You knew, you always knew, her mind chided her silently while she watched him.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, her worst self argued back.
Either way, you must soldier on.
How ironic.
Her two halves, her strength and her weakness, bickered like ornery children, nipping furiously at each other. She would ignore them now, stuff them both into a chamber of her mind, close the door and lock it up tight, choosing to focus only on looking at him again.
He was handsome in the low light of the 0500 hour. Young and brave in his dress greens. She’d met him when he was dressed like that, their separate lives colliding on a humid summer night.
She’d been not much more than a girl. Eighteen. Shiny as a freshly minted penny, pulling threads of a bubblegum-pink cotton-candy from a white cardboard cone, twirling them around her finger, dipping her head back, letting the sugar-floss melt against the heat of her tongue. It had been an event, a Midway Fair, when the boys returned home sixteen months ago. With their homecoming came the sort of fanfare that ran in the paper and presented the sort of opportunity that let girls of a certain age indulge men of a certain rank.
He’d been throwing wooden balls at a pyramid of milk bottles when she’d first drifted towards him, when she’d said the first hello. He’d won twice over under the moonlit sky that night, between the eerie shadows and lights the traveling carnival cast on the quiet Southern town—first a stuffed dog and then her heart.
“You ready?” he asked, turning to her now, standing up straighter under the weight of leaving her behind.
Never, her silent thoughts wept out. “Yes.” She rose slowly, her legs weaklings beneath her.
He’d go, such was his duty. Enlisted men leave you, her mother had warned when she’d said she planned on marrying him just six weeks after they met. But she’d already known that much was true—those dress greens he wore spoke of honor and bravery and future exits. He would return, he’d promised her that much, but who he’d be when he touched his home soil again? That, no one, not even he, could say. The other wives mumbled words like PTSD, nightmares, flashbacks. They spoke of hospitals in far away countries and the men that never came home, the ones that would give their lives for a country that consumes its young.
He moved towards her, reaching for her, she met him half way, collapsed into his starched shirt and steady arms. Arms gentle enough to rock her and hold her, arms strong enough to support the weight of a young, terrified wife and serve his country.
“One year,” he whispered, his breath was warm against her neck as he tightened his tentative hold.
JANUARY JO
“It’s snowing upside down, Momma.”
That’s what January says to me, but mostly to the window with her face close to a pane, her hands flat, her fingers spread, her lips nearly kiss the glass leaving breathy, foggy smudges behind.
I look out over her head which almost clips my chin now.
It is snowing. A swirling sheet of white falls down. Not up. Ice pings the windows and the flakes flutter chaotically all around. Our yard will be swallowed soon by the storm. The weatherman promised we’d see inches fall an hour, spoke of accumulation in the higher elevations, advised residents to bundle up or better yet, stay indoors.
“It’ll get worse before it gets better, folks,” he’d said with a grin before breaking to commercial. Soon enough our sweet spring grass, bare patio furniture and dormant beds of flowers won’t exist until the next thaw.
I think about telling January that the snow is falling just as it always does. That it’s the wind blowing it around. That it’s an illusion — the way she’s seeing it. But I don’t. Instead, I reach out and smooth her hair, so unlike mine, so coarse to the touch, and think of the illusionary quality of our lives — not simply the snow that falls on it now, but all of it, every thread and complicated stitch and the quilt we’ve created with them.
“Yes,” I say, my fingers still woven through her tangles, latching myself gently to her, unwilling to let go. “Upside down. How strange.”
“Do you think we got shaken around? Like a snow-globe?”
She’s puzzled. Sometimes simple things amaze her, but sometimes they are invisible wires that trip her.
“Wouldn’t that be something special?” I ask her, bending down to plant my lips on the top of her head. I breathe her in and I wonder if she smells like them. If her chemistry isn’t somehow predisposed to carry their echoes even after they left her behind. If no amount of soap will ever wash them clean.
