by Ree Drummond
I locked myself in the blue half bath and sunk to the floor, with my back against the tile wall. I felt like an intruder. It wasn’t my place to be there. But maybe it was; I was Marlboro Man’s wife. It was his family, so it was also mine. Meanwhile, my dad was at home alone, probably going crazy in his suddenly empty house. I needed to check on him, to help him through this. But I couldn’t bear the thought of walking into our house again without my mom there. I felt a pang of nausea as my eyes welled up with tears—tears for Marie, tears for my dad, for my sister and brothers and my grandparents. Tears for Marlboro Man and his recent stress, for Marie’s daughter, who was fresh out of college and would begin her adult life without her mother. I thought of every happy Christmas of my childhood and realized I’d never have one again. And I thought of Mike, who thrived on routine and stability, and wondered how he would endure the upheaval. I thought of Marie, and how kind she’d been to me in the short time I’d known her. My tears turned into a wellspring, my sniffles into heaving sobs.
Stop it, I ordered myself. You can’t be hysterical here. You can’t walk out among Marlboro Man’s family with red, puffy eyes.
It was their grief, not mine; I didn’t want them to think I was just putting on emotion. But I couldn’t control the tears, no matter how much I tried. I grabbed a washcloth and dabbed it on my face as I heard the plaintive wails of Marie’s family from the other room. It was over; Marie was gone. My parents were over; they were splitting up. Knowing the rest of the house was otherwise occupied, I stayed there in the blue bathroom and buried my face in my hands, crying uncontrollably. I’ll have to stay in here, I imagined, until I can compose myself.
I’ll have to stay in here until I’m sixty.
I DIDN’T ATTEND Marie’s funeral. By the time it rolled around days after her death, my morning sickness had turned into a debilitating all-day nausea that dictated every motion of my body for all the hours I was awake. What I’d experienced a couple of weeks prior was just a little tummy ache compared to the plague of queasiness I was now enduring.
I was miserable. I wanted to be a young, energetic new wife, full of vim and vigor. Instead I was olive green, plastered to my bed, and unable to raise my head from the pillow without munching a handful of sugared cereal. Every time Marlboro Man entered our bedroom to check on me, he’d step on an Apple Jack. I’d hear it crunch into the carpet and he’d look down at the crumbs on the sole of his boot…and all I could do was watch. When I could bear to stand erect, I’d taken to sniffing lemon halves to ward off the nausea. Spent lemon halves littered the house; I was afraid to let one out of my sight for more than ten seconds.
I was a vision of loveliness—charming in every way—and no help on the ranch at all. Marlboro Man was working hard—the many loads of cattle he’d bought in the month before our wedding were starting to come in, and I wanted to help him get through it. But the smell of manure was too much for me to take. The smell of air alone sent me into dry heaves, even with a lemon wedge shoved under my nose. I couldn’t cook. Everything—from apples to bread, not to mention animal flesh in any form—would make me cry and hurl. I’d drive twenty-five minutes to town just to pick up a pizza, then stop halfway home and put it in the trunk because the smell was so horribly overpowering.
All the while, Marlboro Man tried his best to sympathize with me, his new hormone-poisoned and depressed wife. But there was no way he could possibly understand. “Maybe if you just hop up and jump in the shower,” he’d say, stroking my back, “you’ll feel better.”
He didn’t understand. “There’s no hopping,” I’d wail. “There’s no jumping!” I wanted to go home to my mom and crawl in my old bed. I wanted her to bring me soup. But there wasn’t a home to go to anymore.
I was in a new place, in a new world…and suddenly my life was completely unrecognizable. I didn’t want to be pregnant. If I’d gone ahead and moved to Chicago, I wouldn’t be. I’d be away from my parents’ separation and nowhere near pregnancy hormones and maybe wearing a sleek black turtleneck and eating Italian food with friends.
Italian food…
Ugh. I feel sick.
