by Debra Monroe
You don’t plan a miscarriage, of course. You plan a wedding.
Days before ours, I was at the restaurant. I’d picked up shifts because we needed money. The midwife had said that many women bleed during the first trimester. Still, she sent me for an ultrasound, bad news. Now I was having mild contractions, nothing to keep me from work or school yet, and I couldn’t afford to quit or get fired because Chet was already fired again. But I wasn’t sleeping, stunned, carrying a baby that was not the quick but the dead. The other waiters protected me from the chef’s wrath by keeping an eye on chores I’d space out. Then, cutting baguette, I sliced off a slab of my finger, still dangling.
I wrapped my hand inside linen napkins and bar towels, turning red fast now, and a customer drove me to the ER, explaining to the triage person that he wasn’t my husband. A nurse made a tourniquet, stanched the bleeding, and called Chet. We sat in the ER for hours because a man in the next stall was having a heart attack, and doctors tried to revive him. When they couldn’t, and he lay dead on the other side of the curtain, a doctor sewed my finger back together, did a pelvic exam, and gave me pills to hasten contractions.
It takes a specific kind of courage to call off a wedding, and I didn’t have it. My finger was still wrapped up. I felt like a broken, half-built something moving along an assembly line. Fellow students arrived to witness our vows in front of our fireplace, to eat cake in our dining room. They disregarded basic writing advice—avoiding clichés and mixed metaphors—and said that star-crossed lovers reach a tipping point and the tide turns.
After this deep-in-winter wedding, Chet started working again. I sat alone in the house, thinking next year, my last in the PhD program, was hard to look forward to now. The only person close to feeling as sad as me about the miscarriage was Chet. So, for a few weeks, he understood me better than anyone else could. How did it matter if I wasn’t blissfully married? Most people aren’t. Exotic tulips pushing through snow cannot console me, I thought, remembering Theodore Roethke’s
“Elegy for Jane.” Or they must have consoled me for a moment, because one day I looked through the window and saw a stranger glance around furtively and pick the best one, aubergine and yellow stripes, and I thought it would be a year, or never, before I saw another like it again, and I felt terrible again.
But I set goals for myself, finishing a draft of my dissertation, a collection of stories that had been rejected twenty or thirty times each by high-level, mid-level, and low-level magazines and journals, and I’d send them off together as a book manuscript, by midsummer, I decided—not that I expected anything but rejection, but working down, down a list of options is helpful because just when you think you’re out you’ll find one more.
Most people who praise Utah praise mountains. I praise the autumn, a lull during which the illusion of rebirth by way of fresh notebooks and sharp pencils lasts three perfect months. Chet and I had argued badly just once more when the prospect of being a father after losing his job had turned Chet angry that I’d left the vacuum on when I ran to take food out of the oven and I should have switched it off and saved the rug under it, Chet had said. I’d felt testy too, rolling my eyes. But sitting together in the ER had made Chet, if not my helpmate, a relative. Family is taxing, yes, I thought. And you can run away like my wandering grandmother or hang on like my taskmaster grandmother. Covenant, I thought, looking outside at the rundown Mormon neighborhood, boxy houses in rows.
I was teaching a class, not taking classes, except Immersion Spanish—starting from scratch for advanced proficiency in a foreign language, since the department wouldn’t accept Old English, in which I already had moderate proficiency, because studying it was out of fashion now. Our department with its recent hires from Yale and Harvard was new-fashioned. I studied for my exams in the spring, comprehensive exams on 280 books, lasting four days, six hours a day, or five, counting the last two-hour oral exam.
When Chet came home for lunch, I’d put aside my work, the schedule I’d made for myself: I’d read a book a day. This meant revisiting and taking notes on books I’d already read, reading and taking notes on books I hadn’t yet read—sometimes a short, congenial book; sometimes a short, difficult book; sometimes a nineteenth-century novel for which I’d roll over remaining hours from the short-book days to read these huge books fast, aggressively, my heart pounding as I searched for passages to unlock deep understanding. I was also waiting tables, and one night I got summoned to the phone, no calls allowed. The head waiter thrust the receiver at me: “Your husband. He says it’s serious.”
