How to Catch a Frog

by Heather Ross

  Things with Craig imploded in the most horrible way, in that other people were hurt, too, much more than I was. My mother condemned my actions within her small town and told everyone she knew, every neighbor and every member of our family, what I had done and what I was, which in her eyes was a failure. She was clearly thrilled at being near the center of such a scandal. This betrayal hurt me so much that I couldn’t talk about it to anyone without falling into anxious and endless sobbing. I cut off contact with her completely, which made her even angrier. She sent dramatic e-mails to members of our family, reporting to them what she was hearing about me, most of it false, suggesting that I was taking drugs and living on the streets, or that, possibly, I was in hiding in her town or had been kidnapped by Craig’s family. This was when I realized that she had at least temporarily disconnected herself from reality, which made the entire situation more frightening. Because of this I e-mailed her and told her that I would speak to her again if she agreed to stop sending these crazy letters to our family, and if she promised to cut off all contact with John, whom she still e-mailed and even called regularly, and who had asked me to make her stop. She promised, but then, just minutes later, she accidentally sent me an e-mail meant for John. “Heather is always trying to tell me what to do,” it read, “always trying to tell me how to be her mother.”

  The truth was that I had landed in a room in a house in San Francisco that was owned by a friend of a friend. I didn’t know anyone there except my landlord, but I was within easy driving distance of my sister in Santa Cruz and my father and his sons, who were also in the Bay Area. My sister had been at my side since the beginning of the mess, defending me ferociously. My father began to tell me that he was proud of me, and, at this lowest point, I was beginning to believe him. I was traveling now between cities, helping the company that had bought my brand exhibit at trade shows in New York and Las Vegas, licensing new print designs to them as well as to a quilt fabric manufacturer and to the publisher Chronicle Books for a line of stationery. I was earning very little and living out of a suitcase, having pared down my possessions to not much more than my laptop, my ancient car, my bike, and some clothing that didn’t fit me because I no longer felt hungry. Licensing was proving to be a very poor income generator, but I had signed a noncompete agreement that restricted the type of work that I could do, and I was at a loss, in general, about what I wanted to do.

  I wandered around my neighborhood in San Francisco, sat in cafés with a blank sketchbook and drank wine, and sat up late watching movies, alone. Friends visited and we would talk about the previous year and everything that had happened, and they would ask me if I was alright, and I didn’t know what to say. I suppose that I was, but I also was not. I was lost, and alone, and hadn’t any idea what to do next, but I needed to work. I had only the smallest awareness that there was a growing interest in handmade things, and in tutorials. I didn’t yet know about blogs and saw magazines and books as the only vehicles for such work, and I knew that most of the companies that produced those magazines and books were in New York, not San Francisco. Still, I hadn’t any idea of how to introduce myself.

  At night in San Francisco, between trips to New York, driven to make something but too exhausted to leave the sofa, I knitted. As the summer wore on, I was still alone but less lonely, still angry but mostly at myself now, and finally able to see more clearly what had happened, where I could have done things differently, where I was doomed from the start, where I should never have been. My first project was a tiny baby sweater, just to prove to myself that now, nobody was watching. Now, anything was possible.

  My next trip to New York was in August. It was muggy and I was working long trade-show days and was overbooked. I had promised my friend Tim that I would call his brother, TC, while I was in town, but the only time I had free ended up being after dinner with my aunt and uncle in Brooklyn one night, and now I was meeting him at eleven o’clock in his neighborhood, near NYU, where he had just finished attending business school. I was still dressed in the T-shirt I had pulled on after the trade show, and a skirt that was more West Coast than East Village, and rubber flip-flops, no pedicure. I hadn’t really put a lot of effort into this meeting because I hadn’t yet realized that I had been set up on a date. I recognized TC from a block away, holding up his right hand while his left held his phone, which he had used to steer me up the correct street. He was thinner than the last time I had seen him, but his smile was the same. “The girl who can draw with her eyes closed,” he said when he reached me. “Nice to finally see you again.”