Chapter Twenty-seven
THE MISFIT
THE NAUSEA lingered for weeks. In the meantime, I tried my best to acclimate to my new life in the middle of nowhere. I had to get used to the fact that I lived twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. That I couldn’t just run next door when I ran out of eggs. That there was no such thing as sushi. Not that it would matter, anyway. No cowboy on the ranch would touch it. That’s bait, they’d say, laughing at any city person who would convince themselves that such a food was tasty.
And the trash truck: there wasn’t one. In this strange new land, there was no infrastructure for dealing with trash. There were cows in my yard, and they pooped everywhere—on the porch, in the yard, even on my car if they happened to be walking near it when they dropped a load. There wasn’t a yard crew to clean it up. I wanted to hire people, but there were no people. The reality of my situation grew more crystal clear every day.
One morning, after I choked down a bowl of cereal, I looked outside the window and saw a mountain lion sitting on the hood of my car, licking his paws—likely, I imagined, after tearing a neighboring rancher’s wife from limb to limb and eating her for breakfast. I darted to the phone and called Marlboro Man, telling him there was a mountain lion sitting on my car. My heart beat inside my chest. I had no idea mountain lions were indigenous to the area.
“It’s probably just a bobcat,” Marlboro Man reassured me.
I didn’t believe him.
“No way—it’s huge,” I cried. “It’s seriously got to be a mountain lion!”
“I’ve gotta go,” he said. Cows mooed in the background.
I hung up the phone, incredulous at Marlboro Man’s lack of concern, and banged on the window with the palm of my hand, hoping to scare the wild cat away. But it only looked up and stared at me through the window, imagining me on a plate with a side of pureed trout.
My courtship with Marlboro Man, filled with fizzy romance, hadn’t prepared me for any of this; not the mice I heard scratching in the wall next to my bed, not the flat tires I got from driving my car up and down the jagged gravel roads. Before I got married, I didn’t know how to use a jack or a crowbar…and I didn’t want to have to learn now. I didn’t want to know that the smell in the laundry room was a dead rodent. I’d never smelled a dead rodent in my life: why, when I was supposed to be a young, euphoric newlywed, was I being forced to smell one now?
During the day, I was cranky. At night, I was a mess. I hadn’t slept through the night once since we returned from our honeymoon. Besides the nausea, whose second evil wave typically hit right at bedtime, I was downright spooked. As I lay next to Marlboro Man, who slept like a baby every night, I thought of monsters and serial killers: Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. In the utter silence of the country, every tiny sound was amplified; I was certain if I let myself go to sleep, the murderer outside our window would get me.
And if the prospect of serial killers wasn’t enough, my thoughts would invariably turn to my parents…to my family. My mom, happily on her own in her new one-bedroom apartment. Would I ever be able to forgive her? My dad, deeply depressed in his empty house. What if he just lost it one day and ended it all? My sister, at college and floating. Will she ever want to come home again? My brother Doug, whose bitterness over my parents’ divorce was tangible. And Mike, who was exactly the same as he’d always been. I wondered why the rest of us couldn’t be so blissfully oblivious to all of the human complications around us.
I was exhausted, unable to make it through one day without crying or gagging or worrying. I’d fallen in love, married a cowboy, and moved to the peaceful, bucolic countryside. But it was peace that eluded me the most.
The honeymoon was over, almost before it ever began.
AMID THE stack of issues facing us as a newly married couple, one thing I decided
we no longer needed to worry about was the big renovation of the house next door. Marlboro Man had been dead set on continuing the project—more, I suspected, for my sake than for his. But as the work crew arrived day after day and unloaded pallets and boxes and supplies, I couldn’t reconcile it with the financial turmoil I knew the ranch was in. Marlboro Man wanted to plow through and get it done—he wanted us to have a real, grown-up home when our baby arrived. But even if we made it through the remodel itself, we’d still have to furnish and fill it. I couldn’t imagine picking out hinges and doorknobs and sofas in the midst of all the other stress. I didn’t like the feeling of contributing to the already heavy burden.
