Joy Enough

by Sarah McColl

  “Oh,” he said, looking at me as if I had just come into focus. “You’re corporate.”

  I wish my friend had been on hand to intervene. “Sarah, here, is an artist.”

  All the terms were up for redefinition.

  IN THE LATE FALL, on mornings when frozen dew still covered car windows, my husband and I rode together in taxis five long avenues to a basement office. For fifty minutes, before we each reported to work in midtown, we sat on a loveseat opposite a woman with close-clipped hair and long silken scarves, and talked about our feelings. Permanent Partners and Goddesses in Everywoman stood on her bookshelf.

  The diagnosis was that we had very different levels of emotional fluency. After each session, we stood on the icy sidewalk with our arms around each other. Wasn’t this trying? And if it was working, why didn’t it feel better?

  On the subway, I sealed myself up again, cordoned off the brief opening I’d allowed. At editorial meetings, when I was pitched stories about what rising lime prices would do to the cocktail and guacamole industries (“We’ll call it ‘Limepocalypse!’”), I did not want to look as though I had been crying.

  “It will take fewer than ten sessions,” my mother said. “Either way, you’ll know.”

  It was exhausting, waiting for the final outcome of these two diagnoses.

  That was when I began to fantasize about road trips, plotting giant circular routes around the perimeter of the United States. My escape was powered by one recurring daydream: My back on hard-packed sand beside a dying campfire under black cover of night, the fabric of desert sky pricked with white stars like cross-stitch. I would need a month; I would need a car.

  “I get it,” my brother, Bliss, said. “I ran all the way to China.”

  “Take two weeks,” my boss said over vodka tonics. Then a few days later in the kitchenette, she suggested I could do it in one.

  I applied to graduate school instead. I rented a hippie farmhouse upstate for a weekend to finish my applications. There was a portrait of JFK hanging on the porch next to a stack of firewood and a disco ball in the living room. The house was obstinately cold despite the fires I built in the wood stove. On the sheepskin rug, I read the love letter my husband had pressed into my hand at my departure. It was all too late. In the morning, I sat at the long kitchen table in fingerless gloves. I wrote about my mother. She was affecting my sense of time, and everything was beginning to seem urgent. Then I ran hilly country roads past Jewish summer camps for city kids, mixed myself a Manhattan, and cooked a dry-aged steak for dinner. When the fire died down, I threw on another log.

  winter

  GOOD ROAD TRIPS with a carful of friends begin with Diet Dr Pepper and beef jerky and an ironic Metallica lighter to replace what TSA took away. It was three days before New Year’s Eve. While Laurie watched Chicago shrink in the rearview mirror, Jenny poured Sour Patch Kids into her open hand and cued up the lesbian soundtrack we’ve harmonized to since college. I sat on the backseat hump with one snow boot in each wheel bed and leaned forward between the front seats; I took the low parts. My husband was snug against his window reading the news on his phone.

  Wisconsin welcomed us—a couple freshly in love and a couple falling out.

  But we all loved the alien landscape. When the last glacier moved through the Upper Midwest, it scraped off mountaintops and rounded topographical edges, leaving green hill states that gently roll and unfold. The wedge of land where Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa lean their backs against each other was bypassed, so what remains is the Driftless—an area that is bony shouldered and dramatic with craggy rock faces and blind valleys. Insoluble limestone mountain ranges rise suddenly from grassy prairies, dark on the near horizon like a declaration that takes everyone by surprise.

  The roads were snow streaked through the thinning towns. Gays Mills got a laugh and was followed by Soldiers Grove, where all the lights were off. We turned left at the bend in County Road x-marked by a red mailbox and an old outhouse and slowly traveled an unmarked road past a snowed-over creek bed. It seemed like we were lost, like we had turned too soon and now overcommitted to our error. The car slid as we took a sharp turn and then, there it was on the left: a white farmhouse with a plume of wood smoke and every window bright. That was Annie’s.

  My husband lifted his bag from the trunk and cursed the cold under his breath. He brought his laptop but forgot to pack the long underwear I bought for our trip to Denmark the year before.

