Milk (5 page)

The dairy farm had its less romantic aspects. It stank and there were an abundance of flies; the rooms of the monastery fairly crumbled with dust and mildew.

There were two rooms for rent. I had the lower floor room, Jackson the upper, and we shared a bathroom, midway between our rooms on a circular, medieval stone stairway, dank and unlit. This is where we met: we bumped into one another in the middle of the night, each of us trying to find the bathroom.

“I didn't know anybody else was staying here,” he said once we finished yelling and untangling ourselves. He'd arrived earlier in the day, he explained, but had stayed in his room till now.

“I'm getting over a cold,” he added.

“Oh.” I still couldn't see him and for some reason we didn't think to turn on the bathroom light.

“Well,” he said, “goodnight.”

And we parted, without getting so much as a glimpse of each other.

The next morning took care of that. He saw me, all right—through the tall, gaping, curtainless windows of the bathroom as he hung his wash outside. He couldn't help but look: the laundry line afforded a perfect view, especially if somebody happened to be emerging from the bathtub, as I happened to be doing at that moment.

Not that he looked away.

Grabbing for my towel, I knew it was him. Who else could it be?

From there we became walking companions around the district, through other dairy farms and chicken farms, past timbered Norman houses falling apart, down dirt roads and paths, stopping in town for wine and a loaf of bread and cheese. This was one of the first things we found we had in common; neither of us could stomach French food. We wouldn't admit it—we simply pretended to be full. “No, no, I love tripe.” “So do I!” “I'm just not as hungry as I thought.” “Me either.” Admitting you don't like French food is a little like admitting that you're big and stupid. A heathen. It's like being from Los Angeles. You tell people, they think you're kidding at first. Then they look at you differently; they never look at you the same again. They decide you're vapid, rich and blond (even if you're not even close to blond, like me). Or they say, “You don't seem like you're from L.A.”

That's what Jackson said. A compliment, I guess.

He's from the Midwest, originally, and had his own set of embarrassments to worry about. But to me being from the Midwest signaled stability, honesty. As reliable as meat and potatoes; Jackson's feet were on the ground, and large, solid feet they were. He was handsome in a burly, straightforward way, with dark blue eyes and brown hair, lots of it waving around his head.

For me, who grew up in the land of blondes, brown hair and blue eyes is exotic. Midwesterners are exotic, kind of.

Jackson came from the Midwest but lived in the West. Colorado, more West than California, in spirit. He owned a small ranch, but didn't raise cattle, only leased the land out for somebody else's horses. He warned me: it's not like the Colorado you're thinking of. There are bluffs, not mountains, more rocks than trees. But red rock,
red
. It's wild, he said, it's a wild place.

He didn't make much money, just enough to live on. He taught a few classes at the university. I'm a history instructor, he said, not a professor.

All this he told me in France, as we walked around Normandy.

Before Europe:

I had lived everywhere, it seemed—Vermont, Seattle, Eugene, Oregon, and San Francisco. New England, the West, the coast, the desert. I changed jobs, towns, boyfriends, therapists, insurance plans, apartments, cars, colleges—all through my twenties. Finally, I got my undergraduate degree in Boston, where I settled for a while, writing ad copy and believing that, at last, I'd fallen in love. Mistakenly, as it turned out. At twenty-nine I moved to Tucson. At thirty I bought a condominium. Then I left for Europe.

Jackson and I married two months after meeting in France; our families—sparse in his case, an uncle, a couple of distant cousins—met at the wedding. It was so sudden that people assumed 1) I was pregnant, and 2) it wouldn't last. None of my other relationships had, so why should this? Though people never said as much. They delicately asked, How did you decide to marry him? How did you
know
? (After all those men, they meant.) I just knew, I told the friends I'd collected through all my moves. I knew he was the one. I'd also know if he weren't, I told them. I'd realize it on my walk down the aisle—and I'd turn around and walk the other way.

Since we got married outdoors, there wasn't an aisle anyway. There wasn't a wedding march. My father didn't give me away. No bridesmaids or ushers; we were attended only by a friend's five-year-old daughter, who handed out flowers from a basket beforehand, while a lone saxophonist played.

