Unkiss Me (2 page)

But you LOVE him, you think, and therefore, you must save him.
“Get a clue,” says your therapist, as she recommends some books on codependence. Unfortunately, you don’t like any of the author photos; they all look like your high school social studies teacher—a woman who favored Jonathan Livingston Seagull costume jewelry. After three days without the carpenter, you begin to miss him violently. One day, with the help of a different therapist, you will see this part of the cycle for what it is: the reassessment phase. But now, you simply think you overreacted. Because of the carpenter, you have a new kitchen. You have a deck behind your house. You have a fun playmate for your kids, someone who takes them out near the airport, where the planes come in so low, they tell you breathlessly, they can almost touch them. The carpenter has taught your son to tie his shoes and ride a bike. If it were up to you, your first-born would still be in Ninja Turtle Velcro sneakers. He’d be riding a tricycle until second grade.

You sob, you bargain, you pray and you whine.
You begin to have long conversations with your dead husband. Think of the Tevya character in “Fiddler on the Roof”; the famous vacillating monologues that include the phrase: On the other hand…

You no longer believe in God, but you believe in your dead husband.
He is your Ouija Board. Your magic 8-ball. Your tarot deck. He says, “Hang in there.” So you do.

11.

Tree Pose

The carpenter gives up crank.
He’ll stick with pot; he tells you, it suits his temperament better. You know the real reason, though: one night his best friend called him at two in the morning, talking nonsense. The next day, he found out his friend was in a mental hospital with methamphetamine-induced psychosis. It scared the shit out of him. “Let’s start over,” you tell him. You want to get closer; you want to be in a position where you can monitor his habits on a daily basis. Here is the solution: move in together. Mingle your roots and plant them somewhere. But in whose house will you all live? What you need is a neutral corner. What you need is the proverbial blank canvas.

An opportunity pops up from absolutely nowhere.
On the outskirts of town stands the most picturesque farmhouse. The place comes complete with an old barn, several outbuildings and 80 acres of farmland planted in crimson clover. You can lease out each of the fixers for twice as much as the farmhouse rent. So what if there’s no central heat or insulation? So what if the place is coated in bacon grease and field dust? You’re young; you have sleeves you can roll up.

The carpenter, you, and your kids spend several weeks cleaning, sanding, varnishing and painting.
You go to a feed store and buy baby chicks. It’s too cold in the henhouse, so the chicks are set up in a cardboard box under a heat lamp on top of the Playdoh table. First lesson in farmwifery: chicken urine goes right through cardboard, through varnish, and into maple. Because of this, the table will forever feature a swollen hump; it will take a year and a half for the ammonia smell to dissipate.

Those first few weeks, watching crimson clover overtake the back eighty, watching your children swing on a tire under a back-East sized oak, planning an acre-sized vegetable garden in the orchard next to the house, it’s like the first time you witnessed color television: a threshold into perfection.
Nobody can convince you this feeling won’t last. Even the next week, as the carpenter and you, holding hands, watch your landlord uproot the graceful, blossoming pear trees in the orchard with his tractor bucket—they’re too old, he tells you— you’ll believe you’re the luckiest couple on the planet.

12.

Toe Stand Pose

When you were a little girl, instead of house, you played farm.
You don’t remember a husband, but there were plenty of kids and animals. During your childhood, which was spent mainly in the suburbs, your biggest fantasy was that you would one day spend your mornings gathering eggs, milking cows and making mud pie houses with your offspring.

Here is the reality: chicken shit-encrusted eggs, your neighbor’s bull escaping and running amuck behind your house, the continual encroachment of field dust.
And another thing: you are experiencing the fallout of living with a collector. On your back porch, under the once-serviceable shed, in several of the outbuildings, and indeed, in all the rooms of the farmhouse, are piles of treasure. Treasures like rusted cans of hand-hewn nails, wooden fruit crates holding rolled up yellowed newspapers, ancient stoves, bed rails, curtain rods. As you head out to the back porch to haul sopping laundry to the clothesline, you scratch your calf on the sprung metal band of a wine barrel.

“Fuck!” you say more and more often.

Then comes the emergency room visit to sew up your daughter’s head after she falls on the corner of a sliced-up water heater.

When you played farm as a little girl, in a sandbox made from a tractor tire, you tiptoed barefoot on the rim of that big, black tire.
Farm meant soft, rubber, and warm. If you fell, you fell into sand.

“I thought you could plant something in them,” the carpenter says when he sees you kicking the bisected water heater.
“Or if we get that cow, it could be a water trough.”

“We’re not,” you tell him through clenched teeth, “getting a cow.”

During the years on the farm, you write a dark, Catholic novel set on the rural outskirts of your hometown. In this story, your first person protagonist, who is schizophrenic, kills and buries her mother in a fertile black-soiled field. Of course, this novel—written in spurts betwixt nursing the woodstove in order to thaw your fingers enough to resume writing—will never make it to the marketplace. When you’re not writing, you paint with oils. You erect scaffolding in the dark, narrow stairwell and tiptoe up to the far wall, where you produce a giant sunflower in ocher, sepia and vermilion. One day, the carpenter will tell you the sunflower you painted was the thing he treasured most about living on the farm.

Here are some of the other things that happen: both your children lose their baby teeth and stop playing with Playdoh.
They join soccer teams. You become a hippie-slash-soccer mom. The chicks grow feathers and lay eggs. Some of them die. One drowns in your toilet, but that’s another story.

Each July, August, September, and October, you harvest your vegetables and love where you live.
You love the carpenter’s spontaneous constructs: a bookcase erected in ten minutes from scraps of old growth, a raised garden bed bordered with clay tiles. You fall asleep to the sound of coyotes, their yips and howls like a lullaby as you dream of abundance. Of completeness.