“Hey…,” I said as we climbed into bed one rainy night. “What if we just put the house on hold for a while?” I reached over to my bedside table, grabbed the lemon half, and took a big sniff. Lemon halves were my new narcotic.
Marlboro Man was quiet. He worked his leg under mine and locked it into what had become its official position. It was warm.
“I think maybe we should get to a stopping point,” I said. “And just put it on hold for a while.”
“I’ve thought about it,” he answered quietly. He rubbed his leg slowly up and down mine.
Feeling better, I set the lemon back on the table and reached my arm toward him, rolling over and draping my other leg over his waist and resting my head on his chest. “Well, I was thinking it might be easier for me not to worry about it with my parents and the baby and everything else.” Maybe it would be more effective, I thought, if I turned the focus on me.
“Well, that makes sense,” he said. “But let’s talk about it tomorrow.” He wrapped his other arm around my waist, and within seconds we were in a totally different world, where parents and drywall—and crippling nausea—were no longer welcome.
AFTER A few days, I brought it up again. Our little house will be fine, I told him. We should just wait…I’m only twenty-seven…I haven’t earned a big, huge, fancy house yet…I’d feel like an impostor. I don’t want to have to do all that cleaning. I’ll get scared with all that space. I don’t like furniture shopping. I’m not in the mood to decide on paint colors. We can finish it later, when things get back to normal. Though I knew deep down that “normal” in agriculture was probably a relative term.
Marlboro Man agreed, and after a few days of boarding up and capping off and sealing, the last of the workmen pulled away from our half-finished yellow Indian home on the prairie. And what should have been a moment of disappointment or sadness actually had the opposite effect: I didn’t care one bit. I smiled, realizing that all the best things I’d imagined about marriage actually were possible—that it transcends things and possessions and plans. That no matter how much I would have loved a dishwasher and a laundry room inside the house, what I wanted most was Marlboro Man. And I had him.
Not two months into my marriage, it was a delicious moment of affirmation and clarity.
Then I realized I’d be having a baby in a few months, and I wouldn’t have a dishwasher.
My heart began to race with panic.
Chapter Twenty-eight
ST. NICK IN CHAPS
NOVEMBER ROLLED around and brought with it a new hope: I woke up one cold, windy morning, and just as suddenly as it had arrived, the evil spell of nausea was gone. I could raise my head without chomping on Cocoa Puffs first. The smell of air didn’t make me hurl. I could move without shuddering; shower without gagging. Marlboro Man was still working his fingers to the bone, but I was suddenly more equipped to be there for him in a way I hadn’t been in the weeks before. I took pride in sorting our laundry into piles, in working to remove the mud and manure and blood from his jeans, in folding his socks and underwear and placing them in the second drawer of our small pine dresser, which barely fit inside our tiny bedroom.
The small window of time—a mere month—had made all the difference in the world. My parents were still separated, but somehow, with my renewed physical strength, I was able to put it in a place where it didn’t poke me in the heart over and over. Finally, I could get through an entire day without crying.
No longer repelled by the smell of onions or raw meat, I was able to cook dinner again. I taught myself how to make things like pot roast and Salisbury steak and stew. I slowly learned, through trial and error, that some cuts of meat are tough because of their higher concentration of connective tissues, and that those cuts must be slowly cooked for hours and hours before they become tender. I went crazy with this new knowledge, cooking briskets and short ribs and arm, shoulder, and rump roasts, convinced I’d uncovered some kind of holy grail of culinary knowledge. I slow-cooked meat practically every day, and with the nausea gone, I inhaled it. I was eating for two, after all. I owed it to our growing baby.
With the nausea gone, evenings with Marlboro Man slowly began resembling the way they’d been before. We watched movies on the couch together—his head on one end, my head on the other, our legs in a tangled mess of coziness. He’d play with my toes. I’d rub his calves, which were rock hard and tough from day after day on horseback. After the purgatory of the previous weeks, things were officially delicious again.
