* * *
There was more.
More memories?
No. He’d found something. He hadn’t wanted to tell me. But now here we were. It’s hard not to think about it here, he said.
And I’d wondered why he wasn’t having a harder time.
On his father’s old computer, he’d found some stuff about incest. “Like, research.”
Aaron had gotten rid of the computer. Wiped it, and then trashed it.
It was almost as creepy as child pornography. That he had known what he was doing, that he had a word for his depravity. And that Aaron was just the object within reach.
* * *
I don’t want to know what he knows about my dad, he’d said about his father’s psychiatrist.
Now I understood a little of that freaked-out look he’d given us, Morris and me, as we waited outside Dr. Delano’s office during that first appointment. What a twisted thing, for your father to follow you on his scooter while you walked to the psychiatrist to seek antidepressants for the hell your father put you through.
I mean, I knew Aaron’s depression—if that’s what we were calling it—wasn’t just his father’s fault. You could only blame your father for so much.
Then there was your mother!
These were my thoughts while I waited for Aaron to come out of the psychiatrist’s office, by myself this time, with another sample of Zoloft. I knew enough to know that Dr. Delano was probably only supposed to prescribe to vets. Maybe that was why he always gave Aaron samples, instead of writing a prescription. Maybe he did know what Morris had done to Aaron. Maybe it was his way of offering the amends that Morris couldn’t, or didn’t.
Had he confessed to the doctor? Did it matter? Would it have mattered if he’d told Aaron he was sorry?
I wondered what it would be like for me to find out before his stroke, while he was wandering around the world in his right mind. Would I have been able to look at him?
Well, Aaron was.
Then I wondered what it would have been like to find out after he was dead.
I closed my eyes. I could remember standing here with him as he sat on that scooter. He was anxious, too. I’d written it off to parental concern. I’d believed he was anxious because his child was suffering, and he wanted him to get better. I still wanted to believe it.
I couldn’t stand still. Why was I waiting for Aaron?
I turned and walked down the corridor. Down, down, down. The hospital was the size of a small city. Morris wasn’t in the TV room. He wasn’t in his room. For a moment I thought: he’s died. And my heart cramped with panic.
Then a nurse wheeled him down the hall. He was freshly bathed, the long strands of his combed hair silver and slick.
And I thought: Thank God.
And then I thought: I guess that means I still love him.
* * *
The incest stuff Aaron had found on his dad’s computer—maybe Morris was trying to diagnose himself. Maybe he was trying to heal himself. Maybe it was a word Dr. Delano had used with him, and maybe Morris had accepted it, maybe he had cried, full of self-hate, a remorse so big he couldn’t speak it.
* * *
On Valentine’s Day, Aaron and I went to our favorite Thai restaurant, the one with the perfectly steamed tofu and the little flowers made out of vegetable peels, the little works of art my mother would sneak into her purse in her napkin, too pretty to waste, down the road from the Publix where Aaron had his first job, down the road from the Winn-Dixie where I had my first job, down the road from the strip mall with the CD Warehouse where Aaron and I had met, down the road from the entrance to Lake Shore Drive, where Aaron had lived and we now lived again. It had seemed a whole world, and much of it had taken place, our little story, on a few miles along US-1.
All through dinner, I’d had a feeling he was going to propose. He didn’t.
Then, after dinner, we drove back to the condo and, in his childhood bedroom, Aaron grabbed my hand. In it he dropped one of those candy hearts, yellow. MARRY ME, it said.
My first ridiculous thought was to pop it in my mouth.
“Yes!” I cried.
“Why did you eat it?” Aaron said, aghast.
“I don’t know! I was nervous! Are you really asking me?”
From his pocket he took the ring box. It was a very pretty and modestly sized diamond. He pointed to the long diamonds along each side. “They’re called baguettes,” he explained.
“I love it,” I said. “Yes.”
We were standing on the pee-colored rug in his disgusting bedroom, but over his shoulder, as I kissed him, I could see the ocean.
* * *
It would be a short engagement. We’d been together—practically married!—for almost six years already. We were just making it official.
