Sand in My Eyes (32 page)

“I’ll be seeing you,” she said, heading for the door.

“No time for coffee?” I asked.

“Already had my cup.”

I was glad when she left. I had other things to think about, like my yard sale in the morning, and where to put the signs announcing it, and my husband’s return tonight. I went to the dryer, pulled a warm sheet out, shook it, then went to the sofa and tucked it in.

CHAPTER FORTY

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
in the little yellow room there was a window. Out that window were cars honking, doors opening and closing, people talking and knocking at my door. Then into the room came my husband’s voice like a frustrated squirrel, saying, “I thought you said the sale started at nine.”

“I did. That’s what I put in the paper.”

“Then why are people showing up now?”

I pushed him lightly out of my way and, shrugging my shoulders, I hurried past. “Welcome home,” I said. It was the same thing I had said to him when he marched into my room around three-thirty in the morning and announced his return.

“What’s all our stuff doing outside?” he had asked me then.

“I’m having a sale.”

“You think you went to extremes?”

“Some call it ‘cleansing.’”

“Cleansing? Our house is empty. Should I be concerned?”

“Why should you be concerned?

“A man comes home to an empty house. Are you planning something?”

“What would I be planning?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Leaving?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told him.

“So I shouldn’t be concerned?”

“If you want to be concerned, you can. I did go through your closet. If there’s anything you’re missing and still want, you’d better look downstairs.”

“Should I do that now?”

“No. You can do it in the morning. The sale starts at nine. It should be a good one. I’m hoping to make a lot of money.”

“It sounds like your week was productive. What else did you do?”

“It’s almost four in the morning,” I reminded him.

“Fine, where do you want me—couch or bed?”

“Couch,” I said.

“Story of my life,” I heard him rant as he went down the hallway. “May as well buy a hammock, hang it outside.”

“Welcome home,” I said softly, and could have said more, gone after him with my words. But I felt like an owl that had been hit by a car. While he was away, someone cared for me, brought me back to life, and I no longer had it in me to clack at people who upset me, or puff myself up like I used to. And besides, I was glad he had left for the couch. I didn’t feel like listening to him snore.

By the time I got downstairs, carloads of shoppers already had our belongings piled high in their arms, ready to cash out. I accepted the on-the-spot bargaining they did with me because I was eager to get rid of the stuff before Timothy noticed ties, shoes, or other things he wanted to keep.

“This lady wants to buy your leather journal,” my husband said to me an hour into the sale.

“Two bucks,” I told him.

“You bought that in San Francisco,” he said. “It inspired you, remember?”

“That was years ago, and see?” I said, taking it out of his hands and thumbing through its pages. “It’s still blank. My mind is overtaken by other things now.” I handed it to the shopper.

“I don’t think you should sell it,” he called after me as I walked away.

“Let it go. It’s time to let go,” I said without emotion.

“For two bucks,” I heard him say sarcastically, “My wife is selling the dream she once had, her dream of writing a literary masterpiece.”

“Oh, please,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. “A bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

I wanted then to tell him I wasn’t the same woman I was back when I bought the journal, back when life was simpler and it was the two of us, with no places to fly off to, no children interrupting our every sentence—those newlywed days when we had only a mattress on the floor to sleep on and our dreams to wake up to, back when we didn’t have to wake at the crack of dawn like farmers. I think he already knew he was no longer married to that woman with the pot of coffee and the dreams, but in some ways he’s married to someone better—less egocentric, more compassionate, and there’s three people in the world she loves more than herself—but somewhere in the midst of this beautiful, motherly metamorphosis, she got stuck in a cocoon of martyrdom.

“I’m not the same woman you married,” was all I said. “People change.”

It was starting to feel like a long time that we were standing there, like two bulls looking into each other’s eyes, ready to charge, and I didn’t want him probing further, asking me how I had changed. He was about to, I could tell. I didn’t feel like weakening, crying on his shoulder, disclosing that beneath the mommy costume I had been wearing for years was a woman longing to be in an adult relationship with a husband she could grow with, change with, trust! I was glad when he turned and walked away. I couldn’t help myself. I made sure he wasn’t looking when I picked up the journal that the lady had put back down and wrote in it the first thing that came to mind.

I craved for us, as a couple, to delve into the depths of the seen and unseen, sharing our reactions to the world, and getting to know better the spiritual forces that have the miraculous power to bind two people together for the duration of their existence on Earth. These were my original expectations, and what is wrong with being a high achiever when it comes to the person you are going to spend the duration of your physical life with
?

I closed the journal and returned it to the table, but would have to sell it at a discounted price now. Who wants to buy a journal already written in? There was a lot going through my head at once. When her children are away, a woman finds she still has her brain and all its functioning parts, and she is capable of loving, thinking, figuring things out, and of remembering all the expectations she had of marriage in the first place. I almost picked the journal back up again, wanting to write more, but when I suspected that Timothy, watching me from afar, might recognize all of this on my face, this part of me that hasn’t changed—my creativity, my desire to write, lying dormant within but still there as strongly as during our newlywed days together in San Francisco when that brown leather journal caught my eye—I left the journal and walked away.

We both kept busy for the next hour. He was picking out clothes, and things he liked, and carrying them back into the house, while I was loading furniture into pickup trucks, fitting toys into the backs of cars, and dealing with seasoned bargainers who wanted to buy the belongings of my life for mere pennies. When business finally slowed and I looked up from the wadded-up bills shoved into a coin box, I saw that Fedelina had come over and was talking with my husband.

