Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  A college writing class. The last time he’d attempted one, I was a college student, too. This time, a college writing professor, I did not help him with his papers. He still got an A.

  In the fall, two more classes. Math, Spanish. He took the city bus to the more distant community college campus. Woke up before any of us, put on his backpack, and walked to the bus stop by himself.

  That was when the rash returned.

  By midterms, after more than a year of remission.

  Did the stress of the classes bring it on? Was it that he wasn’t drinking? Or was it in him, ready to return in any case? Would he have finished the classes if he hadn’t gotten sick again?

  What happens to the disappointment when you’re not supposed to feel it anymore? When you’ve detached with love, let go of the outcome? Feel it coming up, a little vomit in the throat. Go to Al-Anon. Say, “I am so disappointed.”

  * * *

  Okay, so he wouldn’t go to school. He wouldn’t work. Not yet. Not now. Soon. When he was better. If stress brought it out, then he had to reduce the stress. We went back to the dermatologists, more specialists. We went to therapy. We went to RCA. I went to Al-Anon. He went to AA. He took care of the kids. He stayed sober. These were full-time jobs, I told myself. We told some friends he was in rehab, but we didn’t tell many.

  Aurora Street was the main street leading to campus, and our house was just a few blocks from the boys’ new school—Nico was starting kindergarten!—and a few blocks in the other direction from downtown. There were benefits to being in the middle of things. We took turns driving or walking Nico to school, or went together. We walked down the steep hill to the Commons, ate in the sidewalk cafés, let the kids play on the rickety wooden playground that would be torn down in a few years.

  But at night, on the weekends, the neighborhood erupted in college-kid chaos, drunk students with fake IDs stumbling down the sidewalk under our bedroom windows, drunk guys chasing each other down the middle of the street, drunk girls woo-wooing from one corner to the next. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, we woke to beer cans in our yard, Solo cups, vitamin water bottles, Doritos bags, lipstick, and once panties. Change went missing from our car when we forgot to lock it. Once, someone stole the lug nuts off our tires. Once, someone simply slashed the tires. Once, at midnight, a guy rang our doorbell and asked for a drink of water for his girlfriend. Aaron closed the door in his face.

  We invested in new double-paned vinyl windows, and double-helix window shades, to soften the noise.

  Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a refuge. It was an alcohol-soaked neighborhood. There was no hiding from it. There was no hiding from anything.

  Sometimes, during those years, Aaron would leave the house, sick or angry or depressed or desperate, and I would run out to the sidewalk and yell for him to come back, hoping none of our friends were driving down the street. Sometimes he came back. Sometimes he disappeared downtown. I worried about him going to a bar. They were nearly indistinguishable fears, as though having a drink might be the end of him, the end of us.

  Al-Anon told me I wasn’t supposed to run after him. Not far, anyway.

  * * *

  When it was Henry’s turn to start kindergarten, in the fall of 2016, Aaron interviewed for a job. He had been without a flare for a few months. He felt ready. It was for a housing assistant at a local nonprofit, helping people get their housing benefits. A worthwhile job with decent pay. In his interview, he impressed them by talking about the history of poverty and the origins of the education system. Every step of the hiring process—the background check, the references, the W-9—I thought, it’s going to fall through. I kept the disappointment at an arm’s length, ready to grab it before it could grab me. But he was hired, and his first day was the boys’ first day of school, too, and I took pictures of all of them standing on the front porch, the boys in their backpacks, Aaron in his tie. It was his first job since Virginia, when Nico was a baby.

  Every morning we drove him to work, then picked him up in the evening. Sometimes, at the end of the week, his coworkers gave him a few items from the community pantry and garden that were unclaimed, ears of corn, a baguette. Once, when I had a meeting, the boys went to work with Aaron, sitting on the floor behind his cubicle. Such well-behaved boys, his coworkers said. There was a framed photo of them on his desk, and his energy bars in the drawer, and a turmeric stain on the carpet where he had spilled it trying to make tea. On Fridays, we cashed his check at the grocery store on the way home, then bought groceries. We needed the money badly. He was happy that the cash he was handing to the cashier was his own. It was a kind of lifeblood, those green bills.