November through June, you are chilled, damp and grumpy.
Unfinished projects are heaped in your path: the school bus shelter that got as far as four posts cemented into the earth, the impotent clothes dryer on your back porch lacking a 220 outlet. You fall asleep knowing that every three hours either you or the carpenter will have to wake up and stoke the woodstove that heats your home.

In the middle of your final harvest at the farm, you and the carpenter tie the knot.
It’s a spontaneous decision, really, if you don’t count the gun to the carpenter’s head. Unlike your first wedding—a Catholic affair involving limos, a three thousand dollar bridal gown and a raucous, boozy reception where people from your side ended up sleeping with people from his side—your nuptials this time involve metal detectors and a guard rummaging through your purse. The judge scheduled to announce the Mad-Lib-style vows in his chambers is late, and your children, swiped from school to witness the event, get into a fight in the middle of the I-dos. One day, while cleaning out a box of miscellaneous crap, you’ll find the dried up sunflower that served as the carpenter’s wedding corsage, and you’ll place it at the base of your wedding photo: two faces squinting skyward, as though determined to out-stare the sun.

13.

Dead Body Pose

You last nearly three winters at the farm before crying “Uncle.”
You are tired, so tired; you just can’t deal anymore with the constant chopping of wood and carrying of water. When a record cold front comes down from Alaska, you lie down in your living room and decide to freeze to death rather than forge through this misery.

Okay, says the carpenter, let’s move back to town.

Oh, the music of those words! Immediately, you are blowing on your crippled fingers, thawing them enough to pack the necessaries. You open your kitchen cabinets, gather your colanders, your juice extractors, and under your sink, in the drip pan, is a mouse frozen in a block of ice. Because you are moving, you laugh and laugh and laugh.

What you don’t know now, what you don’t even suspect, is that next week the hundred year flood will arrive, and the road you are moving off of will be washed away.

14.

Wind Removing Pose

So you all move back to town, to yet another project house. This one is different, though. This one is a mom-and-pop corner storefront with big picture windows right up against the sidewalk. The carpenter bought this “house” for pennies, and it is now half-gutted, awaiting renewal. When you move in, the store, as you refer to it, lacks a kitchen. No problem, though, because you immediately join Costco and buy prepackaged everything that you can microwave in the living room. Doing dishes in a claw foot bathtub is kind of a drag, so on your Costco runs, you include plenty of paper and plastic; lots of twelve-ounce bottles of punch. To hell with canning and freezing your own organic produce. You can buy bags full of bite-sized carrots and broccoli florets; what’s a little sodium benzoate in the vast scheme of things?

The downside is the neighborhood school you refuse to send your children to.
Your inquiry visit includes a furtive skulk down the gray halls, where more children seem to be standing in punishment outside the classrooms than in them. “This is a high-needs school,” says the principal by way of explanation. Briefly, and I mean for less than three seconds, you feel sorry for the principal and the school. You’re used to volunteering, why not volunteer at this school, five days a week for six hours a day?

Ultimately, you hand your kids over to a private school.
The carpenter is disappointed. He wants you to immerse in the neighborhood, be part of the diverse community. He’s right, of course, even if the diversity to which he refers consists mostly of drug houses and right-wing Christians. That first Halloween, the pastor from the fundamentalist church across the street gives out Jesus coloring books instead of candy. On every block there is one house with plywood instead of windows.

One day, when you are upstairs painting a checkerboard pattern on your bedroom walls (perfect ten inch by ten inch squares), you hear a commotion in the backyard.
When you look out the window, you see a couple of your diverse neighbors stealing one of the claw foot bathtubs the carpenter has heaped in the yard. Good, you think. Come back for the washing machines.

You begin to get stomachaches.
Just like in childhood, before having to present something to the class, or when your father had one of his tantrums and you’d lock yourself in your bedroom, doubled over, butt in the air. More and more, your butt’s in the air. Your stomach and intestines and liver and spleen and bowels and kidneys are seeking some sort of re-arrangement, some sort of new relationship. Luckily, you have perfect ten by ten squares to look at. Beginning, middle and end. As your snoring carpenter lies next to you, the total work-in-progress life you lead represented in his half-shaved beard, his partially clipped toenails, his nasal sputter that changes direction halfway through any given snore, it’s the symmetry of those squares that allows you to breathe.

15.

Sit-Up

The Promised Land is for sale, and the carpenter is going to buy it!

16.

Cobra Pose

Here’s the deal: you’ll hand over the equity in your original fixer so the carpenter can pursue his dream, if you can move out of the store, and into a real house. Under no circumstances, you tell the carpenter, will you move from Portland. If he wants to own a business 300 miles away, you’ll learn to deal with it. Done. The strike is so fast, you never know what bit you. Suddenly, you are the owner of an RV park. It’s not just any RV park, however. This one is a geothermic patch of desert a hundred miles from anywhere. Hot springs flow from the ground and bubble into a cement pool, which is housed in a rickety tin barn. People drive from hell and beyond to pay three dollars for the privilege of swimming in the pool. This place is on the other side of the Cascades from Portland. There are rattlesnakes out there. And mosquitoes so voracious the little town has a festival each year to raise the funds required to kill them.

But in fulfillment of the deal, you get to move around the corner from the still unfinished store to the carpenter’s latest masterpiece: an almost finished bungalow so quaint with its shingles and wrap-around front porch, its attractive cottage-like dormers, and craftsman appearance, that people are constantly driving by and pointing.
Well, you think they’re pointing to the quaintness; they might be pointing to the carpenter’s collection of stoves, lumber and unidentifiable gadgets stockpiled in the driveway. But that’s okay, because you finally have a semi-functional stove hooked up to an unlimited supply of natural gas. No more will you have to change a propane tank in the middle of making supper.