by James Dodson
My wife looked at me and I looked at her.
“I guess so,” my wife said to Jennifer.
I didn’t bother answering—perhaps I merely nodded dumbly, like a stunned musk ox or something. The truth was, I was having difficulty believing any of it was really happening, as my wife no doubt was as well, because the previous year had been like one long bad dream. Three months after my father’s death, we had a rare fight in front of the children and my wife suggested we take our coffee out to the deck and talk. I was anxious to talk because our lives, in my view, had drifted even more out of focus, what with her busy work schedule and mine, the needs of the children, the demands of three aging cats and two elderly dogs, a garden that never got thoroughly weeded, and a house that never felt fully clean.
I remember sitting on the deck and looking out at my woefully neglected yard—perennial beds choked with weeds, rosebushes growing like feral children—thinking how we’d been through so much in the past ten years: the birth of our children, a miscarriage, the deaths of both our fathers, working careers that always seemed to be sending us to different places. It was time to clear the air, get the issues on both sides finally out in the open. I decided it was time to propose a new beginning. Perhaps we could renew our wedding vows, take stock of our careers, go on a serious family vacation, or at least indulge in the occasional romantic “couples” weekend—the kind of stuff all old marrieds do to try and revive a sputtering flame. We’d be more lovers and less corporation. Maybe we could have a third child. We’d always talked about a third child.
But I never got the words out. My wife wiped her eyes and said she thought our marriage was about to be over.
I think I laughed. God, I wish I hadn’t done that—but when all else fails I sometimes make a joke or laugh at the terrible irony of things, and in this instance the awful mistiming of our moods and revelations seemed like some darkly comic nineties version of The Gift of the Magi. I wanted in, she wanted out. I wanted to begin again, she reluctantly wanted to begin packing.
For a couple hours, as our coffee grew cold and the sun crossed the yard, I tried to make her see it my way, saying that we had so much more than every other working couple we knew—happy kids, a nice life, a strong house, good values, all the Big Picture stuff in sync. I said that all our friends knew how much I loved her and pointed out that through everything that happened to us, good and bad, for better or worse, up and down, broke or flush, I could count the number of genuine disagreements we’d had on one hand. Wise people learned from their mistakes, I said, and good people deserved second chances. We deserved one.
It was a nice speech and I meant it to my core. But something big obviously wasn’t in perfect sync. She talked again, I listened, my spirits nosedived. She felt profoundly smothered, unloved, overwhelmed—by me, by life, by something. I knew so much of what she said was true. Her instincts were nearly infallible. There was no third party involved, no booze, no violence. Just an unshakable feeling tearing her up that life had drawn us inexorably apart.
Both deeply shaken by the frightening reality that emerged, we declared a moratorium and she rounded up the kids and took them to our favorite beach. I took Amos and went to a nearby lake for a cold swim and a clear think. Sometimes, the poet Wallace Stevens said, the truth depends on a walk around a lake.
Jung said we can never begin to love until we face our shadows. A year of quiet counseling had followed. We worked hard to face our shadows, shadows all couples have, shadowy histories peculiar to us. We learned, among other things, that two people who seemed so adept at communicating understood just about everything around them except each other. Most people saw nothing but an outwardly happy family seated together at church or walking together on the beach, but the truth was, our family was slowly coming apart at the seams, unraveling like a baseball in the tide. We were good, kind, civilized, Christian people, I told myself. How could this sort of thing happen to us? My wife talked to a psychologist named Michelle; I did a private weekly stint with a guy named Herman. We worked hard at salvaging paradise and I took it one step further by discreetly talking with close friends and family, probing their brains for clues and insights I might have somehow missed or stupidly ignored.
