Wedding Cake for Breakfast (6 page)

One evening aboard the ship, the schedule of events was reversed. After dinner, everyone gathered in the lecture room to learn what we might see on our night excursion into the tributaries of the river. We were to explore the moonless, riparian wilds in Zodiacs. Zodiacs sound like they should be impenetrable and, to my mind, metal modes of transport, but in fact they are inflatable dinghies with motors. Inflatable. Did I mention inflatable? The seats were precarious perches along the edges of the craft. We held flashlights and headlamps. Everyone else looked for crocodiles. I looked
out
for crocodiles.

I am not as brave as Sacha. Sure, I went the drug-free route with childbirth, but tolerating pain, when you know that you are not in danger of irreparable physical harm, is very different from putting yourself in a situation with unreasonable creatures, where the jungle equivalent of an episiotomy is not in the offing. Most ecologists are lured to their profession, in part, by the inherent adventure. Take Sacha's boss, for instance, who was with us in the Zodiac. She leaned out over the boat and wrestled something in the water. It came up flailing and splashing in the dark.

“Oh, it's a baby,” she cooed.

Baby crocodile.

She clamped one hand over its mouth so that we could touch its writhing body. Everyone else in the boat eagerly leaned in to stroke the wet scales, while I screwed up my courage. Since having children, especially a daughter, I have forced myself to overcome instinctive wimpiness in these situations and do the required touching of befanged wild creatures. I didn't yet have to be a role model that night in the Zodiac, but I did have a choice to make: reveal my fear to my brand-new husband or attempt to overcome it for his sake. Why? To show him my intention to rise, over the course of our marriage, to his level of adventurousness, and not sink him to my level of overcaution. To reassure him that just because I had the ring, I wasn't going to suddenly strand him with an unadventurous mate. And yet there was something about the ring that made me less concerned with what he'd think of the result of my test of courage. Reader, I failed to coddle the crocodile.

If the first year of marriage is about realigned loyalties, it is also about the blinders that necessarily come off as you gaze eye to eye at your new Numero Uno. Sacha and I have talked openly—though not too frequently—about our disappointments in each other, there being one significant trait (and any number of small peeves) in the other that we wish was more or less pronounced, or something we'd envisioned ourselves doing more or less of because of the influence of our future partner. For him, it is a longing for a mate who would get him backpacking, camping, and rock climbing more than naturally occurs to me to do. (Tough luck for him; I found this great guy who does that for me.) In that first year, coming to terms with the reality we'd committed to—versus the ideals we'd conjured when we were younger—must have been scary for Sacha. For me, the unease was outweighed by the comfort of commitment; there is something to be said for the reassuring heft of a ball and chain.

• • • • • • • •

Ten years ago, like New York City itself, my new husband and I had no way of knowing how we would weather the world events in our backyard. But in just one decade of marriage, we have partaken in better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health, stasis and change, much of it sampled during that first year. Would our legal union have been different had we not begun it alongside tragedy? The answer may lie in the kind of tragedy: if we'd suffered a personal loss, 9/11 might have tripped us up or slowed us down. But while the horror left me with sweat-soaked nightmares of flaming buildings and unbounded anxiety for the future of our city, the fact remained that we were some of the lucky ones. The people we loved were safe.

So even though we were welcomed home with weapons and weeping, even though we couldn't huddle together in the immediate aftermath, and even though I have to think twice to remember the actual, overshadowed date of our anniversary, 9/11 did not harm our first twelve months. It turned out to be a catalyst, speeding up the best and hardest transformations, driving Sacha and me together with brute force, and forging, yes, I'll risk putting this in print, an indestructible bond.

All the Time in the World

DARCIE MARANICH

The call came one crisp, late October evening. I answered the phone awkwardly, trying to balance the handset between the select few of my fingers not smudged with sticky cinnamon remnants of apple-cake batter. The apple cake was the latest in a parade of experimental desserts I proudly presented my new husband during those first weeks of our marriage, so determined, I was, to fill him in every sense of the word.

My stomach dropped when—as an afterthought—I glanced at the caller ID. By then it was too late; I'd already picked up.

I'd quickly learned that the life of an army wife was anything but predictable. Already, in our short two-month union, my husband had been called away unexpectedly for weekend drills, overnight guard duties, and what I would come to know as surprise piss tests, randomly sprung on a sleeping populous. They called so often to pull him away during those first weeks when I wanted nothing more than to spend long, uninterrupted days discovering the depths of him that, through the eyes of marriage, seemed new and uncharted. Admittedly, there were times when caller ID was unwelcome, and if I could get away with it, I'd let it ring straight through to voice mail. On this particular night I'd been caught off guard, distracted by baking and the sound of John Mayer's voice flowing so smoothly from the speakers of my under-cabinet kitchen stereo.

“Hello?” I answered, reluctance tinting every last curve of the word.

“Mrs. Maranich?”

The title was so new to me; I hadn't yet worn it in. “Yes.”

“This is Major Streeter. I'm trying to get ahold of Lieutenant Maranich. Is he available?”

