Authors: Jill McCorkle
What makes this night
different from all the rest? Well, the divorce would be the biggest difference. That and the fact that I invited their dad and their dad’s parents and even their dad’s new girlfriend to stop by for drinks in less than eight hours. And now I’m wondering why I ever did such a stupid thing. Because it’s the season of giving and forgiving? Because all the books say that kids need both parents, that if a parent is cut away from the child’s life it should be because the child decided to do it and not because one parent orchestrates it or poisons thoughts and feelings? Like all those times I have almost by accident swept Joseph and his little sports car into the garbage only to fish him out, wipe stuff like macaroni and cheese off of him, and place him back before Charles notices.
The boys have told me that the girlfriend, Nanci, has two broken arms and talks without moving her lips. Whether these attributes are related I have no idea, and true to what all the books advise, I have not asked any questions. I am assuming she was in a bad accident. Or maybe she’s a ventriloquist who fell down a flight of stairs. She might not have even broken them at the same time. The second break could have been the result of trying to cater to the first.
When they talk about Nanci, I can’t help but feel responsible. I wished for her after all. When the marriage counselor, after months of dead-end conversations and stalemates —hour after
hour of white noise and Kleenex boxes and that pasture full of dead horses we regularly flogged —asked what I really wanted, I stared out his window where I had watched a weeping willow move from icy tendrils to bright green and back again and thought:
Out
. I just wanted out. And it was at that moment I began wishing that he would meet somebody —anybody —so the path to the exit sign might be a little easier.
I told the therapist that what I wanted more than anything was a dog that didn’t pee in the house, a dog who knew to walk right up to the door and beg to
get out
. My attempt at making a subtle point was lost to inarticulate execution.
So, what makes
this night different? It hits me when I open the back door to take out the trash. It smells like shit. Literally. The smell of raw sewage fills the air. Charles drops the cracker to the floor so he can hold his nose, which pleases Beau, our sweet but incontinent basset hound, who lumbers over to clean up. “Beau,” Charles reprimands and shoves the tired old dog with his foot. “You stink.” But it’s not Beau and I know that. I stare out at the rectangle of dead grass where the thin layer of snow melted as soon as it hit. I have lived here almost a year and know nothing about the septic tank. Just as I knew nothing about the sag in the foundation that needed to be jacked up, the old termite damage to one edge of the porch, the faulty wiring in the storage room, and the dryer vent that did not meet code.
How big could the problem be?
I have come to expect very big. I have come to think that odds are it will be every bit as bad as it can be, and if for some reason it isn’t, then I should rush right out and buy a lottery ticket and dash to the frozen-food section of the grocery where
they
say you are likely to meet nice intelligent and normal people. “And who are
they
?” I ask my mother and all other well-meaning advice givers.
They
also say that church is a good place to meet people. However,
they
don’t offer to keep your children or tell you what to do with them while you are out going to all these places.
“Do you want some matzo?” Charles asks Beau and lures the tired soul back into the kitchen. “Do you want some eggnog?” Charles has been hooked on Passover —food and litany —ever since attending a Seder last spring. It was the longest meal of my life. The host asked the children, “Why is this night different from all the rest?” But really, what all the adults wanted to know and weren’t asking was,
What really happened to your marriage?
The four real questions had nothing to do with why we were eating bread that tasted like cardboard and chewing on bitter herbs, double-dipping and reclining while eating. The questions that came to me in hushed whispers or innuendo were:
Is there a chance of reconciliation? Is there someone else involved? Can you afford it financially?
And the most common of all:
But really, how are you?
Sometimes with the stress on
are
and sometimes with the stress on
you
, always delivered with great pity.
Elijah’s wine goblet stayed empty because I kept drinking up whatever was allotted the ghostly guest. I figured if Elijah has half a brain then he knows I needed to do that in order to deliver myself out of an irritating situation of social bondage. Actually the thought of a spirit sneaking in to guzzle wine right at the table where you sat was the only part of the service that frightened Charles. “I want to see the ghost but I don’t,” he kept whispering to me. Little did he know that he was looking at her, two goblets drained and more coming. Little did he know that he was being introduced to one of life’s most common refrains.
