by Heather Ross
When we filled Meredith in on Chris’s plans she looked dubious, but when she saw Chris, now dressed in sturdy work clothes that made him look exactly like the sad, handsome, young, widowed farmer to whom more than a page had been devoted in her last J. Peterman catalog, she perked up. She pushed past me waving a hand. “I just need to change quickly!”
The three of us rode together with Chris on the long bench seat of his vintage red pickup truck. His outfit and accoutrements, which included an old-fashioned push mower, made me wonder whether this was really his true calling, or whether he was like some of the people who moved to our town in Vermont, driven by aesthetic and romantic notions of manual labor, only to move on to something more academic once the tips of their fingers started to split open. He was clearly smart and capable and could be doing anything with his post-college self, so why was he living at home and cleaning up the yards of wealthy neighbors? Whatever romantic notions he had, I decided I wasn’t on board. Who was he to tell me to work in the dirt all day, just because I was his sister’s friend? Was this any way to treat a guest?
As we drove through that sleepy, wooded suburb, past the beautiful houses with three cars each, I felt like an imposter, unsuccessful in my attempt to pass for someone who belonged there, my real identity having been ferreted out by Chris and by Meredith, who now ignored me and listened to each other. I was sure that they thought of me as a silly hick, especially now that I was sitting next to Meredith, who was dressed in her Patagonia Blueberry Fleece Tights, Mephisto Leather Walking Shoes, and Banana Republic Slightly Sheer Ecru V-Neck Tee. I was wearing the same thing I had been wearing the day before. In my defense, nobody told me to pack for dinner and landscaping. I had a single dress with me for Thanksgiving dinner, and I would have worn it to dinner the night before, but it was on loan from Kerry, who had inherited it from her sister.
As I became more resistant to the idea of getting out of the truck, Meredith chattered nonstop about every important place and person she and Chris might both know, throwing her head back and laughing as though she had shared oh-so-many bohemian adventures with so-and-so, more than she could recount, really, all of them so special, in Greenwich Village and SoHo and at this and that club. It was tempting to remind her that she was barely nineteen. I was annoyed. Kerry was quiet, watching her neighborhood go by. We pulled up in front of a pretty house with more than its fair share of lawn and rock gardens. Meredith jumped out and took possession of the push mower, gave Chris a cute smile, and began her solo, morning-long catwalk back and forth across the lawn. This left Kerry and me to the weeds. I was led to a small bushy area by the side of the house, while Kerry was trusted with an actual tool. As soon as I was alone, I began to dig. It had not been as cold in Connecticut as it was already in Vermont, so I found what I was looking for quickly: three very long, very pink earthworms. I carried them back to the cab of the truck and climbed into it without anybody knowing. I lay down on the bench seat and, working humanely, tied each of the worms into a double knot around the steering wheel. Then I slipped out of the truck and back to my spot in the weeds. We were there for more than an hour, which was enough time to make me worry about the well-being of my worms. Finally, Chris told us that it was time to go, and we gathered our things and walked back to the truck. Meredith scooted ahead of me and slid in through the driver’s seat, ensuring her spot next to Chris. She didn’t see them right away. I slid in next to her, and Kerry and Chris got in last. One of the worms had wriggled free; I could see him next to the gas pedal, but out of the way of Chris’s boots. The other two had made pretty good strides toward freedom; one of them was almost completely untied and stretching one of its ends upward toward Chris’s chin. The other, which I had placed at two o’clock, caught Chris’s attention just before his hand hit the wheel. His palm opened flat and his fingers stayed splayed, his jaw dropped, and his mouth opened not in horror, but in a state of speechlessness. Meredith let out a horrified gasp. “That,” she said, speaking to me as though I were a child, “is disgusting.” Kerry looked at me, shocked and clearly annoyed. “Heather!” she said, “Why would you do that?” as Chris untangled the two worms and then opened his door to return them.
We rode home in silence. When we pulled into the driveway, Chris jumped out without saying a word, and Meredith and Kerry followed. I reached down to the floor of the driver’s side, scooped up the third, hidden worm, and rolled him out onto the thick, perfectly trimmed and watered Canfield lawn. This was an excellent spot for a worm, I was certain of that. I said my soft apologies to him and let him go.
Chris never offered me a job again. I continued to take seasonal work at horse barns and resorts, teaching riding or skiing, childhood skills that I was surprised to find out were marketable. I was no expert at either but good enough to teach beginners. Of course, those jobs—and bosses—only lasted a few months by definition. Authority made me anxious, it made me feel small and powerless, and in that state I would act out compulsively, irresponsibly. Eventually I realized that I was better off working for myself.
Seeing people like Meredith, who would pay so much money for a pair of stretchy fleece tights, inspired me to begin making warm clothing—fleece was the hottest thing in fabrics at that time—to sell to my classmates. In the middle of my sophomore year, I moved out of the dorms and into a house in town, where I kept a sewing machine in the front hall of the apartment I shared with three other girls, which likely annoyed them to no end. I used this machine to make pairs of warm fleece tights for my friends and classmates, using a simple formula to create a pattern that would fit them perfectly. We lived in warm layers like these, in our poorly insulated rented apartments located in old hotel buildings and rambling farmhouses. It was a good little income for me and would be the thing that I turned to, much later, as a career.