  Most of his days were filled with paperwork, filing the various forms associated with the two hundred people in his case load, answering phone calls from people who were being evicted, who were waiting for housing. He told them he was sorry, he was doing everything he could, there were eight people in line ahead of them. There was math. There were systems. Some days he made visits to the sites to do inspections with his coworkers, seeing the grave conditions people lived in. He felt overwhelmed, powerless to do much good, and yet it was important work. It made him feel needed, and connected, and proud. He was the first to arrive at work in the morning and the last one to leave.

  My pride was a full breath in the lungs I was afraid to release. There was my husband! Kind and smart and bright-eyed, sharp in his blue blazer, sober, healthy, productive, well-liked, drinking turmeric tea. His teeth were so white! His desk was so clean! Once, I surprised him on his lunch break and we drove to the waterfall nearby and held hands watching the water rush and absolutely nothing was wrong. This is the man I married, I thought.

  I remember making the bed one day, asking myself, is this really it? Is this the way it’s going to be? Is it too good to be true?

  Then, in November, the election.

  We were thrown. The world was thrown. I cried for days, struggled to get out of bed. He went off to work. He was thrown, but undeterred.

  And then his mother called. She was sick. COPD. She was on oxygen. Didn’t know how long she had.

  My own mother had had COPD for twelve years, but once her cancer diagnosis came in, she was dead within weeks. We didn’t want to waste any time. Aaron was nervous about taking time off his new job, nervous about seeing his mother, but I pressed him. “Talk to her,” I said. “Make peace. It could be your last chance.”

  “I’ll go for the kids,” he said. “Just for the kids.”

  So, the next week, for Thanksgiving, we all flew to Santa Fe. It was our third and final visit. Sandra was living in her recliner, sleeping there. It was the only way she could breathe, sitting up. The boys crawled into her lap and she hugged them and uttered sweet words. To be fair, she didn’t have much energy. She wasn’t herself. We stayed at a hotel. We went to the children’s museum. We went to the little toy stores she’d taken us to when she was well. We drove to her house three or four times, never staying more than an hour or two. Aaron didn’t exactly feel comfortable there. He didn’t say much to his mother and she didn’t say much to him. Had she been well, she would have been cooking with the boys and showing them all the flowers in the yard and her boyfriend would have been doing tricks for them, pulling quarters from their ears. But her boyfriend was the one doing the cooking now. On Thanksgiving, we weren’t invited to stay for the meal. They had Sandra’s French club over. We ate at a vegan Indian restaurant. It was delicious. We went back to the house just once after that, to say good-bye. “I love you, Ma,” Aaron said to her, and she said, “I love you, sweetie pie,” to Aaron and to each of us, and then we left.

  Aaron liked to drink in airports, on planes, liked airplane bottles even when he wasn’t on an airplane. But he’d quit drinking. Instead, he took an Ativan, settling into his seat.

  “I can’t believe we took three planes to New Fucking Mexico and we weren’t even invited for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  I tried to reason. We were vegetarian.
His mom’s boyfriend was stressed out. He didn’t need to cook for a couple of picky kids.

  It wasn’t the point. The point was he didn’t feel welcome. He didn’t know what it felt like to be part of a family, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. I remembered a Thanksgiving years ago, when we lived in New York, his half-sister calling, the yelling that ensued. It had never been great, even when it was good. Was it a coincidence that both her other children no longer spoke to her?

  By the time we got back to Ithaca, Aaron was already getting sick. No, I told myself, no, no, nope. It’s something else. It’s just stress. Just trauma and grief and a bad headache. He called in sick to work one day. He was sent home sick the next.