I want to know the truth but I don’t
. It’s the substance of the Garden of Eden and Pandora’s box and every crime that takes place on your street.
The downside in
incorporating knowledge and an open mind and respect for all religions in young children is the blurring of facts. Though I see a kind of sweetness in Easter bunnies hiding matzo and Santa lighting menorahs and fat Buddha statues draped in rosaries, there are also times when I desire absolute clarity. This is good and this is not. Here is a beginning and here is the end. Black/white. Frozen/thawed. Oral/anal. Major problem worth more money than you can earn in a lifetime or little do-it-yourself Home Depot job.
I sniff the air and would not be surprised to find that herd of dead horses piled up in my yard. Panic sets in. A chill that I have
not felt since waking alone the day after Clark moved out. I knew even then, legs stretched out onto that cool empty side of the bed, that the fear I was feeling was not about what was behind me or regret over where I was but about moving forward on my own, no one there to share or even pretend to share the responsibility and burden of everyday mishaps and mistakes. There was no far off promise of the sort people make when trying to patch something broken without looking at what caused the damage —the anniversary surprise, the family vacation, the addition to the house that might take years to complete —pretty pastel Band-Aids applied to a series of hemorrhages. This fear of nothingness is why many people stay put even when unhappy and disillusioned, daily sidestepping the problems and debris. It is why they ask the four questions again and again as they seek their own answer within.
No, but really, how are you?
Many choose comfort within the known boundaries —sticking with Old World order as opposed to striking out for new lands and possibly falling off the edge of the earth.
“You invited them
for drinks?” My friend Gretchen comes immediately when I call to say I need help. She stands in my driveway in her terry cloth robe, coffee cup in hand, car door still standing open. She is stuck with the very beginning part of my story and thinks this is the tragedy at hand. “What kind of drink,
arsenic?” She steps close, invading my space, so I look away, into her backseat, where I see piles of what is probably much of Santa Claus for her three kids. “Have you lost your mind?”
“You don’t have time for this,” I say and point to the septic area, but she continues pressing, her hand heavy on my shoulder. “I don’t know why I invited them except he’s probably going to marry her and I want her to be nice to my children.” I twist away and for the first time she takes in the stench.
“My God, what died?”
“Jesus,” Charles says from behind me, the little nativity figures all gathered in his hand. “Jesus died for your sins.”
“Well, I’m glad somebody did,” Gretchen says, and she finally listens to what is the real problem. She suggests that the first thing I do is call and cancel the drop by and then go to the Yellow Pages and start begging. “Cry if you can,” she says. “Play the divorce card. Single mom, young kids. Christmas Eve. Come to my house. Get a motel.”
“And Hanukkah,” Charles adds. “And Kwanzaa and the New Year parade. Passover is like Easter.”
“You are all confused,” Gretchen says and shakes her head. She squeezes my shoulder to emphasize the point and I nod along with her, making eye contact that she can’t afford to hold too long. She has asked all the questions and more; she has even confessed her envy of my situation on numerous occasions and then, like most, immediately retreated back into the unspoken realm
of financial security, where every minute of the day is absorbed into a defined journey marked by shimmering promises that may or may not come to pass. She catches my glance to her backseat, filled I see now with bags from FAO Schwarz, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s, and looks embarrassed.
“Don’t look, your present is in there,” and then she pulls me back into my house and opens the Yellow Pages on my kitchen table, a table I have carried around with me for over twenty years now, a table that once stood in my childhood kitchen and now is held together by coats of paint, many of which I applied myself over the years. “Here. Just start at the top and work down. Chances are we’re not going to get anybody to come today but maybe Chad knows someone who can help us.”
“The man always knows,” I say, attempting a light laugh, but it sounds sarcastic and edgy even to my own ear. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Well, I didn’t mean it that way,” she says. “Really I didn’t.”
