In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

  Despite my whole bucketful of flaws, there was a nice boy, a friend in our group, who talked to me at work one day and wanted to go for a walk with me. When we strolled down the trail behind the college, crossing the wooden bridge, I wondered aloud about how the first people to ever hold hands would have come up with that idea. Since he didn’t know the answer, he suggested we could be the last people to hold hands, at least for a minute, and so we held hands and walked. Okay, we’re probably not the last ones anymore, he said with a smile, but we kept holding hands.

  Less than a week later, I informed him James was coming back, and he asked whether I had told James that was okay. I said yes, I had, and with the most gentle disapproval I had ever seen cross someone’s face, he told me he hoped I would be happy with my choice. I didn’t know how to tell him that I hadn’t made a choice, that after a childhood of having no control, I couldn’t stand in front of a man and recognize what a choice was—I was just going to let James say his piece, and I didn’t know what would happen after that. Of course, I had made a choice. I didn’t understand that letting someone else decide for me was still a choice, that I could have said no. And I didn’t know how to make this nice boy understand, so I didn’t say anything to try to explain.

  At the time, what I didn’t understand was our spending time together and getting to know each other. I couldn’t tell him how ugly I felt and that it never occurred to me he would find me attractive. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what inside made me feel so dirty and used—I didn’t even have the words to describe that yet. I just knew he seemed nice, and he felt safe and smart and kind and healthy.

  Kind is a relative term, of course.

  He was never very friendly after I told him James wanted to come back. Even long after my relationship with James ended, when I ran into this former friend at a farmers’ market—both of us real-live adults, him a lawyer, me a single mother—I was shocked at how condescending he seemed, how unkind it felt. There were a lot of things I couldn’t explain back then, when we were in college, and maybe we could have been a couple. It didn’t occur to me until years later that he liked me romantically. At the time, I thought he contacted me and visited me and wanted to hold my hand out of friendship—I didn’t recognize a display of interest as courtship.

  He was like so many other people I had met and thought were my people—my new people, not the people I was born to. I thought these new people could see and love the parts of myself that I had invented without my family’s influence—the parts I liked so much better than the self I felt my family had forced upon me. For so long after I left my hometown, I thought that I had found community and that we all cared about the same things: sustainability, equality, spirituality. But I broke the rules too much, stepped out of line too often. I didn’t know how to act like those people, how to talk like them. Quite often in early adulthood, I was still acting out the terrible lessons I had been taught as a child, and though I did not steal, and I’m pretty sure any hurting I did was minimal, I was clearly not one of them.

  Once again, I learned there are unspoken rules to follow, and they have everything to do with your class, your gender, your education. I wasn’t quick to learn those rules, although I tried really hard to mimic the college kids around me who seemed like such adults. But when you try to go where you don’t belong, there is always hell to pay.

  CHAPTER 23

  With You

  That same summer, I went to another concert with Tanya, as well as Rebecca, who finally convinced me that she had slept with my husband. There was more LSD, more of what was left of the Grateful Dead, and when I came back, there were somewhere around fifteen messages on my answering machine. Only the last message had any real information.

  Please answer my call. I need to talk to you.

  Son of a bitch, I thought. He’s calling me for money.

  James and my former best friend had gone to a Rainbow Gathering out west, something idyllic and serene, and I just knew he had run out of money and was calling me to wire him some, certain I would do so. But this was before cell phones, and I didn’t have caller ID. He was calling me from a pay phone, so I couldn’t call him back. The next day, though, the phone rang and I was home. It was him. He asked whether he could come home, and puzzled, I told him of course, he could go to his mother’s, which was what I thought he meant by home. No, he said. With you. That’s my home.

  I wasn’t so sure about that. I had just begun loving my freedom, my independence, the happiness and ease I felt on my own. I told him we could talk when he got back, but I just didn’t know. Where is she? I asked, and he told me she was outside the phone booth. I couldn’t believe he had her waiting for him, watching him as he called me to tell me he wanted to come back to me. Does she know what you’re telling me? Yes, she knew. He had a dream in which he was with me, and that was a sign. She knew.

  About a week later, I came home one evening, and my living room light was on. I had left the door unlocked again because I had gotten used to no one coming into my apartment and helping themselves to my beer or taking showers and leaving dirty towels behind. There was James, buck naked, sitting on my couch with a full erection.

  What are you doing?

  I thought this was the best way to get your attention.

  Put your clothes on.

  We talked a little, and I think we slept on the living room floor that night—I didn’t want him in my bed, wasn’t ready to have sex with him. I wasn’t happy to see him, but he told me about his dream and about how he knew that he should stay married like his grandfather had, loyal to his wife always.

  I let him move back in.

  He was my husband. I had made a vow, a sacred vow, and I needed to uphold it. And I desperately wanted to be like his grandparents. Maybe there was still a chance for me to be loved and loving, content in some quiet routine, normal.

  A day or two later, before he had finished unpacking, he said something about how he missed my old best friend, and I started throwing his stuff back into the half-empty boxes sitting around the apartment. Then he opened the Bible and told me about a verse he read, something to do with unity or marriage or love or who even knows. We unpacked the boxes.

