by Lisa Tognola
Over time, our visits doubled, our phone bills tripled, and my heartache quadrupled. I was consumed by thoughts and dreams of him. I saw his face on students I passed in the hallway, on billboards and TV commercials. I read and reread his letters.
Wim had dreams, and not all of them included me. He wanted to travel, a prospect that, in my mind, threatened our relationship. His ambivalence was forcing me to step back and look at where I was in my life and what I wanted: A husband. A child. A house.
Then, finally, Wim announced that he would be leaving Switzerland in the coming summer. He would make plans to come to LA. In my mind, I started to make my own plan—to make a home with him.
It was the beginning of summer, and dusk was hovering in Los Angeles; in Zurich, the sun hadn’t yet risen.
I picked up the phone, surprised to hear Wim’s voice on the other end. “What are you doing up?” I said. “It’s only five o’clock in the morning for you.” I leaned against the headboard in my childhood bedroom.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Wim said.
“What’s wrong?”
Outside the window, two great horned owls called to each other with deep, soft hoots, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo.
“I’m not ready to move back to the US. I booked a round-the-world trip for a year.”
His words hung like a dense fog, heavy and tangible—the kind we’d once driven through at eighty miles per hour on the Autobahn to Austria. The kind where visibility is cut down within seconds, resulting in disastrous pileups.
“I’m leaving for Asia next month,” he said.
I stared, speechless, into a patch of white-and-pink-checkered wallpaper until it blended into a fuzzy haze. If the owls hooted, I didn’t notice.
He said he had purchased a one-way, nonrefundable ticket: Switzerland to Morocco, Morocco to India, India to China, and on and on. The trip would take a year, or longer. He planned to end his trip in New York.
This didn’t make sense. Hadn’t he already made a commit-ment—to me?
I pictured him lying on his bed, the receiver on his ear tethered to the cradle on his nightstand, his head resting against his wood headboard.
“We’re in different places in our lives,” he continued. “You’ve finished graduate school and gotten a job; you’ve moved in with your parents to save money.”
“And you want to travel the world,” I said sharply.
“Janie, you know I love you, but this is something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time. If I don’t do it now, I never will.”
I wrote Wim letters. I called, desperate to change his mind, but also desperate to not sound desperate. If there was ever a tightrope between preservation and breakup, I was walking it.
I talked to Shayna and lamented to my parents.
“It’s not fair,” I complained to my father as we walked the hills around my parents’ neighborhood, our daily routine—the only thing I felt I could depend on anymore.
“Life’s not fair,” my dad said, offering his standard-issue response, though his voice was not without sympathy.
He pointed to a tree with dark oval leaves and small white flowers. “Do you remember what kind of tree that is?”
I scanned the reserve in my brain and started ticking off flowering trees he’d pointed out over the years on walks, drives, trips together—magnolia, crepe myrtle, plum—and before I knew it I was thinking of Wim and me on a hill in an apple orchard near his Swiss apartment, stretched out on a blanket, looking up at clusters of pink blossoms against a buttermilk sky. “I wish you could stay here,” he murmured. I could feel the warmth of his touch under my blouse, his fingers gliding upward.
“The blossoms can be white or pink,” my father hinted, his words reeling me back to the present, back to the game we’d been playing since I was a child, testing my knowledge of the world: nature, politics, culture, and religion. He loved to fill in the gaps with his own encyclopedic explanations. Then, it came to me.
“Dogwood,” I said eagerly. I still wanted to impress him with the right answer, even at twenty-three years old.
A week later, Wim called again. I sat at my desk, a stack of his letters beside me, and fingered an envelope as I listened. I’d just finished reading a letter dated August 1988, the first he’d ever written me.
Janie,
Let me ask you a question. Who ever said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow?” I’m only asking because nothing about saying goodbye to you was sweet. Well that’s not all true. Your lips were. What I mean is we talked about being sad but watching you leave was truly saddening. It was only one week ago that Shayna, Max, you and I were in Lagos. I’ve been thinking about you this last week. Wishing you were still here. I thought about how you wanted to go to Granada and while I was at the Alhambra I could only imagine what it would have been like to share that afternoon with you.
Enough about could have beens. Let’s talk fact. Lagos was beautiful—not just the place but everything. You really made that weekend an unforgettable one. It was a paradise and I’m glad we got to share it together. How long was it that we actually knew each other?
I turned the envelope over and over in my hands, thinking about how people could enter our lives so suddenly, and exit just as quickly. Could two years of love and commitment vanish in a single conversation? Wim would tell me how he valued his independence, reminding me how in high school he’d waited tables at the Grist Mill to save money for a car—a 1974 used Volkswagen Scirocco, old and battered, but it got him where he needed to go. How he worked his way through college at Huntington Plaza selling cigars, fine clothing, and accessories at a men’s haberdashery, a word I had never heard of until I met him; how he liked his freedom and didn’t want to be stifled. How he loved me but couldn’t let go of his dream to see the world. I waited for the words, “It’s over.”
Instead, I heard him say, “I’ll move back, but on one condition.”
I held my breath.