Marriage is a medieval mystery play. Chekhov said we only lie at the beginning and end of relationships—the middle is where the truth resides. I desperately wanted to believe this was true and that we were simply somewhere in the middle of our married journey, but the truth wasn’t something I really cared to see: We were somehow mysteriously ending. These friends advised me to give it time, keep the faith, keep an open mind, confront my own failings honestly. These things happened to every couple, they counseled. Be patient, keep talking. If you get through this, you two can survive anything—hard weather makes good timber, as they say in Maine. The children heard long and sometimes tearful discussions into the night as we wrestled with this demon like Jacob and the angel, but they had no clue of the approaching meteorite about to shatter their worlds.
And so, mere days before this camping trip to Acadia, we’d come together in the presence of Jennifer, a highly recommended marriage counselor who was going to try and help us reach some final conclusions. It was only our third session with Jennifer and as I sat there pretending to be so calm and civilized I still clung to a fraying faith that we would find the words that would help us untangle the wires and redeem a decent, honorable marriage that had somehow become impossibly complicated. Most of all I wanted redemption and a second chance. I couldn’t even imagine what being divorced would be like, and I didn’t wish to learn.
But apparently this was a minority opinion of one. Jennifer complimented us on our great affection for each other, thoughtful composure under stress, and shared conviction that the welfare of the children was really paramount in this situation. Our children, she said, would always be our spiritual common ground—the place we discovered and celebrated the best part of ourselves. She said the goal was to make a dignified break and create a new kind of expanded but loving family. Someday, in time, she said, we would each move on and begin new relationships while retaining in memory only the best things about our time together as man and wife.
She said other reassuring things but I can’t recall what they were, exactly. As she talked and we listened, I remember vaguely wishing I could take a tire tool to the hood of her nice red sports car with the cute vanity tags. The rage wasn’t really meant for her but rather myself—for somehow spoiling our little paradise and then, worse, being helpless to save it.
Finally, we all stood and shook hands. Jennifer said she was sure we’d make excellent “coparents,” as if a new corporation were being formed. My wife wiped her eyes and thanked her. I thanked her, too. Then we walked slowly down her carpeted stairs together like two people who had just seen the baby doctor and been told they would soon have a newborn. Our newborn was an uncoupling.
We embraced and kissed in the parking lot. It felt—or at least appeared—so horribly normal. My wife went back to work and I went to the bookstore and bought a book on fly-fishing because Maggie and I were scheduled to take a fly-fishing course together at nearby L. L. Bean the same weekend.
—
Amos and the children came back to our campsite.
I was pleased to see that everyone was dry. Jack, swinging a large stick, wanted to know what was for dinner. I said we would start with a lovely Ducktrap River goose pâté followed by a select bed of fine arugula greens, medallions of grilled venison served with a lively mango salsa and puree of Belgian parsnips, followed perhaps by cherries flambé, a wedge of aged Stilton, and a nice bosky Andalusian port on the terrace afterward.
“Hot dogs and beans, Jack,” Maggie helpfully translated to her brother.
“Oh good.” He was clearly relieved.
Maggie explained that Amos had met a girlfriend on the beach, a small poodle named Wanda.
“Amore happens,” I said, “even to old geezers.”
“Amos isn’t a ‘geezer.
’ ” Maggie felt obliged to defend her dog’s honor.
“He’s thirteen,” I pointed out. “That’s ninety-one in dog years.”
“How old are you?” Jack wondered.
“Two hundred and fifty-seven. Believe me, I feel every one of those years, too.”
“That’s a geezer,” Maggie said, pointing out the obvious.
I sat on a log watching my children eat beans and franks by the campfire, thinking how what they didn’t know really was going to hurt them. Their mother planned to move out of the house in a matter of days; she’d already rented a small cottage by a salt pond on the way to their favorite beach. We’d purchased bunk beds for their new “other” bedroom and my framed photograph was already sitting on the windowsill overlooking the pond—all the things you’re supposed to do to try and soften the blow to the innocent parties of a “civilized” split-up. Jennifer would be pleased.
