by Debra Monroe
So I woke up with a short guy who suggested we address the emergency of our hangovers by eating breakfast at a diner, where he said how exhausting he found the parties he went to with his roommate and roommate’s sister and brother-in-law, all the people who wanted to tell you what they’d read with a view to pointing out that it was more than you’d read. I countered this by telling him how, in front of classmates, I once said merlott, as opposed to merlot with a silent T, over-thinking my pronunciation by first considering that claret, also French but drunk by the English, rhymes with carrot. A pert classmate who dated one of our professors—this wasn’t frowned on yet—had corrected me.
My future husband phoned the next day and the next and next.
I canceled plans with my folklore boyfriend, saying I didn’t feel good. One effect of free love on women is serial monogamy entered into too rapidly because women are supposed to play the field just long enough to pick a mate. I couldn’t sleep with two men; I’d be a whore or vamp. The folklore boyfriend stopped by my apartment. We sat at my kitchen table. I wanted to ask point-blank if I should pick him or a guy he didn’t know except as a good outfielder on the intramural team composed of men loosely affiliated with the English Department. I said, “I’d like more certainty you have feelings for me.”
Spring sunlight poured through the windows. He had a nice mustache, kind eyes. He needed a slight makeover and a housekeeper. “I’m deeply fond of you,” he said. Then he flexed his hands. “Is there something else I should be saying?” At the time I thought I could commit to wanting to love him, that if both of us committed to wanting to, in time we’d love each other. That’s possible. But you have to pick a person with the same wanting-it-to-work level who also negotiates differences well, and the two of you have to be hot for each other because that’s part of wanting it to work. “I,” he said, “love.” He paused. “You.” He smiled. I flinched. We agreed to meet soon to discuss love.
When he left, I stood in the doorway. He waved. The devout neighbor’s wife came out and said, “You broke up with him, right?” I frowned. My kitchen table wasn’t near the common wall, not that I’d broken up with him. I thought about telling her she was nosy, but that would mean acting haughty while passing her on the sidewalk each day; I’m not naturally haughty, so I’d have to work at it. She said, “You should. I’m rooting for you to find the right man.” I was wondering how this fit, theologically. I was not-converted, damned, but if I found the right man I’d be less damned? She said, “You met someone with more passion. I heard your headboard banging the wall last week and I thought that can’t be that old guy.” In fact, my future husband was just a few years younger than the folklore boyfriend and his lovemaking style was more athletic, but not better.
I got similar advice from the motorcycle chaps classmate, who’d known her husband a month before they decided to marry. “He was The One,” she said. “I knew it right away. You’ve been dating what’s-his-name forever.” Another classmate had moved in with an engineering PhD student after six weeks. “We knew immediately,” she said, “that what we want to talk about isn’t the same, but differences enlarge our world.” She left out that the two of them had gotten into huge fights about who had uglier used furniture.
I had a coffee date with my husband #2—though he wasn’t my second husband yet, and let’s say his name is Chet—and he objected to the fact that we’d had sex once and not again. My indecision had ripple effects. He’d been dating—casually, he said—his roommate’s sister’s friend, who’d told Chet to choose, and he wouldn’t until I did. I started to panic, not about losing Chet, but about how I must seem to the woman Chet had been dating, or actually to her friend, the department head’s wife. I imagined the department head and his wife discussing me at dinner as they passed around meat and potatoes.
I’d just handed out flyers in my Freshman English class about the university’s counseling center. I made an appointment. A counselor, having seen all varieties of moral blind spots, would have insight, I felt. When I got to the counselor’s office—with a big window, the Wasatch Range a jagged cordon across the sky—I saw my counselor was a middle-aged man; I assumed he was Mormon because of his double-knit slacks, the side-part hair. Mormons don’t look alike. But rules about tattoos and beards encourage conformity. I looked for the ridges of his sacred garment through his slacks, check. But I believed in higher education. He had a PhD. He’d be trained to counsel non-Mormons too.
