The trough between “kids move on” and “place burns down” was where I came in.
“I may be from southeast Arkansas, and I may talk slow. But that don’t make me no dumbass.”
Roy, the man who hired and trained me, had a point. Depending on who you asked, and how you defined it, he and his business partner—also named Roy—may or may not have been a couple of dumbasses, but no one could blame it on geography if they were. The term “good ole boys” may have originated in the South, but the South doesn’t have a monopoly on the type. I was perfectly at home with the Roys. The mill town I grew up in was full of guys like them, country boys who swaggered into the city with grandiose plans and dodgy schemes. True, Roy did talk excruciatingly slow, but his drawl actually made him seem a little more refined. With a face as broken as a sailor’s, and the body of a roughneck, he came across as brutish until he opened his mouth to speak in that deep Delta accent, the lazy beat of a cat’s tail as its metronome. It was rumored that they had done all right for themselves in certain cottage industries, and were in the bar business to branch out. I made it my business not to know.
They hired me on as a cocktail waitress, essentially working for tips. My belly-button ring was investment attire. I worked in low-slung, bell-bottom jeans, with a halter top knotted at my bosom, and towering platform heels. My hair, formerly styled in a preppy bob, had grown long past my shoulders. There was no trace of the earnest young woman who had played dress-up in pencil skirts and blazers and toted a briefcase up and down the elevator to a job at the Board of Trade, just two years earlier. This work felt more real, and in a way, more respectable. The correlation between the effort I put out and the cash in my back pocket was direct and immediate. I had to hustle.
“Hold it HIGH,” Roy bellowed at me, a cigar held askew between his teeth, my first night on the floor.
He gestured to the tray of drinks I clutched at waist level, and mimed the proper technique with one huge paw fully extended over his head, palm open to the ceiling and fingers spread. It seemed counterintuitive, but he was right. The tray was much easier to balance that way. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, along with other tricks of my new trade. Some were taught to me, like how to mix a perfect dry martini by chilling the glass with a shot of vermouth on ice, then dumping it out and pouring the gin or vodka over the trace that remained. Other skills I figured out on my own, like at what intervals a shot of whiskey would give me my second, third, and fourth wind without slowing me down. I was a good waitress, though I had a hard time counting American money in the dark, since it’s all the same color. Customers must have wondered if my impairment was mental or visual, as I held each bill up to my eyes to read what value was printed on it before giving them their change.
Patrick took up a regular position at the bar, becoming a kind of staff stringer, helping out at the door and with closing before we took off for the after-hours clubs. Sometimes inventory had to be bought out of cash receipts. The Roys handed a wad of bills to him one night and sent him down to the nearest liquor store with a list. It was a rough neighborhood, so they gave him a pistol.
“Better take this,” they told him.
“For what?” I asked, furious when I found out, “for someone to shoot you with?”
I had sidled up to the wild side, but in my mind, there was a line, and illegally carrying a gun crossed it. Partaking in the endless buffet of meth and cocaine crossed it. Too much booze crossed it. I didn’t want my wings clipped, but neither did I want to crash and burn from flying too high. The Whitewater was full of addicts and fugitives with one demon or another at their backs. That wasn’t free living, any more than a life of rigid convention was. The corner crew was looking less colorful and more tragic to me with each shift. It had been fun, but I couldn’t avoid real commitments and responsibilities indefinitely. Except that I saw that I might, and that scared me more than all the guns, drugs, and booze put together. It was closing time.
Patrick had been content to let his knee-jerk marriage proposal drop, once I decided to consolidate my attentions. We were very happy together, and I didn’t see how a piece of paper could add anything to our relationship, but I was in danger of wearing out my welcome with the U.S. government. I may have been an adulterous whore, but I was still too much of a nice Canadian girl at heart to stomach the life of an illegal.
