Live Through This (4 page)

As these college years went on, I refused to admit what was obvious to everyone else: Tom and I were a lousy match. I waited jumpily for him to call, to come by. He drove around in his old blue truck, the bed full of whiskey bottles and straw bales. He pulled all-nighters to barely pass classes he'd ignored all semester, somehow getting assignments done in the very nick of time. Just before
he graduated, he was arrested again for driving on downtown sidewalks and for smashing beer bottles on a college building's stoop.

After that last one, Tom phoned to ask me to visit him in the county jail. Without telling my friends where I was going, I rode the bus to the distant side of town, underwent a search of my purse and pockets, then stood behind the glass that separated visitor from inmate, my back resting against a wall of exposed brick. I hadn't known what to expect—but this visit already was no fun, no good, not even fodder for a story I'd want to tell my English-major pals later. I shivered. I didn't know why I was there; I didn't belong. Did I belong? Later I'd believe that this period at jail was my penance, my sentence—or at least one last piece of glaring evidence—for failing to listen to the side of myself that knew our union was no good.

At the jail, Tom, skinny, pale, jumpy, someone I didn't particularly want to be connected to but to whom I was irrevocably connected by then, like it or not, told me they'd just eaten hamburgers and freshly cut fried potatoes, and that he'd made friends with the other men even though they gave him crap about being a college boy. He pulled down his pants to show me his jail-issued underwear, stamped with a thick black number across the rear, while I looked out the sunny window and over the rolling fields of golden wheat trying to pretend I didn't know him.

When he wasn't in trouble, or when his wealthy father wasn't making calls to keep him out of trouble, Tom was bored. Bored, he'd jump on a train. I'd realize I hadn't seen him around for two or three days and then I'd know he'd gone to the rail yard with aluminum-foil-wrapped potatoes in his pocket and a pint of whiskey in his pants. He'd hop a freight car. He knew the regulars, hoboes who emerged from the train smoke as if from a Waylon Jennings ballad, and together they'd ride to Montana or Washington State, sleeping under bridges at night and cooking the potatoes in small fires for dinner. Or so he told me. And maybe later told Amanda and Stephanie. Somehow, anyway, they became aware of the allure of their father's train-jumping past.

At the end of my senior year I was busy panicking about gradu
ation, about leaving the campus, the town, where I'd had the kind of contained success I could recognize. A safe, predictable success. But then my Romantic poetry teacher handed back a major exam on which I had earned a B-, my lowest grade in the past several years, and that knocked me out of the running for the golden cords worn at graduation by the most accomplished students. I stumbled to my apartment, humiliated by this dash of failure in an academic environment I'd believed would never fail me. I pledged to avoid anything that could make me feel that way again. I talked myself into focusing on our wedding, which was planned for the week after graduation. On the pretty bridesmaids and the abundance of roses and gardenias. I sat in my little apartment with my face resting on the cover of
Riverside Shakespeare
and told myself that marriage was good and right and that I must now enter it.

Twelve years after that wedding day—a parade of pastel-gowned girls and tuxedoed boys that my mother had executed to perfection, followed by a feast of salmon and champagne I couldn't eat or drink because I was newly pregnant and queasy—I moved my children and myself out of our Tucson house and into an apartment nearby that was mine and not Tom's. In that decade-plus of matrimony, I'd gotten what I'd thought I wanted. Tom had gone to work and soon enough started a business of his own. We took our pink-clad girls to church, where we taught the seventh-grade Sunday school class. We made hordes of young-parent friends and often crammed them into whatever Craftsman house we were fixing up at the time for wine cocktails and baby spinach quiches. Tom still liked to wander down the street to smoke pot at his friend Pete's house rather than help me get the girls bathed and put to bed, but that was no big deal. I fought with him about chores for the sake of fighting, but I secretly wanted to be in charge of the sweeping and cleaning and child-tending, and usually redid any of his domestic efforts anyway. What upset me more were the times I'd come home to find him building a bonfire in our suburban backyard, our hyped-up and ash-covered daughters throwing scrap wood onto the flames. Or hammering another tree house into the big maple,
a structure the electric company later tore down after chewing me out for posing a danger to the neighborhood kids. The wildness that flared in Tom was milder, yes, and not as threatening as it had been in college—I knew for sure that it no longer thrilled me. Now his rebel self, when it emerged, was irritating. I was irritated at him and he at me, and it wasn't long before the girls noticed our divide: a mother who wanted to play it safe, and a father who thrived on danger.

