Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  Two weeks after that dinner, and two weeks after telling Tom on the way home that I couldn't stay with him any longer, I sat alone in the dark bathroom at the end of our own house, watching the water in the sink run over the washcloth, afraid to face my own kids. I didn't want to go back into the living room, where they would stare at me, wondering why I'd done this—why I'd announced the split from their dad and caused the breakup of our family. When the water was about to run over the sink, I shut it off and used the wrung-out cloth to make a quick rub of my own face, around my eyes, under my chin, across my dry lips. I rinsed and squeezed the cloth again, then I turned and opened the door. I would have spent the night, a couple of nights, in that bathroom if I'd thought I could avoid the consequences of what earlier that evening had felt like my only choice—telling the girls I was leaving their father.

  Blood equals hurry. When mothers see their children bleed, they rush to help. And though every other time my daughters had bled I'd scurried to fix them, the last thing I could do this evening was hustle. I didn't want my daughters to be anguished because of me, to be angry or confused because of me—but they were. I moved through the hallway back to the living room, wondering if they'd all be bleeding because of what I'd done. Red on the chairs and red on the old sofa and stains on the brown oak floor.

  But when I stood at Tom's seat again I saw that Stephanie's crying had turned into hiccups and the blood on her cheeks was already becoming crusty. The coppery smell no longer rose from her skin. I handed Tom the cloth and he touched it to her neck, though Stephanie buried her face into the side of his shirt so she could avoid looking at me. My husband did look, though; straight at me, his own moist eyes meeting my dry ones. "I don't get it," he said. "I really don't." He shook his head, staring at me. "When did you get so cold?"

  Tom and I had met in college—when I was a sophomore and he was a junior. I considered him a wildly mysterious set of contradictions, not yet realizing that contradiction was actually my own disguise at the time. My name was on the dean's list, and I studied for hours each night in the student union building's smoking section. I was vice president for mental advancement for one of my clubs. I chain-smoked Marlboro cigarettes and loaded myself with ten-cent cups of coffee, eating maple bars for dinner while writing about the sod images in My Ántonia. But sometime around eleven, when the student union closed, I'd make my way to a bar where the English majors congregated and where for long stretches I drank too much beer and became overly boisterous and flirty, and we all tried to impress one another with talk of books and writers and by reciting "Thanatopsis" by heart. I drank and drank some more, blushing at attention from boys I believed were too smart, too good, for me, and yet tipping in to press against one or another's shoulder for a few seconds, getting close enough that he could smell the dark hollow of my neck.

  When I heard about Tom, I suddenly wanted his attention too—wanted it a lot—though for reasons I couldn't decipher. I'd been warned about his antics, the bottle of whiskey he often carried in the pocket of his down vest, and the chewing tobacco he'd sometimes squirt through his front teeth, making a liquid brown arc that would land near others' feet. One day, after hearing about how he'd been arrested again, this time for trying to climb the brick and ivy walls of the administration building to break the minute hand off the giant clock—and falling into the bushes below—I decided I had to meet this guy who had such nerve and could demonstrate such badness. I had to find out why he didn't care about disappointing parents or professors or university administrators, how he did only what he wanted anytime he wanted to do it.

  I waited by his baby blue 1960s Ford pickup truck until he came out of the house he lived in, and I started up a conversation with him about nothing. We ended up sitting on the wheel wells in the bed of the pickup for five or six hours, talking. His voice, I remember, was soft. Shy even. He was tall and thin, wore dirty Levi's and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots. His two front teeth were marked with small brown squiggles that I'd later learn were caused by fluoride. That first afternoon, those teeth stains were another sign of his vulnerability, instantly making me want to take care of him and allowing me to form in my mind a defense of what I'd decided that day was his misjudged character.

  After that, I was known as his defender and he was known as my boyfriend. That is, others started calling him that because it was common knowledge that we were sleeping together, and after some months I began calling him my boyfriend too, though it wasn't a label or relationship he wanted. The weekend after I graduated, three years after we'd met, we got married because I'd convinced Tom this was the natural next step, the right thing to do now that we were college educated and had entered adulthood. Besides, my own parents, married practically as children and now in the middle of a divorce, were each calling me regularly to complain about the other. I couldn't imagine a better way to slip from the grip of their unhappiness than to make a tidy little family of my own.

  During our college romance, Tom and I didn't go out to dinners or movies, we didn't imagine a future with a mortgage and a station wagon and towheaded babies—instead, on a Saturday night he might knock on the dorm window some hours after the bars closed, waking the other girls, who'd bark at me to get rid of him. I'd yank on my sweatpants and a T-shirt and meet him in the alley. Throwing his arm around my shoulder, he'd sip the last of a pint of Wild Turkey out of a paper bag or smoke a joint as we walked back to his house, the metal edges of his boot heels sparking off the sidewalk. Those nights, we had sex in his small, musky room, Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger the soundtrack, Tom's whiskey breath hot in my hair. Sometime before dawn I'd sneak back to my own place, hoping no one would notice any evidence of what I liked to think was a secret life. Of course they did; girls reporting to other girls that I was not the straight-and-narrow student I pretended to be, going to my Phi Beta Kappa meetings every third Thursday and my Mortar Board meetings each first Tuesday, delighting my parents and my teachers and the foundation officer who wrote out my scholarship check. I couldn't stop seeing this boy. I couldn't tell him to leave me alone or even to take me out to a restaurant like a real boyfriend. I couldn't convince myself that I should have a plan for the years ahead. Instead, late at night I waited for a sign from him that he wanted me, that I was want-able by someone who wanted nothing. He'd drawn no lines limiting what he did or to whom he did it, a freedom I couldn't even imagine but could try to absorb from him when he was around. This resolve of mine to be with him was beyond my understanding then, only slightly less fuzzy now. For some reason, he was the mystery—horrible and exciting at once—that made me feel most alive.

