Her voice was sweet and smooth and slow, but squeaky like a child’s, and it startled me at first. Why does she talk like that? With such sweetness. It didn’t matter. In that moment, I loved her.
She prescribed an antidepressant, and just as promised within a few months my whole life transformed from behind my own eyeballs. Doctors told me I was bordering on postpartum psychosis, that I was lucky to have come in, that pinching my baby that day could have saved my life, or hers, or both. Maybe it was the pills, surely it was the pills, but I’m not totally convinced I wasn’t healed by the feeling of the nurse’s hand on my knee when she said “Oh, honey,” because I felt like a leper who was touched for the first time by somebody who didn’t care that she was sick and deformed. I was so sure I was monstrous, some uniquely evil specimen of motherhood, that when she touched my knee and called me “honey,” like I was any old mother passing through with a bit of PPD, I saw myself anew.
I was in a pit of black and couldn’t see out. I felt the touch of a nurse and Zoloft and crawled to the top, looked out, and thought, “Oh shit, this ain’t so bad.”
And it wasn’t.
4
Playing House in the Suburbs with Captain Morgan
Atop that pile of happy pills, I peered out over the edge of depression and surveyed the landscape. The first thing I saw was “I need out of this fucking house.” Nothing was wrong with living in Mac’s parents’ house except we were living in Mac’s parents’ house. We were adults. We needed adult space, and in my case, employment. Stay-at-home parenthood was boldly oversold.
So I constructed a résumé emphasizing the honors classes I took in college while omitting the one (or two) I failed, and applied for a receptionist position at a highly respected boutique law firm about thirty minutes from the ranch, in downtown Sacramento. When they called me in for an interview, I knew I had a chance, because I did well with first impressions, particularly when sober. It was everything following the first impression that troubled me. I could give you what you wanted. I just couldn’t keep giving it to you.
Sitting across from me in a large conference room, an extremely put-together, reserved woman with long, curly brown hair asked, “What experience do you have with administrative work?”
She wants honesty. “Well, I spent a summer as an intern at an office supplies business, but I don’t have a ton of experience.” I smiled and made a little face, as if to say, Can I really say that? As if I were a bit coy.
“I graduated from UC Davis about a year ago, but stayed home with my baby,” I continued, “but I am a quick learner. I am very thorough.” My mother had told me once while I was sweeping out our motor home that I was “very thorough.” I stuck with it.
“What do you think your greatest asset is?” She offered a quick smile between jotting notes. I noticed she was left-handed and that her blouse perfectly matched her cardigan.
Humility. Tie it in with the honesty, Janelle. “I am willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. If the firm needs me to scrub toilets, I’ll do it. I’m here to work and I don’t have too much ego wrapped up in that.” She smiled again, and I felt bolstered. You’re doing great, Janelle.
“We are extremely focused on collaboration. What is your greatest weakness?”
Captain Morgan.
Nope. Don’t say that.
“Oh, well, I think it must be that I can be a bit of a perfectionist. I don’t want to let things go if they aren’t perfect, or close, you know? So sometimes I get frustrated with people who don’t have the same focus as I do.” I failed to mention that I thought most people around me were fucking idiots who should lose their jobs. That if I thought things, they were true, even if I had no evidence for them, and that, frankly, I was not exactly shining in my own life, and threatened to leave my husband on the daily. And, speaking of daily, I drank at that exact interval, and used to chase my brother around the house with a large kitchen knife.
I kept all that to myself and crossed my legs.
I was a master at selling my potential. My second-best talent was leaving before you figured out I couldn’t deliver. Or I simply never showed up at the moment of delivery. I stopped calling friends just when they thought we were really connecting, didn’t show up on the day they stopped doubting I’d show up. It was not conscious, but it was consistent. In college, a few professors wrote on the bottom of my papers, “Come see me about getting this published” or “Let’s submit this to a contest I know of!” Each time, I called my mother and told her about it on the way home from class, felt proud and hopeful, told strangers about it at bars, but I never, ever showed up at their offices.
But this—this was an interview, and I believed what I was selling as genuinely as they did. As I shook the interviewer’s hand and walked out the front door, I called my mother to tell her how well it went, and after the second interview, this one with a managing partner, they hired me. I landed the first “real” job I applied for, confirming my suspicion that I was a well-equipped human ready to embark on many great successes.
My first day of work was almost exactly two years after the February morning on the balcony. I was twenty-three and Ava was fifteen months. I woke up earlier than necessary and dressed her in Oshkosh train overalls, a white, collared long-sleeve blouse, and her favorite red leather Mary Jane shoes. I cleaned her face spotless and brushed her wavy blonde hair into pigtails. I packed a blue gingham sunhat into her diaper bag, and folded spare clothes with her name on their tags.
As I closed the babysitter’s door behind me, I wondered if Ava understood why I was gone, and if I was perhaps making a mistake, and if she would be okay, and if maybe I regretted the whole job decision. I continued thinking these things until the moment I climbed into my car, put it in drive, and realized I was truly, completely, and finally alone. I glanced around the car to confirm it was real. No crying, no baby, no diapers.
Oh, thank God. Here I am again, I thought.
