by Heather Ross
Once, while searching for an idea for a product that would involve my artwork silkscreened onto ready-made goods and after eating an entire bag of stale Halloween candy for lunch, I decided that I should design scratch-and-sniff underwear that depicted men whom I had known and loved and featured, at least through twenty to thirty washes, their signature scents. Carpenter? Cedar. Surfer? Suntan lotion, but only because they didn’t make bong. Carnie? Cotton candy. The novelty of the product caught on, and a sample somehow found its way onto the desk of Brendan Koerner, who was writing the column called “The Goods” for the New York Times Sunday edition. Two months and an awkward interview later, I woke on a Sunday morning to find myself and my underpants on the cover of the Business section of the New York Times. The New York Times. For a product that I had designed while high on Kit Kats and desperation, but still. The New York Times. I went to the market and bought all ten copies of the newspaper, but when I got home, I took only one of them inside. John and I were meeting his parents, avid Times readers, for brunch, and while I was determined not to bring attention to myself, which I knew now that they thought to be a sign of insecurity, I was certain that they would find it themselves and find it at least to be funny, if not a little bit impressive. I had showed it to John already and gotten a lukewarm congrats, and now the paper sat on the table in front of all of us. His father had picked through it already but had not seen the article. How could he have missed it? Coffee came, then eggs, then more coffee, then tea, then the check. Finally, I pulled the section out of the pile, carefully folded it into thirds, and put it into my bag. I told myself that it was the fact that it was about other men, and of course, underpants, indeed scratch-and-sniff underpants, that kept John from showing his parents, or that maybe he had just forgotten. Or perhaps he worried that this was just another opportunity to embarrass myself, which maybe it was. “But come on,” I later complained to Wendy and Lisa, “it was the fucking New York Times.”
On Monday morning I got into my car and there they were, still sitting untouched on the passenger seat. I took my stack of newspapers to work with me, where about three hundred orders for scratch-and-sniff underpants from New York Times readers were waiting for me. My friend and screen printer, Tad, tried making the orders for me, but after a week he appeared in my office, where we had already moved on to new, more pressing crises, his arms full of scent-less underpants. “We can’t print these, Heather, I’m sorry. We can do the artwork, but the last passes, the ones with the scented inks, are killing us. We can barely breathe. It’s just toxic.” I had orders to fill and needed the cash, so I put mittens and gloves on my staff and put them out in the alley with foam brushes and buckets of scented inks and ran a clothesline across my parking lot, thinking that perhaps the fumes would be less noxious, but when they were finished they all complained of dizziness and headaches, and one of them couldn’t remember where she had parked. We all had what felt like a terrible hangover for another week, but I made payroll by the skin of my teeth. My stack of newspapers sat on my desk, still quiet, still crisp. On the following Monday I put them in the recycling bin.
When I told this story to Maura, she asked me if I thought that I would be happier with a partner who understood what I was trying to accomplish professionally and could be more supportive. She told me that while she believed that many successful entrepreneurs are driven by their own angst born of not being loved or supported enough as children, a partner who offered those things was crucial to one’s success. I was quiet. This was where our relationship—mine and Maura’s, that is—was at as much of a standstill as everything else in my life. I was working hard to stay in exactly the same place myself and was now using precious time and energy to convince her to stay there with me. She turned down the heat a bit by saying, “Look, are you getting exercise? Because with or without a supportive partner, you are still responsible for taking care of yourself, and this stress is taking years off your life if you aren’t managing it.”
Finally, something I could report positively on. I had been swimming again, in the river just a few miles from town during my lunch hour. I told her how I would drive my old car there, with the windows down, and walk through the brush to the rocky, then sandy beach, and then I would spend forty minutes swimming as hard as I could against the current in the deepest pool, with my eye trained on a white rock below me to keep me in the same spot. I told her how I felt stronger every day, and how much I loved the feeling of being in fresh water again and being outside, and how there was a meditative aspect to it that I had quickly become addicted to. Maura leaned in slowly, until I could see not just the top of her head but her eyes, too, which were narrowed and concerned, and asked me, “And you are just staying in the same place? The whole time?” I could hear her concern and quickly told her that no, sometimes I dove down and let the current hit my shoulders and flip me over and carry me downstream, and then I would swim back as hard as I could until I was back to where I had begun. “So, sometimes, you are going in circles,” she said and then, in her most solemn voice, “Heather, you need to find a form of exercise that is not a metaphor for your life.”
Months later, when there was very little left of my business, some buyers came, people who smelled a bargain and wanted to take the brand that I had built and make it into something else, something bigger and more successful. When I told Maura about it, she said to me, “Heather, this is your chance to get out.” And I knew, without asking, that she wasn’t just talking about my job. “I need to start building a bridge,” I said, and she agreed with me, that I needed to start thinking about where I would go when, not if, I left.