I summarized my situation, my sense that neither of these guys was The One, but I felt pressure because of the department head’s wife’s friend. I was confused, maybe lonely. Life was coupled-up here, I said, not just Utah with its emphasis on brides and progeny, though it was, but the graduate students moved in and out of each other’s apartments every time school let out between quarters. None of us had spare time to linger over dating—we settled the romance question fast and got back to work. The dating pool for non-Mormons was finite, I added, like a small town high school where people recirculate. The counselor scrawled on a notepad. He said, “I’m referring you to a psychiatrist who specializes in this disorder.” I thought of my wandering grandmother. Was I schizophrenic? I did have fragmented thinking: half-scholarly, half-lusty. The counselor said, “He counsels sex addicts.” I’d never heard the term. Most people hadn’t yet.
He said, “You’ll undergo a program to get over this impulse to escape ordinary stress through meaningless sexual contact. You might need in-patient treatment.” I rushed out of the building. I had to cross campus for a seminar on the Victorian novel, where we’d discuss the collective obsession with legitimacy and lineage as a desire for social order that gets mimicked by plot—the end of the story that delivers its message authoritarian and elevated, and scenes leading up to it like minors, dependents, which is to say that the family with its dictatorial clan-head shows up in vestigial shadow-forms everywhere.
My mind was racing as I ran, birds chirping, bees buzzing, trees blooming, branches quivering with pollen, and I bumped into someone and dropped my copy of Middlemarch. “Hey, I’ve haunted the laundromat. I should have gotten your phone number.” It was the extreme sports guy. He was handsome, I realized, blinking. But I didn’t ski, hike, camp. I said so out loud, apparently. Because he laughed and said, “I’m not looking for that. We could see a movie. When we know each other better, we could take turns cooking each other dinner.” Months earlier I might have given him my phone number. Now I had two boyfriends, and—I looked at my watch—in less than ten minutes I’d be sitting in class with that guy I’d had sex with just after I’d moved here, having fallen for a pickup line, also the toupee guy I’d kissed. Maybe I did handle life’s ordinary stress with meaningless sexual contact. I said, “I’m in a big mess in terms of my schedule.”
His smile faded. “I understand. The PhD, all-consuming.”
Love does happen fast. I fell for a house.
After I broke up with the folklore boyfriend, Chet started coming over all the time with clothes for his office job the next day, and I thought I was being cautious, centrist, by thinking about living with him, not marrying him, because pairing off seemed to be a virus everyone had caught. When the quarter ended, I attended housewarming parties for new couples and two weddings. I wanted to live with someone. Or I wanted out of the duplex, its thin wall, its rooms so small and few that, furnished, it felt mazelike. I called ads for two-bedroom houses, and during one call I recognized my landlord’s voice. He said, “For you, a discount. Your rent is on time, and you improve the property by living in it.”
The house I loved had oak floors, a white fireplace, a living room, dining room, big porch, a bedroom for love and sleeping, another for writing and homework. The street in front was a thoroughfare, and our bedroom looked onto a boarded-up house, but a nice family lived on the other side. Our kitchen window faced theirs; our dining room window faced theirs. On dim days, I’d watch them cook, eat. I felt light-years away from campus and its intrigues. And because I�
��m enthralled by unused space—ways to fill it, doors leading to the unknown—I loved the basement you got to through an outside entry.
It had a fruit cellar, which Chet equipped with grow lights for seedlings for flowers for the front yard, vegetables for the backyard, and hydroponic pot plants. The rest of the basement was surrounded by five-foot-deep shelves that I assumed were structural ballast. No, the landlord said, they were built to store food, water, fuel. Preparedness for cataclysm—an earthquake, a government takeover, or End Time— was doctrine. Was a government takeover seen as likely? I asked, curious. “That part’s probably a holdover from the polygamous days,” he said. Souls need food? I asked. All religions are mystery religions, of course. God knows. We don’t. The landlord said, “I guess the idea is that the righteous might not get taken right away and would have to duke it out with the left-behinds.”
So what got the fighting started?