“But people have started planting! All their beautiful flowers! I told them no more snow!”
She panics. Her pale skin blooms with pink splotches as she thinks of her job down at the nursery, of the pretty flowers in their black plastic pallets, the bushes in their pails. They’ll wither and die, and she’ll mourn this deeply. These flowers she’s plucked and watered and rotated, cultured to grow towards the sun, they are like her children, she loves them just the same.
I can all but see her mind work as she thinks of the early planters. How they’ll be angry with her, that when they return to replace what’s been lost to spring snow, imagining that their voices will be clipped and their tones will be sharp knobs. She worries that they’ll blame her. It’s then that she pulls away from me. She’s too big for kisses now, she’s told me as much, but I can’t help but to forget. Her face sweet, her eyes wide and round as saucers, her cheeks full and ruddy. She’s my baby, but she’s not — never really was. I love her fiercely, would protect her, will protect her, have protected her. I tell myself, as I do over and over, she’s mine.
“No one will be angry with you, January,” I say to her, knowing this is true. Our regulars will bemoan the upheaval of spring, will chatter about the global warming, argue that our bigger sister cities are the cause for the fall of the seasons. They will ask for nominal discounts as they thumb through truck-fresh petunias and rose bushes and marigolds sent to replace what was lost, but they will not blame her. “Sometimes strange things happen, you can’t always plan for them. People will understand. This storm was what nature intended.”
Those words carry many meanings, but they have appeased and soothed her and she turns back to the storm, to study the snow that falls upside down to her eyes, none the wiser.
She exhales, lets her breath fog up the view and raises her finger to the window. Slowly she writes her name: January Jo. With that, she claims me — all of us and this house, too, as belonging to her.
Our lives, I suppose are a snow-globe. I suppose, for us, the snow could decide to fall upside down on a March night, even after the first spring plantings.
I won’t tell her the truth about the wind now, just as I keep other truths to myself, like who she really is and where she really comes from. I will lie to her, even though I’m old enough to know better. I will let her believe the things she believes, not because it is easier to do so — it’s not — but because I wish for our world to be the way she sees it.
THE BOOK OF US
My husband is dead.
The thought startles me from a deep sleep. With the unconsciousness of night yanked away I’m left exposed, my body a bundle of lit wires and faulty plugs beneath. I roll over, convinced that it all just a terrible dream, that he’ll be beside me; long and warm, bare skin with boxers askew. That he’ll be twenty-eight and alive, his breath a low, heavy hum.
But I’ve lost my husband. By six-oh-one, I’ve realized this all over again and the pain of losing throbs fresh and new.
It’s been this way for seven months now.
Each day I wake to the same blistering thought, the same shallow hope, only to be left with the same pain to swallow up the center of my chest, left to find that the familiar anger still drips down my arms and legs same as it did yesterday and the day before and the day before that, too. Dead, dead and gone. Alone, alone and angry.
By six-oh-two I think of him, not in death, but as if he were still here. I take com
fort in what I imagine: That we’d laugh over what we’ve become, given another day together. I think he’d say something like we are quite the couple now, aren’t we? But we were always quite a couple. A ying and yang of happiness and love, two halves of a perfect circle. The lucky ones.
I lay still for a very long time after that, pretending to be a starfish in the center of my bed as the waves of realization plummet me: He’ll never laugh, I’ll never smile, we’ll never just be again.
I surface just long enough to touch the pillow where his head used to rest, to feel the cool cotton under my fingertips. I stroke the fabric over and over, worrying the material like a child fusses over a beloved blanket, I ache to roll over onto it, lay against it, breathe in deeply, lose my wits and cry. But I won’t. I worry too much that my hair will scent the pillow, that my tears will wash him away and when they do, I’ll lose another small part of him, the thin bits and pieces of who he was that he left behind in my care.
I’ve not changed that pillow case. Can’t bring myself to do it, that and a hundred other things that would systemically eradicate him from my life for good, changes that would allow him to be dead and me to move on.
