“Raney. . . .”
“Goodbye.” I hung up. Then it struck me what the family was going to think. If there was any way to get out of that then I had to do it. I couldn’t—just couldn’t—let everybody find out my marriage was failing, but Lord knows, I had been so mad that all I could think about, all I could see in my head, was getting out of that house.
Maybe Charles would admit how wrong he was. Maybe he would listen. But I doubted it. Then I didn’t doubt it a little bit. Then I doubted it again.
“Sit down and tell me all about it if you want to,” says Aunt Flossie, coming back in the living room. Something flooded up from inside and I burst out in tears that came and came and came and kept coming and I couldn’t do nothing about it and Aunt Flossie said to cry and keep crying all I wanted to, so I did.
I was finally able to explain everything—it poured and poured and poured out—about how the whole family was just starting to recover from a death and my own husband has to go make everything worse, throw everything off the deep end by accusing my mother of something she would never, never do in her life. And I told her about a few other arguments that had made me feel awful. But I tried to tell her that Charles might be doing the best he could.
Aunt Flossie didn’t say anything much. She just patted me on the back and told me to cry all I wanted to.
VII
It’s been two days now. I go home at around eight-thirty in the morning after Charles leaves for work. Then I come back to Aunt Flossie’s before lunch in case Charles comes home for lunch. I suppose he still does. He always used to.
It’s been the saddest thing. I don’t get anything done when I’m home. Uncle Nate dying and then this with Charles has been worse than anything I’ve ever been through.
It’s like the two main parts of my life, Charles and home, being struck through with sadness and hurt. And pure hate. I just can’t understand what got into Charles. How he could say those things about Mama and my whole family. He seemed so intent on getting up on a white horse and saying all those things about Mama.
He’s made a mistake sticking this psychology on people who’re doing the best they can for each other. This psychology could give a good report on somebody’s who’s not trying, but who’s lucky; then on somebody who’s trying it might turn up a bad report. There is no way to know who’s trying unless you can look in their heart. Which we can’t do.
Charles has a good heart. I know. He wouldn’t have said all that psychology about Daddy or Aunt Flossie. He’ll sit around and talk to them and discuss things. But anybody else in the family don’t have a chance and I know they all notice.
Sometimes I think life is a bed of rose thorns.
I started missing Charles today. Little things. One thing is he’ll get excited about the newspaper, what’s in the paper in the mornings, and I usually ask him a couple of questions about what he’s shaking his head about or mumbling about. And you know Charles. He gets to going on about whatever it is, which is the way I learn about some of the news on TV. Plus those pajamas I kid him about. They’ve got sailboat steering wheels all over but I tell him they look like Cheerios or I ask him how his Cheerios feel, or what he’s doing wearing Cheerios.
And I feel so alone.
Yesterday I left Charles a note asking him if he’d sent in this month’s church money. This morning when I went home he had left a note saying he had. He also left me a cassette tape. And on the note he said he wanted to come by Aunt Flossie’s to see me and maybe we could talk about seeing a psychiatric—a marriage counselor. He said he’s just gone to see one and that if I didn’t want to talk it over with him at lunch then to call him at work, otherwise he’d come by Aunt Flossie’s. He said he missed me and was sorry it all happened, and that so much had seemed to come between us over the last few weeks, and that maybe we could just talk a little. I played the tape. It was Charles playing his banjo and singing:
I see the moon and the moon sees me.
The moon sees the one that I want to see.
God bless the moon and God bless me.
And God bless the one that I want to see.
It tore up my heart and I played it twice more. It tore up my heart all three times. It was so sweet and soft. (I wouldn’t dare ever tell Charles, but his B string was very slightly flat.)
I talked it over with Aunt Flossie about us getting that kind of help. She seemed to think it’s a good idea if the psychiatric has any sense. She agreed that something has to be done.
Charles came by at lunch. Before he came, Aunt Flossie had fixed us ham, cheese, and lettuce sandwiches and ice tea, brought it all in the living room and put it on the coffee table and then left to go shopping for some weather stripping—she said. I was watching when Charles turned in the driveway. He got out of the car with some kind of newspaper in his hand. He knocked and I let him in and we sat on the couch for a minute or two, not saying anything, just breathing, looking straight ahead at Aunt Flossie’s little roll top desk and the sandwiches on the coffee table.
“The sandwiches are for us,” I said.
“Oh, good.”
We picked up our sandwiches, took a bite, and sat there not saying anything, just breathing and chewing, looking straight ahead.
“Did you get my note?” said Charles.
“Yes, and the tape.”
“Is it okay if I show you something here in the college newspaper?”
“Okay.”
It was a newspaper article on marriage counseling at the Hansen County Mental Health Clinic.
“See,” said Charles, “here it says these people ‘have training in helping married couples find different ways to communicate and seek out sources of problems, including potentially destructive patterns of behavior.’ I mean you don’t have to be having any kind of mental problems, and this woman is really nice and I asked her about you coming along with me and she said she thought that was a very good idea, but only if you’d agree.”
