Authors: Jill McCorkle
But I did not
marry
a born-again person and so, yes, I did have a problem when he up and got all religious on me. It was just another way to control and manipulate. You aren’t smart enough because you aren’t Mensa material. You aren’t neat and clean enough even when you say you’re trying. You aren’t saved because you haven’t cried and humiliated yourself by confessing to the congregation all the awful things you have done in life so they can heal, bless, and forgive you. That is
not
who I married. I mean, I didn’t marry a luxury vehicle, I know that, but I did marry what I thought was your basic white stripped-down Corolla. I married Jerry Barnes, Toyota dealer, who in grade school was told that he scored in the genius range on some stupid aptitude test and has spent his whole life doing things like Rubik’s Cube to prove it. He was a lot of hot air but nice enough and kind of cute on a good day —a lot shorter than me but I didn’t think much of it especially since Dudley Moore and Susan Anton were an item around the time we were dating. People would say, “There’s Dudley and Susan,” and I liked that. I know that’s stupid but I was also only about twenty-two years old and still going
to school for interior design. I liked a margarita on a Saturday afternoon and a glass of wine while cooking dinner, and so did Jerry, but now he is a teetotaler. He can’t do anything halfway or in moderation. Forgive my diversion but thinking about first meeting Jerry made me think of my neighbor’s little Chihuahua, who is all the time trying to mount my Lab, Sheba, and I say, “There’s Dudley and Susan.” But now Dudley is dead and very few people even remember that he was ever with Susan Anton. I loved that movie
Arthur
myself. Jerry did, too, back when he was Jerry.
But it wasn’t enough for Jerry to be normal Jerry, he had to always be into this or that. There was always a new hobby and he’d go at it full tilt for a few months and then would move on to another interest. He was into Sudoku and then pottery, model trains, and beer making. He wanted to take dancing lessons and then he got interested in a kind of tag wrestling that involved grown men moving all around one another and then grabbing and holding. I referred to it as “homoerotic dance,” and he accused
me
of not being open-minded, and I just said, “Whatever.” I told him that I’d never in my life had any trouble finding somebody who wanted to dance with me and he should remember that.
I am realistic enough to know that there are often psychological or subconscious reasons people go where they go and make the choices they make. I mean, even though he tells people I’m
not
saved
, I did grow up going to church, right? And where I went there was a virtual feast of questionable things happening, so I’d be a total fool
not
to question. Youth directors and choir directors and assistant this and that who took a “special interest” in the children. Some liked young girls and some liked young boys. “(I’m a) Boy Watcher.” Remember that song? Or worse, remember those sunglasses? A slit of polarized glass so that no one could tell where you were looking —creepy. And that’s why I told Jerry that if he was having some thoughts in those directions that he needed to spend some time with himself and his thoughts and his impulses and come to a personal decision. And of course, that is when he came to the personal decision that he needed to rededicate his life to the Lord and that he needed to bring me along with him. I might add that this is a place where people want to heal the homosexuals and those who are prochoice.
You must get tired
of hearing the same old thing over and over because of course it isn’t really about the toothpaste cap left off or the toilet seat up or who loaded the dishwasher last. All that little nitpicky stuff usually means is:
You get on my fucking nerves so bad I can’t stand it
. It means:
What happened to the person I thought I was marrying?
It means:
You don’t like the cat so I don’t like you
. It means:
I pretend I’m asleep when your hand brushes my back. I pretend your hand belongs to somebody else
.
Now, I’m not trying to tell you your business, but I think if I
were you, I would just have a series of questions that lead to a big yes or no answer. Should I get divorced? Ding ding ding —the answer is yes. I mean, I realize that a lot of people go into your business for a little self-help, and that’s where you might very well overlap a little bit with Jerry being born again. People with mental and emotional problems very often seek refuge in the church and the field of psychology. I’d say about 80 percent of you probably do that. And that’s fine for a personal weakness to lead you to a calling. I can dig it. I mean, that is what led me to interior design after all. Everyone in my town would tell you that I grew up in a rat hole firetrap and that my chosen profession was all about bringing color and clarity and order into a life of chaos. I mean, my mother couldn’t help that she was one of those people who never cleaned house and never cared if anything matched or not. And my dad was a fireman, who should’ve known not to have stacks of paper everywhere with both of them chain-smoking, but the cobbler’s children go barefoot, like your girl I met one day on a bathroom trip, but I’ll get back to that in a minute.
By the way, if you are actually reading this letter, don’t think you can charge me for the time like that lawyer keeps doing every time I e-mail or call him back to answer a question he asked me. Just the other day he said, “How are you doing?” And I said I wasn’t saying unless he stopped the clock and kept it stopped until I was done. I think it was hard for him in that moment to figure out what part was human and what part was not. It was the
only time I had ever heard him pause in conversation, like he’d shorted out or something.
Some of my conversations with my lawyer have reminded me of those little games you had us play, which you need to know right up front do not work at all. I think you’d have to be a total idiot or someone who takes Mensa quizzes regularly to fall for such simplistic crap. I mean, anybody who ever saw
Annie Hall
knows to read the subtext.
You look so pretty today. (Like a bitch who spent too much at Nordstrom.)
Why thank you, love. (Fuck you.)
What I know now is that, just by way of thinking those thoughts, I should not have continued shelling out two hundred bucks a pop to you. I’d have done just as well to rent a boxing ring for an hour. There’s a test right there. Get in the ring and if you are —in a great moment of anger —willing to drive your fist into the face of someone you promised to cherish forever (especially if the genetics have worked such that those are now the same eyes you associate with your children), well then, Houston, we’ve got a problem.
