Planting Dandelions (28 page)

I nursed my indignation over Archer for a little while longer. It made me feel like less of a fool, and filled the space where my crush had been. I didn't miss him, but I would miss that. There's a trade-off for being happily long-married. The energy of anticipation diminishes, just like collagen or pigment. You can simulate it, but it's not the same. There are no more first kisses. But there is deeper intimacy, and paradoxically, there is more mystery. In the early years of our relationship, we had to know everything the other thought, felt, did. Every issue had to be exposed, examined, and resolved, immediately. It was like living in the nude. Sexy for a while, but eventually too familiar. Our second decade feels more spacious, as if we've moved into a different house, where the doors are left open, but there is room to retreat, rest, and change, without anyone having to sneak out a window. So far, I like it, though if I thought my husband was texting flirtatious messages to another woman from one of his rooms, I might start knocking holes in walls.

“You don't have to worry about me,” I tease him when we do our depth sounding, and he accuses me—rightly—of a double standard when it comes to being nosy. “I know what
I'm
up to.”

But I don't always know what I'm up to, any more than I can really know what's happening with him. I was right about his currency going up. He grows more attractive, more confident, more interesting every year. I'm unlikely to be the only woman who takes note of it. I'm unlikely to be the youngest or the prettiest. I don't think I need to know. I'm fairly sure I don't want to know. I'd rather just trust him. If I can survive the occasional bout of wanderlust and temptation, he surely can. If he gets a little lost while daydreaming down the path not taken, I have to believe he'll find his way back, like I did.

There is, in every woman I know, a creature that cannot be domesticated. It prowls through our dreams, enters the house, casts cold eyes on our mate and children, and holds us rapt in its terrible beauty. You can love your husband and children with every breath in your body and still feel restless and detached sometimes. You can be a good mother, and have daydreams of running, or simply walking, away. It's the ones who can't accept this paradox who have the most to fear, are most vulnerable to the sudden ambush of desire.

My favorite maritime legend is the story of the seal wife, trapped in human form by a love-struck fisherman who steals her pelt. They marry, have children, and she lives happily ever after on two legs, until one morning she finds her hidden skin, and remembers herself. She puts it on, and goes home. Just like that. No hand-wringing, no good-bye note, no dropping off the kids with the neighbor. Some mornings I step outside in my red satin robe to pick up the newspaper, and gaze down the length of the driveway, past the minivan, bikes, and soccer balls, to the street beyond. I picture her walking down to the sea. A whisper of satin, a splash, and she's gone. Her red robe at the water's edge, the newspaper still rolled.

We belong completely to the lives we've made. And still, not at all.

I've heard from my old crush a few times since the bonfire of my vanity died down. Brief and probably impulsive updates to let me know all is well with him and his family. I don't think of him much in between, but when I do, I still see him as the gentleman farmer, cultivating his garden, maintaining good fences. It makes me happy to know I didn't trample it. I can't imagine what would have attracted me to such a tidy and careful person in the first place, except maybe our own garden needed a little tending. Years ago, we listened to some marriage enrichment lectures that suggested married crushes can be used as diagnostics, pointing to some characteristic that is deficient within the marriage. I decided to test it on my husband's admitted object of extramarital fantasy, a temp receptionist at his office.

“What's she like?” I asked, open to learning where we needed to shore things up.

“Blond,” he said, without hesitating. “Dumb as a post.”

At the time, I was heavily immersed in Jungian studies. Every aspect of our lives, waking and dreaming, was wrung out for hidden meaning. Obviously, I needed to lighten up.

In recent years, I've watched married friends of mine ride out their own crushes, from mild to severe. It must be our age. It's like the dance of the mayflies, with everybody's libido at two minutes to midnight. Most of these are passing fancies, the kind that afflict almost everybody at some point over the course of a long-term relationship, me included. “Just put your head between your knees and breathe deeply a few times,” I told one friend. “You'll be all right.” She was all right. But she never looked more beautiful than she did those few weeks. I could almost smell the electrical charge in the air around her. Something in her was wide awake, and I was the last person to tell her to hit the snooze button. Every married person has to grapple with temptation in their own way, run their own cost-benefit analysis to come up with the reasons why or why not. Me, I've done the affair. I pulled the chute cord. I know where it lands you.

It lands you back in a relationship, is where. A relationship strewn with the inevitable tedium, crankiness, and wanderlust that accompany two people living together, no matter how much they love each other. You don't need to have fundamental compatibility issues; those weeds can sprout from trivial ones. Like the time we went to the new pizza place in town. Within moments of arriving, it was clear that Patrick was less than thrilled about the place. It was crowded and busy when we got there, the service was rushed, the food was expensive, and customers were swarming for tables. It was a kind of hive atmosphere, because this is a small town, and the place was getting lots of buzz. My husband is particularly resistant to social buzz. I could tell it was grating on him like the noise of fluorescent lights.

Me, I was excitedly flitting around. I love buzz. I thought it felt festive. The restaurant's specialty was wood-fired pizza, served up in a style I would call “rustic,” and my husband called “sloppy.” We ordered, and when our pies arrived, with their toppings in a more or less virgin state (slices of cheese instead of shredded, fresh baby spinach instead of cooked), I was the only one smiling.

