Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

  “I still can’t believe I found this place so fast,” John said later that night as we lay in bed.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “You weren’t looking.” Which wasn’t entirely true. John’s a dedicated real estate window-shopper. He’ll go out for a jog anywhere in the world and come back to the hotel with five house flyers. Once in Venice I caught him seriously pondering a listing for a million-euro one-bedroom apartment with marble floors, ancient wiring, and a shared kitchen.

  “Of course I was looking,” he said. “After the kittens were killed I knew it was time to go, even on the remote chance that Keith had anything to do with it.”

  I just stared at him.

  “I thought you knew,” he said.

  “How would I know that?”

  “Because kittens don’t just turn up with broken necks.”

  “I assumed an animal broke their necks,” I told him.

  “Without leaving any other marks on them?”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”

  “My priority was getting us out. Besides,” he said, “I thought it was tacitly understood.”

  “It was not tacitly understood.”

  “I see that now.”

  “Those poor little kittens.”

  “I know, baby.”

  John and I stayed in Ann Arbor another ten years, bought a house made of wood, and planted hundreds of bulbs in the yard. Then George W. Bush was reelected. The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor was as cozily liberal as ever, but the contrast between those twenty-five square miles and the rest of Michigan got harder to ignore. My drinking, which had become a daily habit soon after 9/11, crept up more as my resentment and frustration grew. Ann Arbor itself began to strike me as increasingly claustrophobic, not to mention a bit smug. “We don’t live in the Midwest; we live in Ann Arbor,” people would say, and I would think about how maybe I didn’t want to live in a part of the country where such fine distinctions were necessary. Or maybe it was inevitable that given my tropical childhood, the sight of mud-snow on the ground in April would one day fill me with despair. Maybe I was just done hiding out from the broader lunacy and beauty of the non-cozy world.

  The January of Bush’s second inauguration, I visited the West Coast for the first time, barely making it out of heavy snow in Detroit in time to meet John at a conference in San Francisco. The morning after I arrived, we walked to Yerba Buena Gardens and sat in the sun, surrounded by flowering plants from San Francisco’s sister cities around the world. On the lawn, elderly Asian women were practicing Tai Chi. Two men walked past us hand in hand.

  “Pretty here,” John said.

  “Yes it is,” I said, and burst into tears.

  Within a month I had a job interview in Seattle, and within two months we had moved away from the Midwest, away from the snow and tornadoes, away from the leafy bubble that had sheltered us, and to the land of evergreens and grunge and no free parking, ever. I had no idea how I would survive in a big city, where even the parking meters were confusing digital contraptions and my new office building was seventy-six stories tall. But I was willing to table that question for now. I needed mild weather and cultural breathing room and a city full of quirky neighborhoods to explore more than I needed to be Useful. Replanted in Seattle, I imagined myself becoming such a vibrant urban creature that maybe—especially if I could dial down my drinking—I’d find a whole new way to belong.

  * * *

  My second sober summer, my friend Marie sent me a link to a four-day farm camp in eastern Washington with a note: “Want to go?” Which is how I found myself pulling a chicken’s heart from its body at 7:00 a.m. in a thunderstorm, wondering if I was still a person with principles or even feelings anymore.

  The chickens were that night’s dinner, and the idea was for each camper to slaughter her own, thereby feeling more connected to the earth, or the food chain, or at least that one chicken. I had lain awake in bed the night before, agonizing over all the different routes I could choose with my chicken: kill it; don’t kill it; don’t kill it but still eat it; kill it but don’t eat it; kill it but then arrange some kind of blind swap so I wouldn’t know if I was eating my chicken or someone else’s; kill it and then myself.

  Ultimately, I made the worst possible choice, which was to hold and talk to the chicken before it died, let someone else kill it, and rejoin for the evisceration. It was gutless and hypocritical and also in the moment seemed like the only honest path. Because I knew that killing that chicken would not do one goddamn thing to make me feel Useful or close to the earth. I also knew I couldn’t admit that to a bunch of near strangers—that I’d feel compelled to fake a solemn awe, when all I’d really be feeling is sorry that I’d ended a life for no real reason. So I spoke softly to the chicken and told myself I was helping it, and after the deed was done, I stuck my hand inside and pulled out its organs.