“A woman psychiatric?”
“Psychologist. Yes.”
“I want to do something, Charles. All this has been so much and I feel so tired and some of those arguments and that last one just got me down to the core and I don’t know why all that happened. I feel so tired now. All that with Uncle Nate and now all this.”
“I want to do something too, Raney. I . . . I . . .” Charles looked at me. His chin began to quiver and then his mouth and then his whole face got out of shape and he said, “I miss you.”
My heart went to mush. I couldn’t be mad. “I miss you too, Charles. And I miss your Cheerios pajamas.”
He laughed and we hugged each other tight. He asked me if I still loved him and I said I did and he said he loved me too. How in the world things can be so one way and then so the other way I will never understand.
We agreed for me to come back home and I felt so relieved. I was so tired and I wanted to go home. I walked Charles out to the car and we talked for a few minutes out there. When I came back in, I noticed only one bite was gone from each one of our sandwiches. I was so hungry I sat down and ate both of them.
When Aunt Flossie got back she was really happy to hear the news and said she was glad we were going to try to work on things and not just let them get swept under the rug.
Driving home I tried to think about what was happening. I can understand hating Charles on the outside and loving him down in the core, but when you go through a bunch of arguments in a row and then through a short spell of hating your own husband all the way down in the core, then you’ve got to figure it out so that it won’t get worse and worse. I’m willing to try anything—even a psychiatric. I figure a psychiatric might be able to explain to Charles at least some of what he did wrong.
VIII
The Hansen County Mental Health Clinic is a brick building without the first tree. We waited in the waiting room. I was a nervous wreck. Charles tried to act calm.
There was a boy and a man sitting across from us. The man was holding a newspape
r in front of his face and the little boy struck a match every minute or two. He’d shake them out and drop them in the trash can.
“Stop striking them matches, Oscar,” says the man, not moving his newspaper.
Oscar strikes another match. And in a minute, another one.
“Oscar, I said stop striking the matches.”
Oscar strikes another match and the man jerks the paper to his chest and reaches out his hand to hit Oscar’s hand but stops short and don’t hit him. The match goes out and the man slaps Oscar’s hand.
“You retard,” says Oscar.
“I’m gonna kill you when we get home.”
“I ain’t going in there.” Then Oscar gets up and starts toward the hall door. His daddy or whoever it was—somehow it didn’t feel like his daddy—told him to sit down, but Oscar just stood over by the magazine rack, thumbing through a National Geographic.
I felt like I had to say something to help the man out, so I said, “Son, you might burn your house down someday and then you wouldn’t have a place to live.”
Charles looks at me like I committed the original sin.
“I just told the boy what he needs to be told,” I said.
Charles sticks his fingertips up to his temples and slides down into his seat, making the vinyl cover squeak.
About that time a woman comes to the door and asks if we are the Shepherds and then leads us into a nice office with a desk and desk chair, about twenty green plants, and three of those director chairs—orange, green, and yellow. I took the green and Charles took the yellow.
In walks our psychiatric. She introduces herself, Dr. Mary Bridges, sits down and explains all about her background—she got her training in Boston—and about how on Wednesdays she leaves her private practice in Linnville and comes to the clinic to work.
She was tall and wore glasses and had a kind of flat face—almost like a Japanese. She made us feel as comfortable as possible, I suppose. I figured the thing to do was show her that we were normal and just needed some help—that we won’t mentally ill in any way.
She went into something about discovering underlying issues and then said, “Let me start by asking if you have any questions.”
Lord, I didn’t know what to ask yet. I felt like I was in a dark room. So in order to relieve a little of the tension I said, “I feel like I’m in the dark.” Charles reaches over his shoulder and turns on the light, which we don’t need because the sunlight is flooding in through a giant window.
“Charles, that’s not what I mean.”
Charles turns the light back out.
“Well, you could leave it on,” I said.
He turned it back on.
“That’ll be fine,” says Dr. Bridges. “Let me start by asking how you two met. Charles?”
“Well,” says Charles, “I got the library job here at the community college, came up from Atlanta, and had been here several months when I heard Raney singing at the faculty Christmas dinner. I spoke to her afterward and told her how much I enjoyed her singing. I play banjo and was hoping that we might be able to play music together, somehow. Then a few days later she came in the library looking for a Mel Tillis record—”
“It won’t Mel Tillis,” I said.
“Raney, I remember writing it down on the checkout card.”
“That must have been some other girl, because—”
“Anyway, whatever it was, we struck up a conversation, and one thing led to another.”
“It won’t a Mel Tillis record.”
“Raney,” Dr. Bridges says to me, “let me stick with Charles for a few minutes more, and then you may have a chance to straighten out inconsistencies as you see them. Right now I’m mainly interested in how you and Charles met, and it makes it easier for me to hear from you one at a time.”