  As these college years went on, I refused to admit what was obvious to everyone else: Tom and I were a lousy match. I waited jumpily for him to call, to come by. He drove around in his old blue truck, the bed full of whiskey bottles and straw bales. He pulled all-nighters to barely pass classes he'd ignored all semester, somehow getting assignments done in the very nick of time. Just before he graduated, he was arrested again for driving on downtown sidewalks and for smashing beer bottles on a college building's stoop.

  After that last one, Tom phoned to ask me to visit him in the county jail. Without telling my friends where I was going, I rode the bus to the distant side of town, underwent a search of my purse and pockets, then stood behind the glass that separated visitor from inmate, my back resting against a wall of exposed brick. I hadn't known what to expect—but this visit already was no fun, no good, not even fodder for a story I'd want to tell my English-major pals later. I shivered. I didn't know why I was there; I didn't belong. Did I belong? Later I'd believe that this period at jail was my penance, my sentence—or at least one last piece of glaring evidence—for failing to listen to the side of myself that knew our union was no good.

  At the jail, Tom, skinny, pale, jumpy, someone I didn't particularly want to be connected to but to whom I was irrevocably connected by then, like it or not, told me they'd just eaten hamburgers and freshly cut fried potat
oes, and that he'd made friends with the other men even though they gave him crap about being a college boy. He pulled down his pants to show me his jail-issued underwear, stamped with a thick black number across the rear, while I looked out the sunny window and over the rolling fields of golden wheat trying to pretend I didn't know him.

  When he wasn't in trouble, or when his wealthy father wasn't making calls to keep him out of trouble, Tom was bored. Bored, he'd jump on a train. I'd realize I hadn't seen him around for two or three days and then I'd know he'd gone to the rail yard with aluminum-foil-wrapped potatoes in his pocket and a pint of whiskey in his pants. He'd hop a freight car. He knew the regulars, hoboes who emerged from the train smoke as if from a Waylon Jennings ballad, and together they'd ride to Montana or Washington State, sleeping under bridges at night and cooking the potatoes in small fires for dinner. Or so he told me. And maybe later told Amanda and Stephanie. Somehow, anyway, they became aware of the allure of their father's train-jumping past.

  At the end of my senior year I was busy panicking about gradu ation, about leaving the campus, the town, where I'd had the kind of contained success I could recognize. A safe, predictable success. But then my Romantic poetry teacher handed back a major exam on which I had earned a B-, my lowest grade in the past several years, and that knocked me out of the running for the golden cords worn at graduation by the most accomplished students. I stumbled to my apartment, humiliated by this dash of failure in an academic environment I'd believed would never fail me. I pledged to avoid anything that could make me feel that way again. I talked myself into focusing on our wedding, which was planned for the week after graduation. On the pretty bridesmaids and the abundance of roses and gardenias. I sat in my little apartment with my face resting on the cover of Riverside Shakespeare and told myself that marriage was good and right and that I must now enter it.

  Twelve years after that wedding day—a parade of pastel-gowned girls and tuxedoed boys that my mother had executed to perfection, followed by a feast of salmon and champagne I couldn't eat or drink because I was newly pregnant and queasy—I moved my children and myself out of our Tucson house and into an apartment nearby that was mine and not Tom's. In that decade-plus of matrimony, I'd gotten what I'd thought I wanted. Tom had gone to work and soon enough started a business of his own. We took our pink-clad girls to church, where we taught the seventh-grade Sunday school class. We made hordes of young-parent friends and often crammed them into whatever Craftsman house we were fixing up at the time for wine cocktails and baby spinach quiches. Tom still liked to wander down the street to smoke pot at his friend Pete's house rather than help me get the girls bathed and put to bed, but that was no big deal. I fought with him about chores for the sake of fighting, but I secretly wanted to be in charge of the sweeping and cleaning and child-tending, and usually redid any of his domestic efforts anyway. What upset me more were the times I'd come home to find him building a bonfire in our suburban backyard, our hyped-up and ash-covered daughters throwing scrap wood onto the flames. Or hammering another tree house into the big maple, a structure the electric company later tore down after chewing me out for posing a danger to the neighborhood kids. The wildness that flared in Tom was milder, yes, and not as threatening as it had been in college—I knew for sure that it no longer thrilled me. Now his rebel self, when it emerged, was irritating. I was irritated at him and he at me, and it wasn't long before the girls noticed our divide: a mother who wanted to play it safe, and a father who thrived on danger.