I stopped for a cappuccino. I tore down the freeway.
• • •
While I saved my receptionist money, my mother and I concentrated with laser-like focus on the role of a house in the stabilization of marriage. She’d say, “You need a place to call your own. You need to be able to create a home for your family,” and I would agree emphatically. The next day, when I would call about Mac’s astonishingly disturbed relationship with a ranch—he still, after two years, couldn’t take a vacation without getting ill from stress—she’d say, “It will get better as soon as you get your own place.”
When I would tell her I was generally dissatisfied with life, or that I hated my body, or that the sense of monotony and seething banality of my daily existence might actually one day take me out of the earth, she’d say, “How long until you have your deposit?”
And I’d say, “You’re right. It will be better when Mac and I move out.”
We spoke as if it were a biological imperative, as if I would implode if I didn’t have access to 1,200 square feet to clean, as if all that was wrong with me could be fixed with some carpets and cabinetry that were all my own. And so, when I banked enough money, I found a house in the suburbs of Sacramento, in a strip-mall paradise called Elk Grove. It’s the kind of place one drives through and wonders if the civil engineers went out of their way to remove all soul from the city, or if that was simply a by-product of the ratio of big box stores to humans. I made an appointment alone, viewed it alone, and rented it on the spot.
When I got home holding a rental agreement, I figured I should tell Mac.
“Hey,” I said, after a few lubricating glasses of red wine. “You know how hard things have been. We need to get our own place. That’s the thing. We’ll be happier.”
He shifted in his seat, his beautiful eyes growing pained at the impending confrontation. But he didn’t say anything. Not with his mouth, at least. So I filled the silence.
“I’m a mother, Mac, I need my own home. Mothers need it. We need a place to decorate. Y
ou don’t understand. It’s a big deal—like a biological thing. You know, this isn’t my family.” I swept my hand across his parents’ living room while a familiar rage crept up my feet and all the way to my eyes as I thought about all I had given up for him and this kid.
He looked at me harder while his silence transformed from space for me to talk into a hundred-foot steel wall between us. I readied my attack. I thought it would penetrate the wall.
“Are you going to say anything?” I was done waiting.
His eyes widened but his mouth didn’t move. He leaned back against the kitchen chair and picked at the label on his beer bottle. He was still wearing his work clothes, an orange and blue plaid cotton shirt, an old button-down from high school, long covered in bloodstains. His curly hair stuck out wildly above his ears from beneath his ball cap, which he had flipped up and to one side. He had dirt across the bridge of his nose, and I couldn’t move close to him on account of the reek of slaughterhouse.
I took a sip of wine, wondering how he managed to stay silent for so long in moments like this, simply refusing to make a sound. Even when angry, when I swore I would punish my adversary with the severest of silent treatments, I found myself unable to quit speaking. It was remarkably disappointing. But Mac would stare at me for an entire night, look away thirty times, walk out ten times, but he would not speak unless he was so inclined. To help him along, I would chase him around the house like a puppy attacking his pant leg.
I hoped this night wouldn’t be one of those nights. “Mac,” I said, attempting greatest civility, “could you please tell me what you’re thinking?”
Finally, after an incredible pause, he said, “We don’t have the money,” and watched me pour a cocktail.
“Yeah, we do. We’re fine,” I said, dismissing him, thinking, God, I hate it when he has opinions.
“How will we be fine, Janelle?”
“Because I can’t stay here anymore.” By then, I was yelling. I didn’t want to talk about his theories of finances. I knew he was simply afraid. He was always afraid. My mother and I had already discussed the whole situation. It was handled.
He countered with more silence, and I knew it was because I yelled, because I asked him to speak and then attacked him, but what I heard in his answer was that he didn’t understand. Again. He took his hat off, and a stray curl fell over his eye, and I noticed his new piercing in his ear. It was a bar that went across the top of his left ear lobe, and I flinched remembering how the piercer inserted it. He stuck a thick needle slowly through the ear and then passed the bar through. But he couldn’t get it right, so he pushed the bar in and out through the cartilage, twice, while Mac sat motionless, sweating.
He was the toughest human I had ever known. But I knew it would be me who carried us someplace new.
“Whatever,” I said, holding his eyes. “I already rented it.” His mouth tweaked in confusion.
“You can come with me if you want,” I continued. “Or you can stay here. I don’t fucking care.” And I walked out of the room.
• • •
He came with me. The house had two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was one of those subdivision homes with a five-foot buffer between it and the next house, no sidewalk, one ten-foot box of perfectly manicured lawn out front, and a two-car garage. The neighborhood was neutral tones and stucco as far as the eye could see. The inside of the house felt clean and contained and new, exactly what I needed to begin my life as a fully-pilled-up, non-psychotic working mother. We moved in and bought a beagle puppy that we named Maggie May, after the Rod Stewart song.
I could not tell which house was ours from afar. Every time I drove near it, I had to check the house number in the black-and-white light-up box. The subdivision had a fake lake a few blocks down from our house, and sometimes we’d walk around the water on the clean cement walkway lined with sapling trees. I’d look at the bigger houses around the lake with bigger backyards and feel envy and disgust at the same time.