I should tell her how often I have gone to the phone in recent years to call my father for the missing answer only to remember halfway through dialing that he is no longer there. It was one of the horses flogged early in the marriage.
You go running home for everything
. Wouldn’t need to if I weren’t alone.
You’re an adult, handle it
. You handle it.
I work for a living
. So do I. And then it quickly spiraled until somebody got tired or too hurt or a child came in.
Now she hands me the phone. “Dial. I’ll stay until something happens.”
I close my eyes and wave one finger around in the air and then zoom in and land on the page. Settle Septic Systems. I get a recording as I assumed I would, try to sound as desperate as I feel. I am about to dial the next one —Pete’s Power Pump. (What is it with all the alliteration?) Pete’s slogan is
WE SUCK
. I am debating going with this one but fearful about who might show up —porn-star wannabe or someone content and proud to do poor work. Before I can even dial, the phone rings, and I answer to find Mr. M. Morris Settle himself, who says that normally he doesn’t work on Christmas Eve but just happened to hear my message while in his office looking for pliers to tighten their tree stand. “Bad luck to have a tree fall,” he says. “Mine fell one year and everything in my life changed afterward.” He laughs and I hear drawers opening and closing, Christmas music playing in the background.
“You sound a little beside yourself,” he says, and I assure him that yes, I am. I am completely beside myself, any more so and I’d be a town over from myself. And then within minutes, when I give him the address, he is on the case —knows the house, pumped it ten years ago and can tell me all about who lived here and their septic habits if I’m interested in hearing. They were wasteful people, kept trying to flush things that were bad for the system. “A lot of people think if it leaves the bowl then everything’s hunky-dory, right? Out of sight, out of mind,” he says and
then keeps going before I can ask when he can come. “It’s a complicated journey from beginning to end. It’s like life that way.” He puts down the phone and yells that he’ll be right there. Brenda Lee is singing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”
“He’s coming,” I finally announce, but everyone except Beau has moved on. I hear Gretchen ask the boys what they want Santa to bring and I purposefully do not listen for fear they have changed their minds again and my own stash in the attic, aside from being quite a bit more modest than they’ve ever encountered, will also be outdated.
I reach under
the kitchen table, as I often do, to feel the thick painted letters of my own name. I was eight when I did that, thinking all the while that I would remember that moment forever. My parents didn’t know I was under there, and I lifted the long tablecloth enough to see their feet rocking back and forth as they hugged there in the late afternoon light. He wore olive-colored Hush Puppies, perhaps why I was so drawn to Beau in the first place, and she wore pristine white Keds with little tassel socks, her legs tan and muscular —young. My dad had just gotten a new job and they were filled with ideas and promises about the future —a bigger house, she wouldn’t have to work so hard, a real vacation. I would one day go to college. They would live to be very old so they could enjoy all the rewards of life. I listened and quietly painted my name with thick old paint, almost pastelike,
as I went over and over each letter to ensure my existence and the permanence of the moment. My pulse raced with their joy and anticipation. What I wanted then was an Easy-Bake oven, a sibling, and a dog. But mostly I just wanted it all to last, this heady anticipation.
For most of my marriage
, I felt all shook up like a can of paint in the hardware store. Activities and projects —one day bleeding into the next. Any average day, I was scattered to and fro —a Jackson Pollock canvas, and if there was any rhyme or reason, I couldn’t see beyond the surface color and pattern. Lose your calendar or dare to admit the truth and the world might suddenly stop. But then the world does stop. You need for it to stop. One day you are shaking and planning, thinking how all you really need is a fresh coat of paint on everything, a whitewash of denial to make it all clean and new and perfect for starting over, and then the next day you lose all traction and have no choice but to call time.
I’m tired. I quit. I can’t do this anymore
. The world stops and the dust settles and there is clarity. The heavy pigment sinks and the oil gathers on the surface, and like a can long abandoned, you can shake until the cows come home but the two will never blend again.