Before Tom and I got married, we'd borrowed my father's Audi sedan and drove to Arizona so I could meet Tom's family and get the first long gander at the utopian ranch he talked about endlessly. He'd promised me we'd hunt for scorpions with a black light in the cracks of the exterior adobe and in the interior closets in the house and take hikes around rattlesnake dens while skirting the inch-long thorns on the cat-claw bushes. About three o'clock one morning during that trip, when we'd just crossed the Arizona border, Tom pulled the car over to pee. We'd reached the deep, broad, and very white bowl of the Hoover Dam, gleaming like a giant skater's park on the mountaintop. I got out of the car to stretch and watched as my boyfriend hopped onto one of the retaining walls then scrambled to the top of one of the highest barriers, teetering there at the edge of a maybe six-hundred-foot fall to the bottom. I didn't move. I didn't cry out or shout or even breathe, worried that even the slightest air out of my mouth would be wind enough to topple him from the skinny perch and frantic already about whom I'd call after he fell. Weaving and bobbing, Tom unzipped his jeans and a second later sent an arc of yellow urine—glittering a bit under the towering mercury vapor lamps—into the scoop of the dam.

It occurs to me now to make this episode a pronounced emblem of our marriage. Tom on the edge, whatever edge, while I'm standing back, cautious and often very afraid. As our girls were growing up, he'd often say, "Don't listen to her—she's scared of everything," to my "Back up, you're too close," to my "Leave it alone, it's too dangerous." Repeated and repeated. We had hardly any interest in common, nothing to say to each other except for the distracting chatter about our daughters, how funny they were and how cute.
And now I understand: soon after Amanda's birth Tom started to become irrelevant to me, each subsequent child made him matter less. I had daughters to love, to mold, to adore, to bring through childhood as I wanted. This boy-man's antics were in my way.

As for Tom, he didn't like that I was gone so much after Mollie had finished nursing and I had begun to take classes and get into some paid work of my own. Mostly he didn't like that I had new friends who had little to do with him. During this year, the last of our marriage, Tom often fled to the ranch, appearing at home every few days to argue with me again about our lack of money, my lack of concern and care for him. By then, I was done with my husband, done with our nattering fights that had no beginnings or ends but looped one into the other until they were a dissonant buzz around my head. As if the marriage were a fuel-dense forest on fire, my attitude was
let it burn.
It was the dawn of the nineties and I was the cliché of the dawning-nineties woman—sure I could leave my husband and get it all, have it all, whatever "it all" was.

The day I moved us out of our house, I did so in secret. Tom was off at the ranch for the day, and an hour after he'd left, I'd jammed every inch of our van with the girls' belongings and mine. I drove both giddy and scared a few miles toward the bone-dry river and, at the apartment complex, turned into the parking-lot slip—number 6. But before I'd even yanked the car's emergency brake, I spotted him—Tom—sitting on the front porch of my new apartment. I still don't know how he found out where I planned to live, but he had. For a few seconds I stayed in my seat, heat rising into my face and bursting out the top of my head while the air conditioner blew one cold line across my sweaty neck. I yanked the van into reverse, ready to pull out of the spot, ready to drive down the street to find another apartment to rent. I felt my husband's smugness through the metal and windshield of our family's car—if his message was that he could always find me if he wanted to, I got it. And now I had to run again.

Then I remembered the money—the thousands of dollars my parents had given me for the deposit. The landlord had told me
that once I'd accepted the keys, the sum was nonrefundable. The money is what got me to turn off the car, to open my door. Even so, I avoided glancing in Tom's direction. I walked around the back of the van instead of the front, slid the side door open, and buried myself in the dark space inside, resting my forehead against the edge of Mollie's car seat until I was ready to move again.