  “There’s no bad weather,” I said, dragging my suitcase up the snowy drive. “Only bad clothing.” I inherited know-it-all from my mother. He inherited long-suffering from his father.

  That trip to Copenhagen had felt different, where we sat side by side at café tables with daytime candlelight and silver pots of winter heather. We drank strong, milky coffee until it was time to drink beer. First thing in the morning we were already off to a good start: I piled thick blankets over us in the dark hotel room and pretended we were prehistoric, bedding down under pelts of fur in the belly of a cave. Behind the closed door of the bathroom each day, I removed ovulation tests from my toiletries case. Walking the gray streets shopping for candlesticks and ceramics for our home, or on trains to see a cathedral out of town, I remembered what a good man my husband was. He bought presents for each of his coworkers, gave up his seat for women on the metro. I was very sorry I had forgotten. “What’s your favorite part of vacation?” I asked, and he answered, “Seeing my wife so happy.”

  And now he had forgotten his long underwear.

  “I made split pea soup,” Annie said, while pointing to our bedrooms up steep, creaky stairs. She wore a plaid flannel nightgown, waved her hand at the stove, and said help yourself. Jenny met Annie singing in a square dance band in Chicago. In the city, Annie owned her own business and wore lipstick. Then four hours away, she lived a country life with a cherry orchard and shaggy white horses in the paddock. She dug swimming holes and painted her face with mud. The sign above the old toilet in her bathroom read WHEN IT’S YELLOW, LET IT MELLOW. The simple things we dreamed about, Annie made real.

  She dropped the needle onto a Loretta Lynn record, and sat back on the couch in the red glow of the Christmas tree. On the Oriental rug, old beagle Betty crossed her paws like a lady, rested her head on top, and sighed. There was a fire in the woodstove.

  I was the first to climb the stairs to bed. Lying under wool blankets, I heard my husband in the living room tell the story of how we fell in love. It was the long version, the one he didn’t tend to tell, the one that begins with my mother. His voice traveled up through the metal heating grate in the floor like a genie from a bottle. It sounded like a fable from so long ago.

  Jenny was wearing glasses and a topknot and meant business frying bacon and sausage patties. She pointed the spatula toward the ceiling as she considered the larder, waiting like a teacher at the chalkboard.

  “We’ll need black-eyed peas,” she said, and I added that to the grocery list, along with four dozen eggs, lemons for hot toddies, tortilla chips. Laurie was out for a walk, but wanted to make her egg-and-green chile casserole for breakfast and Jenny’s favorite spinach dip; I added those ingredients, too. My husband was on the couch in the next room with his laptop. I brought him a cup of coffee.

  “Do you want to go into town with us to get groceries?”

  “No, thanks,” he answered with a brusque smile. He stroked Betty with his bare foot. We were taking turns being optimistic.

  The front door opened and Tommy stamped his snowy boots on the mat. He is as red bearded as a sea captain, and his cheeks were pink with cold from working in the high pasture. He knows everything Annie knows how to do, only now they do it together: curry burrs out of the horses’ manes, repair the floor in the pole barn, shepherd the goats, build a one-room cabin. But Annie knows how to do things Tommy doesn’t, like call a square dance and close real estate deals. Who’s that, he asked of the woman leading a band of bolo ties in a tight dress at the lip of a Chic
ago stage, and that’s how they fell in love.

  “That smells really good, Jenny,” Tommy said, and hung his snow-wet Carhartt overalls on a hook by the door. He sat at the kitchen table with a satisfied exhaustion. “Tonight might be a good night to fire up the sauna,” he said, unfolding the paper, and Jenny and I agreed that it was.

  After breakfast, Tommy headed back up to the pasture, and Jenny and I sat at the kitchen table drinking our coffee. We planned the day. After errands, there were country songs to sing, hills to ramble, tarot cards to read, dulcimers to pick at, beans to soak. We drank coffee until cocktail hour and bourbon until bedtime.

  “Why are we so happy here?” I asked, as if there were more to it than the free expanse of vacation. It was sunny and bitter outside, and there were three swallows hopping on and off the bird feeder near the window.

  “It’s all our favorite things,” she answered. “Maybe the question is Why do we insist on making our lives in the city?”

