“Maybe we could even go up to Green Bay,” he said, his eyes bright.
For as long as I had known him, my husband had been a football fanatic. His favorite team was, somewhat inexplicably, the Green Bay Packers, a town and an institution to which he had no inherent attachment. Rand’s family is from New York, and he was born in Jersey, but he’s always had an affinity for a team whose fans are known for wearing giant Styrofoam cheeses on their heads. I’ve always found this facet of Wisconsin fandom fascinating.
“What’s our mascot?”
“The Packers.”
“Excellent. BRING ME A HAT THAT LOOKS LIKE CHEESE.”
Before I continue, let me be clear about something: I don’t like the National Football League. It’s inherently misogynistic: there are no female commentators except for a few on-field, and it was only in 2015 that the first female referee was hired. The organization has been horrifically silent on issues of domestic abuse perpetuated by its players off-field and seems woefully unconcerned about the players’ health on-field. Players regularly get concussions—or worse—but the legacy of brain damage from such collisions remains altogether ignored.
I’ve noted that there would be far fewer instances of neurological damage if the athletes played without helmets, padding, and maybe even shirts, but thus far my suggestions have gone unheeded by the NFL.
Rand, I should note, agrees with me on all this (though he’s not quite as adamant about the whole shirtless thing).
Despite all that, the Green Bay Packers may have saved my marriage. I realize the absurdity of that statement, but I know people who credit Ultimate Frisbee with their domestic bliss, who attribute their happiness to Magic: The Gathering or intramural soccer or trivia night at the neighborhood bar. Salvation can be found in the most unlikely places. Like on the stretch of highway between Milwaukee and Lambeau Field.
I knew Rand wanted to visit the home stadium of his favorite team, but I assumed that, like so many other things, he’d have to skip it in favor of work. I was pleasantly surprised, though still somewhat incredulous, to find that on his work trip he booked an extra day just to drive up to Green Bay.
For the first time that I could remember, Rand was doing something he wanted to do. I drove, not making a sound, afraid to break the spell, while he took an assortment of phone calls.
Someone once told me that I only endured football because of Rand, and I wanted to laugh, because it’s not like he’s particularly enjoyed the countless seasons of American Idol that I made him sit through while I did interpretive dances to the songs in various states of undress. Sometimes something becomes important to you because it’s important to the people you love. Like sports, or terrible reality TV shows, or adhering to local nudity laws.
The road was flat, the early October sky clear and blue. By the time we pulled into the stadium parking lot, Rand was excitedly bouncing in his seat. I love moments like that, when you realize you are married to a giant, human-shaped puppy. I had to be careful he didn’t run into the traffic the second the door opened.
I once asked Rand about his affinity for the Packers.
“I’m a socialist,” he said, brightly, referring to the fact that there is no billionaire at the helm of Green Bay’s team. The club is a nonprofit that is owned by the town, the nuances of which were explained to us by our guide during the ninety-minute-long tour. I listened intently while watching Rand have the closest thing to a religious experience that I’d ever seen him have. He gingerly touched the walls of the stadium and stepped with utter reverence over the tiles on which generations of Packer players had crossed. He delicately tried on jerseys in the gift shop as though they were made of silk, finally selecting one that he wore out of the store.
For the first time in a very long time, Rand was doing something he wanted to do.
On the ride back to Milwaukee, after a lunch consisting of fried cheese curds followed by a side of dietary regret, Rand took one more call while I drove. It was with a therapist who had been recommended to him by a colleague. I hadn’t anticipated this.
I listened while Rand relayed to him everything that had happened in Ireland and everything that had happened at work that led to that breaking point.
The trees on the side of the freeway were beginning to change color as I listened to my husband admit he was overwhelmed. How he constantly felt like he was behind. He told him about his chronic pain and his inability to sleep. How he felt that he couldn’t take time off because doing so would mean letting his coworkers down. The therapist asked him how he’d feel if his coworkers said something like that to him.
Terrible, Rand admitted. But he had more at stake in the company. He had to be the hardest-working person there.
“Yeah, but how can your coworkers comfortably take a break if they don’t see you doing it?”
Rand had no reply to that.
The therapist then gave him a homework assignment: Rand and I would talk about the lack of balance in his life, how it made us both feel, and what we could do to fix that.
On the drive back, after a day spent at Lambeau Field, as the sun was setting and the sky over the surprisingly flat state of Wisconsin began to glow a soft peach hue, we had that talk. I told him how it seemed like work came before everything. How it felt that he never prioritized us. How he never even prioritized himself.
I told him how the only time I had felt important to him was before my surgery, leaving me nostalgic for a terrible time in my life. How now that I was okay, work went back to being first on his list.
“I felt like you were just waiting to go home every night from the hospital so you could work,” I said.
How I had come to this conclusion was unclear to me—I scarcely remembered my hospital stay. But somehow, I’d managed to form hurt feelings while barely conscious. I held a grudge even though I had forgotten nearly everything that happened.
“Baby,” Rand said, “that’s not true. I just went home and slept. And every morning, I came back to the hospital to be with you.”