His clothes still hang beside mine in the closet, his nine-grain bread is in the pantry—I replace it every week, stroll down the narrow aisles of the store towards the bakery, place one fresh loaf I won’t eat inside my cart. I leave the hall light on all night just like I always did when he was working late, tapping away on the keys of his computer.
My mother works herself up over these habits of mine, but I hold steady to them in this new uncertain life, they convince me nothing has changed. That if I just wait long enough, that if his bread is in the pantry, if his pillow is familiar, if his clothes are ready for wearing, if a light is on and his computer hums, then someday he’ll remember this is his home and come back to the place we left off. Our love story has become a book, our spine cracked, ready to be lifted from a nightstand, a couch cushion, a table where we left off, and be read again.
These are wishful thoughts of a young widow. A widow who was no more prepared for a dead and gone husband than she was for a life lived alone.
At six-oh-five I rise to face the day. To brave another sixteen hours until I can fall back asleep, to dream of him and wake again at six to feel the hope that he may still be alive, that his aneurysm was a nightmare I can shake myself free from and when I do, he’ll still be beside me, long and warm, bare chested, boxers askew, breathing in my ear. That the remainder of my life will be neither lived angry nor alone and our book, full of simple pages and long lines, will be read again.
PLASTER WALLS
Here is the most absurd part of being thirty-six and single: I’m actually okay with it.
You probably won’t believe me when I say that, you’ll wonder if I’m lonely. Assume that I couldn’t possibly be content, unattached as I am. To hear me say it, you probably convulse a little thinking of your own single days, your ex-lovers, your broken hearts, and the skin you shed when you said I do and how sincerely you meant it. You probably remember the guy from the bar that said he’d call, but never did, and how you waited for days, fingers crossed, that he would. To hear me say single probably evokes you to thank your lucky stars that all of that is behind you. And so, naturally, you think I’m a big, fat fibber.
I don’t blame you. Really. I don’t.
How could I when even my closest friends don’t even believe me when I say that I’m fine and swirl the red wine around the bowl of stemless glass undeterred, raise it to my lips, raise my brows, as though I’m silently daring them to challenge me. Still, despite the show, I know they don’t believe me.
They bemoan the walk up to the studio in the city that I’ve rented since I graduated. “Don’t you want to own? Aren’t you tired of throwing your money away on some landlord’s mortgage?” they ask, pouring another two-fingers into my glass. My cat; they look at his full, furry body with shifty eyes, questioning my sanity and choice of pet. “Dogs love in return, cats are like bad boyfriends, they only want you when they want something from you!” They purse their lips at my closet full of designer jeans and on-trend tops. They worry about my feelings most of all when I demure a couples’ night of board games and fancy cheese spreads from their organic, locally sourced, grass-fed grocery stores. That I opt instead to order a deep dish for one and a RomCom movie onDemand. “You’re not the third wheel! Come! Have fun! We miss you. We feel like we never see you. You’re all alone in the city!”
When I do come, they parade me around their McMansions that still smell of fresh paint in sprawling suburbs with lush names that all but scream new money down the quiet, tree-lined streets. They treat the boroughs of the city they call home like a Mecca and me like I’m a visitor from another land. They wag manicured fingers at their plush shag carpets, “A shade too dark, don’t you agree?” and the hand-scrapped wood floors “So hard to clean, thank goodness for the housekeeper.” Balancing babies on their yoga-pant clad hips “Luluemon had a sale, couldn’t believe my Monday-morning luck! Had to buy one in every color!” Their lives are suburban happily ever afters. Their pumpkins have turned into minivans with televisions in the headrests and satellite radios in their dashboards. Their glass slippers are sheep-skin Uggs.
That, a life of carpet swatches and Swiffer mops and spit-up bibs, and buttonless pants, I don’t envy.