“Guys,” I said casually, as we neared the ceremonial marshmallow-toasting course of the meal, “I’ve been giving some thought to this summer. I think we should take a big vacation. If we could go anywhere and do anything, except go to Disney World, what would it be?” My work as a golf writer took me to Orlando every January for the annual PGA Merchandise Show and we usually made a small family vacation out of it. It was time to expand our horizons a bit, though.
“I’d like to go fly-fishing,” Maggie said simply.
This was no great surprise. We’d just finished the fly-fishing course at Bean and she’d not only been the only girl in a class of ten men and nine little boys, but the only child who earned the right to wear her graduation pin right side up for catching a small brook trout. She also displayed a natural instinct for identifying bugs and at one point startled the Bean instructors, and disgusted her male contemporaries, by identifying a dragonfly pupa and then, on a tongue-in-cheek dare from her favorite instructor, dramatically popping the small critter into her mouth and eating it. “That’s a sign,” the instructor whispered to me later, “of a real fishergirl.” Her maternal grandfather would undoubtedly have been pleased, but then Sam Bennie had been fly-fishing crazy, a charming Scotsman who tied his own flies and chased trout all over Scotland and the Alaskan Yukon. Perhaps fly-fishing was merely wandering through Maggie’s bloodline the way golf wandered through mine.
“I want to see a rocket go up,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “And go to Africa.”
I nodded, not surprised in the least my son would say this. We were always talking about rocket ships and Africa. Africa was the place, I’d told him, where the first human beings may have walked upright and where lions still roamed in the wild. He had loads of picture books about Africa but he was also a little boy drawn by the mysteries of space and flight. I’d painted stars on his dormer room ceiling and he was forever asking me questions about how far away the stars really were and what it felt like to fly. My nickname for him was Rocket.
I held my marshmallow over the fire and told Jack I was fairly certain we would do those things in time.
“What about taking a camping trip out West?” I tossed out casually.
“Where out West?” Maggie seemed interested.
“I dunno. Wyoming or Montana. The best trout streams in the world are out there. To say nothing about the incredible stuff along the way. We could do the Adirondacks. See the Badlands and Mount Rushmore. I’ve got a friend in Minnesota who wants to fish the Boundary Waters. Who knows, really.”
I told them about Yellowstone Park, Old Faithful, herds of elk and bison in the wild, beautiful trout rivers I’d never seen, gorgeous desert canyons I’d never visited. It was a long way from Maine, I said, but wouldn’t it be fun to drive clear across America and see what we could find? I didn’t bother telling them why I was so anxious to leave home for a while.
“Are you sure we’ll go see the space shuttle go up?” The Rocket was beginning to sound as worried as his old man.
“Absolutely. You’ve got my word.”
“Pinkie promise?” Maggie was a veteran negotiator who knew enough to invoke the ultimate verbal contract on behalf of her younger brother. I reached over and we hooked small fingers, sealing the deal.
“Pinkie promise.”
—
Then something strange began to happen around us in the pines where the mountains met the sea.
I’d just fetched The Soul of an Indian and started reading them a bit about an Indian child’s life when the campground began to fill up with other paying customers.
A truck camper with Connecticut plates pulled into the site next to us and a man climbed out bellyaching at his wife. A baby was squalling within. We watched a pair of kids hop out and begin pestering the man for their bikes, which he unstrapped from the rear luggage rack and placed on the ground. They hopped on them and pedaled away whooping.
We watched other vehicles arrive—a caravan of campers, the late arrivals of Luggage Rack Season. They pulled into campsites and threw up tents, cranked up generators, fired up electronic bug killers. Teenage girls were now sauntering past us on the road, playing rap music on a boom box, and I watched Maggie watching them. Behind us through the trees someone else turned on a gas generator and soon we heard a television set playing—the Red Sox were hosting the Twins at Fenway. There was a raucous burst of male laughter from another direction where, through the trees, an evening poker game was under way.
“Dad,” Jack said, balancing his marshmallow over the flame, “next time can we bring our TV?”
“Absolutely not,” I told him, a bit more sharply than I should have. “The point of camping is not to watch television.”
