My Three Husbands

by Swan Adamson

  I pulled up in front of my mom’s dinky little house (“Early Crackerbox,” I once heard Whitman describe it) and sat there, smoking and listening to my old Black Garters tape. Black Garters was this awesome all-girl garage band that lasted about a year. JD, lead singer and lead guitar, gave me the band’s one and only demo tape when we were lovers. Her singing voice was a hoarse, croaky rasp of anger.

  Mommy! Daddy! Where are you?

  I’m fucked up, man, but you are too!

  You say you love me.

  You say you care.

  You say all kindsa shit,

  But you ain’t really there.

  I just sat there in my incredibly messy car (Whitman had once likened it to a hamster’s nest) thinking about my mom, my dads, and me. If you eventually turn into your parents, no matter how hard you try not to, which one of the three was I doomed to become?

  Long ago, back in the mists of the ’80s, even before my dad left us, I realized that I could twist Carolee, my mom, around my little finger. I could get her to do anything I wanted.

  It’s kind of horrifying, in a way, to realize how much power you can have over another person. What intrigues me about Whitman, for instance, is that I have zero power over him. Back when I was five, and Dad was just starting to date him, Whitman and I would get into stupid fights over things like who got to sit next to Daddy in the front seat of the BMW. I always won. But it was because Whitman let me. He could afford to because he had the real power, and we both knew it. He had Daddy.

  And Carolee didn’t. Not anymore.

  When Dad left, all Carolee had was her “support group”—this huge congregation of women bitching and bawling their way through the pain, pain, pain of wrecked dreams and fractured lives. My mom was the focal point, the earth mother, the good witch doomed to stir the cauldron of unconditional love until she keeled over from the fumes.

  She was a size eight back then. She was my size, and my age, which is too freaky to think about.

  They came, all those women, because Carolee had the biggest heart and the nicest house and the largest alimony check. Back then we lived in a huge old Victorian that Daddy had turned into a showplace. Some of Mom’s endless women friends hung out there so much they had their own rooms. “You could almost call ’em boarders,” my grandma sourly observed, “if they ever paid any rent.”

  During the year they were separated, Daddy continued to pay the mortgage and all the bills. And after the divorce, Mom had alimony for three years and child support until I was eighteen. So she didn’t have to work back then, except to take care of every freeloading sob sister who showed up at our door.

  I took advantage of her like everyone else. I got everything I wanted because my own mother was afraid of me. If I didn’t get my way I turned into Linda Blair in The Exorcist. It worked every time.

  Until one day I made the mistake of calling my mom a “fucking bitch” in front of my grandma. Mom let out a weird noise and started to cry. But Grandma’s hand shot out and slapped me so hard I went blank with terror. And in that moment of shocked blankness, Grandma, furious in a way I’d never seen before, leaned down and said through her new dentures, “Don’t you ever call your mother that again, young lady. Do you understand?”

  I nodded dumbly. It was the first time in my life that I’d been disciplined, and it was overwhelming.

  “When you say that, it means you have no respect,” Grandma hissed. “You should always respect your mother because she does her best for you.”

  Mom, of course, got furious with her mom for slapping me because I’d never been spanked or physically mistreated in my life. I played it up for all it was worth, loving the way Carolee’s dark eyes glowed with fiery maternal indignation and concern. It meant I’d be getting more presents than usual.

  But I have to say: Grandma’s smack and admonition did work. I heard what she said. I remembered. Her slap sent me flying into a new phase of understanding, or trying to, anyway.

  Respect. Like that old Aretha Franklin song. Mom with her big hair deserved R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

  But then the dynamic changed and Mom began sucking me into her confidence. Every night she drank a bottle of red wine, drew me close, and told me all the scary non-fairy tales that turn bratty little girls into fucked-up women. What she didn’t know was that her life was territory I didn’t want to explore. It was dark and scary and lonely in that forest. There were horrible monsters hiding behind every tree.

  Daddy had been her one fairy tale come true. A young hot-shit architect, he plucked her from the receptionist’s desk, married her, and introduced her to a world of high-flying affluence that just about wrecked them both. Mom had just divorced her first husband, a Sixties radical who got busted for selling LSD at UCLA. Dad had just been divorced by a mysterious Italian woman who ran off after she became an American citizen.

  John gave Carolee this short, fabulous life. Then he took it away. She wasn’t Cinderella after all. The glass slippers shattered into slivers that pierced her feet and made them bleed. That wasn’t a diamond tiara perched high atop her big red hair; it was a dunce cap.

  Mom never blames anyone for anything. She’s chronically unable to express hatred and anger. She tried to understand where her husband was coming from. She even tried to support his decision to leave her for a man. But other betrayed women in her support group kept telling her how awful Daddy was, how selfish. I heard what they said. Daddy was just another incomplete, incompetent, insensitive man, and she was a wimp if she didn’t take him for all he was worth. Under their influence, Mom began ragging Daddy constantly. Never to his face, because she was afraid of him. She did it in private, to me.

  I began to see Daddy in a very different light, one that made me resent him for what he was doing to us. His side of the story didn’t matter because he was the one who fractured our fairy tale.

