by Leigh Newman
Leonard lifts his head off the bed and looks me over. I put the phone down.
A week later, though, I pick it back up. I call my mother. She answers in one ring. “No time to talk, honey. The taxi’s waiting!”
Mom is on her way to a mock hurricane in Texas. The mock hurricane only takes place once every three years, with actors playing the victims and real firemen playing real firemen, erecting tents and aid stations. If you don’t make the mock hurricane, you can’t volunteer for the Red Cross during real hurricanes, which my mother has always wanted to do in order to make up for the fact that she did not do the Peace Corps and, instead, at age twenty-two, got engaged to my dad.
I tell her my news.
She says, “I’ll skip the training. I’ll hop in the car. I’ll be right there. Don’t move!”
I slump immediately. Here it is, the moral showdown: Leigh versus hurricane victims. How can I ask Mom to race away, at high speed, from one of her lifelong dreams? She is made for the Red Cross. She is made for helping people who need help, and I don’t need help—at least not in that way. Nothing was done to me by the hand of God or a freak act of nature. I did all the devastation myself. “I’m in the car,” says Mom on the phone. “I’ll be right there!”
I lie down on the bed and stare up at the rafters of the garage. In nine hours, Mom will be here, bearing a Polo shopping bag stuffed with soothing Wedgwood plates for my new garage (which also lacks a kitchen). And it will be as comforting as our constant arguments or the bag of chips that we’ll eat while watching black-and-white horror movies in silence. This is what my mother can do for me—and it’s not a small thing—she can brush my hair and love me with DVDs. But I need to figure out the rest of my life. And that will take something different, something she can’t give me, something I need to find by myself.
“Mom?” I say. “I’m okay. Go to Texas.”
Next call: Dad. This will be easy. This makes sense. Dad walked out of a marriage, a marriage with a child even. He’ll forgive me. He’ll tell me what to do. That’s his job, besides saving my life, over and over.
“Leifer,” he says.
“I’m okay!” I say, then hang up.
I throw the phone on the bed, under the covers, where the rings are muffled when he calls back ten minutes later. I can’t talk to Dad. What if he tells me to go back to Lawrence, now, for Christ’s sake! What if he doesn’t? What if he says, I knew it all along, Leifer. That was a FUBAR relationship from day one.
What I’d really like is a paddle to the head.
This goes back to the canyon, when I was eleven, maybe twelve. We were floating the Talachulitna River with Abbie’s sister and brother, up from Ohio for the summer. They were looking for a family fun trip in the wilderness. They took our small Avon raft, and we took our big one. Rafting isn’t exactly a hard-core adventure. Basically, you sit in the raft, letting the current pull you along, plunking lures into the water. Every four hours or so, you pull over to a gravel bar and fish the hole, hopefully procuring a silver for dinner. Then you pitch camp and, the next morning, do it all over again.
The day of the canyon, the sun was out, warming the thick gray rubber of the raft, inspiring me to doze between casts with one foot hanging off the side. We had heard from other rafters about the canyon: It was a box canyon with a tricky, pretty drastic left turn at the exit. There we were, noodling along, tanning, chatting about country-music singers, when the rapids started. They were a little rougher than expected. “Gosh,” said Abbie, her face getting a little white.
In about three seconds they weren’t rapids at all, they were ocean waves in an angry river with lots of huge rocks. “The rain,” shouted Dad. “Last month!”
And suddenly there was the canyon—a black stone throat, vomiting boulders and waterfalls. We had no helmets, no waterproof bags, no straps tying down anything, and no experience in serious water. We were normal Alaskan fishermen, not semi-suicidal adrenaline addicts from Colorado who kayak out of flying helicopters.
But there we were, in the water, too fast for any of us to plan. Abbie’s sister and brother-in-law led the way in. They bounced through the first set of falls, then shot up onto a massive boulder at the turn. Here, their raft stuck—half underwater, half out of water. Abbie’s sister, Joanne, in back was submerged, and the boat was filling up, their gear whisking off in the current and froth.