  Separate head from trout by inserting a paring knife under each cheek and cutting upward.

  Make a cut just in front of the tail, only through the skin, until you reach the bones. Peel back the top of your fillet. Be sure to keep the bones under the knife. Set fillet aside.

  Loosen the bones by gently pulling them away from the flesh beneath them with the tip of the knife.

  Grasp the tail and peel it away from the remaining fillet.

  Drinks led to dinner the following week, another sweaty, muggy August night. He picked me up at my hotel looking polished and handsome, which made me second-guess my sundress and drip-dry hair. “I’ve made a reservation at a place that is supposed to be great,” he said. “It’s called The Red Cat.” I stopped short on the sidewalk and looked at him. What were the odds, in a city with thousands of restaurants, of him choosing one my cousin used to manage and to which I once sent chanterelle mushrooms picked from the forest floor around the cabin I lived in with Mick in Arcata?

  When the special of the evening was announced to be trout, from Vermont, he ordered it without even listening to the rest of the list or paying any attention to the way that it would be served, and when it arrived whole, fresh from the pan with head and tail still intact, a single glassy eye staring up at him from the plate, he was more than slightly surprised.

  “Do you have any idea,” he asked me, “how to eat this thing?”

  “Yes,” in fact. “I do.”

  HOW TO

  begin again

  EVERYTHING HAD ENDED AT ONCE. My grandparents, my aunt Jane, and my uncle Mike had died in the space of less than three years. Mike died in his sleep, sick with the flu in the middle of February, his body thinned and wrecked by drugs and the events of his own hard life. Jane had died of cancer even though she convinced us all that she would beat it. When she was gone, there was no one to come and sweep out The Red House, and dry it out with the cookstove, and hang the sheets on the clothesline, and put them back onto the little rows of beds, smelling like fresh hay. The house became cold and damp and quiet without her. The land in Vermont, including The Red House and the old dome site, almost a thousand acres in all, was put up for sale.

  My sister and I and Jane’s children did not want to see it go, especially after we had spread Jane’s ashes there. My mother, who had moved into a house in town after both of my grandparents died, needed the money. My uncles seemed ready to let go of the land, too, convinced that it was too far away from where they lived. My cousins and I couldn’t understand why this seemed so easy for them, why they didn’t see what this place had represented to all of us. For Jane’s children, it was partly about maintaining a connection to their mother. For Christie and me, it was about wanting to hold on to the closest thing we’d had to a childhood home, a place where we had never felt entirely welcome but had, nevertheless, come closest to feeling like part of a family. I had long held on to the idea that someday the property would belong to my cousins and my sister and me, that we would find a way to share it equally, that it would be a place where we would come with our own children.

  When the property was sold, I tried to explain to TC how I felt. He had grown up in northwest Indiana, in a big, close Irish Catholic family, and while he had happy memories of running and playing in the woods behind his various homes, it was his parents and his siblings that he felt connected to. The homes and the towns that they had lived in didn’t seem to ha
ve a hold on him. When he talked about home, he was referring to his parents’ house, wherever that might be at the time. They seemed to move around a lot, as a reaction to their growing and then shrinking household. He had been raised with limited resources, too. His father had been in graduate school for much of his early childhood, and his mother had fed five children on as little money as possible. TC was a good student and a very good swimmer. He started competing as a child and chose the most challenging and least popular of race categories: the 500-meter butterfly. Swimming, with its endless, punishing practices, taught him unending endurance, patience, and persistence. He was offered several opportunities and scholarships, but he made the decision to leave the U.S. National Swim Team that he had joined in his last year of high school and go to Notre Dame, even though it wasn’t one of the schools that had offered him an athletic scholarship. He did this because his parents had taught him that a good education was more important than anything else and because his family had a history there. His mother went back to work, having just finished the job of raising five children, to pay the tuition. I asked him, when we went to visit his parents for the first time and were driving on what I assumed was a familiar road to him, if he felt as though he were home. “These roads didn’t even exist when I was a child. I would be lost right now if I didn’t have this GPS.” I thought this was sad, but he assured me that it wasn’t, and when I saw what happened when we walked into his parents’ little house, when I saw the tears in his mother’s and sister’s eyes, I understood why.