“If I’m going to give up my life here, I want a commitment from you. I want to live together.”
I jumped up from my chair and paced the carpet as far as the phone cord would allow. To the ceiling, I mouthed, “Thank you!”
CHAPTER 15: CONSPICUOUS CONSTRUCTION
Raymond Ave, Rye – August 2006
When Wim and I first moved to Rye, we had to choose whether to live in Rye Borough or Rye Township. Even though they shared a public library, a post office, and even a common zip code, the two sections of Rye were divided into two governments. They were also divided in spirit and had been fierce rivals for generations, each municipality fighting (in the hockey rink, sometimes literally) for respect. I’d heard you could have had a Borough–Township game of tiddlywinks and it would be sold out.
The Township was historically a place where farmers lived on large properties and tended dairy farms and cattle, but those farms had since been replaced by luxurious new homes on large lots. Borough residents, considered sophisticated city folk, were willing to tolerate tighter living space for the perks of convenient access to town, including a train-station parking pass that town hall reserved for Borough residents only.
The competition had mellowed in recent years, but an underlying mutual feeling of contempt remained—despite the fact that both sections were equally filled with hedge fund managers, parents paying for private tutors for their children, and people vacationing in Africa and Alaska. A Township friend said to me once, “I had to get out of the Borough. The houses are packed so tight I couldn’t retrieve my morning newspaper without listening to my neighbor rattle on every morning about her dog’s thyroid problem.” A Borough friend, meanwhile, scoffed, “I hear Townie women don’t wear sweatpants—they wear ‘yoga apparel.’”
When we were house hunting for the second time, we had to make the choice again. Staying in the Borough would allow us to continue to enjoy the community feeling that a tighter-knit environment lends; moving to the Township, with its sprawling acreage, would give us the space we cra
ved. We wanted a larger house, but we valued being close enough to neighbors that we could chat from porch to porch and watch the kids play in their front yards, things that make you feel like you’re connected.
Ultimately, we decided to stay in the Borough, holding out for a rare large property, thinking we could have it all. On Lexington Avenue, we’d literally be living on the border, between Borough conservatism and Township flash. While many of my peers had upgraded to larger homes, some of my closest friends lived in homes that were quite modest, and the potential scale of our new house made me self-conscious.
I feared being judged for having a basement that was as big as some of my friends’ homes. “She used to be so down-to-earth,” I imagined them saying. They’d make assumptions, wrongly believing that I’d adopted a new image to match my conspicuous construction, that I’d trade in our neighborhood walks together for private personal trainers and substitute volunteer time for a time-share in Bermuda. When we first started talking about renovating, I worried that I’d lose my friends.
I don’t know why. I had a tight-knit group of friends I’d grown close with over the years; hanging out on the school playground together, pushing our babies on the swing set, and watching our kids climb on the jungle gym had bonded us together. We’d exchanged books, traded recipes, and shared carpools.
I loved that my friends didn’t care how big or small their—or anyone else’s—houses were. However, I thought some of them were shocked by what we spent on our Lexington Avenue home. So the self-doubt began to creep in.
We would appear wealthier as we built our big house, but in reality we were stretched thinner than ever. I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself—just my home. I’d always told my kids that “what matters isn’t what you have but how you act toward others.” But if I was being honest with myself, I believed it was really both.
Would I start putting on airs once I moved to an area where the culture was trumping the neighbor’s latest acquisition? For the zillionth time, I asked myself if we should have stayed put. But then, in my mind, I saw our Raymond Avenue house with its small kitchen and no garage, my parents having to stay at a Courtyard by Marriott twenty minutes away. I heard my mother: Maybe in your next house you’ll have a mudroom. I heard my son’s school friend: Where’s the rest of your house?
I told myself we made the right decision.
CHAPTER 16: A ROUGH START
Rosemead, CA – September 1992
It was a warm, sunny morning. Cotton clouds drifted over our heads; a black crow cawed from a nearby power line. I stood crouching over a tomato plant, grimacing at a four-inch, phallus-shaped creature that looked like it had been designed for a science fiction movie.
“Last one,” Wim said with satisfaction as he took a gloved hand and plucked off a fat, ugly hornworm enjoying a destructive meal at our garden “salad bar.” I stood ready with a disposable jar in hand and watched him drop the wriggling insect inside to join its companions. For hours we’d lost ourselves in an obsessive game of hunt and pluck.
“How many is that?” He removed his gloves and set them down on a yellow wire garden seat.
“Six,” I said, relieved that the worms were inside the jar and order was restored to our little patio garden. I observed them tumbling and clinging together, desperate to escape.
I picked up a mallet and struck a new stake into the tomato pot, trying not to hit any roots.
“I can’t believe we started this thing from seed.” Wim gestured to the vine that had grown past his own shoulders, beyond the five-foot stake. The bent plant, weighted down with shiny clusters of red-ripe heirloom tomatoes, leaned over, yearning for reinforcement. “When I was a kid, we used to give our tomatoes a head start by growing them in small containers under artificial light in our basement until it warmed up outside.” His words were tinged with nostalgia.