I held out hope that my estranged husband would file for divorce from Canada, where it would be automatically granted after we’d lived apart for a year, but it was no surprise when the anniversary of our separation agreement came and went with no decree. We spoke once by telephone when I was in Mexico, long enough to know he wasn’t inclined to do me any favors. It was time for me to go home and dispose of the remains. I flew back by myself to handle it.
In a courtroom I testified that yes, those were our names on the petition. Yes, we were married. Yes, we still lived separate and apart. It was our wedding ceremony in negative, the bride attended by absences. No dearly beloved, no rings, no troth, no thee. Just me. Divorce granted. I wondered if I should call my ex-husband to let him know we had been unmarried that day, if that would be courteous or cruel. I got his voice mail, and left a message, telling him one more time how sorry I was.
I flew back to Little Rock, and we made plans to get married, quickly, quietly, and without fanfare. I thought we might do something a little offbeat, elope to Las Vegas, or a country wedding chapel. It would be a second marriage for both of us, Patrick having divorced the year before we met. It was only four years since my big white first wedding. I lost a year of my life to obsessing over stationery, orchids, and stemware patterns; sashayed down a red carpet on my father’s arm, all my doubts bound and gagged with a white satin bow. I suppose I thought if it looked like a fairy tale, it would end like one. I spared scant consideration for what came after happily ever after.
This time was different. I loved Patrick, he loved me, and that was enough. We didn’t need to decorate it. But since he had proposed once to me already, I thought it would be nice to return the compliment, so I surprised him with a ring. He accepted it, but popped his own question again anyway before giving me my engagement ring, a deep green tourmaline for a stone instead of a diamond. Suddenly, we were engaged twice. Ironic, for a couple who’d insisted all along that we didn’t need a ring.
From there, things took on a life of their own, as weddings seem to do. As news spread up and down the bar that we were getting married, our nuptials turned into a barn-raiser. A guitar player with the house band mentioned that his wife was an ordained minister. We didn’t care that she was ordained in the Church of Wicca, but we had to hide it from Patrick’s Southern Baptist parents.
“What denomination did you say she was?” his mother kept asking.
“Ah, ecumenical something or other,” we’d mumble, and then make up a burning question on floral arrangements or Italian buttercream, just to divert her attention.
As long as the Wiccan priestess was cool with the marriage license bureau, she was cool with us. Another band wife worked in the catering department of a posh hotel, and was able to swing us a deal on the fancy penthouse ballroom. Musician friends offered to come and jam for free beer. It was shaping up to be a party we couldn’t stand to miss.
From my tip money, I bought a couple of yards of ivory charmeuse and a precious bit of silk Venetian lace. It was important to me that the materials were natural, and the dress simple. My previous wedding gown, hermetically entombed in a box in my mother’s basement, was a white satin cyclone of sequins, netting, and bows. I was wary of sculpting another castle out of spun sugar. I wanted no artifice and a minimum of adornment. I sketched a long, plain slip with a small lace jacket, and brought it to our priestess, who, handily, also happened to be a seamstress. The result was even more spare than I had envisioned. I tried on the finished dress less than an hour before the ceremony, and discovered that the thin straps and low neckline didn’t cover my bra, and that my underpants were clearly visi
ble through the sheer fabric. Already running late for my own wedding, and faced with the prospect of going completely naked beneath handkerchief-ply silk, I dashed into the hotel gift shop, hoping in vain that they kept white G-strings and pasties on hand for spontaneous bachelor parties. There were only panty hose, queen size, in “suntan.” I grabbed a pair and ducked into the lobby restroom to pull them on, hiking the waistband up to my armpits like a body stocking—ready to be lawfully wedded, for better or worse.
I told myself all along that it didn’t really matter whether or not we got married; that I never really belonged inside the white picket fence. I’d jumped in, then jumped out, a trespasser. Unforgiven. It wasn’t just that I’d betrayed my husband; more grievously, I’d betrayed myself, because I married him when I knew better. I had no faith in marriage, because I had broken faith. But then I found—through the writing of the vows, the choosing of the guests, the selection of the rings, and the countless other details, symbolic and practical—that it did matter. There was a gate in the fence that hadn’t existed for me before, and it swung open as I walked up to it. Thus I entered matrimony, in full faith for the first time—soberly, advisedly, and in complete accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted. Wearing no panties and married by a witch.