All I saw was Joanne. She was a rag doll, wet and blond and breathing. And then wet and under and not there. And then she was up, yelling at her husband to push with his paddle.
“Leverage off the rock!” Dad was screaming. “God bless—! The paddle! Leverage! Shove!”
I crouched down. Our raft was spinning. There was no place to pull over and plan a route. Down we went. “Paddle,” said Dad. “DON’T HIT THAT ROCK!”
Screaming from Leigh Newman. High-pitched, frozen screaming.
“Paddle,” Dad said.
More screaming.
Down came his wood paddle, bam, on the top of my head. I sat up. My brains wobbled.
“You’re okay!”
I picked up my paddle.
“You’re okay!”
Uh?
“Now paddle. Goddamnit!”
I got to work; we made it around the rock; we snagged the other raft and pulled it off the rock with us; we got slammed by water, all of us, a wall of water; we lost most of our gear. “You’re okay,” Dad said, over and over, as we bumped off boulders and down waterfalls and finally came to a beach where we could pull over, take a minute, laugh from the adrenaline, and plan out how to keep going with little food and wet tents and clothes. “You’re okay!”
“I’m okay,” I tell myself now. The futon trembles again—the ring of the phone muffled by the pillow top. I don’t pick up.
My new life in Massachusetts is disturbingly easy to kick-start. As per my curt request, Lawrence doesn’t come up to visit. And I don’t go down to New York, not even to file the separation papers. Oddly, this new life is more like my old life in assorted overseas countries than I want to admit. I stay in my garage with the lights off, as if I were holed up in a dark train-station hotel, with a view of a subway bridge (a common occurrence at the end of my Travel Time tenure, when expense budgets were slashed). My fellowship means that I don’t have to teach or work at a restaurant like the other grad students, who are bonding over training sessions and pairing up for drinks. I see them only once a week, for two hours during our one class.
For the most part, these students are twenty-two or twenty-three. And yet, not only do they seem older than me, they’re also far more intellectually focused and profoundly educated. Schools did not have official writing majors back in my day. And if they had, no doubt, I would have felt it too confining to study only one area of interest.
After class one night, some of them invite me along to a bar with bicycles hanging on the ceiling. There, over two-dollar beers, the table begins to argue about novels and poets and installation artists and experimental films that I think I might have heard of, maybe, once. Or maybe what I think is a poet is a band. Or maybe a literary critic.
I put my head on the table, while everybody keeps talking about edgy, artistic things that I’m too confused even to contemplate. Maybe my head on the table will go over as quirky and eccentric, instead of crazy and inappropriate. I’m so grateful for their voices and laughter. This is the first human contact I’ve had in weeks.
Now, though, everybody is getting up. We’re going to a show, which, as it turns out, means a concert in the indie-music world, of which tiny Amherst is evidently a major capital. The show is in a big wooden bar with a stage. A band goes up there and plays. But no one dances. Our group, like the rest of the audience, just stands there, listening to the lyrics and quietly, drunkenly swaying in the dark.
I do this, too. It’s not so bad. I like moody, depressing music. I like that nobody holds up flaming lighters or jerks their heads back and forth in time to the pounding deep bass and schizophre
nic lights so inevitably requisite to massive European discotheques.
For a minute I think: This is what I’ll do from now on, on weekends when I’m alone. I’ll go to shows. I’ll listen to indie music and pick up an obscure instrument like the Dobro.
Then I look around. I’m wearing black leather pants and a fluffy pink sweater. I’m also wearing my mother’s horrible veins that pop up along your hand and show the world that you are no longer in your twenties. The rest of the crowd is wearing shrunken vintage shirts and library glasses and skin that makes me think of Copenhagen and the thick bowls of cream they pour on herring there. Because I spent my twenties missing all this counterculture in favor of places like Denmark, where I drove around the flat, bleak countryside, spending the night at eighteenth-century manor-house hotels, dining with power couples playing Lord and Lady for the weekend by drinking obscure Romanian wines and getting hot-rock massages.