Chet and I painted the inside of the house, and he got upset because my brushstroke was inefficient. I tried to make light by calling him Paint Marshal. He got upset in the store when I backtracked to pick up a jar of mustard we’d meant to buy, so that he could continue on with the list, the cart, but we were not to separate in the store. I needed to finish my degree fast because he was staying in Utah only for me, he emphasized; he wanted to move ASAP. Basically, we had our first fights, never-resolved, a solid fighting foundation.
Subsequent fights built on that.
But he had a green thumb. He fried food well. He praised my collection of lace curtains—some old, others $6 a panel at Wal-Mart and you launder them on gentle—and the antiques I’d earned out at Garnett’s store. He said, “I’ve wanted a homespun woman, but they’re usually dumb as cows. I didn’t think a smart one would be interested in me.” I attributed this—he didn’t think a smart one would be interested— to the fact he wasn’t tall. Women are biased toward tall men. He also didn’t feel worthy because he’d been raised by a single mother who’d had to work and sometimes left her kids with ruthless people.
One night, coming back from playing Scrabble at a party, and we’d drunk wine, and Chet was mad I’d played for the most interesting words, not points, and I temporarily misplaced my appeasement mindset and told him he was a control freak. He reached across the seat and hit me. I hit him back. You might think: she showed him, and that was that. No. I learned not to bother him if I could help it because his first instinct—instilled when he was a child, more beaten on that beating—was to swing, swing again. He was strong. The advice my older self has for my younger, or for you, included with the price of this book, is don’t move in with someone if you don’t have savings, first and last month’s rent plus deposit. Don’t sign a lease. I had to make it work until the year’s end.
That bad fight put the kibosh on the athletic sex.
We were both mad but pretended we weren’t as we went to work, school. I never turned to him at night, and he didn’t insist, going to sleep holding me as tight as a child would.
I had straight As, but I hadn’t published. I sent out my stories, each accompanied by a manila-colored, self-addressed envelope with correct postage so the journal could respond. Chet spent weekdays at work, where he negotiated easements for oil and gas. I split time between campus and home. I’d be working, making headway, and check the mail to find, over and over, manila envelopes, form-letter rejections, no encouraging notes, mixed in with the bills. Some of the bills were Chet’s from out of state, way past due.
Before we moved in, I’d studied our expenses. I earned less than he did but was used to being frugal. So I’d proposed we split rent and utilities fifty-fifty. We should have been fine. But he always wanted something, a housetop satellite dish or, if not that because, shrewlike, I’d objected, a new TV. Or he hadn’t paid his half of the rent when he spent $400 on exotic tulip bulbs because, with winter coming, he was planning for spring. He said, “The trouble with you is that you’ve never had money and don’t know how to spend it. You’re what we call penny-wise and pound-foolish.” I’d studied him too, making sure he wasn’t like my first husband, too calm, lazy. Chet’s impatience, his pushy way of insisting, meant he’d be forceful about earning money, I’d felt. But the money problems got worse. Waitress experience, my mother had said, you’ll use all your life.
One night I came in from the restaurant at 11:30 p.m., later than usual, because my friend Shen and her boyfriend had come to the restaurant and I’d waited on them and we’d visited a while before I cleaned my station, wiping away grease and food on cabinets, tables. The end of a shift is hours of carrying other people’s dirty dishes while congealing food spills on your clothes. I opened the back door to the house and saw that Chet had cooked dinner, fried sardines and fried canned oysters, according to the empty, smelly cans on the counter, the stove covered with spatters. And what had required a colander? I wondered. He tended to use one without a sink. He’d dumped something into a colander over the stove, then thought twice because murky liquid trailed across the floor.
I woke him to say that when I’d left for work the kitchen was spotless.
It’s a bad idea to wake a sleeping person with a history of anger management issues to say anything at all. He hit me. I kept yelling. My yelling is querulous and tremolo, not commanding, maybe excruciating in the way silent whistles are to dogs. Chet swung again. I ducked. My head banged into the wall, crumbling the old plaster. Then he started breaking, one at a time, fragile home furnishings, all of which were mine, treasured.
I ran out the door and drove and drove.