We argued about it all the way home, and well into the next week.

“That place was awful,” said Patrick, “sloppily prepared food and no service masquerading as philosophy.”

“It's trying to do something different and creative,” I said.

“Pretentious,” he declared. “Inflated.”

“Small-minded,” I charged. “Judgmental.”

We were moving beyond critiquing the food, and into one of our dirtier forms of fighting, spinning a disagreement into evidence of each other's “issues.” The negative side of being even a little bit hip to psychology, which we are, is that you can use it as a handy weapon in a pinch.

Clearly, I told Patrick, he was threatened by the pizza's success.

Our hot air was a bellows to the embers of another disagreement we'd had a few weeks before, when Patrick decided he needed to shade all the windows in his beautiful sunlit office in order to see his work on his computer screen. Sunlight to me is like oxygen. The idea that the windows in that room, in the center of the house, would be permanently shaded, made me crazy. Worse, I knew I didn't have a leg to stand on: He's the one who has to work there, and he let me have my way in virtually every other aspect of interior decoration. All I could do was sulk. And glower. Which is what I did every time I passed through his office for the next two days, thinking, go ahead, take a happy, bright space and make it a sad and dark space.
Like your soul.

Because natural light is important to me, and if it's not as important to him, then he must be wrong. And bad. And most likely a fascist. And if he doesn't like his very expensive pizza flung down in front of him with all the toppings scattered unevenly and the edges a little charred from the wood fire, if he didn't find that charming, if he didn't
get that,
he must not get me.

I know better than to nurse that line of thinking at my bosom for very long. It's temptation, waiting to strike, with the lie that I would be infinitely happier with someone
different.
Something new. It promises that somewhere out there is a man who loves full-spectrum light and artisanal cuisine as much as I do, and I owe it to myself to find him, and spend the rest of my life with him under the Tuscan sun, eating wood-fired pizza alfresco, in the nude. But different and new is just the same old if you keep doing it over and over. The real novelty for me lies in seeing what the next decade of marriage brings.

What I've taken from the first is this: If you can hang in there through minor and major differences of opinion, through each other's big and little fuck-ups, year after year, you come to understand that the person you married is really, terribly flawed. There isn't a human being you can hang out with, day in and day out, for over a decade, and not come to the same inescapable realization. You can find a new lover who gets you and completes you, and you can run off together and never look back. One day,
I promise,
you will find yourself leaving a restaurant with that very person, wondering what in the world you are doing with someone so obviously wrong for you in every way. But in that same instant, in a one-two punch to your consciousness, you'll realize he has wondered the very same thing about you; that the real wonder is that any two people stay together, as impossible to live with and as broken as we all are.

T
he dress is one hundred percent pure vintage polyester. The fabric is flimsy and printed with a psychedelic shooting star motif, in faded rainbow colors. It has long flared sleeves and a halter-style top with a keyhole opening at the bosom. The hemline barely skirts public decency. I always wore it with five-inch stiletto heels. Patrick audibly panted whenever I put it on. He said it was a dress a Marvel comic book artist would draw on a girl, a fantasy straight out of his seventies boyhood. He called it the Super Heroine Dress. I'd sling my fringed leather jacket over it and go out to make the scene.

To make
a
scene, more accurately. Musicians onstage missed notes when I walked into a club wearing that outfit. Conversations stopped. Women whispered and men stared. I saved it for special occasions, as if wearing it was a kind of gift I brought. I wore it to birthday celebrations. To gigs and concerts. To the funeral of an old hippie friend, accessorized with a matching rainbow bouquet of helium balloons, which I released to the blue sky when his ashes were scattered.

It was outrageous. I was outrageous.

Then I became a mom. As my body and my lifestyle changed, an identity crisis came to lurk in my closet.

“I don't know who this girl is,” I lamented from deep inside it one day, clutching the phone in one hand, a silver lamé halter in the other. I'd called a friend in a panic attack brought on by an attempted wardrobe purge. “I don't know where she fits anymore.”

It made sense to let go of the shiny cropped tops and the low-slung pants, the crazy shoes and the short-shorts. When I got pregnant, I took my belly button ring out and let the piercing grow over. Those were all appropriate edits. I couldn't chase toddlers around the playground in Lucite stripper shoes. It wasn't as if I was expunging sexiness from my life, succumbing to the mom haircut and mom jeans. But the excisions weren't painless either. Whenever I came to the Super Heroine Dress, the purge was over. I could never part with it, but neither could I imagine wearing it. I would close the closet door, unable to reconcile that wild child with motherhood and maturity.

I tried. On a whim, I put a customized license plate on my minivan that was imprinted with the words HIPMAMA. It was meant as a personal affirmation, but it soon felt like false advertising. There was no way I could consistently deliver on it, unless you interpreted the term to mean a woman whose offspring are attached to her hip, or a reference to anatomical changes wrought by childbirth. After we downsized to one vehicle, Patrick found the license plate equally hard to live up to, and I was just as glad to remove it. I thought I'd get a tattoo instead, something artful and discreet—a more private reminder that, beneath the capri pants and nursing tops, I still rocked it. I had my design picked out and was ready to go when I discovered I was pregnant again.