  Before Tom and I got married, we'd borrowed my father's Audi sedan and drove to Arizona so I could meet Tom's family and get the first long gander at the utopian ranch he talked about endlessly. He'd promised me we'd hunt for scorpions with a black light in the cracks of the exterior adobe and in the interior closets in the house and take hikes around rattlesnake dens while skirting the inch-long thorns on the cat-claw bushes. About three o'clock one morning during that trip, when we'd just crossed the Arizona border, Tom pulled the car over to pee. We'd reached the deep, broad, and very white bowl of the Hoover Dam, gleaming like a giant skater's park on the mountaintop. I got out of the car to stretch and watched as my boyfriend hopped onto one of the retaining walls then scrambled to the top of one of the highest barriers, teetering there at the edge of a maybe six-hundred-foot fall to the bottom. I didn't move. I didn't cry out or shout or even breathe, worried that even the slightest air out of my mouth would be wind enough to topple him from the skinny perch and frantic already about whom I'd call after he fell. Weaving and bobbing, Tom unzipped his jeans and a second later sent an arc of yellow urine—glittering a bit under the towering mercury vapor lamps—into the scoop of the dam.

  It occurs to me now to make this episode a pronounced emblem of our marriage. Tom on the edge, whatever edge, while I'm standing back, cautious and often very afraid. As our girls were growing up, he'd often say, "Don't listen to her—she's scared of everything," to my "Back up, you're too close," to my "Leave it alone, it's too dangerous." Repeated and repeated. We had hardly any interest in common, nothing to say to each other except for the distracting chatter about our daughters, how funny they were and how cute. And now I understand: soon after Amanda's birth Tom started to become irrelevant to me, each subsequent child made him matter less. I had daughters to love, to mold, to adore, to bring through childhood as I wanted. This boy-man's antics were in my way.

  As for Tom, he didn't like that I was gone so much after Mollie had finished nursing and I had begun to take classes and get into some paid work of my own. Mostly he didn't like that I had new friends who had little to do with him. During this year, the last of our marriage, Tom often fled to the ranch, appearing at home every few days to argue with me again about our lack of money, my lack of concern and care for him. By then, I was done with my husband, done with our nattering fights that had no beginnings or ends but looped one into the other until they were a dissonant buzz around my head. As if the marriage were a fuel-dense forest on fire, my attitude was let it burn. It was the dawn of the nineties and I was the cliché of the dawning-nineties woman—sure I could leave my husband and get it all, have it all, whatever "it all" was.

  The day I moved us out of our house, I did so in secret. Tom was off at the ranch for the day, and an hour after he'd left, I'd jammed every inch of our van with the girls' belongings and mine. I drove both giddy and scared a few miles toward the bone-dry river and, at the apartment complex, turned into the parking-lot slip—number 6. But before I'd even yanked the car's emergency brake, I spotted him—Tom—sitting on the front porch of my new apartment. I still don't know how he found out where I planned to live, but he had. For a few seconds I stayed in my seat, heat rising into my face and bursting out the top of my head while the air conditioner blew one cold line across my sweaty neck. I yanked the van into reverse, ready to pull out of the spot, ready to drive down the street to find another apartment to rent. I felt my husband's smugness through the metal and windshield of our family's car—if his message was that he could always find me if he wanted to, I got it. And now I had to run again.

  Then I remembered the money—the thousands of dollars my parents had given me for the deposit. The landlord had told me that once I'd accepted the keys, the sum was nonrefundable. The money is what got me to turn off the car, to open my door. Even so, I avoided glancing in Tom's direction. I walked around the back of the van instead of the front, slid the side door open, and buried myself in the dark space inside, resting my forehead against the edge of Mollie's car seat until I was ready to move again.

  I pulled the biggest box from the interior and carried it in front of me across the overly lush lawn so Tom couldn't see my face. I wanted change to be easy—I wanted him to let it be easy. But there he was, muddying the smooth transition I'd counted on. His body was sprawled over the white, hot concrete steps, keeping me from the front door that was mine. Behind my box shield, I felt him, maybe I smelled him—the familiar scent of his glistening sweat rising in the
hot air.

  I'd told him that if I lived without him for a while, I'd have distance to think about our marriage and about him and what I could and could not commit to. I told him that if he would get out of my sight, out of my path, out of my way for a few weeks or months then I could find my clear head and work out what was best. But when I set the box on the sidewalk Tom was every bit there, grinning, his elbows resting on the concrete steps and a set of keys dangling from one index finger.

  He wore a T-shirt he'd owned since college and a pair of cutoff jeans from which his long legs, coated in a fine layer of blond hair, angled down the stair steps, ending in a worn pair of red flip-flops, one of which he slapped, slapped, slapped against his heel.

  "Where'd you get those?" I asked him, pointing to the keys hanging from his finger.

  "Easy," he said, squinting in a way that made the crow's-feet around his eyes deepen. He jingled the keys, which had its desired effect—I was even more irate. "I told the manager that I'm the husband."