  Then Carolee got into this weird competition thing. If Daddy was gay, and dating a person of the same sex, then she would, too. God knows there were enough lesbians in the nonstop cotillion passing through our beautiful old house.

  Only Mom didn’t get a Whitman. She didn’t get a rich handsome younger man who spoke foreign languages and wrote travel books.

  She got Jerri. A possessive, alcoholic dyke who spent her life spinning the same ugly brown clay mug over and over on her potter’s wheel. I never could see what the attraction was. Mom was so pretty. Jerri was thirty years older, with short-cropped gray hair and false teeth that looked too big for her mouth. They met at one of the endless garage sales Mom and her friends were always throwing.

  Their affair lasted about two years. Jerri was subtly abusive when sober, insanely jealous and violent when drunk. One night she hauled off and belted my mom across the face. It was true-blue black-and-blue physical abuse. One woman smacking another. I saw it with my own two eyes.

  Saw that shocked look on Mom’s face before it crumpled into tears. She probably felt like I did that one time Grandma slapped me.

  But Mom didn’t even have the balls to order Jerri out of the house. All she could do was politely ask the cunt to leave. But of course, as I know all too well, the sick sweetness behind abusive behavior comes afterward, when the abuser is contrite and the abused is forgiving. The puke of souped-up emotions between Mom and Jerri made me sick and fearful.

  It was so different when I was with Daddy and Whitman. They had this breezy affability with one another. They were full of secret looks and jokes. I resented their happiness because I knew it didn’t include me. And I couldn’t figure out why they were so happy. There was no sign of physical affection between them, no terms of endearment spoken. Whitman wouldn’t allow it. When my eagle eyes caught Daddy trying to stroke Whitman’s ass or pull him into an embrace, Whitman always cut it short. Once I heard him whisper, “Not in front of her.”

  Her.

  That was me.

  For five years I was shuttled back and forth between the big beautiful house where Mom lived with her female suppor
t group (and more and more junk and clutter), and the austere apartments where Daddy and Whitman lived with just a few sticks of designer furniture.

  It was all very complicated. But it was what I knew.

  It was my life.

  Mom, the former receptionist, doesn’t answer the phone much anymore. She can’t say no to anyone, no matter what they’re selling, so she filters calls. I pulled out my old cell phone, so outdated and clunky that nobody even wants to steal it, and called her from my car. I said what I always say: “It’s me. Pick up if you’re in there.”

  She was on the line instantly. “Where are you, sweetheart?”

  “Outside.”

  She drew back the curtain. We waved at one another. “Lock your car if you’re coming in, sweetheart. There’s been a lot of gang activity lately.”

  A moment later she unlocked the three locks, drew me in, and quickly relocked the door. “I heard gunshots last night,” she said.

  Mom was wearing black polyester lounging pants with an elastic waistband and a long, flowing, floor-length robe with a pattern of silvery lines in the weave. Thanks to some really bad fashion advice she had new glasses with white, laptop computer-size frames. The one thing she never gave up was her big hair, still piled high atop her head and dyed a shade of red you only see in early Technicolor.

  The house was stuffy because she’d had the windows painted shut. One of her doctors told her she might be allergic to dust, so now air filters and deionizers hummed in all four rooms.

  She muted the old black-and-white movie playing on her VCR. Bette Davis, with big gluey tears in her eyes, was pleading with some guy for something or other. Mom’s a real Bette Davis freak. Back when she smoked and drank, she used to do bad Bette Davis imitations at parties.

  She gingerly embraced me, afraid to pull me too close because I smelled like cigarette smoke. One of Mom’s doctors told her she might be allergic to it. This was after years of smoking two packs a day and inhaling down to her toenails.

  “Well, to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” she asked, using her gentle “what did you do in day care today” voice.

  I shrugged and collapsed onto her overstuffed sofa.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked warily.

  I shook my head.

  “Do you need money?” She started for her purse.

  “That’s not why I came over.”

  “You’re all dolled up, sweetheart. High heels and everything. You look bee-you-ti-ful. Did you just come from someplace fun?”

  I kicked off the red stilettos that were killing my feet. “The dads took me out to dinner.”

  “Oh?” She moved closer. I was her only source of information about the glamorous private lives of the dads. “Where?”

  “Gianicolo.”

  “Oh? I haven’t heard of that. Is it new?”

  “It’s this fabulous new Italian restaurant over in the West Hills. Everything’s gray and black-and-white marble. Except for this blue wall of water.”

  “Was it expensive? How much was the bill?”

  “A hundred and fifty-four with tip. For three en-trées and three Caesars. I had a dessert and we all had espresso. And wine.”

  “Who paid?”

  “They split it.”

  “Was the food good?”

  “They were raving.”

  “The dads were?”

  “Mm-hm.” I waited a second. “They’re getting married.”

  “The dads are?” She didn’t so much sit down as drop into the chair beside me. “You mean like a commitment ceremony?”

  “That county registry thing. Domestic partnership.”

  “Well,” she said, “isn’t that nice.”

  “Did you know they’ve been together for twenty years?”