Our mothers were thrilled. Aaron had driven over to ask my dad for my hand (a somewhat gross tradition now, we both acknowledge) and he’d cried. Happy tears!
The same week I got engaged, I received a call from the University of Virginia. My first grad school acceptance, and I was invited to compete for a Jefferson Scholarship. I flew to Charlottesville and did the interview. I didn’t get the scholarship, but it was okay. A photographer took a picture of me in my one and only black suit, my engagement ring gleaming. “Nice ring!” he said. By the time I left Charlottesville, I’d gotten more calls from more schools, including schools in New York City and Cornell in Ithaca, New York, but I’d already made up my mind. We didn’t have to return to New York! None of those schools were fully funded. We didn’t want to go broke all over again. Besides, I liked Charlottesville; it reminded me of Burlington. “I’m in love,” I told my fiancé. Aaron was happy for me. We would start our married life in a new place, in Virginia. We’d be in between my two brothers in D.C. and North Carolina. Online, we rented a townhouse that was brand-new. In the pictures, the tape hadn’t even been taken off the kitchen counters.
I spent the next four months doodling pictures of wedding dresses and making lists in a notebook while my middle school students did worksheets and watched videos. I’d never really wanted to wear a white dress. Yellow, I’d thought, was sunnier. White was repressively virginal! Now, though, after a year of living in this urine-colored apartment, I really wanted a pure white dress. I wanted white everything. Cream-colored roses and cream-colored napkins and cream-colored invitations and a cream-colored wedding cake from Publix. We weren’t fancy!
We booked the yacht club downstairs. We had never set foot in it before, let alone on a yacht, but it was pretty, and it was there, and we could practically spit on it from our balcony. The ceremony—it would be short and sweet—would take place in the community room off the pool. It was used for things like knitting club and bridge club and it had a broken coffee machine and flowered wallpaper that looked like a Laura Ashley dress circa 1989. But it was $25 to rent! My parents offered to pay for the reception. For months they put their groceries on one credit card to keep the other one clear for the wedding. Sandra helped with the groom’s dinner. Aaron and I covered the rest. When we needed to put down a deposit—for the band, or the judge—Aaron went into his father’s room and took out a coin or a baseball card and sold it on eBay. My mother was delighted to learn that a panda figurine covered the photographer. In this way, Morris helped pay for our wedding, too.
* * *
A few weeks before our wedding—in time to include it on the invitations—Aaron changed his last name.
He’d been talking about it for a long time. He’d been thinking of last names. He thought of Henderson for a while. I liked the idea. I wasn’t going to change my name, I knew. But he didn’t want to be absorbed into my family, just as I didn’t want to be absorbed into his. He thought of Morrison. Son of Morris. It was direct. But also indirect. Was it indirect enough? The whole point was to drop his father’s name, to chainsaw that limb from his family tree.
What he settled on was his mother’s last name. “Italian as fuck” was how he
put it. It sounded like an obscure pasta eaten only on the island of Sicily, and it would take our children a long time to learn how to spell, but it was his choice.
I didn’t pretend to understand it or love it. It was a lesson in the kind of acceptance we would have to practice again and again in marriage. I was happy for him, that he’d shed a part of his identity he’d long wanted to shed, that he’d never have to see that name on an envelope again. I went to the courthouse with him to file the papers. And then we went to file for our marriage certificate.
He didn’t invite much of his family to the wedding. I asked him about each of them, in case he changed his mind. Your sister? Your brother? Your niece? Your cousins? Your aunts and uncles? He didn’t want them there, he said. “My family’s complicated.” Your dad? But I knew before he answered that he shouldn’t be there, not in the state he was in. What was the point? His mother and her boyfriend would fly in from New Mexico, where they’d moved, leaving New York shortly after we did.
Months later, one of his cousins expressed disappointment—not that we hadn’t invited her to the wedding, but that Aaron had changed his last name. “I know why,” she said sadly. Other family members had changed their last names, too. She believed, I realized, that Aaron had changed his last name simply because it was Jewish.
* * *
The morning of the wedding Aaron saw a person hit by a car.