  TC’s family is remarkable. I’ve spent days with them, with both parents and a few other siblings, when almost everything has gone wrong. Just getting these people out the door with their purses and coats and children and car keys is a feat. Their father has learned to stay out of it entirely and will sit, in his pajamas, on the sofa reading the newspaper until the rest of them are literally beginning to get into the car, and then will disappear for a moment and reappear behind the steering wheel, not adding a second of delay to the outing. But then someone will have to use the bathroom, and even though that someone is an adult, this will be immediately addressed. And then we will get to where we are going, hours late and already exhausted, and someone will need to eat something, and then there will be a movement toward a restaurant, where allergies, intolerances, and special diets will need to be accommodated. The group will begin to grow as friends and other vehicles appear, and then, inevitably, the exodus of siblings and friends and vehicles and children will begin without everyone knowing, and somebody will be left behind at the Dairy Queen, without their shoes or their wallet or their cell phone, and will have to walk the four miles home. And just when I, as an outsider, think that it couldn’t possibly get any more complicated or frustrating, TC’s mother will pick up the phone and call the one sibling who isn’t there that day and will recount the entire outing as one of the most perfect, most love-filled, most wonderful days that the family has ever shared, and then she will pass the phone around to everyone, and everyone will agree that, yes, this day was perfect because—and I have heard this phrase over and over again—“we were all together.” And for someone like me, for someone with a family like mine, this moment feels like a gift.

  I went to New York to live with TC in an apartment in Chelsea a year after leaving Arcata. We had been together since our dinner at The Red Cat, and I loved him and trusted him very much. He was working uptown, so every morning I walked him to his train and then bought a coffee at Penn Station. I would peruse the magazine racks, now bursting with DIY and craft titles. I was designing fabric for a company called Free Spirit, and through them I was introduced to the work of Denyse Schmidt, who had just written a book about quilting. I went, with Kim Canfield, to her book signing at Purl SoHo. Joelle Hoverson, the owner of Purl, was also there. She was opening a small quilt shop down the street and had just ordered my line of quilting fabrics from Free Spirit. “Have you ever thought of writing a book?” she asked. I hadn’t, not really, but I was flattered. “You should meet my editor, Melanie Falick. I think she’s the best.” Joelle connected Melanie and me through e-mail and, largely because of Joelle ’s recommendation, Melanie asked me to submit a proposal, which became my first book. Melanie suggested that I start a blog, and, for the first time since selling Munki Munki, I felt as though I had a job.

  TC was supporting me financially and otherwise. I cooked our meals, kept our house, and learned to make martinis. It was not what I knew, not what I had come from, and not where I’d ever thought I would be. Surprisingly, it was during this period of time—when I was playing the role of the traditional “wife”—that I was also able to focus on my art and design work and find the footing for a new career. When I told TC that I believed I could build a new business of my own, he told me that he believed it was possible, too, but that if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter, that we were a team, that he was proud of me, and that he loved me. Even if I didn’t earn a penny, he wanted me to be an artist because it seemed to make me happy.

  When TC asked me to marry him, I said yes, even though I didn’t know what that meant, even though I had never before lived in a house with people who wanted to be married to each other. The loudest voice was coming from the place in my brain where instincts are hatched and where faith lives, and it was saying, Yes, this is different than anything you have ever known, and this is something you should do.