Chet said, “How’s it going, hey? You won the Flannery O’Connor Award.”
He was talking about a competition for book manuscripts. Many story writers enter it, hundreds of entrants a year. When I’d mailed my manuscript from the airport post office at 11:30 p.m. on the last possible day, I’d told myself this was an exercise in meeting deadlines. Winning meant one first place only. The winner is published with big fanfare—not to be confused with being for sale on the paperback book rack at Rexall Drug.
This was Chet’s idea of a practical joke, I supposed. He’d driven me to the airport post office. I cared too much. The mail had already come before I’d left for work. But, no, only the submitters of rejected manuscripts get letters. The winner gets a call.
The director of the series had called and asked for me, and Chet hadn’t told him to talk to the answering machine. Chet had jotted down a number so I could call back in the morning. When the director told Chet I’d won, Chet told him I hadn’t published hardly at all, just poems, not my stories, which had been rejected everywhere. The director conceded they were unusual, yes, that one at a time they might seem rough-hewn and unskilled, as opposed to subtly wrought in an imitation-of-blue-collar-life way. But all together, he told me on the phone the next day, they comprised a world, an iconography. They were shrewd, feisty. Nice, I thought, exulting. No one before had said anything so pleasant.
I’d made bad decisions, moving in fast with Chet, for instance. But I’ve had good luck. This prize was luck, not that I didn’t work hard, but most people do. And who judges a contest, and what writing he’ll like, and who will win is arbitrary—a windfall leading to future windfalls. But before I could think of windfalls, a professor said that since I had an award-winning book in press and would be graduating in June, I should hit the job market. “You won’t do well, but it will be good practice for next year.” Most new PhDs need at least a year of trial-run job interviews, he explained, before they get an offer.
So one day a week, I read ads and submitted applications. If I looked interesting, a department would ask for more material. If I looked interesting after that, I’d have made the cut from maybe three hundred applicants to ten and get interviewed in a hotel at a national convention between Christmas and New Year’s; I’d pay for that trip. If I made the cut after that, I’d travel to a two-day interview on campus, paid for by the interested university.
Chet had a credit card left from the days before he was in trouble with the IRS and banks in Houston—this was why he’d moved to Utah— and he paid that bill on time every month. If I got requests for interviews at the conference, Chet said, he would charge my plane ticket, and we’d pay that back slowly. I didn’t have my own credit card yet because this was before banks gave credit to students. I got calls for interviews at the conference.
This might sound like an ideal time for me to have removed myself from the marriage. But we were newlyweds. A lot happened fast. Interviews could lead to a job, money. So I shelved conjecture about good and bad love until this busy spell was over.
When I got to the conference, I consulted a notebook in which I’d taped a subway map, a conference map, notes I’d taken about the universities interviewing me. Fourteen. “Fourteen,” my professor said, “no way! Well, you’ll get just one or two interviews on campus.”
During the first interview, I had a frog in my throat. I worried compulsively that I’d forgotten to hook my blou
se at the back of the neck, a pearl button with a loop, and as I answered a question my hand flew involuntarily to check—it was hooked—and the professors interviewing me jumped, then becalmed themselves, assuming, I guess, I had an itch. But my answers were logical. I’d written out questions I imagined I might be asked, trick questions, hard questions, obvious questions, and composed my answers, edited for clarity, and committed them to memory using tricks I’d developed memorizing Luther’s Catechism when I was twelve, and the wine list and daily specials when I was twenty-nine. When I’d pause to access my mnemonic triggers, I’d look bemused but not clueless.
