This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

  I went home later that evening and broke the news to my mother: her mother had been married before. My mother said she already knew this.

  While I hadn’t known the story about my grandmother’s first marriage, I knew the one about her father’s first marriage by heart. My grandmother’s father, Rasmus Nelson, had had a wife and two sons back in Denmark. He came to this country and settled in Kansas to work as a blacksmith. He worked and saved for years until he had enough to send for his family, and when he did, he wrote to his wife and told her to come. His wife wrote back to say she wanted to move to Kansas, very much, but first she had to tell him that she had three sons now.

  The invitation was rescinded.

  Sad as it was, that wasn’t the part that kept me up at night. My grandmother remembered that once a young man with yellow hair and blue eyes came to Ogden, Kansas, looking for his father, and that his father—my great-grandfather—refused to see him. That pale young man who had done nothing wrong came all the way from Denmark to find his father and was, in Ogden, denied. “What was his name?” I asked (this was a story I insisted on hearing many times, as opposed to the one about John Drain, which I left alone). But my grandmother was just a little girl at the time and she hadn’t thought to ask her brother’s name.

  This is just to say that without doing a moment’s work in genealogy, I know that a minimum of four generations of my family have failed at marriage. On my father’s side, six out of the seven Patchett children, my aunts and uncles, married, and five of them divorced. My sister and I have both divorced. Our parents divorced when I was four. I have many memories from early childhood, and though there are plenty of scenes in which both of my parents are present, I was too young to understand that they were married. They simply existed in the same house to take care of us. The explanation of what marriage was, and that it was over, all came in a single afternoon.

  “Tell the story of your marriage,” my young friend Niki says to me. “Write down how it is you have a happy marriage.” But the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale—the German kind, unsweetened by Disney. It is a story of children wandering alone through a dark forest, past shadowy animals with razor teeth and yellow eyes, towards an accident that is punishable by years and years of sleep. It is an unpleasant business, even if it ends in love. I am setting out to tell the story of a happy marriage, my marriage, which does not end in divorce, but every single thing about it starts there. Divorce is the history lesson, that thing that must be remembered in order not to be repeated. Divorce is the rock upon which this church is built.

  After my parents divorced, my mother moved my sister and me from California to Tennessee. We were going to Tennessee because Mike had moved there and she was dating Mike, that much we knew, but once we arrived that relationship seemed difficult. We relocated several times before landing in a tiny tract house in the unfashionable town of Murfreesboro, outside of Nashville. One night my mother and Mike came home from dinner and announced that they were married, which, much to our horror, seemed to mean he wasn’t going home. Several months later, I came in from playing to find a boy a few years older than I was in the kitchen. I told him to get out of my house and then he told me to get out of his house. That was how I discovered I had four stepsiblings. That was how my stepbrother Mikey discovered his father had remarried. I can only assume those books about how to discuss divorce and remarriage with your children had not yet been written, or that no one in this time-strapped, cash-strapped family consisting now of six children had the resources to go to the bookstore.

  My father and his second wife, Jerri, seemed to have a happy marriage out in California with no additional children, but we only saw them one week a year. My sister and I adored Jerri and her mother, Dorothy. The house they lived in together was the site of some of my happiest childhood memories. One day before Jerri and my father were married, during our annual visit, I found Jerri with her sewing machine set up in the living room, making a dress. By what I could tell from the picture on the front of the pattern, it was a wonderful dress. “What’s it for?” I asked.

  “The wedding,” she said.

  “Whose wedding?” Jerri wasn’t looking at me, she was pushing the gossamer fabric through the machine.

  “My wedding,” she said.

  At that point I burst into tears, begging her not to get married, to wait, please wait, because sooner or later my father was bound to marry her. Which he was. He had just neglected to tell us.

  The marriage of my father and stepmother, however appealing, was beside the point. It was the marriage of my mother and stepfather that I grew up in. They were together in some fashion, though not always married, from the time I was five until I was twenty-five. Mike also had a first wife, JoAnn, whom he had left behind in Los Angeles along with four children, ages eight, six, four, and eighteen months (the aforementioned Mikey being the oldest). I once asked Mike why he had divorced JoAnn, and he told me that she was a terrible housekeeper. Maybe that’s as good a story as any to tell a kid why you left your wife. The truth would have been inappropriate, and the excuse could also serve as a cautionary tale since I wasn’t the neatest child in the world. Still, I am ashamed to say it was many, many years before I woke up and thought, Wait a minute! She had four children and she was messy?

  Back at our house, there was a constant complaint about the alimony and child-support checks that had to be written, and that dialogue kept this first family present in our daily lives. Mike’s children, who came from the West Coast twice a year to spend summers and Christmases with us, went to public schools, lived in a small, battered house in the San Fernando Valley, and had very little in the way of niceties. My sister and I went to Catholic school, had better clothes, and were brought along on the occasional vacation. When we moved to the country, my sister had her own horse and I had my own pig. We also had to live full-time within the walls of the second marriage, so that I imagine if you sat the six of us down now, the four Glasscock children and the two Patchetts, none of us would be able to say for certain who had really gotten the short end of the stick.