  Over the next year, he would disappear sometimes, and later I would find out he went to see her at her dorm. He finally got a job, and one day, his boss called the house, asking where he was. I thought he was at work, but he was with her. Later, he told me that during this time, he heard a mockingbird sing and knew he should go home to me. Something about what the other girl had told him as far as mockingbirds and their songs.

  Inside, I wanted to laugh at that idea. Birds and their songs—why would that matter when you’re hiding the truth from someone? None of it struck me as making any sense, but I quickly felt confused. I had always given him so much credit for knowing more than I did—he seemed so confident. And I knew that I came from a dysfunctional family but that his family had always been kind to me. Every time I found myself upset with him, I ended up thinking it must be something wrong with me. And so when he expressed this love, this devotion that rang false, I thought that it must be true and that I was somehow at fault for just not understanding.

  They weren’t sleeping together. At least, that’s what she told me. Regardless, the back and forth was starting to make me feel crazy, and eventually I sat down with both of them and told them I didn’t care if they wanted to be together, but if so, they had to tell the truth and leave me alone. No more lies, no more secrets. She said she wanted nothing to do with him and only to repair our friendship. I don’t remember what he said.

  They stopped meeting up, but I was still angry. She would appear at our house sometimes—by that point, we had a roommate, and there were constant parties. I was shocked she had the nerve to show up, but it didn’t occur to me to tell her to leave. Eventually, I decided the only logical course of action would be for the two of us to go to a Rainbow Gathering the following summer. I walked with her to the same woods where I h
ad held hands with a nice boy and, for a brief moment, we were the last couple to ever do so. I told her I wanted to forgive her, really forgive her, and the only thing I could think of was to take a trip like that together.

  We did, and it was amazing. She came back with a boyfriend, and I came back and broke up with James for good. But from then on, my newly forgiven friend was afraid I would try to steal her boyfriend, to seek vengeance and do to her what she had done to me, and so we grew apart after all. It didn’t matter that I didn’t blame her for the breakup—I knew that wasn’t her fault, or if it was in any way, it didn’t compare to the other fractures in my marriage.

  So much of my adult life would oscillate like this: some form of spiritual focus and hope, a good job or loving friends and maybe a boyfriend or husband who adored me for a time; next, a darkness. I would periodically discover I was taking too many drugs or drinking too much, or I would find bruises on my neck from a drunken argument with my lover. Then I would run to the light, to music and hiking in forests, to poetry and moderation, but the darkness inside me always drew me back, away from the flirtation with normalcy and stability. I couldn’t pretend to fit into the world around me, which I so desperately wanted to feel part of.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Cathedral

  When I moved away from home, Granny and I wrote a few letters back and forth. Actually, she wrote fairly often, and I responded a few times. I didn’t yet know what it felt like to lose someone you love. I didn’t know that I would one day—many days—dream about her house and my simple childhood moments there. Eating watermelon on the picnic table between her house and the garden in the summer. Running through the fields, trying not to step in the cow patties. Playing in the creek. Sitting down to her table.

  I wish I had written her back more.

  I didn’t know how often I would later tell God that I would give all the money I had just to go to her house and lie in her arms, beg her to hold me, please hold me and let me be her little girl. Although well-meaning people sometimes told me I should cherish those days with her and not take them for granted, I took them for granted anyway. I didn’t run to her when I could have. I often brought a boy with me when I visited, hoping for her approval but precluding any chance of lying in her lap and letting her pet my head and tell me she loved me and always, always would.

  The Christmas before James and I split up for good, we went to her house for our family celebration. I had stayed awake for at least twenty-four hours, making stained-glass candleholders for family members while smoking meth to stay awake, cutting myself over and over on the little, beautiful pieces of glass as my fine-motor skills went from bad to worse. At Granny’s house, I felt like everyone was looking at me, like everyone knew that I hadn’t slept and that something was not quite right. There was hardly anything I would eat—I was still vegan, mind you—and I did not have much of an appetite anyway. Granny fussed at me for not eating, and I tried to stand my ground without being disrespectful.

  Soon afterward, I wrote her a letter and told her I wanted to be able to come to family gatherings without such a negative focus on what I would and would not eat. I told her I was not so concerned about the meals but wanted to enjoy the moments that we could be together, which were so valuable. Of course, I mostly just didn’t want anyone to look at me in a way that made me wonder whether I was paranoid or my drug-induced state was so obvious. She responded and told me that she knew better than I how valuable those moments were. Three years prior, she had been diagnosed with heart disease and was told she would probably die within a year. So, as I quickly caught on, she had outlived her timeline already. And, as she clearly stated, all she wanted was to provide for me in the same way she had always provided for me: with food.

  I sighed. I would eat meat with my granny, for my granny, and only for her, cooked only by her. Preferably only from animals killed by her. I wrote her a letter and told her. When I visited a couple of weekends later, I thought the event would be a special occasion between us, a time when we realized that we had formed our own language of love, that fried chicken meant devotion and over-easy eggs meant adoration and the act of eating itself was worship.