I’d woken up in a sleeping bag on my dad’s office floor. No seeing the bride before the wedding and all that. I’d get ready at my parents’ house with my aunts and my mom. Anyway, the showerhead at our stupid apartment had broken, and I didn’t want to shower at the gym by the pool, not with all the setting up happening there.
Aaron was picking up his rental at the tux shop and saw the woman try to cross Northlake Boulevard. She was hit by a Buick going forty-five miles per hour and went sailing across two lanes of traffic. “A couple car lengths at least,” Aaron told me on the phone. “Nell, it was so crazy.” He’d had to stop and wait for the police, give his report.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Do you think it’s a sign?”
He gave a shallow laugh. “I hope not.”
But he didn’t know if the woman lived or died. She’d been taken to the hospital.
“Well, I hope she’s okay.” I was worried about something else. “Dude,” I said, “I have my period.”
“What?”
“I know. I planned everything around it! But I’ve been so distracted I forgot to take my pill for like three days!” I’d started bleeding that morning.
“Another sign,” Aaron said.
“Shut up. I’m so mad. I don’t want my period on my wedding.”
“It’ll be fine,” Aaron said.
“Aaron?”
“Yeah?”
“Please don’t forget to shower.”
* * *
We were late getting to the venue and later still, as I had to run to the gym bathroom to blot my armpits. “Come on!” Jen, my maid of honor, handed me my flowers. I saw her scoot ahead of me along the pool to take Derek’s arm, the best man, and together they ducked into the room. My dad and I followed. For the short walk down the aisle, he handed off his cane.
Aaron was already at the end of the aisle, waiting for me, shaved and smiling.
“Oh my goodness,” Jen’s mom told me later. “He just looked so in love!”
We didn’t write our own vows. Embarrassing, to announce your love in a room full of people! Instead, my friend Ursula read First Corinthians, its pale, palatable loveliness. “Love is patient; love is kind.” My cousin Darlene read an Apache wedding blessing, the one that starts, “Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other.” I liked it, and it sounded like something that should be read at a wedding, and hadn’t yet heard of appropriation. I had not yet read Khalil Gilbran’s The Prophet, the popular wedding reading that started “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.” If I had, I might have included it. Instead: no spaces. All togetherness. Our moms came up to light candles. Aaron fumbled the ring, trying to put it on the wrong hand. Everyone giggled. It was over before we knew it. The organ started up, and we headed for the same door we came through. There was my eleventh-grade English teacher! And all my friends and their moms! And all the guys from Aaron’s band! And my aunt Gretchen and my aunt Brenda and my cousins! And Aaron’s weed dealer! They threw rose petals at us and we dodged them and laughed, and I started to cry. We didn’t know what to do, or where to go, so we just stood by the pool and hugged and kissed and laughed, the two of us alone for a minute, the evening light so pretty on the water and the marina and the distant boats.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too. We’re married!”
“I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
He leaned in close. “I haven’t showered in five days.”
I smacked his lapel. “Aaron!”
“And I’m wearing an Anthrax T-shirt under this tux.”
He lit a cigarette and held my train as we walked along the water, and the photographer snapped pictures of us as the sun slowly fell. If it felt strange to be there, to look up seven stories and see our balcony and beyond it that place I hated; if I felt like a teenager who still had no idea what she was doing—I was two weeks shy of twenty-four—it also felt magical and tropical and special and sweet. After the pictures, we walked to the yacht club, and everyone toasted us and cheered. For the first dance, the band had learned our song, “Everything I Have Is Yours,” which the white front man in the keyboard tie sang with a kind of loungey spoken-word bravado. I would gladly give the sun to you / if the sun were only mine. Aaron and I laughed. Then he danced with his mom and I danced with my dad. We did most of the things that were done at American weddings. We cut the cake. I tossed the bouquet. “We know what a wedding is,” our wedding said, “and this is one.” A part of me knew it was for other people. Our wedding said, in the fine print, “We know we are an odd couple, but maybe if our wedding is totally by the book, you won’t notice!” The cake wasn’t even vegan. We didn’t even eat it. The top tier sat in our freezer, which was what we were supposed to do, waiting for something, I don’t know what. When we moved to Virginia, we threw it away.