2.
Meet the Sunshines
I’m too selfish to have kids,” I told my mother a few years before my first child was born, sitting at a wrought-iron table, exhaling smoke and affecting world-weariness, like we were outside a café in Montparnasse and not an ice cream parlor in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I was baiting her, as daughters in their twenties do when mothers come visiting, but I secretly worried it was true. I was not very maternal as a child. The attention I gave to my dolls was erratic and occasionally catastrophic, like the time I fed Baby Alive mashed leftovers after the packets of synthetic baby food ran out. She became constipated and moldy, and eventually bugs hatched inside her motorized bowels. It was truly gross negligence. My Barbie dolls were just plain abused. I gave them garish makeovers with felt-tip markers, back-combed their long silken hair into frizzy blond Afros, and left them lying around naked, like skid-row floozies passed out on bathtub gin.
Then there was the Sunshine Family: Steve, Stephie, and their baby, Sweets. They were packaged as harmless, peace-loving hippies, but the constricted pupils in their vacant, round eyes suggested they might be a family the way the Mansons were a family. “Welcome to the warm world of The Sunshines,” the back of the box said. Please leave your legal name and all your worldly attachments behind.
The Sunshines’ world was not all that warm. According to my mother, who overheard me playing with them, Steve and Stephie were constantly bickering.
“Get the baby!”
“It’s your turn!”
“I do everything!”
Poor Sweets. Poor Barbie, and poor, poor Baby Alive. If there had been a Department of Doll Social Services, they’d all have been taken away.
I got pregnant barely six months after I married Patrick. It was planned, but only for about five minutes in advance of conception. I had gone for a walk near the river and came back to our apartment with a four-leaf clover in my hand. I held it out to Patrick, and joked that it must be a sign, since it was Mother’s Day, and thought I was probably ovulating. I was chronically forgetful about taking birth control pills. “There’s a full moon tonight, too,” I teased. “If we ever wanted to make a baby, now would be the time.”
What Patrick heard was, “Let’s have sex now.”
I knew the moment we conceived. I knew in the same instant that I deeply wanted a baby. It seemed like a wish that was so new and tender called for some kind of reinforcement, so later that night, I made Patrick walk with me in the moonlight through a nearby wooded park, to an ancient oak, at the base of which I buried a little nautilus shell, an improvised symbol of protection for the tiny life I was sure flickered inside.
“This is pretty witchy,” Patrick observed.
“It’s asking a blessing,” I said with authority, though I wasn’t sure of whom we were asking it. I didn’t believe in religion, but I was a poet, and I believed in its etymology, religare: to bind, to fasten. I was tethering a soul to my body. I whispered a prayer that our child would be blessed in every way, then we walked out of the woods, laughing and feeling high.
The next day, the signs seemed less clear. Maybe I was pregnant, but then again, why give up happy hour on the basis of hunches and superstition? It hardly seemed prudent. But I substituted sips of wine for swilling bourbon, and counted off the days before I could take a home pregnancy test and find out for sure. Fourteen days after the night of the full moon, I peed on a plastic stick, then watched with Patrick as the test developed. It was hardly the first time I’d nervously waited for the results of a pregnancy test, but this was a different kind of nervous. It was looking into the same little window from the opposite side.
The first pink line, and then the second, developed, confirming that I was indeed pregnant—and as far as I was concerned, the first woman in the history of the world to ever have been. It was critical that I gestate perfectly. I immediately regretted the couple of glasses of wine I’d had since conceiving. How bad was that, I wondered. Where else had I already gone wrong? I needed answers. I ran straight out and bought a copy of the prenatal health classic What to Expect When You’re Expecting, commonly referred to as WTE within online pregnancy support groups—a convenient abbreviation, as it converts readily to WTF after you read the book.
