by Debra Monroe
Pearl, “Her new boyfriend thinks she’s heaven-sent. A man like that is still coming.”
Garnett, “When you can’t see what’s next, assume it’s better.” She hugged me.
Late that night, I wondered if maybe I deserved this poetic justice, supernatural retribution, because of my reprieve-fling with the woodsy poet—an idea I put to rest when the band wife who’d told me I looked good for my age called from a bar. “I heard it’s over,” she said. “Good riddance. I wouldn’t put up with stepping out. We women wanted to tell you all along, but Eddie said we couldn’t. If Eddie did me like that, I’d glue his dick to his leg with Super Glue.” I thanked her, hung up, and I worried about Christmas.
Economical option, I’d stay in Kansas. I asked which classmates would stay. None. I flew home and went to my father’s newly purchased cottage on a river. His girlfriend, now my stepmother, went to bed early so my dad and I could talk. He showed me his new TV. I admired it. I told him I still had the old one from the summer cottage. He said, “You’re hiding in school. You’re afraid of getting a real job.” I said that I graded three hundred papers per semester. “Not for pay,” he said. Yes, I explained, my fellowship. He said, “Like the dole. And you’re educating yourself out of the marriage market.”
A few days later, I went to see my mother, who’d moved in with a boyfriend. On the phone, she’d told me he owned a mired-in-debt supper club, and she was taking him and his supper club in hand. When I got there, she was in its kitchen, prep-cooking. The boyfriend sat at the bar and gave me quarters for the jukebox. He liked the song I picked out, “Time after Time,” which was sung by the Vienna Boys Choir, he said. I mentioned that it was sung by Cyndi Lauper. Then he called me the last dirty word in the English language.
This word has a respectable history, having appeared as recently as the fourteenth century in its Early Modern English form as a gynecological term—”queynte,” in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. It was a medical and private word for another three hundred years, but it wasn’t considered lewd until the seventeenth century. I said so the second time he said it, as in: “High-on-your-horse, know-it-all cunt.” Good thing I didn’t visit often, my mother said later. He didn’t eat well. “What?” I asked. “He’s a picky eater, so he doesn’t have food in his stomach when he drinks.” When I went to bed, he was drinking vodka. When I got up he was, but—concession to dawn—he’d added orange juice.
The supper club was next to his house, so well insulated you couldn’t see outside, windows dripping with condensation. My bedroom was in the basement. That night, I woke to noises and shrieks. My mother’s boyfriend was overturning furniture. She came down to wake me. We listened to him stomping, smashing. We spent the night with the door locked, though we worried he’d knock it down. My mother sat on the floor. “You have no idea how hard marriage is.” Maybe I didn’t. Maybe my one-year marriage didn’t count. I said, “But you’re not married. Leave him.” She couldn’t. She’d put her savings into his business. I wondered how long she’d known him when she did. Yet I’d spent a student loan on my shirker husband. She said, “I’ll have to marry him to get it back.”
Did I understand that being a middle-aged divorcée in a small, frozen town had made her feel redundant, a reverse spinster, without even a widow’s status, so she’d taken the first man on offer? Yes. Did I worry she wasn’t safe? Yes. Did I know that her situation would cast a shadow over her life and mine for years to come? No. I was young, a sad-circumstances-that-can’t-be-averted novice. I saw her life as a problem I’d solve by phone once I got home, a plan that would turn out to be unworkable, but I didn’t know that yet either. And I had to survive this visit, which was going badly, she intimated, because her kids, evidence of her previous, solvent, reputable life, made him insecure.
Then the fee-fie-fo-fum stopped. He’d passed out. Christmas Day went on as usual: gifts, food, the radio playing carols. My mother’s boyfriend got up at noon, jaunty. Relieved, my mother asked him to drive me to the airport at three a.m. the next morning for my seven a.m. flight. We were barreling down the road, the temperature at minus thirty, when the car heater broke. We went to a gas station, found a piece of cardboard to put in front of the grill to keep air from blowing through the grill as wind-chilled air as opposed to merely unheated air. But because we’d hunted for cardboard at gas stations predawn, I missed my flight. Chagrined, my mother’s boyfriend paid for my changed ticket. I flew to Kansas. I drove three hours in whirling snow to the almost-ghost-town.
