Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession (5 page)

You’re probably asking yourself about now:
how
does someone get like this?
How
is it that a grown man never grows up?
As with most
psychological profiles, this one
isn’t hard.
He was raised by
a
timid, overindulgent
Mum,
C
atherine
;
and
a domineering
bastard of a father.
C
atherine
would watch, timidly, as Mr. Warwick beat Nigel with a belt
and punched him in the face
.
Warwick was a piece of work:
a relic
from the Edwardian age
, he lived his life as if
bombs were still dropping in
The Blitz
. H
e
rationed soft drinks (three
people
to a can); toilet paper; water (one could only
fill the bath with an inch
) and kindness.
This was a man who, when his aged mother’s gold tooth fell out,
picked it up
and sold it to a pawnbroker.
Who took a bath and changed his underwear
exactly
once a week,
on Sunday (
thus
saving
pence
on water and pants
).
Who, when hijackers took over the Greek ship that he, C
atherine
, and her young students were on, shimmied over
the side on a rope, leaving woma
n and children last.

“Come on C
atherine
!” he shouted.
By then he was
seated
safely
in a lifeboat.
On deck,
Arab
t
errorists were
still
shooting people
with machine guns
. Call him the
true
heir to
Bruce
Ismay of
Titanic
fame.

I know I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture
of Nigel
, but as with everyone, he had his good points.
He was smart; he was sensitive
(when he was calm)
;
he was well-read
; and he had that wicked
British sense of humor.
This is why
I hu
ng in for as long as I did:  eleven
years.

But
let me assure you
,
ladies
,
no
t every Englishman is Mr. Darcy,
n
or
Edward
Rochester,
who broke
God’s law for love.
If you’re lucky
,
when
they have a fit
,
they’ll just break a dish.

The first thing I did
after
WaMu
imploded
was to book a
ticket
on a plane
.
I was sitting in my
rented
French door-lined
office downstairs,
adjacent to the game room
–
freezing, as usual.
Outside, the snow was falling like rain – in sheets – and the immense sloping driveway leading to
our
house was, again, impassable.
Now that I was
sans
job, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Washington.

All
you i
ndignant Seattleites out there
–
hear me out!
I
am
a
Valley Girl
, born and bred in
L.A.
, us
ed to sweltering summers and
slightly-
less-sweltering winters.
This year in mid-November, the thermometer hung around the
upper 90’s
. People start wearing North Face coats
when it dips below 70.
Rain
is
so rare that i
f it drizzles
, commuters br
eak
down behind the wheel, ears anxiously tuned
to
STORM WATCH!
L.A.
!

So sue me
, I like the sun.
I am a Southlander
through and through.
Not so Nigel,
native son of Albion
.
In fact, h
e reveled
in a place
which was just as goddamn miserable as
the one he
’d
left behind.
(Stolen from the great Swedish comic, Diane Ford).

“Isn’t it marvelous?” he
would
say
, taking photo after photo of t
he mountains, snow, sleet, hai
l
,
leaves
turning red and gold
, the sun setting at 4 P.M
.
He was a manic photographer.
If I’d stopped as many times as he wanted to take pictures,
I’d still be
circling Lake Crescen
t
.
“At least
the Northwest
has seasons!”

I didn’t give
a
nun’s fart
about seasons.
Every
night,
I would
dream
about
the ocean,
palm
s
, 20
th
Century Fox.
Sometimes,
it was
potted palms
lined up
at
a
watery
Fox
.
In short, I was
homesick, as miserable as
Lucy
Snow
e
haunting the empty streets of Villette
during the L
ong
V
acation
.
A good Protestant, s
he ended up confessing to a priest.
I didn’t know any, but I could
easily
have poured my heart out to the
waiter
at Goldberg’s
Deli
.

Now hang on a
second
,
you’re
telling
yourself, she
wasn’t
alone, was she?
She
did
have Nigel
and
a
daughter, right?
Dear Reader
,
that’s
what sent me
screaming
onto
that
plane.

Long ago, perhaps while I stood, robed, on that
sandy beach at the age of five
,
I came to
one
inexorable
conclusion:
I
didn’t want
to have
children
.
Wait!
You cry.
Selfish!
Child hater!
No.
In fact, I love
children and
babies.
I just want
to p
lay
the role of
avuncular Aunt
ie
, who, when
done
taking
little
Joey and Suzy to Disneyland, the Zoo, and
Chuck E. Cheese
, h
ands
the
vomiting
tykes
back
to Mom and Dad
.
I knew, even at five, that
where c
hildren were concerned, I
didn’t want another me.

How then, did I end up, at the advanced age of forty-eight, with a twelve-year-old?

Before we got married,
I remember sitting by the seaside at Scarborough, a place beloved by Anne Brontë, and saying
to Nigel
, “Let me make this clear – I never want to have children.
It’s just something I know about myself.”

“OK,”
He
nodded, cheerfully munching his fish and chips.
Th
e subject
remained closed
–
for a
n entire
decade
.
Then
, the
obsessive c
ampaign began.

“Won’t you reconsider?” I heard at dinner, in bed, while I was grooming my horse.
“It’d be fun – think of it, a sweet little girl already grown.
We could avoid the messy baby stage!”

“No.”

Nigel had been
pinpointed
as
“different”
at a very young age
(read: OCD)
, a
nd his assaults were relentless
.
Like a
toddler
, he
would repeat himself until he got his own way.
I had grave doubts
envisioning
Nigel in the role of father.
Nigel hated
Mr. Warwick and
wanted to prove that he would be
better
.
But could a man who freaked out in traffic,
who
destroyed
computers by pummeling their keyboards – could this man
be
a paragon of parenting?
Dear Reader,
heed my words.
Don’t have children to prove a point.
Have
them for their own sake, because you love them and want to
nurture them.

The
onslaught
continued:
“Will you say Yes?”
“Will you?
”
“
WILL YOU
?”

Finally, we were swimming in
a
pool at Skamania Lodge, gorgeously poised at the edge of waterfalls and
landscape
as green as England.
“Look.”
I cut him off.
“Maybe, OK?
Maybe
.”

Lesson
Number Two
.
It’s obvious, but I was
too dumb
then
to get it
:
never go against your gut.
The minute the word left
my mouth, I had an Alka-Seltzer m
oment.
It didn’t
take long for Man On A Mission
Nigel to find the pe
rfect child.
Aurora came to us from the
WA
Department of Family Services,
where
she’d
burned through twenty-t
wo
foster ho
mes
in
the space of
just
four years
.
Red
Flag
Number One
, hello!

She had
a
tragic past.
Her birth mother, Donna, was a full-blown
paranoid schizophrenic – unmedicated, of course.
She would talk to
an imaginary Mexican
in her laundry basket, and instilled in Aurora a
n unnatural
fear of grass and dirt.
But what was far worse was that she
beat
Aurora, viciously, every day.
Held her down while she fo
rced pills
and
suppositories
on her
.
Never cooked or bought
food
.
If it hadn’t been for Aurora’s older sister
Britney
–
herself
mentally delayed
–
she would have starved to death.
After nine years of
baptism
in
this
bubbling
lake of fire, the state finally acted, and Aurora was taken away.
The fact that she had remained mute through the entire second grade hadn’t been
enough of a
sign
.
The caring
American
“village” had done nothing but fail this child.

Then came the
twenty-two
fo
ster homes, some of them repeat stays
.
“She might have some behavioral problems,” the blonde social worker cooed to
me
as we prepared to adopt this waif.