The Pioneer Woman (26 page)

That I was going to have a baby…that I needed her right now.

I hung up the phone. My mom—likely aware of the futility of trying to have a productive, meaningful conversation that night—didn't call back.

When I arrived at the house—the house where I'd grown up—my dad opened the door and we hugged and cried, my dad's cry more of a stunned whimper than a sob.

“I'm sorry, Dad,” I said, hugging him tightly.

He couldn't answer.

I stayed with my dad for two hours, sitting and talking with him until his best friend, Jack, arrived. My brother Doug, in another city, had called Betsy and told her what was going on. Around town, I could already feel, the news was starting to spread.

On the ride back to the ranch that night, after I'd made sure my dad was psychologically stable, I called Mike.

“B-b-but where will Mom live?” Mike asked after I explained what was going on.

“Well…I think she has an apartment. But we don't really know what's going on yet,” I explained. “We'll just wait and see, okay?”

“Wh-wh-wh-what is the apartment like?” he asked.

“Mikey, I just don't know,” I answered. “I just…I don't know right now. But don't worry, okay? We'll figure it all out.”

“Where will we have Christmas?” Mike asked.

I swallowed hard. “We'll have it here, I'm sure…,” I began. My eyes started welling with tears.

“But dey are n-n-n-not going to get a diforce…are dey?” Mike asked.

It would take him a while to grasp this.

We talked for a few more minutes, said our good nights, and I hung up
the phone and sobbed. I needed this not to be happening—not now.
Please, please, please…not now.

I arrived back home just before midnight, and Marlboro Man met me at the car. I could hear nothing but cows and crickets when I climbed out of my car and into his arms, which were strong and warm and comforting. I was a wreck—sick to my stomach and even more sick in my heart—and Marlboro Man helped me to the house, as if I were crippled by a terminal illness. I was completely beat, hardly able to finish my shower before I fell into bed with Marlboro Man, who rubbed my back as I tried with all my might to keep from throwing up, breaking down, and completely saturating my red floral pillowcase with tears.

I
WOKE UP
the next morning feeling drained…but, magically, a bit better on the nausea front. Maybe, I reasoned, I'd have the shortest bout of morning sickness in the history of pregnancy. I stood up from my bed and waited for the nausea to kick in, but it didn't. Feeling hopeful, I washed my face and got dressed; Marlboro Man was gone, of course, having gotten up and gone to work while it was still dark. I put on my makeup, wondering if I'd ever get up at the same time as Marlboro Man. Wondering if anyone ever did.

Around eleven, after calling my dad to check on him, I scoured the kitchen for lunch ideas and finally settled on chili. It would be okay for several hours, I figured, so whenever Marlboro Man came home it would be ready. Wives made chili for lunch, right? I still hadn't figured out the flow of things. I diced up some onion and garlic, breathing through my mouth to avoid making myself sick again, and threw it into a pot with a two-pound package of ground beef, which I'd thawed in the fridge earlier in the week. I didn't have packets of chili seasoning in my pantry—I hadn't put that item into my grocery shopping loop yet—so I improvised, sprinkling in chili powder, paprika, cayenne, cumin…whatever spice smelled remotely like I always remembered chili smelling. By the time it really started bubbling, the smell of chili had taken over the universe and the queasiness had
returned with a vengeance. It was the worst smell I'd ever experienced—pungent garlic, the horrible, overwhelming aroma of cumin…the stench of cooking flesh.

By the time Marlboro Man walked in the door, I was stirring in the canned kidney beans and minutes away from throwing up.

“Mmmm…smells good,” he said. He walked over to the stove and wrapped his arms around my waist, resting his palms on my belly. “How are you, Mama?” he asked. Butterflies went crazy in my stomach. He did it for me, even when cumin was making me sick.

I'm better today,” I said, focusing on my physical condition. “How are you?”

“I'm good,” he said. “I'm worried about you, though.” His hands caressed my ribs, my arms, my sides.

He touched me all the time; physical indifference was never a problem with Marlboro Man.