Jackson and I entered the garden together. Afterward, people joked that we'd walked toward the minister so fast, they didn't have time to focus their cameras.

Later I had to wonder if it was the wedding I'd wanted. There was no doubt about Jackson (at the time), or about our vows—for that's what I remember best, the two of us facing each other in the red desert sunset, whispering our vows, holding hands, kissing. No, it was everything else—that I'd refused to let my father give me away or have any part, not that he'd asked; that I'd had no attendants, no one to help me get dressed beforehand, no one to keep me company. Not friends, not Aunt Lyla, and certainly not Dorinne, who wanted nothing to do with me anyway, a feeling that by then was mutual (her motto: I married your father, not his family). No, I'd done everything myself, all the planning, reserving, ordering, the writing-out of invitations; I refused even Jackson's help.

Later on I questioned why I did things the way I did. Why I'd refused everyone's help. Why I wore a pale pink silk and not white. Why I felt uncomfortable at the reception, as though I were a Greek statue on wheels. Jackson could've pulled me along by a string. “You look lovely,” guests said. “Beautiful. Splendid wedding.”

“Thank you,” I said. “So glad you could attend.” Jackson would take my elbow: time to roll me along to the next grouping of guests.

Finally we escaped and went out to an all-night restaurant for breakfast—we were starved. Everybody at the reception had talked about the wonderful food (the other topic besides my looks), but we'd eaten nothing.

Our honeymoon was perfect, romantic—cystitis aside. “Tell him to leave you alone,” the doctor counseled.

It became our joke, the doctor thinking Jackson was pestering me for sex, when if anything it was the other way around. Nonetheless, we had to settle for strolls on the beach the last couple of days. Rather, Jackson strolled while I dozed on a blanket.

It was after the honeymoon that I began to worry about details I'd had no interest in before: why, for instance, we hadn't had a receiving line.

A receiving line? Jackson had said. It wasn't that kind of wedding.

We didn't put RSVP on the invitations, I said.

We forgot, he said.

We?
I
forgot, I said. You didn't do invitations.

You wouldn't let me.

I know.

It would be the middle of the night and I'd sit straight up in bed, waking up Jackson: During the toast, I'd say, we didn't intertwine wrists like you're supposed to.

So? I didn't even have champagne in my glass.

What did you have?

Beer.

Beer? Jackson, I'd say, we didn't cut the cake right.

There's a special way to cut the cake?

Your hand over mine. We just cut it. And you didn't feed me cake. I didn't feed you cake.

Don't you think that's a little corny? Personally I'm glad we didn't feed each other cake. You're crying, he would say. Why?

At Stonewall Creek, where Jackson and I lived after the wedding, tiny barrel cactus lay hidden in the prairie grass like eggs, blooming pale pink, yellow and white flowers in June.

Our house was a modern-day log cabin set down on softest red dirt, vermilion dust, like powder in a woman's compact.

There was a particular bluff I liked, of mottled, pot-holed pink and gray rock; where I'd go after rainstorms, to listen to the water seep into rock and gravel and into the roots of the rabbit brush—the sound of everything drinking.

In the potholes birds would bathe.

A sensation of feathers on the bottoms of my feet; I could run forever.

Indeed, Indians had lived there once. Jackson said Stonewall Creek gave him a sense of history he couldn't get from his own family. Both his parents had died in his late teens, his mother of ovarian cancer, his father in a car accident. No siblings. Jackson's being an orphan appealed to me at first. We understood each other. We would strike out into the world unencumbered, together. We would be everything to each other. Although I had a smattering of family, I felt like an orphan myself, and acted the part: I saw my father and brother infrequently, and Aunt Lyla not at all. As for my mother, I'd lived more than three-quarters of my life without her. The place where she should be was blank. So I understood Jackson very well, I thought.

