by Debra Monroe
I moved with the girl from wealthy Oconomowoc and her two friends into a cream-colored house. My mother visited. Someone mentioned James. My mother said: “Who?” He had trouble sticking to my schedule, so he’d drop by, wearing aftershave, and leave pot in a box my roommates kept on the table. He conversed about blues guitar with one roommate, social work with another. The girl who’d invited me to live there loved cocaine. We’d start to wash dishes, scrub the bathroom. She’d say: “Call James and get some coke over here, so we can get this place spiffy.” She’d do lines with him, then fire up the vacuum, shouting: “Now this is housekeeping. This must be how my grandma felt when she got her first electric washer.” But we didn’t tell my mother that. “Who is James?” my mother asked again. The coke-roommate said: “Debra’s boyfriend.”
My mother asked to meet him. I didn’t want to give James false hope by introducing him to my mother. I was removing myself slowly, peeling away so he wouldn’t notice. But I couldn’t describe to my mother James’s status as half-boyfriend. I called him.
He answered his door, holding a corsage. He was taking us to dinner, he said. She’d pay, she answered, firm. Then three grubby brothers pulled up, and one handed James money. I hurried my mother back to her car. She said: “Are you kids dealers?” How would a person who didn’t sell drugs or date someone who did respond? Flabbergasted, I decided. Flabbergasted, I said, “No, why?” She said, “That boy gave James money.” I scrambled. What was wholesome yet enterprising? “James runs a lawn-mowing service,” I said. “He sets up accounts and hires people.” She wasn’t done yet; she was a bookkeeper: “Why was the employee paying the boss?” I stopped working on my facial expression. My mother had been privy to my subterfuges since I was little. “Customers pay the guy, and he brings a percentage to James,” I said. She sighed. She weathered bad facts this way: accepting the semblance of a reasonable lie.
I gave notice at the café—Kristine barely spoke as I finished my two weeks—and started at an expensive new restaurant, for better tips. I kept track of James, his schedule. I got cagey about my own. Peter, a boy I knew from Sigma Tau Delta, said to me in a bar, “You don’t like intelligent men.” Men? I thought. I said, “James is intelligent.” Peter said, “You’re too insecure to sleep with me.” I wasn’t. “Prove it,” Peter said. I went to his apartment in one of those business districts with a one-room grocery, butcher, tailor, a strip of stores in the old Polish neighborhood, and Peter’s room an empty storefront with curtains covering the window, his bed pushed so near we heard chattering pedestrians on the sidewalk. We didn’t undress. We talked about Theodore Roethke.
Next, I lived in a blue-collar neighborhood between the tire factory and brewery, in an apartment I shared with a girl doing practice teaching at a nearby school. A man with a PhD doing postdoc research in rivers asked me out. He’d first seen me at James’s. When he came to pick me up, he offered me coke. I declined. He said, “I thought you were a coke whore. I couldn’t find another reason for a girl like you being over there.” My face felt like a mask. I’d seemed like a whore? He’d insulted James too. I said, “This isn’t charming date conversation.” The PhD said, “He has good drugs, but he’s a blowhard. What’s with the guitars?” I said, “He plays well.” He played well with records. He didn’t play with people. He’d never had people, just customers—not counting me, and his mother, who’d called the police to arrest him for breaking curfew after she passed out. “He’s had a hard life,” I said. “He has ten times more courage than you.”
“Whoa,” the PhD said. “I didn’t know you loved him.”
After the expensive restaurant went bankrupt, I took a job at a bar and moved alone to a tiny half-duplex, charming in the summer once I’d redecorated with knickknacks and lace curtains from the thrift store. But winter blew in. The kitchen used to be a porch. The apartment turned cold. I hung a blanket over the kitchen doorway and, in the morning, I found ice-covered dishes in the sink. I wore mittens to make coffee and never covered the kitchen doorway again. I was wrapped in blankets, circling ads for new apartments, when my mother phoned to say that she was buying me a ticket to fly on a prop jet to a hospital in North Dakota because my taskmaster grandmother had terminal cancer.
“You’re never home,” my mother said. “I call and call and call.”