  Instead, Granny served me some country ham she had fixed the previous day. The event was clearly not monumental to her. Since I often promised to visit and never showed up, she did not go to the trouble of making a special dinner. She warmed up some green beans that she had canned from the garden and fried me some little round hoecakes, and I ate alone at the table, talking to her in between bites, my husband sitting with Papaw in the front room.

  Granny had always favored me and made no attempt to hide that fact from anyone. She told me I was special, and though I wasn’t sure what she meant, I believed her. Growing up, I got used to hearing that I was smart, but I would only ever count Granny’s opinion as having mattered. Her calling me special was the only real compliment. When I was around nine or ten, she gave me her mother’s jewelry box that still played music, and it contained a crown-shaped pin set with the birthstones of my great-grandmother’s twelve children. My older cousin protested because I was younger, and she did not understand why she shouldn’t be entrusted with the jewelry box. I’m not sure, either, but I think it could have been that Granny knew I would treasure it in some way no one else could.

  When I became a young adult, Granny gave me her kitchen table, made of heavy oak. Again, it had belonged to her mother, and it also served as the place where the adults of my life had eaten every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and birthday dinner since I was born. It was the same table at which my father had eaten those meals, along with every other meal, from the time he was born. My granny ate and prayed at that table just about every day of her life. The gift of the table upset even more of the family, as my father informed me, since each of his adult siblings had expected to receive it in my grandparents’ will, if not before their deaths.

  Granny didn’t talk about how much she loved us. She never pinched our cheeks or patted us and didn’t smile a lot. In the winter, she put on thick gloves to carry in wood from her front porch, and she stacked it next to the woodstove close to where Papaw’s recliner sat, where he watched Kentucky Educational Television and whatever else they were able to get—somehow, their reception was a little better than ours, but we hardly ever watched television there.

  Junior and I wandered down to her house all the time, roaming around her yard and creeks as if they were our own. She often put us into a bath—sometimes in the washtub she canned vegetables in, or with some dish soap in a small kiddie pool in the backyard. We seemed to always look in need of tending. Other times, she sent me to her bathtub, and I would sit in the stillness, soaking it in. She would bring me a thick slice of fresh cabbage, which I loved, and I would eat in the tepid bathwater, the soothing quiet like a blanket that surrounded her home and protected us whenever we were there.

  I took in the details of her bathroom each time I entered—the water heater on the other side of the shower wall, the oval mirror placed in front of a window that looked into the backyard, their towels and washcloths on a shelf above the toilet. The clean laundry that never sat for too long. The simple hook lock that slid into an eye to lock the door.

  Granny didn’t play music at her house—maybe gospel every once in a while, but not often enough to recall. Her house was clean, and it felt old and solid. The wooden steps that we loved to play on, and that she didn’t want us to play on, were painted maroon. There was a window toward the bottom of the steps, which faced toward the mouth of the holler. Granny had a small mirror there and would put Oil of Olay on her face while sitting on the steps. She kept her round hairbrush on the windowsill.

  Everything there was holy.

  Granny had a flock of chickens at all times—of course, Dad sent me down for eggs when I was little. After I stopped being vegan, Granny started giving me eggs by the dozen, and I discovered their yolks were a deep orange-yellow, rich from the bugs and worms the chickens must
have found as they explored Granny’s yard and fields. When we were small, my brother, younger cousin, and I watched while Granny killed one of the chickens. She wrung its neck, twisting the head right off, but the chicken’s body still hopped around for a while. I stood behind the screen door of the kitchen, horrified and frightened, but awed by my granny’s strength. My brother and our little cousin shrieked with laughter and ran around the yard. Granny’s face revealed nothing about how she felt. She cleaned and cut up the chicken, cooked it with dumplings, and fed us all, as she so often did.

  When we spent the night at Granny’s house, she made us go to bed early—in the summertime, it was still light out. She and Papaw knelt by Granny’s bed together—they hadn’t slept in the same room since I was born, as far as I knew—and they prayed, heads bowed. Sometimes they both prayed out loud at the same time, words overlapping like waves coming ashore almost together, one looking for the other. Granny often cried like she did at the altar. Sometimes I listened to them quietly, but if Granny was praying by herself, she had me kneel beside her, clasp my hands, and bow at the side of her bed with her. She prayed for us all, and from what I could tell, she prayed for us every day.

  I wish sometimes that I could have the strength she had, with nothing but her prayers to comfort her. Granny had the only kind of power a woman in that time and place could have—the power to transmute pain into comfort, absorbing untold sorrow and giving her family a safe haven. It was alchemy.

  I didn’t know that we went to an evangelical church from a Pentecostal tradition. The Pentecostals I knew would speak in tongues and sometimes dance in the aisle, which made me laugh behind my hand because What are these grown-ups doing? Our church grown-ups mostly said hallelujah a lot, and there was some crying and the anointing with oil, which came with prayers that spilled onto me in a rushing, falling-apart voice that made me think someone was maybe going to do something wrong.