Live Through This (3 page)

The August night Tom and I sat in the living room of the house where we all still lived together to tell our daughters about "the
separation," not yet "the divorce," Amanda was the one most wiped out by the news and flattened by what she, more than others, had known was coming. It was Stephanie who actually cried the hardest and the longest, though, wailing as she could as a child, a sound to pierce the heart, and holding her father's arm as if he'd float away if she let him go. Just out of the shower, Stephanie had a blue towel wrapped around her shoulders, her arms and legs the warm color of cinnamon popping out from a terry-cloth robe. Her long blond hair dripped down her back. The second I'd said the words—
Dad and I are going to live apart—
to our daughters, who were scattered around the room, Stephanie had flown to Tom's lap and stayed there, her arms gripping the towel to her chest, her lips and face wilting. When I said,
We're going to live in different houses, but you'll see both of us as much as you want,
Amanda turned her face to the horsehair couch's scratchy fabric and refused to turn back. Mary and Mollie were six and four years old. They pressed themselves into my lap, crying too, dampening the front of my shirt, though I could tell neither knew what was happening except that a sadness had washed through their family like the flash floods from monsoon rain that filled the arroyos at their father's family ranch in the hills above the city.

I'd said what had to be said. I held Mollie to my chest with one hand and rubbed Mary's back with the other, waiting for the sobbing around me to pass. I couldn't afford to enter this weeping with the rest of my family. Someone needed to get the little ones to bed, finish the dishes, fold the laundry. Move on. Suck it up, get going, don't look back. I had no idea how to make this change, this reconfiguration of my daughters' lives, better for them. Since I couldn't make it hurt less, I made myself still and silent and withdrawn.

Then Stephanie's nose started to bleed. First a bulb of red at one nostril, then a gush from both. I stood up, leaving the little girls on the seat without me, and stepped to the edge of Tom's chair. He'd tipped Stephanie's head back and held the bridge of her nose; his neck and the front of his shirt were covered by a bloom of blood. His bloody hand stuck to her bloody cheek.

"I'll get a washcloth," I said and rushed down the narrow hall to
our one bathroom at the back of the house. Once in the little space, I stopped rushing. Without flipping on the overhead light, I turned on the sink's tap and laid a square washcloth in the cool dip of the basin and sat on the toilet to watch the water soak into the green cotton fabric. From the other end of the hall, I heard Tom's mutterings to the girls, though not his words. I stretched out my leg and nudged the door closed so I'd hear nothing at all.

Balanced there with my knees against the edge of the tub, I thought about a dinner we'd had at Tom's family ranch, forty miles into the Catalinas, a few weeks earlier. As we'd passed platters of enchiladas and bowls of black beans and rice around the table, Tom's mother had—out of nowhere, if I remember—told us a story about her husband arriving home hours late one evening from his work as an engineer. She was irate, she said, about having been left with the evening chores for their children, several saucy teenage girls and three wild, uncontainable boys.

It turned out that her husband and a few friends from work had stopped at a carnival in one of the small towns they'd traveled to that day, and while they were walking among the neon-lit rides and game booths, my husband's father gave in to a whim—he stepped behind a curtain and let a palm reader tell his future. Once home with his wife, he sat on the living room sofa and, under soft lamplight, showed her the lifeline that the fortuneteller had suggested was shorter than most. There wouldn't be all that much time left, the woman had told him. He should live it up. He'd pulled his hand back from his wife's and laughed at the story, standing up to pour his evening toddy. But my mother-in-law hadn't taken it as a joke. Thirty years later, fork in hand at our family dinner, she trembled a little over the memory of that long-ago conversation with her husband. She took a sip of her wine and gave me a long stare. Or I felt her stare was directed at me, anyway—that night, I probably couldn't have imagined it pointed anywhere else. I sat at the far end of the table with Mary in my lap—my six-year-old's earache (which she heard back then as
ear-egg
and couldn't understand why I didn't reach in and pull out the offending egg) had made her feverish and fussy, her heat pouring into my chest. Now my own
face turned red. Tom's family had, no doubt, picked up on my un-happiness, which I'd made quite a show of that night with drooped shoulders and something of an overproduction in the care of my sick child.