  I don’t think that anyone, not even the two principal players, thought this second marriage was going to work. It had the sharp smell of insanity from the get-go. There were fights and splits, reconciliations, intractable depression, and a large stash of firearms. Fidelity was not the order of the day. My mother was willing to put up with a lot, but she was not willing to be twice-divorced. That, she told me later, was her own personal line in the sand. Even when she and Mike did finally manage to divorce, they began to date each other again and then became engaged, complete with diamond ring. In fact, they were engaged when I got engaged, and stood together at my wedding, even though a few months after that they were done with each other for good.

  This story would be more neatly convincing if it were about my mother marrying a crazy man she should have divorced right away, but nothing is ever as simple as that. My stepfather was crazy in those days, he’d be the first person to tell you, but his craziness was closely linked to his appeal. He was also an extremely successful surgeon, and despite the burden of six children and two wives he did not stay poor for long. He flew a helicopter that he landed at the hangar he’d built in the front yard. He bought racehorses and drilled for oil and lost piles of money on both endeavors. He tried his hand at novel writing, sculpture, ironworking, tennis, fencing. He built a houseboat. Of his many interests and many children, I was his favorite. He sent me to college. He was furious with me when I said I wanted to put myself through graduate school, because he didn’t want me to have to worry about money. More than twenty years after he and my mother finally parted company, he and I are still very close. “Who is this wonderful man?” my stepsister, Tina, likes to say. “And what has he done with my father?”

  My mother, for her part, was overly beautiful, and if you don’t think excessive beaut
y is a problem you should try living with it for a while. The bag boys at the grocery store tried to kiss her at the car. She couldn’t have her phone number printed on her checks. People came to our table in restaurants to comment on her beauty; people let her go to the front of the line at the bank. Along with her looks came an overly sensitive nature that made people want to both protect her and run away with her. She did very little to try to put out the many fires that were started in her wake. When I first read The Iliad in high school I had a better understanding of my life: my mother was Helen of Troy.

  I don’t blame my mother and father for getting divorced, nor do I blame my mother and stepfather. But I had about as much coaching on how to conduct a happy union as a rattlesnake. I had two best friends through junior high and high school; both had parents who divorced and both were in the custody of their fathers, which, given the fact that these two divorces took place in the 1970s, speaks volumes as to how bad things were at home. We weren’t the products of our parents’ happy marriages; we were the flotsam of their divorces. In the house of my mother and stepfather, my sister and I were the spoils of war. I was still in high school when I decided I didn’t want children. My somewhat twisted rationale was that I would never inflict childhood on anybody, especially not someone I loved. I never changed my mind.

  This is not to say that people who have watched their parents perfect the craft of divorce will necessarily divorce themselves, any more than the offspring of happy marriages will necessarily wind up being happily married. As evidence, read the wonderful companion memoirs of Geoffrey Wolff (The Duke of Deception) and his younger brother Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life). When their parents divorced, their father got Geoffrey and their mother got Toby. The boys were raised in their parents’ very different and equally disastrous second marriages, yet both boys grew up and married well. The Wolff brothers, with no discernible examples to draw upon, proved themselves wonderful husbands and fathers. They figured out the skill set for decency and commitment on their own. Clearly, we are not all ruined, and if we are, at some point it becomes our own responsibility.

  Which brings me to my first marriage: not the happy one we have come to discuss, but the other one. I would like to wrench it out of the narrative but it will not be budged. Even though it appears that this is a wedding feast and should therefore mark the end of the tale, we’re only just getting started. We are, in fact, still alone in the forest of the blinking yellow eyes.

  Dennis and I met at the beginning of graduate school. I had a crush on him and so I invited him to my house for brunch. Because I didn’t want it to look like I was asking him on a date, I cleverly invited a smart, pretty girl named Julie whom I had also met on the first day of school. Dennis left the brunch with Julie, and for a time they were happy together. Many months later, when they ceased to be happy together, he started going out with me. I moved into his small garage apartment during our second year. Thanks to twelve years of Catholic girls’ school and four more at a practically all-women’s college, thanks to my own nervousness about matters regarding men and women, my experience going into the first serious romantic relationship of my life was close to nil. If this were a deposition, I would like the record to state that I didn’t know any better, and the things I thought I knew were just cataclysmically wrong. For example, I could see no end of good things in Dennis; he just couldn’t see those things in himself. I knew that he was funny and smart and talented, even though he often came across as angry. If I could show him what a wonderful person he really was, I could introduce his fine qualities to the world. All he needed was a little fixing, and I was just the person for the job.

  It was as if I had been born before Freud. I existed in a world without psychology, and by psychology I’m not talking about therapy or analysis (both of which were big elements in the marriage of my mother and stepfather but were not services extended to the children of the house); I’m talking about the very simplest levels of self-awareness that can be picked up from an hour of Oprah or a few articles in women’s magazines. There are women who want to be saved (charming prince, big white horse), and women who want to do the saving (Beauty, Beast). If these archetypes go all the way back to fairy-tale land, then it’s safe to say I wasn’t breaking new ground. I thought that men were like houses, that you could buy one on the cheap that had potential and just fix it up, and that fixing it up was actually better than getting a house that was already good because then you could make it just the way you wanted it. In short, I was an idiot, but I was also twenty-two years old. I was pretty and good-natured. I worked hard at everything I did. I should have been treasured for those things alone, which was not the case. I was not treasured, not one bit.