Neither maid nor matron, who was I? In Garnett’s store, I found a book of old movie stills. I was Greta Garbo, I decided. I bought a carton of cigarettes, an antique ashtray, an art deco lighter that looked good in my apartment. I forced myself to smoke no less than four cigarettes a day, never skipping even that first bad one with coffee, but I never got past the nausea unless I was drinking. I cut my hair so it fell across one eye. I spent the last of a student loan to buy retro sweaters, fuzzy, feminine, that I wore with trousers.
Country music, inescapable in Kansas, wasn’t my druthers. Every morning I listened to jazz, torch songs, until it was time to get dressed for class. Then I’d stop brooding and put on my makeup. I loved classes I was taking. I loved teaching, students entrusting to me their faith in self-improvement, then coming back to report that they’d started getting higher grades in every class. One day, I told my students what pitfalls to avoid as they took on a new, more demanding paper. I said, “See you next class period.” I felt euphoric. I wondered—as I did every morning when I woke—what I’d been sad about before I’d been unconscious. Then I’d remember, oh that: my husband found me dispensable.
Max found me in a graduate student bar. He wasn’t a student. His money came from cocaine, which he’d offer me, and I’d decline. He owned a huge house surrounded by piles of firewood. Its windows were covered with light-blocking, thermal blinds that tacked down with wing-nuts and metal eyelets. He thought fossil fuels would run out in the next decade. I didn’t see a future with this libertarian with a penchant for dystopian novels and a conviction that Western civilization was on the brink of ruin. Yet, despite his depend-on-no-one view, he’d cook for me, buy me wine. We’d have sex for hours, good for relaxation. He didn’t believe in monogamy, but he hadn’t expected to like me. For me, he said, he’d give monogamy a whirl. Yet I couldn’t be around more than one night a week, school work. Plus, I needed money—I’d taken a job at a bar by the gravel pit.
When I walked in for my first Saturday afternoon shift, customers in sweaty T-shirts and feed caps went silent. The owner, showing me the ropes, said: “Yes, we have a heifer on the premises. At ease, gentlemen.” I felt unsafe. A customer who wasn’t a regular said, “When do you get off work, little lady?” Asa, who wore a cowboy hat and sat at the bar, told him: “Best mind your manners.” Another regular, a pig farmer, grabbed the new guy and made a fist. Asa told the pig farmer to calm down. He told the new guy to find another bar. When spring arrived—redbud blooming against the prairie, temporarily green now—Asa and I went catfishing. Or we’d ride in his jacked-up pickup.
The sun set, red. Or stars glittered. With the windows rolled down, we’d ride over hills, down into valleys, lush pockets of cold air, crickets chirping. Once, we parked by the river. When Asa leaned over for a kiss, his hat slid off. I’d been around Kansas long enough to know that men who never take off their hats are bald. Asa was really bald— this makes any man look low-browed, exposed. Moonlight flickering through the bug-spattered windshield turned his head mottled, unearthly. I said I wanted to have sex. He put his hat back on and said, “I don’t think so. You say you do. But you seem gun shy.”
Max had pointed out that he wasn’t mean. He said he loved me. “You’re my best girl,” he added. But pretending to be someone he wasn’t, someone who didn’t sleep with other women when I was too busy, wasn’t feasible, he said. So I stopped seeing him, though sometimes, home alone at two a.m. and wondering what high standards were for if
no one knew I had them, I’d call Max, and he’d answer, at first sleepy, then his voice turned seductive in a too-practiced way, or that’s how he sounded aroused, and he’d drive fast to my apartment. Some high-level pining had been set off in me, an alarm. When Billie Holiday sang about a Lover Man, where was he, at first I thought she meant he was across town with someone else. It took me a while to understand Lover Man didn’t exist.
I thought about Betty from school, who pined for someone who wouldn’t make their nighttime affair a daytime affair, and she was pined after by the woodsy poet, who’d hardly been with anyone but his high school girlfriend, now his wife. “Maybe it’s that Betty’s out of reach,” the woodsy poet said one day. The man Betty wanted was out of reach. The economy of love, I thought. One person wants someone more than the other one does, and the one who wants most has least power. Because Max hedged his bets with spare lovers, he had power. If he wanted me more, I wouldn’t want him. Not Asa either. Not my husband, who once offered to do the leg work to get our divorce because he felt bad he’d done so little when we were married. But months passed. “You file,” he said.