At the table, Tom's mother went on with the story about her husband's palm. She said that every time she'd felt fed up with him—the man who'd died suddenly of a heart attack in his early seventies—during the five decades they spent as a couple, she'd remembered that short lifeline and forgave him.

An hour later, I sat on the closed toilet lid in the upstairs bathroom of my mother-in-law's house with Mary still in my lap. I was taking her temperature—my excuse for stepping away from the dinner and from my drunk husband, who'd already pulled one of his favorite late-night family stunts. Just after dinner, and more wine, he'd jumped on his chair and stripped down to nothing, then leaped off the seat, leaving a rumpled pile of jeans and shirt and boxer shorts, to run white-bare-assed through the living room, out the front door, and into the pool while his sisters and brothers scattered chairs across the tile floor and tittered with laughter and while the group of child cousins who'd been playing in front of the fireplace, our daughters included, stopped what they were doing and watched, stock-still and stunned. We moved from the table, the group of us, though I straggled behind the others with Mary in my arms and Mollie wrapped around one leg. The adults and the children all peered out the giant picture windows in the living room that faced the unlit swimming pool, trying to see Tom rise and fall through the dark water. A sister-in-law, the oldest, wandered in close to me, as if to challenge my moodiness. "Isn't he just so much fun?" she said into my neck.

I closed my eyes, wondering why I felt no joy about my husband anymore, no surge of humor over his boyishness and revelry. I'd known he was this way since the day I met him—but at that moment I resented the hell out of Tom for the one attribute I was always claiming I wanted more of from him: consistency.

In the bathroom, the thermometer sagged at the corner of my daughter's pink mouth. I held it to make sure it stayed inside her
gums and under her tongue. Mary's eyes were closed and her cheek rested against my sweat-soaked arm. A minute later, I pulled it out—101 degrees. Now I could insist we go home. I could load her up with baby Tylenol and wrap her in blankets, pack the car with the rest of our kids and our things, and leave this ranch—Tom's most beloved place, where he could be as wild as he desired—behind.

I recapped the thermometer and set it on the countertop, but before I got up, I readjusted my daughter so I could take a quick look at the flat terrain of my hand. I held my right palm still beneath the bathroom light. I knew my mother-in-law's story was supposed to have stirred in me compassion for my husband, but it was my own skin I peered at. My outstretched palm had a series of intersections and grids and crevices, its own mysterious geography; I looked for the lifeline, whichever one that was. I was thirty-three years old and figured in this moment that if a prophetic indentation in my skin suggested I had decades and decades to live, maybe I should force a few more years of making do with my marriage for our children's sake. Except maybe the short line in the middle, the one starting between my first two fingers and swooping below my pinkie, was telling me to hurry up and get out before I'd damned near wasted my life.

Two weeks after that dinner, and two weeks after telling Tom on the way home that I couldn't stay with him any longer, I sat alone in the dark bathroom at the end of our own house, watching the water in the sink run over the washcloth, afraid to face my own kids. I didn't want to go back into the living room, where they would stare at me, wondering why I'd done this—why I'd announced the split from their dad and caused the breakup of our family. When the water was about to run over the sink, I shut it off and used the wrung-out cloth to make a quick rub of my own face, around my eyes, under my chin, across my dry lips. I rinsed and squeezed the cloth again, then I turned and opened the door. I would have spent the night, a couple of nights, in that bathroom if I'd thought I could avoid the consequences of what earlier that evening had felt like my only choice—telling the girls I was leaving their father.

Blood equals hurry. When mothers see their children bleed, they rush to help. And though every other time my daughters had bled I'd scurried to fix them, the last thing I could do this evening was hustle. I didn't want my daughters to be anguished because of me, to be angry or confused because of me—but they were. I moved through the hallway back to the living room, wondering if they'd all be bleeding because of what I'd done. Red on the chairs and red on the old sofa and stains on the brown oak floor.

But when I stood at Tom's seat again I saw that Stephanie's crying had turned into hiccups and the blood on her cheeks was already becoming crusty. The coppery smell no longer rose from her skin. I handed Tom the cloth and he touched it to her neck, though Stephanie buried her face into the side of his shirt so she could avoid looking at me. My husband did look, though; straight at me, his own moist eyes meeting my dry ones. "I don't get it," he said. "I really don't." He shook his head, staring at me. "When did you get so cold?"