For the first time in my life, I realize I can’t buy an outfit and sway in the dark and fit in. My age—and bewilderment—won’t let me. This should be discouraging, and it is. But it’s also consoling. If I can’t change myself for the people I love, then at least I’m not going to change myself for people I don’t love and I don’t even know—people who refuse, despite all the music and space and anonymity, to dance, even badly.
Before I can figure anything else out about my new single life, the phone rings. Travel Time has finally gone bankrupt. One of my laid-off old colleagues has found a new job at Bride-to-Be magazine. Bride-to-Be is a handy guide to life down the aisle, from shoes to honeymoons. As it turns out, she needs some travel writers. “This gig is perfect for you,” she says. “You’re like the voice of our readers!”
“I am?”
“You’re an actual newlywed!”
Even though a tiny, know-it-all voice is saying to me, This seems a little masochistic, a louder, more desperate voice is saying, You know how to do this. And doing it will make you feel better. And if you feel better, you’ll look better and act better and go out and meet some other funny, tender, intelligent, badly dressed, wonderful guy and this time not ever, ever marry him.
All I have to do is make my one graduate class during the week, then take off for honeymoons by myself during long weekends. “All right,” I say. “I’m in. But does my newlywed husband have to come on all the stories?”
“We don’t have the budget. But write as if he were there. Make us feel the romance! The poetry!”
“Romance,” I say. “Poetry. Got it.”
I’m sitting on the tin pail, holding the cell phone, trying to keep my sizzling pee noise to a minimum. Pee noise undermines my argument. And I need my passport. I try again: “We need to talk to someone about a formal separation. We need to take legal steps.”
Nothing from Lawrence. A long, long pause. Then he says, in a casual tone, “Why don’t you come down for the weekend? Or I could come up.”
Is he ignoring me? Or just distracted by the noise at his office? “We need to talk to a lawyer.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about it over the weekend. I’ll come up—with some kind of papers. I’ll stop by city hall and see what we need.” His voice remains calm, unruffled, as if we’re talking about buying fabric softener.
He arrives on a bus. He has my passport, but no separation papers. I do not yell at him for not doing what he said he would do (one of our classic arguments). Instead we drive around in the car, taking scenic byways through the woods of Massachusetts.
I hate scenic byways. I get motion-sick two minutes in. But I rest my head on the window and say nothing. We drive over twisty Route 2, past waterfalls and the state line and south to the bombed-out river town of Newburgh, New York. We drive over to Beacon. We drive past it. We drive back up the Hudson, crisscrossing bridges.
Outside the boarded-up methadone-clinic town we’re circling, Lawrence tries to hit the brakes. The pedal gets stuck. He reaches down. He fumbles. He comes back up with a smashed Taco Bell bag. Oozing through the paper is an ancient Burrito Supreme that I didn’t quite manage to finish.
“I can’t believe this,” he says. He isn’t yelling, but he never yells. His whole being slows during stress, his volume decreases. He can’t stand garbage in the car. Not that I can, either. Both of us grew up with what we refer to as the Single Mom Mobile, a dented hatchback filled with office papers, apple cores, extra sweaters, the occasional broken umbrella. There was no room in the Single Mom Mobile to give friends a ride. And even if there had been, we would have been too embarrassed—in the deeply painful, completely out-of-proportion seventh-grade meaning of the word—to offer those friends a ride.
“It costs fifty cents to vacuum,” he says, speeding the car faster and faster, off the road and into the lot of a weedy, dead gas station. He yanks open the door. Leonard leaps to the back and hides by the pile of jumper cables.
There is the sound of plastic, glass. I turn around. Lawrence is hurling garbage across the parking lot—a Filet-O-Fish wrapper, an empty bottle of antifreeze, then the snow scraper, the first-aid kit. “Have you ever heard of a garbage can?” His voice is compressed, cold, terrifying.
I shrink down, and an unfortunate thing happens. I begin to smile hugely, unmistakably, in the style of me at age eight when my dad bawled and refused to stop hugging me good-bye in the aisle of a 727. This is not good. I try to dig below my seat, to show him that I’m helping, that I’m taking his feelings seriously and find—a milk shake cup half filled with dried vanilla cement.