And then: “You are more important than work.”
Deep down, I’d known this. But upon hearing it vocalized, I promptly started to cry. This is slightly problematic when one is driving on the freeway. I wiped my eyes with the back of one hand while I steered with the other. I began to realize that the source of my own unhappiness was not exclusively my overtaxed marriage. It was because my head still hurt and his back always did. It was because I felt alone and he felt overwhelmed. While Rand was mired in stress, I’d created a false narrative—one in which I was unloved and uncared for, his work would always take precedence over us, and he saw no reason to change things because I—and our relationship—just were not worth it. Especially now. Especially with a hole in my head.
But during that drive, I realized that the endless hours he spent working had nothing to do with me. It had to do with him.
We started talking about what we could do to fix things. We made a list of all the stuff we wanted to change. One day a week, Rand would come home before 7 p.m., and he wouldn’t work on his computer again until the next morning (it has since been known as “anti-work night” and is a recurring appointment on his calendar). He promised to take a vacation, during which he’d work less than sixty minutes a day. Eventually, he might limit his work on one weekend day to less than one hour.
I, in turn, promised not to run into his office in my underwear and scream “BREAKTIME!” while pouring a gallon of bleach over his laptop.
In the coming months, Rand would achieve most of his goals. He started saying “no” more. He hired an assistant who is kind and capable and makes sure he doesn’t die of dehydration. He would eventually voluntarily step down as CEO, instead crafting a role for himself in which he works on the projects and products he wants to and travels around the world, speaking and building brand awareness. These were all positive steps toward achieving real balance in his life.
And then, perhaps most remarkable of all, Rand took
a vacation.
He got away from work for a while. Really, really far away. Rand, never able to underachieve, put the entire planet between himself and his office. Two months after our trip to Green Bay, in January 2013, we went on vacation in South Africa, which is Seattle’s antipode—the point on the globe that was farthest away from it. Or, rather, South Africa is very close to being the antipode—the actual spot is in the middle of the Indian Ocean. If you find it on a globe, you will see that it is surrounded by lots of blue enamel paint.
Approximately 160 miles northeast of Cape Town is Bushmans Kloof, a lodge located in the middle of a wilderness retreat. It was here, in a remote part of a country on the other side of the world from home, that things started to change. That was where we saw the animals. The Kloof is home to thousands of them.
Every night guides would take us out on wilderness drives in search of creatures to spy on. Because the reserve was fenced in and there were no predators, the animals we saw weren’t terribly skittish. They just stood in the golden fields, eating and staring at us. A lot of the time, we were doing the same thing.
Here’s the thing about Rand: he adores animals. I’ve seen him scamper over rocks in pursuit of lizards and sit motionless by the side of a pond in hopes that a frog might appear. We once came across a turtle in a creek, and for the rest of the day Rand talked about it.
“Wasn’t that a great turtle?” he asked me, and I wanted to tell him that I had no idea whether it was or not—I had no frame of reference as to what made a turtle great. These are things that are beaten out of you—sometimes literally—in middle school. Somehow, Rand who always, always had to be the grownup, had managed to hang on to this one glorious facet of childhood—an absolute love for the grimy, slimy natural world.
When I saw the look of utter delight on his face at the mere memory of that turtle, there was no other answer for me to give other than the affirmative.
“That was the best turtle ever,” I said.
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
At the Kloof, it was like that every day. Our turtle pond overfloweth. We saw zebras, wildebeests, ostriches, and a number of creatures that we’d never even heard of before visiting South Africa. Oryx. Bonteboks. Elans. Red hartebeests. Giraffippos.
(Okay, I made that last one up. We’re getting to the end of the book. I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.)
On top of all those, I saw what may have been the most elusive creature of all. I saw my husband, relaxed. He slept in. He didn’t check his email. He tried sneaking up on a herd of elan and found a gecko living under the light fixture on the balcony of our cottage.
One night, he looked at me as we were watching the sun set over a ridge and said, “You know what? My back doesn’t hurt. That hasn’t happened in four years.”
Under a blue African sky, the freckles on his nose came out and the crease in his brow began to slowly fade. He laughed, and we made memories and the world back home did not fall apart.
And then, after several sunlit days on the other side of the earth, we went back to Seattle.
I won’t pretend that everything is fixed. Changes to the patterns of your life take time. The masterpieces of the world—Rome and the pyramids and Jeff Goldblum’s abs—were not built in a day. Rand still frantically rushes around, still doesn’t sleep regular hours, still works weekends. His hair continues to turn gray; his back continues to hurt.
But sometimes, sometimes, he steps away from it all. He takes a break. He sits down and enjoys himself and watches a football game. He reads a book. Sometimes, we go somewhere and look for frogs.
Every now and then, he does the things that he wants to do. Those trips—whether across the world or down the road—are always my favorite ones.
Rand once told me that you can’t engineer quality time. You can only spend a lot of time with someone and hope that it turns into that. That if you are lucky, something memorable will happen. Our journey out of the dark could have taken place at any point along our travels. Or it might not have happened at all.