I found a lawyer, money for the lawyer, started proceedings. I was in the last year of my degree, reading for comprehensive exams, doing research for my hundred-page thesis. But I couldn’t write it. I consulted books about writer’s block. The consensus seemed to be that you distract yourself, write casually, carefree, until you feel excited. I stayed unexcited. I dithered away months, a semester, taking a “Progress” instead of a “Credit” for my thesis grade. And I celebrated Halloween that year by going to bars that teemed with costumed students. I wore a mauve suit, circa 1940, I’d found at a thrift store, also a hat with a veil I got at Garnett’s store; I clipped a fountain pen to a notepad. Dressed as a stenographer—a menstruating stenographer, I thought—I popped Midol and drank.
Then it was a Saturday in December. Theresa Minster came to my apartment to cook chicken parmesan. She’d worked as a butcher, and she’d brought her own knives. She sliced expertly, next to the bone, as she talked about Asa, “the bald guy from the gravel pit,” she said, not quite accurately, and Max, “bad news,” she said, “amusing, yes, because I’ve yakked with him in the bar too, but a sociopath.” We talked about Betty, where she’d go next year, because she’d applied to a PhD program based on where the man she loved had applied. After he broke up with her, she’d torn up a letter from the school.
Theresa and I zipped through a bottle of store-bought wine, then got out the dandelion wine. Theresa said we should put on coats and sit on the roof. “It’s safe for two people, right?” she asked, remembering the Halloween party. It was. I watched sunsets out there. Dawn. Wind making the tall wheat rise, fall, and roll like waves. Tonight the sky was pocked with stars. Theresa and I sat, backs to the wall, and I said that Betty’s letter was likely neither an acceptance nor rejection, just information, because it was early. Graduating at last, I’d applied to PhD programs and was waiting to hear.
If I moved, I thought, I wouldn’t be able to afford an apartment this big. When I worked at the store, Garnett paid me in credit, and my rooms had become a shrine to someone else’s domestic history. I had a Shirley Temple milk pitcher; ceramic statues of dogs, remnants from a 1920s collecting craze; mirrors with hand-painted borders; a plaque made mosaic-style from crushed, colored tinfoil that read GOD BLESS THIS HOME COOKING.
Theresa said, “You can’t keep splitting time between Max and Asa.”
I thought about my soon-to-be-ex-husband, how I’d married his faux-bucolic ideals and soundtrack to match. Or I’d fallen in love with his family. I’d put up preserves, cooked, cleaned, ironed. What did I take from this insight? Don’t marry a facade.
Theresa said, “You’re at a crossroads.”
I’d temporarily lost my goal, yes. Teaching at a two-year college had suddenly seemed wrong. I’d be an old maid schoolmarm, no husband, children, nothing. But I was in too deep. I’d requested documents from archives at universities across the country, sorted them into tidy but guilt-inducing piles around my apartment. Dreams get sacrificed, I’d think, not writing. I made charts, outlines. I refined my title, “Fact and Fiction: The Artificiality of the Distinction between Expository and Creative Writing.” The genres became separate in the twentieth century, I’d argue, because of the history of the American English department. I got down to the wire, eight weeks, still nothing. I worried in front of Asa, whose advice was to stop saying that I couldn’t go on, forward. I asked Max for pot. I wrote my thesis stoned, spattering myself and my desk with Wite-Out.
My acclaimed advisor had beamed. “By God, this is publishable. Essentialist preconceptions revealed as historical fluke. This should be a monograph.” What’s a monograph? I’d wondered. The other professors praised my research, my peculiar organization they charitably described as a rejection of rigid genre definitions. Three weeks before my qualifying exams—covering forty books of literature, forty books of rhetoric—I stopped smoking pot, which overcame inhibitions, I knew, but hurt short-term memory.
Theresa said, “I mean that neither Max nor Asa share your interests.”
Combined, they almost did. Asa suited the part of me raised to be a farm wife. Max was so considerate in bed and inconsiderate everywhere else I’d forget I’d hoped to be a scholar. I didn’t date classmates—dating would seem like homework. The distance between my aspiring daytime self and my nighttime self had widened. I said, “You mean I should date someone like Shawn?” Shawn was one of the students who’d come to last year’s Halloween party dressed like Ryman Stacker, not that Shawn was interested in me, a cowboy’s castoff who dressed like Greta Garbo now. With my marriage done for and wrapping up, I felt older than Shawn. Did that work? I’d never wanted to be the man’s elder.