A bubble of lies floated to mind. He's not here. He's sick. Hospitalized. Out of the country. Just plain gone. My conscience took over, though, popping that little bubble of lies and sending them scattering every which way. “He is,” I conceded. “Just a sec.”

Within minutes my husband would hang up and turn to me, his eyes so burdened with sadness that I knew full well what he was going to say before he said it. We'd spend the rest of that night together but apart, so separately crushed that nothing could build a bridge between his misplaced guilt and my unadulterated despair.

Just two months before, on a balmy September evening with the weight of a monsoon storm still hanging heavy in the air, Jeff and I stood on a hilltop in the Sonoran Desert and made public the love we were convinced was unlike any that had ever come before it. Surrounded by little more than a scattering of saguaros and a handful of loved ones, we took turns speaking aloud the vows we'd written. He promised to cherish me—and my three young daughters—until time ticked its last. I vowed to him my undying love and unwavering commitment, not having any idea at the time just how quickly my words would be tested.

The phone call that came on that October night served as a two-week warning that Jeff was being deployed to Iraq. The days that followed were both a gift and a curse—time alternately zooming past or dragging on, though the inevitable loomed like a dark cloud all the while.

On his twenty-sixth birthday, I shaved his head almost completely bald at his request. The girls and I sang while he blew out the candles on his lemon Bundt cake. He unwrapped my one gift to him: a framed picture that played my voice at the push of a button.

Early the very next morning we drove to the airport. I sat in a chair and swallowed hard, pushing back lumps in my throat so thick I thought I might suffocate. The girls busied themselves crawling over him as though he were a jungle gym. As though he wasn't marching off to a war halfway around the world. He stayed with us until he couldn't put it off anymore. I can still recall the sight of him approaching that security checkpoint, turning one last time to blow me a kiss from two fingers.

Coming home to an empty house was difficult. Facing the entirety of his civilian wardrobe left hanging in the closet even more so. Nights trumped all of it, though—our king bed stretching out before me like an insult. So, too, did my subconscious taunt me then, conjuring up sounds that weren't there. One night—a couple of months in—I shot straight up in bed at the sound of the doorbell. My heart raced as I made my way to the front door and peered through the peephole, so sure that on the other side I'd see two uniformed men with a folded flag in their hands. There was nobody there. Never had been.

The mail brought thick envelopes full of pages covered front and back in the familiar slant of his print. I opened my e-mail to find new gems awaiting me each morning, dense with poetic professings of his love. Sometimes he sent song lyrics, or long-since-forgotten punch lines to our two-bit inside jokes. The most rare treat of all was digital pictures of him depicted in a distant land, striking a macho army pose with one of Saddam's palaces rising imperially in the background.

What I hadn't predicted was that the quarrels of young love would reach us, in spite of the distance between us. We fought something fierce. Our heated words most often flew through cyberspace, igniting long stretches of silence between us. It wasn't the typical woes of young married life—money, priorities, sex—that fueled our respective fires; ours were disputes born of frustration and stress. Loneliness and blame. Little stones of it piled up, landing with a sharp ping on my internal points scale. I could almost feel them accumulating there, weighing heavy in my favor. On Tuesday nights as I lugged the trash bin to the curb after dark, sure I was going to step on a rattlesnake or some equally scaly desert creature.
Ping.
Every time I drove alone to the Realtor's office to initial the contracts for the house we were building.
Ping.
Every bill I paid. Every toilet I plunged. Every spider I killed.
Ping. Ping. Ping.

More than once I questioned whether our marriage would outlast his deployment. Almost without fail his voice was the one of reason, so consistently calm and reassuring—even in the face of mortar and rockets—that I always came away from our arguments shamed by the stubborn impulsivity that left me so weak, especially in contrast to his strength.

Four and a half months after his sudden deployment, Jeff was sent home. The girls and I made T-shirts with catchy slogans:
Welcome Home Baghdaddy; Glad You're Back from Iraq.
We used window markers to decorate every square inch of exposed glass in our house. We tied balloons and strung banners. We dusted and vacuumed and swept and mopped. I woke up on that final morning and literally pinched myself, just to be sure.

Indeed he came home, bearing only a select few scars from his time away, none of them external. I remember walking alongside him in the parking lot of the mall. A nearby car backfired, sending Jeff instantly to the ground. I laughed at him, protected by the ignorance of safe borders—the bliss of a life uninterrupted by the sights and sounds and smells of war.

During his time away, I had dreamed of us. All five of us. I dreamed of picnics and road trips and backyard barbecues. I dreamed of chatter-filled dinners and evening walks around the neighborhood. I dreamed—I knew—that if only he were home with us, we'd settle into the rhythmic hum of a family as true as there'd ever been. It took me a while to admit, even to myself, that my “if-onlys” were as flawed as a fairy tale. What I'd forgotten to account for was that life with three young daughters—one of whom has Down syndrome—isn't always overflowing with the stuff dreams are made of.

It's not that my girls were a surprise to him. Far from it. He'd known about them from the very start and had, in fact, come prepared to dive headfirst into the treacherous ocean of fatherhood. The only problem being that my girls already had a father. It would take them some time to accept another.