So I wonder
about you. Like at the end of the day, do you put your feet up and tell your wife all about us? Do you open a bottle of wine and snuggle on that big divan up in your room (I made a wrong turn once going to the bathroom and will get
back to that) and say thank God I am not living such an unhappy existence? Does it make you love her more? She looks a bit older than you and so I did wonder (when I saw the photo on your dresser) if she had had a husband before you and how you had adjusted to that or if you all have some different kind of marriage like mentor/mentee or mother and child. Truth is, you seemed a little too interested in a lot of what Jerry had to say, and since this is my last letter to you, I’ll just go ahead and say that. There were days where I felt you two were picking up a frequency like a dog whistle that I just wasn’t able to hear. Of course, you might just have a great gift for empathy, but then I’d have to ask where was this gift when Jerry was trying to have me committed to the attic like that woman in
Jane Eyre
who set everything on fire.
I have to admit I was curious about you and your life, especially after I met your kid and saw your room, and what I observed undermined my confidence in what you might or might not know. I mean, those enormous ornate cornices you all chose in your bedroom I can overlook. That is
my
business after all, and a lot of people make the unfortunate mistakes you did. Yellow really is a hard color to pick and work with. Any artist will tell you that. But my advice would be to go in there and start from scratch. That overhead light looks like something Liberace might’ve had in the bathroom.
I think it would help in your job if you had a chart of sorts that told people how they
should
feel. This is a normal range of
jealousy and here is where you went off the deep end. Here is true compassion and concern and this is malicious and calculated. Like that’s what I’d say about Jerry putting me on the prayer list at his new church. People keep leaving fruit on my steps and I keep driving over to Jerry’s house and throwing it through the window. “Stop praying for me!” I said, and he said, “I can pray for whomever I want.” He said he would continue to pray for those like me —the sick and deranged. I didn’t say what was on my unbrushed tongue, which shows how far I have come from the anger of it all. I am evolving each and every day. That’s what I told Jerry when he sighed and stared to the heavens and mumbled something on my behalf. Instead of putting a foot in his face as I desired, I just told how at
my
church, my own personal testimony had inspired many. How I told I was born into chaos —a swirl of dust and stacked newspapers and old plastic-lined drapes that had not been opened in years —how my parents had sex that one time and then I was on my own tidying up when no one was looking and reading house magazines about decluttering and complimentary colors. “I am so evolved,” I told Jerry, “I never had wisdom teeth. I have an innate sense to get rid of what I don’t need.”
So, do you ever
wonder what happened to us? Good old Jerry and Hannah. We went to a mediator after you, and we’re still dealing with the lawyers, the kids going back and forth every
week like little ping-pong balls. It’s all complicated. I know you see it all the time, enough that perhaps you can predict the ending to those like us, but aren’t you ever curious or is it just part of the job, part of the day, like you’re just one of many stops on the underground railroad? Or maybe not, since I can’t imagine a slave choosing to go back or to just sit and talk indefinitely.
Emancipation
was a word on my mind before I even knew it was there.
Many of our
problems began —as you should remember —when Jerry wanted to buy a house in town known as the murder-suicide house because he knew we could get it for a song. He was also putting in a bid on several divorce houses for the same reason. He doesn’t believe in the supernatural elements the way that I do, unless, of course, it’s biblical. He believes that Abraham heard a voice say that he should take his fully grown son and kill him on a mountaintop and that Moses heard and took dictation for the world, but he doesn’t believe that I sometimes hear a little voice say
don’t go there
like I might be in an Alfred Hitchcock movie heading toward the basement. He doesn’t feel the wood of the floors straining to tell what really happened the way I do. Now I did not say that in therapy because it was during all that time he wanted to have me diagnosed as someone hearing voices. I had a hard time arguing the difference between literal and figurative. “A deal is a deal,” he always said, even when I pointed out it wasn’t if you didn’t want it to begin with. Interior
design is my business, a whole little popular business that centers around a kind of recycled cottage look, and he was trying to move me into a huge modern ant farm with black marble floors where on one unfortunate night an angry woman done wrong popped a bottle on the head of her husband and instead of running, as most people would do, killed herself with a knife right on top of him.
“No stains,” Jerry said. “Very Romeo and Juliet. Fifty thousand less than that rundown bungalow you love.”
I was holding a big bottle of Perrier and I gave a look that let him know he was on my last nerve, so he moved on to the divorce house, which was across the street.
“All glass, brand new, nothing to fix,” he said.
“Nothing but the marriage,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear. If it’s not on the Mensa quiz, it might not be worth his attention.
“Can’t throw stones if you live here,” the Realtor said, but I told her that Jerry could because he was without sin.
And speaking of houses
. Yours is palatial.
A special buyer
is what the Realtors will tell you that you need when you decide to sell and you won’t know if that’s a compliment or like when a handicapped person is being described. Were you planning a compound or what? A school? Did you think you’d have six kids and then change your mind when that one took up the habit of putting safety pins in her neck? When Jerry told how I
have an awful sense of direction, that is actually true, and your house is so big it’s easy to get all turned around.
“The Crazy Pit is that way,” this kid said to me. Crazy Pit. And I smelled some serious reefer action, but of course I didn’t tell you that your daughter was stoned and sad looking because then you would’ve known that I went the wrong way and saw your king-size bed and those unfortunate drapes and a big stack of strewn papers in the corner. I really wanted better for you in that moment. And I really wanted better for your daughter. You owe her. As soon as they arrive, we owe them. They didn’t ask to be here. If we chose to have them, then we
made
them live; we made them come on out and be with the likes of us. We owe them big time.
If I had your job
, I might ask a person:
If there was a nuclear disaster and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life —This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what I believe. —who do you want hearing your whispers?
Or perhaps better:
Who do you trust to hear your whispers? Whose breath do you want mingled with your own? Whose flesh still warm beside you?