  After a while, I asked if she thought they needed a new coffee shop in the nearby town, though I was tired of the sentence before it had finished leaving my mouth.

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “How does anyone ever make any money without selling their soul?” I asked. She didn’t have an answer for that, so we sat quietly for a few minutes, listening to the man in the next room, tapping at his keyboard, writing code.

  In the evenings, Jenny and I took turns cooking. We kneaded dough for sheet-pan pizzas and heated old cast iron skillets until they shone. I showered coarse salt on thick ribeye steaks that hissed as I laid them in the pan. Annie sat at the table with her guitar and the three of us sang while we cooked. Stews simmered, root vegetables roasted, and breads rose. We sliced venison sausage from a local hunter, arranged crumbly cheeses on a platter, mixed simple drinks.

  At the dinner table, we drank too much wine and passed the salad for the second time. My husband sat mute at the head, staring at his empty plate. His hands were folded in his lap, his legs crossed at the knee, fork and knife at a forty-five degree angle.

  “Are you having fun?” I asked later when we pulled back the sheets. We slid in side by side, and I kicked my legs to get warm.

  Sociologists have studied eyes at the dinner table, he told me. The people we look at even when they are not talking—when they are shaking the salt or wiping sauce from their lips—reveals who we love.

  “So who do I look at?” I asked.

  “You look at Jenny,” he said. “You all look at Jenny.”

  “Because Jenny talks the most,” I started to say defensively, but he was already switching off the lamp and rolling over.

  Before he was my husband, before he sent me roses, Jenny and I were hanging around each other’s dorm rooms, flipping through hulking CD catalogs and approving of each other’s bookshelves. I noted the black-and-white photograph of Anne Sexton on her bulletin board and photographs of her friends back home in a park, wearing black sack dresses and huge sunglasses.

  There was a snapshot on that same bulletin board of Jenny in a grand and voluminous taffeta plaid skirt, nipped at the waist. It had belonged to her great Aunt Pat, she said. I was always asking Jenny to tell more stories about Pat. We’d sit on the steps of our dorm, where we drank coffee and looked out at a wide, leafy boulevard lined with turn-of-the-century mansions, and she would. How Pat fled midwest heartbreak in the 1930s by sailing steerage to Europe—the apocryphal version that she was a stowaway. How she pursued painting instead of men, though men still pursued her. How Japanese diplomats sent her boxes carved from jade and ivory, how a famous novelist wooed her with a watercolor. How she was a great beauty, cruel and brilliant. We could never understand why art and all those lovers hadn’t given her more pleasure, how she had died so angry and so bitter and so alone. Hadn’t she chosen? What makes someone turn so sour, we wondered. We thought it had something to do with risk taking and with resilience.

  Over the years, as Jenny’s parents sorted through belongings in their garage and attic, I would sometimes receive care packages filled with silk scarves printed with scenes of Venezia, white horsehair clutches, black suede gloves edged in gold lamé, a robin’s egg bathing costume, a green silk cumberbund-style belt with folds deep enough for stashing lipstick or a spare twenty-dollar bill. I loved the glamour of the items, and how they functioned in my wardrobe as both calling and warning. “We’re unloading more of Pat’s things,” Jenny would write in the enclosed note. “And you’re the only one who appreciates this stuff.”

  The afternoons were quiet. Laurie strummed a ukulele, Tommy was up in the high pasture again hammering nails on the one-room cabin, and Annie had exchanged guitar lessons for pottery classes from a neighbor. It was zero degrees in Soldiers Grove, but every day I left the house for a long jog. The runs were hard, the weather and terrain extreme. That landscape is an anachronism, a loophole in the surrounding topography, and as I ran, I imagined that I entered a portal to a frontier, one that would be more difficult to traverse but potentially more beautiful. I wore an ivory fisherman’s sweater over my workout clothes and ascended a steep hill to a ridge with an old dairy farm. I slid on the ice, and at the base of a hill, a dog snarled madly until I passed from his view. I returned to Annie’s feeling triumphant, my eyelashes frozen and legs numb. Upstairs, Jenny was reading in bed. I took off my wet sneakers and slid in beside her. Maybe it was the sudden change in temperature, or the exertion, but my feelings were right at the surface, like a leaf trapped under the thinnest morning frost.