I had one last interview the morning before I flew home. Tired, woozy, I dragged myself to it and answered the only question for which I hadn’t prepared an answer. My old personality seeped out. I cussed, saying, “It’s bullshit that savvy readers don’t look for causality. A story is one thing after another, a chain that teases out the desire for cause-and-effect answers to life’s big questions, and since the point of art is to give us what life can’t, even sophisticated readers crave clear-cut causes and effects, phony effects, resolution.” I stared at the gray-haired men on the edges of their chairs staring back as if I were an opinionated trained seal. “In life, though,” I said, “there are flukes, happenstance.”
I had eight calls for interviews on campus.
In January, the landlord stopped by and said he was selling the house and we could have first shot, no down payment. I’m not clear what instigated what, chicken or egg, but Chet started asking people what they’d heard about cities where I had interviews, reported dire details, pressed me to bow out and pick up classes around Utah like my old folklore boyfriend did. But Chet hated Utah. He’d wanted out. I didn’t ask what was wrong in a wifely, patient way. I said I wasn’t staying in Utah just to buy a house. And I couldn’t consider Chet’s doubts for long. I was overscheduled, reading a book a day as I traveled.
I flew to Nevada one sunlit day; to Colorado on a sparkling white day; to North Carolina on a balmy day; to Cleveland, where a professor, assessing my worth while also convincing me of the job’s worth, pulled back his office drapes to show me his splendid lakefront view. Loading docks. Smokestacks. I didn’t understand that, in urban terms, this was attractive. I felt nostalgic for cattails, lily pads. I lay in my hotel room that night and pretended I was home, and that didn’t help. I pretended I was in my childhood bed in Spooner, and that didn’t help. I pretended I was on the pier in front of the vanished summer cottage, sunshine and the sluice of waves calm, restorative, and I started to sleep but not long, sitting up and thinking of myself on the basement ledge in Utah, how I’d felt wrongly safe there, unlocked, open to the world. Then I got out of bed and looked out the window at Cleveland’s high-rises lit like checkerboards and thought: I’m all over the map here.
I flew to Washington state during a squall, and this was the department that had been my last woozy interview at the conference, and the professors must have decided I was fun, or they were. On the last night they took me to a Robert Burns festival, where we drank whiskey and ate haggis. In the morning, at the airport, they waved as if saying so long, see you soon, and my journey was uneventful until it came time to land. A storm had settled into the Valley as if in a bowl, and we circled, people vomiting into their little bags.
When we landed at last, I hauled my suitcase through the airport and passed a guy sleeping next to a duffel bag and pair of skis, and he opened his eyes and smiled. The extreme sports guy, I thought, who’d seemed so nice with his talk of studying, dinner, laundry, movies, and I’d failed to notice in time, and now I wouldn’t live in Salt Lake City long, assuming I passed my comprehensive exams, also the foreign language exam on which I’d so far scored high enough for only moderate proficiency. Then he shut his eyes, and I realized it might not be him. I’d seen him just twice. Ski bums look alike. Besides, I was married to Chet, waiting curbside, irritated at another late-night airport pickup.
The next morning I had calls to make. Though I had two more interviews, and good times in Washington notwithstanding since the salary was low, I had offers, the most high-profile one from a department that wouldn’t give me more time to decide because they had their second choice waiting. I accepted that job quickly, no chitchat. I had to return to studying. We were all studying—the classmate with the toupee, the classmate with the motorcycle chaps, the classmate who slept with the professor, the classmate with the overused seduction line. I wasn’t behind yet, I thought, the house turning dimmer, light buried behind clouds and falling snow. I called the professor with the lakefront office in Cleveland. I wouldn’t be taking the job, I said. He seemed amazed. “Really?” Another life I wouldn’t try on. And I didn’t want him to feel bad he lived in a gloomy city, I thought, though it was perhaps nice in spring. He said, “May I ask where you accepted a job?”
Snow was falling in clumps, and people were driving to work in front of my house, lines and lines of headlights grinding toward downtown jobs. Then I heard a thud, and all at once the room was lit up. A car had slid off the street, crashed onto the porch, its headlights like floodlights; I froze. I looked out the window and saw a terrified woman’s face in a windshield ten feet away. I said to the Cleveland man, “We’re having a blizzard, and someone has crashed into my house.” He probably thought I was lying or crazy.