I remember long months of refereeing. Each time Jeff would ask one of them to pick up this or put away that, they'd look to me instead. I could read the questions in their eyes without their saying a word: do I really have to do what he says? He held strong, enforcing rules that I established—rules that had been in place for years and years—yet still the girls would come running to me, hedging that I'd nullify anything he might have said. I never did, even though I sometimes wanted to. I felt torn, as though by siding with him I was betraying their tenuous sense of security in a family they already questioned. I became skilled in the art of trapeze, walking so fine a line all while trying to balance our fledgling little family.

Jeff, meanwhile, struggled with the nitty-gritty. He came home in the midst of my attempts to potty-train my five-year-old special-needs daughter. There really are no words to describe the level of patience such a task requires, so I won't even try. Suffice it to say, though, that the job was a trying one, even for a biological parent. My clean freak of a husband had some major adjusting to do. After so many years on his own, Jeff was unaccustomed to finding toothpaste globs in the sink, muddy shoes by the door, unflushed toilets. He lamented my daughters' bad habits; they resisted his influence. I fought for neutrality.

Not all of the forces against us were internal. In-law issues simmered, constantly threatening to boil over. Whereas my parents adored Jeff, his parents were slightly less than thrilled that their West Point alumnus son had chosen for his wife a divorced mother of three. One without a college degree, no less. My mother-in-law seemed to be eager for our marriage to fail, even going so far as to quietly slip Jeff's cell-phone number to one of his high school girlfriends in a shady attempt to derail us during our make-or-break first year. Jeff would pass that test, much to his mother's chagrin.

It certainly wasn't all bad; there were high points. A camping trip to the Grand Canyon with days spent hiking the rim or jumping from boulder to boulder during a family-concocted game we dubbed “rock tag.” We spent that week within the tight quarters of a camping trailer and came away from it all close and “Kumbaya,” though I don't rule out s'more sugar highs as a contributing factor. At home, Jeff proved a priceless resource for homework help; it didn't take long for my eldest to realize that while math is my weakness, she was lucky enough to have a resident rocket scientist (literally) on hand for tutoring. And take advantage she did. Weekends at home found us wasting away occasional Saturday afternoons, pretending to be tourists in our own city. There were canyons to explore and trails to hike and museums to take in. We went to the pool, the park, the mall. As we neared the end of that first year, we surprised the kids with a seven-day trip to Walt Disney World, a family-moon to rival all others.

There was an undercurrent all the while, a silent tug that left Jeff and me spinning in circles, though the girls were oblivious. In the months that led up to our marriage, we'd considered and compromised on some of the biggest things couples face, from where to live to what to drive to how much to save. One nagging question went unanswered, though: to have or not to have another baby. It was an issue we saw eye to eye on, each of us with matching hesitations. The problem was that neither the yea nor the nay seemed to outweigh; we were content, but not convinced. We didn't talk about it in front of the girls, but once they were tucked into bed, we'd retreat to our own and lie there in the dark for hours, rallying pros and cons back and forth like the game ball, each hoping the other would drive home a winning point. Once—during a weekend trip to Vegas while the girls were visiting their dad—we paid forty-five perfectly good dollars to a psychic, hoping she would peer into her crystal ball and save us the trouble of deciding. In the end she couldn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Unless, of course, we were willing to part with another fifty bucks, which, by the way, we were not. (Here's the good news: the answer would eventually come some twenty-three months after we said “I do.” Dressed in blue.)

Before our wedding, I had Jeff's ring engraved. It was a surprise to him, one that I almost ruined time and time again because I was nearly too excited to keep the secret. It had been a challenge to sum up so big a commitment in so few characters. Though when they came to me, I wondered why it had taken so long to find them: six such obvious little words. They are printed in perfect script on the inside of his ninety-nine-dollar titanium band:
All the time in the world.

Throughout that first year, I would summon those words to see me through. During the long, lonely stretch of deployment, they rang like a promise in my ears, pushing me just one day further, one day closer. When his return finally came and the constant conflict between him and my girls wore me down, I wondered if my family would ever be whole again. And then I considered the words and I came to understand that with patience and perseverance we'd get there. When I put those words inside his wedding band, I'd meant them for him. I meant that we'd have all the time in the world for nights of endless passion, knowing glances, and secrets shared. All the time in the world to perfect our blueberry-pancake recipe, take that Mediterranean cruise, grow a garden. All the time in the world to decipher the too much from the not enough and the never gonna make it from the almost there. Time for knock-down blowouts and kissy makeups. Time for lazy days and Indian summers and cold wintry nights. I meant those words as a promise to him, but in the end they came back to me, a little time capsule of truth in the face of my doubts.

I don't recall giving Jeff anything for our first anniversary. We're not one of those gifty couples. Well, not usually. He did get something for me, just the once.

There was a gauze bandage around his ring finger when he came home that day. He took it off to reveal what I still consider to be the most meaningful gift he has ever given me. It was a tattoo he designed himself: two interlocking fish that wrap around his ring finger. The most meaningful gift because even after that roller coaster of a first year, even after the unanswered questions, even after the deployment and the kids and the in-laws, even after all that, he'd do it again. Willingly.