Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  A few weeks later, your husband is alive and out of the psych ward and in a rehab program and back in the house, and then a few weeks later, back in your bed. You make dinner for your family. You invite Emily and her daughter and her ex-husband, who is back in her bed, too. There is soup and bread and blueberry pie, which your baby smudges over his lip in a mustache in his high chair. The kitchen shakes with laughter. Your baby laughs back. You think how lucky you are, to have made it intact. To have a second chance. For years afterward, you will pass by the streets you might have moved to, without him. Your ghost lives there, in all those houses. You don’t tell your husband you’ve been inside.

  And then one night a few weeks later still, after Emily has moved out of the apartment in your house and into a new one, after she argues with her ex-husband and leaves his house, her ex-husband hangs himself again, and this time he does it right. Their daughter, four years old, now has no father. It’s days later, but you rush to her new apartment as though there still might be flames to put out. There are women there already, a team of them, washing the dishes, brushing Emily’s hair, reading to her daughter. What is this, the suicide response team? It’s her friends from AA, you realize. An evil part of you is jealous that they have beat you here to demonstrate their love and support. Another evil part of you is relieved, so relieved—this little tableau could have been yours. Hug her. Feel sick. Say, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” You have switched nightmares.

  SEYMOUR STREET

  1997

  In Vermont, when I was in college, we lived in three apartments in three years, all of them on Seymour Street. The first was a one-bedroom in a yellow house above an architect’s office, around the corner from the post office. It was brand-new, with A-frame walls and baseboard heaters and a clean white kitchen where we made spinach and feta quesadillas every night. We weren’t supposed to have cats, but we did. I sent my parents a picture of our bedroom, the queen mattress on the floor, the light coming through the lavender tapestry I’d hung in the window. “Why would you send me that?” my mother asked.

  One day I came home from class and climbed the outdoor steps and found Aaron sitting on the floor—we didn’t yet have a couch—with a stack of Toni Morrison novels beside him. He’d spent the last three days reading every one of them.

  Another day, I came home from school and found a white Pottery Barn couch sitting in our living room. Aaron had had it delivered as a surprise.

  It’s safe to say it was a happy time.

  * * *

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to live in the dorm. My roommate was nice enough. But she had a boyfriend, too, and they had ostentatious sex in her twin bed. When I knocked, her boyfriend would say, “Don’t worry! We’re definitely not having sex in here!” At least an hour a day, my neighbor played Third Eye Blind at full volume. And then there was the whole part about going to the bathroom beside other people and wearing flip-flops in the shower. None of it appealed to me when presented with the alternative of a Pottery Barn couch.

  I made a choice. A nice guy from my freshman seminar showed up at my door one evening and asked if I wanted to hang out at his dorm and drink some wine with friends. “I don’t really drink,” I said, and closed the door.

  Within a few weeks I was living permanently at Aaron’s. He was both a comfort from my home life and a promise of something more exciting than the campus life I thought I’d wanted.

  It was a year of firsts. We bought our first dining room table. We got our first email addresses. We almost got in our first car accident and traded the rear-wheel-drive Pathfinder for a used gold Range Rover. One weekend morning, I woke up, walked to the bathroom, and looked out the window to see that it had snowed overnight. The sun was shining, and the tree limbs were glassed in white. It was my first snowfall, and it was magical. Us two Florida kids dressed in our parkas and went downstairs and built our first snowman in front of the architects’ door.

  We buried our first cat, a calico stray we’d adopted that I’d let out late at night and forgotten to call inside. I spotted her through the window the next morning, dead in the snow on the side of the road. We borrowed a shovel from the architects and drove out in the woods. We couldn’t dig very deep; the ground was too frozen. We cried a lot. My tears were tears of grief and also guilt.