I hung up, went outside, brought the woman in, called a tow truck, sat her down at my dining room table, and offered her coffee. Being Mormon, she said no, did I have cocoa, and she thought she’d been in my house before. “Maybe,” I said. Who knows who used to live here? Next, she said I was her second-cousin’s niece. “I’m sure of it, positive.” She looked at the room this way and that, then noticed the neighbor’s lighted dining room, not very different from mine, and said, “Oh. Everything is starting to look alike.” Happy families are all alike, I thought, panicked, because I hadn’t read Anna Karenina yet. Maybe mildly unhappy families too. The woman and I waited for the tow truck to arrive, and the woman’s daughter too. “The poor dear,” the daughter whispered, bundling her mother out the door. “She hit the gas exactly when she should have hit the brakes.”
Serfs and Landlords
Chet got to Greensboro before me and found a house with two front porches: one open, an invitation to stop by for sociability and a glass of sweet tea; the other screened with a door that locked, a darkened box passersby strained to see inside. In Utah, he’d run out of work. His car was leased. He gave it back to the company and drove a U-Haul truck, towing my tiny, new Subaru I’d bought when a driver had hit my old car, totaled it, and I’d used the insurance money for a down payment and signed my first promissory note.
I spent the rest of the summer in Utah at my friend Shen’s, bumming rides to and from work, where I waited tables, including on graduation day, fathers and mothers proudly pointing out the honoree. Once, taking an order for a jolly family, I said I’d graduated that day too—I’d skipped the ceremony, its pricey fees for cap and gown—and the mother politely asked what degree I’d earned. I said a PhD, and she looked upset until I told her I had a real job, but it didn’t start for a few months and I needed money. The graduate’s father said, “Can we get another photo, this time with the waitress with a PhD?”
Why Chet wanted to stay married is guesswork.
Why I stayed married is guesswork too. I’ve never been good at saying No, and I don’t mean No to sex, though sometimes that. I’d had trouble telling white-shirted missionaries No I don’t want to join the Mormon Church. I’d had trouble turning down job offers. So I never thought about telling Chet we should split up before we’re trapped together on the other side of the country. Saying No might be everyone’s problem, but women are first girls who, like boys, can’t disagree with parents, and then they’re wives-in-training—that scramble to be a good sport, a salt of the earth. My dad once said, tautological advice when I was an unattached female of the species: “Don’t say no. It’s negative.”
&nbs
p; Or I didn’t want to move alone again, long haul and nerve-wracking tight budget.
When at last I flew to Greensboro and Chet drove me from the little airport to the little house, he told me he’d impressed our new landlord, who was also the former mayor. The landlord had said, “Son, when your wife gets here, I want to take you to dinner at my country club.” I said, “Really? He takes his tenants out to dinner?” Chet said, “He saw something of himself in me, I suppose, and I played into that.” Played into it for what? I wondered. “He gave us a rent discount?” Chet said, “I’m making business contacts.” I nodded.
At the rounds of orientations, I met other women professors, all hired in the last few years because women now had PhDs, and the new view was that female students—over half the student body—have different research interests, and these students need mentors. Chatting with recently hired women, I noted that their husbands hadn’t found work.
One husband who used to be a CEO took watercolor classes now, his wife said. She was glad to have him out of the house because he’d gotten prickly, scheduling the laundry, rearranging dishes in cupboards. Another picked up part-time work. If one spouse moved for another’s job, the spouse who’d followed was likely to be unhappy. Yet Chet had never had a career in the way these husbands did, I told myself. He’d have options.
Chet revised his résumé—not exactly untruthfully—by describing his freelance work as owning businesses. His last run of work in Utah had been contract work. In Houston, he’d freelanced during the oil boom, but not steadily, as his mother had intimated when she’d visited us in Utah: “I’m so glad he’s stopped selling pot to cover expenses.”