Here is what I didn’t want: to take the elevator upstairs and spend my wedding night in my husband’s childhood bedroom.
So I’d booked a room in a fancy hotel on Palm Beach. My groom drove me over the bridge to the island. It was all symbolic, I was beginning to see, all a bit of a show. But I didn’t really mind. What else was there? We were exhausted and drunk, my up-do had turned into a mullet, and I was bleeding. We made jokes about deflowering and I gave my husband a blow job. “I just gave my husband a blow job,” I announced to him, and fell asleep. In the morning, he drove us back over the bridge to my parents’ house, where our family and friends had gathered for brunch. “You don’t look like virgins anymore,” my mom joked as we stepped out of the car, and everyone stood on the lawn and clapped, and from then on we were married.
WAXING GIBBOUS
Spend the summer in waiting rooms, on hold with doctor’s offices, writing your husband’s health history on intake forms. He still has to look at the engraved date on the inside of his wedding ring to remember your anniversary, but you memorized his social security number long ago. When calling psych hospitals, a good thing to do is pace the deck, where he can’t see or hear you from his bed. This one requires a local intake first. This one requires the patient to call. This one has no beds but may have a bed on Saturday; this one has no beds, but the state hospital may have one on Monday. This one takes your insurance but maybe not, it depends. Your husband is too sick. Your husband is not sick enough. Try to time the whole thing so you don’t have to take him against his will. Try to time it so he is psychotic enough for them to take him, but not so psychotic that he refuses to go. Enlist the psychiatrist, the therapist, the doctor. He says he doesn’t want to live
. Cancel your appearance at the writers’ conference. I mean, you can’t leave him. Also, you can’t leave the kids with him. Don’t refill the lithium. It might as well be a Flintstone vitamin. But what is he if not bipolar? Chart the cycle in your little green notebook. Watch the pattern emerge like a sine wave. A weeklong flare, and then a weeklong crash. He is raging, sleepless, rocking, wild; then he is complacent, remorseful, and tired. He sleeps, and he heals. Sometimes suicidal, sometimes flirty, sometimes an asshole, sometimes cracking jokes over the eggs he’s cooking while imitating Louis Armstrong, or Braveheart. Sometimes he doesn’t even wake to eat, just sleepwalks to the kitchen in the middle of the night. In the morning, there is a slice of Swiss cheese on the kitchen counter, empty cracker boxes he denies having opened. “That’s not mine,” he says.
“Yeah, okay,” you say.
You manage to laugh together, looking at the mystery cheese melting a little, hardening at the edges as cheese does.
Watch him emerge from the coma. Enjoy it while it lasts. Stop calling the psych wards for a few days. Give yourself a break. Watch him shower and shave and wipe the grassy shake from the shelf in the bathroom, where he’s arranged the shards of his skin like a kid with a rock collection. Sometimes you clean it before he does, because it is just so gross. I didn’t sign up for this. But he’s clean now and he’s wearing pants with a zipper. Kiss him on his smooth jaw. There he is! You knew he was in there. He takes out the recycling. He walks the dog. He takes out his Pashto workbook. He is teaching himself how to speak Pashto! He boils an artichoke for your strange artichoke-loving child, and shows him how to eat the leaves, raking the flesh with his bottom teeth.
But it’s as predictable as the recycling truck. Every two weeks, it arrives.
Slowly, first, like a cold. Then he starts disappearing into the bathroom again. The snakeskin bread crumbs on the bathroom shelf. He takes a four-hour bath. He knows better than to show you his skin now. You hear him talking to himself in there, until he’s not talking at all. He’s been in there an awfully long time. You knock, and he doesn’t answer. You slide open the pocket door, your brain flashing red to all the haunted-house possibilities. What you see instead: your husband lying flat on his back on the bathroom sink, naked, holding up his phone to the back of his left hand. Looking, looking, through the magnifying screen of the camera.
Everything I Have Is Yours Page 16