“Okay,” I said. Now I could tell right off that there’d be a lot of mistakes going on here and that I might not get a chance to correct any until it was too late. If Charles spun off a row of six mistakes, not that he’d do that on purpose, by the time he got to number six, I would have lost track. I figured right then and there that I might as well get comfortable with a lot of inaccuracies on the record.
Dr. Bridges was taking notes. “Now,” she says, “what do you mean, Charles, ‘one thing led to another’?”
“Well, we’d talk in the library about music, mainly. At the time I was collecting some original folk music from the mountains and learning to play banjo. Then we started going out and playing music together.”
“What led you to fall in love with and marry Raney?”
“Well, that’s hard to say. I mean, you know. She was different from anybody I had ever met—still is. Independent. Very attractive. Beautiful voice. And I think I’d reached a point where I wanted to get married when the right person came along.”
“What would you say you liked most about Raney before you were married?”
“Well, I certainly liked the way she looked, although that would be a poor excuse to get married. I liked the way she sang, her honesty and the slightly weird way she looked at things.”
“Slightly weird?”
“Well, she would have these stabs of common sense, or something, which would stun me sometimes and I’d never experienced that in a woman before.”
“Oh? Okay, well let me—”
“I don’t mean that as a sexist statement. What I mean is that I’d never experienced that in anyone I’d dated or anything. On the other hand, I also assumed, I guess, that Raney and her family would be able to manage a certain amount of flexibility—that she and her mother and aunts would at least be able to—”
“I’d like to save some of these things until later if I might. Let me give Raney a chance to add any points she might have on your courtship and engagement. Raney, what led you to fall in love with and marry Charles?”
“Listen, my mama and aunts—”
“If at all possible I’d like to save points of disagreement until later—we will discuss problem areas in some detail. Let me just ask what led you to fall in love with and marry Charles?”
“Well, one of Charles’s strong points was his mind. I’ve dated better looking boys. And I just liked him a lot and he was easy to talk to and I liked him more and more right up to the day he asked me to marry him and by that time I loved him and had told him so and he’d told me so. Course there was his interest in music and he knew all this background about country music, and Mama and Daddy liked him all right. Or Daddy did. Maybe more than Mama.”
“Okay. I just wanted to get an idea of the initial stages of your relationship and your feelings about each other.”
“We didn’t have a relationship until after we got married.”
“Excuse me?”
“We didn’t have a relationship until after we got married—and Charles set that up. I mean I do my part but he sets it up.”
“Oh? Oh. No, I don’t mean a sexual relationship. I mean a, ah, regular relationship. Perhaps we can come back to that later.”
“Back to what?”
“Your sexual relationship.”
“That’s not what we’re here for.”
“Perhaps not, but—. Well, let’s see, I think at this point I’d like to get some idea of what you feel your problems are. Who’d like to start?”
We just sat there.
“Well,” Dr. Bridges says, “perhaps I can say a few more words about what I hope we’ll be able to accomplish here.” She talked about how conflict could be good and so on for a while, and then asked us what we had in mind to accomplish during our sessions.
Charles spoke right up. “I’d like a third observer,” he says. “Someone who is objective. We seem to observe the world from different vantage points. So what we need is—”
“I’m only doing what I think is right,” I said. “You think I do what I do because I think what you do is wrong. That’s what you think. What it is, Dr. Bridges, is Charles’s family background and that’s not entirely his fault
. I don’t think—”
“My family background. It doesn’t—”
“Wait a minute. You can’t—”
“You wait a minute. I was talking first.”
“Do you see what I mean, Dr. Bridges? He—”
“Do you see what I mean?”
Dr. Bridges says, “Let me see if I can understand what each of you is saying. Charles, you would prefer a third point of view concerning your marriage conflicts. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And Raney, you feel that your marriage problems may stem from a difference in early family experiences?”
“I wouldn’t say they stem from it,” I said. “I’d say that’s it.
And it’s family background and ways of looking at things. Not just experiences. The main problem is what Charles thinks of my family. My Uncle Nate just, just died, and he blames my mama.”
“That is not what I said, Raney. You—”
“Just a minute, Charles,” says Dr. Bridges. “We’ll get back to that. Raney, I don’t mean to keep us from talking about problems you’re having now. In fact that’s probably going to make up a good part of our therapy.”
I stared at Dr. Bridges. “What is this therapy part? I didn’t know about that.”
“This is the therapy part,” says Dr. Bridges. “Therapy means we work together regularly for a while, talking, trying to understand your marriage in a way that will enable us to solve some of the problems you’re having. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Now,” she said, “So Raney you believe some of your problems stem from differences in family background?”
“That’s right.”
“Well,” she says, “I think we’ve identified several starting points. Both of you should know that for some time you may be angry after some of our sessions. We manage to stir up some volatile issues. But over a period of time I’m hoping we’ll be able to understand and manage some of those issues. In other words, don’t be surprised if you leave a session mad with each other. I’ll be seeing you next week, same time if that will work. We’ll try to concentrate on the specific misunderstanding you had about your uncle. It would probably be a good idea to work on that only in here and not at home—for a while, anyway.”
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