Of course I have my moments. Like any sane person, there are things I want that I haven’t yet found. But don’t you too? Even married to your accountant-lawyer-doctor-engineer husband, aren’t there things you still wish you had? That doesn’t mean you’re unhappy (or miserable, or suicidal, or lost, or D — all of the above).
I actually like hiking up the three flights to my studio. The inch-thick plaster walls and pipes that clang and windows that open, not to a golf course view, but a rickety fire escape. That my couch is only bore down on one side and that I sleep in the center of a queen bed, selfishly swaddled in all the covers. I like that when Ms. Mirotta, my landlady, collects the rent check she hands me a silver wrapped Hershey Kiss, left over from Halloween I’m sure, in gratitude for my punctuality. I like waking to first November snow with my big bellied cat purring away in my ear. That’s the soft, supple love of a feline. We silently communicate that this is all right, here is all good, we’re happy to lay for a few more hours. Dogs, on the other hand, want to go outside no matter how temperamental the weather. I like walking into a salty bar to meet a stranger, to hear about his life for a few hours over watery drinks and know that tomorrow morning I neither need to fix his breakfast nor wash his underwear.
Everyone always wonders what the secret is to love, so here it is: It’s not the stuff or the man or babies or the opulent house. It’s the way you feel about yourself when you strip all that other stuff clean away.
DEAR KAIDANCE
Do you know the day I met your mother the first thing she said to me was this: “I have a daughter, she’s six, and she’s my world.” Her face lit up at just the mention of you, and I knew anyone who could make a person smile like that, well, they had to be pretty special. Your mom, she just kept on, “Her name is Kaidance, she’s so bright! And funny! You should have seen her yesterday…” then she told me a story about you and a school project, and she was right, you were funny.
Ten weeks later, I finally got to meet you. I invited you girls to the lake house. Do you remember the first time you came out this way? We had a picnic on the dock. By then your mom liked me almost as much as I liked her, but I think she worried I’d see you two as a big mess, a single mom with a little girl, both of you doing the best you could with not a whole lot, and realize I’d rather not get myself into that. And I have to admit, I was a little worried too. For as much as I cared about your mom, I was still pretty much a kid myself and I hadn’t really thought much about children. But when she pulled up to the house, you rolled down the window and waved, almost like we were long lost friends rather than strangers and I liked y
ou instantly. But then, when you jumped from the back seat, you gave me this smile and I was completely sold. Just that quick, you wrapped me around your little finger. Still, your mom was nervous, I think she was waiting for me to tuck tail and run, only, I already knew better, knew that after meeting you, I couldn’t.
We spent the afternoon collecting agates. You told me you loved the color blue, peanut butter and banana sandwiches were your favorite, and that fishing was something you’d like to try—how interesting you were. When we said goodbye you gave me one of those little stones we’d found, “for keeps” you said, pressing it into my palm and I watched you two drive away, the whole while holding onto that rock. I carried it around for weeks, just because you trusted me with it.
Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about for keeps. See, I love your mom. She’s the kindest woman I’ve ever met, and pretty, and smart and a heck of a lot of other good things too. That’s why I asked her to marry me. Because I loved her, because I couldn’t imagine my life without her and I wanted her for keeps…but not just her, you too. You both were a packaged deal from the start.
Tomorrow I get to marry your mom. It won’t be fancy, your mom isn’t really into the fancy stuff, but it will be the most important day of my life. I’m not only marrying a woman I love, but I’m gaining a daughter and that’s the reason I’m putting all this down into a letter.
Someday you’ll look at me and wonder who I am. You’re seven as I write this, and you like me plenty, but there may come a day when you might think of me only as your step-father, like I thought of my own step-father. Someday I may ground you or take away your car keys or give you a tough time over responsibilities, and you may stomp up the stairs and yell down that I’m not your dad — you’ll say it to hurt me, and it will hurt me, but I’ll understand why you say it, because I said those same things once. And when that day comes, I’ll slide this letter under your door.
One Page Love Story- Share the Love Page 6