I told her I’d been at class, at work, or studying. Some nights I studied until dawn in the oldest building, Schofield Hall, which stayed open all night. It used to be a laboratory school with secret balconies so normal school professors could observe teaching and learning—ghosts of professors circling as I studied. I didn’t tell my mother that on coldest nights I went to James. We had sex. Then he got up to drink as I slept in a warm bed.
She said, “Just to let you know, I don’t know where your father is.”
She should move on, I said, make a new life. But in a small town filled with bars and strip joints, they’d been not just husband and wife but partners in get-up-and-go. Everything they said, did, wore, drove, established that they weren’t lowlifes. She said, “Divorce is impossible. I’d rather be a widow.” I was shocked. “You wish he was dead?”
She said, “Did I say that? No.”
She needed a plan. I didn’t have one.
When I got to the hospital in North Dakota, my sister was already there, holding her new baby. I sat next to my grandmother’s bed and studied my niece, her tiny face blinking at light, at motion. At the end of life, my grandmother was docile, benevolent. In the middle of life, my mother was staggered by double losses looming. I saw it in her wilted posture.
When I got home a few days later, it was December.
I was graduating in a few weeks. My grades were As, except Cs in required sections of Physical Education I’d procrastinated until the end: a C in Relaxation because I fell asleep instead of relaxing; a C in Beginning Swimming. The teacher had noticed me the first day, floating easefully, and stared at my face: “There’d better not be anyone in here who already knows how or that’s an automatic F.” So I feigned helplessness in deep water.
I’d feigned confidence everywhere else.
I’d feigned for roommates, Lana and Maribel.
I’d feigned I was popular enough for the girls in the cream-colored house where once, at a party, when I was dancing to the Rolling Stones, I heard a guy, too well-off for me, ask: “Who’s the girl with frizzy hair who digs electronic music?” It seemed like a line from a movie. When I realized he was talking about me I danced like life was a movie. I danced faster, thinking I could measure life out, not in coffee spoons, like J. Alfred Prufrock, that neurasthenic who just needed a job and a few deadlines, but according to the places I’d lived, the parts I’d been forced to play, changing myself as various settings required.
And I’d feigned for Dr. Darden Stoat who, hurrying to get this sticky moment of college teaching behind him, had added, “I hope this predicament won’t keep you from finishing your degree. When a problem presents itself, we have options, but options can shrink.”
He was saying, for instance, that I could have handled writer’s block many ways, but I’d waited too long and had one option, writing my paper in a grueling vigil. He was saying a pregnant college girl could have a baby—back then a college girl who kept her baby married the father, if he could be persuaded. Or she could put the baby up for adoption, dropping out for a semester. Or she’d have an abortion. Maribel, my lovelorn roommate, had an abortion, her parents never the wiser. This was a small school, a small department, and I wasn’t dropping out, nor would I hurry to class with a gold ring, swollen with child. I should have told him I wasn’t pregnant. But I didn’t contradict my elders. For the first time since I’d swallowed tissue paper with a butterfly wing on it the night before, I spoke from deep inside the truths I had available. I said, “This is a nice handkerchief.”
For the next three years, I’d be better dressed—at a visiting scholar event, or smiling as I rushed out of class, happy to have received an
A—and I’d see Dr. Darden Stoat in the shadows, his human, intimate smile. I’d change my expression. I’d never been pregnant, of course, but I hadn’t known where I fit. I’d belonged somewhere, then didn’t. I’d been pregnant with hope, that’s all. I couldn’t begin to explain I wasn’t a diamond in the rough with morbid regrets. I’d never been her and was already more.
I graduated and got a job at a cable channel that flashed news on the TV screen. Monday through Friday, the graveyard shift, I took stories off the wire and condensed them. I met a man who seemed wholesome, or his family did. It was time now, I felt: marriage. People my age married. Besides, when I’d get in from work, I’d find my mother in her car in my driveway—who knows how long she’d sat there—saying she had no husband, no children, nothing. I’d take her inside and pour her a drink, though it was morning.