  The day after that, his boss called him into her office. There had been some mistakes, she said. Miscalculations. She showed him some of the forms he’d filed. In the original versions, he’d gotten the numbers right, but then he’d corrected himself, and they were wrong. “It’s like you second-guess yourself,” she said. It was a pattern. He would be on a kind of probation period, to give him a chance to get it right. They liked him. They wanted to keep him on. But these were dollars, people’s lives.

  Aaron thought about it for a day. His body lit up like a match. And then he quit.

  “You’re quitting because you’re afraid you’ll be fired,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “So? I’m going to be fired anyway.”

  “They’re giving you a chance. Don’t pass up a chance.”

  He held his arms up, red with a fresh rash. “How am I supposed to work like this? I can’t fucking do it. My brain doesn’t work. My body’s falling apart. I’m not good at this shit.”

  I let him let it go.

  Was it the stress of seeing his mother? Or the stress of losing his job? Maybe he’d been right. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone to New Mexico. Maybe, if we hadn’t gone, he wouldn’t have gotten sick. It was like a virus, all the cold indifference in his mother’s house. He’d caught it and brought it home.

  She hung on for a few more months after that. He spoke to her on the phone in her last hours, told her again that he loved her. His half-brother, when Aaron called him, wanted nothing to do with her. His half-sister, estranged nearly as long, came to her death bed and was there in the end. There was a memorial for her in New York, but Aaron chose not to go to. He said he couldn’t stand to be around all her friends talking about how great she was.

  “How’s that going to look?” I said. “Us not showing up at your own mother’s funeral?”

  “I don’t give a shit how it looks,” he said.

  * * *

  The only thing that kept me from being consumed by disappointment was that Aaron was already consumed by disappointment in himself. He was disappointed enough for both of us. His body was enacting it, engulfed in flames, the self-pity battling the self-loathing. I could only make room for it. He sat on the couch and he lay in bed and he went to therapy and he didn’t hide it: he said he’d been knocked down and he was afraid he’d never get back up.

  Get back up! I said.

  Get back up! Stu said.

  This was a setback. Everyone had them. You’re not so special. Send out your résumé again! It had a nice new line on it, and he was pretty sure he’d get a good reference.

  You’re smart! Capable! That math was hard!

  Stu made recommendations to his doctor, mixing and matching his meds. Let’s drop the Depakote, let’s up the Wellbutrin, let’s try Seroquel, Ativan at night.

  Meanwhile I felt like stabbing a small innocent creature with the silverware as I unloaded the dishwasher. Maybe not the forks or knives. Maybe a spoon. Maybe not a creature. Maybe just a big bag of jasmine rice.

  I had spent nineteen years desperate for my husband to find work that would validate us. Nineteen years of writing cover letters for him. Please find attached … He’d stop me there. “That sounds weird. ‘Please find attached’?” “That’s what you say!” I’d scream.

  Everyone else’s husband was an engineer or an analyst or an exporter or did something else I didn’t understand but that meant a lot of money and a 401K. This was where my mind went while I threw the silverware in the drawer, the shiny, spotless blades hot from the dry cycle. I knew my friends’ marriages weren’t perfect. We talked shit about their spouses too, our Bluetooth earbuds picking up all the clatter of the dishes we were doing. The one whose husband played online video games with teenagers all weekend long. The one whose husband was addicted to porn. The one whose husband did not understand her needs. The one whose wife did not understand her needs. Almost always there were problems with work. There were the husbands who worked too much, the husbands who traveled too much, the husbands who got jobs that required them to move across the country. There were the husbands who lost their jobs. This was perhaps the most destabilizing marriage problem of all. Almost all my married friends had seen marriage counselors at some point, and no matter the chronic issues—sex, money, kids, communication—they were often brought to crisis, to instant instability, when their husbands lost their jobs. When will he get a new job? became the consuming question of my friends. They watched their husbands go out on interviews and I understood their worry and I hated them for it. Because their husbands always got another job. I would have given anything for my husband to get another job. I would have given anything for him to text, Sorry babe, I’ll be home late again.