  Our wedding was in Vermont, at Blueberry Hill Inn, which sits high in the southern Green Mountains, above a sweeping view of soft green hills and pastures. It was a hundred miles south of where I had grown up but at a high elevation, which made it feel much farther north. The hayfields looked, even smelled, the same. The inn was similar to The Red House, with its crooked floors and stone thresholds and narrow stairs. I wore a pale blue dress made by hand by a woman whose studio was just a few blocks from us in Chelsea, from a bolt of silk faille that I had found at Mood Fabrics. I carried wild white roses and had a cake I designed that looked like it was covered in birch bark, with wild strawberries and more wild roses made from marzipan covering it.

  Planning the day had not been easy. I had not grown up imagining a wedding and was searching for ideas that seemed genuine and fitting. I had seen an image in a magazine of something another bride had done, a twinkling string of lights strung between trees, with photos of her and her husband throughout their lives clothespinned to it. I had asked my family to send me photos, whatever they had, but was met with grumbling, sad responses by almost everyone. “I’m not giving you any pictures,” said my mother. “I won’t ever get them back.”

  “Chris has all of them,” said my uncle Halsey, referring to his brother. “Ask him.”

  My aunt gave me a few photos, not originals, all of them printed on cheap paper and trimmed unevenly. They showed my family at The Red House, and swimming together, and lined up on a wooden porch. I knew that if I tried to hang them from a string of lights that they would curl and look awful, and there were so few of them that it didn’t seem worth trying.

  The wedding photographs themselves are beautiful, especially the one of TC’s family, which took almost forty-five minutes to organize and caused me to have a panic attack about dinner being late and cold. My friend Louisa watched the whole thing, trying to help, and likened the experience to herding cats. Someone kept wandering off to get someone else, and then that someone else would appear and then realize that they had left their something somewhere, and on and on and on until we had absolutely everybody, almost thirty people in all.

  The picture of my extended family, by comparison, took only a moment, I think because we were all desperate to have it over with. I sent one bridesmaid cousin up the hill to gather everyone and then down they came, in an uneven line, together but apart. We stood in odd groupings, looked straight ahead, and smiled when we were told to. When I look into the faces in that image, I am instantly reminded that my wedding day was, by sad coincidence, the day the land my grandfather had purchased back in 1
960 was officially sold and was no longer ours.

  It seemed that I could not get my own family to see what I saw, to imagine what I had just begun to let myself imagine, to trust that, after perhaps too many rounds of failure, I could manage something permanent, lasting. The thing that had changed in me, though, was that I no longer needed them to tell me what was possible. I had never imagined my own wedding before it was time to plan it. I had not pictured the dress or the cake or the groom or the invitations. I had not imagined the honeymoon, which was in Switzerland, hiking in the Alps, and in Italy, swimming in a perfect pool on the edge of a lake, surrounded by steep mountains. And yet here it was, all of it born out of my own hands, with the handmade invitations and the bespoke dress, and the husband, who, just like Canfields years before, had appeared out of nowhere and saved me from my own pictures of what a family was and convinced me what it could be.

  Instead of twinkling lights strung between trees, we had a bonfire in the meadow the night before the ceremony. When everyone had gone to bed, I used a stick to push the hot coals apart so that they would die out more quickly, and when the flames rose up one final time before dying out completely, I looked away so that my eyes wouldn’t sting, and in that instant I saw the inn and my wedding tent and empty chairs lined up in the meadow, all under the stars. At that moment, I only saw how perfect it all seemed and nothing else, and I knew that I was ready to begin again.

  HOW TO

  have faith

  THERE WAS A PIECE OF ADVICE THAT came to me when I was too young to understand or appreciate it, from a woman who was wise and old and whose face remains in my memory but whose name does not. She told me that no matter what I did or did not do, there would be only two things that I or any other woman would never, ever regret: “A swim, and a baby.” I understood the swim part perfectly, having grown up in a damp swimsuit, and knew that late-afternoon sun and finally-dry-again hair could trick you into thinking that you did not need another jump-in, when in fact you always do. I had learned long before that if I jumped in with the faith that once I was underwater, the reason I had jumped would be clear, there was no point in arguing with myself.