One day my fiancé—he wasn’t perfect, but I was good with raw materials, I felt—didn’t see any reason to stop using the dealer with the best pot, the best prices. I waited in the car as he went into James’s apartment near a school for criminally troubled boys; James worked there, I knew. He was troubled, but not as troubled as the boys, and they responded. Yet he was a drug dealer, I thought, fuming, waiting for my fiancé so we could head off into a life in which I’d get a master’s degree in a warmer state, and my fiancé would learn to be employed. He’d come to college on full scholarship but never finished and clerked at stores and played in bands. He was still inside—getting high by now.
Then I looked up and saw James in stocking feet in the snow, knocking on my window. I rolled it down. For a while, we’d been alike. We’d been squared: strengths multiplying, weaknesses multiplying. He was still who we were when we’d met—outsiders in unfamiliar terrain. “Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials,” he said.
I might have said back: “I wish you a happy life.” But I didn’t know yet that I wouldn’t see him again except dead-but-alive in dreams I’d have for decades. I said, “Thank you.” I cranked my window back up. My fiancé came out. I rolled away scot-free.
Drinks Are on the House
Reader, I married this fiancé. One year later he left me, hauling himself and his guitars away on Halloween, hours before a party I was hosting. We graduate students socialized with fervor—getting too drunk too soon, ignoring social niceties to cement these new friendships, stories of mishaps our creation myth. Standing at the top of stairs that led to my apartment, I watched zombies and ghouls stream past and thought that the idea of this party had probably seemed better to me than to my husband. After all, it wasn’t his master’s degree. Dressed as Dale Evans in my husband’s left-behind cowboy hat, wearing a yellow-sequined square dance skirt with bulls and bullfighters swirling, I put beer in coolers. It would be a buzz kill to announce my separation leading to divorce, I thought. Perhaps not leading to divorce. I wanted him back. He was family, familiar. Manners keep us from revealing feelings too soon. I’d read that in an antique etiquette book.
I greeted people by name who didn’t wear masks. A fellow student, a woodsy poet, came as himself in a flannel shirt unbuttoned to display a ceramic medallion on a rawhide string. Three male students came as one of our professors, Ryman Stacker. They wore guayabera shirts, striped book bag/man purses you could buy at head shops, and pins that said: ANITA BRYANT IS A FRUIT FLY; OUT OF EL SALVADOR NOW. Ryman Stacker came too, dressed as Woody Guthrie. He said to the three students, “Ha ha. Imitation, man. Sincerest form of flattery, quote, unquote. Charles Caleb Colton.” Other young professors came. At a state school with big graduate programs, but located in the middle of Kansas and far from a city, the best chance to mingle with the local elite was drinking.
Professors who attended graduate student parties were young, male, white; professors who didn’t attend graduate student parties were old, male, white. They all had wives who’d typed their dissertations and now taught Freshman English for low pay. Male and female He made them, I thought, noting that there weren’t female professors here, just female students. But professors implied we might one day be more than educated wives.
The professor I’d come to study with, a scholar with a national reputation in rhetoric, knew one female professor at Carnegie Mellon, another at Stanford. But the job market was difficult, he added. And then: “This mixes badly with marriage, you see. Dreams get sacrificed.” Not my dreams, I thought. My husband didn’t have a career. My plan was to stop after this degree and teach at a two-year college. Another of my professors just let old ideas slip. Once, I worried aloud about a paper. He said, “It’s good you’re insecure. Otherwise, with your brains and feminine attributes, you’d scare me.”
I’d scared myself, enrolling in this traditional but newfangled program where, for two years, I’d study literature but also rhetoric, Old English, history of the English language, history and theory of grammar. Then, when I finished two years of classes, I’d spend another year studying for exams on eighty books and writing a thesis for which I’d conduct primary research because the professor whose reputation I’d banked on felt that the study of rhetoric in America was in its infancy and his students should not only summarize current research but exhume the untapped material waiting for us in archives all over and broadcast new conclusions to the world. Most of my classmates were focusing on creative writing or literature instead, not rhetoric, and they seemed more self-assured.
Maybe they were. Or maybe they pretended. I did.
As I’d dug deeper into debt to train for a career my family had never heard of, I saw that I had to go not just to three-hour classes, but to readings, receptions, and happy hours. As I did, I worked hard at acting smart, and then I’d notice my husband working harder.