  Then it was 8:00 a.m. and time for breakfast.

  I’d known I was in some trouble since the first day, when the campers—all women—gathered for the opening circle. I’m not an opening-circle kind of person. I don’t mind the reflecting and the intention setting and the blah-blah-blah; I just don’t like packaging it all up in a thirty-second blurb to share with total strangers.

  This particular opening circle was like the first chapter of one of those novels where five very different women gather at a spa or class reunion to learn that they aren’t so very different after all. The oldest camper said she was going through a divorce and had come to the farm to reconnect with herself. The youngest, a sweet-faced blonde from a family of Napa winegrowers, had just gotten married and felt it was time to “take stock.” A freckled thirtysomething working to open her own bakery said she came to the farm once a year to remind herself why she does what she does.

  We were a group of five, so now only Marie stood between me and my story. I had no idea what I was going to say. I knew that Marie, damn her, was not a huge talker. Fortunately for me, she’s also one of the most straightforward people on the planet. She gestured toward one of the camp leaders. “I’ve taken Kim’s cooking classes in Seattle and really enjoyed them, so this seemed like a fun opportunity to get away and learn more from her,” she said.

  Then it was my turn. If I’d been an opening-circle kind of person, my story would have gone something like this: I have been sober for fifteen months. I’m awake and responsible and on time. I am a blank slate. I thought I would know who I am by now, what I like, what I can do. I thought I would be more Useful. I thought I would have passions. Skills. I came here to fall in love with something Useful so I can feel as if I belong on this earth.

  What came out was “I absolutely love goat cheese and thought it would be fun to learn to make it!” Which wasn’t a lie, and got me through. And so there we were: the divorcée, the newlywed, the entrepreneur, the hobbyist cook, and the goat-cheese chick, embarking on a voyage of self-discovery.

  From a handy-skills perspective, farm camp did not disappoint. We foraged for berries and anise hyssop and pine nuts. (Now that I know what it takes to find and shell a pine nut, I’ll never complain about the price again, and neither should you.) We made gnocchi and aioli and wood-fired pizzas. We murdered birds and squeezed goat udders, and I tried persistently but in vain to get the border collies to stop herding goats and pay attention to me. We learned to can, a terrifying process involving glass, tongs, boiling water, and the specter of death—all for a little apricot jam.

  And at every turn, my fellow campers seemed to be finding meaning in it. The young newlywed told stories about her family’s vineyards and how connected they made her feel to the California seasons. The divorcée said she felt herself opening up. The baker was especially charming in a hyper-Etsy way, describing the yogurt, butter, and even salt she made herself in her studio apartment. I, on the other hand, tried to make meaning. To convince myself I was having an experience, the kind of experience only a super-fly, sober, Useful American such as myself could have.
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  Making fake meaning is exhausting. I mean, at least with canning you end up with something to eat that might not kill you. In the afternoon of day three, I snuck away from shelling walnuts and wandered into the orchard. Ayla, a Great Pyrenees whose only apparent farm job was to hang out being awesome, came with me. We sat under a tree for twenty minutes, the longest I’d gone since arriving without the sound of human voices. It was still and very hot, over a hundred degrees. Eventually, things got quiet enough for me to know what I had to do: give up. Give up on this story of me as Useful, or Sober Person Rediscovering the Joy of Life, or anything with capital letters. Can you just be a woman who thought this would be more fun than it is? I asked myself. Who wondered how goat cheese is made and, now knowing, is ready to go home?

  In that moment, yes. It turned out I could just exhale all the fakery and return to shelling walnuts as someone with no real feeling for walnuts. So what? They still ended up shelled and ready for pesto, and I breathed with a little less effort.