  It would not be revisionist to say I was miserable right from the start. But hanging on to miserable relationships was something I was born for. Had I known anything about the elegance of quitting at the right time, I would have made so many people, starting with myself and Dennis, so much happier. Every week, every day that I stayed with him, I compounded my mistake. As hard as I searched for possible exits, I found none. Again, had I had even a passing contact with, say, a back issue of Cosmopolitan, I would have been able to figure out that the world wouldn’t end were I to pack up and leave. But Dennis seemed so sad, and how could I leave someone who was sad, especially when it was my job to make him happy?

  Then one summer night we were taking a walk by the Iowa River and Dennis dropped to one knee, pulled out a diamond ring, and asked me to marry him. He might as well have pulled a knife. The word no flew from my lips before he had articulated the entire question. I then dropped to my knees, horrified by every single aspect of what had just happened. I could have walked into the river and sunk. I said I was sorry, and I was sorry, but I had had the kind of overt visceral reaction that could not be undone. It was a true disaster for both of us, and for our different reasons we looked at the ground, trembling. I was twenty-three and he was thirty. We had never talked about marriage, and certainly there would be no talking about it now. I didn’t even get a real look at the ring, which had appeared, a brief spark of light, and then was gone.

  Many months went by and still we continued living together, considerably more miserable than we had been before. We moved to Nashville, thinking we might be in need of a geographic cure. Nothing improved. Dennis did not forgive me. And then one night, after an enormous amount of suffering, I finally figured out a way to make it better. “Okay,” I said while we were sitting in the living room. “Okay, we’ll do it.” And he went and got the ring out of his dresser and gave it to me.

  We were married in June 1988. My wedding shoes were lost the day of the ceremony and never found. We married outdoors and bees swarmed the flowers in my hair during the exchange of vows. The wedding cake melted in the heat, and because there wasn’t time to make another cake, my sister frosted the empty pans so that we could take pictures in which we pretended to slice. The car threw a rod through the engine on our way out of town and we spent our honeymoon, and all our honeymoon savings, at a Gulf station in Pulaski, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. The marriage, which lasted fourteen months, was an unmitigated disaster.

  We moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where we split a teaching job at a small liberal arts college. Since we didn’t know anyone there, we could do a pretty good public presentation of a happy couple. Oddly, what I fell back on during that time were the lessons of my high school home economics classes. I decided I would maintain stability through food preparation. I made chicken or fish with a vegetable and a starch (rice, potatoes, pasta) seven nights a week. I made dessert. We drank huge quantities of milk. I had no idea what it meant to be married, what it meant to be a wife, other than I was supposed to make dinner, do the laundry, clean and iron. I was playing house. In retrospect, Dennis, who raged and slammed and could go for days without speaking to me, literally days without a single word, was probably every bit as terrified as I was. We were both fa
lling back on what we knew and were completely unable to help one another. The next summer, exhausted by our lack of success, we went off to separate writers’ colonies—summer camps for adults—and there, after two months without him, I finally found a bright red exit sign glowing in the dark.

  At the risk of raising any hopes prematurely, I should say that this was not the exit sign that led to happiness, but the door that took me to the darkest part of my unhappiness, after which there began to be less darkness.

  “Write the story of your happy marriage,” Niki says.

  “I’m trying,” I say.

  It happened in early August, at the end of my first day at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. I was walking through one of the common rooms late at night where a group of women were talking and a young man was sitting in a corner, writing in a notebook. Another woman then came through the door behind me and she was crying. She said she thought she was having a miscarriage and needed a ride to the hospital. Did anyone have a car? The man with the notebook had a car. “Shouldn’t a woman go, too?” I said, thinking that if it all turned out badly someone might need to go back and hold her hand. The other women in the room looked at me blankly, and so even though I knew none of them, I said I would go. The three of us got in the car and drove to the hospital. As the woman was rushed away, the man and I promised to wait. We sat in the waiting room, and later on a bench outside the hospital, talking and smoking, until the next morning.

  David, the man with the car, had an excellent grasp of psychology. He was a year and a half older than I was and had already been in two psychiatric wards. He had put in long hours with a psychiatrist. He was also considerably smarter than anyone I had ever met in my life. I was not one to talk about my troubles, which was probably one of the reasons I had so many of them, but he knew the right questions and, after all, we had a lot of time to talk. By midnight, David had heard the story of my unhappy marriage, chapter and verse. By three in the morning he was delicately suggesting that the way I was living was no way to live. When the third member of our party reappeared around six, she was surprised and touched to find we had waited. She had not lost the baby, and on that happy news we drove her back to Yaddo to rest. David and I were hungry, so we headed out to a diner for breakfast and stayed well past lunch. There was still a lot to talk about, and so we went back to Yaddo and talked until late in the night and saw the break of the next morning, at which point he came back to my room and we stopped talking.