To make a pattern for fleece tights, gather these measurements: your waist, hip, and ankle circumference, and your outseam (or length from waist to ankle bone). Tape together 2 pieces newspaper so length is as long as you want leggings to be plus a few inches, and width is as long as your arm. Starting from a top corner a few inches from side edge of paper, with a thick, black marker, draw a line parallel to long edge of your paper that measures the length from your waist to ankle bone, plus 2" (5 cm). At one end of line, draw a perpendicular line as long as your waist divided by four, plus 1" (2.5 cm). Label that line “waist.” 9" (23 cm) below that line, draw a parallel line as long as your hip measurement, divided by four, plus 1" (2.5 cm). Label this line “hip.” Draw a line parallel to the hip and waist at the bottom end of paper that is your ankle circumference divided by four, plus 1" (2.5 cm). Label this line “hem.” Connect ends of hip and waist lines with a curve, as shown, and connect end of hip line and ankle line with a straight line. Using paper scissors, cut out your custom pattern. To make the tights, fold in the ends of a 2-yard (2 m) piece of double velour 4-way stretch fleece with right sides together so both of its selvedge edges meet in center, creating two folded edges. Place your pattern on one side, with its long straight “outseam” edge along fold, and trace using a refillable chalk pencil. Flip pattern over, and repeat on other side, with pattern’s outseam along opposite folded edge. Cut out the two leg pieces, leaving folded edge uncut. With fabric still folded, right sides facing, sew each pant leg closed by stitching along inseam using a ½" (12 mm) seam allowance and a medium-width zigzag stitch, back-tacking at start and finish. Repeat with other folded leg piece. Turn one leg right side out and put it inside other leg, with inseams matched up. Sew crotch seam together with a ½" (12 mm) seam allowance and a medium-length zigzag stitch, back-tacking at start and finish. Unfold legs and turn both legs wrong side out. Fold waist edge over 1" (2.5 cm) and sew down, capturing its raw edge with a medium-width, short-length zigzag stitch, creating a tunnel and leaving a 2" (5 cm) opening in center front for elastic. Using a seam ripper, gently pull both ends of thread on both sides of this opening to wrong side, and tie them to each other to finish seam invisi
bly. Cut a piece of ¾" (2 cm) waistband elastic so it equals your waist measurement plus ½" (12 mm). Attach a large safety pin or bodkin to one end and thread through waistband tunnel. Overlap the two ends and stitch them together using a medium-width, medium-length zigzag stitch. Hand-sew waist opening closed.
The Canfields, on the other hand, became the one constant in my life. I would not have been able to stay in college as long as I did without them, not emotionally, not practically, not financially. They remain dear to me to this day, more than twenty years after that first dinner. When Kerry’s father was dying, I was living in California, and I flew back to Connecticut to see if I could help. Kerry’s bedroom was the same as it always had been, more familiar to me now than any home I had ever shared with either of my parents. On her dresser sat a familiar Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit address book. I opened it to the page that held my name and saw, in a long list that covered the page and the one next to it, plus every small margin, each of the more than twenty addresses where I had lived over the previous decade, even the ones that had lasted only a few months, all of them except the most recent crossed out.
Chris and I eventually became good friends, too. He stayed handsome and idealistic and married a beautiful girl who was raised more like me than like him, and they live in a tiny New Hampshire town with their two intelligent, beautiful, free-spirited girls. When I got married, at the age of thirty-seven, I asked Chris to officiate. He still had that lovely voice and that confident presence. I explained my reasons to TC and assured him that Chris would do a great job, that he had once been a teacher so we could count on his ability to hold the attention of our guests. TC agreed, and even told me that his parents approved, which surprised me given their dedication to the Catholic Church. Chris did not disappoint. He delivered a funny, personal speech and made me feel, along with his parents and Kim and Kerry, that I was surrounded by people who had always known me, and always loved me, even before I was the person that I was always meaning to be.
A year after my wedding, I asked TC what he wanted to do for our first anniversary. “I think we should call Chris,” he said, “and just check in. You know, tell him how things are going and ask if he has any words of wisdom or advice. It’s what my brother and his wife do with the minister who married them, once a year, on their anniversary.”
“But,” I said, “Chris isn’t our minister.”
“Yes, but he used to be a preacher, so he’ll be fine with it,” TC responded.
I gave TC a look that prompted him to add, “You told me that he used to be a preacher!”
“No,” I told him, “I said that he used to be a teacher.”
I asked TC not to share this revelation with his mother. There wasn’t any way for me to explain to her, or even to TC, that if I had to bow to anyone’s authority on my wedding day in order to get the job done, I wanted it to be Chris Canfield’s.
HOW TO
run away
I MOVED IN WITH MATTHEW AT THE beginning of my fourth year of college. He was from Shelburne, Vermont, and had also been brought up by a single mother, which is different for a boy than for a girl but also the same. He was a few years older than I was. Instead of going to college immediately after high school, he had followed the Grateful Dead around the country for two years and become a remarkably successful businessman, procuring and selling pot to fellow travelers and, when he did finally go to college, to students.
