Sand in My Eyes (6 page)

“Oh stop,” I said. “Let me be how I want when the kids are in the other room.”

“Whatever,” he said, “but you need to let me know.”

“Know what?”

“Whether you can forgive me or not. I can’t go on being tormented by your punishment. If my parents take the kids for a week, it’ll give you time to figure it all out, determine whether you can get past this or not. And time to pull yourself together again.”

Pull myself together? “What do I look like to you?” I asked, disturbed. “A rag doll—Raggedy Anna—in need of stitching, a third eye glued on?”

“You need a lot more than an eye glued on.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“You need to decide, Anna, whether you can forgive me—whether we can get past this. Do you think it’s possible?”

I stared at him and at the horns I saw coming from his head, and shook my head. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t know how to sew a button on my own blouse, let alone gather off the floor and stuff back inside me the trust I once had for him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I need to think about it, and I don’t have time for thinking right now.” But I was leaning in the direction of
“No, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

“I’ve got to go,” he said, picking up his duffel and suitcases. “But I feel strongly about this. I’m calling my parents. They’ll come get the kids.”

“Whatever,” I said, not believing he would do it. “Enjoy your getaway. Must be nice.”

“Actually, a comfortable dinner at home would be nicer,” he said. “Something other than cereal. But look, it’s not like I’m headed to the beach for a few drinks. I’m working, supporting my family.”

“Poor you,” I said.

“Good luck,” he told me. “You need it.”

“Adios”
was all I said, and he was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A COUPLE OF MORNINGS
later there were no tiny arms wrapping around me in the little yellow room, no fingers pulling on my hair, squeezing my neck or pinching my belly. It was me alone in our house in the forest, a forest of banyan tree limbs and hanging roots. I missed the children and their noise. I even missed them jumping on my bed and throwing their toys.

“It’s good for them to get away. And it’s good for you,” my mother-in-law had said the night before as she helped fold and pack the children’s clothes into a large duffel bag for their impromptu trip. “This time to yourself will only make you a better mother.”

That
is
what I wanted, to be a better mother, more like I was before all the weedy events started tangling around my knees, yanking me to the ground. I also wanted sleep, but it would take a hundred years of deep, dark slumber to turn me back into the brilliant woman I once was, before my husband betrayed me.

Tucked within the blankets on my bed I learned that I can hide from the light of day, but haven’t a clue how to hide from the contents of my mind—the worries and resentments that kept me up, returning in my sleep to the fiery forest where my smoldering thoughts had their way with me. And at last, as I was drifting into sleep—
cuk-cuk-cuk
—I heard an alarming burst, a pileated woodpecker striking its beak against my tin roof, driving me crazy as its jackhammer-like sound played with my sleep-deprived mind.

“I thought birds were smart, knew the difference between wood and tin,” I mumbled as I curled like a shrimp, pulling the sheets up over my face. Alone in the king-sized bed, I stayed like a child under the haystack fast asleep, hiding from the bird, and from life and all its humdrum happenings that made me feel like I had been repeatedly slamming my own head against a tree. And because I’m not a bird designed to sustain unusual blows, I had been feeling like a woman losing her mind in recent months. It was easier having my children here. At least they kept me from thinking. And now, with them gone, I felt guilty.

“They look fine, no longer sick,” I had tried reassuring myself last night as I stood in the middle of our sandy road, watching and waving, wondering if my children still loved me as their heads grew smaller in the back window of my in-laws car. It looked like they did, the way the boys blew me kisses and Marjorie cried. “She won’t be crying for long,” I told myself. Once she crossed those gates into the Magic Kingdom, she would have been nothing but smiles, and I should have been, too. I should have been happy my children were spending time with grandparents whom they hardly saw when we were living up north.

Still, it’s hard for a mother to turn off mothering because her children were away. I didn’t know how to stop worrying about my father-in-law, and his driving too far to the left, and my mother-in-law, strict disciplinarian that she was, a firm believer in not sparing the rod. Her eyes had slapped me with judgment as the kids jumped back and forth from the love seat to the sofa, and later she shared with me her views that my generation of mothers was letting kids get away with too much, and that our withholding of spankings was why the world was headed in the wrong direction, why children were turning into outrageous adults. I wanted then to tell her that we didn’t believe in spankings, that time-outs worked well, but she had come to help me in response to a crisis, the emotional state of crisis I was in, and my husband had told me over the phone to keep my mouth shut and to not say a thing.

I don’t know why I let all this negativity creep into my sleep, or why, on my first morning all to myself, I lay in bed harping over how his mother and I got into it when she told me our moving here was irresponsible,
impulsive. “No one said life was going to be easy,” she had said, looking me up and down as if I wore a crown on my head, her eyes declaring me an imposter, demanding from her son a castle in a tropical kingdom, a chariot, exquisite gowns, and a maid. “I know your job up north was stressful, but you’re only running from your problems, thinking that if you move to a beautiful place, everything will be better. You mothers today,” she had said. “You think life should be all good and pleasant. And you expect it all.”