  * * *

  The ghost of Richard Hugo still nags at me from time to time. At the market I hold a jar of locally made jam—generally some kind of classic/modern mix, like peach spiked with cardamom—and feel a pang of longing for days spent making something so simple and luxurious. The smell of fresh topsoil in spring reawakens my fantasies of a garden with all the plants from the R.E.M. song “Find the River.” But I don’t run headlong toward grand visions of homespun utility anymore. Instead, I am Useful in small ways: boiling mint and sugar into a syrup for soda, growing thyme and chives on the back porch. I drag my compost bin to the curb. I tell tourists as kindly as possible that I can’t direct them to Seattle Grace Hospital because it doesn’t exist. There are no amber waves of grain in my life, and I don’t think much about whether I belong on this landmass; I just want to belong to the day as it forms around me. Or when I’m feeling ambitious, to the city.

  Blackberry

  Dear Richard,

  An old blue Volvo wagon drove past the window just now and reminded me of the summer I spent in New Hampshire with Ben, your friend, my boyfriend and near-undoing. It was 1990, the summer after sophomore year. Ben and I drank mint juleps and skinny-dipped in frigid creeks and drove his father’s hand-me-down Volvo wagon: a car so old that once it started, we were afraid to turn it off, so we kept it running even while buying gas. Ben had spent three consecutive summers reading Moby Dick, picking up each year where he’d left off the previous one. I was there that day in June when he stood up naked on a flat rock, shouted “Finally! I’m done!” and jumped into the creek, book in hand. You visited us not long after, en route to the Appalachian Trail, and a little part of me wanted to leave with you, because I didn’t understand you at all and I was preoccupied (maybe still am) with men I didn’t understand.

  Back at college that fall you sort of adopted me. Ben had gone off to grad school in another state, visiting now and then but already drifting toward more convenient women. You and I would cut class and go to the dollar movies, sometimes two in a row. At night you’d show up at my place with a bottle or two of five-dollar red wine. Avia, from Yugoslavia. We’d drink and sometimes you’d unpin the Robert Hass poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” from my corkboard and read it to me. Poetry-reading guys were a dime a dozen at our school, but you were different. You looked like the ex–football player you were—went to the gym twice a day, drove around in a Jeep with roll bars, and never talked about your feelings. And I still didn’t understand you or what you wanted from me (though I knew it wasn’t sex, which I found mildly insulting). So when you read, I paid attention.

  We were earnest English majors. We knew that “Meditation at Lagunitas” was about clinging to the names of things as a way to hold on to what those things represented. For Hass, the word “blackberry” stands in for a whole raft of lost moments. But because we were also twenty-year-old romantics who knew absolutely everything there was to know about longing, pining, and missing, our favorite line was “Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.”

  I had spent my whole life longing. In my parents’ house, I longed for a place where safety and peace were less tenuous. In our crass, gold-plated Florida town, I longed to live somewhere with changing leaves and old houses and creaky wood floors. I was awkward and embarrassed by every word I said and wanted to feel beautiful and eloquent. I was compulsively cautious and longed for the abandon I imagined from the Prince lyrics that mortified me. I thought back then that the right boy would be my one-stop solution to all of it. Over and over I proved that theory wrong, but I still carried the longing with me, invisible and shifting to fit whoever was around the bend.

  At some point I just longed for an end to longing itself. I bought a coffee mug that said, “Bloom Where You’re Planted,” and every time I filled it, I translated it for myself as Jesus Christ, can you just be happy for once? This approach failed, too, and by our year of dollar movies and Robert Hass I was just as susceptible to longing, and also to poetry and wine.

  Four years ago I drank my last bottle of wine (not Avia, and not five dollars). For years I had longed to want to quit. Then I was just desperate to quit. Once I quit, I longed to drink for what felt like the world’s slowest aeon. Then it stopped. I am a superhero! I thought. I can kill longing. From now on I will live in a state of acceptance and joyous contentment.

  I was very impressed with myself. And quite badly mistaken.