“It’s strange to think that you grew up with basements.”
“It’s strange to think you didn’t.”
“Where do these worms even come from?” I peered into the jar to get a good look at one—the V-shaped marks on each side, the tiny black horn on its hind end—then handed Wim the jar.
His lips curved down and he stroked his chin, pondering the mysteries of the tomato hornworm. “No idea,” he answered.
We had yet to figure out that the stunning, hummingbird-like moths we often admired in the late afternoon, unrolling their proboscises like party noisemakers to sip nectar from our deep-lobed petunias, had evolved from these very larvae.
I silently mused over how something could appear out of nowhere—an ocean wave, a shooting star, a flashback, a romance. A thought emerged out of the blue, prompting me to remind Wim about our dinner plans. “Don’t forget, we’re having dinner with the Greenbergs and the Kahns in Santa Monica tonight.”
Wim’s head fell back, his eyes closing with annoyance. “Can’t they come here?”
“To Rosemead? And eat where, In-N-Out Burger?”
He frowned. “I’d rather do that than traipse across LA County just to hang out with friends.”
“They’re your friends,” I reminded him.
“Then they’ll understand.”
I knew his irritation stemmed not just from the inconvenience of long-distance friendships but also from his growing disenchantment with Los Angeles. Wim had left Zurich to build a life with me in California with no car and no cash, only a suitcase in hand. He had left his conservative East Coast roots and arrived in an unfamiliar place where snow was only on TV, earthquakes were a real threat, and Barbie actually lived in Malibu. He couldn’t fathom kids surfing, grown men skateboarding, grandparents sporting tattoos, or, most important, raising a family in Los Angeles.
Hoping to temper his displeasure, I told him I’d made reservations at the Greek restaurant he liked, the one with the marinated lamb kabobs. His look told me the restaurant didn’t matter.
“It’ll take us an hour to drive there, and that’s assuming we don’t get caught in any crossfire on the way.”
He was being facetious, but there had recently been a rash of drive-by shootings in Los Angeles, and crime seemed to be creeping closer and closer to home. Driving to my parents’ house recently, we’d witnessed two policemen holding down a man at gunpoint in his driveway, his hands cuffed behind his back. I’d been so shaken by the sight that I had begun to carry mace on my keychain.
“I hate the traffic as much as you do,” I said, “but Saturday’s better than weekday traffic.”
Wim looked frustrated. “It’s more than that.”
A feeling of apprehension stirred inside of me. I knew what was coming. We’d performed this kabuki dance since he’d moved to LA, and we always ended up back in the same place. Marriage, it was turning out, wasn’t the Cinderella fairy tale I’d grown up believing it to be.
I often wondered why young people weren’t better prepared for marriage—why Home Economics required us to learn how to make snickerdoodles (cookies a three-year-old could bake unsupervised) and seventh-grade woodshop required us to build birdhouses. Why couldn’t high school have offered Marriage 101, where I’d have learned how to be a more active listener, to say “You seem a little frustrated” rather than “You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’ve lived here for two years and—”
“You don’t like it, I know,” I interrupted. “But this is home.”
“This is where we live,” he corrected.
This is where I’ve built my life, I thought but didn’t say. How could I? He had built his life too—in Switzerland.
“You don’t know what it’s like to leave everything behind. In Zurich I had my life together. I had a good job, I had connections, I traveled, I had my own apartment—”
My mind flashed to the year Wim moved in with me—and my parents. Wim slept on one side of the house and I slept on the other, an arrangement that often included one of us creeping past my mother, asleep on the couch late at night, and lasted for an entire year, until we
got our own digs in Rosemead.
“You’ve got your life together now. You’re in graduate school. Soon you’ll be working,” I said hopefully, all too aware of the burden of expectation he felt to “make something of himself.” It was an expectation set by all of us—me, my parents, and Wim—that had spilled over into pressure. Wim’s goal had been to travel around the world. Instead, he’d moved to a place he hated and had spent the past two years struggling to find the right career path, all of which had been causing us to have the same arguments over and over again.
“I’m just saying it’s been hard. I’m not happy, okay?” Wim frowned. “This isn’t what I expected my life to be.” He flicked the glass jar with his finger and knocked the caterpillars down. Each time they gained an inch, he knocked them down again.
“Wow,” I said, taken aback by his blunt statement. “Not happy? I know you had a rough start, but—”
“A rough start?” His jaw tightened. “It was the middle of a recession when I first moved here.” His voice was rising. “I remember feeling like everyone around me—all of our friends—had their act together, going to work in suits, practicing law. And what was I doing? Data entry. It was humiliating—one of the worst periods of my life,” he yelled, his angry hazel eyes fixed on mine. His fingers were clamped so tightly on the jar, I feared it would shatter in his hand.
“Wim, keep your voice down.” I cast a quick glance over the patio railing. I heard our next-door neighbor, Judy, turn down her TV.
“I don’t give a crap if Judy hears me. I’ve listened to worse things come out of her.” Tilting the uncapped glass jar back as if it were a grenade catapult, he turned his body and pitched the tomato worms toward her patio.