The phone rang suddenly, and I continued stirring the chili as he walked into the living room and picked it up. He talked for a while as I added the last dash of salt, then came back into the kitchen.

“Marie's only got a few hours,” he said. “They're telling all the family it's time to come down.”

I turned off the stove. “Oh no,” I said. “No.” It was all I could say.

“If you're not feeling up to it, you don't have to come,” Marlboro Man said. “Everyone will understand.”

But I wanted to. Her fight was ending. Even though I was the newest member of the family, I couldn't possibly not go.

But when we walked through the door of Marie and Uncle Tom's house, I wanted to be anywhere in the world but there. Family was huddled around, hugging one another and crying. Food was being served, but no one was eating. I didn't know how to greet people. Whether to smile. Whether to hug. Whether to cry. I thought of my parents. I felt oppressed. I couldn't breathe.

Matthew met us at the door and tried to smile as he hugged us both, then led us to the back bedroom where his mother lay in her bed, unconscious and breathing laboriously. Marie's brother sat at her side and held her hand in his, bringing it to his face affectionately and speaking to her in a gentle voice. Her parents stood close by, consoling each other in an embrace. Matthew joined his sister, Jennifer, on the bed, touching their mother's legs…her arms…anything to maintain the physical connection they knew would soon no longer be possible. And her husband, Tom, sat on a chair, presiding sadly over the whole gathering of friends and family. It was so heavy with grief, so horribly sad—I couldn't bear to be in the room. My mother-in-law was in the kitchen helping with the food and dishes; I slipped backward out of the bedroom to be with her instead. Marlboro Man followed close behind me. After enduring the death of his brother Todd years earlier, he'd had about enough of this kind of mourning to last him a lifetime.

Just as we arrived in the kitchen, sobs came from the bedroom. Marie had taken her last breath. I heard Jennifer crying out loud for her mother; Marie's parents saying “No…no…” over and over. I heard the tears of Marie's closest friends, who were also huddled around her bedside. I felt myself breaking and excused myself to a guest bathroom on the other side of the house. I was crumbling.

I locked myself in the blue half bath and sunk to the floor, with my back against the tile wall. I felt like an intruder. It wasn't my place to be there. But maybe it was; I was Marlboro Man's wife. It was his family, so it was also mine. Meanwhile, my dad was at home alone, probably going crazy in his suddenly empty house. I needed to check on him, to help him through this. But I couldn't bear the thought of walking into our house again without my mom there. I felt a pang of nausea as my eyes welled up with tears—tears for Marie, tears for my dad, for my sister and brothers and my grandparents. Tears for Marlboro Man and his recent stress, for Marie's daughter, who was fresh out of college and would begin her adult life without her mother. I thought of every happy Christmas of my childhood and realized
I'd never have one again. And I thought of Mike, who thrived on routine and stability, and wondered how he would endure the upheaval. I thought of Marie, and how kind she'd been to me in the short time I'd known her. My tears turned into a wellspring, my sniffles into heaving sobs.

Stop it,
I ordered myself.
You can't be hysterical here. You can't walk out among Marlboro Man's family with red, puffy eyes
.

It was their grief, not mine; I didn't want them to think I was just putting on emotion. But I couldn't control the tears, no matter how much I tried. I grabbed a washcloth and dabbed it on my face as I heard the plaintive wails of Marie's family from the other room. It was over; Marie was gone. My parents were over; they were splitting up. Knowing the rest of the house was otherwise occupied, I stayed there in the blue bathroom and buried my face in my hands, crying uncontrollably.
I'll have to stay in here, I imagined, until I can compose myself.

I'll have to stay in here until I'm sixty.

 

I
DIDN'T ATTEND
Marie's funeral. By the time it rolled around days after her death, my morning sickness had turned into a debilitating all-day nausea that dictated every motion of my body for all the hours I was awake. What I'd experienced a couple of weeks prior was just a little tummy ache compared to the plague of queasiness I was now enduring.