  I got my first college job. In high school, I’d taken art classes at the local community center, where I stood around with senior citizens drawing strangers. If seeing nakedness as art made one an adult, then being that naked art seemed a mark of even more advanced maturity. So in my first weeks of college, when I was looking for a job on campus, I circled the ad for “nude model.” Plus, how cool would I look, a nude model with a shaved head?

  But Aaron got mad when I said I wanted to apply. (What would the application process look like, though? Do you have a body? Can you stand for a long time?) He didn’t want me standing naked in front of a bunch of college boys.

  I raged at the injustice, his small-mindedness and chauvinism.

  I also understood and craved his protectiveness. I needed him to need me all to himself. I wouldn’t want to share his naked body, either.

  Instead, I got a job at the local bakery. Anyway, it was our first fight.

  * * *

  When I’d first arrived, I had scoped out the retail options for Aaron. For some reason I’d pictured him working at the army surplus store downtown, selling backpacks and hats and hiking pants. But he didn’t like something about the guy who owned the place. Aaron had asked him who the owner was so he could get an application, and the guy said he was the owner, rather rudely, Aaron thought. Young and entitled, was Aaron’s estimation.

  Meanwhile Aaron’s rich aunt had given him an old diamond ring with which to propose to the girl with the glasses, and when they broke off the engagement, the girl with the glasses had given him the ring back, and his aunt had let him keep it. I didn’t know this until he’d sold it for $6,000, an amount of money that made me ill to contemplate. I didn’t like knowing that we were dining out on the money acquired through his ex’s engagement ring. Then again, I didn’t want the engagement ring around, either. I certainly didn’t want him to recycle it on me. Two thousand dollars of the money he spent on a new keyboard. He said he thought he deserved it. His father was sending him $500 a month, which covered the rent. It seemed to be a temporary allowance until it wasn’t. It seemed a generous gesture, that his father covered the rent, and then odd, and then embarrassing. It was the least his father could do, Aaron said. I remember thinking that it was an odd thing to justify, and yet also sensing that he was right—that he’d been wronged somehow by his family—and that this keyboard, this rent money, was his compensation.

  For months, I circled the ads in the Classifieds. I left them on the dining room table, in the magazine basket in the bathroom. I pointed out the HELP WANTED signs in the windows. Aaron always had an excuse. He would apply eventually, or the job wasn’t quite right, or he didn’t want to go back to retail, or there were no good options in this tiny town. He wasn’t angry, exactly. He seemed to be nursing some greater injury, some resentment for what the world owed him. I couldn’t tell what the source of it was, only knew from instinct that I had to walk on eggshells. In this way, we managed to avoid conflict for a while. I observed his pain and respected it, even if I hadn’t begun to understand it.

  “We don’t really fight,” I tried to explain to my friend Jen on the phone. “We just kind of get sad.”

  That fall, I helped him study for the GED. Look how smart he was, when he applied himself! When given the tools! He passed the test and got his certificate in the mail, and that spring he enrolled in two classes at the community college, on his father’s GI Bill. He started out strong. We did our homework side by side on the couch. Then he fell behind in computer science. He got pissed at his English teacher for implying that his Middlebury girlfriend might be writing his papers for him.

  I wasn’t writing them for him. I was maybe h
elping him find his voice.

  Then one day I found some porn videos in the closet. I felt my stomach drop. I put them back, shut the door. I tried to unsee what I’d seen.

  It wasn’t really the porn. I was mature enough not to be shocked that my boyfriend owned pornography. I was angry and hurt that he’d hid them. I felt the rug pulled out from under me: that we’d shared everything, that I knew him inside and out. And yet he’d had a secret.

  Okay, it kind of was the porn. When I looked at the pictures on the back of the VHS, what I saw was all the girls he’d been to bed with. Copulation and its attendant positions were not in fact the sacred invention of me and my boyfriend but had a long and colorful history to which I was an innocent latecomer.