After an hour, I passed the house. The lights were out. I parked on a street Chet wouldn’t drive down on his way to work, walked home, lifted the basement door, and crept downstairs to the well-swept basement, its cheery furnace humming, lay on one of the five-foot ledges where emergency supplies should be stored for the righteous duking it out with the left-behinds, a situation that, if I meant to be thematic, made me not left-behind, not righteous, but one of the supplies for someone who was, I thought confused, dozing.
Through the old-fashioned floor registers, I heard the alarm go off, 6:30 a.m. Chet made coffee in the last tidy corner of the kitchen. He had to work at 8:00. I had to teach at 9:30. The new phone Chet had bought trilled. I sat up carefully, so bills and change in my apron wouldn’t shift, jingle. Chet answered the phone, then said: “Top of the morning to you, Shen. No, she’s at school already.” He was trying hard to sound upbeat, normal. At parties he sometimes paced with his hands in his pockets, whistling. “Would you like to leave a message?” He wouldn’t write it down, he said, because we had one of the new answering machines, and Shen should feel free to call back and talk to that.
That night, when he asked where I’d gone, I said I’d used my tips for a motel. I was too cheap to spend a night’s worth of earnings to sleep in dirty clothes in a motel, but he didn’t know me well enough to know that. He washed the dishes. I cleaned the stove, mopped. We swept up the broken knickknacks. He glued the frame of an antique picture he’d thrown, and he spackled crushed plaster. Three months until the lease was up, I told myself.
But I didn’t have the money yet—no first and last month’s rent plus deposit.
Then my mom and her boyfriend, husband now, visited on their way to another scouting expedition in Arizona. I’d saved time to spend with them, but they arrived a week late.
They stayed up every night until dawn.
Chet and I lay awake side-by-side, listening to my stepfather wrenching the ice cube trays, walking around in clickety-clack cowboy boots, saying, “Hon, do you think I should go out in this goddamn town and find more ice?” He’d gotten thrown out of the state-owned liquor store that afternoon for threatening a clerk. This was after I’d come home from class to the two of them waiting to see the sights, and I should have been grading or writing, but I was too tired, and I tried to be nice for my mother’s sake, thinking they’d leave soon, and my step-father stared and said: “I’d like a job that l
asts three hours a day.”
Lying in bed on the fourth night, I pictured my stepfather’s boot heels like hooves on the wood floor, my hooved stepfather upright, ambulatory, mixing drinks, and Chet said: “You’ll have to tell them to leave.” Chet would be at work by the time they woke, he added, so I should tell them. Next to each other in the dark, scared and sleepless, Chet and I quietly had sex for the first time in months. Who knows why? Perhaps not having a mother or father to confide in, a home to go back to if life turned to shambles, made me lonely. I wanted someone. I wanted a replacement family, my goal, my target. Chet was nearby.
The next day, I told my mother and stepfather that Chet and I were having trouble getting our work done. My mother said, “But you’re good at school. You’ll be fine.” I said, “We can’t sleep with you partying all night.” They packed and left. My mother waved, tearful. I never saw my stepfather again except in his casket. I talked to my mother on the phone but didn’t see her until he’d died, years and years later. I’d broken a big rule. I’d disregarded generational rank, failed to respect my elders, by sending them away.
I was pregnant.
“You’re shitting me,” Chet said, beatific. “After just the one time?”
I can’t logically explain my joy, my newfound purpose. I’d watch the Mormon neighbors (mother, father, sister, brother) through our matching gold-lit windows. Not having this baby was unthinkable. Being unmarried while pregnant was unthinkable. I was raised to think so. But Salt Lake City exerted its own pressure. I could imagine being an unmarried mother better than I could imagine crisscrossing the city, pregnant, no ring, forced into small talk with cashiers, bank tellers, my students. It would be easier to say I was divorced with children, sad facial expression, than to say I’d never married at all. Even a dud husband was better than no husband, I reasoned, someone to doze on the sofa when I left to study or work. I didn’t want to give up on my PhD, or I might for a few discouraged hours now and again, but I owed so much in student loans I couldn’t repay them without a good job. I needed to finish the degree, earn a living, support this child.