I was miserable. I wanted to be a young, energetic new wife, full of vim and vigor. Instead I was olive green, plastered to my bed, and unable to raise my head from the pillow without munching a handful of sugared cereal. Every time Marlboro Man entered our bedroom to check on me, he'd step on an Apple Jack. I'd hear it crunch into the carpet and he'd look down at the crumbs on the sole of his boot…and all I could do was watch. When I could bear to stand erect, I'd taken to sniffing lemon halves to ward
off the nausea. Spent lemon halves littered the house; I was afraid to let one out of my sight for more than ten seconds.

I was a vision of loveliness—charming in every way—and no help on the ranch at all. Marlboro Man was working hard—the many loads of cattle he'd bought in the month before our wedding were starting to come in, and I wanted to help him get through it. But the smell of manure was too much for me to take. The smell of air alone sent me into dry heaves, even with a lemon wedge shoved under my nose. I couldn't cook. Everything—from apples to bread, not to mention animal flesh in any form—would make me cry and hurl. I'd drive twenty-five minutes to town just to pick up a pizza, then stop halfway home and put it in the trunk because the smell was so horribly overpowering.

All the while, Marlboro Man tried his best to sympathize with me, his new hormone-poisoned and depressed wife. But there was no way he could possibly understand. “Maybe if you just hop up and jump in the shower,” he'd say, stroking my back, “you'll feel better.”

He didn't understand. “There's no hopping,” I'd wail. “There's no jumping!” I wanted to go home to my mom and crawl in my old bed. I wanted her to bring me soup. But there wasn't a home to go to anymore.

I was in a new place, in a new world…and suddenly my life was completely unrecognizable. I didn't want to be pregnant. If I'd gone ahead and moved to Chicago, I wouldn't be. I'd be away from my parents' separation and nowhere near pregnancy hormones and maybe wearing a sleek black turtleneck and eating Italian food with friends.

Italian food…

Ugh. I feel sick.

T
HE NAUSEA
lingered for weeks. In the meantime, I tried my best to acclimate to my new life in the middle of nowhere. I had to get used to the fact that I lived twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. That I couldn't just run next door when I ran out of eggs. That there was no such thing as sushi. Not that it would matter, anyway. No cowboy on the ranch would touch it.
That's bait,
they'd say, laughing at any city person who would convince themselves that such a food was tasty.

And the trash truck: there wasn't one. In this strange new land, there was no infrastructure for dealing with trash. There were cows in my yard, and they pooped everywhere—on the porch, in the yard, even on my car if they happened to be walking near it when they dropped a load. There wasn't a yard crew to clean it up. I wanted to hire people, but there were no people. The reality of my situation grew more crystal clear every day.

One morning, after I choked down a bowl of cereal, I looked outside the window and saw a mountain lion sitting on the hood of my car, licking his paws—likely, I imagined, after tearing a neighboring rancher's wife from limb to limb and eating her for breakfast. I darted to the phone and called Marlboro Man, telling him there was a mountain lion sitting on my car. My heart beat inside my chest. I had no idea mountain lions were indigenous to the area.

“It's probably just a bobcat,” Marlboro Man reassured me.

I didn't believe him.

“No way—it's huge,” I cried. “It's seriously got to be a mountain lion!”

“I've gotta go,” he said. Cows mooed in the background.

I hung up the phone, incredulous at Marlboro Man's lack of concern, and banged on the window with the palm of my hand, hoping to scare the wild cat away. But it only looked up and stared at me through the window, imagining me on a plate with a side of pureed trout.

My courtship with Marlboro Man, filled with fizzy romance, hadn't prepared me for any of this; not the mice I heard scratching in the wall next to my bed, not the flat tires I got from driving my car up and down the jagged gravel roads. Before I got married, I didn't know how to use a jack or a crowbar…and I didn't want to have to learn now. I didn't want to know that the smell in the laundry room was a dead rodent. I'd never smelled a dead rodent in my life: why, when I was supposed to be a young, euphoric newlywed, was I being forced to smell one now?

