by Sarah Fuller
“People,” I answered.
She rolled her lovely blue eyes, a gesture she started doing at about age two. “No, like, what religion are we?”
“I don’t have one,” I said and, because I’m an asshole, I added, “I’m not religious. I’m spiritual.”
“Well, what am I?” she asked.
“You’re whatever you want to be,” I answered.
“How do I know what that is?”
Good question. “I’ll teach you, and you’ll explore, and one day, you’ll choose. And then you might change your mind. You have to give yourself the freedom to do that.”
“What do you believe in?”
I shrugged. “I believe in it all. Hindu philosophy. Jewish ideals. Christianity. But more than anything, I believe we’re all connected, and God is in everything. Well, and like your father, I like science a lot. Like Dan Brown says in his new book, ‘Science and religion are saying the same thing, just in a different language.’”
My daughter is used to me using fiction to explain my point. She nodded, seeming to assimilate this knowledge.
A moment later, while Eleanor was still mulling this over, I sneezed.
“God bless you, Mommy.”
I turned to her, giving her a scolding look. “Where did you pick that up?”
“People say it when you sneeze.”
“Yeah, but that’s because they used to think that someone’s soul was escaping their body,” I explained. “We know better now. If you learn anything from me on this subject, let it be to check your information. Find out whether it is true, kind, and necessary.”
She nodded.
“Instead, when someone sneezes, I say ‘Gesundheit,’ because the Germans got it right with that one.”
“Aren’t I mostly German?” Eleanor asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, predominantly on your father’s side.”
“Then is German my religion?”
I shook my head. Damn, I had seriously neglected my daughter’s religious upbringing, probably in an attempt to curb my own.
I was raised in a Christian Science home.
There. I said it.
Okay, now that you’ve all stopped gasping, yes, I was one of those weird kids who didn’t go to the doctor; if we got sick, we prayed the flu away. And I didn’t get vaccines, just like the damn hippies here on the West Coast who have pretty much brought back the whooping cough epidemic.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes vaccines seem weird to me. When the doctor gave Eleanor the chicken pox vaccine, I sort of freaked out.
“Chickenpox is a rite of passage,” I told her doctor.
“But it doesn’t have to be,” he explained.
My brain crowded with uncertainty. I have a cute chicken pox scar above my right eyebrow… What if she didn’t get her own mark? Didn’t she need to?
And then I remembered when my mother told me I had chicken pox at age five. I had started crying.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” I’d asked.
“Probably,” my sister said beside me in the back seat of the station wagon. “I mean, if you get sick enough you will, because Lord knows Mom isn’t taking you to the doctor.”
My asshole sister ate her words years later. She’d asked me to wake her up in time to watch the movie of the week, about a woman who faked a pregnancy to get her boyfriend to stay with her. Real classy stuff. Is anyone else surprised that my lovely sister has six kids?
Anyway, I remembered shaking my sister’s shoulder, but she wouldn’t wake up. Sweat was rolling down her forehead, and she was seemingly in a coma. I went to fetch my mother, who decided this was the perfect time for us to sit beside my sister’s bed and pray.
“This isn’t the time for your religion!” I yelled, nearly in tears, thinking that my sister was going to die from some virus.
“Sarah, this is precisely the time for our religion,” my mother said. “When we are fearful, that’s the time to strengthen our faith.”
We prayed through the night, and in the morning, my sister awoke. She wasn’t the least bit grateful that I’d spent the whole night reciting scripture; she was pissed that she’d missed the movie of the week.
I’m not sure what saved my sister that night, but I also don’t know what was wrong with her in the first place. That’s why I tend to think that science and spirituality need to be connected in my world. If I pass one lesson on to Eleanor, it will be to surround herself with as many diverse people as she can. Value others’ beliefs, and they will enrich our lives. We may not all believe in the same thing, but we are all connected by a cosmic force called love.
I may not be able to see it, but I know it exists.
Chapter Nineteen
Why Is The Gardner Carrying A Pistol?
My friend tells me that I break up with a guy in my heart long before I break up with him for real.
“It’s like you do it in your head years before,” Nancy explained, “then you slowly start to push them away. By the time you’ve built up the actual courage to do it—”
“Eons later,” I interrupted, like an asshole.
She nodded. “Yes, usually at least many months later, you’ve already processed the breakup, and all that’s left to do is divvy up the linens and such.”
I grimaced at my friend. “The guys never keep the linens. Those fuckers don’t get my grandmother’s doilies.”
“You get the point, though, Sarah.”
“I left Skyler with all the furniture and the projector television,” I said smugly.
“What did he leave you with?” she asked, the bitch already knowing the answer to the fucking question.
“Ten thousand dollars in credit card debt,” I stated.
I still stand by it, though… Best money I ever spent. When Skyler and I got together, I wasn’t even eighteen. Having been on his own since he was seventeen, he’d sabotaged his credit way before we were a thing. That’s why when we got our first apartment together in Texas and needed to furnish it, it made perfect sense that I would be the one to get a Target, Best Buy, Capital One, and Dell credit card.