“Don’t touch it,” he says. “Don’t you touch anything in my car.”
And then he finds the tub of Kentucky Fried. It is half eaten. It is a few weeks old. He rattles the tub near my face. “You disgust me,” he says. “Do you hear me? You. Disgust. Me.”
Nothing from me.
“Look at yourself. When was the last time you showered?”
Nothing.
“You’re not even eating this crap.” He kicks the chicken tub across the lot. “You just buy it, take one bite, and throw it out.”
I sit up, right in his face. “I’m not going to the grocery store, either! I’m not playing the guitar! I’m not skiing! I’m not planning us trips to the beach! Or baking you oatmeal cookies! Or cooking goat cheese tarts! Or throwing you surprise birthday parties! Or taking you for picnics! Or diving! Or reading! Or dancing! Or doing anything I like doing!”
We both go really quiet. There are windy highway sounds all of a sudden. There are bird chirps and branch rustlings.
“Well that’s a stupid fucking way to live,” says Lawrence, his voice his again—human. He kicks the tub of rotten chicken across the lot. “Clean up my car,” he says. “Now.”
I pick up the wrappers. I throw them away. He doesn’t look at me. He drives and drives and drives, the muscles on his arms flexing as he hurls the car up to ninety. We are still fighting, apparently, about the car garbage. But not about my high-speed marital exit. And this, I tell myself, is yet another reason we should not be married: We don’t know how to fight, either, not with real words and feelings.
At the bus stop by the Amherst common, Lawrence pulls the car over. Something strange washes through his face—an exhausted calm. He gets out of the car. He knocks on the window. “I’ll call you later,” he says quietly, “about next weekend.”
I nod, confused but too tired to correct him. What is his problem? Why won’t he just let us cut this off fast? Pain only seems scary while you’re waiting for it to happen. After it does, it’s just hurt and recovery.
The day before class, I write a short story. The discussion at the table is brief: My teacher, classmates, and I all agree. The story is simplistic and hysterical and just plain bad. It’s about a woman married to a man who fills up their house with gadgets designed to protect them: an air purifier, a bug zapper, an electric fence to keep out deer and thus Lyme-disease-ridden ticks. One weekend, he slathers all their windows in several hundred black plastic bird stickers to prevent live birds from f
lying into the glass.
Smothered, the woman asks her husband to leave, only to cower in the living room in fear that night. Alone, in the dark, without him, the bird stickers seem to come alive, turning into bird-looking bats that swoop down, trying to peck at her.
I’m not the woman in the story, of course. I’m not going crazy without my husband. I’m just getting thin. I have lost 17 of my 117 pounds. My hair is falling out and my skin is gray. I look like me after my parents’ divorce. Minus the boils.
A week before I’m scheduled to go to Bermuda to write about quaint limestone cottages where honeymooners can spend the week, drinking high tea and playing croquet, I get a call. It’s Nana. “How are the newlyweds?” she says.
“Great,” I say. “We’re doing great!”
There’s a long, inexplicable pause. “I feel a little funny,” she says. “I’ll call back.”
But she doesn’t call back. I try to call her back, no answer. Dad calls. Nana has had a stroke. He tells me not to come; we don’t know anything yet. Besides, it’s almost Christmas. I can go see her over the holidays.
“Okay,” I say. Then I get in the car and drive to the airport. By the time I get to the hospital in some distant strip-mall town outside Seattle, Dad is there, too. Nana is puffy, swollen, paralyzed on one half of her body. Her eye droops, her hair is plastered to her head, and she is moaning. I pick up a cup, then a box of tissues. I want to hold her hand, but there are tubes all over—thick, hefty, upsetting ones.
There is a window in the room, with a view of the parking lot. Seagulls wheel over the rows of cars. Bright, impossible sunshine slants across Nana’s bed. She has no pillow.
“Take me home,” she says, her lips sludging to one side.
Instantly everything in the bleak, silent room restarts. Dad and I have something to do besides stand there stunned and gaping. He runs downstairs and pulls around the car. Then he runs back into the room. “Get a wheelchair,” he says. “Let’s go. Hop to!”