  I wasn’t mature enough to tell him so. I couldn’t even confront him. Instead, I huffed and puffed through his paper that night, guilt-tripping him, making him feel inferior, making him need my help. Finally, in the morning, I said, “I found your porn.” It was an accusation. I had been simmering all night. I was pissed. I’d wanted the upper hand: not only had he lied to me; now I could lord it over him that I’d spent all night sweating over his paper.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Tim sent me those! It was a joke!”

  Oh. “Then why’d you hide them?”

  “So you wouldn’t get mad like you are now! Jesus, it’s just porn. All night I thought you were mad because you didn’t want to help me!”

  We fought, yelling at each other, accusing each other of betrayal, sabotage, manipulation. I had a class to get to, and we fought as he drove me to campus. I slammed the car door, slipping, spilling my thermos of coffee in the snow. “Go find a college boy!” he yelled at me and drove away.

  Okay, so we did fight.

  * * *

  He didn’t accept my help with any assignments after that. He was a few weeks from finishing his first semester when he stopped going to class.

  But that spring, he finally found a job, in the afterschool program of an elementary school. For three hours every afternoon, he helped kids with their homework, played kickball on the playground, and made friends with the farm kids of Vermont. It seemed one step closer to his dream of being a teacher. I was relieved.

  “What’s he do the rest of the day?” my boss asked me. She was looking for someone for the lunch shift.

  I loved my job at the bakery. I washed and dried the dishes, returning all the utensils to the special jars and drawers where they lived. I took sandwich orders and made them—whole wheat, honey oat, sourdough, rye, or French? I shook the rugs and rolled the croissants and made cappuccinos with just the right amount of foam. But Aaron had made it clear he didn’t want our work worlds to collide.

  “He writes music,” I told my boss. I didn’t say that he hung out at the coffee shop. That he copied videos of hardcore shows he’d taped in Burlington and sold them online. That he drove his Range Rover through the woods, and tended to it, moisturizing its leather seats, bottle-feeding it high-octane fuel, memorizing its exotic British parts.

  When he got a second job, at a TV station, I felt like I could breathe. It was still just part-time, but we were both, more or less, pulling our weight. We drove to Burlington. We watched Days of Our Lives. We ate at every restaurant in town. All of the waitstaff had crushes on him. The waitress at the Mexican restaurant, who’d been in his class, once put black pepper on my black bean pizza. And the waiter at the place with open-faced sandwiches once rubbed Aaron’s back as he took his order. Aaron stopped wearing his silver hoop earrings after that, and I started growing my hair out.

  Sometimes I snuck him into the dining hall on campus. We ate in the lobby downstairs on our orange trays. We always felt like we were trespassing, because we kind of were.

  It was easier to be in our universe on Seymour Street. We were outliers. Our litter box overflowed.

  * * *

  Sophomore year, I chose a dorm based on its proximity to a parking lot, which meant my boyfriend could drop me off with ease. No one really lived off campus, and certainly not sophomores, so I had to keep a room. It was a single, but I never used it, except to store stuff I didn’t need.

  My mother’s cousin, at my mother’s urging, had invited us to Thanksgiving dinner in New Hampshire. We’d accepted the invitation, but then the Rover was in the shop again. We were on a first-name basis with the rental place down the street called Lemons 4 U. No lemons were available the week of Thanksgiving, so my mother’s cousin had kindly arranged for a family friend, who was driving from Burlington, to swing by and pick us up in Middlebury. I was wearing a new dress Aaron had bought me after I’d seen it in the window of Banana Republic, purple velvet with a V-neck. My hair was in the Chia pet phase, but that dress made me feel pretty.

  I wasn’t really sure what was bothering Aaron. He didn’t want to go to Thanksgiving dinner. I thought it was very clear and very obvious that we had to go, that we should go. What else were we going to do? “I don’t know how to be around family,” he said. And we were vegetarian. What were they serving? The whole idea seemed miserable to him.

  The family friend picked us up and we cruised along. Aaron was silent in the backseat. The friend was a nice guy, young and long-haired, a Burlington kid you could almost smell the weed on. He seemed not much more familiar with the family we were going to see than we were. We were strangers driving into the unknown.