What it told me to expect is that breeding is a highly complex and delicate process that requires standards and oversight not enforced in nuclear facilities. Fall short of 100 grams of protein a day, and you have only yourself to blame for your child’s subpar intelligence. Allow preservatives or alcohol to cross the placenta, and you are begging for social and emotional disorders. Sugar? Why don’t you just take a shit in the gene pool? It’s the “Scared Straight” program of prenatal health.
We moved from our one-bedroom apartment into a two-bedroom downstairs duplex, and began scavenging yard sales for baby gear. The array of equipment deemed essential by parenting magazines was staggering. We couldn’t hope to acquire all of it, even secondhand. The cost of raising a child to adulthood is a newswire perennial, with the bottom line always estimated to be roughly even with the GDP of a small developing nation. I take a skeptical view of the math today. It strikes me as a transparent scare tactic to keep poor people from reproducing, perpetuated by the same experts who would have it believed that a human fetus can’t thrive if exposed to a Twinkie. But then, I believed every word. We needed that stuff.
Relax, said my midwives. Get some diapers and a car seat.
“How much will it all cost?” I fretted to Patrick.
“It will always cost a little more than we have,” he said with uncanny foresight. “Relax.”
The pregnancy books and magazines set impossible standards, but at least they were measurably impossible. I could tell where I came up short in grams of protein, or pairs of booties, and decide how much I was willing to worry about it. But I had no way of knowing if I possessed enough love or patience, or if I had the right psychological equipment on hand. I could avoid hazardous substances like preservatives and alcohol, but what about toxic feelings? Did anger, resentment, and insecurity cross the placenta? I hoped not, because I was surely exceeding the safe level. Angst churned in my gut like acid, and the source of it was the gaping disconnect between the way Patrick and I were experiencing pregnancy. It might seem like an obvious state of affairs, given that I was pregnant and he wasn’t, but I had naively assumed that we would be of one mind, if not womb, from the moment of conception to the moment of birth. Meanwhile, he acted as if expecting a baby was just one of several compelling things going on in his life—sometimes as if it was the least of them.
I thought our rock-and-roll lifestyle was behind us, even before I got pregnant. When a kitchen fire shut down the bar I worked
in, I heard it as last call, and decided to sign up with a temp agency and look for office work instead. Patrick, who already had a straight job, had been playing a little guitar on weekends with a rhythm-and-blues cover band, but it conveniently crashed and burned around the same time. Anyone could see the writing on the wall. But where I read “The End,” he saw “To Be Continued,” accepting a new gig with a band that had an aggressive practice and booking schedule, and an even more aggressive drinking schedule.
Years later, that band came up in a conversation at a dinner party. One of the women remembered seeing Patrick perform, but her husband was drawing a blank.
She nudged him. “It was the night we danced and danced, and then you threw up.”
“That’s the band!” Patrick and I said in unison. There was no mistaking it. Throwing up was a reliable identifier.
Gigs were a race between the band and fans to see who could get the most drunk first. Often as not, the band won, and the music suffered. The fans were never far enough behind to care. Patrick loved being onstage in front of an appreciative audience, even if they did tend to black out. He’d gone into his first marriage and a desk job straight out of art school, and it was a chance to trip down the path not taken. Only the path wasn’t cut out for the wide load I was carrying. A year earlier, when I could drink, smoke, and party all night, I would have been fan number one. Instead, I was moody, tired, and stone-cold sober; number one shrew.
I was only a little bit sorry about begrudging Patrick his time with the band, but I was sincerely ashamed of resenting the other chief rival for his attention: his terminally ill mother. That spring, she had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and the life growing in me and the life slipping from her placed us at opposite doors of a long hallway, a juxtaposition that was cruel for everyone. Patrick’s close-knit family was stricken with shock and dread, and I was deeply grieved with them, but I also felt cheated of our full measure of joy.
Planting Dandelions Page 2