Next, he joined a band, which solved the problem of whether he should go to my events. When I went to his gigs, though, I talked to people he was hell-bent on impressing, including other band member’s wives, who said I was “unique,” which didn’t sound like praise. I started staying home, doing homework and housework, homework and housework. Not quite synonyms, I thought, as I dusted woodwork while mulling over the Great Vowel Shift, due to migration, also the emergence of a prestige accent. Yet I worried I wasn’t adopting a prestige outlook, so I’d planned this Halloween party.
People were arriving in hordes now. “What are you supposed to be?” a gorilla asked.
A Ryman Stacker look-alike said, “She’s a cowboy’s girlfriend, in real life too.”
When I first met my husband, he’d played in bands people now call alt-country, hippie and hillbilly influences merged. After we moved to Kansas, he played straight-up country. As he’d switched genres, I’d switched personas; I added farmer’s daughter dresses to my repertoire.
As I sewed, I thought how, when I was little and watching Gunsmoke, I’d been mesmerized not by the calico-and-lace heroines but by saloon girls, their clothes, eyes, lips, thrilling bits of cleavage. I’d studied women carefully because I’d grow up to be one, I’d reasoned then. But now I wondered if my childhood longing for a quality these women had and I didn’t meant that I was a latent homosexual, a phrase people were just starting to use. Yet my longing wasn’t for sex but impact: making power fall to its knees.
It seemed wrong to give that up to try for the new power—”women’s lib”—that most people didn’t want women to have anyway. But I couldn’t express my doubts well, and all around me people had refined their women’s rights arguments: precise words, sarcastic zingers. So I kept my feelings about whether I wanted to be sultry-powerful or brainy-powerful to myself and avoided choosing by trying to be both, which is to say dowdy.
One of my classmates, Betty, walked in wearing a boa. She said, “I hate it when people call you a free spirit if they mean they think you’re a whore.” Another classmate, Theresa Minster, came as Charlie Chaplin. She was a lesbian. In Kansas, the word still sounded vaguely kinky, though, when Theresa said it, it sounded dignified. She had a friend, a graduate student from another department, who was also a lesbi
an, and the two of them knew all sixteen lesbians in the county, who’d formed a softball team. They came in wearing their jerseys. Another classmate, Ray, was gay. Gay men sometimes got treated like lepers then because AIDS was misunderstood. So, for Ray, and Ray’s partner, who said to call him Ray’s Wife, being gay meant being militant. Ray’s Wife grabbed my crotch. “It’s not as if I’m a man demeaning you,” he said, wearing a dog collar and leash.
The apartment was rocking now.
I lived in the country in a not-quite ghost town—above the old general store. Downstairs, in front, a portico that had once sheltered horse-drawn wagons and, later, automobiles, now covered a bench where my landlady Garnett, who sold antiques, not groceries and sundries, sometimes sat with her friends, Opal and Pearl. These names are real. How could I find better? I have nothing but praise for these semiprecious jewels. They treated me like—Garnett’s word—kin. The only other big building besides the store was the empty schoolhouse, where I sometimes did the Jane Fonda workout with young farm wives, including Garnett’s daughters. Everyone knew everyone because we were isolated. The bridge that once led straight to the college town had washed out years ago.
The first emergency at the Halloween party that night, not counting my husband leaving, was the shaky portico. Upstairs, it was like a balcony without railings that you got to through spare bedrooms. The first spare bedroom contained childhood mementos my mother had shipped when she’d emptied the attic, preparing for the court-ordered sale of property co-owned with my dad. The next spare bedroom had a door leading to the roof.
In mild weather, I sometimes studied out there. Once, my husband and I had lain there, staring at stars while taking peyote. He’d rambled on about his recurring dream that he drove a school bus that flew through the sky. I hated peyote. But mutual interests are the foundation of marriage. As my husband talked, I realized that the only recurring dream I had involved my teeth crumbling. This didn’t seem worth describing, so I talked about Death & Dying, which was the unit all teaching assistants were teaching then, using the same textbook, teaching essays, poems, and stories about death, grading fifty freshman papers about death, and I’d never before quite understood that one life is like one sigh entering a whirlwind, that death itself is a blue-gray square, a not-luminous destination.