I stepped closer, pretending to care about folding sweaters on the clothing table. I wanted to hear what they were talking about, and was hoping she was talking sense into the man, telling him his wife wasn’t nutty and that she didn’t need her kids taken away for a week. All she needed was a little help around the house and short rests here and there.

But I know they weren’t talking about that. Husbands don’t like hearing about sleep-deprived, overwhelmed wives.

“A man I was talking to the other day told me he was having marital problems,” Fedelina was saying to Timothy, “and so I asked him, ‘Do you fight a lot?’ He said, ‘No, hardly ever.’ ‘That’s your problem,’ I told him. ‘You both need to say everything, get it all out and let the other say it, too. Oscar—he and I were together a long time. Want to know our marriage secret?’”

“Sure. What do you charge?” Timothy said.

“Nothing,” she said as she leaned toward him. “We fought daily. That
was our secret.”

“Really, that’s it?”

“Yeah and right after the fight I’d say, ‘Do you want a sandwich, Oscar,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, bologna.’ I’d speak my mind, he’d speak his and then we’d both move on. We were good at moving on.”

“Thanks for the pearls of wisdom.”

I walked over, wanting to tell them how hard it would be for me to joke about a sandwich after a thick slice of my heart—the slice I had fed to Timothy—had been half chewed and spit out.

“Hey there, Fedelina,” was all I said.

“Why, hello, Anna. I was telling your husband my marriage secret. Have I told you?”

“You did,” I said matter of factly. “How long did you say you were married for?”

“Five decades, can you believe?”

“My God, that’s long,” I said. “But life is long, too. At least sometimes it seems so, doesn’t it?” I turned my attention to a lady who wanted to buy the heart earrings Timothy had bought me for one of our anniversaries.

Moments later, after she left with the hearts already on her ears, my husband came up and asked, “Where’s your ring, Anna? Did you sell that, too?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then where is it?”

“I lost it somewhere in Tarpon Bay,” I told him.

“Tarpon Bay, that’s interesting.”

“Yeah, I went canoeing while you were gone. It slid off accidentally.”

“I didn’t know you liked canoeing.”

“I do now,” I said as I put my hand out and let a woman drop quarters into my palm.

“Should I be checking our banking account to make sure our money is still there?”

“Yes, and brew some more coffee while you’re at it, will you?” I asked, and was glad when he went upstairs. I found it easier to warm my face into a smile and walk over in friendly mode to Fedelina, who was flipping
through a box of photo frames.

“The orchid you gave me hasn’t bloomed,” I told her. “It hasn’t opened at all.”

“Give it more time,” she said. “It will.”

“What if it doesn’t?” I asked. “Nothing in my life is blooming.”

She let out a loud sigh. “What are you saying to it?”

“To what?”

“The flower that you want to bloom, how are you talking to it?”

“I’m saying, ‘What’s wrong with you, you’ll never open, will you?’”

“There you go,” she said. “You have to be careful in what you are saying to yourself, Anna, what messages you are giving you! Talk to yourself as if you were a flower, wanting it to bloom. Talk to the flower, too, and it will bloom!”

“I think I’ve got a buyer for a lamp over there,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ve got to get going, dear. I’m taking my son to the airport,” she said.

“Are you going to be okay? It’s a long drive home.”

“My God, Anna,” she gasped. “I live for these moments when my grown children need me. I spent most of my life training them to solve problems, handle their own needs, and I guess I did a darn good job as a mother, sending them into the world as fully capable, independent adults, because, believe me, they don’t need me often. So when they do—even if it’s just a ride to the airport—I see it as a selfish opportunity.”

By now the sale had picked up again, and the area under my stilted house was swarming with people. After answering questions, taking money, helping load things into bags, Fedelina was gone, but her car was still there. I watched in the direction of her house like a woman actively birding, determined to spot some rare species before it flies off for the season. They wouldn’t leave—he wouldn’t—without coming to say goodbye, and all I kept thinking about in my mixed-up mind was how I might go on without him.

“Life is a pilgrimage,” I thought to myself, wishing I could find my journal once more to write it all down, the ideas that were coming as I handed over a stuffed toy turkey to a man, giving it to him for free so I
wouldn’t have to count money and disrupt my parade of thoughts. “And I am a woman capable of enduring, but also of leaving certain hardships behind should leaving become necessary, journeying toward a better life, one of true love.”

And then another man came up to me with my music box in the palm of his hand, the one Liam and I had danced to.

“‘It’s a Wonderful World,’” he exclaimed when it stared to play.

“That’s right,” I told him. “But it’s not for sale. I don’t know how it got down here—my husband, maybe.”

“Oh come on,” the man said. “It’s my favorite song.”

“It’s everyone’s favorite song,” I told him. “And it’s not for sale.”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars.”

“Nope.”

“Seventy?” he offered.

I shook my head. “It has sentimental value. It’s priceless,” I told him, taking it from his hand. It was then that I spotted the man who had made it sentimental and priceless to me in the first place—Liam! He was kneeling on the ground, flipping through the pages of an encyclopedia set I had as a schoolgirl.

I walked over to the man I happened to love and knelt down beside him, pretending I cared about the page he had opened in the encyclopedia—a page about leaves. I tried focusing on all that was written about them, that when they fall off annually they are called
deciduous
, whereas, when they remain for two or more years, they are
persistent
, and the plant is
evergreen
. But after reading more than I wanted to know about the arrangement of leaves on a stem, I said to him, no pun intended, “You’re
leaving
today.”