Theresa threw her hands in the air. “Why? Are you attracted to him?”
I said, “He’s nice.”
Theresa sighed. “I always fall for straight women. You couldn’t tell?”
I felt guilty. But so far I hadn’t worried that Theresa might be interested in me, because if I had I’d have participated in what she’d called homophobia, a new word to me then: the bigoted tendency to assume that gay people were trying to turn everyone gay.
“Yes, I did say that,” she agreed, slumped.
I started to put my arm across her shoulder. Then stopped. I’d once kissed my college roommate, the girl from wealthy Oconomowoc. We’d been in a bar, and boys were hitting on us, and my roommate from Oconomowoc flew into a rage and yelled, “Enough. We’re lesbians. Leave us alone.” The drunk boys yelled: prove it, prove it. Drunk ourselves, my roommate and I kissed, a slow and histrionic kiss. It had the wrong effect. The boys cheered loud, lusty. So we paid for our drinks and went to a different bar.
But when I’d pretend-kissed my roommate from Oconomowoc, it was in the middle of a conversation about how she wanted her old boyfriend back, a not-pretend kiss from a prince of a guy. This was different. I turned to Theresa in the dark. Did I feel recoil? I’ll never know. I felt recoil for considering recoil. I didn’t want to recoil from a lesbian who was my friend. “I like you,” I said. This wasn’t a wide-eyed prick-tease line, like: I care for you but not that way. I meant I was heterosexual. Or, if I believed recent talk that sexuality is fluid, sexual identification cultural, then I was conventional; I’d been raised, cultivated like a crop, to settle on a man. So had Theresa—her parents were well meaning yet baffled, she’d said. But Theresa likely had different genetic markers than me, though the science that would suggest this hadn’t been developed yet. I said, “Let’s call it a night. You sleep on the couch. You better not drive.”
I got her a pillow and blankets. I kissed her goodnight. How long? Did you kiss Mrs. Tilton? Henry Ward Beecher had been asked this during his adultery trial. He was the country’s first celebrity preacher, and people are prurient. A holy kiss as I have sometimes seen it in poetry. I’d read the transcript in an American Studies class. That night,
I kissed Theresa too long. I meant that I felt friendly, open-minded, not sexual. This is a lot to convey by kissing. I smoothed over a rough situation, not realizing that removing hope is like removing Band-Aids, best done fast, no frills, sympathy dispensed later.
In the morning, I wore my chenille robe as we hugged goodbye in the doorway. Garnett passed us on her way to church and either thought I was dating a slender young man or that a woman had visited me early, maybe dropping off homework, hugging over homework.
On Monday, I saw Ryman Stacker on campus, and he asked about my plans. I told him that I’d meant to quit after this degree and let my husband explore options, but we’d split up. His band had split up. The best musicians—the ones who didn’t get drunk on stage—were moving to Nashville. “Maybe I’ll get a PhD. There’s no one around to mind.”
Ryman Stacker said, “Ha ha. Decisions and revisions, T. S. Eliot.”
That afternoon, sitting in my kitchen, I contemplated my first solitary Christmas.
The black phone shivered and rang. The possibilities weren’t infinite: Asa, Max.
I answered. “Hello?”
Theresa cleared her throat. “I want to say in my defense that there are more straight women than gay women in the world. That was a hard mistake to avoid.” I sighed. I understand mistakes, I thought. She said, “There’s a time for candor, and a time to keep ideas to yourself. It must have been your dandelion wine, truth elixir.” I wasn’t listening carefully now because a florist’s van was pulling into my driveway, looking for directions to somewhere else. But, no, the driver got out, holding cellophane-wrapped flowers, consulting his clipboard, my mailbox: 229B. Now he was knocking. “My gosh,” I said, hopeful and ingenue-like in spite of myself. “Someone has sent me flowers.”
Theresa said, “You’re kidding.”
Lover Man, I thought. A one-size-fits-all for my variegated selves, someone I knew but hadn’t noticed yet, announcing his arrival. I left Theresa on the phone as I rushed downstairs, signed for the flowers, hurried back, ripped open the card. “Thinking about you at Christmas. Love, Dot.” My not-yet-ex-mother-in-law. Last clue. Mystery over.