This couldn’t be it. But damn, look how nice that pool is.
• • •
It was exactly like my mother and I imagined it, which was exactly like a 1950s sitcom, except Mac and I were the main characters.
“Hey, love, how was your day?” I’d ask when I got home from work. But instead of putting on my apron and floating around the kitchen like a house angel, I’d put my bag of groceries on the counter, kick off my scuffed fake-leather shoes, and wonder how long until I could drink rum.
“Fine, you?” he’d say. I would mention what I was making for dinner, and he would take his boots off, and we would watch Ava play in a laundry basket, and laugh. Then I would notice the laundry at the bottom of the basket, which was clean, and yet, still in the basket.
“Hey, you know I, uh, put that basket there so you’d fold it.” I’d say.
“Mmm,” he’d mumble.
“What?” I’d snap, leaning toward him, as if to say, “You ready for this fight?”
“Sorry. I didn’t notice,” he’d say in quiet apathy, an indifference that seemed to place the weight of our lives onto my shoulders. I’d watch him rub his feet and I’d notice again his flannel shirts stained with some livestock excretion. He didn’t care about laundry or our futures. He just worked. He worked Thursday through Sunday. I worked Monday through Friday. We parented in silos. I worked five days at the office and two days alone at home, where I would do all the things that never occurred to my husband, who had moved from his mother’s care to mine, his parent’s house to this one, and simply steeled himself when my rage blew, hunkered down until the tornado passed, which usually looked like me getting drunk enough to no longer care.
On the days when I worked and Mac didn’t, our evenings were always the same.
“What did you do today, Mac? What’d ya do today, exactly? Because the house looks the same as when I left.” The anger settled across my shoulders, heavy and exhausting.
“I don’t know. I drove Ava to daycare, picked her up.” He’d throw me a glance and I’d notice how handsome he looked sitting on the couch with his feet up, out of his work clothes, his perfectly square shoulders and chest, and I’d marvel at how somebody who infuriated me so completely could be so fucking gorgeous at the same time.
I’d pummel him with questions about household tasks. Dog food. Dishes. Laundry. The oil change. He’d meet my inquiries with silence, and I’d wonder what beat him into silence. Shame? Resignation? Personality? How broken-down must one become to simply power off in the face of conflict? But I had no energy left to draw words from him.
“Did you watch TV this entire time?”
Silence.
“Mac have you not noticed that I work five days a week and then when I get a weekend, you go to work, so I work seven fucking days a week? Do you think I sit around watching TV for five hours? Do you think I ever enjoy myself? I can’t do this. I want a divorce.”
Silence.
I would uncork a bottle of wine, and by glass two or three, I would speak more gently, earnestly. “Mac, please. I need your help. I need you. Why don’t you mow the lawn, take care of the car? Anything.”
Silence.
By glass four or five, I would scream or cry, or drive to buy a bottle of rum, or sit on the couch and watch some British sitcoms. Or we would go into the bedroom and have sex that never left me feeling whole, but at the end, I’d think, He’s really going to change this time, on account of our highly productive talk.
I would pass out, then wake up in a haze and sweat at two or three a.m., with a headache that threatened more sleep. I’d find the Advil and water on my bedside table, take a few, and in the morning, I’d get up and go to work. I’d feed Ava an egg or oatmeal, wash her face, and dress her warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Almost every day, I’d take a picture of her grinning and holding her little lunchbox beneath the white light-up address box, and I would send it to my mother so we could ogle at her beauty.
I decorated Ava’s room with a twin bed
made of pine, a white bookshelf, and a rug from the actual Pottery Barn, which felt like reaching a suburban pinnacle. We now had a real bed instead of a lumpy futon, and I hired a dog trainer for that fucking beagle. The trainer said Maggie was the worst dog he’d ever seen in his life and essentially told us the little bastard was unfixable. After Maggie ate our hose for the twelfth time, pissed on the carpet, and stole our dinner off the table, Mac and I agreed to give her away to an old man who had owned beagles his whole life and never left his house. I missed her as soon as she was gone.
• • •
Every day, I woke up and got dressed in my business casual clothing, wished I exercised more, drove twenty minutes to my job in the black Infiniti four-door sedan my father had sold us. I listened to NPR on the way, specifically the old guy with the oddly soothing voice who did the news. I sucked down coffee and a cigarette. I played my music loud. It was wonderful, sort of. It was at least twenty minutes each day that felt hopeful. I was heading to a new place. A new day! Tiny potential!
At work I could drop my purse off at my desk and travel into the clean break room for a cup of coffee. While I stirred in the cream, I could stand by the counter and say hello to my work friends and feel capable and centered. In the afternoon I might get a sparkling water from the refrigerator or a caffeinated soda if I were tired. I might walk down the hall and grab a chocolate from my boss Beatrix’s office.
To keep me busy between calls and visitors, Bea would give me tasks I could perform right there at the reception desk, such as calling computer companies for technological difficulties or to discuss warranties. Often I would end up shouting at the overseas customer service representative, right there in the front office. Eventually Bea banned me from making such phone calls, and I told myself she had simply realized, finally, that I was too damn smart for such menial laboring.
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