Everything was working out great until I ponied up the strength to tell him I wasn’t in love with him. That only took five years. Since I can’t watch grown men cry, I walked away from that relationship, leaving him the house, the furniture, and the electronics. I took the debt.
Still not a single regret.
Here’s what I’ve learned about myself after thirty-seven years: I punish myself when relationships don’t go right. Think about it; I think we all do it to some degree. When I left Skyler, I firmly believed I was in the wrong. I was the heartbreaker. I was the one who couldn’t make things work. Therefore, I was the one who should pay for things.
I then moved into a mother-in-law quarters above a garage owned by a family friend named Crazy Joe. We never called Joe ‘crazy’ to his face. But we always called him ‘Crazy Joe’ in conversation. Crazy Joe was a paranoid hoarder. So although my mother had been nice enough to help me rent the place, and four hundred and fifty dollars was a great price for all the utility bills included, I still lived in a junkyard.
I didn’t care, though, because, for the first time in my adult life, I was free. I had my own home. There is no price tag you can put on that.
Later, I would associate freedom with living in LA. It was something that movie stars and the rich did. It was something that people who were taking a risk did. People who wanted joy over comfort. Luxury over convenience.
However, those were foreign concepts when I was growing up. So when I was in my early twenties, I was barely making it. But for those few months after escaping Skyler, I felt freedom for the first time in a long time, and it was…well, a hot, hot mess, but we will get to that later.
I might be the only person to have graduated college and never attended a single party. I kept my head buried in the books, not just to avoid the relationships I didn’t know how to get out of, but also because I loved college. It was the fi
rst time I’d found a true calling. And like a genie’s lamp, it promised certain treasures.
“Study hard, and you’ll find success.” “Get a high GPA, and you’ll have freedom.” “Earn a great job, and you can make your own choices.”
These messages were against everything my mother believed in. None of those statements revolved around a man and the security he was meant to provide me with.
I hadn’t been making my own choices for a while, although I thought I had. I was a product of my mother’s parenting, still operating with the mindset that love was someone who paid the bills for you. That’s not a mindset I’m proud of admitting, but it is mine. I’m an asshole who isn’t afraid to admit that I was operating based on wrong beliefs from the beginning. I learned, though. And when I learned better, I did better.
When I was fifteen, my mother came home with a man who she called ‘the gardener.’
“Where did you get him?” I asked as the guy shoveled dirt in the backyard.
He was considerably younger than my newly divorced mother, and he wore a mustache that made me want to puke. Worse yet, his name was Maurice.
“I didn’t ‘get’ him anywhere,” she said. “He simply came back with me to unload the landscaping supplies I bought from his uncle’s nursery.”
“Because that’s not weird,” I observed.
“Oh, Sarah, you’re so uptight.” My mother waved a hand at me as she craned her neck to watch Maurice bend over to spread out mulch.
‘The gardener’ didn’t return to his uncle’s store after unloading the supplies. He actually didn’t leave my house for a year and a half. I didn’t realize it then, but my mother—who had always picked men based on the balance in their bank account—was finally choosing someone she actually liked. A sudden inheritance had changed everything for my southern debutant mother. Still, if she were allowing her heart to choose a mate for once, I wished it could have been Tom Selleck. His mustache was cool. Oh, and he didn’t drink a bottle of Drain-o when he was a child, unlike Maurice.
Maurice and my mother, who was obviously having a mid-life crisis, landscaped the entire fifteen acres surrounding our lake house over my junior and senior year in high school. That’s when I met Skyler—during an emotionally vulnerable time in my life.
I didn’t realize I was learning a silent lesson. My mother, although she didn’t have chalk or a chalkboard, was teaching me lifelong lessons about love and freedom. Her definition of freedom was tied to a man. And love, to her, was growing plants bought at a nursery.
For my mother, it was more about the flowers that bloomed temporarily than the long-term plans that sprouted real potential.
“The retaining wall has officially fallen into the lake,” I said to her one day, as she planted a fig tree beside the front door.
“The lady at the nursery says that fig trees are fast-growing,” my mother said, ignoring me. She looked up to the sky where the Texas sun was shining down. “By the spring, this plant will shield the house from the heat, providing much-needed shade. And figs are considered a romantic fruit, isn’t that something?”
“So the insurance money for the retaining wall?” I asked, never in the mood for my mother’s hippie talk. Shocker, right?
“I spent it on a new car,” she said, motioning to the small truck that Maurice now drove full-time.
The irony that my mother was spending all her time and money on landscaping our property while it crumbled into the lake wasn’t lost on me. She was also planting a fig tree to shade the roof, which was caving in.
I had loved the lake home where I grew up, but I’d also always wanted to escape that small town, knowing it wasn’t right for me.
“This place suffocates me,” I remember telling Skyler. “I can’t do small towns where everyone knows my business.”
“Then come away to Dallas with me,” he said. “There’s tons of computer jobs for me and lots of colleges for you.”