Tom and I had met in college—when I was a sophomore and he was a junior. I considered him a wildly mysterious set of contradictions, not yet realizing that contradiction was actually my own disguise at the time. My name was on the dean's list, and I studied for hours each night in the student union building's smoking section. I was vice president for mental advancement for one of my clubs. I chain-smoked Marlboro cigarettes and loaded myself with ten-cent cups of coffee, eating maple bars for dinner while writing about the sod images in
My Ántonia.
But sometime around eleven, when the student union closed, I'd make my way to a bar where the English majors congregated and where for long stretches I drank too much beer and became overly boisterous and flirty, and we all tried to impress one another with talk of books and writers and by reciting "Thanatopsis" by heart. I drank and drank some more, blushing at attention from boys I believed were too smart, too good, for me, and yet tipping in to press against one or another's shoulder for a few seconds, getting close enough that he could smell the dark hollow of my neck.

When I heard about Tom, I suddenly wanted his attention too—wanted it a lot—though for reasons I couldn't decipher. I'd been warned about his antics, the bottle of whiskey he often carried in the pocket of his down vest, and the chewing tobacco he'd sometimes squirt through his front teeth, making a liquid brown arc that would land near others' feet. One day, after hearing about how he'd been arrested again, this time for trying to climb the brick and ivy walls of the administration building to break the minute hand off the giant clock—and falling into the bushes below—I decided I had to meet this guy who had such nerve and could demonstrate such badness. I had to find out why he didn't care about disappointing parents or professors or university administrators, how he did only what he wanted anytime he wanted to do it.

I waited by his baby blue 1960s Ford pickup truck until he came out of the house he lived in, and I started up a conversation with him about nothing. We ended up sitting on the wheel wells in the bed of the pickup for five or six hours, talking. His voice, I remember, was soft. Shy even. He was tall and thin, wore dirty Levi's and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots. His two front teeth were marked with small brown squiggles that I'd later learn were caused by fluoride. That first afternoon, those teeth stains were another sign of his vulnerability, instantly making me want to take care of him and allowing me to form in my mind a defense of what I'd decided that day was his misjudged character.

After that, I was known as his defender and he was known as my boyfriend. That is, others started calling him that because it was common knowledge that we were sleeping together, and after some months I began calling him my boyfriend too, though it wasn't a label or relationship he wanted. The weekend after I graduated, three years after we'd met, we got married because I'd convinced Tom this was the natural next step, the right thing to do now that we were college educated and had entered adulthood. Besides, my own parents, married practically as children and now in the middle of a divorce, were each calling me regularly to complain about the other. I couldn't imagine a better way to slip from the grip of their unhappiness than to make a tidy little family of my own.

During our college romance, Tom and I didn't go out to dinners or movies, we didn't imagine a future with a mortgage and a station wagon and towheaded babies—instead, on a Saturday night he might knock on the dorm window some hours after the bars closed, waking the other girls, who'd bark at me to get rid of him. I'd yank on my sweatpants and a T-shirt and meet him in the alley. Throwing his arm around my shoulder, he'd sip the last of a pint of Wild Turkey out of a paper bag or smoke a joint as we walked back to his house, the metal edges of his boot heels sparking off the sidewalk. Those nights, we had sex in his small, musky room, Willie Nelson's
Red Headed Stranger
the soundtrack, Tom's whiskey breath hot in my hair. Sometime before dawn I'd sneak back to my own place, hoping no one would notice any evidence of what I liked to think was a secret life. Of course they did; girls reporting to other girls that I was not the straight-and-narrow student I pretended to be, going to my Phi Beta Kappa meetings every third Thursday and my Mortar Board meetings each first Tuesday, delighting my parents and my teachers and the foundation officer who wrote out my scholarship check. I couldn't stop seeing this boy. I couldn't tell him to leave me alone or even to take me out to a restaurant like a real boyfriend. I couldn't convince myself that I should have a plan for the years ahead. Instead, late at night I waited for a sign from him that he wanted me, that I was want-able by someone who wanted nothing. He'd drawn no lines limiting what he did or to whom he did it, a freedom I couldn't even imagine but could try to absorb from him when he was around. This resolve of mine to be with him was beyond my understanding then, only slightly less fuzzy now. For some reason, he was the mystery—horrible and exciting at once—that made me feel most alive.