugging me about seeing each other during break, though, and Portia knew why.

  “Are you finally going to do it with Tommy?”

  I stared at a corner of the ceiling where a small spider was busy making a web. It had been over two months since Peter and I stayed in Minneapolis, and to say we did it was just so middle school. It felt like an ocean had opened up between me and Portia and I would never be on her side of it again. It made me embarrassed for her, and lonely for me.

  I hadn’t seen Peter alone since the night we parked at the scenic overlook in February. It was like I was fasting for weeks and weeks before getting these sudden feasts, where I had to eat as much as possible to survive the next fast. Before we drove away that night, he told me the same thing he had before we’d left Minneapolis, that we didn’t have a relationship. I can’t be with you, he said, not the way you want. And I ignored him again. Graduation was only a few months away and then our biggest obstacle was gone. Peter didn’t know that I had plans; I could see how the whole play would unfold.

  In the meantime I still had to wear this other life. Part of me had wanted to break up with Tommy since the first night Peter kissed me, but the show had to go on. Everyone thought of us as a couple, a single unit. Every day someone asked if Tommy and I wanted to do this or that and I always answered, “I don’t know what Tommy wants to do. I’ll ask him.” Then during lunch I asked Tommy about our plans until he said what I wanted him to say. I always tried to spend our dates with other couples, especially since he’d started trying things.

  “I told him waist up only.”

  Portia tucked her jewelry bag into the suitcase next to me on the bed. “You said he wanted to do more.”

  “It’s not my problem if he doesn’t listen.”

  “It might be your problem.” She put on a jacket and quickly shrugged it off again. “What am I doing? I won’t need that in Tennessee. It’s going to be eighty degrees.”

  Then she sat down next to me and got really serious. “Look, Hattie, I know you think you’ve got Tommy wrapped around your little finger, but look at him. He’s a giant.”

  She stopped, tongue-tied, which was so not like her.

  “What are you saying, Portia?”

  “I’m just saying be careful.”

  I left her on the bed and stood in front of her full-length mirror. It felt better to have this conversation through a reflection. “You’re saying be careful in case my boyfriend is a rapist?”

&nb
sp; “Pretty much.”

  “And this has nothing to do with the fact that you wanted to ask him to Sadie’s?”

  “Are you kidding me? He was just one option. It’s not like I liked him.”

  “Obviously not, if you think he’s going to force himself on me.” I started giggling. “Come on, Porsche. Tommy? Really?”

  She looked put out by my laughter; she just sniffed and went back to picking out clothes and talking about all the fabulous things she was going to do in Nashville. We didn’t talk again before her trip, but as soon as their plane landed she started compulsively texting me, which was typical Portia. I just replied with stuff like, “Great!” and “That sounds awesome!,” which was typical Hattie.

  Tommy ended up coming over on Tuesday during spring break. Mom was home, putting together a care package for Greg in the kitchen. We hadn’t heard from him in a few weeks because he was on an active assignment. No one really knew what it meant except that Mom had to start working on a package for him. She bought magazines she thought he’d like, made cookies and wrapped them in bubble wrap, and tucked in all sorts of odds and ends with sticky notes to tell him why she’d included them. She sent cartons of cigarettes, too—even though she hated smoking—because Greg said they were better than money over there. It sounded a lot like prison to me. He was scheduled to come home in July, and sometimes I caught Mom flipping the calendar pages back and forth like she was counting down the number of flips until she could breathe easy again. You didn’t notice when she was moving around, which was like always, but when she sat at the dinner table or read books at night her hands trembled. I didn’t remember them doing that before Greg left.

  When Tommy came over, he asked about Greg. I always forgot they’d been on the football team together when Greg was a senior and we were sophomores.