Dallas was where I’d grown up on the weekends, where my grandmother lived. It was the only close place to shop with real stores. However, although Dallas seemed like the best option for me, I knew, deep in my spirit, that there was a better place that was more in line with my personality. Many years later, I’d cross over Los Angeles’s county border and find that place.
In Dallas, I met rich aristocrats with conservative mindsets. Old money was the way of life. I didn’t understand old money—although, later I’d realize I’d actually come from it. Even back in my early adulthood, I didn’t know I was craving the fresh excitement of a city that swept over the West Coast. LA might have old money, but I think it attracts so many because it offers the chance for riches and fame to those who have nothing. It’s where new generations can make their mark; hopefully, create a legacy, as my ancestors did in the South.
“The neighbors are starting to talk,” I told my mother one day as she shook her head at the fig tree.
“It’s quite the marvel, isn’t it?” she remarked, ignoring me, per usual.
The tree had taken off, having grown almost level with the house after only a few months.
“Mom, did you hear me?” I asked her. “Maurice carries Charles’ old pistols around in a holster as he does his gardening. The neighbors don’t like it, as you can probably understand.”
My stepfather, Charles, was known for his guns. We were in Texas, right?
Side note: When George and I were dating, back when my mother remarried Charles, I took him around my stepfather’s house. He’d been in the ranch house several times, which was located in an iconic place in Dallas, not far from someone closely tied to the Kennedy conspiracies. I can say no more. Anyway, on this occasion, my stepfather (twice removed…wait, I’m not sure if that’s how that works) and my mother were out of town. I thought it would be fun to surprise George.
I took him around and pointed out over three hundred guns stationed in the house, most almost in plain sight: Behind a door, under the couch, inside the pantry, in the linen closet, next to the television remote.
George was a whole lot more careful in my stepfather’s house after that.
However, after my mother’s first divorce from Charles, he left many of his guns behind, and Maurice seemed to think he’d inherited them.
“Let the neighbors talk,” my mother said. “They’re just jealous.”
The neighbors had always talked. We were the Addams family. The people with the deteriorating retaining wall and the gardener who strolled around with a machete and a pistol. Shit didn’t get much more entertaining than that in our resort community, which was used to rich weekenders from Dallas. We were the locals. The ones who did strange things like carry walking sticks back and forth from the bus stop.
Freedom for my mother has been a tricky affair. I respect her for her struggles, and that shouldn’t be misconstrued in this text. We all do the best with what we’ve been given. I think, for her, freedom was growing plants. It was new beginnings. It was making something out of barren soil. It was starting over. Learning love’s lessons from her might have screwed me up, but that’s no more than what most parents unknowingly do to their children. My point is, there’s no blame.
The year I was going to graduate from high school, Skyler and I loaded all my belongings into his pickup truck. I didn’t want to move to the city with a guy I didn’t love. But I couldn’t stay in a town that had no economy or college…there wasn’t even a fucking Starbucks. I know, right?
I was my mother’s child. I did what she taught me to do. I ignored my heart over the more practical needs of my lifestyle. I’m not implying that I used Skyler; looking back, it was mutual in many ways.
The day I moved to the city, everything that I’d ever written about the world was loaded into the desk that Skyler had put into his truck. The boy understood computers better than most twice his age with a formal education, but he hadn’t thought to load the desk with the drawers facing inward. I lost many of those early writings on an East Texas highway, but I digress.
We can always rewrite. We can always rebuild.
“The fig tree…” I said to my mother as I was loading up, about to leave for good.
She grimaced at the towering tree. “Yeah, not such a good idea, after all.”
Turns out, she’d planted it too close to the house, and it was fucking up the foundation.
“I’m sure it will be okay,” I said, not really talking about the fig tree—mostly referring to the fact that Maurice had run off with the truck and a lot of money.
He and my mother had spent a year, plunging every single dollar of her and my inheritance into making the lake property amazing. I, as a minor, didn’t have access to the inheritance yet, which I didn’t even know about until that year, when my siblings had come of age. I’d get this inheritance later, once I was twenty-one. In the meantime, my mother was to serve as executor, taking out money when there was a good need.
Japanese maples and hundreds of bags of mulch aren’t cheap. There was the good need. Honestly, I think my mother thought that if she made that property better, renovated it, that we’d all start over.
However, one year later and we’d lost fifteen feet of land to erosion from the lake, and the flowerbeds were overgrown with weeds. It’s hard to sprout a garden when there’s no one there to tend to it.
She and Maurice had spent over forty thousand dollars on the plants and dirt that would later burn to the ground. However, that’s a story for another time. The moral to this story relates to freedom. To taking a path and retrying over and over again until you find the right one. Sometimes our intentions are to protect ourselves, but instead, we break the very foundation we stand on. It’s then that we have to grab onto a branch and find a new home.
I’ve found that it’s best if I make that on my own, instead of relying on a man to provide it, but that took me a long, long time to be able to do successfully. My mother did what she thought was best. And when she knew better…well, she went and remarried my stepfather, Charles.