“What is the point?”
I told him I thought the point of camping was to get as close as possible to nature without being murdered in your sleep by mosquitoes. I said living close to nature was the Indian way.
“Are there Indians around here?” Maggie wondered.
I said there once had been—plenty of them. The Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes had lived here and all of the land where we were sitting had been part of Norumbega, the Indian name for Maine. I told them the first European explorers had mistakenly thought Norumbega was a mythical city whose streets were paved with gold and searched for it for many years but never found it.
“Maybe it wasn’t there,” Rocket said.
No, I said, Norumbega was there all right. I explained that the Europeans made the mistake of thinking that because Indians didn’t build grand cities like their own, they were basically godless and uncivilized. Indians saw life through a different lens, though. To build something permanent in nature, they knew, would be the quickest way to spoil God’s paradise. So they moved around all the time, making camp and living as close to the land as possible, taking only what they needed from it. I said their great-great-grandmother would have understood this thinking because she’d been a full-blooded Cherokee Indian woman, perhaps even a foundling from the Trail of Tears.
“Cool,” Maggie said. “You mean we’re Indian, too?”
“Some part of you.”
“Me too?” Jack perhaps feared being left out but I had no intention of ever leaving him out.
“You too.”
—
Emerson said we do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchworks; now a little joy, then a sorrow. Someone else said a divorce is like the death of a small civilization.
That’s exactly how I felt watching our children’s faces on the morning we broke the news to them about the divorce. Jack sat rigidly on my lap and finally began to shake with tears. Maggie, sitting with her mother in my faded green reading chair, squeezed her arms and refused to make eye contact with either of her parents, staring in stunned disbelief at a bookshelf. She had combed her own hair and pinned it up beautifully; she looked like a young princess being betrayed.
Her mother spoke eloquently and bravely—it was perhaps her best moment ever, explaining how brokenhearted both of their parents were that things had come to this moment, but r
evealing our shared determination to create a better, perhaps even happier life from this unhappy time. Mom and Dad genuinely loved each other, she said, but they couldn’t live together and didn’t wish the two people they loved most to be caught in the cross fire. It was time, she added, for everybody to start healing. Then I took a turn at explaining the unexplainable, trying to calmly reassure our children that everything their mother said was true, that things would be better in time, the pain would subside, and with God’s help we would all eventually heal. It was perfectly natural to be sad, I said, afraid and angry and worried.
I said these words with great conviction, and may have even believed them. But it still felt like a civilization was dying. After a little while and a lot of tears, they went out with their mother to see their new place on the salt marsh and Amos and I got in Old Blue, my truck, and drove to L. L. Bean to purchase a canoe.
A week later, around noon on a Sunday, I finished packing up the truck. The rear cargo hold was full of gear, a new Discovery canoe was strapped on top, and the backseat had just enough room for the Medicine Bag and my guitar. I put the Medicine Bag in the backseat and returned to the house for my guitar, which Maggie had specifically asked me to bring.
When I came back to the truck, two dogs had added themselves to the cargo hold. I ordered Bailey, our younger female golden, out of the truck and she obeyed because she’s an excellent dog and always does what her owners command. I ordered Amos out of the truck but he stuck his head out the window and rested his chin thoughtfully on the sill, ready to see the USA in our Chevrolet.
“Look,” I tried to reason with him, “we’re not just going to the store for a loaf of bread. We’re going out West, to the land of sagebrush and rattlesnakes. Get out. You know how you hate heat.”
He yawned, implying I should shake the lead out. I carried the guitar back to the house.
The children and my wife were waiting for me at our favorite seaside restaurant, a lobster shack on the docks at Cundys Harbor. The place had recently been written up in USA Today as one of “Maine’s best-kept secrets,” which meant it was no secret anymore and the place was crawling with tourists and summer people. They looked so lithe and happy in their fresh sunburns and new summer clothes and we looked for all the world, I suppose, like the perfectly flawed four-part family we’d been not so long ago.