Marlboro Man was delicious again. After a love-drenched honeymoon in Australia, we’d returned home to a bitter reality that had put a screeching halt to what should have been the most romantic days of our lives together. Since my nausea had been so bad that the mere smell of skin made me sick, it had been difficult for me to lie in bed with him some nights—let alone entertain any other thoughts. It had been a cold, frigid autumn in more ways than one. If Marlboro Man hadn’t been so happy about his child developing in my body, I imagined he might have taken me back for a refund. I was so glad that this time had finally passed.
THE AIR turned colder and Thanksgiving Day arrived, marked by an enormous, warm lunchtime feast at my in-laws’ house…and a sad postdinner evening at my dad’s. It was the first time my siblings and I had been together since my parents had split, and the absence of my mother from our home left a gaping hole that was visible. It was awful and uncomfortable, a searing pain you’d give anything not to feel. My dad’s eyes were gray; his face drawn; his mood morose. Betsy and I tried our best to combine our efforts in order to create the illusion of having our mother there, but it was forced and futile. I wished I could fast-forward through Christmas; I didn’t want to have to feel those feelings again anytime soon.
My brother Doug had completely estranged himself from our mom. He and my sister-in-law were expecting their first baby any day, and he was understandably irked that we all had to negotiate this new family development when we should be enjoying one another’s company, talking about baby names, and passing out in a turkey-induced tryptophan coma. He didn’t feel like playing happy family by spending Thanksgiving at separate homes of our mother and father…and frankly, neither did I. It was such an avoidable death that had transpired—what about all the families who’d lost their mother to a car accident or cancer? And we lost ours…to marital ambivalence? Our collective anger was a bitter side dish.
My mother, well aware of how raw all of our emotions were, spent a quiet Thanksgiving at Ga-Ga’s house. She called me after Marlboro Man and I returned home that night.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Ree Ree,” she said in her subdued—but still sing-songy—voice.
“Thank you,” I said, polite and cold. I couldn’t let myself go there. I was just feeling strong again.
“Did you have a good day?” she continued.
“Yes,” I replied. “We had a good meal here on the ranch, then went over to…to Dad’s.” I felt like I was talking to a stranger.
“Well…” Her voice trailed off. “I really missed seeing you.”
I tried to speak but couldn’t. I couldn’t purport to know everything about my parents’ marriage, who did what to whom and when. But my parents had been happy. We’d been a family. My dad had worked hard, my mom had raised four children, and at a time when they should have been revel
ing in the good work they’d done and really enjoying each other, my mom decided she was through.
Deep down, I knew that nothing in life was black or white. I knew that if you weighed one side against the other throughout the whole course of their marriage, it would probably come out a wash. But that first Thanksgiving, my emotions so close to the surface and raw, my mom was the villain who’d dropped a bomb on our family. And the rest of us were wandering around in the smoldering aftermath.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Mom,” I said, before hanging up the phone.
I was so mad at her, I couldn’t see straight.
I went to bed and sucked on Rolaids.
MARLBORO MAN had to spend the rest of Thanksgiving weekend weaning the calves that had been born the previous spring, and since I was clearly feeling better, I no longer had a get-out-of-jail (or sleep-in-till-nine) card to use. He woke me up that Saturday morning by poking my ribs with his index finger.
A groan was all I could manage. I pulled the covers over my head.
“Time to make the doughnuts,” he said, peeling back the covers.
I blinked my eyes. The room was still dark. The world was still dark. It wasn’t time for me to get up yet. “Doughnuts…huh?” I groaned, trying to lie as still as I could so Marlboro Man would forget I was there. “I don’t know how.”
“It’s a figure of speech,” he said, lying down next to me. Make the doughnuts? What? Where was I? Who was I? I was disoriented. Confused.
“C’mon,” he said. “Come wean calves with me.”
I opened my eyes and looked at him. My strapping husband was fully clothed, wearing Wranglers and a lightly starched blue plaid shirt. He was rubbing my slightly chubby belly, something I’d gotten used to in the previous few weeks. He liked touching my belly.