The location, if I’m truly honest with myself, had nothing to do with it. But I remember exactly where we were when Rand, for the first time, perhaps ever, started to put himself first. And for the first time, ever, I put him first, too. These two trips—disparate and unalike but forever tied together in my memory—are when I first started to think that he, and we, would be okay.
14
TURNS OUT, THINGS AREN’T ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM
IT SEEMED LIKE THINGS SHOULD have been okay after that. My marriage was on the mend. Rand was working less. My tumor wasn’t cancerous. I should have been happy.
Let me tell you something that is not at all surprising but nevertheless came as a bit of a shock to me.
Brain surgery is a very, very big deal.
You’re probably thinking, Really? You didn’t see that coming? That someone carving into your head and taking out bits of it might be a very special sweeps week–worthy episode of your life, like that time on Friends when Winona Ryder kissed Jennifer Aniston?
And no, I did not. I can be shockingly obtuse when it comes to matters of my own life. It’s why I keep buying jumpsuits, despite the fact that they’re the adult equivalent of a onesie. You can glimpse so many of the treasures that the world has to offer, you can study its mysteries and its secrets, yet the ability to see yourself clearly, and to realize that certain clothing makes you look like a giant toddler, will continue to elude you.
The significance of my brain surgery and the difficultly of the ensuing recovery caught me by surprise. Because it wasn’t actually brain cancer and because structurally my brain was healthy (despite vast swaths of it being dedicated to the plots of 1990s-era sitcoms and the names of every member of the Wu-Tang Clan, living or dead), I’d managed to convince myself that was the end of the story.
During my surgery, ten staples had been placed in my head while I was still under—a neat little row holding my scalp together. An eleventh went in when I was conscious, cutting through the haze of painkillers to make me wince. The technician apologized profusely.
“This is why everyone hates me,” she said, pitifully.
“It’s okay,” I lied. She must have been terrible at parties.
Ten days after my surgery, those metal brackets were removed in a series of surprisingly painless snaps, and I reasoned that was sufficient time for me to get back to normal. Or whatever passes for normal for someone who insisted that she wanted photos of Patrick Stewart on her business cards so that she could hand them to people and say, “My Pi-card.”
I’d be back to that, right?
But that isn’t what happened.
I passed my neurological tests with flying colors. I was able to squeeze the doctor’s fingers on cue, could follow the little light that they waved in front of my eyes, and could relay the president’s name when asked.
But I felt different.
“Something’s changed,” I’d tell Rand, after spending far too long in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at a reflection that seemed slightly off, as though someone had tried to recreate my face from memory and hadn’t quite gotten all the details right.
“Nothing’s changed.”
“I look different.”
“Nope.”
“My face. It’s different now.”
“It’s the same one you had before.”
Frustrated that he was unable to see the utterly intangible but still fucking obvious thing in front of him, I’d insist that I felt different, knowing that this was an impossible point for him to argue.
He never lost his patience during my many attempts to get him to admit that I was changed, never gave any fuel to my growing notions that I was different now, less lovable. But if you repeat any notion enough you risk it becoming true, no matter how absurd. Kale chips are delicious. Leggings may be worn in place of pants. We are not deserving of love or kindness.
Yet even as my neuroses pushed my b
eliefs to the border of becoming self-fulfilling, I was adored. When I would insist that I was no longer myself, Rand would stop whatever he was doing to wrap his arms around me—long, blanketing embraces meant to calm the demons inside me, well-intended but entirely ineffectual.
“You had brain surgery,” he’d say. “Give it time.”
Patience is a profoundly difficult thing to have when all you want is to feel like yourself again.
In the last few years, I’d come to terms with the idea of getting lost as I made my way around the world. I could handle taking the wrong train or making a wrong turn, realizing that in either case I’d be fine. I’d be in Queens when I meant to go to Chelsea, but I’d be fine.
What I was not okay with was feeling disoriented in places I knew well. At home, or in front of a computer, or inside my own head. I was fine if the world around me was unfamiliar, but it was a different matter entirely when everything I was started to feel that way, too.
I began to scrutinize every aspect of myself. My voice, which sounded more shrill and more nasal than I remembered. My jawline, which looked weirdly fleshy, as though the moon face from the steroids I’d taken had never really gone away.
And something else less tangible than even those things. Something indescribable that had made me who I was seemed irrevocably different. I was okay with losing my keys and losing my way and losing a chunk of my skull, but I was terrified at the prospect of losing myself.
I’ve never had much trouble making conversation. I could walk into a room of strangers and introduce myself to them without thinking twice about it. It was something I prided myself on, a necessary skill I’d honed when traveling with Rand to professional events. He’d get pulled away by someone who was eager to discuss something involving acronyms, and so I’d roam the room engaging people in conversation while I made my way to the dessert buffet. Part of this was tactical: if you head straight for the cake table at a party to which you are not technically invited, security is occasionally called. But if you ask people about their lives and their children along the way, no one will call you out when you go back for sevenths.
All Over the Place Page 17