But this was really just a new way to stall, because I was already thinking of my cats and wondering secretly whether, once the stress of my business was gone, John and I would have a chance. I began to picture my life without the stress of running the business, after simplifying everything and putting more focus into home. I agreed to sell my business and began to negotiate the terms. I threw myself into home improvement projects, which were where John spent all of his free time and where he was happiest. He took charge and began assigning me tasks. I spent two days pulling the old linoleum off a kitchen floor and another week pulling nails out of a ceiling. When I begged to be outside, it meant spending a day alone weeding the sorrel, which I actually thought was very pretty, in our front yard. When I told him that I thought I would be good at painting, being an artist and all, he assigned me the inside of a closet door and gave me detailed, patronizing lessons on how to do it properly. I began to see that he did not trust me to work with him on the decorative elements of our home or the projects that would allow for any creative expression. I hated the work, on my back or my knees and all the same tedious task. I didn’t miss my job but I missed the creativity, the constant pushing, the excitement of a new idea, the challenge.
I thought I was doing all the right things, until I woke up one morning, just weeks before I would sign the final documents to sell my company, to find John sitting on the edge of the bed with a cat in his lap. We had spent the evening before with his family, a boisterous evening at which I’d had a very nice time, finally able to relax, knowing that I was close to a fresh start. I could tell by his face now that he had not had a good time. He had been quiet on the car ride home, but that had become pretty standard. Without looking at me, he quietly said, “I used to think that the way you acted at parties was refreshing. Now I just find it obnoxious.” And then he got up and walked out of the room.
I got out of bed and put on my bathing suit, shorts, and a T-shirt. I called Wendy and told her that I was going swimming and asked her if she wanted to come. I got into my car with a blanket and a water bottle and I drove to Wendy’s house, where she was waiting for me. We drove the hour-plus over the foothills and into the hot, dry valley until we reached the small highway that followed the huge river known as Redwood Creek. We followed it for another half hour until we came to the trailhead that leads to one of the prettiest and biggest
swimming holes in northern California, Devil’s Elbow. We hiked down the steep hill, and back and forth along an endless and precarious series of switch-backs, and then, finally, climbed over massive rocks and onto a shaded beach of thick white sand alongside a pool of water that was almost twenty feet deep and, at its widest point, nearly sixty feet across, through which ran a thick, heavy current that you could not see until it hit the rapids below, where it churned a crazy white.
I came here a lot on weekends, sometimes alone but more often with friends. I would leave my things on the beach and swim upstream against the heavy current in the clear water, with long strokes underwater that moved me just inches at a time. This river was bigger than the one I swam in on my lunch break, and deeper, more clear and wild and beautiful, and I had all day to go in circles. It would take me perhaps a half hour to get just barely around the bend, where I would pull myself into an eddy and rest briefly before I turned and dropped, underwater and with lungs full of air, motionless into the current. I could see my shadow below me, moving across the bottom of the river, so clearly that I could make out fingers and toes and long pieces of hair. I would take long strokes again, but this time they seemed to propel me twenty or thirty feet at a time because I was swimming with the current now and moving more quickly than I ever could on land, and if I held my chest very still, it was as though I wasn’t even holding my breath; it was as though I was flying through a silent, peaceful space.
Wendy and I found a place on the beach to set up the two folding chairs that she had brought and settled in with our books and our complaints. There was a family near us, a mother in cutoff shorts with sad, deep eyes and thin hair. She had with her a boy who looked to be about four, a newborn baby, and a man who appeared, based on his behavior, to be the father of the baby but not the boy. Between them sat a carton of beer cans, some of which were already empty. The little boy could not or would not be still, even for a moment, and seemed only to be happy when he was scrambling on rocks or furiously digging in the sand. He moved from one activity to another quickly, losing patience or interest in everything that was not dangerous or destructive or instantly capable of getting an adult’s attention. Finally, his mother put the baby down onto the towel next to her, took his hand, and led him into the water. I wasn’t watching what happened next, but Wendy was, and so were the group of people to the left of us, a band of happy, naked young men, who were, I noticed, all in the process of growing beards.
The mother had pulled her little boy onto her back, with his arms around her neck, and had tried to swim across the river, at its widest point. She had made the mistake that many people do and misjudged the distance. It’s very easy to do, when you are looking across a moving body of water at rocks and trees that are so massive in scale, without a house or a person there to give you a reference point. When I looked up—only because the man next to us had stood and pointed and said, “She’s in trouble!”—she had nearly made it to the other side, but now the current had swept her up and she could not reach the bank. She was moving at a fast pace that I recognized as the current, though she herself was hardly moving, her face just barely out of the water, and her little boy clutching her shoulders and pushing her down.