  But what was it for, who was it for, my longing, my lamenting? Why did I need him to work so badly? I would be slamming the glasses into the cabinets by then. They were the same questions I’d asked in Virginia, pregnant with Nico, desperate for him to get a job. Was it so I could tell my friends? My family? Was it so our kids could be proud of him? Was it just because we were broke all the time and needed the money? We were; we did. But that was just part of it. What I wanted a job to give us, I was beginning to admit to myself, wasn’t just financial capital but social capital.

  There’s the man I married, I thought. It was the same sentence, now inspired by panic instead of pride. It didn’t really matter. Either way, I felt responsible for him, felt that he was responsible for me, that we manifested each other’s worth. And that was the messaging, wasn’t it? Ask more of your man! Don’t let him drag you down! Women did not, should not tolerate indolence. Women worked hard enough as it was, inside the home and out of it. Women should work and men should work; we should be equals; we should do the same thing.

  But wasn’t demanding that your husband work also the opposite of equality? Wasn’t that assumption also rooted in primitive models of marriage and, like, toxic masculinity? In repressive models of labor? Women should make a good marriage, so others know they’re good, too? Fuck that, right? Why were we still asking our men to go out into the woods and kill and drag home our dinner, in a time when people of any gender are capable of preheating an oven for an organic frozen pizza? Didn’t modern feminism need to include sympathy for male weakness, and to imagine masculinity in various forms? Wasn’t there strength in vulnerability, and all that? It seemed like a lot of things, or maybe just a lot of things that were happening in my house, were the epitome of American feminism and the exact opposite. I was confused and angry and tired of reading the New York Times’s Vows column—why did I keep reading it?—the crowns of roses, the rented barn behind the happy couple. Maybe none of the people in Vows had problems or maybe as a culture we had created a language to talk around all of the things we didn’t want to put in print.

  My dad lost his job when I was fifteen. He was let go from his position as head designer at an architecture firm he’d been with for years. The office was moving to another city and he was too old, sixty-two, to move with them. The phrase we used was “early retirement,” and then, when he tried to pick up work here and there, “consulting.” “He’s consulting,” I told my friends, trying on the word. What I felt was a need to use language to make a painful thing less painful for a man I cared about. I heard my mom say it, and I said
it, too. Meanwhile my mom had gone back to school to get her teaching certificate and she got a job teaching seventh-grade Language Arts. She went from homemaker to breadwinner, not because she wanted that title but because she wanted to pay for our college, for the Nikes my brothers kept growing out of.

  My dad didn’t last long in those consulting positions, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I suspected it had been a pattern all along. My parents moved several times when my brothers and I were small. The work dried up, was how my mother put it, but I wonder if my father’s short fuse, his fragile ego, was to blame. When he was a young man, after seven years in New York working for I. M. Pei, Pei reprimanded him for some work poorly done, or an attitude problem. Probably my dad’s feelings were hurt that Pei hadn’t shown sufficient deference to his designs. Pei told him to take some time off. My dad drove to Vermont to visit a friend, and he never went back to New York. He met my mom and married her. To try to save his self-respect, he quit before he could be fired.

  The euphemism we’d used for Aaron, “stay-at-home dad,” wasn’t a lie. Our progressive friends in Ithaca were impressed by it, or pretended to be impressed by it. That’s great! The most important job there is! Or they pretended to not be impressed by it. Cool, like it was the standard thing. It wasn’t exactly standard, but there was a Friday dads group that met at the baby store downtown, the one with the cloth-diaper delivery service, and they all gathered around the little germy indoor bouncy house, watching their toddlers topple one another. You should go, I told Aaron. No, he said.

  It seemed like the title “stay-at-home dad” expired when your kids started elementary school, though technically Henry had been in preschool practically full-time until then anyway. Still, Aaron picked them up from school, gave them a snack. It wasn’t like they could be alone. That was still his job, wasn’t it?