We lived in a very small, very sweet house together in Stowe, forty minutes or so from Johnson State and maybe twenty minutes from the restaurant where I waitressed. It was also near the ski area where Matthew went almost every day of the season, with his puffy red eyes and his snowboard. I had dated other boys at Johnson but nobody whose upbringing was even slightly similar to mine. Matthew was more like the boys that I had gone to high school with, proud of their guns and of their cars and of their ability to force their cars into fast, tight circles in empty parking lots and snowy fields. Matthew owned several guns, including deer rifles and handguns, and a large, amber-colored bong with a huge NRA sticker on it. Matthew had been happy and funny in the beginning, convinced that he was moving toward good things, but after we had lived together for a few months, I could see that he was becoming less satisfied with me and was more frequently falling into dark moods that, when fueled with alcohol, would lead to destructive behavior: a fist through a window followed by the roar of his car on the gravel, tearing out of our driveway. This was comfortable, familiar ground for me. When he punched a wall and broke through the drywall, it was my mother who gave him step-by-step instructions on how to make the necessary repairs.
He was a student when we started dating, but then he had needed to go to Mexico for a few months because some of his business partners were being arrested, and when he came back, he did not re-enroll. Now he was growing a large number of pot plants in our basement with the help of photovoltaic lights, which seemed to require a lot of his time.
I had been a student, too, but by the time the spring semester began, I was working full-time as a very bad waitress instead. I had convinced myself that school was not as important as Matthew and that we would be happier—he would be happier—if we had more money and a nice car that ran well and had four-wheel drive. We shared a sense of futility where college was concerned, deep down believing, though we never said it, that it was for spoiled rich kids and could not give us what we needed to survive the lives that we were building for ourselves. “I think your best bet,” he said to me one night right before I left school, “would be to find a small company that might be big someday, and to get in on the ground floor, doing something maybe in the office, where they need a pretty girl, and then stick it out. I could totally see you,” he said, “wearing high heels.”
Leaving school meant no longer seeing even my closest friends at Johnson, which was more of a surprise to me than it should have been. They moved on without me, getting through their last years and shifting their focus to what they would do next, after school, when they went home to Connecticut or New York. But that was the thing with Matthew and me: We were home, we had never left, we had nowhere to go back to.
One night, after a waitressing shift riddled with mistakes, the owner of the restaurant where I worked told me that I was fired. I had just purchased four new logo-emblazoned turquoise polo shirts—a requirement of the job—and this was the first thing I thought of when I got the news. Later, I would boast that I had told the owner that I wanted him to buy back the shirts and that if he didn’t, I would paint swastikas on them and wear them around town, and that he had given me my money back. This was all true except that I was sobbing when I did it, a detail I didn’t mention back then. I had gotten a ride into work that night because my old, rusted, completely illegal car had finally died, so I had to call Matthew and wait outside, by the restaurant’s back door and Dumpster, for him to pick me up.
I waited for almost an hour, and when he did come, he was drunk. We went to a restaurant that was open late, and I used the thirty dollars from the polo shirts to pay for Matthew’s dinner. By this time, Matthew was behaving as though allowing me to be by his side was an honor that I did not deserve and that buying his meals was the least I could do to show my appreciation. Things had been this way long enough that I had begun to believe him. He was silent on the way home, and when we reached the driveway to our house, he sped up and drove past it. The gravel roads were icy and the meadows had at least two feet of snow, at least half of it fresh. He yanked the steering wheel to the right and suddenly we weren’t on the road anymore but in a pasture, and the car was spinning, in loose control, and then his headlights were off and it was just the moonlight over us as we spun, silently, in fast circles through the thick snow. “You are going too fast,” I said, thinking then that the ride was supposed to be fun.
“Am I scaring you, Heather?” he asked. “Are you afraid, Heather?” he continued, his voice calm, slick, and patronizing, and then loud. “Are you AFRAID?” he asked again.<
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“Yes,” I said. “You are going to hit a goddamned tree; slow the fuck down!” He didn’t stop, though, not until I was crying and holding on to the door handle with both hands, and then he pulled the car back onto the road and leaned over me, pushed open my door, and shoved me out into the snow. “I’m fucking out of here!” I heard him yell as he sped off with the door still open. I walked home, in the moonlight, and found him there, tearing our little house apart, piece by piece. I hated Matthew with all of my heart at that moment, when I found him in the rubble of our living room, not gone at all, like he had promised. This, after all, is why boys in the country drive in fast circles, it’s why they throw drunk punches and say they will leave but never do. It’s because they have no place to go.
A few days later I sat in my small living room. I had no job, I was no longer in school, and—I was finally starting to see—I had no future with Matthew. The phone rang; it was his mother. I told her what had happened, that Matthew had torn apart our house, broken windows and punched walls, and that he had decided that I was almost worthless. “His father did that once,” she said, “and he told me that he was leaving me, but he didn’t go. I looked back many times, over the years that followed, and wished he had gone, and not come back.”