I had given thought to what she said all night and come to the conclusion that, yes, I had been running from my problems for a long time now, and that it all started my freshman year of college. I felt as if I were on top of the world, knew it all, those first few days after my mother helped move me into my dorm. But then, a couple of weeks later, my mom died instantly in a car accident. The moment I heard the news my world collapsed and I no longer felt I had control over my life, or knew anything as to why things happen the way they do. And to this day it saddens me that I never had the chance to ask my mom all the things a woman-turned-mother wants to ask her own mom.

No one at college knew her. There weren’t any lifelong friends there with me, so I kept my grief to myself. And I didn’t feel like socially engaging. I kept everyone at bay, not joining sororities or clubs, but burying myself in my studies and in books, reading every novel I could get my hands on. I was lonely until I met Timothy. He was the life of every party, and both he and our bottles of coconut rum brought me out of my shell. After graduation, we got married and together moved around the country for the fun of it, chasing his promotions. Each time we relocated to a place I had never been, it brought me back to my freshman year at college, when I moved in and knew no one and hid within my shell. And each time I started getting involved, getting to know people, I felt a sense of relief as Timothy would announce another move. It kept me far from intimacy, clinging to the loneliness that had been my state of comfort in college.

I pushed the blankets off my body. My mother-in-law was right. I was running from my problems by moving us to a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico, but by then I knew that husbands and wives who fought up north
were still going to fight down south. And worrywarts lived everywhere, thriving in every climate. And even south of the Mason-Dixon Line bitter thoughts ran wild, which explained why, well into my first morning alone, I was still strolling the wild forest of my mind, conversing with the beasts that lived there and getting upset over all the people who have done me wrong.

“Come on, Anna, get up and do something productive this first morning all to yourself!” I told myself, pushing the pillows onto the floor. Do what, I didn’t know—search for my missing eye. That is what a rag doll does when wanting to feel alive. And then she shoves her stuffing back in and stitches her seams with needle and thread.

But I was no doll. I was a woman, and there were more important things demanding my attention than me falling apart at the seams. I looked around at the messy room and decided to spend the day cleaning, but then I thought of all the things a mother does in a day—things she doesn’t want to do but must—and walked over to my writing desk instead. It wasn’t that I did writing at the desk—I didn’t have time—but it was a writing desk nonetheless, and when I cleared the clutter a desire to create flooded my mind. But I swallowed that desire back down again, sending it to the depths of my soul, where it would stick around until a time in my life when I would have more time.

“But then I’d be old,” I told myself, “and I don’t want to wait until I am old to get started,” and so I turned on my computer and sat down to write. That’s when I was struck by what my husband had said about the chicken or the egg, and which came first—my misery or our rotten marriage.

As I put my fingers to the keys, I did so with the intent of making sense of it all.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Once upon a time there lived a woman who worked as a publicist at a major New York publishing house. There she would create and implement publicity campaigns to generate maximum book sales. It was a low-paying job and hard, promoting fifteen titles at a time while dealing with the authors, each of whom poured their heart, soul, and ego into their written masterpieces. Never does a publicist meet a writer who doesn’t believe that every breathing, reading creature in the universe ought to buy their book
.

This publicist was also the mother of three small children and didn’t know which was harder, handling their demands, or arriving at work each morning to twenty voice messages, forty faxes, and eighty e-mails in her in-box. Going to the copy machine room to make copies of press kits was often her only escape, and she spent much time in this stuffy room without fans or windows. But one day, when she lifted the lid, placed an author’s photo color-side down, closed it, and pressed thirty-six, like her age, then hit start, all the copier did was grunt and groan. She didn’t know why it was grunting and groaning, or what to do about her own discontentment. She put her hand on her head and gently pulled it to the side, hoping to release tension, but she didn’t have time for this, standing around waiting for a machine to act right, and it annoyed her—as did her life, in which she no longer had time for selfish pursuits of any kind
.

She watched as the machine spit out sheet after sheet, drab like the mornings of her life, one after the next, and they kept on coming, exactly the same and not to her liking, but she didn’t know how to fix the color of things, or change her outlook toward a life that was bleak and fading. And when the flickering red light came on, she knew how to open the tray and add paper, but she didn’t know what to do concerning her own feelings of emptiness
.

The meeting she was heading was starting without her, but she was tired of hurrying, exhausted from her hectic mornings caring for her children, rushing them out the door, but the mornings kept coming, like the dull color copies, and she didn’t know how to stop or alter them in either way. She could hire someone to help her with laundry, or ask the intern to make the copies for her, but she didn’t know how to ask for help. She did everything herself
.

She stood there dumbfounded when the copies went blank, and when the beautiful colors vanished from her life, but somewhere in the midst of pleasing everyone else, of saying one too many “yes”es and not enough “no”s, her identity as a person started ebbing away. She had no technical ability to fix the inkless machine, nor wisdom to change her unhappiness, and she let them both continue, disliked seconds of her life, one after the next, blank page after blank page
.