  This week alone I have longed for the following: lemon ice cream. One more hour of sleep. The smell of rain without the rain itself. A car made of green glass. A private conversation with Emily Dickinson and also one with Grover, the Muppet. My husband’s hands on my naked back. Someone else’s husband’s hands there, too. Blue espadrilles, grilled octopus, the sureness of God, the dog to stop kicking me in his sleep.

  So much for joyous contentment.

  I got some of these things. But “some” leaves a lot of distance to cross. Last week I reread “Meditation at Lagunitas,” and when I got to our favorite line, I thought, Endless distances. The fucker was being literal, and we were too young and dumb to know it. I texted you: “Robert Hass’s endless distances: they’re uncrossable, aren’t they? I’m never going to cross them and neither are you.” You live in Montana now and I pictured you reading my text standing next to a moose.

  “Yes,” you wrote back. “I mean, no. We’re never going to cross them.”

  “We didn’t understand back in 1991,” I said. “We didn’t understand that longing never stops.”

  “No,” you said. “It’s the gun on the mantel in the first act, destined to go off in the third.”

  I frowned when I read that. How can it be act 3 already, when it feels as if we finished that bottle of Avia ten minutes ago? When I felt like a superhero just five minutes ago? When I want so much more? I have a whole book of names standing in for my losses.

  “I hope you’re assuming a five-act structure,” I wanted to respond. But I didn’t, because I don’t want to know. So please don’t tell me.

  I was staring at that old Volvo outside the window when I started this letter, and that summer in New Hampshire came flooding back. The buzz of deer flies, the smell of cold water, road trips with Ben in the ancient Volvo wagon that somehow never let us down. Drinking minted bourbon in Adirondack chairs with both of you, in love with Ben but a little with you, too, and thinking I couldn’t go wrong either way. Being twenty and so sure that nothing lay ahead but more love and an eventual end to longing.

  Now I’m old enough to know better. But I stared out my window at the Volvo and thought, Maybe if I owned that car, I could feel that way again. Richard, I’m telling you: I nearly ran out into the street to make an offer, just to close the endless distance.

  Notes to Self: Election Night 2016

  The plan is for a quiet celebration. It’s not 2008, when your neighborhood pub went insane with joy over Obama’s win. When you drank five glasses of Oregon Chardonnay, and the guy on the nex
t bar stool grabbed you and kissed you and John didn’t mind because history was happening. You expect history to happen tonight, too, and the idea of a woman in the Oval Office is enough to make you swoon, but tonight there will be no boozy group hugs or kisses from strangers. Tonight you’ll stay safe, at home, alone in your kitchen because John is out of town. You’ll bake cookies to keep yourself busy while the returns come in. It’s oddly appropriate: Remember 1992, when Hillary Clinton was all but publicly flogged for saying she didn’t stay home baking cookies? Well, now she’s about to become president. Who needs booze when you have cookies and vindication?

  Revised plan (7:15 p.m. PST):

  The plan is to stay calm. Remember that these things rarely get called early and that the networks have a vested interest in creating suspense. Remember, too, that sobriety means riding out these moments of uncertainty: the mammogram that had to be redone, the job offer you weren’t sure you’d get. You’ve trained for times like this. Keep baking and ride it out.

  Revised plan (8:00 p.m. PST):

  Okay, so the news is getting a little weird. Maybe it’s time to stop baking, before distraction makes you confuse salt for sugar or grab a hot tray. The rest of the dough will keep for tomorrow. You can put it in the fridge or just, you know, eat it. Let the dogs lick the beaters. It’s important to keep a brave face for the dogs. You know this because the election commentators are no longer keeping a brave face for you, and it’s freaking you out. Don’t let your dogs down the way these people and their stupid pollsters are letting you down. Be glad you’re not watching at a bar, where the vibe must be getting sketchy. Be glad that you’re here, in your spacious kitchen, in your pretty house, sober, and able to process what is happening rather than spinning out in ten drunk directions.