During the day, I was cranky. At night, I was a mess. I hadn't slept through the night once since we returned from our honeymoon. Besides the nausea, whose second evil wave typically hit right at bedtime, I was downright spooked. As I lay next to Marlboro Man, who slept like a baby every night, I thought of monsters and serial killers: Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. In the utter silence of the country, every tiny sound was amplified; I was certain if I let myself go to sleep, the murderer outside our window would get me.

And if the prospect of serial killers wasn't enough, my thoughts would invariably turn to my parents…to my family. My mom, happily on her own in her new one-bedroom apartment. Would I ever be able to forgive her? My dad, deeply depressed in his empty house. What if he just lost it one day and ended it all? My sister, at college and floating. Will she ever want to come home again? My brother Doug, whose bitterness over my parents'
divorce was tangible. And Mike, who was exactly the same as he'd always been. I wondered why the rest of us couldn't be so blissfully oblivious to all of the human complications around us.

I was exhausted, unable to make it through one day without crying or gagging or worrying. I'd fallen in love, married a cowboy, and moved to the peaceful, bucolic countryside. But it was peace that eluded me the most.

The honeymoon was over, almost before it ever began.

 

A
MID THE
stack of issues facing us as a newly married couple, one thing I decided we no longer needed to worry about was the big renovation of the house next door. Marlboro Man had been dead set on continuing the project—more, I suspected, for my sake than for his. But as the work crew arrived day after day and unloaded pallets and boxes and supplies, I couldn't reconcile it with the financial turmoil I knew the ranch was in. Marlboro Man wanted to plow through and get it done—he wanted us to have a real, grown-up home when our baby arrived. But even if we made it through the remodel itself, we'd still have to furnish and fill it. I couldn't imagine picking out hinges and doorknobs and sofas in the midst of all the other stress. I didn't like the feeling of contributing to the already heavy burden.

“Hey…,” I said as we climbed into bed one rainy night. “What if we just put the house on hold for a while?” I reached over to my bedside table, grabbed the lemon half, and took a big sniff. Lemon halves were my new narcotic.

Marlboro Man was quiet. He worked his leg under mine and locked it into what had become its official position. It was warm.

“I think maybe we should get to a stopping point,” I said. “And just put it on hold for a while.”

“I've thought about it,” he answered quietly. He rubbed his leg slowly up and down mine.

Feeling better, I set the lemon back on the table and reached my arm toward him, rolling over and draping my other leg over his waist and resting my head on his chest. “Well, I was thinking it might be easier for me not to worry about it with my parents and the baby and everything else.” Maybe it would be more effective, I thought, if I turned the focus on me.

“Well, that makes sense,” he said. “But let's talk about it tomorrow.” He wrapped his other arm around my waist, and within seconds we were in a totally different world, where parents and drywall—and crippling nausea—were no longer welcome.

 

A
FTER A
few days, I brought it up again.
Our little house will be fine,
I told him.
We should just wait…I'm only twenty-seven…I haven't earned a big, huge, fancy house yet…I'd feel like an impostor
.
I don't want to have to do all that cleaning. I'll get scared with all that space. I don't like furniture shopping. I'm not in the mood to decide on paint colors. We can finish it later, when things get back to normal.
Though I knew deep down that “normal” in agriculture was probably a relative term.

Marlboro Man agreed, and after a few days of boarding up and capping off and sealing, the last of the workmen pulled away from our half-finished yellow Indian home on the prairie. And what should have been a moment of disappointment or sadness actually had the opposite effect: I didn't care one bit. I smiled, realizing that all the best things I'd imagined about marriage actually were possible—that it transcends things and possessions and plans. That no matter how much I would have loved a dishwasher and a laundry room inside the house, what I wanted most was Marlboro Man. And I had him.

Not two months into my marriage, it was a delicious moment of affirmation and clarity.

Then I realized I'd be having a baby in a few months, and I wouldn't have a dishwasher.

My heart began to race with panic.