  Perhaps thirty miles from Middlebury, the family friend pulled over to get gas. Aaron saw his opportunity. “I’m leaving,” he said, getting out of the car.

  “What do you mean, you’re leaving?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll find my way home.”

  “Don’t do this,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  And my future husband walked down the highway and disappeared.

  “Where’s he going?” the family friend asked, getting back in the car.

  “I don’t know.” I sat in the passenger seat in my velvet dress and began to cry. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what just happened.”

  “Should we go after him?” he asked. But it was too late.

  We began to drive. The Vermont landscape passed by our windows, leafless and gray.

  The family friend shrugged with understanding. “Relationships are hard.”

  It was a great kindness he extended to me, the little bit of language he offered to describe the indescribable abandonment, bafflement, and embarrassment I felt just then. We drove along, chitchatting. I felt that I had left my heart on the highway. And yet I was safe in the car, sniffling and listening to the radio and talking to a person I’d met an hour before. I trusted him to get me where I needed to go.

  The next day, my mother’s cousin drove me back to Middlebury. Like my grandfather, he was a political science professor. Was I registered to vote? Did I know what an exciting time it was in politics now, with a socialist Vermonter named Bernie Sanders in the Senate? I wasn’t and I didn’t, I was ashamed to admit. My mother’s cousin’s arm was amputated above the elbow. When he was a kid, he had grabbed an electric wire while climbing a tree. When I was a kid, I had rebuilt a beaver dam with him at the lake where our family had a cabin, and that was how I remembered him, swashbuckling through the water, heaving logs with one arm and a stump. I didn’t know how to build a beaver dam and I wasn’t registered to vote and my boyfriend had left me with a stranger and hitchhiked home. I felt so clueless.

  We pulled up to the little yellow house. My mother’s cousin had to pee. So he came upstairs, shook Aaron’s hand, and went in to use the bathroom. Aaron and I stood awkwardly outside the door. I didn’t know where to begin. Where did you go? might have been a good start. What the fuck is wrong with you? would have been something.

  Then my mother’s cousin hurried out and drove away, and only then did I see that the shower curtain was open and at the bottom of the shower was a giant cat turd.

  * * *

  That fall, I was enrolled in Intro to Drawing. A nude model came in from tim
e to time to pose for us. She was a freshman named Eleanor. I wondered if she had a boyfriend.

  For one assignment, I created four paper and fabric collages. It was a knockoff of Matisse’s paper cut-outs and of my mother’s acrylic paintings of figures in bed. Each of the four pieces of paper depicted a couple in the same bedroom—sometimes in embrace, sometimes with distance between them—and a season revealing itself in a window. Snow, flowers, sun, leaves. I connected the four collages with tape, like four images on a strip of film, and then I shaped them into a cylinder, so there was no beginning and no end.

  When it was my turn to present my creation to the class, I said, “I wanted to show the perennial nature of love.”

  To my professor’s credit, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t cringe or raise an eyebrow. Instead, he thoughtfully critiqued my method. Was the sculpture to be viewed from the outside, or inside? It was like a wheel, but you could see the inside, the seams, the tape. Here he did cringe.

  What did that nineteen-year-old know about the perennial nature of love? My professor must have wondered. I want to laugh at that girl, critique her method. I didn’t know the details of what the next twenty years would bring. But after living through one cycle of seasons with my future husband, I already knew the story. He will go away, and return, go away, and return.

  * * *

  Aaron was straight edge when we met. His body was covered in straight edge tattoos. In Burlington, I watched more straight edge tattoos go on his body. In Burlington, we went to straight edge matinees. I wasn’t really straight edge, but I didn’t drink or do drugs, either. I’d let my senior-year experimentation fade when I met Aaron. I wasn’t trying to escape my life anymore; I was living the life I’d wanted to escape into.