I pulled the biggest box from the interior and carried it in front of me across the overly lush lawn so Tom couldn't see my face. I wanted change to be easy—I wanted him to let it be easy. But there he was, muddying the smooth transition I'd counted on. His body was sprawled over the white, hot concrete steps, keeping me from the front door that was mine. Behind my box shield, I felt him, maybe I smelled him—the familiar scent of his glistening sweat rising in the hot air.

I'd told him that if I lived without him for a while, I'd have distance to think about our marriage and about him and what I could and could not commit to. I told him that if he would get out of my sight, out of my path, out of my way for a few weeks or months then I could find my clear head and work out what was best. But when I set the box on the sidewalk Tom was every bit there, grinning, his elbows resting on the concrete steps and a set of keys dangling from one index finger.

He wore a T-shirt he'd owned since college and a pair of cutoff jeans from which his long legs, coated in a fine layer of blond hair, angled down the stair steps, ending in a worn pair of red flip-flops, one of which he slapped, slapped, slapped against his heel.

"Where'd you get those?" I asked him, pointing to the keys hanging from his finger.

"Easy," he said, squinting in a way that made the crow's-feet around his eyes deepen. He jingled the keys, which had its desired effect—I was even more irate. "I told the manager that I'm the husband."

I reached for the keys but he jerked his hand away. "It's not a bad place," he said, standing up and brushing the dust from the back of his pants. "I left a drawing on the table to show you where to fit the furniture." Shoving my keys in his pocket, he slid on the sunglasses
that had been hanging from his shirt's neck and walked past me to his car.

"Don't come back here!" I shouted at him. He smiled, waved, and then he drove away.

I talked the landlord into changing the locks on the doors, but that didn't keep Tom from appearing all the time. There he was in the pool delighting the girls with four new squirt guns when we went out for a swim. There he was parked in my space when my daughters and I arrived in the late afternoon, inviting us out for green-corn tamales and cheese quesadillas. At night, he'd phone me five or six or ten times to ask when I was coming back, when I was going to get over my bad stage, my crisis, my fit of selfishness.

Five days before Halloween in 1991, a few months after my move into the apartment, I drove to the elementary school to pick up nine-year-old Stephanie from basketball practice. I pulled to the curb and slid open the door, and she climbed in over sacks of groceries, past Mollie, who was strapped into the middle seat of our van, past the box of clothes I'd been intending to drop at Goodwill for weeks, and into the far back corner. Stephanie wasn't speaking to me at the moment. During a costume-buying trip the day before, I'd declined to rent her a real cheerleader's uniform for $24.99. Yes, it came with thick pompoms and had a fat blue
S
sewn on the peppy red sweater. And it had a swingy skirt that flashed a blue satin lining when she danced about. But it was $24.99. That was too much when we could throw one together at home that would be just as good, I told her: she already owned a skirt and a too-big red sweater. I could pick up football pompoms at the university's bookstore, and bows for her hair. I was sure, I said, that we could find an old school letter at a thrift shop to sew on the front of her outfit.

Now Stephanie buckled herself into the farthest bench seat back and stared out the window. Amanda had stayed home to play with a friend from the other end of our apartment complex—the first of the girls to enter this new circle of apartment friends—Mary was in the passenger seat next to me, while Mollie sat behind us in
her car seat. Stephanie was alone in the far reaches of the van, sighing out her disappointment. "Is that belt on tight?" I said, watching her in the rearview mirror. Another sigh, this one louder.

Fine. I had enough on my mind. I preferred silence over the morning's argument about the costume. Stephanie hated the homemade idea, and Amanda was her champion in dissent. Didn't I know how important it was for Steph to look right when she hit the trick-or-treating with her fourth-grade friends? With everything they were going through, the two girls as a unit told me, the least I could do was make sure Stephanie had the perfect costume.

I drove the school's circular driveway and turned sharp out onto the street, tipping over a couple of grocery sacks. Cheese, toilet paper, a package of hamburger, and apple-strawberry juice boxes tumbled onto the floor. "I want one! I'm thirsty!" Mollie cried when she saw the drinks. I ignored her plea and Stephanie's silence and raced home to get Amanda to afternoon theater rehearsal—off to her new play.