I dove into the water and swam as fast as I could toward the point, just above the rapids, where I thought I could intercept them. The man at my left dove in, too. When I could finally see them underwater, they were motionless. The mother’s head was completely below the surface of the water now. Her little boy was floating behind her with just his hands still on her shoulders. He was face down but he was craning his neck so that his forehead, his nose, and for crucial seconds at a time his mouth could rise above water. They were exhausted and panicked to the point of stillness now. And their eyes were perfect circles, wide and full of fear. They were drowning. I reached them first, and I didn’t know how far behind me the man was, but I knew that even though my arms and my lungs were stronger than they had been when I had lived like a frog in the water behind the schoolhouse, I could not save two people at once. I was behind them suddenly, with my right arm around the little boy’s chest, over his right shoulder and under his left arm, moving with them now because I wasn’t fighting the current. He was holding on to her shirt, I realized, clutching it with all of his might. I pushed my feet forward underneath him and pulled them apart, pushing her even farther underwater but separating them, and just as he let go of her I saw the man reach her and pull her by the arm toward the surface, where he expertly turned her onto her back and hooked his arm around her chest. I had the little boy under one arm now and was pulling him, with a strong sidestroke, back to the beach. I spoke to him and told him that he was going to be OK, that his mother was going to be OK, but I couldn’t see his face and couldn’t feel him moving and wasn’t at all sure that what I was saying was true, until we reached the sand and I could stand and lift him and carry him onto the beach, where I tried, because I remembered Meliah that day in her father’s arms, to put my arms around him. But he wriggled free and stumbled to his mother’s boyfriend, who stood with a dozen others at the edge of the water watching as the mother was pulled to shore, their baby safely in the arms of a naked stranger.
The man who saved the mother got her close enough to the beach for her to stand and then helped her, both of them clearly exhausted, walk the rest of the way to her blanket and her baby, where she collapsed. She was smiling, a broad and ignorant grin. She was oblivious to what had just happened, what had almost happened, and to what her role had been in it all. Her family surrounded her and then packed their things, and within minutes they were gone. The man who had saved the mother came over to me and thanked me and said something about how ungrateful, how foolish they were, and asked me if I wanted help finding the sunglasses that he had seen me dive in with. We swam and dove for almost an hour in the deep pool, looking for them, in silence. Finally, we gave up, and he and I shook hands, and then he put his arms around me and told me that I had made the right choice. That was when I knew that he had seen what I had done; he had seen me push the mother away from her little boy with my feet on her back, push her deeper down into the water with her lungs already empty, in order to save the little boy that she had carried into the dangerous water.
Wendy and I packed our things and climbed the hill as the sun went down, picking up the family’s trail of beer cans as we went.
HOW TO
eat fresh trout
HAD I JUST LEFT ARCATA, WITHOUT doing what I did, I might have gone back. It would not have been enough, I know now, to build a bridge. I had to burn it to the ground behind me, too.
I had tried to go home, back to Vermont, after the incident at Devil’s Elbow. I had closed the deal to sell my company and bought a plane ticket to Vermont, packed a straw hat and a swimsuit and a few thin dresses and sweaters and sandals, and told John that I was taking a vacation and that I wanted to wander around northern Vermont from swimming hole to swimming hole and see some old friends. On the first day back, I stumbled across Craig, a friend from high school. He went with me, the next day, back to the water hole behind the schoolhouse. It was one of those perfect days, sunny and cloudless, and the water was clear and cold, and I kissed him even though I knew he had a girlfriend (and, technically, I still had a boyfriend). And then I kissed him more. And then I fled, as quickly as I could, after I fought with my mother because I hated myself, and jumped into my rental car with my small bag and drove toward a friend’s house, knowing that what I had done was wrong but still believing and hoping that there was another town in Vermont that would feel like home, too, where the air and the water were the same but where I could live without becoming someone I hated. But I could feel it coming up behind me, the chaos and the recklessness, the feeling of being eight and being hungry and poor and desperate enough to reach for the wrong branches.
I stayed with close friends on their beautiful property and swam in their pond and rested and ate and drank, but it was too far south and the water was
warmer and not as clear, and while it all looked the same, it wasn’t somehow. Then it was time for me to go back to California. Craig caught up with me the night before I left. He told me that I should come back, that he wanted to see me again, that he had always wanted to see me again, that I shouldn’t go back to a man who didn’t love me and to a place that wasn’t my home. By the time I got back to John, I knew it was over. I left a few days later, moving into a spare room at Lisa and Tim’s.
John didn’t try to stop me, not at first. And then he broke into my e-mail account, and he found out about Craig, and he fell apart. Then he sent an e-mail to everyone I knew, personally and professionally, telling them what I had done and that I was a terrible person. He and my mother became confidants, e-mailing each other about my every move, despising me, vilifying me together. That was the hardest part, the thing that made me realize that I had never trusted my mother, and I never would.
John soon realized how much he loved me. But we could never go back, even if that had been what we both wanted, which it never was, at least not at the same time. Had I just left, without getting involved with Craig, I might have gone back. It had not been enough, I know now, to build a bridge. I had to burn it to the ground behind me, too.
I had certainly succeeded in simplifying things. My home was a place where I was not welcome anymore. John’s family, who had been like my own, was no longer a part of my life. My job was gone, replaced by a new responsibility—far from full-time—to the company that had bought my brand. After the deal closed, there was just enough money to settle the debts. I had only a few thousand dollars to my name, or about what I had begun with seven years before, when I had started the business. There was nothing keeping me in Arcata anymore, and I couldn’t imagine rebuilding a life in a place where I had never felt that I belonged to begin with. My close friends, Laura and Lisa and Tim and Phoebe, Wendy and Leeann and Bill, gave me beds to sleep in, cooked me meals, listened to me cry, and then encouraged me to move on. In the end, it was easy to go.