  “I had no idea life would be so disappointing,” I said, and wiped my face on the pillow. She put her book down on the quilt.

  “Seems to me you’re only disappointed about one thing,” she said.

  “Then I guess I’m confused,” I suggested. She turned on her side so we were facing each other and put a hand beneath her cheek.

  “I don’t think you’re confused. I think you know how you feel.”

  The sociologists are right. I love Jenny’s flat wide fingernails, the calm and assured way she navigates traffic, her untouchable don’t fuck with me attitude at parties, and I love the Southern timbre of her voice, even when it gets slow and honeyed, which is what it does when she’s about to deliver what’s hardest to hear.

  “How do I feel?” I asked.

  “You’re over it.”

  New Year’s Eve morning. It’s the best time of year for someone who likes imagining a better future, and my husband was sunny and warm. He poured me a cup of coffee and pulled me close.

  “I know what my New Year’s resolutions are,” he said with a grin like he’d been up to no good. It had been so long since he had flirted with me, it felt sudden and inappropriate, like an uncle kissing me on the lips.

  “Oh yeah?” I wanted to soften into his arms. There he was, finally. I was there, too. I leaned into him, felt supported by the muscles of his chest, the bones. He put his lips to my ear.

  “I want to have a baby,” he whispered, “and anal sex.”

  Before dinner, Tommy carried logs to the barrel-shaped wood-fired sauna so that its hot maw would welcome our naked bodies once we were full of black-eyed peas cooked with bacon and Annie’s homegrown onions. Only the women ever made the pilgrimage up the snowy hill. We carried glass vials of chakra-clearing potions to dab on our damp skin and mason jars of cocktails. Inside, it was like a gypsy’s caravan. Sweat beaded on our breasts like jeweled necklaces, and we told secrets in the dark. When we emerged, I plunged into the snow, and arced my arms and legs until there was an angel.

  When my husband and I were on that happy Scandinavian vacation, we traveled to a nineteenth-century sauna built at the end of a wooden pier. He waited for me in the snack bar, and I pushed through the door marked DAMER. As I sat in a sauna with a square window that faced the Øresund strait, it began to snow. A swan glided past the picture window view, no joke. I liked being among the bodies on the teak benches. We were old and young, some folded with skin and age an
d others languorous, starlet-stretched. I sat there as long as I could, skin scorched. The cold plunge was straight into the sound. I pretended to be brave and jumped. Just seconds of splash in the water, then hauling my body out on the ladder, my skin electric and burning, my mind slapped right into present tense.

  ENOUGH TALK. To become the kind of woman you want to be, my mother said, you have to take the kind of actions that woman would take.

  I LOVED MY HUSBAND, and then I didn’t. Is that a story?

  Story is giving a character a tangible desire, then putting things in her way. I wanted my husband to “be there” for me as my mother died. What does that mean? he asked for months. To “be there”? More tangible, he said.

  Then my desire was for him to acknowledge my body, to hook an arm at my waist on the street, and in our bed, to press his torso against my back in the dark. Be there like that. We, at least, were still alive. Please, I said.

  His desire was to not be told what to do. I began to cry beside him on the loveseat in our therapist’s office.

  “Is there something you could do now to comfort Sarah?” the therapist asked. He looked at her like a student eager to have the right answer. He graduated summa cum laude, but I thought I’d had the better education. “I don’t know,” he said. I pulled another Kleenex from a box on the side table. “Hold her?” he asked.

  “That’s a great idea,” she nodded, with gentle encouragement. He moved closer to me, draped his arm around my shoulders, and we looked at each other with proud embarrassment at this modest, remedial breakthrough. The awkwardness underscored—this was not practice, it was performance.

  IT WAS AN ACTION, but it was not the action of the woman I wanted to be.

  He sat at the end of the bar in a Klos Nomi t-shirt and a leather jacket. It was late. That winter, I often stayed out late, telling my friends to go home, that I would just have one more alone.