He'd moved to Colorado in his twenties to go to school and find himself, he liked to joke, but instead he found Stonewall Creek which he bought for cheap in the 80's, when Colorado went bust. If he couldn't have family, he used to tell me, he'd have land, this land, where the Arapahos had camped during the hunt. Everywhere there were spearheads, the rubble of ancient jugs, bison bones. After the Arapahos came the horse thieves and cattle rustlers, who drove livestock into the gorge of Stonewall Creek, further made inescapable by crude walls built of rock piled upon red rock.

I felt like a prisoner myself in that gorge, imprisoned in a place I loved, with a person I loved.

Stonewall Creek itself ran high in late spring, so high the sod of the creek bed rolled up in places, like carpets thrown back, baring root systems and the flat, pale rock underneath.

In the creek bed grew reeds and Russian thistle, yucca, some cottonwood trees, though not tall ones, and patches of willow. Everything grew up to your waist so that you couldn't see your feet as you walked, just a thicket of green pulling and scratching at your legs.

In the fall everything laid down and died, grass and reeds flattened as though felled by a sickle, and in these boughs of dead plant material, almost like nests, we'd find the carcasses of deer, two or three a season, killed by mountain lions: we'd know we were about to come upon one by the smell of rotting flesh.

So died my feelings for Jackson, worn down season after season. It's hard to say exactly when they began to change. From the very start I wanted to run from him, hide. I didn't want to talk about myself, my family, least of all what had happened to my mother, though I'd had enough therapy by that point to appear at least willing to broach the subject. But I never really did. Like my brother Corb, I suppose, I shared only the facts. I told Jackson I'd been seven. She'd been sick for several years, in and out of mental hospitals. Corb and I had found her.

“That's about it,” I would tell Jackson.

“That's it, huh?” He eyed me.

“Yes,” I said coolly. “That's it.”

He would stare at me some more.

“Well,” I said, “quit staring and ask me some questions. What do you want, a prepared speech?”

“Ask you some questions.”

“Yes!”

“All right. How did it feel, you and Corb being the ones to find your mother?”

“Bad. Awful.”

“This is not talking about it, Theo.” He would turn away, get busy on some sort of household task, weather-stripping, caulking windows.

“Oh, shit, Jackson. What do you want me to say? Listen—” Here I would turn the tables, go on the attack, “—we never talk about
your
parents.”

He couldn't even stand the word ‘parents.' He would actually withdraw physically, eyes darkening, shoulders rounding, chin pulling inward like a sea anemone that retreats into itself when you lightly touch it.

If you didn't know him (and the subject of his parents didn't come up), Jackson appeared to be stolid and Midwestern, a burgher, dutiful and thick-muscled. Inwardly, however, he was sensitive, curious, and intense, the very qualities that drew me to him in the first place. He pounced on every topic (except personal ones) like a predator, no subject too trivial. Even when we were talking about buying new tires for the car, he turned it into a different subject altogether, rhapsodizing about the history of the automobile, how cars had changed us from people forced to plod across the land, “touching the land with our feet,” as he would say, into a people lacking dermic contact with anything—land, animals, horses, each other. He had a point, of course, but it was all for the sake of argument, and it meant nothing to him personally. He loved Stonewall Creek but he wasn't an environmentalist, he wasn't that devoted to the land, and he still bought tires for the car and he drove the car a lot.

I never knew what he was getting at with these lectures. Clearly he was building a case—history of the automobile, the effects of using a stylus when voting, the overabundance of dairy products in our society—but why? Sometimes I would venture an opinion. “But dairy products are the easiest way for most people to absorb calcium.”

“Not the only way,” he would say dismissively. “Almonds, sesame seeds, broccoli, kale, tofu, carrot juice.”

“Wait a minute, Jackson. You have milk on your cereal every day. You put cheese on everything. Yesterday you bought a gallon of ice cream. Are you trying to tell me you're planning to change your diet?”

“No, Theo. Don't you get it?”

“No!”

We'd both storm out of the room only to run into each other in the hallway; the house had a circular design, almost like a hogan.

I'd halt in front of him.

“Are these little talks supposed to make us closer?” I would ask. “Because I don't feel closer to you. You're like a stranger when you talk this way. Why don't you talk about
you?”