  “Yes, sweetheart, I’m aware of that.”

  “That’s longer than anyone I know. Straight or gay.”

  Her eyes stole over to the television screen.

  “They invited me and Tremaynne to go on our honeymoon with them.”

  Mom cocked her head, like a bird who’s just heard a worm, and slowly rose from her chair. “Would you like some passionflower tea, sweetheart?”

  “Ick, no.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t offer you very much. I’m off coffee, pop, wine, off everything but natural herb teas and pure spring water. Carla”—her nutritionist—“thinks I might be allergic to wheat. Gluten. And of course I’m lactose-intolerant.”

  I didn’t want details but dutifully asked if she was feeling any better.

  “Well, sweetheart, I’ve been ill for a very long time, you know. I just didn’t know it. And nobody’s been able to figure out exactly what it is.”

  Lose a hundred pounds, turn off the Bette Davis movies, and get out of this house once in a while, I wanted to shout. But didn’t. “Should we go on a honeymoon with the dads?” I asked.

  “Well, sweetheart, it depends on what you want.”

  Out of the blue I just blew up. “Can’t you ever just give me one solid piece of advice? My whole life it’s always been up to me to decide everything. And it’s like I never make the right decision.”

  Mom was on the verge of tears. Breathing hard to fight down her panicky agitation. “Well, we learn from our mistakes,” she said wobbily.

  “Then why do I keep doing the same stupid things over and over again?”

  “I don’t know where you’re coming from, sweetheart. Did you have a fight with Tremaynne?”

  “No, but it pissed me off that he wouldn’t even go out to dinner with me and the dads. They invited us. It was supposed to be a kind of special prewedding kind of dinner thingie for us. For me and Tremaynne.”

  “A celebration.”

  “Yeah. But he wouldn’t dress up, so I just told him to stay at home.”

  “Are you having second thoughts about marrying Tremaynne?” Mom asked.

  “Well, the first two turned out to be duds, didn’t they?”

  “Maybe three will be your lucky number.”

  To smoke, I had to stand outside on her teeny front porch. Mom stayed inside, behind the screen door, seated and listening like a priest in a confessional.

  “Sometimes I think I have, like, absolutely no ability to judge character,” I said, trying to blow my smoke away. The breeze blew it right into the house. Mom coughed. “It’s, like, I’ll believe anything a guy tells me.”

  “Well, you essentially trust people, sweetheart. You assume they’re always telling the truth.”

  “They act one way when they want to fuck you and then turn into something else afterward.”

  “Tremaynne seems more . . . intelligent than either Sean or Peter,” Mom observed. “Or JD for that matter. But he seems shy. He doesn’t share a lot.”

  “He doesn’t trust people.”

  “Oh. Well, when you lose your trust—” Mom said vaguely.

  I flicked my cigarette out toward the street and lit another. The caffeine from that last double espresso at the restaurant zoomed through my veins. I wanted to be out on a dance floor. I wanted to be happy. I wanted never to end up like Mom.

  Tremaynne was sleeping when I got home. He’d left all the candles burning, which meant he wanted to make love.

  Once he came down from that tree, after spending three months in it, it’s like that’s all he wanted to do. It never got boring. Tremaynne said he loved my body, and he proved it every time we fucked. I faked orgasms with my first two husbands. I didn’t fake them with Tremaynne. I never fantasized that he was Ethan Hawke or Leonardo DiCaprio.

  But tonight I was still pissed off with him for not going out to dinner with me and the dads. I crouched down beside the futon and looked at his sleeping face, the wispy goatee, the long eyelashes, the oh-so-kissable lips. His warm, earthy smell seeped up from the tangled bedclothes.

  I thought: This man will always tell the truth. This man will never compromise his principles. This man will never wear cologne (maybe not even deodorant). This man is
dedicated to being natural.

  All that was good.

  Then, suddenly, I had a glimpse of the future. Our future. I thought: I will never see this man dressed up in a drop-dead suit. This man will never shine at one of the dads’ big parties. This man will never take me out to a hip restaurant or on a trip to Venice. This man will never play the status game, so we’ll never have a pretty house or a cool car or stainless-steel appliances. This man is part Teflon: He won’t let my middle-class fantasies stick to him.

  Tremaynne was an alternative media star when I met him. He was famous because he’d spent three months living in a tree in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon. It was a grove of old-growth redwoods that some lumber company wanted to cut down.

  He joined a group called Arbor Vitae. This group did everything it could to stop the logging. They spiked trees, damaged equipment, and chained themselves to tree trunks. Then Tremaynne volunteered to actually live in one of the oldest and largest of the threatened redwoods. The lumber people were so pissed off with Arbor Vitae they wanted to kill everyone in the group. Especially Tremaynne.

  Living 180 feet up in a tree was the kind of publicity stunt that Tremaynne knew would draw attention to the cause. He looked like a movie star when he was on the news. Like Brad Pitt without the jaw line. A local station covered the story and I just happened to see it one night when I was at my mom’s. Then a local indie rock station started a weekly “Tremaynne in the Tree” story, asking him how he was doing and what was new. His life was, like, totally surreal and fascinating.